Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 55: Kursk Disaster

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

today we talk about russia milo's new pod: https://domainmasterspod.podbean.com/ trashfuture: https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/ milo: https://twitter.com/Milo_Edwards slides: https://youtu.be/39-S9-ZXzqA patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp

Oh, Roz, you only have 20 tabs open instead of 30. Yes. Okay. Wait, you have to do OBS as well? Yes. Oh, wow. We're so fucking good at this. There may be a more effective way of doing this, but we're not doing it because we're

not smart enough. Also, Liam, I can hear myself on your fucking headphones. Sorry. Sorry. How's that? Okay. Yeah, it's better. Thank you.

You're welcome. Hang on. Sorry. You said gain all the way up all the time. I think that's right. Yeah. Feeling bad for the Kansas City Chiefs. I was about to say, Touchdown Tom did it again.

Yes, he did. People told us to count them out. I never counted them out. Don't ever count them out. I did not count out Touchdown Tom, no. No, you can't do that. All right. I'm good to go.

Should I just start my recording? Yeah, please. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. Okay. My recording is now running. Do you want me to do a clap or something? No, that's fine. Justin is able to like sync this stuff up without the clap, which makes the clapping

superfluous to me. Yes. I just synced it up with the audio track from OBS. It works pretty good until about 45 minutes in where Alice consistently desyncs by about two seconds. Cool. So I have to do the Alice check every 30 minutes or so. Make sure that Alice is still in sync along with everyone else's recordings who are usually

fine. Oh, yes. Alice check and the vibe check. Yes. Okay. So all I need to be watching is your Discord stream, right? Yes. And then you should know what slides we're kind of vaguely on.

I mean, just fucking talk over it. All right. Well, yes. That's our, it's a sneak peek for the listeners behind our podcast production process. It's really bad, folks. Okay. So welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters, which has slides.

You can look at the slides on YouTube. Slides. We post this. The slides. The slides. It's a podcast with slides. You can look at those slides on YouTube, which is where we post this podcast in addition to podcasting apps.

So if you are confused about that now, hopefully you are not the links in the description. I don't know why this is so hard for people to figure out. Well, the people want us to do all sorts of Jackie shit. Like they want us to like have chapters in the audio versions. No, we're not. Sorry. Like this thing goes up. I almost killed myself fucking doing the transcription, which, and if you have a better

option to transcribing a four hour episode of like my own voice, please tell me because I cannot do it. Give it to some people in the global south. That's something that's why most people do it. Those are hardworking people who we can always send our shit work to. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Sorry. Very good at typing. So I hear the text in the transcription just reads, help, I'm trapped in a podcasting factory. Haven't we inflicted enough on the global south without making them podcasts for us to. Oh God. That's the British Empire just went around the world building podcasts.

Nothing. Nothing bad. Nothing bad happened. They tried to switch out the voice actors on the Simpsons a while back with voice actors from like Costa Rica or somewhere who could do the voices pretty well. And maybe that we should just do that for podcasting. Just overdub ourselves. Yeah.

Just anyway, let's continue through introductions. I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay. Alice Koto Kelly person talking now. Yes. Pronoun.

She. Her. Liam. And we have a guest. We do. We do. We're the guest this time. Yeah.

Hello. She. It's me. It's me. Sheamus Milo Sheamus. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

And my pronouns are Sheamus. She and much. That's right. So this is interesting because today Alice did the notes. Not me. Yeah. That's right. I look forward to finding out all of the things that I got wrong,

which the comments will gladly tell us. And I'm sure they'll do it in ways that are polite and not condescending and not just why don't you read a book? Why? Why is this funny? Why are there jokes? Like we don't get these comments so much anymore. But there was one that was like, I have an idea for your podcast.

Get to the point. And I told that guy to watch the documentary if he hated it so bad. We're like, yeah, we've talked about this. A lot of these actual disasters took like five minutes. So we got a big joke. This is going to be one of those. Yeah. And we're going to be talking about.

Well, you see it on the screen here. You see a submarine. And submarines typically aren't supposed to look like this. It does look very fast. This is a submarine cabriolet. Wait for some kind of intake. Hmm. Well, technically, it's a giant sea water intake.

Yeah, this is the screen door on the submarine. That's what we're going to be talking about. And we're going to be talking about how the Russian Navy inadvertently opened that screen door. But first, before we do that, we have to do a segment on this podcast that we like to call the goddamn news. And I forgot how to fade that out. So I'm just going to cast it.

Yeah. So, um, yeah, a glacier outburst flood just to the dam in India and absolutely fucking obliterated it in the middle of, you know, winter, early February. Just normal thing for a glacier to be melting so much that just all of the fucking meltwater overwhelms the dam, kills like 150 people minimum. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if it didn't happen now, it was just going to happen in summer. I mean. Are you taking a like rip the bandaid off kind of approach and be like, well, might as well get it over with. My suit starts early, baby.

People keep putting off their glass. At the end of the day, you've got to do it at some point. That's right. Yeah. Hope your flooding turns up. My dad texts this link to me and was just like, bizarre disaster question mark, question mark. Nobody that bizarre.

We've been, no, we've just been pumping the melt. Glassia gases into the atmosphere for the last time in many decades. Should I not have been holding down the switch that says melt glaciers? Yeah. I've had like an aerosol can in each hand and like an old one just spraying them into the air the whole time we've been recording. I keep opening the doors to old fridges. Yes.

Oh yeah. I'm always doing that. That was a good time, you know? Yeah. So I mean, it's early days yet. Also, this is relatively speaking in the middle of nowhere. So like there's only a handful of photos at the moment, which are all extremely low resolution.

It's difficult to say much about it other than. They're low enough resolution that they could be photos of Nate Bethay. We're not sure. That's the hairline right there. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the only thing we can say about it is don't, don't do the thing, the climate change thing that you've been doing

for the last however long that we've built our society around. Please stop. I gotta say, I have learned from researching this podcast that the lower resolution the photos are, the worse of a disaster it was. Well, I agree. Actually, hold up. Go back a slide.

That's a pretty low resolution photo. Yes. All things considered. So this one might be bad. Yes. I don't know. Oh, that's, that's some excellent bad Nick work there, Roz. That was true.

I really liked that. Yeah. Yeah. I was about to say no, no one noticed that. I was just going to like, did they, did they not notice? All right. What else we got? Yeah.

In other news. Fucking Elon Musk. Mr. Mr. Musk has crashed another rocket. This is progress. Richard Hammond of space travel, Elon Musk. Well, Richard Hammond at least has the decency to get injured. Yeah. Endangers himself as opposed to others.

Is he trying to do this time? Is he trying to like do the thing where you land the rocket intact to refuel it? As far as I can tell, it was just a bog standard test flight. And if it didn't crash, that was a bonus, but they were kind of expecting it to crash. I mean, they were only going to use this one once anyway. They had another one across the street. They were going to, you know, send up in a couple of weeks. It's cool that you can just kind of be like, yeah, we expect this to blow up.

We're just fucking around here. Kind of the cost of doing business with testing rackets. I mean, that's the thing. Yeah. Rocket tree. Yeah. You just don't, you don't do this. Don't do this with a commercial payload.

Then you'll lose the big bucks. Yeah. Don't do this with the first teacher in space, for instance. Yeah. No, absolutely not. If you're launching pedophiles into space, make sure you test it. This is the one that you want the pedophiles on because you would just like it would be an extremely baroque form of death penalty, I guess.

I was right up there with the North Korean anti-aircraft guns. Yeah. All the bright side, you get to experience the weightlessness for about 10 seconds before you're turned into spaghetti sauce. Yeah. You get a beautiful sense of cosmic wonder and then you get turned into fucking marinara. Cool. It's actually something they don't know, which is that the most delicious marinara

sauce does contain a small amount of pedophiles. Most people don't put it in because it's hard to get. But if you go to a real Italian restaurant. That's why they don't have problems with pedophilia in Italy proper. Yeah, because that all goes into the sauce industry. Yeah, exactly. They're all chefs. All the pedophiles in Italy have to take refuge in a small enclave.

I'm talking about the Vatican City. Yeah. It's like a play. I appreciate that. You were just like subtle joke. Yeah. Well, people might think I'm talking about San Marino. Oh, those fuckers over at San Marino.

We were doing a bit about the, the bit in JFK where he's pointing out all the different intelligence agencies around that one. Yeah. We were like in the Vatican City and they're like, now there's the Vatican and then behind the Vatican City, the St. Peter's Basilica. Gentlemen, we are in the center of the global pedophilia community. First Pope from Texas. That's what I love about choir boys.

Oh my God. Anyway, now that I'm horrified. Yeah. Yeah, now they're horrified. The news. That damn news is over. We're going to the actual thing. The actual fucking thing.

This weird forbidden steampunk apple bullshit. So it looks like a grenade James and the giant peach. Yeah, it doesn't look right. Back in the day when you could like be an inventor and you had to wear like a three piece suit to go do whatever silly bullshit you were doing. I was about to say this is all dressed to drown. Yeah. Since time immemorial, man has dreamed of being slightly under the water just to

like do stuff. And I mean, we were pretty good at that because like diving bells are a known technology, right? They had fucking diving bells in ancient Greece. You sink a thing in the water. Some of the air gets trapped. You stay in there. It's fine.

Yes. If you the difficult part is like, what if you wanted to take that dive and go and fucking move around and do shit and make a kind of sub marine vessel thing? And the main problems as it turns out with that are how to move it around, right? Like you can kind of control the buoyancy a little bit, but like how do you propel this? And the answer originally is you have a guy in a three piece suit pedal as seen here. Yes.

Because you want people breathing really heavily when they're underwater. Yeah, that's right. He's about to say you want this thing to slowly fill up with sweat. I will point out he has two of these little cranks. One of those is a hand drill, the one that goes upwards. And the point of this is you like pedal your way up to a ship and you drill through the hole. Just for underneath it.

Oh God. I mean, I'm thinking of the jet, but the suicide torpedoes at the end of the war. Yeah. Just like realizing that some dickhead in the three piece suit had beaten them to it by like a hundred years. I was just thinking. Hang on. Look at the suicide torpedoes.

Oh yeah. They just fucking drive a torpedo full of explosives into a ship like a man's torpedo. Yeah. I'm looking at that tiny drill and I'm like, all right. So I'm going to go drill a hole in the bottom of the ship. Yeah. I hope they haven't thought to install build pumps. Yeah.

I'm really going to hope nobody plugs that hole with anything. Otherwise, this whole thing was fucking useless. Just the guy like sticking his hand on that boat. Trying to like lay limpet mines. Like just trying to stick them to the bottom like a barnacle. Just like your range of motion is totally gone. You're just like, OK, two mines. That's it.

That's just blowing up. Now we're going to fucking cycle this apple back across the fucking water. But next slide, please. We get to this silly bullshit. This is the Confederate one, right? This is the Confederate one. This is the first submarine to sink a ship. I have seen a replica of this.

It killed its whole crew twice. Oh yeah. They killed the whole crew. They fished it out, put another crew, and it killed them too. This is called the HL Hunley. And the guys in there look like they're jacking each other off. Yeah, it really does. And I mean, that's kind of the answer to your question, right?

Is that like the reason why they did this and why it didn't work is because the Confederacy was one extended jackoff project. And so they did a lot of this weird bullshit that didn't work, which is kind of why they lost the war. But they managed to sink a US ship. They managed to sink the USS Miskatonic. They fucking cranked this thing across a bay. And then if you see on the bottom illustration there,

there's this weird pole thing. That's a torpedo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a torpedo. What it is is that thing that's flying off of it is filled with explosives and they would literally just put the tube up against a hole and physically like ram it through. And hopefully it would blow up the ship and not sink the submarine.

But, you know, it did sink the submarine. Well, I mean, at least it didn't, you know, the other potential failure mode for a submarine is it surfaces. So they avoided that one. That is true. That is true. What they did was they did kind of invent suicide bombing. But yeah, aside from that.

I think I saw ISIS as a lot to the Confederacy in a way in many ways. Yeah. But like, obviously, we can kind of see the limiting factor here. And that is that like it requires what eight dudes cranking hog in order to move the thing. Yes. No, I'm just imagining a bunch of guys on a submerged Toyota Hilux. A guy in scuba gear. They were all wearing fucking snorkels.

The snorkels are for. Underwater ice is a strange, but very strong bit. Anyway, next slide, please. I will say, I believe lions led by donkeys did a whole bit on the HL Hanley. And you should go listen to it. Mermaids and burkas. Things get marginally less stupid once we invent the steam engine. This is a steam powered submarine.

Oh, boy. I can see some problems with that. Yeah. This is British, by the way. So it's just full of guys in there talking about how many genders there are and inhaling a bunch of like coal smoke fumes. Say the word nonce. Yeah.

We say can't smell over the Lord in them. Yeah. And for obvious reasons, this doesn't work, right? But basically what you've got is a very low lying boat. Because it has to have a big steam funnel coming out onto the surface. Yeah. So you just submerged this whole thing, but there's still a smokestack above the water. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And you kind of hope that the Germans or whoever are like, oh, that's just clouds probably totally normal to have a bunch of smoke and steam. I say that whale smoking a pipe. Now, I mean, we get slightly better at this, right? What we do is we combine a diesel engine and batteries, and that works pretty well. Like that works through two world wars, but there's a big problem, which is the batteries

run out. When the batteries run out, you have to run the diesel engine to recharge them and you do that underwater for the aforementioned breathing diesel exhaust reasons. So most of the time that you're in the submarine, you just have to fucking sit on the surface charging this bullshit, running a diesel engine, which is very dangerous, right? Right. How do we solve this, right? What's a good uninterruptible source of electric power?

Boiling centrist pits. Absolutely. That's why the HMS Corbin is going to be captured by Owen Jones and it's going to absolutely furious David Bedeal peddling. Are we going to split the atom? We're going to split the atom. We're going to fucking do some mad science and we're going to keep to meter. Yes, that's right.

We're going to fucking bang rocks off of each other at a really small scale. And what we end up with is this thing, the USS Nautilus, right? And you can see a top and bottom comparison. The top one is there was a USS Nautilus in World War II. That one was diesel and then there's one on the bottom, which is the submarine of the future. Which you can go see. I do like that for the bottom one, they just decided fuck hydrodynamics or whatever.

We just have a square front. It looks like a Kenworth truck. I like it. Get that. Get that W. I forget if it's the nine hundred or the five hundred. That's the squared off. The fucking first, the fucking Optimus Prime looking truck. Yeah.

Yes, exactly. I mean, that's the kind of shit that you can do when you have functionally unlimited power, right? You have a nuclear reactor on the ship and I mean, you just stay underwater as deep as you want as long as you want. You can fucking pull oxygen out of sea water. And the only limiting factor then is just like people need to eat. So like this is basically unchanged down nuclear submarines will leave fucking cold

port and Glasgow just absolutely physically stuffed full of food. And then it gets miserable later on because all the fresh food runs out and they have to eat like frozen pizzas or whatever. Why don't they go fishing? That's a good question, actually. They have to fish everywhere. Why not just eat the fish? Just surfacing somewhere in the Pacific and each guy will be like, all right, catch

your own. I think for ethics reasons, they kind of prevent you from torpedoing a whale. Outside of the Japanese Navy anyway. We're doing that. We're exploding this whale for research. Yeah, to see what happens when we blow the torpedo. Yeah, we want to see how exploded whale flesh tastes. I mean, we need a bigger sample size.

Go get that one too. I wouldn't really fancy whale somehow. It's suddenly very useful to have a nuclear powered submarine that you can just do all the stuff with. Because next slide, please. Communism. Not just communism, but the fucking Cold War is happening, dude. And now you have these two superpowers who want to do all of this spy stuff.

They want to be able to tap into undersea communications cables. They want to be able to land special forces and they want to be able to launch nuclear missiles at each other and you can do that from a submarine. This is real thread stuff, right? You can kind of maybe blow up a nuclear missile and a silo on land before they can launch it. But you really can't do shit about a submarine and so you can just wait off of the shoreline of Florida or fucking the Kola Peninsula or whatever and just obliterate an entire country. It rules.

You have no idea where the submarine is at any time. The only place you could be sure of there were no submarine based nuclear missiles was on land. We managed to rule out two thirds of the Earth's surface. But they also managed to fool them on that one too because both the Soviets and the Americans deployed or attempted to deploy railroad based ICBM launchers. Oh yeah, that's true. As shown in the fucking documentary GoldenEye.

That'll be another episode. That was a sick train though. That was a cool train. I love the history channel. It just reminded me of a time when I was like, it was 3 a.m. I was high and the only thing that was on was the history channel. And what was on the history channel was a show called Hitler's Secret Train. And I watched this thing.

Wow, Alice. Yeah, no, but I was just absolutely out of my mind and I just watched this thing. I was like, yeah, man, that's crazy. Just real super film shit. Just like, yeah, I'm going to have a train and it's going to be like an armored train. I'm just going to ride it around Europe doing Nazi shit on that. It's really funny that of all the things that Hitler did and had that the thing he would keep secret would be the train.

Not like the Holocaust. He's like, yo, I'm kind of ashamed of this train though. I don't want people to think I'm a nerd. You know how Hitler had like a really long office with like a desk on the pedestal? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So everyone else would feel smaller or whatever. Yeah, and they had to walk up a long ways. I wonder if he also did that on the train.

There were multiple cars on the train that were just to walk up through his desk in like the caboose. Yeah, that was actually the inspiration for the movie Snowpiercer. Also, why is this guy holding a shoe? That's because it's Khrushchev. Yeah, it's Khrushchev. He was in the U.N. I forget why something the U.S. had done. He took off his shoe and started beating the desk with the dude rules. Yes, dude's rock.

All right, next slide, please. Yes, Khrushchev, Hispanic mother. Yes. It's just like you're a boiler. So now now we're going to your graphics card software or the box graphics card came in. That was a very tasteful. It's black and green. I'm looking at it right now.

It even says it has subtle lighting. I've never seen RGB lighting that's subtle. I gotta tell you, mine is like flashing rainbow colors right now. Thank you, patriots. This is where it goes. So this is a very shiny example of a torpedo room. You can see a torpedo. It's the thing in the middle just to the right of the walkway with a green band on it. You can John Madden that.

And a torpedo has evolved a bit from the days when a bunch of Confederates cranking hog had to like physically shove it right now. What it is, is it's a kind of like undersea rocket. You put it in a tube that goes out to the sea. You close the submarine side door. You open the seaside door, fire the thing and a bunch of like burning propellant shoots this thing out until it hits something like a whale. Yes. Yes, like a whale. And then and then you will.

It's a research torpedo. Hmm. We found out that because the whale flesh is burned, we can't make sushi with it. However, we are happy to announce we will be using a non nuclear torpedo on a juvenile. 10 miles south in five minutes. We have tactically ascertained a potentially Soviet affiliated whale like mammal in the vicinity perpendicular to the submarine. It's like blowing up some coral reef because some whale gave you the slip. You're just like, well, the torpedo is loaded. I'm going to get dinner one way or the other.

Fire and torpedo one. Oh, my God. So. May I have the next slide, please? I didn't know you were the fucking flat fuck. I put the flat fuck right on. That is a sick fucking boy. This is the size of the correct aspect ratio.

I've ever read. It's genuinely this is the fucking shape that it is. So we now we stand and we salute the technical achievements of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. The gangway says Smolensk, but that can't be the name of the port because Smolensk is an extremely landlocked town of the like Belarusian border. That's the name of the submarine. Yeah. It's like one of those old timey steam boats. They could go and surprisingly.

Yeah. A bunch of a bunch of Soviets just fits Corraldo and this just physically carrying the submarine to Smolensk. Dragging it with one tow rope between the. The Russians, the Russians do have a River Navy who I once saw someone do a stand up bit about this where they were like, do you think the guys in the river Navy get bullied by the guys in the regular Navy? They were like, oh, where have you where have you been seen? Say like in a straight line. What are you going home for lunch? Mark Twain did a short story about a terrible storm on the Erie Canal.

We're finally after being pummeled by the waves, the canal boat man is forced to step off the boat and onto land. All right. So this beautiful wide by the Smolensk. The Americans call this an Oscar to class because they tactically ascertained that they were going to name these in an alphabetical style order. So there was an alpha and then a brother and a child and they got to ask her. The Soviets called this project and chaos, which is absolutely super villain shit. Right. Yeah.

He's rushing for project data. Yeah. It's very thick is what I like about it. And they built these starting in 1982. This is like down near the apex of Soviet submarine technology. And because that was one of the like along with the space program, one of the like prestige things of the Soviet Union. This is like one of the only pieces of Soviet technology that worked. Right.

Like you get an, I don't know, say you got a digital watch that was made in the Soviet Union in 1982. And it doesn't keep time. Right. You get a car that was built in the Soviet Union in 1982. And you close the door and all of the panels fall off. Right. But like that because the state was heavily invested in this being a thing that worked, it actually kind of did. Is this in the commuter trains?

Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. That's kind of cool. I kind of like Travots. Travots are East German though. That's true. There.

Yeah. Good enough. Are there any good like Soviet cars? Like I genuinely want to know. Yeah. Like I genuinely want to know are there any like consumer level products made in the Soviet Union? A lot of meat. A lot of that.

It's cool that it work. Or is it just stuff? The Lada Niva. The Lada Niva is like a decent off-road four by four. And I mean you can buy like a UAZ like the commercial version of one of those too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. The was is fucking intense. So maybe that's the thing. That was the only Jeep I think ever manufactured where they had a model which you had like a hatch in the floor for ice fishing. Should have done that with the fucking submarine. The vulgar cyber. Which looks like they just, I'm pretty sure they just stole Chrysler's blueprint for the

stratosphere. Or just like, no it's ours now. That is suck. You know why that is? Why is that? Because Lada got bought by Renault. So Renault started making all kinds of like fucked up like Renault adjacent models but under the Lada brand and they're bad as hell.

You know I'm just looking at this photo. Like why do you have all of these tiles right? And then you just have like two old car floor mats on the front. It genuinely looks like the passenger foot well. You know why they couldn't have an ice fishing hatch on the bottom of the submarine? No ice. Oh no, because then it would be a diving bell, not a submarine. There's a website just called sovietcar.com and they'll sell me a Lada 2101 from $78

for $10,950. And Patreons. I'm begging you. I have only one thing to say and it's. My friend, would you like to die in a car accident? What the hell yeah. Next slide. Next slide.

Give me the next slide. We got another angle. Pulverized into your constituent Adams by Chevy Suburban. We got another angle just so you can see how fucking wide this thing is and the reason why it's so wide, which is like you open up this lid and you get a bunch of like trash and looking things. All of those are cruise missile launches, right? Like the point, the point of these submarines, this whole class of submarines, they weren't

meant to launch like nuclear missiles. What they were meant to do was like fight American carrier groups. Like one of these like comes up to an American carrier group and fires a shitload of torpedoes and a shitload of cruise missiles, which are in these giant racks on the side. It's a stupidly well armed fighting submarine and they built, I think 11 of these. They're all named for Soviet cities. So there was Smolensk, there was Kursk, a bunch of others. They're all still in service apart from Kursk.

What happened to Kursk Alice? Well, that's not spoiled it. I don't know how to say it. So as I was saying, right, these are some of the like prestige projects of the Soviet Union that meant to work. We know that some of them are still working today. So what went wrong next slide, please? Oh, boy.

Oh, boy. Oh, the Gorbachev Pizza. Fuck yeah. I'd explain this to my girlfriend like two days ago that yes, Gorbachev was in fact, didn't he also do Louis Vuitton? Oh, he might have done. Yeah. I mean, that was recently.

Right. I thought for a second this child had a beer. Well, yeah, it's also as Russia's. So yeah, probably. Yeah, that's probably that could be Coke or it could actually be a glass of class, which is one of the most perfect drinks. Oh my God. Yeah.

A bread based soda. You can really taste the bread. It goes perfectly with your pizza. Yeah, that's right. So my question, my question before I go to the next slide before I spoil stuff, my question to the assembled brains trust here is what do we think the effect of the Soviet Union sliding into revisionism and then capitalism was on the red fleet? What do we think happened to the Navy?

It obviously got better because capitalism breeds innovation. That's right. And we have on the next slide, a photo of some innovation. Oh, okay. This is like that Penn Central video where they paid the government for a bailout. On like, this is more months, which is a northern ports on the Kala Peninsula. And like in more months, it fucking sucks. It fucking sucks.

And one of the reasons why it fucking sucks is because until like, I don't know, a couple of years ago, right? Pretty much all of the Soviet submarines that the Russian, the new Russian government couldn't afford to keep running. They just left them there like with the nuclear reactors in and running. So you like, they didn't even use them as a power station, which would have been dope. They just kind of left them to rot. And like to say, what do they, they like keep the propeller running and then have a rope

tying it to the back. Comes by to like scrape the ice off of it. No, no, no. So like the like catastrophic downsizing because like, apart from the Soviet, apart from the new Russian government having no money for anything and everybody getting onto crocodile, there's also like no reason for this stuff to exist. Like every, as far as everyone's concerned, it's the end of history, right? The Cold War's over.

You don't need a bunch of ballistic missile submarines because, you know, what are you doing? You have Pepsi and Pizza Hut and stuff. You're going to use it to get in range so they can hack the election for Trump. Yeah. And turn all the frogs gay. I guess they didn't love that at the time. Liam.

Liam was just a horny guy back then. That's true. God, he really was. Anyway, Liam kind of spoiled this slide for me, but the Soviet, the Russian Federation and Liars Love My Darkies episode, that's how I tell it. The Russian Federation sold 20 warships in one business deal, President Deals, Deals of My Art Form. They sold 20 of these.

What do you think they got in return? Next slide, please. A beautiful Trump steak. Seriously close. Yeah, they got what they got was Pepsi. Pepsi bought the rights to distribute in the Soviet Union for 20 Soviet warships. And until they could, like, find a way to scrap them or sell them on, Pepsi was the sixth largest navy in the world.

Well, actually, the distribution agreement had started slightly earlier. Actually, because Pepsi had previously been distributing Pepsi in the Soviet Union in exchange for the right to distribute Stelichnaya vodka in the United States. Oh, shit. Okay. And then after the Soviet-Afghan War, there was like this American boycott of Soviet products. So they weren't selling as much solely as they could. And they wanted to cut off their end of the deal, but the Soviets really liked Pepsi.

So they said, well, why don't you take all these warships and scrap them? Because the ruble is worthless. Would you like a guided missile cruiser? And someone at Pepsi had to be like, yeah, okay. Hand me the keys. Just sending the intern over to pick up the submarine. Don't worry, you'll figure it out. Just drive it.

Don't stall it. Just get back out of the clutch now. Be careful of the carbon monoxide levels. You'll figure it out. May I have the next slide please? Because we're going to jump ahead a bit. We're going to jump ahead 10 years in fact. Oh, who's this guy?

I mean, I'm sure he won't be important later. He looks very sickly here. I understand he controls all of American politics somehow, right? That's right. That's Vladimir Putin with a Kim Il-sung. How do you look sickly in a photo where you were standing next to Boris Yeltsin? Well, Yeltsin just always sort of looks like he's been pickled already. Yeah.

Yeltsin there impersonating a waxwork of himself. Staring just blankly ahead. Man, Yeltsin was such a fucking king. Missed that guy. Food looks like he's maybe just been drinking a little bit. I'm not sure. Yeah, I could say that. I presume we all know the story about Yeltsin getting fished out of the river by a homeless guy.

While he was president. I actually don't know that one. So basically, Yeltsin had a dacha in Spenskaya, which is like, I don't know, like 30 kilometers from Moscow saying it's a pretty bougie neighborhood. And this is like in the 90s, like he's president of Russia. He's like balls drunk one day as he was most days. And it's just like wandering around in Spenskaya, just like being Yeltsin. And he like goes, he like walks over this bridge over the River Muskova.

And he just like gets a bit close to the railing or whatever. And being just like absolutely balls drunk, just falls over the railing into the river. Now, this is quite near the source of the river. So it's not exactly like a raging torrent. So he falls in there. There's some homeless guy who like lives under the bridge, dragging Yeltsin out of the river thinking like, oh, this is probably one of the other local homeless guys gone too drunk for the river.

And he's just like, that's fucking Boris Yeltsin. Local homeless man becomes hero of the Russian Federation. And that's one weird trade. My other Yeltsin story, I didn't know that one, but the story I do know is that he on his state visit to the U.S. The Secret Service found him on the lawn of Blair House at three in the morning in his underwear trying to order a pizza. This is why we're the greatest country on the earth.

Because we would make it inside the underwear order of pizza. Like 20 years later, they would like make that guy the president. That's right. So we jump ahead a bit to 2000. Yeltsin is out. This new guy, Putin is in. Nobody thinks he's going to last that long. It's probably fine.

And the Russian. He didn't. Yeah, that's right. And the Russian Navy is holding its first exercise like ever. They haven't had the money in 10 years of Russia being a country to ever do this. But now they're finally like, OK, you know, we've gotten over the worst of the sort of the mob years and stuff. Maybe now we can take the boats out and we can do a bit of Navy stuff.

Everyone gets excited. They get to go boating. It's going to be a nice time. Yeah. We're going to drive the boats around. It's going to be good. Everyone's happy. Yeah.

Yeah, they call it exercise summer X or summer 10. I couldn't tell which. And this this submarine, the Kursk is going to practice doing what it's supposed to do, which is to sink an American carrier. And the American carrier is being played by a Russian warship. And what they're going to do is they're going to go underwater and they're going to fire a dummy torpedo at this at this Russian warship. And everybody's going to have a nice time.

Next slide, please. Right. Yes. We're all going to have a nice day out boating. That's right. We're going to have a nice excursion. How beautiful. We're diving.

We've got some wonderful boaters in Russia. Oh, God. The trucking Trump boat rally, but in Russia. Yeah. Submarine, it's like a boat, but under the water. Not a lot of people. They don't know that. Submarine, it can go on top of the water.

It can go under the water also. You know, the Germans, the Germans called them under sea boats. You know, that means folks, it's underwater boat. People didn't know that on you. Did you know this? Did you know this? Yeah. Do you know about this?

Yeah. Do you know about this? I didn't know. No one told me. You want to hear that in the media. They're not interested in reporting facts like that about the boats under the sea. So you may notice that this is a slightly older looking submarine. This is another British one.

This is HMS Sedon. And this got blown the fuck up in 1955 by one of its own torpedoes. And the reason why it got blown the fuck up by one of its own torpedoes is because, okay, you need a propellant to make the torpedo go, right? Yes. Propellants. You're a guy peddling in. And different kinds of propellants that they're all nasty, right?

There's no nice rocket fuel. But a really bad one to use is high-test peroxide, HTTP. They stopped using this in the West after one of these fucking blew up and took out this submarine. And now they only use it for frosted tip. Yeah, that's right. That's right. What high-test peroxide does is it frosts your tips and it oxidizes stuff.

That's what it does. Once it's oxidizing, it doesn't stop oxidizing. It creates steam. It creates oxygen at a very fast rate. And then ideally... Very much the Pringles of oxidizing. Yeah, that's right. And ideally, you fart this out of the back of the torpedo and the thing goes forward.

Well, that's fine unless, say, you have like a bad weld and the high-test peroxide leaks out of the torpedo, lands on literally anything and generates a combination of oxygen and steam in a highly energetic process called it blows the fuck up and it sinks the submarine. Why do we think the Russians are using in 2000 this propellant that was proven to be absurdly dangerous in 1955? Because a very good man, he has entire shit full of high-test peroxide. His father made this in the bathtub in the 1950s. I see no reason not to buy this.

He's husband of my cousin. Are you suggesting that the Russian government in 2000 might have been slightly corrupt? I would go so far as to say I wouldn't suggest that the Russian government was corrupt in 2000. It was when they had rooted everything on the United Russia party is so popular because they have no corruption. That's like 92% of the vote or whatever every year, right? Yeah, and that's why they have the same logo as the Fox's Glacier Mint. Oh shit, they literally did.

Just a happy bear. Anyway, high-test peroxide rules because it's slightly cheaper. Again, there's just sort of Chernobyl vibes. It's like, why do we do this insanely dangerous thing? It's slightly cheaper. Because to make it safe is gay. Yes, because we are not women and we like to die. That's right.

The void calls to them. One of the reasons why it's cheaper is because high-test peroxide is just highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide, H2O2. It's cheaper because it's a monopropellant, which means you only need to store one kind of fuel on board, the torpedo, as opposed to maybe a more modern propellant where you might need some kind of fuel and then an oxidizer, which might be a separate tank of liquid oxygen. As the H2O2 burns, it creates its own oxygen, which means, of course, it's also very good if, let's say, you're underwater, which is one of those places where torpedoes need to operate most of the time.

It's a lot simpler to build something with this high-test peroxide engine than pretty much anything else. Now, you do have some issues with it. If anything goes wrong, but hopefully you don't have any water in your submarine. Why do I use highly dangerous chemicals on board my submarine? The same reason why I bungee-jump from top of my apartment block using only rubber bands. Because I am man. What is life without it? He asks as he plugs 445 feet to his death.

It's Russian guy Sokratik Lenkusen used. He drives a larder where it's like two fronts of a larder welded together, bag-to-bag drunk off of a cliff. He's just like, but do I do this because the God tells me to, or does the God tell me to because it is right? Let's go forward a slide and let's see some Russian guys doing exactly that. All of these guys are doing a Sokratik Lenkus right now. That's why they've got their hands out like this. This is a tostushka. It's a fat girl.

It's not for a second. It was named after Tolstoy, but you know, okay, that was a word. Lev Tolstoy literally means Lev fat. Oh, yes. Oh, boy. Oh, man. My fat was good back then. That is true.

That was. This is actually quite thin, though. I'm not sure why they called it Tolstushka. Maybe it's just like because it's very heavy. Like it's a large torpedo, but like it's not a wide one. It's because the other ones are much thinner. They were like pencils, you know, which the Russians used instead of ballpoint pens. Yeah.

That's right. So in Kursk's full torpedo room, right at the front of the submarine, the guys, the boys, the bratva, the lads are loading the dummy torpedo. And when we say dummy torpedo, what we mean is it's it's like a regular torpedo. It just doesn't have an explosive warhead on the front. What we mean is it's completely normal. We use it to figure out where wells are. It's just it's a big rocket full of fucking explosives, man.

They're going to fire out of the submarine and like they're not firing at this warship. The warship is Piotr Veliky, by the way, but not really great. Yeah. And so, OK, so this is an absurdly dangerous thing. Nobody knows what they're doing is absurdly dangerous. The torpedo room has this like specially reinforced bulkhead. So if the room blows up, it doesn't take the rest of the boat with it. And these guys, they leave the hatch cracked, I guess, to like yell at each other or something.

Let me get this straight here. They have a dummy torpedo. Right, which they are going to fire at a warship. Yeah. Is this warship like empty or are there people on it? No, no, no. They're not going to hit it with it. At least they're not hoping to.

They're hoping to like fire it like under it. We're going to fire it. We're going to fire it under it. That's cause we're concerned. We hope we miss. Given how drunk we are, we are likely to miss. I mean, the good news is, right? They're far enough away that like by the time it gets there,

it's burned off enough of this, this fucking peroxide that hopefully what happens is just donks into the hole and it's fine. But anyway, well, let's hope their bilge bumps are in order. So these guys, they're leaving the hatch cracked. They're in order on different ship because they sold them for money. For cigarettes. They're working. It's fine though.

They've got a set of instructions that they're working off of. And in my head, this has like the IKEA, like frustrated man diagram with the phone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I should also point out in a classic move, these instructions are the wrong instructions and they get several key bits wrong. Incredible.

They're like missing some bits. Yeah. Pretty much. They also like a bunch of the electrical contacts don't work. So they keep, they keep having to like dive into circuit boards and stuff and like physically clean the contacts off, which is fucking great. Fantastic. Yeah.

Oh, that sounds like a fun note. That's great. And now between playing Counter Strike, whichever team they are doing. Yeah. That's right. It's just a LAN party in there with an associated torpedo. That's why they've cracked the hatch. Just screaming about lag 2,000 meters under the water.

Just screams of Suka Blast. The entire submarine. Yeah. Absolutely. Hundreds of voices joined in one chorus of Suka Blast. Suka Blast. Suka Blast. That's right.

I mean, nobody actually knows what happens next, which is unfortunate, right? Like the most probable thing, and this is what the Russian Navy thinks happened is that like they had a bad weld in the torpedo, like fucking Vitaly and Tom's who was welding this thing got slightly distracted for a second and he fucked up. But it could have been that they did the wrong thing. I saw some big naturals. It could have been that they just like did the wrong thing in the room. I was like, could have just fucking dropped this thing.

It's a big torpedo. Right. Suka Blast. Suka Blast. At 11.29am and 34 seconds. Oh boy, when Alan says a date, you know something's about to happen. Okay, fine. Let me put it this way.

At 11.29am and 33 seconds, everything is fine. At 11.29am and 35 seconds, there is no front torpedo. Shit. That's got to stop. Next slide, please. So this is the Kursk, right? We've got a nice castaway drawing. It's in relatively shallow water, so it.

Russians say he for ships, I think, not she, so I'm splitting the difference. Yes. It's it. Yeah. Well hang on. No, I think it would be she because it's like it's Podvodnaya Lodka, so it's feminine. Oh, okay. I think she.

Well, she. Under underwater boats. Did you just assume a boat's gender? If you identify as a submarine, that means you identify as she. Ship would be here. Yeah. Because the ship would be. So Z here hits the seafloor pretty quickly and 135 seconds after the first

explosion, all of the other torpedoes that you can see the little green pencils on the right there. All of those explode to out of sympathy with their fat sister. Torpedo was a suicide torpedo. Pretty much. Yeah, we can now John Madden this right if you draw a line down from like the back of the sail, the conning tower thing. Is that here?

Yeah, like right there. Yeah. Everybody forward of that line is now marinara. So somebody. That's not good. Somebody worked out that they sustained like even the guys at the back there sustained a force of about 50 G's. They found one guy's remains physically embedded in the ceiling like a cartoon, which that's

just crazy. That's a seed for the Avengers. And that is a way that lots of Russian guys die. Yeah. And usually not doing anything quite as adventurous as being on a submarine. Usually just from like, I was trying to make my own alcohol and it's a genuine, there's a genuine like really restrictive planning rule in Moscow that you're not allowed to knock out any walls in your apartment, even non-supporting ones.

Because in the 90s, so many guys were like, I do renovations and just knocked out a supporting wall in their life for apartment and brought down an entire tower. Basically, the same thing happens here. Like all of these like bulkheads in between things, those just fucking collapse, right? You may notice all of the stuff that like in front of that red line, that's all the important stuff, like, you know, all the stuff that controls the submarine. The captain lives there. Yeah.

No, not good. Anyway, all those guys dead immediately to the, to the left of that line. Cafeteria too, it looks like. Yep. Gone. Oh, shit. Where are we going to put all this murder sauce? All that marinara sauce and nowhere to eat it.

Same joke, baby. So over to the left, that sort of little yellow thing. That's the reactor. Are you ready for some good news? Always. Okay. It's not broken. The reactor shuts down completely safely.

Like instantly. You clear power, folks. It fucking rules. Turns out you can just explode everyone around it. And this thing is just like, yep, going to flood myself with seawater. And it's fine. It's absolutely fine. There are like no radiation emissions from the submarine at any point, which.

It's pretty cool to me. The ones that have parked at the dock. Yeah, pretty much. It's genuinely, it is safer to blow up a nuclear reactor on a submarine than it is to just leave it. The bad news is that everybody else in this back half of the boat, which is like engineering, mostly the engine room, all that stuff. They're fine.

You got like Jordy LaForge back. Yeah. Yeah. They're fine. Fine. Oh, they're physically like, I mean, some of them might be injured, but by and large, they're okay, which is a bad place. They're vibing.

They're vibing. And you don't want to be, you don't want to be vibing. You want to be, this is one of those places where you want to get killed in the first thing quickly, right? Because like, otherwise you're in, you're in for a time because right now you're fine. And by fine, I mean like, sort of knee deep in freezing oily water. But like, you're not like, you're not. Which first of all, DM me.

But like you're not, you're not marinara, right? So you're fine. Also, I would like you. You're marinating. Yeah. I would also like you just into, to John Madden. You see that little orange and white donut? The lifesaver here.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Literally a lifesaver. What this is, right? This is a rescue boy. You say, do you say buoy for boy? A buoy.

A buoy. A buoy. A buoy. There's a little nothing. You could have gone. What is up with that? Not aware there was a no. Did you get that with the fucking buoy?

Yeah. We strapped it on top of your powder crab. Shut up. There's a big, there's that with I was the other thing we put down as well as the flag was a buoy that said no wake zone on it. Yes, you go slur on the moon. So what this thing does, right? And a very visible orange buoy to the surface on a tether.

And so everybody then knows, oh, hey, there's a submarine that's had an oopsie and it's directly down on this tether from where this is so we can go and find it. Good news. Somebody has welded this shut to stop it from doing that. Jesus Christ, Russia. Wow. Apparently the reason why, the reason why, because like other submarines had done this too, is that like, if you're trying to be stealthy and do submarine stuff and this is

too sensitive, it kind of blows your vibe. If you just have an enormous, highly visible rescue marker, just shoes off upwards when you're trying to be stealthy. The commander of the enemy fleet is like, oh shit, here come that buoy. And so like what you got to do is you just send a guy back and you just like, they get as well that down. So they do. Now we got to talk about the guys.

Vitaly did a good job on that one. Yeah. This one he can weld. Maybe next time. Yeah. Spend a little bit more time on the fucking torpedoes, mate. Next slide, please. And we're going to talk about the guys who are fine.

This is Captain Lieutenant Dmitry Kolesnikov, who is now very young, but like in his career, but you know, happily for him, good news, he's been promoted many times over. He gets to command his own nuclear submarine now because he's the senior ranking officer. Yeah. He does look 12. Yeah. Because he basically is. I forget how old he is, but like it's not very.

And like, This is a bit like how all these kids in Russia are like, when they're 13, their dad is like, why don't you learn to drive? And then like 16, they're like, have you ever tried a nuclear submarine? No, why not? I bought one of a guy. Come on down to Harvard. Then you come back to school.

I exchanged it for Pepsi. So Kolesnikov, he takes charge of like the survivors of whom there are quite a few and he writes this note, which is on the right here. And it's like, you know, he's not too stressed about it. Like obviously something's gone very wrong, but they're on exercise, right? Everybody knows where they are. They're right outside of moments, right? They're in pretty shallow water.

You just stay where you are, try and like not panic too much and wait for rescue, which should come quickly. Oh, it's going to be like Greb fell, isn't it? Oh, this is actually, this is actually a sad ass note. Yeah. Do you want to press see this note for us? I mean, it's hard. Well, it's hard to like exactly read because the handwriting is kind of fucked up, but

it's just like telling people who loves them and saying that it's quite difficult to write because of something. Not great. Meanwhile, on the surface. Yeah. Next slide, please. Yeah. This was actually the only Russian naval ship with an onboard rugby pick.

I like how much it's healing over to one side. That's a good sign to me. I was about to say how heavy is this thing? Oh, I mean, the problem is it's a fat bitch on one side. The problem is it's right. It's a really rough sea. Right. And there's it's fine.

They have a submarine rescue vehicle, which is a converted lumber tender. And on this. Okay. And on this, they have two of these sort of orange and white things you see here, which is submarine rescue vehicle. It's a little tiny submarine. It goes down. It couples onto the submarine.

You get all the people who need rescuing into the little submarine. Little submarine comes back up. Yeah. It's a Wes Anderson ass device. Yeah. And so they put the first one in the water and it's so fucking choppy that it collides with the side of the boat and just cripples itself. Okay.

That's not great. Not ideal. It's fine. We brought two. So we launched. Thank God. We launched the second one. Second one immediately cripples itself likewise.

And so now you, you just have a bunch of very stressed Russian guys trying to cannibalize the parts off of one of these to make the other one work. I, I'm kind of like maybe you should. Maybe these, maybe these cranes should move further off the side of the boat. Like this is a little bit more delicate than a log, which is designed to lift on the boat. Like, I will say this, right? The Soviet, the Soviet Navy had two full size, like proper nuclear submarines designed exclusively for rescuing other submarines.

And both of them are in dry dock in St. Petersburg. Cause that's too expensive to run them. Jesus Christ. Oh my God. Now, I mean, I should also point out the initial response is like the ship, Piotr Veliky, that was, that was going to be torpedoed, heard this thing explode through the hole and they, they put in this report and they're just like, Hey, we think a submarine might've kind of fucking exploded.

And the Russian Navy brass were like, Oh yeah, cool. Okay. Whatever. Just kind of forget it. Sounds like dude's rock to me. Congratulations on winning the sea trials or exercise. Yeah. So like it takes them hours to even do this rescue response.

And when it's obvious that's not working, these offers of like rescue aid from the UK and Norway, because I should point out the reason why is because both the UK and the US are obviously spying on this exercise and have a bunch of their own submarines nearby just hanging out chilling and just, they watch one of them fucking explode. Gee, I hope they don't accidentally torpedo us. Yeah. Like spying on, like spying on that exercise just, it feels like kind of just clowning on them at that point.

Watching a guy like backflip into his own dick. Yeah. No. So like a bunch of British naval officers taking a break from numsing. Right. Let's watch this fucking balls out. And of course the Russian Navy is just like, yeah, no, we're not going to, we're not going to accept foreign aid.

We don't need it. We got these guys. We're pretty sure they can make it work. We've got these two crippled submarines. We've got two broken. We've got a submarine, which is broken and a submarine repair kit, which is also broken. We're pretty sure we can make this work. Putin.

Prevented Vitaly from drinking for three hours. We reckon he's got this. Putin is still in fucking Sochi and he's on TV barbecuing. He just wants to grill, for God's sake. Taking a grill. Hell yeah. And like part of the reason why, part of the reason why is that the Navy have told him, don't worry about it.

We're going to, we're going to fix it. You don't need to do anything. You need to cancel your, your vacation. Right. Um, and they, they don't have it under control. Meanwhile, back on land is the real victim here. Well, meanwhile back on land, the families of the crew of the Kursk are like, Hey, what's going on?

How come everybody's acting like you've got a, a submarine that's lost and nobody's talking to us. And you're being really weird. And what they get told is don't worry about it. It's fine. Oh hell yeah. See what happened was. What happened was.

Uh-huh. And they're just kind of. Kursk is completely fine. May I see it? No. The commander of the Northern fleet is, is like, he tells them, Hey, don't worry about it. The headquarters building is half empty and all the guys there, they're just wasting

time. Meanwhile, they're fucking working around the clock trying to get these submarines to work and they don't. And meanwhile, down on the Kursk, the emergency lights go out as they run out of power. And we know this because like, I, I fucked up because I don't read Russian. I barely know the alphabet, but like the note that I posted from Kolesnikov on the last slide, that was supposed to be the first one that he wrote. That's a, I guess the second where he's like, you can barely read it because he says, yeah,

I'm writing by feel because there's no light. Which is compounded by the fact that Russian cursive is illegible when it's written well. Also true. Oh man, it's so fucking bad. I got this note here. It says. Yeah. Russian cursive sometimes makes Arabic cursive look well defined.

God. I learned it in college and then forgot it. But I don't know if I ever really learned it. I mean, the classic is the Russian cursive for Chinchilla, which is just like a whole series of lines over and over and over and over and over again. Yes. Justin, I'm going to give you the next slide because it's all chem time. This is my perfect Russian curved cursive or something.

That's right. That's gorgeous for us. Oh, nice. Look at this guy. It's some balls. Right. This is, this is important. All right.

So now we got to talk about a chemical called potassium superoxide. Okay. That's cool. That means it's good. Yeah. Yeah. Super. Right.

So what's a superoxide? A superoxide is a chemical which contains the O2 minus ion. Right. Oxygen is like an oxygen molecule, but it's got an extra electron that makes it extra reactive. It's not very stable usually. You know, it tends to want to react and become oxygen, right? An oxygen molecule, which is O2.

It wants to get the hell rid of that extra electron. It doesn't like it. So if you add potassium to this, you have potassium superoxide, which is stable most of the time, right? This is sort of a, I guess you would call it the crystal structure, because just one of these guys with the two oxygens and the potassium are in a super, potassium superoxide. So anyway, this is a stable chemical in dry air, right? But it reacts very readily with water or even just moist air, right?

So you get two. I can't see that being a problem. Yeah. Oh, it's a good thing. I will explain because two potassium superoxides plus two H2O's gives you two KOH plus two H2O2 plus O2 gives you oxygen, right? So it's good because it produces a bunch of oxygen in this reaction. And as such, it comes in a canister and you can use this as an emergency oxygen generator,

right? Ah. Okay. So this is one thing. This is the good part. Now, the bad part is, in addition to the oxygen, this produces KOH, you know, potassium, I think that's hydroxide, yeah. Also known as caustic potash.

It's the same stuff that leaks out of like an old alkaline battery, right? Yeah. As long as you don't touch that, you're fine, right? Yeah. Here's the ugly part. This reaction also produces H2O2, hydrogen peroxide. Also known. Also called frosted tips.

Yeah, exactly. We're right back where we started with the frosted tips. The same, it's not in a huge quantity, but it is high-test peroxide at that point. The same stuff that went in the torpedo, the same stuff that caused this problem in the first place. How? Yes. So anyway, they break out their emergency oxygen canisters.

Yeah, which we have on the next slide. These guys. Those are some deeply Russian-looking containers. Oh, yeah. It's an IP5 rebreather canister. Literally, you just pull the tab off the top and in wet air or any amount of water, it just reacts oxygen. And it's fine.

You get a decent amount of oxygen out of these for a lot of people, but in order to change these out, a guy has to go and get these out of a storage rack and they have to hand them to each other hand-to-hand in the dark, in freezing, oily water, exhausted. Yeah. Which is fine, until one of them drops one in the freezing, oily water in the water that's now producing hydrogen peroxide, horrible flash fire is what happens. So they solve the freezing problem. Yeah, you're no longer freezing.

The good news is the lighting problem has solved two of our problems at once by sessing himself on fire. Let us look on the positive side. It's not only Mr. Putin who is barbecuing. Would anyone care to join me in a grill? I mean, you lost your legs. This is so, like, so, like, powerfully Russian, like the top bras are, like, boning down there. So, I mean, this is why I say that the guys in the back survive too much, right?

Because, like, some of them survive too much even after this, because some of them being, you know, practically minded people and experienced submariners, there's a fire. What do you do? You dive under the water and that's fine. They survive the fire and then they get back out out of the out of the out of the water and there's no oxygen. They suffocate to death. Very grim, right?

Like, to one of those things where you want to get killed quickly, how long did they survive like this? Well, probably somewhere between six hours and three days, just in the dark waiting for a Russian Navy that isn't going to do shit to do shit, waiting for Vitaly to fix the fucking submarine that he's broken with the other submarine. That was the range they found on when people's watches stopped, I'm sure. Yeah, which, again, probably on, like, two watches. Yeah.

It's very like, it's very interesting that the Russians didn't like accept because it wasn't the reason the Russians gave for not accepting a rescue that they were like concerned about like military secrets. And was the military secret concerned that, yo, our shit is fucked up. Like, you know, fucking British naval crew is going to get in there and be like, look at this technology like, no, they're going to be like, look at this technology. They figured out how to use thicker gauges of steel. Yeah, like technology military secrets that are of the value of one twentieth of Pepsi

distribution rights. Oh, yeah. Simplify and add weight. All right. But they do finally accept international rescue aid. Next slide, please. They get the Brits in and they get these guys, the Norwegians in. I like how the Norwegians just show up to half of our disasters.

Like at some point, they're just because you don't get enough. Yeah, you don't get enough cold water. You have made something of a mess. Would you perhaps be in need of some help from a very well run country? Yes, Pearson over here who is like, does not get enough experience of cold water diving at his job. Cold water diving 365 days a year wants to do some hobby, which is like living on a house next to an ice.

Exactly. He wants to get some more recreational saturation diving in. And so he's got to he's got to like his pet reindeer with him. Yeah, they are. Fjord Fjordersen. Yes. Next to him on the right here. And they fucking go down into this like absolutely black sea.

You can see them here. They're working on the hatch to get into the escape trunk. The Russians had told them repeatedly and in very strong terms. You have to open this hatch counterclockwise. It's a very delicate piece of machinery. If you if you don't open this counterclockwise, you're going to break the hatch and you're not going to be able to get in. And they try this for several days until eventually out of Norwegian desperation, they try it

clockwise and it works. A man who gets the words clockwise and counterclockwise mixed up continuously throughout his life. I'm not very good at left or right. And I guess the entire Russian Navy is not good at clockwise or counterclockwise. It's righty righty loosey, right? Oh, my God. That's delicate. Why is this hatch so delicate?

It's the hatch for a submarine. Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's the hatch for a submarine. You must be very careful with screen door. We believe it may already have been damaged by huge explosion. The worst part is right. The Norwegians, they do all of this shit.

They get the thing open. They come back to the top and they're like, well, there's your submarine. And the Russians are like, great. Fuck off. We're not going to let you in the submarine because you're going to steal our secret Pepsi documents. They have to send Russian diving deep in Pepsi. That's right.

They have to send Russian divers in to get all of the classified documents and like radios and shit out of there before they let anybody else in to get the bodies out. I'm just like, okay. Conspiracy time. I'm not usually like conspiracy guy, but like. The Russian diver has to go down there and execute all the survivors with a Makarov. No, I figured they were getting that part out of the way by just locking them in there for three days for no reason.

Oh, God. Okay. They knew it was clockwise the whole time. Oh, shit. No, I'm on board with that. I'm on board with that. Cursed truth is although there are like, there are cursed truth is in Russia. Like because of the government line being like, nothing is wrong.

And then like, well, something is wrong, but it's not bad to then sort of something is wrong and it's bad, but it's not our fault. A lot of people thought that it was like, oh, they must have collided with a NATO submarine or something. And it's like, no, they fucked up the fat girl is what they did. But like NATO submarines know where they're going. They just didn't want Western divers going in there and seeing how fucked their shit was.

Yeah. Also the fact that they like had a, didn't they have a swimming pool in the submarine? Well, eventually. Wait, what? Pretty sure. I'm pretty sure. I'm not a good swimmer. This class of submarine, if I recall correctly, had a gymnasium with a swimming pool in it.

I know it had a gymnasium. I don't know if they had a swimming pool in the gymnasium, but if they did that rules. So yeah. Well, you know, when they found the Kursk, the swimming pool was still full. It's resilient technology. In my opinion, this is what happens when you name a submarine after a town like Kursk. What's up with Kursk? What is in Kursk?

Oh man. Kursk is genuinely, and this is just a coincidence, my least favorite town in all of Russia. They call it the city of the seven prisons because under the sun there were seven prisons that were built in the general vicinity of Kursk and back in those days, like it's basically like Russian Australia because people got sent there to jail and there was no public transport. So people just kind of stayed there when they got out of jail. Submarine.

Exactly. Yeah. So when you go to Kursk now, it is just full of like the roughest, like most like motherfuckers in the entire country. Like everyone has a huge watch and like a rusting G-wagon. We used to go there and do gigs. This genuinely happened. I was there at a gig with a guy, like another TV comedian.

He goes out on stage and he starts like telling, telling some joke, whatever. And some guys who are sat in the front, just like guys, like forearms the width of your head, like these kind of motherfuckers. And they just go like, yeah, it's boring. Tell something else. And he's just like, okay. That's what gigging in Kursk is like. Hell yeah.

Good lord. All right. Now we're going to talk about some rare putans. There's some rare putans on the screen. We got some rare putans here. You have to pay us extra for these putans. Right. Yeah.

They gave her an injection. She was like, okay. So essentially like after days and days of lying, right? In the most obvious and cynical way, Putin finally cancels his vacation and he chairs this six hour long meeting with the families. And one journalist who was there said that they felt like they were going to tear him apart with their hands. Right.

Like it was probably the most public anger he'd ever been exposed to from that day to this. And this woman got forcibly sedated. Like she was screaming at him, not unreasonably. And this woman as you see just fucking jab so with a syringe like hitman and just like ushers her offstage. This woman's frosted all of her motherfucking tits. Siphoning off some of that peroxide.

We have something in common, you and I. I'm very intrigued by this photo down on the right where it seems like Putin is meeting Theresa May and Vitaly the welder. Yes. Thank you for your service in the welding industry. Also Putin's seven foot tall bodyguards. There could not be a man who looks more like, yeah, like a drunk guy who can't weld that guy.

He's wearing a suit jacket, a polo shirt and a camouflage cap. What is that? What is that? It's a pocket square. That's what he does have. I do kind of want like two, like nine foot tall FSB agents just following me around. I like that. I think that's cool.

Oh, they would be. They would be FSO. Oh, right. The Russian Secret Service. Oh, would you like to hear a great story about the Russian Secret Service? Yes. Yes. This story concerns the Russian Secret Service, Vladimir Putin and the Queen of England.

So strap in. Yeah, there's a guy I know from like Russian comedy called Ivana Bramov, who's quite a famous like kind of TV comedian out there. And one day he is emceeing this like huge gala variety show in Moscow. And there's like, you know, like 400 people in a packed theater and Putin is supposed to be the guest of honor. And Putin is like an hour and a half late at this point. And so these people have been waiting for a show to start for like over an hour and a

half. And he's like losing his mind. So eventually he goes up to one of the FSB guys, like the Secret Service guys, and he's like, look, can you give me some idea when we can expect Putin to arrive? Because like, there's like 400 people out there who are losing their fucking minds about this. And then he's like, like, go and tell you this information. And he's like, no, like fucking level with me here.

I understand you're not supposed to tell me, but can you give me like a ballpark of when he might show up so I can do something about this? And he's like, no, no, it is you who does not understand. I have no idea when he will arrive. And then he says, once the Queen of England waited for him for six hours. And then what he said precisely in Russian is Anna Achuil, which for the non Russian speakers is like selling along the lines of like, she lost her fucking rag. Imagine the Queen losing her shit at Putin is so good.

Yeah. Yeah. Just being absolutely fucking hell. Yeah. So Putin's cool. And I mean, if you wanted to do like the sort of Natsik-Wank thing, you could probably make the case that like a lot of Putin's more repressive instincts, a lot of his more like great power, sort of muscular foreign policy stuff has been absolute terror of the time

when he like went to this meeting and a bunch of like Russian Navy now widows like shouted at him for six hours. Yeah. The scariest people on earth, Russian mountains. That's right. Like it's still a sore point for him. He went on Larry King like a year afterwards and Larry King asked him, you know, RIP, by the way, what happened with the Kursk.

And he said in Russian, he said it sank like that's the whole fucking up. Yeah, I suppose. Yes. Yeah, it's like it was not wrong, but it's pretty fucking cut to say it like that. You know, it's like maybe Putin just derives all of his power from non-punctuality. Maybe he's just he's just late for everything and everyone assumes they're being snubbed by him and respects him more. He's just gaming.

Actually, actually, yes. So actually, he's just late for everything because he doesn't. He doesn't understand time. Six hours late to see the Queen. Putin turns up like hands covered in barbecue sauce. He bought one watch in 1986. He still believes that it's accurate. He's lost.

It's lost six hours of time. Oh, God. And I mean, like everyone's afraid to question his timekeeping. I still think my favorite Putin thing is the like stealing the guy's Super Bowl ring just as a flex. Oh, fuck. Yeah. And I mean, also stealing the election and making Orange Man president, too.

Of course. Yeah. I mean, they seem to be unable to make their most basic naval technology work. But 20 years later, they were controlling the entire American political system. How do you choke away the Cold War 25 years after you want it, man? It's no, it's incredible. It's incredible how capitalism really revitalized Russia. Yeah, for a second, we thought she wasn't coming back, but there she was. Maybe.

I get the next slide. This is a thing that people don't understand about Russia is that, like, all of their international affairs moves are just trolling. Yeah, it's so much easier to understand Russia once you understand that, like, in any single, like, international move they make can be followed with, like, a winky face emoji. Yeah, I'm so random. I can't believe I just did that after poisoning a dissident.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like when the European Union fucked up their vaccine orders and then Russia was like, we will sell you some vaccine. And it's like, you can just see them winking behind that. Dang joke. Would you like to buy our vaccine, like, blinking with both eyes? Almost no cyanide. So, like, we give it to this woman from Kursk.

That's right. She calls it a beautiful sleep. We chase this engineering disaster with an engineering success, which is the contractor Mamut raises the Kursk, like they literally tie a bunch of cables to it and lift it under a ship and they bring it back to port. And wherefore, we get these photos of this, like, newly exploded submarine. Yes. Like, I believe they had to, like, write some very complicated software

to, like, compensate for the movement of the fucking barren sea so that the cables wouldn't snap. Oh, it's very cool. It's a sawn off submarine. Yeah, it's a submarine. It's that's illegal in the United States, actually, highly illegal. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

This was also a bit we did on the stream the other day, but how? Because they have the the most in Nagant, but he has, which is like the sawn off most in Nagant. But this prompted me to realize that Arbarez is also the Russian word for circumcised. I'm using a circumcised shotgun. And the next and last slide. I brought it in under time. I should do the notes more often.

And it's about to say. So, I mean, like the human cost of all of this immeasurable, same as everything we do is a young crew. Even by Navy standards, you can see they all look about six. Yeah, fucking when the commander of the Northern Fleet actually finally told them, like, yeah, no, the submarine's gone. He took off his hat and he said, forgive me for not bringing home your boys. Like, I don't know if any of them did.

I don't know if I would. Your booze. Your booze. They took the the conning tower off the sale. That's a memorial now. You can see it in the park. Luckily, no disasters have ever happened in Russian naval history since then. Oh, like, of course not. That's about to say.

Russia is the watchword for Russia. I think when I think Russia, I think safety. Absolutely. Ever since this, I was briefly before Christmas, like, kind of slightly dating this Russian girl in London, whose dad had been a Russian submarine officer. And every single story she told me about his days as a submarine officer basically involved them all almost dying in completely peacetime conditions because something had gone wrong with the submarine.

Oh, my God. It's almost like when he was like the most junior officer on the ship, like when he basically just come out of the Naval College, one day he like woke up on the submarine and realized that he'd passed out and he realized that everyone else was passed out apart from him because there was like carbon monoxide like leaking into the fucking hull somehow from something, something had gone wrong. Oh, boy. And so everyone like he managed to like wake everyone up

and like surface the submarine. So, yeah, safety, safety. Yes, it's very my favorite guy who has a good carbon monoxide tolerance. It's what they recruit them for. This is my faith. My my favorite post curse Russian Naval disaster is the one that just happened a couple of years ago. We're an experimental submarine fucking blew itself up doing God knows what.

Nobody knows the Russians weren't talking. And like the the casualty list that they were released was fucking wild because they were all officers and they were all like pretty senior officers, too. Like it was like three fucking admirals were down in this one submarine doing some fucking like, I don't know, making the voting machines vote gay or something. And like we're making the Russian version of Salo. Yeah. And they just fucking blew itself up. So, yeah, at some point, we're going to find out something about that maybe at some point.

Hmm. Yeah, this was it. This was these were the notes that I had for this. Does anyone have any when the Ukrainians blow up my submarine full of officers? Anybody have any closing thoughts, questions, comments, concerns? You know, it could have been the natural enemy of submarines. Wales. No. Rebellion.

No. Blue meanies. Oh, yes. Blue meanies. Wait, what's that? Damn, it's. Oh, shit. Yellow submarine. You live in Britain. That's where the Beatles are from.

About blue meanies in the movie. They're they hate music. They were the Yellow Submarine movie. Yellow Submarine movie. I don't want to be on this podcast. I've seen the movie. Great. And no one's ever watched the movie. The next episode is the Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster.

No, because we have a segment on this podcast. God, the Tacoma Narrows bridge is looking fucking great there. This is the one from last week that we didn't get around to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which I think we've got time. Miley, you got another like 10, 15. I got I got time. Yes. Absolutely. It's all right. Do the draft. Love to talk about baking devices.

Oh, shit. What the fuck? Where's the drop? Where's the drop? Where's the drop? Anyway, this is the torpedo draw from the course. Shake hands with danger. Good morning, afternoon, evening and or night. I have a story that ends with OSHA being entirely unhelpful and with me picking up the process of petitioning them for a new policy after having forgotten about it for a couple of years.

Cool. Allow me. Allow me to set the stage. I'm working at an Ohio based pizza chain which people often mix up with Domino's when they decide to call to order. For those who have not worked in pizza before, you typically have a couple or so big ovens in the middle of the kitchen with a hood vent over it to suck up grease particles in the air along with any gases you shouldn't breathe. They should put that in the summer.

Yeah, I should throw the grilling. After all, these ovens are powered by burning natural gas. Carbon monoxide is a byproduct of this gas, right? No, that colorless, odorless gas that couldn't possibly harm anyone. That's right. It's just a nice thing. You get a good nap on the subway. You get a good nap, yeah.

Microdosing carbon monoxide to get a better night's sleep. Here I am, working closing shift as I often do it as perpetually understaffed hell hole. Starting around 10 30 p.m. half an hour till close, the closing manager starts complaining about a headache. Mm hmm. I say that sucks, at least for closing soon. About 10 minutes later, I also started getting a headache.

I tell her when that happens and then one of the two closing delivery drivers that night, who is out on delivery when the manager complained about her headache said, wait, you're both getting headaches. I've had a headache since and like an hour ago. And that's when we realize, OK, there's a problem here. Yeah, so there's women nagging us all the time. That's when they went on reddit.com. The hood vent the previous week operated very weakly for a couple of days,

but got fixed. We checked to make sure it's giving the kitchen the good suck still. And to our surprise, it is. Oh, wait. Good. This break. That's when we realize there's a big problem. Big is in italics.

So, you know, it's big. The one driver goes out on another delivery and returns with a carbon monoxide detector he had at its own at his own home. Thank God for this guy. When he turns it on, it reads 30 parts per million. For a reference, the ocean maximum limit in a closed environment is 35 parts per million. That's fine.

Oh, yeah, that's fine. That's OK, right? We call the general manager for directions and he told us to close, saying he would get someone to look at the oven in the morning to fix the issue. We opened the front and back doors and he brought us box fans to aerate the place, which helped a little bit. The problem is, since we couldn't detect anything above the ocean limit, there really wasn't anything we could do without risking getting fired.

The following day, I came in for another evening shift. Butch to my disgruntlement, the doors are still open with box fans aerating the building. The mechanic had been scheduled to come the next day to fix the problem. In the meantime, the carbon monoxide detector still read 33 parts per million, still within ocean limits, but just barely. But whatever, at least it's not busy right now. But about an hour later, business picked up.

It became steady. Everyone in order to pick up comes in at least once about. Everyone in order to pick up comes in about all at once, about 20 to 25 minutes later, making us dedicate two staff members to catch registers. Right. Sorry, was this written while still under the influence of carbon monoxide? Yeah, I was going to help with that. Then at that moment, literally every phone line fills up at once from people calling in.

So I switched on the second oven. Hither to unactivated because it wasn't busy enough to justify it at the moment, right? And immediately the CO detector spiked up to 50, then 120, then 230 parts per million in about 10 seconds. Jesus, holy shit. So yeah, that doesn't sound good. We shut off the ovens and told everyone calmly to exit the building as there is a dangerous carbon monoxide leak. Two of the eight customers in the store at this time fight us about how they

haven't received their food yet. No, I want you, all of you and myself to die so that I can get my food. Yeah, that's right. I came here for a donor and I'm not leaving without a donor. We tell them to exit the store and complain to corporate because we are exiting the building. We call the fire department and explain the situation. They arrive about 10 minutes later along with a general manager. The fire department finds the source of the CO and slaps it with a big tag,

reading basically, fuck you, you're not using this again until it passes our paid inspection in the future. Cool. I love neoliberalism. The GM talks them out of it on the condition that someone will come in that same day to fix it and it will not be used until thereafter. Then he yelled at us for turning on the second oven, which was not supposed to be turned on. Apparently, he knew the second oven was more broken than the first. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. I love the hierarchy of brokenness. We tell him to fuck off because not only did he not tell any one of us working that evening, but he also didn't think to leave a note saying something like, don't use like he normally would do when something is inoperable, like when we need a new chain or something. It's not inoperable. It's just deadly.

Lethal. Lethal. It's operable. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's just operable in a Sylvia Plath Swens. Yeah, it's operable once. The oven itself is operable. It will just render the people operating it inoperable.

Well, the label on the oven was confusing because it said, do not touch Willy. The instructions are clear. Touched Willy. Yeah. I reported this whole situation to OSHA. How we were made to work despite the high level of CO and the fact there was no CO detector. The next day, I got a call from the local OSHA office saying, hey, yeah, we can't really do anything about this because they didn't make you work while CO was past our limit.

This is a recurring theme, right? The only times when it's justified to call the cops or snitch on somebody are the exact same times. It's a circle. The exact same times when the cops will be like, yeah, we can't do anything. You can't do anything about that one. No. Does it sound like you're being murdered right now? Oh, well, you know, if they rob you again, make sure that guy was 20 minutes in advance.

Yeah. But if you could give us actually a couple of days lead, that would be great. Yeah. And CO detectors are not required in restaurants. What? Which is fucking wild. What? Right.

Yeah, I know, right? Because I'm thinking like, OK, what's in our kitchen? CO machines. Lots of stuff on fire all the time. So anyway, very cool knowing that you can be in a closed building with commercial ovens, which are literally CO machines. And the company doesn't even have to shell out $10 for a detector. So basically OSHA has no teeth when it comes to CO, which is something it could literally fix on its own without Congress's involvement. I am now working on a petition to tell them to add CO detectors that are listed required restaurant equipment, as they do have a department designated to receive petitions from people outside the agency.

I highly doubt it'll go anywhere. And if it does, it'll take longer than it should. But it still pisses me off to this day that closed spaces burning tons of natural gas are allowed to operate without a detector for this. Once again, colorless and odorless gas. I mean, you know what my answer is at all times to anything? Wildcat strike. Yes. Well, you need to organize a lot of restaurants to do that.

Oh, yeah. I hate working in the Russian naval bakery. Where safety is our primary concern. It is our primary concern because it is very bad. Very bad. Fixing it. Shut up. Like what I'm saying is it's likely you will die.

If you don't die. Bonus. Plus easy access to a swimming pool. Yes. Well, another emotionally devastating episode and a fine safety third. Fine safety third. Yes. It's always like I like getting in safety thirds from like fast food restaurants.

Oh, yeah. That's like the stuff that that's like the stuff that micro would say. Oh, no, it's that's completely safe and you should be paid. Builds character. 725 an hour to work there. They're like certainly dangerous. Yeah. Anyway, so that was the episode.

The next episode will be on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. Oh, yeah. Milo. Thanks for coming on. Yes, Milo. Thanks for coming on. Absolutely. You can you can follow me on Twitter at Milo Edwards.

I also have a new a new podcast called Masters of Our Domain where we very, very loosely talk about Seinfeld, but mostly just do riff. Hell yeah. Alice is going to be honest. That's right. Nice. And of course we have a Patreon five bucks a month. You can pay us.

You get a bonus episode. I'm doing the next one. We're going to probably try and have Nate and Francis from hell of a way to die on going to do something military themed. This is the first time I've heard of it, but yes. You asked me if I'm fine. Yes, but we yes, that's the plan. I'm I'm can.

Okay. Yeah. Maybe maybe I'm just having like huge gaps in my memory. Once again. I'm a carbon monoxide detector. Please. Good Lord. Yeah.

Also the Patreon is $2 a month, not five. Oh, whatever. We all have carbon monoxide. Yeah, that's right. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Well, There's Your Problem. The only podcast produced in a carbon monoxide rich environment. Possibly the last episode we put out because we're all going to pass out in like a couple

days. Just never wake up. Yeah. If we do send Norwegians. That's what I was about to say. Yeah. God, imagine you're fucking dying of carbon monoxide poisoning and you see fucking like you're getting some fucking like frying the hatch open.

It's cool. Just know he's going to be going. No, he's going to be smug at you about social democracy and you're just like, oh, fuck off. A guy in full scuba gear entering your bakery and talking to you about a sovereign wealth fund. With his reindeer also in scuba gear. Just like I'm like hallucinating this. Hmm.

You probably wouldn't need to be cascading on the on the carbon monoxide detectors. If you end one percent of all of the word stocks and shares. Just saying that. Maybe invest the oil money next time. Norwegian, Canadian. Going out for a deep thought. They're very close together in a fashion. Well, fuck yeah, but.

I don't know. Minnesota is basically Canada, which is full of Norwegians. All right. And the podcast. All right. God damn it. God damn it. All right.

All right. Okay. We're we're we're finished podcasting.