Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 41: Nine Eleven (just the WTC towers)

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

we did not have time for the pentagon or much of building 7 sorry for some garbled audio, we didn't record quite right follow sean: https://twitter.com/as_a_worker DONATE TO BAIL FUNDS AND ETC AND PROVIDE THE RECEIPT TO US VIA TWITTER OR E-MAIL AND WE WILL SEND YOU THE BONUS EPISODES: https://www.phillybailfund.org/ https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019 E-MAIL IS IN THE CHANNEL ABOUT PAGE OR ALSO WE SAID IT IN THE VIDEO: DUBYA TEE WHY PEE POD AT GEE MAIL DOT COM!!! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod

All right, I'll call with that slide, man, with the title. I'm sorry. All right, we're podcasting. Welcome to Well, there's your problem. A very solemn podcast about engineering disasters where we're not going to make any jokes at all. No, sorry. No, no jokes. Zero zero jokes.

You know, I just realized. I didn't change the text from the goddamn news from the Joe Kennedy Ed line. That's probably fine. That's probably fine. Yeah, OK. Nobody's going to notice that. Yeah, exactly. Leave me to you. Quiet. Are you saying that you forgot something on the Never Forget episode?

Oh, my God. You're supposed to have total recall. It's already quiet. How's that? Ah, a little bit louder. A little bit louder. That sounds good. You sound good to me. Yeah. Um, not that I'm bad.

Oh, buddy. Now you're quiet again. I am goddamn working on it, man. OK. Have you tried simply talking into the microphone? Maximum gain, maximum gain. OK, here we are. We start we start slightly over. It's start start the recording.

OK, well, we're I think we're we're going good. Welcome to where is your problem? It's a podcast about engineering disasters. Today, we're going to talk about an engineering disaster that we can't forget what it is. That's right. Yes, I forgot. Oh, but you can't forget. Oh, no, you're supposed not to do that.

Don't not for that. Some disasters you sometimes forget. Other disasters you never forget, not not allowed. Not allowed to forget. He's like imprinted on your memory with like cattle brander, you know, it just says. I don't remember. Yeah.

You're walking around some days, you're like Lusitania disaster. And I don't remember what that is. And then the Twin Towers pop into your mind and you know, never. That's right, baby. It's the 9 11 episode. Yeah, we're going to do 9 11 today. We're really don't get me on any more lists

by saying the phrase, we're going to do 9 11. I'm I'm not going what we we you can't do 9 11 because 9 11 has already been done again. I believe I believe a September 11th happens every year, Justin. Yes, well, up every year. I think the next 9 11 that happens, it'll be something other than the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center being hit by airplanes

because there's only one of them now. I mean, raising the curse at a prospect of like, you know how you have Civil War reenactors and 9 11 reenactors? Oh, my God. I think the New Tower would be a lot harder to take down. I'm going to be honest and we will get into that guy that tried to fly a plane into like an office building in Florida in like October 2001. Yeah, it was like an IRS building.

Oh, yeah, I remember that. And he just I think he killed one guy, one IRS guy in his office who just got a Cessna through his window and nobody else. It turns out big planes do more damage than small planes. We'll get to that. Anyway, I'm Justin Rosniak. My pronouns are he, him, arcade, go. I am Alice Kofo Kelly. My pronouns are she and her.

I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he, him and I'm a guest. Yes, we have a guest and I'm a guest. I'm Sean KB and my pronouns are he, him. And you're here from the Antifada, which is an excellent podcast that you should listen to. Yeah, thanks. I'm here from the Antifada, but I think I'm also here. You guys don't give your qualifications anymore, but I'm also here because I don't

have any and it makes me like saucy. Am I allowed to do my qualifications? Oh, yeah, for knock yourself out. I'm not I'm not simply a podcaster. I'm a long time rank and file union building tradesman. And I work, you know, with big buildings. I work with structural steel. I work with concrete.

I work with all the sorts of materials that we're going to be talking about in this episode, including nanothermite. Local control demolition and allied trades. Yes, local, local control is important. Local control is important. We can't outsource that demolition, man. NAFTA kills the demolition industry. They want to send our buildings to China to be demoed.

We can't. He's bloated on a barge with a big crane away. It goes way forward. We talk about nine eleven. We have to do the goddamn news. You can see, I already forgot something. Yeah, that's right. It's just a new deck.

Yeah, I know. Because this was this was yesterday. Oh, excuse me. This was last episode when we were talking about not even last episode, the episode before last, when we were talking about Joe Kennedy. Yeah. But now we are bullying buses and we're body shaming them specifically for having batteries on them. I I think so.

Yeah. So our local tragedy is not officially a crack. Not officially a crack. You're an idiot. Yeah. Seven is not idiots. You're an idiot. It could be bullying works for these other top stories on the right here, like Pennsylvania unemployment rate drops to 10.3 percent. Hospitality and leisure still suffer.

Maybe those workers are getting bullied. Yeah, that's true. There's not enough jobs in bullying right now. So bullying works by getting people to work. And they close down the bullying factory. That's right. I'm here with a bullying local one oh three. We are a union of bullies not affiliated with the police unions.

We are workers. We work to ensure nerds get their swirlies as needed. For too many years, the good jobs, the good lockers have been sent down south and then overseas. We want to keep the lockers here. At home so we can bully people and push them into those lockers in our hometown. That's what you want to in a solidarity strike with you as the bullies union. Oh, yeah.

Just taking just absolutely taking some scabs and just like pushing them into a giant inflatable lockers. It's actually it's actually just teamsters. They are the bullying union. That's true. We scabby the locker. So last last year, except about a bunch of battery powered buses, right? Oh, they sure did.

And they they decided to deploy them on former trolley bus routes. That's where they had electric buses that draw power from overhead lines. Right. They spit on the graves. Yes. Yes. And what happened is apparently they had to take the buses out of service last February and didn't tell anyone. And because all the frames cracked because the batteries are too heavy. Inside job 9 11 control demolition. Good to lose change, Saptar.

They could have used lithium batteries, but instead they went with a much too heavy and bulky nano thermite battery. Investigate Saptar. What they could have used were the overhead lines. The wires are already up. We don't even have to put up some goddamn wires. They're already up. Couldn't do that. This was just incredibly embarrassing that like they bought these new high tech

buses that use worse technology than what they already had. You know, it's more extractive. They need these big lithium batteries as opposed to just some copper wires over the street and they broke just immediately like. Have you considered that perhaps the actual conspiracy is that they needed one more reason to overthrow governments and countries like Bolivia? Yeah, that's right.

Need to keep Janine Agnes and power. So I'll bring that up in the next board meeting. Anyway, that was that was the goddamn news. We got a long episode today. We had to keep it short. News. Yes. News you can use. I was quoted in that article.

I was I forgot to mention that we're all very proud of you. You were looking on moving on. OK, we're moving on. Yeah, it's right, motherfucker. Stressing here with the retro World Trade Center. Yes, actually, this was the world's largest office building for a while. Hudson Terminal in Lower Manhattan, right? This was on the site of the World Trade Center before the World Trade Center was there.

So this was just a big office building for the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad. It had offices for the railroad, but mostly offices for other businesses, because the railroad wasn't that big because it just went from Newark, New Jersey to Lower Manhattan, right? And this railroad connected three of the five big West Shore of the Hudson Railroad terminals. Those were Exchange Place, Pivonia and Hoboken Terminal. And it went to Midtown and downtown Manhattan, right?

Only Hoboken Terminal still in use. This railroad is now known as the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Railroad, or the PATH, right? Well, kick into this day. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's an outside transfer, though. So it's no, no, no, I barely use the fucking thing. Plus, you'd have to go to Jersey. Yeah, I've only used it, like I think twice in my entire life.

There was it was, I will say it was it was not a pleasant experience. In the one time I took it with you. Well, I think that was more due to people and not the trains themselves. No, that was due to the natural enemy of trains. Yes. So, you know, Lower Manhattan in the early 1910s, this building was put up in 1909. You know, Lower Manhattan,

there's this tangled up mess of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, the Interboro Rapid Transit, the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit and the Independent Subways, right? And this is why Lower Manhattan real estate was very valuable. This is where the first skyscrapers show up. They eventually spread to Midtown, right? And once Midtown becomes more valuable, the New York City Tunnel Authority was created, right?

And that's to bring more people from Jersey into New York City. Always a bad idea. That was you would think this is a Robert Moses thing, but it was not. This was from this was headed by an angry old Norwegian man named Ole Singstad. Oh, wow. Well, am I allowed to use the S-slur on the show? What the fuck is the S-slur? OK, I'll say it quietly and gently.

Square head. I mean, I work in the New York City building trade. Some of our unions, some of our locals were founded by square heads back in the day. Some of them up until like 30, 40 years ago, you could barely be an Italian, you know, let alone an Irishman and be in some of these locals, because it was all Norwegians, all Finns, blah, blah, blah. Couldn't get made because you had full suite of chef. They they they had to measure your head and make sure it was square enough.

In good, in good, Durringan. And Lee Ferrikson Day is a big, big celebration. There's a thing out here in Philly, Lee Ferrikson Day. It just brings out the Nazis. There's actually gets pushed into the river. Yeah, one stretch of the in between the where the BQE turns into the Bell Parkway called Lee Ferrikson Way or yeah, Lee Ferrikson Way. And that's because it used to be little Norway, little Scandinavia in Brooklyn.

All right, because Robert Moses, that was like one of the first highways he drove through an ethnic neighborhood. That's right. And it was this week. Got it. Yeah, the Swedes got it first. Oh, the Canary in the coal mine. Yeah. So always Singstad. He got to work in the 1930s. He his authority built the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel,

the Queen's Midtown Tunnel, and he got through half of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel before Robert Moses managed to fire him because he didn't want anyone building anything that wasn't with Robert Moses, his express permission because they hated each other. Singstad and Moses. Probably not the least because Moses drove like a highway through the the Swedish neighborhood. Robert Moses famously insensitive to urban residents' needs.

It turns out he was kind of racist. Learning so much, though, that he was racist against. I didn't even know Leaf Ericsson Day was a thing. I thought you were doing a bit about Columbus Day. And I was like, oh, that's a good joke. But no, it's a real thing. Yeah, we really have Leaf Ericsson Day. Yes. I know this is crazy to a person who lives in the United Kingdom,

but there are actually places outside of the Commonwealth. I know. I know. But it's not that it's not that there are people like places outside of it. It's that anyone takes Scandinavians seriously. Oh, come on, sobs are nice. That I don't mind grovelocks. I quite like it.

The Swedes have produced snooze, the greatest tobacco product known to man. That's right. Shameless, shameless plug for buy snooze.com, who I could no longer buy from, but who continue to send me about 10 emails a day. And they mean it when they say overnight shipping, folks. The better social democracy than anyone else. But, you know, that's because of the oil. But you get to keep all the you're good American racism.

Oh, it's just true. Yeah, if you like your racism, you can keep it. If you really want to fly a Confederate flag in Europe, the place to go is Scandinavia. You know, it's it's so fucking weird, man, to see like, like, obviously, like I and I understand that all Europeans basically are dumb as hell. That's right. It's a war against the whole continent now, baby.

That like we use like Confederate flags as stand-ins for like Nazi and, you know, others sort of super nationalist flags. And I'm just like, yes, OK, so we need to ban it. And I I'm not a big fan of federal government overreach, but I personally would support a lot. And if you're flying a Confederate flag on your private property, you just get shot. Like, like the National Guard comes in and just shoots you. Did you go ahead, Sean?

Oh, no, Liam, did you see online that there's an account that's pushing the Scots, Irish Trump movement that's putting Confederate flags next to the Ulster flag? I did see that. And it's like, yeah, yeah, there this what corporate needs you to tell the difference between these two images. They're the same thing. Mm hmm.

It's always so fucking weird when you see like an Irish protestant in the wild. And you're just like, oh, right, you you you dumb assholes actually exist. You in paisley looking mother fucker you. All right. I hear siren in the back. Yes, that was the police coming to get me for your flag. You're flying. Yeah, exactly. We once flew a Gadsden flag and someone just took it.

But it was also like right before Trump got elected. So I was like, I I'm just so mad that the fucking like shod conservatives took the don't tread on me flag. Hmm. Like what you should have done is me off. I have the naval jack version. What you what you should have had was the come and take it flag because then you couldn't have been mad that someone did.

In fact, come and take it. Ross has already made that joke to me. Yeah. Yeah, this is true. And late Alice late Alice. You also have a come and take it flag. Yes, I do. Yeah, it's always like I like flags. As anybody told like I like shuds.

No, I just don't know where it is. It's a challenge. Challenge to the listener. Take Liam's flag. Yeah, no, it's hard to do it. You lost. We were talking earlier about hair social relationships and how like we like active

distance, like if you come and try and jump our fence, you'll be shot. I will add to that, though. If you try and jump the fence, but you managed to take the flag, you will be allowed to proceed without being shot. This is like the most dangerous game with more steps. You know what? I get bored, Sean. Yeah, I do. I sit and I look at the the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

across the street for me all day, and I just think to myself, why couldn't you just be Catholic? Like the anti-Azov battalion front. The effect of these tunnels was to make Midtown, Manhattan real estate easier to access from the Jersey suburbs by car than downtown, right? Since your suburban commuters could drive in more easily and also like the big rail terminals were there that were in

Manhattan, like Penn Station and Grand Central, right? So by the 1940s, downtown Manhattan had started to get real cheap, right? The company started moving out. There are a lot of vacant office buildings. There's not a lot of restaurants, cultural amenities. The whole place looked like a ghost town after five o'clock, right? So the idea is how do we revitalize this area? And what the New York City government came up with was more office space.

They start thinking about building a World Trade Center, right? A World Trade Center? Yes. Crazy. So there's lots of World Trade Centers out there, right? What's a World Trade Center? It's a fancy office building, which has paid for a license to call itself a World Trade Center from the World Trade Centers Association. Wait, that's actually like a protected term.

Yes. That was what that honestly blew my mind. You can't just slap up a World Trade Center sign. What are they going to fucking do? You know, the other thing is, what's the benefit of calling yourself? Like, why not just Trade Center or like one trade? Well, it's a brand, a brand that is now forever associated with the horrific act of terrorism. I mean, he doesn't love that.

People don't think that the World Trade Center has power. But, you know, if you if you fuck around, you might find out they might send you one of those means that Saudi Arabia sent to Canada. Are we saying here that the World Trade Center Association did 9-11? I like the idea, actually, that like unlicensed World Trade Center, just like a crack team of World Trade Center organization, lawyers and operatives just comes in, doesn't do like a bombing campaign. But like what the Mossad did after the Munich massacre?

That sort of thing, they're just like shooting building supers in the street. If you open a bootleg World Trade Center, sleep with one eye open. Wake up with a horse head in your bed. But it's a horse from a foreign country, a bloody globe. So, like, there's a World Trade Center in Boston. There's a World Trade Center in Montreal, which is like a mall center to commerce, Mondial. Yes. About what I noticed you didn't mention the Baltimore one.

You're too good. You're too good for the Baltimore one. Oh, I wanted to see. No, it looks horrible. It truly does. It's honestly one of my favorite buildings in Baltimore because it's just so goddamn ugly. Well, I got I got the Dallas one because I think it's the most ominous right up here. It looks like an NSA building. Another one is the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D.C.

A good food court. It has a good food court. It does have a good food court, the Ronald Reagan building. He's got a million jelly beans. Yes. You're going to have ketchup and it counts as a vegetable. Yeah, it's actually kind of a weird way that the World Trade Center's Association was formed. So the first World Trade Center was in New Orleans. Actually, shit.

Yeah, also, sure. And this was emerged from a series of simple concepts, right? So someone realized people like to make money by buying and selling commodities. But also people like daiquiris. That is for you. Don't like daiquiris. I've never had a daiquiri. Actually, I tried to give you a daiquiri once

and you just yelled at me. You weren't even coherent. You were just, no, I rammed throw up. That was the sentence I got out of you. Yeah. Yeah, because I was like, I've had too much to drink and rum does nothing good to me. I will say I was in New Orleans. When were we in New Orleans? Last last April, apparently.

I and I just I followed in the footsteps of my dad in New Orleans. So I was just like, I'm seven fucking a.m. Bloody Mary, baby. Like it's so good to like watch joggers and people coming home from the bars, not to the bars from the bars at like the same time, just waving to each other. Yeah, but you're just playing cell commodities. I was like six months there in New Orleans. If I live there, I thought that I was just like, it's like I'm

I'm a pretty heavy drinker, you know, I'm a good Irish boy. And and like people there are like frighteningly drunk all the time. But in the way like an SEC strength coach gets fucked up. And you're just like, man, what happened? Like, where are you? Like, what is going on? It's just like, yeah, it's like 11 a.m. And there's like these 55 year old like Mississippi dudes in like windbreakers.

Just the drunkest they've ever been outside like a hotel bar. I'm just like, I can't keep up here. Also, compared like you've got to add in the food, right? So like, even if the booze doesn't kill you, you will find yourself like eating gumbo at five in the morning. And you will just die that way. Yeah. So I have a question for you. Yes, the World Trade Center in New Orleans.

The same as the World Trade Mart owned by Clay Shaw. Oh, shit. That's a good question to conspiracism here on this 9-11 episode. Triangulation of fire. So there was an international trade mart, which started in New Orleans, right? OK, that might be what I'm saying. And there was within an accompanying International House Hotel, right? And that started actually before World War Two.

And this was sort of the World Trade Center Association did not do 9-11, but they did kill JFK. Yes. They sent their operators down to Dallas. So this this building actually opened in 1968, one year before the World Trade Center in New York City. And that's where the International Trade Mart moved to, right? And you're basically your idea here is if you wanted to do trade with the United States, you know, your World Trade Center or your International Trade Mart

had a bunch of resources to assist you in doing trade, right? And you could also come to New Orleans to do it and drink daiquiris. Much better than buying steel from Toledo. You come to New Orleans and buy the steel and then get drunk. And both the steel guy and you get to drink the daiquiris. The better for everybody. Exactly. OK, so we take that that thing of like New Orleans, a place where people like to go, which has good drinks and good weather.

And then we apply that to lower Manhattan. Yes, which has neither of those things. There are like my favorite thing is like the few bars in New York left that are good. It's just like none of them are in lower Manhattan, notably. Yeah, no. Tempest Bar, Tempest Bar, New York City, baby. Their web page is one page and it's them complaining about other bars. They're right to because it's really good. There's no one there. It's cheap.

It's right next to Penn Station, so you can get fucked up before your last train out. It's fantastic. Well, she missed the train, in which case bad things happen. Well, we did do that. Oh, we did. Oh, well, we did. We did. Yeah, there's the Patriot Bar downstairs or downtown, rather. That's a good place, but it's also got some pretty pretty bad clientele. There's all kinds of stuff.

I'm stunned. I'm stunned that the clientele at the Patriot Bar is bad. Sean, I mean, people like me, like dirty. Do not attempt to form a parasocial relationship with any of us. Do not come to these bars. You will be shot. Listeners away. Well, once the DSA moved out of lower Manhattan, the Antifota crowd moved in. The Vanguard of gentrification.

Yeah, the DSA was actually headquartered in lower Manhattan for most of its existence. That's about right. Yeah. Barbarian, right? Can I? The Yippie Museum was there, too, I think. I don't know where it is now. And part of that is because of the World Trade Center. There's so much goddamn office space.

It actually kept rents low enough for like a socialist organization to rent office space there. America's group that has an entire loft down in lower Manhattan, not far from Zucati Park, and a lot of the organizing and signmaking and stuff for Occupy Wall Street happened in this giant industrial loft, like right by Wall Street, because it's so fucking cheap, you can afford it. Well, like this is the same thing is happening in London right now, where we in Trash Eater are looking for office space for our studio.

And like it's entirely plausible with office space. Yeah, I know, right? But it turns out as ridiculous as that sounds. Now that now that the economy has imploded, you can get that for nothing. The shard is entirely empty, and they're just begging you to like fill space up in the shard. Holy shit. That's what I'm saying. No, I will go with the gherkin. Yeah, you want to guest on the show?

Sure, our address, the giant penis building. Yes. All right, I started the Trash Future building now. That's right for naming rights. Yeah. Look, if Trump can do it, we can do it. I can't wait to eat Trash Future steaks at the rest. Do you want to spend eighty eight dollars on a Trash Future branded necktie?

Of course you do. I honestly, I honestly. I would do it. Don't love that it's eighty eight dollars. I'll tell you that, Alice. Making a patron goal or something. Yeah, on the back, we've got so in made in America with air quotes. America with three K's.

Yeah, just get a bunch of like unemployed gig workers and buy and get some really cheap office space in downtown Manhattan to make the ties there. Maybe we can make sure you open the textile mills. Yes, we're going to triangle shirt waste, too. But triangle is the Trash Future logo. All right. So unlike the International Trade Mart in New Orleans,

the World Trade Center in New York was not it was going to not only not feature daiquiris, it was also going to be publicly financed. Right. David Rockefeller, who was president of Chase Manhattan Bank. Yeah. He went in with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. They go, yeah, it's a bill. The World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.

Right. There are a couple of sites that were considered. But what eventually they settled on was on top of the H&M's Hudson Terminal. Right. This was sort of towards the tail end of the massive expansion of public authorities powers, which were sort of pioneered by Robert Moses. But Robert Moses was not directly involved with this project. And, you know, they want to do this big revitalization project. And World Trade Center was supposed to be 10 million square feet of office space. Right. It's it's it's just they're going to build a shitload of offices.

And this is going to cause office space to be more desirable. Right. Famously, when you increase supply, you also increase demand. Yes, that does work for highways. It does not work for office space. Yeah. So he was Robert Moses, he was confused about that. So the idea of Robert Moses just like being like, I'm here by the World Trade Center, we're going to put a highway through it.

You guys are going to that hotel in Disney World where the monorail goes right through the basement. Yeah, that's exactly what we're going to do. That was a real plan. Two times that fucking what was a real what? That was a real plan. There was supposed to be a midtown. Lower Manhattan Crossway. Oh, yeah, the Lower Manhattan, but also the Midtown Highway,

which never got built. Christ almighty. Just go two freeways, just going through the different angles at different heights, circling back around and like curving through both power. You guys have been to triple crossing in Richmond. It's like that, but you die. You just die. The Midtown one was supposed to be built at a height of 100 feet through the on about 34th Street, I think.

How it has the renderings of it in there. And it would have been an unmitigated fucking disaster. So the second of our candidates to possibly do 9 11 after the World Trade Center Association is Robert Moses with a freeway. A second freeway is hit the towers. I cannot wait for the comments on that. Jesus Christ, I don't even want to think about it. The same shit as always, don't get mad at us.

People are making a podcast about it. Nineteen years later, get mad at the government that choked and get mad at terrorism. Yes, we didn't do anything. We're just here making jokes. Simply get mad at the Saudi government. Yeah, and and Bush, you can get mad at Bush and you can get a push and HW Bush and Clinton, actually, Clinton.

Yeah, yeah. It's an idea. Get mad at the president. Get mad at the system that creates these presidents. Get mad at the political economy, that system that creates the United States. Just get mad, but don't get mad at us. That's right. Yeah, that's actually that's basically how I feel about it.

Like people, you know, whatever the respectability concerns, bullshit trolling. But like also, like, yeah, I'm not the fucking one that threw that that flew a plane into the World Trade Center, man. I'm just an asshole in a hotel room in Portland, Maine. Like drinking a Narragansett hard tea, which, by the way, Ross is disgusting. Would you say it's likely to be better or worse than the dark fruit cider I had last time?

It's so the one thing I could say in Twisted Tea's favor is that it's not carbonated. This shit is carbonated more than like a soda. So I'm trying to like choke down that like school yard iced tea, you know what I mean? But it's also been carved with an inch of its life. And I'm not feeling it. No. OK.

So the government's just going to build a huge fucking office building with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is sort of quasi government agency, which has some powers of government, but some powers of a private corporation. It's confusing and irritating. We're not going to go into it right now. But importantly, importantly, they can leverage the income that they get in order to float bonds in order to get more and more money so they can build

and build and build. Yes, which damn, I wish they would still do that. They did a good job for a while with that. Yeah, I know they were doing very well. Robert Moses perfected that, you know, the trick was to keep yourself in debt to the extent that you had an excuse to float more bonds, but not in debt so much that those were a financial burden. You had to have a nice balance. And all those little nickels falling into those toll machines on the TRIBUROW bridge.

They added up. And then if you fucking leverage those those nickels, then it turns into a lot of fucking money. And then you create six or seven or eight or 10 or 12 different authorities that are all getting different incomes that are all floating different bonds. And you could fuck up an entire city that way. Oh, yeah, all the Swedes, then the Norwegians, then the Finns.

And you just go from that. Well, I think the who do you fuck up after the Swedes? I think it was the Jews after that. Yeah, and the broadest expressway. Yeah. But Port Authority is outside of Moses's control to a large extent. And I think by this time, Moses was kind of on his way out. But yeah, the government was just going to the Port Authority

was just going to build a huge office building and lease it, right? A lot of people thought this was a dumb idea at the time, you know, kind of because it was this is just, you know, the government nakedly getting into leasing office space, you know, as supposedly as, you know, revitalization. But you would figure you'd build something that had more of a public purpose, like, I don't know, housing or something.

Yeah, this is a weird definition of infrastructure here. Yeah, exactly. You're telling me that like Canter Fitzgerald and their like 300 road and casts aren't a public good. OK, you you can't just wander in off the street and see the road and but they're up there and knowing that they're up there. That's a public good. Yeah. Now, there was at least some public purpose to this as part of this deal.

The Hudson and Manhattan Railroad would be owned by the Port Authority. That's how they renamed it path, right? And they were going to construct a new railroad terminal underneath, which would be more efficient than the one that existed beforehand, right? But that was about the limit of the public benefit here. Otherwise, it's like, yeah, we're going to build a big office building and say this is good government right here. Hmm. It's fine.

It's got a train station source of. Yeah. That's why we need to talk about Sean had a bit about co-op city and construction in the 70s. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like before I get into this massive project that happened at exactly the same time as the World Trade Center is coming together, people have to realize that New York City through the 60s and all the way up to like 1974 was basically like a municipal social democracy,

which is why it sounds crazy for the Port Authority of New York to be like to be creating an entire complex of office buildings even to lease out in order to bring business back to lower Manhattan. But there were like public hospitals. There was a free public university. There was a home municipal like welfare system that existed. So this happens like alongside that. This is part of the postwar New York City's social democratic polity,

as they call it, which comes to a screeching halt, of course, with the New York City financial crisis, the fiscal crisis of 75. But with that said, before that, here's a quote. This is about co-op city from the New York Times. Co-op city occupies a special place in the imagination of New York. It is not only the country's largest cooperative apartment complex. It is a sort of working class utopia where, at least according to the original ideals, firefighters, post work, post office workers, plumbers,

carpenters and clerks could afford to buy apartments in which to make homes. So the city of the New York through what's called the Mitchell Lama Project, which was a way to like subsidize low and middle income housing, decided as they kind of aid up all the other like big public housing areas for public housing in the city to create the largest residential complex in the country and in the world in 1968. And they did that by building 15,000 departments. I mean, can you guys imagine that?

They just threw up these buildings, 15,000. There's 35,000 people that live there, and they just put it up like LaCouple C.A. towers in the park. You know, weird how all you have to hear about 70s and 80s New York is like urban decay, the warriors like burning cop cars and shit. And not this weird. Yeah, because because like because because both the World Trade Center and co-op city live in this weird like liminal period in history,

where the sort of like Promethean social democratic impulse is still alive and they're still building like half billion dollar like working class cooperative apartments funded largely by trade unions, by the way. You know, this is put up by a coalition of New York City trade unions. That exists. But then that's why Ford to City, New York's Ford to City drop dead. That famous Daily News cover, right? Where the federal government says no bail out for the city.

That's why it was just shocking thing, because like New York City had been this and this is the process of it like not being that very violent. That makes sense. So basically built with union money, built through the Mitchell Lama, 1968, same year as the World Trade Center, it starts to go up within a few years of building this, right? While the World Trade Center is still going up and while these buildings are completed, then people start moving in.

They start to realize little things about the way that these buildings have been constructed. Number one, the windows kept falling out. Jesus. Number two, you'd go out all the way and it would collapse. Your balcony would just fall down. Thirty stories. That's not good. I would want to simply not go out on the balcony. I like balconies.

Those are not too high. You know, I like balconies. You know what I don't like? Falling 30 stories. Because Co-op City is built on this marginal land, like way up in the north of the Bronx, it's built on marshland. You would think engineering people out there that you would do some sort of, I don't know, deep foundation, maybe drive some piles, maybe put the building. Piles, shallow foundations are always fine.

100 percent of the time. Turns out it wasn't quite that it was just a slab, but some of the smaller buildings were literally just slabs. The parking garages started to subside within a couple of years. The main big buildings, like the 30 story ones are the balconies that fell off. Like those stayed up, OK? But the rest of them just started to like sink into the fucking swamp. Not good.

Then last but not least, there was supposed to be a thing called reinforced bar, rebar in the concrete. And about half of this entire complex didn't have any rebar in it. Oh, my God. Jesus. In their defense, isn't rebar extremely irritating to put in? I honestly, I say a ball of rebar myself. I am willing to stand here on this podcast and say to my brothers and sisters out there,

not just in the trades, but all Americans, all the workers in the world, we must come together, we must fight, we must abolish rebar. Not because it's bad, but because it's a pain in the fucking ass. That's what these workers were doing back in the 60s and 70s. They were trying to get ahead of abolishing rebar, and we should respect them for that. However, concrete without rebar and not so good. Well, yeah, we should go back to unreinforced masonry. That's right. Yes. Yes.

You know, maybe especially in like low earthquake zones, I don't know. Like in the West Coast, you might have to do some bullshit with like, I don't know. You might have to throw some some bars in after the fact. You know, but I think you can get away with unreinforced masonry most places. Well, you say, did you say, did you say oriented stramble? That's that's the opposite of masonry. I'm pretty sure you said oriented stramble. I am also pretty sure you said oriented stramble.

No, it's not oriented stramble. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So there's there's two takeaways from the co-op city story. The first is that it set off among the residents who had working class residents who had moved in there, in there, many of them who were tradespeople themselves, the largest and most sustained, the biggest rent strike in American history from 1974 to 1975 for 13 months against the city and state who were trying to make the residents pay for this fuckup.

That was actually a successful rent strike and they won and they made the state eat it incredibly in a time of like intense austerity where the city was out of money and they were laying people off. These 35,000 New Yorkers came together and like basically held tens of millions of dollars of rent and said, fuck you. And then finally, the city and the state they gave up. But the other important thing for them is that this co-op city these residences were built under the same conditions, often by the same workers,

certainly some of the same contractors as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and presumably building seven as well. So when we're looking for the engineering disaster of the World Trade Center right out of it collapsing on 9 11, maybe it we might want to take into account that a similar project of a similar scale, just 10 miles north, had mobbed up contractors who stole tens of millions of dollars worth of material and labor and you had whole situations where things like rebar weren't weren't even put in so you could read the as built drawings

on what co-op city look like or what the World Trade Center look like. But is that what was actually produced? Is that what a bunch of drunken, doped up, awesome, heroic chat actually put in there or was it just a pipe dream? The as built say that this is rebar, but actually the reinforcing elements and this is mostly mob snitches. Chemically treated to make them actually hold up. Yeah, it's mostly hoffers down here.

You've got to dump some guy in the co-honest to be like, all right, listen, you're going to have to hold this. I want an anti-rebar action sticker now. Yes. Talk about a patrons goal, man. I love that. The workers in the 70s knew, man, it was a very radical time for labor. They knew that when the apprentice showed up in the morning,

he better keep the cooler full of beer, cold beer. And they also knew a abolish rebar by that. I mean, just don't put any rebar in there. Bringing back the spirit of Frank Furness, really, who's his he always said, you know, is he kept interns in his architecture office to keep the drinks cold as an apprentice. But just a dirty intern, you know. Yes. So with that in mind, 1970s New York City construction,

let's look at how these buildings were put up. Allegedly put up. Allegedly put up. All right. Oh, boy, this is a lot less legible. Now that I've switched the background to black. It's fine. Golf diagram. They hired put the architect notes on two slides ago. They hired architect Minoru Yamasaki, right? He decided to use a relatively new form of structural design

called tube frame construction. He also decided to design it to like have Middle Eastern architectural features, which is like he designed it to evoke the great masquer at Mecca, which is very strange and ironic. Well, because he had previously worked on a big airport terminal in Saudi Arabia, which, of course, the contractor for that was Saudi bin Laden Group. Of course. Well, what a pin in that name there.

If you if you work on any kind of construction in the Middle East, you will work with Saudi bin Laden Group. They are they are big players over there. This is this picture like describes mostly the elevator concept, which will be important later. But sort of the the whole concept of the towers here with your tube frame construction is that there's one acre of column free office space on every floor.

Open plan, you know, the way of the future. So there's a whole bunch of columns on the exterior. They're placed 18 inches apart and those handle a lot of the weight. And then there's columns in the core and those also handle a lot of the weight. Those are thicker. But then this area in between. No columns whatsoever, just open an area, right? Put a pin in that, too.

Yes. And then your elevator system is interesting, right? Rather than having elevators that start from the ground floor and bring you to any floor, you have a system of local and express elevators, right? So you start at the lobby, right? And then there's a system of local elevators that gets you through the first 30 or so floors. You know, higher than that, you take the express elevator, the first sky lobby and then get on the local elevator there.

You want to go higher than that, you get on the other express elevator to go to the third sky lobby. And then there was actually another elevator just for tourists. And then, of course, there was the service elevator where the contractors go and they have to wait a long time for it. And, you know, there's there's a guy who sits on a crate in there. He's pushed the button for you, you know, because you're not allowed to push the button over some place and explosive charges.

And that could only hold so much nanothermite at one time, but it was pretty effective. I mean, usually those service elevators are pretty big. Have you guys ever? Did you guys ever go to the towers? I guess Alice wouldn't have gone. But I have one time. I did. Yes, I did. Oh, cool.

I stayed at the World Trade Center Marriott and Windows on the world and they never fucking replaced Windows on the world with a good restaurant, which I'm very excited about. You went to rest. I never went to the towers. I did go to New York City once before nine eleven and I was very small and also terrified of the tall buildings. They were so fucking tall. We used to skate down there all the time because there were good

places to skate by the Brooklyn Bridge and you'd stand in between the two towers. And because of the way your vision was, it would look like they were leaning in on you. It was like the most they were absolutely fucking insane, like humongous. It's hard to even understand the scale of them until you've like been in them or stood under them. But I'm sorry, go on. Yeah, so there's a couple of couple of interesting features here, one of which is, you know, why were the columns space so closely together?

And it's not actually for any structural reason. That's an architectural decision because. What's his face, the architect? How do I pronounce his name? Yamasaki was afraid of heights. And here he was, designing the tallest building in the world. So and then the elevator situation, the idea is you save space on the core of the building, right?

Because after parking minimums, the main limit on the height of the building is the elevator system. You ever played Sim Tower, you know that. Which is really just the elevators. Yeah, you can see the stairwells here in the core. This has three visible, but there should be four in each core. Um, the old code would have required six, but the new code that had just been in effect

after these buildings were designed only required three. I think you would need four now. I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't know anything about New York City codes. I think they upgraded the code after 9 11. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So it's it's one more.

One of the results of this is that the World Trade Centered Towers were incredibly light and airy. You can see the sun just shining straight through. You can even see through the core of the building, right? This is partially because this was designed during a particularly lenient period in building construction where they didn't actually need any concrete in the core of the building.

It was all steel. Cool. Sounds fine. Yeah, that's great. We'll talk about how that how the fire proofing worked in a bit. Another another factor is, you know, we have the bathtub down here. They had to excavate out all the way to bedrock to build this all complex. And they had to build this big slurry wall, you know, to hold back all the water to avoid affecting the water table.

You can see here how the 1909 tube from the path trains just penetrates straight through the building. They just supported that the tube on a bridge while they were building it. Oh, that's terrific. Yeah, foundations are my work, and I'm looking at this on the right. And I'm just so proud of my people. Good job. Beautiful. Yeah, those those those retaining walls, you know, held up like a champ. You can see here a set of trusses and those sort of help keep the building

together below grade. They also help tie the the outer columns into the core. But the main thing we want to look at is you see the load bearing exterior columns, right? These are all these all every single like a piece of facade had a load bearing column behind it, right? You can also see I think Atlas machine works. Is what these columns say on them. There's an interesting thing they did is they bit out every individual lot of steel

individually, so they got them from all these different manufacturers because they thought it might be cheaper. Just just like the New York City financial crisis basically created neoliberalism in the United States, you know, this is happening right before that. Just bid it out to like a thousand different fucking factories. Roll that steel and yeah, just get in get an underbid. You'll be good. Yeah, it works out. Yeah, these two large Italian men want to come to your office

to discuss the steel bed. OK, so a huge amount of although they bid it out to several companies, a huge amount of the building was built out of basically identical three story high sections of steel. You know, you have these three columns, you have three spandrels, right? And that was over three floors, right? You have your structural steel clad in some fireproofing, probably spray on on the outside.

And then, you know, there's some aluminum panel outside of that, right? Well, all I can think of while I look at this, these pieces of steel being a welder. I'm like, that is a lot of fucking work. That's a lot of lovely man hours of welding and making union rate right there. Oh, yeah. And she had these probably pretty, pretty thick sections of steel. Yeah, great work if you can get it. Exactly. And then your floors are of, you know, fairly light, but fairly standard construction.

You got concrete over a metal deck, which is over your your steel joists, right? You're trying to be heavy because all of the weight is in the outside columns and the core, right? Yeah, you're just bracing into the columns on the outside and you're bracing into the core on the inside. And then there's some funky stuff that happens in the corners, which I'm not quite sure what it is. Yeah, so your main purpose of this is you're

bearing the weight from office crap, right? There's nothing structural in the center. It's just completely open plan. And these are just basically, yeah, they just run from the center to the outside, but they're bearing almost no load at all. Yeah, your concrete here is mostly just to give you like a smooth surface to put flooring on than anything else. Or a mental concrete.

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's carrying like stockbrokers rather than anything heavier. Yes, the load rating is going to be something like I think at the time it was 80 pounds per square foot. There's just there's no there's not even a lot of rebar allegedly. Rebar is just like wire mesh. You're just throwing mesh down and then you're pouring like about four to eight inches of concrete on top of it.

I think it did. Yeah, I think it did serve a purpose to sort of tie the exterior columns into the core. But, you know, that was spread out over 110 floors, right? So it was it wasn't it wasn't no individual trust is doing a lot of work. And the other part of that is because of the hat trust. We'll we'll talk about in a second. So yeah, you get some more detail here.

You can see there's you know, you have your exterior column. You have sort of it's bolted in with the sort of angle bracket here with bolts and slotted holes, right? That lets it sort of expand and contract as needed because the building sways with the wind, right? Why wouldn't you just make it less flexible and stronger? I was going to say your main character from that bridge episode came out in the gossip play.

That's right. The villain is back. Well, if it just didn't have expansion joints, it would have been fine. I don't know why they didn't build it. I don't know why they built it with expansion joints. Here we go. Expansion joints did 9 11, folks. That's right. Having any flexibility in your building system at all is like added to list of 9 11 perpetrators after Mothman.

And so it's rigidity really to 9 11. Like a rigidity. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, some people say float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. But Alice wants just to be a rock. Yes, float like an anchor. Yes. But yeah, so you can sort of see how these assemblies were bolted into the exterior spandrels here on each floor, right?

This is all the same same crap we were looking at before. This is before the concrete was poured. And then at the top of the building was something called the hat truss. Oh, boy. Now, why do you call it a hat truss? Because it looks like a hat. I'm guessing you're going to be distributing something up there. You're going to be moving things toward the center. It looks like it is because it's at the top of the building like a hat. Yeah.

It's just a hat. Yeah. The hat truss. It's at the top of the building and it's a very strong structure right here. It ties in the top of the building to the core of the building, the exterior. The can I ask a question real fast? That hat truss between the top of the building and then the foundation of the building is the only thing that's tying all of these columns, these vertical columns together.

Oh, no, there's 110 floors of trusses as well. Yeah, but those little weak like pussy trusses, right? Yes. Interesting. OK. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I'm not the architect. I'm just going to think of this like in light of the inevitable disaster that's going to happen later on. The hat truss is the big thing that's holding everything together. Yeah. A very heavy thing that if you watch the video of what happened to the tower,

it kind of falls by itself at a certain point and then everything else collapses. Yeah, nothing's going to sever a bunch of those columns. Yeah, it'd be impossible. Land explosives, land explosives. Yes. Yeah. So the hat truss is, you know, it's the main thing that holds it together. Everything else is kind of like just those weak ass floor trusses, right? And, you know, there's concrete on top of them.

You know, the main thing you're worried about is like wind loads. I don't know if they were talking about earthquake loads back then in New York City because I believe you have to do that now, but you didn't then. Yeah, probably not. I mean, I think earthquake loads are basically the governing code everywhere now. But yeah, you just it's just to prevent the outside from moving independently of the inside. Yeah, which would be bad if that happens.

Quite bad. Yes. So in 1973, they finished the buildings, a bunch of tenants move in at the tallest building in the world. They're the buildings with the most floors in the world. Tube construction was proven, which meant a lot of other buildings were built with this form of construction. City Corp. Center, which we'll talk about later, the Sears Tower, and nothing bad happened. No, famously.

Yes. This is where Alice takes us on. That's right. Welcome to my short explainer about how nothing bad happens. So if you listen to our episode about the Solang tunnel fire, we talk about how the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This has been widely held to be a very bad move, not least because as part of the like psycho, Reagan, doctrine, anti-communism, the US and the US's friends

in Pakistan and Israel and so on, trained, armed and funded a mixture of Afghan and foreign, mostly Saudi Islamist fighters to fight the communists. And the good news is a pin in that. Yeah. Yeah. Put a pin in that running out of pins. The good news is, well, depending, the good news is they win. Next slide, please. Now, the buildings fell down.

You ran out of pins. It's a pin in this guy. He will always be a grateful ally. In this in this this article from, I think, nineteen ninety one anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace. Robert, he's still out there. Yeah, still writing. So after they win, some of them go on to form the Taliban government

of Afghanistan, others of them like this guy are just kind of wandering. Like, thus, this article about how this cool guy who like never worked with the CIA or anything of that nature is now building roads in Sudan. And he's like, he's put his army on the road to peace and he's doing humanitarian work. I brought him into the family business. Yeah, they send us up to the Bronx. We're going to build these residential towers. Yeah.

So I think it did co-ops idea. Sadio Bin Ladio Group. Three more. Put on one terrorism here. Three more bad things happen in order. Russia, post-USSR Russia invades Chechnya. Serbians kill a bunch of Muslims in Bosnia and then lastly, George H.W. Bush invades Iraq, which requires stationing US troops

in Saudi Arabia, which a Saudi Arabian Islamist like Osama bin Laden could get very upset about. And all in all, it becomes very easy for guys like this who have been like who have found themselves in this world of jihadism, I suppose, to then sell this idea that the West, right? It including Russia, but also the US is at war with Islam. And this leads to the foundation of al-Qaeda. And what al-Qaeda start doing is blowing up American stuff abroad.

Embassies, the USS Cole, which I think kills like six sailors. Next slide, please. He's basically doing falling down. Yeah, a disgruntled former US contractor. I don't know what's funnier is imagining Michael Douglas dressed like bin Laden or bin Laden. Please photoshop that and send it to us on Twitter. Either way, preferably both.

So then the terrorist attack happens, but not that terrorist attack. In 1993, and I think Egyptian guy called Ramsey Youssef figures out, hey, there's a vulnerability in these twin towers. You can just drive into the parking garage under here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to fill a van with explosives, park it next to a column and set it off. And hopefully what's going to happen is one of these towers is going to collapse, fall into the other tower.

They both come down a huge win for jihad. This does not happen. You can see a little diagram here on the left hand side of what does happen, which is essentially he blows a big goddamn hole in three or four floors of the parking garage, kills like six people. People, yep. But there's a few more details to put pins in. So I hope you have pins ready.

Well, I would say real fast. I was blocking them out of the towers, actually. Also, Ramsey Youssef was, I believe, Khalid Sheik Muhammad's nephew. Khalid Sheik Muhammad is one of the architects of the 9-11 attacks. And he is still sitting on Guantanamo Bay and we're never going to try him because we are a broken and diseased country. And also, I would say, too, you can critique this plan, this 1993 plan.

But the guy who in question was named the blind shake. So he might not be the best planner of this operation. No, perhaps not. Khalid Sheik Muhammad, by the way, waterboarded two hundred and seventy three times by the CIA. That seems to have been excessive. Two hundred and seventy two more than Christopher Hitchens. It's not to say, like, I don't know.

Maybe if they had done it three more times, he might have confessed. Take three more pins. Pin number one, it's very difficult to evacuate the towers because when Ramsey Youssef's bomb goes off in the parking garage, smoke just goes straight up that core. It chokes the entire lobby. It floods up the core through the elevator shafts. And so people are trying to evacuate through this.

The firefighters have to break out windows so that the smoke can get out. They just built two giant chimneys. Yeah, that's that's that's one pin. Second pin, you'll notice on level B one, there's the Port Authority Control Center. That gets destroyed, which means the Port Authority's like communications infrastructure for telling people to evacuate and stuff instantly destroyed. And pin three, when they get there, the New York Fire Department

put their command post right outside the lobby of the North Tower. And you can see on the right here, the photo of the street outside covered in emergency vehicles. Apart from that, nothing bad is going to happen. You can't help but admire the RTS bus right here. You also tried to assassinate the Pope, didn't he? Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff like that. A lot of like cockamamie schemes that kind of didn't go anywhere.

They were a bunch of loser jerkoffs, right? They did one heroic battle in fucking Afghanistan. And then they're like, we're out of work. What do we do? And they just, you know, how do you try to assassinate the Pope? But then get away with it to an extent that you failed, but are still able to do further terrorism. Huge L for the Swiss gods. He got arrested, I believe, in 95, maybe in Pakistan.

And now he's serving two consecutive life sentences in Supermax. So he didn't do it that good. Hey, but at least he didn't get waterboarded that we know of. So did he tried? How far did he get to assassinating the Pope before he was later able to do this? OK, I close after the Iranian shrine, Bobby, you know what? You do that. All this was supposed to be the Catholic on this podcast to assassinate the Pope.

You do not own Catholicism. I'm telling you that he tried to assassinate the Pope. Guys, we're fighting amongst ourselves, OK? Yeah, let's go on the next slide. He was going to be a suicide bomber dressed as a priest. Jesus. Oh, apparently that's not real. According to Wikipedia, phase one, Colin Pope assassinated what it is. Fucking clown shoes.

OK, so this is a memo. It's called the President's Daily Briefing. The CIA collates it. They give it to the president every day. This one is highlighted and it's declassified now due to public interest because its headline Bin Laden determined to strike inside US. And what this tells you is the president at the time, George W. Bush, meant to have read this, probably never did,

that Bin Laden wanted to follow the example of World Trade Center Obama, Ramsey Youssef and bring the fighting to America. And you have your like cause and effect quite neatly here because after US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington. And so the CIA, he went over, buddy. So the CIA already kind of know that Bin Laden wants to do this, but they don't want to share information with the FBI.

The FBI don't want to share information with the FBI. The NSA, you don't want to share information with the FBI. And so, like, basically, there are snitches, the CIA and the NSA aren't snitches. They're not going to go. Yeah, ACAB. I guess the lesson here is that like FBI agents are incredibly unpopular and no one likes them because you end up with all of these memos flying back and forth between FBI agents that like, hey,

we know all of these al-Qaeda guys are in the US and have like multiple entry visas. And some of them are at this flight school. Should we do something about that? And then they just get things back like, eh, nah. Probably fine. Feds, baby. Yes. Yeah. Who would want to hang out with an FBI? They're all Mormon.

They don't even fucking drink. They never let down. Oh, man, I wouldn't snitch out if I was in the CIA, which I'm not. He said not quite convincingly. Hmm. This is how you get the like 9-11 conspiracy theories that like are not Bush did 9-11, but Bush allowed 9-11 to happen is that, like, it seems so implausible that you could have all of these like kind of near misses

where the FBI like, could we do that? If you think that's an implausible level of incompetence for the federal government to display, I would ask you, have you seen anything the federal government has done in the last 20 years? It's a good point. Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. I feel like that's the fundamental tenet of Marxism. So that's me.

That's that's my little like posthumous explanation of how 9-11. And of course, we know what happened on 9-11, apart from unless you're in our audience, our zoomers, in which case you may not. So I guess building blow up go boom. Yeah, yeah, 19 of Bin Laden's guys fly one airliner into the North Tower, then like an hour later, they fly another one into the South Tower. A lot of people get killed. A lot of people get trapped above the impact site

because the plane like severs all or all but one of the stairwells and the core. Those people are just fucked. And you get like really grim photos of people hanging out of windows and like 9-11 calls, people jump out, people fall. Grimacing, one of them lands on a firefighter and kills them. Then they whacked a plane into the Pentagon. And then Amy McGrath shot down Flight 93. Yeah, that's right.

I was going to talk a little bit about the actual emergency response because that's a disaster in and of itself. So as with last time, the fire department just sets up a command post in the lobby of the North Tower and you can see it there on the top left. The post authority announcement system that was in the basement, it does not get blown up this time. So that's working and they get on the radio and they say, OK, everybody, just stay where you are.

We know how much of a how much of an effort it was, how chaotic it was to evacuate last time. It's safest to keep everybody where they are and you fight the fire. It's shades of Grenfell, right? In fact, a lot of people in the South Tower come down to ground level when the first plane hits the North Tower and people tell them to go back up. Some of them do, some of them don't. Oh, my God, it's just the worst instruction I can think of.

Like, yeah, but I also see why people would do it. Mm hmm. They don't know what the fuck to do if the building you're currently standing in has just been hit by a plane. No, that's fair. I'd like to think I would do the right thing and just walk the fuck out and go home, but, you know, it's capitalism. You know, you have a job back up there.

Oh, the people down the security down there, the firefighters, the cops are saying it's safe, go back to work. OK, I'll go back to the count tomorrow. Do more counting. That fires like 40 stories above me. I don't care. Look, I remember reading one survivor talking about how, like, he gets down to the lobby and a post authority guy with a bullhorn

like yells in his face to go back up. And he's like, I don't know how I didn't punch the guy, but I just walked past him because what was he going to do? Arrest me. So, you know, some people do. Um, also of notes is I want to go at radios a little bit because at this time, I had Juliani fucked up the radios with the video contracts.

I'm assuming that's what you're going to say right now. Right. That's exactly what I'm going to say. So famous, famous story in New York. People talk about this all the time. Like, yeah, I was told that Juliani loved America. Now, 9 11. Yeah, New York City and talk to people here both before and after 11 and see how much fucking people love Juliani.

He's a mayor and he fucked. He screwed the pooch on this one. There's two. There's actually two bad Juliani decisions. I feel like if I say Rudy Giuliani loves America, anywhere in New York, I'm going to get laid out and I'm going to. Yeah, don't say the Patriot Patriot Barman. Just don't say it.

So there's actually two Rudy Giuliani horrible 9 11 decisions. One is the radios. One is like basing pretty much all of the like New York City's emergency operation center in building seven, like directly across, along with a bunch of like incredibly hazardous chemicals for some fucking reason. Like he was a Batman villain. But yeah, anyway, radios. So because of shitty low bidding,

the FDNY and the NYPD and the Post Authority police all have separate radio systems. They can't interact with each other. They can't talk to each other. NYPD and Post Authority have UHF, ultra high frequency radios, which work quite well in buildings. The fire department has VHF, very high frequency, which don't. You heard Al Jankovic, we know.

Yeah. And there is there is a Post Authority repeater in in the building that like you used to like increase that signal strength. Nobody quite knows how to operate it. It sort of works. It kind of works. And so you have this incredibly chaotic thing where people are coming down, people are coming back up. You have firefighters trying to go up the stairwell. There's a picture of that on the right hand side.

That guy, Mike Kehoe, survived, by the way. And as they're doing this, their radios don't work. And so when the second plane hits the South Tower, the FDNY orders an evacuation and none of the firefighters up there can hear it. And so Jesus fuck kills. Three hundred and forty three firefighters. One guy from the fire patrol, who you can see there in the red helmets, fire marshal, also a bunch of cops, but at least like they had some warning.

Whereas like the firefighters absolutely did not. Jesus. And as ever, like there's all of the dispatchers instantly overwhelmed with nine month calls and radio communications. The like in cab terminals that you have now, those were new at the time. And they just kind of stopped working. And so if you were an FDNY commander and you wanted to know like what units you had available to you, the dispatcher would have to read that out to you.

And that would take like five, ten minutes of just uninterrupted airtime. Everybody's talking over each other because the handle of channels are overcrowded. And of course, you still have, as you see in that diagram on the bottom right, I just everybody's just parked right outside because that's that was how you stage things. And so you just said that with this. That ACAB, but also AFAW, all firefighters are wonderful. It's hard to hear the story because firefighters do nothing but good.

They're like a municipal service that does nothing but help people. There's like people out there to help you out and get you safe and put out the fire. Good people. Yeah, yeah, like I've got a lot of shit in my life. But like I could look again with firefighters. It's just as simple as like I don't and I will never have the fucking balls to like run into a burning building with my radio not fucking working. I just be like, yep, this is a Tuesday.

This shit blows ass. Yeah, catch me running in the opposite direction and wanting to be a firefighter anymore. I am, in fact, a pussy bitch, baby. That's why AFAW, all firefighters are wonderful. That's right. So this this of course sets up for like a massive disaster in the emergency response and it's why the death toll is as high as it is.

I don't know if there's like lessons you can learn from this, aside from fucking evacuate a building when a plane hits it. Yes, because it's not something that you can really like prepare for. You can't say, oh, the fire department didn't have enough radios because like they were never going to. You can't keep that many on hand just in case 9-11 happens. There's a certain inertia, too. Like you keep coming back to you, keep putting a pin in these plans.

What happened in in 1993 and what happens in at 9-11? And it seems like the like the mists of time, like it seems like forever ago. But if you were there, it was only eight years apart, right? You had this plan then and we have this plan now. And it wasn't that far apart from one another. So somebody I remember the port, the port authority guy said at the time, like he was telling people to stay put over the announcement thing. And the phrase was like, I'm going to keep doing this until I get authority

not to from the fire department or somebody. And of course, the fire department kind of busy at the moment. And so you just fire. Yeah, just don't get that. And there's also like a lot of precedent for tall buildings not falling down right at this point, you know, even ones where they really thought it was going to, like one meridian plaza in Philadelphia. They were like, that's buildings definitely coming down.

And they evacuated most of Center City because they thought it was going to come down. And like finally, the fire got high enough to hit a floor that had sprinklers on it, tamp the fire down. Can I, Alice, are you done with the part where Giuliani puts the staging and building seven in the city stuff? Yeah, this is this is this is me done with my my slide here. So like, I figure if we will have anything else to contribute about the actual like day of this is kind of where it belongs.

Yeah, if I could, like, and I think that was a good presentation. Thank you. We have to go back to the get back to the political economy of it. Right. Because we're talking about the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. It's like mongrel, disgusting, public, private entity with a ton of money and a ton of power that kind of exists outside the structure of the city and the state. Both states but kind of lives in it at the same time has the ability to create all these hundreds of millions of square feet of office space, even when it's needed or not.

Like there's a whole like economic world that's existing here. And part of the reason, as I understand it, and again, like I'm a New Yorker and like people still talk about this, the reason why Giuliani ends up putting all those essential services in the World Trade Center complex is because the World Trade Center from the fucking get from the 1970s with the fiscal crisis and all the way up to the time when 9 11 happens was an unmitigated fucking disaster. It was a boondoggle.

They never leased out all that fucking space. So what what do you do? You get another government agency to lease out the space to bail out the Port Authority to try to get private people to come in and lease it. But they don't. So you bring another public entity in there and you just keep like filling this thing as much as you possibly can to make sure it doesn't lose all the fucking money. So incidentally, incidentally, why you see this in like conspiracy theories,

which we'll talk about in a second. But like they'll be like, oh, why did the FBI and the CIA and the NSA have an office in the World Trade Center? Yeah, because they're bailing them out because you can always get money by like having the feds be tenants in your building. And that's what was happening. Yeah. If the if the buildings were still up, they'd have the DSA as a tenant by now. Oh, yeah.

They're half feds. Yeah. Yes, I'm sorry. I should say I should make it with you on that one. You guys mind if I take a break and use the bathroom real fast? I go for it. Yeah, go ahead before. All right. Get some drums there. Hey, guys. Hey. Hey, my roommate just got back from a few months away because of covid

and he informs me that a woman named Ruth Bader Ginsburg died an hour. You hear about that? Our very own 9 11 on the 9 11 episode. She talks so bad on Rosh Hashanah, which if you need any further proof that God hates the Jews. Yeah, how's that year going for you? It's yeah, yeah, we're starting off real good, dude. I don't want to get into into it too too much

because I don't want to deal with the snarky bullshit. Ruth Bader Ginsburg should have retired because that's not really here nor there right now. Yeah, but just absolutely fucking Mitch McConnell. Absolutely fucking like just fuck this whole thing, man. Like everything. Fuck it all. That's how I feel, man. I just like I said, I'm not I'm not doing the blame.

I'm not I'm not getting into the blaming her for her own death bullshit right now. But I just kind of know. Yeah, I might I might go with myself. If you I will say and I don't want to even speak these words. But like if you live in a state where there's a Senate race and you can vote for someone who is not like a literal baby eating monster. Please, please do that. But I don't really give a fuck about the vote for president,

but like please like at least in the Senate like this, this, this is really earlier just happened, but isn't Mitch McConnell just going to jam this through? Yeah. Oh, yeah. In the statement, acknowledging her death, he also basically turned around and was just like, but we're going to nominate our person and the Democrats will filibuster because it's going to be some slavering dog. You know, who's going to have to save us? Mitt fucking Romney.

Oh, no, you don't want to see that, Alice. You don't want to see Mitt fucking Romney stabbing Mitch McConnell on the floor of the Senate with some sort he got from his dad in like it's 70s Detroit flea market. You don't want to see that if you do. If there's one thing I share, sentiment I share with some of the protagonists of our story. Fuck America, man.

Not in the way that they said it, but just like, oh, what a fucking unmitigated disaster. Bernie Sanders is the only senator I have no know of who has a sword. This is going to be more than that. I believe there's some there's some wacky noodles in Congress that I imagine have some of you and on senators soon. So I'm sure. Oh, my God. We have we have a queue and on, Senator, before we get, like,

just a different democratic one. Oh, my God. I am so tired of the queue and on people, man. I'm just like, why do you believe? You know, or is it our opportunity? I'm doing an episode in that Christmas next week. It's going to be great.

It's going to be a lot of fun. I'm sure he's going to take this news extremely well. And like equilibrium, we know him for. What happened? She was going over to his house and I feel a little bad for her. She's going to hear it. What what just happened? I didn't understand the last discussion we had.

I showed out. The Gensburg died. Well, this has become the Joker. It's not like. I don't know what to get. She's screaming a fucking bullet. I'm so. I'm sorry.

Welcome back, baby. Oh, well. Oh, it's going to get run through in like two days. Oh, man. Do you remember that like a few weeks ago, she officiated a wedding and like they posted it on Twitter and they were like, no, guess who officiates their wedding? Nobody's wearing a mask, but don't worry, we all got tested.

I'm grinning and giving a double thumbs up into the microphone right now. Oh, it got her. Holy shit. Oh, man. Oh. Wedding influencers have just perpetrated a greater act of terrorism on the United States and Al-Qaeda. That was that was hell of a that was that was a hell of a bathroom break. I took that I missed that.

My roommate, I was saying my roommate came in. He just got back from covid quarantine and he told me about that. It was that's quite interesting. It really puts a new shine on this whole electoral contest here. Oh, man, it's going to be really funny when they ram someone three before the election. This is but you know how good this is for content because you can use that break break and do part two. And then part two of us basically be doing a cold open of when

we found out that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. That's great. Yes, that's a really good idea. Really good. So. Anyway. With with that news that the notorious RBG is dead. God, don't even. So.

We all know Bush put bombs in the towers, right? Twirling his mustache, bringing up big crates marked Acme in the service elevator, right? Yeah, just the one service elevator. The rest of it has to be for other shit. The designated designated bomb service elevator. It's usually like one service. So I don't know. I've I've I've been up the main tall building.

I've been up is the B and Y Mellon Center in Philly. They only had one service elevator. How many bombs could you fill as hell? How many how many items of nano thermite do you think you could have brought up with? I was big. I could have brought a shitload of nano thermite, but I couldn't have concealed that I was doing it because they have a guy

sitting on a crate who pushed the button for you. The nano thermite checker. He just checks to make sure you don't have nano thermite. No, I think he just has a really good union and he's the elevator operator still. The I.U. elevator operator. Hell, yeah. Yeah. We're going to talk about how these towers came down.

And then we'll talk a little bit about the conspiracy theories around it. You know, controlled demolition theory, right? And I've worked on controlled demolitions. Well, a controlled demolition. Yeah, 9-11. Ross, I did. It was the polls of suspects. The polls did it.

Do you know, polls went to work that day? Put a pin in this podcast. Why the polls have jobs, regardless. All right. Terrorists whacked two big planes into the buildings. And for some reason, a lot of folks think that isn't enough to bring a building down and instead, you know, Bush called up the Agmi company and put the bombs in the buildings. So we're going to talk about thermite.

We're going to talk about squibs. We'll talk about the explosions in the lobby in the basement. We'll talk a little bit about building seven. I don't know if we can talk too much about it just because of time constraints. But first, we're going to talk about the official explanation for the collapse, which I think is basically correct. And I want to say this. We planned this episode before true and on World Trade.

Bush did 9-11. Episode three came out. We're not doing this in response to that. I don't want to start a podcast. Beef, I mean, still, though, that being said, I learned most of this from that episode, and it's not very convincing. I'd also like to note the kind of wild card. I'll just be floating over all of the content here was what I presented earlier,

which is that construction in the late 60s, early 1970s, maybe wasn't up to up to the codes that were demanded. Maybe the as belts looked a little fucked up. So something to think about moving forward. I have some pictures of that, actually. Yeah, good man. So a plane whacked into the world, one of the World Trade Center towers, right? And you can sort of see, you know, looks like a lot of column-shaped hole.

Yeah, it's a plane shape. Real like Acme, like Looney Tunes. Shit, you have like a plane shaped impact hole. The fuselage, you got the wings. You can see as the wings get thinner, you know, less stuff is impacted, right? It's ripped the cladding off, right? It's severed some of the column. Certainly right here is like two or three floors of columns just gone, right?

These are a few diagrams I found of estimated damage caused by the impacts, right? And this is in Tower One, the North Tower and Tower Two, the South Tower, respectively. So one of the things you can sort of see here is that the impact did a lot of damage. This is mostly showing what happened to the core. A lot of the core columns were just just whacked, just gone by, you know, the plane ramming into the building.

These are prefabricated sections. We saw those three story sections that are being flown in and then put in place and then welded together. So in terms of like a column coming apart, it could simply just be a weld breaking. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why you can't be like jet fuel can't melt steel beams. It's like, you know, can destroy steel beams is like a plane.

Yes. Or paper burning really hot. Because as it turns out, there's a lot of paper, you know, plastic. I would be happy to like, you know, stand my beads up to anybody. But if you flew like really fast and like really hard steel and aluminum into my welds, I'm not sure they would hold. I don't know. Fair enough.

As someone who is welded at some point in my life and was never very good at it, you'd definitely fly a plane into my welds. New American Welding Society certification is when you fly a plane into the world. Yeah, I got my AWS. All right. Once this plane wax into the building, right, it causes a lot of fire. It's ever some columns and since we're severing the columns, we need to start thinking about the load path through the building, right?

And you can see here, we have another view of the hat trust. We're looking along a different cord. That's why it looks different, right? So kind of a more sombrero vibe this time. Yeah, exactly. We've gone from sort of a trilby to sombrero. Different phases, different hipsters doing different styles, different areas. Once the plane hits the building, it cuts through the exterior columns.

A couple of things happen. Number one, assess the building on fire a lot. There's a lot of fire, right? The jet fuel burned up really quickly. Office supplies and shit kept burning, right? It's stripped off to fireproofing. That's something we will talk about in the next slide more extensively. Your exterior columns are hollow tubes, so the fire can get inside, right?

It severs the pipes in the core, which lead to the sprinkler systems, right? And also all the other pipes. So, you know, if you shat yourself when you were in an upper story and you needed to use the bathroom, the toilet's not going to refill. That smells good. I know. All right. I love that your scenario is just if you shat yourself. This is the Virgil Texas guide to. Yeah, first of all, I'm in 9-11 and second of all, I've got IBS.

Why would I not? Yeah, I'm sorry about your stomach, Alice. Thank you. I didn't. But number four, it changes the load path of these columns, right? So there's these exterior columns. They're taking the weight from these floors here, right? And originally they would transfer the load down, right? Now they're cut in half. So the lower part still transferring the load down.

The upper part is transferring the load up to the hat truss. The hat truss brings it across into the core columns, which bring them down. It's fine. The hat truss is strong. It's fine. In addition to this, a whole bunch of the core columns have been severed, right? So although they're much thicker, much stronger, they are also now being subjected to much, much higher loading than they are designed for. Now, you have a very strong safety factor on these things.

You have a very strong safety factor on all of these things. And of course, if there was one thing these exterior columns had, it was redundancy, right? You can see just how many columns there are on every side. I think there's 18 inches, you said. That's a lot of column. Yeah, especially when there's one acre of floor space on every floor, right? But again, there's a lot of fire, right? And it's hot initially.

It gets hotter with paper. It starts to cool down later on. We'll talk about that in a second. And there's a few recordings which taken out of context, say, firefighters thought they could knock down the fires with one or two lines. And that was referring to some of the lower areas of the fire, not like the main areas of the fire where there was a lot of fire. So now we have to talk about the fire proofing system.

All right. And this is that good. Is that supposed to look that way? Oh, boy. All right. So this came from. Let me remember what it is. Fire Engineering Magazine. I think it was an article in which one. I get that every week. I forget where it was. I will link to it in the description just to make I got these images from there.

Fire proofing is kind of relative, right? It's rated for however many hours of protection at whatever temperature if it's properly applied, right? Our co-op city people are taking the pin out of that right there. It's moving these various pins around. The temperature of the fire is lower. It might last longer. If the temperature of the fire is higher, it might not last as long.

This depends on chemical composition. What kind of fire proofing it is, right? So that's why you want fire proofing to be installed completely and adequately is standard and their standards and tests which exist now to ensure that fire proofing is applied properly. Yeah, plus fewer large Italian men coming to your office to talk about the fire proofing contract. Yes, like on the right there.

I just got to say that that's actual like what it looked like. That looks like shit. This is from inside the towers. It's not from one of the floors that was hit. But yeah, it looks like it looks like it looks like. You'll let that that's just that's garbage, man. So in phone, so. Yeah, so the sort of tests we do today to ensure fire proofing is

installed adequately didn't exist when World Trade Center one and World Trade Center two were put up. Thank God, it was the era of the working man. Yeah. No rebar, no fire proofing, simple as. No problem. There's barely any concrete in these buildings, so you didn't need rebar. It's the future we all want.

World Trade Center one and two had two fire proofing systems. One was spray on fire proofing. That was on the floor choice and most of the structural numbers. You can see the metal deck has spray on fire proofing. You can see the floor choice here mostly have spray on fire proofing. Well, some of it has spray. The upper cord has spray on fire proofing. So.

That's just an honest day's work right now. It's fire proof on average. I would feel good about that going home at the end of the day. I did it. I did a good job. That's just trying to get the upper cord is the one intention and the lower core. No, the lower core is the one intention.

He needs the fire proofing more. Fuck. All right. Anyway, one was spray on fire proofing. What we're seeing here are two parts of the building. On the left actually is a section of the core. And this had previously had spray on fire proofing applied. This is a column, right?

This is I think three or four stories tall. You can see the little bit at the top, too. No. What you're what you're looking at here is this spray on fire proofing. You can see where it's still applied, right? It adhered well to the surface of the column when it was put on. But the surface of the column was,

you know, it had been exposed to the elements for a while. So it rusted. It sprayed the fire proofing on the rest of the time they like put the building up. That's what seven years. Now, this is 1992 and the building was built in what? Seventy three or something like that. You're talking like 15 and 16 years, something like that.

And it sounds like I don't remember when it was the sixty eight. Sixty nine. It started in sixty eight. I think it wasn't it wasn't in complete until like seventy or seventy two. So you're looking like, yeah, a decent amount of time, twenty years, maybe. But they put the fire proofing on after the column had developed a layer of surface rest. So it just peeled off at some point. The fire proofing just started flaking off on its own, right?

And, you know, this this section, according to the article, was on the seventy eighth floor, I'm not sure of which tower. And the author noted that this condition was still evident in June of two thousand. Not good. And on the other side, we we already talked about how this fire proofing is not well applied. And this is not necessarily the fire proofers fault, because a lot of times fire proofing is applied last before other systems are installed, which makes applying fire proofing to Joyce like this very difficult.

It's difficult to start out with because it's a complex, you know, system of shapes, right? Don't say Justin doesn't stand for the working man. OK, he. The building was all the buildings were also both built during the transition from as best as fire proofing to newer, non as best as fire proofing. Another pin. Yeah, which we were, you know, when Trump says something incredibly stupid, which is also right. All time, yeah. Yeah, which is when he said about the forest fires,

that they should rake the forests. But the reason why was that trees explode. He was right. Trees do explode in forest fires. Yeah. OK. And it was like, you know, asbestos was something that we knew how to apply when these buildings were built. And then, you know, we were looking for new, non asbestos, fire proofing which were ordered to be applied when these buildings were half built. So this, like, similar to the political economy of it,

it's kind of span two eras, like the asbestos era and the post asbestos era. Yeah, you have just enough asbestos in there as seasonings to make sure that everybody gets mesothelioma. So I believe this is high enough that it's all gypsum based fire proofing. But we didn't it didn't adhere as well. And it was also just not it was either not applied well. Or it was we didn't have good adhesives back then. I'm not sure exactly.

Again, I'm linking the article, which has more details. I just took these images to show that, like, this was representative of the amount of fire proofing inside the buildings. There was also a second form of fire proofing in the building, right? Mostly protecting the core. We saw how there was a hole through the core earlier, right? So the World Trade Centers did not have concrete cores like a modern building would. They had it was all steel, protected by spray on fire proofing.

But also you can see some panels here. And I believe that is a different kind of fire proofing. I'm not sure if that's exactly what it was. But I do know for a fact that the other thing that protected the course was gypsum wall board. Ah, classic, classic choice. Also known as drywall. Mm hmm.

That's making the 9 11 hijack is the first kiles to punch holes in drywall. They were not the first kiles. Plenty of people punched holes through drywall before before 2001. Let's say the deadliest kiles. That does mean World Trade Center one and two were Grover Tower. I would I would watch the deadliest warrior, but only with kiles. So all right, drywall is actually pretty good fire proofing, right?

So that along with the spray on gypsum, water proofing, you know, gypsum is about half water by weight. The way it works is there's water crystals in the structure, right? In the molecular structure. And as the fire burns the gypsum, the water vaporizes, becomes steam, right? And that keeps temperatures low enough because there's so much so much heat required to vaporize the water

that you can get these good fire proofing ratings out of it, like one hour, two hour, three hour, right? But gypsum is bad with impacts. Yes, back to the kiles. Yeah. So they kiled their way through the towers and basically negated the fire proofing. Well, Ben, anyone's ever dropped a piece of drywall when you're walking with it and the thing just goes like crumbles.

Like, yeah, it's not not the strongest with that sort of sheer, right? It shears very easily off. And I believe there are there's there's some stronger versions of drywall, which a bunch of with a bunch of glass fibers in them. Which I assume is probably what they used, but they're probably not aircraft impact rated. That's it. That's an impact rate rating. They only brought on after night a lot.

Why don't they make the whole building out of the black box? All right. So how does your whole bunch of fire translate to the building collapsing? Right? And there's a few things that go on here with the floor plates, right? So step one is the impact happens. And that causes a hell of a lot of damages to the building, right? We the fire is kind of gravy on this. The impact did most of the damage. You know, it kiles its way through the drywall, starts a big fire.

This floor trusses start to sag from the heat, right? And the fire is interesting because it starts out kind of cool from jet fuel, right? And then it gets hotter from paper and shit, right? And then it starts to cool off, right? After the floor trusses start bending, right? And once the fire starts to cool off, the floor trusses start to contract and they pull the exterior columns in with them as they do. So that causes these columns to buckle

and that reduces the amount of load they can carry. In addition, with all these core columns being exposed to unrestricted flame and many of them being severed, right? So you can you can see this. Here's a series of lines that imposed or what's the word I'm looking for? Not imposed, superimposed. Yes, imposed, but better. Yes, exactly over, you know, where you would expect

the columns of the World Trade Center to be, right? And you can see one of them right here and you can see how these. Actual columns are bending inwards and then back outwards, right? And you can sort of see that here as well, right? And vertically buckling. Yeah, and this is this is a subtle bending, but it's very significant, right? These columns have been turned into the equivalent of wet noodles. And, you know, also several of them have been severed.

So in the meantime, right, these are events leading up to the collapse, not the actual collapse under, you know, the intense implied heat, the remaining intact parts of the building start to twist, you know, writhe under these incredible forces that are being put over. And your load distribution over the whole towers becomes eccentric. Lateral loads are introduced into structural columns designed only for vertical loads that are being pushed and pulled. Generally, they're not having a good time, right?

And I can I say real quick, yeah, different to a welder, although welding, you know, works for this too. I also use the oxy acetylene blowtorch a lot. And you'd be surprised by what a giant, heavy steel H beam will do under heat. Like it will twist. It will turn when you're putting that much heat on it, the thing no longer stays structurally as it's supposed to be. I've seen that in real life.

Yeah, I mean, she just goes, you know, oh, crap, I wasn't supposed to switch the slide. And so at some point, you know, a few structural members go, one floor collapses into the one under it. And the top half of the building starts coming down, right? Each successive floor pancakes down to the next one. And those floors aren't able to put up a lot of resistance to, you know, just like a few inches of concrete.

Yeah, exactly. A few inches of concrete, some shitty floor trusses. Not much resistance. Stockbrokers. There's not a lot of resistance that like a stockbroker has to compression is the thing. I'm sure it should have a load bearing stockbrokers. And, you know, the following mass increases with each with each floor, right? The columns and trusses, of course, the columns themselves are misaligned at this point. So the columns are not really putting up any resistance.

They're unable to effectively impede the mass of the building. It's just 100 PSF floor trusses, which are resisting this whole building coming down at its fastest. One floor was collapsing into the next within a tenth of a second. And one thing is I just want to explain these. These are computer simulations here. These are used done by something called finite element analysis. What you're looking at here is using something called exaggerated deformation, right?

When you do these sorts of computer simulations to illustrate what is happening, usually the deformation is subtle enough that you can't effectively display it graphically without exaggerating it significantly, right? So it's difficult enough to see with the with the superimposed lines. Yeah, like these things are these things might fail, you know, when it's just out of alignment by a couple inches. So the twisting and the deformation is real. Yes, really happen with all those.

Yeah, so, you know, when it's a couple of floors doing this, even if it doesn't look exactly like this, it's still pretty bad. Yeah. And also, it's fast enough that it's like only possible to reconstruct that it's like floors, pancaking in each other, like from slowing down the footage a lot or from first principles, right? Like to anybody watching, it just looks like the whole thing comes down at once. Yeah. And another thing is if someone had staged a series of explosives around each floor and so on and so on. No spoilers, dude. Yeah.

Another thing is like a lot of people say this this building was designed to withstand the impact of a 707, which the engineer said it was. Engineers would never exaggerate. Here's the thing, they did not have analytical methods to determine what that impact would be in the 1960s. No, it's like Liam saying that, like, he could fight Sean McAway. Like, he doesn't actually have an empirical basis for that. It's just something he's pretty confident about.

I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I can do it. You have to, like, exaggerate both Liam and Sean in order to, like, you know, analyze this.

We're both supposedly six tail, like he's he's I'm sure got tiny little baby hands. And like, there's so many variables there, like maybe they were thinking like a 707, but it was on approach to an airport. So it was going slower, you know, and they also would have been like, OK, this is a point load applied to one part of the building. We have to consider that probably not like full of fuel. Also, like, airlines did get airlines did get heavier is the thing. This building could withstand a 707 impacting it, assuming the 707

was spherical with the uniformly distributed mass. Assuming a perfectly circular hijacker. Yes. All right. So when these buildings came down, it was the floors that went first, right? And we can sort of see this through how it collapsed, right? It goes in a wave, right? It goes top down and then partway up.

It starts going bottom up to. Yeah. Well, OK, yes. So the top comes down, but it's mainly the floors doing the work, right? Which is why you see very large pieces of facade, largely intact, that landed around the site, right? And you also see pieces of facade, which were in free fall, well past, you know, the actual front of the collapse. Because the floors impacted themselves.

The facade stayed intact because it was the main structural part until the top part of the building came down and sheared them off, right? And actually, the core stayed intact of at least one of these buildings, like 25 seconds after the main, the floors, it all collapsed. I would throw some video in here, but I've given up on putting video on these because we keep getting copyright strikes. I don't need to see video again to be quite honest.

And also, YouTube watchers are very rational, reasonable people. They can just imagine this happening and they'll agree with this assessment of it. Yes. So just visualize 9-11. Yes. Go to 9-11 in your mind. Go to whatever the opposite of a happy place is. So these buildings, you've done visualizing 9-11. Good, let's move on. These buildings collapse from the inside out.

Now we have to talk about conspiracies. Right. We're not a conspiracy podcast. I don't like conspiracies. I think they're counterproductive to like this psychologically. Yeah, psychologically, they're a way of explaining how something like how an atrocity, exactly, which is true. Yes. That's every conspiracy theory about Italy is true. But 9-11 did not happen in Italy.

Yeah. So conspiracy theory is just a way of explaining how something that profoundly affects your life and like has a lot of meaning. Can't just be random. JFK can't just get shot by some guy. It has to be the mob and the CIA and so on and so on and so on. And so like 19 assholes can't just murder 3,000 people and like change the entire course of history. It has to be the feds or Mossad or whatever.

I personally, I'm an agnostic on a lot of conspiracy theories, but I think we always need to be careful. So I think that, you know, true things like Gladio do exist. We always have to be careful to attribute things to agency that we should be attributing them to structures. Yeah. Well, what's the materialist explanation for 9-11? It's well, the Reagan doctrine and then the fall of the Soviet Union and just arming and funding whoever.

Like that's that's the conspiracy, right? It's like that that was an illicit series of acts. It's like that's not something you need to theorize. I am fine with saying Bush did 9-11, to be honest. I'm fine with that. But the materialist and structural explanations we're going to get through here, but in a literal sense, not in a not not in a structure in terms of like economic structure.

Yeah, but Bush Bush himself, either of them, did not like go to go there with a hatchet and start knocking down beans. But Dick and Dick Cheney didn't take the flight. Ninety three passengers off the jet that landed in Kansas or whatever and just shoot them. Yeah. One person. No, it was secret missiles. Amy McGrath's shot down flight 93.

Right. Amy McGrath did it. And Dick Cheney is part of an entire systemic looting and destruction of human life and society. Anyways, that comes out of being the vice president of the United States. You don't need him to be personally executing people on the runway in order for him to be in some way complicit in 9-11. Yes, pretty gruesomely evil. Yeah, exactly. I'd be pretty funny if he did, though.

He stole one of their hearts. We know Dick Cheney didn't kill any of the victims of 9-11 because he didn't demand that they apologize to him like that friend of his. He shall let me tell you about controlled demolition, right? Speak your truth, Justin. This is all right. So controlled demolition. Is like the big 9-11 conspiracy theory.

Bush put bombs in the towers or whatever. Right. While he was twirling his mustache and bringing up big crates, ax me sticks at dynamites, right? So there's a few specious pieces of evidence which support this, which we'll get into, but let's talk about how controlled demolition works. Controlled demolition. A lot of times people say this is a building implosion, right?

But it's not. It's not an implosion. There's a small set of shaped charges, right? They're made out of high velocity explosives. They cut critical structural numbers, which usually means almost all the structural numbers and gravity does the rest of the work, right? Usually, what Ramsey Youssef was trying to do is just know successfully.

Usually used. Well, he would have used multiple truck bombs if he wanted to make it work. Not to give him tips or anything while he's in Supermax, but he's not exactly about to take down the World Trade Centers. Someone else did that. Mission accomplished, if you will. So usually you're using plasticized explosion

plasticized explosives, right? RDX, you know, C4, the plastic explosive stuff like that. That leads you to that stuff that's easy to detect. Yes. So it lets you use less explosive overall. It lets you shape the charges. It lets you produce less noise, which is very important, right? Your high velocity explosives produce those very sharp, short booms, right, as opposed to, you know, a bomb,

which would do a big, loud kaboom. Right, like the baby explosion. Yeah, which would then shatter windows, cause widespread damage, so on and so forth, right? Because you want to prevent damage in adjacent buildings. You want gravity to do the work. So most of the blasting happens at lower floors, right? Sometimes you might do blasting on upper floors

if you need to bring down the building in a certain pattern. If there's a confined space, which, you know, there usually is. But of course, World Trade Centers came down in an extremely sloppy fashion. So you would think they would do the blasting at the lower floors, right? This this is a picture of the Queen Lane apartments. This is a controlled demolition I worked on. Well, congrats, Mazeltov. Yes, it was me. I tore down public housing.

So you can sort of see here's part of the buildings coming down here, right, because they took down the columns here. And usually you bring it down sort of one set of columns at a time. That way, the building starts to sort of lean into itself. And that helps it fall into its own footprint, right? Right. Now, your your prep work is a lot of times very long, extensive and complex, right? And it was, you know, you remove facade materials, remove all the windows, right?

You strip the building down as much as possible. So, you know, absolutely what it'll do when you blow it up, right? You apply the charges. A lot of times there's a bunch of protective like tarps you put around the the explosives in order to ensure that like the the explosion only happens on the column. Yeah, actually, you want to remove the like brokerage firms and like arbitrage offices that those kind of get in the way of your explosives and the tarps and things of that nature.

You want to get all the job liquidation assets out of there. Ideally, you blow up the building when there's no one in there. I like ideally, like, sometimes you've just got it. The guy hasn't moved. You're like, fucking, we said nine a.m. We met nine a.m. All right. Listen, there's a whistle. There's a horn.

Yeah, at some point it's on you. One of those is not one of those 19th century boxes like from the cartoons you press down on. When I OK, I worked on this project. I was I was put in charge of like, I guess, basically doing a lot of public outreach on this, which involved I worked for PHA at the time. I didn't work for controlled demolition. Controlled demolition did the demolition.

Right. My job was to like, you know, do a bunch of maps showing where the, you know, where people shouldn't be and where you were going to inhale a lot of dust if you were if you were nearby. Then there were some groups who were charged with like trying to persuade residents to evacuate around the demolition and determine who could not evacuate. And then there was this third group, which was like, you can evacuate. And what we're going to do is we're going to bring around a judge

who will issue a writ of eviction on site so the police can come take you out of your house and put you away for an hour and a half while we demolish this building. Congratulations, Ross. This is your fault. I listen. I was not around when the building actually came down. Way to pass that blame, buddy. No, these these these demolitions, like there's a lot of weird stuff

that happens around them. You know, I was like, literally, we have you had to evict residents in the surrounding blocks. Just just so no one would get hit with debris, which might happen, didn't happen, though. It was a very controlled enterprise. This is very logistically complicated. There's a lot of people on it.

Well, the fact you have to get a judge involved to just, you know, hand people evictions and two hour evictions, not like an actual eviction. It's just like you can't be here for two hours. It's a bizarre profession. There's. There's very few people who do this job because there aren't too many controlled demolitions. It's usually like a certain height of building, right?

I believe the tallest building that's ever been implosively or explosively demolished was the Hudson Department Store in Detroit, right? And they had to do all kinds of strange prep to it. They had to actually fill all its basement levels with dirt because if the building collapsed into its basement, it would knock down the buildings across the street. Right. Makes sense.

Sometimes they do kind of goofy stuff for movies, which is fun. They do like pyrotechnics. They take buildings down in weird ways. You know, they do that in Las Vegas a lot. A stunt building. Yes. The biggest piece of evidence for me that this was not a controlled demolition, other than the fact that it would be logistically impossible

to rig these buildings for demolition with no one noticing, is that the collapse started where the plane hit the building, right? And not from the bottom, which is where you would start one of these. So you could do a latched plane. No, the hologram hit. Yeah. The hall. Yeah. The holographic plane hit the building there and then it started from there. And that's how. Oh, my God.

I didn't know where to start anymore. Just as an engineer, this whole thing just throws you for a loop. I I. And it's like, well, it was a hologram of a plane. Well, then they put the explosives up there, I guess, as opposed to where they would logically put them, unless it was a hologram of an X book. You might as well make the whole building a hologram at that point. They're now getting into the building.

The building ever existed. The thing. Yeah. Nine eleven didn't happen. That's right. Oh, yeah. As a fan of time hypothesis, the earth is flat. Quantum mechanics on that ship. Oh, my God.

So that conspiracy theorists disagree. Like no steel frame skyscraper had collapsed because of fire before the World Trade Center did. Well, crucially, nobody had flown an airliner into one before. Yes. Like granted, they flew a small bomber into the the Empire State Building. But like the Empire State Building also had a bigger core. It was like it was a smaller plane. Entirely different structural system.

It was going as fast. It was like lost in fog. Yes. Yep. Yeah, they're going pretty slow. Much, much, much smaller plane. And then there was that one guy who flew a Cessna into the IRS building. But like, come on, man, it's a Cessna. Oh, look at this website.

I just did. I did spend some research time here myself. I read this entire PDF. I I didn't read the entire PDF. I didn't realize I had a 50 page PDF until I am not a crackpot. Right. But I did look at the goddamn architects and engineers for 9-Eleven Truth page. Huge mistake.

Huge mistake. All I can say is like thirty three thousand plus people with PEs and AIAs believe this shit. I mean, you get you get like anti-vax doctors and stuff. It's I don't know. You can be good at some stuff and then also really dumb. I don't know how else to explain it. Well, education doesn't work.

No. All right. So we're going to look at some of the evidence. There's the lobby explosions, the squibs, concrete pulverization is a big one. Logistics of Bush secretly putting bombs in the towers. And of course, the thermite. One of the things they said is for months after September 11th, the investigators were unable to persuade FEMA to obtain basic data like detailed blueprints of the buildings that collapsed.

Sure. You're telling me that FEMA is like negligent. I mean, I don't know what you're talking about. One of the things about buildings, right, is that we talked about the as built earlier. Here's the as built brand. The as built are essentially the blueprints, right? They're not the last one anymore, right? Here's a sense of as built.

I had to work with photocopy burn when I was still working at one of my earlier jobs, right? One of the earliest subjects philosophers pondered was the nature of knowledge, right? Geosystemology. Yes. What can we hold Plato's World Trade Center? Did you pay for the license for that World Trade Center? What do we know? What can we know? Can we know that we know is knowledge possible? This is called a epistemology known unknowns, and there's unknown unknowns.

That's right. And one said yes. Yes. Sean Rumsfeld, I believe, was his name. Sean, where were you in early 2000? I didn't list of suspects. Sean and Saddam Hussein in the same room at the same time. All I got to say is put a pin in me.

OK, modern construction has settled these questions once and for all. The only thing we can know is that we know nothing. After the work of architects, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, contractors, subcontractors and dozens of project managers come together. There are two distinct end products, the building and the as built documents showing how the building was finally built. And they bear a tenuous relationship at best. They sure as fuck do go out, go off, King, as built documents display

for all to see our lack of knowledge of our own creations. And as such, to hide our shame, we usually store them in a rusty filing cabinet under a leaky water heater in a locked closet to which only two people have the keys. Both of whom are retired. Then ten years later, when some major alteration or renovation occurs, these waterlocked documents are removed from their prison, scanned, saved as a low resolution PDF and handed off to an intern to clean up the photocopy or burn as best they can so design work can convince.

Sounds like Justin might have been the guy at one point. Contractors are given these designs and then throw them out. And work from actual field conditions, requesting change orders as needed and cursing design professionals all the while. Once the work is substantially complete, design professionals return to survey the work, completed and create a new set of as belts built based on the original photocopied set and the cycle continues. Yes. Can I tell a as built story?

Yes, please. We were building a this was six, seven years ago at this point. We're building a new hotel slash residential right by the Staten Island Ferry on the Staten Island side. And it was a complicated job because we had to do the foundation around the Staten Island Railroad, which ran under this property. So there was a bunch of piles, drilled and whatever. There was just like a whole bunch of shit.

But one of the things that had to be done was a ton of tie backs. Justin, what's a tie back? Tie back is when you you're throwing a cable back to hold a retaining wall. Right. Thank you. Yes. So we're throwing cables back to hold a retaining wall. And that involves drilling into the ground. When the contractor looked at the as belts, they said, oh, this drill rig here can clearly with no problem, with no danger whatsoever,

drill into the soil of Staten Island in this area because this high tension power line running under the ground is about 10, 15 feet away from where we're building, where the as belt set as built says it was. We're working on like a Tuesday morning and all of a sudden the fucking stop lights and all the lights around us go off. And we see this one guy in the in an operator in the operators union, just like shitting his pants. And we realized that that as built was horribly, tragically wrong.

And he had drilled with his drill rig directly into half of the power for downtown Staten Island. I don't know how many people were in that fucking machine and all the guys standing in and because we were drilling piles to there was fucking water everywhere, people were standing in puddles. But thank God nobody actually got hurt on that. But essentially as built almost killed like 15, 20 people because it said the line was in one place and it ended up being the other.

So fuck as built, man. Well, you're going to call it one one. Yeah, April, eight, one, one has the fucking as well. That's one of the weird things. I know the Philadelphia Water Department has legendarily accurate maps of on underground utilities, which is why the city is trying to privatize it all the time. They will never ever succeed in privatizing it ever, ever.

The city is probably a big filing cabinet. We live in hell, but like Philly Water is amazing because it's impossible to open an account there. Like Philly Water actively just does not want your money. They might want your landlords money, but they don't want you to pay them. Cool. So like it's impossible to like set up an account or a closing account. So I think everyone in Philly is just sort of stuck in this hell

where sometimes we just send Philly Water like 90 bucks every so often. And I assume they just spend it on like, you know, we maybe they go to dinner or whatever extremely accurate subsurface mapping. I've never paid for water in this city. Yeah, it's all service. Yeah, my God. So yeah, as bills are useless. This is an example of an as built I was provided.

You can see a wide variety of lines that should be there, which are not. You can see my lines that should not be that all leave the date on this document is 1930 something. There's that good old school photocopier bird. Yes, all the drunk people that made that site are long dead. You can't even ask them. Well, no, they're still around. You could go ask old Jim where he put the power lines.

The building itself looks very good. I will say that some people may be able to identify it. I'm not going to identify it on the podcast because I don't want terrorists to take this some document and figure out the lighting profile of the twenty fourth floor of suburban station. Names have been changed to protect the guilty. Yes. This is a urban station, urban urban urban type station.

So all right. So we're back to a slide we already showed. One of the nine eleven conspiracies, right? Was that there were a couple of explosions in the basement and on a few floors, including the lobby and sky lobbies, which occurred after the plane hit or depending on who you ask before the plane hit, right? And the official explanation for this is either you don't acknowledge it or you say there was some jet fuel that poured down the elevator shafts and it ignited,

which caused explosions further down the building, right? Some people think this is kind of unlikely. Was there really that much jet fuel or did Bush put some bombs in the towers, right? Well, like I put this in, but remember that in 1993, the same fucking thing happened in reverse where you had an explosion in the basement and it just sent smoke up. Yeah, exactly. It makes a lot of sense in the building goes through, excuse me.

If if a building goes through the planes, no, if a plane goes through the towers. Just just call mine set nine eleven hijackers. Like the building was involved in a plane involved crashing. Maybe I was in fear for my life. I had to like fly the plane into it. I had a gun. I forgot. I was going to say something back when we were looking at the fireproofing

that was shit, which is buildings, no angels. A back. All buildings are cursed. So you get a plane that crashes through the buildings, right? She dumps a full shitload of jet fuel over several floors. They don't go down a couple of elevator shafts. That'll hit the sky lobby first, right? That'll also hit the elevator that goes down to the main lobby. Right.

And proletary elevator. Yeah, exactly. That'll also probably hit the service area. Elevator that goes all of the thermite that's stored in there. Yeah, exactly. Right. And, you know, this fuel, it may not be much, but it will be certainly pretty well atomized. You'll have a good fuel air mixture to cause a real big boom.

Right. And it's being confined by. Drywall. Also, it comes down and then when it's actually released into the air, it explodes. Yes, exactly. It's not any longer. That makes sense. So, yeah, it'll cause some big explosions further down the tower. The other thing is like, there's like everyone was killed in these various areas.

It was like, there's a big boom, lots of stuff was disheveled. So, yeah, it and the other thing is like, if this was because Bush put bombs in the towers, they didn't work because, you know, presumably he would want below grade explosives allegedly the planes insurance policy. The bombs actually holograms planes and the bombs were holograms. OK, yes. You know, these bombs didn't work because it would have taken down the towers. Like, is, you know, reason to weaken structural members

underneath where the plane crashed, which brings us four hours before it falls. Like, just have some red explosion. Let's bring us to our next one. This is a picture from architects and engineers for 9 11 truth. Oh, fuck. Which are squibs. Not like the Matt Christman complaining on live stream squibs with but the squibs, which are explosions of debris, which

are the result of explosives in the towers, right? Which are just placed randomly, always conveniently, like a few floors below the like collapse. Yeah, so these are supposed to be pups of smoke from explosives, which are detonating further down in the towers, right? So there's a couple of things which we have to look at here, one of which is something called detonation velocity, right? Um, detonation velocity is sort of the speed at which an explosive explodes,

right, in the most literal sense. This is why when there was that big explosion in Beirut, some internet nerds were immediately able to look at it, get sort of a bearing on the distance and the time. And they're like, yep, that's ammonium nitrate. All right, because that's a known detonation velocity, right? So if you look at these squibs on video, they're sort of like a sort of slow expulsion of debris

that then gets faster, then it gets slower. Again, I gave up putting video in here because it was too goddamn difficult. I hate to get sued by loose change. LooseChangeLLC.debt.debt.debt. Whatever they have an Earthlink email address, but they are very serious about copyright. They're very litigious. This is for educational purposes.

We are fine. I thought this was a parody purposes, both. This whole episode is satirical. Yes, by now. Right. No, actually, we do think Bush put bombs in the towers. Yes. So are you saying that to ensure that it's parody?

Yeah, he's twirling his mustache. He's bringing the button. OK, anyway. So the whole graphic bombs, yes, go on. This does not indicate like any kind of high velocity explosive. This indicates that there's some pressure pushing down from, like, say, floors collapsing inside the towers. There's a bunch of air that rushes out the path of least resistance, which turned out to be the one window that had a slightly bad installation,

right? Mm hmm. You know, because if it were an actual explosive, it would start out fast and then go slow as opposed to start out slow, then go fast, then go slow, right? And they also don't they don't follow any pattern you would expect for controlled explosions. If you're going to take out columns in order to allow this to proceed unimpeded, you don't take out one or two random columns

in this building with a million columns on every side. You take out the whole damn row. Save on explosives. It's neoliberal terrorism, right? So OK, yeah, it was terrorism. It just didn't work to play the planes did the job. The planes did it. This is the man added to Suspect List. They put in redundancy just in case.

Yeah, they put in really shitty redundancy. We just do the Eustica thing, which is Bush was trying to blow up the towers. And then, coincidentally, 9-11 happened. That's kind of how I feel, JFK happened, but that's. Yeah, you just have some like CIA mafia team sighting him up and then his head fucking explodes anyway. That's like the Dandelion theory. If anyone's oh, yeah, Libra, yeah, that great book.

Here's here's one, which I always thought was a little bizarre. One thing which I've never quite figured out, whether it's indication of it was a controlled demolition or is also not indication that it's a controlled demolition, which is that the towers were in freefall the entire time they came down, right? But you know, that's where you get like, dude, measuring the like falling speed and like slow mo on like early YouTube. Yes. Now, the biggest hole in this theory

is that the towers did not come down in freefall. Yeah. A lot of every floor absorbed kinetic energy from the floor falling behind it or on top of it, right? This whole mass then kept coming down and down and down again, pancaking. Right? Every time the next collapse took shorter than the last one, right? But it still was not enough to arrest the collapse of the building, right? There's a man named Dr. Frank Greening who did a paper on this that I'll link in the description that he does a lot of really extensive

calculations involving energy and mass, right? And how much it would affect the velocity of the collapsing section of the building? And the time in the collapse was estimated by local seismometers, right? The First World Trade Center fell in 12.6 seconds, right? The second one fell in 11.5 seconds. Freefall. Once again, just visualize 9-11. Freefall from the top of the building would be. Go to your 9-11 place and imagine this happening.

Yes. If you drop something off the top of the building, freefall would be 9.1 seconds, right? And this is complex and annoying calculations, but the overall energy that collapsed would have been about 272 tons of TNT or about a quarter of a small atomic bomb, right? How much? I know thermite, though. Oh, my God. But away your graphing calculator, I'm joking.

So the other thing is, like, is this enough to pulverize all the concrete in the building, which is one of the big, one of the big conspiracies? Like, oh, there were no big chunks of concrete in the debris. And it's like, well, you know, as we've discussed. There wasn't that much concrete in the building. Not that much concrete in the building. Yeah, it was all drywall. It was concrete with, like, presumably wire mesh just to hold it together.

Yeah. And it's like, yeah, it is there. It's just in a, like, a single pancake layer with a bunch of, like, dead firefighters sandwiched in between it. Like, great, cool. It is mostly just completely just pulverized into dust. Yeah, just by the energy of this collapse. I don't know if this even needs to be said, but as again,

somebody that works with a lot of, like, finished concrete to, like, I don't know if people need to hear that concrete will pulverize really easily, but it does. It's not going to hold together all that great if you've got the force of a building coming down on it. But anyway, simply don't worry about it. I'm not going to hold up too well. Yeah, if the building's coming down, it's the building's coming down.

Yeah, you know what else isn't going to hold up to that force is me. Your organs. Yeah, or stockbrokers, for that matter. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Load bangs, stockbrokers. Another question is, how difficult is it to rig up a building with explosives? Right. Is there like a precedent for a job this big being done in secret? Which, funnily enough, the kind of is.

I love it. Go on. In 1978, a college student at Princeton University realized that owing to the recently completed city corp centers. That's this guy here. Very strange structural design. It was more heavily affected by quartering wins than perpendicular wind loads,

which are the usual load case engineers tested for, right? Quartering wins is when it comes at the building diagonally as opposed to perpendicular against the wall, right? Now, since during the construction of this building, Bethlehem Steel had managed to sub out welded connections for bolted connections. Sure, sure. Smith, the building was significantly weaker than expected. And it's just about an entire work process and make a different one happen.

Love to see that. They found out that about a 16 year storm, assuming the power went out and the tuned mass damper stopped working, a 16 year storm might just knock the building clean over. Cool. So for about three months, construction crews entered the building after the office workers went home. They welded plates over the bolted connections

and they, you know, they left before office workers came in the next day, right? The engineers discussed evacuation plans with city officials. The city government almost went through with them because Hurricane Ella looked like it was about to hit New York City before the work was done, but it veered out to sea. This was in 1978. This was kind of secret, but you had a huge number of guys involved with the work, right? It was kind of like if someone asked, like, hey, what are you doing?

It's like I'm doing reinforcement work because they fucked up the building. Oh, OK. It's like it's not public knowledge necessarily, but it's like professional knowledge. Yeah, it's not like it's not like something. It's not like you're doing something bad. You should just try and not to tell anyone about it. I'm telling certain people what exactly is you're doing and they don't ask because they're accountants and they just go home at five o'clock

and then you come in and then you leave in the morning. Yeah, you probably get a nice chunk of overtime out of it, too. Yeah, exactly. You get a shit lot of overtime. You're going to talk to anyone. So no one knew about this until 1995 when the New Yorker wrote a story about it, right? There's also a press strike at the time, which helped a bunch. Still, though, successful, successful conspiracy to do the opposite of demolishing a building.

Yeah, exactly. So I mean, if you're keeping something which is slightly unethical, but beneficial to the public secret, I think that's maybe not so hard. But if you're trying to get the same amount of people to put bombs in the building. Yeah, like how many like Sean, how many construct? How bad the construction workers hate stockbrokers that you could convince all of them to be like, yeah, we're just going to kill all of these guys.

Also, probably a bunch of firefighters and cops and shit. Don't tell anybody that. All I got to say is like when you were knocking off at like eight thirty nine o'clock and walking down the stairs and the stockbrokers were walking up the stairs, a lot of them would have been fucking shoulder checked. It would have been a messy fucking scene. And there's no way that some guy would have yelled in the other's face like, listen, you cocksucker, you could fucking live.

I'm welding gusts and plates on there. Fuck you, buddy. Fuck you. You can't imagine it happening in a common orally fashion. Fuck those guys. Individual workers that worked in the city court building back in the 1970s. Yeah, if you're listening to this and you worked in the city court building as a stockbroker, fuck you. Yeah, fuck you. Always.

So I mean, but for Bush to put bombs in the towers, you need to find a couple hundred workers who were just OK with cramming an occupied building full of explosives. And also, even if you find that many unethical people, you need to also make sure they're not worried about liability in any fashion. Right. You'd have to pay me triple time at least. Yeah, I was about to stop anybody from finding the explosives or noticing that like you and your guys are like coming into their offices

and moving shit around and putting shit on columns. Yeah, and like probably coming down in the swing stage on the outside of the building to do the outside of the column. Can I get into the conspiracy shit real quick? Because I watched fucking loose change, the one that came out like it's like the most recent one, like the final loose change that came out. How are you like six versions of this fucking movie? I realize there was more than one.

I only watched one of them. They keep people keep dunking them. Yeah, they keep finding more change in their pockets. Tons of change, more change than you could even fucking imagine. I'm watching into the sofa in anticipation of this. And, you know, like normally with conspiracy theories, you just kind of like let them wash over you. You know, you're watching and you're like, oh, yeah, maybe that checks out.

Maybe this checks out. But there was this whole segment in that movie. It wasn't long. It was like just a few minutes, but they're like one of the commercial residents of the World Trade Center was a company called Turner Construction. Turner Construction was connected to George W. Bush, and they were also connected to the National Institute of Safety and Testing or whatever it's called.

And I'm looking at this having worked for Turner Construction before. I literally did a job for Turner. They're this like, yeah, 9-11. They're like one of like there's like Turner and Skanska and Saudi Bin Laden Group are like the biggest fucking one in the entire world. And this idea that they're trying to make these connections between Turner Construction and the NIST and like the like George Bush's family. It's like, oh, good job, guys.

You like you came up. You discovered the idea of there being a ruling class. And of course, the CEO of Turner Construction knows George W. Bush because they are part of the capitalist class. They fucking rule us. But there was like done in this sort of nefarious way, which was supposed to think that Turner because they had a spot in the building. They were part of like contracting out, putting in the nanothermite or whatever.

It's like it's not that complicated. OK, the ruling class sticks around. They all know each other. And if you're like at Turner Construction, of course, you're you've institutionally captured the NIST and have like a lot of power over that. It's not fucking complicated. You don't need a conspiracy. Yeah, I was about to say, Turner is a big fucking firm.

And I was like, you know, they're into the only the only bigger ones are like Bechtel and like, I don't know. Yeah, all the ones in the Iraq war. Like, yeah, Saudi. Hello, I guess the point is that like, you don't need that there can be a conspiracy, but it's not a conspiracy to do 9-11. It's just to like make as much money as possible and like secure their class position. Secure the bag.

Yeah, exactly. That's the actual of nanothermite. That's the structural shit I was talking about before. Like, you don't need to impute agency to these Turner executives, like sneaking a bunch of us up there at night to try to put in this thermite when they were simply taking a contract, you know, they simply stayed in the building and they simply knew other members of the ruling class. Not complicated, which is where we get to our next subject.

I swear to God, we're getting close to the end. Thermite, one of the problems for the conspiracy theorists is that there wasn't any explosive residue at the site that might be left by RDX or other blasting materials, which is which, as we said, easy to detect. Those whole files were like climbed all over by every like explosives detection dog in half of the U.S. I like the idea that a plane did hit the World Trade Center, but it was that whatever Iranian F-16 that ended up at the side of the hill in Italy.

Yeah. Let me explain. Getting really lost. The explanation is that these buildings were taken down by thermite, you know, noted explosive thermite, right? And thermite is made out of iron oxide and aluminum powder. There's some variations on this, right? Both of which are found in quantity at the collapse site

on account of the building being made of steel with aluminum cladding. That's making it the perfect crime. Shot with an ice bullet. Yes. Hot hot. So the big problem here is built the explosives into the building. That's what it was. Even if they did that, I don't think they could have cut the columns with thermite. One of the problems is that thermite is not an explosive.

Thermite is a powder that burns very, very hot, right? Hot enough that it can melt steel, yes. But you need a hell of a lot of it to melt the steel, right? Especially if you're melting it for the intention of cutting it. It's very, very good at welding. And that's one of its most common use. They use it to weld railroad tracks, right? But if you want to if you want to cut the steel, you need

you need a huge quantity of thermite per the amount of like area you want to cut through, right? It would be the equivalent like instead of using it because that we we cut steel with oxy, right? Oxyacetylene, you would need to put the thermite on top and let it like work its way through. Yeah, you would need to like build like a big hopper, right? Around the column.

And of course, these are the exterior columns, so they're hollow, right? Right. And then you fill that hopper with thermite. This is my best approximation. A couple of people have tried to prove this and they're like actual 9-11 conspiracy theorists and they've all screwed up and none of it worked. And a lot of times they're doing horizontal columns and not vertical ones. And the vertical column is particularly difficult

because the worst what you might wind up doing is just this entire thermite. You know, it melts, it adheres to the outside of the column. And suddenly instead of made the building stronger. Yes, yes, exactly. That's what you'd wind up doing opposite 9-11. Reverse 9-11. Reverse 9-11. The tower has just got 10 stories taller.

You just badly inconvenience the FDNY because they have to recruit like a hundred more firefighters to disappear. I'm looking at the hopper idea and I believe you that this is the best idea for it. And the idea of just like what you're pouring thermite into it and then letting it go through the column on the outside, you're like directing it downwards into one place. Couldn't it all flow through the hopper and then just like, you know, whatever. The weather would also need like a magnesium strip here.

You'd have to ignite with some kind of electric igniter, right? And you see a guy going round on the swing stage with a lighter. No, that's the other thing. You would have to get access to the outside of the building with a swing stage or something like that in order to get this thing installed. I didn't see any of those on the outside of the building in the video. Wouldn't you see like a little thermite hopper like on the outside? I would assume it would fit inside the cladding,

but he would have also seen a bunch of window washers taking off the cladding. The bunch of CIA window washers base jumping to safety. Are there enough CIA guys who are brave enough to get in a swing stage? Oh, shit. OK, we're punching a bunch of holes in the thermite. That's more holes than the thermite would punch in the steel. Yeah. It's either not happening or you're adding floors to the building.

OK, so what if what if instead of thermite, you use the thermite, but it behaves the way I want it to now thermite. All right, so this is a real material. It's a real thing that exists. OK, and that's what Bush put in the towers when he was twirling his evil villain mustache, right? It was nanothermite. I think he had time.

So he was the president, man. He had a schedule. People were following him around with cameras. The secret service with that. How would he take the time off to go to New York, go to the Fortress? This theory. No, I don't think it's very serious. I don't think George W. Bush, while being oppressed, commuted to his second job of putting nanothermite in the.

It was Jeb. The Jeb did it. Jeb did 9-11. Even if you don't go the like reductum out of surdo, you know, root here and say that Bush himself did it, regardless, if anybody, if they if they contracted it out to Turner Construction International, it would be a lot of work. It would be like noticeable work, a lot of work and really hard and complicated work to do. And no one's ever taken down a building with thermite.

A lot of buildings have been taken down with high velocity explosives, which is why nanothermite comes in here. Nanothermite is an actual material. The idea is you make the particles of iron oxide and aluminum oxide, very, very, very small, why it's nano. Some people also call it super thermite, right? And that increases the rate of reaction. So you get an actual explosion, as opposed to a slow but very hot burn.

Right. And that would also mean less thermite would need to be used. So here's the big problem with that. No one's been able to synthesize nanothermite in quantities higher than like two or three grams. Even though he's at the CIA. Yes, obviously, he's got a dumpster full of that stuff and they're just wheeling it in. Even to this day, no one's figured out of the synthesizer. And just the entire black budget of the CIA is going to producing five tons of super

they're still paying off those debts. Yeah, they can do this, but they can't prevent F 117 from being shot down by a Serbian baker. So yeah, this material, it exists, it's real, but like no one can figure out how to synthesize it. And that is why I might what I say is like, thermite is to 9 11 conspiracies as adrenochrome is to QAnon, right? It's like a fairly simple and common substance,

which has been assigned magic properties, right? Adrenochrome is actually just oxidized adrenaline, which can be has been since the synthesized in labs for over 100 years now, by the way. You don't have to get it from a child's adrenal gland. I sound like an infomercial there, just cracking open a child. And you're like, if only there was a better way. Yes, there is a better way. Now, we have to get to building seven.

The reason I kept this short, because I knew it was going to go this fucking long. Building seven, though, that that is like the go-to thing. I mean, even I'm a little whatever about building seven. It seems pretty sketchy. Yeah, why the collapse, right? It looks pretty bad from the video that's out. I will I will agree that with that. It looks it looks kind of weird.

One of the things is like, OK, building seven collapsed at about five o'clock when the towers went down, like 10 ish, 10 ish. One was nine fifty something, I think. Yeah, and like also tower seven building seven is like also the one with all of the like emergency operation shit in it. So like that's another angle at the SEC. It had the CIA in there.

They had the DSA in there. I like New York City municipal offices with all of like the tax documents for all sorts of corporations and shit. Actually, DSA was a couple blocks that way, not affected in this disaster. Do not in this on Barbara Ehrenreich, OK? Building seven did not get hit by a plane. It didn't have the massive structural trauma inflicted on it. You did a nine eleven.

You did a no gross. Yeah, you did a thermite. But the thing is that a transfer. The thing is that this building burned for a very, very long time, right? And it burned on many, many floors simultaneously. Right. If you look at like previous high rise fires, like one meridian plaza or something like that, it was like one or two floors going at once.

Right. You look at further structural fires, just stuff like Grenfell, which is mostly on the exterior. And then like there's actually been one or two. There's been two steel frame skyscrapers that have collapsed from extensive fires since then, one in Iran, one in Sao Paulo, which I forgot to put in here. So I'll link those in the description. Well, what we said about fire ratings being kind of relative,

I think, is relevant here. In this case, you know, building seven was rated throughout with fireproofing for two to three hours, two hours on the floor joist, three hours on the main structural columns, and it burned for seven hours. Right. So it exceeded expectations. Yes. And, you know, mostly with your gypsum based spray on fireproofing. Right. And this building was built in 1988. It probably had a lot fewer issues than one in two World Trade Center.

The other thing is it has a very fucked up structural system. So above the seventh floor, relatively conventionally framed building between floors five and seven, you had this system of transfer girders. This is because the building was built on top of a consolidated Edison's substation, which was designed to be eventually overbuilt by a twenty five story building. This is a forty seven story building, so they had to make some changes.

You put in the giant overhang, I guess. Just can't believe you're like millions of tons of steel and concrete and glass just right over that substation, right? Just throw it over on its side. It's fine. Which is fine. That's fine. That's fine. As long as it doesn't get you on fire on every floor. Yeah. So long as nine eleven doesn't happen, you're OK.

That's a good nine eleven happen. Most buildings are great if there's no nine eleven. That's true. Yeah. Famously, one of the weaknesses of buildings is when nine eleven happens. Very few buildings have with have had a nine eleven happen to them. And of those, I think, only one has survived, which was the Verizon building right over here. That was the Greek Orthodox Church.

I think that made it through. OK. Oh, no, that got flattened. Oh, well. That was it. They're rebuilding it now. That's the one building of the complex they haven't finished yet. The people that say reject modernity, embrace tradition. Yeah, not looking so good there on that Orthodox Church. Anyway, the official story here, and what I think is correct,

look at column seventy nine here, right? Column seventy nine would be about right here in this diagram. Right. So approximate location of kink. Yes. And the way this worked was this is also kind of a tube frame building like the World Trade Center, but the the core was a little bit more substantial. But also you can see there's a lot more columns on the exterior. But also it had these weird presses at the bottom, right? So column seventy nine was the first to fail.

That's why you saw the penthouse collapse in first in the video. And you can sort of see the penthouse collapse into the building. See a bunch of windows break and then the whole building seems to collapse from well below where the camera angle is. And that's why people say this is a controlled demolition, right? The thing is we can't go too much into detail about this because we're running out of time. Once once this column goes on account of it's got no bracing,

the start of the buckle under extreme heat, it's basically in line with trust number one right here, right? It starts to pull on that trust number one, which is again also under an extreme amount of heat fails that will knock down a couple more columns. That's also going to bring the whole structural system down real quick. Just because, you know, at some level, this building was extremely interconnected with the rest of the building. No, I was just saying that like because you have that cantilever,

when that thing essentially ripped off the side of the building, it brings all of the other trusts, all the other structural steel down with it. Yeah. And from the outside, it just looks like it tears itself apart spontaneously, right? And so that's where you get the, I guess, controlled demolition and miniature thing. Yeah, I mean, it looks like it comes down from the bottom because it did come down from the bottom, but it wasn't because of explosives. It was because of, well, this is how they built it. Holy. And though, how is it ripping down from the bottom though?

What happened to the bottom? Was that the weakness from the heat? I imagine it's weakness from the heat. And again, like you got these big crosses, you know, and if they're being pulled over and you got the columns above the columns, which are again, attached with whatever to column 79, I if one of these columns comes down and enough columns are attached to other columns with weird trusses, I imagine this whole damn thing comes down pretty quickly with the load paths here are weird.

You know, that's the main thing I would say. That's like the building in Ghostbusters. This thing is weird, man. I looked at blueprints. This thing is weird. It's a conduit for goes are the goes are in. The other thing was like if it was a controlled demolition, it was pretty fucking sloppy. And of course, the main thing is like, what if it didn't get hit by debris? What was the excuse for demolish? So, you know, this is.

But yeah, so buildings, we don't have time to go into detail about this. And maybe we'll do. I mean, we're not even talking about the Pentagon, which is another whole kettle of fish. So obviously, there's more to do. But world holographic castle, holographic fish, holographic building seven, holographic trade centers, holographic hologram, hologram, most living. You know, people don't know this, but George Bush, hologram, hologram. All the time, hologram, hologram.

9 11 at my school, hologram. They didn't tell us about it. It was fucking weird. It's just like, wow, it's weird that a bunch of kids have doctor's appointments today. I believe it was Miss Esposito who came out during recess to say this, but nothing bad is happening. Famously, something you want to hear. Everyone's aware.

My dad picked us up at school. He's like, bad news, guys. 9 11 happened because nobody knew what 9 11 was yet. So you were just like, what? Well, that's a conspiracy right there. I don't know how to know, you know, what's what's the aftermath of this? Yeah, well, I mean, you're living in it. Like this is what happened.

History happened as someone in London's goal with the attacks was push America into massive overreaction that makes it explicitly inimical to Muslims, destroys its economy, destabilizes it to the point of imperial collapse. Yeah, all of that happened. And then he won, retired. I don't feel a lot better about that just because he gets killed eventually, like in his retirement home. It is about to say, you figure, you know, I've done with the job.

You know, I why do you even bother killing them at that point? But yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you see here some of the the slogans that like various troops have written on have written on bombs that were then dropped in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Krugman told me that there was no anti-Muslim sentiment after that. That's right. Yeah. No, famously not. Americans on the whole reacted very well.

I didn't as NYP and NYFD patches were painted on. And I was going to say that is an incredible attention to detail. That's my local firehouse there on one of those patches. How do you like that? Engine 277 Ladd 112. Cool. Paranthetically, my grandfather was a firefighter at that time. I mean, he was like a really older guy. He was like the chaplain or whatever.

And he went down right after the towers collapsed and all of his guys were there. And he saw all the dust everywhere. And they told him to set up like a center, like a triage down there. And he said, go fuck yourself. And he's like, I'm going above 42nd Street. So he took his entire shit and he sent it up to Midtown because he knew. Like, if you're a rational, you knew that that dust was not good for you. It's a combination of asbestos and gypsum.

And of course, fucking concrete, like nobody needs psiliosis in their lungs. Even Giuliani and all of them knew that that was bad. But obviously a lot of people knew. They tried to screw all of those guys out of, like, any compensation for it. Yes, we're still doing it. Yeah. Yeah. Disaster. And I mean, two thousand nine hundred and seventy seven people die. Total global war on terror deaths,

conservatively, like well over half a million still going up, like every day, like today. There's not like America was doing torture and it was doing assassinations before. But like after nine eleven, there stopped being any pretense that like that was something that America was like above. You don't need me to tell you that that created a massive expansion in the exact same Salafist jihadist ideology

that produced nine eleven in the first place that then like necessitated more military intervention and begets ISIS and al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda and wherever. And I mean, I did some maths and fewer people would have died if the U.S. response had been to do nothing and fewer people would have died if the U.S. response had been to load up a couple of passenger airplanes with Marines, fly them into the two tallest buildings in Kabul and then do the same thing every day for six months.

It doesn't like those numbers don't really it's difficult to comprehend exactly how much destruction was wrought as a consequence of nine eleven. And the sort of I guess the political consequences of making war on Afghanistan, Iraq and the aftermath of it. And yeah, no, classic blowback. Don't don't fund these psychos. Yes. And they still do it. They still do it every time there's someone in the U.S.

or the UK who is like, no, OK, I've I've got this this one jihadist guy. But like, I'm pretty sure I can control him. And, you know, enemy of my enemy, right? And so, you know, and eventually this happens again. And the same thing happened with the the Manchester arena bombing where and my five walks a guy into and out of Libya to go fight Gaddafi. And then he comes back and he blows himself up. And I, you know, it's just depraved, man.

Or be it for me to plug other random podcasts on here, but blowback pod, which came out like four or five months ago is tremendous and in not just the timeline, but understanding what happened after nine eleven. Understanding what was happening in Iraq and how Iraq became the sort of fulcrum became like the target for the United States. And of course, what the consequences are since then. Yeah, it's so wild how much like how much of that's just gone in the memory hole. Like how how people were thinking, how people were acting after nine eleven.

And now you can have poor crewmen. Nobel laureate in economics just rise on Twitter on the whole. Americans didn't like have this upswell of anti Muslim or anti Arab sentiment after nine eleven. It's not just the government officials because they should all be at least in the Hague, if not worse. It's not these. It's not the commanders that went over there and did the highway of death and all that shit. The fucking the media, the people are media.

As we look on Twitter or we watch TV news or we read the newspaper, whatever it is, these motherfuckers who are directly culpable in helping to bring us into this war have suffered zero fucking consequences like worse than that. They're still out there and they're still fucking peddling the same lies. And there's no no consequences whatsoever to do it to do a bit of a callback. Like when I when I make the joke about visualizing nine eleven, the reason you can do that is how many times have you seen that footage and where have you seen it, right?

It was the only thing that was running on every TV channel for weeks afterwards. And every time there was some new atrocity, every time, you know, you found out about waterboarding or Abu Ghraibu or Guantanamo Bay, that you know, you would run that nine eleven footage back. And the lead up to that war. And trust me, I was a fully grown adult, some oldest shit at that time. The way that the media and the Bush administration and the Democrats, to let us into that fucking disaster, that human disaster,

half a million, one million fucking Iraqis dead and counting was a fucking travesty of what this country is supposed to mean, what truth is supposed to mean, what governance is supposed to mean. I watched it happen in real time. It was fucking disgusting. These motherfuckers led us by the nose into a fucking massacre. And I mean, in that sense, prove to some of Bin Laden's theory about America and how America would react to an act of terror.

Correct. Not great. Not great. Yep. Not great. Well, you know, what can you do? History, man, we just live in that. Yeah. Well, on that note. It's about to say on that bomb shell, since we have several on screen right here.

Holographic bombshell. Now, these are also holograms. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. I got to do the drop. Where's my safety? Third drop. Oh, my God. All right.

It's exciting as a guest, but also a listener of, well, there's your problem. All right. So we have one from, well, he says his name. So hello, well, there's your problem podcast people. My name is Mike, and I used to work as a mechanic at various bowling allies for seven years. I have lots of stories of safety issues, but I think I will tell you all my favorite time from when our safety standards broke down.

Yeah, this time on 9 11, when a guy came in and bowled a perfect game. Prior to my employment at the company, OSHA had come through and forced rigorous lockout, tag out safety standards on the company as a result of a couple of mechanic deaths at other locations. Who sees it simply put a hell of a. Hey, just get caught. You're like, um, comes back up through the ball return. These things look like those like.

Um, Victorian child murdering textile things. Satanic mills of Victorian England. OSHA came through due to a couple of mechanic deaths caused by inserting their heads into the Shino Borla. Simply put, the lockout tag out standards we use meant that a special L O T O Lotto power switch was installed on every pin setting machine. We were forbidden from working on, climbing on or even touching the machines unless the lockout tag out switch was padlocked in the off position

to cut off power to the pin setter. This was considered necessary because the particular model of pin setting machines I worked on were designed during the 40s and 50s. Released in 55 and built with various modifications until 1988. Right. Awesome. Also reminds me of my favorite lockout tag out actual tag, which is sometimes you attach them to the padlock and one of them was it had a blank field for if energized blank will happen.

And it was explosion will result killing all within 50 foot radius. At least they were honest. Yes. As a result, these machines were almost entirely mechanical and have few electrical components. The entire machine is run by a single one horsepower motor. There were gearbox in the series of cams, levers and belts. That sounds like a death trap.

Holy shit. Most of the machine is built with steel and there are no sensors of any kind monitoring it. In other words, if a person were to be inside the wrong part of the pin setter when it was running, it would not stop and would just crush them and keep running. Yep. Get your pins up. Incredible what one horse can do. A former human being into perfect pin shape.

Never look at a horse the same way. One particular morning, I came in to find that one of our 32 pin setting machines was down unexpectedly. The mechanic from the previous night left a note saying that it had blacked out. And he ran out of time to fix it before he had to leave for the night. Now, a blackout is the most dangerous kind of state these machines can be in for a mechanic. Ninety eight percent of the time, a blackout is caused by the jam switches.

Each pin setter has two jam switches that cut power to the machine if they are opened by certain parts of the pin setter, getting jammed in place, such as when a bowling pin gets stuck between them. Right. This is to stop the machine from destroying itself, trying to continue running, which it absolutely would if it was not shut down immediately. What makes this dangerous is that it requires a mechanic to climb into the machine to remove the stuck pin, which then closes the jam switches and immediately restores power to everything.

Oh, no. Now, lockout tag out completely cuts power to the whole system, allowing this work to be done safely. I'm sensing it, however. However. It turned out this machine had not lost power due to a jammed bowling pin. This is one of those two percent of the times it was something electrical at fault. Now, on top of each pin setter was an electrical control box

with all the machine's electronics inside, as well as two simple glass fuses. These take zero time at all the checks. So I decided to start troubleshooting there first. However, I remembered an incident from a previous bowling alley I had worked at that did not have lockout tag out. Another mechanic on the machine next to me removed the smaller of the two fuses and got a small electrical shot, shock, not shot, causing him to drop the fuse deep into the machine.

And we did not have a spare. It took us until three a.m. to find it. And all that could have been avoided. All of that could have been avoided had he simply unplugged the main cow, main power cable from the electrical box first, right? Not this particular type of job. But I remember being like a part time shitty worker when I was a teenager and stuff like that would happen all the time.

You'd be like there till like two a.m. on a school night, like trying to figure out some dumbass fucking problem to fix. So I already had lockout tag out in place, so there was no possibility of getting shocked by the fuse. But I decided to add an extra layer of safety by unplugging the main power cable as well. Now, the cable hangs from the ceiling above each pin setter. So I unplugged it and let it hang nearby while I checked the fuse.

The fuse was still good, so I put it back and grabbed the power plug to plug back in as well. The plug arc flashed in my hand. Nope. In my peripheral vision, I saw what appeared to be a softball sized ball of fire where my hand was when this happened. He went that. Instinctively, I jumped off the seven foot tall pin setter

and ran until I regained my senses a few seconds later and looked for injuries or a potential fire. There was no fire and I had not received any burns or even a shock by sheer coincidence. I had grabbed the large cylindrical plastic plug around the side and the arc flash had come out the top of the plug where the cable enters, leaving me unscathed. But why was there any power at all

when lockout tag out was applied correctly? Well, it turns out the company installed the lockout tag out switches themselves and connected them to a small box directly on top of the pin setters control box. The main power cable plugs into this other box from above. Thus, lockout tag out only isolates the circuit box below that point and the main power cable always remains live. Unless a circuit breaker is shut off in another part of the box. Is shut off in another part of the building.

That blows. This was not known to me or anyone else in the company. It seemed it wasn't on the as bills. We were all trained that lockout tag out removes all electrical power all of the time. When I told my supervisor about this, not only did he not believe me when I told them what happened. He accused me of violating lockout tag out. Years later at a company training session,

I was a part of a group group being trained by one of the highest technicians in the company. This was the guy who wrote the lockout tag out standards for the company alongside OSHA. When I told him about this incident, he refused to believe it was possible. Even though other mechanics in the training session back me up with their own experiences. So that is the story of how this company, even with OSHA mandated safety regulations, still manages to leave my safety up to personal responsibility. Always.

Always, always only hold the plastic part. And yeah, don't don't work at a job. Yes, good start. It's great. It's like when you get into the union, they give you like the insurance package and you find out you get like two hundred dollars for a finger, eight hundred dollars for a hand, like three thousand dollars for an arm. Make sure what I would recommend is simply not being employed anywhere at any time.

The safest way to avoid on the job accidents is to never be on the job. To abolish work. That's right. Yes. And rebar. Yes, and rebar, anti rebar action. All right. So. We made it. That was an episode. All the way. That took some tries.

They hate it when we split them, but we may not have any choice. I might whatever. We'll we'll. I don't want the hogs to like be. Let's burn that bridge when we get to it. Anyone got any commercials before we go? I can do a short plug, I guess. Yeah, go for it. Yeah. Yeah, everybody, you can follow me, Sean KB at as underscore a underscore

worker at Twitter dot com. And of course, check out my podcast, which is called the Antifada. I've got some really good history episodes coming up with our friend, Matt, really good stuff. So, yeah, give us a listen and I hope you like it. Oh, yeah. Yes. Listen to the Antifada. I'd say so you can't tell people to vote for Jessica Raine anymore, but because we got owned.

Yeah, sorry, Jess, real owned. Well, you know, sometimes between that and Grenfell, where we told people to vote labor, I'm starting to think that our endorsement is a curse. Like a reverse 9-11, but for voting. So, yeah, that's just a regular 9-11, Keep America Greats. Yes, exactly. Four more years. Yeah. Ford, Ford, election affairs.

I am the Russian election election interference. So you're the Polish election interference. Well, it's basically the same thing. Yeah, it's got a screen door on it. Well, never forget everybody. I don't remember what we were talking about. I don't know. It's something about holograms.

It's been a long time, man. There's been a lot of podcasting. Yeah. Oh, my God. All right. What do we do now? All right, good night, everybody. Good night, everyone. Good night, guys. That was fun.