Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 192: The Other Texas City Disaster

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

texas city 2: 2 texas 2 city support the RIT model railroad club: https://www.change.org/p/save-the-rit-model-railroad-club?recruiter=1392500672&recruited_by_id=1a9ac1c0-abb7-11f0-b291-5f916dd0aefe Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

All right, so 23rd of December we're recording this. Christmas TV. The season in which I get adjective that gets the video sort of throttled by YouTube depressed for the whole season. So yeah, cool. Looking forward to doing some jokes. It's great. I don't know what it was, but you know, we got hit by that copyright strike today,

but only in Russia for some reason. Well, I just, yeah. If you, if you are a listener from Russia, you probably know how to use a UPN. Yeah. Are we sort of like allowed to have any left? Does that constitute kind of like trading with sanctioned density? I would assume we don't have any because they're all using VPNs. Yeah.

Yeah. They're on that, they're on that U.S. East Coast server. They're on the Albanian. They're on the US East Coast server, playing Counter-Strike Go and calling you homophobic slurs. Succa, bliet. Yeah, that's one of them. Yeah, yeah.

Wait, I don't actually know what that means. So a Suka is like it's a bitch, but like a prison bitch. Oh, I see. What do, Roz? Yeah, like most notably in the Gulag they had in sort of late stage. of the gulag they had something called, wait, no, not the late stages. It was, when, when were the Suka wars? But like, they had a kind of like civil war amidst like gulag inmates. Yeah, between 45 and 53 because, because, you know, Suki, like, bitches collaborated during wartime, whereas

you're sort of like, your vore, your thieves didn't cooperate with the authorities, even under under sort of war conditions. And yeah, a lot of, a lot of killings in prison. That's just a little kind of like thing that I remember. Damn, you know, that Gulag place doesn't sound very good. No, no, probably not. Blyette, by the way, is like a sex worker, right? Obviously not as sort of wokely framed as that.

Oh, I see. As Sukk Blyat is like a sort of not just a prison bitch, but a prison bitch who is sort of like transactional, a prison bitch, right? Like, it's, yeah, I, my favorite, my favorite piece of Russian math is, is a story that Milo tells, um, I've seen a video of these, like a guy, uh, threatening the word that gets the video demonetized, um, by the side of the road with a grenade, right? Like, he's just got a grenade and he's like, I'm gonna do it. And there's two traffic cops, uh, you know, like short sleeve shirts, big fucking patrol

caps watching him and they're like, no, he's not going to do it. And then, of course, he does it and, you know, explodes, and the one cop looks to the other cop and just says, bleat, perfect. Perfect. Actually, it might have been a pizdi-it, but anyway, my point is Russian, one of the most advanced languages in the world for obscenity and profanity. And, you know. So if you want to say that, uh, wokely, you gotta look up Russian for incarcerated sex

worker. Doing sort of like person-centered Matt. Yeah. Yeah. Doing progressive stack in the fucking prison colony. So anyway, apologies to our, I don't know, three or four Russian listeners. I think one of the promise of Russian liberalism when it was still a thing, you know, back before they killed Navalny was like, we're gonna, we're gonna sort of like.

like, make how youth clean up their language in a CSGO voice chat, you know? Like, eventually you will be, you will be getting beasted on by a Russian teenager who will call you and incarcerate sex work rather than, rather than a prison bitch. You gotta do therapy speak, but in Russian. That sounds impossible. Your lack of getting good causes me to feel negative emotions towards you. Yes. All right, so, 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 just about still November Kelly. I'm the person who is speaking right now. My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. I'm the person speaking right now. My pronouns are he, him, his. I've outwoked you again. Outwoking, motherfucker. Wow. God, just for that, she, they.

Oh, cowards day. I'm Victoria Scott. I'm a person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. And I have a better microphone this week, so I don't sound like shit. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Hell yeah.

Those podcaster paychecks have rolled in. Oh, yeah, who takes the lead on this one? Oh, God. It's another one of the things where it's sort of like the writing duties this place, isn't it? Yeah. Well, I only did one slide. Victoria did all the other ones. In the same way as like together.

Albanians and Chinese comprise like half the world's population. Yeah, it's a split system of rising. Yeah, today I was gonna talk about the Texas City disaster. Not that one, the one from 2005. Otherwise known as the BP Refinery Explosion. Multiple Texas City disasters. We're going back to our sequel. Basically, if you like... We've run out of ideas. We're actually just rehashing the first one. I knew we would run out of ideas eventually. It's like SilverBidge 3. Yeah.

No, I'm just gonna mine the entire corporate history of BP for disasters for the next like three seasons of this show, I think. There are no seasons. I love when podcasts have seasons. We fucking don't. We just take breaks without scheduling them. Like a blowback season trailer, but for like going back to Silverbridge again. Also, can I just say, I love this photo.

It's got that beautiful kind of tilt shifted, isometric thing going on. I love real time strategy games. wish they'd make another one someday. This makes me feel like I'm playing the OSHA version of Command and Conquer Generals. Oh, yeah, you just killed several dozen people with an isomerization unit. I'm sort of like,

clicking and dragging with the left mouse button over the structure for any survivors, and then I'm right-clicking outside of them to move them outside of. Now, this might be surprising, but it shouldn't look like that, by the way. It should not look like that. Yeah, what you see on the screen here is a shed.

It's been blown up. It's not supposed to have blown up. I have to say the trucks look pretty cool and a kind of blown up vicinity. I don't know, just as an object, they've yet to make a pickup truck that looks bad when it's been partially blown up, you know? What about the cyber truck? The cyber truck's not a pickup truck. It's barely even a car. That shit's like a glorified word I can't say without getting the thing demonetized machine for people with too much money. Yeah, the people's demonetization word machine is the Dodge Viper, of course.

Of course, but that's an honorable demonetization word, whereas like crashing your cyber truck into a tree, the doors don't open, you burn to death. That's, I mean, that's the... That's the embarrassing. Yeah, it's embarrassing. It's shameful. I'm just here to point out the channel's not monetized. We get the money from Patreon.

I don't mean monetization. I mean whatever the thing that YouTube does where it makes you... fucking show them your like possible. Dealgamization. Yeah, the de-alogramization. People are real mad. And my goal was to get every video I'm on age-restricted. Don't do that.

And I'm doing pretty well, I think. Age-restricted, age-restricted, banned in Russia, which that's not bad. That's no. I am actually banned in Russia, but it's not as much fun that way. I wanted to go see cool stuff there. I know, I know. I would also like to go and see cool stuff in Russia. I went to Russia when I was like to go and see cool stuff in Russia.

I went to Russia. kid, I saw a bunch of cool stuff, didn't have the brains to appreciate it then. Now I do. They should let me back in. And that's how she died. Yeah. Yeah. As she lived. Yeah.

Instantly conscripted. Oh, this is embarrassing. Yeah, I'm on the fucking Donetsk. I'm on the Donbass front feverishly trying to make this a sort of like anti-imperialist squared circle. I'm like, I can do it. I can do it. I'm only gonna shoot the weirdest gnafbo guys, I guess. I don't know. I mean, in fairness, I'm pretty sure the guys I just war-crimed were Nazis is like in a grand tradition of British war fighting. This is true, yes.

But before we talk about why this shed is blown up, we have to do the goddamn news. That was a flawless segue. I hope everyone was impressed by that. No, it was wonderful. It's good to have my news button back at sort of like fully functioning capacity after the live shows where, as I understand it, I pressed the button and you received a kind of scream of internet noise. Yes.

One of these days we'll play in a venue that has good Wi-Fi. One of these days we'll play in a venue where I can be physically on the stage is what we'll do. That's right. It's our Nova Sibirsk's show. We're doing the Russian equivalent of a USO tour where it's just like us talking to a bunch of like doomed boyatians being like, okay, so here's a picture of the city of Bachmuth. It's not supposed to look like that.

We're gonna get yelled out so much. I'm the most normal and I'm the most like Ukraine supporting leftist who is still mentally normal. And I still get yelled out by it for not being pro-Ukrainian enough. I don't know. I kind of be really careful about the content in the Groszni show. Oh, man. This is fucking crazy. Washington flooded.

Yeah. That's the news. This is my hometown report. We got like over a foot of rain in the span of like 48 hours. River in the state overflowed. This gag, get river hit an all-time record. Also, okay, just for the record, I know everybody already knows this, but I keep getting corrected to my pronunciation of Washington place names, and I know, okay?

I know I don't know how to pronounce anything here. I moved here. I'm a refugee from rural Idaho. You were a refugee from the Idahoans, the Idahoan century of humiliation. I am trying desperately to, like, become culture. all of my friends in Seattle are also trans women who are refugees from red states. So none of us know how to pronounce anything. I am listening.

I am learning. I am doing my best. Don't do that. Don't do that. Fuck them. Never change. Well, I also, I mean, I... No, I mean, I got to try because I don't want them to...

If they send me back to Idaho, I'm fucked. I cannot. That's the, like, Shibilath for, like, Cascadian, like, Maoist citizenship in the Civil War universe is being given a list of place names to pronounce. And God help you if you don't get all of them. That's what I wanted to do when Dr. Oz was running for Senate. I just hold him down and make him pronounce shit. Make him say Shamokin.

Yeah, exactly. A Shamokin handshake. Yeah, I was told by someone in my Tumblr asks that I received honorary Cascadian Maoist citizenship because of the Yakima voice labs joke I pulled off a few episodes ago. So I'm sort of, I don't need to worry too much about how to pronounce the homage, you know? Yeah, I mean, you also just pronounced it correctly, so fuck you. Oh, well, okay, cool. I mean.

I'll move out, you can take my apartment, I guess. That's just so. It's fine, it's like, here's the thing. I'll go back to the potato mines. If you, what we do is we switch and then you get stuck with all of the like, small town Scottish names, you know, like you have to, you have to pronounce like Kirkcati and stuff. Yeah, but like as fucked as it is, I think right now, living in Washington is a safer bet than living in the UK.

God, that might be true. Oh, it's suppressing. It's Boise, but the Novosibirsk of America. Please, are there any American trans women who want to go in on a green card marriage with me? It will be... It doesn't even have to be a sham marriage. It's fine.

I can fall in love with you. That's in the wheelhouse, you know? I'm sorry to area. I already have a wife that I achieved, that I attained through this podcast. She heard me guest here, and that's why she slid into my DMs to ask if I needed a roommate. They're calling, well, there's your problem. The greatest dating app in history. We do.

Yeah. It's actually, like, you're gonna start seeing those graphs of, like, how did you first meet for couples? And, like, surpassing Twitter is like, well, there's your problem. Yeah. We're taking over the role that, like, smoking outside class. used to have and yeah, it's just gonna be us now. Yeah, so anyway, this Skagit River flooded. The Snohomish River is a foot over its all-time record.

Tens of thousands of people were under evacuation orders at peak. There's not really great numbers yet, but thousands seemingly of homes are destroyed. The Trans-Canada Highway washed out up in like near Vancouver. This is something I would experience as like a divine punishment against me specifically. Were we doing the Vancouver live show for? instance. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the Amtrak Cascades is out too. Like the link between Seattle and Vancouver is suspended for flooding damage. So it's just bad. Obviously, like, it rains a lot up here, but it rains generally very lightly over a long period of time instead of dumping two, you know, a foot and a half

of rain in the span of two days. And this is probably, I don't know. I'm sure that there's some way that this is climate change linked and that, you know, we haven't. We're woefully unprepared, even though we've tried to, you know, be used to rain in a place where it's cloudy 300 days a year. It rains all the time. All time. Yeah. It does seem, it does seem likely that it's, uh, it's climate change on account of how fucking everything else is. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think at the same time as this, they were getting like all time record lows in like Chicago, um, and, you know, feet of snow places. So the U.S. is just kind of a mess. But again, I mean, I, Washington's pretty cool about letting me use the bathroom. So on the whole, I'd say, you know, the flooded bathroom. You know, as long as the river doesn't come back.

You have to wade into it and wait out, but you know. Yeah. All gender, breached levy. Yeah, your reminder as a sort of public service that we like to do, don't get in the floodwater, don't swim in the floodwater, don't touch the floodwater, because that's poop. That's mostly poop. And you shouldn't, you shouldn't do it. That does mean you can poop in it, if you could figure out a way to do that. Like, from a hundred people. Or if you're wearing like fishing waiters or something. Like fishing waiters with like a like a butt flap.

Yeah, butt flap, yeah. Oh, like Christmas jammies. How fast it. Okay, we can't keep adding things to the list of merch we could make. Because that's one of the ones where you have to go to like a factory manager in China and be like, hey. Yes, I'm serious. I'm 100% serious.

What I want is fishing waiters with a butt flap. And the butt flap has to be like, waterproof. once it's closed, but then allow a sort of easy transit of, of like, shit through the buttflap, you know? Cawking my ass hatch shut for watertight because I wade into the Skagit River. I mean, it's not, people wax their car huts and stuff. It's not any different, you know? People being like, yo, the new world there's your problem.

But flap waiters are like way worse. The quality is way worse. They don't use like the same materials anymore. It's just like, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, this is a supply crisis on. I've been watching a lot of menswear, like, YouTubers. I've been watching... Are you okay?

No, no, I'm not. You posted some watches the other day, and I always kind of interpret that as sort of like a call for help. Yeah, basically is. Especially if the watches are uglier, and I really did not like the one you just posted. So I was like, get her ass. Yeah. Look, why does it... The weird operator Roman numeral and

and like Arabic numeral mix is disgusting. That shit is awful. It's called a California dial and I think it looks good. Maybe I think it looks good because something is wrong with my brain. I don't know. Maybe that's why I'm watching a guy sort of walk around a woodland in upstate New York talking about how Carhart is bad now. I don't.

Locally taking you to Electroshock therapy until your watch opinions improve. I'll circle back on that with you later. Um, yeah, so the Pacific Northwest has been destroyed. Yeah, that's all for that, really. Okay. It just, it just sucks and it was my local news. Yeah, they warned us about this in the film, Pig. Yes.

Don't worry about it. I don't know that one either. You should watch it. It's a really good, Nicholas Cage. Good, good Portland film, actually. I like a Nicholas Cage movie, yeah. It's one of his like art ones. It's one of the ones where he's decided to do.

like a good movie. Oh. Oh, okay. No, I don't like that. I want them in a bad movie. Yeah, yeah, you're a bad, a bad Nicholas Cage movie. I'm a good Nicholas Cage. Enjoy it.

It's fine. Two houses alike and Digness. Exactly. The yin and the yang of Nicholas Cage. Anyway, in other news. So, in, we said this was going to happen news. The HSTs that were sent down to Mexican. for the interoceanico.

Well, one of the things Scooter predicted was they were going to get taken out by a tanker truck. And look what happened. This one was taken out by a tanker truck. Yeah. You see what you see the whole, the whole thing is the crumple zone?

Yeah, you see, well, there's no crumple zone whatsoever, you know, there's no driver protection. Somehow the drivers survived this. Just get out and run backwards, I guess. I guess. I don't know what else you would do. Build different industries. cut that guy out of the thing and he was completely fine.

Yeah. Stop bothering me. Went back to work the next day. What's the one fucking anime where the like insanely ripped guy is just like, um, uh, just like raw dogging being in a hospital bed with like one less limb? Just like that, you know? Uninjured like mentally. Yeah, I think that was, uh, that was in Monty Python's meaning of life where the officer got his leg

eaten by a tighter, a tiger. Yeah. It's a horrifying thought. Inventing the new worst smelling fan of anything, you know. But the, yeah, so, you know, I would highly recommend do not use your English rolling stock in Mexico, but they don't keep doing it. No, because they don't have great separation. We told you so, go back and listen to the episode.

Exactly. It's a funny. Look at your entire government of Mexico. Still hopeful that the Mexican Navy doesn't want us dead. that we kind of squashed that beef because I would like to go to Mexico as well. But yeah, they got to do something about it right. Yeah, I got to, you know. Or just let this one engineer drive all of them.

I think apparently in immortal. That's true. I mean, I guess like the reason why they maybe wanted to kill us was because we thought they were going to kill Amla with one of these things. And Amlo is not even president anymore. So I guess it's fine. And they couldn't even kill like one like train driver. So, he has way less hit points than a president.

He's like the one punch man of locomotive engineers, so, you know. That is possible. It's like grading on a scale. Yeah, he's got like three health bars. I'm glad he's okay. Yeah, I'm glad he's okay. This is an unexpected death for a great Western high speed train, though. Yeah, just kind of...

Wacking it. I understand they don't have any spare cabs. So while the locomotive may be mechanically fine, they can't put it back into Serb. Yeah, it's just dead. Well, that's the thing. The guide clearly doesn't need one. You bolt some kind of like control panel to the front of this, he'll drive it open air and just be fine.

I do really like the idea of a convertible high speed train. Yeah, well, it's a convertible once, you know? Yeah, I mean, you know, below a certain speed with trains, aerodynamics is fake, you don't have to worry about it. So yeah, why not? They can't be running these things that fast, right? Like that was the other big kind of point of the thing was that they were gonna have to run these really slowly because the track was dog shit, so...

I wanna say it's about 60 miles an hour and it's entirely in dark territory. Oh, well, yeah. I guess maybe we just give the guy like a headlamp or something. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, and if he sees a freight train coming, you know, head on, he's gonna have to one punch man his way out of there. Yeah, two trains destroyed. One Mexican train driver uninjured. Yes. Terrifying.

Well, yeah. I wouldn't work here. Anyway, that was the goddamn news. All right. So to understand what happened in 2005 in Texas City, we must ask a very important question, which is, what is British petroleum? A force for evil. Oh, my God.

It was really funny doing the research on this because I just kept hitting history's biggest shitbags. It's kind of like, oil companies in particular is really one of the ones where you can get sort of Bush era leftism. It's all about oil because they've had a finger in fucking every evil thing that's happened, more or less. And you just keep like digging stuff up and it's like, oh, it was those guys again. Okay, sure. Yeah. I'm pretty convinced that we could probably record the longest, well, there's your problem episode of all time on just the history of British Petroleum. I tried to keep this shorter than that.

so that, you know, we could go see our families for the holidays instead of, you know, recording for 36 straight hours. There was a BP station near my elementary school that was so goddamn chaotic that they had to disaffiliate with BP because there were too many accidents going on there. This is like sometime after Deepwater Horizon. And it was like, apparently BP thinks this gas station in Burke, Virginia is worse than Deepwater. Water Horizon. You're too toxic for our brand. Now it's called the Express Stop. It's an independent gas station.

Still completely chaotic. Independent gas stations. Yeah, exactly. But it's usually about three or four cents cheaper than all the other gas stations. So, you know, people drive their car at 60 miles an hour into it constantly. I love to refuel my car. GTA online. This reminds me of one of the

formative experiences of my childhood that explains so much why I'm like this, which is when I stayed with my grandparents, they lived in Buffalo, New York when I was a kid, and Buffalo is near a bunch of native reservations. And my grandfather used to take me for like, what seemingly were like several hour long rides

to drive way out to the country to these native reservations so he could fill up the tank on his car because the gas there didn't have to pay state, like the same degree of state taxes because it's like sovereign land. Um, so he could save like, I don't know, 10 cents a gallon on gas. Yeah. I think he spent more driving out there than he saved.

Yeah, but would you rob him of the joy of feeling like he's cheating the government? No, no, it was genuinely one of his happiest, like times I remember seeing him. So, I'd say, you know, he was a real patriot. I know. Yeah, driving a GM, driving a conversion van GMC Van Dura with like a power. me a sticker on the back of it out to like the middle of nowhere upstate New York to to fill up his 35 gallon tank with a $1.75 gas instead of 183 at the sit go down the street. Incredible. Peak childhood memories. Anyway, he probably would have gotten along with this man pictured in this

slide. William Knox Darcy Darcy Darcy. Darcy with an apostrophe. Yeah. It's it's just Darcy, like mister. Also, this is one of the most fucked up hair mustache combinations of all time. I'm deep in the fallout three character creator on this guy. Like, I... Yeah.

Yeah, most of the 20th century was this guy's fault. In 1901, he brokered a deal for the oil rights to the majority of Iran with significant backing from the British government because the British government believed it would help them in

the great game against the Russians. And so they were trying to win influence over like the Middle East. And they were like, all right, cool, we'll take control of most of Iran's natural resources. This will help us. The terms of this deal, if you're curious, was that the Iranian Shah received 20,000 pounds in cash, which is equivalent to about 2.1 million today, 20,000 pounds worth of shares in the new oil research expedition. and 16% of whatever annual net profits came from whatever oil was found.

And in exchange, William Knox Darcy received exclusive rights to prospect, explore, exploit, and transport all natural gas, petroleum, asphalt, and mineral waxes in 75% of Persia's landmass for the next 60 years. Surely this can have no downside. This is where they get you. You got to ask for a percent of the gross, not the net. Yeah, you get, it's like Bob Evans, the Hollywood producer, would tell you, you get points, you know, you get points on the picture. But I am glad that we did choose not to illustrate this with Drake's well, clumsily Photoshop into Iran.

It's the same thing, though. Because here's the, oh, what, I knocked the sandbag that's holding up my microphone. It's good, so emphasis. I do this thing sometimes where I get too mad and I bang my desk, but it always hits exactly on my wedding ring, so if you hear a, or Devin has to edit that out, that's what that is. So yeah, we all have a little quirks. Also, because it's the 23rd of December and I barely give a fuck about myself, I am eating pringles on the mic, but I am trying to remember to mute myself.

Eating pringles, quiet. What kind of pringles? These are Texas BBQ sauce. And weirdly the source has a little apostrophe after it, but there's none at the start, so it's not speech marks. It's just... Maybe it's a Texas barbecue sochi, or I have, like, counterfeit pringles? Like, maybe it's a misprint.

It's interesting how it seems like over there they will always qualify the region of barbecue versus over here they do not. Texas is having the region of barbecues are all here, though. Maybe Texas is just easily identifiable as a barbecue location. In fairness, it does say, like, this does this in all the European, languages, since this is also sauce barbecue Texan and Texas barbecue sauce. The real question is, do they have Carolina barbecue or Kansas City barbecue? I know the Burger Kings have Kansas City barbecue.

Yeah, I, it's weird. I mean, there's generally a layer of geographical abstraction over it, such as my favorite meal deal component, the southern fried chicken wrap. But like, yeah, I've most commonly seen. Texas and barbecue when there's bubble. I'm not sure what specifically makes it Texan. I don't think there's anything characteristically taxing about it, but these are these are my Pringles. I hope you're excited for us keeping you on topic here, Victoria. These are my Pringles. There are many like them, but these ones are mine.

This is my rifle, this is my gun. This one's for fighting. This one's for fun, but I'm just holding a can of Pringles. Yeah. Texas barbecue is better anyway. That's my official stance on it. Texas City barbecue is when the when your Pringles can explodes and 15 people die but it is too full of sauce. So anyway, speaking of Texas, Darcy's company drills in Iran for eight years finding basically no commercially viable oil fields and they burn through a significant chunk of this guy's fortune. So he transfers... That's kind of rough. If you're like, sort of, the British government's cat's poor and

the sort of great game and you're like, I'm going to sort of extract all of this, this, you know, sort of this oil and become unfathomably wealthy and then you just don't find it and the government doesn't give a fuck because they're like, you know, whatever. Well, well, he transfers all of his personal oil field ownership to the Burma oil company in 1907 because he's just, he's like, I'm cutting bait. This is terrible. I'm not finding anything. There's no oil here. Burma tries for another year and then the bosses at the company send a telegram that's like, okay, we're done here, quit. Before the foreman had read through the telegram, he hit a 50-foot gusher and struck, you know,

commercially feasible oil fields and that is the beginning of like... As your eyes hit the cue and quit, there will be blood gusher goes off through the derrick and and you hit one of the largest oil fields in the world. Yep. Yeah. You're like, damn, okay, I'm not going to get killed in a bowling alley. All right. Thank God.

So Darcy becomes chair of what becomes the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the APOC, which is a subsidiary of the Burma Oil Company, and it has exclusive handling to the Iranian fields. Next slide, please. Oh, this fucking guy. He picked the most cursed image. He looks like he's pissing himself right now and he's happy about it. Yeah, that's true.

It's really hard to find an image of him where he looks good. It's kind of wild that this guy got lionized so much. Yeah, I mean... I mean, just hanging out in a room with Roosevelt and Stalin, I guess, just gives you an aura. Hang out in the room with Roosevelt and Stalin. Roosevelt and Stalin are bonding and then bonding like at your expense. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, well, you know, say what you want about Churchill, but he did stop a lot of Nazis being weighed. Yes, we know about Operation Paperclip. Leave us alone. Yeah. Guy who's like sort of sole virtue, which he really sort of like beat to death was being anti-appeasement eventually.

Uh-huh. Well, so we have to start way before he was, he was the Winston Churchill we all know and hate now. He was the Winston Churchill, the Admiral. In 1914, he urged the British government to buy a controlling stake in the APOC so that they would have a constant supply of oil for warships, which they then purchase a stake in it. The British fleet transitions off of coal and onto oil because now they own most of Iran's mineral rights. I'm raising my hand because the truth is so much more personally pathetic than this. Imagine being mad that you never got a commission.

So, like, Churchill was, he was like a young cavalry officer for a bit, was never an admiral per seagre. He was never a naval officer, but he was first sea lord, which is like, at that point, like, it's like being secretary of the Navy, right? Like, you're not sort of a, you're not a sailor, you're not a naval officer, you're a bureaucrat. It sounds like something about like Avatar, the last airbender. Yeah, I mean, I'm willing to be corrected if I'm wrong about this, but one of my sort of abiding

sort of facts about Churchill that I know is that among one of the sort of jobs that came with this, he was also in charge of Trinity House, which is the like bit of the British government responsible for lighthouses. And because that was a sort of like pseudo naval activity, that had offices and those had uniforms, which looked a bit like naval uniforms. If you ever see Winston Churchill in what looks like a naval uniform, he is stealing valor by wearing his lighthouse uniform to like, to the war to be like, you have to take me seriously as a Navy guy, which he wasn't. I'm a lighthouse keeper. Yes, yes, he is showing up to the thing in his like Admiral of Lighthouses uniform and being like, you have to take me seriously as a kind of naval thinker.

Well, he also had the ability to get them to buy an oil company. Yes. Which is, you need oil to light the flame on the lighthouse. So, you know. Yeah, perversely, this kind of ends the reason why the British Empire has had a lot of the places that it had as colonies in it, like, the more far-flung stuff, a lot of time was gotten to be a, like, coaling station. Yes.

You switch to oil, you need to refuel your ships a lot less. You can do it at sea more easily. all of a sudden, you know, this stuff becomes a lot less important to you. Well, he seemed to like it because after he was done, I guess, well, I, I had assumed that he had quit the Navy, but yeah, I suppose after he quit his lighthouse gig, his next job in the 20s was becoming an oil lobbyist. Man, just loved oil, you know? He really did.

His job as an oil lobbyist was to persuade the British government to allow the APOC to have exclusive rights to all Iranian oil fields. And he succeeded at that. The APOC, it gets exclusive rights to all of Iran. And then he persuaded the Iranian monarchy to allow British people to continue, like, taking their oil for the next 30 years, basically without complaint. So, you know, we go to World War II, which is either the absolute peak or the absolute nadir of the British Empire.

I can never quite figure out which one it is. Sort of both at the same time. Yes. In stereo. So after World War II, in 1951, the prime minister of Iran, Ali Rasmara, is assassinated by someone acting on behalf of a group called Fadiane Islam, which was considered to be the first Shia terrorist group. The main reason this group was created was because what is now the AIOC, the Anglo-I-O-C, the

Anglo-I-I-O-C company. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, the Anglo-I should have written it down because I'm forgetting my acronyms as I go, is wildly unpopular and is completely screwing over the Iranian government in like broad daylight. The population is furious, and they treat all the workers like disposable shit, and so they're all also miserable about it. And so this kind of like, you got to ask for a percentage of the gross, not the net. You're going to call me, Mr. 5%.

And so the, you know, the discontent over the AOC is like what begins early Arab nationalism. Like it's basically all starts here in the early 50s because of the British government's controlling stake in the oil fields. So the now assassinated Ali Rasmara is succeeded by Mohamed Masada. Mossadegh. Thank you. Yeah. Again, this one, I can fill in bits and pieces because to an extent this is like Baby's first British imperialism that you learn as like a British leftist.

So Mossadegh, one of the things that he wanted to do was to audit the AIOC, right? Which they really didn't want to do because of. the stealing, basically. Yeah. And obviously they sort of perceived this correctly as sort of the first steps towards nationalization, right? That they were going to try and actually take control of the oil that was coming out of Iran, and Iran was going to try and make a profit off of it instead of just, you know, a bribe to the Shah.

So there was this MI6 operation called Operation Boot. which actually sort of preceded Churchill, like Attlee, was sort of like involved in this as well. So, you know, you do get a kind of like bipartisan consensus on this, that you have to sort of use all possible means to prevent nationalization, which ends up with a like a boycott of Iranian oil while this is, while this is going on. but also a lot of secret operations to attempt to destabilize Mossadegh's government. Yeah, well, and see, this is where you learn about it from the American side of things, right? Because, you know, the Brits are extremely pissed that they have lost, what I would describe as the infinite free money glitch they've had going on for the past 50 years. Yes, yeah.

So Churchill gets on the phone, and next slide, please. Oh, baby, girl. Yes. I just, I love using this. image. Um, calls up. The monk straps as well. I'm sorry, I've been on too much like menswear stuff lately, but the, and they're like silk stockings.

Jesus Christ. Dude. He served much more than just the American military. What's, what's that one tweet? I love buying military surplus because somebody died in these pants and I'm still the first person to serve in them. Yeah. Yes, this is, for those of you who are just listening, this is Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He was, you know, it's what his story is called the baby cow photograph. Like, you're familiar. Our dandy president. He is at this time president of the United States. And Churchill's like, hey, do you want to do a coup with me? So the, the, the, the nascent CIA, Dulles boys hatch up Operation Ajax. and the United States is like, hey, you know, nationalizing the oil fields and respecting the workers, that sounds like communism to us. So, like, we can definitely get in on this.

So they overthrow the Iranian Prime Minister, Mossadish. Mossadegh, thank you. In exchange for getting some American companies in on the oil fields and, you know, getting an end to train anti-communist Korea as in the Middle East for the next year. You know who? 30 years. You know who the CIA officer who led this coup Operation Ajax was? Not off that my head. Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.

Oh my God. Oh, dear. That is Teddy's grandson. Like, again, one of these guys that you can sort of like trace through history and be like, a lot of evil shit you did. But yeah, they just, they overthrew Mossadegh and really sort of enforce or sort of like helped the Shah of Iran bolster his role as

as like an autocrat until the Islamic Revolution. Yeah, well, and now this foreign consortium, which is created, you know, this creates BP. They are sort of reborn from the ashes of the AIOC, you know, gets to own all the oil fields,

and the Shah gets his kickbacks again. He's got a, he gets a Western, friendly prime minister installed underneath them, He gets his own United States trained secret police and death squad. Everybody's happy. Yeah, I mean, you know, women could wear bikinis, which is, you know, the main indicator of a peaceful, liberal state. Right.

As much as I sort of like lament that in the Middle East, the CIA managed to sort of crush and kill, the CIA and M-Sex managed to sort of like crush every left one. wing popular movement in which I include Mossadegh, and the National Union. I think that ultimately they were not able to withstand the sort of wave of like Islamist insurgency. I don't have to give it to them ideologically, politically, but if we're counting the rings, that's a better team that they put up, you know? And it's just, it's rough.

I don't like acknowledging that, but... If we're counting the rings is fucking... Anyway. Incidentally, by the way, this kind of sets up a lot of like long-lasting Iranian attitudes to both the US and the UK, like post-Islamic revolution. You might be familiar with the description of the US as the great Satan, right? Yes. That originally comes from, I think it was so many, describing Britain as like the lesser Satan and America is the greatest Satan, right? But weirdly, yeah, but weirdly in like things that I've read, man, in the experience of so like people that I've read, the instinctive Iranian sort of like suspicion for a long time, something that they had in common with Russia is Britain's really pulling the strings. We have more of a sinister vibe than you do. We just do. And so it's like more plausible to a lot of Iranians that like Britain is more.

actively evil than the US is, and you're just a kind of like clumsy dog that we're manipulative. And this is a big part of the reason why is because we did do that one time, very notably when we were like, okay, we're losing out on the oil revenue. We got to convince the Americans to go in on this. Yeah, I mean, I... No one's ever called us, perfidious. Not once. No, you don't do a big line in perfidy. You mostly just do a big line in like the straight war crimes, you know? Yeah, I mean, the US isn't really subtle about doing anti-commer. I mean isn't either, whereas I feel like, you know, I feel like Britain is a little bit more subtle about its covert operations.

We make better movie villains than you do, you know, for good reason. I mean, I don't know, the extent of what I know what am I six, admittedly is not my specialty. I defer to Nova for all spy knowledge, but I did really, I did really like Tinker Taylor Soldier's spy. It's a really good movie. Yeah, it's really, really good. That's about the extent of my knowledge, though. Anyway, but yeah, so everybody dusts their hands, right? Because it's like, surely liberalism, social liberalism under absolute monarchy forever,

you can keep doing repression and sort of like torture as long as you like, and it's never. Again, very funny to be like leader of Iran and think, that's fine, I can torture and execute my way into keeping in power forever. A lesson there, maybe for the future, but who can say? the bikinis keep flowing though. Yeah. Shut off the bikinis doesn't work anymore. Yeah. That's why the U.S.

is so unstable right now. We've got this, we got, we got the violent repression. Not enough, not enough bikinis. Yeah. Dept to the one piece. Posting like Sydney, Sweeney and the American flag bikini and being like average

American girl before the revolution, you know? Yeah, so obviously you already got to this, but you know, in 1979, the Shah gets overthrown. B.P. is expelled from Iran. in the wake of this. Iran was...

It's like you got to look at the scoreboard, right? Like a bunch of do-gooding, bleeding-heart leftists just kind of got overthrown. Whereas you bring Rahala Homini, the guy who like was looking out of the window of the plane, taking him back to like become supreme leader of Iran. And a journalist asks him what he like thought about Iran, what he like made of it, what it made him feel.

and he said nothing. Like, just a complete kind of sadistic void who, like, and because the Islamic Revolution, there were a bunch of different directions that could have gone. There were, like, more moderate guys like Sharia Madari, there were, like, full on, like communists involved. And, yeah, Germany's guys were the guys who not only sort of won the sort of, like, revolution, but also then hanged a lot of communists afterwards.

And then the Iran-Iraq War. I think the real strat is that you just have, if you're going to do governmental overthrow from any direction, Islamic or leftist or whatever, you've got to do it while Jimmy Carter's president. Otherwise, it just doesn't work. Yeah. You think you can get anything past the steel trap that is Dwight Eisenhower? No, no. They went too early.

You got to wait for Carter to come around. So we've got to wait for the American Carter for anything to happen anywhere in the whole world ever again, actually. implies that original Jimmy Carter was not American. Jimmy Carter Berthaism? Why not? I refuse to recognize Georgia as a mal in U.S. state. His real name is Jimmy spelled with a D-Z-H-I-M-I, and his real last name is Carter Ashvilly.

So, yeah, so the consequence of... you know, the 70s basically is this rising wave of Arab nationalism kind of sweeps through all of the places that BP happens to have oil fields, you know, whether these things are related or not, who can ever say. But, you know, through the 70s, BP loses its fields in Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Kuwait, and then Iran. So they have like no reserves left. They went from one of the most like reserve rich oil companies in the world to basically having nothing in the span. My infinite money. My money. Yeah.

To purchase things. Almost simultaneously with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Margaret Thatcher privatized. Thank you. That's right. That's right, Liam. Whenever Margaret Thatcher comes up, my wife does the old lady with the thick accent bit. Steak through her heart, garlic around her neck. She never comes back, yeah.

they're like, what a terrible thing to say about somebody. And it's just like, I don't care. Too bad. Too bad. Yes, that's just permanently embedded in my head with the thought of Margaret Thatcher, which I suppose is fitting. But yeah, anyway, so BP gets privatized. It's no longer a state enterprise.

So now there are shareholders. And you know what shareholders love is, hey, could you make more money while also imperiling more people? Yes. We need money right now. We can do that. Me money. Me money now. Me meeting money. Money. Money now. Sounds like we're all having a stroke simultaneously, baby. Me money now. That's the correct Christmas Eve Eve recording energy, I think. Fucking delirious. Nothing feels good. Let's do it. You should sleep sometime. I'll get there. All right.

I'll sleep and I'm done podcast. No, I got to go back to back. I got to record with Tom later. Oh my God. Oh my God. Yeah. So, so, so. Basically, you know, through the 80s BP accrues one of the worst safety records of any oil company in the entire world. Next slide, please. Oh, I know this guy. This is Lord Brown. And even if I didn't know who he was, I would recognize the uncomfortably high resolution of the sort of parliamentary portrait photographer. Very distinctive style. These are all publicly available.

They're all like Crown copyright. Right. If you want an 80,000 pixel to a side image of like any MP or Lord, they'll do that for you. The full title is the right honorable Lord John Brown of Mattingly, which is, it's amazing that people have taken the UK seriously for as long as they have. He looks like evil Larry Krasner. He does. Yeah, let me break out the Hasselblad to get this, I don't know. I don't know.

Yeah, interesting guy. Uncomfortable. But anyway, in 1991, he becomes managing director of BP, and his goal is to run a tighter ship while also greenwashing BP. So they become kind of the woke oil company. Oh, dear. And New York Times profiles him shortly after he took over as an exec that is, quote, as much at home in Silicon Valley as in the oil belt.

So obviously the first order of business is to fire like tens of thousands of people and start doing takeovers of every oil company that you can possibly buy immediately to try to rebuild the reserves. So the balance sheet looks better, basically. As a result of this strategy in 1998, BP merged with Amoco, which was the remnants of the Standard Oil Company, which is another episode, honestly, just in itself. One of the several remnants of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny how the entire first half of the 1900s was breaking apart a bunch of oil companies,

and then the second half was reconciling them back together, the way they were. Brick by brick. Most of them became ExxonMobil. Not quite all of them, though, but most of them. Yeah. I mean, thinking about this guy's a bit of a time capsule as well, because one of the things I remember him for is he is gay. openly now. But at the time...

We're getting that, trust me. Oh, okay, sure. We'll talk about this guy being gay racer. It's funny because, yeah, his being gay ends up being very important, much more important than the fact that he ran this company and killed 15 people, which is kind of a, it is an interesting window into how the we have created it. Be gay do crimes until, until it's time to do crimes against humanity, yeah. Yeah.

That's the marketing scheme for Tel Aviv, I think. Be gay, do war crimes. But also, crucially, to like a decent segment of the population, do not be gay. We will stab you at the Pride Parade. Yes. I think that one of the most, like, Israeli stories of all time is the guy who, like, stabbed a bunch of people, killed one, to my knowledge, at the Tel Aviv Pride Parade, went to prison, was sort of fated as a hero in prison.

buy everybody up to the guards until they let him out of prison and then he went back to the next Tel Aviv Pride Parade and did it again. I'd irredeemable, you know? Well, you know, the rent and prison is cheap. I mean, Tel Aviv's expensive. Some people just get, you know, institutionalized or whatever. Yeah. In any case, in 1998, I'm sorry, I'm not, I refuse to, like, I have to still find a job,

so I am not going to talk about the topic of Israeli pride parades in a place. It's all good. You know what this is? What this is, is my mental health is in shambles and I'm distracting you from doing the thing because my brain doesn't work. It's why I brought up fucking Muhammad Rasa Shariat Madrealea is because like, it's all, everything is happening at once. No, I'm just explaining that I want a job again someday.

And if I'm going to deliver parts for the O'Reilly auto down the street from me, I need to not touch the third rail of Israeli gay pride parades. Oh yeah, like you're delivering somebody's new like intake manifold requires you to acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist now in America because it's a normal country. Yeah. In like 26 states, yes, I would need to sign a paperwork to that effect. God, America's so cool. Not Washington.

Washington, yeah, I don't think you have to do that. I'm pretty sure we don't have any laws about that here. So I do not need to sign the... Israel is good, actually, poison pill paper. That episode is coming. That episode is not coming. It's one way to solve like the anti-Semitic dual loyalty trope is to make everyone have dual loyalty. Anyway, BP merges the EMOCO. They become the third largest oil company in the world.

They change their logo to the green and yellow sun to show off how environmentally friendly they are. And their slogan becomes beyond petroleum. Yeah. Yeah. This is the point of which oil companies start becoming energy companies. The right honorable Lord Joan Brown of Maddingley swears that he will not cause any more catastrophic damage to the earth. It's amazing how many oil companies rebranded the energy companies

right down to Octan, you know, the Lego oil companies. Yes. I have a tweet about this. And annoyingly, it never popped off to the extent of the Lego police officer of losing the Smil over the years. But like, yeah, fucking Octan is an energy. You can buy an octan wind turbine. I wanted that set so bad when I was a kid, which probably says something about me. Yeah, you have these companies that have like, you know, a trillion dollar balance sheet,

but they advertise like, yeah, we're investing $10 million into green energy research this year. Yeah, Lego set 74747 has an octan wind turbine in it. That makes up a catastrophically small amount of like octan's energy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm putting it on the next. They only sell the like octan refining and oil extraction sets in Saudi Arabia. Well, it's basic offsuring, you know?

Like you kind of like you sell the wind turbines in the sort of developed world. Yeah, there's a whole secret set of Lego. We don't do that. That was another candidate for the goddamn news, just that they, we've canceled all offshore wind turbine projects in the US because... If you... If you let me do a lot of... If you let me do a Lego bonus episode, it will run about seven hours and culminating me

spending about $10,000 on myself, but on impulse and bankrupting myself. I'm gonna have to go on Bricklink.com and I'm gonna buy all the secret Saudi Arabian Lego sets. It's like the special 9-11 play set they only gave out on Saudi flights. Jesus Christ. Listen, he who interferes in what doesn't concern him, finds what doesn't lose him. There's a bunch of like, you know, different like pipe bricks that you can't get anywhere else other than Saudi Arabia, you know, that's, that's, that's a piece of advice.

They have one, they have one, they have a couple of like really long bricks that were used as part of the promotional set for the line. I just think it's not Arabia only. The Lego architecture, the line set. Yeah, trying to do the line and being like, I got to go on brickling and like 15 billion of these straight line pieces. I mean, the real thing is that no one wants to talk about like Octan rebranded to Octan energy, but if you look at 60025, they do so much fucking sports washing and that's what really makes them a Petro state. This is true, yeah. I want to see Kate Wagner's like F1 story, but for the Octan Lego sports washing

scandal. Octan, Octan do so much motorsport and it doesn't fucking have me fooled, you know? Yeah, they do motorsport, they do, well, they make all the history textbooks, I know that much. Flipping to the back of my history textbook and it's got the green and red logo on there. It's like, God fucking damn it. They make the voting machines. I used to be able to do that spiel from memory. I can't anymore.

You gotta rewatch the Lego movie. That's like, regressively, it's a good brand movie. Yeah. Anyway, BP got a big refiter. Your next slide, please. It's like, yeah, I'm having some trouble. We have a trouble staying on topic on this one. I got 15 minutes in me about the Octan Cooperation.

We keep, I feel like ever since I've started like writing these, I've been bringing like bonus energy to mainline episodes. Honestly, I love it. No, don't do not ever feel bad about it. I love it. The listeners should love it and if they don't, the thing that gets the thing, the algorithm. Don't worry, guys. I'm gonna make the next one real boring.

Just like they like it. Yeah. Well, so... We're going to explain stress and strain again. Ooh. So do you see this... Do you see this image? I do see this image.

This is the... This is an Amoco refinery. Well, it's a lot of different companies refineries, but this is a refinery in Texas City. The BP got from the Amico merger. It gives me the largest refinery in America. It can refine 10 million gallons a day or 2.5% of the US is gasoline production. Good God. It gives me anxiety.

society to look at and it feels like it gives someone else cancer to live downwind of like Oh yeah, Texas City is like just a super fun site. Nightmare, yeah. With a fucking city council. I'm just thinking, wow, look at all these cool process units. That is pretty. You're factorial killed right now. Yeah.

This image, by the way, for this slide is via the Center for Land Use interpretation, which is one of the coolest like photography and like, I don't even know. just a very cool project. They really like them a lot. So shout out to them for this photograph. Yeah. I mean, we are currently interpreting that land use right now. Yeah. Yeah. So we're doing the thing. So this refinery, despite making two and a half percent of the U.S. is gasoline, has been losing money for years. So BP immediately goes cost cutting mode at this place. They target budget cuts of 25 percent in 1999. And then another 12 and a half percent in 2005.

All right. So everybody's interviewing for their job back, essentially. Yeah, yeah. According to ProPublica, to save money, BP. What would you say you do here? I'm one safety guy. Well, there been any accidents? It's like, yeah.

The level of ruthlessness was they eliminated safety calendars for $40,000 worth of savings. But in fairness, if you're doing the kind of like big, it has been X hours since last incident thing from Steve, Starfield, a game only I played, I could see how that would be expensive and that would be a saving. But if we're just doing like, you have the Pirelli calendar that's like, don't bansaw off your own thumb or like, don't swim in the benzene, the sort of message for July. You're not my superveter. Maybe that's useful. Yeah, that's true.

Is that what a safety calendar? I don't know what a safety calendar is. I don't know either. I'm thinking novelty calendar. ProPublica did not go into detail about what safety calendars was specifically. So I'm assuming that it was like... It's got to be like some kind of this procedure needs to be done on this time. Yeah, that was kind of what I was interpreting it as.

I like my Pirelli answer better, but sure. They also eliminated purchases of safety shoes for employees to save $50,000. What the fucker? You have like, you're, you are one of the largest corporations in the world. They eliminated the safety awards as well to save $75,000. I just make you like buy your own like sort of composite to cap boots or whatever to go to work in the refinery and that's you know I I imagine the kind of line of work that runs through boots pretty quickly and all of a sudden you're at the mercy of the fucking like like vimes calculus you know yeah yeah well they also got rid of TVs and cable from the employee lounges oh you fucking Nazis $20,000 for comparison do out here. Fuck off. In 2004, BP made $16.2 billion of profit on $215 billion of overall revenue. Yeah, but...

Safety calendar is, in fact, the novelty calendar with safety tips on it. Okay, maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe I might, I might, you know, say if it's costing us that much. But here's the thing. If it costs you almost as much as, like, safety shoes, surely you cut the calendars in the safety shoes are now functionally free. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or you could spend the same amount and do like, fucking twice as many safety shoes, I don't know.

Hell, they could have upgraded the cable package. That's true. Just like, so the safety calendar is gone, and because of that, you can watch Pluribus at work. That's a good idea. That's an actual improvement in your work day. The only thing I can think of is, you know, the safety calendar probably has all the safety tips and larger print than the OSHA poster next to it that says all the same stuff. Also, there's a new thing every month, so your brain keeps working.

We, the company, bought Amazon Prime Extra Pro added plus that means that you have slightly fewer ads to skip through. So, you know, check that out. We spent, we spent $50,000 on that. But turns out we were spending that much on the cutting off your thumb hurts. See, but they might have needed the calendars because the safety record of this point, plant was not good. Even before BP took it over. When I was researching this, I found stories of a worker dying

because the safety railing he was leaning on was so rusted. It collapsed under his body weight and he fell to his death. Jesus. Yeah. You know, on all these process units because they are, you know, frequently

cycling like lots and lots of fluid, you know, and they're all tall, right? So you need all these exposed, like, galvanized steel sort of safety platforms all around them. You know, and it's genuinely hard to inspect all of them just because there's so much of them. You know, that seems, yeah, I mean, that's one of the places you would see.

Costco first is like, uh, we didn't check this railing because we had no one had used it in seven years. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I mean, Texas City is like right on the ocean and it's continually covered in like salt spray. So it russed. Yeah, in 2004, this, this specific refinery under BP's leadership suffered from three workplace fatalities, which was three out of 23 in the past 30 years at this exact plant. But at the same time, BP made, had 900 million in earnings off of this one refinery. So, you know, who's to say if drunk driving is bad? It gets a lot of people to work on time. But for an entire corporate strategy. Next slide, please. Now, you might ask yourself,

did BP know this facility was a ticking time bomb? They intentionally neglected for profit. According to this slide, the cost-benefit analysis of the three little pigs, I would say yes. Okay, so introducing levity to industrial accidents is our job. It's not the job of the guys causing the industrial accidents. That's literally adding insult to injury. This is one of those Those slides you just do not want printed and handed to you by a representative of the federal government. This is some MBA shit right here. I fucking hate people. Loads of people think like this.

And it's like, look at this maximum justifiable spend. A piggy considers it's worth $1,000 to save its bacon. Come on, come on. Yeah. One point old piggy lifetime. What would any of you put a dollar value on your life as? You know, eight bucks, why? Oh.

Two packs of Marlboro Reds frankly. When do I have to give you the money? Like, yeah. Ross might be able to be able to the indefatigable human sense. Hold on, hold on here. I got, I got, I got two pounds 25 on me. How does that strike you? No, no, no, no, you're supposed to, you're supposed to say how much money would it take someone to give you, but then they get to kill you.

Oh, I mean. That's really a question for my wife, I think. Yeah, that's also really a question for my wife. Doubly so, she's the one killing me. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I mean, well, she's the one who's going to have to, like, you know, invest the money or whatever. I don't know. I know that, like, the, FEMA has like.

She's behind me, isn't she? I gotta be honest, I've never, and I'm gonna expose myself as a kind of financial illicit right here, because I never expected to have a real job. I don't have like a pension or anything like, I mean, like, I don't, the death benefits for podcasting to the best of my knowledge. Yeah, not good. Like, if I, if I, if I, you know, get hit by a falling microphone or something, like, I don't be right. I don't know. It's not going to be good for the pollicle. I'll tell you that much.

Well, I'm just, you look at this whole slide here, right? Cost benefit analysis of the three little pigs. Frequency, the big bad wolf blows with a frequency of once per piggy lifetime. Consequence, if the wolf blows down the house, the piggy is gobbled by the wolf, I would assume. Maximum justifiable span the piggy considers its life. It's with an apostrophe. That's, fuck. God.

Anyway, so $1,000 to save its bake. They got that one right. Right. So what type of house should the piggy build? You build the brick house every single goddamn time, because if you save money and die, you're still dead. You can't spend the money. Yeah, that's one of those things that is in both capital and the Bible.

It's how you know it's right. have devoured your treasure or whatever. Yeah. It's remarkable how much those two agree, you know? If only I could synthesize them. No, you're not allowed. Stop right there. Do not proceed any further enough.

Esco. We gotta introduce Bible study into MBA courses, obviously. So based on this, you would imagine that Liberty University's business school would provide both the most moral and the most sort of efficient business graduates in the nation. And that's why we're hiring them exclusively. Business Secrets of the Torah. That's like a book that would have been written by like an anti-Semitic Russian officer

in 1919. And everybody now who is like anti-Semitic believes it's real. Yeah. Yeah. I call it the book of numbers for a reason. It's like business secrets of the Torah is some shit that like the Japanese, you know, the Japanese militarists were inventing in their head when they were doing Plan Fugu. Anyway, I think the correct move here is a little book entitled, Everything They Teach You at Liberty University Business School, and then a second larger book called Everything They Don't Teach You, at Liberty University Business School.

I studied financial instruments in Utah called that Brigham Young Money. That's just the name of a podcast that already. exists that did that joke well before me. Next slide, please. This is my favorite slide from that deck, which was from 2002, for the record. Okay, so this is a graph, a really poorly formatted graph that describes the

intolerable environmental risk for a major operation that counts cumulative frequency on the y-axis and on the x-axis outrage on a scale from local, national, regional, global, and then someone has extrapolated that beyond the grounds of the thing to something that is presumably like, cites BP is like an intergalactic environmental criminal, but that is so rare it almost never has. Some guys, some guys out on Alpha Centauri are like, damn, that's fucked up. BP causes the fucking gray goo apocalypse.

This is also how I decide what jokes I'm going to say out loud on the podcast. I have a graph in my mind where one axis is labeled outrage. Well, this is also the interesting one here is outrage is like an abstract term, but they've decided, you know, we're going to make one side scientific. We're going to be, we're going to do this by doing scientific notation for values that would make a lot more sense, not in scientific notation. Yeah, so presumably in this, BP, they're plotting that BP causes a global outrage 1E minus 4 times a year.

1 to the negative 5th, which I believe would be 0.005. BP causes national, causes global outrage way more than that. Yeah. Every like what, 50,000 years BP causes a global outrage that they're they've covered the last like 150,000 years. I need some data points. I want some data points on this because it's going to be like, I don't know, there's like, or excuse me, no, it's going to be like, ah, yeah, actually they're all over here. This lacks rigor.

Yeah, exactly. Well, this is like, it happens when you get an MBA. Yeah, there probably were some, there were some like, there were some data points that were like this. And then someone's like, I need a better R squared. Fit this to a linear equation. So my, just to kind of docks myself as a hereditary member of the professional managerial class, my dad has an MBA. And when he got it, I never knew what that was other than that my dad worked at the business factory, which seemed to consist of going in really early, coming home, really late, making phone calls, writing emails. The longer I've like, the longer I've

lived and the more experience, you know, admittedly kind of second and third hand of the corporate world I've had, the more I'm finding that that's kind of what an MBA is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My mom got one and I think it was just like to allow her to like fill out insurance paperwork for a hospital. It's weird that to be a podcast to one of your parents has to have a master's degree. It's it's the sort of a podcast theory of elite overproduction, you know, and like we would have had real jobs last generation just by virtue of heredity, but we don't now because we

produce too many elites. Yes. I mean, I thought this was just the only job you could get as a transit, but I'm not going to lie to you. That too. I don't know about the rest of you all, but like... Yeah, yeah, that too, that too. No, my parents are the lawyers. You can't even you can't even be a grad

student in half the universities in America anymore because somebody will write a paper like, I love to, I love to, I love Christ, and you'll be like, hey, The paper was asking you to analyze why the Civil War started, and then they get you fucking fired from your job. Yeah. Because we're doing one-sided asymmetric warfare against all trans people,

and nobody is willing to recognize it as such. So nobody can get me fired from this because... That's true. I mean, actually technically all three of you could get me fired from this, but nobody else can. Yeah. Wait, Victoria's trans. We offer a crucial difference from...

We offer a crucial difference. from every other employer and that we're not transphobic. I, speaking of, I got a few sort of Tumblr asks recently where people were like, yeah, I haven't listened to your podcast in like a couple of months or whatever. I stopped, I thought somebody who was like, I stopped listening for a while and I thought you were a new host. Like, so I don't know if my voice has changed that much, but between that and the name change, I'm just happy to disorient and confuse people.

Hell yeah. Yes. Taking a literal interpretation of like the old me is dead when you transition, but like just doing it every time you change your name. Yeah. I got another few more of these in me. I mean, like, what, 25 more? Oh, some of those are gonna be rough.

Do you not ask me about the Papa year. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. No, I'll be 100% real. I already made the joke that I'm everybody's dad last episode. Second choice is going to be Sierra, obviously,

and then you get to some really problematic ones, you know? India's pretty bad. Zulu's probably worse. Oh, yeah. Anyway, so now that we've discussed the outrage graph, just for an idea of what conditions were like at BP, in January 2005, Taylor's group was brought in as an outside auditor.

They interviewed employees and stuff. This is a direct quote from somebody who worked at the BP refinery in Texas City. Telling the manager what they want to hear, that gets rewarded. For example, one person who had cut costs, done a lot of band-aids with maintenance and had to quit your belly-acheing, quit your complaining attitude, was rewarded in the last reorganization. When his replacement was brought into his previous maintenance position, his replacement found that a single pump was fit for service.

Air compressors, all that. not one spare was fit for service. Yeah, I cut a lot of costs by not doing anything. Yeah. One prediction from another employee was that the plant, quote, kills someone in the next 12 to 18 months, end quote. What is that but a differently drawn outrage graph, you know? Taylor's group in their own conclusion said, quote, there is an exceptional degree of fear of catastrophic incidents at Texas City.

We have never seen a site where the notion I could die today was so real. These conditions you would never encounter its shells, Chevron, Exxon, et cetera. When your, when your auditor tells you this, is that good? You know, largely this is because the turnover was insane. The cost-cutting pressure was absolutely insane, you know, because basically they had developed a factory in which you put in dangerous conditions and get out $100 million a month. Like, yeah, just a direct input output. But, um, so obviously there's nothing, nothing bad is ever going to happen here.

And, uh, capitalism naturally sustains itself. And it never, the worst in conditions never impact anybody. So, uh, we can obviously, nothing bad happened. Now we'll do an unrelated episode, uh, and the next slide about how we make gasoline. Yes. And then nothing else happens. That's it. I'm going to see fucking Drake's well again.

Um, no. Probably. So, not right now. I will be right back. My main goal, should we keep on? Yeah, she just, of course she manages to skip out right when you start the organic chemistry. That makes sense. Lucky her.

Some people just don't want to have the knowledge. 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 raised through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash 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. Anyway, my goal for this podcast is, of course, after you've listened to every refinery disaster we ever do,

which will be all of them, of course, in order. You finally understand every. single refinery process unit. Yeah, because every process unit has failed disastrously at least once. I bet there's like some that probably can't, but I don't know what they are offhand. Like I think it'd be, you know, pretty crazy if like the asphalt blowing unit exploded. Yeah, it would be pretty crazy. If that's ever happened, that's an episode.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. We got hydrogen synthesis down here. I don't know. Anyway, so we all know, we should know at this point, the big part of the oil refinery, At the start, fruit oil goes in to the distillation column, right? Work out how heavy, well, to like separate stuff out based on, based on, like, length of hydrocarbon chain, I think. Yeah. It's based on basically where it condenses

based on temperature. So your lightest products are up here. And then your heavier products condensed down at the bottom, right? The chemicals that come out of the bottom are, are called the bottoms. The chemicals that come out of the top are called the tops. In our Philadelphia refinery explosion episode, we talked about the bottoms, which went into the, where is it, alkalation unit over here, right? This is a very complicated process to create gasoline out of horrible nasty oil. Now, here's the thing. There's also pretty good oil that comes out, right? So, in order to, you know, a lot of stuff that comes, especially if you have lighter crude oil, you're going to have more stuff coming out of the top. These are the tops. This is light naphtha, right? So in order to turn

the light naphtha into gasoline, you know, well, first we feed it through the hydrotreater, right? And then I got to get back to my notes here. You know, we do some minimum processing in order to turn it into the main product of the refinery, the vroom vroom, beep gas, gasoline, right? Vroom B, p, get. Yeah, the gasoline we all know and love. So this light naphtha is largely what you would call alkanes, shorter chain alkanes, right? Saturated hydrocarbons. Used to call them paraffins.

Does that make any sense to anyone? Yeah. Yeah, I know what a hydrocarbon chain is. Okay, okay, okay. Something about bottoms and tops. Yeah. These are tops. But like, yeah, keep your mind on your work here.

But anyway, so a saturated hydrocarbon is a molecule where all of the Cs, those are in black here, bond with either other Cs or with H's. That's carbon and hydrogen, right? Oh, I suppose I should have put a C here as opposed to a circle. You know, so everything, it's saturated because there's like, no open space where another Adam could come in and say, hey, how are you doing? You know, because sometimes that happens and that, that's, oh dear.

My God, sorry. God damn it, Buzz. That was Bert attempting to bond with an unsaturated hydrocarb. Jesus, man. Sorry. I just see like one flash of like an orange tail retreating. Bucking! Now attached to several carbon atoms, yeah.

Let's talk about these carbon atoms. Exactly. So I want to get into valence electrons or covalent bonding or all that bullshit because I don't remember it too good. But your alkenes, or excuse me, alkanes, alkenes are a different thing. like CH4, that's methane, or C2H6, that's ethane, C3H8, that's propane, right? But we want to talk about our good friend here, C8H18. Big long stringy, high after carbon chain.

Is, oh, this is nowhere near as long as it can get. Fuck. Yeah, no, this is octane, right? Like from Lego. Yeah. So octane is a fairly common, hydrocarbon, but it is, it can come in many forms, right? You may have heard of gasoline having an octane rating, right? That's a measure of how much it can be, you know, compressed in the engine

essentially, or that's a way to measure how much it can be compressed. Modern high efficiency, high compression engines need high octane fuel because otherwise they're subject to engine knocking, which is when the fuel detonates at the wrong part of, you know, the sucks, squeeze, bang, blows cycle. We used to have a technology to deal with engine knock, but due to woke, we're not allowed to... Yeah, the liberals took the Tetra-out, the lead away from us. God-down government thinking it knows better than me, they took it away, and now you're not allowed to use it anymore, and now you have to have a higher octane fuel. Exactly. Well, I mean, tetraethyl lead gasoline is high octane definition. Because octane

doesn't refer to the actual amount of octane, but rather sort of a proportional amount of compressibility. I don't fully understand it. I'm going to be honest with you. But there are plenty of chemicals that have an octane higher than 100, including some isomers of octane. We'll get to that in a second. Yeah, aviation fuel is like 105 anyway. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And there's some, there's some that's even higher than that. Which is leaded to hell for the record. Still in the U.S. Oh, yeah. That's why being around planes makes you dumber.

That's why pilots are so right wing is because of all the lead in the fucking gas. You start off as like a tree-hugging, like, bleeding heart liberal when you start pilot school. And by the time you're done, you're like, ah, we should have, we got to bomb them all. Well, of course, because bombing them all gets you more exposure to your beloved lead. Yes, that's a good point. Wow. I think my Avgas with depleted uranium just for some spice. Yeah.

I don't know what the octane rating of depleted uranium is, but it's probably good. I'm struggling to get my 182 off the ground because I'm using 300 octane depleted uranium fuel. No, it's not even depleted. Put some uranium hexafluoride in there. see what happens. Everyone's favorite molecule. Wait, do you put six fluorides?

And it's uranium? What's the line about from that one chemistry book about fluorine compounds? You know, my advice in dealing with a fluoride fire is a good pair of running shoes. Yes. So anyway, these high efficiency, high compression engines need high-octane fuel. Otherwise, they're subject to engine knocking, is when the fuel combusts at the wrong part of the cycle, right? Which, you know, at the best makes a horrible sound,

and at the worst makes the engine blow up, right? Bad. That's why your Mercedes-Benz only takes 93 octane. And the GTI, yes. Yeah, that was a tune, but that was either going to know there. Yeah, you got more compression. You need a better fuel. Yeah.

So the octane ratings based around 100, or a value of 100, being a fuel, which is pure 224 trimethyl pentane. That's this guy here. That's also C8H18. But yeah, you can see other molecules here. At the top, this is regular old octane in one long chain. There's a lot of this in diesel fuel. You know, this guy, as I said, 224 trimethyl pentane or isoctane. This is the standard for 100 octane. But most fuel brand, fuel, fuel blends are not purely this molecule, right? You also have different configurations like this guy down here is 2-5 dimethyl hexane, right, which is also C8H-18.

They're all the same chemical formula, but it has more than 100 octane, right? I don't fully understand the chemistry here, but, you know, the important thing to know, these are isomers of the same chemical formula, right? It's the same amount of atoms just arranged in different ways. Yeah, and time was you could make a great deal of money being the person who understood this well enough to arrange the atoms in such a way that your Mercedes didn't explode. Yes, exactly. And then along came a guy who said, what if we just put lead in there and that worked better?

No, we're off the races. So for octane, there's 23 different isomers, right? All of them have different properties. And so the purpose in the refinery of the isomerization unit right here, right, is to take the boring low octane isomers and change them into the exciting high octane isomers. Bang some atoms around until they get into the shapes you want. Exactly, exactly. So you can then blend this.

into the final gasoline blend, then you can get 93 octane, and then you can finally make a fuel suitable for driving your BMW to the top golf and then park across six parking spots, right? This sounds like a personal grievance, but yes. And so, you know, how does this work? It's like almost every other process unit in a refinery. And, you know, it's heat and a catalyst. it's just it's all heat and a catalyst.

I think the isomerization unit runs at atmospheric pressure. Some of them use pressure and heat and a catalyst. It's all heat and a catalyst. That's, you know, there's a lot of complicated piping and safety devices, but when it comes right now to it, it's just heat and a catalyst, you know? The catalyst varies per unit for what it's going to do. I guess also people might ask, okay, what's your hydrotreater here that's also along this process line. That is just a do-hicky that removes the sulfur because we use low sulfur fuel

for everything now. You know, and then I think on the next slide there's another. Yeah, the thing that decreases the amount of acid rain and increases the amount of climate change. Yeah, well, you know, everything's got tradeoffs. I don't know. My roof is going to last longer. So I, you know, six to one, half a dozen of the other. I'm high enough on a hill that I'm not going to get flooded immediately. Anyway. Yeah, until you tear your own roof off because it's too hot, you know? No, I'm American. I have air conditioning. Yeah. Must be nice.

So anyway, that's why we need this isomerization unit because we want the atoms to look different or the molecules to look different so that they have higher octane. Anyway, back to Victoria's slides. Yeah. Yeah, so that was, thank you, Raz. There's no way I would have remembered how to explain any of that. I was homeschooled, so my chemistry class was me self-teaching from a textbook as my mom got more stressed out. Why does it say Octan Corporation on the back of this?

The important part from BP's perspective, right, is you put no maintenance into this huge sprawling facility in Texas City and you get $100 million every month. Almost as if the whole refinery is a kind of process unit for capitalism. No, it's multiple different process units. But mesophorically, wrongly, it's a device for producing United States dollars for shareholders. So you take the whole refinery as a process unit of capitalism. Yeah, it's sort of like a close, yeah, exactly. I mean, Texas City is kind of like just a geographic location where we isolate all of the nastiest things we do near a city in America.

And then we also put them next to a place we haven't protected with a seawall. So if a hurricane comes through and just aims the right way, we cause the largest environmental disaster ever in history. And we have left this up to Texas to fund and build.

I'm going to need another diagram to explain how the capitalist process works. This is the problem. This is the problem with Marx's capital. It should have been a large diagram rather than a book. If he had that fucking slide, Luxury automated space communism by now.

Yeah. Where does the refinery fit in all this? RIP Karl Marx, you would have loved a searchable PowerPoint. You imagine Karl Marx gets into Factorio. Do you think Karl Marx would have been a grungler? I think Karl Marx would have been a satisfactory guy more than Factoria to answer the first question. To answer the second question, one of our surviving pieces of Marx's correspondence with Engels is one in which he volunteers that he has been lately dealing with extremely painful boils on

his penis. And then sort of complains at length about his penis boils. I think 100% he would have been hanging out with two guys. He may have been at the time. Probably would have been a grungler, yeah. My other Marks fact is that apparently someone, another writer I don't remember who recounts this of him in a really baffled way that occasionally when he was drunk, he would would just pick someone and just start saying, I will annihilate you.

I've done that. And then get more and more drunk and keep saying this, I will annihilate you and making himself laugh until he was like completely insensible, drunk and laughing, thinking about annihilating a guy. So- No, so what you're saying is he would produce like a 50-page article called Critique of the Grungler Program. And, yeah, the grungreser.

Yeah. The grunt. Well, now that we've tackled that. Yeah. Yeah. Big tick on the to-do list. Yeah. People think we don't script these, but we do.

Exactly. Yeah, that was on the to-do list from while. We don't scripted, but we do have a big to-do list. This is the is the iserization unit at the Texas CISO. at the Texas City plant, which refines the octanes, as Rod said. The simplest way to explain it is that the low-grade hydrocarbons, which are called raffinate. Your insult just dropped. Are you implying that there's also a riffinate, the riff rat, if you will.

That's our role in the economy. The raffinate, I believe, is derived from the archaic term, which is paraffin. Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm like paraffinate. Yeah. Huh. Yeah, so they pump this in.

They catalyptically cracked the first syllable off of that. To the, to the raffinate splitter tower. And basically, like, parts of it get trickled down to the base and parts of it get, you know, bed back through the loop more or less again until they are further refined. So this raffinate splitter tower is actually 170 feet tall, but only the bottom nine feet of the tower are designed to be filled with liquid. From there, the liquid, the distilled liquid is pumped to

various storage tanks or recycled through the system for further refinement and blending into gasoline and all that kind of stuff. Next slide, please. Oh, crap, hold on. What happened? Oh, I was busy annotating this and then I'm sorry. I went to the next,

anyway. I apologize. Forgive me for shamelessly stealing from the CSB for this, but this is genuinely their greatest hits video. They went back and re-rendered this in ultra-high-deaf for the 15th anniversary celebration. You should never buy the fucking Game of the Year edition. It's such a fucking rip-off, you know.

They made a whole new workplace training out of it and everything. I fucking hate when the CSB decides to re-release Texas City again and break all my mods. If for some reason you don't know, you listen to this podcast and you don't know, CSB is the Chemical Safety Board. They have a good YouTube channel. It's like, they're like us if we had production values and worked for the, and had government money. Yeah, and didn't make jokes.

Yeah. Yeah. They, okay, they make a couple of jokes in their episode about Texas City. They're just really dry, right? Like they have, they have a sense of irony. Oh, yeah, that's true. as God, but, you know. My belief is that the people working for the Chemical Safety Board are the only people

in the United States federal government who are actually, like, probably still communists. Like, they got rid of most of us, like, from any kind of, like, government service job, you know, years and years ago. But I actually, based on the cadence of these videos and how basically beginning with, well, it's later in the episode, I'm getting way too ahead of myself. I'm so excited about the CSB. God damn it. I mean, again, it's one of the few things our tax dollars go to, which is good.

Yeah, this is like, if you were trying to, you know that scene in, in glorious bastards where he puts his hands up to count off three and it reveals that he's like not German. Yeah, asking a trans woman who is trying to be stealth about the CSB would be a way to get her to out herself. Yeah, what's your favorite three lesser agency? Yeah. You're like, oh shit, no cis person would ever, ever admit to that. And yet every trans woman is always like, yeah. Yeah, every trans woman has a favorite and least favorite three lighter agency, CSB and TSA.

Transition safety agency. No, no CSB agent ever groped me in an airport. Well, in any case, so this still is from that video, which you should go watch. Even if you like this episode, you should still go watch it. It's just like a really nice rendering, honestly. Yeah, it's like this picture, except it moves and there are a lot more of them. And the guy who, like, transcribes his videos just has the best announcer voice, possibly in like American history.

Oh, yeah, sure. I'm familiar. Anyway, so at the bottom of the Raffinate Splitter Tower, there is this gauge, which you can see here. It is a glass tube that shows for the bottom nine feet of the tower that can be filled with liquid. And you're supposed to be able to look into it and see like, okay, where visually is this indicating how much fluid is in the bottom of the in the tower? But BP hadn't cleaned this tube for like six or seven years. So it was too dirty to see inside of it.

And there was too little time to clean it on their turnaround schedule because they were, I don't know if this is. This is the best place to put this in, but they were in the middle of doing a basically a refinery shutdown and restart process where they maintain a bunch of stuff that has to be emptied out and then hurry as quickly as possible to boot everything back up and keep making $100 million a month. They were like, leave the tube. Yeah, fuck it. We don't need that.

When you do refinery, turn around, that's always major, major heavy maintenance. And that means you have a lot more personnel on site. You might have temporary structures put up just for like additional. offices or even like, you know, you know, it just played break rooms, all that kind of stuff. There's a lot more people on site at the refinery during the turnaround because you were either fully or partially taking offline the refinery. Maybe you're only taking offline some of the process units, but you try and get as much maintenance done as quickly as possible because anytime these machines are turned off, you're making gasoline less efficiently, right?

So you're losing a lot of money. And also, you know, crap, what was the second thing I was going to say? Some of these machines are difficult to shut down and start up. You know, it's so sometimes you don't want to, you know, you want to avoid like doing maintenance too frequently because the shutdown and startup processes maybe. they may take a long time or they may be dangerous or they may be so on and so forth. So the, yeah, a turnaround is just a quick but very intensive period of maintenance. Like everyone has to descend upon the process unit, you know, and like, like, I don't know, fire ants or something and, you know, just redo the whole thing.

Chaos mode. Yeah. You've enabled chaos mode in your refinery. Yeah, okay. We need 1,000 man hours. Every man works for one hour. And restarting the is a known dangerous process because it's, you know, working with like explosive shit that you're heating and cooling and pumping all through,

you know, a tower where we've got like a bunch of vapors and stuff. So it's not like they were, it's not like this is considered like a very safe part of the plant. It's considered difficult to start up. But in any case, this glass tube is dirty. We're not going to clean it. We're rushing. And it doesn't matter because we've got two sensors to tell us how full it is inside. We've got like a high sensor, which is at like seven and a half feet. And we've got like a high, high level alarm, which is like at eight feet. So it's fine. Off scale high and off scale higher. Yeah. I mean, it's still within the scale because like nine feet is technically the maximum. but, you know, it's whatever.

Now, of course, the startup process for the isomization unit, the written procedure is to fill it up to like, you know, four feet halfway. No one has ever done this because if the level drops too low, it can damage the heater, the heating furnace that's further downstream because it'll like basically heat up the equipment instead of the liquid and, you know, cause damage. So they're always overfilling it. So they always fill the tower basically all the way up to nine feet to make sure that it doesn't, you know, drop as the startup begins and damage the equipment. So, and it very, very early in the morning at like 1 a.m. on March 24th, 2005.

Oh, boy. We finally got there, huh? After a mere hour 49. I'm sorry. I'm trying. I really try. That's on me. I said all of that stuff about the Iranian Revolution. And Octan, don't forget that. And Octan.

I'm worried that all the fans are gonna hate me because my episodes take forever. The fans love you as well they should. The fans on the other hand would pick the sort of meat from my bleached bones. Um, I stop, well, no, no, they're hogs. They eat the bonds still. Oh, fuck. I learned that from the Guy Ritchie film Snatch. Yeah. Bricktop.

A guy whose name is significantly hotter than he is. Yeah. So. You can't be called that. Like, you just can't be called brick top. I'm sorry. They begin filling this raffinate splitter tower to start the is the isomerization unit back up.

They fill it to what they think is nine feet. It is actually full of 13 feet of liquid. Of course, there's no. way to tell how full it is because it turns out one of the two high level alarms was broken. So only the first one sounded. And the level sensor is also reading just 99% full. And there's no way to visually check because the glass tube is too dirty. So they're like, yeah, sure, it's 99% full.

Cool. That's like 8 feet and 11 inches. Sweet. Let's keep going. So 5 a.m. rolls around. The guy who's running the ISOM startup in the satellite control room. briefs the central control room further away where he thinks the level

inside the Raffinate splitter tower is and he leaves work an hour early don't know why he was just like yeah fuck it you just can it's allowed this job sucks it's Texas City yeah you know like I that's he he should if it if it sucks

hit the bricks yeah and I can guarantee you Texas City sucks there are situations you can just walk out of So at 6am, the guy who's going to take over the ISM startup in the central control room comes in for his 30th straight 12-hour shift in a row. God damn, that can't be good for you. The CSB animation has the guy plop down in the chair and stare at the ceiling, which I believe is true to life. He reads a single line note and very cryptic information regarding the state of the raffinate splitter tank from the previous shift and he's like, all right. Generally speaking, the startup process isn't supposed to be handled, like handed off like asynchronously like this.

So he's already kind of starting at a disadvantage and then they gave him nothing to go off of. So it's like, okay, cool. I guess. I guess it's 99% full. Sure. This is some extremely bad procedure to do it, you know, A, at a weird time a day, and B, have the things, you know, just split it through a shift, yeah. Yeah. To add on to things, the head day shift supervisor arrives to the central control room at 7 a.m., over an hour late for his shift and never got briefed on anything because he-trunk.

Because he never saw the night shift controller because he came in so damn late. So nobody has any fucking clue what's happening. This is important. Next slide, please. Now, as the day shift begins, against best practice, they kept the automatic tower level regulator belt. Something goes against best practice right at the, yeah. Yeah.

Well, so the supervisor was told that the heavy raffinate storage tanks were almost full, and so they couldn't pump out heavy raffinate. But the operators beneath that supervisor believed the light raffinate storage tanks weren't supposed to be filled. So they are refeeding the light raffinate back into the feed. The heavy raffinate isn't going anywhere. So there's like basically like no outflow, because of this miscommunication. We have, we have, we have nothing going out the bottom and the stuff that comes out of the top is now being recirculated around and being sent back in. Oh boy. Along with, I assume new product. Yes. Yeah. They turn on the furnace burders.

and they crank up the raffinate in inflow. And they begin to start up again at 9.50 a.m. So, yeah, we have no outflow and we have tons of inflow. At 11 a.m., the supervisor of the central control unit leaves for a personal emergency and leaves no one watching this during its most dangerous period where they're pumping in explosive liquids to try and get this process started again. By understanding is the supervisor, the reason he came in late is he was having a very, very bad day. Yeah. About to get worse, I feel like.

Wow, he won't be there for that. Yeah. So there's one guy left watching three different refinery units, including this one. At this point at about 11 a.m., the tower, which is 170 feet tall and designed to hold nine feet of liquid, contains 67 feet of liquid. It is indicating that it has eight and a half feet full. Me, when I say I'll have a few small drinks. Yes. Yes. A few small rathadates.

Oh, you know. So they just keep pumping in more liquid. And the level sensor, which has no fucking clue it's doing at this point, starts reading that it has less in the tank as time goes on and the level gets higher. And because of the way they have this control room set up, there's no one screen that they can look at and say, okay, we have this much coming in and this much coming out, right? It's all split into different data feeds.

So the operator who is currently watching three process units misses the fact that there is tons of raffinate going in and basically nothing coming out because there's so many different places for it to come out and in from that there's no way to simplify this down to, okay, how much is going in and how much is going out? Just like, give me that information. That's not indicated anywhere. And even if there was indicated somewhere, the heavy raffinate outflow reading is wrong.

It indicates that there are 4,100 barrels per day of heavy raffinate flowing out of the manual control valve when currently there is none flowing out. So even if even when you look at that, it's like, oh, well, it's not that bad. We still have a bunch pumping out. It's no big deal. There's nothing. You have unwittingly created a kind of closed loop. Yes. Meanwhile, the level...

It's an open loop, but it's an open loop in so much you can add product. You can't remove it. Oh, well, good. I mean, you can remove it, but you won't wake out. The five-year plan for nuclear energy generation has been fulfilled in point zero zero zero. Yes. This slide comes directly from the CSB report. This shows the 104 p.m. status of the Raffinates Blutter Tower.

which is that there's 158 feet of liquid inside the tower designed to hold nine feet. And the control board display has now dropped showing that there's less than eight feet of liquid inside of it. So it's just fucking lying. Even if this guy wasn't like, even if the supervisor wasn't having the worst day of his life and, you know, there wasn't one guy watching free process units. And they had consolidated some of this information to a single screen. the equipment is just so poorly maintained that it's just lying. And nobody can go look and check because again, the glass tube is dirty.

Next slide, please. At 1241 p.m., a high pressure alarm goes off in the raffinate splitter tower as the 100 plus feet of liquid inside it compresses the gas left at the top. And so there's sensors to indicate like, hey, you might have an explosive situation here because the gas inside is too high pressure. And the controllers are like, what the fuck is going on? This doesn't make any sense at all. There's seven feet of liquid in here.

And, you know, there's no indication that we've like run this process in a way that would cause like a buildup of high pressure gas. And they're like, okay, whatever. So they open up a manual release valve to vent the gases to what are, to what is known as a blowdown drum. The sort of oopsie valve, you know? Yeah, yeah. The process unit for when you have fucked up is real bad, you know?

Yeah, that's the, oh, you know. You spend it somewhere and we'll handle that later. Don't worry about it. Yeah. In a civilized refinery in like a first world country, there's usually a flame at the top to burn off all the combustible left in the whatever you're venting. Because presumably it's going to be some sort of like hydrocarbon dry product. It's going to be really flammable.

But because this is BP, they've been using the same design since the 50s. And it's just a vent that just pushes the chemicals straight to atmosphere. Whatever. It's Texas City. Just like a dog you're trying to get rid of. Get out of here. Yeah. It's Texas City.

Like, what are you going to do? Make it worse? I mean, I, like, Texas City is one of the places where, like, when right-wing grifters are like, hey, you can buy a house in this, like, cool 50s neighborhood for like $40,000. It's like, oh, yeah. Yeah, your next door neighbor is a refinery who's like, it would be a super fun site if the EPA had inspected it in the past 30 years, but they're not allowed in. Well, you know, that's unfortunately the case with all operating refineries.

It's kind of hard not to do that. Yeah, yeah. It's just, but like that's the thing, right? It's like, you know, Texas City is like, it's, I used to live like 20 minutes north of it. And I would still occasionally get the shelter in place alerts when something would explode. And we'd be downwind. And they'd be like, hey, there might be some nasty fumes coming your way. So, Texas City.

Thanks. guys. Texas, yeah, most of Houston just like, you know, once a year, it's kind of like when, you know, the energy just goes out for a week or whatever. It's like, you know, once a year, the air's not breathable. And then you get hit by a hurricane. It's fine. It is funny to think of like some of those like trad, fascist guys trying to get their

1950s Levittown experience. And it's right next to the refinery. No, like when I, my years and years ago, But I was dating somebody and I, we lived in Houston. We, like, looked at houses together. And we looked at a place that we could actually afford. And it was, like, suspiciously close to Texas City. And we were both like, oh, these houses are really cute.

And they seem like really nice. They're pretty cheap. And then I was like, I don't know, though. Can you, like, see the flare stacks. And it threw over the fence in your backyard. Yeah, it's the problem with Philadelphia energy solutions leaving. The rent's going to go up everywhere. the bell weather district oh god yeah so in any case um you know they they vent this atmosphere

and they finally open the outflow valve for the raffinate to send heavy raffinate to the storage tanks um because they're like shit we should probably like empty this as quickly as we can um they have no clue of what the flow level is at this point because again it's been lying to them this entire time by 104 p.m the tower has 150 beat of raffinate inside it. And it is the first time all day that the heavy raffinate outflow actually like

matches what's being put into the tower. But again, they have no idea of this. So finally we've achieved like neutrality, right? Like the heavy raffinate in flow is finally the same as what they're pumping out of it. So it should theoretically stay at 158 feet. It doesn't. The reason is because as they've opened

the outflow valve, the raffinate has to, flow through heat exchanger before it can go to the storage tanks. And this heat exchanger is also shared with the inflow loop. And so it, because all of this hot rafidet rushes through the heat exchanger, the inflow temperature rises dramatically and the heated liquid inside the tower makes all the gas left in it and like liquid expand and fill all 170 feet of the tower, basically in this like the blink of an eye more or less.

Right, yeah. We just vent this safely out through the explosion machine. Oh, that's gone. Yeah, so this has a clever feature where when you pump out the stuff on the bottom, right, because you have to heat the incoming light naphtha anyway, it goes through a heat exchanger and then into a heater so you can use the residual heat to heat the incoming product while also, you know, cooling the outgoing product, right? So, you know, okay, this is very clever in normal circumstances.

But here, not so good, not so good. And I want to avoid that, yeah. If you've filled your tower with 158 feet of liquid, it can be bad. But yeah. I'm learning this for the first time. So they instantaneously basically expand all of the liquid inside the tower. And you can see on like this temperature diagram. or bad.

Yeah, no, this is probably, I mean, you're probably, well, I doubt they're near like the super critical fluid at this point, but you are, you are doing bad stuff to, to all of this. You're doing stuff to the liquids that you've never really thought you, they ever would have done to. Yeah. Yeah, no, this is not, this is outside of, outside the design constraints of this device. Oh, yeah. There are so many things that should have stopped this process before we got here, but nothing did.

So we're here. So next slide, please. So the raffinate splinter tower is now all 170 feet of it are completely full of liquid. So there is a tube at the top meant to vent gases that now is full of hot liquid. So the pressurized heated liquid raffinate works its way through this tube, blasts directly through all three safety valves. and allows direct flow of the liquid to the blowdown stack. This isn't like the worst case scenario because there is like a sewer at the base of the blowdown drum that is meant to just like collect all of the runoff like liquids created by the plant

and then we sort of threw and disposed of later. So you're kind of like, all right, that's, you know, we can we can deal with some of this. Unfortunately, it's 52,000 gallons of liquid, which is much more. than it's intended to deal with. So these flow into the blow down drum and the liquid outflow alarm triggers and the operator's like, oh shit, there's like liquid in the in the safety relief valves. That's crazy. Why do we have that?

Unfortunately, the high level alarm for the blowdown drum doesn't trigger. So they're supposed to be inside the blowdown drum itself, another secondary like level alarm for your liquid is about to overflow. And that doesn't work. So they're like... Andy your sticks alarm. What? Don't worry about it.

I'm referencing a Tumblr post. Oh, Jesus. I would describe that as the hit the bricks alarm, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Bye. Bye. Start lacing them up.

Your watch has ended. It's time to leave. Yeah, because you know, this is, this is, it should, you should never be triggering this. And yeah, that should, that should be caused for incredible, immediate alarm. But it doesn't trigger. So they're like, we still fundamentally have some sort of gas problem, but we also have some sort of liquid problem that isn't the most pressing thing. What's going on? And there's, they're kind of like, what the hell's going on? We don't know. They're trying to figure out what's happening. And then a geyser of hot raffidate erupts from the

top of the blowdown stack, roughly 50 feet high, flooding the entire isom unit with incredibly flammable high-octane fuel vapor, which is bad. That's a failure mode. Yeah. I mean, the, the chemical that caused this problem is the heavy raffinate, right? But you have to remember that this is generally, you know, on the lighter end of the petroleum spectrum. So it's, and it's also, this is bad. You don't want to be around this. They've also been mixing the lighter raffinate back into it, too. Oh, yeah. So it's all of it. It's just 52,000 gallons of, you know. You are now surrounded by aerosolized racing fuel. Yes.

Oh, oh. Yeah. And of course, they shouldn't get like a good lead high off of this either. Oh, you're going into the trash. Now, here's where the, this is really where the Victoria special interest actually kicks into high gear for this episode. 25 feet away from the blowdown stack was a parked and running pickup truck that happened to have a diesel engine. Now, do we know what happens when a diesel engine is fed air that is full of flammable vapors? Yeah, so the thing about diesel engines, right, is that they just kind of combust everything that's around them, right?

That's why they're kind of useful and they just kind of want to keep running. Yeah. They don't need a spark plug. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, they don't need very high octane fuel either. So the intake. Uh-oh, this feels like foreshadowing.

This intake of this truck begins sucking in, you know, literally like, aerosolized fuel. Going to truck engine Valhalla as the kind of air around you fills with racing fuel. Doing the shiny and chrome bit, but as a vehicle. Spraying the quick start, like high octane shit directly into the like radiator grill. It is one of the funniest things a diesel engine can do is a runaway engine. Yeah. Yeah, which this truck immediately does.

My truck is fucking melted down. Yeah, no, we can't stop this. You know, the workers are like, what the guys in the truck are like, oh, God, we got to shut it off. And of course, they can't because once a diesel engine is running away, you can't stop it without, you know, cutting off the all of the air supply to it, which they can't do because the air is full of gas. Yeah, the air is gasoline. Yeah. The workers run away. The pickup truck backfires.

Next slide, please. At 1.20 p.m. on March 25th, 2005, the ISOM unit at the Texas City Refinery explodes when the backfiring truck ignited the massive cloud of explosive gas that it's coagulate. Last words before being vaporized, hey, whose truck is that? The force of the explosion broke windows three quarters of a mile away. People in Galveston felt building shake. Galveston is not connected by land to Texas City. That's all the way across the bay, yeah.

Yeah, 15 people die, 180 people are injured. 43,000 people have to shelter in place because of the explosive toxic gas cloud. Jesus. Next slide, please. Now, do you remember earlier when we went on that tangent about this being a turnaround? Yes. Yeah, well, so BP had brought in thousands of contract workers to help with this process. and they just kind of put them wherever.

They threw up temporary trailers, full of offices. Oh, boy. Anywhere they could find on the refinery. And they decided to put like a dozen of them directly next to the ISOM unit and didn't tell any of these contract workers what was happening or that it was starting up or that the ISM unit was dangerous or that things could, you know, that they were within basically the blast radius of an incredibly dangerous process.

I mean, you are sort of in a refinery. situation. It's like, well, we can put you next to this incredibly dangerous unit or we could put you next to a dozen other incredibly dead. Yeah, but putting like temporary temporary trailers next to this does feel like not the best strategy, you know? Well, then you put it next to, again, the other incredibly dangerous unit of some kind. The whole place is, the whole place could blow up at any time. It comes with the job. Really, that just describes living in Texas city, I suppose. Well, of course, nobody ever fired the alarm for, you know, hey, the whole plant's going to explode. So nobody had Andy what was happening. And they had 12 people inside one of the trailers

having a meeting while the ISM startup was taking place. And they all died because the trailer was instantly destroyed by the explosive cloud. Yes. So, you know, three more people died from a trailer in the satellite control facility. So like if they had had permanent structures or not, positioned mobile homes so close to like tower full of explosive liquid people would have lived through it. The CSB seems to think that this was something that was actually doable on site here. Like I know that yes, the whole thing is dangerous, but they did not need to, like, it was literally like stones throw 50 feet away from the Raffinate splitter tower. They had these trailers. Yeah, I guess that's going to be a question of whether, you know, you could have moved this temporary

structure like across, you know, another set of pipelines somewhere that's like less hazardous. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm also kind of thinking like, well, you know, there's, there's a lot of things in the refinery that are hazardous, though, you know, it's, I don't know. That it comes to the territory. Also, this does also seem like, well, no one really thought that one through. Yeah. I mean, the CSB said in addition to a lot of other things that they should have not put the,

they should have known better to put the temporary trailers there. And BP actually, like, had rules regarding where temporary structures could be placed. They just didn't really listen to them. So. That's probably it. Yeah. Yeah. So next slide, please.

You can see kind of like the extent of the damage to the trailers in the nearby area. Because, again, they were really fucking close. So the other reason that this, you know, became so catastrophic was that part of the, part of it was the 1950s era blowdown drum and, stack design, which they had kept for decades because it was cheaper. Over the 10 years leading up to this specific disaster, there were eight times that the blowdown drum had vented dangerously, including six that had resulted in a big-ass cloud of explosive vapors at ground level. You're sort of like in the double-wired next to this being like, oh, that's the thing

that kills us instantly, almost killing us instantly again. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you. Bad situation. I love doing refinery work. I guess. You know, worst situation possible is you're like a model engine hobbyist and you have your

tiny like diesel engine running on your desk and it runs away and kills you. Yeah, the first person to be killed by a like sterling steam engine desk toy. Yeah. I mean, based on my, based on my kind of like menswear browsing lately, I feel like all of these guys were currently on different subredits and like the last thing one of those guys was doing was writing a really acerbic post on R slash Goodyear Weld. So, wow, it was 2005, so they were on something awful, but yes. Oh, God.

My wife used to use that site. Everyone used to you. Yeah. I never used it. I didn't know what something awful was. You're better off not. Not knowing. But it does offer you.

You pay 10 bucks and your brain gets destroyed. You pay a guy who's later gonna die in a basement $10. And as a result of that, you get to experience the wide world of sports. And you get to experience emotions, the likes of which you will never experience. You couldn't experience before and will never experience again. Like, the guy who I'm beefing with on the internet died in Benghazi. Or, potentially, the guy who I'm beefing with on the internet got blown up in Texas City. Well, in any case, they changed the regulations after this to require the flare blow off

instead of just letting vapors blow directly into the atmosphere because that would have probably helped with aspects. Safety regulations are written in, well, there's your problem episodes. That's true. Safety regulations are written in FYAD threats. The internal BP produced report found,

quote, the Texas City Refinery had a culture of risk-taking coupled with a failure to understand the process safety implications of prior incidents. A long tradition of failure to comply with simple procedures, the desire to avoid, conflict within its organization and a penchant for placing persons in key roles who lacked adequate professional training.

I deal. They identified four specific executives who they were like, you should fire these guys. It was their fault. And then BP fired none of them, but did fire a bunch of other lower level people as scapegoats. Magnificent. Wow. The EPA did actually get a criminal federal Clean Air Act conviction out of this in a pretty hefty, I think it was $50 million fine.

Exploding is something that the air does when it isn't clean, I guess. Yeah, yeah. This is also, like, so I mentioned the CSB video earlier and how they made a greatest hits, like, re-release for this disaster. And this really kind of was the heavyweight event of, like, the modern study of process safety, because there are so many parts of this, like, entire process that failed. And it also was when the then relatively new chemical safety board

got to like really go dive deep. This was their Al Capone, you know? Yeah, yeah. They sent 13 investigators to the Texas City site. They were there for months. They interviewed hundreds of people. Their final report from this was 300 pages long with a slew of recommendations for not just VP, obviously. But really, this is kind of where they were like, this is all of our safety tips for all refineries,

all processes that you, that have, you know, anything similar to like this kind of danger. this is what you should be doing. Plus, it's where they got big on YouTube, which is what... It literally is. Yeah. Yeah. Once you get that silver play button, it changes a person or an institution, I guess. Yeah.

So, no, this is when the CSB went from like, you know... The CSB's going to a gold one. I'm checking this now. The backwoods sort of like, you know, little tiny government agency, nobody really cares about, to your favorite YouTuber's favorite YouTuber. 404,000 subscribers. So obviously, mugging us, which I... Fair enough, because they have the production. They are literally a state actor. We are a non-state actor. This is true, yeah.

Well, I mean, interesting. I mean, you know, the one thing is the way these oil refineries and chemical plants have been regulated before was largely, you know, by private trade organizations. Like, I'm not so familiar with refineries. I know chemical plants was largely what is it? I think it started out as the manufacturing chemists, a chemist's organization, and it became American Chemistry Council now, which sort of was like,

okay, we're going to regulate internally to make sure that no one fucks up so bad that the government has to get involved and didn't quite work in a lot of situations. Yeah, CSB was founded in 96. Yeah, and they can't even get a gold play button because you've got to have a million subscribers for that. That's fucked up.

I would like to know where the CSB's silver play button is though. You could probably FOIA that. You could almost certainly write to them even without FOIA and just be like, hey, presumably you have one. Is it, do you keep hanging up in the office? They gotta have it hanging up in the office.

They must have like sent it, sent a couple to a couple people. I will note that like on the note of the dramatic irony at the CSB, they specifically went out of their way to mention the 12 employees who were like a bunch of the employees who were killed in the explosion had just gotten back from a lunch that they were they were celebrating 30 accident three days oh god damn that's that you hate the dramatic card okay so the CSB literally has a press release about them getting their play button which includes good for them the most I mean

seriously they've got like like 10 paragraphs of them hyping themselves up and Honestly, God bless them for it. Plus one photo that's the most clearly like government employee doing this on their phone, photo of the play button just sitting in an office, like against a desk. Look, I fully admit they did a better job covering this disaster than I did. Again, they have government money. They're a federal agency. If I were a federal agency, I would have a team doing like CGI for this shit.

If I had been allowed to spend like six months and like hire 12 people to, help me cover this. Yeah. The slides might have been better. Who knows? Also, to be fair, like the CSB, it comes with benefits, right? Like the CSB investigators aren't allowed to get on the thing and say that they're kind of like algorithmically depressed over Christmas, right?

That's unprofessional when they do it. We can do it. I don't know. They put out videos less frequently than we do, so at least right now. Well, they can, people understand that it takes them time, whereas we're just, you It's just like when do we have three free hours in front of a microphone and how long does it take Devon to do the heavy lifting of editing us? Wow. And you got to write the slides.

And you got to write the slides. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. In this one, I had to figure out how refineries work, which I didn't even know before. It was easy back when I did the car episodes because people wouldn't get bad at me a lot. Now I've got like geologists mad at me because I don't know what unsorted glacial till is.

I'm sure people are going to be like, if Victoria, you dumbass, raffinate doesn't work like that. to be like, shit, you're probably right. Listen, fucking, uh, when I said, I will respond, took mercury pills. What I meant was Antimony, you sons of bitches. I knew it was wrong the second I said it, because I didn't correct myself, you fuckers, are in the comments. You all need to stop reading the comments. Why are you reading the comments?

No, no. You got, I want to know if people like me or not. I will take all constructive criticism labeled, you can send it directly to me as long as it's written on a Lego box for Octan Wind Turbine sets. Yeah, yeah, I also accept criticism in the form of Lego sets. Same. Yeah. Like getting a Lego box, just like, get like metallic Sharpie, you hack bitch. And I'm like, ooh, I also accept hate mail in the form of gold play buttons.

if anyone wants to give us another like 8,800,000. How do you even do that without resorting to like the grotesquely on it? Mr. Biss, Mr. Bisset, yeah. Mr. Bist, yeah. How do you avoid doing Mr. Bisk stuff? How do you avoid doing cocoa melon? You know, like, I don't, I'm not the best content creator in the world, manifestly. But like, I feel like the way that we do things is relatively ethical.

Maybe we gotta start like just ruining kids' attention span or something. This video could have been 10 minutes and have four more explosions in it. Could have had subway surfers down the side? Exactly, exactly. I don't know. I think unfortunately we're all adults here. We have to present it in this fashion. It's true.

Next slide, please. You may ask yourself, did BP learn anything? I saw that one DPR. Deepwater Horizon movie, so no. Yeah. In 2006, BP spilled 212,252 gallons of oil directly from the Alaskan Prudeau pipeline

onto the ground, because cost cutting caused inspectors to miss corrosion in the pipe. On the ground, where oil's not supposed to be. No. It was in the ground. Except in Los Angeles. Wow.

Yeah. In 2007, Notably not in Alaska. 143, workers were injured when toxic fumes were released from the Texas City plant again. And here we go. This is 2007 was also the year that John Brown resigned from BP in disgrace, not because he kept killing employees or poisoned like the Alaskan Prairie, but because he was gay and lied to

afford about it because he desperately wanted to stay in the closet. Yeah, I mean, he, he was getting like injunctions against his ex to try and like, you know, stay in the closet. It was bad. And I mean, that's a real sort of time capsule of, you know, pre sort of even Gen 1 DEI, you know? Yeah. Woke, one, you could poison the environment and be gay. Woke, two, we're going to try to fix both.

We're going to try to fix it so you can't. You can still be gay, but you can't poison the environment. Yeah, as opposed to anti-woke, which is the opposite of that, where you can poison the environment so long as you're not gay. Yeah. Yeah. So in 2009, OSHA actually went to the Texas City plant, found hundreds of violations and fined BP $87 million. It was the highest ever fine levied by OSHA against any employer. And in 2010, the company was charged with running malfunctioning equipment and poisoning the air surrounding the Texas City plant on a systemic basis instead of shutting down and losing central output.

then Mark Wahlberg wasn't on the oil rig. So we got deepwater horizon. So in 2012, they sold the plant to Marathon after killing four more employees. So I guess they kind of learned something, which is that they should make that plant somebody else's problem. Incredible. I mean, that's a lot of people to kill in that amount of timing. Ideally, you know, the amount of people kill is zero, obviously. It's a bad safety record.

Yeah, I mean. I mean, that's very bad. Yeah, I mean, consider like in a decade span, they had killed like 25 people. That's, you know, and that's just the people they killed explosively. If you count the sort of like downstream stuff. Oh, my God. If you look at like, if you, I'm sure that cancer stats for Texas City are probably like, yeah, you have every cancer.

Mm. It'd be, Texas City, we should treat like Chernobyl where we build the sarcophagus around it and evacuate everybody. but since we would have to admit then that perhaps a petrochemical industry has negative effects, we can't do that. And so instead we just sell the plant and say, oh, no, I promise you, safety is our primary concern.

Please continue making $100 million a day. Also, you can no longer watch the Sopranos in the break room. It's fucked up. Yeah. Well, what do we learn? Don't work at a refinery. Especially don't work for BP. Jesus. Yeah, but it was like the highest paying intern.

at Drex. People made like 30 bucks an hour and you got to climb up the cool process units. Oh my God. Everyone wanted the PES internship because it was so cool. You made so much money. I mean, listen, don't look at me when I was in law school.

If you didn't want to do corporate law, the only thing anybody really wanted to do was prosecution. So, you know. Yeah. In the, well, there's your problem, like horror movie. We can be certain that Roz would not be the final girl. Well, if things had worked very differently, if we hadn't done the podcast, it's, well, there's your petroleum and, you know, you're sort of like doing that.

And I'm doing, well, there's your prosecutor. Yeah, I'd be like, I'd be like, uh, yeah, look at this cool ladder we get to climb. Yeah. You're still beefing with Laser Pig about the ladder safety thing. Oh, that would have still happened, yeah. Yeah, but as a kind of anonymous commenter. You're like, ladder rings are actually less safe now. And he's having the reaction that I have to the Antimony Mercury thing, where he's just seething.

Listen, this is a fall arrest system. No, you know, based on my career in building inspection. No, I would have gotten terrified of heights still, and I'd be working in the control room. Podcasting, one thing I will say, requires relatively little working at height. Yes, yes, until we build the podcast headquarters, of course. Oh, then, of course, we're all gonna be on the girder like that one photo. No, I'm in talks with Tudor Perini right now, yeah. I guess what we learned is don't work for BP, and the petroleum industry has been an unmitigated disaster

the human race. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad overall. Yeah. Right of bicycle. Right of bicycle. It's the most efficient method of human locomotion. Oh, bad news.

You still need the oil refinery to make the tires. Fuck! Yep. Oh, God, dumb. It's so over. Okay, we can have one oil refinery that makes tires. At least micropastics probably have no harmful impacts on human health. Hooray.

That's fine. Bicycles make less microplastics. Anyway, get this over with so I can go back to my 20 different tabs of boots I can't afford. Okay, dokey. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands for danger. Dear November, Devin at all. Okay, I can't argue with that.

I kind of like that one. Yeah. Actually, no, it's fucked up to miss out Victoria. I just just, uh, uh, cis people don't exist. Yeah. Wow, wow, I'm being erased. This is Cicero. Sure.

Listen, there's one way out of it. So this may not be your usual safety third fair, but after growing up on a farm and witnessing my fair share of accidents, injuries, and deaths, I decided to prioritize avoiding risks to my physical safety in my own career. Good idea. Unfortunately, I neglected to consider. threats to my psychological health. Oh boy.

As evidenced by my decision to get a physics PhD. Foolish. After defending my dissertation, things did not improve. When I left academia, I got a job working at a small aerospace company in Orange County, California. Very evil location. Developing software to help keep satellites from crashing into each other. Part of this job meant obtaining a security clearance. Yeah, yeah, okay, sure.

Yeah, I got you. All right, yeah, I'm on top of it now, okay. For reasons I obviously can't go into here. Would you believe that this is not the first time I have been threatened with a safety third from someone with a clearance that is like, yeah, I would have to edit bits out of it, but I'm pretty certain I could send you a safety third. Yeah. But because of the nature of the work, I had to do a lot of it in the closed room.

Really, really missing out in the opportunity for a kind of West Coast Fed coded control game, you know, because like, I love that game. I love Fed horror, but it really was going all in on like East Coast Fed, you know? The closed room is a room designed for lower classification work, not as intense as a SCIF. I don't know what that is. A secure compartmented information facility. It's like the room where they take your phone off you and you can't listen to podcast

broadcasts while you work, and then you come back out of it, and you have to get your phone out of the locker, and you've got like one million notification. All right, and if you, if you, if you, if you violate any of those rules, they, they, they execute you. Yeah, they kill you. Unless you're a congressperson. Unless you're a Republican congressperson. They dump you in a dumpster out back that gets dragged onto a truck.

I see why it's a skiff. Okay. Yeah. Not as intense as a skiff, but still secure. See figure A. Yeah. That's, that's a room. Right. Yeah, that's a room. It was a soundproof, windowless, vault-type room in the middle of the building where you couldn't bring your phone, but you could gossip freely about anyone outside.

This was mildly stressful at first, but the problems really began after a few months when a large megachurch, which you've doubtless heard of, bought the building for their new administrative and or black ops needs. Oh, that feels bad. Why does Joel Osteen have a skiff, man? He doesn't fucking need that. And I don't want him to have it. Well, he's got to, he's got to talk about, what's his name? John Goodman somehow. No, if I was actually going to put money on like which megachurch would buy a skiff and need it, it would be like, it would be the Mormons. Yeah, that's true. They already have, that's what the temples are. That's where they get the tablets from. Also, they don't need to, they were ready to get the

tablet from them. They don't need to like, buy it. Joseph Smith was, Joseph Smith was able to get the tablets from God's skiff. Because I don't think you'd describe Scientology as a mega church. That's just a cult. I barely even think you describe Mormons as a mega church. I think, I think this, this, this smacks to me of some shit that, like, Chris Pratt is in, that's, that's called, like, I don't know, something trad and based. Yeah, fucking some shit. These are mainline Protestants, yeah. Excuse me, evangelical Protestants, not mainline Protestants. Okay, so you work in the office that the Christmas adventure has bought at the end of one battle after another.

Gotcha, sure. They bought the building for their administrative and or black ops needs, giving every tenant a year to find a new office. My employer was in the midst of expanding and had a new office ready to go, but the new building didn't have a closed room, and one would need to be constructed, inspected, and certified before we could move any classified work over.

Figure B, unrelated. I have such a sense of the person who sent this in because there is a subgroup, my favorite, my beloved subgroup of listeners, often subgroup, sometimes Dom Group, if you are, the email is high at November Kelly, but there's a period before the Y. The people who are listening,

to this while also browsing non-credible defense. Um, that shout out to you. Um, and, and all the things that you do, good, evil, moral hazardous, et cetera. Um, and you still find the facts that Trump was keeping a bunch of like classified documents in his, in like his guest bathroom really funny. That is funny. Yeah. That's a good bit.

There was plenty of unclassified work for everyone to do, but someone would need to keep an eye on the old closed room and also make some progress on the relevant projects so we could keep the clients happy. It's just picturing to like NRO satellites just dinging off each other constantly making the source engine collision. As the most junior engineer in the company, that responsibility fell to me. So after the fastest legally compliant ISO training possible, is ISO. I don't know what ISO is here.

That's just like international, annoyingly international organization for standardization, but the acronym doesn't match, which is just... No, I figure this has got to be a security thing. I don't think it's that way. Well, it's not one that's familiar to me. Liam?

Yeah. So again, I was using the bathroom. Does ISO mean anything to you besides the standardization guys? No. No. Okay. After the fastest legally compliant ISO training possible, I was set to maintain the office

and closed room by myself for the next month. Over a course of a week or two, everyone else in the company moved to the new building, leaving me alone in the closed room. This was okay with me at first, since it was only supposed to take a month for the new closed room to be ready. And as an extremely repressed egg,

working at an aerospace company in Orange County, California, I was happy for the time away from my coworkers. However... I bless you. Oh, God. Okay. Oh, boy. As the weeks went by more and more of the other companies in the building relocated to new offices and the new closed room was delayed further and further. After two months, the building was unoccupied apart from myself.

You can inherit my classified information if you spend one month in my haunted skiff. Eventually, janitorial service ended and I began bringing my own toilet paper and garbage bags to work. I've never seen an episode of Severance, but I understand it's some shit like this, right? Like, during my lunch breaks, I roamed the halls of the now empty building, peering into the abandoned offices of dentists, HR specialists, and the like, as my mental health deteriorated. I began to worry what would happen if I had an aneurysm, well, locked in the closed room by myself.

Oh, geez. How long would it take? Yeah, I also do this. do this. I do this when my wife leaves so longer than half an hour at a time. But like, I just, I just think it's such a beautiful tapestry that like, this sort of clear, like, clearly resolved, like, satellite photos of like, I don't know, the PLA Navy ship that's going to sink the USS Trump in five years time depended on one then egg slowly going insane in an empty building. You were the O'Meilus child, but like by sort of

lot assigned. How long would it take for someone to find me? Would it be worse if I were conscious but immobile or if I died right away? Which co-worker would be the one to discover me and what would be the funniest

I could arrange for them to discover? And so on. On one of my sojourns, I found a six foot tall decorative plastic tree, see figure C. Hold on, that scrolled back up the notes.

And I did what any normal person would. I named him Bradford and brought him into my office. Stationing him just outside the closed room. I'm on estrogen. I'm on progester and I'll cry about that. I don't give a fuck. Blake Wilson and castaway Bradford's presence called my mind and I chatted with him through the large soundproof door all day long. I cared for him as best I could, keeping ants from colonizing his foe's soil and making sure to rotate him, so each of his plastic leaves got some window exposure over the course

of each week. Oh, this is a lockdown story, even if it's not chronologically. Bradford was my truest friend and is not an exaggeration to say that without him, I would have suffered far worse psychological damage than I undoubtedly did. When something passing is, for like, woke to gets into power, I'm gonna be writing a letter long hand to the new president asking them to authorize a National Defense Service Medal for a plastic plant now. Four months after beginning my experiment in solitary office work, the new closed room was

finished and I was finally stationed in the new office. Over a January weekend, everything was transported securely and I came into work to find that Bradford had been dropped in a dumpster at the old building and was already in a lander somewhere near Santa Ana. I'm gonna fucking cry. My boss said something about my mental health and implied this was a benevolent act of shock therapy on the company's part, but I had learned the most important lesson of U.S. employment. Management is not your friend and will dumpster everything you hold dear and expect thanks for it.

I'm kicking this further upstairs. Bradford demand, I demand the presidential Medal of Freedom be awarded posthumously to Bradford. Yes. I consoled myself with the knowledge that even in the dump, Bradford's plastic body meant he would outlive us all by centuries and resolved to find a new job with less risk to my mental health. Now I'm a scientist in a federal climate science lab. Oh, fantastic.

And you kept the punchline until the end. Yeah. Can't win them all. Oh, God. Thanks for the last. the rage and especially for cracking my egg at the 2023 live show. Keep up the good work and best of luck with November's visa process. Thank you.

Thank you. I don't think it counts as like journalistic exposure if we get stuff written about us in the CIA's sort of internal stuff. What was it, studies and intelligence? But like, you know, do that anyway. Yeah, exactly. Oh, Jesus. From live.

There you go? I don't think so. We may never know. Yeah, exactly. Thank you for sending that one in. Thank you, that one was delightful, actually. Well, no, I was sad at the end. Yeah, it pleased me, but it also made me upset.

So justice for Bradford. Justice for Bradford. Yeah. And once again, this is the podcast that cracks eggs. This is the podcast that is here to tell you that if you're on the fence about it, you should transition. And if you're feeling weird and then like you're talking to the plastic barns at work, I don't know, maybe you fucking try taking some hormones about it.

Probably works. Yeah. That's probably one thing you could do about it. Yeah. Well, that was. Safety 3rd. Shake hands for danger. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Oh, listen to all of the other podcasts. Higher Victoria. Yes. Yes. I want to shout out my wife. That's my advertisement. Can I shout out my wife as well?

Yeah, I don't see why not. Yeah, shout out to Gwen. My wife rules. I don't have a wife, so I have to shout out something else. DM Ross, if you want to be his wife. The RIT Model Railroad Club, RIT is Rochester Institute of Technology. Hold on, let me. Yes. So they are being kicked out of their room at the university,

so the university can repurpose it to house administrators, to administer other administrators. Yeah, you gotta house the office for giving Donald Trump and his supports, everything they want forever. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, this is something that's been happening at universities across the country, but there is a, no, I hate to say this,

there is a change.org petition you could sign that could maybe convince the university to do something else. So I'm just going to drop that in the description. Yeah, you do that. Sure, sign the petition. But then the next thing you do is you find like some kind of right-wing influencer. You might have to change your profile picture so you're wearing a MAGA hat and put like a, you know, like a Christ is King in your bio. And then you go, the woke transgender university administrators at RIT are taking away our Charlie Kirk Memorial Model Railroad.

Actually, though, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, that's one way to do it. And you just wait. Give it like a month, Max, you're going to be on CBS and the Model Railroad Club is going to be in a bigger room. Yeah, I mean, I guess you gotta find like, you're gonna have to find like a transgender fall guy. It's a service I like to offer for the community. Yeah. If you would like to be a sort of ablative heat shield for the model railroads, then get in touch with them.

This is part of like a really broad trend across the American university system. of like, yeah, student clubs are fake and gay, we should get rid of all of them. It's not, going to university is not supposed to be fun. You're supposed to be learning about how to, you know, fucking... Well, the ideal university has no students and no professors and only administrators. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So anyway, I'm gonna drop that. They maybe need like one trans instructor that they can fire over and over again to keep the administrators in work. Yeah, I guess so. yeah, they're gonna keep the Title IX office just buried in paperwork constantly. Not to go back to a mailus here, but it's really like every trans woman briefly has it like a TA position at every university. We will just cycle between them getting fired for clout. Oh, God.

It's a universal jobs program just for us, just for the dolls. So anyway, shout out to the RIT Model Railroad Club. And really all university model railroad clubs. I wish I had one back in college. God, I was going to say, if I had had a model railroad club in college, I would have been a lot less the algorithm word. Yeah. We hope you get your space back because that's model railroad club without a designated space

is just some guys who sit around at a table and argue about trains. Well, five of those guys are not going to be guys for much longer. That's right. A model railroad club without a model railroad club room is just a podcast. Pretty much, pretty much. They call that a curtain because it's full of eggs. I think that was the podcast. That was the podcast. Bye everyone.

Just under three hours. Bye everyone. Sick.