Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 202: USS Iowa Turret Explosion

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

this would never happen on a Trump-class battleship 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/

My local's been going this whole time. Yeah. I expect to see this in the final episode. Flashback. Zencaster hasn't started yet. No. Furthermore, the virtual camera is not recording the screen. What is it recording?

It is recording nothing. I shouldn't do that. No, that's audition. There's audition. There's Zencaster. Right. Okay. Hold on.

Let's see what we... End a flashback. Anyway, Liam, I got a Jeep. Yeah, what did you get? We got to do a sync point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, well, yeah, but I want to talk about my Jeep. Well, we'll do the sync point.

Then you can talk about the Jeep because otherwise it will be confusing for Devin. All right. All right. Three, two, one, Mark. Okay, good enough. That was crispy. 1992 Cherokee XJ. Oh, you're kidding.

I am not. Four liter high output. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OBD1, five speed manual. It's a Laredo, so it's got like the nicer seats and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, manual, everything. You know, crank windows, no crews, no ABS, which is good because I don't want to deal with any of that shit.

I've already put nice tires on it. I need pushings, but like, it's sweet. It was owned by one guy, and that guy was responsible for the deaths of seven people. So it's got really good, well, there's your problem, Providence. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'd say so. Yeah, it was purchased new by Joe Wilcox, who led the doomed Denali expedition to the 60s.

Wow. Yeah, he didn't drive it very much. So, you know, it's got like 140,000 miles. Yeah, yeah, I got a crazy deal on it. So I'm back among the auto enthusiast living. Plus, it's like, you know, Pete Chrysler back when they were good. They were like two years out from inventing the Dodge Viper and, you know, kind of recalibrating the American auto landscape.

So it's, you know, like that one brief moment where it looked like the end of history was true. And America was just going to like slowly improve forever. We had the Cherokee XJ. We were on our way to having the Viper. Phil Clinton was president. What's upon time? Yeah. Yeah.

That was definitely better. Yeah. M-Track was expanding. Yeah. Can you imagine like that sentence now? Like Amtrak is expanding like new routes and shit. New long distance rats even. Yeah.

Yeah. They had the Kentucky Cardinal. Right. They had the National Limited. No, they didn't have the National Limited anymore. Excuse me. That was actually, I think back when the Cascades started playing around with the idea of like,

what if we did high-speed rail at our own trackage? We'll have this ready by like 2005. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, that Florida high-speed rail was coming. What else? And not to blame Brightline, because I do think that the vast majority of people

who get merged by Brightline had it coming. But I completely disappointed. agree, but go on. Florida high-speed rail was killed by people who would later go on to invest in Brightline. That's a different episode. That's a whole. That's this episode. I've seized the radio stations.

That's that's a whole. That's a whole kettle of fish right there. That's, that's, oh boy. Some shit happened. One second. I just did. Yeah, there we go. No, Brightline.

Brightline and like Brightline noisely kills people because they're cheap. The thing is they do anti-car propaganda by showing you the like three fatalities caused by some assholes warving around seven lines of crossing gates driving in the opposing traffic and then getting their their Nissan Ultima completely vaporized by a train.

But the vast majority of the people they kill are people who live on one side of the tracks and don't have the car and have to walk cross tracks that they don't protect and just like split apart neighborhoods for like miles on end without any easy access. Yeah. Yeah. Those people had it coming.

But yeah. 80 mile hour trains are not like, it's kind of like it's like a helicopter. So like a military helicopter or something, right? Where it's like, oh yeah, I would hear it coming. And then it's like, no, you wouldn't. It's over time. By the time you hear it, it is too late. It's done.

Right. Yeah. You are a fine red pace. Yeah. And especially in the US or everybody's like, oh, a train is like a 15 mile an hour BNSF, you know. seven mile long just in time freight shipment precision scheduled and not an 80 mile an hour passenger train so i am ashamed that i bought into that propaganda then yeah that's uh that's that's

crazy i had no idea because like you read like the the the stuff i've read right it's like not much beyond like okay this person like drove onto the tracks yeah no uh that my Miami harold did an incredible long form piece of like years i remember seeing that yeah it was it was really depressing, but it was so good. And a lot of it is kind of like, it's an engineering problem in the same way all the rest of this is, where it's like, if you build something fundamentally flawed in a way that people will

necessarily end up taking shortcuts because you have no other option, then they are going to die. It's like the same problem we have in like with like Sound Transit in Seattle where we built a bunch of the light rail at grade across a bunch of intersections and like, it always has car accidents and like, you know, injuries or whatever at deaths.

And it's like, well, yeah, because you split apart neighborhood for like seven miles with the active train tracks that are used every five minutes or whatever. Like, of course it's going to cause problems. It's like, you know, anyway, sorry. I won't give bright line any credit. It needs to be elevated anyway because of South Florida. You know, it's going to have to do it sooner or later. It's coming, folks. Florida Department of Transportation hasn't helped at all by building those insane roads and intersections, like right through the train tracks. Or just build some fucking elevated walkways for people. People don't use those.

Or those fun, there's like wildlife bridges that they have in Europe. We think we have one of those here. I love it. I don't know that. Yeah, we have one over I-5 in Washington. Oh, you have mentioned that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because, you know, the great country, for which I'm very patriotic, Washington State.

Yeah. And speaking of states, oh, wait, that's a bad segue. Hold on. That's good. That's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, keep it. Welcome to Well, there's your problem

A podcast about engineering disasters With slides I'm Justin Rosnack I'm the person who's talking right now My pronouns are he and him Okay, go I guess it's me Fuck Jesus I wasn't ready for that

I know VA situation Nova yeah Liam I'm Liam McKeithen I'm gonna I guess I don't know Hi my name is Victoria Scott I'm the person who's talking right now My pronouns are she and her

I am your, I am the podcast quotas of trans women for today. Yes. It's November is, she's dead. In London. I can't believe that she's dead again. I know. Got a real necromancy situation going on where she just keeps dying and being revived. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I had something, but it's God. It's gone. Well, and the thing is, is like, I haven't. Hey, one second. My wife's about to leave. I'll be right back. You guys go, go, go, go. Okay.

We never saw Liam again. Yeah, he died. Yeah. People have been asking me about this, so I should probably just address it. I have a job. I finally, I left the, Well, There's Your Problem Jobs program because I got an actual job. I still host my podcast, Trend Girliesmo, about automotive culture. I don't know what it's about.

The collapse of empire and also cars. But I have a job working for a nonprofit here in the city of Seattle, helping trans people who are fleeing hostile states. So it's kind of like, you know, a extreme job sort of situation for me. me. It's about to say business is booming right now. Yeah, we're boy howdy do people love our services, which, you know, obviously like we're really small and we don't have like the kind of funding. So what we do is a lot of like mutual aid and kind of peer support stuff. But yeah, I'm working there and trying to like help build out a lot of the new stuff that we're doing, assuming to

get, you know, some more resources, assuming that we can get some people sort of volunteering and on board with us. So yeah, it's called Traction. I work for this segment called Project Open Arms, which is the initiative that like helps people flee. A lot of people end up coming to Seattle. Not all of them do. We help people go to Twin Cities and Chicago and even like, I think we've had a few that are like Philly and Baltimore and kind of like easy keyboard. But yeah, so that's, I probably won't be on here a ton. I've got like a couple episodes I want to write. Oh, I assume you were telling them about your new job. I just want to make sure I know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah.

But, yeah, so I probably, I have a couple episodes I still want to write, but like, I probably won't be on here as much because, like, well, there's your problem job program work. It has a 100% successful rate. I, so one of the things I was talking to Rinn about, first of all, congratulations. I thought I said the two off air, but genuinely congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It is. It is, but it's rewarding. Yeah. But one of the things I was talking to Rit about, she was like, hey, like, when she was, I think, I think like Sam set in his invoice.

and my wife was like, hey, Sam's like the research, and I was like, yeah. And she goes, oh my God, it is a make work program. And I was like, yes, it is. Yeah. Yeah, but it worked. It works. It works. Call this podcast the New Deal.

Yeah. Because there sure is some progress of this works administration. We're jobs. We're jobs creators. We create the jobs. Yeah. My, that's my favorite thing is we're an economic engine of growth, despite our own best attention.

The only company hiring in Philadelphia, the problem is we don't hire in the city. Yeah, but I'm back today because November is dead, as previously mentioned. And so, you know, I got to help out. I got to cover. So I have no idea what we're even talking about. And speaking of death,

what you see on the screen in front of you are two terms of you are two terms. each with three 16-inch guns, one of which doesn't look so good. They may have had a problem, fell off its elevation. There's a lot of smoke. That's right, folks. We're talking about that time when the USSI was number two turret exploded, and then the cover-up of that explosion.

I do want to acknowledge other podcasts in the Napothay Extended U.S. the Napethei extended universe had done this, and we're doing it now because shut up. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Look, there's no, the statute of limitations on that has expired. Oh, man, it's going to be a real shame when we have to resurrect you from the dead, Ross. Well, no, that'd be great. I'll be back from the dead.

The only podcast with a 100% fatality rate. Yeah. Or like the, the surgeon we talked about, like, the surgery with a one at two, 100% or 300% fat. Because he died, the patient died, and the guy died to shock. That's us. In podcast form. But I can't wait for my mom to listen to this one

when she's trying to brag to her friends about her son, the successful podcaster. Thank God my mom's dead, so I don't have to worry about that one. Oh, okay. Well, now I feel bad. My parents are dead. But before we talk about that, we have to do the goddamn news.

Oh, we don't have the goddamn drops. Jesus Christ. What is this episode five without it? Yeah, I think so, something like that. Yeah, I think I've now been on more episodes without it than I was with him. I just don't understand. Like, I do literally understand because like November's getting a mixer. November's also not here.

No problem. But like at some point, we got to do a new stinger that's just us like playing a recording of us doing that. So there's the the oil crisis deep. as Saudi Arabia invades Yemen and is immediately repelled and the Houthis bomb all the oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. It's really funny. Yeah. It's a really funny thing that happened. As someone who is a great fan of our president, Degrowth Don. Degrowth Don. This is, this is an amazing development. There's going to be no oil, which means no cars,

which means trains. I think it's incredibly funny here, right? I know 92 Jeep Laredos, huh? Yeah. How's that? Oh, yeah. No, okay. So I bought that Jeep.

And literally it was like the next day that everything was like, oh, God, it's all over. Like that was when the glue started to come up. Yeah, I was like, cool, 15 miles a gallon sweep. This is right. I knew, here's the thing. I waited all summer to buy this car

until I had like a job and some stability. And I was like, The minute I buy this, the entire global economy is going to collapse. Like, I know it. And it literally was the day of. And so actually, I take credit, death to America. I give that. It's actually me for buying my Jeep.

No, the thing that's funny about this, right, is that it's like, do you mind if I go off for a second? Because I do. Yeah. So, and Trangralismo this week, I have written, we're recording tomorrow, but we are, we have six or seven pages of notes on the history of Yemen because I was like, I need to know what's going on here. Yeah, of course.

Fascinated country, genuinely. Yeah. Seriously, it's like it should absolutely get more play. As usual, the U.S. funded infinitely the worst thing happening. And eventually, given enough time and money, that did happen. And now we are now, like, this is just another form of blowback, right? It's that we don't have oil now. But the thing that's funny, right, is like most of Saudi Arabia's crude goes to, like, Asia.

and all of the Saudi oil fields are on the like eastern half in the eastern province like right along the the um where the strait of Hormuz is they ship it all out through the straight and so obviously they haven't been able to do that for a while and how they've managed to keep things from like completely going haywires they've got this huge pipeline that carries seven million barrels a day from the eastern province all the way to the west where they ship it through the red sea and down through the strait of bab el mendev which is where yemen is it's like between yemen and jibbutti Chiboutibouti. In Africa.

And it's a really tight choke point, but like, you know, they're still getting oil out via the sea, and they can ship it over to, like, Southeast Asia and primarily China. And so the thing that's funny about how this has worked out is Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a proxy war as part of the civil war between Yemen's, like, officially recognized government and the Houthi rebels, which kind of actually run the whole place. at this point for like 14 years. And the Houthis are now have taken control of a bunch of the islands in the Strait of Babel Mendeb, and they said they're going to start blowing up Saudi ships, but only Saudi ships.

So the U.S. doesn't want to get involved because we're busy in Iran, right? So we're actually not going to help the Saudis here. Aside from giving them infinite amounts of money and we're going to sell them F-35s and stuff. Which means they immediately go to the Chinese, but that's fine. Yeah. Well, and also, you know, the Houthis just took out at F-15 this week. week. Like there's dudes in cargo shorts, like AKs over their shoulders posing on the blown up tail of an F-15. Hell yeah. Yeah, Houthis complicated ideologically. They do, they are not

like a progressive force for good or socialists or whatever, but that shit goes hard. It just, it's just cool. But China has managed to suppress most of their oil's like demand globally, like for imports by using these massive reserves that nobody knew they had. And they're finally running out of that and they really need oil again just in time for the Houthis to now basically shut off Saudi Arabian exports to Asia. So China has been arming Iran, which has then been sending the arms to the Houthis, who are now blowing up Saudi Arabia and now China has to go to Iran and be like, hey, can you please tell them to stop doing that? Because although we enjoy you fucking up America's oil supply, maybe, it's complicated. Now it's fucking with our money. And so now

the shit can really hit the fan because if China starts running out of oil, they import like nine million barrels a day, I want to say. This is like reduced demand. Jesus Christ. Yeah. And like they have, they, the reason that they have been able to do this for so long is they had basically put a ban on exporting refined goods. But the capitalists got kind of antsy and they started exporting them again and now they're burning through their supplies really quickly. So, it's completely out of America's hands. We have nothing to do with this. They're like, we can't stop this if we wanted to. The beehive is fucked.

It doesn't matter what the swelling is now. That's not up to us. It's in the bees' hands. So it's, you know, what did you think degrowth was going to look like? Vives, essays. No, sorry, we're here. Folks, the oil-based economy is dying. It may already be dead.

It just hasn't stopped moving yet. As someone who owns a bicycle, I am excited. Although I still need to, I need a new inner tube for the rear tire. It punctured like two days ago. Well, you know, but the thing is, Braves, do you like to eat food? Yeah, eating food is pretty good. This may affect you. Yeah.

I'll tough it out. I don't know if you've seen how much diesel fuel currently costs. Oh, it's like infinity dollars. Yeah. It's like pricing getting quartz in California. Yeah. Yeah, it's like over, it's like 10 bucks in California. It's like nationally like I think the highest ever been.

And of course, since the U.S. doesn't have electric freight transport anywhere, um, basically every single thing you need to buy. Conreel got rid of that in the 80s. Yeah. Unless,

unless you, unless you do like, um, unless you have a farm and you live on the commune and everything you grow just it's you. Um, and you don't need society at all, which hint you do.

Uh, it's probably going to suck. Unless you like make a ton of money in which case I imagine the case. I imagine the K-shaped economy thing will just continue. Yeah. You'll never hear this. Folks, folks,

time to invest in oil as a commodity. This guy named Brent is just cleaning the fuck up. Dude, Brent's doing so great right now. Brent and his friend, West Texas. I don't know why they call him West Texas, but,

you know. Anyway, the funniest thing about this pipeline is that, what's his name, Chris Wright or Mark Wright or whatever. The guy who runs the Department of Energy was out, unlike CNBC, like, don't worry, this pipeline that they just blew up,

that was how they were getting all of their oil out of the country, will be fixed in like a couple days. No, what we've been noticed. Will it? And it's like every single specialist bag I read about this was like, people are like, if it's fixed within a couple of months, that will be quick.

And also now that it can be struck, it will never be peaceful again. Like this is just never going to be like the straight, right? Where it's like some oil leaves from it, but it's never going to be like a sure bet ever again. So everything will just get worse. Again, we just can't tap the brakes, runaway train. Midterms in like what, a month and a half?

There's an interesting development in oil and gas related to the midterms, actually, which is the Texas Railroad Commissioner race is competitive. Holy shit. Bo French is an insane person, as we learned. They got a guy who's too racist for Texas as the default Texas Railroad Commissioner. And just so everyone's aware, the Texas Railroad Commissioner is the de facto regulator of basically all oil and gas in the United States. You know, just because you have so much power over such a large market as Texas. The Railroad Commission doesn't regulate railroads anymore.

It only does oil and gas. Was that the guy who was freaking out about like UT students celebrating? Texas, yeah. Yes. Yeah. Because they were like not white and he was like American. has fallen. Yeah. Like openly.

My favorite thing is and like obviously you shouldn't trust these people. They're snakes just like him, but that fucking Carl Rove is like, now I'm going to vote for the Democrat. He's vaguely funny to me. Which is also how I live that Carl Robe was still alive.

Well, his opponent, John Rosenthal, is like you know, protect trans people, anti-Zionist, Jewish State Assembly member, all this other stuff. Like we got,

They got the potential for the world's most progressive oil and gas regulator in Texas right now. Just because Beau French can't shut his mouth. It's really funny. I'm excited for it. Oh, wait. Oh, wait. I want to hear. I want to read you something funny.

I'm on. I'm on. He's dead. Bo French's Wiki page. This is a fun nugget, right? Ready? Bo French was a business partner of Chris Kyle, the author of American Snyker. One of the law enforcement training company Craft International.

Following Kyle's death in 2013, French and a business partner were sued by Kyle's widow, Tara, Taya. Taya? That's not a name. Taya. For allegedly forcing her out of the company. Although French and the partner denied the charge and the suit was later dropped, the parties reached a settlement agreement in 2014, which stipulated in French not used Chris Kahn's name, like this logo or image. Amazing.

That guy. I do love how much they all screw each other over. Oh yeah, because all these people hate each other, right? Like, it's just a matter of like being a useful idiot. Like it's just like like the guy is so, so bad that he is, he is going to throw the least competitive political office in the United States. Like the least competitive important political office. Carl Rove, welcome to the resistance. Yeah.

So, so on that very small bright spot. Again, if you are in Texas, vote, make sure you go to the polls and vote for John Rosenthal. But what the fuck is Trump doing with the Kennedy Center? I don't. I think he's going to run a bulldozer. Yeah, I don't.

Apparently, yeah. No, this is, I mean, this story, I know that like this is not the most insane thing going on right now, but like, what the fuck is going on with the Kennedy Center? I think the best way to view Trump at this point is like, you know, it's countrywide family annihilator. I think so, yeah. Like, I don't like how this is going.

I will simply, I'll destroy it. You know, this is somebody who's like, oh, I don't get to like have the toy. Well, I'm going to kill all of you. Yeah. Yeah, Trump's had this like vendetta against the Kennedy Center for this second term. He tried to put his name on it And then the judge said You can't put your name on the Kennedy Center

Because you're not John F. Kennedy And now And then you know His new board has claimed The Kennedy Center is bankrupt And I don't know I'd been in the And it's falling apart

And you know I don't know I've been in the Kennedy Center several times It looked basically fine Yeah well I mean he's like ripping out trees in D.C. To like build another golf course And he wants to build a stupid bit like Arc to triumph. And like he, the, the, the, I, you know, we went for train girlismo and we covered the

Freedom 250, uh, Grand Prix. It was around the, the footsteps of the capital and like on the, in the middle of the National Mall. And it's like, it's all, it is, it's insane going to D.C. And seeing how much he has tried to remake that city in his image. And like it is, obviously, it's half asked and half baked like everything else he does because he says, this is what these are not, you know, intelligent fascists. and they're not good at what they do.

But the attempt is to basically turn DC into like, you know, as much of a monument to Trump as it is to Washington. Germania, yeah. I will say David Roth, formerly if that's been now of the Factor, had said something that I think is true, but I can't remember the exact quote, but basically what he said is that like Trump is going to take us all with him essentially. Yeah. We all have to get in the boat with him.

And I think that like this Kennedy Center representation is very like, Like very true, right? Because, like, I mean, I do think that, like, having the Kennedy Center is a net good and makes sense. Like, as the idea of, like, showcase the arts. And also the Virginia. What do you do over there? The Virginia High School Theater Awards? Oh, that was the last time I was at the Kennedy Center, which admittedly is quite a long time ago.

Now that I think about it. But it was, yeah, Bishop Byron High School was nominated for Cappy. So my brother was in the theater program. So I got to go to the Cappies Award Center. That was a pretty good time. I don't think the building has, I mean, the place was immaculate back then. I can't imagine it's deteriorated enough. Disrepair that quickly.

Yeah, in like 10 years. Like that, you know, you have to demolish it. I think this is part of it too, right? Is it like they would rather, they, as part of the, like, capture of all truth, they have to regulate everything with like direct control of like what the narratives are, what stories can be told and they can't do that with this because I don't know why I don't know if it's like the way that it's structured or how the board was set up or whatever and so the it's preferable to just destroy it because it's embarrassing I guess so yeah when I went to the when I went to the

fucking Smithsonian I went to the natural history museum when I was there for that stupid god awful fucking fascist shit show of a race and they like they had an exhibition for america's 250th about like the national animal of America which is the buffalo and they their entire exhibit mentioned did nothing about how the extermination of the buffalo was an attempt to genocide native people. Right. There was no link. And so it's like

cool, we've now established like this alternate history where everything is sanitized and fine. And if you can't if you can't do that in totality, it's not going to work. So you might as well. And they're just starting in D.C. It's like it's a it should be a state that's not. They get more control and leverage over the shit.

It really actually drives me insane. But also at the same time, it's kind of like a little funny. Like, I'm not going to lie. DC statehood now. Yeah, DC statehood now, but also like it was kind of funny when they knocked on the East Wing, you know?

That was pretty funny. That is way funnier than demolishing the Kennedy Center. Fair, yeah. The East Wing was kind of a shitty building. You know, I, no, I agree with Trump on the ballroom. That's the thing. The ballroom's a good idea, right?

The other stuff he has done really bad ideas. Going to the polls in 2028, like, well, He destroyed the economy. You know, he hates trans people. ICE is out of control, but the ballroom is a good idea. I got a ballroom is a good idea. Who was the president of Liberia during the Liberian Civil War? Charles something.

I don't know. Okay. Well, he had a campaign slogan that was he killed my mother. He killed my father, but I shall vote for him. Charles Taylor, maybe. Yeah, Charles Taylor. I am so good at. knowing things.

I was talking to my mom the other day about how you can't import snooze anymore because of de minimis and explaining that I am now a single issue voter for getting my importation of snooce back. Oh, God, yeah. I mean, there's so many, it's been a while since we did a mainline episode.

There's so many news items to cover, like the Canadian tariffs in Canada and L.S. That Amazon jet, that they just forgot to land? Oh, right. Yeah, no, they did a bad job. on that one. Yeah. Probably a bunch of other shit happened.

I don't remember. I don't know. I mean, I've taken the stance of, I, because obviously there's been a bunch of like anti-trans turns from like Democrats who have no signs. Oh yeah.

They're trying to push that guy. And I'm like, cool. I'm not, I like, I have pride. I won't vote for you. I might actually go vote for the Republican just to spite you.

I don't understand why they can. Propane tank straps to the bicycle. All is. Like, fuck you. You think you can make my rights optional? Well, it's, it's frustrating to see them looking at what the Labor Party did and saying,

yep. Good idea. One for one for it. That's our path, boys. Yeah. Well, they, you know,

all respect to like British leftists, but having used that as a cautionary tale, I've turned, I've entered that into my model of the world and I will do everything possible. If you are an anti-trans Democrat, I will in the state of Washington, I will devote my life to you losing. I mean, that seems reasonable, rational to me. Yeah, and I'm sure plenty of people tried that in the UK as well.

I'm not saying that people didn't. I'm just saying that like I have become insanely hardline immediately. But that also happened. A bunch of children's hospitals stop providing care to trans people, even though they were in theoretically safe states. And a bunch of attorneys general won't do shit about it because they're all cowards. Just capitulating before anything's even happened. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, they lost like another two F-16s or whatever since we recorded last two, I think. Oh, that's, that's just, keep piling them into the earth, like over the U.S. Have a little foot up there yet. That's true. Except for Voyager. Yeah. Well, that was goddamn news.

Bo do, but do, boo-bo do-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-doo-bo-doo-doo-doo. You know, there's a Zencast or drop function. We could just put the sound effect in there. I've always wondered why we haven't done that, but that's okay. Yeah, that makes fun. You know, whatever. All right. So before we start, I want to acknowledge, like, the main source for this podcast is a book

called A Glimpse of Hell. Great time. Yeah. Charles C. Thompson II, who was a producer for 60 minutes, I want to say. It's a very, very good book. You should go read it. I mean, what we're going to be able to talk about here is, like, barely scratching the surface of just how fucked up the accident was and also the investigation

and just everything about the events we're about to discuss. I mean, there's so much detail. It's a fantastic re. Go out and go out and buy this book, even if you don't care about battleships or it's just if you, if you want to, if you if you want to like a hell of a story. But anyway, first we must ask, what is battleship? Obsolete. Yes. I can't believe he died live on air. No, not quite.

So a battleship is essentially a really, really big. A battleship is, you know, as like a popular term, right? I don't know. You could assign that to any kind of Navy ship. but a battleship as like the formal turn is a specific kind of very, very large, very, very heavily armored ship that has very, very, very big guns on it

and you can point those guns at things that you want to go away. Crucially, if you're talking with somebody who has ever been in the Navy, ever, even if they're like a disillusioned bet. And I know this from personal experience. If you want to piss them off, call any boat with a gun on a battleship.

I love that. Yeah, it's like a great way to annoy somebody you care about. But yeah, a battleship, it's bigger than a destroyer. It's bigger than a frigate. It's smaller than an aircraft carrier. It's bigger than most kinds of ships out there. It is much more heavily armored. Like the idea of these things is we're going to take out the big guns.

And even if we're under like heavy enemy. fire, we're getting hit by shells, torpedoes, all kinds of bullshit. Well, we can still keep going. You know, in practice, though, the way these were deployed a lot of the times was sort of like, we're never going to send these things into the type of conflicts that they're designed for because it's going to be such a morale loss if they sink a battleship. It's a DPS that you're unwilling to use. Yeah, pretty much.

and the USS Iowa class pictured here, right? This was the largest class of battleships built by the United States with the biggest guns and the heaviest armor and we stopped after that. There was another class designed afterwards but never built because people realized, oh, we just build an aircraft carrier.

Good Lord of the aircraft carrier, yeah. Yeah. I do really like that you can see the little sideways drift from the bow wave. Yeah. Because it's moving itself sideways from firing its guns. The guns are really big.

The really big guns. They're pretty cool, actually. Yeah. So anyway, these made sense when you were building them just before World War II, which is when the Iowa class was started. And, you know,

they fought World War II. They fought in Korea. The USS, New Jersey, fired its guns in Vietnam. And then it was like, you know, these things, we really don't need them anymore. They put them in the mothball fleet. You know, maybe you could reactivate it in case of a major conflict. And then President Grandpa was elected.

Oh, God. Ronald Reagan, our first president, grandpa. Fuck. He ruined everything. It's midnight in America, all right? Everyone's fucking dying. Everyone's dead. Fucking do not consult an astrologer on what's going to happen to learn if you.

You have to shell the Soviet Union, dickhead. Well, President Grandpa consults his astrologer to find out if he has to shell the Soviet Union. And the answer is yes. I hate everything. We need a 600 ship Navy to counter the Soviet Navy, the notoriously competent institution. Yeah, I was going to say. Well, yeah, because I mean. Please look up the Kersk disaster.

Yeah, I was going to say this is before they gave all those ships to Pepsi, right? So like those were clearly the prime of the world's fleet. Yeah, yeah. Definitely, definitely not a Navy that can, you know, just sink its own ships just by hanging around too long. Let me just check. I'm going to go to the Wikipedia page for the Russian invasion of Ukraine and just do a quick count of how that's been going for the mention of the 21st century. There's like, there's like 19-year-olds in gamer socks. down the prime of the I guess it's still Soviet fleet I mean they haven't really upgraded their

ships then have they? They built any new if they built any new war materials since they became the like Russian Federation so I'm actually I'm looking up the same thing they can't have I mean all that money went straight to grift surely they built like I don't know like a littoral combat ship something like that I mean we barely built those I you know what I meant yeah I green water Navy thing. You know what I meant? Like a little little guy, right? Like a riverboat cruiser. A bathtub toy.

So, hold on. Victoria and I are both on the wiki page. Yes, go ahead, Ross. Here's, here was the plan as part of the 600 ship Navy. Now, some ships were going to build new.

Some of them were going to reactivate from the reserves, including the battleships. Fuck it. What's going to go wrong? What is it about having Alzheimer's that makes you want to build bigger battleships? Oh, hang on. Hang on. Victoria, they focus on submarines such as, I kid you not, the Lata class and the nuclear

air boy, Yassin class, nuclear power attack submarines, design were commenced in earnest in the 1980s. The first submarine was built in 1990s to early 2010s with commissioning in 2013. I assume they've all been sunk and everyone on board of his dad. All right, so I guess they have built some new stuff. Okay, so Russian federate, you know, blowing up a Russian federation naval ship in from a 19-year-old Ukrainian in Gamer Sox flying a drone from like a thousand miles away. I mean, they have an awful, they have an awful kill ratio because the ships usually sink

themselves before they're even in sight, you know, but yeah. So, all right, we're going to reactivate the battleships from World War II. This is the most Ronald Reagan idea I think he had. So I have several questions about this, which I'm sure will be answered, but I'm looking at the Russian Navy wiki, so I can't be bothered. So do they, do they like, this has got to involve like not just like, you know, okay, we're just going to send it out to see. This is got to involve like retrofitting for like navigation, stuff like that, like ages systems. Yeah, okay. There is a comprehensive modernization program with new armaments.

Let's look at some of them, right? Oh, for Christ. We have our old friend, oh look, a civilian airliner. It looks like a landlord special minion. They put some extremely heavily armored Tomahawk missile launchers on there. The idea, yeah, because Jesus, crows, look at this.

The idea being that you could still use it like a battleship where you're getting constantly shelled by Germany, Germans and launch a Tomahawk missile. That was obsolete in 1930. They got other anti-ship missiles on there, right? They have a cool drone they can launch. And this is to aid in aiming the artillery, right? Because, well, isn't that the thing, right?

It's the artillery. That's what we want to hear about. None of this modern shit. Why? Okay. So this is a legitimate question. Why are we then not just building more artillery? That's got to be cheaper, right?

You just get a bunch of howitzers and string them together. Well, I mean, yeah, you're on the right track here, Liam, because all that modern armament is a bunch of liberal bullshed. This is the real thing. It's why we got to go back to the steam cannon launchers on aircraft carriers too. We're going to do the Great White Navy, huh? The Great White Fleet? Yeah, I remember 10 heroes of Elvis.

Wait, Riles, I got a question for it. you. How does the Iowa class compared to the Trump class size wise? Well, so the Trump class is currently only an idea. Well, yeah, but like we have the AI drawn schematics. I have no idea. God, if you're, if you, if you are an elderly person and you ever find yourself thinking about how good battleships are, you should go to a like cognitive specialist immediately. Time to, uh, time to, uh, time to see how good you are drawn to clock. Maybe reconsider. Yeah, maybe reconsider your driver. license. This is a public safety announcement. So there are three turrets with three 16-inch guns each, right?

This is the part that's above deck that rotates everything else's static. You know, you have all the powder rooms down here. You got the rooms with the shells. You got all this crap, right? This thing fires shells that weigh as much as a Volkswagen Beetle, right? The battleship, New Jersey was said to have sank an island with one of these shells in Vietnam. Like, there was a whole island, and they lobbed so many shells at it, it disappeared. This is a-

No wonder conservatives love these fucking things. Oh, yeah. Big, big gun, cool. Big gun. Well, big gun cool. And also just like the conservative military fantasy is that you go up against it basically an unarmed opponent. I'd still lose. These systems were built in the late 30s.

And by the time they're reactivating these ships, well, it's no longer the late 30s, right? There's no real modernization that goes on here. It's all very manual, right? There's nothing in terms of like safety interlocks. These torrents are cramped. They're loud. They're unpleasant. They're dangerous.

I'll be right back. They're designed for a time when we placed less value on human life. Well, so that's kind of my question, right? Like I, so I was just on the wiki for the whatever Trump class or whatever the lead chip is, the defiance. And it's just like, this is like, this is what I don't understand, right? It's like, by and large, like, and I'm not sympathetic to the, Pentagon of all fucking people.

But what I do, from what I've understood, it's like, the Pentagon more than once has been like, we don't need this and we don't want to do it. And then you get, you know, degrowth Don over here being like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to have a battleship that hasn't been relevant since goddamn, you know, the Hoover administration. It's barely relevant then. I know. I know.

I just, I don't understand this. Like, you know, I think that's, that's kind of what I, the fundamental thing is that, like, I can understand a lot of bullshit. but this is this is just one that like just baffled me right like the 600 ship navy it's like yeah but we have aircraft we have nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines now yeah but but you need a battleship you don't need a bat for no you need a battle so you can shoot the big gun okay why can't we just all right all right let's let's let's let's let's all right let's let's all right let's put our our breaking caps on right so we're gonna turn the dial all the way up to fucking drooling and and sundowning

and whatever else. Okay, great. Okay. Well, I just think it's cool when they shoot the big guns. That was a lot better than I expected to be, and I'm a little annoyed. Why do we not simply that nuclear carriers are real big, right? Like, what's the big one right now? The Ford.

Yeah, Ford class. There we go. So why don't we, and hang with me, folks, why don't we simply point a 105 millimeter guns on the aircraft carrier? everybody wins. Well, because the turret can't rotate because it would be on the runway. Yeah. Okay, I'm quitting. All right.

Send me much. Send me my check. Send me on check. I'll seal it. It would obstruct the airplanes. You need a debt anyway. Put it low. Put it at the water line for all I fucking care.

But then there's a big hole. We did an episode of the podcast about this. You can't do that. It sinks the ship. The thing that really pisses me off, right? Is that you're right far more often than you're wrong. Yes, go ahead. I love this, electronics, 1943 and 1969.

Oh, good. Yes. So how do you load the gun? Okay, here we go, right? Here is a shell. Look how big that is. Very large next to a man. Damn.

Yeah. So the shells are really, really heavy. They're brought up to the gun on an elevator. that's this guy here I mean essentially like a dumbwaiter system tips them over they roll down into this shoot here right and there's a big hydraulic ram back here right and the big hydraulic ram rams the shell

into the breach of the gun right at the bottom of the shell down here it's literally just an enormous gun like a musket I mean this is a musket I'm seeing I'm seeing the words big silk bags of gunpowder, which I'm going to tell you I don't like that much. Down here is a copper band, and the copper band engages with the rifling of the barrel

as the shell is rammed in there, right? Therefore, the projectile spins when it comes out of the gun. It's sort of like mechanical deformation. It actually, the gun barrel wears out fairly quickly as a result of this, but that's the way it's done, right? then the same elevator will come up and discharge these big silk bags of powder, right? Gunpowder. These must also be rammed into the gun, but crucially, at a slower speed than the projectile, right?

Because if you overram the powder, bad things happen. Now, how do we not lose all of these ships? There's only been a couple of turn explosions. Your dumb luck and a deal with the devil. Yeah. Yeah. So, so choosing between the two speeds for ramming, there's no safety interlock.

The, the rammer man just has to get it right every single time. Wait, wait, just has to know? Yeah. Oh. Yeah. The bright line philosophy of loading a gun. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Do it. I do it right beside your problem anymore. Hell yeah. Yeah, exactly. Just do it. right every single time

and you'll be fine, right? This is... Can you imagine having like OCD and working here? No. Holy shit. I wasn't going to watch it in the Navy of the first place. Just like once you've... Oh, the intrusive thoughts

have got to be crazy. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I'll go out to sea, baby. Let's do it. Once you rammed the shell in and rammed the powder in, you close the breach and then the gun aims and fires, right? And that's the process.

I mean, you know, there's been a rather rosy projection about how operating a turret works by whatever the heavy turret simulator do-hickie is on Steam right now. No, no, it's all very manual. You need like 50 people to do it, you know, because there's these guys up here, and then you got like 30. guys working in a powder room.

It's like scaling up the misery of being the like ball turret gunner. Yes. To like 50 people. God, it's crazy. It is baffling to me that this is manual. It is baffling to me that this is manual. Well, yeah,

because I mean, when they invented this in the 30s, they hadn't invented robotics yet. I understand that. But like it's whatever. It's the 80s. Like we have fucking cool stuff. And computers exist now.

They're not just, we're not just running around with goddamn eating. But think about how bad it would be for like the libidinal like urges of the Navy if we had to like automate this. Oh, you want to talk. Like those 50 men are hard. Yes, I know. I was got to. You got a pound.

I know the bar. You just like, yeah, we computerized the turrets and you just toss a HP laptop into the breach. All right. How you go? Good luck. This is why we got to check their testosterone now. You got to be high tea to ram the gunpowder into the board. No, no, no, no, no, go back.

We're doing that. I missed test. Yeah, we're mandatory testosterone testing. What? Certain military officials over the age of like 35. Not even, like, because originally it was going to be optional. And now it's literally mandatory. Why?

And they will force you to take testosterone supplements if you say you have like low libido or something. Okay, good. All right. So we just, so, so the answer is clear. The answer is. Yeah. Everybody, I implore you listening. watching or whatever you're doing, we're all going to join the Navy, and we're all going to get real weird.

Look at me in my eyes. Real weird. In the Navy. See, I've like, I don't see in the Navy. Great song, dude. Yeah, it's really good one. I don't think we can successfully make the U.S. Navy weir than it is. We're going to, we're going to queer the Navy.

So we're going to do that anymore. No, you can just keep turning the dial. You couldn't do it then either. We'll get to that in the second. You could absolutely do it then. Liam. Are you familiar with the city of San Francisco? Unfortunately, yes.

You can't make the Navy gayer. I'm going to force them the Navy, I think, is my response to this. Let's look at the U.S.S. You're telling me that there could be 50 butch women inside that turret ramming the four full of gunpowder. I'm actually, I'm not bored now. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah.

Nope. Yeah. Fuck yeah. Sign my ass up. Sign Rod's ass up. I don't care what he wants. You've been press gang. in Shanghai.

If I ever have to join the military under duress, you are absolutely coming with me. This is my emotional support, Ross. Please be mess officer. Please be mess officer. Congratulations. You got bilge pump. Honestly, I feel like if I was going to,

if I was going to be prescangue to the Navy, it would be pretty cool to actually be the person who's loading the gun, not because the job would be good, but because if anybody ever gave me shit, I could kill 50 people. Oh, hold on to that thought. Like, let's say they gave me shit

for being gay or something, right? That would be a great way to get back at them. Anyway, I'm not doing, I didn't like read through the notes beforehand or anything. I'm just kind of spitballing some ideas that I would have as a devious, like, tricky homosexual. Yes. So let's look at the Iowa.

our story starts as USS Iowa is being overhauled this isn't like the main overhaul that restores the ship this was a subsequent overhaul it's being overhauled in preparation to go relieve the USS New Jersey which was stationed in Lebanon where they'd been firing guns and everything and anything over there was in an actual conflict and they kept missing like nearly every single. single time. And time was of the essence. So the new captain of the USS Iowa, Fred the Mooseley, elected to forego some important turrent repairs so he could get out of the shipyard in Norfolk more quickly and devote

those resources to the engines instead. This is going to cause some problems, right? and with that I guess we should look at some of our cast of characters right so this is Captain Mussoli here they're just close to New Mussolini I just won't put that out

uh yes the Moose he was a big college football guy that was his thing he played college football he'd let you know about it every single time he approached being the captain no one thing he was a battleship captain because he had enough CTE to get the necessary Alzheimer's to be into them.

Don't worry about that. Well, he was an office guy. He was a man predicted to exist in 1878 by one W.S. Gilbert. Now, landsmen, all, whoever you may be, if you want to rise to the top of the tree, if your soul is unfettered to an office stool, be careful to be guided by this golden rule. Be careful to be guided by this golden rule. So good. Stay close to your desks and never go to sea.

And you all may be rulers of the Queens Navy. Yeah, all right. He was an office guy. He spent all his time as he rose through the ranks in an office in the Pentagon or in the Navy office in Washington, D.C. He was not like someone who went out to see frequently. He was not a guy who he had a command of a destroyer. briefly, but he is trying to improve his career and whose superiors are like, look, look,

Musil, if you, if you want to write, if you want to make an admiral, you need a C command. And so he's- You can not blow up the ship will promote you. All you have to do is not blow up the ship. I just want to point out. I just want to point out one thing. And this is not to his credit. Musley graduated in 1966 with the class ranking of 812 out of 868. He was good.

That's too many officers, man. That's too many fucking officers. That's that, but they had a lot of the shit. This is like, that's only like half the people on the ship though. It's like a six, 1,600 people on the ship.

You need a lot of officers. And he's dead. Yeah. So he relieved Captain Larry Sequist who was this sort of respected and admired captain. He had really good relations with his officers. The men all love.

loved him. He was running as tight a ship as could be achieved with the Iowa. We'll sort of talk about that in a bit. You know, everyone liked Larry Sequist. Musilie shows up and he's like, all right, I want to get one thing straight with you guys. Fuck you. His name is Seekwis. The old guy's name was Sequest. That's called nominative determinism. Yeah. So Musilie comes in and he's screaming at people. He's installing his own, like, special cronies. He and his cronies sort of try and kick basically anyone who's a senior officer who's competent off the ship. You know, it's, it's, again, you got to read the book. It's pretty crazy, right? You know, a lot of people, the first, the first meeting in, what's the officers, the ward room, you know, everyone is just

leaving in disbelief because you're like, why is he, nothing's happened yet? Why is he just screaming at everyone? You just got here, man. Calm down. Yeah, exactly. So another important character here is the fire control master chief, Stephen Skelly, right? And so Stephen Skelly was also popularly known as the Pots and Pans Man. Because previously he sold kitchen. where before he joined the Navy. World's finest Navy, baby. His thing was being a big, dumb nerd about battleships

and specifically gunnery on board battleships, right? Okay, I actually, this does sound promising because those guys tend to take safety seriously. I'm going to bet he doesn't, though. No, no, he does not. Okay, great. Thanks, Freddie foreshadling.

You got to love when somebody is, like, autistic about a thing. but not about like operating. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, it's almost cute when it's about like, I don't know, like putting your Jeep in very precarious situations. But it's less so when it's a shit full of people and like a gun

with like 50 dudes inside the gun. So, yeah, you would think this would be a good thing. It was not. Captain Sequist's officers kept Skelly on a pretty short leash, but under the moose, he was allowed to conduct. all sorts of unauthorized experiments with the 16-inch guns. Why? He's using illegal powder configurations.

He's using different types and batches of powder to try and get either more range or more accuracy out of the guns, all in flagrant violation of safety regulations, right? And even more alarmingly, sometimes these experiments worked. we'll get to that later. Hello and welcome to the USS Iowa. We have a segment on the ship called Safety Third. Yeah. I'm Moose and welcome to Jackax.

We have Clayton Hartwig, who worked in Turrit 2. A nice Seventh-day Adventist boy. Wouldn't hurt a fly. I didn't write as much in there as I should have anyway. And we have over here is Kendall Truitt, who is a bastard. one of our protagonists. So he, after the last time he left the Iowa,

he stole a car and drove up to visit his mom in like Illinois, I want to say, and then stole a different car to drive down to Norfolk to get back on the ship, right? Amazing. It was a Camaro, I think. Oh, hell yeah. Well, if you're going to steal a car, right?

Yeah, exactly. He is the shipboard loan shark, right? Oh, supposedly. Is that an official position? Yeah. Something like, you know, like a huge amount of enlisted men are in debt to him. This is the kind of shit. This is the kind of shit that we, the innovation and like small business like can do attitude that we have lost by outsourcing this kind of work to Calci and all these fucking sports betting firms.

Like we've deprived an entire generation of men like Kendall. Exactly, exactly. You know, a couple times, he gets away with it too just because, you know, so many men are in debt to him. You know, one of the officers has to come down and declare a debt jubilee, which he does by just handing Kendall a huge check. See, okay, I just zoomed in on this image. And I understand why he was allowed to get away with it.

It's because he has the operator glasses that people on Twitter think makes you an extra lethal officer. He looks like Mr. Navy. You know, this is a big advantage for him. Hair like a Lego brick. Yeah. You know? The other thing I wrote down here as I was thinking, okay, you come in to park your car before deployment. You don't want to lose that parking stub.

You know, you come back six months later and you don't remember if you parked in the olive drab lot or the gun metal gray lot, you know. Well, that's why there's so many, like, options package for Dodge Challengers, so you can find it in the lot. That's true. Next to all the other Dodge challengers that everybody else bought. Yeah, but I got mine in Hellraising. A real color Dodge will sell you.

I know. I will, I hate to hand it to Stalantis, but their color names have been pretty good since about 1970. Another two guys who were important to the story, who I couldn't find pictures of, where Dan Meyer, who is, I think he's promoted a few times through the course of this story. So he ends up as a lieutenant. And Gunners mate first class Dale Mordinson.

Dan, Dan Meyer in particular, seems to show up everywhere on the ship and be one of the last generally competent people around, right? So anyway, Captain Fred Musilie takes charge and they go to the dry dock and and this is where we got to talk about the problems in the turrets, right? Oh, boy. Okay. So there had been some modernization of the electronics in some of the turrets, right? They had new circuit boards and everything, or they had new-ish circuit boards. And what are the problems with, I was never able to get this straight.

They were either upgraded with the refurbishment of the ship and they weren't good, or they had just had this problem since 1939. but every time the guns fired, every time the guns fired, the circuit boards would just fall out of their housing. Oh, good. And, you know, and everything would go dark. One use only circuit boards, yeah.

Pretty much, yeah, yeah. It was, you know, in order to use the guns, you sort of had to bypass everything with alligator clips. They're leaking hydraulic fluid everywhere. The firefighting systems were non-functional. The compressed air tanks, the compressed air tanks are used to blow compressed air into the gun barrel so that after each round, you can flush out all the horrible, volatile, flammable gases in there. You know, the compressed air tanks didn't work. Now, that meant you had to get compressed air from the main ship system from engineering, which was inconsistent.

the ready safe switches were inoperative. That's sort of the stuff that prevents the gun from firing unless you really want it to. Did Chrysler build this? Stalantis. Yeah, like this sounds like a 90s Chrysler product. The lighting was inadequate, particularly in Turin 3, I want to say. They had to use 20 watt light bulbs because anything else would blow the fuses. Oh my God

In turn to the powder hoist was inoperable So they had the haul it all up the stairs I do love the idea of having mood lighting Inside your like neighbor chip turret Gamer lighting It would go crazy in there though Can you imagine how good the sex would hit like Yeah we're fucking on a gun

We can kill everybody aboard and we have mood lighting D-sexual light yeah yeah Damn making the Navy sound cool I'm sure nothing will change this in the future slides of this episode. Don't worry about that. So to fix all of this would cost $1 million. Okay.

That sounds reasonable by naval standards. So I'm sure they're not going to do it. By Navy standards. Yeah. Captain Fred Busily had just taken the ship out or he was going to take the ship out for sea trials. And he was like, it's going to be real embarrassing if this thing can't make full speed. So he redirects all.

of that funding to engineering, which was also a department that was having a lot of problems. And the gunnery officers had to resort to cum shawing, right? Which is essentially... Yeah, that's what I was just talking about in the ship. Do we get inside the turret? It's sort of wheeling and dealing with the shipyard workers to get work done in the turrets to get anything fixed. Obviously, I miss Nova always, whatever she's not on this podcast.

But now I really miss Nova being here. The sexual tension we could make from this is crazy. Yeah, I, I, I, God, come back, Nova. It just, like, I, I, I know that she would have something good for this. Come shawing. Come shawing. Oh, oh, Rita Hayworth and come Shankredemption. No.

No. Come back to me. Cut. Come Shaw, Shankredemption. There we go. I got it. I got it. I got it.

were able to correct some issues this way, but functionally, the turrets were still in pretty much the same shape that they were in 1939, except worse, you know, because of age. No one in charge really cared about this so long as the guns could fire, it was all good, right? The weapons officers are like way more concerned about stuff like the missiles and the gun that shoots down civilian airliners and all that other crap, right? Oh, yeah. Another problem in the gun was the powder. No new powder had been manufactured since 1952.

What? Most of it dated back to the 1930s. Okay. All right. Yeah, why not? I don't even care anymore. Fuck all these people. While the ship was in Drydok,

the powder had been stored in unventilated barges on the James River, where various nefarious chemical reactions could have been accelerated by hot and swampy temperatures. That's a crazy sentence you just wrote. When the powder was reloaded, many bags of powder were covered in mold. They smelled of ether, and the various batches of powder had been intermixed,

making firing inaccurate and unpredictable. Despite being warned by nearly all of his subordinates that the powder was bad, the new ship's gunner master chief James Hickman shrugged and said, eh, it's probably fine. But, but it's not. I mean, like, what would he have done if he had said they weren't?

Did they have more powder that was newer? Yes. Oh, well, then I guess he's just stupid. I was really trying to find a systemic cause to not blame this one guy, but now fuck him. Yeah. So, um, Inson, Dan Meyer,

I'm not sure if he was an ensign at this point. I think of the rank is confusing here. I don't understand ranks. Dan Meyer and Gunner's first mate, first class, Dale Mortensen, take it upon themselves while the powder's being loaded to go find the worst or the worst shit and toss it over the side. But most of the bad powder makes it on anyway. But, you know, once you shoot the powder, it's,

downrange's problem, right? Well, yeah, but it's got to make it up the barrel. Which seems like a problem if your gunpowder is bad. Not that I'm like, you know, a gun expert, but it seems like that is an important part of firing the gun. You're a trans woman living in the Pacific Northwest. You are basically a American sniper marksman. Call me, call me Christina Kyle. Hopefully you don't get got in the same way, but yes

How do you get God anyway? He got a shot at a shooting range, right? Oh. A likely thing to happen. He got wrecked at a shooting range. Well, yeah, I hope I would like to avoid that. No, I'm gonna do. Murdered by Eddie Ray Ruth at the Rough Creek Lodge,

near Chalk Mountain, Texas, yeah. My goal is to end up with my Jeep like somewhere where people are like, how did it get there? You know, like, the, you know, and there's that scene in Jurassic Park where there's, like, the Port Explorer in the tree? Yeah. I'm trying to dice through some shit like that.

How do you get a, how do you get the Jeep Cherokee into the Nutty Puddy Cave? Four-wheeling through a, um,igara fault. All right, it's time to talk about stunts. The James River is very crowded with naval vessels and is very shallow in a lot of areas, making it notoriously difficult to navigate, especially for a wide, flat-bottomed ship like the USS Iowa.

Oftentimes, but not always, these battleships would need assistance by tugboats and a civilian pilot to enter the harbor. Now, the previous captain Sequest was an extremely good helmsman and would often do this on his own, just to keep in practice. But Fred Musilie takes the ship out on August 24, 1984, 1988 with a new untested navigator, a new untested helmsman for an excursion around the bay.

Oh, great talk. Yeah. When they return to the James River from the Chesapeake Bay, it was just about a day later, despite the fog that it rolled in, the moose decided he doesn't need any stinking and tugs. He had his helmsman sail right up over the bridge tunnel, down the James River, promptly had near misses with three other naval vessels, ran over every buoy denoting the location of humble shoals, which the ship then beached itself on. This wrist bricking the engine's cooling systems with soft mud, but by heroic efforts from chief engineer Jerry Ware,

that was avoided. He knew those engines. real good. He knew that if you stopped them, you were fucked. He had to run them full blast just to keep the mud from solidifying in the systems. Like an air-cooled Porsche. Hell yeah. Don't get second traffic. No, I was

thinking this is more like when you got a GM product and you get some pretty old decks cool in there. You just got to redline the shit out of it so doesn't congeal. So they were beached there for about an hour and Misley asked for a tug in a civilian pilot. So that's gone poorly.

Master Chief Skelly went around every regulation in the book to figure out how to shoot a shell as far as humanly possible, coupled with the fact that the moose didn't really schedule shots that often. Essentially every salvo from the 16-inch guns was some kind of bizarre experiment. We're talking about custom hollowed out shells filmed. with cluster munitions. Oh, good. Right? Shells with timers attached so they can act as depth charges.

Can you, can we please? Yes, I've got a special one for you today here. Can you fire this war crime for me, please? He referred to them as his baby killers, yes. I love how whenever you try to, like, anybody ever tries to make an excuse to the military. Like, we see this a lot now with the bombings of, like, like the civilian boats off in the Caribbean, right?

Where it's like, well, let's do some 5D chess about how it's not these guys' faults. And they, you know, the Nuremberg defense is actually real for them. And then anytime any of them open their mouths, they're like, I fucking love war crimes. Yeah, you're just like, all right. Yeah, all right. It was like, damn, that would be war crime.

I think he might be bad people. There was drugs on the boat. The crews performing these experiments were largely untrained in gunnery because, again, the moose didn't use the guns very often. It was difficult to train people. This particular experiment made Dan Meyer and Mortensen really mad, though. This was an experiment to shoot a modified ancient shell from before World War II with seven bags of powder, including one supercharged bag. Oh, no.

These guys would have been so good as like gun tubers or something, you know? They shouldn't have been controlling a naval ship, but they probably would have made some good videos. Yeah. They voiced their concerns to superior officers who said, yeah, that sounds bad. And they let the experiment go on anyway. Right.

On the day of the shoot in a show of confidence in the safe, of the test, the entire bridge crew, all the officers on the bridge of the ship, crammed themselves into the armored helmsman citadel. Right. Now, surprisingly, this test worked. The shells flew 48,000 yards, that's 27 miles, and they were only about 75 yards off target. This was, in fact, a record for 16-inch gun artillery, although there had been some tests back in the 50s with nuclear artillery that had gone farther.

Now, from this test, no data was gathered and nothing was learned, but Captain Fred Musilie was able to brag about it. I don't want to hand it to him, but like 27 miles, a 75-yard. That's pretty good, yeah. It's pretty good. It's completely pointless. You risked everybody's life for nothing. This was already like 30 years obsolete.

But it is, I mean, if you're, You're going to enter a dick measuring competition that's completely pointless anyway, and you do measure an insanely long dick. It's kind of like, well, I suppose that is kind of... 27 miles of dick. Oh, yes. You got to... I think it's really funny that, like... I think it's really funny that Pete Heggseth is the latest in a long line of, like, American military greatness.

We just make these guys. Yeah. Another stunt was the John Wayne shoot. No. There was a senior officer who saw a cool picture of a battleship firing off six rounds at once from the two forward turrets aimed just off the starboard side of the bow and decided he would like to have the Iowa have such a cool picture, right? So the John Wayne shoot was born so called because it would be cool like John Wayne. Oh, my God. Yeah.

No, wrong. Wrong, dumb and bad. Are you familiar with Gil Scott Heron? Yes. Are you familiar with Gil Scott Heron's song B-Movie? Yes. I didn't listen to that one. It is one of my favorite songs by him.

It feels like it never unfortunately goes out of style, but it's largely about how America desperately sought a savior in the form of John Wayne, but John Wayne was not available. So they got the next best thing. Ronald, as Gil Scott Heron called him, Ronald the Raygun. Ronald the Reagan Yeah And I just can't stop thinking about it

For this entire story This culture is so fucking stupid And oh killer Mike has a song about Reagan Is it just called Reagan? That's just right Ronald Wilson Reagan 666 Yep Yep

Turrets one and two Were aimed about 15 degrees starboard So from where we're looking in this picture They'd be gone This way a bit turret one, that's the forward turret, got off three rounds, turret two got off three rounds, and in the process, because the guns were aimed in such a way,

the turret two's guns were on top of turret one's guns. It ripped all the bloomers off turret one's guns. That's the big fabric, whatever you call it, that is over the, that covers the area where the gun, rotates up and down, right? They're very big, like, heavy, expensive canvas thingies that are impossible to replace. Yeah, and it ripped them all off, right?

There was the huge fireball from turret two flashed all the accumulated nasty water in the bloomers into steam, right? This was luckily not able to penetrate the turret, but the shockwave did. All the electrics went out in Turrent one. You know, and anything that was like tack welded to the wall fell off, right? All the lights went out.

Everyone was screaming. It was chaos and pandemonium. From the outside, there was so much steam. It looked like the turret was on fire. The turret also started on its own slowly rotating towards the port, right? But there was also chaos on the bridge. The captain wanted the cool picture, right? With the electrics out on Turrent 1, that was.

going to happen. So he was furious and hooting and hollering and yelling and everyone's yelling at each other on a bridge when a chief suggested, why not fire by percussion, right? And this is sort of a final method of desperation where you physically fire the gun, not through some electrical system or something you can control remotely. No, there's a little firing hammer on the inside of the gun. You attach a hook to it and you pull a piece of string, right? Uh-huh. This bypasses all the safety procedures and interlocks such that they existed, right? And the moose thinks this is a great idea.

He gives the order to do it. Um, and the guys in turn one are like, no. No, fuck you. No. Right? What, one of the gunners like just throws the, uh, percussion string down the, down the, uh, shaft of the turret, right? You know, everyone, and the bridge just responds by yelling louder, you know, this is a fuck you, no, fuck you type situation.

This dance continues for a while until both Dan Meyer and Dale Mordinson calmly asked the bridge to look at where the guns were pointing. Come on, mutiny. Turn one was now pointed directly forward, and if the turn had obeyed the order to fire, it would have shot the bow off the ship. Should have done it. Should have done it. It is. Every time I hear any story about the U.S. Navy, I'm kind of amazed we haven't had more mutinies. Oh, yeah, me too. It like being on a ship at sea sucks.

I have friends who have been like civilian mariners. I have a couple who have been like on naval U.S. Navy ships. It's terrible in the best of times. And the fact that it's just, it's just all these guys up and down. The whole like, I just guys screaming at each other constantly over nothing. And they're always like, you are, like, they basically do the Lord Farquod speech every time they fucking deploy it's like, where it's like, some of you will die and I don't give a fuck. Like, you're, you are toys for me to play with so I can move my way up the ranks and retire and write a book about, you know. How hard, how hard it was right?

Yeah, like, it's just, it's insane to me. How bad I thought that you all died? I, like, I was really, I was really, when I started seeing pictures of the gray slime meat that they were serving aboard ships in, in the, like, straight of Hormuz. area. I was really hoping we were going to get like the U.S. battleship attempt can. It would have been so cool if our battleship attempt could have been the Abraham Lincoln. It just would have been it would have felt right. I would have been like, yeah, that's my America baby. And then, you know, sailing it. Anyway, I can't see the rest of that sentence. No, you can. Don't bleep. No, I, I, I, look, I said some shit on here that Devin didn't bleep

and I heard back later and I was like, I'm not saying that again. Did Devin let a few through that I was like, I love you, Devin, but I was like, that was probably not the most advisable thing for me to have said because, you know, Cash Patel runs the FBI. I don't want him to listen to this recording. No, but he does. He doesn't. He's not too. Fucking donkeys or whatever it is he's doing these days. That's true. Yeah. I mean, they would. Thank God that they're doing the inverse Mr. Hans investigation where they just create more Mr. Hands. Can we move on to the next? Whatever. I hope. I'm sorry. You don't like the Pacific Northwest culture I try to bring to this show?

I don't want to do horse fucking or being fucked by a horse or whatever it is we're doing now. The two gunnery officers here over the sound-powered phone. That's a fun thing they got on ships. It's a phone that uses no electricity. It's just powered by sound. They hear from the bridge. Every single officer up there say, oh, shit, in succession. Thus ended the John Wayne shoot.

Jesus. There were further exercises to come. Great. You may guess that this ship had some morale problems. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah. Sailors in Turrent One in particular were like openly discussing committing suicide.

Oh. Everyone sending letters home proclaiming the damn ship is a mess. It's going to blow up. You know, it was it was not a good situation out there. Then came Fleet X, right? In early April, I want to say this again, 1988, the USS Iowa ships out to participate in Fleet X 389, right? Which was a series of naval exercises designed to show off the capabilities of the newly refurbist battleship. Hold on a second.

Oh, he got it. Oh, he's dead. I'm just going to live with that. All right. Part of these exercises included a secret missile experiment. What? The USS San Jacinto would lob an actual, honest to God, armed and everything, Tomahawk missile at the USS Iowa

to test some fancy new electronic countermeasures that were just put on the ship. Why? We have computers at this point. You could just... Okay. It's fine. No, we got to test it. Everything's a lot of fire.

We got to see what happens. We got to see what happens. This test was kept secret from the crew. I wonder why. It was the only knowledge anyone had about it was, it's weird that a crane lifted this truck trailer full of electronic equipment onto the ship. And there's these weird civilians who won't talk to us on board.

What the hell is going on? Some of the gunnery crew broke into the trailer and found out about the experiment. And they were unhappy about the situation. How have we never had a major mutiny? How? Seriously. Yeah. They're lobbing actual armed missiles at you for fun.

Theoretically, if the electronic countermeasures didn't work, the missile was supposed to pull away at the last second and then go whack into a liberty ship. Sure it was. I'm doing the jerk off motion here. Okay. Is it legal to advocate for mutiny? What's the, can we get a lawyer in the comments really quick so I can tell where my jokes can, how far I can go with it?

Surely we can just ask my dad. Yeah. Can you call them really fast to see if I'm legally allowed to make these many jokes about mutiny? Hang on. Let me look. Simple fuses to obey is not mutiny. Yeah, I think we can get in trouble. It sounds like we can get in trouble.

Damn. Okay, well, I... We're not a part of the UCMJ, so I don't know what they're going to do to us. It would be kind of crazy if they just started court. It would be crazy if they started court-martialing random trans women because we wear camo. Like, that's actually the technically qualifies you as a combatant. I don't know. I don't know how they'd find you.

I mean, presumably the IRS would just share my address. Oh. You got to not pay taxes. I was making a camouflage joke. God damn it. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Turret 2 was scheduled for an overhaul the night before the Tomahawk test,

which was performed to the best of the completely undrained cruise ability, which is to say poorly. There was also a new experiment to be performed that day. Skelly was going to use D-846 powder charges, and that 846 just refers to the batch number of gunpowder, right? It's sort of, you know, because each batch performed a little bit differently. There was not a lot of consistency. And he was going to use D-846 powder charges on a 2,700-pound shell, which is the biggest one.

Now, one of the notable things about that particular batch, D-846, is they had a very distinctive feature on all of the bags, large, friendly letters that say, warning, do not use with 2700-pound projectile. Yeah, but. I do love the example image of the bag here that appears to be just taken as like a conversation piece in somebody's home. Like there's like a nice pleasant wood floor and like a really like tasteful blue painted. It's not a military base.

That's just somebody's house. Yeah. I know what you are. So anyway, warning, do not use with 2700 pound projectile. That sign, that's probably for somebody else. I know what I'm doing. I can't read. Yeah.

Now, the worry with the D-846 lot is that this is a, this particular batch of powder was known to burn very, very quickly. And the Navy was worried that too much pressure would build up behind a heavier shell before it started moving. And rather than being propelled out the barrel, it would just explode the barrel. So with this in my mind. mind, it's the 19th of April, 1989. Okay, the date I said earlier was wrong.

Excuse me. 1989. There's a pre-fire meeting. It establishes all the parameters. We'll fire all the guns to port, unless we feel like firing Starboard, or maybe we want to do it at some angle. Doesn't matter. We will fire all the guns in a direction, right?

We're going to fire all the guns, including the ones we can't fire because they don't work. If you're confused by the firing plan here, just consult the firing plan, which we didn't write. Oh, good. Oh, good. We're going to use the illegal powder and shell combination, except in Turrent 1, where Mortensen just flat out refused to allow it. And we'll fire the gun at some point during the day. So that all clear. Does everyone get that? Yeah. Yeah. So we're Fucked is what I'm hearing. How did we win the Cold War? We didn't.

Because the Russian Navy is worse than this somehow. Jesus Christ, I cannot believe we managed to pillage the entire Earth for all of its wealth. And directed here with this. I know. I know. It's really, like. Baffling. It's baffling.

Genuinely, ideologically, obviously. Like, we're terrible. But. But they're worse. So fuck them. But just how? Captain Booselie tells the Bosen to give the order to man the turrets. Oh, Braz, I think they mean boat swain.

I can read that word. It says boat swain. It's the Bosen. It's the Bosen, Victoria. It's Bosen. It's Bosen. God damn it. I don't even know how to respond. I do want to say, you keep saying Musilie, and I wish you would say Bousali, because it sounds like Bousie or boy pussy, and I think that's funny. This is Moose pussy. Oh.

Let's see. Yeah, it's about an hour and a half in. So it's about right. We're only halfway through the slides. Yeah. That's about the right point for that. Only about 30 minutes later, the turrets were manned and as ready as they could be. New additions to the turret crews were helpfully provided by the master at arms,

who simply took anyone who looked like they were lollygagging and shoved them into a turret. Like as ammo or just to work there? Just to stand around. This included legal man first class, Robert Morrison and Michael Hilton, who were now standing around inside turret two, getting in the way of everything, because they had no assigned duties

because they were part of the ship's legal counsel, that gunners. Sure. No, it doesn't even matter. It doesn't even matter. No, it looked like if you can lean, you can clean, you know? another late edition was Clayton Hartwig, who wasn't scheduled to be in the Tarrant that day, but was regrettably the best qualified man available for the job, right?

I want to say, I forget if he was in charge of the whole thing or if he was, he was, the point is he was in the Tarrant, I guess. And so the exercise began. They were going to fire the guns. Turret one misfired. And it misfired again, I want to say. in breach of regulations that said in peacetime you had to clear the misfire before you fired any other guns they kept shooting right on the bridge the moose was entertaining the top brass

who dropped in for the exercise he said to vice admiral jerone johnson now this this is my best turret watch these guys shoot gave the order for turret two to shoot now watch this drive. No, watch the drive. Turn two exploded. Jesus. There's a massive fireball that tore through the gun room into the turn officer's booth made its

way downstairs to the powder handling room where it ignited further bags of powder which caused a second explosion. These bags have been coated in a new wear-reducing polyurethane jacket. Oh yeah, they did. Decomposed.

into cyanide gas. Yeah, it did. Yeah, hell yeah. This is awful. A third blast followed nine minutes later. I believe that was from anti-freeze that had been stored topside illegally. Jesus Christ. Nearly everyone in the turret was killed instantly.

The only survived. You'd hope, right? This will re-jointed. Liquefied pretty quick. Yeah. Oh, my God. The only survivors were way down in the magazine. they had a hell of a job evacuating through the exploded area.

They reported glowing red hot surfaces, arms, legs, heads everywhere. It is the ball turret at sea. You can kill 50 people at once instead of one. Cool. I love man-made horrors beyond my comprehension. I think it's sick. I feel like this was kind of within your comprehension, right? I don't, I'm not going to lie to you.

I don't. If I walked into a room where the walls were glowing, and it was full of disembodied body parts. I don't know how well I would comprehend that. I'm not going to lie. Fair enough. Oh, there's some crazy body horror in the book. Like, my God.

Don't like that. Yeah. The moose, like, looks at this and has no fucking clue what to do. Oh, really? Yeah. He sounds general quarters, and everyone does the normal general quarters panic. You know, get to your battle stations, bed down in the hatches, so on and so on. forth, the result was that the hatches were now baddened down and the firefighters couldn't get

anywhere. Oh my God, dude. So they have to unbaden down the hatches and, oh God, the new chief engineer because if you remember the heroic effort to save the ship by the previous chief engineer, obviously that guy was good at his job, so he was fired. Oh my fucking God. The new chief engineer panics and tries to cut the power to the front of the ship where the fire was, right? And that would have shut down the fire pumps. Luckily, another officer intervened and said, fuck that guy, I'm chief engineer now, send that guy to the brig. And so, yeah, no one on the bridge knows what the fuck is going on.

There weren't even blueprints of the turrets to refer to so people knew where stuff was connected to. So you could figure out how the firearm might spread. Dan Meyer was the helmsman for the day, because he's, again, he just shows up everywhere. He offers to go down to the turn and survey the damage. He goes down there with two other guys. They have breathing apparatus and they enter a sort of hell, right? That sounds about right. You have the, all the powder bags are glowing bright red. There's bodies everywhere. There's body parts. everywhere. They go in and they pretty quickly retreat because it's just even with the breathing apparatus, it's so inhospitable in there. And they tell the moose, you got to flood the turret

with seawater right now, right? And this was done. And below decks, this smothered the remainder of the flames, right? Above decks, the turn is still on fire. Shortly afterward, the ship starts listing alarmingly far to Starboard, so they start pumping the seawater out, and that was slow going, because the pumps, they brought in portable, submersible pumps, and they kept getting clogged with body parts. Jesus Christ. In the meantime, the firefighters had finally fought through all of the locked hatches on the ship, and they got access to the gun rooms where everything was on fire.

There's headless bodies and bodiless heads everywhere. Like there's like five or six pages in the book of just straight up body horror of people who were disembodied, disemboweled, and straight up turned to goo. Right. Some laugh at that, but yeah. Yeah. This is. We all come up with a horror in our own ways here. Yeah, exactly.

This is when the looting started. Which is in the chaos, a bunch of sailors took it upon themselves. All right, boys, this is now we're going to break into people's lockers. Jesus Christ What the fuck is going on in the Navy? Nothing good. Victoria. I should know my bad, Victoria.

No, see, you've mixed up your transoment. I don't actually want to be in the military. I just like the camo. Those you want to be a lawyer? I don't know. Now, there was in fact a team of Naval investigative service accident investigators on another ship nearby, the USS Coral Sea. And they were told, nah, we don't need you guys, right?

Once the fires were out, recovery of bodies and equipment started with almost no attempt to document the condition of the turret, the location of everything. There was no attempt to preserve any evidence. In fact, they started cleaning and repainting the turret almost immediately with broken equipment and other useless junk thrown overboard because evidence is a made-up concept by detectives to sell more detecting. My wife plays this game. She plays a bunch of games that are kind of just like, she sort of like, you know, does a little bit of an edible,

sounds out for a bit. I sit on the couch and read and she'll like play a little like mindless game before we go to bed. It's like part of her routine. So I get to see a bunch of sort of like game of the week sort of steam you know, flavor of the week kind of, you know,

relaxing games. And the one that you've been playing a bunch recently is a viscera cleanup detail. Oh, where you, like, mop up blood. It's like you play as like the person

who cleans up the video game level after like, you know, the events of half life happened, right? Yes. Somebody had to do that with this and it's like,

yeah. Horrifying. It's genuinely horrifying. Like, no, I mean, like, one of the things I've thought about

in the past is like, I, remember reading somewhere about like tank warfare and like generally speaking it's not that hard to repair a tank after certain kinds of hits the hardest part is rinsing out the guys inside it before um and like that seems like what happened here and that just it sounds bad yes like that that feels like it would give you a new kind of pt like turbo PTSD that just we i don't know what kind of therapy you would need i'm sure we wouldn't give it to you like it just we're oppositional opposed to that as like a foundational

tenant of like the U.S. military. Like, nah, suck it up, man. Oh, God. Jesus. Fuck. The moose convenes a meeting with the officers and the ship's legal counsel. When the investigators come, don't tell them nothing. Right. A lot was at stake.

The battleship program is already on thin ice because it was a stupid idea. An accident like this could terminate it permanently if the turrets or the powder or anything like that was found to be unsafe, right? We got to keep our phony baloney jobs. Makes sense. And independent investigator was appointed for one officer, informal investigation, Admiral Richard Milligan. He arrived in pretty short order toward the site of the accident. Then it was time to take testimony from the sailors. Sailors, right? Saliers, yeah. That's a commentary on the Navy right there. Anyone who had testimony about the accident should report to the ship's legal office.

And about a hundred sailors showed up to the legal office. Most of them had to be turned away because the two legal men whose job would be to take the testimony had been shoved into the turret for no reason and blown up. Oh my God. And the senior legal officer couldn't handle the workload. Now, a controversial appointment to the investigative committee was Captain John. Joseph Micelli as a technical advisor, right? He was basically in charge of large boar gunnery in the Navy.

And he determined from a quick inspection, well, if there's nothing wrong with my guns or my powder, this had to have been sabotage. Whoa. But who? And why? And how? I do love that they called up like conflict of intervention. interest, Giorg.

And they were like, hey, man, we need some help. Can you be unbiased? Yeah, he's like, yeah, I got you. Yeah, I got you. I got you. No problem. These questions and more would be answered soon,

but I have to use the restroom. Oh, good. Me too. But I have to run the thing by myself on the Beastie Boys freeze frame? Yep. Come on. Just keep saying intergalactic and planetary. Barry, we'll be right back.

I guess I could just talk about my Jeep. All right, I'll stay. No, I have to go. Sorry. I was like, I'll stay. No, I won't. I guess I get to do an advertisement for myself. I was going to do at the end of the show, but I mentioned the beginning of the show that also,

hi, everybody. It's good to be back on. I've heard a bunch of you have missed me. And I probably won't be here as much. Because as I said at the beginning of the show, I've got this job now. And I work for traction. and I did want to say, I was going to say at the end of the episode,

but I'll just do it now. If you are a trans person who is stuck in a, you know, bad state, if you're living like a red state and there's a lot of laws that make your life harder or get jobs or whatever,

you know, our project open arms will, you can reach out. We're pretty booked. We are trying to onboard more volunteers and get more capacity. But you can reach out to us and we will do our best to connect you to somebody who can at least try to help you walk,

like walk through the process. process. You know, we don't have like, we can't promise anything, uh, like super drastic because like, you know, we're a pretty small organization and we do our best. A lot of it is just mutual aid and peer support. But, um, it, you know, it can be helpful to have somebody who's like familiar with at least where you're trying to go. If you're like, oh, I want to move out to the West Coast and you don't know anybody out here. Now you probably do if you reach out to us. So, um, yeah, if you're in one of the situations that just feels like things keep getting worse, um, you do not have to be stuck there forever. Uh, I did this a while ago. Like I moved to Seattle

about three years ago from rural Idaho. I didn't use traction because I just had some friends here who, you know, basically like helped me get out here, help move my stuff. You know, I couch surf for a while or whatever. And life did really get a lot better once I was in a place where I felt like safe and, you know, supported. So things can be better. And if you are somebody who lives in a safe place, like Twin Cities or Chicago or, you know,

we have a lot of people in Seattle and Portland, and you want to volunteer, please hit us up. We could always use more people who have work as like peer navigators or like find out data for us. It could like help, you know, sort of deal with the like influx of people who are trying to, you know, get moved and just get, get the more information, try to help them find jobs, you know, review their resumes, give the help with cover letters, all that kind of stuff. I have. And if you have money, please give us money. That'd be great. But if you're listening to the show and your transgender, you probably don't. So anyway, this is not an official advertisement.

we aren't the traction is not affiliated with well there's your problem everything i say here is because i feel like saying it um and i like what we do and i think it's worth you know doing public awareness about it so there's my advertisement also you should listen to train girl ismo there we go that's that's good idea yeah talk a bunch about traction advertised train girl ismo why is it called traction uh trans community action oh i see i see acronymish kind of thing so my mind immediately goes to trolleys. No. That, you know, it's a, you know, and also like, you know, spiritually we're trying to, like,

help people get, get some forward momentum in their life. Stop being stuck in, like, places like Sam and Idaho or Reno, Nevada, or Houston, Texas, all places I've been stuck in my life. It's not ideal to be stuck in Reno. No, a miserable place. I mean, I feel bad because I have a friend who is there who's one of the most delightful human beings to have about my life. And she loves Reno and she does a ton of work to make it a better place.

But it's just like, it was not a place. for me. You know? That's where you go to... And she is very much fighting an uphill battle. It's where you go to shoot a man just to watch him die.

Yeah. I've been to... I've been in Reno once briefly, but I was very sick and all I saw was a concrete retaining wall. Oh, you went through the train trench there. Yeah, I went through the train trench. Yeah, I was real excited to see the new Reno

station and then I got really sick. And I was like, I can't... All I could do was open my eyes and say, yep, I'm in Reno. And then I fell back asleep. Yeah, I mean, you didn't miss a ton. There's not much there. It's like they got the arch.

I mean, the thing is like if you enjoy kind of American decay and sort of like if you would like a time capsule of like what actual 70s Americana, like the return stuff, like what would be returning to? Well, it'll be this. Reno downtown is really cool for that because it mostly sucks. If you want to go to like the most depressing casino of your life, you should go to like the Calviva or something, which is just kind of foster. from like 1973 because the layer of cigarette smoke.

It's just sort of permeates the entire interior as it tastes everything in a tarry amber. Oh, damn. You know, it sounds like almost as good as an off-track bedding parlor in New York City. Yeah, really. It really is kind of. But yeah, I'm not a big, big Reno fan, unfortunately. And I've found it to be very hostile if you were transgender. It was very confusing that particular trip.

Well, both trips I've taken to California now, a lot more rain than I expect. I heard there was no weather out there, apparently not. I mean, that's only true for like a small, like San Diego. I guess that makes sense, yeah. And like L.A., I guess a little bit. Although L.A., like it rains like once every six months and then everybody crashes their car at once. Yeah, yeah, I was taking on a tour of Malibu the day it was raining. And I was like, why are we doing this?

I don't want to be here. We have regained a Liam. Have we regained Liam? We have regained Liam. Hey, sorry about that. All right. So in that case, as we said, sabotage. Wow.

But why? Who? How? How? Et cetera. Well, there were some leads. Right. So Kendall Truitt and the now dead Clayton Hardwig had been good friends.

But I thought we were good friends. Yeah. So, but yeah, on the ship they were rarely seen apart. They had a good report, you know, yada, yada. They were very good friends. So, of course, all the crew were spreading rumors and making gay jokes. Right. That makes sense.

As it happens, there was an incident where they were like wrestling each other while they were supposed to be on watch, right? And it's wrestling like, uh, is this like a metaphor or a, no, no, this is, this is just, this is just dumb 19 year olds. And they were briefly. investigated for the crime, the heinous crime of homosexuality. That is the 80s. In the Navy.

In the Navy. Can you imagine? Right. And this was under Captain Sequist and they pretty quickly determined, no, there's nothing there. That's not real. But they weren't goofing off on duty. So they got like an extra duty for that.

Right. This is just a close platonic friendship between a nice, devout, seventh-day Adventist boy and a complete bastard lone shark car thief. Right? And I think that's beautiful. It's like me and Jordan untrained for Lisbo, just yin and yang. We're so back and so over. One thing which is common in the Navy is for good friends to take out life insurance policies

and name their friends as beneficiary. This goes way back to like World War II and everything. You know, in this case, Kendall Truitt was the beneficiary of Clayton Hartwig's policy to the tune of $50,000. Uh-huh. Now, after the incident. Oh, I forgot to tell you, I took life insurance out on you at one point. Oh, yeah, it's a good cough. Yeah, keep coughing like that.

Can you do it? No, actually, every podcast is actually just a ton team with a bunch of, yeah. Like with a bunch of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I watched Archer. I know what a ton thing is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know.

The old double do's. It's like an early form of life insurance, basically where the last person remaining of the group collects the pot. It's like reverse life insurance. Yeah. Everybody pays in. And then, yeah, the blast survivor gets it all.

And obviously these are, these became illegal basically the minute they were invented because there's a huge incentive to kill people. Yeah. Yes. They are still common among the French, which makes sense. Huh? Oh,

ho, we-vee. No, regular life insurance pays out when you die, babe. Yeah,

as soon as a odd team, everybody else dies. You get their life. Inverse, inverse life insurance. It's the same

mechanical process. It's, no, it's, think of it like a death lottery, right? Like that's, you want to just

be fourth, Mike? It's, it's, as my, uh, engineering economics professor put it,

life insurance is a bet with the insurance company. If you die, you win. Yeah, but here's the thing, right, as I've explained many times, especially to my wife, I bet her half my stuff that I would love her forever. Yes. I really don't want to have to get more stuff. Let's go gambling. No, I don't gamble.

You know this. So at the ceremony on the shore, Truitt planned to give all that money to Hardwig's surviving family, the Cubacinas. Cubacinas, I'm not sure what. Doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter. They agreed to this in person on the day of the ceremony, but Clayton Hardwig's sister, Kathy, excuse me, why am I saying?

You know, this is. Yeah, I do appreciate your commitment to fucking up every day. You're allowed, you just hit the two hour mark. Yeah, we're good. We're good. Podcasting madness is setting it. Yep, you got it. Kathy took upon it herself to see if she could convince the Navy to help ensure

that Truitt made the correct decision since, as we are all aware, he's a bastard, right? This letter winds up in the hands of Admiral Milligan, who finds it very interesting that Hartwig and Truitt were so close. and there was this insurance policy. And there was, you know, Truit had various convictions for illegal actions. And, you know, maybe

we can connect this with the sabotage of Turrit 2. And so the theory is assembled. So they blew it up on purpose to collect the life insurance money, recklessly engaging the lives. No, no, there's more. There's more.

For Christ's sake. There's more. Hardwig and Truitt were gay, lovers. So? But Hardwig had been jilted when Truitt, like a gay man does, married a woman, right? And in a subsequent depressive state, resolved to take himself out and everyone else with him. He constructed a bomb to blow up Turrent 2, which he inserted into the gun just before it fired. It was the perfect plan. But it's not the perfect plan. The perfect plan would just to be to blow up blow the thing up with the Tomahawk missile, they were firing at the ship anyway.

Yeah, yeah. I love when you open up the box of the entire history of America post-World War II, and it's just McCarthyism. Like, oh, shit, I'm sorry, it's lavender scare again. That's all we got. Lavender scare again, Mom. There was also an alternative theory that Truitt killed Hardwig for the insurance money. that one didn't have legs.

And also they were still gay in that theory. So anyway, naval investigative services were called in. Okay. And this is, this is the agency that preceded NCIS. It was just NIS, right? They went down for a separate scandal that happened at the same time as this. It was called Tail Hook, which was, that was a whole, that was a Las Vegas hotel party that went too far. as all the good ones do.

Yeah. But we got to introduce Tom Goodman and Ed Goodwin, Naval Investigative Services official Gator unit. The blowjaw brothers, yes. No, no, that's gay, that's bad.

The opposite of, what? Yeah. Oh. The blowjob, but only for women, brothers. Yeah. Bring the clip like a doorbell, moving on. Yeah. The mission is simple.

Determine. Two things. was he gay? And seriously, bro, how gay was he? Yeah, I was going to say. So they first call on Kathy Kubiccena to find out under the auspices of helping out with the life insurance situation, what's going on, right? This interview goes poorly. They informed Kathy that her brother Clayton was a homosexual. She tells them, no, that doesn't sound right, which was a disappointing answer for the Goodman wins. Goodman wins.

It proves difficult to interview the family and the family home, what with the kids screaming and all that. So they try conducting the interviews individually at the agent's hotel rooms, where, again, having put people through the rigmarole, they try and get Kathy the breakdown and admit she knew Hartwig was this sort of degenerate homosexual, which didn't happen, right? A copy of Hardwig's will was found, so the agents pay to visit the Hartwig's parents' house and looked through Hartwig's bedroom, right?

They find not only the will, they find incriminating evidence of homosexuality. Oh, do that. He's writing letters. I write letters. That's pretty gay. Oh, right? Thanks, man. But here's the kicker.

The letters were to girls. Ew. So just to, all right, let's put off. our lavender pan of hats. It's all do it. All right. So I want to be very clear about something. You ever hear the Greg Geraldo bit where he's like, can you imagine writing

like a Civil War Island out? Don't fuck nobody while I'm gone. That, that, but for dudes maybe? Question mark. Look, again, we're very open on this podcast. We're all, whatever. Just don't join the Navy is my advice. You fuck all the dudes you want.

Just don't join the Navy. If you notice, if you notice, I haven't said anything. And it's because I'm trying to rotate my mind a bit, I can say. Because I'm like, so do you mind if I make every, if I'd be a huge downer for a second? Sure. Can I, can I? Okay, cool.

Permission to be a downer received engaging. When I was working at NASA, I was part of the ERG, you know, employee resource group for gay people at Johnson Space Center. And we did like a monthly meetup. And most of it was like we all hung out and had like cookies. And it was me who was, like the closet was translucent, but I was still kind of in it. And then a bunch of people who, like, had loved ones who had died of AIDS in the 80s,

and then a couple of gay people who had somehow managed to survive the gauntlet of being hired by NASA to work on classified, like, space shuttle missions while they were gay in the 80s and having to like convince the FBI that, no, this is just my roommate, you know? So like, and so we had one month where we all sat down at a room and watched a PBS documentary about the lavender scare. which was like, in retrospect, this is my first kind of introduction to this, and it was, in retrospect,

they focused a lot of the Matasian society, and I disagree with some of those, like, the tax that was taken. It was a lot of reformists versus kind of radical sort of talk, and it was PBS, so, you know, they were pretty heavy on the reform. Doesn't matter. If you ever watch a film about gay people

who worked for the government, who dedicated their lives and trying to make things better, and a bunch of them were hounded to death and killed themselves. because of being gay. In a room with a bunch of people who spent the first 15 years of their career desperately hoping that didn't become them,

it is the most emotionally affecting thing you could ever be part of. It was just unbelievable to be in a room of people where it was like, yeah, this was real, this is how my career went. And the whole time I was there, I was like, God, I hope we never get back to this.

So now I can't, yeah, I'm like, my blood is at a temperature that is actually, it's like the powder bags. It's glow. If you pointed a thermal gun at me right now, I would show up. I'm like missile lock. Could a Victoria shoot down a stop with camel? Hmm.

I'm not, I don't trust the Navy to answer that question. I played a lot of the Snoopy Flying Ace PlayStation 2 video game, so maybe shot down the red bear in a bunch. Just like a nine-year-old. Proud of you. Thank you. Anyway, I'm going to go back to being quiet now. Kathy Cupertina, who is part of the Seventh-day Adventist. family later describes these agents as extremely homophobic.

Wow. Yeah. The agents, meanwhile, instead of listening to the testimony, made up some bullshit about how the Coupuccinas were all saying, F, slur this, and F slur that. And it was obvious that Clayton Hardwig was gay and a disappointment to the family and this kind of like, you know, all kinds of crap. It's insane. All right.

I know it's not. It is, it is personally his fault because he did everything wrong. But we, we got it. We got to dig up it, Reagan.

Yeah. We got to do it. We got a cadaver sign on Reagan. Yeah. Yeah. Kendall Truitt transferred off the Iowa in May of that year and was brought in for NIS questioning.

Goodman and Goodwin had a simple question. Exactly how gay were you and Clayton Hardwig? Born and a mountain raised in. a cave? Gunning and fucking is all like grave. Questioning lasted three hours.

Trude was never informed. He was the subject of a potential criminal investigation. They received permission to search his locker, but the most incriminating evidence was in his apartment. The agent showed up to search the apartment. They met Truit and his wife.

And they said, my God, this gay man has an attractive, sexy wife. Deep cover? Right? What? Deep cover? Deep cover, apparently, yeah. They, they, they are astonished by the presence of sex toys in the bedroom. They're marital AIDS, Roz.

Marital AIDS, yes. And even more incriminating. And a testament to the bad character of this man. This man who works as a gunner in a battleship has books about battleship gunnery. Only a violent mind would have that. They took the books as evidence. What? I am thinking, and like, I will admit, like,

just given the sample size of people I hang out with regularly, having books about military equipment does correlate with being homosexual. Yeah. This might be just my sample size. But it does seem to hold. Several other interviews with sailors and family and so on. goes similarly. No one relates any evidence of Clayton Hartwig's homosexuality. All of them speak highly of his character and his mental state before the accident. He had a lot to live for. He was

going to go to a sort of prestige post in London after his deployment on the Iowa. He had a, you know, he was he was excited for that. This testimony, however, was apparently taken on opposite day because none of it registers with Goodwin and Goodman and furthermore none of it was recorded or written down so they can say whatever they want. Come on

assholes. I like how the ACAB thing holds so true that it even applies to like interagency like the cops. These guys only investigate the Navy and presumably have also been through all of what involves being in the Navy and they're still

just like the most rotten bastards never lived. Like if anybody is ever going to see themselves as the same cut from the same cloth as the people they're investigating, it's presumably the guys who serve in the same branch of the military as the guys they're investigating. Nah. No. Nah. No, no.

So, of course, the next thing that happens is it leaks to the media. None of this was supposed to go out in the public. It's an early phase of the investigation. So, yeah, it all leaks. And the press do what they love the most, which is both sides reporting. Yeah, you know, it's a sacred duty of journalism to endanger as many trans people as possible. But it was the 80s, so it was just gay people then.

Just gay people in general, yeah. So an article appeared on May 25th in the Washington Post explaining that the Navy was investigating the Iowa Turn explosion under the suspicion that it was sabotage. by homosexuals. And they did this with a straight. I hate to make a joke here, but a straight base, if you will. I'm actually not sure if this article was the one that said it was by homosexuals. I might have been an NBC news piece that came out shortly afterwards.

Right? This is sensational, right? Even though the author of the piece didn't believe the official line of inquiry, because let's be clear, no one involved who had a rank lower than Admiral believed the official line of inquiry, except for like a few exceptions. Of course, it had to be reported that way, right? You have to say, well, the Navy is investigating these people for this, you know, and they don't do a lot to counter the narrative, right?

Suddenly, Clayton Hartwig and Kendall Truett's names were mud, right? And the deluge of media attention wouldn't stop for the Hartwig's for years. This also sort of forces the Navy to retrench its case against Hardwig, which was very flimsy to begin with. So they started a new round of interviews. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah. Kendall True.

Here's the thing that's really offensive here, right? It's like then these people for the rest of their lives are going to be litigating whether or not they were gay. Not even whether, like just taking it face value that if they had been gay, obviously they would have blown up the ship in 50 people. Yes. Because, you know, that's gay people for you, right? They love to commit mass murder.

I'm so mad. I'm sorry. If I sound furious, it's because I am. That is, it is crazy looking back at this in year of our Lord 2026. And like, you know, I. Do you know what this is exactly? Do you know, I mean, and obviously like, granted, people have not died in this. So it is not a one to one comparison.

But the tenor of this reminds me exactly of the internet, the, what was it, the IOC, the Olympic Committee talking about Castro Seminaia and like whether or not she was eligible to compete. And then everybody was like, oh, is she transgender? And it's like, that was never in question. We're talking about like bullshit like testosterone standards that have nothing to do with trans people. And then it becomes a culture war over us completely negating the entire original issue where it's like you people are, if, It's like you're hunting down imaginary trans people because you're so scared of the concept coming across one. And it's like, this isn't even about us. Anyway, sorry, I'll be normal now.

I won't be furious. I'll do my best to change that. Thanks, great. Yeah, we got to talk about now the interrogation of David Smith. Are you familiar with the shapes place? I'm going to go there. So David Smith was one of Hartwig's few other close friends, right? The NIS descended on him, took him to an interrogation room.

There was Agent Tom Goodman there and a different guy, right? They sat him down. Unfortunately, he did not ask for an attorney. Folks, always ask for an attorney when you're talking to police. Every single goddamn time. In fact, don't talk to police at all if you can avoid it. Nope. Every day you shut the fuck up Friday.

For over seven hours. in 40 minutes, the agents tried to ply out some admission that Smith knew Hartwig was planning something, that he was a disturbed prevert of some kind. He was out to murder himself and his fellow sailors. The agents threatened him with 47 counts of accessory to murder, perjury, obstruction of justice, so on and so forth. And Smith, to his credit, didn't quite crack the first session. he was let go he returned to the USS Iowa where he had to stand for a nine hour watch

and then the agents were like you know we really should audio recorded that interview let's bring them back so they brought him back immediately this time they did a videotape and audio recording so it would be harder for him to recant his statements later

and Smith at this point very sleep deprived basically loony he spills the beans. He was like, yeah. Yeah, Hartwood was gay. And he was always trying to fuck me. And he made a bomb. And I saw it once. He showed it to me. He took it out of his bag. He had a big square timer on it with big digital numbers. Guys, just carrying around a bomb as like a everyday carry sort of dealer. Yeah. And this astonished the agents. Finally, some progress. We have something. of course, of course, why didn't I see it before?

A time bomb. Yes, a time bomb, that dastard, that ruffian. Of course, he knew from the ship's firing plans. The precise moment the guns would be loaded and go off. Oh, on such a well-oiled ship as the Iowa, there could be no doubt. And of course, of course, he'd be right there to plant the device. It was the perfect plan. But of course, you couldn't keep it to yourself.

You had to tell someone you needed them to know of your dastardly scheme. But that would be your. downfall. I'm on to you, Clayton. That was beautiful and alarming. How's your voice? How's your voice feeling, bud? Pretty bad. With that, Naval Investigative Services initiated the process to subpoena every receipt from every radio shack within 200 miles of Norfolk Naval Base. David Smith showed up the next day

to recant all of his testimony but there was also further evidence recovered from Clayton's car Big fuck off dildo My God the book Getting even the complete book Of dirty tricks

Such a nefarious tomb A dastardly dictionary of deceit A calamitous conax No sane man of good Christian Character would own The Madman Clayton seized by lust but jilted by his lover dove into this horrible handbook

for instructions on bomb construction. So getting even the complete book of dirty tricks is a 60-page joke book. This was waved around as evidence in multiple press conferences. Exactly who this was for remains unknown. again, no one was buying any of this whose name didn't start with Admiral.

There was, however, some actual testing going on in this investigation. Aside from the Navy's toxic Yawi fan fiction, they were trying to do some testing, right? Yeah, it was hard on my voice. It was worth it. If this is your final podcast, that was a wonderful stand. I was genuinely one of the funniest bits I think you've ever done.

That was terrific. At the Naval Surface Warfare Satter-Dall Green Division in Virginia, there were multiple test fires to try and replicate the exact way that the time bomb exploded the shells. Of course, Maselli was in charge, right? The test gun was an ancient, rusty, and the burrow. was about 90% worn down, but it was what they got, right? Despite their best efforts, they can't replicate the exact way the shell was stuck in the barrel, 44 inches up.

Eventually, they switched from the time bomb theory to a chemical explosive theory, which I believe the theory was he made a bomb out of bril cream, a little dabble do you? Sure. Yeah. They can't get. They can't get that one to detonate on impact at all. It would either light up the gunpower or before ramming or fizzle out inside the barrel, right? Section of the accident shells rotating band, we pointed that out earlier.

It's the copper ring that sort of engages with the rifling of the barrel, right? They were sent off for testing at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and independently to the FBI Crime Lab in Washington. Right. At the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, they found the smoking gun. This copper ring was contaminated by silicon. Silicon can only come from an integrated circuit, such as one might find on a timer from Radio Shack, used to construct a time bomb. Ah, proof it last thing you had handed Mr. Hotwick. And the FBI asked, has there been any potential for? contamination between the incidents and the tests. And the Navy said, no, the only thing we've done to the shell was to drill into it with huge drills and attach hooks to pull it back out of the shell and drenched it in a chemical called break free and also several other things at various lubricating

oils, whacked it a few thousand times with a industrial hammer, right? And the FBI said, I don't know. That sounds like there could have been some contamination. And Captain Misselli said, nah, that's not contamination. And the FBI walked off the case. I love the idea of just walking up to like a sculler and moulder and scully and dropping a big like fucking dripping wet with PV blaster shell on a lab desk and being like here, just as it was fired. I've watched a lot of X-Files lately so mentally the FBI is just those two to me There was also some interest

in grabbing the other two shells from the turret that had been stuck in the guns in which were also laboriously and you know very very loudly extracted from the guns they had been pulled out and the Navy lost them so they couldn't do comparative analysis

So, you know, obviously what we got there? That's some fine forensic work, boys. Case closed. Uh-huh. So. Yeah. All right. All right, cool.

Wrap it up. Yeah. No, that's what the Navy does. And they're like, the only thing left to do is inform the families. Oh. The Navy is done with the investigation. Now they have to inform the families. They're done with the investigation.

So they decide that the guys are gay? and that's it. Yeah. Like that's the actual conclusion of the investigation. They literally could not get anyone to say, yes, they were gay, and they just decided that this is what they were going with. I fucking hate America. Yeah.

I fucking hate America. I think that's probably the correct take. Yeah. I hope that we get our asses kicked, which we are. The land. Yeah. What is this? The crimes of this guilty land can all be purged through blood.

Hold on. There's still more, though. Oh, my God. hate everything. So the way they decided to inform the families is we're going to film a propaganda video explaining exactly how Hardwig had constructed a bomb and inserted it into the gun killing himself and 46 of his roommates. Yeah. Can I cut me off there? Bras, we've all seen the video. It shares if I could turn back to high music video shot on the deck of the USS Missouri. We've always seen that. That one also had a juicy or no, the Mississippi had a turrent explosion. Excuse me,

not the Missouri. Yeah. So as as well as how the testing was performed, the results of said tests. You could, if you knew what you were looking at, you could see some interesting editing on these tests. Oh, really? Good, but, you know, this, this tape was to be brought to each and every family who, uh, of a victim on either VHS or Betamax. And if the family did not have a VHS or Betamax player,

they were going to bring that to them. or in a few cases, they had to bring the whole television. What about Laserdas? Wheeling, having a naval officer wheel in the fucking substitute teacher. So anyway, here's how faggots killed your child and 47 other people. I can say it.

Yeah, but I can't. Well, I'm sorry. I'm always a large way. Did you try sucking dick then, and you could get to say it too. I feel like I have to go the whole way, right? Like, I got to divorce my wife and just marry Roz, which again look I have it from I have it from some sources in naval investigative

services that you can have a wife and still be gay yeah yeah yeah yeah what do you want to hang out next uh yeah that's good point so basically everyone thought this was bullshit right most offended of course were the heartwigs and the kubuchinas who had you know a navy man show up and say, all right, watch this video explaining how your son is a psycho mass murderer. Anyway, have fun. Bye. So what happened to Hartwig through this? Well, Hartwig's dad. Well, the other guy.

Sorry. Truitt hired a really high-powered scummy Miami lawyer. Like the good kind or the bad kind? Oh, the bad kind, but good results. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that's one of the things that happens is that because he's getting really, really, really up in the face of the Navy, this goes to congressional hearings. Oh, my fucking God.

Because no one believes the story. It's so stupid. Right. And so Senator Sam Nunn announces that Sandia National Labs would get involved in testing the shells copper band for contamination. I got to ask a possibly a rhetorical question. Why are we not using the national lab we have in the first place? because this investigation was started as a sort of informal one officer investigation. Okay. So there's no authority was out there that could change it until we wound up here.

So this is an independent lab. They mostly do like, you know, national sort of nuclear engineering, you know, secret squirrel shit. But, you know, they're independent to the Navy. They don't have a huge stake in the matter, right? The Navy had continued their investigation into the contaminants in the barrel and the gun and the shell, because the conclusion of the report was actually distributed before the report was actually finished. They found interesting stuff in the barrel and on the shell. We know the answer we want.

We just have to figure out how to get to it. They found calcium, chlorine, PET, plastic, glycols, my God, man, glycols. Like you find an Austrian wine. What's going on? Oh, my God. It's evil, Riley. Yeah. And Dr. James Borders from Sandy Allad had to sit them down and explain that chlorine and calcium

come from seawater, which you may find on a battleship. The P.E.T fragments were probably from pens or eyeglasses or any. anything else sailors brought into the gun room. Yeah, they were probably liquefied when they fucking explosion happened. Yeah. And the glycals were from the break free. The Navy also claimed to have a single, minuscule iron fiber coated in calcium and chlorine.

That was proof, proof of the use of a chemical explosion. And Dr. Borders travels to Crane, Indiana, where this single minuscule iron fiber was stored. goes to the naval laboratory. The technician produces the envelope with the fiber in it. This is genuinely a very tiny thing. It's like a hundredth of an inch long.

It's even smaller in diameter. You can barely see it with your eye. So they open up the envelope with the fiber in it and shook it out into a petri dish and nothing came out. Where did it go? Probably the same place as the missing two shells. You gotta love an investigative service whose approach to evidence is like

my girlfriend is in Canada. No, you can't see her. You don't know her. She goes to another school. Jesus Christ. Oh my God. Well, hey, we're back to it being funny again because this is the stupidest thing

I've ever heard in my life. Truly not the stupidest. It's a good thing I guess these guys weren't gay. Yeah. I'm surprised they didn't try to like come up with some reason that AIDS did this. This feels like the general climate of the 80s. They made Truitt take an HIV test.

Why? I am, oh, Jesus fucking Christ, man. Jesus fucking Christ. I can't believe. I cannot believe that it is 2006, and basically I and everybody I know has to devote their lives to clinging by their fingernails to keep this stupid regressive shithole society

from backsliding into the, this exact shit again because another stupid motherfucker with an obsession with battleships and who has Alzheimer's runs everything. It's great. We don't know. I have, I will, I will credit my mom with this one. I don't think he has Alzheimer's. My mom's theory, remember, she is a psychologist. Okay. She has a doctorate. Is that it's advanced late stage syphilis, which I choose to believe instead. Sure. Yeah, I'll take that. Fine. It doesn't really matter, but it's objectively funnier if we're being led to our doom with a guy that just like has terminal brain rot from like fucking bad. Yeah. All right. I'll accept this into my worldview. Either way, the champagne's going to fucking pop the same.

Oh, yeah. So the scientists and Sandia are convinced of a simpler explanation. Over ramming, right? The ramming arm, as we mentioned before, manually controlled. old, the possibility of accidentally ramming powder at high speed, causing it to ignite spontaneously, was entirely possible, right? There's no safety interlocks that prevent us. A distracted gunner could simply do it by mistake. And one of the things that was distracting the gunner that was unusual in this turret was that the powder elevator wasn't working. So, you know, everything had to be delivered by hand rather than the normal procedure, right? Sandia did some small-scale tests that made sense.

Captain Maselli was unimpressed by these, but he agreed to do full-scale tests at the range at Dalgren using a test rig, which is just a 16-inch steel cylinder, which they dropped a big rock or something into to simulate the RAM, right? And the way this investigation had gone, the media circus surrounding it was so, pervasive in the culture at the time that the moose starts to think this is this is not working guys this is a real bad situation he's called to testify in front of the senate armed forces committee

as such he has to prepare for the testimony and you know he does his due diligence he reads up all the existing documents and he comes to the conclusion that the theory hartwig did it was bullshit, which puts him in an awkward position because now he has to tow the party line, which means lying to Congress to continue the smear campaign against a dead man in front of the dead man's family. And to his credit, he can bring himself to say it was sabotage, but he can't say and Clayton Hartwig did it. Oh, okay. Well, all right. Well, that's kind of your thing, right? Isn't that the whole thing? Yeah. Yeah. He thought it was, somebody he didn't know who.

Oh, but I thought he was pretty sure. It sounded like he was pretty sure like 10 minutes ago. Yeah, no, he was like, fuck. No, shit. And mostly towed the party line not completely as such torpedoed his own career. He was probably only a few months for making Admiral. And winds up retiring not too long afterwards. Oh, too bad.

Very briefly, he was a hero in the eyes of the families. but, you know, this left room for further doubt about the narrative brought forward by the investigation. Tests are still ongoing at Sandia and Dalgren, which is when we have to do a heist. We're doing a heist? On the powder bags are a trim layer, right? This is a thin layer of extra powder that's added to each bag to ensure all the bags weighed the same. Each trim layer is different. It's just like a little extra bag attached to the bag. Micelli's tests were using powder bags other than the ones involved in the accident.

When Sandia Lab scientist William Chambers visited the ship, he asked, is there any powder left over from the accident? And one of Lieutenant Dan Myers' gunners' mates said, yes, there is. I'll go get it, and he got it, and he handed it over. This was spotted by one Lieutenant Kevin Hunt, who started hooting and hollering about it being evidence, you can't take it off the ship, so on and so forth. He tries to physically snatch this jar of powder away from the Sandia scientist. And the scientist simply walks down the gangplank and off the ship. The Navy.

Just walk out the Navy if you're quick. You can't do shit to me. I'm a civilian. And so Lieutenant Dan, Meyer, who had no involvement in this, was then arrested, then released for weekend leave, then personally arrested by the moose on Monday, confined in the master in arms office, which was bizarre because that meant he had access to the one and only outside telephone line on the ship, which he used to his advantage by asking his dad to pull some strings to get him

out of the situation. Oh, my God. God, really, this is the most naval story of all times. every single aspect of this is like, yep, that sounds like the Navy. Then he was released again, kicked off the ship for good. The folks from Sandia Labs arrived at Dalgrann with new knowledge of the powder and specifically the trim bags, right? Misselli was finishing up the last of his drop tests,

none of which had resulted in even a fizzle. And they asked, can we fiddle around with the powder bags a bit, make them look a bit more like the ones that are actually on the ship, right? And that was mostly to have a bit more space in between the pellets in the trim bag, right? So they go out and do that. And they retreat to the bunker and Maselli ran the test. And boom! The whole test rig vaporized.

Oh, fuck. Well, that might be the problem. So you're telling you that it was nobody's fault except for like a manufacturing error that they didn't know would cause this. Well, that and the storing the powder on the barge and untrained crew. and I mean there's so many there's so many causes here in order went out that very day to stop firing

all the 16 inch guns no one thought this was something that was no one thought this was a potentiality you can't pin this on one guy is what I'm saying even if you were like trying to be like I'm I'm the dumbest you even being a lot right yeah I cravenly want to climb the career ladder

on somebody's dead body you can't find a single person. Because this problem started 50 fucking years ago when they decided to make the gunpowder and then store it on a barge. Cool, great, love that. Are you telling me that systemic causes made this accident happen?

And they blamed it on gay people? Just a little bit, yeah. Wow. So the Iowa investigation on the Navy's part was reopened. And furthermore, during a later visit, A scientist from Sandia had a novel idea about the missing shells, which was to ask a random guy on base where the shells were. And he was like, yeah, they're over there.

There were the two heavily damaged shells sitting next to a warehouse. Control testing was back on. Sandia found similar contamination on those shells as the accident shell that had been used to prove the presence of the time, time bomb, the brew cream bomb, right? Yep, yep, yep. Hell yeah. And the Navy said, no, you didn't.

All right. Mutiny, beauty. It's the only, it's the only rational answer at this point. Micelli's crew does further tests with a 16-inch gun and a mock-up of a rammer for these tests produced explosions with various levels of overram. The Navy responded with, La la la la la la la la la I'm not listening but you know the Sandia report Disagreed so we're forced into better than this

We're forced into a situation the Navy has to revise their report and all they can say is We don't know. Oh we don't know what happened. Yeah. Okay. Yeah It might have been sabotaged. We don't know what happened. Yeah, yeah and I might have I might have sharded it in there. Who knows? They do sort of a non-apology to Clayton Hartwig's family and also to Kendall Truitt. At the very least, it was interpreted as an apology by the press. And there were a lot of subsequent lawsuits. The Hartwig sued the government, NBC News, et cetera. All these were dismissed. Families of the victims sued the Navy. That was dismissed. The only lawsuit that went anywhere was when Fred Musil, Captain Moseley, and a few other officers sued the publisher and author of Glimps of Hell,

our big source for this particular episode. And also Lieutenant Dan Meyer. And this was settled out of court. So the conclusion to all of this was the Navy was like, yeah, maybe it wasn't that guy. And maybe they weren't that gay, but we don't know. Who's to say? You know, we, we, we, we don't know. Can't say that.

Can't say that. Can't say that. What do you, type out of the chat, what you want to say, I'll say it for you. I can't write these down. Oh, coward. But there was good news. Captain Fred the moose, musily landed on his feet and was put in charge of the Lockheed littoral combat ship program.

And the one headquartered in Morristown. Jesus Christ. Right across the river, baby. Old RCA. Well, good for him. Yeah. Great. I'm glad that his career was safe.

Well, that in the Navy is a defense contractor now. So he makes three times the money and does you have to work? Yeah. That was how it was at NASA. It was like if you want to go actually make money, go work for a defense contractor with the skills you got here. Yeah. Do less work and make more.

money. There's nothing wrong with defense contracting. I don't believe that. No, there's nothing about defense contracting. Leave that in. Leave that in. Leave that in. Why would you leave that in? This is the thing I earnestly believe. Okay, Liam. I'm being very sarcastic. I hope we're all aware of that. Okay. So my favorite thing is that many, this was long before I was born, but my grandfather

worked in old RCA and then before that for oh my god it was not NASA but it was the part of the Navy I may have that wrong that was around the the ages program and the Apollo recovery missions in the ocean and then he was like and then he got cancer he's like well I need better insurance so here I go and it like worked for RCA for like a million years and that's how my mom went to college don't worry about that yeah I had nothing to know with it. I am clean as a whistle. Obviously, like, there's material incentives to do it.

And I've met people who I'm like with. Like, this is what, like, Ross has hit on this a million times. Is it like, if you go to engineering school and you're what, like, 150K in the hole in debt, like, what, like, yeah, no, I mean, it makes a lot of sense.

The entire contract. Exactly. That's what sucks. Yeah. If you're looking at, like, the purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of the American system is to get you to compromise in all of your moral.

and do whatever anybody will pay you to do because they've put you in a position where you have no choice. Right, well, you have to do it, right. That said, still don't think you should talk about it proudly. You know, it's one of those things where it's like, look, I recognize there's lots of gray areas and lots of things, but if you work for Lockheed Martin, probably don't tell me. And if you do tell me, you should probably say it pretty cheap.

That's where I kind of fall on the matter. Yeah, but you could work for the next generation overhead persistent infrared. Oh, it's a missile warning constellation. God, damn it. All right, yeah, moving on. You know, it was funny. I read something recently about like testing they had done back in, I don't know, the 90s. Testing. Oh, testing they had done. Is that what you said? Okay. Yeah, like psychological testing where they had did like war gaming and they put a bunch of conservative freaks altogether on their own team. Right. And like had them play

war games against like a, you know, as NATO against like Baltic states. Of course. You know, kind of like a Warsaw pack. And like they always got to the brink of nuclear war really quickly. And if they had nuclear like missile if they had missile defense systems like you know an iron dome whatever they became even more genocidely like maniacal basically instantly that sounds about right um so that explained 90% of the world we live in basically instantly for me um so no i don't think that's good i don't think you know no it was the atlas missile uh it was the cold war leave me alone and then um rca servicing in which is in morstown they say cherry hill but it's in fucking morstown dickheads yes moving on swiftly so what did we learn

honestly if you're gonna be gay go the whole way just to fucking just really just smash ugly's in the in the turret and then I don't know

do a mutiny I have no idea I bet fucking on top of it yeah you might as well be fucking on top of the missiles right you're gonna I guess yeah you may as well

just be gay because even if you're not they're just gonna say you are yeah but I do think might as well be fucking so the thing that's really interesting about this to me that I would like to actually, you know, is my takeaway from all of this.

It's like, obviously, the Navy is a hot topic once again in America. And specifically how dog ship we treat sailors. And like, there was that story pretty recently about the enlisted guy who tried to kill himself. He jumped off the ship in the middle of nowhere, right? He's not like trying to swim to land. He's trying to drown. Are you talking about the Abraham Lincoln? Yeah.

Yeah. And that's happened more than once, right? Well, there was the one that really made headlines very recently during this obscenely long, ridiculous deployment because they're way over extended because we've opened up as many fronts as we possibly can because famously a thing that works pedophile Nazi state et cetera um but like and you know the thing is is like everybody on board is like morale is in the toilet they're not getting mail they're not getting like resupplies the food is like fairly edible the toilets don't work the showers are failed like it's as bad as it can possibly be at sea this guy tries to kill himself

because he's pushed to his limit and they're charging him right like they're going to try to charge him and give him a dishonorable discharge, strip away all of his benefits, make all of the sacrifice of his life worth basically nothing to him long term. He's not going to get any of the benefits of having served. And it's just, you know, it kind of opened a discourse about how like this administration doesn't respect the troops. We use them as disposable. And if you take one thing away from this episode, it's that America has always fucking done this. Yep. Yep. It's not, this is not an aberration. This is continuation of policy. Donald Trump is a lot of like end point of a of a

art that began 250 fucking years ago. Pedophilia Nazi bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. Hail Satan, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah,

basically. What I'm, what I'm imagining here is that meme of the thing going over the guy's head. Watching a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. You know, and you're like, oh,

funny music. And what's going over his head is the Navy is fucked up. the definitive version of that for me is like somebody playing fallout new Vegas it's like war never changes like is the thing that he's seeing and the thing going over his head is California sucks actually um also I'd like to take this chance to remind everybody that I am here in an unofficial capacity and my bosses do know that I podcast and you can't get me in trouble or saying I don't like America yeah same Don't worry about it.

Yeah. Also, my boss is Rod, so. Well, I bet my boss and my real job. No, I, no, we talked about this, the circular firing squad. Yeah, but I meant my other job. I meant the real job, one that I did the advertisement for when you got up to go pee. Oh, I poop. Oh, damn.

Yeah. So, hold on. So I'm your boss. Yeah. Which means Nova is my boss. And I'm Nova's boss, yeah. Okay, yeah, that makes sense to me. All right.

I actually report to all three of you my management structure is fucking nightmare. My inbox and slack messages are just a complete disaster. I do like that we got a fucking email from some Spanish audio editing company the other day. I was just like, hey, do you want an editor?

I was like, we have, Devin. Like, they're pretty good. Leave us a load. They don't kill you for dropping four hour episodes for somebody called in from a World War II field telephone. RIP, damn, McQuay, I love you, Big Dog. I think that you're not going to do better than them.

Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. She cans with danger. Yellow. I am here to relay a safety third story from my girlfriend, who knows for sure the answer to the question, the man or the bear. Oh, no. Oh, this is about a literal bear.

All right, we're good. We're good. Yeah, yeah. For those who are uninitiated, I just learned this today. There's a viral question on social media. If you are a woman, would you rather be stranded alone in the woods with a man or with a bear? A bear. It's a bear.

It depends on the bear. It does actually get a bear, yeah. I guess we can safely assume because we all, well, no, Victoria lives in the Pacific Northwest. So for her, it might be a fucking grizzler, right? That would be a bad bear. For you and me, it's a black bear. I'll pick it all.

I hang out with a black bear. They're supposed to eat your trash. Yeah, exactly. Grizzlies are kind of like, I don't know. I mean, if the question is, would I rather be murdered or raped, I suppose that's also kind of, you. Okay. Thank you.

I'm just saying. No, I know. That seems to be the nature of the question. Said the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet. Yeah. Sorry. I'm not good. I'm too autistic for tax.

Jesus. You are wrong. Like, it's just depressing. This runs a little bit long And I apologize for that But it has lovely illustrations From my lovely girlfriend Remember how we said one goddamn page, you assholes?

Yeah About 15 years ago When she was a college student She had a part-time job As a guide in a large zoo complex It had animals typical For a zoo in the northern region of Russia Goats

Raccoon dogs lynxes, wolves, foxes, various raptors, and of course, bears. Not many people know, but bears are incredibly intelligent, persistent, and patient animals, capable of plotting something for days and playing chill and calm, until the moment of opportunity. And if a bear has set its mind to something, it will eventually do it. I blame the stereotype of bears being these big, goofy animals that are only sometimes scary to cartoons like Masha and the Bear.

I don't know that one. Is that like Russian Yogi? That must be like, dude, Russian Yoh. Why the hell not? Hey, Boo, Boo, we're going to steal a samovar. And the fact, the bears. Beres. Yogi, I don't know if that's a good idea.

That's Grushab. That's Grushab. That's Grushab Samavar. And the fact that bears show no emotions on their faces, interpretable by humans. But when a bear is suddenly right next to you, you got to experience all emotions. As my girlfriend says,

so in this particular zoo, there were several bears. some of them seem to be fine to exist in their enclosures, but one or two individuals had made up their mind. They wanted out, and I've said if a bear has set up its bare mind to do something, it will do it. And in a zoo where enclosures were basically a plot of land circled by a two-meter-high mesh-wire fence without an overhead roof, these bears sure fucking did what they planned to do.

one time a bear dug under the fence another time a bear climbed onto a tree within the enclosure and somehow made a five meter long jump over the fence sometimes the bear just shook and rattled the fence or door until it broke so what do you do as a hypothetical owner of the zoo what do you do when you have a loose bear in your zoo well let it out let it out i don't care you hop into your UAZ and drive to the city. The UAZ you just have? Yeah, because it's Russia. Oh, yeah, that's true.

I want to know if it was like, was it one of the breadbox vans? They make the little breadbox vans. I love them. Oh, that'd probably be fun. Yeah. Oh, I would kill for one of these things. Like a 450 or something?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then you drive to the city 70 kilometers away from the zoo complex to gather volunteers to help you persuade the bear to return. They don't speak English while you're in Russia, I guess. So, of course, yeah, yeah, no, everyone speaks Russian. I don't know if bears speak Russian or not. They don't know.

Yeah, I think they speak bear. So you can't get this help from the nearby village because you, the hypothetical zoo owner, had previously employed villagers from there, and they're mad as fucking you because you thought that a mug and a single orange is a good idea for bonus pay for their work that occasionally involves catching loose bears. Now, unfortunately, my girlfriend does not know the methods of bear persuasion and cannot relay them to the listeners, but I can't fault her for that because she, as a part-time guide, staying in the zoo over weekends, had another role in the bear-catching scenario.

She was to stay overnight in the zoo complex on the second floor of a tourist house. These these Russian zoos are kind of weird. I'm not picturing this, but I guess you can stay overnight in the zoo there. She couldn't stay in the employee house because it only had one floor and the bears could climb into it if they set their mind to it. I do love the illustration of the girlfriend staying in the tourist house. Yeah. It's cold as fuck outside and there's a confused bear.

out your window. Hey, you guys have snacks? They probably could set their mind to get to the tourist house as well and all the locked doors and second floors wouldn't stop them, but luckily for my girlfriend and me,

the escapee bear just wandered around the complex while she was trying to calm down her anxiety by reading some books on the second floor. See picture one, the bear was persuaded via unknown methods next day. She survived. The rest of her job was, was perhaps more arduous than persuading the bear to return to his enclosure

because it involved persuading idiot tourists to stop trying to get maimed by the animals while visiting the zoo. One would make jokes about Russians yearning for the void when some dumb fuck from Novurchask throws his sunglasses into a bear enclosure and attempts to get over the fence and fetch them back real quick. See picture two. Why? Just let it go, dude. Or some idiot, this is the shit

that they killed Harambe for. They should have killed that kid. They should have killed the kid. They should have let, yeah, they should have let Harambe. I don't think Harambe would have killed a kid. No, that's not what I'm saying. Pay attention to someone I'm saying

I'm saying that instead of shooting Harambe, they should have shot the kid. It's a warning. That's a completely. Yeah. They should have killed that kid. I don't give a fuck. Teach those six-year-olds.

And then mount his head on the wall like a moots. Or some idiot mother unwittingly tries to sacrifice her least favorite child to some very confused wolves. Been there. But idiot tourists not understanding the dangers of wildlife is a universal human experience. And I trust that the dear hosts of this podcast have already made jokes like this on their own. I'm advocating to kill kids, yeah. I worked at the zoo briefly. Yes, you did. Yes, you did. Now, onto the man in question, the bear or the man. As a zoology faculty student,

my future girlfriend had field practice hours during which she and her classmates were sent out to a village. The girls in the course were to live in an empty house on the very edge of the village, and we're told to lock the doors and be on high alert at night in case drunk village youth will come to visit the girls. Because we live in a society, the warnings weren't just words. The girls were wide awake with knives and hands, listening to the drunken morons, trying to get into the house for several nights. One morning they discovered that the frustrated lads had stolen all their boots,

and another morning they found the outdoors, the outdoors hand washer broken. In response to this egregious behavior from the locals, the college, of course, reprimanded the female students for not keeping their property intact. So my girlfriends answer to the question, the bearer of the man is simple. It depends.

Vindication. Yeah. There we go. I mean, doing fair, it sounds like the bear was better about the house. The bear sees a lot more polite. Yeah. Yeah. which is generally what I would expect.

Yeah, I've generally found bears to be very polite in my limited experience with them. Again, apologies if it's too long, thank you for helping me keep my sanity in this messed up geopolitical reality. I hope we all live to see our respective empires fall and meet the dawn of better times. Also, fuck turfs from redacted. Big, big, enormous, like, predator-style handshake, L.E. Yeah. I hope those guys die. Let me tell. I hope they were killed.

Oh, yeah, probably in one of those stuff videos. I hope they were inside the Russian submarine. They managed to crash into the bottom of a lake during a testing exercise or whatever. They all got sent to the Ukrainian front, and they were each individual one was in one of those drone snuff videos. Yeah, I was working on my transgender smoky and the bandit. post-apocalyptic future you know futuristic novella and I was like I should learn about like drone warfare and I took last about ten minutes before I was like nope oh I don't want to actually I don't want to know but this is yeah this is not good

yeah future sucks don't like it's pretty bad pretty bad also bad the present also bad yeah we're gonna find gonna find that ideal what there's like one year where warfare was really great you know everything else was really bad. I don't know what that year was. Yeah. I was going to say like 1946 because everybody was too tired, but I remembered I'm Greek. So that's not. Yeah, right. Yeah. 1848. Oh, the year of revolution. No, I'm pretty sure that sucks too. No, that was probably pretty bad. Shocking. I can't believe you would endorse slavery, Roz. I thought 1848 was was, was a, was, Ross, when do you think the Civil War was?

No, no. We're talking about revolutions in Europe. Answer the question. Answer the question. Answer the question. Answer the question. When do you think the Civil War was? The Civil War happened sometime between like 1855 and 1870. Good enough. That is true. I can never remember the exact time.

61 to 65, but yeah, I'll take it. 61 to 65. Okay, yeah. Yeah. You know, that's, I send a long letter back home. My darling, Masha, I cannot even remember what year it is. Don't fuck nobody while I'm gone. My favorite is still Napoleon's letter to his wife. He's like, I'll be home in three days. Don't wash.

Stank. Wow. Where's I going with that? I was talking about ringing the clit like a doorbell and then... What was that? Let's add this. Well, it's been three hours and five minutes. I think that's a short, normal episode.

That was safety third. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? I did my commercial in the middle of the episode, but yeah, you want help in the U.S. You reach out of attraction if you're a trans person trying to get out of your shitty state. It doesn't like you. And if you want to volunteer with us, you should. And if you want to give us money, you definitely should.

And also everything I say in my podcast is that's a separate thing. I just genuinely believe in what we do. I was already volunteering here for the entire year before I started working here. I do want to. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. I'm so sorry. Oh, yeah, and listen to Trank Girlie Smoh. I have a guess not for this show, which is that we will be recording a bonus.

Hopefully next week, assuming everyone's around. I am going to be doing it on the Pennsylvania State Universe. So that is this month's bonus. Oh my God. That's going to be dark. Yeah. It's real bad. Yeah.

Damn. I should have put in now. Also, like, I just, I guess, a brief moment of extreme thank you to the wonderful, well, there's your problem audience for all of her support while I was unemployed. And for like both your support and Nova's obviously, even though she's not here for like, you know, helping me until I could get back out my feet. I appreciate it. But you won't see me anymore.

So I'm sorry. Bye. I'm dead now. I've died. I'm here to say. listen to my other podcast, Trains Atlantic, exciting new episode coming out soon, where I explained to Gareth, why I don't like trains anymore. Yeah, I got those texts. I don't believe you.

Yeah, yeah, that was, that was, that was an experience. That was, I have to go to, I have to go see the therapist on Monday. I'm going to have to talk to her about, yeah, that was probably top five worst experience of my life. Yeah. Anyway, you know, but that's, that's, that's a different story. for another time. Yeah. All right.

We're good? I think so. That was a podcast. Bye, everybody. Right. Bye, everyone. Bye.