Episode 180: Times Beach

And we have to do a

hoot

point.

That's the word I'm looking for.

Yes, I remember how to podcast.

You take one month off merely because you've been doing an extremely strenuous tour, and also I had to finish my degree.

And all of a sudden, we have an idea how everything works.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, I say finished that.

I think it is still technically possible for me to have fucked up this last like dissertation bit badly enough that I like don't, but you know, inshallah, right?

I get a degree soon.

Yeah, I was about to say, we need to see you with the degree in your hands.

Oh, they don't do the graduation ceremonies till like October, so it's gonna be a minute.

Yeah, I know, it's crazy.

Wow.

So, um, oh,

three, two, one, mark, yeah.

Um, three,

two,

one, mark.

Okay, that sounded crispy.

Yes.

Um, all right, all right, we're here, we're podcasting.

All right,

Sick.

Welcome to, Well, Where's Your Problem?

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides that sometimes we accidentally take a month off from.

Which we've done multiple times.

Yeah, listen, we have a particular kind of work ethic.

And also

the Protestant time.

And also neurodivergent.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I missed you guys, and

I missed the audience as well.

I missed doing this.

Don't tell them that.

No, okay, fine.

I resent all of them deeply, right?

But like, if I had tried to do one of these while I was doing my, like, the end of my dissertation,

my brain would have melted out of my ears live on air.

Like, you think you've seen derangement beforehand?

It's no, it would have been, you know, incomparable.

Absolutely.

Yeah, now we're all here.

We're in a relaxed Zen type state.

A Zen caster type state, one might say.

Exactly.

I'm pre-plugged for the software that we all hate.

Well, I was going to get there.

I was praising it.

It's like when my dad says thank you to the ATM because when the robots rise up, they will remember his kindness and spare him.

Your dad believes in Rocco's basilisk, but for ATMs?

Yeah, yeah.

The singularity is coming.

It's kind of job one.

Let me finish the intro.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi.

I'm Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he, him.

And before we get too far into it, I have a plug, which is to say that my co-worker's grandson needs an accessible van.

We're going to drop the link in the description below.

The hogs are going to buy a van.

Yeah, I mean,

the cop you buy for $3,600 somewhere in the polka nose and then the front.

And you go to Atlantic City and try to steal the president's stuff.

Yeah,

it's a pro-van podcast.

We've been very clear about that.

That's right, baby.

Yeah.

And I just want to thank everyone who came to the tour.

Yeah,

really good.

And if you didn't, fuck you.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Nothing bad happened at any of the shows, I think.

No, it's crazy.

And I mean, we'll be like releasing the

edits of the shows, the recordings,

as we, you know, as those of you who are.

You want a lot of ideas for POTUS episodes?

I have an idea.

I'm just trying to schedule it, right?

Oh, is that

guest?

Yeah, yeah.

We'll talk about it.

We'll talk about it.

But like,

the reason why I'm being so oblique about that is because it sets up the only joke that I've thought of for the subject.

So I don't want to spoil it.

I hardly know.

Thanks to everyone who helped out with us on the tour.

You know, June, Corinne, Scooter.

Who else was there?

Megan, Jay.

Megan, yes, Megan and Jay.

Yeah, obviously Jay, because he's doing the edits.

Yeah.

He sent me an email that said, I'm trusting you to not abuse this power.

I don't know what that could have possibly meant, but buddy, I am going to abuse it.

Wait, what your power?

I think I now have root access to his file server.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

I don't know that I do, but Jay, the unfinished

TF2

mods are coming.

Yeah.

Jay's cut parentheses Liam's version.

I'm downloading a bunch of documents from the War Thunder forums and storing them in here.

Just 3D printed auto-seer files.

Yeah.

All right.

So anyway, what you see on the screen in front of you is a quite pleasant-looking state park.

I see it in the

Merrimack River, which I assume is going to intersect with the Monitor River downstream.

I think it actually might.

You're kidding.

Merrimack is spelled differently when it's the boat, though, I think.

Well, they're spelling all kinds of stuff wrong back in the 19th century.

Well done, yes.

That's true.

I'm going to AP U.S.

history as well as criminology.

Well, that means you don't have to take a class in college.

Anyway, so this pleasant-looking Route 66 state park, it's not supposed to look like this.

What?

What?

It's supposed to be a town.

Oh,

okay.

A town called Times Beach, Missouri.

Yeah, I've read

Greed Anarchists.

Yeah, I've just read Why Hope, The Case Against Civilization.

Yeah, this is what the NIMBYs want.

Eventually demolish every single building.

But before we talk about the fate of Times Beach, Missouri, we have to do the goddamn news.

Hey, Krasner one.

Yeah, fuck you.

Stay out.

I really liked your, I like that.

I really liked your I am a hardened criminal in favor of Larry Krasner's pro-crime policies.

Yes.

Yeah,

that is true.

This guy.

So the big hobby horse right now for a lot of people in the Philadelphia Democratic machine is we're going to try and kick out our progressive prosecutor,

Larry Krasner, who has been pissing off the establishment for a long time.

Yeah, because he does his job.

It's the San Francisco playbook.

It's the same thing they did to Chaser Boudin.

Is that how you pronounce his name?

I hope so.

That sounds about right.

But yeah, it's the same thing of like, oh, we got a prosecutor who's too progressive.

So, you know, the cops and like every other kind of force of evil out there is going to collaborate to try and rap fuck him.

Well, yeah, once the FOP endorses a candidate, I sort of turn the other way.

I do want to point out

in Roz's response to the auto text from

Fuckface.

What was his name?

Dugan?

What's his name?

Was it Dugan?

Either like Shaga or something.

Red Shoes Dugan.

It doesn't matter.

He lost.

Yeah, he lost.

That's exactly the other way.

He capitalized both W's and Wawa.

That's how I know you're not fucking from.

So Wawa camel case?

That's deranged.

Yeah,

that's the fuck shit.

Wawa is not capital A or capital W lowercase A, capital W lowercase A.

It's just W A W A for the one in wildwood yes that one's well okay so that's not you do camel case in wildwood and wawa there just for just for yeah wild

was a trip i was in wildwood last week

place never changes man

my my my note here just says congratulations to a zempic patton oswalt uh gone off that zem And if you think that's a cruel thing for me to be saying about Larry Krasner, I'm also on.

I am Ozempic November Kelly, so it's fine.

I'm allowed.

So I have like epistemic privilege i can say that um there you go there you go so yeah this is uh i mean good for the city i i mean these this seems to be the only place where you know progressives seem to be consistently winning anywhere is das i don't know why well there is there is an addendum to that which is if you if you live in new york city vote many times and illegally for zoran mamdani uh for mayor of new york city because he has a he has a decent shot like against against it's looking looking more promising there.

If I have to hear from Cuomo one more fucking time, I'm going to,

you'll have to bleep this Devin.

I'm

9-11.

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, he's within touching distance of Cuomo, and that's the last distance you want to beat of Cuomo.

I was about to say, I probably want to avoid that.

For more, see our Cuomo episode.

Yeah.

But is Zoran gonna bring home the ZD?

Yeah.

By the way, can someone explain to me, right?

I don't have a dog in this fight, right?

I don't go to your country, but like, can someone explain to me why neither AOC nor Bernie have endorsed that guy yet?

Because he really, it's fucked up that they haven't at this point.

It's,

you know, there could be a lot of reasons.

It could be a timing thing.

Sometimes people like to wait a bit so it's fresh in the minds of everyone.

Sometimes it's like, okay, we need some kind of, you know, someone's got to pull some strings in the background.

You know, there's probably all kinds of internal politicking we're not even aware of.

I mean, I'm sure there's a bunch of like horrible, you know, liberal bullshit.

Liberal bullshit.

You think the AMC is like working tirelessly towards an endorsement?

Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right.

Yeah.

You know what?

The older I get, the more I'm just like, all right, November Kelly is Stalin.

Let's do it.

But voting for voting for November Kelly for Stalin.

I don't, I mean, listen, just put my dad there.

He's whatever.

He's a million.

He's deranged.

He's not a sexual predator.

He's just insane.

Your dad is running for Mao.

Yeah.

I don't think I'd be a good Stalin.

I think I'd be a good, like, one of the guys Stalin shot,

like, who went to his death being like, sure, whatever.

It's all for the revolution.

I'm sure it'll turn out fine.

You know, that's my niche, I think.

My dad's Twitter bio, because he's not allowed to go on Twitter anymore because it raises his blood pressure too much, a real thing that happens.

Oh, I know.

It's just, it starts with unrepentant leftist.

Hell yeah.

I mean, you'd hate to have a repentant leftist, right?

Well, he doesn't give a shit.

He's going out both middle fingers up, I think.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

So, all right.

So, just, yeah, my dad for Mal, whatever, man.

Yeah.

Who cares?

Planets do.

Climate Mal.

Everybody start making solar panels in your backyards.

We're bringing back Lysenkoism, folks.

Yeah.

in other news

the pope is from chicago oh that accent oh

yeah uh the lord said go socks go socks yeah wrong socks though doesn't matter close enough

i yeah i i he's not the guy i would have picked for it but then they don't let me pick the pope either um it turns out so

i i do think that i have i have an inkling right which is that as popes go this is going to be a relatively woke pope I think he's going to be a pretty yeah I think this is going to be a pretty good pope I the thing things are looking good I mean he's continuing a lot of Pope Francis's policies he's going after Opus Day right now which is hilarious

I mean, also, because like

the thing that I want to see from a pope is, and I think why he got this job in the first place, is to yell at American like MAGA conservatives and try to.

That is also the impression I got.

And also, it's like a compromise because, you know, having an American Pope, you know, these sorts of Tradcath guys who want to, you know, create a new kind of Protestantism are kind of like, well, they just want to do prosperity, gospel, bullshit, nonsense, and then dudes paying $40,000 for boot cancer because their dads failed them.

Bullshit.

Yeah.

You ever see a guy get elected for what might be like a 20-year term

purely to write one encyclical that starts, listen up, fuckface?

Yeah.

Well, no, there's also going to be the encyclical on a prohibition on Catholics putting ketchup on hot dogs.

I like ketchup on hot dogs.

Gonna get a real like dogmatic ruling on what shape a pizza should be.

Exactly.

It should be a casserole of some kind for some reason.

No, no.

Maybe it's tavern style.

Yeah.

i like it i like a deep dish you know like you can't really get them here but in principle i like a deep dish i a deep dish is like a once in a while thing you know tavern style is like you can have that a bunch

the other

it's too it's too expensive is the thing like you can't just get it ordered you have to go to a restaurant's too expensive

it's it's it's weird that you get that as an encyclical in english verbatim um the other the other thing about this guy is that he's kind of peruvian right which it means that this is a generational endorsement for the idea that if a white boy is sensitive enough, he can kind of become Latino.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, this is

a big, this is a big leap for Pan-Americanism.

We are going to close the Darien Gap.

The Darien Gap.

We're finally going to put a railroad through the Darien Gap.

Yeah, we're going to do it.

Pope Leo, close the Darien Gap.

I am tired of riding my armored motorbike.

Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's going to be like anything else, right?

Where you see any of the stuff that hews to a kind of basically pastoralist kind of woke Catholicism,

where, you know, you're going to see all of the pro-migrant stuff, which is fully in line with that, or all of the Catholic social teaching stuff, and people are going to be like, and you're telling me this guy's a reactionary.

And then you're going to see all of the anti-abortion and all of the like anti-queer and anti-trans stuff.

And people are going to be be like, so you're telling me this guy's supposed to be a liberal?

It doesn't mean anything.

No, he's the pope.

He's the pope.

Yeah, that's his job now.

The fucked up thing is that he has brothers and

who will like make themselves available to the media because, you know, the church doesn't like sequester you for that anymore.

And he's got like one woker kind of like shitlib brother and he's got one MAGA chud brother.

So you get one brother each for like MSNBC and Fox.

They just go back and forth.

Maybe they teleport.

Who's to say?

Yeah.

I'm excited to hear from both of those guys for the rest of my life.

This is also going to be the guy who's probably, you know, starting to set up Vatican 3, which I think is

tentatively.

Alex, probably still like

15 to 20 years off.

Yeah, let me in the fucking building.

Also, when I said in my life, I really hope I live longer than that, but you know, if I don't outlive the Pope's MAGA brother, then you know,

yeah, do do

uh,

Holy Father.

I assume you listen to the podcast.

Uh, you speak English better than any of the previous ones.

The last Pope who spoke English spoke Middle English, so like

I assume you listen to the podcast.

Can you just fucking like chill?

Yeah, we gotta, we gotta start uh more aggressively steering the tiller towards it's okay to be gay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know, it is the the the the the church is an oil tanker, not a ski-doo.

Just, I like the, the visual of Pope Leo tagging on for dear life in Wildwood Crest.

You know what it's been?

You know what it's been too long since we've had, in my opinion, is a gay pope, right?

Because, like, when's the last time you had, like, obviously, okay, they can't be like gay, gay, but like, sometimes you just know, right?

You know, when you see a gay priest, right?

When, when was the last time we had a like ambiguously gay pope and why isn't it now?

You know, I think it would do wonders, bring back a whole like medieval Renaissance vibe.

What's that word that Pope Francis used?

Throchagine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I can.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

the late pope of like dear memory used to say that there was too much thrushagine in the Vatican.

And then when he got called on that, he apologized.

And then the next week, he said it it again, which I can't boil down, baby.

How are you not supposed to like?

I don't care what he called me.

That's a funny thing.

I feel affection for the guy.

It's a beautiful word, like everything in Italian.

Absolutely.

So, yeah, American Pope is crazy.

And Villanova, I assume, are going to be normal about this.

Yeah, well, that's, that's...

I would call him Chicago Pope, but people are trying to say he's a Philly Pope.

Villanova is a Philly.

Villanova is not a Philly school.

We have two legitimate Catholic universities.

We have the good one, St.

Joe's, alma mater of my beloved wife, and we have LaSalle, alma mater of my less beloved father-in-law.

But if you look at the scoreboard, zero popes.

Pope Francis did visit St.

Joe's and yet did not visit Villanova.

Interesting.

Two people

world leaders right now who have probably been to Wawa.

I mean, the Pope and BB Netanyahu

going to the same Wawa?

Yeah.

Troubling.

Oh, what a world's worst meat cute.

My AO3 page is going to look like fucking Chernobyl.

Enemies to Lovers Arc, Slowburn, Coffee Shop AU.

I'd read that, yeah.

And Craig Pope is what I'm saying.

I think that gets you excommunicated, and you just got in.

I just got here.

Yeah, well, when I come back, when they make me Pope, you're coming with me, Nova.

Oh, sure.

I'll handcuff you to me, like what's your name did to the Twitter door?

Yeah, I'm Stalin.

Your dad's Mal.

You're Pope.

We just got to find a job for Justin.

It's fine.

Vice Regent of the Swiss Guard.

Yeah.

Whatever they use.

Come on, man.

You get an MP5 and a funny hat.

What's going on to lie?

I do want the funny hat.

Yeah, you wouldn't wouldn't be so good with an MP5 at all.

No, probably not.

Your accuracy.

The thing, the last thing I got to say about the Pope, right, is they, they really threaded the needle on this one, right?

Because he's a compromise candidate in the funniest possible way, which is that on indications, he's like a woke Latin mascui, which is so fucking funny as a combination of aesthetics and politics.

It's like, I have high hopes that this is the guy who brings back the incredibly heavy crown and they're being carried around in a big chair, being fanned with like ostrich feathers and shit.

But he's also like woke by Catholic standards.

That's that's the dream.

Trans people know the image of God, but I can only say this in like high church Latin.

Yeah,

he picked Leo as his name because he's like, you know, a big fan of Rerum Novarum.

So, you know, God says join a union.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, AMDG, baby.

In a jarring shift in tone.

Banned cars.

No, different ones.

Different one.

No.

These are all the bits of stochastic terrorism now happening against,

on the one hand, Israeli diplomats and now like

pro-Israel marchers.

And I think we file this firmly in the what the fuck do you expect is going to happen, Colin?

Yeah, I mean, once you've lost my mother, uh,

I don't know disorganized political violence was always going to result from you know doing the genocide.

I mean, 100% accurate, man.

That's that's just there.

It was very, very uh, you know, I'm surprised it, you know, took this long.

Somebody is going to be like desperate or deranged or despairing enough that they decide that what they want to do is to like kill some people.

Um,

and I mean, this is after, mind you, over a year of showing people that nothing works, right?

Like

protesting peacefully doesn't work.

Like writing your congressman doesn't work.

Well, exactly, right?

And so it's not really a surprise that somebody who's at the most like extreme end of like emotion for that decides, okay, well, maybe the thing that's going to work is setting other people on fire, which it isn't.

But you see how someone gets to that.

Connects those dots, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, we don't, we don't have, I mean, you know you you can't do organized political violence because we don't talk about that on youtube um i mean it kind of we're going to rumble it kind of doesn't just it kind of just doesn't happen anyway like at least the way things are set up something something would have to change for that to be possible yeah and so instead you get this which is it's like a con not going into gear you know it's like uh

it's purposeless senseless violence like the thing that that has really gotten me about the way pros, like I've said a billion times, the anti-Zionist Jewish nation states shouldn't exist in the first place, and my people don't need one, especially, you know, colonization, so on and so forth.

But one of the things that really strikes me is the tone of pro, the pro is like I like that Lindsey Graham tweet, Greta Thunberg is going to,

as far as I know, run the blockade something.

Yeah, but it's just like just

spirited bullshit nonsense.

I mean, fucking,

I know you're not wearing a shirt that says dog MILF.

Well, listen.

I mean,

don't worry about it.

All right, roll tide.

Roll down tight.

I just, I just, and like Fetterman too, it's just this mean-spirited bully shit where it's just like, I know the guy's brain doesn't work anymore, but it's just, it's just so fucking, it's that MAGA, like, who are you triggered?

It's like, people are fucking dying.

People are starving in the streets.

You know, and regardless, I would say almost regardless of your positioning on Israel Palestine, which should be that Israel, that one state called country, one, one language called language, and one currency called Liam Bucks,

as we've stated,

official podcast position.

I think what gets me the most is just like, you can't even fuck, you can't fucking talk to these people.

No, they're all fucking cuckoo bananas.

Uh, you know, and I don't, I don't necessarily endorse gunning people down in the streets, but like, I, I think the answer is what the fuck did you expect?

If you're being exposed 24-7 to horrific images of children dying in the streets you're gonna lose your a little bit yeah and i mean nobody's really equipped to deal with the notion that like there is nothing that can be done to stop this right which is what it increasingly seems like and it seems like that more every day for the last what like fucking 14 months or whatever the it is um

like i and i obviously that's gonna like push some people over the edge um yeah and like

the it just again, it's impunity again, right?

Like, and all of this stuff indirectly kind of benefits that because then you get to say like, um, the entire world is so anti-Semitic that it produces this kind of like anti-Israeli terrorism.

uh and therefore israel continues to have like a kind of moral duty to commit this genocide right

yeah

like i i don't i i see i mean i see those takes and i'm just like listen man like,

as like, I have been subject to anti-Semitic attacks when I was growing up.

I would call them attacks.

They weren't.

They were just because I was Jewish.

And, like, I don't know.

Like, the people I know, I mean, I'm sure, like, I've said this to Roz is like, I don't really think there's a meaningful anti-Semitic problem on the left.

I mean, there is, you know.

You get conspiracy theorists for sure.

I said to Roz, and I do believe this that the language of anti-Zionists can creep towards those tropes.

Oh, sure.

But once you set someone down and are just like, hey, man, like, we probably shouldn't be using the phrase Zionist occupied government because that's Turner diary shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But like, I just, I think I just come, I can't wrap my mind around like the thing that actually really kind of gets me is like, no one's

Tel Aviv and they probably should be at this, but you'll have to bleep that, I guess.

Yeah.

Like, nobody, nobody who has the power to do that will.

Right.

And like, the only people who have the like will to do that don't have the power to do that you know like

reminded of that um that imam on memory tv yes i support lgbt let's go bomb tel aviv

happy pride month to you

yeah

i uh i just i i just the mind hunts for an explanation and it's just like i mean we're gonna

i don't know sorry dev

bb

send him to the hag

you know i i just I'm so I'm so exhausted and like not to make it about me again, but like I'm so exhausted of watching horrific crimes be committed in my name and then watching people who aren't Jewish turn around like Fetterman and be like, aren't you grateful for this?

Fucking no, I'm not.

It's like I'm happy when we're not massacring innocent people.

It's the same as like the Trump stuff where you look at it and you go, okay, well, all of the stuff that's already happened, right?

Not even the stuff that's going to happen that they say they're going to do, that we know that they're going to do,

but like even the stuff that's already happened is like so bad that there's no way back from it other than, like, and this is the minimum like shitlib position, like, war crimes trials, right?

Like,

you need to have some kind of like massive Nuremberg scale.

And that's not even like a huge fucking sell on Nuremberg because they let a lot of people off the hook, but you need to have some kind of like formal process to say that the ideology that produced this can't exist anymore.

Whether that's for the MAGA ship, whether that's for Zionism, it just like, if it leads to this, the only way out of it is

through like something like that.

And there's no sign that that's going to happen for either of those ever.

These are my

corrective shotguns, truth and reconciliation.

Yes.

Yes.

But I would like to emphasize, we do not endorse disorganized political violence.

No, we do not know.

No, no, we do not.

You can read Trotsky on like individual terrorism, right?

Like it's it's it's adventurism, but like you see why it happens and it's not like to

set your personal feelings about it aside.

Like it's also like, how do you think this is gonna end?

Whether that's you know in either like the US or Israel?

Like do you think it ends with like a Democrat getting elected or like a guy who believes 80% of what Bibi believes getting elected, but who has like

slightly less oppositional defiant disorder and slightly slightly less corruption.

So he's not going to, you know, perpetuate the genocide to stay out of jail in part.

Like, of course not.

That's, it, it's, it's, this is setting things, or has set things for a long time on a path to which, you know, the ending is, is something even worse than this, something like almost incomprehensible.

Yeah.

You know, this is an ugly situation.

You can understand the motivations here.

But also, yeah, I, once again, I don't think disorganized violence like this is going to help.

This is an ugly situation.

Yeah.

No, for real.

If you're looking for an endorsement of disorganized political violence

on an engineering disasters podcast that we have to host on a Google product.

You can figure out how to host it.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah,

you know.

Right.

Anyway, I recommend to the listener, do not go out and do something like this.

There's a bunch of fundraisers, some of which are going to be on the description.

And again, okay, yeah, sure.

That raises the same question of like,

you know, this is a kind of drop in the ocean, but you still have to do it.

You have to do it.

You are morally compelled to do it.

In all seriousness,

yeah, follow dev.

They're doing a great job on fundraising to get people to safety and out of Gaza.

You are morally compelled to help people.

That is your duty as a human being.

That is the deal you cut.

Yes.

If you don't like it, fuck off to Mars.

You can take Elon with you.

All right.

You want to have a bunch of people?

That'd be a quick way to go anyway in other news

yeah banner cars yeah banned cars this is this is just a quick one from me um it's it's a uk update yeah so the good news is bafflingly no one died in the course of this but so uh liverpool football team uh won the question mark fa cup i think um football association yeah yeah big big parade through the middle of town uh Like the, you know, the team was there, all the supporters are there.

Great.

Good time for everyone.

They close off all the streets.

But then

somebody has like a heart attack or whatever.

So they have to open one of the barriers to let an ambulance through.

And some guy who is just like

driving, right, tailgates that ambulance through the thing, gets...

immediately stuck in a crowd full of people because the road's closed and he's not supposed to be on it.

And I mean, this is all like in course at the moment, so I'm kind of limited on what I can say about it.

But like, I don't know why, but it seems like then just runs a bunch of people over.

And this is not like a huge like Ford F-150 type situation.

This is like a like a, what do you call like a people carrier in American?

Like a

minivan.

Yeah, it's a minivan.

Yeah.

Like it's not like a big like war vehicle, right?

It's it's just a completely normal, like, large family car

just driven into the crowd by someone for, you know, we don't really yet know why,

and injures, like, a hundred people, like, just straight down the street.

And it's

absolutely, like, miraculous that nobody died.

There's a couple of things here.

The banned cars thing is where I'm going to finish this up.

The other thing is,

because of the like Southport thing and the riots, all of the usual suspects, all of these like far-right influences were all immediately assuming and hoping that this was like some kind of Muslim domestic terrorist attack.

Of course.

And had already kind of pre-announced that.

And so that pushed the cops into having to announce, hey, we've arrested a white British guy

like within an hour.

Well, so you were just saying terrorist.

I mean, but you repeat yourself.

Yeah, well, exactly, right?

But the thing is, they're not charging it as terrorism.

I don't think they're even charging it as attempted murder.

I think it's like GBH and dangerous driving.

What?

Oh, my God.

But like,

this is, I think, troubling, right?

Because if you're setting the precedent that,

okay, well, when it's a white guy

and it's, it's like, when it's not a Muslim.

we announce that to tamp all of this shit down and we go, yeah, we arrested like, you know, sort of

area angry white driver for this dickhead, right?

Yeah, then what happens the next time it isn't a guy like that, you know, and you don't, do you like not announce that and get the same riots thing again?

Like, it's a really like uncomfortable precedent for the future.

Um, so that's the one thing.

The other thing is, uh, you, you just can't have a city center that's built for cars that you then close off for parades, and you can't do that consistently and safely without this being a thing that can happen.

Um, I got to say, I mean, they, they have, uh, the last Super Super Bowl parade in Philly, they handled it much less well than they did the first one.

Yes, they did.

They didn't handle the first one all that well either.

They didn't handle the first one that well either.

Well, I guess they didn't want to see people hauling kegs over the city hall gates.

We're fucking Philly, dude.

Yeah, and I know, right?

I fucking hate Sherelle Parker so much.

I hate the fucking fun police.

I hate that she comes here to suck up fun with her big old straw.

Go birds.

Didn't someone die at the second parade and not the first one i don't know man probably

yeah but i like i don't even know how well or how badly they they set up the like barriers for this but it's driving right like that's it's the kind of thing that driving like makes you do is go well fuck it i can i can like tailgate this ambulance into the thing uh and and then you kind of find yourself in a situation where you set off what looks for a long second like a terrorist attack because you're like certainly is by the way, yeah, because you're like, Well, I want to drive my car down the road, and it's not even just like that guy's a unique kind of asshole, although he may well be.

It's also that, like, he is literally on a road that's designed to do that that has been closed off temporarily.

Like, it's it's not wholly him, it's not wholly deviant or aberrant.

It's also that we have designed everything in this country around around cars.

And we've designed it so that, like, we've had this ecosystem for for like years at this point of being like oh you know latently I can't wait until someone runs over those just up oil protesters or whatever

and that builds that sense of like entitlement to the point that something like this happens and it's like if you want to have a like vibrant civic life right and if you want to have parades and stuff like that then you have to decar all of these places in ways that are more permanent and more protective than this.

And, like, I had this really uncomfortable revelation about this because I know this street.

This is, um, I think this one, this is uh, Water Street.

Um, why is there a Hooters here?

Uh, British Hooters, it is cursed,

it is real.

Um, I we have to go.

Uh, yeah, let's do a Liverpool live show.

I'd be thrilled to get a Liverpool show.

Yeah, go to the Hooters.

Okay, sure.

Um, but like, I've been on this street before because the uh Liverpool Pride March goes down it, And that's an uncomfortable sensation to think, oh, well, it was, you know, presumably protected using the same traffic strategy by the same people making the same decisions.

This could have happened to fucking anything.

Like, and it could have happened by someone who had like

a different intention.

It could have been worse.

We don't know.

Like, and so

you just, you can't do this.

You can't be like, by the way, every street has to be this kind of like incredibly broad like sign for traffic thing you need to pedestrianize shit like urge everything everywhere i don't know if you saw the article that came out recently where all the tech bros are like really excited because um we're making the waymos more aggressive oh cool okay i'm getting a harpoon gun so now we can get this exact thing except there's nobody to pull out of the driver's seat Just have a fucking like glorified Roomba with like a five-ton car just decide to miss the Mercedes an entire fucking city.

Yeah.

Well, not until I get my harpoon gun.

Ross and I are going wailing.

I'm looking for the white Waymo.

Roll boys roll as I just puncture an entire car full of tech brokers.

Yeah, so like this guy's this guy's like in court.

I don't know what's going to happen to him, but like, it almost doesn't matter at this point because

whatever it is,

it's not going to address anything systemic here.

And the only thing that would be addressing something systemic would be to try and and like wean city centers off of cars because you don't like i've been in liverpool city center many times you don't need a car to get around it if anything it's a hindrance right um it's it's like you need the stuff you need to move around is like deliveries like municipal services and the emergency services and public transport right there is a way to do that that is so much safer and also by the way is gonna save fucking planet because of the climate uh rather than having like every dickhead in a Ford galaxy be able to access every single street address in the middle of town for no reason other than their own like rage.

Yeah, yeah.

That said, yeah, I mean, you know, that's get, let's, uh, start getting rid of these cars.

This is a bad idea.

We don't need them anymore.

All right, that's it.

That's, that's all I had for that.

That was the goddamn news.

All right, 40 minutes in and we're talking about

it.

I had a lot to get off my chest.

No, no, no, you're not.

It's been a month.

I have some self-disclosure here.

Okay.

So, my mother used to live in Missouri.

That's it.

That's the self-disclosure.

Okay.

She's going to, she's going to love this.

She's going to love this bit.

Gonna have to recuse yourself.

No, I'm not recusing myself.

I'm doubling down.

Level the Midwest.

All I know about Missouri is that it loves company.

Level the Midwest.

Do you know how many hills there are in the Midwest?

How do we phrase that?

Turn the Midwest to glass.

Is that better?

Lake of the Ozarks can stay.

Friend of the show, Katie, in Northwest, I believe Northwest or Northeast Arkansas can stay.

That's it.

That's it.

I know Arkansas is not the Midwest, but for my purposes,

oh, and Francis gets to stay.

Yeah, Francis.

Yeah.

All right.

That's it.

That's all we're saving.

Turn it to glass.

First, we must ask, what is Missouri?

A pointless wasteland full of the worst fucking people you've ever met.

Also, Francis, and sometimes my mother.

It's home of Flight Simulator 2024's only unmarked challenge level of flying under that motherfucker right there.

Yes, under the gateway arch,

which is a terrifying structure if you see it in real life.

Don't we have to do an episode on that?

No, we're doing an episode about the arch, yeah.

I think Francis's brother is actually a park ranger there.

Okay, well, wait, that Doc's Francis' brother, man.

Well, no, I should.

Okay,

you know, cut that out then.

Anyway, so there's two things in Missouri, St.

Louis and Kansas City.

It was admitted as a state in 1821.

Oh, do you mean Kansas City, Missouri, home of the Super Bowl losing Chiefs?

Yeah, Kansas City, Missouri, home.

Taylor Swift's loser boyfriend?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

She's not giving us reputation Taylor's version.

Go fuck yourself.

You may ask, you may ask, why is Kansas City not in Kansas?

There's two of them.

Yeah, KCK and KCMO.

Yeah, but the main part of Kansas City has always been in Missouri.

This is what happens when you build a city on the state line.

Yeah, and the real answer to that question is: I don't know.

I don't know anything about Kansas City.

I like the LLQ.

And I like the Super Bowl losing Chiefs.

I like the baseball mascot.

Yeah, go Royals, baby.

Yeah.

What else do I have to say about Kansas City?

Don't people like the streetcar there?

Is there like a touristy streetcar people like?

It has the one good Obama-era streetcar.

Yes, there we go.

Because it only goes in a straight line

and it actually has like some advantage over a bus, unlike the rest of them.

Obama-era streetcars.

That's a future episode.

Put it on the spreadsheet.

Yeah.

Yeah, one thing to do is...

Yeah, we have a spreadsheet.

I think it's on there.

On there.

It's okay.

Weird cheese, fried ravioli.

Fried ravioli?

Fried ravioli.

I had some fried ravioli at the end of the day.

Yeah, but fried ravioli was actually

good.

Gosh, it was really good.

I mean, it looks like a fried ravioli.

I don't know what I expected, but like, I don't want this.

I don't.

Yes, you do.

No, this is like white boy falafel.

This is horrifying.

No.

The only food Ross, I'm surprised you don't eat more of is falafel.

I feel like you would fuck with some good falafel.

No, I like falafel.

I'm just not usually in a position to acquire falafel easily.

You are in the halal cart capital of the Western Hemisphere, and you don't have

regular files.

The two halal carts next nearest me are like a half a mile.

Oh, the one at the mosque?

Yeah, the good one, the good one over at the American Institution for Islamic Charitable Projects.

Yeah, this is how Aleja was able to dox you is because you triangulated your position perfectly with two halal carts.

And the peacekeeper is coming.

I would need three

halal carts.

Yeah, Otherwise,

it's just a line.

Otherwise, right?

So, yeah.

No, it's fully not.

If you say I'm half a mile from point A and point B, you draw a circle around point A, you draw a circle around point B that has an intersection at like

so St.

Louis, Missouri.

Missouri, you can you can see the arch.

You could go see some significant architecture like the Wainwright building here.

It does.

The skyscraper that was the skyscraper and still is.

We've talked about it before many times.

Yeah, exactly.

Did you go see the blues play?

There's a Hooters across the street from it, but not in this picture.

Interesting,

it gave the world the new American Gothic, which is this couple.

Yes, yes.

You can go see some racism.

Is that a SIG like P230?

Like, what the fuck is she cooking with there?

Uh, racism.

It might be a

cross on a black couple's lawn, frankly.

That's that, that's that's that's too cool of a gun to be handled by that racist of a woman, I think.

Yeah, um, see, this is why, uh, this was in in in this was a uh people threatening a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, and I'm here to say we should have armed Black Lives Matter protesters with uh with with 50 cal sniper rifles.

Well, I mean, it's it's it's like again, the kind of impossibility of uh organized don't worry, don't worry about it.

Don't worry about it.

It's just crazy that nothing happened.

Yeah.

Give me a 50k.

I'll be responsible with it.

You could go see Union Station.

You can go see the last piece of Penn Station over here.

Oh, that's

mowing.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, no, they mow that lawn really good.

I haven't been there, though.

So I can't.

Maybe this was a publicity photo.

What else?

You go see the City Museum and get stuck in a coil.

What?

Excuse me?

So the St.

Louis City Museum is a very strange place built by a very strange man.

Ah.

And it's like a bunch of like, you know, kinetic sculptures and outsider art and a bunch of weird stuff.

They got a whole floor that's just terracotta from demolished buildings.

They got a whole floor that's like, you know, they have

a 10-story slide.

They have a five-story slide.

They have a place where kids can go crawl under the floor and get stuck there.

They have.

So it's just

the booby-trap juggles of all the people.

Oh, my God.

There's so many ways a kid could get hurt everywhere.

It's terrific.

Yeah.

You know,

bring your kids to the city museum.

No, it's great.

Yeah.

There's an outdoor section where you crawl through like coils in order to get into a fighter jet that's like perched precariously on a on a thing.

Yeah, the city museum is like, they got like an indoor, like, there's so many ways to injure yourself in there.

You know what else they have?

Bars.

Incredible.

This is maybe the greatest city on earth.

Oh, my God.

It was so good.

It was so good going to the city museum.

I'm a great fan.

I should put some pictures in here.

Yeah, I was distracted looking at airsoft guns

because I'm normal.

There's a school bus on the roof that's half perched on the outside.

Cool.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's the main thing in Missouri, I think, is the city museum.

Everything else sucks.

All right.

Summarized, perfectly.

Summarized, yeah.

Oh, and also St.

Louis Union Station is a bizarre, incredible architectural space, which I never experienced anything like it in my life.

Just

you think there's no American Art Nouveau?

Knocked my

dickhead.

Yeah, that was a mind-blowing thing to go into.

Anyway, so Missouri, it's a mixed bag.

But now we must ask, what is Times Beach?

I recognize this photograph from the map we saw in slide one.

Yes.

So the idea of Times Beach, this is a fantastic vacation destination right by the scenic Merrimack River.

Which they've misspelled in the thing.

Or unless the spelling changes every time you look at it.

That could be the case, yeah.

I mean, this looks...

So this looks not bad.

I mean, this looks like some of the campgrounds in Cape May, but.

Very, very ominous photo that they've used on that ad, though.

It's like, come and come and buy

this, you know, get a time share in this horrifying location.

Exactly.

Yeah, I've so been to Eggleson, New Jersey.

Yeah, go ahead.

This is sort of a largely auto-oriented resort town, right?

On the beautiful Merrimack River.

And this is based on a simple deal with the St.

Louis Times, right?

Why?

Pay $10 down and $2.50 monthly, and for the low price of only $67.50 total, you get a 20 by 100-foot lot and also a

six-month newspaper subscription.

Oh, they were desperate, huh?

Yeah.

So I assume that just like the guy who owns the newspaper, because it was just a guy then, oh, I guess it is a guy now, again, because it's just Jeff Bezos,

just was like, also, I have a real estate development.

Please, please help me.

Yeah.

And so is the idea then when you say auto uh like an like an auto focused thing that you drive like an rv or like a trailer then a 1925 rv it's 19 my jalapi yeah my you drive your jalapi out to times beach which is about i think 20 25 miles away from downtown st louis okay and then so you drive there it takes you four hours yeah all of you get like hernias and sciatica from the suspension uh and and then you with your own two hands you being you know the silent generation, build a vacation house for yourself.

And then as you put the last nail in, a newspaper thrown by the paper boy, which they used to have back then,

hits the house and then the whole thing collapses.

Exactly.

Gotcha.

Most of the houses when the development was built were built on stilts because the Merrimack River likes to flood.

Oh, this is getting better and better.

I'm sure this won't come up again.

But

anyway,

so, you know, admittedly, you know, okay, this is a great deal because you get a plot of land where you build your house and a newspaper subscription, which is worth about the same because the economy was weird.

And this, this starts off pretty good, right?

This was a deal a lot of people took up.

This is 1925, right?

Bad stuff started happening pretty quickly.

Yeah, it's 1925 in Missouri, dude.

Yeah, the Great Depression means no one can buy a vacation house.

And then after the Great Depression, of course, you got the war, which means no one can afford the gasoline to go out to their vacation house.

You'll have it.

Yeah.

Yeah,

there's just rationing.

So over a long period of time, you know, especially as travel patterns change after the war, this town goes into a steep decline.

It's mostly like lower middle class permanent residents.

By the time our story starts in 1971, there's not many people and there's not much to do do in Times Beach.

Just one kid throwing newspapers at the houses.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It's like, damn, why did we leave the contract going that long?

No, the Times had been bought by the Post-Dispatch.

I just put together that it's called Times Beach because it's presumably named for the St.

Louis Times.

Yes.

Oh, that's smart.

Okay, I would never have thought of that.

Okay, sure.

Yeah, that's why Roz is the showrunner, and you and I are just heckling him.

Hi, it's Justin.

So, this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

The deal is you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month.

Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks.

You get what you pay for.

It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them.

The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month.

Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod.

Do it if you want, or don't.

It's your decision, and we respect that.

Back to the show.

So, in the meantime, on the other side of the state, in Verona, Missouri, there's a chemical plant owned by Hoffman Taff.

Oh, no, are we going to have to do it?

Are we going to have to do OCHEM again?

I'm not doing too much of it.

Thank you.

Hoffman Taff was producing strategically important chemicals for the military, namely Agent Orange.

Oh, fuck.

Oh, cool.

Okay.

I'm sure this won't have a kind of like

moral luxury that kind of leaks out into the soil of not just Vietnam, but also in a metaphorical sense, the United States, right?

And literal sense.

Hold that thought.

Oh, boy.

But this is a relatively flexible

facility, right?

It had some extra capacity.

So this company, Hoffman Taft, leased some of the space to Northeastern Pharmaceuticals and Chemicals Company.

Oh, yeah, the shit that the Joker fell into.

Yeah, it's it's so cool that if you're like a chemistry graduate, right, this is one of the two kinds of companies you can go and work for.

You can go and work for the like we are poisoning Vietnamese children company, or you can go and work for the nice civilian we are poisoning American children company.

Yes, well, French children, but yes.

It's like, what do we do here at like incorporated petrochemicals?

Well, mostly we like, we get a paintbrush and we baste every toaster sold with a thick layer of hexavalent chromium so that if you touch it you get cancer and die um i'm not entirely sure why we do this but we kind of you know it's good business

yeah it looks nicer yeah it does

shiny

and now yeah 50 years later you get boomers complaining like why don't the toasters look shiny anymore everyone i know died of cancer yeah so they uh we're gonna do the episode one day on the company that made everybody stupid that Ross and I have been to.

Speaking of chemical processes.

So the Northeastern Pharmaceuticals and Chemicals Company or Nepa Co, right,

they start occupying the space in 1969.

They were going to use the facility to make

this guy here on the top, right?

Which is hexachlorophene.

Uh-oh, that sounds bad.

I'm not thrilled about any of the syllables and that.

Hexachlorophene is actually manufactured in a similar process to Agent Orange, but it's different, right?

It's an antibacterial chemical, which was used in soaps and toothpastes and disinfectants, right?

Okay, all right.

And then they found out later we put this in your body.

Yeah, they found out later it was extremely highly toxic.

And if some of these products were manufactured wrong, it would cause severe brain damage.

So in 1972, products containing this chemical were pulled from the market.

I believe right after 36 infants in France were killed by improperly produced talcum powder.

Oh, Jesus, man.

Yeah.

So anyway, the process for making hexachlorophene involves some big organic chemistry nerd shit where you react formaldehyde with 245 trichlorophenol, and then there's a bunch of complicated stuff with the reaction that happens, and you get your hexachlorophene, but you get a fun byproduct called 2378 tetrachlorodibenzo p-dioxin not thrilled with the last two syllables of that yeah particularly i love being i love being a perfectly innocent and morally neutral civilian and going to work and reacting formaldehyde with 245 trichlorophenol to create 2378 tetrachlorop dibenzop dioxin

So I bet this kills weeds really, really good.

Oh, yeah, no question.

Makes a toaster shiny as fuck as well.

This is like my dad's mom insisting on using bootleg DDT well into the 90s.

You've got to use this on the clear coat on like a car because it shines like nothing else.

There's no eagles around.

It's fine to use DDT.

So anyway, yeah, this big long word, we're just going to call it T C D D for a while.

Of the several chemicals known as dioxins, this is the most toxic one, right?

It's pretty bad,

but mostly it's bad if it's in like relatively large quantities.

You know, what constitutes a large dose varies widely by species.

I mean, you know, because there's like instances where, you know, some animals just keel over and die instantly and others are like, you know, they shake it off.

I mean, this, it's a weird, it's sort of a Calvin ball kind of toxin.

Oh, good.

To hear the phrase Calvin ball toxin if there's one adjective i want to associate with my chemical toxin it's unpredictable yeah very unpredictable it does weird thing unpredictable but in the end it's very fatal this was also present as a contaminant in the production of agent orange wait so wait so there's contaminant there's contaminants in my agent orange well yes because um

Arguably, this is the worst chemical in Agent Orange.

Oh, Jesus.

Okay.

You know, the other two were, you know,

they're defoliants.

They're not necessarily designed to hurt people.

I always forget, based on the, you know, wanting to beat Robert McNamara to death with my bare hands thing,

that they weren't.

Agent Orange was primarily not intended to give a bunch of children birth defects and stuff.

Right, yes.

That was not the intent of it.

It just happened and largely

probably because of everyone in Vietnam ingested huge amounts of this particular contaminant in Agent Orange.

But since, you know, the

hexachlorophene was not intended as a defoliant to be used in war.

It was intended to be used on soaps and,

you know, talcum powder and toothpaste.

Of course, they tried to get rid of as much of it as possible.

So Nepiko simply distilled.

the hexachlorophene.

Oh, right.

It's the world's worst whiskey.

Exactly.

This, of course, leaves a nasty oily residue on the bottom of the still that's full of the T C D D,

you know, and in chemical processing, we call this horrible oily residue bottoms.

I mean, yeah, we've all known some horrible toxic oily bottoms.

So Nepico originally dealt with these bottoms by sending them to an incinerator in Louisiana.

Yeah, give us another couple of pride months under Trump.

They'll be trying that shit again.

This was expensive and time-consuming, though.

They wanted a better, cheaper way to handle all the bottoms.

So

they contract with the Independent Petroleum Corporation,

which is a chemical supply company, but they don't actually deal with waste oils themselves.

So they, in turn, subcontracted this job out to a man.

Just a guy?

Yeah.

Russell Martin Bliss.

Okay.

Well, he was a man with a truck and a shed with some tanks in it.

Listen, if a guy with a truck can't handle some bottoms, what is America coming to these days?

This is a good point.

Yeah.

Based on it's always sunny, I believe the guy in the truck may be the bottom.

So Bliss picked up the still bottoms and he brought them to his facility in...

Frontenac, Missouri, apparently unaware that what he had picked up was much nastier than his usual line of business, which was used motor and transmission oils.

This being pre-woke, the you just poured that on the ground, you know?

Well, there was at least one instance where a truck came into his property overweight and got pulled over by the police.

And they just, yeah, they dumped, they dumped the

waste.

They dumped the still bottoms directly onto Bliss's property.

Wow.

Covered it up with some dirt.

Fuck you.

And I believe the farm across the street had 70 chickens die and one dog.

Oh,

Jesus.

So anyway, he dumped the horrible dioxins into the main tank.

Great.

With all the other waste motor oil and the transmission oil.

And

there was some sense of environmental responsibility here because Russell Bliss did keep transformer oil in a separate tank because that was full of PCBs.

But this, no, this one went in the main tank.

You get the sense that nobody told the guy shit, or he wasn't paying attention if they did.

Yeah,

I do get the sense that it was never adequately conveyed to this guy how bad the stuff was because it was also not really adequately known at the time how bad the stuff was.

Right.

Oh, boy.

I hope there's nothing like that now.

Don't worry about that.

So, here's a question: What can you do with waste oil?

Um, refry some ravioli.

No.

Don't do that.

You can use it to power your 80s Mercedes.

If it's multi-fuel, maybe, yeah.

So in some cases, you get this big mishmash of waste oil, right?

You can sometimes send it to an oil refinery and they just re-distill it and they make new oil with it.

certain kinds of new oil.

Obviously, you're not getting everything out of there unless it's a very advanced facility.

This is how they do like multi-product pipelines, right?

You know, where you have like a pipeline that goes, well, there's a pipeline that comes from like the Gulf Coast, goes all the way up to like Maine or so.

It's a product pipeline.

And like, okay, on this day, we're sending jet fuel.

On this day, we're sending heating oil.

On this day, we're sending fuel oil, so on and so forth.

There's obviously a big mishmash at the end, you know, that gets stored in a big tank and it's full of all kinds of grades of oil and they just send it back to the refinery and distill it a second time.

I had no idea how that worked until like a couple months ago.

And I was astonished that you could just do that.

Um, anyway, so in other cases, you just burn the waste oil, right?

Either in an incinerator or as Bliss is doing, just selling all this as heating oil.

Okay.

But there's a problem with that, which is that you only have the option to sell it as heating oil in the winter, right?

No one needs it in the summer.

But in Missouri, there's a lot of dust.

So, especially on the many unpaved roads.

So, what do you do?

You take the waste oil, you put it in a big truck, and you spray it on the road, and that keeps the dust down for a few months.

Okay.

Sure.

Yeah.

I mean, this is a, that's such a like 50s sort of like, what would we do without petrochemicals?

It's easy, greasy, and fun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, one convoy could slide.

Yeah, but convoy going down the street.

First, you have the

water spraying truck that, you know, is the street sweeper that, you know, shoves all the toxins directly into the nearest river.

Then after that, you have the DDT truck that sprays every single service.

And then after that, you have the waste oil truck.

So this is similar to

MacAdam pavement, but it's greasier, right?

And for Bliss, this was free, fun, and easy.

It's a safe and legal thrill.

Oil off those roads.

Exactly.

People paid paid him to take the oil and then people paid him to spray the oil that he had been paid to receive on their roads amazing this is the second greatest grift we've we've we've talked about on this podcast the circular economy yeah so bliss owns his own farm he has dirt roads and he has a large supply of waste oil so it's kind of like okay why not uh let's give it a shot uh one application on his farm was sufficient for several months of dust control.

And apparently, he started this practice sometime before receiving the TCDD from Nepico, right?

But his reputation starts growing.

He finds himself in a nice new side business, namely spraying down the roads, paths, and interiors of local equestrian facilities.

Giving the horses cancer for fun and profits.

Oh, man.

Oh, they don't live long enough for that.

Oh, no.

So he starts with Shenandoah Stables of Moscow Mills, Missouri.

Moscow Mills, famous home of knockoff outlet mall Stalin.

You know what?

Actually, I want to give one more thing to Missouri, which is that Branson slaps.

You go to the

Moscow Mills G-U-M outlet.

Fans of Soviet department stores are going to like that one.

Hold on, Ross.

It's there next to

Saks on the prospect.

I don't know.

Anyway, doing great.

So this is the 26th of May, 1971.

This is when our story really starts.

The owners of this equestrian facility who are Judy Piat and Frank Hample, they pay him the princely sum of $150 to spray 2,000 gallons of waste oil on the floor of their indoor equestrian arena.

Oh, no.

Just like, hey, I want you to kill all my horses.

Yeah, I'm going to sabotage the derby from inside.

I just,

I don't understand.

I'm not a horse girl in that sense.

I don't understand.

What do you mean in that sense?

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Pause.

What do you mean in that sense?

Don't worry about that.

I don't understand how having a big oil slick on the floor of the thing makes the horse spectating thing a more enjoyable achievement because surely the horses are like slipping and it's like, it's horrible.

There's no dust.

You're only doing a little bit of oil.

Oh, okay.

So it's not a giant slip and slide full of

slip and slide.

It's just to keep the dust down.

Okay.

Okay.

But this oil seemed unlike the oil that Bliss had used himself.

It was thicker.

It was darker.

It left a horrible smell.

But the smell did dissipate after a while, but the effects did not.

So the first sign that something was off was there were hundreds of dead birds discovered in the arena the following day.

They had all keeled over and fallen from the rafters.

Oh, God.

Well, we'll just sweep those out of the way and bring on the horses.

Yes.

Fuck off.

No.

What?

Yes.

Don't horse people like

their horses?

Isn't that like a

yeah?

Like.

So there was a horse show at this location

soon after the spraying.

And this particular show was said by the participants and the audience to be remarkably free of flies.

Oh, I mean, it's working so well.

Smells awful, though.

Then the horses started to become ill with anorexia, diarrhea, abdominal bloating, bad balance, rashes, so on and so forth.

And then they all started to keel over and die.

In fairness, these are all also conditions of a perfectly healthy horse that thought it saw a snake.

This is true, yes.

A horse is not a resilient animal.

One reason why I identify with them a bit, but like,

even still, you'd think this might be a sign that something is wrong.

Poor Snuffles thought of ants and died.

There were also 11 cats and four dogs who fell to the ravages of the TCDD.

And then Judy Piatt's six-year-old daughter fell ill, who was frequently, you know, sort of used the equestrian arena as a sandbox in the off days.

Oh, God.

At least if you're riding the horse, you're above the

worst.

You're not getting like skin contact for a lot of it.

Yeah, you're not getting skin contact.

You're not like, you're six years old.

You're like licking it and shit, you know.

Yeah.

That's lead-based paint.

It's not even lead-based.

You'd be lucky to have lead-based paint.

Dioxin-based paint.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, but at least the toasters are shiny.

So, in the end, 65 horses died or were destroyed.

Or were destroyed doing a lot of work.

That's like a kind of minor Civil War skirmish kind of numbers.

The Yankee artillery killed 65 horses, 11 cats, four dogs, and a six-year-old girl.

A six-year-old girl lived.

Okay, well.

So it's not immediately clear of the cause of this rapid illness.

The Center for Disease Control got involved.

They were completely stumped.

You know, is this some kind of localized pan-species epidemic, right?

Oh, boy, okay.

They took some soil samples, but they couldn't find anything particularly wrong, right?

There were some elevated levels of PCBs and trichlorophenols, but not enough to cause these sorts of problems because those were a little bit better understood at the time.

In the meantime,

Russell Bliss went on to spray two more horse facilities with similar results.

Oh, Jesus.

This guy was just running around killing horses.

Yes.

Except for some reason, his own.

It's like he's killing more horses than like a 1920s movie director.

What I've sort of, what I think sort of happened here is that as he, you know, because he owns a waste oil business, obviously he's getting more waste oil in every day, not just from, you know, the horrible Agent Orange and soap factory.

So like the concentration of dioxins in the waste oil he's spraying changes over time because he only got those dioxins for like a year, I want to say.

But he went on to spray two more horse facilities with similar results.

And the owners caught on.

They began the long process of, oh, God, we got to remove all the topsoil in the entire equestrian facility.

What are you going to do with this incredibly contaminated earth as well?

Oh, I have a great idea for that.

Some of it was actually disposed of properly in like a hazardous waste landfill or incinerated.

But of course, some of it was also used for landscaping in a residential neighborhood.

Okay, sure.

Yeah, why not?

What's this playground made out of?

Don't worry about it.

Agent Orange, kind of probably fine.

Probably fine.

Bliss also took smaller jobs.

He started spraying like driveways and parking lots.

He was spraying mobile home parks, other miscellaneous sites, but his biggest contract was yet to come.

So his dust control contact, his dust control methods had been remarkably effective and very cheap.

This is the guy.

You're like, I don't want dust.

You call this guy and his

Chevrolet Kodiak of the Apocalypse.

Yes.

Yes.

He shows up in sort of a Mad Max v.

5276666.

Who wrote this shit?

Cormack McCarthy?

Yeah, let me just call Judge Reinhold's waste oil service.

What the fuck?

So the town of Times Beach had fallen onto hard times.

They had never paved their roads.

Yeah, hard Times Beach.

They had never paved their roads.

There was a long, dry summer coming up and several afterwards.

What do they do?

In 1972, they hire Blitz for the princely sum of $2,400 to spray 160,000 gallons of waste oil over a period of four years.

He's going to come back each summer to reapply the waste oil.

That goes until 1976, and Times Beach's dust problems were a thing of the past.

In the meantime, the owners of the horse ranches were getting angry.

Judy Piatt and Frank Hampel were preparing a lawsuit against Bliss, but they don't have the evidence they need, right?

So they start borrowing cars and wearing wigs to tail Bliss's trucks to determine exactly where all this waste oil is being sprayed and logging everything for 15 whole months.

That's pretty badass, honestly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's that's kind of cool.

I'm, I'm, I'm the environmental crimes PI,

you know?

Yeah, among these sites they stake out is Times Beach.

Um, and in the meantime, it's a bad time for our friends at Nepico, right?

The FDA bans hexachlorophene in consumer products in 1972.

Now, you kill 36 French kids and all of a sudden, suddenly you're a villain, right?

Everybody's woke.

Yeah, everyone's woke.

Everybody's got opinions.

They had to reformulate dial soap.

And suddenly you're like, this doesn't get my kidders clean.

And you're like, yeah, that's because of like the fucking tyrants at the FDA deciding that it's not a worthwhile price to pay to just kill a bunch of French children.

Exactly, exactly.

You know, this is, this is, this is woke gone mad.

So there's no market for Nepico's product anymore.

They're one single product.

So they shut down and a company called Syntex moves into their part of the plant in Verona.

Again, Cormac McCarthy, but less subtle.

Yeah.

Now, the Center for Disease Control was still working to find the actual cause of the death of all the horses and the birds and so on and so forth.

Raising hand.

Is this the CDC?

Because it looks like somewhere that just got hit with Agent Orange.

This is the CDC, yes.

I think the building was relatively new at this point.

Jesus Christ, newer than like grass?

I don't know.

It might be, maybe they covered it in hay because they're trying to get it to grow fast.

Maybe they did.

I don't know exactly what's going on here.

It's the centers for disease control, not the centers for

beautiful lawns.

I guess I'm doing the like Stephen King the stand thing, but instead of being like, what are they doing in there?

They're probably like, you know,

doing like secret experiments and shit.

I'm like, my objection is the landscaping.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like

this is where they dumped the like topsoil.

So they're still trying to find the actual cause.

They'd taken soil samples from all the stables.

They were seeing some strange results, right their initial theory was some kind of contamination from trichlorophenols right which are well understood used in herbicides insecticides to confirm this they applied samples of the soil to rabbits oh

thank you for your service uh thank thank you for your service bugs um they developed irritations on their skin as expected right and then two of them unexpectedly died of liver disease oh

Serving right for drinking on the job, you know?

We do that.

Oh, yeah, shit.

Sorry.

My apologies to the alcoholism community.

I was just trying to get bits off and I wasn't thinking that hard.

We prefer to be called people of drinks.

That's what the pod and podcaster.

Keep it moving, Rob.

Anyway.

Clearly, something else was at work here, so the CDC started looking for dioxins.

Not to bury the lead.

I'm sorry.

Does this say 31,000 parts per billion?

That's not, you know, it's...

That's a lot of parts, motherfuckers.

No great, not terrible.

But yeah, think about it this way.

It's only 31 parts per million.

I am flabbergasted.

That's a lot of parts.

Clearly, however much it is, it's enough to kill a horse.

Yes.

Not a six-year-old, though.

The CDC tried looking for the dioxins, and what they found was a horrifying amount of, yeah, 31,000 parts per billion of 2378 tetrachlorodibenzopedioxin.

This was nasty stuff.

This was a lot.

Horses weaker than a six-year-old.

That's what I'm saying.

Just to confirm that, get that on the record.

Yeah.

As I said, there's like a weird way this affects different species of animals.

Yeah.

You could just say horses are pussies, Roz.

Yeah, well, well, yeah, you know, I honestly, though, kind of.

I too have spooked at my my own shadow.

Yeah.

So in the meantime, there are also veterans returning from the Vietnam War, right?

And they were complaining of various diseases.

Many of them attributed these diseases to their exposure to large quantities of Agent Orange.

I mean, correctly, but also not just that.

I feel like I've said this before about like Gulf War syndrome as well, that like...

If you were in the U.S.

military up until about like, I don't know, 2010 and probably later in some applications, your like immediate supervisor, your commanding officer, was almost certainly like a large lump of uranium sculpted to look like a guy.

That's pretty good for that.

Yeah, the bird pits are everywhere.

Yeah.

Yeah, like everything is coated in like five different horrifying chemicals.

Uh, because, like, weirdly, given that it supplies a whole parallel healthcare system for them, the U.S.

government does not consider troops human.

Uh, so, you know, uh, you get that, you know, get that benefit.

You would

have

so many horrible chemicals that it's like really hard to isolate the effects of any simple single one.

Yeah, oh, yeah, it's why there's no like one kind of etiology for Gulf War syndrome, because fucking like they were, they were like spraying like desert paint on vehicles in like completely enclosed tents,

like shooting you up with experimental, like uh, anti-nerve gas things however shiny yeah yeah yeah very shiny so who fucking knows so when the news came down to judy piett and frank hempel that their horses had been killed by dioxin they immediately realized wait like an agent orange and then after some sleuthing by the cdc they found the offending chemical plant which had done business with bliss the now defunct nepiko

So those guys went on the lawsuit despite being non-existent.

I like these.

I like this couple.

They're like, uh, they're persistent, you know.

Oh, yeah, they are.

They are doing a lot of due diligence.

They assist the CDC and later the EPA and a lot of this stuff.

The horse people, they might not have cared about the horses enough when they were alive, but once they were dead, you know, that's a lot of money down the drain, you know.

Can't even make it into soap anymore because there's

you can't put the chemicals in the soap anymore.

So, with the dioxin or with the locations of dioxin contamination confirmed, the CDC recommended that the state of Missouri get involved in the cleanup.

However, with the half-life of TDCC and the environment estimated at one year, Missouri opted to just do nothing and let the problem sort of solve itself.

That sounds like

how many horses can it possibly kill in two years?

My understanding is some of these horse ranches attempted to continue operating.

And

the horses did not last.

The horse ranch that kills your horse instantly.

Yeah, exactly.

Imagine that.

The wheels keep turning, but very, very hard.

They keep turning, Roz.

They're horses.

They have hooves.

Have you seen the horses in city skylines?

In 1979, the EPA, which is still only nine years old, they finally get involved.

Which is, of course, too old to be killed by the TDCC.

So, right.

Apparently, yeah.

I think before we continue here, a useful thing to remember is just how bad the damn pollution was back in the 70s.

You know, how much it was absolutely fine to like dump all your hazardous waste barrels into a big hole just 11 miles south of downtown Louisville.

It gives a shit.

It's at the dumpsters.

It's America's red barrel room.

This is where you go if you want to discuss your favorite passwords.

This is the Valley of the Drums.

Sick name.

it's a sick name yeah it's and it's very descriptive you think it's oh it's like music no it's chemicals um

oh i've just found a color picture of it and it looks so much worse very yellow god yeah i was gonna say like the doom three color palette no no no it's like you can climb on this video game semiotics yellow Well,

most of the defoliated hills you see back here, those have drums buried underneath them, which is why they're defoliated.

And then eventually they ran out of space to you know dig anymore so they just started tossing the barrels on top of there um this was a chemical waste dump for a very long time i think sometime in the 70s the owner died um and then people just kept dumping their barrels there uh funny story there's there's one of these in west london and nobody knows what to do about it uh and that

yeah it catches fire occasionally do you not have super fund No.

No.

Oh my God.

It's down to like a borough council to decide if they want to do anything about that.

I'll make an episode about it.

Would probably say remediation is a good idea there.

So, yeah, no one knew what kind of horrible chemicals were where.

No one knew what half of the horrible chemicals could do to you, right?

It was assumed that if you dumped these chemicals in a hole, it was no longer your problem.

But

the pollution got bad enough that fucking Richard fucking Millhouse fucking Nixon

Finally, we had to create the Environmental Protection Agency.

Also, created legal services.

Yeah.

Before we all poisoned ourselves or dissolved ourselves with acid or whatever.

So this will provide.

Yes.

Yeah.

This will provide some context for what's coming next.

A former NepiCo employee reported to the EPA.

that the company had covertly disposed of 90 barrels of still bottoms on some guy's farm.

Oh, perfect.

Through this investigation, they also found that Nepiko had left a huge tank, also still full of still bottoms,

on the property of the chemical plant, right?

Which no one could figure out how to dispose of because these dioxins had gotten a bad reputation.

You know, this is getting a little bit publicized now.

The only way you could get rid of them was through a sort of high-temperature incinerator.

There was not one in Missouri.

There was one in Minnesota that was willing to take it, but no one was willing to allow any of it to cross state lines.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And who can blame them?

So this becomes a huge headache for the EPA for a while, and they wind up just isolating this tank with a big concrete berm.

Just say no one can go near this.

It's a different kind of house of size, house of mind.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

We're handling it.

For bizarre world waste.

Yes.

Yeah.

So the EPA decided that along with investigating this, they should probably go revisit all those stables and test the soil there.

Dead.

All of them dead.

The horse is dead.

Six-year-old dead.

Richard Dixon dead.

The news was pretty bad.

Rather than the one-year half-life expected, when I say half-life here, I don't mean in the nuclear sense.

I mean the half-life of the chemical sort of exposed to the environment, right?

You expect it to sort of, you know,

this is the amount of time that it will take for half of the the chemical to sort of reduce into more benign compounds, right?

Um, they expected a half-life of one year, so after one year, half of it would be gone, the next year, you know, three-quarters of it is gone, the next year, so on and so forth.

Uh, rather than the one-year half-life expected, it appeared the rate of can contamination had not gone down at all.

Oh, okay, okay, good, yeah, okay, ideal,

sure, yeah, so so uh, ignoring the problem was not working.

The area that kills horses forever.

Yeah, it's frustrating because I use that strategy so much in life

that sometimes it does not work.

Turns out that often the problems remain.

The problems keep going, yeah.

Furthermore, they put together a list of all the potentially contaminated sites in the entire state of Missouri.

It's just the state of Missouri.

The Fed diagram's a circle, yeah.

By By 1982, the EPA was ready to begin addressing this issue in an orderly fashion and in accordance with the latest science, which had also indicated that possibly

the dioxin was not so bad as long as it was not present and in huge quantities, like in the stables and arenas.

Right.

There's some threshold here where it's much more benign.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not as huge of an issue.

So, anyway, the Environmental Defense Fund

leaked all those internal documents.

I mean, I guess you got it, right?

But like, did they, so did they leak those with the intention of being like, it's fine?

No, no, the opposite.

Okay, gotcha, gotcha.

Yeah, the first on the list of contaminated sites was, of course, Times Beach.

And so the residents are really pissed off by this, right?

They've been mired in this stuff for years.

They didn't even know about it.

They didn't know the government knew about it.

What's more, the government doesn't know how toxic it, how toxic it is, actually, but it's also, you know, trying to defend against lawsuits over Agent Orange related to the same chemical.

Yeah, right.

Like the feds aren't going to be like, oh, sorry, you know,

I guess now it's our responsibility that you decided instead of paving your roads to just have Judge Reinhold spray a bunch of like Agent Orange on them.

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's just sort of general outrage that no corrective action was taken.

You know,

it's a confusing situation to be in because there is, I'm again going to say there is some evidence by this point that, you know, as long as it's not in a huge concentration, this stuff is not good, but it's not going to kill you.

You have to trouble.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Unless you're a horse.

Right.

You're fucked.

You're fucked out of AI.

Well, again, 31,000 parts per billion is a lot more than the concentrations we're going to talk about.

So this finally prompts the EPA to get off their asses and do something, which was soil testing, right?

Now, the soil testing in Times Beach indicated that concentrations were as high as 300 parts per billion along all the town's roads, right?

This is well below the rate of contamination for the stables, but still above the EPA's new threshold, which had to be developed like right on the spot without all the knowledge of 100 parts per billion, right?

So, actually, not great, not terrible.

Yeah, actually, not great, not terrible.

Yeah.

The CDC recommended one part per billion.

But this is again based on nothing.

On December 3rd, 1982, these tests were completed.

And then on December 4th, 1982, the Merrimack River overflowed its banks, reaching 20 feet

above the flood stage, completely inundating the town.

which of course meant the whole town was evacuated.

So sometimes, quite often, I've done it on this episode i i i think ahead too far and i say the thing that's going to happen and i accidentally the foreshadowing and i really i'm i'm sorry to do that this one uh this one blindsided me yeah because i you you mentioned the river flooding and i didn't put that together in my head and i'm so glad that i didn't because that was an earnest reaction of of like horror there and that realization it just right after all the testing flood everyone's evacuated

so no one really knew what to to do at this point, right?

The town was flooded.

The people were all gone.

No one knew how toxic anything really was.

No one was acting rationally.

The residents just wanted some action, god damn it, right?

Now, luckily, there was a group inside the EPA called the Chlorinated Dioxins Work Group, right?

With direct experience.

Not a work group you want to be a part of, but yeah, at least they're there.

Far more than like anyone else at that point, right?

The chairman of this group had an idea.

Well, you know,

if you just pave the roads and add sidewalks, all the contamination is going to be sealed underneath there.

It's going to be fine.

Just build the town on top of it.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, it's like Centralia.

Great.

Okay.

Terrific.

Well, no, Centralia has actual physical problems that result in the stuff being disturbed frequently.

I think the paving idea was probably viable, but these guys were never consulted.

Oh.

There were now several agencies with jurisdiction over the emergency because of the flooding, right?

The CDC, the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

They're all complaining at each other.

They can't get along.

Luckily, we have President Ronald Reagan.

He convenes a Times Beach task force.

With the limited knowledge they have, they come to a reluctant conclusion.

Yeah, we're going to kick everyone out.

Yeah, the tracks.

Yeah.

Ann M.

Gorsuch.

No relation to the Supreme Court.

Just okay.

She's his mother.

Ann M.

Gorsuch gives the order, and the EPA agrees to pay $33 million

for relocation with $3.7 million coming from the state of Missouri.

All 800 families in Times Beach were bought out and moved by the government into whatever housing was available nearby.

It happened so quickly, there was not even really any organized resistance to this.

This is a route.

This is a panic.

Yeah, exactly.

Nor was the community consulted for anything, right?

Notably, a lot of people were moved into the nearby Quail Run Mobile Manor, right?

That's a trailer park, which Russell Bliss had actually sprayed with waste oil much more thoroughly than Times Beach.

Right.

Okay.

And that was also later evacuated.

Okay.

Cool.

Yeah.

Everyone is panicking about what the long-term effects of dioxin are, what health problems they or their kids might experience.

This was a complete disaster, right?

It's just like, all right, everyone leave.

You never want the kind of like federal government advice to be like, now panic and freak out, right?

Exactly.

Go in, they put up the big scary signs.

like this one caution hazardous waste site dioxin contamination stay in your car minimize travel, keep windows closed, stay on pavement, drive slowly.

Incredible haircuts on this woman as well.

Oh, yeah.

We used to let women have mullets.

Back in the day.

Back in the day.

That's what you could do in the Midwest.

Real trade-off.

On the one hand, the feminine mullets.

On the other hand, dioxin.

Dioxin.

But the toasters, think of the toasters.

Yeah.

So shiny.

Creased jeans?

Yeah.

So then they start demolishing the town.

Furthermore,

they start going to all the other contaminated sites around the state, basically everywhere that Russell Bliss had been.

They start demolishing them as well.

How do you think he feels at this point?

Like smoking a big fat cigar he lit off the back of an oil fire.

Yeah, I think

he probably came off best out of anyone involved.

The waste was all stored at Times Beach, being what they figured was the most contaminated site, pending construction of a powerful enough incinerator somewhere in state, which happened in 1995.

They built it on the site of the town.

Jesus.

Okay.

Vast numbers of lawsuits go forward.

There's something like 14,000 individual ones.

I know Piatt and Hempel eventually settle for $10,000 from Bliss.

$100,000 from Independent Petroleum, but the guys with the big pockets don't exist, right?

Right.

Most of the pertinent environmental legislation that would have punished anyone involved was passed after the dioxin-laced waste oil was applied.

So there were a few legal avenues to proceed here.

You know, when this disaster started unfolding, the EPA was a year old.

Eventually, Independent Petroleum pays out a million dollars to each of Piat's daughters who had gotten permanent chronic health problems from dioxin exposure.

Real bad.

Yeah.

But the weird thing is, you know, they clean up the site in 2001, 1997.

They finished the cleanup.

They finished, they demolished the incinerator.

2001, the site was delisted from the Superfund program.

Since then, dioxins in particular have received a lot of heightened scrutiny from regulators, but there are some questions to be addressed regarding, you know, even chronic low exposure.

This problem may not have been so bad that they needed to evacuate.

All of the studies of Times Beach residents revealed negligible at best health effects from the long-term dioxin exposure.

You know, so

of all the real stuff to panic about, The thing that gets the big panic and the big scary is something that turns out maybe not to have done anything.

Maybe it didn't really do anything.

I'm not disputing like over in Vietnam where you're getting, you know, Agent Orange dumped on you like every day for hours.

But, you know, in this case,

maybe

you could have taken some less extreme measures.

This may not have been necessary.

So the just the just pave it, just the just pave over it gang were right?

Pave over it.

Probably, yeah.

Yeah.

You probably could have just paved over it.

Incredible.

It was not, it's probably not that bad.

Well, I mean, it it makes sense because if it's, if its job is to stick to the dust and stay there, it's going to do that.

Nobody's walking around licking dirt roads.

Exactly.

Well,

you won't be able to lick the dirt road because there'd be pavement over it.

Well, exactly.

Wow.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

Times Beach is gone now.

The only building left in town was the roadhouse that was built across the river, which is now the visitor center for what is now known as Route 66 State Park.

For like to commemorate the Route 66, which is no longer there.

Yeah, Route 66.

It was never really a thing in the first, okay, sure.

It's signed, but it's no longer signed.

It's like decommissioned.

Yeah, it's right.

Okay, great, cool.

Well, I mean,

this is a perfect American story, right?

Of like

town that exists due to a weird capitalist swindle that fails on its own merits is then horrifically polluted by by one guy in a way that then gets everybody to panic.

One guy with a truck ruined everyone's lives.

Yeah.

And then the feds evacuate everything, and then it turns out they never even needed to.

And now it's kind of a boondoggle national park or state park.

Yes.

Yes.

You can go there.

And I think there's like a dog park.

And there's like, I don't know what else there is in there.

The negligible health effect.

Yeah, negligible health.

Well,

the Superfund cleaned it up good good and proper i mean they took out all the topsoil and everything this is this is like the ideal right of a kind of centralized planned economy is uh everybody has a kind of do-nothing job at uh like a state institution that only really exists to cover up like a series of other people's errors this is it's it's really it's really bad when you you you look at this and and you you say um you know you you start to agree with reagan about i'm from the government and i'm here to help

well in this case the the federal government didn't really make anything worse apart from destroying the title.

They just kind of, yeah, they cleaned it all up for no reason.

And now there's a state park there.

Yeah.

Well,

they've exploded the community.

I mean, that

is perfectly capable of doing that on its own.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

What the hell do they got at the Route 66 state park here?

Cycling.

Yeah, no,

equestrian trails.

So I guess it's fine for horses now.

Picnic trails.

Horses can handle it.

It must be fine.

Yeah.

Route 66 captured Americans' imagination and exposed millions of citizens to small towns across the country.

Okay, sure.

I have a feeling a lot of those citizens also lived in small towns at that time.

I'm much more interested in the other parks you may like, Missouri Mine State Historic Site, which looks fucked up.

That is, that's an old mine.

It's in a state of extremely cool disrepair.

And I like the way that.

that.

So,

what did we learn?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

No, I learned.

I would definitely say government, who's to say?

Good or bad or not?

I don't know.

I was reminded strongly of East Palestine by this.

Yeah.

Palestine, excuse me.

Because, you know, you have people like, we want the government to do something.

And then the government does something.

And not like that.

I shouldn't have done that.

Yeah.

Read.

There's an extent to which environmental remediation works.

And sometimes you don't need to take the most extreme option.

Yeah, this is my,

this, this is my most pro-chemical industry episode.

I invite

the listener to read the novel White Noise.

The movie's pretty good too.

Yeah,

cool.

It's a real kind of sim yavac type situation yeah it's uh this is uh well you know they'd only been doing it for 10 years you can't expect the epa to not make an oopsie doopsie every once in a while

well we have a segment on this podcast called safety third

shake hands with danger uh

all right

hello nova liam justin and schrodinger's guest yeah great well now i'm lost yeah it's the punchline to a joke i haven't haven't even told.

Whatever.

Good enough.

Schrödinger's driving along and he's speeding and he gets pulled over by the cop and the cop says, do you know how fast you are going?

And Schrödinger says, great, now I'm lost.

And it's not even Schrödinger.

It's Heisenberg.

It's Heisenberg.

It's Heisenberg.

So I fucked up the joke that I also fucked up telling.

I'm really tired.

It's 1.45 in the morning.

Can we do the thing, please?

Yes.

In my current life as a site reliability engineer, which involves neither sites, reliability, nor engineering, quite frankly.

You wouldn't think I've had any good workplace stories for safety third.

However, I wasn't always a desk jockey, and my proper trade in education is in the kitchen.

Oh boy, a lot of injuries in there, a lot of safety thirds there.

Yeah, as you might imagine, there are no shortage of ways to injure yourself or others in a commercial kitchen.

That's what I get for not reading along.

So, the real trick is finding a way to do it that is novel.

Oh, okay.

Many years ago, when I was fresh out of college, I unknowingly resolved to do just that.

And so we have the oatmeal incident.

Oh, God.

I'm scared.

I took a job right out of college because it was available, but also because it was the only unionized kitchen I've been aware of before or since.

That particular local turned out to be not so useful, but that's neither here nor there.

Oh.

My precise job as the new hire and a lowly block one cook was to single man the entire preparation of our breakfast buffet.

For a hotel chain, you've definitely heard of in a city I know at least two of you have been to, and no, it wasn't a Howard Johnson's.

Wrong with Hojaz.

This relatively straightforward task would not have been difficult for an experienced cook with a good sense of how long it takes to do things and a corresponding ability to sort out the order of operations.

Again, I was right out of college.

One day when a QHL hockey team was staying at the hotel, I actually managed to run out of oatmeal.

Jesus.

The commercial preparation of oatmeal for a buffet service is not complicated, but it is time-consuming, as you need to bring a liter or two of

your preferred cooking liquid, I believe I used milk at the time, to a gentle boil before adding the oats and give the oats time to cook in that liquid and the whole product to thicken up.

Now, I was mortified by this, so I made sure not to repeat that mistake the next time the team stayed with us.

For this kitchen, oatmeal is cooked in a large, shallow, three-foot-wide aluminum pan called a rondo.

Rhymes with bondo.

Thank you.

And looks like a Louisianan surname.

Yeah.

The advantage of this arrangement is that you can cook a large quantity of the oatmeal while providing a broad surface area and a large enough body that you can employ two burners on the stove to supply the necessary heat.

This was my undoing.

Okay.

As was the fashion at the time, you handled pans like this by gripping their handles through the aid of a side towel, which is nothing more or less exciting than the sort of thing you'd use to dry your dishes.

Knowing that the time for the buffet to open was drawing close, I shut down the burner, seized the pan, and turned hurriedly towards the preheated chafing dish I intended to put the oatmeal inside of.

But since I only killed one burner, the slightly oily, very frizzy towel in my left hand immediately caught fire.

Oh, boy.

And at the speed of reflex, I did what any sane monkey would do and let go of the burning thing.

Oh, no.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

The pot immediately fell from my hands.

And if I had followed the thought through and had the good sense to turn away, this wouldn't be a safety third story, but a shitty morning and a lot of hard work to clean up.

Instead, I stared at the mess I was about to make and all my hard work as it fell to the floor.

No.

Dannis Fluids are wont to do the bubbling hot oatmeal, happily jumped out of the pot and slapped me straight in the face.

What you did to yourself is something that

sometimes prisoners in the UK do to other prisoners or prison officers on purpose.

Since you cannot run a prison system in the UK without every prison cell having a kettle in it, this is

a known thing, right?

Like sugar and water,

it sticks.

It's real bad.

Yes.

Skipping all the really ghastly over-explaining this unexpected hot oatmeal scrub had the predictable effect on my ability to make logical decisions.

And after being talked to by our baker into going to the hospital, I took took a taxi rather than calling an ambulance.

Why'd you do that?

It's Canada.

Yeah.

At the ER, when the staff called my parents to tell them that their son was in the hospital, my father immediately demanded to know what my little brother did that time.

I escaped the worst of the scarring.

And thanks to Norm McDonald,

I will never forget the phrase, always wear these safety glasses.

I hadn't been wearing my glasses that morning, things would have been a lot worse.

Jesus, no kidding.

Yeah.

Jesus Christ.

What we learned here is that brand new cooks should probably be reminded to slow the hell down.

Side towels should be clean, dry, and free of lint.

And that

some jumped-up hockey player from Montreal has to wait a few minutes for his oatmeal.

You know, just let him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Greetings from Irvingland from Patch.

Thank you, Patch.

I'm glad that you did not

lose your vision to a thing of Quaker Oats.

Yeah.

Jesus Christ.

These and other things can happen to you in a kitchen.

Yeah, I want some more kitchen safety thirds because I know there's a million of them out there.

Yeah, yeah.

I feel like I might cause some at some point in the near future.

Me anytime I cook.

Yeah.

Same.

Well, that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Do all the stuff in the description of the video, whatever it says.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Buy a shirt.

We have shirts.

Probably should have plugged that at some point before

an hour 54.

No, the hogs will do it.

Merchandise.

Thank you, Hogs.

Thank you, Hogs.

Yeah.

Do organize political violence.

Roz.

Delete that.

Yeah.

Or don't.

I don't care anymore.

Who knows?

No one's going to watch it to this.

Well, hopefully,

the content moderators don't watch it till this far.

No, it's Dora.

It's just AI robbing us again.

Oh, my God.

All right.

Bye, everyone.

Podcast.

Bye, everyone.

Bye.