Episode 170: Indiana State Fair Coliseum Explosion

I will simply buy a new audio interface.

Okay.

Okay.

I don't know if that's the most efficient way of doing that, but it doesn't matter.

I will buy your best.

Just completely replace every aspect of your life around.

What I've done is I've bought a new audio interface every week.

The podcast is not, it's not even breaking even at this point.

Yeah, my

tech setup is how I would, how, how would you describe it?

Ship of Theseus.

I'm about to have to take the ship of Theseus out of the harbor because I'm going to have to move this computer.

All your loose hard drives are going to be rolling around.

This computer is going to have to

get out of this corner, out of the apartment, into a Nissan juke.

And then across town.

I don't know.

That's what the car rental place had.

And then into the new apartment, down a really narrow flight of stairs.

Oh, Glasgow tenement stair type situation.

Oh, yes.

Into the new flat.

And yeah, so

I

have the travel rig as a backup.

I have a laptop and a microphone for that.

So if I suddenly sound worse for a while, it is because something has gone, something else has gone wrong in the move.

oh my god

oh moving is the most exciting thing uh my favorite thing and my favorite thing especially is to move with rods who is the worst mover in the world well what i what i what i've discovered i don't like doing like moving i know you don't is is is

having having to give your landlord or the letting agency like an ultimatum like a full-on like the the full on this is unacceptable letter before you've even moved in oh yeah you are in a tough pickle i'm i'm I'm in a situation.

I'm in a situation because I rented a furnished flat and they decided the day before giving me the keys to take half the furniture out of it and then go, is that okay?

And I have to now go, no, it isn't.

No, it is not.

Give me my shit back.

Give me your shit back.

Yeah, get your shit back in the apartment or like give me like a reduction on the rent, you know?

I hate landlords.

I hate letting agencies.

We should sync.

We should do the sync.

We should probably do the sync.

Yeah.

Three, two, one, mark.

Okie-dokie.

I like that Devin put in the notes or put in when they flash something up.

I left this in so you can see how good they're getting at it.

I'm so proud of them.

I know.

That did make my day.

That did make my day.

Beautiful.

Thanks, Devin.

It's positive reinforcement, you know?

It's very important.

Positive reinforcement works on me.

Negative reinforcement doesn't because I'll just ignore you.

I also love that we destroyed it later in that episode.

That was also beautiful.

Beautiful symmetry.

Something went wrong later in the episode, and

we just undid all that good work.

And you know what?

That's why they keep coming back.

They love it.

Not Devin.

Devin would rather be more professional.

I mean, the Hogs keep coming back.

They love the chaos.

Yeah.

Enjoy your slop.

All right.

Let's do this.

Hello, and welcome to,

well, there's your problem.

It's It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

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

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

I am about to avenge Nova's apartment calamity.

Please, please.

You have my sword.

My pronouns are he and him.

And with us, we have not a guest.

Not a guest.

No, my name is Gareth Dennis.

Hello.

I'm also a co-host temporarily.

Don't worry, everyone.

You'll get rid of me soon.

That's how I know my own demise is inbound.

My pronouns are he and him, of course.

We put you on like a performance improvement plan after like two episodes.

It's like we're really trying to line shit up.

We've got you moved to a basement office and

you're just getting the sense that the walls are closing in a bit.

Yeah.

I did wonder about the damn Gareth's stapler.

Yeah,

you withdrew my toilet privileges as well.

I I was still wondering about that.

Let's do an episode.

Oh, no.

But first, we have to advertise something that's, I mean, I'm amazed that we have any spaces left given how well it's been selling.

Goddamn tour.

Goddamn tour.

No, the announcements are on the second slide.

Oh, man.

You're right.

I keep doing this.

I keep jumping ahead.

I'm reading the mail performance review.

Yeah, you are actually going to be guillotined there, bud.

Sorry.

I know you have a family, but that's kind of a good, that's a demerit right there yeah damn it god damn it that's the cause in fired for cause

okay what's going on what's tell us what's happening ross what you see in the screen in front of you is the interior of the indiana state fair coliseum oh shitty view

this is this is

on sugar motor is like partially obstructed yes you may i like the guy standing here uh bottom right uh in the I mean, it's a grayscale photo, but like with clearly with his arms crossed just surveying the damage like that's not gonna buff out as it's that's the

official pose of well there's your problem that's uh

you hit one of these you know yeah

that guy is saying hmm well there's your problem yeah yeah um also is that pinata dog that's also just on some remaining concrete possibly yeah golly so you may notice there are some seats missing and a wall has fallen over whoops um today we're going to talk about the 1963 Indiana State Fair Coliseum explosion.

Ooh, okay.

Yes.

Now, there's a quote from the Reverend Fred Rogers that's often dragged out when there's a tragedy or a disaster or something.

Or Trump wins somehow.

Yeah, exactly.

Can you believe that Kamala Harris is going to be president?

Fred Rogers said, when I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, Look for the helpers, you will always find people who are helping.

To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing there are still so many helpers, so many caring people in this world.

Sure, it's beautiful.

Yeah, that's for kids, that's not for you.

Today, we're going to learn what happens when there are a lot of helpers.

Oh, boy,

maybe too many of them.

Oh, God.

Oh,

well,

crush my childhood sense of security.

Exactly.

But first, we have to do announcements.

Fake me out.

I don't have a drop for this.

Exactly.

There's no announcements dropped.

I was going to say a trade-off.

Announcements.

There we go.

Let's say announcements.

There we go, right.

Announcements.

No, no, no.

The New York City and Boston shows that we advertised earlier have sold out.

We have added an extra New York City show and an extra Boston show.

Links to tickets for that will be in the description.

They're on the 29th and 30th of April, respectively, I believe.

I can't wait until we keep adding shows as they sell out and we end up booking me into what is functionally a six-month East Coast residency.

Yeah.

That's going to be a lot of episodes to put together.

Yeah, we're under the gun.

We're going to do an episode on cocaine as we're on cocaine.

I've never done Coke in my life.

And I think

if ever there was a time to do it, it would be like two minutes before going on stage for the cocaine live show.

That would be pretty good.

On the other hand,

if I say that to customs and immigration, I will never be allowed to enter the United States again.

So let's not do a cocaine show.

We're not doing a cocaine show.

We already did an LSD.

We'll don't do drugs.

Yeah.

As for the other shows in Washington, D.C., we still have about a third of the tickets left as of recording time.

In Philadelphia at the Fillmore, we need to fill more seats.

Yeah, please.

That's why they call it that.

Exactly.

So buy those tickets there.

There's still about half of them left.

Sorry if the tickets are kind of expensive.

We don't control the prices.

You know,

that's a Live Nation Ticketmaster thing.

You know, it's outside of our control.

also yeah well uh the sony hall uh where we're playing because we're playing times square a real sentence i have to say now yeah yeah you did just say that uh they they uh they sent me an email after i signed i was testing something for the pod and they were like coming to like sony hall it's well there's your problem like yeah i know man i booked that show well the booking agent booked that show but i know about exactly

um

do we want to talk about the toy drive or do you have any yeah talk about the toy drive yeah talk about the toy drive yeah yeah great so last year hogs uh you raised so i was talking to uh my oh i'm gonna get her title wrong erica if you're listening i'm sorry uh she's like our development director so head of like fundraising and stuff like that uh the hogs have donated between when we started donating last year so like november of 2023 to about now The hogs have raised $27,683 thereabouts, which is a tremendous amount of money for the place I work, which is called Lutheran Settlement House.

We do social work, we do domestic violence, counseling, prevention, housing.

We have a senior center.

We have a food pantry, kind of everything to everyone, especially with Mayor Parker putting her

incompetent thumb up or equally incompetent ass.

You might have to bleep that, Devin.

But yeah, so the hogs have been glorious, but I am appealing to the hogs today because

I, once again, we are doing the toy drive for kids at our shelter That's called Jane Adams Place and kids in our domestic violence program.

I will bully Roz into linking.

We have an Amazon wish list.

That's the easiest way for us to do this.

We're not doing the P.O.

box like last time because I got sick of going to the P.O.

box every day and having the post office employees be like, there that motherfucker is again.

You were literally bringing toys to at-risk youth and the post office were like, this motherfucker.

I'll see his face again.

Once I told them what i was doing they became very sympathetic instantaneously which was pretty funny yeah i bet like you have a massive guilt card to play on anyone who fucks with you which i think is really like you know it's not a very well-rewarded task but that's one of the few perks that there are you know yeah absolutely they were like oh come in the back get a cart and they would like hook me up at the loading dock which was pretty funny it's it's it's like the the your rewards are the laughter of children and making a postal worker feel just horrible about themselves.

I hope not.

I rolled my eyes at the guy who is basically Santa.

Yeah, also Jewish Santa.

I'm Hanukkah Harry, really.

But yeah, if you want to donate toys,

I would appreciate it.

I'll also have

the...

just the donation link to Lutheran Settlement House.

If you hate toys and want your dollars to not go to children at all,

but exclusively to hungry people and our seniors.

If you're on some kind of anti-natalist beef, but you're still charitable, so you're like, fuck these kids, but also like, you know, I want to do a good deed, I guess you could do that.

Yeah.

All I'm going to say is another year has gone past and, you know, these children, they need the scale model hawker hunters, you know?

And they're having comets.

I'd already seen the comets popping up.

I was very pleased about that.

I will say to those of you, there are some people who have donated.

I don't have the names in front of me.

I don't want to dox anyone, essentially.

But I do want to say there are several of our listeners who have donated in the thousands of dollars.

That is so generous.

And that is extremely generous.

And

if there's now a flag in our

flag in our donation software database so that if you donate and it gets flagged, yay, Liam, and I have time in between whatever it is I do at work, I will be writing you a note on a post-it within reason because they're censoring me.

I've already been told numerous times that I will be censored.

All right, that is my plug.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you for giving us money.

Thank you for enabling us to help

survivors of domestic violence, old people, and the hungry.

We are deeply appreciative of it.

Absolutely.

Yes.

All right.

I'm saying that, like, I did something.

I didn't do shit.

Well, no, you're on the podcast and therefore getting the message out.

I guess so.

I guess so.

Yeah, exactly.

This is a group effort here.

It's just that Liam's doing most of it.

As Enver Hojo said, between the Albanians and the Chinese, we comprise like over a quarter of the Earth's population.

Yeah.

I mean,

this is maybe not group effort.

The word I would use there is group project.

Yeah, one person does most of the work.

Okay, I need to be very clear.

There are

people who are doing the work with like working at Jane Addams and working with survivors of domestic violence much more intimately than I do.

And I just want to say they are, they, they, they deserve the, uh, none of the credit.

I deserve all of it.

I am, I am, I am, I have Liam the great and powerful.

Bell to me.

Don't hit your fucking kids.

Just put that on like a sort of rainbow, like animated text, you know.

Unicorn across the screen.

Don't hit your kids.

Yeah.

The more you know.

Yeah,

let's get into the meat and potatoes.

I was about to say

that was nice and uplifting, so it's time to do the goddamn news.

Must we?

Yeah, we blew it.

We live in hell.

The once and future president has returned.

You see here before you on the screen, the text that I sent to my extremely worried group chat the night of the election when I was going to bed and I was like, I'm not going to stay up for this.

I'm not going to torture myself because it's going to be fine.

It's going to be fine.

It's going to be like you're going to get a shitty liberal and things are going to continue basically the same.

Why stay up?

Why, why feel anything about this?

And unfortunately, as a sufferer of OCD, what I realize now is in that moment, I failed to observe my rituals and my compulsive behaviors, and I jinxed it and I caused Donald Trump to become president again.

So I'm very sorry.

If you're looking at like net good and evil this podcast has put out into the world, Liam is helping the kids.

I got Donald Trump re-elected.

You did?

Yeah, because I did all of my rituals.

Yeah.

And it still didn't work.

No, because I didn't do mine, right?

This is the thing.

We're all looking for the one OCD person who didn't do the thing, and that's me.

It's my fault this happened.

I will say, I, whatever, he's a shitty pro-life Democrat, but Bob Casey refusing to wave the flag like two weeks in or whatever.

Oh my God, we're eight days out for the election.

It's only been a week, yeah.

Matt Gates is going to be Attorney General, folks.

Elon Musk is going to be

the guy.

I'm pretty sure that's just the Blue Ribbon commission in order to get him out of the way.

But even still, like,

I don't know.

Plus, he might kill everyone.

Here's a toy you can play with.

Go away.

Mandatory Neuralink for every U.S.

citizen.

That's what we're seeing in two years' time.

I know a lot of people out there are struggling.

And

even from an ocean away, I kind of am too, because the whole planet's a little bit fucked off of this.

I worry a lot for Americans.

I worry a lot for my American friends.

And

I mean, I didn't, I gotta be honest,

I felt the vibes that things weren't going Kamala's way, and I ignored them.

I was like, I'm gonna listen to the polls.

I'm gonna listen to

Jayan Seltzer or whatever.

And I was wrong to do that.

What I should have been doing is turning my light switches on and off an equal number of an even number of times that's a multiple of four, but not of six, um, until it feels right.

And I didn't do that.

And, and now this is happening.

I had a conversation with my dad about politics, which is something I can very rarely do right after Kamala was got the nomination when Biden dropped out.

Yeah.

I was like, do you think she's got the juice?

And dad was like, no.

And I was like, no, I don't think so either.

And then

had to suppress that feeling for

the rest of the the election.

I was like, yeah, I don't think she's going to do it, folks.

It's funny.

It didn't seem worth discussing.

How many people, including me on the left or even on the like center-left, like sort of left liberals or whatever, that whole sphere, managed to convince ourselves that

she was going to pull it off because she was brat?

Yeah, a really, really, really serious group thing here, I think.

Yeah, for real.

The other weird thing is, you know, just how I would say this election has been very parasocial in a lot of ways.

I don't know if it's the first one, but

this applies to both sides because a lot of people who voted for Trump were like, you know, they interviewed afterwards, they're like, I don't think he's going to do all the bad stuff.

I think he's just saying that, you know, for laughs.

There were people who voted for Trump and then voted Democrat down ticket in order to like put a break on Trump somehow.

Yeah.

But then there was also like a similar thing with like Kamala.

You know, one of the things is I don't know if you remember any of the big group calls that were

organized like the week after.

Yeah, one of them.

Yeah, and one of them was like,

I'm sorry to do this because I know some of the people who organized it are probably listening.

There was one that was like, train lovers for Harris.

And I looked at that and I was like, what are you talking about?

She's not going to do any of that.

And now she definitely won't.

They already did infrastructure.

They're not going to touch that again.

You know,

everyone was projecting everything they liked onto both of the candidates.

And it kind of, I don't know, it went nowhere.

I looked at her policy page, which is still up yesterday.

I was like, and I looked at it and I was like, there's nothing of substance here?

There ain't shit there.

Yeah.

I mean, people were talking about,

how do you say,

you know, Democrats should have campaigned on this or that.

They should have been less woke.

They should have been so on and so forth.

I think they should have had a policy.

I think that would have been a

single policy.

Yeah, just one single policy.

I think would have been a nice thing to say, hey, vote for us and we will deliver this to you.

Yeah, the Trump's the Labour Party got involved, didn't they?

Yes, the Labour Party are allergic to having any policies other than occasionally ones that are extremely harmful to vulnerable people, such as trans people.

So,

yeah.

I know, yeah, Nova, you're getting involved again.

I have a question.

I have a question.

So,

Dart Brandon, right?

I'm Track Joe.

Everyone made a huge deal about his rail credentials, right?

And so, you know, made this huge fuss about this big infrastructure investment.

How much of any of that actually is progressed at all?

And

is all of it just going to get cancelled?

I assume that none of it even got to the point that there will need to be cancelled by the Republicans because I don't know of any actual rail projects that were actually being progressed other than just big talk.

So what's actually, where are we actually at with any of that, Ross?

I would say the sum total of progress which has been made,

the New Orleans de Mobile train is probably going to go through.

They're too far in on that.

There is now one extra train from

Chicago to Minneapolis.

Can we get the funding approved for more Pennsylvanians?

Yes, that's also going through.

There's going to be one extra train from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh at the cost of several hundred million dollars.

Making some sense.

Beautiful.

That's mostly improvements for Norfolk Southern.

What a legacy.

What a legacy.

To maybe be like the worst American president.

And that's

there is a lot of Northeast corridor improvements which are going through at this point.

They're mostly bridge replacements.

They're replacing the BNP tunnel in Baltimore.

They are probably going to manage to force through the Gateway Tunnel in New York City this time around.

Portal Bridge is well underway.

But that's all, you know, Northeast Corridor improvements.

You know,

projects like expanding the the long-distance Amtrak network or like, you know, replacing the long-distance fleet,

that's all up in the air still.

I mean,

so the Democrats did the classic thing, and they do this with women's rights, they do this with all this stuff, where they say

they basically don't do it and don't do it so that they can hang it over everyone for the next election.

And they've been doing that for 40 years, where they say, oh, you have to vote us in so that we can, you know, codify Wade v.

Roe.

You know, you have to, you know, just wait till the next one.

Then, you know, then we'll do it.

Then it never happened.

This is the most important election of our lifetimes because, you know, it's another.

I was telling you about John Kerry in 2004.

Yeah, yeah.

I think if they had maybe made this election about codifying Roe versus Wade, they might have had a better

idea.

They relied on abortion too much in the final weeks and nobody gave a shit.

I kind of feel like none of us know is the thing.

I made the mistake of thinking I knew what was going on or I knew what I was talking about.

I know I have no qualifications to do so.

I made the mistake of like thinking things could ever be good, which I know I shouldn't.

And I didn't touch light switches enough instead of touch.

I touched grass instead of light switch.

You didn't flip the light switch three times, yeah.

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

Like three times would have been wrong, like four times unless it feels wrong.

And then if it does feel wrong, then you go up to eight and then 12, but then something.

But then you've had no effect because the light's gone on and

you have to have an odd number to have an effect.

No, no, no, that's not.

Well, okay sure but then either the lights are always on or always off yeah correct yeah yeah this is the list

yourself ros

don't worry about the lights in my house i'm not i know i have any furniture in there

just turning the light on and off on an empty room um but yeah no i mean obviously the thing is right we can go through because it's everybody's fault um it's like it is your fault for if you voted for her not voting for her enough it's your fault if you didn't didn't vote for her.

It's Joe Biden's fault for setting her up to fail.

It's her fault for losing.

It's Tim Waltz's fault for,

I don't know.

It's Donald Trump's fault for winning.

Tim Waltz, I feel like,

got a bit too much of the muzzle put on him.

Yeah, they were scared of him being relatable.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like Devon's fault for telling you not to vote.

It's

fucking Putin's fault, probably, or something because of Russia gate.

You can play this blame game all day, and it kind of doesn't matter because all we really know is that, like, even if you have the perfect theory of change and of how to win elections, the Democratic Party have indicated to you that they are not going to listen to it, right?

They're going to do the thing that they want to do.

They're going to run things their way, and their way loses every time.

Yeah, Yeah, I mean, about all you can say is, well, that went poorly, but I don't know if it could have gone a different way.

Yeah, no,

I don't know if there was a campaign that could have run in three months where she was like vice president of someone as unpopular as Joe Biden that could have won.

Even if there had been, she would never have run it because, you know, the people involved were just never going to feel comfortable doing that.

Yeah.

So here's the thing.

I'm a moron, right?

That's very important.

Absolutely.

Put that on deck.

But I have just written a book that did a lot of discussing.

I kind of repeat the point that people can get too locked into kind of fluctuation events and not look at the macro.

The macro here is that, and it's the same in the UK with the budget we just had, to be honest.

We just had a budget that says it's record investment.

And yet none of that will be seen by the lowest income people.

And that's exactly what happened with the big investment strategy of the Democrats is that they said we're investing all this money.

It's a lot of people who are thing.

We're like, you need

you refuse to acknowledge that people are suffering um so i don't think any different i don't think any campaign could have won this for the democrats because they'd it by their broad economic policy of we're going to do big investment but it's all going to disappear into big corporations to make line go up rather than to actually land in the pockets of people who are struggling And the only person who was actually promising economic change was Trump.

Yeah, I have maintained the theory that the Democrats could have run basically anyone besides maybe a couple people and Trump would have won.

And I think a lot of his people like Trump.

And

it's hard for us on the left to get that.

But like, I

like, I don't fucking like the guy.

I think he's a lunatic moron, but people love him.

And I was reading the New York Times article that came out today because

I am a moron as well about like what undecided voters in 2024 and who they voted for.

And number one, I have a bone to pick with the, there's a woman in there named like McLean.

Like that's her given name McClain yes yeah and she was like I she was like I was I was swayed by the Trump they them vote like I was gonna vote by before that and she voted she wrote in Romney in 2020 and it was like uh-huh you're you lying scumbag but I do think I do think that like yeah people wanted to vote for Trump and like we have to deal with that on the left and even with our our liberal friends friends sort of in quotes there yeah

I do I mean we have to look

I mean the stuff that people like about Trump is that he's funny and he feels like he's going to be strong and he's going to fuck with and trigger all of the like liberal institutions that everybody hates.

I do like two of those three things already, right?

So like, if there's a lesson from this, it's, it's to like fucking get more like a podcast, I guess, or kill yourself.

I don't know.

People want to meet the left, uh, the left Joe Rogan, apparently.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

It was called Come Town.

Well, yeah, actually, I mean, you know, this is the thing.

That was a big piece of discourse like a couple of days ago.

You know, there's this whole ecosystem of left-wing podcasts that, you know, showed up over the past, you know, eight years or so since the Bernie run.

And I guess the liberals just have no idea we exist.

We didn't like move the needle at all because we didn't want to because we felt like ambiguous and because we felt ambiguous conflict are we gonna come out and endorse kamala harris no i'd rather i'd rather end the podcast and beat you two to death with a sword

yeah

which one of you survives one of the three of you one of the three of you gets to live

I just I think, yeah, maybe I'm oversimplifying, but I think

when a lot of people in the U.S.

are feeling fucked, as in like their cost of living is getting worse,

the amount they can actually get for a dollar is getting smaller.

And there's two parties, and one of them says, we ain't changing shit.

And the other one says, I'm going to do change, even if it's fascism, then you're going to be inclined to vote for the person who does something because at the moment you're fucked.

And someone telling you, we're not going to change anything is not appealing.

Yeah, I mean, I said this one's never going to learn this.

I said this on TF, right?

Because like one of the things that Riley on there is trying to contextualize this in is within this like global shift rightwards, right?

And it need not always be so.

That's not just like weather, you know, it's because of stuff happening.

But speaking of weather, one of the things that like

is like profoundly affecting this is climate change, right?

And we saw in Spain, I don't know, we probably should have put this in as a separate notes thing, but I want to talk about it now.

We saw like absolutely catastrophic flooding

caused by climate change, like hundreds of people dead.

I'm just Santiago Calatrava

putting that big arch center where the river's supposed to be.

Yeah.

And

like Spain, Spain has a sort of center-left government that clung on by its fingernails in coalition in the last election.

And their reward for that is something that

makes it obvious how untenable this whole thing is, you know?

And like, of course, that's going to drive you into the arms of whatever party is like, you know, what's causing this shit is, you know, immigrants or whatever.

Yeah, I was about to say,

the Democratic Party going hard in anti-immigrant was a bad idea.

Also dropped opposition to the death penalty.

Of course, no one wanted to do anything about Gaza.

No one touched that issue.

They made that way worse.

They sent, what's this?

They lost Michigan off that shit.

Like, whenever anyone tells you that it doesn't matter, like,

they lost like big cities in Michigan.

They lost the college towns in Michigan because they were like, kids were getting fucking pepper sprayed.

Yeah, the kids just didn't show up to vote.

And I mean, that was definitely.

Well, obviously, kids are under 18.

They should not show up to vote.

That's voter fraud.

But the young people did not show up to vote.

And no one could fucking blame them.

So I turned 18 in 2009.

So I voted socialist in 2012.

I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2010, and I voted Democrat since because they've all been fucking against Trump, who, regardless of his politics, I just, I can't stand his voice, like his speaking voice.

And when people do their Trump impressions, it makes me mad.

Oh, I'm glad you said that sentence sentence because I was, I I was giving up.

I was mad.

I am.

Friend of the show, Tom Payne does like a pretty spot-on Trump impression.

He does, yeah.

And it makes me furious.

Very mad, folks.

Very mad at my voice.

I will beat you to death with your own shoes.

Is he triggered?

I don't know.

But I was just like, I can't stand this asshole.

And

my entire.

Should we bring out the fish?

Should we bring out the fish?

I don't like fish.

And my entire, whatever you want to call it like voting career uh it's been just like oh this is the most important year like we'll do it this time you guys like we'll you know we'll we'll make life measurably better for and then they just don't yeah it's what gareth was just saying and i wanted to reinforce that it's like when when people can't buy like eggs and meat they're going to vote for the other guy even if the other guy is like as long as they just say change because the median voter is a dip shit i think but it's also to say that you know that that no one was going to address you know the big sources of inflation that have been obvious in our fixed costs that everyone has, you know, rent,

healthcare, higher education.

Can't touch them.

Can't touch them.

Do you know what would have made the egg cost

60 cents more?

Yeah.

I wonder what, yeah, I wonder what would have

the Democrats, you know, saying Medicare for all and just flatly.

Liam, in fact, you even gave them a head a few episodes ago, you even gave them the headline for the legislation.

Just Medicare for all that would immediately

save like every American on average like hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

Yeah, it was my dad's idea when he was arguing with Glenn Beck on Fox News when Obamacare went to it back.

I made this show before, but I'm going to make it again.

And my dad was like, I could do it in one sense.

The United States of America hereby adopts universal health care and empowers or delegates the Secretary of Health and Human Services to implement the same.

Done.

One sentence.

We have universal health care.

That's one that's one page.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Give my dad Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Yeah.

Donnie, I know you're a big fan.

I take back whatever I've said about you or whatever.

Give my dad HHS.

This is going to be interesting because they want to put RFK into something and he's going to

die.

Oh, he's going to kill us all, dude.

I'm going to get cholera.

But what I'm excited about is he does want to ban chemtrails, which I think will be good.

That's going to be good for the railroad industry because we just won't be able to fly planes anymore.

Yeah.

I look forward to that.

Yeah.

That'll be good.

I just, every time I think about the election, I think about a new way in which all of us are fucked.

And I haven't run out yet.

It's been a new one every time.

So I just,

I don't know what to tell you.

I don't know what to say.

Buy whiskey, buy street waffles, consumer.

Like, fucking.

If you live in the United States, you can do it legally if you feel like you can do it safely, I think it's something I would do if I lived in the U.S.

Like, no question, I wouldn't hesitate about it.

Um,

because shit's gonna get like as bad as it is now, it's gonna get so much worse.

Yeah, I was about to say we need a we need a liberal Waco.

Oh, God,

yeah.

Talking of changing climates and mass slaughter.

Yes, I was about to say, let's go to the other side of the world.

So, in in neom

in saudi arabia

they're putting up panama canal numbers more than panama canal numbers this makes the panama canal look like uh you know uh sort of uh

kids play yeah yeah putting up like white sea canal numbers you know exactly 121 000 people dead or missing 21 000 dead over 100 000 missing jesus putting together neom and the line and

missing in this case presumably just means like buried alive in trench or something.

Yeah, I am really confused at how

you can put up those numbers with modern construction techniques.

Yeah, me too.

You just actively have to like beat a couple of guys to death every shift.

Those are visible from space numbers.

Like, like, I, I, I, yeah.

So

it's funny because I recently was working on a, in a company, and I joined the company and then realized that that company, oh, it's Sistra.

It's Sistra.

Everyone knows it's Sistra.

I was working at Sistra and Sistra were working on Neom.

And I come in and they're working on Neo.

And I was like, why are we working?

What?

And the people at the top genuinely convinced themselves, like, you know, obviously they're, you know, they're working, practice, and stuff, but we can change it from the inside.

Like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Why do you, why do you think that?

Have you ever met MBS?

Do you know what he's like?

I just wish MBS left, you know?

So, yeah.

So, so while I was in the brief time that I was at Sistra, I was basically going,

we should not bid for this.

It's extremely high risk.

We should not bid for this.

It's extremely high risk, just listing off all the neon stuff that we were trying to get in with.

Partly because all engineering consultancies in the UK have been driven insane by the fact there isn't any work here.

So they start doing nuts stuff like,

oh, what crazy shit monies can we go for?

Neon is like one of the places that is building stuff and it's a short list, you know?

Yeah, it's a giant, it's an extremely long ditch

that is,

I hope, not going to be much more.

But they've killed 121, they've sorry, killed or lost 121,000 000 nepalese uh indian bangladeshi

pakistani yeah people who come into the country have their passports confiscated have absolutely it's essentially indentured servitude um and uh have pretty grim working conditions uh and send a bit of money back to their families and and then apparently don't even don't even get recorded as dying you become lost And then the kingdom of Saudi Arabia pretends that you weren't and gets upset that the Western commentators are

are talking about you yeah we have we have a hundred thousand different videos of these guys walking backwards out of the airport so it's all good yeah i don't understand how it's it's like um what are they doing are they like trying to you know blast the several tunnels for this project entirely with like people with suicide visits

i don't i don't understand

to a factor of a million yeah are they just giving these guys tolerance

my feeling is like if you if you think that the you know design process for this is bad, imagine what the like sort of like works oversight for this is.

You know, what do you think the kind of like foreman for this look like?

What do you think their managers look like?

Like lining people up in front of the scraper?

I mean, maybe you know, I don't understand.

Listen, I don't mean to be sort of like, I don't mean to brag, but I'm pretty certain if you put me in charge of a construction crew of 100 people, I could find a way to kill all of them accidentally.

Like,

you know what, Nova, I don't know if you could.

I honestly do not know how you kill this many people without shooting half of them.

Imagine I'm like a very junior Saudi prince's like fail daughter, and uh, like,

I then have the same job, and I'm like, okay, now I need all of these guys to stand in front of the bulldozer just in case, you know, so to balance.

I was about to say, if if if you killed all those people by shooting them, that's adding a lot of ammo to the budget.

That's true.

The ammunition is expensive because we're in Biden's America.

Not for long.

Oh, Jesus.

And it's going to be more expensive somehow.

Yeah, it probably will.

This is appalling.

So my call to, and there are lots of engineers out there, lots of my fellow design engineers out there, but others as well,

people in the UK right now.

If you're working on this and you're kind of like, well, you know, I was told to work on this job and I don't have a choice.

Say no.

You can move to another project or you can threaten them with leaving.

Say no.

Give your line manager the stories about this, the stories about the indigenous populations being murdered.

You should not be working on this stuff.

You have blood on your hands if you work on this project.

Step away from it.

Call it out.

Shout out to New Civil Engineer, which is like an incredibly middling sort of engineering business to business publication.

But

they've been gunning for this.

They've really pushed hard on like making a point of this and shaming some of the UK companies working on it, of which there are a long list.

So fair play to New Civil Engineer magazine doing some proper genuine journalism The big media companies just haven't been.

They're actually calling out engineering consultants and engineering companies in the UK who have been working on this.

Universities involved in this stuff.

Stop it.

Abandon KSA.

Just because he has a lot of money does not mean that you should be sniffing his ass.

Get out of there.

Yeah.

Yeah,

this is a bad project, folks.

You know,

my concentration at Drexel was in construction management.

And the one thing they drilled into us at Drexel, which is otherwise, you know, I don't think they were very good at engineering ethics there.

Every worker has the right to leave the job site uninjured.

Yep.

And

here in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, apparently they've managed to install some kind of Rube Goldberg machine that they just toss all the workers in, you know, instead of that, you know.

Just

a stack of it's a really big number.

Yeah.

It's, it's,

in return for, in return for what?

Yeah.

Well, exactly.

It can't be a very efficient site.

Just go back to the Seamus episode for people.

God, it was a while back now.

Absolutely.

Torre de Force.

That's Seamus episode.

If you want to understand what these projects are and why they exist and how fucking stupid they are, that episode, I'm sure everyone listening to this has because it's a brilliant episode.

But if you haven't, go back to the episode to understand what the hell is going on with these projects.

But like, this is, it cannot be stressed enough that these are, these are planet-killing projects.

They serve no useful function.

There are like maybe two projects as part of vision as Vision 2030 that are useful, which are railway projects, dedicated railway projects that have nothing to do with NEOM.

But

the majority of the 2030 stuff is shit like this.

It's like 500-meter high mirror stuff that is just planet-killing projects that we shouldn't be progressing.

No one on the planet should be letting MBS build this stuff.

Sorry, I know I'm getting angry and elevated about this stuff, but

this is like a typical situation where my fellow engineers, we don't, we are not taught ethics.

And this is the fucking result.

This is the result is that my, is that British engineers, shit tons of them, are working on this stuff, are going out to Saudi and doing this, you know, are working on this stuff as site engineers, as consulting engineers.

Why are you doing this?

Stop it.

The money is not worth it.

You have hands, you have blood on your hands.

It's like the only, the only like situation in history that this feels comparable to in terms of like the churn raid feels like French Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, where they did just, you know, run through slaves at an incredible rate because they just considered people completely disposable.

Yeah.

You know,

this is ugly.

This is ugly to comprehend.

Yeah.

It's a lot of

that around, you know?

Yeah.

Let's blow something up.

I was about to say, that was the goddamn news.

Give me one second.

I got to get a backup beer.

We continue.

Yeah.

Well, listen, it was always going to take a minute to talk about how the bad things

happened.

Yeah.

I can't stress enough how much I'm not an authority on any of this.

I just know that it sucks.

I don't have a prescription for it or anything.

Just.

Don't get mad at me because I don't know either.

I don't know anything other than that.

I feel that in my gut.

Liberal delusion, liberal complacency.

Those are the words that just come to mind.

It's like we on the left are doomed to remember, right?

It's like, if you do nothing and people get poorer, well, anyway, we've been there.

We've been there.

We've done that.

Let's talk about explosions and

once Roz comes back with beer when we're good to go.

Let's do this.

I'm getting in a beer, actually.

That's a good idea.

Yeah.

Okay.

Do we wait a bit more then?

Yeah, we'll wait a second.

Okay.

No, sorry.

Oh, that's good.

Cool.

Okay.

What is propane?

What is propane, Roz?

We're on organic chemistry again.

Yeah.

I was about to say, yeah, a lot of organic chemistry this season.

Yeah.

Propane.

Three carbons, eight hydrogens.

That's propane.

This is really nice, good, clean-burning fuel.

Now, propane, as sold to consumers, is a type of liquefied petroleum gas.

Okay.

It's a mixture of propane, a small amount of propylene, and some other trace gases.

Some other fun stuff.

Yes.

Sulfur smells so that you can, there's sulfury stuff so you actually smell it if it leaks.

Little

stuff like that.

Liquefied petroleum gas can also include butane and other chemicals, but commercial propane is 90% propane.

And then the stuff you use in like a propane grill, that's like 95% propane.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

So propane is gaseous at room temperature, and so therefore they liquefy it by cooling it down and they store it in pressurized tanks, which you can then purchase and take home with you for your propane grill.

Yeah, have a liquefied pressurized gas that you can use to cook meat on.

Exactly, exactly.

It's reasonably safe.

It's reasonably clean.

It's reasonably convenient.

It's practical.

It's a very like Hank Hill type of fuel.

Yeah,

you don't have to clean out the grill afterwards.

I'm a charcoal charcoal guy.

I'm just, I prefer charcoal.

I like to taste the meat and the heat.

I think I've got like three almost finished cans of propane upstairs when I go camping.

Those are now like haven't been used for like 12 years.

So they're probably ready to just explode upstairs.

That's fine though.

That's good.

That's good.

They've probably, either that or they've all leaked out by now.

Well, that's also true.

Yeah, they're sat next to the plastic cup of old BR track detonators that are also explosive.

That's a good idea.

That's a good idea.

Workflow safety is number one, baby.

Yeah, we have

different parts of the thing.

Like Ros, you have the nuclear bomb in the basement.

That's that.

And Gareth, you have the explosives in the attic.

So it's, you know,

there's a symmetry to it.

One inherent issue.

It's a shame.

And I was going to say, get the fertilizer, but

one inherent issue that sets propane and other liquefied petroleum gases apart from, say, natural gas or like fuel oils, is that propane is a dense gas.

If the cylinder springs a leak for some reason, the gas will flow out of the tank and it will pool on the ground instead of dispersing into the air.

Oh, so you don't blow up your house if you have a leaky propane canister upstairs.

Ah, maybe.

Oh, I'll open some windows.

So that's why you should store propane outdoors in a cage.

Then if you blow it up, it's the ground's problem.

Yeah.

Then if there's a leak, it's dispersed by the wind.

That's why you usually store it in like a big cage with like individual cylinders.

Or if you.

I'm just writing this down.

I'm just writing this down.

I'm thinking about my IKEA Calax upstairs that's full of propane canisters.

Outside

cage.

Okay.

Yes.

So keep going.

If you need a bunch, you have a dedicated tank, which is also outdoors.

designed to vent to atmosphere.

Vent to atmosphere.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, throw-off valve, yes.

So propane is also odorized, so you'll be able to smell the leak and know that when you smell it, it's time to get out of the area.

Propane has many commercial uses for fuel, for vehicles, or for industrial equipment.

A lot of forklifts run off of propane, I want to say.

It can also be used as an aerosol propellant.

There's a lot of newer heat exchangers or heat pumps that use it as a refrigerant because it's more environmentally friendly than chlorofluorocarbons and also works a lot better um and of course another aspect where propane is used is in commercial kitchens especially those that are like off of a natural gas distribution system um you know it's a lot it's a lot more convenient to transport propane than compressed natural gas propane is like 320 psi or so compressed natural gas is like 2400 psi i want to say He's a much more robust container.

You're running like massive, like gas-burning

stovetops off of it, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

Now, in this presentation, just because of the sources I use, we're going to refer to propane and liquefied petroleum gas interchangeably.

I should mention the big source I used for this was

Disaster in Isle 13.

It's a report on sort of the emergency response to

this incident more than it is about the actual incident.

That's available on Internet Archive.

You would hate to hear disaster on IL-13 over the like tannoy at a supermarket.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's pretty bad.

They don't even use the code, you know?

Yeah, a quick shout out to Snyder episode where someone who, one of the sources that you use, Roz, came into the comments and was like, oh, that's me.

I wrote that.

So a shout out to that guy.

Hi.

What is is a state fair and why does it need a coliseum i can answer this through the medium of stationery okay

are we are we familiar with the hipster stationery brand field notes yes are we aware that they did uh you like them justin they're a little like a kind of like two staple uh like cardboard notebook thing uh

it's it has like a pretense of being unpretentious it's meant to be like a farmer's almanac or whatever or like something you would use for like you know engineering maybe um i i And so they do a lot of like special editions.

And I

had a box set of one per state in like different colors with a little like, you know, sort of gold foil thing with some fun facts about the state.

So I, you know, this is, you know, the California notebook out of the box set.

And it's, here's all the stuff that California exports or whatever.

And, you know, I used these for like years and years and years.

And so because of this, I not only know state state capitals but i also know what a state fair is and a state fair is where you uh like go to a low like a location in the state and you look at like a cow made of butter or you look at the like the best pig from this state or you see you see some

butter made of cows yeah you can you can see some have i ever taken you to the uh the the uh farm show i have not been to the farm show i would like to go to the farm show i'll take you to the farm show yeah so my my understanding of it is is you and whoever is running for president if it's a swing state and an election year go to this place you see some cultural activities uh you consume some very strange very like high fat and carbohydrate foods yes the best milkshakes you've ever had uh-huh and then and then you maybe get drunk in your garage with my milkshake oh you so hate

yeah actually these milkshakes might bud yeah that's a good point

um

he's mad at me because I tripped over him in the kitchen yesterday.

Oh, you're a joke.

Cake milkshake like the food.

Jesus Christ.

Jail for Ross.

Jail for Ross for 1,000 years.

Yeah, so, you know, this is a great place.

You can show off your biggest livestock, your giant vegetables, your enormous fruits.

Eventually, there's sideshows and attractions that show up.

You can go on a Ferris wheel.

You go on some kind of fold-up dark ride, little tiny roller coaster, merry-go-round, the infamous zipper.

I wonder if it's possible to do a kind of night's tour situation and go to every state fair in like the same year.

Oh my God.

I think they're all roughly in the same season is the issue.

Yeah, you'd have to do a lot of traveling.

And like some of them, like Hawaii and Alaska, would like fuck you up in terms of like the travel.

Yes.

I wonder.

You also have shows or events.

You might have horse racing or a concert or auto racing.

You can just say Kentucky.

You could just say Indiana.

Yeah.

Demo Derbies.

Demolition Derby.

Demolition Derby with minivans.

Demolition Derby, but with pickup trucks, monster trucks, Demolition Derby, but with

they usually have a lot of Demolition Derbies.

You might have a Tractor Pull, too.

Oh, I love a Tractor Pole.

Yeah, many, many redneck things.

Hey.

They're all very exciting and fun.

Fun, yes.

Yeah.

Oh, I'll do, I'll do Republican voter outreach.

It'll just be me at the Demo Derby with

like a 10-foot idol of Joe Biden on my car.

Oh, you have the

Kamala Harris car at the Demolition Derby, it's painted brat green.

Yes, you get the most neck injuries someone's ever had at one of these.

But I'm so Julia.

The problem is, it's a banger, but now it's indelibly tainted by association.

You want to be including the thing of She could have been legendary.

She could have had like a reign of power to totally restructure the U.S.

But like, you know, the hubris and tying herself to the thing made it like really, really tainted.

And ultimately, she lost out on power and it emerges that I'm talking about Charlie XIX.

You'd wind up like that guy, the

pro wrestler guy who went as a heel, the progressive liberal, where he forgot it was a bit.

Yeah, I would not, I don't know,

seeing the Harris Waltz car at the Demolition Derby would be very funny.

Oh, yeah.

Crushed into a cube instantly.

Yeah.

Lots of horrible, delicious fried foods.

Yeah.

Go to the state fair.

It's a good time.

At the Indiana State Fair in particular, you can visit the Midway.

You can see automobile racing.

They got a racetrack because, you know, it's Indiana.

The Indianapolis 500 500 is not so far off.

I was going to say the Indy 500, but you can see the local 4-H show off their livestock.

You can see high school marching bands in competitions.

There's also a hot air balloon race.

How do you,

what?

I assume that the first person to get vaguely near the county where the finish line is wins.

That's the bullshit.

No, this should be precision.

You should have to do this like a J-DAM.

For the first time in history, the Indiana State Fair balloon race has been won by the People's Republic of China.

Piloted by Balloon Boy.

Remember that?

Oh, God, yeah.

In the past, there were such exciting events as Velocipedestrianism.

Yes.

Very, very early bicycles.

Ah, Velocipedes, yes.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Horse diving.

That's so bad for the horse.

They don't like it.

No, that feels cruel.

And, of course, they had a eugenics event.

Oh, hey,

what?

I mean, it's a logical progression in the sense that you have a bunch of like sort of planters and like ranchers going, yeah, this is the best cow we bred in the state this year, and I am very racist by the transitive property.

This is the best baby we bred in the state this year.

Yeah,

we have moved past such things as velocity pedestrianism and eugenics.

So let's talk about the Indiana State Fair Coliseum.

Why is Garfield in this?

We'll get to why Garfield is in this in a second.

I'm glad because

that had a series of questions about Garfield.

Why is the ticket booth so ornate?

Because this was a Works Progress Administration

construction.

Yeah, this was actually renamed to Corteva Coliseum

today.

It's happening today.

Yeah.

What the fuck is it Corteva?

It's some kind of big agri-business.

Of course it is.

Of course it is, yeah.

Before that, the Monsanto Farmers Coliseum.

Before that, it was the Indiana Farmers Coliseum.

And before that, it was the Pepsi Coliseum.

Yeah,

you hate to see a kind of small local producer like Pepsi bought out by a Leviathan like Indiana Farmers.

Yeah.

So it's funny.

So there's a thing every year called the Royal Welsh Show.

The UK has like farmers' shows.

They're kind of like lots of elements of this, but without some of the Americana.

A lot cheaper.

Much cheaper.

Yeah.

And

I suppose this is the parallel of like the fact the Royal Welsh Show happens every year.

It's in the same place.

it has permanent structures.

So lots of it's like tents and temporary stuff.

But you, for the thing that you know, you need to have lots of people seated in every year, you might as well build a permanent thing that does that, right?

Which I guess is what this is.

It could be a tent, but actually, by the time you've built an enormous bloody tent with all the seats once a year, just build a permanent structure, right?

Yeah, it comes in useful in the offseason for miscellaneous.

Plus, I mean, this isn't really a coliseum, it's like a medium museum, but like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, uh, yeah, so Indiana Farmers Coliseum named after the Indiana Farmers Mutual Insurance Company, who uses Garfield as its mascot.

Illegal?

I bet they paid like $5

in in like 1932 for it and

they've just ridden off the back of it since.

Now, why do they use Garfield as their mascot?

Why?

Yeah, that's a good question.

Why did they?

Because Garfield lives in Indiana.

No, he.

That can't be true.

I refuse to.

Google Garfield.

You're not telling me that Garfield is in Indiana.

No, Garfield lives in Indiana.

I'm not.

No.

Prove it.

Where's his?

Show us the long-form birth certificate.

He lives in Muncie.

I just...

There's also a kind of element of like a kind of uh john grisham or james elroy thing here where it's like the indiana farmers mutual insurance company is they'll they'll kill you in the sense that that's like a like a probably like a multi-billion dollar corporation somehow that is just like ostensibly and like you know grew out of like two guys in dungarees being like uh bury my money in this barn but like now is like this kind of terrifying thing that has like tendrils all over the world that extends from Indianapolis and is now like having a guy beaten to death in a back alley and Kowloon somehow, you know?

So, yeah, they actually have a big Garfield mascot who hangs out in the stadium.

I don't like that at all.

The mask of Capital is a Garfield face.

The creator of Garfield is a resident of,

he's an Indiana native.

He's from Lunatech.

Yeah.

He's from Marion.

I don't know where that is.

I mean, like, I know the Dilbert guy is in.

So sorry.

So sorry.

I was starting to worry there was something wrong with Cartoonist.

Even more, even more.

So sorry.

Jim Davis, as far as I know, is normal.

The only one we can trust is Heathcliff.

I mean,

he did draw John drawing Dogcom that one time.

So, you know, maybe not that normal.

That's a good Garfield right there.

We can find that, Dev, if you just Google, well, don't Google Garfield but like find it.

God damn it.

Find it.

There's a lot of Garfields out there that are kind of mediocre.

That one's a good one.

The thing is, I find Garfield very, very germane to like the kind of absurdism of putting like Garfield out of order or Garfield without Garfield.

So it's just John talking to himself.

Or my favorite was the one that there's a panel, there's one panel of Garfield where Garfield is being flung upside down, T-posed out of a window.

And if you tag that on as the third panel of any Garfield comic, it's still funny.

So,

yeah,

this is the Corteva Coliseum, I guess, again, as of today.

It kind of looks like old Boston Garden.

I like it a lot.

This is a very handsome building.

It does, yeah.

It is nice, yeah.

Reminds me of,

this is some shit from Tropico, kind of, which I, you know, big fan.

So

I really like the ticket windows here i assume these have been boarded up because they put hvac back there or something but they got like you know the grating is all corn stocks beautiful yeah very nice yeah of course there's corn stocks yeah oh that is nice i like a little detail of that oh yeah well i i it's it's interesting uh the works progress administration sort of invented a new order of columns um where the capital it was like functionally they were an ancient greek city-state for like a week you know yeah exactly

where the capital is like a a corn stock as opposed to you know, the ancient Greek, whatever.

I forget.

The Ionic, the Doric, the American.

I mean,

fuck, I feel a little bit like Patriotic by proxy.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is a multi-purpose arena.

It could be set up for ice hockey, basketball.

It could be set up for concerts.

Again, this is built by the Works Progress Administration in 1939.

to replace the 1907 livestock pavilion.

It formerly was the host of the Indiana Pacers

and no less than seven ice hockey teams, none of which were in the NHL.

They sure are trying.

Doing ice hockey in Indiana angers gods.

I think this is clear at this point

to everyone except Indianans.

It's a lot better than doing it in Las Vegas.

Oh, fuck the Knights, dude.

Yeah.

6,800 seats when configured for basketball, 6,200 for ice hockey.

You know, today it's just not big or modern enough for professional athletics.

They all moved downtown to the Gainbridge Fieldhouse.

They still use it for smaller events and concerts and like high school sports and stuff like that.

They hosted the Beatles in 1964.

Wow.

Huh.

Yeah.

And the recording for it was just solid screaming, as every Beatles live-act recording was.

Yeah, so this is a pretty nice venue, in my opinion.

Now we have to talk about fire inspections.

I desire this car aesthetically.

Fire Marshal.

Yeah.

Let me drive this around.

Listen, okay.

Everybody got mad at me, right?

I got a new compromise thing that's going to make only 70% of the people mad at me.

Let me be a fire marshal.

You get the car.

I think they give you a gun.

You definitely have a badge.

That's like most of the way you're going to be.

I think

good, right?

Yeah, I think so.

Fire police and PA, I don't think carry firearms.

The guy, our friend here on the right of the floor, seems to be enjoying it as well.

He seems to be puckering

at the fire marshal vehicle.

He seems quite pleased.

Yeah,

exactly.

I was.

That white arm.

No, it's gorgeous.

Gorgeous.

So for any building that's like a large venue, fire inspections are important and ought to be conducted regularly.

Yeah, by a guy with the coolest possible of a car.

Yes.

These inspections are the purview of the fire marshal.

During these inspections, of course, you're looking for anything that might cause a fire or which may impede evacuation if a fire were to occur.

Like, you know, a whole bunch of crap stored in a stairwell.

Unlocked emergency exits.

Yeah, padlocked doors, improperly stored flammables or whatever, right?

Now, fire inspections are important, but they only work if you actually have the manpower and the wherewithal to do them.

One of the first things that any fire department facing budget pressures cuts.

Yeah.

Yep.

This stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

In Indianapolis in 1963, there was a problem with both of these.

The Indianapolis Fire Department had shortened the work week from 70 hours to a leisurely 63 hours.

Oh, God.

Fucking hell.

All those lazy tricks.

They read, you know, they read the thing about eight hours for work, eight hours for leisure, another eight hours for leisure.

Yeah, exactly.

That's basically how much the French work.

This resulted in the shortage of manpower.

Fire police do not carry weapons.

Sorry that took me so long.

Still a cool job title, though.

Yeah, they're basically just glorified traffic cops, but they what's what's what's the car look like?

Let me google this right quick.

It's yeah, it's

I think it's municipal base, but there are some that are like pretty sick.

Fire police car.

I'm just seeing a lot of police cars on fire.

No, dude, fire police car.

Fire police Pennsylvania.

Oh, that's pretty sick.

A bunch of like old like 90s SUVs, like an old disaster movie.

Okay, that's sick.

Oh, nice.

Okay, yeah, that's nice.

You just know that in the UK, it's a hatchback astra.

A 1990 suburban that you have to drive for work.

Incredible.

Fuck the climate.

This rules.

Pennsylvania does it different, baby.

I don't know.

Someone's going to have to send this to Devin so they can put it up on the screen.

All right, I'm not going to remember to do that anymore.

No, we're not going to remember that.

She's so tired, bro.

Now, furthermore, the fire chief in Indianapolis believed that because the Coliseum was state-owned property,

it was outside of his jurisdiction, even though it was inside the city limits.

You ought to have some kind of state fire marshal, you know?

Yes.

Thus, the inspections were rare and only cursory.

Usually, they just inspected it right before the state fair, even though the Coliseum was leased to promoters and held events throughout the year, uh-huh.

Now, you might ask, okay, what's the risk of fire in a fire-proof Coliseum?

You can't burn down a Coliseum.

I haven't seen Gladiator 2 yet, so I assume.

Yeah, it's all made of brick and like concrete and you know, metal, you know?

Yeah, right.

It's ice hockey.

You got ice in there.

What's the ice?

Is ice gonna catch fire?

I don't like that.

Oh, Rats.

Way more.

In the Coliseum, of course, they serve concessions.

Yeah.

Well, no.

Concessions need to be heated.

Oh, boy.

It's going to suck.

Just a shitload of burning corn dogs.

Yeah.

This is about, I want to say, four miles north of the city center.

There's no municipal gas line out here, so the heat comes from propane, which needs to be stored.

Where is there a lot of room for storage in a Coliseum?

The basement.

The seats.

Oh.

Oh.

Now, do you see a problem that may develop here?

I'm not.

I'm deliberately not.

I'm looking at the corn dog.

I'm thinking

how good a corn dog is going to taste, and I'm just not thinking about it.

So, so, for everyone, anyone who uses the Asda in Adel in North Leeds, there's a space underneath that Asda that's called, by the staff, called the Void.

Because when they built the ASDA, they built the ASDA was, you know, it's basically a giant warehouse.

They built it flat, but it was built on a, on a, a plot that was on a slight slope.

And the void, uh, the bit that you could actually access without stooping, had lights.

It was kind of like basically fine.

They used it for storing stuff.

But they also store stuff in the void, which was the bit where you open a door, go in, there were no lights, and it disappeared off into infinity.

You can't go all the way along the building.

You can't be like, hey, can you store this bag of like crisps or whatever in this palette in the void?

That is literally what they did, yes.

And what I love is

there could be anything in there since that thing was built in presumably the late 90s.

So,

yeah.

So, if you're using Azte Adl, just be aware that you might be stood on pot above anything.

And it could be flammable.

It could be, yeah, who knows?

So, Azta Adel, shout out.

Yeah.

I've been addled by this information.

So, you know, there's a problem that may develop here.

We'll talk about here the commissary, which was located under aisle 13.

Oh.

I'm just going to read the caption here.

This is an artist's conception of the approximate dispositions of materials in the concession commissary at the Coliseum.

According to an eyewitness, a radiant heat device, number one, fired by propane gas, was used to heat pre-popped popcorn in a storage bin.

Not the popcorn heater.

A nearby tank.

You're supposed to serve man, not betray him

to serve Kyn.

A nearby tank of

feeling like emotionally, like the popcorn heater has betrayed its purpose.

I don't know why I just immediately, my mind just put you into a berry and you were just dressing down, like Sergeant Sargon dressing down this slightly sheepish-looking popcorn machine.

That's not your popcorn.

That's the king's popcorn.

Oh, dear, I must be delirious.

Yep.

Right.

A nearby tank of propane apparently became overheated and a safety valve was popped, causing the gas to flow from the valve and the tank to fall over.

Oh, no, I don't like that.

It's about a hundred-pound tank of propane.

Five-second rule.

You pick it back up, it's all good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Another popcorn storage bin, number three here, was being warmed by an electric cone-type heating element.

Right, okay.

So as you're describing this, I know there's a little bit left for you to describe in this.

I'm visualizing like six or seven different, like, kind of like weird heating constructions of varying types and sizes.

All kind of divided heating popcorn kernels and like the music powerhouse is like

this is the this is the propane popcorn, this is the electric popcorn, this is the charcoal popcorn.

Do you think the popcorn is like a popcorn colour site?

Yeah,

bituminous coal popcorn.

I believe that like there was there was a point in the Pennsylvania State Fair's history where you could have got like anthracite popcorn.

I believe this.

Pennsylvania dominance.

I mean, coal-fired pizza is still a thing that's single-handedly holding up the Pennsylvania anthracite industry.

Good grief.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Also, still some home heating.

So all these things are wiggling and jiggling and falling over

in this void underneath the seats uh at aisle 13.

yeah what's really funny about this is this disaster happened on halloween and we didn't do it for the uh halloween episode

sake

yeah why is your halloween costume osha inspector this is on october 31st

um it's maybe not in order here but that's that's rough if you get like blown up and you're wearing a costume you know you gotta go you gotta go to the hospital and they're like you know trying to reattach your arm you're wearing a dracula cape.

Sometime shortly before the events we are about to describe, a manager opened the door to the commissary, saw a thick fog inside, closed the door, and warned employees to get out.

I'll just put this over here with the rest of the propane.

One man went in to try to stop the leak and failed miserably.

I don't know what happened to him.

I'm going to be honest.

I have a guess.

I have a guess.

yeah that's rough that i mean fucking trying to do the like chernobyl reactor diver shit but you're one indianan man yes yeah you've got like fireworks but it's popcorn exploding around you like just

like

the indiana medal of honor like he went into he went into the like you know the gap of danger right like the popcorn reactor the the

reactor number

vessel what is this if not a pressure vessel to contain popcorn reactors

you have to dip the control rods in but they're corn dogs

no granted the re the pressure differential is one to one but it's a pressure vessel for containing popcorn reactions

oh yeah so now you may ask okay why why are these uh things running at all what's the event it's not the state fair it's a separate event which the uh coliseum was rented out for it was of course the performance of Holiday on Ice.

Oh, no, no, this sounds like it sucks.

No, no, well, it's got to suck a little more, Nova.

This is a very long-running.

It's too early for this, but this is what you get for doing Christmas before Thanksgiving.

It's not even Christmas-themed, is the interesting part.

You said holiday, yeah.

No, they do like a non-denomination every holiday.

Yeah, this one was Kwanzaa, weirdly enough.

Yeah, I believe, I think they have done a Kwanzaa themed show.

Yeah,

I'm not super familiar with the ice show scene, but I believe this was actually the first one, and it's still running to this day.

I went to say,

fucking Shenyun, China before communism on ice.

But yeah, this is on October 31st, 1963.

It's the first show of an 11-day run of Holiday on Ice.

Great.

Now, this show starts a little late, but not so late as to cause an uproar.

It starts at 8:45 instead of 8:30.

So the show was supposed to wrap up around 11:15 instead of 11 as scheduled.

Charlie Cheeplin at the front there.

Yeah, very good.

There's

me boy moding standing next to him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Devin, you can put that picture up if you want.

There's 4,327 spectators for opening night

with propane slowly filling the commissary.

Now, at 11.06.

Oh, God.

As the show is running.

11.06,

we pop the fuck out of some corn.

We pop more corn

to a greater extent than has ever previously been popped.

The corn popped.

Oh, my God.

The corn pop heard

round the world.

Yes.

Yeah, just as the finale began at aisle 13, there was an enormous boom just underneath the box seats.

A 700 square foot section of the seating and floor flew up into the air and came back down, smashing a load-bearing wall below, which collapsed and took out another 500 square feet of floor with it.

Jesus is like a mortar, like a trench mortar.

Yes.

And in amongst all of it is just gallons of half cooked popcorn yes raining body parts and corn dogs yeah geez it took a moment for anyone to figure out what had happened many of the people who were not directly viewing the exploded stands thought that since there had been small pyrotechnics as part of the performance maybe this was actually part of the show until they looked and saw the destroyed

people sat there with their hair like comedically like goths like stretched to one side, with like the comedy, like Daffy Duck beat spun around the back of their head, going, going,

geez, was that part of the show?

Or uh, yeah, bloody hell.

It was so clear there was a horrible accident.

People were strewn across the ice, they were crushed under big concrete blocks, they were mangled in a big pit of debris.

It was very ugly to behold.

This is also this is a

family show, right?

Yes, very much, very much so.

Now, despite this, there was general.

Could it not have been, I ask this rhetorically to God, could it not have been a show that was like, you know, for unlikable losers, right?

Like people that you wouldn't miss, like anonymous, showing up, you know?

Why is it always

the like the like low the completely blameless, like, oh, you know, here's here's a benefit we did for the local kids.

Why is it?

Why does this never happen to the letting agents national convention?

November.

November.

Only the good die young.

Yeah.

I mean, you joke about that, but the number of train crashes, the number of formative train crashes in the UK that involve like a holiday train full of children is

actually notable.

It's about to say, you know, you see that big train

to our drunkest driver.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like, yeah, yeah, this train is full of nuns and orphans.

Let's give it to drunk Uncle Bob.

That's my Uncle Bob.

We miss him every day.

So, anyway, despite this huge explosion, by and large, there's an aura of calm in the auditorium, right?

Or in the Coliseum.

The Holiday on an Ice Band, in fact, keeps playing to keep everyone calm.

Near my God to thee.

Yeah.

People start to evacuate in an orderly fashion.

That's when the second band.

What?

The second explosion happens.

Oh, no.

Mr.

President,

a second popcorn reactor has struck the Iowa State

Coliseum.

This time there was a 40-foot fireball contained entirely within the Coliseum.

Wait, this was October 1963?

Yes.

They would have had to tell Kennedy about this.

And Kennedy was like, damn, that's crazy.

By the way, everything's still good for me to go to Dallas next month, right?

Surprising how often that comes up in this podcast.

Yeah, right?

Like, I don't know.

It's like 9-11, right?

I can relate stuff because I know the date of the Kennedy assassination because the Stephen King book, I can relate stuff chronologically to it.

Huh.

Happy birthday, by the way.

The president's been shot.

That apparently is how it went, yes.

Jesus.

The debris with many trapped underneath was now also on fire.

Just like trapped under concrete block.

Like, well, this can't get any worse.

The concrete block is now on fire.

Now on fire, yes.

Lots of people were buried underneath concrete slabs weighing five to ten tons.

You're not walking that off.

Again,

it's going to be.

Why can this never happen to like a Trump rally?

You know?

Because there's never enough of them there.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

Yeah, it'd be embarrassing if like an empty section of the stands.

Why this and why not Trump on ice?

Or I guess 1963 equivalent, so George Wallace on ice.

Yeah, George Wallace on ice.

Oh, God.

Doing a long way before he's just out there saying the word.

Singing the word, actually.

A beautiful contralto.

I don't want to add it to him, but it's like, it's really technically impressive.

um now this fire dies down pretty quickly because it is being fueled by the uh propane which you know sort of disperses right yeah it did but it does burn a lot of people at least it burns off clean you know odorless you know like

the charcoal sentence

stinky corpse hope you're uh hope you're not wearing um polyester oh it's the 60s everyone's wearing polyester yeah that's true oh yeah you are going up like a like a christmas tree

so it's very very apparent pretty early on that a lot of people are dead or injured, right?

An off-duty firefighter called the Indianapolis Fire Department within minutes of the explosion, saying there are probably 50 to 100 people injured in his estimation.

Police were on the scene by 11.15, shortly followed by the media, and only then by the fire department.

The budget cuts again.

Yeah, that 63-hour work week really cuts into response times.

The American Red Cross and the Salvation Army, also dispatched personnel, civil Defense arrived on the scene.

If I'm dying and this fucking Salvation Army are trying to save me, let me die.

Put me back in.

Put me back in.

You put that concrete block back on top of me.

More weights.

You got Civil Defense,

you know, countless other rescue and relief organizations just...

They hear about this and they send everything they can, right?

Oh, dear.

Uh-oh.

What resulted was an enormous traffic jam of emergency equipment.

Incident command management

is a skill.

Gold, silver, bronze.

It's actually very important to manage this stuff extremely carefully.

In fact, you can sort of see this in this picture.

This is inside the auditorium.

You can see a lot of ambulances.

You can see a tow truck here.

You can see probably a police car over here that's sort of blocking a way out.

A lot of people milling around.

Yeah.

Like no clear function.

Yeah.

It's just like, damn, look at that.

Yeah, that's that, that's the, that's an aftermath type job.

That's what the MTSB or like, you know, the sort of like accident investigation board do, you know?

So that's a situation.

I, I, okay, yeah, okay, it's easy for me to post more on this.

I would not be bringing vehicles in here.

I would be getting people, I'd be human training people in and out so that you have clear working space because also you're doing all the excavation of material.

And

yeah, well,

seven one races in the Coliseum.

I mean, the first and biggest problem was the police, right?

All races.

Yeah, they had more officers on duty than normal because it was Halloween, right?

All the kids are getting into mischief.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, people are putting fentanyl in the 60s candies.

Exactly.

Those kids deserved it.

Guys, it was like, what was the 1960s drug of choice?

Qualudes, bud.

Putting Kwaluds in my 1960s candy and poisoning a bunch of racist children.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

What's the one?

What's the one that gave all the nasty birth defects?

So, of course, they rushed to the Coliseum.

They park all their squad cars at the sort of jaunty angle typical of police.

I like

it.

It's one of the most offensive things just to be like, yeah, I'm parked at like a 70-degree angle across like three handicapped spaces and a bike bike lane.

I'm going to leave it parked there for four and a half hours.

This blocked access for everyone else.

Yeah, you'll get nothing like it.

Of those vehicles and personnel that made it to the scene, there was very little that could be done for anyone but the most accessible victims.

One of the more satisfying videos I've seen on YouTube is an FDNY engine physically moving an NYPD car that was blocking it out of the way

and just sort of like idly crushing it and pushing it aside.

You piece of shit.

Get out of my way.

The debris was, of course, too heavy to lift by hand.

So police radioed for tow trucks and mobile cranes and the tow trucks showed up, a whole shitload of them.

And they were of no use.

They needed to lift the debris, not drag it around and potentially injure more people.

Yeah, dragging the like six-ton concrete block off my legs, just smearing the whole like lower half of my body across the ice.

About to say you get turned into an uncooked smash burger.

Yeah.

Finally, by 11.35, police from neighboring Speedway.

I don't know if you could call Speedway a neighboring municipality.

It's entirely surrounded by Indianapolis.

You know, they managed to locate and borrow a mobile crane, which was then given the world's slowest police escort to the site of the disaster, arriving at 12:50 a.m.

And then it got stuck in the traffic jam.

Of course.

So we're nearly two hours.

Correct me if I'm rolling the timeline.

It's nearly two hours now after the event, right?

Two hours after the event, the mobile crane makes it there.

Here it is over here.

It's on tracks because it's 1963.

It's not one of the new ones that, you know, can go fast.

Of course.

Yeah.

The coroner of Marion County arrived at 11:45 p.m., right?

He managed to fight his way through the ambulances and fire trucks and heavy equipment, civil defense vehicles, salvation army canteen trucks, so on and so forth.

Ice cream vans.

He's like, he's like pinching his way through chaplains, like the opening of airplane.

I provide important pastoral care to the pow.

I was thinking of a separate scene from airplane where they dispatch all the emergency vehicles and they have like the

airstairs and the mobiliser truck.

That's what's coming into the area here.

Well, you're new to Indie Finn.

Fucking Shriner's heavy rescue squad.

It's a little tiny truck.

It's got 20 like.

It was Shriner's night, actually.

Oh, my God.

Fezz is on the ground.

Oh, no.

They're tiny hats.

You know,

when the coroner shows up, he is the first physician on scene.

Jesus Christ.

To do, like, is there a doctor in the house?

And it's two hours later?

Yeah.

Sorry.

I've been drinking.

Oh, no.

It's only 11.45.

Okay.

He's there.

The crane hasn't arrived yet.

Understood.

So 45 minutes is still pretty bad, though.

People have died by that point who would have not otherwise.

What are you doing but triage?

You know, just be like, dead, dead, dead, almost dead, almost dead, dead.

Well,

he's too overworked to triage.

The only thing he can do is give the trap to victims who are not yet dead some comfort in the form of lots of morphine.

Yeah, that's right.

I'll do it.

You know, until the crane showed up and additional

physicians,

you know, it wasn't until like 1250 when they could set up a makeshift morgue.

Now, conveniently, they were on an ice rink.

So, you know, they...

Well, that's convenient.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

At least one aspect of this was well planned by accident.

By accident, yeah.

So, you know, there's the makeshift morgue in the foreground of this photo.

Jesus.

You know, about 11.50, the police chief of Indianapolis finally showed up to the scene, having also fought his way through other emergency vehicles, set up a command post.

to finally get all these various relief organizations organized.

Yeah, it turns out that that's important.

You can't just like throw things at the thing and hope it works itself out.

Yeah, so we finally have some traffic control.

All right, so here, here is the Coliseum here.

Here is the adjacent building,

which at the time was known as the cattle barn.

Am I seeing a salvation army canteen directly in front of the site of the explosion?

Yes,

they got in really early and started making coffee.

Oh, that's that's nice of them.

I have some suggestions for what they should do with it.

I hate the fucking Salvation Army, and I wasn't expecting to come out of this episode with a second reason.

I'm so proud of you.

They'll get you.

Union busters,

they hate gay people.

They will take your

unused surplus clothing, though.

I don't know.

And they'll cover up abuse scandals in the process.

Oh, yeah, they do that.

I love doing it.

All right.

So there's this solid mass of emergency vehicles blocking all routes in and out of the Coliseum.

There's no coordination.

There's no coordination between any relief organizations.

The Chief of Police takes control, sets up an actual command post in the fair's administrative building.

That's down here or over here, depending on which of these images you're looking at.

He ordered the fairgrounds sealed off until they could figure out what the hell was going on while local relief organizations were still bombarding the site with ambulances, buses fire trucks wreckers these things are piling up like it's uh like blue volume service yeah yeah they're sending

like this is like klein stateri this is like every county just has a like volunteer fire service that it's just has no coordination and it's just sending in more

yeah the the funeral homes are even sending in hearses There's dozens of cars full of various volunteers from like civil defense, from like, you know, um, uh, they, they, they, they got a, you got Red Cross and Salvation Army in feltness to the funeral homes.

A lot of them were like ambulance services also at this point.

Uh, like, in fact, the sort of like form of the ambulance evolved out of the hearse.

They ran a few as like so-called combination cars for a long time.

Um, that's convenient if you die en route, yeah, exactly.

Just change the sign over, yeah,

just a little roller, like a butt, like in a bus, you just roll it from like funeral

into funeral for ambulance.

Yeah, I believe the army was saturating the area with army ambulances.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

I'm just visiting.

It's like a van turns up and a bunch of mimes get out and start doing it.

Army brackets salvation, army brackets, regular,

army brackets, mime.

This is, I think, a big win for Colossal Order, the publishers of Cities Skylines.

Oh, you thought emergency vehicle traffic jams were fake.

No, they're very real, dolls.

No, they are.

This reminds me of a top-down video game I used to play.

Do you remember the emergency series?

I think they released it as like 911 first responders.

I used to love that game.

Love that fucking game.

Never really got a proper sequel.

I think there's like a free-to-play one now.

But yeah, like large part of it is like there's a gap in the market for that kind of like incident command management RTS game, you know?

The local churches were sending priests and ministers in cars.

Oh, my God.

I was joking about having to fight your way through a bunch of clergy, but like

every denomination is represented.

I was about to say,

we found a one, the, the, the one, like, Shinto guy.

He's ringing a little bell.

Um,

so the chief of police is like, okay, we just

on the radio, like, have you got the concrete blocks off the guys yet?

And And some poor Indianapolis firefighter is like, no, but I did learn that the temple bells reflect the impermanence of all human life.

So sheep, I got no attachments over here.

The chief of police at the command post finally says, all right, here's what we're going to do.

Grab a triage.

In the cattle barn.

Cattle barn is just an open space.

It's not like full of like dirt on the the floor and crap, but they do put cattle in there for the state fair.

But it wasn't the state fair, so there's no cows in there.

You know, we're going to do that.

We're going to move the police vehicles out of the arena and away from the area.

We are going to have a one-way loop for ambulances through the cattle barn to pick people up.

This is

traffic design.

It's a good system.

It's a good system, and it's actually a convenient site for it, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, exactly.

It's indoors, it's enclosed, you know, because you can drive vehicles in and out of the building.

I believe there were specific gates for the entrance and exit.

Can draw a nice clean diagram of it, too.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So I guess very quickly, it's the

in the Google Earth image you've got on screen, Ross, there's loads of car parking space.

I'm guessing that wasn't necessarily quite as extensive then.

It might have just been like open fields, maybe.

I do not think so,

but I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, I just think because, like, yeah, if he's saying do it in the barn, I presume that was it was covered, it was the right space to do that.

Like, they didn't have all that big open concrete of tarmac.

Because the thing I'd have been saying is, okay, all your vehicles

off over there.

You can go around in circles, I don't care, just leave.

All of you go away, and I will come for you if you're needed.

Uh, if there's this bizarre, like, Blues Brothers kind of pile up going on with all with all the lights, like people turning up and the sirens going,

it's completely deafening.

Um,

Yeah, so they moved the police cars out.

They let the mobile crane into the arena finally after making a space for it so they could finally pick up these big concrete blocks.

And they moved the Salvation Army canteen truck into the Coliseum for the coffee.

I think they set up a grill as well.

I would not feel very hungry, but

I just hope it's not a propane grill.

I'm like a hot dog.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But there's still further disorganization occurring, right?

So So while they're being bombarded with ambulances, no one's coordinating which hospital do we send these people to.

Oh, my God.

There was some instruction.

There's a vague idea, okay, we're going to balance this between the hospitals.

We're going to, you know, because there's a lot of hospitals available.

Specifically, the Samaritan hospital was very well prepared to receive quite a lot of

victims from this.

Though no one was really prepared because no one thought to contact the hospitals beforehand, hey, there's been an incident.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, this is quality disaster response.

Pick up the phones.

Yeah.

Send a guy one of the 50 cars that you have parked blocking the entrance.

Yeah.

So most ambulance drivers just brought people to the nearest hospital, which was Presbyterian Hospital,

which was pretty full up and not really prepared.

to uh to to handle a lot of people they got 120 victims while uh the samaritan hospital, which was better prepared, only received 27.

Okay.

There were like eight more hospitals that got victims,

and a lot of them were like just not prepared for it at all.

You know, they only found out there was an emergency when there were

50 ambulances showed up.

People with traumatic head injuries.

There's like 50 Draculas have showed up in the

covered in fake blood and real blood.

Yeah, the Dracula.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Then began the grim job of identifying the dead.

The morgue was set up and they installed temporary rubber flooring so as to prevent the friends and relatives of the deceased from slipping on the ice in the frozen pools of blood.

Raising hand.

How many times do you think that happened before they put in the temporary rubber flooring?

Good question.

Give me how much of a shit show this has been.

They've definitely

hospitalized multiple family members.

I've got to say, I imagine all the emergency workers are constantly slipping and falling in this incident.

Yeah, exactly.

I've played Mario Kart.

That's exactly how this went.

Yeah.

You got to have

the reverse Samboni come out and rough up the ice.

I mean,

yeah.

What's that boney backwards?

Hold on.

The

Inobmas.

Yeah.

Send one of those out.

Yeah, exactly.

Now,

the first people came in to identify the deceased around 3 o'clock in the morning.

By 7:30 in the morning, there was actually a line out the door from the amount of people who managed to force their personal vehicles through the emergency vehicles

and the tow trucks.

At least there's like 500 different chaplains and ministers and shit to try and comfort them.

Yeah, everyone's, you know, there's like, there's like 4,500 people there to give last rites.

Yeah, it's like many dead, but like none of them went to hell.

Yeah.

No, they went to extra heaven.

They got so many last rites.

That's how it works, I'm pretty sure.

Yeah.

So many sacraments.

I got like.

The Catholicism bonus episode is coming.

The secret extra sacrament.

Now,

five propane tanks were discovered in the wreckage belonging to the Midwest Gas Corporation.

These were removed from the scene as evidence, but with caveats.

We'll get to that in the next slide.

By 4 p.m.

the next day, all victims had been identified save for two of them.

All survivors had been removed from the building.

Emergency workers had all left save for a few state police guarding the site.

By the way, there had been jurisdictional conflict this whole time between the Indianapolis police and the state police as to who's running this.

Yeah.

It was gradually handed over to the state police as the night wore on.

In the end, 81 people were dead and over 400 were injured.

Jesus.

Oh, boy.

And in the confusion, something strange had happened.

Oh, no.

Did someone forget to do the S and S and R?

Like, did someone forget to do the search and search and rescue and there's just still like guys under the thing?

No, someone was searching, but for, not for the, uh, not for the victims.

The pinata dog?

Several lawyers had managed to infiltrate the blast site mere minutes after it happened.

I don't know how that phone call went.

It's like an orbital dropped in.

Like, how the fuck?

Yeah.

We need you to drive at like 120 miles an hour in the shoulder past like a giant like a lane

full of bumper to bumper fire trucks and ambulances and get and get in there and start suing people.

Yeah.

The The first people on the scene, the lawyers.

I'm like a legal first responder.

I'm like a legal observer at a protest.

I've got like a fluorescent green hat, and I'm just there like serving people.

They're paralegals, yeah.

These lawyers come in, they clamber over the records, they ignore the dead, the injured, and the dying, and went straight for the propane tanks and removed crucial parts, the valves and the hoses, and so on and so forth.

Oh, my gosh.

They were stopped.

I need Intiana cops to learn how to set up a cordon ever, maybe.

Like,

it's French for line.

They were stopped by the state police, and they were ejected from the arena without the evidence that they tried to steal.

But the damage had been done, you know,

like one loafer on a guy's head, the other one braced against the propane tank, trying to pull the hose off of it.

The evidence had been thoroughly and completely tampered with.

Good creep.

Jesus.

So these lawyers.

Do we know?

I might be about to shoot your fox, Ross, but

whose lawyers were these?

Were these the sites lawyers?

I am not sure.

I had difficulty.

This mysterious gang of lawyers.

Well, they said,

It said they represented an Indianapolis law firm, which is fairly obvious.

I don't know who they were in the employee of.

I didn't coach, unfortunately, I never quite gleaned that.

Yeah.

Like

rogue state lawyers just popping out of nowhere.

The police recovered the evidence.

The tanks were sent to Purdue University for analysis.

What do you know?

The tanks had been stored next to a heat source.

The gas inside expanded.

The safety valve did its job, invented the excess gas.

A vast quantity of propane built up in the commissary and exploded the box seats when it found an ignition source.

The National Liquid Petroleum Gas Association attempted to dispute this by saying, Well, what if it was a steam leak or a carbon dioxide leak?

I mean, you don't really, that's that's a kind of commitment to like evil that you don't see in as many industry concerns outside of the like, you know, oil and gas industry these days.

Like

tobacco uh and like

arms dealers

like

in general though your average like corporate lobbyist for the thing that kills people accidentally won't go as hard as this until it's in court but like in public to be like yeah you know maybe it's just fucking uh swamp gas yeah exactly i i just from from like the letter they sent it seemed like even they didn't really believe it themselves but you know we have to send the letter.

A bunch of like propane valves falling out of my pockets.

It's like, yeah, this could have been anything, you know?

Yeah.

A grand jury was convened to assign blame.

They indicted no less than seven individuals, the Indianapolis fire chief, the state fire marshal, three individuals from the gas distributor, Discount Gas Corporation.

Would not buy my gas from them.

Yeah, I know what I'm amazed at.

the general and concessions manager for the coliseum were both indicted um and everyone sort of through legal proceeding managed to shift the blame around adequately enough that they're all acquitted um

actually just like yeah forget it jake it's indianatown yeah like i i did

in particular the manager of the coliseum managed to argue that he had no idea he needed a permit for indoor storage of propane and that hey the propane had been stored there in full view of inspectors for over 10 years at this point.

Come on,

presumably,

yeah,

good creep.

So, ultimately, new procedures were put into place to ensure propane was not stored indoors at the arena.

The Coliseum would be regularly inspected by the fire department going forward.

There were about $4.6 million in settlements from the gas company, about $70 million in insurance claims overall.

And the Coliseum, well, they managed to reopen it in only six weeks.

Jesus.

I mean, I guess you just pour some more concrete, you know, like hose it down.

But like,

they just had this area roped off.

Oh,

put a tar over it.

Jesus.

It looks like the fucking Fura bunker in there.

Jesus Christ.

They fully repaired it in only a few months.

Holiday on Ice returned the following year, despite

fears that people would be afraid to go to the performance.

No, they sold out the arena.

Yep.

Yep, that tracks.

Indiana Strong.

Yeah, not too much later than that, the Beatles play the Coliseum.

Indiana weird.

Yeah,

as a result of the explosion, the Indianapolis Capitals hockey team moved to Cincinnati.

This is a really grave sort of like consequence of this, you know?

Yes, exactly.

But this is the worst thing to happen at, well, this is the worst disaster in Indiana history, but there would never be another major fatality, major incident at the Indianapolis State Fair until an inadequately secured stage collapsed in 2011 in a thunderstorm and killed a lot of people in the audience and also a stage hand.

Well, I remember this is a Beyonce cake.

No, no, this was.

This was country music then.

Sugarland, yeah.

Okay.

Oh,

I do remember there being a stage collapse.

collapse, and yeah, good grief, they're not good.

Yeah, um, so we learned a lot then, uh, yeah, yeah, lots of structural issues at the Indiana stage.

Yeah, you can tell

those columns are meant to be vertical, and instead they're all the way over and not attached anymore.

They've invented a new style of column, you know, as Ionic, Doric, uh, Corinthian, American, and whatever this is.

This is like uh, VLA Leduc was always, you know, wanted to experiment with uh angled columns.

So, you know,

oh my god but yeah that is the story of the indiana state fair explosion of 1963 or state fair coliseum there wasn't anything horrifying thank you yeah i yeah oh i didn't oh grimy what did we learn uh put down some tar some like mats before you have your more on ice off shit that's true yeah yeah

um

maybe

store stuff in the void fuck the salvation army yeah for for a different reason than we thought going in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My main lesson is do not store propane indoors.

Do not store propane.

I'm just writing it down.

Just writing it down.

This may be an actionable item there, bud.

Yeah.

Always store propane in a well-ventilated space.

Away from popcorn maker.

Oh, yeah.

Don't store next to the popcorn maker.

Or the debts.

You understood?

Okay.

Yep.

Good.

Good.

Well, that was absolutely horrifying.

Yeah, crikey.

I suppose we have a segment on this podcast.

Called Safety Third.

Shake hands with David Chair.

Oh.

Dear, well, there's your problem hosts and also guests who are present.

Wrong.

No, no, no, they're not.

While not as life or death as some of the submissions to Safety Third, I hope these two brief anecdotes illuminate the disaster of so-called small business that Americans claim to love so much.

Uh-huh.

For instance, you appear to have some kind of rat king of dogs here.

I was about to say, it took me a while when I saw this picture.

Is this two dogs or just one really fucked up dog?

Yeah, where's the ass?

What's going on?

I mean, I'm already happy because I can see dogs, but also, where's the ass?

Yeah, I'm confused.

Sort of a biblically accurate dog.

Dog king.

I previously worked as an environmental consultant, creating reports assessing the environmental risk of a property during a sale.

In October of 2020, I traveled alone to a fairly remote, small factory in Michigan, which did plastic injection molding.

Sounds like the opening to an extremely well-reviewed narrative indie game.

But match the picture

on the right,

yeah.

They were housing eldritch horrors there,

very, very fluffy ones.

While not as intensive a process as other manufacturing, this process does involve the use of huge, complex machines, applying 8,000 psi to make plastic parts from pellets.

Now, my first red flag was a Trump flag.

Actually, it was strung across the front of the factory, at least 6 feet by 10 feet in size.

I was expecting a typical light manufacturing facility, but you can imagine my surprise when the husband and wife owners

led me through rooms full of ugly furniture to their bedroom where a Trump rally was playing on television.

To the bedroom?

To fuck them?

There's a lot of problems here.

That is one of them.

But also, yes, they lived in the factory, which was a converted shop school.

There's a lot going on here already.

The median American voter, somehow.

Yeah.

Venturing outside, I discovered they had four dogs, not mean guard dogs, but some big fluffy ones and tiny yappers.

That's definitely dogging is something there's there's there are things going on here.

Are the dogs a metaphor or uh

yeah, it's like Silent Hill.

The dog is a metaphor for your kind of like loss of connection, you know.

Yeah, they then proceeded to let all four dogs run around the active production floor where the giant and very old machines were operating, including 25 or more open drip pans of hydraulic oil.

oil oh boy

leave the dogs alone i'm not no no what

probably should not allow dogs in that space no people are fucking stupid man yeah keep going there are around 30 55 gallon drums with random chemicals labeled on the side and i asked for the purpose of all these chemicals and he stated he bought them all at auction auction unless they were all mislabeled I went down to the chemicals auction and I bought some drums kind of at random.

I bought some random drums and I thought they were cool.

This feels like a money laundering operation for

every time I try to understand Trump's people, I learn something like this, and it just slips further from my grasp again.

I would probably go down to the chemicals auction and buy some chemicals, though.

That sounds fun.

All right, man.

Justin, who did you vote for?

The basement nuke.

Yeah.

I voted for a woman who lost.

Same thing I do every election.

She was dying.

We don't talk about that.

In fact, there were huge amounts of random equipment he had bought at auction with no discernible purpose.

Oh, Liam, you are absolutely on the money with the money laundering.

100%.

That's what's going on.

Money laundering/slash/hoarding.

Yeah.

I wonder how those dogs are doing now.

Keep it moving.

I don't want to think about the dogs too hard.

A second small business disaster I inspected involved a car dealership with a large auto repair shop he went by the name of john taliban

auto repairs typically pump their drains or oil water uh auto repair places typically pump their drains or oil water separators i'm gonna say that's what that's supposed to read uh regularly as a lot of used oils flow to the floor drains in the repair bay most i have been to have done this cleaning annually, if not more frequently.

The manager I was interrogating seemed bewildered when I asked about the frequency of cleaning.

It had not been done since he started in 1997, which was the year I was born.

Oh,

it's your twin.

The oil is your twin.

It's the same age as you.

Furthermore, the new and used oil tanks were in one room I refused to step in, as the leaking oil was several inches deep, uselessly covered with rags and cardboard.

Are they trying to create a conflagration?

Like, oh, we just tossed the flammable stuff in that room.

Yeah, I just throw some leaking.

It's It's the fire room.

Yeah.

And you just put this over here with the rest of the fire.

Yeah.

The oil leak was so bad that it was seeping through the cinder block walls into the adjoining rooms.

Oh, God.

What the fuck?

While I was appalled with what I saw, as someone who cares even a little about the environment, there's no guarantee they have to do anything to fix or clean this.

Especially not now.

The facility had also never bothered to clean up the leaks from the historic underground storage tanks, which is probably still polluting the groundwater to this day.

Now I work with the ongoing engineering disaster that is NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act, I believe is what that is.

But I am glad to have seen many wild and interesting things in America's backrooms at this job.

See photo two.

Yeah, no kidding.

That's a back room.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've been here since the first episode, and I appreciate you all very much from Charlotte.

Thanks, Charlotte.

Thank you, you, Charlotte.

Thank you, Charlotte.

Thanks, Charlotte.

I, oh, no.

Part of me finds the idea of the flammable stuff room humorous, but also

I suspect that building is no longer as intact as it was when we sought it.

We sought these rooms by flammability.

Jesus.

Well, that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

I think we hit them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And my book launched last night, and I got

on sale.

Go buy the book.

By the book.

How the rails will fix the future.

Buy the book.

Buy the tickets to our live shows.

Yes, Philly, particularly Philly.

Yes, buy the Philly tickets.

Fill more seats.

Fill more seats.

Yes.

Wow.

Almost two hours on the dot.

All right.

That was

good night, everyone.

Bye.

Really good, guys.