Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 31: Salang Tunnel Fire Part 1

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

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Hey, this is Justin in post-production again. So like the last two episodes, we recorded this episode a while ago, so the goddamn news is not very current. Since we've recorded this, we have entered what historians call the cool zone, and that means there's probably some more important things for you all to do with your money than give it to us to get bonus episodes. So again, for the duration of the protests for George Floyd and against police brutality, you can donate to any of the charities listed below, they're mostly bail funds, and send

us the receipt via Twitter, DM, or email, and we'll send you the link to the bonus episodes. You know, instead of you all having to donate to our Patreon, you can also donate to our Patreon though, if you want. Now, so far, you all have raised over $5,000 for bail funds across the country, which I guess really means that podcasting really is praxis. Also, I split this episode in half because I'm sick of uploading two hour podcasts, and I'm sure you all are sick of listening to them. So part two of this episode will be out next week.

I'm now recording again for the second time. So I am also recording. All right. All right. All right. Well, welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters with slides where two introductions, two introductions, because we forget to tell our guests that they need to record their voice individually, because we're fucking morons. I love to host a podcast, but also come on your podcast to ruin it.

Yeah, if there's ruining to be done, we've already done it, you're fine. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. And my pronouns are he and him. And that that's the introduction for me. Oh, yeah. Alice called while Kelly, my pronouns are she and her. And I'm also on a podcast called Trash Future, which you can listen to.

You should do that. I am William Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. I am on Twitter at Oldman Anderson. I don't know. Yeah, that's it. Just stop a podcast so you have something to introduce. Yeah, exactly.

I'm working on it. I'm working on it. I'm working on it. And we have a special guest. We have a special guest today. We have Joe Cassavion. We have Joe Cassavion from the Lions led by Donkeys podcast. And also thanks for having me, author of books.

Yeah, it's a great podcast. Which you should absolutely go out and fucking by right. Yeah, but by the book, hard is incredible. Go buy it or I will come to your house and I won't wear a mask to do it. You'll come to the house and you spit dip at them. I think it's called that Texas marketing. Oh, I don't like that. On the screen, on the screen, you need to do the slideshow also.

Yeah, on the screen in front of us, you will see a tunnel, right? You see, it looks like, you know, a big, generously sized tunnel. It's got a picture of a guy on top. I'm not sure who that guy is. Yeah, I can't make him out. It looks like a kind of like a fucked up trotsky, but I'm sure it's not. I think since it's in the Northeast, it's probably Mohammed Shah Masood. Ha, OK.

That'll do it. Isn't it wasn't Masood like a big beard guy, though? That guy looks clean shaven to me. Oh, he's got a beard, doesn't he? He had a pretty neat beard, I think. Oh, OK. Well, either way, very ominous looking hole here with a nice, with a nice Mercedes truck outside it, which before recording,

we were arguing about whether it was a Unimog or not. It's clearly not. It's like an actress. OK, well, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, my bad. I also drew like the outline of how big the tunnel actually is. This is a ruse out here, right? Ah, yeah, I see that the tunnel is shockingly small. I've had the the the wonderful pleasure of transiting

through this dark ominous hole, probably close to sixty to a hundred times. Wow. Oh, we should also say that before we get going, we are drinking old crow for you, Joe. Oh, I am. I am so thankful for that, because I can share with everybody the drink that I discovered on accident because I only had five dollars in cash and their debit machine was down.

I am I am I am back on my maker's mark, shit as it is now the month of Chihuahua. So I am not like sinning as much by doing this. So just sending a little bit by the same company. So Beams and Tori, get get at us, please. Yeah, absolutely. We want like what we want is we want the like NASCAR overalls that are covered in sponsors, but we just wear them while we're podcasting.

Look what I want. I will I will record in a fire suit if I have to. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but like a bunch of logos on that. That's to protect us in case our takes are too hot. Oh, yeah, I've sent emails to multiple different sponsors back when I was looking for them for my show. And Old Crow is actually the only one that answered me back and it was an emphatic no.

No, it's the troops. You hate to say that. Exactly. It's a tragedy. All right. Speaking of hot takes, today we're going to talk about my door just got itself. I love it when it does that. It does that. Do you still hear the Weedwacker? No, I can't hear the Weedwacker.

Today, we're going to talk about the Salang Tunnel Fire, which is a big fire that happened in a big tunnel in Afghanistan in in 1982, right? All right, I'll buy it. What's Afghanistan? What's Afghanistan? I've been told it's a land of contrasts. It is a land of contrasts.

I just wanted to start by saying this. Just starting just starting the podcast, where we read from the CIA World Fact Book for an hour. Yeah, the GDP of Afghanistan is the definition of unforgiving step is some some call it the graveyard of empires. Hope you like goat pads. So, yeah, this podcast is dedicated to the brave

Mahajidine fighters of Afghanistan. I see where you are going with that. And yeah. Amazing. Anyway, also, the GDP of Afghanistan is five hundred and twenty dollars and ninety cents per capita. It's not very much. That's an Xbox. That's an Xbox.

That's true. That's true. Every Afghan citizen could buy on average an Xbox. All right, so if we've solved this shit, I have done more to advance the cause of counterinsurgency than David Petraeus has in his fucking life by being like, why don't we just give every Afghan an Xbox? A UBI for Xboxes. Yeah, yeah.

Don't worry that you don't have food or health care. But we have like electricity to power it. But like you get this box. I mean, I think diesel generator, baby. Somebody did work out like I think it was the straight dope column from the Chicago reader way back in the day worked out that the amount the U.S. spent prosecuting the Vietnam War start to finish for that amount. You could have given every citizen of Vietnam like three thousand dollars.

And it's like, yeah. Pretty good. Would have done a lot more about who gives a shit. Yeah, that's true. That'll do it. So anyway, but before we move on to the subject of today's podcast, we have to do the goddamn news. Do you like our news stinger?

It's amazing. All right. Yeah, let's do some news. I don't. I need to log out of steam because it put a thing. What? Yeah, I put a thing in the corner. Anyway, we're back.

All right. So yeah, so a bunch of all of America's opening up, even though coronavirus is still happening and not everyone's going to the pool and like sneezing on each other. Yeah, this is Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. It's like the Ozarks. You ever been to Lake of the Ozarks? Never.

All right. So let me tell you about my one experience of Lake of the Ozarks. OK, I went there when I was not quite 21. And it's the best way I could describe it is if Venice exclusively were a frat part of Venice, the city in Italy, rather than Venice Beach. OK. Yes. And just I think there's a contingent of people who basically just live there and never stop drinking.

Huh. I thought that was just Missouri. That Lake of the Ozarks is just absolutely the fuck wild. The Ozarks are probably my favorite place in America, but this place is just absolute unforgiving hell. Awesome. Love it. Yeah, I've never been that drunk in my life. I just I didn't know if I was there.

I just didn't know. So because of these shitheads, right, there's going to be rolling lockdowns forever, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. OK. It definitely seems that way. Like I live in Washington state and we have those fucking gun-toting idiots take over Capitol buildings and stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because I think it's going to be like the the the Boogaloo, right?

The fucking right turn of the shit. And everybody likes to think of this area as like super progressive. There's like a ton of fucking Nazis here. But like almost immediately after that, because, you know, our state cap is Olympia, there's a news story that comes as like mysterious covid outbreak in the Olympia area. Where? Fucking mysterious. Yeah, I just I just noticed something.

Is the goddamn news banner getting lower resolution every episode? You know, I mean, I keep copying it from the last episode. Wonderful. Perfect. That's how you know it's official. This is this is the logical end point is we do a show that is one pixel. It changes color occasionally. The shade of beige.

This is a slightly different shade of beige. Why is everything in that image so pink? Like not. It's only one pixel. Oh, yeah, that'll do it. You sent me this image. You can't complain about it. I literally I literally did. But like I'm I'm still going to complain about it because like the health

consequences in melanomas alone, I just like I feel like I can hear this image and the noise that it makes is a sizzle. It's the sound of when you scoop in a spoon to a mayonnaise jar and just flop it on the counter. Oh, oh, thank you. Yeah, thank you, dad. Yeah, in other news. Um, so Elon Musk was supposed to shoot some astronauts in space today.

Shoot some astronauts in space. In to space. You know, I was just going to go up there with a gun. Going to go up there with a gun. He's going to shoot up the International Space Station. Nowhere is safe from mass shootings, I guess. No, it was going to blazing new trails. I was supposed to be a launch today with some astronauts

sent of the International Space Station on one of Elon Musk's rackets. But they had to scrub the launch due to bad weather. So we don't know if he's going to kill them or not. That's scheduled for May 30th now. Maybe we can ask you know, you can ask future me. Yeah, Justin, how did this go? And we just leave a pause. Bob and Doug did, in fact, make it to space successfully on May 30th.

Congrats to Bob and Doug. Open up Elsinore for me, I guess. All right. So whatever I said is what happened because I have knowledge of the future. A shocking portent of things to come. Yes. So I really want to know who they drafted for the Tesla space program. I think it's NASA guys. Yeah, it's NASA guys.

Yeah, there's like they've contracted out. So like that experience of like looking around you and realizing that you're sitting on a bunch of hydrazine, but like every component is contracted out to the lowest bidder just got a little bit more obnoxious because now you can be like, yeah, that. But also the guy who's ultimately responsible for all of this is like tweeting and like tweeting Rick and Morty shit. And it's like there's nothing more American than

because most NASA people are in the military than them being kind of like subletted over to some death contractor to put some rockets on them. It'll probably work out fine. Like I remember a friend of the show, Nate Pathay, also of How to Avoid a Die and Trash Future was talking about one of the times one of the first times he got really disenchanted with the military was the helmet scandal in Afghanistan. Oh, right. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, they literally they found that a bunch of like, quote, unquote, protective helmets were just like filled with dust because they were they were made by prison labor and just they just been like, yeah, no, put some like grade a like circus dust in here or something. The fucking circle of American contractors is complete. If you can get the pipeline, it's it's the oraboros of death labor. It's like it's like you've been you've been being sent up to space on Russian rockets for the past like nine years now or whatever.

And now we're going to put you on Elon Musk's Grover rocket. I don't know. This is better or not. Yeah, you can play Tetris on the console. It's cool. Oh, my God. It's the only rocket of all time fueled by burning workers from the factory. Just keep shoveling them in, boys. I can't wait to go to space based on prison labor. Some guy on some guy on the bottom of the rocket has like,

spin the rocket motor by hand like it's an old airplane, you know. Just know it's fucked. I mean, the thing about the like the Soyuz, right? The Soyuz is it smells weird and it like destroys your back and like, they have to fit you into this weird foam seat the whole time. But it doesn't really explode. That's one thing you can say for it. We don't know if we can say that for the epic bacon rocket yet.

Yeah, I mean, it's it's absolutely amazing that nobody's batting and I is like an apartheid South African billionaire is like, fuck this, I'm going to space. Like, oh, god damn it. We call people pedophiles and people are like, don't yell at him. That's how you get supervillains. I'm like, the dude's already a supervillain and honestly, I'm fine if the United States government and all of my just

just laser laser rockets or whatever right. Elon Musk's dumb face. They're just does does some Avengers shit. I'm so fucking tired of hearing about Elon Musk. I think that's it. It's just everything the guy does sucks and everything he does is exhausting. And I'm just like, you fuck, you have like a newborn kid and 36 billion dollars. Just fuck off and go away.

Yeah, it's amazing that every time he tweets out something that like causes like 50 billion dollars in Tesla stock shooting out the door. All of his defenders like, please, sir, I just lost my life savings. Well, like my favorite my favorite genre of that is the guy who like buys a Tesla like the Tesla evangelist who finally gets one and then at him because he's like responsive on Twitter or whatever to be like, hey, all of the doors just fell out of my car. Is this normal and like 500,000 nerds all just go.

No, fuck you, you're using it wrong. Why did you try and open the doors? Everybody knows not to do that. I saw one the other day that the steering wheel fell off. Like, good, that's what you get. You bought a car from fucking apart. Tide Willy Wonka is a defense mechanism, right? The steering wheel falls off of the sacrificial measure

to stop it from like the auto drive slamming you into a truck. It's like when a guana drops its tail. Yeah, totally. That steering wheel is going to grow a second Tesla. I like the I like that or the state of California made him get rid of the numbers in his kid's name. Really? Yeah. Oh, that's outstanding.

Yeah, they're taking away your number and giving you a name. It's amazing that's coming from California because like the governor kind of looks like if a real doll came to life. Like a like Gavin Newsom is like a less charismatic boost a judge to me like God. Oh, my God. And much like most of his supporters are or most of his donors base is probably pretty racist in LA.

It's just just a thousand ed bucks. Awesome. All right. All right, we got it. We got to get on to the destruction. There are no good head alumni. I just want to say that. That's the goddamn news. All right.

So let's get on to our actual subject today. We're going to start by asking what's a tunnel? It's it's a thing that like is probably the reason why my transport fever two games never load. Yeah, it's it's what a big hole on the ground. It's a hole in the ground. It's a whole test left firing device. It's a thing that some schoolchildren can get stuck in.

And then when you go into rescue them, Elon Musk calls you a pedophile. No, that's a cave. It's different. OK, what's what's the difference? What makes it a tunnel? Although there is natural tunnel in Virginia, which is a cave that they built a railroad through because they could. Huh. It's just that transport does slave somehow.

I mean, the shittiest thing is you're on the train. You just get attacked by like more locks or whatever. You've got to have like an axe in there. I do. I think the train can just run them over. It's like you hope. But like there's clearly some more locks are going to like swarm the train like jump up onto the side of the engine and stuff. It's the death train from Final Fantasy six.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. So. Tunnels hole in the ground that you can go through. So you can go through a thing instead of around the thing or over the thing. You're sometimes in practical, like maybe you may have a canal. Canals are not good at going up hills as it turns out because water. I mean, you could build 9000 locks that each take 15 minutes and a lot of like cranking a big wheel to work.

Yes. Or you could build a tunnel. Hmm. To get through like one small hill. Yes. That seems like it could be a bad idea sometimes. Yeah. I mean, well, apart from anything else, it's it's scary. And also like I is dark in there. Just generally, I don't I'm not a fan of that. I think if you're going to like build stuff, you should not do it underground because underground is like full of more locks

and like possibly like flooded salt mines full of fish. We don't know more people. Got to watch out more people, especially in New York City. Yeah. The non-maga kind of chud. Yeah. I always forget that's where that originates. Do you think that like non-maga kind of chuds are mad at like chuds for culturally appropriating? Yeah, it's a generation.

They're not trying to do a race war. They're just trying to eat some fucking people. Yeah, right? They just want to be left alone and eat some people. They don't they don't want to do any turn of diary shit. And no no subterranean chud ever called me a slur. Another another thing that tunnels are good for is trains. These trains can't go up hills.

They're a little bit better at it than canals, but not so much as. But moosing the existence of a train lock where you like you winch up the rails in a big box. Yes, that is it. I want to hear Warner Herzog's favorite mode of transportation is winching things up hills. That's true. Yeah. Waterloo and City Line in London

used to have a train elevator at the end at Waterloo Station. And that's all the rules. That's how they would take the cars out of the system for servicing. Huh, it's like a steampunk death trap. Yeah. Moscow subway just used to like a crane. They just run it to like an overground bit and then just pick the car up with a crane and dump it in the like depot.

I believe they called it an Armstrong lift. Huh. Yeah. Intriguing. I've never heard of a train elevator before. They were real. Ah, huh. So. But one of the things which is annoying about tunnels is some chuckle fucks decided to be good to put cars in them, too. Right.

Oh, but what's that thing we always say? Train good, car bad. Yes. Well, I'm American. What's that mean? Great. Now I need to like try to find a way to express train good. Car bad with smaller words. The closest thing I had to public transit growing up was like a fucking monorail in the middle of Detroit. Yeah. Yeah, we got Springfield.

The people mover is good. It just needs more transit around it to make it work. Hmm. That's that's another store. I could rant on that for a while. It's like building an off road of transport just to call it the people move. Yeah, I sure hope it like that. It sounds vaguely sinister. All right.

So why are road tunnels bad? Car tunnels, right? And the reason is that unlike a train or a canal boat, people who drive cars are morons and they crash into each other. Right. They're all fucking dumbasses. They don't make you. They make you pass one test to drive a car as opposed to like 50 to drive a train.

I haven't driven a car in seven years, and I am fully licensed to just get in a car right now and crash into a telephone and yet you never know. Nobody is counting the hours that you spend driving. No, nobody is like testing your knowledge of like the routes that you're driving on. Nobody's inspecting your car. So if you can get on to the road, you're going to end up driving it with everybody else, even though it's held together with like duct tape and corkscrews.

Now, when there's a fire in a tunnel, it's very dangerous, right? Because, you know, you get you get a fire that produces heat. The heat has nowhere to go, right? Because the tunnel is surrounded by rock and scrap on all the sides, right? So, you know, and as heat increases, you get the this thing called paralysis happening to all the materials, which are near the fire. That's where it like it's not combusting, but it's being broken down into similar chemicals.

And those chemicals can vaporize and fly up in the air, right? And if you reach most of those chemicals are fairly flammable, right? So as as these chemicals build up in the air, eventually you reach some flashpoint and that's when you have a flash over when suddenly you go from having not a lot of fire to a lot of fire. Yeah, well, what was the episode that we talked about flash overs? That was the King's Crossfire. Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. Very bad.

Very, very not good. And like because it's a, you know, it's one enclosed space. It doesn't just like stop there, right? You don't it doesn't burn through one room. It's one tunnel. Yeah. And of course, there's a whole bunch of because everyone's trying to drive through the tunnel because it's convenient. There's a lot of sources of fuel.

So then you have to figure out how do we evacuate people, which is difficult if it's a long tunnel, right? So they made that whole movie with Sylvester Stallone about it. But he's like, I think he like volunteers to go into the collapsed tunnel. And like, it's like the Lincoln tunnel or the Holland tunnel. And like, he like tries to lead people to safety. It's a dog ship movie. Highly recommend it.

The collapse is the last thing you need to worry about. There's so many bad things that can go wrong, which is so much more likely. Yeah, but, but, but if it collapses, then you might see a fish. Oh, fuck. Don't, don't, don't. I just I don't, you know, I just I don't want to see him. I just don't want to see him. I fucking hate looking at them, man.

And like, one of the things that this extends to like, I just don't like to taste a fish by and large. And my girlfriend's dad, my girlfriend's dad always makes salmon. And I'm like, oh, like, that's a nice meal. And like, I appreciate you making it. And I just he's like, oh, I'm in salmon. And I'm like, but what if you didn't? What if you made any other thing instead of salmon?

Please. The movie, the movie is Daylight 1996. Oh, I do remember that movie. Yeah. Starring Sylvester Stallone, Viggo Mortensen, actually. Yeah. No, incredibly bad movie, but like, yeah, highly recommend it. All right. So that means if you're trying to build a tunnel for cars, right, you need to have a bunch of, you know, means of egress, right? So like, you know, there's a door on the side of the tunnel. You can evacuate here.

Although I don't know how you got to climb over this like fence here. I don't know why that's there. Yeah. And don't they usually have like a bunch of like evacuation rooms where you like you wait it out with an air supply, like a mine? Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you're like digging something real deep or under water, you might not be able to have evacuation shafts. You might have to, you know, just say, all right,

go in this room, wait for your car and all your possessions to burn up and then wait a little bit longer for the air to disperse and then come back out. Another thing, which is a problem, is that car tunnels need a lot of ventilation because, you know, cars are powered by a series of very small explosions, right? Yeah, which creates carbon monoxide. So it's not as cool as it sounds weirdly. If you're not ventilating the tunnel constantly and there's a traffic jam or something in there, then the carbon monoxide builds up

and then everyone, you know, goes to sleep and doesn't wake up. You don't have to ventilate a train tunnel that much. Something that was like made clear to me by a video that I saw of a German like heritage steam train just on regular main line track, like for like once every 10 years, it comes past the level crossing out of this tunnel. And the next five minutes after it comes out is steam coming out of the tunnel in like huge clouds so you can't see anything. I was like, that was a problem with steam trains, right?

Is if you stalled out in a tunnel in a steam train, that was not a good situation. Like it was on a grade like that was the rule with steam trains was you cannot stop in the tunnel for any reason. Sweet. Wasn't there also didn't you also have to close the firebox because if you left it open going into a tunnel, it would just suck all of the like guts out of the engine. It would suck everything in. Yeah, pretty bad.

I don't remember if it was that or the fire would blow out. One of the things I don't know. Steam engines rule. There's so much that can go wrong there. I was thinking about that as a bonus episode, the steam locomotive. Yeah. But, you know, the if you have like a diesel train, it's less of a problem. You have an electric train, it's not a problem at all. And of course, you got the piston effect, which is where the train is just

occupying so much of the cross section of the tunnel. It just naturally ventilates the whole thing because it just shoves the air forward. That's why you can feel a subway train coming before it does. Yes. So, you know, you have regular ventilation to get the carbon monoxide out of the tunnel. You have emergency ventilation to really do rapid air changes. If there's, you know, an actual fire in the tunnel, this is where, you know, counterintuitively, you actually want to feed more air in to where the fire is.

Because it will just it will like eat the air and like in the tunnel so quickly that it doesn't matter. Yeah, exactly. Right. So anyway, what my working knowledge here is entirely based off of one terrible Stallone movie. I think there was like a Hong Kong movie where they like they reuse the same plot where it's like a tunnel collapse, but like. They do that in Independence Day. Well, it's not a collapse. There's just like, is it an alien fighter like shooting through a tunnel

or something at some point? Yeah, it's it's the 27th. The Hong Kong one is Shockwave with Andy Lau, which is a way better movie. Yeah. Right. They got they really got the talent for that one. But he's like he's like a bomb squad guy. And then I think they like bomb the Hong Kong China tunnel. I I don't I have never watched these. Well, welcome to movie podcast. I get all my tunnel information from Sylvester Stallone.

So that's good. This is all fully tracking. Yeah, true American hero, baby. And so these are statements. Don't build car tunnels, build train tunnels, make people get out of their cars and onto a train if you need to build a tunnel. Yes, yes, drive the cars onto the train like the channel tunnel. That's true. Yeah. You can even train was the cars.

One one car at a time specifically. Oh, Mr. Musk has joined the chats. I'm just here for the billions of dollars in investment. So the other thing we had to talk about is Afghanistan. Oh, this outline looks familiar. Yeah, it's like this big kind of triangle. Yeah, so here's Kabul right here. Here's Kandahar, where the hooligans live, I've heard.

Kandahar, I see. I've heard that they've they've all got extinct. So it's a big country. It's got lots of mountains. You can see, you know, mountains in the middle of Hindu Kush mountains. It's landlocked, so there's no ports, right? You can't get a big ship anywhere in here, because there's no sea, right? Yeah, that is typically a problem.

And we're back to the Verna Herzog again. Yeah, you just you want to get a ship into Kabul, you have to carry it over a mountain by hand. No one's entirely sure why America invested in the Afghan Navy, but they had a fun time doing it. Yeah, a five hundred billion dollar grant to like develop Afghan naval competence. Hell, yeah, it's a lot of aircraft carrier.

I'd like it. Robinson Crowe, the fucking aircraft carrier over the Hindu Kush. Historically, the Silk Road went through Afghanistan, right? That's why it has a bunch of like fancy mosques and stuff still. Yeah, exactly. Right. You know, they got all the fun stuff from China. I went to Rome and back and forth and, you know, all that stuff. Well, and in Europe and what it was, it was a thing, right?

So they had a bunch of trade going through here. This is like the difficult bit. You had to hike over the mountains and crap. So, you know, which means it's easy to control, which means you can make yourself sharp and then you can be like, I'm going to build a gigantic minaret for my own edification and whatever. And then you can kick empires out of there, which is what you do when the British show up and we're just like,

hey, do you want to maybe like secure our northern border and just like be like, no, and then shoot at us. I remember reading. I remember reading about the British retreat from Afghanistan, the Second Anglo-Afghan War. It's absolutely amazing. There's a sentence on the Wikipedia of all places that was like, yeah. So the British officers surrounded attempted to parlay with the Afghans.

End of sentence. Next line. Then, comma, the sniping and you're just like, yeah, no, that'll do it. Turns out the sniping was the real defining. And the best part was is the guy that was in charge was told by the Afghans, like, you know what, you can pass, but you have to give us some guns and the British were like, OK, hand over some guns and then shoot at him again. This is a surprise tool that will help us later.

I don't understand. I thought we were friends. It's a perfect life with guns. Yeah, I just I just I just love a kind of like tribalism and nationalism that you install in a place that like has the perfect terrain for you sit on top of your house and you shoot at the enemy all day and you just like you just chill like that. You have like a mug of tea or whatever. And you can just be like the Team Fortress 2 sniper.

It's great. Yeah. And like every couple of generations or so, you're like, all right, son, things are different again. They look up that they're wearing a different uniform. But just just keep doing it. It got more difficult when they stopped wearing red everywhere. But you get used to it. You're going to go fix it.

So it's just leaving your kid with whatever, like a car, 98 or some shit. I'll be back, son. I'm digging a hole. Yeah, they love a Lee Enfield in the Kiber Pass, which is absolutely an endorsement of like the Well, There's Your Problem bonus episode on the SAAC where I was very complimentary about the Lee Enfield. Have you ever seen the the gun markets in the Kiber Pass that have like that they have bolt action AKs and shit? Yeah, they'll just duplicate stuff and invent stuff from like nothing.

It's it rules. Yeah. If you're interested in that caliber of scura, is a yes. Follow on Twitter for just the fucking weird stuff. Although, yeah, I think you mostly post like Syrian gunsmith stuff, but like the anti-Miracchi stuff. But I know it like, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like the center of this kind of like weird firearm stuff shifts based on where the actual conflict is. But reliably, you will just find someone who has just like electroplated a scorpion submachine gun and then like a bunch of like helicopters on that. My favorite thing I think ever saw is like they had T 55s. But like, obviously, nobody had been trained on to fix or maintain these things in your decades.

But it's it's some guy that had to get a waiver to join the Afghan National Army because he couldn't read or write. But he's like got an entire engine rewired back together. And like rules up like a cannon breach that was clearly forged in somebody's backyard. Hell, yeah, man. I mean, yeah. Rules are my favorite.

My favorite piece of like this improvisation on like on a vehicular level, right, was some Syrian civil war footage. I found ages and ages ago. I don't remember which side or who it was. I think it might have been the Free Syrian Army when they were still a thing, right? And they had put one of the like the ZU-23 anti-aircraft guns, the Quadmat ones, on the tiny little Toyota like high ace K-van.

They had propped it up on one side with some bricks, which you needed to do because the guy could do like one trigger pull. It would go the entire van would shift over 45 degrees. You just have to wait for it to like roll back over before you did it again. It was great. If there's one thing I've learned from weapons and weapons like station just bolting things together, see if they work is like the eternal symbol of war

is going to be the Toyota symbol crossed with like an AK of some variation. Yeah. In like 20 years, the US Space Force is going to invade the moon or some shit. And they're going to lose some driving a fucking Toyota pickup truck with an AK where it sandals like again. Well, you guys again from the back. I'm just back. Fasting seeing you.

Yeah. So Afghanistan, very difficult to invade. Traditionally, what empires do is they invade Afghanistan, fail miserably and then collapse, right? Yeah. Graveyard. Yeah, that's a good thing we don't. Please read the bulletins of K-Dog.

I know a book. Is that the plug I'm supposed to have there? You know, I really think in 20 years or so, things will really turn around if we, you know, people don't understand this kind of uncertainty. It's really a 40 year effort. Nobody ever talks about that. It's the 40 year plan.

Well, good. We're about to go to Vietnam. Yeah. If we hadn't done such a good job of counterinsurgency in Vietnam, then how come they've dealt with the coronavirus so well? Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. It's the coronavirus was born in the lab to specifically seek out democratic liberty.

That's what I'm hearing. So it's like Dengist virus. You've got to have some state capitalism going on. And it only targets you if you don't have a social credit number. Noted. Noted friends and allies, the Communist Chinese Party and the Vietnamese Chinese Party go on. Great.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. So in Afghanistan is a city called Kabul, right? It's the capital, right? That's the part where the government has control over the country, which is yeah, yeah. That's both of you to say. It's the couple of blocks where the government has control of the

couple of blocks sometimes. I think one of the best things I ever heard said was like by an Afghan policeman because one of the times I was in Kabul for a short amount of time and he was like super relaxed. I'm like a chair, just like like a plastic lawn chair smoking a cigarette. And I was like, hey, and my job is supposed to like to train them. Like, shouldn't you like be like looking around for like, no, no, I don't see any Taliban here right now.

That means we could holy shit. That's their entire government. That guy's thriving. That guy's living his best life. And I think we're wrong. Oh, yeah, he made me look like a fucking idiot. I'm like, well, fucking hell working. Yeah, whatever.

Hey, working hard or hard work. Yeah, this this plastic lawn chair, the shessy white plastic lawn chair cost 50 billion dollars. Yeah, it's made out of some kind of material from the depths of like general dynamics that somehow of you cancer. Yeah. But like, OK, the thing about Kabul, you know, it's a city where like people live like we're doing the bo pal thing again, four and a quarter million people.

It's bigger than Los Angeles. Yeah, yeah. Population density is crazy. Yeah. And they got, you know, they got like jobs and lives. They got cars. They got like air conditioning and televisions and stuff, you know, it's like it's like a regular place where like people live. You know, it's just like, I don't know, occasionally things might explode,

which I I don't think you can say that of anywhere. Like, which is basically accurate. Yeah. Yeah. The laws of thermodynamics apply in Kabul as anywhere else, unfortunately. And what's the difference between a mass shooting and like someone blowing up their motorcycle? Yeah. Yeah. Ready availability of like old artillery shells, I guess.

Yeah, they just need to keep them close by for home protection. Yeah, just I just love the idea of like being a guy who like collect old Soviet how it's around, but like home defense. These guys are anybody comes into my house. I'm just going to fire this. How it's around. We should all fear for the poor guy that keeps the the collection of Soviet military artillery just for funsies.

Like, oh, you you Taliban guys are ruining it for the rest of us. Legitimate collectors of being persecuted once again. Just because I own like I collect old Soviet nuclear weapons. Yeah, the forgotten weapons guy of Afghanistan is entirely sick of like a bunch of special forces kicking his door in at three in the morning. It's like you guys alone. Yeah, I make YouTube's. I have a license to own these weapons.

It's not not quite the anarcho capitalist paradise. You thought it was you need a license. The bad part of what the real criminal is, the person that makes you register your how it's around. Oh, my God, I shouldn't need to do that. I should not assault how it's her show. Fuck you got to get a tax stamp for this. And the other destructive device.

Try to call the ATF about what have the Afghani ATF? You guys only hear it once three and a half weeks like, yeah, I see that. Yeah, the Afghani ATF, like they take six years to show up and shoot your dog. Well, she's got some time with her. Where did you guys? Where'd you guys go to school, L.A.? Fuck. So. So since it's a city, right, Kabul is a city.

It needs a lot of stuff, right? You need to bring stuff in, you know, for people like buy like food and like you need to bring in like. Gugos, Chachkas. Chachkas, yeah, exactly. How do you get the Chachkas there? Well, to the north is something called the Salang Pass, right? I'll do it.

You can either do the north or you can do the south, which is you drive over the border from Pakistan in a truck convoy. Sure. Yeah, I'll do that. I don't give a shit. And it sucks. And that's always been fine. No one's ever had any problems with driving a bunch of trucks

through the federally-administrated tribal areas. It's never been a problem before. Yeah, no. Actually, funny story about that. The so, you know, like when the US Army ships everything and normally it's over the fucking the the pass on truck beds driven by like from mostly Afghans, some Pakistanis and they ship all of like your your gear in a giant box through the same pass.

So they always get robbed. So you you get back home and you open this giant shipping container. It's fucking bare and they've picked it clean. And with the end, but it still has like the the the the customs label on it. So what they so what they did is they cut the whole top of the shipping container off, picked everything out and welded it back on. So the US Customs thing was still on their level of ingenuity. The that that I salute once again, the noble freedom fighters of Afghanistan.

I'm glad I sacrificed my Xbox to the cause. I'm glad my Xbox could become a martyr for the emirate. We've come along. We've come a long way from the primitive days of stand and deliver. Oh, yeah. Like these people are making advancements in robbery that we never even thought were possible. I mean, does this mean like if if the Xbox is truly become Shahid, does that mean what is a master chief fall?

Because I just I just saw them talk about Memorial Day. So I think they might have turned out. Oh, yeah. Halo's like promoted tweet that was like, thank you for your service with a picture of Master Chief like the cool. They'll ban you if you say that gamers are braver than the troops to the block. Getting blocks by Halo from like like talking about my memories of blood gold. Awesome.

So if you're going from Kabul to the north, you go up and you enter the Hindu Kush Mountains, you go through this area is the Salang Pass, right? You go up, you go over the other side of the mountain and there's some more like mountain roads and then eventually you're back down and you go to a number of places, mostly in the former Soviet Union, you know, like out here. Or, you know, to Jikestan, across the Friendship Bridge, the one tiny like five mile border with China. Yeah. You know what?

Well, we're going to talk about the Friendship Bridge. But this is this is the way to go. Right. Just this. This is what there is. So, yeah, in the 1960s, the Soviets started pouring a whole bunch of foreign capital into Afghanistan. So like, yeah, we're like, yep, this is going to be the next. We're going to invest in Afghanistan. This is a good idea for a world power to do.

It's never backfired for anyone else. But like the investment here being, you know, you prop up our guy and like also like where you get all of the like fetishistic photos of like Afghan women before the Taliban wearing miniskirts and stuff just Kabul that never like they got like they met an incredible amount of graft and like the money never left Kabul and like the Charkar province above that. And so it's like amazing that they had like the level of poverty from like the north and the south.

It's like, no, man, you got played and they played you good. And any skirts happened. And if you can see leg, that's a free country. So the fact that they're communists not withstanding. You know, you can absolutely do a post. Like if you're a serious national security guy or whatever, you work to think tank, you can absolutely do one of those. Like this is what they took from us.

Reject modernity, embrace tradition posts. But it's like a picture of some Iranian woman in like 1950 in like short skirts. That rules. I love that. Freedom is based on how horny you can be. Absolutely true. USA, USA, USA. The Soviet Union in in trying to like prop up the People's Party of Afghanistan created a great deal of horniness.

And for this, we should thank them. That the people's local union of Cam Girls is really trying to help out. Yeah, absolutely. So the, you know, the Soviet Union came in, they put in a bunch of money so they could build like these big Soviet style micro district department blacks, you know, Chris Chovkas. Yeah, they got. How would those deal with the heat?

I wonder, because that's great. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds better. I'm like, yeah, those those deal with cold pretty well. They're very well insulated. I wonder if building them to a standard design is like going to backfire. I don't know if they did the Soviet Union ever have the window air conditioner? I'm not actually sure. I've never seen one in Russia, but like I feel like that would

acknowledge that these buildings can't quite cope with every climate. If you put a window, this is just like you're just like you're in your house and it just feels like you're wearing one of those quilted jackets all the time. Wait, actually, there's got to be real bad units right here. There's two window units right here. Oh, shit. OK. Well, disregard that, I guess. So I see two for an entire floor. That's not a good sign.

That's how you know who the important people are. You just like look for the air conditioners. They put in a trolley bus network, you know, sweet. They had nice trolley buses. You know, you get the nice air electric, right? This ran until ninety two. And then, you know, in the in the Civil War, people stole the copper wires. Well, I mean, having having trolley buses is a Western innovation.

And as such, it's Iran. So. That's why the Taliban stole the cable cable. That's right. Yeah. You could have the bus, but we're taking this. So, yeah. So, you know, the Soviets are pouring a bunch of foreign capital in there. So they can build, you know, they build apartments, some infrastructure, you know, they they need to open a market for, you know, Soviet tchachkis.

You know, they need to ship, you know, so they can buy a bunch of Matryoshka dolls. Yeah, a bunch of Matryoshka dolls with famous figures of the Russian Revolution. You know, yeah. You can buy like a pilotka side cap with like a bunch of badges from like football clubs on it. Yes. So. But the thing is, all this stuff had to get into Kabul somehow. Right. Hmm.

We have a drop for this because you asked me to get a drop for this. Well, we should start by talking about the Soviet Railway Network. I'm just going to cut you off with that. Just like this. This is your patriotism moment. Please, please demonstrate the proper reverence before we talk. Yeah, there we go. All right. So the backbone of the Soviet transportation network, more than the backbone, the backbone of I mean, the backbone of the whole Soviet Union was its railroads, right?

Yeah, that's why it was a good country because train good. Because train good, yes. Well, you'll notice that this is a graph of railroad freight ton kilometers, USA versus USSR. This is the same for passengers. There are different trend lines here. It's still going up even in the eighties. It's still going up until ninety one.

It was a big problem, actually, in the breakup of the Soviet Union because the underbreeding of the railroads were overstressed. Like they were they were using them too hard. Train good, but like too much train, it becomes not so good again. You've got to have responsible train ownership. Yeah, absolutely. You have a license for this train. I have a concealed train carry permit.

In the bizarro world, there's a libertarian train system that is fueled by like the fire consumption of poor people. This is snowpiercer. You just invented snowpiercer. God damn it. That means we got turned into a cop show. You're the only homicide detective on the train. My favorite detail of the Netflix snowpiercer thing was

I found out one of the lines was like, Matt, maybe the train doesn't stop. Maybe it just keeps going forever. It's like, yeah, maybe it's like some kind of metaphor for society. It's like, yeah, cool. Right. Awesome. There's actually a weird libertarian railroad. It's a German like railroad that goes to an island that has open railroad access. If you if you own if you own.

Plenty of trains, James. Yeah, if you own a railroad vehicle, you can run it on the railroad just freely. I mean, it's like it's called like the Dur-Epshteen line. I like trains that I don't like pedophilia. No, no, no trains. But I don't do well among rail fans, you can imagine. They're really subscribing to the libertarian line so they can demand can they the banishment of consent law?

The lines don't go above the 13 line and it starts back down at one. It's really weird. All right. So the Soviet Union relied on its railroads. Anywhere in the Soviet Union that was inhabited or nearly everywhere had access to railroad transportation. Places that are uninhabited, thanks to Papa Stalin being like, let's have all these poets build a line linking the far north to like the other bit of the Far East, two places where no one lives.

Should not have gotten a C minus average at Bogograd Technical College. Yeah, right. Exactly. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely should not have done the equivalent of posting in your time because because of your because of your literary shitpost, you will now have to go and dig its own with the suck. Aline, what they what they what they used to call poetry. We now call shitposting, right?

But, you know, so, you know, roads are really bad in Russia because the the railroads were so, you know, good. I mean, they worked really well. You know, this is all built to the same gauge, same standards. That's Russian gauge. It's five foot between the rails. Yeah, because if you put standard gauge in Russia, the Russians are afraid you'll invade them and they'll be right.

Yes, but there's also like the whole. Yeah, exactly. The reason why there's no like a contiguous rail link where you have to have a break of gauge if you're going across Russia to like anywhere else like China is because the the Soviets and then the Russians are like, no, if you use the same train, that train will suddenly instantly become full of the Waffen SS and you will drive it straight into Moscow Station

and like try to overthrow the government. It's a very Russian version of Pokemon. Suddenly, the SS appeared. Fuck, they do like a Team Rocket intro. The train from the will just is going to get like restarted as a Pixar children's film now. Oh, cause to the way this railroad works is like, you know, in this in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc,

it's all the same trains, same gauge from Kaliningrad, the Vladivostok, from Burmansk to Serheta Bat, which is Southern Turkmenistan. I'm going to hit the I'm going to hit the fucking drop again. All the way all the way into Eastern Poland. And, you know, as even Helsinki, the Finnish railways are Russian gauge, right? This is all interoperable.

You know, you get the really won the continuation war anyway, bitch. Exactly. You know, these trains can run for miles and miles and miles without stopping, without changing the train. Conductors write the history books. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, these were good at, like, you know, serving rural areas. You know, we had this thing called the electricia.

This is this is wonderful. I like the I like the the communism is a sick paint job. Yeah, communism is Soviet power plus electrification. Right. That's Lenin's Lenin's formula for it. So if you lived in like a yurt, right, in middle of nowhere, God forsake in Central Asia, right? If you could make it to the railroad tracks, you could flag down one of the passing

electricas, right, such as this. They would stop the train and let you on the lanuk at the at the windshield and it's like donks off and the guy stops it. Yeah. And they let you on. And then that would take you to the next big city. And then, you know, you could then probably you don't get a train to from there to Moscow. You know, I know a joke about this.

Yeah, a joke with this set up, which is that the the the Chukchi, the like one of the Sami people was one of the indigenous peoples of Russia. He he gets the train to Moscow and he like he does the tourist thing and he comes back to his village and they ask him what what communism is like in Moscow and he says, it's wonderful. Everything's for the betterment of man. I even saw that man. I'll do that. Hang on a second.

I'll give myself sitcom laughter for that one. If like they like chucked a shoe at the front of the train to get at the stop when they're outside of it, how did they let them know? Like, hey, I need to get off here. This is my village. Show them the lanuk at the door of the cabin. No, you would tell us a specific area. Please throw here.

Yeah, it's a big target with Trotsky's face on it. You talk to the conductor, you'd say, hey, Boris, I need to get off at milepost whatever and he'd say, OK. And the measurement of stuff in railway, milepost is like an enduring feature of the Soviet Union and then Russia. Like you could be exiled from Moscow to a number of mileposts like Kropiskaya, your internal passport would not be valid. Beyond like 400 miles from Moscow.

Yeah, it's any of that 100 kilometer town. That was the usual thing. Yeah. And then, you know, if you. But, you know, most places were accessible by train just relatively easily, assuming your internal passport let you go there. Some places didn't have electricians like this. They had diesel trains, in which case they just call them diesels. Some places. Some places.

Diesel. I love a lone word. Some places didn't have even that. They would have, you know, just old locomotive and some ratty passenger cars and then a couple of freight cars on the back, you know, usually, and that was called a bitch of Oz, which is. What did you call me? That's Russian. What did you call me?

Bitch of Oz is Russian for hobo train. Suck a black. I love to throw my valena cut the yob's voilette. It's a Moscow. That's useful if you've got to like you have to bring your yak with you, you know, or something like that. You know, sure. Yeah, yaks aren't good at tucking and rolling on the way out.

No, you have to do like the channel tunnel again. You walk the yak onto a flatbed. The yak elevator. I just want to say, like any time someone says passenger trains can't work in America, because it's too big and spread out. So. This this worked. It's a system that worked.

Yeah, I'm going to have to have like train line. CEOs have Twitter accounts, a shit post to make people interested in going on the trains in America. Yeah, sure. So all right. OK, so how do you get things into Afghanistan? Now, I mean, we have up here very carefully. These are all these are all Soviet countries

with very good railways. And Afghanistan didn't have any railways at this point. There was briefly a tram and Kabul, but that ran for like a couple of years in the 20s. And then and then like the Taliban's great-grandfathers took the copper wiring out of it. It actually it actually started the Taliban. Like this isn't right. Yeah, one guy opens a madrasa to like lecture against the influence of trams. And the next thing you know.

So in Uzbekistan, the city of Tehran, which is very, very, very old place, the railroad reached there in 1925, right? So at that point, if you're trying to ship chatchkies to Kabul, right, you know, you have a couple of boxcars full of matryoshka dolls. You have to take his pants. Yeah. Yeah. No, these are Soviets. They're not gopniks yet.

Not yet. It's too early. That's the Americans fly those in, I believe. Yeah, the main export of of Russia, post-Soviet Russian culture is the gopnik. Just stacking up a bunch of guys, squassing, smoking cigarettes down to like the filter. Just in a boxcar. Yeah. Natural gas, natural gopnik. Hey, you can you close up the boxcar and you just hear hard bass echoing from inside. All right, all right, so here's your standardized counter-strike terminal.

Try not to kill each other. So you take it on the train down to Termez, right? And you unload it and you got to bring it on a truck down to the docks. And you got to unload it from the truck and then you got to put it on a barge. The barge goes down the river just a little bit, right? It's not a proper ferry, to my knowledge. It was a barge, like really crappy, like old timey, like wooden barge. Couldn't handle a truck.

So then then you got to Haritan in Afghanistan, right? Which is just about right about here, right? And then you got to take it off the barge. You got to put it back on a truck. What color should I use for the truck? I'm going to use blue. You just draw like a euro or something on the on the map. And so then you take the truck down pretty crappy roads, right?

And then you bring it to the Solange Pass. You're playing you're playing Mudrunner or spin tires at this point. Well, at some point, the road disappears. You got to take it off the truck and you got to put it on a goat. No, you don't. No, you just drive over the mountain. It's easy. No, you turn. You turn all wheel drive on. You go into a low gear and then you spend an hour

going at like one mile an hour and then you rage quit. It's easy. I miss my fucking chief. I miss my fucking chief. Let's not let let's not discount the public transport via goat. All right, that's why it works. The train train goods call bad goats goods. I say goat is chaotic, neutral. Yeah, yeah, goat is up there with horse.

So, you know, the goat, the goat's got to bring the stuff over this mountain. You know, long, twisty path, you know, and then the goat like maybe the goat like breaks down or something, which I guess just needs to fix the goat to fix the goat. Yeah, I can't. I'm the goat. I spent two years in goat mechanic trade school. God damn it. Don't you take away from my education.

Goat mechanic sounds like a slur. I it isn't. But it sounds so much like one. So you take the stuff off the goat once you've gone over the mountain and you put it back on a truck. Keep in mind, this truck had previously been transported over the mountain on a goat. Yeah, you just have to get a really big goat, like a truck size goat. He is like several goats, like six or seven goats to hold the truck.

Absolutely. Goat Fitzcarraldo is happening here. So then having with a lot of goats. Well, think we're moving like six boxcars worth of chatchkies on like, I don't know, six hundred goat trips, probably, you know. I mean, power is that it's like one GP. What's the division by horsepower? I'm trying to keep it. What is the equivalent horsepower of a goat?

I assume a goat is like a third of a horsepower. I'm going to say a goat's at least one quarter horse. Like it's twenty five percent. If you read if you red line a goat, I think you should be able to go quarter as fast as a goat with a like a goat. GTI, cheese, the image, the image of in my mind is Liam up to the Hindu Kush trying to red line, trying to VMAX a goat. Let's go. Let's go, Sally.

We are going to get to the village by sunset. God damn it. Just letting out slight hisses as you fucking downshift. I'm going to go horse power and I got an answer to a better question. Which is how many goats would it take to generate two gigawatts? I want to go back to the downshifting thing. An average goat weighs one hundred and fifty pounds to the average horse is twelve hundred. So let's call the goat to horse ratio eight to one.

It would then take one point four nine two times ten to the ninth power multiplied by eight equals one point one nine three six times ten to the tenth power goats to generate two gigawatts of energy. I knew I should have paid closer attention in goat mathematics. So after you you use the goat, which you you read lying the whole time, you blow the stuff back on it and then you bring it back to Kabul, right? You bring the stuff, you bring the chachkis to Kabul and then you give people nice Soviet chachkis, right?

So this is not a great system. You can see there's an obvious bottleneck here where you got to go through a shitload of goats, you know? And like there's not like a broad like it's a goat track, right? You're not getting a lot of goats in parallel. And you're also like you're shipping everything this way. Like if there's if there's a gas station in Kabul, if you're a gas station, you're like getting

gasoline shipped in via a goat with two 55 gallon drums attached to the sides. I mean, the joke that I'm thinking of is if you just apply American urban planning to this, you end up with the same thing, but an 800 lane wide goat track. So the Soviet Union decided, all right, we're going to do all this investment in Kabul. We should probably do some infrastructure improvements. And they build something called the Salang Tunnel and the Salang Pass, the road. Yeah, even it even sounds like it needed the national anthem.

And I'm calling it that is Masoud. You could see the hat. Ha, yeah. I couldn't see the hat. I couldn't like zoom in far enough. Yeah, the this picture is a little bit better. It looks like. Oh, sweet. So. So they they improve the road.

You can see this is like a two lane ish road over the pass as opposed to the goat path that previously existed. And there's a lot of hairpin turns and crap. And, you know, yeah, I see that. They're legitimately terrifying, exhausting to drive. Like it's real bad, especially. Are you guys are you all familiar with like jingle trucks or like South Asian culture?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like hyper decorate the trucks. Yes, yes, like got like a whole like curtain of bells around each side. Yeah, it's absolutely amazing. I wish there was some kind of like demolition derby, but for like to crown like the king of all jingle trucks, but they go like red lining balls the wall down this road that is not big enough to hold two of them around. Mostly they do not move like they'll come.

It's like watching chicken at 60 miles an hour on a mountain pass and so they'll assume that somebody will eventually chicken out and move to the side. Yeah. And I am shocked. I never saw anybody die. Oh, man. Yeah. Like for the shades of the road of death in I think Peru, except yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, except for the fact that like you don't have the color distinction to tell you which side is the death.

It's all brown. Don't think it don't think you. Yeah, like I feel like I'm getting like dirt blindness from looking at this. I ever wanted to do that. Just being like, fuck, no, no, no, no, no, no. I drive a small car just no. So this was this was largely mined by hand.

You know, this is one and a half mile long tunnel, I believe. They mined it by hand because all the tools they brought up had to be transportable by goat. Man, Soviet miners. I'm beginning to see why they had they comprised a power block in their own right within the Soviet Union. Just by virtue of like not wanting to say no to the guy who digs a mile and a half through an Afghan mountain

based entirely with like goat transportable logistics. I also think that they underestimated the goats. They strap enough goats. They could have got like a shovel up there or like those giant like drills or whatever. Like just keep slapping goats on it for years. How much does a tunnel boring machine weigh? Probably not that much.

I mean, we have like thirty five hundred goats transporting platform. Getting in the move in unison is like difficult. And if there is one like group of people that could figure out that they would definitely have the goat mathematics experts to figure out how many goat power they need to move that drill one hundred percent thousand mountains. Oh, yeah, I studied at the Technology Institute, the goat. Genuinely, right.

Like I like I'm aware of like friends who are in Afghanistan, like the extent to which public engineering and civil engineering is like a venerated profession. Like you can like admiringly call someone engineer, John, to mean like, hey, you know, you got a guy who fixes the generator. And it's like a kind of it's like a highly valued thing. So like presumably the guys who dig this tunnel, like they're they're they're doing OK for themselves, right?

Good. They're definitely rich. Yeah, absolutely. Get my money and more goats than I do. I can say that much. Well, it's a cover of Buster Rhymes is Arab money. They're getting Pashto money. I try to convince you by a goat. And you want no part of it.

Well, where would you keep a goat? I don't think that's any of your goddamn business. I mean, it's a solid investment from like years ago, you get a goat for like twenty five to thirty bucks. Very good. I mean, we're going to we're going to pick goat and then pretty soon they'll be paying you to take the goat off their hands. Yeah, it's it's it's not a pure scheme.

It's a multi-leveled goat marketing. I'm building I'm building goat equity. Yeah, so when they finish this tunnel, it was the highest road tunnel in the world, eleven thousand feet above sea level that's since been surfaced by some bullshit in Colorado, which looks exactly the same as this. The second picture is of Colorado.

You can't convince me otherwise. So they the highway through the Salang Pass was improved and still, you know, winding, treacherous, many hairpin turns. A lot of avalanche hazards. There's been some severe avalanches recently on the pass. And of course, they tried to make this an old weather route, but it's not not quite there. I'm not even close to the route.

It's some weather. It's that there's not any like like Mr. plows of Afghanistan going trying to clear those roads. I'm surprised they don't have more snowshoes. Like that seems like something that would make sense here. And they just didn't do it. What? What about the pass?

But a snow just build over the road. That's where it gets to go, yeah. Yeah, like the like think think about like Swiss highways, right? Well, they build the way you know, I got you. All right, part of the Salang. I'm American. Yeah. I mean, those things are fucked, though, because like it gives me anxiety

because you're like driving through like a 20 mile long tunnel. But like you can see the outside is like it's not great. It's it's better than Michigan's resolution to that problem when I was a kid. It's like just throw salt on it. Yes, it eats your car and the road alive. But like it'll work. Whatever, I have to buy a new car. And finally, they're just like, we don't give a fuck about your car.

We give a fuck about your kids. We give a fuck about your life. Like this wouldn't happen if you had a goat. Yeah, the goat would just be eating the soul. It's fine. That's why they have strict goat control in most places. The whole road is a salt lick for goats. I'll be right back and it is a restroom.

Yes, of course. All right, that's that's where I'm cutting the episode in half. You get the rest of it next week. All right. See you then. Well, I won't see you. It's a podcast. You'll hear us is what will happen.

OK. Bye. Bye.