Episode 173: Oops! All News 3: News Hard With a Vengeance

Let's do a three two one mark.

That's three two one

mark.

God, really?

Yeah,

every single time.

Let's try that again.

Try that again.

Okay.

Two, one.

Mark.

There we go.

Okay.

Get clapped.

Yeah.

Great.

All right.

All right.

People really liked being able to see our cameras for like a split second.

And you know what?

I like it.

I like giving them that, you know?

Like, maybe not a full pivot to video, but I like the little like peek behind the curtain, you know.

But maybe there's like this like catch-up session of like 30 seconds of like our face, you know, faces and then disappear again.

Just enough to I just realized that I have a pile.

I'm sorting laundry right into keep it up.

And

God only knows what's behind me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's it's added here.

Pay no attention to the podcast behind the curtain.

I should never have gotten this blue screen covered in my bank details and all my passwords.

Why did I do that?

So

I doxed myself live on RailNet or like a few episodes ago when I

held up my sacking letter from Sistra, which is here.

Oh, with the address.

No, don't do it again.

Obviously, the address on it.

Like tens of thousands of people now have my address.

That's fine.

Devin, I'm sure you know what you're doing.

Just

Aalaya, just like showing you the live satellite imagery

from your house.

Devin, beep that.

Beep that.

Thank you.

Yeah, that's that's how that works, right?

Leah still has his head in his house.

All right, all right.

All right, it's it's been a while since we recorded.

Um, welcome to, well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

His head's still in his house.

Justin Rozniak, I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I am November Kelly.

I am the person who is speaking now.

My pronouns are Shay.

Fuck hell.

She?

She and she and her?

My pronouns are she and her.

My pronouns are she and her.

Going to the gender identity clinic.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

I don't even want to fucking do this.

Hi, buddy, Liam.

It's okay, Liam.

Good.

It's okay.

Fuck ali.

It was a...

Hi, bad.

I was wondering whether we've just actually lost him.

Can you hear on your mind?

It's possible.

Is it even moving?

Can you hear me?

Like, this would be the funniest possible time for this thing to cast out computers.

Did it die?

I'm going to kill myself and kill all of you.

Okay.

There he is.

There we go.

I know what he's going.

Yeah.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he and him.

And with me, we have not a guest for Victoria Scott purposes.

Yes, very specifically.

Hello, my name is Gareth Dennis.

My pronouns are he and him.

Yeah, because you were talking to Victoria about whether or not these episodes

count for total number of episodes guested in.

And I think she still has the record.

So that's why.

She does still have the record.

So weirdly enough, you need to have me on more, guys.

That's right.

That's what we have to understand.

You need to have me on more.

If you've been watching the most recent set of episodes and you're thinking, well, it's been a while since they've had Gareth on, you're right.

You know, that's a counterintuitive opinion, but you're completely right.

Completely correct.

Yes.

We will get on that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Victoria, in our eternal battle to hold the hot the top spot, Victoria, she's winning.

And the, the, yeah,

it's the let them fight situation, you know.

Um, yeah, it's, it's a very violent battle between Victoria and I.

There's, there's no love loss between us, you know.

Fractions.

Podcasters enter.

One podcaster leaves.

What we really need to do is do an episode with both of you, you know, unless we can really settle this.

Yeah, it's going to be

train versus car.

All right, we're going to settle this for once and for all.

Train versus plane, also, potentially.

Oh, yeah, that's true.

I've had Victorian for like plane episodes before.

Yes.

Ooh, now my brain is running.

Anyway,

why are we here?

What's going on?

What's going to be dragged into this lair?

We did those decades comprised of weeks where decades happen.

I was about to say, this is one of those, you know, once they elected Trump, the news started happening again.

No, yeah, it's been a while since we've recorded because, you know, like everyone else, we didn't do any work between the holidays.

So, you know, we have families, you know, you may remember that of Gareth.

And so it's true.

Can't confirm.

So we're doing another oops all news episode.

I'm really hoping that we do this and then just there's no more news.

No more episodes.

In a good way, not in a like, you know,

right, right, right.

What I'm hoping is,

I got you.

After this, we get a decade where weeks happen, and it just kind of like, oh, I'm so stuck for news entries for this episode.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I kind of believe that,

you know, Trump, you know, became a Zen Buddhist.

He's looking at the doctrine of Wu Wei or non-action.

Yeah, he's uh, he has, um, he has found the middle path.

Yeah,

Trump coming out with the shaved head and saffron rose.

Siddhartha Katama Trump.

Yeah, with the ear piercings.

That would be nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, uh, without further ado, let's do the goddamn news.

So, this is a new one that just started today or earlier today or late yesterday.

Yeah, we're starting with

a pretty grim one, to be clear.

Oh, most of them are grim.

Don't worry.

Yeah, these are

happy news in here, is this?

Oh, no, no, there's one happy piece of news in there, but it's buried in there.

Don't worry.

I mean, in terms of this one, I've literally been hearing from our listeners who are getting like evacuated.

So, this is this is happening to like

you know,

people.

This is, yeah, that's safe, actually.

I was up late on the phone yesterday talking to Noah.

Uh, more on that in a second, but yeah, uh, Los Angeles has been destroyed.

Yeah, how to go right wildfires

of the list of American cities destroyed by climate change.

Uh, you know, very sad to have to add Los Angeles to it.

Um, Tampa's still avoiding being on that list somehow, after all.

I mean, drugs in Tampa Bay.

Divine providence for the Tampa Bay Bucks.

Yeah.

No, I, um, I mean, as far as this goes, this has been on the cards for a while, you know, like, and I think it had been like a sort of like

a thing where, like, anytime you hear about Southern California's like increasingly losing battle with a biome comprised primarily of like dry tinder

with the invasive eucalyptus thrown in for good measures,

just some Australian koala bombs.

Yeah.

But yeah, so there are, I believe at this point,

two or three fires burning in Los Angeles County.

There is the Palisades fire that's down by the coast,

just northwest of Santa Monica.

Pacific Palisades.

Santa Monica.

Santa Monica.

Santa Monica.

Santa Monica.

There's the other one, which I believe is the Eaton fire.

Yes.

Yes.

That's sort sort of

sick of hearing about which schools these fuckers went to.

Threaten me with a good time.

An Eaton fire would be marvelous.

That's sort of northeast of downtown Los Angeles near Pasadena,

near Altadena, which is looking pretty ugly right now.

Those are...

Tens of thousands of acres between them are on fire right now.

And it has been pretty ugly to watch.

This is a really big fire.

And this is usually sort of the rainy, you know, wet season out there.

That sort of just did not happen this year.

Usually the fires don't happen this time of year.

So it's been, you know, tough marshaling all the firefighters.

It's been tough.

It's January.

It's January and it's fucking like fire season.

Fuck you.

It's January.

Yeah.

Genuinely.

The one silver lining of this, and I hesitate to even call it a silver lining.

is you see that one venture capitalist guy who was uh tweeting

can someone find me the private fire department i'll pay any amount is there anyone i can like buy buy like a fire department off of it's like you pay your taxes you know

Seth McFarlane drew a little like Brian family guy dog cartoon to thank the firefighters for saving his house.

No, he didn't.

No, he didn't.

I wanted to see it.

I think he said thank you, LAFD, and that's a Los Angeles County fire department bulldozer there.

Oh, yep.

That's, yep, yep.

Yep.

What you're seeing here is that when the first evacuation orders came down.

You're seeing Roz actually with his bulldozer.

This is his, folks.

This is not like the Nuke.

This is his.

This fire, the first evacuation orders seem to come from this one development that's fairly

high up in the mountains, and there's one road in and one road out.

That sounds like a, then there's

a second road that's blocked off most of the time.

That's the, quote, fire road, unquote, in case the main one is blocked.

Anyway, they sent the evacuation orders out.

And

the fire moved so quickly that the one road in was blocked.

And so everyone had to get out of their cars and run for it.

And then, of course, they couldn't move equipment in because the road was blocked with abandoned cars.

So the fire department.

They took the keys as well, just in case someone stole your Nissan in the middle of the fucking fire.

Yeah, fire department.

If you wanted that bad,

I would point out,

you know, there's a big bus depot about two miles away by highway that could have moved people out in other ways.

Nah, fuck you.

Well, I mean, conversely,

a related part of climate adaptation is going to be maybe not building communities in places and in ways such that there's

one and a half roads out and you can only get people out by their own cars.

All of the development in these parts of Los Angeles County, I think this is still Los Angeles County.

It's pretty big.

It might be like a lot of people.

It's like a county fire department there.

Yeah, exactly.

Probably.

So

the thing is, there's a lot of this stuff where you talk about like the urban wilderness interface.

These are houses which are, you know, they're single family.

They're large houses on smaller lots.

And they're built.

you know, with a bunch of dry vegetation around them.

And they're built inside.

They're built in areas that when the wildfire goes,

it goes really hard.

In this case, the one thing that's been exacerbating it are what are called the Santa Ana winds.

And these are a phenomenon that happens, you know, a dozen and a half times per year or so, where it's just like, okay, we have a night of 99 mile per hour gusts.

Jesus.

So

that's where anything can happen.

Exactly.

And those peaked about two and a half hours ago as of now.

This fire is still very much going as we speak.

The fire has managed to make it down the mountain and it looks like they just issued the first evacuation order for Palisades Park a few minutes ago.

And that's sort of past like where a lot of the vegetation is.

That's gotten into, you know,

Los Angeles bungalows proper.

So

that could get pretty ugly, you know, even by the time this episode is finished recording.

Oh, yeah.

I I mean, the stuff moves so quickly.

Um, I mean, yeah, and then it's already

already grim.

That particular fire, um, at least the winds are mostly moving out to sea, so you don't have necessarily the spread.

The other one, the Eden fire, um, that one, there's you know, probably a dozen miles of city between it and the sea.

Um, they've been, there have been a couple of fires that have been, you know, started just from embers drifting three miles away, um, which is pretty pretty not a good thing to think about.

But those have been contained fairly quickly.

Um, but the town of uh Altadena has already, you know, had pretty serious damage to its downtown.

Um, you know, and again, that's past like the urban wilderness interface that's moving into proper urban.

Um, so that's that's also not so good.

Um,

it's just grim to consider that not only is this the kind of thing that's going to get worse every year for the rest of our lives, but the Chirons are going to become become less and less like a joke every year for the rest of our lives.

Yeah, I was about to say the other thing is there's been a bunch of people complaining, oh my God,

why did the fire hydrants fail?

Why is there no pressure in a fire system?

You can't design a fire hydrant system, a high-pressure water system for a demand like this reasonably.

This is outside of scope.

This is not something anyone could have reasonably predicted would happen.

Scope creep would just have soak down the rose bowl with like a bunch of whatever the fuck is in fire hydrants now.

Yeah, it's just kind of like whatever we build the whole town out of asbestos, which to be clear, they tried.

So yeah, they're largely, you know, in parts of

the area that is currently being burned over.

They are

without any fire hydrants.

You know, you have to bring in water trucks and bumper trucks.

The situation is not good.

Climate change.

I mean,

this isn't just just climate change.

There are lots of other factors in here

that are causing it as well as making the consequences worse.

But

we've talked about it all before.

I talk about it in the book.

It's talked about by a lot of experts.

We're going to have to build, we're going to not only build our new developments and new cities to be much more resilient and also.

move, you know, improve mobility and so that you can actually get people in and out of areas.

But there is so much retrofitting, particularly in U.S.

cities that are so sprawling.

Because the thing about the sprawling cities is that they are hopeless for putting in

dense transit.

You can do it, but they're not so good.

But also, they're really good for being obliterated by fire because you've got just lovely fire going through, wrecking everything.

I've been working my way through on Google Maps, looking at where the fires are and just looking at how perfectly arranged all the housing is between kind of pretty decent fire loads

in the kind of the brush, as Ross was saying, that interface.

And the other thing is it's like Switzerland in the sense, some of this hilly stuff, it's like Switzerland.

You've got one road up, except that in Switzerland, you'd have a rack railway down the middle of the road.

Yes.

So like there are ways to do this where you don't have everyone parking your car in the road such that they have to be bulldozed out the way.

It's yeah.

And I think that the images of the bulldozing, bulldozing cars out the way, given that for the U.S., cars are up there with among the highest sources of greenhouse gas emissions right now.

It's, yeah, it's a bit like that photo from Spain the other day, right?

I thought you were going to go another way with that and say in the United States, cars are the highest and holiest form of life.

That is true.

I mean, that's kind of true.

Yeah.

Like, it's like, okay, it's going to kill how many people, but it's going to destroy God knows how many cars.

What about my Neesodesi?

That's the real horror.

Yeah.

Coming off of my burning building, holding Toby to save my V-Sod rogue.

The thing is, there are quite a lot of wide roads.

Like, you could have...

I just, per to

the next episode, of course, I just finished watching Chernobyl series.

I'm very late to that party, but I finally just watched it.

And one of the things that struck me in the early part is how quickly the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian SSR just rustled up like 200 coaches and just evacuated an entire city.

Like that sort of thing can be done.

Ros was talking about a bus depot earlier, yeah.

There is a depot for the big blue bus,

which is one of the local transit agencies in this area.

Pretty big depot right in downtown Santa Monica, about two minutes travel time from where this bulldozer is.

I mean, short of like building better transit for the fringes of Los Angeles or Los Angeles in total, like the city planners, you know, the county needs to be saying, do not drive your car.

There will be, you know, we have an evacuation plan.

Yeah, we have an evacuation plan that involves buses.

I mean, you could have that organized for next season.

You got to worry about stuff like, okay, you know, personal possessions and pets and so on and so forth.

But you'd want to encourage people to use the bus where possible.

Yeah, exactly.

So you don't wind up in

this.

Yeah, yeah.

I like the firefighter filming it on their phone.

Yeah, that's so funny.

Get your show before I do it.

Like,

yeah.

We got a statement from Noah, our Southern California correspondent.

Hello from the climate crisis.

There are over 27,000 acres of the county burning.

There's ash falling all around my apartment.

A mall developer who ran on being LA Trump is getting quotes in LA Times.

And our mayor cut the fire department funding by $20 million so that she could pay for exorbitant raises for the cops and LAPD staffing positions that remained completely unfilled for years because of how evil the LAPD are.

This will happen to you one day.

Great.

Not me.

I'm just jumping.

I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, that is another aspect of this is that a lot of emergency services other than the police have been recently defunded, not just the fire department, also things like homelessness services and stuff.

All that went straight to the police and it's just padding the budget.

It's not even paying for new officers.

It's really good that you guys, it's like every other country that pays for a secondary paramilitary force ends up getting couped.

It's amazing that it hasn't happened in the U.S.

yet.

It's kind of a temper.

Civilian control of the police is something that people

want to be focusing on.

We should work towards civilian control of the police.

It's about building, like, you know, strong institutions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, so that's an ongoing story.

I mean, who knows what's happened by now?

The whole city may have been destroyed by the time this

is released.

But yeah.

But anyway,

in other news,

it's there was, yeah,

there was in New Orleans a mass running overing.

It's just, it's, it's, uh, this is just a kind of like omnipresent feature of life now.

Uh, it's a thing in Europe.

It's a thing in the US.

Um, and I mean, the thing I've been talking about this a bit on Trash Future, and the thing that I come back to is that you just have a segment of the population who are so, who are like aware as everybody is that something is badly wrong and that something is is fucked but are like

willing to be or like sort of like able to be led into the most incoherent self-radicalizing positions based off of that um oh yeah just just uh just just insane political violence that doesn't make any sense i mean i don't know you could learn by uh this guy he he he he did an assassination and left an elevator pitch memo everyone liked him um you know i don't that's that's also an example of like incoherence because, okay,

when he killed the health insurance CEO, it's like, yeah, that was cool, fine.

But like, he did it because he was radicalized by like Malcolm Gladwell.

You know, it's not something that doesn't make any fucking sense.

The first, you know,

radical centrist.

Yeah, and it's like, it's, it's deeply like individual and atomized.

It's like a kind of more, especially for a guy like this, right?

To be like, I'm going to join ISIS and then do a ramming attack off the back of like self-radicalization is

just a kind of like more elaborate form of murder suicide, right?

Like instead of,

I don't think he even joined ISIS.

I figure you got to like send in like some paperwork or something.

Yeah.

Pay an application fee, you know, processes.

Right.

But like, but like, because like part of the thing here was like he was, he was like broke and he was getting divorced and he was unhappy about the divorce settlement, if I remember right.

Like, and it's like, this is the thing that I guess you do when you can't kill your like soon-to-be ex-wife and the rest of your family is you decide to take it out on like society in general in the form of Bourbon Street.

But I think there's some interesting local politics here as well.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

So, you know, this is okay.

Shamsuddin Jabbar, right?

U.S.

Army veteran, American citizen.

He rented off of Truro.

Turout.

Turo?

Turout.

Turo.

Okay.

No, I was thinking the city of Truro.

Yeah,

he rented off of this like

Airbnb

processing.

Yeah.

So he rented a Ford F-150 Lightning.

That's the electric version of the Ford F-150.

This thing's 6,000 pounds.

There's 164 seconds.

It's one of those things where it's an EV and that's useful for this kind of thing.

Right, exactly.

Weighs a ton.

Yeah.

Turned right off of Canal Street onto Bourbon Street, dodged around a police SUV because they didn't have the wedge barrier barrier there that day.

Presumably all the other police crap that said canal and bourbon because usually they get the portable sentry tower there and everything.

Rams into the crowd on Bourbon Street, kills 15 people, injures a hell of a lot more.

He had an ISIS flag on the truck.

He rigged some pipe bombs to detonate with remote control.

Never got to use them, probably because he crashed into the man lift here.

And then the airbag went off.

And then he was stuck in there getting shot at by the police.

It's a pretty bad situation, you know?

Yeah, not ideal, not ideal.

Well, you know, if you don't want to wind up in that situation, don't do a truck.

Don't do test trucks.

Yeah.

You know, so this is about three blocks into Bourbon Street, right?

This is,

what is it?

I want to say there's a daiquiri place right up here.

It is Bourbon Street, also does pizza.

Yeah, I'm sure we've been there in the dead of night.

We were there the last time we were there.

I know you're right for this kind of thing because you just have like a bunch of people like walking around very closely packed.

Yep.

Yeah, yes.

This is a very, very narrow street, very heavy pedestrian load.

It was

bars.

Everyone is fucking hammered.

Yeah.

But anyway, so one question is: if you've been to New Orleans, what's going on with the Bollards?

There's usually Bollards blocking off Bourbon Street at this time of day.

It's all talking to Morning.

It's going to go back to Bollards.

It's all Bollard posting at the end of the day.

Yep.

So Mayor Mitch Landrew proposed closing Bourbon Street to traffic back in 2017.

A bunch of business owners successfully opposed this because they get the majority of their business from the roughly 15 parking spots on Bourbon Street.

Not the

trillions of pedestrians, right?

Correct me if I'm wrong, right?

But isn't that whole area in the quarter kind of like de facto pedestrianized, but it also like occasionally gets cars through it you can drive a car there you shouldn't but you can yeah um the sidewalks are very narrow the streets are very narrow most streets are one travel lane one parking lane

um you know it is it is built for uh the 17th century um yeah back when you couldn't do like a self-radicalized horse attack right yeah exactly exactly the horse gets scared by the other horses i mean it's just primary like prime one of one of the most perfect one of several cities in the U.S., but possibly the most perfect city for being car-free.

At least this section of

I think you could make a very strong case for pedestrianization, the French quarter.

I agree.

Yeah.

Now, at a compromise measure here, meant to prevent exactly this kind of attack were these movable bollards here.

Yeah, we've got zero colours.

They're stupid.

That's fine.

They're also pathetic, right?

Like if you've seen in places that are sort of like designed against vehicle ramming attacks, and this does not always work, as we saw in Europe recently, in Germany, but like when you see, like, look at like the US embassy in your country, if you're not in the US, for instance, or like, you know, parliaments or stuff like that, that it might be in the form of like big planters or something, but you will have big concrete like fortifications.

Right.

You know, yeah.

And that's not something that's necessarily implausible to put in.

It's not something that's implausible to move in and out of the way a bunch of times a day, but like the little tiny metal bollard just kind of doesn't cut it, you know?

Oh, no, these guys, these guys are pretty heavy duty.

They're like crash rated for like,

I wanted to say like 20 tons or something like that.

I didn't write that down.

I don't know what I'm forgetting.

Something like

the model name is a matador or something.

I want to say that's that.

Yeah, exactly.

That's not how a massador works.

The massador's job isn't to try and absorb

the ball.

You see, the matador gets out of the way, right?

Right.

I don't know.

So, anyway, these slide in and out diagonally

so that when the street is pedestrianized in the evenings, the ballers are up, but otherwise they are not, right?

Otherwise, you know, you can get your deliveries early in the morning and people can drive their cars down the street until I want to say like eight o'clock in the evening.

cargo bikes exist, you don't need vehicles for deliveries anymore.

This is true, yeah.

Um, so this was the compromise measure, and this was deliberately like supposed to prevent truck attacks because everyone was terrified about the attack in uh nice at that point, right?

Right, yeah, uh, a later proposal by Mayor Latoya Cantrell to pedestrianize not just Bourbon Street, but most of the French quarter in response to COVID was also shot down

to the point where even mild traffic, yeah, even mild traffic calming was rejected.

Just for clarity.

It's like literally, it's like a combination of like bar owners and the kind of 15 ancient French vampires who actually live in the French quarter.

Well, this is

a Philipine Lallery's ghost sticking that shit up on the front door.

This is a photo I took on Bourbon Street several years ago.

Save our neighborhood, no pedestrian mall.

This is on an Airbnb.

Can I just, can I just, explicitly, for everyone watching, listening,

all of the evidence shows that business income increases when you pedestrianize an area.

Just in case anyone was in any doubt about what the actual evidence is, these businesses are morons.

Their patronage will increase when you pedestrianize the street.

That is a fundamental thing.

And also, to maintain access for disabled people coming through, it's very straightforward to enable, because those people are driving disabled you know disabled people driving a vehicle are they are likely to be you know firstly very few vehicles allowed in they can drive around at like very low speeds or you can have mobility scooters that allow them to move around there are ways to manage that without limiting their access but you can fully pedestrianize an area and the business income will increase because the cars aren't in the way because cars are a shit use of road space i'm thinking i'm developing a theory

for feet i'm developing a theory that not only are cars the highest american form of life but drunk driving driving is the most sacred American activity.

Yes.

You're not wrong.

I will say some of the resistance here is also from people who just fucking hate tourists, which I understand.

I get that, but like they lost that battle in New Orleans in like 1830.

1850s.

You're not making any.

It's like living in fucking like Celebration Florida and being like this dude fucking tourists.

Yeah, Venice.

or I like I like the idea of a guy who does live in Celebration Florida and it's just like if I see the mouse one more fucking time

Yeah

Yeah, I guess who lived there when it was all just orange groves and is just like

why should I leave?

I was fucking here first

This later proposal this later proposal to pedestrianize bourbon street was also um you know sort of uh of course disregarded it was shot down um you know this this would have uh you would have uh pedestrianized a few other streets in the French quarter as well.

You know, you'd have a bunch of traffic calming elsewhere.

All the stuff that would have prevented you from driving a truck down there at 60 miles.

That would have made it nice.

It would have made it nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Admittedly, it's already very nice, but it would have made it nicer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

New Orleans.

The only city where I'm willing to move besides Philadelphia is New Orleans, Louisiana.

So if anyone's got so high on my list of like needs to go there.

Beautiful place.

Beautiful place.

I love it.

Every time I've been there, I've been

treated like a king.

I love it.

I love New Orleans.

And I genuinely, this one was like, this hit me especially because I was like,

as horrific and grotesque as Bourbon Street is,

a place that I dearly love and care about.

And just seeing this

is gut-wrenching.

And

my sincere condolences.

No, it's horrible.

It is.

And it's terrifying.

And

we had a shooting at the Christmas market here in Philly, and I had the thought after this happened of just, it wouldn't be that hard.

And I was just

probably pretty, yeah, just that, that fucking thought, man, is

super grim.

So let's talk about something even worse.

Yeah.

And like the car as a weapon, again, like the car, like, I want to be explicit about it.

The cars as an offensive weapon, not just causing climate change, not just like wrecking our space environment, but cars are getting heavier,

still getting more powerful.

They are weapons.

It's just someone who has apprehended the kind of like anti-social violent potential of a car more than like most other people have.

There's no reason for vehicles to be this big, this fast, and this heavy.

Yeah.

No, no.

It just gets stupider.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's talk about the truck bomb.

No, no, no, no.

It gets stupider.

Oh, fucking Jesus.

All right.

So anyway, these are pretty good hefty bollards they installed anyway, right?

You know, but so how is the truck able to make it through?

The The answer is they were not compatible with the environment of Bourbon Street.

What?

The fuck does that mean?

It's not a graphics card.

They had to be manually moved into place every evening.

And because Bourbon Street is a place where people get very, very drunk and drop stuff on the floor, the tracks got clogged up with beads and trash.

And what the municipal workers referred to as Bourbon Street juice.

Oh, delicious.

A heady mixture of zombie vomit

and like God only knows what else.

I had to describe that as a serviceability limit state failure.

That's poor design.

That's an obvious and inevitable outcome.

In preparation for hosting the Super Bowl, they decided to clean up Bourbon Street and install new bollards and remove the old unreliable bollards, right?

Removed the matadors.

The matadors were turned into doormats.

Oh, oh, yeah, I see what you're doing there, and I don't like it.

Yeah,

so anyway, there were no, there were no bollards installed at the time

of this impact.

There was absolutely no kind of barrier whatsoever, save for the police SUV parked on Bourbon and Canal.

Yeah, this is this is the one time where you need the cops to be double parked, and

they still managed to fuck that up too.

So,

So, anyway, yeah, from NOLA.com, the Bollard project began in November and was scheduled to last three months.

It involves removing and replacing sections of road to take out the existing Ballards.

A city press release on Tuesday, Tuesday night, noted the project was ongoing, but did not provide details of the work done such far.

The old barriers never worked, blah, blah, blah.

Bourbon Street Juice.

Yeah,

the new bollards they want to put in only rated for a 5,000-pound impact at 10 miles an hour.

Man, fuck off.

So everything you were saying, Nova, is correct.

I was right, but about the wrong bollards.

This is what I get for reading ahead in the notes.

No, the new bollards aren't going to work.

The old bollards would have worked fine, but they took them out.

Uh-huh.

Are you fucking kidding me?

No, Nova, you were just 100% correct about

the bollards that

are there now.

Hopeless.

You know what you could do if you wanted to block a road in a way that you could get in and out of the way without having

street juice blocking it is like some kind of a gate

swings up or across.

So, usually in Canal Street.

Castle, yes.

At Bourbon Canal, they have a what's called a wedge barrier.

That's one of the ones that where the big sheet metal flips up.

The thing is, it's a portable one that's not there the whole day.

The other thing is, it's

what it's

I'm just thinking about the juice coming off one of those wedges as it rises.

Pouring down from the swamp, like Baron Locken and

Bourbon actually has a pronounced grade towards the center because it is so frequently submerged in liquid.

So this portable wedge barrier, actually,

like half of it is slightly in the air because it's flat, but the street is not.

So every time anything goes over it, it just bends the thing.

So I assume they just weren't using it because it was probably broken.

Genuinely, at this point,

it's got to be cheaper to dig a moat.

moat.

That's what I was saying.

Yep.

Well, they did the moat.

But

they have a levee that's like the reverse of a moat.

Yeah.

Big earthen berm blocking off Canal Street.

No cars.

Just make it no cars.

If you just, you know,

if you just pedestrianized this thing, this would not have been possible if you just did it properly.

I mean, okay, you need some room for deliveries to some of these places, but you know, if you had a lot of street furniture, if you had a a lot of you know just even like chicanes would have made this impossible yeah yeah but

everything i know about new orleans is that it's it's a like a beautiful city that is tremendously poorly led and kind of always has been as long as it's existed um

and yeah you know just kind of more more of that i guess well you know i there is very little we can do to uh you know no one wants to give up americans sacred right to drive a car as quick as possible everywhere yeah no one competent ever wants to be mayor of anything uh is another part like there's no there's a real dearth of like effective municipal governance is why i did sort of doing the

mayor podcast uh it's like there's a real kind of like

thing where it's just not something that anyone seems to bother to take seriously, even in large cities.

We need a, you know, some kind of vat where we can grow new Anadalgos.

Yes, doing the prestige to Anadolga.

Yeah, exactly.

Also, there was a woman who was hit by the truck and then was shot, and she was told to come into work the next day by Amazon.

Yep, that just about sums those cut tracks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, anyways,

very, very ugly truck attack here that could have been solved with a little bit better municipal governance if that.

I mean, you know,

these are ways you can be resilient to sort of the horrible alienation that's resulting in these bizarre

terrorist attacks.

That's the thing that I always come back to, right?

Is that like,

it's a, it's a, like a symptom of a, uh, like really like, of an age of incoherence, right?

Yeah.

Do you know how you make yourself less lonely is you take the person out of the three and a half ton isolation box and you make them mix with other pedestrians in a largely pedestrianized part of a beautiful city.

I mean, you can't even make Americans ride the subway with each other without having them kill each other now.

So, yeah, this is true.

This is, well, we'll get to that

later in the presentation.

Oh, God.

Okay.

Can we talk about a fun car-based violence?

Yeah, let's talk about the stupider one.

Yeah.

Okay, right.

So we have to tackle the...

Firstly,

I laid this into existence in the last episode we did.

You did.

Sorry, everyone.

We need the mental bookend here

all right go oh yes sorry yes we laid this into existence uh as a podcast and i i i can only apologize for suggesting that it would be a cyber trunk a cyber truck bombing trump uh as we could see here happening

that did in fact that did in fact happen a man a man not just any man but one of god's own green berets a special forces soldier that which makes everything that follows significantly funnier when you consider the whole, like, oh, these guys are like hyper-trained killers kind of thing.

This is the most pathetic explosion.

Oh, sorry.

There we go.

He got a cyber truck off of Turo.

Off of Turo.

Yeah.

Then asked ChatGPT how to get to Las Vegas and drove to the wrong one.

He also asked ChatGPT, and again, this guy was, this guy was, he was a Green Beret, he was in the special chart.

He asked ChatGPT how to build a bomb, what explosives he might need.

And

for the first time in ever, AI's tendency to just hallucinate wrong shit

saved lives.

Yes.

Because see, he's just, so the most dangerous thing, the most dangerous object that we see here of all the stuff that was dumped into it and around it was the cyber truck itself.

Because, right, he filled the incredibly small boot of this thing with fireworks.

Now, fireworks don't explode hot, they also don't explode particularly violently.

He had seen the most recent bonus episode and was like,

What if I did that, but in a way that was also a

temple?

People are gonna have to bleep the word side and all of this.

Sorry, Devin.

Oh, sorry, Devin.

We'll try not to use it too much.

One in the last one as well.

Um, yeah, so he uh, yeah, he went to Ent FX and he hired the O-bang and he put that in the boot and of the Cybertruck, drove it according to

the wrong, to the wrong place.

To the wrong Las Vegas, Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Yeah.

Realized his mistake and drove to the regular Las Vegas.

Those marvelous green brace.

Yeah.

I love how much AI is just going to be a confounding factor in like increasing amounts of news.

We're like, oh yeah, this is, this terrorist attack happened, but it happened in a, it happened where no one was in like a set for a movie film of us of the city rather than the actual city because AI just sent someone that way.

I just,

doing 9-11 to Manhattan, Kansas.

Oh, man.

Just incredible work.

Anyway, so it went pop.

It didn't even break any windows, right?

It was just

injured like a couple of people who were nearby, but like,

the guy shot himself and then hit the

uh oh god okay the detonation thing and then just kind of you had a very like voluminous fireworksy explosion um and the cyber truck caught off it was pretty loony tunes yeah it was a bit comedic yeah um and then of course one when when the cybertruck got hot enough that was then things started getting dangerous yeah

I mean, yeah, you're then faced with a Cybertruck fire, which is not great.

No.

Iron was like,

look how great the Cybertruck

was designed for this, yeah.

It was designed for this because my cyber truck is made of steel.

Guess what?

All their cars are made of sometimes aluminum, sometimes cars.

Yep, twat, anyway.

Yeah, there it is.

It's just

that means we're sliding towards a future where the Los Angeles County Fire Department's bulldozer is unable to push a cyber truck out of the way.

Oh, my God.

No, they'll upgrade.

It's fine.

Fire with fire

Bigger bulldozers.

You gotta buy them from the IDF.

No, I want them to stay BDS compliant.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

The bulldozers are really, the bulldozers are really like kind of an extremes of morality technology in the sense of like you can use it for a genocide or you can use it to crush a cybertruck to like do firefighting.

Yeah, that really is the opposite end of the spectrum.

Is Caterpillar on the the bds uh big time

that's what i figured yeah you did i mean i guess you'd have to i mean where else who else builds bulldozers you know like china there's only like 20 different bulldozer manufacturers in china

like human rights uh abuses and

probably volvo uh

might be woke i don't know volvo woke manufacturers the logo The logo is the man's symbol.

Yeah.

So no.

Well, they care about men's mental health is the thing.

Dude, we got to get, we got to get Volvo to change it to the trans symbol, and then they'll be woke.

Yeah, that's it.

I'm going to need Volvo to do a couple of things.

First of all, change the logo to the trans symbol.

Second of all, build the world's largest bulldozer.

Three, start giving it to American firefighters.

Yes, exactly.

Okay.

Glad we're making progress today.

Yeah, it's, you know, we're rattling through this agenda.

We have a coherent vision for a better world.

Imagine the woke fire department bulldozer crushing a cyber truck forever.

And that's our vision of the future.

Kamatsu, Europe.

That's who we want.

That's who's building our bulldozers.

Komatsu.

That's who we're going for.

Yeah.

I think you think bulldozer guys get really tribal about their bulldozer affiliation, like power tools guys do.

Oh, 100%.

Yeah.

I'm guessing that's a good thing.

So it's like they're making up homophobic acronyms for like other bulldozer manufacturers.

Like the operating engineers union is like barely holding together constantly because of these internal digital power struggles.

It's like, yeah, I showed him my set of keys to the Kamatsu and he stabbed me in the hand with a pencil stone.

Oh, dear.

Anyway, boom.

This is, again, another symptom of incoherence, this time of much less consequence.

I've been calling this whole thing the years of lead poisoning.

I'm really happy with that.

I'm going to be using everything.

I was about to say.

The other thing is, of course, this guy who did this, whatever the hell this was, was a big Trump guy.

Yes.

Donald Trump's supporters love trying to assassinate him when they're bored.

Yes.

And who can blame him?

His enemies have way more reason to assassinate him.

And yet, as far as we can tell,

basically, none of them have made a serious run of it.

But his own guys, they love trying to kill him.

They can't get enough of it.

It's like

you remember that editorial cartoon?

It was like Washington Post, whatever, with the

dark MAGA figure with the like, I'll take care of them, Mr.

President.

It's like that, but he's shooting at Trump.

He's still the gun pointed directly.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yes, sir, Mr.

President.

I'll take care of the woke deep state

sighting up Trump.

This man has created a reverse secret service.

Yeah, he's creating a core of like thousands of lunatics dedicated to his own assassination.

What if this is what if I'm going to try and get it into every item?

What if this is an elaborate

method?

What if Trump is like, he's, he's still like,

I don't want to be president.

I want to die.

And so he's just like setting up these guys, you know?

You've heard of

by cop.

This is, can't say that on YouTube.

By political supporter.

YouTube.

By assassin.

Yeah.

Yes.

There's going to be a little counter for that word in the corner that Devin's going to contain.

Devin, I'm so sorry.

Yeah, I'd like you to.

If you can do the counsel, that'd be great.

But ideally, what I'd like you to do is instead of a beep, just replace every instance of the word with a really flat recording of yourself saying YouTube.

That would be great.

My understanding is that

actually YouTube doesn't censor you saying

this is a form of mass psychosis that Gen Z has imposed on us.

Oh, unaliving yourself.

Oh, like unaliving yourself.

Yeah, possibly.

We did get a video get like de-boosted or whatever the fuck it is.

No, that was because we talked about Aaron Bush now.

And I think that was a specific political thing that YouTube did not like.

I guess we're going to A-B test that with this.

Yeah, I'm sure going to try.

I quoted, I read a quote by him in

my New Year's Natter, actually.

I had one very angry email about it because he gave a really good quote on Reddit in 2023 that was, I thought was pretty inspirational.

And

yeah, YouTube hasn't hit me hard on that, but yeah, I don't know.

I haven't noticed anyway.

Yeah, Zoom's still being proven more right every day.

I think a lot about the this is what

our ruling class has decided is going to be normal.

I think that's, yeah, we're looking at all of this and yeah, getting that feeling.

Hold on, that slides later in the presentation.

Oh my god.

The word incoherence,

political incoherence comes up a lot.

That just, I think, if I think Hussein,

not to cross-post, but like, yeah,

the last trash reached Hussain, Hussein kept talking about it.

And I think he was spot on with that point about this incoherence.

It's just going to happen more and more because the landscape is incoherent.

Like, our politicians are incoherent.

Anyway, sorry, next slide.

Let's

talk about some other really horrific things going on.

So we've lost another 737.

Oh, our t-shirts are.

It's a max.

Yeah.

This is not a max.

This was an 800.

Isn't the 800 just the re haven't they just rebranded the max?

No, this is

a much older airplane, actually.

Oh,

forgive me.

Okay.

I believe this is before even the 737NG.

Oh, okay, crikey.

Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 left Bangkok, Thailand, approached for its scheduled landing at Muan International Airport in southern South Korea.

They had an initial failed landing attempt.

There was a go-around

and they had a bird strike, I believe.

At least when I wrote this slide, that was the most current information.

Yeah, so

they did a go-around.

They came back in for landing.

The flight crew sent a distress signal.

They tried to land on a different runway than the one they were

given clearance for because apparently that's all they could do.

The plane touched down without lowering its landing gear, right?

It skidded along the runway, very high speed.

Actually, for a belly landing, absolutely beautiful.

Pilots did a great job.

Thing is, they couldn't stop in time, overshot the end of the runway.

And so at the end of the runway is the localizer antenna, which is usually made of a sort of material that can break away

in these sorts of instances.

Well, what they did was they perfectly prevented a truck attack from hitting the end of the runway.

Yeah, yeah.

This localizer was on a big concrete berm, and the plane hit it and just blew up.

Everyone except two flight attendants at the back of the plane died.

Yeah, Christ.

Yeah, it sounded again.

This is one where there is, we need to wait until there's a report on this because all the details on this seem a little bit muddy still.

I'm now a pro-air crash investigator, having watched pretty much every single episode of Air Crash Investigation.

Exactly, Exactly.

I've watched a lot of mentor pilots, so I'm an expert.

I've seen whose appearance on this podcast is equivalent to a year's

college.

And you all have your pilot flight investigation.

Congratulations.

Yeah, exactly.

The credits come good.

So it seemed like there's suggestions that

the pilots landed it beautifully, but

they just took too long along the runway.

They went too far down the runway without touching down.

So they didn't have enough to spend enough time skidding along on their belly to slow it down.

That seems like,

yeah,

I'll be very interested to see what went down on this one because it's a real fucking mess.

It's second to say, and like, also, I don't know if you put this in the slides, but like South Korea, a country that is experiencing a surfeit of news at the moment, like a real news.

Yeah, should have put that one in.

Yeah.

It's fine.

Like, it closed itself off neatly, right?

That's, it's all good.

Everything's fine and dandy in South Korea right now.

Not so much, no.

I think they're up at like two presidents impeached sequentially.

And, like, one of them is like barricading himself in his house with the Secret Service, like, as the, you know, the cops try to arrest him, the non-Secret Service cops.

God, I hope, I hope we can have that kind of politics.

I love the idea of just, I'm never coming out, just like bashing at the door of the pledger.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, man.

So, hypercapitalism,

the countries in East Asia, in the Far East, where we exported hypercapitalism, it's doing great.

So, South Korea,

it seems like their entire democracy has collapsed in on itself.

And Japan, the average age is 78.

So, yeah, it's

going real good out there.

Yeah, terrific.

And so, also now, this in a country with like a kind of like barely functioning executive is sort of like, it's never a good time to have a massive plane crash, but this is distinctly

worse time.

Not

South Korea, and people are going to catch me if I'm wrong on this one.

South Korea has a pretty good safety record.

Oh, I would say like world standard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

As in, like, in terms of like actual very low, you know, we're not talking Taiwan.

We're not, this isn't China Airlines, you know, where they have like six 747s hit the dirt a year.

This is like, um, this is this is a very high, um, you know, very good safety rating.

I would hope then that they have a very effective air crash investigation board.

And obviously, you know, the NTSB will be over there sniffing around as well and supporting him.

So, yeah, I look forward to reading the crash report into this one.

This is all going to be very heavily investigated.

I was interested to see that there was no, apparently, no,

what's it, EMAS on this runway, the engineered material arresting system.

Um, it just seems like this airport was old and poorly designed and couldn't handle the runway overrun without

the aircraft turning into

razor blades.

Yeah,

yeah, this is this is a, I mean, you don't get many big crashes like this anymore, thankfully.

You also don't get many that are like apparently caused by like airport design.

That's something that you tend to think pretty standardized, you know?

We had quite a few in the 90s and then kind of since then, none really, because we fixed, you know, Emacs is a good example of the thing that, you know, we, we kind of, it was a solved problem.

We had, you know, the surge in downdrafts in the early 90s as well.

There are various things that we kind of solved.

And so it is surprising to see this.

Yeah, I just, it's one of those situations.

I look forward forward to seeing the crash report.

It'll be a really interesting reading to see what's gone on because it feels like it feels like there's not been good crew resource management.

Like this,

for this to happen, it's likely there was stuff going on in the cockpit.

Yeah, you know, bird strikes to bring an aircraft down is very unusual.

They're designed to deal with this shit.

Yeah,

there's a lot of stuff that doesn't add up.

And I think you're right.

It's going to be one of those situations where, you know, where air traffic control overworked, mismatched.

Yeah, I look forward to reading that crash report.

A really intense bird strike.

Like the bird.

It's more of a bird.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

It's a bird strike.

It turned out it was Feathers McGraw.

Oh, no, no, Feathers.

Wildly fuck.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So,

who knows what happened here?

Anyway, in other news.

How are we doing in Gaza?

Poorly.

Bad.

Real,

real bad.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was about to say it's getting real, real ugly, and then no end in sight here.

Israel has blown up or set fire to Kamal Odwin Hospital, which was the last functioning hospital in the north of Gaza.

Pure fucking evil.

Same as it ever was.

I believe there's been some kind of torture video released where the Israelis got some doctor to admit there was Hamas in the hospital.

NYT breathlessly reported on that.

I'm pretty sure that was, was, you know, complete fucking nonsense.

You know, I'll say this much: since it's clear that the Israelis would have like

destroyed the hospital either way, at that point, it doesn't matter.

You know, it doesn't really matter.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's, yeah, it's a war crime, but like

not like they give a shit.

The whole thing's been a war crime.

Yeah.

Why are we like you?

Just add it to the station.

How many days are we in now?

Like, yeah, it's, it's,

I literally have lost count.

Like, it's getting, it's getting, uh, I mean, it has been ugly the whole time, but it's ugly.

It gets uglier every day.

It's very difficult to, like, you know, we haven't spoken about this for a while, I suppose, because it's just like, what is there to say?

Right.

But yeah, this is.

This is only getting worse.

The word impunity feels like it's completely lost meaning at this point, right?

Like, impunity, it just took a meaningless word.

Right.

Israel have just, Israel have just been told again and again, you can do this and and more, and you will still get billions from

the U.S.

You'll still get all your weapons.

You can take over parts of Syria.

Yeah.

You can.

What else?

What's the scary thing?

They now own significant percentages of the water supply in

Jordan, Syria,

not to mention Palestine, because of the fact they've just done, they've just taken over bits of Syria.

They've just decided, oh, that's ours now.

That's ours now, yeah.

We need a buffer zone for our buffer zone.

And I need a buffer zone for my buffer zone for my buffer zone.

Yeah,

and it's like I

fucked if I know what I can say to like do about any of this.

Yeah, no, there's I reminded of that, the Kurt Vonnegut custard pie quote, yeah, about the Vietnam War.

Yeah,

it's not as if anyone involved was like waiting to hear about like what podcasts thought about this, but fucking how

or like you know, mass protests or uh you know, any kind of you know, writing your legislator, withholding your vote in an organized fashion.

Fuck you.

It's just not nothing has worked.

Nothing has moved the needle an inch.

It's a real fucking dummy and diamond on how evil our governments are.

Yeah, this is how you get to the like incoherence as well.

Even the people who like uh think this is good and are praising it are still like learning the lesson that there are no levers that you can pull, right, other than violence,

that there is nothing that you can do to make any of these governments listen to you.

And what these people are learning from that is like, well, the only thing for it is these kind of like grandiose terroristic acts of violence, you know?

Yeah, I think the only thing that's important.

But to be clear, those don't work either.

It's just that's what they're alighting on, you know?

Yeah.

The only thing that I've like, the only thing I've been doing is reminding people

that this is not just something that someone else is doing and it's bad boo-hoo.

This is like in the UK, we are sending arms, we are providing intelligence, we are flying our very expensive AWACS planes over the top, and we probably have boots on the ground, even though we're not like it's it's a even though it's not being talked about officially, it's very likely we have boots on the ground in Israel in some form, whether it's advisement, whether it's the likelihood is there's probably like 1500 BAE guys out there.

Like we are out there, we are facilitating this gender.

So that's not even, you know, that's not even talking about the US.

That's the UK.

And so, we are absolutely, all of us have blood on our hands, whether we like it or not.

And we should be reminding our MPs of that as frequently as we possibly can.

You were right.

Remember the aid pier?

They built the aid pier and then they

drove like four trucks in and then used them to do a war crime and then dismantled the thing.

I got yeah, I got

an American soldier died of like misadventure in the course of this, uh, building this pier and like a, and like an industrial accident.

Um, so yeah, great record there.

Uh, do you ever

Jose Andros, the celebrity chef who also does World Central Kitchen?

Oh, you remember the Presidential Medal of Freedom after the administration killed some of this guy.

Yeah, from the guy who helped kill a bunch of his staff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They were shooting at like at like WCK convoys, like, oh, not WCK, but like

NGO convoys like two days ago.

Yeah.

And the IDF is like fucking with the UN forces in Lebanon still, even after the kind of like withdrawals there.

And it's just like,

it's like fully a rogue state, but it's a state that's kind of like apprehended the way things are going, which is like, oh, so you know, we can, we can, we're really kind of putting international humanitarian law to the test as to whether it's going to do anything.

And that's still, that's not going to be a settled question for a long time yet.

I think you're, you know, as more and more evidence comes out about things that, you know, atrocities that, you know,

the IDF have committed in Gaza,

you know, I saw this thing that was like advice to

like IDF soldiers traveling abroad in case you get arrested.

It's like, and the thing at the end of that was like, you know, the risk isn't going to decrease over time.

It might, in fact, increase over time.

So, yeah, we don't know what shape that's going to take.

But in the meantime,

they just started today, I believe, blurring soldiers' faces on television.

I mean, yeah, great.

Have they got them to stop posting TikToks and stealing rents on it?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And

like, I just, at this state level, in the immediate term, I think Israel has just kind of made the correct bet that no one is going to stop it.

And this is just how international relations is just going to work for everyone from now on.

Hey, it's going to be ugly.

It's going to be ugly, especially when Trump decides to invade Mexico or some bullshit.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, this this is the thing.

Like, it's,

it's kind of like, well, you can just do what you want, pretty much.

And there's a lot of countries that want to do shit like this.

You know, Israel isn't like uniquely evil in the sense of being the only country that has done a genocide or wants to do a genocide.

You see that with like Azerbaijan just as much, for instance, and then Gorno-Karabakh.

And like, this is just going to be a thing that like is going to become.

normalized at this rate.

And

you combine that with like the kind of like, you know, billions of climate refugees and the whole thing takes on a real like children of men cast right like yeah

i mean you're gonna only thing we can do is hope we run out of ammo um the only thing we can do is fucking give the un nuclear weapons at this point like i mean honestly though yeah i mean if we could uh you know everyone could vote Well, no, because there's still big United States veto.

I'm now at the point where I'm just at the kind of desperation that people got to after the end of the First World War, where they're like, what if we had like an international air police to enforce,

to enforce peace?

That kind of thing.

I'm just like, well, there's got to be something.

There's got to be some solution out there.

Maybe it's besardism.

Maybe we just have the fucking aliens take over because we're unfit to govern ourselves.

Or the dolphins.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, the dolphins aren't getting away from the sexual assault allegation.

I like to separate the art from the artist.

You know, there's counter-culture shit that's gone too far.

You know, okay, maybe they didn't do some shit that was so good, but like, I saw them in a lot of

nature documentaries.

They're an inspiration.

Yeah.

Have you seen dolphin Chinatown?

That's some dolphin fur.

This is Chinatown.

Very good, Roz.

Oh, dear.

Yeah.

Delirium has said.

All right.

Well, let's move on to some later news.

Yay.

All these guys hate each other and they're not even in power yet.

Yeah.

Trump and Musk have both said immigration is good, actually.

I was waiting for a politician to finally

do this.

It's just they're only talking about the H-1B program.

We're annexing Canada, maybe, possibly.

We'll get that.

That's another thing.

That's later.

Yeah.

But yeah, so this was the thing Elon Musk.

We didn't even include any of of his European crash outs, which I guess we'll get to in future episodes.

I genuinely think there's a non-zero chance that Elon YouTubes himself.

Like,

I think it's

a possibility.

Come on, baby.

Yeah, I mean, this was the joke when he started doing Twisted Premium.

Do you want to see what happened to the last guy who made me post on a forum and made me pay for it?

You know?

There's been a split among the ascendant right wing about immigration in the sense sense of, okay, we need to keep out those, you know, dirty brown people, but we do want to bring in, but the other, the other side is like, yes, but we do want to bring in the educated Indian people to work at our tech firms.

Exploited, yeah,

exploit their labor.

You know, you hire a guy who's like a very specific kind of computer scientist and you pay him like stupid wages.

Yeah, I was about to say this is a person who's put in like, you know, know, fucking eight years of study at, you know, the most prestigious university in like Chandigarh.

And like you're paying him, I don't know,

20 bucks an hour.

And he can't quit or get another job because then he will get divorced.

And his wife is not allowed to work.

Right.

And this, this, uh, this sort of like nuclear heterosexual family where the wife isn't allowed to work, of course, triggers all of the worst chuds on the internet because

they're racist, right?

And because they are threatened by the existence of non-white people.

And also there was a particularly faddish, anti-Indian specifically racism kicking around.

This is true.

That's become a new fad, yeah.

And

maybe I'm wrong.

It's a type of racism.

The US does a wondrous rainbow of racisms, but actually that kind of racism isn't one I'm that familiar with popping popping up that much in the U.S.

I don't know, maybe it's sort of one that existed mostly on like the

chans, pretty much, like the image boards, and then kind of grew from there, right?

Um, and it was kind of like it was, it was a meme through the kind of like uh like sort of groiper bit of the far right.

Um, I feel I feel fairly horrible, like

I feel like there, there, we've had sort of this rise of this sort of rise of multicultural racism.

Yeah.

Where like the racists don't care the color of your skin as long as you're racist against someone, right?

That's put that, you know, they're putting that on the new unwoke statue of liberty, you know, yeah, exactly.

But so

racisms, the real, the real sort of like counter force here is uh, you know, guys like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, who want cheap labor personally because it benefits them, like SpaceX and Tesla just don't work without H-1B visas.

Um, yes, And also,

as a fun little tendency,

the like Indian upper class who are also racist, but wish that you weren't racist against Indians.

This is a kind of like,

you know,

because

it's a fine tradition for like any immigrant from like any ethnicity anywhere in the world is to kick the ladder out from under you, right?

And that's something that you saw like white immigrants do, but it's something that you're seeing here.

And that's like, you know, every immigrant's fondest dream is your grandkid achieves some kind of like high business or political office and is immediately the most racist person you've ever seen.

So Vivek, Vivek Ramaswamy, the other guy who is at the Department of Government and Efficiency,

he has started experimenting.

Yeah, no, he seems to be starting to experiment with the idea: maybe I'll be accepted by the GLP base if I am racist.

Nobody.

And the people I have chosen to be racist against are white people.

Well, this, this is, yeah, no.

It's this kind of strange contortion, right?

Because if you look at like

kind of like this same tendency in the UK, right?

You have a lot of non-white immigrants that you can distinguish yourself by being racist against.

And that's something that, like, whether that's Rishi Sunak or Kami Badenock,

you people reinvented being racist against Polax.

I mean, true, but in this case,

it's more like

sort of like coming from an immigrant background and then being still very racist against

even people of like your own national background in that sense, right?

Yeah, the I'm one of the good ones sort of approach.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Like whenever Kemi Badenock talks about Nigeria, for instance, but like

Vivek's deal was

white people are on the outs because you watch too many cartoons and you don't know how to work,

which had the kind of like expected reaction from all of these like based European traditionalist guys, right?

Of screaming and crying and shitting themselves.

And it's just like, I wish these people every happiness with each other is the main thing.

You know, you understand how Omalas works now.

Everyone

became everyone decided to be racist against one child.

Yeah.

And then they all got along.

My favorite thing about this was the discourse got so bad that Elon remembered that he's South African.

He almost never does.

Yeah, this is it.

I'm a Scottish guy.

I was like, oh, God, good on you, Elon.

You know, remembering the apartheid bit of your upbringing.

I'm done so much.

Yeah, no.

So it remains to be seen.

Like, ultimately, this is something that I think bodes, if not well, then at least humorously for the next four years of hell.

That the kind of question

is going to collapse.

The coalition.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We're going to see.

We're going to see how the GLP walks away from Omolas.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like that there are pictures from Mar-a-Lago, the New Year's party, where

Elon took his

infant child as a human shield, which is a strange thing.

That motherfucker is stuffing that kid into a plate carrier, like the division.

It's like

Warzone.

He's got like four kids.

He's layering them on top of each other.

You can never be too sure.

Going out to my kids holding triangles, sticking them in front of my sternum so that nobody shoots me.

Oh, God.

But literally, though, on the shoulders, walking into the party.

But what's funny is that later on, there's a picture of these two within reasonable proximity of each other.

And it's quite clear that, I mean, Trump is, let's run ourselves, a disgusting, unpleasant character.

But he was looking repulsed at Musk, who is also a disgusting, repellent, unpleasant character.

Donald Trump deserves

so much, man.

Donald Trump.

Donald Trump enjoyed hanging out with like, you know, Jeffrey Epstein and stuff due to their shared interest in being a rapist, right?

But like Elon commits a far greater crime than that, which is being annoying in Trump's eyes.

And

I don't think you can litigate that.

I don't think you can argue that Elon Musk isn't annoying and isn't a bad hang.

So

it just, it's just his vibes are, I mean, like, yeah, just like spending any time with him.

It's just like,

it just makes vibes are off.

Stop.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was about to say.

I mean,

they're both sexual assaults and sexual abusers.

That's, that's, these two, they've got that in common.

But uh, yeah, no, apart from that, I think this is definitely like an oil and water type situation.

Yeah, he's like one step up from like Notch of Minecraft thing

in terms of how bad I dug deep in there.

Yeah, I was so I had a week in Tenerife, escaping from 2024 and running into 2025, uh, somewhere that had sun and warmth.

And uh, it was lovely,

but I swear to God,

I swear to God, I saw Notch coming down the beach on the same beach I was on.

Which I mean, it probably wasn't him, but it just made me think

very distinctive looking.

I mean, the thing that the thing that I always think about.

He smells like the

sort of rancid candy wall.

The candy wall.

I was going to mention the fucking candy wall.

Yeah.

If you're not familiar with this detail,

when he made his money off of Minecraft, he bought himself a beautiful house, which is presumably now on fire.

So I guess the candy is being cleansed and purified with flame right now eucalyptus trees are like blowing holes in it

like one of the things he installed in this kind of like ultimate kind of man-child act was he had like a wall that was filled with like candy like pick and mix like sweets um which he then couldn't eat enough of And so it just kind of like stayed inside this like perspex wall.

Just like roughly.

Obviously.

Just obviously that was that's how that Those work when it's at Woolworths and you've got like

50,000 people.

That's definitely a house designed for entertaining.

And I don't know who Natch has to entertain.

Minecraft, I don't think, was ever developed by someone who is a good socializer.

I think we can be clear about that.

I got to imagine the people working on it now are probably a little bit better.

I mean, you know, starting from a really low low bar.

Maybe.

Donald Trump's looking well.

He's looking

quite trim in this picture.

I don't have any tone for crazy, I think.

I was about to say, yeah, no, that's, you know, here's the thing, though.

The new MAGA hats, I don't like them.

I don't think they're well-proportioned.

I didn't like the old songs.

No.

They're too busy, right?

Adding the flag on the side, I think, is too much.

But the text is too big.

They do not have the same genesseit qui of the first.

It's like what if what if the Nazis had got in for like, you know, had briefly had an interregnum, got back in and gone, okay, so this was the seraphs on it now instead of

it's the Superman and Lois 90s font, right?

That's what it reminds me of.

Yeah, I saw someone wearing it on the train.

One of the most pathetic things I've ever seen is Elon's dark MAGA hat.

Oh, God, the dark gothic MAGA

Harry Potter font.

All right, it's terrible.

I saw someone wearing the MAGA hat on Mtrak about a week ago, and I was like, that's way worse than the old hat.

I'm sorry.

This campaign is decayed.

This is going to be far less entertaining than 2016.

Pista is 2020, I think.

Remember the piss tape?

Yeah.

Yeah, I have that hat.

I know you don't.

Yeah.

The piss tape is real.

The piss tape, I think we can be absolutely clear about that.

I'm still a true believer in the piss tape.

Nah, let's hope that drops at some point.

Yeah,

that'll that'll be one right side.

Day one.

Yeah.

You know, just day one when he says, opens the oldest media vault and is like, yeah, fruit and opens the oldest vault, takes out the piss tape.

It's like a shitty quality WMV because it was filmed in Moscow in like 2000.

That is just how he's going to negotiate with Trump for Ukrainian unconditional surrender.

Zelensky having to be like, what the fuck is, why did you send me

a video that requires a real player?

What did you do?

recorded on a flipped pv unregistered hyper cam too

and it's just trunk getting like bathed in russian hooker piss yes

thank you there is a detail there's another detail about this photo by the way that i want to mention

no there is there is because uh it's it's the dumbest thing ever it's the stupidest lowest stakes lie but i remember last year when when Elon Musk accepted on stage an Israeli dog tag, an IDF dog tag,

and he said in front of God and everyone in his fucking weird accent, I am going to wear this until all the hostages are free.

And he isn't fucking wearing it.

So

he got bored and he, yeah, he's betrayed the IDF.

And I can only hope.

No, can't say that on YouTube.

We can't say that, I don't think.

But

just bleep, just bleep accordingly, bleep accordingly.

Based on the widespread destruction in Gaza, I suspect all the hostages may be free of this mortal boy.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

Yeah, if nothing else, it like beats out the Russians for worst KD ratio in a hostage rescue operation.

Congratulations, you fucking morons.

I was about to say, yeah.

It helps if you're not trying, you know.

Yeah, exactly.

This is more of a game of.

I think they were trying.

I'm pretty sure the IDF were trying.

They were just trying to kill as many of the hostages as possible.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

Those guys who came out who were the hostages with the white flags, the IDF were just like, they just shot all of them.

Actually, straight up, do feel bad for those guys.

What are you going to do?

Yeah, no, you got, you got, you got, you don't move to Israel.

That's what you do.

No, I know.

But like,

that's a real, like, yeah.

no, I get it though.

Yep.

Well,

in other news,

oh, yeah, that's right.

We're under siege.

Yeah, everything's a drone.

Everything's a drone.

Everything's a drone.

There's drones everywhere.

There's drones everywhere in South Jersey.

I saw a big drone a couple nights ago.

So this is ages ago now, this news, but is it still, is it still happening?

Is it still like ticking around in local news and stuff?

There's drones happening.

Are there this?

I believe there's still drones happening.

Have you?

One of the classic

I'm cursed to just have a memory for tweets, but one of the classic tweets,

I don't remember who it was.

Sorry, you can credit it if Devin can find it.

Where the guy's like,

my buddy says that he saw an alien, but he just saw like a regular plane and he looked at it with binoculars.

And when he looked in the cockpit, there was an alien flying it.

That's

I am awaiting the drone equivalent of that of like you look in the cockpit of a plane and it's a little quadcopter, just like hanging onto the young.

I mean,

we, we, we, we didn't get a chance to talk about the drone panic when it was at its height, but yeah, the, and apparently in uh New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania and uh parts of Delaware, I think parts of Maryland,

um, there are, there is a huge swarm of potentially Iranian drones.

Of course, they're Iranian, yeah, yep, yep, yeah,

which are doing secret surveillance or something of like, I don't know,

Vineland, New Jersey to get a look at the glass factory or something.

I don't know.

I mean, this is, this is kind of interesting, right?

Because this followed on the heels of similar reports in England.

I think there were some in Germany as well, right?

And the ones in the UK were like...

kind of acknowledged by the like the US and and by us as being like, yeah, there was some drones.

We don't know what the deal with them was.

We're investigating.

Then no one heard anything else about it.

And then and then all of a sudden, everyone in New Jersey decided to go out and try and shoot down the nearest like seven.

Don't forget,

yep, yep.

Which is really like, you know, muddying the waters in the sense that maybe there was something there.

I don't know.

We saw with the like spy balloon shit and all of the like quote-unquote UFO videos from the West Coast that like probably some secret drone shit is happening somewhere at any given time.

Oh, sure.

Like just by like law of averages, it probably doesn't involve like United Airlines flying over your house in the same pattern that they do every day.

Right.

Are you like a FedEx cargo flight?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say no one saw a secret drone because

if it's a secret drone, you'd never say it.

Why were the lights on?

Yeah.

Good question.

Just turning on the marking lights on my secret Iranian drone.

Respect for the federal aviation authority.

Just like, well, the entire United States is the greatest Satan, apart from the civil aviation.

Yes, guy who's really

true.

Actually, the FAA is the only good agency.

Doing like Iranian worldview, and it's like, my enemy is not the American people, it's not the American political leadership, it is specifically the FAA.

I mean, I guess that was kind of al-Qaeda's deal, too.

But, like,

what should we call it?

The best one was, of course, former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, whose Twitter handle is still Governor Larry Hogan, posting look, look at all these looks.

See, that's like my Twitter handle still being like 99 kilograms, November K.

What did he do?

He got into office.

He canceled the red line in Baltimore.

Then he got cancer.

Then he left office.

Anyway, so, you know,

he was like, look at all these drones in the sky.

And he posted a picture of the fucking constellation Orion.

What was there?

There was

another elected official who genuinely posted a picture of

a like film prop TIE fighter

on a low loader on its way around Interstate somewhere.

They genuinely had like

rural cops driving around watching the skies for this shit.

Like they were going to do anything.

And like, you know, there were reporters doing ride-alongs with these four fucking idiot cops being like, yeah, we don't know.

We just thought we better keep an eye on it because people are worried.

And it's like,

that is an airplane.

No, like six cops shooting at the International Space Station.

Stop resisting.

I'm not going to say anything about shooting at the International Snow Space Space Station.

Don't say anything though, but but

I don't know.

I guess there is a real thing.

Listen, I think Elon Musk should be assassinated by Mossad.

That's all there is to it.

Listen, there we go.

I just, I want them to give him a pager.

The thing is,

there is an actual point here about how poorly equipped people are to know anything about civil aviation, even though it's a thing that has been a sort of technology to which most most people have had some form of exposure since, like, I don't know, the 50s.

As like, you can't even recognize an airplane.

Like, it's, this is not, like, difficult.

It's not new.

It's just, you're not used to looking at stuff in the sky and you look at it and you're like, that's, that's fucking like the Islamic Republic coming to blow up Danbury, Connecticut.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like, it's even, it goes even deeper than that.

It's like the extent to which it's

like it's like, it's, it's like, only turbans.

It goes back to the incoherence things.

Like people have just got absolutely people, okay.

Some people are just ignorant to start with, but a lot of people are like just suspending their own not their own awareness because they just have no idea what to believe.

They're not even believing their own senses anymore.

That's not a good situation to be in from a political thing.

I've had this feeling for a while.

I think everybody has, right?

And I don't know whether there's anything to it.

I don't know whether it's just kind of like mass hysteria because everything feels off or like some kind of cognitive bias.

Or I'm sure people will tell me it's like all long COVID or maybe like increasing CO2 in the atmosphere or something.

But it really does feel like everybody is getting dumber and like angrier and crazier all the time.

Yeah.

And the only thing that's like kind of keeping me

like contextualizing that is how much stuff from like, I don't know, like the 60s and the 70s is also like, it feels as if everyone is getting dumber and crazier all the time.

Because I don't know.

It just feels like we're in that kind of cultural moment, I guess.

You know, and that's not to discount fucking COVID or CO2 or whatever, like, you know,

future pandemic castle pandemic is fucking around with people right now.

But like, it's, it's just like, I don't know.

It really feels, it feels bad out there, you know?

Was there ever a period of history where it felt like everyone was getting smarter and saner?

That's my favorite.

It's called the 1990s.

Oh,

then it ended.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it ended famously.

It ended.

Yeah, and

thank God

What's his face spoke it into existence?

Francis Foca.

Yeah,

we could have kept it going.

Yeah, it has access to the lathe of hell, where the thing that you were saying comes the opposite of true.

False, I guess.

So, anyway, so far, no one has blinded a pilot with a green laser, but I assume that I don't think this has fully gone away, the drone thing, so I assume someone will do it.

100% of FedEx 777 is getting spread across somewhere because

some angry kids trying to, yeah, little laser pens for the weekend.

Just like, just like short approach to Norwick Airport and lands on the turnpike by mistake.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it should be

these days because of future story congestion problems.

Wow.

There's a lot of people going around, is the problem.

Ah, damn.

Yeah.

Well, but sticking to transportation news.

Who the fuck is this guy?

We're ostensibly a train podcast.

So,

or we talk about trains a lot.

Let's talk about Donald Trump's transportation secretary nominee.

Oh, that was a real.

He made that decision while on the toilet.

Like, I don't think

there were a whole bunch of people.

Speaking of logical that would just,

just like not a priority for donald trump like this would be one yeah oh he is he the sean duffy was a competitive log roller you're joking you're shitting me yeah he was a competitive log roller when he was younger i take it that's not tape uh that's not caber tossing so that that's just rolling the log it's not it's not picking it up end on end and flipping it like

a river right this is in a river right there's there's so i i i think there's either you're rolling the log yourself or there's two people rolling the log and they're trying to knock the other one off.

Oh, I see like American gladiators.

Yep.

So this guy looks like I imagine most like

federal bureaucrats look as in like too young wearing too Paisley-ish a tie,

and just looking very ill-equipped to cope with the world.

He got the anti-peat bootage.

He's got a fascinating kind of baldness coming in where it's coming or like he's balding from under.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right here.

Yeah.

He's also got

boyband

sort of gel in his hair as well, which is an interesting move.

Can I call Donald Trump a homophobic slur?

I think I have done before.

Okay.

Damn.

Well, that was all the content I had for this segment.

So you guys

moved out.

Yeah, me and Nova are just like, who this guy?

I don't know.

Tell us about it.

I believe, a congressman from Wisconsin.

Wisconsin, maybe, maybe it was Minnesota.

Maybe it was Michigan.

I think it was one of those something up there, Great Lakes,

Northwest Great Lakes area.

Right.

Wisconsin.

He has no transportation experience that I've been able to discern.

He was on Road Rules All-Stars.

He was on MTV's Real Life Boston and then Road Rules All-Star.

Yeah, we're all boss.

So he's a campy TV personality, like the president will be.

Okay, cool.

He's on Fox News.

He hired a guy off the TV.

He was definitely shit.

He was definitely shit.

Donald Trump, Donald Trump, saw this guy was in a series where he was in an RV for a long time.

He was like, yeah, that guy, he's transportation secretary.

Okay, right.

There is something funny about Pete Butigej having been Secretary of Transportation for four years, having left no imprint or legacy on the office besides East Palestine, and then has to hand it over, turn over the keys to the RV idiot.

That's probably a degree from St.

Mary's.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

I believe he also has done some lobbying for the airline industry, which is important because Transportation Secretary is kind of like, well, you are in control of

a lot of agencies, but the only one that does anything is the FAA.

Yeah, and the only thing the FAA does is stop doing anything, make sure that anything that the NTSB suggests gets delayed as long as possible.

That's kind of what the FAA's job seems to be.

I mean, you know, I think at this point, we are in a position where the safety record is pretty good.

I mean, it's been a long time.

Oh, and it's out for sure, but there's still a fitness in any sense.

Yeah,

I'm not a big FAA fan, but uh you will be

but if you look at like other other agencies like FRA doesn't do anything um we'll talk about the FRA in a second.

Um, what else?

Hey, you know, the big, the big thing he's in control of, I guess, is going to be dispersing funding

from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act because a lot of that is still in the planning stage.

Um, so essentially,

Biden passed the siege infrastructure bill, and Trump is going to make all the decisions about who gets what money.

Well, it's going to have to be supply lines for the invasion of Canada, first of all.

So maybe

high-speed rail to

Wisconsin

and

upstate New York.

Wisconsin doesn't like high-speed rail.

I mean,

they're going to have to like it when there's trains full of like Abrams tanks going north.

So maybe we could briefly talk about, okay, what does this mean for inner city passenger rail?

Are those passengers wearing multicam or not?

Good question.

This is the MTRAC connects us map.

This is supposed to be, you know, what a lot of that infrastructure funding was supposed to go to.

The light blue lines are new services.

The yellow lines are enhanced services.

The dark blue lines are existing services.

And what you can sort of look at here is

what happens now.

I think a lot of this just doesn't happen.

Maybe you get some like patronage stuff that goes to, I don't know, North Carolina or like Virginia, but this is going to be very, very determined, I think, on, okay, who delivered the votes for Trump and who has a state legislature that is sufficiently committed to like passenger rail that they're not going to say, oh, that's communism.

We don't want the money.

Sure.

Which is what happens.

Everywhere voted for Trump, but the places that think trains are communism is also everywhere.

So yeah.

Well, so I would say, like, okay, Virginia and North Carolina are going to be the ones that are going to go for it because they have pretty durable pro-rail majorities.

You know, North Carolina essentially threw so much shit at the wall that if they get all the funding they want, that place is going to be like Switzerland.

Sure.

You know, in terms of passenger rail.

That would be good.

That would be nice.

California,

nothing's happening there.

Right.

You know,

Washington, Oregon,

who knows?

But yeah, this is going to be, I don't know, maybe we can do a deeper dive at some point in the future, but I could see a lot of stuff just not happening.

You know, extremely depressing.

Yeah, several, like, you know, dozens of billions of dollars that just don't go anywhere or do anything for like at least four years.

It's just, and the other thing is that all these proposals were so like tepid to start with.

Yes.

Like, it's not this is like the minimum that's then just not going to materialize.

It's, oh, it's extremely aggravating.

It's amazing how long it's taken for like to get someone to fund a train from like Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, you know, which is the most obvious three cities in the entire country.

Yep.

But

yeah.

Yeah.

I remember asking the question when Trump had got in, I remember asking the question, what happens to all this?

And,

well,

get your rubbers out and start rubbing off those lines off this map.

I was about to say, I mean, at least Amtrak's been pretty good about trying to award as many contracts as possible before inauguration day right now.

Trying to rush everything through because we also have to talk about our new FRA director.

This fucking guy.

I like the very low resolution picture that's distinctly Diane Abbott Shade vibe going on here with the Lorentz.

It's very nice.

God bless that woman.

I am proud to announce that highly respected David Fink, a fifth-generation railroader, capital R, will be the next administer of the Federal Railroad Administration, wrote Donald John Trump.

David will bring his 45-plus years of transportation leadership success, which will deliver the FRA into a new era of safety and technological innovation.

Under David's guidance, the Federal Railroad Administration will be great again.

Congratulations to David.

Make railroad great again.

Thank you, Mr.

President.

David Fink

was the president of the Pan Am Railroad

in New England.

Why is it called the Pan Am Railroad?

It's a very good question, Ros.

Why is it called the Pan Am Railroad?

Because David Fink's dad thought it'd be funny to buy the defunct trademarks of Pan Am

and switch them with the railroad he owned and the airline he owned.

I mean, that does sound kind of funny, to be fair.

Yeah, that is funny.

It's kind of

posting energy, you know.

Yeah.

And I do like the Pan Am branding, so, you know.

So there's now, it used to be called Guilford Rail Systems or something like that.

that is kind of kooky pan am railroad and guilford airlines i believe jesus christ i think that actually does work better to be fair okay that's actually based uh okay i'm reassessing i was gonna whisper into the mic is this us handy but uh but i don't know maybe maybe it isn't uh because i actually i i'm all for that bit gareth you're the you're the the railroad right-of-way expert here i am i don't like i know i see you've put two pictures of rights of way here and i i was deliberately actually three because because there's some under the wagon above.

I was deliberately not paying attention to picture number two.

Ooh, yeah,

shootly.

Shoe.

Shuggles.

You remember the episode where we did at Morpeth, where we talked about super elevation?

One thing that I didn't need to say in that episode, because I felt strongly that I didn't need to say it, is you don't put super elevation on straight track.

They seem not to.

In fairness, the track is not exactly straight.

Yeah, that's also a fair point.

Yeah, they're just responding to the deficiency as they go through all these 50 pence pieces in all directions.

Yeah, that's uh, that's horrifying.

Uh,

like that, that's a shambles.

So, the Pan Am Railroad essentially took over a lot of uh

tracks that Penn Central didn't want, let's say, in New England.

Oh, wow, sure, yeah, um, I mean, you know, so that's a lot of about 1700 miles of track in New England in about this condition.

Yep.

You know, a lot of times this track is like 10 miles an hour if you're lucky.

They're known for like

bizarre derailments in winter.

Like, okay, the track goes through a divot.

The divot becomes a pond.

The pond freezes over in the winter, and then the train derails and skids on the ice.

What the hell?

That's just not a derailment mechanism.

That simply is not a derailment mechanism that exists.

I refuse to believe it.

Hey, buddy, you better believe it.

There's a big tunnel.

I've seen this also tunnel collapse in one of the other photos here.

There's a big tunnel in New England.

The Huzak tunnel is like four miles long.

It was an amazing engineering achievement.

It came into Pan Am ownership.

It collapsed.

What, the tunnel?

Yeah, not the owner.

He let the Huzak tunnel collapse.

Oh.

Great.

Yeah, I would.

Nope.

Yeah.

Yep.

Do you don't want to do that?

Nope.

So this guy is like, he's a, he's a fifth generation railroader and a first generation tunnel collapser.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's, I'm, I mean, the, the Pan Am has long been like, you know,

we talk about how bad that the class one railroads do maintenance.

Um, but when you get down into the class twos, uh, this was, this is a whole other situation.

This is, this is like, how far can you push it?

Oh, boy.

Seeming pretty far.

Yeah.

So, one of the things that got, so here's a little peep behind the curtain.

One of the things that, for the sake of making my book smaller and tighter, one of the things that got chopped, actually, and I got to turn it into an article, was me going into some detail about how you fix in, you know, how you fix the U.S.

railroad system.

And I'm going to, I'm going to put it up as a proper article and so on and so on.

But one of the key things was

take the railroad out of the hands of these guys.

Yeah, please.

But the problem is, if you do that, what you might end up doing is putting it back in the hands of this guy because he's now the head of the FRA.

Yeah, exactly.

So,

yeah.

Yeah, but he's wearing a different hat or at least a different time.

Yes.

So this is

this railroad.

Some people have said, okay, but he kept freight rail a going concern in New England because that's been a very difficult thing.

If you call this freight rail, like isn't a rail supposed to be

this is a good point yeah i mean but you know okay it's been very difficult to sustain freight operations in new england for probably 90 years now but on the other hand i'm not surprised at the tracks looking like that for sake fix your man yeah it's it's it's not a good situation um this this railroad was it folded a couple years ago it was sold to csx who i believe have since reopened the huzak tunnel thank god good i mean if you're running a railroad at 10 miles an hour, the thing that railways are good for is that they're fast.

Like, you can run fast and get your goods reliably on time places.

Yeah.

It makes no sense to have, it would be like they would make more money by ripping this up, laying the track, completely fresh tracks along this right-of-way, and then they would, you know, and then running the trains quicker so they can move more goods.

It just makes no sense to have a railway that looks like this.

Not only can you not run it fast because the track's in so bad shape, you can't even run a long train.

No, you get nothing.

Yeah,

just a well, just a shambles.

Anyway, let's not dwell on this.

I'm sure this is actually fine.

He's competent.

No, the American Elon takes this guy with you.

The American Shortline and Regional Railroad Association is excited to have one of their guys at FRA, though.

So,

okay.

Good for them.

Mixed blessings.

That's a whole different level of small business tyrant when it's, you know, a small railroad.

So, I'm sure the next bit of news will be good to happy railroad news, finally.

No.

Oh, oh, God.

Oh, oh, dear.

So, this is one that a lot of people like asked me to talk about, um, you know, because this is such an insane incident that occurred.

I don't think it got a lot of press because there's just insane derailments that happen every single day that don't get a lot of press.

But this is one of the bigger ones.

This is in Pecos, Texas, right?

This oversized load truck stalled at a grade crossing that I believe it was not authorized to cross.

It had some kind of big oil refining equipment, whatever this huge tube is here.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we've done a few of these in the UK in the 60s, 70s.

Installing the special transport DLC for American trucks.

And then

this happens.

Yeah, this is like a distillation column or something like that.

I heard from some of the earlier articles that eyewitnesses said it was stuck on the crossing for 45 minutes.

I think there was a subsequent report from the NTSB that said it was only there for one minute.

Then all that was taken down.

I have no idea how long this truck was on the crossing, but this huge fucking, you know, chemical reactor, whatever the hell this thing is, was stuck on this crossing up here, right?

Um, and then rapidly all converted into scrap by

yes, this big uh Union Pacific, I believe, train came through.

This is full of domestic containers, um, so like 53-foot containers.

Those trains go fast as opposed to the sea containers that go slow.

This was probably doing there's a video uh up there on YouTube.

If you want to watch a snuff film, this was probably going 60 or 70 miles an hour when it impacted.

You can see several, probably dozens of cars jackknifed here.

The big chemical reactor impacted the Pecos, Texas Depot, took out probably two bays of windows.

This was very, very nasty.

Also, well, I guess there's no hazmat, so it's fine.

No reporting in the media.

Killed the engineer and conductor.

You know, so this is very, very ugly.

And this is something which is not too uncommon.

This happens every day, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, you know, all I can say is if you're in the situation, there's a blue sign on the railroad crossing where you can call a phone number and speak to the dispatcher and they will stop the train from crashing into your truck.

But also don't,

unless you're 100% confident your vehicle is getting across that little crossing, don't enter the crossing.

Yeah, and this is uh, this is very, I don't know.

The video was insane to look at.

It was like, yeah, you know, and the amount of damage that was done here, like bizarre.

It's impressive how much it's compressed in, actually, because there's so much momentum behind this, you know, these mega trains, particularly when they're going at those high speeds.

I'm impressed how localized the mess has stayed.

There's a hell of a lot of energy that's been dissipated.

I was about to say, did you say it was an engineer?

Did you say the engineer died?

Engineer died instantly, conductor died a little bit later.

Absolutely awful.

Yeah.

So don't kill people.

If your truck gets stuck on the crossing, call the phone number on the little blue sign.

I mean,

I'm sure if we looked, we could find some structural causes in this about the trucking industry.

Right.

This is true.

This is true.

I mean, this is probably one of those where it's like, well, we could save some time if we just go through downtown Pecos as opposed to an authorized crossing like 50 miles away.

Or the time to train the driver to be like, read blue sign, call me, read the blue sign.

Call the number on the blue sign.

I think a lot of people don't know about the blue sign, though.

You're probably right.

It's a thing that comes, there's a thing that happens a lot in the UK, more than more than the US,

or certainly, well, bridge strikes happen in the US, but your bridges are often bigger, so that the trucks get smashed up and the railway doesn't care.

But in the UK, we have quite a lot of bridge, or GB, we have a lot of bridge strikes where, unfortunately, because our bridges are often very spindly and our HGVs are our road trucks are oversized

and too heavy.

They often

have to close the railway to go and check that the railway is safe and fine.

And these happen so often.

And they're bridges that these happen.

They're bridges where people have set up webcams because it happens so often.

And I know that the US has a few like that as well, but certainly the UK, we have several of those.

And it happens all the time.

And you get angry people, boomer types, going, oh, we should be prosecuting the drivers more and more.

You know, we need to increase the penalties for drivers.

Like, that's not going to solve it.

Drivers are overworked.

Yes.

They are,

you know, they're working for, you know, their conditions are getting worse and worse as drivers.

They're overworked.

They are overstretched.

The reality is that

the way you hit this is by taking the license away from the operator.

You take it away from the haulage company.

And doing that, the drivers can move on because the drivers are very skilled and very, in very short supply.

Drivers can move on.

The company dies.

But the,

you know, you have to, it's training.

You know, they're overworked.

They're not trained.

Often there isn't the back office support because with the haulage company, it's not just the driver going freestyle.

Like these routes have to be planned, particularly for this thing, which is a specialist object.

That route should have been planned meticulously and hopefully it's not.

It's not coordinated with the railroad.

I mean, on the video, you can see there's multiple support vehicles and folks are just sort of standing around like, I don't know what to do.

Like this, like that company should be out of it.

That's a company that should no longer exist.

You know, that haulage company should be out of business.

I mean, if you kill people, you know, you should probably be facing, the management should be facing, you know, crazy.

Exactly.

That's it.

It's not the, like, I don't hold this against the driver.

This is on the planners.

This is on

the back of house staff, but particularly the management, because clearly there's not, there's a failure here that's allowed this to happen.

But just really, yeah.

Oh, these are like fly-by-night haulers.

You know, that's the, yeah, exactly.

It's, oof.

Yeah.

Well, it's like whack-a-mole.

The challenge is if, you know, if one of these, if you get into a situation where they're used to getting penalized to debt, to kind of totality, then there's another one pops up with it with a slightly different name they just add it add the number two after the name of their company or whatever exactly yuck well don't like that

hi it's justin uh so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to uh 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.

But I do have one piece of positive news.

Just a

tiny.

There we go.

Hey.

How about congestion pricing?

We got it.

Finally.

Oh, my God.

New York City has congestion pricing.

Thank you.

Are you telling me that, like, a

good idea came to pass in government and had like immediate positive material effects?

Yeah, when was the last time that shit happened?

Like, weed legalization?

Like, only and only one man could make it happen.

Governor Cuomo.

Governor Cuomo.

Yeah, baby.

I told the cars

to make CD

for the people of New York.

In the open top 1930s, like loud.

This is actually, yeah,

I mean, this was,

this genuinely was legislation that was passed under Cuomo's administration, which was durable enough.

Yeah, 2019.

That it was durable enough that even Kathy Hochl could not stop it.

Five years of your life on an obvious thing that is going to make the city so much better.

Well, I think

this actually started well before that when they were trying to make it happen.

I didn't actually write when it started.

I did say it took about 1.7 Apollo programs of time.

Yeah.

What a beautiful reflection of state capacity that is.

Yeah,

that is how I've started

thinking about

various small transit or transportation projects.

It's like repaving Washington Avenue here in Philly.

That took one Apollo program.

We got to start using that measurement for everything.

Yeah, I like that.

I'm making that official.

It's very nice.

Start using that in the UK for things like HS2.

So there was a lot of

the idea idea is, okay, below 60th Street in Manhattan, you will, with some exceptions, be charged nine US dollars to enter the most congested area of the entire world

in order to discourage you from doing self-harm like that.

They're just putting up a big sign that says, hey, why not consider taking public transport?

Take care.

Sure.

Considered public transportation.

Take a bicycle.

Walk.

I don't know.

How far a walk is it?

If you stood at the southern tip of

Lower Manhattan, right down at the bottom, bottom end, walked straight up northwards along the grid.

I suppose skirt around the side of Central Park.

How long would it take you to reach, I don't know, like Harlem?

How long has it taken you to get up to, I don't know, what number of streets does that?

Three hour walk.

Manhattan's

like 13 miles long up and down.

But 60th is right at the south end of Central Park.

So how long does it do?

So from the tip to the south end of Central Park, how long is that?

How long?

How long was it?

Hold on.

I'm measuring this now.

The batteries are long takes.

We have two guys here who walked the whole length of Broadway from 225th Street in the Bronx to Battery Park, and it took them six hours, 30 minutes at a leisurely pace.

A leisurely pace.

Enjoying yourself.

Yeah, that sounds like a nice day.

Just walk New York City.

That sounds good.

It's five miles along Broadway from Battery Park to Columbus Circle.

Yeah.

So

you certainly couldn't be walking here.

You could be walking here.

One of my favorite days in Philly was when I just went for a walk and walked all the way around.

That's a very, very long walk I did.

It was nice.

I spent a lot of time over in East Philly.

Sorry, in West Philly.

There's no East Philly.

In a dream, I saw City Invincible.

It's just Gareth.

Yeah.

Yeah, just me out on my own in a little tent.

So, yeah, that's a nice walk.

So, my point being, the reason I asked that question is because New York, very dense.

Manhattan, very dense,

super walkable, right?

Yes, it's got the most public transportation of probably anywhere in the United States, at least, possibly.

I mean, just from the density of the subway.

Maybe.

Almost anywhere in the world.

You're all right there, buddy.

Yeah.

You know, and so this has been opposed by a lot of disparate groups, most notably the state of New Jersey.

Fuck.

Fuck those guys.

That's fun.

Because

the governor of New Jersey has made the argument this is going to increase pollution in New Jersey

because of

the question mark.

Take the train ticket.

Well,

you know, the idea of this congestion tax is that we are going to,

or congestion toll, it's a tax.

I don't know what it is.

You pay the government money.

We call it a congestion charge.

It's as good a term as any, I guess.

All of this money goes straight to funding public transportation.

Good, perfect.

Yes, exactly.

So,

you know, this was opposed in New Jersey because, you know, you're double told, I guess, if you go through, you know, the Holland Tunnel or the Lincoln Tunnel, which is something you shouldn't do.

Nope.

Because New Jersey has what you call the get out of New Jersey tax.

You don't pay to get in, but you pay to get out, baby.

You pay to leave, New Jersey.

You don't pay to hanner, but you pay to leave.

Like hell.

As Senator Sumner said shortly before the Civil War, New Jersey is the valley of humiliation through which all travelers north and south, from the city of New York to the city of Washington, must pass.

And the monopoly, like Apollyon, claims them all as subjects, saying, For all that country is mine, and I am the prince and god of it.

So they're finally like this.

Yeah, that's phoetic, man.

I like that.

That's how it looks.

They're finally getting a taste of their own medicine.

This is it.

But

this was delayed significantly because Governor Hochul thought that she could increase the odds of Democrats winning elections.

She fucked it

in New York if she delayed this tax, which was

presumed to be unpopular, or this toll, excuse me.

And, well, that didn't work.

New Jersey sued to stop it from happening.

That has so far not worked.

They failed to get an injunction.

Yeah,

the tolls are being levied.

But we lost six months of revenue.

Also, the toll was reduced from $16 to $9.

Such a sizable reduction in revenue, like a massive reduction in revenue.

Yes.

But at least it's happening.

Yeah, exactly.

At least it's happening.

I mean, you're still going to have problems with the MTA budget,

but it is happening.

And it has sort of worked

better than maybe people expected because, you know,

it's only been a few days now, but travel times in lower Manhattan, if you're driving, are

like the streets are free and open everywhere.

Oh, wow.

Nice.

They're probably going to have to start readjusting bus schedules because they're all arriving early.

Yes.

It works.

The thing works.

This works.

London made it work.

It works.

I wrote a piece and jack-a-bit about this.

It works.

All the evidence is there.

It works.

Hockle is an idiot.

I'm glad that she's had to eat shit and this has happened.

Definitely ate shit.

Yeah.

On this one.

You know, she's now known for being opposed to this fairly obvious thing.

But people are still like trying to figure out ways to get mad about this.

I mean, this is sort of, you know, the world's most obvious policy.

You know, I guess you could say it's neoliberal, but guess what?

We live in neoliberalism and this is like a good policy that works.

Okay.

Maybe there's like one guy.

who lives in a rent-controlled apartment in Lenox Hill who is poor, but not poor enough to qualify for an exemption.

You know what?

Fuck him too.

Is disabled, but apparently not disabled enough to qualify for the exemption, who may get fucked over by this.

Yeah, my understanding is that they found like

this has affected almost no one negatively.

They found the one guy that it affected negatively who's also the least sympathetic possible guy for this.

Where

it's like a guy who, like an insanely rich guy who lives in an insanely rich place who cannot leave his block without getting charged something by someone now.

Yeah, which is really funny.

It was it was this guy was like

interviewed on like freedomeagle.biz news or something like that.

And

you know, he was like, well, I can't go visit my kids up on 79th Street because I park on 61st Street.

indicating that he probably has a parking spot that he paid, you know, a tremendous amount of money for.

more than the entire uh

town of like

shelby montana is worth for the one parking spot um and uh you know he's like well i can't drive north without i can't drive at all without going through the congestion zone because okay fifth avenue is uh one way southbound And it's like, sure, but dude, take the subway.

You don't know what $9 is.

Take the subway.

$9 is literally like

you've never had you you you aren't aware of sums of money that small like because that that's where

it is funny that

the the the guy with a really like uniquely real estate situation is a real estate developer yeah

well that's where the cordon is it's through a part of the island where everyone's absurdly wealthy So anyone who is stuck in that situation, again,

get over it, boys.

Yeah, it's like

$9 is what they think a banana costs.

But yeah, it's very good to see them.

For them, maybe it should.

Finally see some good policy happening.

It's good to see congestion pricing.

I mean, this is going to fund a bunch of ADA improvements on the subway.

This is going to fund theoretically the 2nd Avenue subway extension to 125th Street.

This is going to fire.

Well, those are the two I know about.

I don't know about the rest of it.

You know, but this unlocks a lot of bonding capacity for the MTA.

It's good.

It's a good thing.

Everyone who's mad at it is done.

Suck shit.

And I don't care about them.

Yeah, exactly.

Listen, sometimes you've just got to hit the big state go do thing button and

damn the consequences.

And win World War II.

Yes, I agree.

Andrew Heiberger, you can suck the shit out of Liam Zuckerberg.

Exactly.

It's the bit in Ford versus Ferrari where Henry Ford II or third or whatever the fuck is is like, we used to build planes in this building,

therefore fuck Italy.

It's kind of like that, you know?

Great movie, by the way.

Noted.

I'm summarizing it very poorly, but I cite instead my letterbox review, which is, I think, four stars and just the word VRO.

Very good.

I need a few more Goodreads reviews like that of my book, actually.

People just

the word trend with an E and a a five star review on goodreads that'd be nice if anyone wants to make that happen then go for it yeah please yeah all right we've done the good news let's go back to bad news

we're all gonna die we're all going

how about that bird flips good i i oh i'm not

thinking about how thinking about like the prospect of doing a lockdown again and how how that would go um how trump has to do another lockdown

well the thing is right what lockdown did right it saved a lot of lives it got a lot of people into podcasts.

And so, therefore, I assume, right, they do lockdown, lockdown number whatever

for bird flu.

Not only do we like all go completely insane, but we also make infinity money.

Like, you know,

we could make a lot of money and go insane, which is usually with collision.

Like, that kind of overlap of things rarely happens outside of like cult compounds.

But I think we have the possibility.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe like the Spanish economic miracle, but just for podcasters, it'd be amazing.

Yeah.

People thought podcasts were washed, but then one turkey started coughing into its beak.

And, you know, from then, you know.

I mean,

I don't know if I'm ready for another global pandemic.

I had COVID again over before Christmas.

In fact, when I was in the height of the fever when we recorded the fireworks episode, I wasn't joking about my 100-degree fever.

I was burning up.

What's funny is my fever broke mid-episode.

So, like, you might have noticed I took my hat off and beads of sweat poured out because my fever broke mid-episode while we recorded, which is quite funny.

So, I just had an all-night night's sleep.

I've been masking and I still feel like I've been sick, like, pretty much all the time.

So, but it was COVID because I lost my sense of smell and taste and haven't come back properly yet.

So, like, have I wanted to get out?

And what's great is that I can't find any information.

The NHS website hasn't been updated with the latest COVID symptoms or the latest strain for like two years or something now.

So yeah, it's really great that we've just decided that's done.

And now bird flu's on its way over.

So great.

Like, I don't,

you know me.

I've never been one of these people who's like hyperbolic about it, but we really did just like give up, it seems like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, like, the other thing is, I don't want to reassure anybody because.

Like, I don't want to say like, oh, you know, the healthcare system's better prepared for like zoonotic flu than it was.

It was

No, it is better prepared for than it was for COVID because COVID was really like de novo, whereas like flu is something that, like, they've kind of like been

all the exercise sickness, the thing that we got nightingale hospitals from, was specifically like basically H5N1.

There's a ton of like planning around it.

But the thing is, when COVID was a thing first in like 2020, I did a

what was pretty well reasoned at the time, I thought, thread where I was like, listen, there's very little chance that it's not contained in place.

And then there's still less chance that it spreads, you know, like regionally and then internationally.

And like, you know, ultimately, if you, if it gets to a point where you have to panic, you'll know, but don't panic.

And at the time, I was right.

It's just that I was then subsequently more owned by events than I have ever been.

So

I don't want to be like, don't panic now, you know?

I told Liam when the when the lockdown happened and we were not let into Local Pez because the lockdown happened.

I was like, this is going to last two years minimum.

How many Apollo programs is that?

We did an Apollo program for giving everybody a respiratory disease.

That's one-fifth of an Apollo program.

We choose to give everybody COVID and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

So the bird flute, the bird flute, this H5N1, this has been interesting to see.

Yeah, you guys heard of this H5N1?

This has been interesting to see progress because it's been a long time.

It's been around for ages.

It's been around for ages, but it's okay.

It started spreading from birds to cows, right?

And then it spread to agricultural workers, but also those people are blameless.

It also spread to raw milk guys.

And those people should

quarantined.

Like all the stuff that they thought that lockdown was should be happening to them.

The WHO should be hunting them down with dark cunts.

Yeah, dark cunts.

Yeah, exactly.

Bluey Pasture didn't die for this.

I agree.

All the scary, like, you know, like disease thrillers where the government comes in and kicks your door down with the hazmat suits on.

They should.

That should happen to you if you drink raw milk.

It's like, come on.

Come on, come on.

It's just boiling it.

It's fine.

The only time you can can ever drink raw milk is immediately after it's come out of the cow.

Anytime after that, do not do that.

I've drunk,

I'm not a raw milk guy.

Good grief, no.

I have farming family, and I know what that looks like.

Don't do that.

But drinking it straight fresh out of the vat once it's come out of the cow is very nice.

A rare treat.

But storing it in the whole point is that as soon as it's more than five minutes after that, it's full of all manner of excitement.

Nothing

for all kinds of stuff because it's like warm and fatty.

It's like, yeah,

yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, I have to buy like insane chemicals to clean dairy equipment because it's all so grody instantly.

It's instantly fatty and full of nonsense.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, the main thing here, and this is this is something that we're never going to do.

And it's a lot like the car thing, right?

Except instead of what we consider to be a higher form of life, it's what we consider to be a lower form of life, right?

Is that okay, pandemics, like zoonotic pandemics are not the main reason to do it.

The main reason to do it is climate sustainability, but like we need to start like rapidly rethinking our relationship with animals as food.

Like the

like poultry industry, the meat industry

in, I mean,

the developed world at a minimum, right?

It's just like not sustainable.

It's not compatible with a kind of like non-disastrous continued existence, right?

Like, and I'm, I'm not going to tell you that you have to go vegan overnight, right?

But like,

unfortunately, you're going to have to eat the bugs.

Here's some shrimp.

Here's some crawfish.

You might have to make it a lot.

Here's a delicious

roll.

Most of us don't even have to reduce our meat intake at all.

Like the amount of wastage, the amount of mass meat that gets consumed by people who just don't eat meat.

Like, most of us could still have like a nice meaty meal a couple of times a week.

And and the and it's the mass, it's the cheap mass meat manufacture that is just the amount of land, carbon, and then as you say, very squeezed in close proximity, no quality of life animals that we go through.

And also rapid fire generations, which are just fan, as you say, fantastic for zoonotic diseases to just, oh yeah.

So, um, yeah, no, absolutely.

Very good reason for us to completely reevaluate that.

Yeah, it's also like we're just reducing your meat consumption.

I mean, you know, you can make a,

I know some people are like, I want to eat a one-pound steak.

And it's like, I don't understand that.

You can have like a pasta and, you know, has like, I don't know, half a pound of pancetta in it.

It feeds four people.

I mean,

it's a lot.

It's a lot healthy.

It also tastes better.

It does like feel a lot better.

I just, it's one of the things that like, I think about it the same way I think about the cars getting crushed by the like fire department bulldozer, right in that i think this is one of those decisions that you can make now or that is going to get made for you by circumstance in in the like near future right um like ultimately we we have we have lived through the golden age of eating meat right like the kind of ready availability of that as a protein um unless we like really go like the only way out is through and lab grow the fuck out of things i think i don't think any of that's gonna that's not gonna turn out very well yeah well then in that case i think any conceivable future is one where people eat a lot less meat, and that's probably for the for the best.

But it's uh it's been interesting to see like uh the sort of lack of response to uh bird flu contaminating all of these you know dairy uh cattle, um, you know, because it's like, okay, we're not we're not quarantining agricultural workers.

The government is not, you know, ordering these these herds destroyed.

They're also not paying for quarantining those herds.

It's sort of like there's been a total paralysis in terms of containing, you know, H5N1.

We've had a few situations.

Where does it spread?

Sorry, I'm actually not up to date with where it's spread.

Is it in California or is it where?

It's in, oh, God, I want to say that it's in the Midwest.

It's in the South.

It's in the West.

I don't think it's made it out east yet.

But this has been kind of...

You know, there's only a few human cases.

Like, well, there's been like 60 human cases or something like that.

There's been no human-to-human transmission.

We have had situations where, like, I think there was one like big cat sanctuary that, like, the, all the big cats were wiped out by bird flu somehow.

Um, you know, there's uh, the the bird flu is obviously affecting birds, including wild birds.

Um, yeah, this is, uh, you know, I guess the real question is, um, with our pretty meager attempts to contain this, can we, I don't know, tough it out until the summer when presumably transmission is down?

I have no idea how bad flu is transmitted.

So, the thing is that as far as we know, the thing that has not happened yet that would be the scary thing would be like human-to-human transmission.

And so, you get cases where people like catch it from animals and then get sick.

And I think like

three people have died total,

which is a pretty high case fatality rate.

and yeah,

I don't like betting against the CDC,

even in like two weeks' time when

the new director is someone that Trump saw on TV.

Turbo Hitler, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I'd have to really lock myself in my apartment to even a greater extent than during COVID because I don't want to, I don't want to like give it to Milkshake.

I'd miss you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't want Milkshake to die.

Yeah, me either.

You don't want to fuck around with this one, but like I say, I think the public health and surveillance system that exists around

flu like this

is as good as there is for anything.

And, you know, like I say, I really don't, I really, really don't want to reassure people again because

we're out of control.

Don't touch the anti-lathe.

The official WTIP position is do panic.

Yes.

Yeah, panic, lose your ship, like

out into the country,

kill all birds on site.

Yes.

Do not allow any animal protein reservoir to become close to you.

No.

Oh, dear.

Panic, freak out, going to be a bitch.

Become vegan, but also psychotic against all living animals.

I'm vegan, not because I love animals, but because I hate plants.

So you vegan for health reasons,

or like crippling contamination, anxiety.

A little economy, a little economy.

I actually kill every animal I see and refuse to eat them.

It's fun because my wife is basically vegan, which means I'm basically vegan these days.

Sure.

And it's crazy how much I don't miss it.

Like, in general, like, uh, the fucking impossible burgers or whatever the fuck, they're fine.

It's the same.

Like, they have no cheese yet.

That's the only thing.

I was going to say, me, I don't think it's cheese that I think I'd miss tremendously.

Actually, cheese would be the problem for me because it's not just a check.

Because vegan cheese sucks.

I've not worked that one out yet.

Vegan cheese, no one tells you this, but vegan cheese stinks.

Like, especially if you, like, if it's been in the fridge for like a day, vegan cheese will, like, it's like a chemical fucking web.

Uh, but yeah.

Yeah.

So, okay, we've had panda, we've had plane crashes, we've had uh derailments, we've had pandemics.

Surely, this is not gonna escalate from

my head when I'm trying to go to sleep.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's like anxiety nightmare.

All right, folks.

Oh, no, it's the golf of America.

Gulf of America.

Oh, manifest destiny everywhere.

This is, I mean, again, you want to talk about the age of incoherence.

You want to talk about crash outs.

Fuck Elon Musk.

Donald Trump going on TV and being like, you know what?

Maybe we got to invade Panama, Canada, and Denmark.

Well, and Greenland.

Greenland, yeah.

And we're going to rename it from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

The U.S.

might have enough clout to have that stick.

Like, he can't change it internationally, but he can order federal agencies to use it.

And to be honest, if you could definitely put it in public schools, yeah.

Yeah,

like that's probably enough to get it changed on a lot of the maps.

I'm thinking of a great follow on Twitter, Pinstruck Bugle.

I'm just thinking of like the mass of

the U.S.

civil service just like

unhappily having to go through all their atlases and saying, oh, well, I'm not happy.

I'm doing the unhappy face while I change all of these, score out Mexico and all these maps to America.

I just gotta, I just uh I picked up a globe off the street a couple days ago.

It's it's crazy.

You know, I don't know, I don't know if you've ever done this, you've picked up a globe off the street.

It's in my living room now.

I never picked up

the street really excited because it is an old globe.

It still had the same thing.

Oh, you get to date it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hell yeah.

If it spells Korean on the spell.

It said Zimbabwe, but brackets Rhodesia.

No, but Zimbabwe.

So it looks something like, oh, okay.

Like, no, no.

Where's the XKCD diagram of how you date things?

That's the one that's my go-to.

But I know that now there's going to be some

Gen Z kid, you know, 10 years from now who's also going to pick up a street globe.

And he's going to be like, wow, this one's Gulf of Mexico on it.

This is literally why, right?

Like, it's crazy how much this is just straight up Trump thinking about his legacy, right?

Until H5N1 has him go out like Stan Chera again.

Like

him just being like, before I die of bird flu,

he's going to get, he's going to get bird flu and transform into a bald eagle and fly in the sunset.

Yeah, yeah, experts now believe this Donald Trump was more of a mythological figure.

But yeah, no, he so clearly wants to change the map as like a way of securing his personal legacy.

Yep.

And the ways he can think of of doing that are like territorial expansion that the U.S.

last tried in like the 1830s.

And it should be be called the Gulf of America.

And the thing is, right, I've said this.

You could placate the guy.

You could fulfill that need by either putting him on Mount Rushmore, which I bet South Dakota would go for, or renaming Florida the state of Trump.

And the thing is, I think Floridians would go for that about three to one.

You could fucking dare another.

You could ultra cuck DeSantis into a level of

never seen.

Yeah, Florida.

I think the U.S.

should be reminded of Trump in eternum.

For sure.

I think it deserves a state of Trump.

I think it should have its face on the flag like Washington state.

And

it will continue to be the worst place on earth.

I was going to say with the proposed annexation of Panama or re-annexation of Panama, I should say.

um and annexing canada and so on and so forth i you know i think uh you know a lot of these people maybe maybe start sending out some feelers to china like you guys interested in a foreign military base

Yeah, they're like driving me

into the arms of China to be like, Yeah, you know, sorry, do you want to station a couple of like marine regiments in Greenland?

Yeah, yeah, you thinking about like a, you know, like a little, you know, marine base?

We could probably do that for you.

Yeah, where are the Panama?

I'm guessing my people in Nuke yearn for freedom.

Yeah.

Please send J20 strike fighters.

Well, politically, whereas Panama, in my head, Panama is a bit of a sock puppet for the U.S.

because of the

Panama is a fake country.

We invented to build the canal, yes.

But then we gave them a lot more independence and we gave them back.

Jimmy Carter gave them back the canal, which a lot of people were very mad about at the time.

And Trump is apparently still mad about it.

Apparently.

But also, if we retake the canal.

So they could definitely go to China.

Yeah.

If we retake the canal, guess what?

We get the expanded locks at no charge other than the military intervention, which will probably be

because they're going to be dry.

I'm sorry to bring it together.

It's not money, not your money.

It's a thing that a lot of people don't realize about how much global trade is going to get turned upside down the next 30 years.

But it's unlikely the Panama Canal will be functioning much after the middle of this century.

And the U.S.

has already been handed the fucking Northwest, like the Northwest Passage.

So

you got to get Canada for that one.

We're going to use tariffs and economic pressure.

Now, I think Alberta and Saskatchewan would probably join the United States, no problem.

But I don't know about Ontario.

I mean, I am excited to see if we annex Canada and American politics has to deal with Block Habitcoix because it'd be really funny to see

Blockhabecois establish a foothold in Louisiana.

I'm really, really enjoying the idea that making Canada a state and you immediately get

another 50 electoral college votes that all go to Democrats.

Like, Alberta just gets completely shut out.

New Hampshire, New Hampshire is lost to Bloch Quebecois as well.

But because it's because Trump read Infinite Jest and he's trying to do the great concavity.

Either that or he played Fallout 1.

I don't know, which is scary.

I mean, like...

any one of these is like so obviously fucked.

I don't know.

I thought maybe in my lifetime we would see the end of the United States with its borders as it has them and constitutional system as it has it.

I wasn't expecting it to be this stupid.

Maybe I should have, you know.

You should have.

Maybe

this will

because like I remember when, like, when I was a kid, the kind of like prevailing lib dream was some kind of like

EU analog, like North American Union, right?

Can you imagine two senators from Greenland?

Yeah.

That can be

fun.

I'll tell you that.

At this point, I'm surprised Trump hasn't tried to buy Baja California from Mexico, like in Bardo.

Like, it just.

It would make more sense, I would think.

None of it makes any sense.

It looks like Claudia is about to do the big, big, shitty infrastructure investment on there.

So, you know, give it to us, Claudia.

We can be strong.

It's the first possible time for the U.S.

to seize control of

how long it's free railroads.

Yes.

Oh, God.

I just don't have to visualize it.

I'm just being in the Canadian military right now and having to earnestly be like to Justin Trudeau, who is resigning in like a week's time, just in case.

Yeah, we do have the backup plans for the like stay-behind guerrilla operation that we would have to run in case he's actually serious.

Canadian Pilatio is going to be a hell of a thing.

Yeah, they're going to start poisoning.

Gonna

open the maple syrup flood.

I'm just enjoying the idea of a bunch of Quebecois French speakers

flipping the coin on Trump and invading,

yeah, like going invading down into New Hampshire.

And you have, so you've got a bunch of Quebecois guys like taking over Berlin.

Aha, we said we would get it.

No, we are finally marching through Berlin.

Yeah,

I look forward to that moment.

Maybe it might happen.

Canada just seizes the Great Lakes, you know,

like preemptively, in a preemptive, you know, preemptive invasion.

I, you know, I think, you know, some of those cities would go with it, you know.

This is what happens when you hang out with Baron, your only map game playing kid.

Take that guy's Steam license away.

Yeah, he's been, he's been all playing TNO as well.

It's like weird.

Yeah, the really fucked up, the really fucked up, only fascist mods on

Heart of Army.

I could see Baron as a Millennium Dawn guy, I'll be honest.

And I think that's what I think that's what led him to this.

You know, I think that's how this is happening.

You know,

it's an it's an oops news episode, and we've hit the two and a half hour mark.

My god, there's been a lot of news, there's been a lot of news, it has it's true.

I do like the Knights of the Golden Circle flag on the thing, by the way.

This is uh, I can explain this.

So, this was this was an idea that was sort of in vogue uh pre-Civil War, um, where the U.S.

was gonna like seize and colonize

a kind of South and Central, yeah, all of Central America and also the Caribbean for some reason.

Yeah, well, it was going to be like a as a hedge against the Civil War, right?

The South was going to create this country, the golden circle that was going to be like all slavery.

And

yeah,

it's like you want to talk about like Hearts of Iron mods.

This was Burgundy.

This was like the Ordenstadt Burgundy, but in like 1850.

And yeah, thankfully, this did not come off.

But like, people were still pitching this.

Even after the war, people were pitching to Ulysses S.

Grant of like shit, like, hey, maybe the US should like try and grant statehood to, I mean, Cuban statehood was a thing that was proposed a number of times.

But like, you know, bits of sort of the northern coast of South America.

I think there was even a push for like

Brazilian statehood at one point, which was, you know, not something the Brazilians were interested in.

So yeah, no, it's

just kind of bafflingly weird geopolitical intrusion.

The US has like benefited a great deal from its geography and from the kind of like map game starting position that it's ended up with of like having no one who's really credibly able to invade us anymore.

But that also means that they're stuck in this position where it's like, if you are of that mindset and you want to paint some more like color on the map, your places to go are basically just like

Canada, the Caribbean, or south to Mexico and South America.

I was talking about the Knights of the Golden Circle.

Yeah, that's a real

coofy one.

That's where we're heading.

I mean,

if it keeps Trump entertained, then

the Mexicans will keep him busy.

So, you know, it's fine.

Just tell him they did it.

He'll believe it, probably.

Yeah,

that is the part that I'm worried about is invading Mexico.

I feel like they might just actually do that part.

And that sounds really bad considering the amount of progress that's happened in that country recently,

attempting to kill friends of ours notwithstanding.

I don't think they deserve another punitive expedition for it, you know.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And then, like, you know, 100 years later, you get a bunch of like really cool revisionist Westerns about it.

Sure.

Ooh, yeah, that's

true.

Yeah.

No, I think they should go.

I think the U.S.

should go north.

I think Canada

could do with.

Canada has a reckoning coming on, like all the Trump guys in Canada as well.

So maybe

aim northwards.

Let's see what happens.

I want to see the timeline from Escape from LA, where the shining path unify all the oppressed peoples of the world against the U.S.

And Florida is invaded by a joint Cuban-Ugandan Marine force.

I'd watch that before.

That'd be pretty good.

That'd be pretty good.

I'd love to see that.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the one thing about invading Canada,

cold.

You know, Amtrak has priority over freight trains and via rail does not.

So,

via rail, how many divisions do they have?

Yeah, exactly.

So, so

you would wind up improving passenger rail in the former country of Canada.

I mean, listen, we have precedent for what happens when a superpower tries to invade a like much smaller neighbor just on the basis of like, well, they're not really a country anyway and will probably be greeted as liberators.

And the answer is that your three-day special military operation is like bogged down for multiple years as that country is like...

turns itself into the most armed sort of like rump state imaginable.

A huge personal curse to everyone.

What I'm hearing is that all of

the

Ukrainian-Canadian fascists

are going to have the most unexpected convergence of interests ever.

They're going to have to start taking arms from Russia.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, no, you don't understand.

Canada is American Ukraine.

That's how you pitch it, Susan.

You know, that works.

The languages are mostly mutually intelligible, but there's a series of revealing grammatical mistakes you can make.

Tell ourselves.

If Trudeau's going to have any sense behind him, he needs to be phoning up the Houthis quickly.

If he wants to know how to circumvent and destroy U.S.

heart military hardware, then there's no one better.

There's no one doing it better right now.

Maybe the Iranian drones are just Trudeau hedging his bets just in case Trump's serious.

Damn.

Damn.

No, no, this has gone poorly.

I support this idea now.

This is not where we're supposed to be.

Okay.

Anyway,

I think this is our last piece of news.

Hell yeah.

The Sixers arena is coming to a center city near you.

Huh?

Yep.

Oh, okay.

Zooms in on Philly.

Where's it going?

So they...

Okay, where?

Yes.

Take

a city.

Where?

Yeah.

So the Philadelphia 76ers, the basketball team has been wanting to move their arena into Center City for a while now.

And

I feel underqualified to do a huge exposition here,

but

it's been very, very unpopular with a lot of grassroots activists.

It's been very, very unpopular with parts of Chinatown because, you know, it's seen as this big

project that's going to gentrify neighborhoods.

it's going to it's replacing part of a dead mall in center city which admittedly is good they're building it right on top of a train station and also blocking off all the light into it which i think is bad um there's a lot of uh uh stuff going on replacing the skylight you just see them dribbling the basketball on top of it yeah exactly exactly um where's it going where's it where's it going exactly well i'm whizzing about where's it been dumped

it goes yeah something like what is it?

They're going to knock down

the fashion district to build it, right?

Yeah, so it's between Market and Philbert and 11th and 10th,

as well as the bus terminal just north of that,

which was previously sold off by private equity.

Although, you know, I think they did take advantage of the fact that this

thing was going forward.

I mean,

this has been a very contentious issue for a while.

It seems like Mary Sherelle Parker was sort of elected to do this deal.

Right.

It's been sort of steamrolled through for like a year now.

And it's, it's,

I, I, I'm not as like radical as some people in saying this is going to destroy, you know, Chinatown, this is going to destroy Center City.

I think it's a bad idea, and we don't get much out of it.

Um, obviously, this is at the final vote.

You can see here someone being arrested for protesting.

Uh, it's good.

I gotta say, this is a great photo.

This is one of the best being like, like, sort of like

buckled out of the location of all times.

You know,

I was actually in the building when this happened, but I was a jury duty.

There's a huge line of people outside the building, like waiting to get into the council hearing.

I was like, oh, damn.

A lot of people have jury duty today.

I was like, no, they said, no, go to the front of the line.

You're allowed in.

Thank you.

So you're losing losing a Primark, you're losing a GameStop, you're losing a Wetzels.

Wetzel's pretzels.

Of course.

What's it?

There's the AMC Theater.

There's

like the building it's replacing is not like especially great.

I mean,

the sort of,

whatchamacallit?

They call it the fashion district now.

It used to be called the gallery.

But this whole like process where they, you know, it's at some point it was like the Sixers are gonna move to center city um you know there was not much community input there was not much

called it they've called it something at something 76th place at market east yep yeah i hate that exactly i hate that the part i don't like is that they're gonna ruin the train station yeah but you know the the the big thing here is i i a lot of people have been protesting this for a lot of reasons and and then it just didn't they just ran it's never felt like there's been any sort of engagement with anyone

about the stadium.

The concerns people had.

No, of course not.

Yeah, I don't feel like it's necessarily like, again, I don't think it's the end of the world, but

the way it's been pushed through has been crazy.

Yeah.

The one, a couple of, they have like a community benefits agreement, which is kind of mediocre.

There was a plan to put a bunch of affordable housing on the site, but that got canceled because people don't like affordable housing, I guess.

Oh man, this is a little bit hesitant to me.

Yeah.

So like

so

the Save Chinatown Coalition did a poll, which showed 56% against, 18% in favor.

But then when participants were given neutral information about why people support and oppose the arena, it went to 69% against.

So

you try and pitch this to people and they like it less, which is

how I feel.

Yeah, I am.

It's weird.

I mean, more trackable.

If you look at the only thing I could say is look at similar

arena situations, like in Washington, D.C.,

where they did put, you know, a multi-purpose arena in the middle of their Chinatown.

And, well, there's no Chinatown anymore.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's multi-purpose arena.

Yeah, exactly.

It's sort of uh increased rents, you know.

It's sort of it's it's oh god, I should have put more notes here, but yeah, this is uh, I

it it feels a whole massive space that I happen to know is free down and uh right down uh where there happens to used to be a massive refinery complex.

And why the fuck don't they put it down there and just you know put some returns to it?

It already is down there.

That's the thing.

Yeah, I have an idea.

Leave it down there though.

I have a modest proposal.

Could you fit an NBA standard-sized basketball court on the SS United States?

Yes.

Oh, that thing's never going to move, so they may as well.

Yeah.

Refurbish it.

Move the 76ers onto it.

You know what?

Fine.

Do it.

Honestly, that might be the solution.

Yeah.

This is the kind of like lateral thinking, you know, that

City Hall needs to hire me, you know.

SS United united states conservancy dm us

listen listen stranger ideas have come to fruition right and if the us is gonna invade greenland you tell me why the hell you can't play basketball on the largest ocean liner built in the u.s and the fastest across the atlantic ocean sure yeah i again it's not gonna move i mean it might move no it's probably not gonna move

no that that's gonna be gareth you mentioned you were disappointed about not being able to see it.

Well, there's probably still time.

There's still time.

There's still time.

Yeah, I'm glad there's still time.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I'll be making a point of whizzing over it.

Yeah, that's it.

That and the dead fleet, there's a couple of things that are on my list.

Actually, there's a lot of stuff on that, on the on the Delaware that I want to see, actually.

This is just a nice walk down.

Yeah.

Anyway.

But yeah, I think the big thing about the arena is that the vibes have been totally rancid this whole time.

It's really hard to, like, I guess, put a fine point on what exactly is wrong with it, but the vibes have been so rancid.

I've seen the like the like concept illustrations, and it's just this weird kind of like box.

No, fuck that.

Basketball at sea, like in that one Simpsons episode.

Yes.

Couldn't they flatten the convention center and put it there instead?

I don't know.

Just like.

All right, the convention center needs to.

That could be a whole episode.

Oh, my God.

The convention center was a terrible idea.

Basketball

at sea.

That seems to be irritating.

I mean, they've done

a deck of an aircraft carrier.

Irritating to see a lot of people who are urban

talk about

it.

Football was a joke.

Go ahead.

Sorry.

Listen.

Listen, listen.

What you do, you take all the superstructure off basketball court, and then

you tow it out to international wars.

Football was fake, but basketball is real.

You start betting some real money on it, you know?

Like, international wars, you can do whatever.

The laws of the NBA do not apply.

Holy shit.

There is a picture

of the North Carolina Tar Heels and the Michigan State Spartans

on the flight deck of the USS Carl Vinson.

Okay.

Legit.

There we go.

It's

a teacher basketball.

It's irritating to sort of see, you know, especially a lot of folks from the local urbanist organizations saying, you know, we have to replace this this horrible dead superblock in the form of the mall with the arena, which will also be a horrible dead superblock.

Exceptionally, they have literally played.

They've played college basketball.

Yeah.

Like,

you can do this.

You can just do this.

Just do it.

Just do it.

Yeah.

I got you.

I thought you were talking about football for a second.

Sorry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well,

yeah, it's a very, it's a prime location.

There There are definitely better things they could do with that space.

It's a really prime location right in center city that they could be doing different and better things.

They're going on there.

Yeah.

A good one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

But also, I agree, Roz, I agree.

They need to not fuck Jefferson Station.

It's already.

Yeah, Market East is a very, very nice station.

I refuse to call it Jefferson Station.

No, it's Market East.

That's a naming right steal.

Oh, is it?

Yeah, we have several

NRG or whatever they're calling it now.

Yeah.

Patton Avenue.

That's Patton.

Drexel Station at 30th.

Fuck off.

No, you know what that one did?

You know what that one did?

Is that when you scroll through the app for arrival times for the L, now it's like, oh, okay.

You know,

you know, 46th, 40th, 34th, and then it goes straight to 15th because alphabetically, Drexel Station at 30th is not between 34th and 15th.

That's that's extremely aggravating yeah

yeah oh my god yeah well people morons run cities there's a podcast about it yeah that's true that's true that's true yeah no godsnomans.com that was yeah the goddamn news uh shit oh there we go

there you go we have a segment on this podcast called safety third oh oh god

hello justin november liam gareth and strdinger's guests Nope.

Fuck you.

I come to you with a story from a hospital of unspeakable prestige, which you may be familiar as with.

You may be familiar with as an institution next to a children's hospital that abuts a CSX line carrying hazardous cargo.

Okay, sure.

Docs your own, dox your own place of employment at rwtyppod at gmail.com.

We have mentioned this hospital numerous times, and there's a lot of people.

It could be any hospital.

It could be any hospital.

There might be a lot of them like that.

I don't know.

It's probably obvious.

Yeah.

Okay.

Sure.

As a resident physician in internal medicine, one of our jobs was to respond to codes in the hospital.

In general, a code refers to when a patient has sustained a cardiac arrest, also known as dying.

And we would attempt to revive them with CPR.

Depending on the case, sometimes this involves using a defibrillator to shock the patient's heart into a rhythm that can produce a pulse.

Contrary to popular depictions, we do not use paddles to shock patients.

Figure one.

Is that an obsolete technology?

They don't CPI you out of platforms.

It's not defibrillator.

Yeah, all the defibrillators that are spread around in like phone boxes now in the UK, they all have those little pads.

It's not nearly as exciting.

It's like if a phone, like a mobile phone, entered and stayed in popular culture as a flip phone, like forever.

Instead, adhesive pads are stuck on the patient, stuck onto the patient.

See figure two.

Adhesive paddles are advantageous because they limit downtime between CPR rounds.

They do not need pressure applied to the chest.

and they minimize the risk of electric arcing.

Yeah, but that electric conductive gel is horrible stuff.

Like, okay, yeah, you might still be alive and okay, you might be having a horrible time on a more fundamental level, having just been defibrillated and like

CPR'd, but like, you gotta get the goop off you and it's gonna get on your chest hair.

Yeah, the yucky goop.

No one wants yucky goop on.

That's true.

Yeah, just let me tell you.

Maybe some people do want yucky goop on them, but that's different.

It is standard practice for everyone to clear the patient prior to delivering the shock.

This is accurately depicted in entertainment.

Anyone who is touching the patient or is touching something that is connected to the patient is hands off.

Now, a component of CPR that is underappreciated by the public is that most patients end up intubated, which is having a breathing tube placed in them during CPR.

We have been mulling for a while a bonus episode about anesthesia.

And that's still in the works, you know, so we'll get on that sooner or later.

Compressed oxygen then runs through the breathing tube to be delivered to the lungs.

Prior to shocking the patient, the respiratory therapist on the case is supposed to disconnect the tube from the ventilator to minimize the risk of sending large amounts of 100% oxygen into an electrical environment.

God.

Today's seemingly apocryphal tale started as a run-of-the-mill cardiac arrest.

We were faithfully attempting to return someone from the heavens.

My job was to jam my fingers deep in this patient's groin to palpate ephemeral pulse.

Medicine's so glamorous.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's such a, I love learning things about medicine.

You look at the big mural on the side of the hospital and it's a, you know, go the square jaw pushing death scythe back.

And then you go, what's going on inside this hospital?

And it's like fingers fully into the paint.

Yeah, exactly.

The code leader, which was one of my co-residents, called for a pulse check, which I did not feel.

The cardiac rhythm was one that was shockable.

So the leader called for everyone to clear.

A shock was delivered and chest compressions resumed.

Then, at 12 minutes and 7 seconds into the code, a smoldering, smoky odor rose, and the patient burst into flames.

Oh,

geez.

Oh,

I believe David.

Classic patient, Eno.

You are a patient.

You're just like, you're in this, you're in this state,

sort of like between clinical life and clinical death.

The medics are like, get back here.

And you're like, I'm going to do something nobody's going to expect.

What do you do at that point as a medic?

Did you just get your cigarettes out and light it up?

Might as well roughly be patient.

We've got the attendings coming in with marshmallow sauce.

This was not a situation that any of us residents had encountered previously.

And the patient could not stop, drop, and roll on account of being dead.

Yeah, that'll do it.

Yeah.

Gonna save a lot on cremation costs.

I can tell you that much.

Luckily, luckily, a supervising ICU physician always oversaw codes from the background, and he literally sprang into action.

In a moment of ingenuity, stupidity, or both, this

attending physician, I assume, ran into the room.

leaped and belly flopped onto the patient, smothering the fire.

That's okay, cool.

Fuck it.

Yeah,

after recovering from our astonishment, we resumed compressions as if nothing had ever happened.

Unfortunately, the patient was not revived, but the fire likely had little to do with the outcome.

They were, after all, already dead.

Oh my God.

This is Jerusalem six feet under.

Yeah.

This is the type of shit they used to open episodes with.

This is like you're doing courtesy CPR.

You know, you have to do it in front of the family to look like you're trying, even though you have to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, do you remember that one video of the guy like pretending to search people at the entrance to the thing?

And it's like he's blessing them because he's just doing the like hover hand.

Just doing that, but like over the sternum.

Yeah.

I still do not know what caused the fire other than a freak accident.

It is possible 100% oxygenated air.

made it near the pads and ignited.

Shocks without clearing are being trialed because of the safety of adhesive pads.

But I certainly am not someone who wants to have my hands on the chest when the electricity is delivered after seeing this case.

Do we found the least popular doctors to trial

not clearings the defibrillation?

Thank you for the continued entertainment from Dr.

H.

Dr.

H.

No, you're very welcome.

Thank you, Dr.

H.

P.S.

Support Resident Physician Unionization.

We make minimum wage in conditions that would make a railroad company blush.

Absolutely.

I mean, for all the good that like having a medical union like the BMA is doing doctors here, but like, yeah, absolutely.

Sure.

Yeah.

Damn.

I mean, well, the undertakers are going to have a bit less to do on that guy.

I was about to say, you know, if you can, if you can, you know, it depends on how you want to be buried, if you can figure out how to self-immolate.

Oh, you're sick of your Turkish barber job, you know, the cottonwood and powerful New Year's type situation.

Easy peasy.

Question is if the insurance will cover it.

The fuck do you mean out of network?

Well, you know, you got a, you get a, your family gets a bill that's like, oh, uh, fire extinguishing $400,000.

They'll just kill me.

Don't worry, the insurance covered the first hundred thousand.

All right, our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Bye, Garrison.

Oh, that was safety third.

Oh, shit.

Shake hands with danger.

Yeah, what Liam said.

Thanks, Liam.

Yeah, buy my book if you haven't already.

Thank you so much.

The third print run is now out and about.

There are 1,200 copies in the warehouse.

So they are there finally.

We've got ahead of the, the fact that everyone has bought it has caused problems.

But we now have enough that you can buy them again.

If you haven't, if you are having problems, genuine supply problems, you can message I'm an idiot.

I reply to people who message me on things like this when I shouldn't.

I should ignore you all.

But no, no, message me, and I'll lend pests to the publishers.

What else?

No Gods, No Mayors has been entertaining me.

I've very much enjoyed

Noah dropped in actually, and I enjoyed that episode.

That was from the most recent free one.

We talked about Sam Yorty, mayor of Los Angeles.

Yorty, yeah, what a guy.

So, yeah, that's tremendous fun.

I enjoyed that a lot.

And then, you know, the usual list: 10,000 losses,

TF.

Oh, kill James Bond, for God's sake.

Rail Natter.

Yeah.

We've got a whole smortness board.

We have eight tickets left in Washington, D.C.

We have something like 250 tickets left in Philadelphia at the Fillmore.

We need to fill more seats.

We still need to fill more seats.

We have quite a few tickets left for the first New York City show.

People don't want to do the Stalinist congestion pricing.

Yeah, apparently, no one wants to, uh, no one wants to come into uh Times Square on a Tuesday.

Who could blame them?

Bullshit.

Yeah.

Where you're going to have a great time, assuming that the like federal government lets me into the country.

You'll still have a good time anyway.

You know, we'll figure something out.

Yeah.

Bye, everybody.

Bye, everyone.

Bye, everyone.

Bye-bye.

Okay, good.

I was worried I was running out of hard drive space.

I hate you so much.