Episode 149: Ghost Ship Fire

I have

a local storage.

Do you have a storage space?

Because somehow, even though

I've checked it, yeah, yeah, you did it.

Oh, wow.

I checked it already before.

Oh, good.

Oh, yeah, you did the thing you're supposed to do.

Wow.

Yes.

I did the thing I'm paid to do.

Shittily.

All right.

I'm paid.

You pay quite well.

Pay quite well to do it, shit.

This is the bulk of my income.

This is

discontinued Bacardi 151.

Jesus Christ.

that's a crime.

Why would they discontinue Bacardi 151?

How are you supposed to?

How did it be discontinued in 2016?

I didn't know.

I always used Everclare.

Yeah, I was about to say, you know,

that rum is a great way to make a wide variety of terrible decisions when you're 19

or cause other people to make terrible decisions when you're 19.

What kind of big government shit is this that Joe Biden's taking away your like 150-proof rumor maybe they

well that Donald Trump took it away 2016.

They shifted uh production back to Havana and then they reinstated the embargo.

Now we're screwed.

Yeah,

Cuba just like thriving with cigars and rum.

Yes.

I mean, how am I supposed to play my favorite my favorite drinking game?

Is this 151 or is this apple juice?

Damn it.

Hello and welcome to Well There's Your Problem.

Nope, not yet.

Nope.

No.

Do we want to procrastinate for a night?

Hello and welcome to Well There's Your Problem.

Motherfucker.

I know.

We're back.

It's 2024.

It's been a long time.

We're going to do it back to back, too.

I know.

It's been a hot minute.

Sorry.

It's actually been cold because it's been winter.

It's been a cold minute.

It's only been five minutes.

Yes.

But we're back to deliver another sad and angry episode.

Yes,

we don't run on a schedule because we're

bad at organiz, or I'm bad at organizing things.

Let me be clear.

I'm trying to organize us by force this year.

This is sort of the mission, you know.

The irresistible force against the inmoving object.

I'm going to get a bomb collar for you.

Like suicide.

We will record an episode of podcasts

tonight.

Yeah, so

this is one that Liam and I largely wrote in a kind of like furious

haphazard way.

Much like the structure we're going to discuss here.

That's right.

The Oakland ghost ship warehouse fire.

Hold on, we have to do the actual introduction first.

Hello, and welcome to Walares Your Problem podcast.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

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

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

Okay, I did that out of order.

Anyway, pronouns.

Pronouns, what are you doing?

Pronouns, he and him.

Fuck, Jesus.

I am Alice Cordor-Kelly.

My pronouns are she and her.

I am the person who is speaking now.

Yay, Liam.

Fuck.

Hi.

Yay, Liam.

My pronouns are he and him.

And for my coworkers, hello.

I promise this is going to be very professional.

I missed you guys.

I missed this.

And, you know,

we took some time off over winter.

Liam got married, which congratulations.

Thank you very much.

And now we're getting coronavirus.

Yeah, exactly.

Everybody got something.

You have the immune system of a toddler.

I guess so, yeah.

You got to stop

licking door handles like other people's minds.

I don't know where I got it from, genuinely.

Because even the one time I could think of where I was in a situation where there'd be a lot of ambient coronavirus in the air

would have been

on Mtrack.

And the Mtrak train I took back home, since I could game the system, I took the Piedmont, which doesn't let anyone on after Washington Union Station.

So not only did it cost 60 bucks because it was subsidized by the state of North Carolina,

it was also completely empty the whole way.

I had a whole car to myself and what other person.

I don't know.

So I don't know where I got the coronavirus from.

Sometimes it just gets you.

And I refer back to a tweet that I did that like when you get COVID, you should get like a Call of Duty kill cam where you should see the like virus

or the guy who got you.

Yeah, yeah,

you should get like a sort of marker in your sort of like objectives with the

assassination coordinates of the guy who gave you COVID.

Right.

Yeah, I probably like passed someone on the street near Alexandria Union Station who just super infected me out of nowhere.

They still make overproof goslings.

Yes, they do.

Thank God.

Our long national nightmare of a lack of overproof rum has been alleviated.

So this summer,

I am doing the Raz torture gambit.

It does have to do with the bum call.

It does, but it also has to do with making him drink tiki drinks until he feels bad.

Oh, okay.

This is going to dovetail well with my so-far pretty good streak of keeping the alcoholism under control this year.

It's not until the summer.

You got plenty of time to rest out.

Right.

Non-alcoholic tiki drink Hellscape.

What you see on the screen before you is a two-story warehouse.

Yes, it is.

It's a no-story warehouse.

It's the shell of a two-story warehouse

in Oakland, California.

And it's not supposed to look like that.

It should have a roof at least.

It shouldn't be so burned.

It shouldn't look like that.

But we're going to get into that.

But first, we have to do the goddamn news.

I'm so proud of my captions for these ones.

Nails.

Nails, nails, nails.

Yeah, so

Boeing, once again,

have fucked it.

You know, like,

you're not allowed to make fun of Airbus anymore.

You're not allowed to do the die-by-wire thing because now the windows are off your planes.

If it ain't Boeing,

I'm going.

So I'm pretty satisfied, actually.

That's what you get.

I mean, listen, man, I've been crammed into enough American Airlines Airbuses to just accept my fate at this point.

I flew at a 737 to and from my honeymoon.

It was just about the worst thing I'd ever experienced.

And I didn't get

my door blown off halfway through flight.

Listen.

It's Boeing de jure, but it's McDonnell Douglas de facto.

Yeah, so this is the chaos flame.

Boeing trying to like

roll out the max brand again, and this was a Max 9, which is the smallest.

An auspicious start.

Yeah, yeah.

And they supplied it in a bunch of configurations, one of which had this door that you see before you.

But like, if you didn't need it, they would just like plug it closed and it would just be like straight fuselage, right?

And an Alaska Airlines plane

on taking off,

the door falls off, which it's not supposed to do.

You want the door to stay on the plane so that the plane stays pressurized.

Ideally.

And this depressurized the plane, and they were lucky that this happened as they were climbing because they could descend very quickly.

And

someone got their shirt sucked off.

Like a couple of people got their phones sucked out.

Yeah,

the phone landed intact, still in airplane mode, still at the baggage claim uh screen you don't want to hand it to apple but you do kind of have 16 000 feet that's pretty fucking impressive that was all the otter box

let's get real it's like that guy's toyota that survived the california wildfires and toyota was like not to do any free advertising but the the the the taco is an indestructible truck assuming you get the right model yeah no no i i mean uh auto box i i switched between autobox griffin survivor and now i have a peak design case on there that I never used a little like magnet thing on.

But I have no confidence in its sort of like plane crash surviving abilities.

Oh, I have a lot.

So when I was younger, I had a habit, this may not shock the listeners, of throwing phones at walls.

This is before I had psychiatric health therapy.

Yeah, yeah.

I just, you know, and now I have a, I have a lovely, my Otterbox, the clear cases don't hold up, but I've currently got a, what I can only describe as a very vibrant, what'd you call that, lilac?

i i would say the mood for me and i i think i need to i had this period in my life where i'm like because of how good the peak design camera straps are everything in my life now needs to be integrated into the peak design system and then i found all the bits of the peak design stuff that don't work for me like the phone case and i think what i need to do now is to go back to the the griffin case which is like big and bulky it clips onto a belt clip like you're a dad and it makes you feel like a cop And because if you want to feel like a cop, you cannot do better.

That's my recommendation.

There you go.

You should see see roz's phone because he's got the screen protector just i wouldn't even say half on there still it's it is

gradually slowing off yeah yeah and just like i tried to convince ros to buy a new cell phone and it just went you're the oldest 30 year old i've ever met i don't

i don't need a new phone it works

no you no you just need to get better at answering phone calls and text messages thank god right there was no one

yeah there was no one sitting in a seat or something

there was no one sitting in the seat next to the like door that blew off otherwise they would have been like surely sucked off to a fatal end right

if they had their seatbelt on they probably would have been fine i mean the seat's still there you got the seat still that's that's integrity maybe they should just build the whole plane out of the seats I mean they had this thing where like with another Boeing I think it was another Boeing Max actually where like a woman got partially sucked off um and like died later of her being sucked off injuries.

But she was sucked off through the window.

Yeah, I guess so.

So you got nastier injuries from going through the small space.

Yeah, I guess.

I guess you just get a nice, you get a nice, you get a nice breeze.

That's going to be your biggest issue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So yeah, MTSB, after some searching, found the door.

In the meantime, like all of the Max 9s got grounded, which wasn't a lot.

Like there aren't many in service.

I think it's mostly Alaska and 29 or something.

Barely any.

There's none in Europe.

It made the 737 Max Barquetta.

Exactly.

That's very funny.

And yeah, what they found in the course of inspecting them is that a few others also have this problem.

And the problem is just you didn't tighten the bolts.

Well, the FAA had

announced a crackdown on Boeing

for the excellent tweets of Jason Rabinowitz, Av geek.

If you're not, I think he's Av geek.

I forget what he is.

Yeah, that sounds right to me.

On Twitter.

Oh, at Airline Flyer.

Highly recommend the follow of him.

He's really good.

But yeah, the FAA

rounded 171 Boeing 737 9 max planes, and they're going to increase oversight of production and manufacturing.

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, right?

Boeing is washed and fucked because,

I mean, this is like they had to get Congress to waive the like airworthiness rules for a couple of other maxes the the first max thing which just had the plane like sort of fight the pilot the pilot to try and kill itself um

that that you know they got that that happened because they tried to lie about it not being a new airframe um and the whole thing has been sort of

this background of them trying to outsource as much manufacturing as possible uh to like union bust to put the manufacturing in places where there are fewer rights and worse pay.

And then they're surprised when

lots of financial tricks, too, like where instead of having, you know, doing manufacturing of parts yourself, you spin off that part of the company into its own company, which has its own parts and everything.

And they make parts for their one customer, Boeing.

It's very, the structure of like the supply chain for these planes has been,

you know, it's very strange.

It's stranger even than Airbuses.

And Airbus has to contend with the fact that they want to make parts in every single EU country and bullshit like that, including like Liechtenstein.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, I did see one post about this that sort of gave me pause, which is, um, it was like, if you are going to fly on a Boeing Max, don't, right?

Like, exercise your sort of visa power.

I'm like, I think you've misunderstood what an airline passenger's sort of position in an airport hierarchy is.

You can't like look out the Skybridge, Jetbridge, whatever, and be like, this is not my beloved Airbus.

Therefore,

right, yeah, I'm not going on this way.

You hopefully fly on triple sevens.

Yeah, on an airframe.

You would feel so smart, though, if you refused a plane and then that plane crashed.

But like, in general, you don't really have the option.

You book a flight and you take your chances and maybe the airline just kills you.

Like, yeah, maybe no rights, only, only possible deaths, which is one reason why I don't love flying.

Are you going to love flying?

No, no, no.

I mean, this is the reason why I haven't been to the live shows in the U.S.

is because I fear both.

Yeah, no, it's fine.

We'll come to you.

Don't worry about it.

Thank you.

I fear both what a friend of mine referred to as the tranny scanny and also

I don't want the wings to fall off in mid-flights

why do they have to push a big like button that says yeah I reckon this one's got a dick like why did why why is that

maybe maybe the dick could be a gun I guess so I guess I could have brought my like Semtex packer to the airport I don't know

but Alice Paul Barkellich was the IRA

yeah the Kelly part becomes predominant

but yeah so we will see what happens with this But in the meantime, if they try and put you on a Boeing, exercise sort of like unlimited violence and self-defense,

this will go fine for you.

Stay away from the doors and places where doors may exist.

Do the thing of like, you know, like a nervous parachute jumper and just like as you're going in, one hand on each side of the door frame and just hold, you know, they can't force you into the aircraft.

Yeah.

In other news on the opposite side of the terrain spectrum yeah so i again uh i i caption terrific caption thank you thank you if you if you can't read the thing because you're listening on audio says actually i'm not telling you watch the video uh watch the video yeah so we gotta we gotta talk about the the uh hasidic tunnels

yeah we do have to talk about the chabad tunnel the year of the tunnel you know it begins now big year of the tunnels

the tick tock tunnel

with the god with the goddamn multiple of bitchers.

Every single fucking time.

And there's something fucking weird.

And it's just like, why can't you people just be fucking normal?

Why can't you just be fucking normal?

We're all going to the same camps.

Why do you got to fucking act like this?

But this is even weirder because it's a kind of like,

just real quick to check my pronunciation, it's Chabad, right?

Not Chabad.

Yeah.

It's Chabad.

Okay, thank you.

Just to make sure I had it right.

So it's, there's this internecine like warfare within Chabad

of

Right, right.

Okay.

How to explain the Lumavitch or ever.

So they had

this guy is the Messiah.

They had a rabbi.

Some of them, a minority, believed that he was the Messiah.

And those guys kind of maybe got kicked out of the house,

which is called 770, because the address was 770 Eastern Parkway.

And what they tried to do is, depending on who you believe, either tunnel into the shul from beneath so that they could be like praying within it, or they tried to illegally expand it so that they had more room because it's a cramped building.

They didn't tell anyone they were doing this.

They just started digging.

When the like uh non-messianist Havard guys found out, they called the cops and the NYPD came to with the like Department of Sanitation to fill in the tunnels with

uh like concrete.

They took down one of the walls in the women's prayer area and they just found a bunch of these guys just in there

being

the guys that they are immediately started to like throw shit around and fight the cops.

I

How long was the tunnel?

I don't know.

I mean, I don't know if there are diagrams.

I think it's mostly like Saddam Hussein meeting.

Right next to Saddam Hussein.

Yeah, genuinely,

I haven't

had the mental capacity to process this whole event.

And, you know, the first thing I do when I hear something like this

is like, okay, where does the tunnel start and where does it end?

And I have no idea.

It was maybe it was

one of the theories that was that it was coming from like uh um like a a mikveh down the street like like a block away um and then one of the other ones was just that they had like gone from within the building and just sort of hollowed out this extra space to the side um

but like

you can't do that

i'm so fucking angry this i mean the

pray that fucking bad bud this was we're gonna do the bonus episode on judaism and Rabbi Goldenberg is gonna call me from Queens and get real mad at me.

And I assume my mother will be upset, but that's fine.

Oh, but I hope you're enjoying your retirement.

That's not the fucking issue here.

These fucking people are insane.

There's a subway under Eastern Parkway.

Okay, what do you want me to fucking do about it, dude?

They must have dug underneath the subway.

Yeah, I mean, like, actually, there were videos.

There were videos of like, uh, like Haredim, like, crawling out from sewer grates and like scurrying away

with the hat with the hat and everything and the thing is right like i want to live in a world where that can just be funny because there was like a microsecond that that existed on the internet before it became the most anti-semitic thing you've ever seen in your life and i want to live in that microsecond where we can just be like that guy that's funny that that i saw that video and here's the thing I saw that video, and like my eyes glazed over, and I failed to register it for like several hours.

Because you had COVID, I guess so.

Yeah, I mean, because I was like, okay, this is clearly some weird anti-Semitic gag.

You know, it's just fucking us doing it down here, dude.

It's just fucking us down here doing it, man.

I mean, this is this is the thing about like a lot of ultra-Orthodox stuff is

it's probably not good to have a kind of like total disregard for any secular laws or like ordinances and to have like your own sort of like your own law enforcement and your own I guess building codes now that you're doing tunnels but you do have to respect the the chutzpah of it you know yes I mean, this is the actual definition of chutzpah.

Right, yeah, truly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just, it's just so funny watching this wall come down and a bunch of like baffled Italian-American cops wondering why

there were Jews coming out of the walls to fight them.

This is going to.

I'm not doing anything for the fucking cabal conspiracy theories.

This is the first thing.

That's all I can keep fucking thinking is just, I just, every single fucking time, I've said this before on the show.

I basically do a,

I don't know, like a

thing where I just say, please don't be Jewish.

Please don't be Jewish.

And then the fucking love of it just pulls stunts like this.

This is this is

doing this shit.

This is the first chip in the wall, the previously insurmountable,

indomitable monument that is the Jewish-Italian pact in Hollywood.

Yes, um,

nine arrests, yeah, oh my god,

nine, yeah, nine of them.

So, uh, but I believe this will.

I just don't understand.

This is also a potential solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

What the masculine urge to dig.

The masculine urge to dig tunnels.

Hamas and Israel crossing picks and just united in one.

The Hamas-Israel friendship tunnel.

Yes.

Exactly.

Heading to an invisible hospital.

Speaking of which, in other news.

Oh, yeah, we're bombing Yemen now.

We're going to do some more bombs.

We're going to bomb the Middle East a bit more.

Guess who's escalating?

Sort of like, guess who's coming to dinner?

Guess who's escalating the war in the Middle East?

Is it Joseph Robinette Biden?

It is Joseph Robinette Biden.

Wow.

Crazy, right?

Who could have seen that one coming?

Yeah, so

the Houthis, the sort of movement which controls

most of Yemen,

have been doing solidarity with Gaza by trying to blockade the Red Sea to Israeli shipping.

And they haven't maybe been the most discriminating about what's been Israeli shipping, but that's not really the point.

You got some sick videos of them landing helicopters on ships out of it.

I don't think they've actually killed anyone.

I think it's only been like property damage, right?

They've like hijacked one ship, but I think that's it.

And they've like launched drones at each other.

But like,

yeah, so so obviously this this aggression will not stand because uh we need our treats and the treats are now instead of going through the suz are going around uh the cape so gotta protect the supply chain at all costs yeah yeah yeah i mean this is i need my alibaba bullshit

this actually does have like serious economic like implications But no one's kind of treating it that way, including the people who want to do it.

Because if you if you analyze it that way and you go, okay, well, the Houthis really do have a kind of like veto power over a lot of shipping in the Red Sea, maybe you should like negotiate with them or try to give them what they want.

Because what they want at this juncture, at least, is

to stop the genocide in Gaza, which is something you should also want, something you should also be doing.

You just have to like yank on the leash.

It's what Reagan did.

Get a surface to ship missile and just go down to the Delaware.

Well,

I want to point out that the Saudis have been bombing these people for years with no effect.

No effect at all, right?

And at our sort of instigation

without help and funding.

Our bombs.

Like the Saudis aren't making, like they're dropping our bombs on the Houthis, and it's just not fucking work.

So

what are we doing here?

The same thing as always.

What are we doing here?

Honestly, I feel like this is some kind of weird, like, misguided deterrent thing with, like, okay,

Israel's being like tried at The Hague right now for doing genocide.

Um, and the Houthis are claiming we're doing our internationally required duty to economically inhibit Israel.

And I feel like this is a way to put pressure, maybe not on the Houthis, but to put pressure on like the international court of justice in a way.

i think at the same time there's a there's a thought that basically u.s military doctrine especially at these at least how congress sees it is this sort of idea that surgical strikes surgical strikes with it with obvious quotes around them sort of don't count yeah like these i mean this is doing the like

the 2001 authorization for for military force the one that says that like the president can just do it for like anything that's like materially supporting terrorism which right is this is pushing it.

I think he knows the same it's pushing it.

I mean, you can, I think, argue as well as you want that Iran is maybe a state-sponsored terrorism in as much as any other state is a state-sponsored terrorism.

But like, this ain't it, Chief.

Yeah, this is the thing.

I do sort of like the idea of sending the USS Abraham Lincoln or whatever to protect your Alibaba treats.

It's

a gross, disproportionate response is kind of darkly funny.

Yeah,

I feel like it increases the consequences if like, you know, the ICJ says, okay, yeah, Israel is doing genocide.

Now we also have to like say, well, the United States is directly aiding and abetting genocide by like,

you know, attacking people who are trying to prevent genocide.

I mean, at the same time, like,

it's not like U.S.

official doctors to invade the goddamn hag, which, which we should do on some level, because the judge doesn't have a right to exist as a people.

That's the ICC rather than the ICC you're right my bad it's fine it's confusing uh I I mean I think my main thing is that what this reflects is an absolute sort of lack of strategy or forethought this is more of a decadence of military power like

that too but it's it's it's it's it's like what it is is it's firefighting right because had you any sort of grander plan this would never have happened because you wouldn't have needed it to.

Like, because you, things wouldn't have escalated to this this point uh but because you can't control israel um and because you know biden seemingly has no interest in preventing this from escalating uh i i that was another thing i had thoughts about yesterday it was like it feels like no one's at the helm um you know there's no there's no one driving this thing there's no there's it's one guy who with a like inscrutable worldview um smudging a block of kerry gold butter right yeah exactly exactly and like

i hadn't i had a couple of moments where I was kind of worried about escalation in the sort of early stages where I thought that like,

you know, like Hezbollah is actually going to do something.

And then, you know, we've seen like a bunch of speeches from Hezbollah that's like, oh, we're going to do it.

Maybe we're going to do it.

We're taking it really seriously.

And then they don't fucking do anything.

And the Israelis then sort of double down on this idea of escalating with Hezbollah.

But like.

This is a whole new thing where it's like, okay, well, it could just be us.

And by us, I mean the US and the UK just deciding to do this

because weird sort of piecemeal war almost.

Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's so stupid and wasteful is the main thing about it.

Like,

at last I heard that these strikes killed like five people, right?

Which is, depending on how you look at it, either extremely good targeting to avoid collateral damage or the most expensive way of killing five people ever devised.

Yeah.

And I mean, now, like the Houthis come out with a statement, like, well, you know, we're, we're, we were ashamed to not be in the same situation as the Palestinians where we were being bombed and this is like only strengthened our resolve now that we are part of the conflict.

It's, it's very, it, it, you know, that's sort of, I don't know,

you know, sort of warrior poet mindset.

I think these guys, these are very resilient people that we've decided to, you know, piss off extra.

This is going to go extremely poorly.

That's like the only thing I'm, you know, unless you like.

You can just write a book that says this is going to go extremely poorly, U.S.

foreign policy since 1946.

Yeah, I was about to say everything after World War II has been just a disaster show.

It's made them way more popular.

And yeah, the only thing that's going to actually change the fact that they can still put shipping in the Red Sea at risk is like invading Yemen and pushing them back from the coast, which I pray God no one has the idea to do because it would be even more catastrophic.

So for now, it's just like we're going to do airstrikes.

And if that doesn't solve the problem, we're going to do more airstrikes.

And we just kind of keep throwing missiles at it until the treats can feel comfortable enough to go through the thing.

I just want to point out right now on marintraffic.com, there are about a billion ships in the Red Sea.

So, you know, I do feel like these strikes that the Houthis have been doing have at least been a little bit targeted.

Yeah, I mean, it's mostly just stuff like the risks that MSC or MASC or whatever are willing to bear, you know?

Right.

Yeah.

Or, or, um, or, uh, whatchamacallit, Zim.

I don't think they, I don't think they'd like Zim.

Zim's definitely got to go around a horn because that's, that's the Israeli shipping company.

I don't know, there was one.

Yes.

Yeah, they got a bunch of ships.

They got a bunch of containers you'll see every once in a while.

Yeah.

All the containers have bombs of genocide in them.

That and hummus.

Soda streams.

Yeah, soda streams.

Billion.

Waymo, or is it Waze?

I forget which.

Waze, Waze.

Waze.

Okay.

Yeah.

Waymo is still.

It's just a shipping container full of apps.

Yes.

Has been sent to the website.

And Intel chips.

And Intel chips.

That's why you should go AMD.

Please do AMD fabrication plants.

Please don't tell me there was a lot of stuff.

I want more cores.

Give me more cores.

More cores.

Anyway,

that was the goddamn news.

Nice.

All right.

So we see here the Wood Street Encampment in Oakland.

This used to be Northern California's largest homeless encampment.

It was shut down by OPD and the city in May of last year.

And I put this up to ask a couple of questions.

Firstly, what is Oakland, California?

It's like San Francisco, but on the other side of the bay.

Yeah, it's San Francisco brackets annex.

And

just as a little update, so far as I can tell, assuming that Global Foundries still manufactures AMD's chips,

I have good news.

Despite the fact that

it was privately owned by a sovereign wealth fund of the UAE until 9 PO in October 2021.

They have operations in Singapore, the EU, and the United States.

And I think we're good.

I think you can still buy AMD.

All right, so

but Israel is in Eurovision, which is the same as being in the EU, right?

That's right, that's it.

Yeah, so that's that's a little

using TSMC.

God's damn thing.

Oakland is on the other side of the bay from San Francisco.

It used to be cheaper.

It still is cheaper, but like

we'll find Israel.

What has happened is

it?

Let's go on.

So Oakland used to be poorer.

It used to be blacker.

It still is both of those things.

Yes.

But decreasingly so, because the economy of the Bay Area has been,

well, I mean,

this is the thing.

Like, number go up, line go up.

Line go up.

Line go up.

That is true.

Jobs get created.

You know, people get paid more sometimes.

Um, and then the number that doesn't go up is housing, right?

And so, what Oakland has is sometimes called a housing crisis.

It's sometimes, I think, maybe more accurately called a displacement crisis, right?

Yes, where uh, the cost of the housing goes up to accumulate people who are working at like you know, who are working in San Francisco and commuting in, uh, or who are working at like startups or whatever in Oakland.

Um, and the people who are already in Oakland get priced out.

Um,

And

so, as a consequence, like

I have, I have some numbers here, right?

So, like, in 2014, the Oakland rental market was the 21st most expensive in the US.

And by 2015, it was the fourth.

The city has a minimum wage.

That minimum wage

is,

oh, God, what actually is it?

$12.55 an hour.

For which, fuck off.

You cannot find an apartment in Oakland.

If you earned that, if you earned $12.55 an hour and you worked full-time, you would have to spend 112% of your income on housing.

I mean,

it's at the point where now you have think tanks saying, well, hold on a second.

Not only can

just ordinary people who we don't give a shit about not afford housing, but like teachers can't afford housing, like firefighters can't afford housing,

Cops even, like still, like if you if you started as

like an entry-level teacher in Oakland public schools, your estimated salary is like $42,000 a year.

Congratulations, you live in Sacramento now.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly, but you can't afford anywhere in Oakland.

Oh, you can't.

You can't.

I mean, it's, it's, yeah.

Yeah.

And so.

Anybody, it starts out obviously with the people who are like most precarious in housing, right?

like, you know, low-wage workers, students, the elderly, um, artists who we'll get to later.

And now it's sort of like ballooned to the point where it's just consuming everyone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so people are being like gentrified out.

Um, homelessness is vastly, vastly increased.

Uh, it's heavily, heavily racialized as well.

So, like, um, like 60% of the homeless population of Oakland are black, and they're about like 20% of the city's population.

Um, and despite the fact, despite the fact that the mayor used to have to live in her car,

like as recently as 2018, the UN General Assembly, like the fucking UN, went to Oakland and called their treatment of homeless people cruel and inhumane.

It's in this situation where this is really one of the like

front lines of, and I hate to put up the harrowing of hell here, but housing policy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, you know,

the situation in, especially the Bay Area, but California in general,

you know,

it's you have, you know, people like to frame this in terms of like the YIMBY and NIMBY debate.

I think even if you were, if you were in a situation where like, boom, we've upzoned every single parcel in California so you can build a 150-story building there,

I think you need more radical measures just to move the housing market in the direction of providing housing.

And that is, you need to really start to say, we are going to build mass public housing on a huge scale.

We're talking hundreds of thousands of units because

the current situation is very advantageous for owners of real estate.

The market value keeps going up and up and up and up.

And as long as you constrain supply,

you are going to do better financially than if supply is not constrained.

I mean, this is one of the things about landlords is there's two ways for them to make a lot of money, one of which is to build a big building, and the other one is to ensure that no one is able to build a big building.

Right.

And I mean, and the second one has a much higher return on investment.

Yeah, you have to like reconceptualize this as, you know, housing is a human right and housing has to be extremely affordable or else um and we'll sort of we'll get into some of the implications of this later but that's the sort of the scene set for for oakland and like northern california in general uh if we go to the the next slide please yes i put this one in

um so we need to talk about the phenomena of the taxpayer building um this has sort of implications for both you know housing policy for architecture, but also especially for firefighting, right?

And this is, I think, one of the most well-known examples here is, all right, so this was a building in Chicago.

This was the Masonic Temple building, which is essentially part of it was the Masonic Temple.

And above that, to pay for the Masonic Temple's upkeep, they had a bunch of offices.

This was the...

We've talked about it before.

Yeah,

this was, for a brief period of time, the tallest building in Chicago.

21 stories tall in 1895.

But they tore it down in 1939, right?

Well before its useful life was over.

It needed some building systems upgrades.

It needed some foundation upgrades because they put the State Street subway right next to it in that year.

You're just doing your weird Masonic rituals and the floor, the checkerboard floor is like shaking under you, and you're just like, for fuck's sake.

That's sort of,

that's a lot of downtown Masonic temples, though.

You know, it's kind of a lot of times they're in older parts of town where the subway will be.

At that point, they should just incorporate it into whatever 33rd degree Master Mason ritual you're doing.

Obviously Scottish right.

Anyway, so

now why was this building?

I was inducted and killed.

This building was torn down and replaced with a two-story building.

Wow, that looks like that.

That's beautiful.

Yeah.

Well,

no, actually, I use this as an example because there's no pictures of the building that

this was replaced by.

This is a similar building.

This is where Abner's Cheese Steaks in Philly was.

And the Sitar India.

Yeah, Strip Club was in the basement.

Yeah.

Sitar India restaurant was formerly a Chili's.

It was

kicked down to that Chili's once.

Really?

Yeah, I got kicked out of it.

There was a notorious club called the Blockley here, which used to serve people underage.

Yes.

Jesus.

Anyway,

this is a good example of a taxpayer building.

But the idea of the taxpayer building is, what do you do?

You own land, right?

Do you want to develop it?

No, you want to speculate on it.

I want to speculate on it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Developing stuff costs money.

Speculation?

Not so much.

Great amount of habit.

You have this annoying thing, though, called property taxes.

And if you have...

a completely vacant lot, you're going to be taxed on like the square footage of the land, right?

Sure.

And then you will also be taxed on any improvements you have on it, which is sort of like a building, a shed, pavement, you know, whatever, whatever the assessed value of any man-made structures on it, you will furthermore be taxed on that.

So if my pure idea here, if all I want to do is speculate, it behooves me to build the most minimal building on the structure I can.

that pays the property taxes.

Oh, the minimum viable commercial building.

Yes.

Yes.

That is the taxpayer building.

Huh.

So that's why there's like a fucking like mattress warehouse or whatever.

Yes.

Mattress warehouse, the American candy store, whatever.

It doesn't have to sell a lot.

It just has to sell enough to like make refugees.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And they can do their own little like money laundering or whatever the fuck in there.

I don't give a shit because I just want the like the tax revenue.

Right.

Yeah.

So in this case, this very large and architecturally notable, historically notable building was torn down for a two-story building that I think was a Walgreens until like 2008.

You know, it was, it, it, it, it, yeah, so you have sonic Walgreens.

Yeah, you put the smallest viable building on there, and these buildings have a lot of shared characteristics, right?

They're usually one or two stories tall, they have a commercial use on the first floor, sometimes it's residential on the second floor, but sometimes it isn't because a lot of times these buildings cover a huge amount of the lot.

They have very deep floor plates, which means there's going to be a lot of rooms inside the building with no access to the outside, with no daylight, with no nothing, right?

They have a lot of internal space, but since they're generally constructed in an old-fashioned manner, it's very easy to reconfigure rooms.

It's very easy to do that without a permit because everything's happening away from windows.

You know, and this is,

you know, these buildings were very, very common until probably the 1950s,

just because eventually people found out that you can make the same amount of money to cover property taxes with a surface parking lot, which is another great way to speculate on land.

Different kinds of urban blight.

Yes.

So Disney Hole.

Yeah, yeah.

So eventually, you know, the term tax fare is sort of lost in urban planning and architectural contexts, but one place it remains to this day is in firefighting

because these things are death traps.

Cool.

As we'll see.

You got lots of internal rooms with no access to natural light.

So if you have no

power in the building, you can't see shit.

They're going to be made of wood largely

and not like, you know, not really heavy timbers.

This is sort of light stuff because a lot of this happened sort of in the later era of wooden construction.

You know, after we stopped using really big, heavy timbers, which are more fire resistant, right?

There's lots of opportunities for things like backdraft, various sudden exacerbations of the conflagration, right?

These buildings don't have plans on file because...

numerous random people have reconfigured the interior any way they want.

You a lot of times will have situations where there are rooms which are completely sealed off at some point.

So you can have a fire growing in there and have no idea, right?

Somebody getting cask of a Monteado in there with their fire.

Yeah, well, that probably would have happened, you know, like

a dozen years prior.

Um, you know, no one's going in that completely sealed-off room, people won't even know the room is there.

Jesus, that's sort of its own kind of urban nightmare, along with the guy who fell in between two buildings with no access except from like above in New York City and just like they found his skeleton like wedged in between two buildings.

Yeah, that's

folks, if you're designing a building, try to avoid opportunities for a room to be completely sealed off with everyone forgetting about it.

And, you know, so these buildings are, they're, they're not good buildings.

There's still a lot of them left.

You know, because the way that land speculation worked in American cities is a lot of these got built in like the Great Depression.

And then, guess what?

The fortunes of cities haven't recovered until very recently, at least in terms of being able to make money off of real estate.

A lot of these buildings are over a century old with a century of modifications.

They're very common and you know, everywhere, except like cities that are very new, like I don't know, Anchorage or Neom.

Neon.

There's no taxpayer buildings in Neom yet because there's no buildings.

But

yeah, so taxpayer buildings, this is they're very bad for firefighting because they're buildings that want to kill their occupants.

Yes.

Yes.

If we go to the next slide.

Yes, we now see 1305 31st Avenue in Oakland.

And

it's difficult to find a like.

You may be wondering why it looks like this.

There's no pre-fire street view shots of this.

Right.

Yeah.

This is this is concrete and wood built in 1930, so right sort of like pre-Depression.

Yeah.

Right at the depression.

Yeah.

And this is this is a two-story warehouse originally designed for milk bottles.

So the idea is that you have milk bottles get washed on the upper floor, they go by conveyor belt down to the ground floor, get loaded onto trucks, drive out, and then you get your milk.

And this immediately collapses because of the depression.

And as far as anyone remembers, this was kind of like a hippie party space through the 60s onwards.

Um, yeah, because at that point, you're trying to get a rent from basically anyone you can so that you can continue to hold these buildings.

Yeah, if you're even getting rent at all, it may be a squat.

Like, it's people remember doing drugs there, and that's about it.

Um,

and uh, so this then in 1988 falls prey to like a new landlord.

I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of the

music.

Thank you for doing this so I don't have to.

It's fine.

I'm going to take a guess at Chorna Su,

who bought this building in 1988.

And she is the sort of owner of record for a shitload, like $5 million worth of...

sort of low to medium value bullshit

in Oakland.

Yeah, taxpayer buildings, like a Buddhist temple, like uh laundries, like auto repair shops.

Um, it just kind of the kind of absentee landlord who like doesn't really like ever check in, you never see them except to collect rent, yeah.

Um, you know, it's sort of uh as a tenant, sometimes that's the ideal landlord, yeah, in some ways, right?

I will say that, uh, just uh, in case you're wondering how this ends for uh, Miss,

I apologize again for the name, they are bankrupt, thank God.

Yeah, finally, at long last.

There were some sort of consequences to this.

But yeah, so

I'm relying a lot here on the reporting of the San Francisco Chronicle, which is

an excellent job.

Yeah, fantastic.

What a Pulitzer for this, as well.

They might have done.

No, the East Bay Times were the Pulitzer.

Oh, excuse me.

Sorry.

No, it's okay.

I'd rather be right about it.

But yeah, so she doesn't really show up.

Stuff communication goes through her kids and emails tend to not go answered for a long time.

And like a lot of landlords with this sort of portfolio, she is racking up like code violations and fines and stuff.

Over the period of like 2005, 2014, the vacant lot like next door, the lot that this like building abuts,

she paid Oakland like $26,500 in

code enforcement fees.

Enforcement fees, right?

There's not a lot of regulations out there about vacant lot.

You have to be really trying.

Yeah, I assume just like dumping shit on it, but nobody knows.

And yeah, the sort of city of Oakland's building department gets a bunch of complaints for

in the last couple of years about how like unsafe this building is.

And

the last time it was inspected was 30 years earlier because they send an inspector and the city inspector like knocks on the door, can't get in, does a like sort of eyeball-based inspection and is like, I will call back about this and then never does.

Yeah, the inspection systems in a lot of cities are really based on sort of a mutual understanding between the city and the building owner that it's good to have a safe building.

And so when you have someone who doesn't,

does not conform with that particular system of trust, you have a problem.

Right.

Yeah.

And that's, I mean, as we'll learn, the fire station is, what, a block and a half?

Yeah.

I think you said.

So, yeah.

And in terms of her other tenants, like

some of them were like in the same position that you mentioned of like, yeah, she doesn't give a shit.

This is fine with me.

And some were in a position of like, yeah, my like electrical box kept sparking and I had to email her for two years.

And then she sent out like some guy who maybe fixed it,

which again is like very familiar landlord stuff.

So she has this building, right?

And she wants to make some money off of it.

So she lets this out to a master tenant, right?

One guy.

If we go to the next slide, this is not zoned as residential.

This is zoned as like warehouse.

And so this is a warehouse nominally

whose sole tenant is this guy on the right, Derek Almeiner.

That's his wife on the left.

And we should be very delicate and say this dude should be punched in the face repeatedly.

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing.

Like, you never want to sort of,

we're engaged in sort of like social history and engineering history and stuff here.

We want to sort of like identify a context to stuff without necessarily being like, it's this one motherfucker's fault, but it's this one motherfucker's fault.

Yeah,

this guy

is not worth defending.

He is a a true shithead.

Oh, yeah.

So

what he did is he illegally sublet this

by dividing it into housing units and renting those out for like

$700 a month.

And as we saw, the rent in Oakland for a one-bedroom is like $2,500.

So,

you know, that's very attractive.

And...

It's not sort of your typical slum lordship.

What it is, is like, he kind of starts a cult.

Um, yeah,

I mean, it's initially called Satya Yuga, um, and it was then later named Ghost Ship.

Um, it's sort of like nominally, it's an art collective.

There's a cron interview with like the next-door neighbors who do a kind of like, we didn't see him do any art, just meth, which, to be fair, sure.

Um, who amongst us, right?

Right, exactly.

Um,

and so this warehouse space, the top floor of it is this guy Almeina and his family, his wife, his three kids,

which they kind of turn into this hoarder space.

There's some photos of it later on.

And then the bottom floor is like subdivided.

And because it's intended to have milk trucks drive in, what they do is they just drive a bunch of RVs in.

Five of them are probably not a good idea.

Yeah, so it's like five RVs.

There's like some stuff that's like

sort of built shanty divisions within it made of pianos in some cases.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And to get the city off their back, nominally this is not housing.

This is a 24-hour art workshop, right?

And that's what they have to tell people.

And this guy is maybe the most irritating motherfucker on the face of the earth, right?

In a Facebook post seeking tenants, Almino wrote, seeking all shamanic rattlesnakes, sexy jungle jazz hobo gunslingers, looking for a space to house great gear, use studio, develop next-level Shaolin discipline after driving your taxicab late at night, build fusion earth home bomb bunker, spelunker shelters, and plant herbaceous colonies in the sun and air.

Would you believe this guy used to run a weed farm and also apparently did a lot of meth?

Allegedly, I'm so mad you took that from me.

Yeah, this is to give you to give you a sense of the vibe, this is the kind of place where they make you sign a mock contract where you commit to being unconditionally awesome.

I dislike

California.

This guy's got California brain.

Yeah, this guy's got serious California brand.

California landlord, or at least like master tenant.

Oh, yeah.

He's he's he's he's he's he's in a he's in a middle manager position where he is both tenant and landlord.

The contradictions are

eating this guy alive.

Yes, exactly.

There's a dialectic occurring, which I understand is when two things which are the opposite are happening.

Yeah, Hegel's master slave dialectic makes this guy

sort of act like a cult leader.

He has little David Koresh moments.

He does long, like weird, long, rambling Facebook posts about Hitler and stuff.

Positive or negative?

Positive.

Positive esoteric.

If we go to the next slide um

so he also has this wrenfield uh this is a guy called max harris um

and max harris seen here in jail um he gets a very like sympathetic piece in new york times magazine um of which i read the whole thing i'll summarize for you this is an extremely dumb and exploitable motherfucker um who is this like drifter from middle america who like uh ends up in brooklyn and then sort of

then Colorado and then Oakland and is kind of like alternately groomed and psychologically terrorized by Derek Armeida into making all of the shit run, collecting rent, working the door at parties

and all of this.

He's like nominally creative director of this art collective.

A thing you've never want to be.

Sounds like he's been creatively directed.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of, one of the tenants says that he has a, that Harris has a servant's heart.

And yeah.

Poor dumb motherfucker.

Yeah, genuinely.

But like, he's the type of guy to be rescuing like bugs he finds in the prison yard.

Because he's just a kind of like well-meaning hippie.

um who is now at the whims of a kind of like would-be David Koresh.

Lunatic.

Right.

Dude's.

I mean, we

really cannot stress enough that

Derek Almina is

a horrible person.

Yeah, yeah.

As we'll get to an absolute garbage person.

There's a detail here in

that New York Times magazine profile where he says,

occasionally, people who lived at Sacha Yuga told me Almena spoke to Harris in a sharp German accent, pretending that Harris, whose mother was Jewish, was his Jew, his slave.

Harris insisted he meant this as a joke.

That Almina meant this as a joke.

We should probably

sorry, Devin.

You gotta watch out for artists who are put in a position of power because all of a sudden the eccentricities aren't so funny anymore.

Yeah, that's how you get to the point.

I don't know if this guy ever was an artist, meaningfully, I just thought of himself that way.

Who's that guy I hate?

Who's that artist I hate?

Oh, that name.

Who's that guy I hate?

Let me open a screenshot.

There we go.

Yeah, is this the part where we say that Valerie Solanis' only problem is poor aim?

Yeah, so so so this guy, this guy, Max Harris, he does all the like bullshit work.

Um, uh, meanwhile,

yeah.

Yeah, meanwhile, Almeino and his family are like living on the second floor.

Uh, if we go to the next slide,

hi, it's Justin.

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

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

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

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You get what you pay for.

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

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Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod.

Do it if you want, or don't.

It's your decision, and we respect that.

Back to the show.

This is the ground floor.

Yeah, you may notice

a trailer in here.

It's going to get worse than this, folks.

This is one of five, as you say.

Actually, the notes say specifically, the ground floor had five recreational vehicles, open parentheses, all caps, five question mark, not one, but fucking five, another question mark, closed parentheses.

Yes.

No electricity or running water.

No, I mean, this is the thing.

They did later have electricity of a sort.

We'll get into that.

Sort of, yes.

Yeah, it's it's like a lot of these places where where like sometimes it has electricity and water and heat most of the time it doesn't um and as you see there's just all of this horda

just like crammed into it like

there's a lot of a lot of uh a lot of various pianos and speakers and there's some of these old-fashioned you know wooden you know uh sort of bar backs there's like a whole bunch of uh i mean okay i i would probably also decorate like this but without having a trailer in there and also with fire suppression The other thing is you would find it difficult to decorate like this as intensely were you like, you know, for benefit of not being on meth.

Yeah, you need you need you need to, I mean,

this is like sort of, I don't know, this looks like a

set for like psychedelic rock music video.

Yeah, it's, I would say it's Burning Man shit, but Almeida did a Facebook post, which I've read, which I kind of agree with him about, about how cucked and shitty and and like dot-com Burning Man is now.

Okay.

I mean,

he was cooking with that one.

But yeah, so he like tells the cops, no one lives here.

This is like an artist collective.

People come in and work when they feel like it.

He gets people to lie about it.

Meanwhile, the upstairs, he's like renting that out for concerts.

And these sort of like nooks are being rented out to like tenants.

And the whole time, the side of the building, like abutting that vacant lot, is just getting filled with like dumped RVs and like scrap because like he kind of dealt in that and like at least one time stole a trailer off of somebody.

And so like

that's such white trash behavior.

It's yeah, yeah.

And yeah, and so like all of this stuff is just building up against the side of the building.

If we go to the next slide, we can see the upstairs, which

listen,

I don't hate it, right?

It's eclectic, but at the same time, it's also...

I like the organ console.

That's nice.

He's got all the sort of fake reproduction Tiffany's.

Guess what we're going to talk about in the bonus episode?

He's got the, you know.

This is a case of, and I live in a glass house on this one, someone with like a fairly decent hoarding thing going on.

Yeah, no, it's like all the stuff is cool and I like it.

But

I don't consider one speaker.

I don't need one speaker.

I need 20.

I feel like the wall of sound.

Thanks for nothing.

Once again, who's which was Phil Spector?

Phil Spector.

There we go.

A guy who should have had worse marksmanship.

Yes.

Better hair.

So if we,

this is where you do your like concerts and stuff, thus you can see the drum kit.

This is where Almeina and his family live.

And this is a sort of a wooden floor above the ground floor full of rvs um so there is there's a concrete staircase in back i think but if you go to the next slide there are there are stairs but they are they are hidden and don't lead directly to the exit yeah it goes up to like a sort of a half landing so what you need obviously is a staircase that's just going to go from the ground floor to the second floor right um and so they build this and they build this out of like wood that they find it's like pallets mostly um

like the next door neighbors neighbors who are interviewed, who are like, oh, they just mostly did math.

They went over to visit and they find that like they're building this staircase.

There's a massive hole in the concrete floor that like the kids are playing next to.

And, you know, neither of them seem at all worried about this.

It's the most, it's the ricketiest looking shit in the world.

It's covered in fairy lights.

It's important to remember the kind of wood you use for pallets is not very good.

It is not very strong because pallets are intended to be disposable unless they're blue or red, in which case you could probably use, you could probably use that, but the CHEP company would get really mad at you.

The disposable staircase, yeah.

Would you believe that Oakland Child Protective Services visited the Almeidas and took their kids away off the basis of like, this is not a safe environment?

Right.

Yeah, this is not a

situation where,

you know, it's it's it's one thing if there's like complicated, like uh familial and emotional and behavioral problems that you know, the child protective services take your kids away.

It's another, they take your kids away because like your kid is going to fall in a hole.

Your house is so goddamn unsafe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.

Um, it's not you, it's the whole, it's the fact that you tolerate the whole existing.

Yeah, and

see our caving disasters episode for more.

That's true.

So, so child protective Protective Services is, after like Oakland Department of Buildings, the second agency now who have gone, this is unacceptable to us.

And then also gone, we're not going to tell anyone about this.

This is fine.

No other action needs to happen.

This is sort of a police department in a serial killer investigation sort of deal.

Oh, we'll get to the police department.

If we go to the next slide,

if you're trying to get out of the building from the second floor down the staircase, this is your route, right?

It is not intuitive and it's not marked in any way.

This is from the New York Times.

You come down the staircase made of balsa wood.

You go around the quite nice Chesterfield wing back chairs.

Yeah.

You go around one of those.

One out of 50,000 pianos,

take a left at a door and then go out onto the street.

Yeah, I'm in a situation where like I deserve to own all this stuff instead of this guy because I I want it.

And I would also be more responsible about it.

Well, to be fair,

I would, yes.

To be fair, to be fair, to be fair, our couch came out of a dumpster, and uh,

bed bugs, though.

We don't have bed bugs, we didn't have bed bugs, no, it was fine.

That couch is

that I stole a um a steal it, it was in a dumpster, it was in a dumpster.

I had to pick you up, remember?

You called me like nine times, yeah.

You were convinced all was gonna take it this is this is this is lawrence noll's sofa this is the thing it's ten thousand dollars on design within reach

all three of us all three of us are are gonna discover and this was something i had planned to introduce later on but you're doing it now for me we we are these types of people right like if we're making fun of these people this is not coming from a place of elitism this is coming from a place of recognition yeah this is if

differences between me and this guy

Yeah.

Differences between me and this guy.

Not being a landlord, not having done meth, fewer neck tattoos.

But, like, other than that, we've got the hoarding in common.

That's for fucking sure.

Yeah.

Praised Hitler.

I've never praised Hitler.

No.

If we go to the next slide, I can talk about our beloved law enforcement, the thin blue line.

So this is from an OPD body cam.

That even says 24-hour artist studio.

Yeah, 24-hour artist studio.

This is when it was still under the saturated game.

You got to do some art.

It's 3 a.m.

Oh man, we're open.

That's right.

So you need to do paints.

You need oil pastels.

You need to do a fresco.

It is time sensitive that I do this fresco.

So yeah,

it's a very thin fig leaf, right?

Everybody knows it, but you know,

per the next door neighbors, again, who are the one source for like what it's like to live next to this place, the cops and the fire department get called out here constantly, like all the time.

It's like a problem place for them.

This is from an OPD body cam in 2015 where they came out to reports of a stabbing.

And what you have in this in this body cam is two or three like Oakland City cops.

poking their heads around the door looking at like exposed wiring and all this wood and like sparks and the park trailers and saying to each other oh man this shit's gonna burn down like they are on their own videos saying, it's like a huge fireplace in here, one spark and it will all be bad.

I would be so worried about the electrical wires.

And again, like going three for three on this, they don't report that to anybody.

They don't tell anybody.

And that never leaves the Oakland Police Department.

It's not a stabbing.

It was 3 a.m.

aggressive interpretive dance.

It's artistic.

It's yeah, what's the thing where people stick hooks in their skin?

It's like that.

Doing some really interesting art.

I mean, like,

as far as the policing goes, like, they could either do nothing, kick everybody else out onto the street, or like at least tell someone.

And what they chose was do nothing.

right

um which i i guess maybe it's better than making everybody homeless.

Maybe.

And the whole time throughout,

you get like fights, you get parties, you get loud music, you get small fires,

you get a lot of drug use,

which fine, whatever.

It's probably not great to live next to.

I'll get to that in a bit.

And the city inspectors come back out

because...

The neighbors complain because of all of this shit, because of the quality of life stuff.

The trash is piling up.

They, you know, know that people are living in there when legally they shouldn't be.

And the inspectors knock on the door, nobody answers, and they go, okay, well, bye.

And they just leave it.

That's also one of the things with this

inspection and why it wasn't done.

They didn't have access to it.

Also, we already said that.

Yeah, literally, like hiding inside with the lights off, pretending nobody's home kind of thing.

I get the feeling there was relatively little art going on in there, just on account of

a lot of artists do seem to have connections with people in the city, you know?

At least in my experience.

If we go to the next slide where I call you a bourgeois comprador.

Yeah, please.

Yeah, because the thing is, right, like

I've been like kicking the shit out of this place for 20 minutes.

People got to live somewhere.

Well, it's not only that, right?

It's like, on the one hand, this is probably extremely annoying to live next to and i think it's it's perfectly reasonable to go like oh man these guys aren't artists they're just doing meths right doing meth rights doing meths yeah doing methylated spirits um but like if you ask the people who actually live there right okay they might have neck tattoos and shit uh and they might be doing like maybe the worst tattooing you've ever seen i've seen some bad shit yeah but on the other hand like uh people live here.

It, where the hell else can you afford in Oakland is nowhere.

And it's not like you don't know that it's scary.

It's not like you don't know that there are people there who are doing like methfield posts about Hitler.

Um,

and you know, I can't judge these people because I've been in squats that I knew were scary.

I have friends who live in places like that.

My landlord is kind of an absentee slumlord because, like,

despite the podcasting millions, thank you for subscribing to the Patreon, my rent is about the same as these people's.

And, like, people,

I believe, did make art here.

They were part of a community there.

And the fact that it was exploitative and dangerous and like very annoying doesn't make their lives not matter.

Right.

The one thing, the sole intervention here that benefits everyone is making housing affordable and abundant, right?

Because otherwise, you just end up with these situations where if you want to live in Oakland and you want to make any kind of art that doesn't sort of like allow you to maintain connections with people who work for Google and who are going to sort of patronize you in that sense, then you have to live somewhere like this.

And you're sort of, you're picking between this and maybe something that's worse.

Yeah.

And the other thing that, you know, puts

decorating such such as they had done in the interior apart from you know doing that in a real apartment or public building is that you know the people who actually live there certainly knew how to get out of the building quickly if they had to.

Right.

We learned, I think, that one resident dies in this fire.

Uh, everyone else has no idea, obviously, where the exits are, so on and so forth.

But I, I, I, I, yeah, I mean, you did it much more beautifully than I could, but uh, I've got more.

I've got a whole second second wind queued up.

I'll just go fuck myself then.

No, no, no, please.

Do you do your thing and then I'll go again?

People got to live places.

People got to live places.

That's, you know, obviously in my job, I work with people that need places to live.

And this sort of like, oh, we're just going to fucking toss them to the wind is unacceptable.

And what we should do, I think, is obvious to anyone who's been paying close enough attention to me, which is we will level San Francisco, we will level San Jose, we will tear down Levi's Stadium brick by brick and build a million, a million person.

Remember that Tokyo Giga skyscraper that was supposed to exist?

Yeah.

We're going to do that.

Which one?

The big one.

The really big one.

Which one?

God damn it, Robinson.

Anyway, carry on, Alice.

Yeah, but no,

people

who lived there thought it was beautiful.

And I think this

differing conceptions of beauty and of meaning and of like what safe housing and what home is come into play here.

I think that was something that came out in the court case is, you know, prosecutors and defense attorneys trying to extract this stuff from people who lived in like a different generation and a different lifestyle.

And there was this kind of like mutual incomprehensibility of what it meant for something to be home and for what it meant for something to be like,

you know, to be a beautiful place.

And I think a lot of people who lived there or who visited were like genuinely inspired and made genuine connections there.

There's a quote from one resident who said, it was a beautiful but a terrifying place.

And this is someone who says that, like, you know, they were constantly the electricity and the hot water were going out.

The cops showed up because like people had guns.

You know, she says, I kept a fire extinguisher, a flashlight, and a self-defense weapon.

It was a nightmare.

But at the same time, there is something

alluring and there is something different and there is something like inspirational about it.

And that's not wholly attributable to

one guy and sort of having Stockholm syndrome for him.

It's also like having a place that is outside of a mainstream that is a horrible place to be an artist.

And I mean, there's an LGBT issue here too, as well, because like a lot of these people are queer and trans.

And, you know, as far as we know, three of the victims of the fire were trans.

And after the fact, the authorities dead named and misgendered fucking all of them.

Um, and I just find it really, really bleak that you know you can get out of fucking like Indiana or whatever, and you come to somewhere that you think is going to be better, and it kills you in its own distinct way of forcing you to the margins, right?

Because you've been forced to the margins, I was about to say exactly that, that you've been forced to the margins your entire life, and now you're killed for it.

Yeah, and it wants to sort of like have its cake and eat it, right?

Like, Oakland is one of these places where like it wants to see itself as like inclusive and like having this kind of like counterculture, but it doesn't do anything that allows that counterculture to sustain itself, and when it does, it snuffs the life out of them, exactly, exactly.

Uh, if we if we go to the next slide, I one of so one of the victims was um uh Cash Askey, who did this.

Uh, she was she's in a band called Them or Us 2, and I listened to a lot of them researching this and uh genuinely like really, really talented.

Um, it's just really bleak, um, But yeah, so

we've got some interior shots here.

And I'm going to talk about Oakland Fire Department as the fourth agency, which knows that this place is fucked up and does nothing.

I will say you just, this is a nice looking space.

I like this, how this

whole composition here.

I also would say I have a little bit of formal education in like the architecture of like houses in this area.

And other than the fact that it's a little bit bigger and the trusses are made of steel instead of wood, it's identical.

Yeah, yeah.

You can see the sort of frame of this roof on the exterior shots post-fire.

This is not even not even like that notably a fire trap in some ways.

Yeah, so the nearest OFD firehouse was a block away.

And they were on friendly terms because, you know, the firefighters were out there constantly for people setting couches on fire and shit.

You can't take that from West Virginia.

That's a West Virginia thing.

Yeah, go Mountaineers, baby.

Offend West Virginians again.

We're not apologizing for that.

West Virginia University students are infamous for their

burning of couches.

They're right and glorious to do so.

All glory to the Mountaineers and your hideous ass PRT.

Yeah.

But sort of, like,

unlike the cops, the firefighters, they stop by and they like the place, right?

Like, there's, you know, reports of one of the firefighters stopping to play like piano number 43 or whatever.

And they seem pretty chill about it.

Like, one of them tells Almeina that, like, as long as you've got marked fire exits, it's fine.

And, you know, after this, like, off-duty firefighters come and hang out.

They stay at parties.

They stay at barbecues and stuff.

Like, they're on friendly terms.

and it lends people this air of confidence that, like, well, if the firefighters say it's okay, then it must be okay.

Um, and I should say that at this point, Oakland Fire Department

was funded, it was fully funded, but it was chronically understaffed, possibly because you cannot live in Oakland on a firefighter salary.

Um, and so uh, between 2011 and 2015, uh, they had no fire marshal, no assistant fire marshal.

So, nobody who's supposed to like enforce fire codes or investigate breaches of them.

Not to even make a joke, but they are running on fumes here.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, there's, there's no, there's, there's, that's the thing is you, you, you just have priced people out of existence, and now the fringes of society are left to just burn for it.

And it's

gruesome.

You got the muscle, you don't got the brains.

Well, this is the thing.

It's the same thing I talked about with like the sort of policy papers earlier, where it's like, if you think of like a housing crisis or a displacement crisis in like tranches, right?

Where the first tranche is like people who are going to become immediately unhoused and who in this sort of like grand scheme of things, nobody except like charities gives a fuck about.

Right.

And then the sort of second tier of like people who are, you know, artists or living like an alternative lifestyle who are then marginalized,

but who the city still wants to like exploit in that sense.

Nominally cares about, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And then, and then the third tier of like people who you need to like run essential public services and who don't want to commute for like two hours to get to work, like teachers and firefighters, and even in this case, cops, right?

Like, it's still a lot of these cities also have a residency requirement, which makes it even more difficult.

I was gonna say the same thing, yeah.

It's a sort of thing where, like, if you want to be a firefighter, you have to be independently wealthy, which is a fucking insane thing.

Um, you just have to like do it for fun.

Um, yeah, or so, uh, you're in this place where the city kind of like eats itself in that way.

And it eats itself first in sort of like in human terms, then in cultural terms, and then in like functional terms.

If we go to the next slide, we're going to talk about electricity.

And I've shamelessly stole this graphic from Bay Area News Group.

So the year previous,

there was another show.

and they had a power cut in the middle of it.

And Almeina had to like go next door and fix the power.

All four of these buildings are running off of one PG ⁇ E box.

And it's like three different businesses and this warehouse.

And the wiring is sort of like daisy chained through them.

And when it gets to the ghost ship, it is divided into,

it's going to be like...

power strip to power strip to power strip to power strip to appliance.

The way you classically blow out a power supply, right?

Exactly.

And also, you know, it's coming right off the power pole here into what was formerly industrial buildings.

You know, this is this is probably like 243 phase on the way in, or I think it's 240, might be 480 even.

So, you know, this is like higher than normal voltage.

I think it's not that good with electricity.

It's just one of those, I think.

Is the fact that their contract, their electrical contractor,

I don't have his first name, but his last name is Cannon.

Basically, just lied about his credentials, took the fifth

for his deposition, and just like

didn't do

his moral ethical duty as a human being.

Yeah, because the landlord tried to replace the Transformer on the cheap.

On the cheap, right, exactly.

Quote, we are going to use it a little bit differently than standard, close quote, in regards to this transformer.

Yeah, and their license as a contractor had expired five years earlier.

And they were just still going.

If there's two transformers and they're wired in series, they're definitely doing a weird thing with stepping down the voltage here.

And yeah, so tenants remember that like you couldn't use like two appliances at the same time kind of thing.

Or you would just take the power out.

Well, in fairness, that's the same with my kitchen.

I was going to say that.

I was going to make that joke.

But at least I know the breaker box works.

Yeah.

So this electricity is going to like a little kitchen in the back.

There's like two refrigerators in there

and I think like a microwave.

If we go to the next slide,

we'll talk about

the actual event itself because they were doing ticketed events

and this was like going to be a concert.

It was a secret location.

It was a secret gig

that was going to be announced on Facebook.

And Almeina wasn't in the building because of childhood neglect, as it happened.

Because CPS made it so that, like, if you want to see your kids, if you want to get your kids back, they can't be in the warehouse when you're doing a like a concert.

So he, his wife, and the kids were at a hotel.

And it's all delegated to Max Harris, who's like running the door.

He's, I guess, technically the bouncer.

He's also one of the first people to respond

to the fire in an attempt to get people out of there.

I do want to say,

I have to quote this.

This is from the promoter of the show.

They can limit our invites, but not going to let them limit our fun.

We shall rise up, overcome, and dance on the ruins.

Stay safe out there.

Also, we should mention that the cover, which was $15, which should be fucking illegal,

basically paid, that is what Almina spent as his living expenses.

Basically, he made rent from the illegal tenants and then parties covered, like he was running a goddamn 2011 fraternity.

Parties covered his expenses.

There's something very evil to me about the idea of charging $15 to burn up like this.

And I can't shake that.

Just like you're talking camping stoves in the kitchen, like really just the fringes of society we talked about.

And just like these people having no idea, you know, to try to go to a party or a concert or something.

If we go to the next, the next slide.

So the party is happening second floor and

people

notice smoke coming up through the floorboards.

It's about 11.15 the night of December 2nd, we should say that.

Yeah.

And this happens very, very quickly.

It's an extremely flammable building.

Like, as far as people remember it, like, stuff was, the building was, like, filled with smoke within like five or ten seconds.

Fuel source is aplenty.

This thing is just going up like a like a Christmas tree.

And that kind of like

that kind of smoke, like a couple of breaths of it will kill you.

Like you will lose consciousness and then you'll die.

The firefighters make it all of goddamn 20 feet.

Yeah.

Literally, they make it 20 feet.

This is one of those where I just, I want to scream into the void.

Yeah.

Just classic the evils of

all these things collide.

And I mean, you could not have had a a faster response time had it been, like, unless it was next door to the finals.

Like, they cared about it.

Three minutes after the first 911 call.

Yeah.

And yeah,

I mean, there's sort of, there's descriptions which are sort of vivid and horrible.

Make people sob, yeah.

Yeah, people sort of go to this

staircase

and a lot of people don't want to go down it.

A lot of people want to like stay up because it seems safer.

There's a detail about a woman sitting on the first floor in a wicker chair screaming not to come down and chanting this is the will of the spirits of the forest.

All right.

Well, someone should beat that lady to death with a baseball bat.

Yeah, I think a key aspect of fire safety is you don't let somebody say that it's the will of the spirits of the forest.

Generally, mysticism does not

improve an evacuation situation.

No, you can do the mysticism afterwards.

Yes,

that's the time for mysticism.

There's a time for action on there.

There's a time to commune with the spirits.

Right.

This is not it.

There's an absolutely.

The spirits will commune with you if they need to.

Don't call us.

We'll call you.

There's an absolutely heartbreaking sentence in here that I don't think I'm going to get through without crying, which is Michaela Gregory and Alex Vega embraced his body on top of hers to shield her from the flames.

And just,

what do you fucking say to that, right?

It's just like...

These greedy motherfuckers pushed these people to their deaths because they just didn't fucking care.

And systemic failures, the failures of capitalism, the failures of all of this just make you want to punch a wall.

Yeah, all of these people deserved so much better.

And

so,

you know,

so Max Harris is downstairs.

He's like, at least trying to like shout so people can follow his voice.

He is doing his level best.

Yes.

As far as we can tell.

And mostly people just do not make it down because there's no time to.

Neither stairway leads to one of the two exits.

The pallet staircase, as you can imagine, is absolutely fucking gone by this point.

Yeah.

And

I mean,

the roof collapses at 11:49.

No, please.

I'm just reading from the notes.

Do you want to read this

motherfucker's Facebook post?

I'll read it.

Yeah.

So

take your time.

So, so,

I mean, everybody's dead like

half 11.

No, I mean, no, no shot.

You have you, if you, if you, if you were in there, your chances of getting out alive are

slim to none feels optimistic.

And, uh, and about 1.30 in the morning, Almeina posted on Facebook, Do Not Post,

where he posts, everything I worked so hard for is gone.

Blessed that my children and Micah were at a hotel safe and sound.

It's as if I've awoken from a dream filled with opulence and hope to be standing now in poverty of self-worth.

And this is

part of your brain.

You will have to bleep this, but that dude should do us all a favor and put a sh ⁇ .

Yeah, well, this is the thing, the recurring thing is that this guy's sort of like monstrous egotism.

uh where he cannot like make anybody do anything other than hate him like when he's on the stand at trial this is going to be a recurring theme when he hears the victim impact statements he says that he he's like willing to to tattoo the names of the victims on his body

to apologize.

He does some weird shit the day, maybe the day after the fire or at least the day.

He's interviewed by, I want to say Matt Lauer, maybe,

where he's like, clearly traumatized, but also like doing it the worst fucking way you could possibly do a thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I don't, I don't know what it is.

I'm, I'm sort of grasping for words, but it's sort of those

fucked is the word, I think.

Yeah,

if we go to the next slide.

I'm interested in how he says I would tattoo the names of the people who had died on me, you know, because you know who else does that is serial killers, Senator John Fetterman.

Christ.

Damn.

That guy turned out pretty bad.

Anyway.

Yeah, we're sorry.

I hope I listen.

I hope I never get brain damage, but I especially hope I never get the kind of brain damage that makes me a Zionist.

So

if I start wearing an Israeli flag as a cape, I'm going to need you to put me in inpatient cap.

Yeah, don't worry.

We'll take care of that.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Bodcastle bravely soldier on with milkshake.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Just like

keep paying me, but like get an understudy.

And yeah, so the aftermath for this is, you know, like, obviously this devastates an entire community.

Like, there's so many photos and so many descriptions of people like, you know, going to leave flowers or whatever and just breaking down in the street.

Like, I,

you know, this happens occasionally where, like, we'll talk about stuff and people have like personal connection to it.

I guarantee it's going to happen in this one.

You know,

I think I know people who know people who lost people.

So I'm at that level of like remove.

And, you know,

I really hope we're doing it justice.

But yeah, it absolutely like tears the heart out of a community in Oakland.

And, you know, you have like

the Oakland Fire Department, you have like Cal Fi, you've got like the ATF doing a lot of the like fire investigation.

And ultimately, what they conclude is we don't know.

For a while, they sort of pinned on one of these

refrigerators, yeah, but like it's too badly damaged to even be able to tell.

And I mean, just in terms of the length of time where people are waiting to like

find out whether their loved ones are alive or dead, whether or not they're going to get their remains back,

which again is sort of doubly fraught when that person is trans and so therefore or, you know, their ID might not match,

is,

yeah, it takes days and it's agonizing.

And I think that's one of the sort of cruelties of a lot of sort of like fire investigation, right?

Is, you know, not only are you sort of like not able to give a lot of definitive answers, but it takes you a long time to not be able to give a lot of definitive answers.

Right.

I mean, and

the Oakland fire chief, Teresa Delote Reed on the design.

Yeah, just she just fucking pieces out.

She just leaves.

She goes on leave like right after this happens.

Then she quits.

Right.

It's it's yeah, because which I

don't even know how to express how I feel about that, you know, you know, you got to use those vacation days or you're going to lose them.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah, enjoy, enjoy the, enjoy the hottest fires of hell, lady.

That's I, I, I don't understand

why

every single agency involved in this

is so complacent about it.

Um, like, and I think it's maybe like most excuse inexcusable with the fire department right because child protective services they're thinking about children right the cops I don't expect to do anything um but like if you're a firefighter I expect you to be able to recognize

sort of in your job it's actually it's actually kind of your only job yeah most of what your job is or should be is prevention i i i expect you to be able to recognize when a building is dangerous um instead of just thinking it's cool right and getting buffaloed by like

one dip shit, you know?

Yeah.

I just you got to wonder a couple things like, is this even the worst building they were at every day?

I mean, are there other ghost ships?

Oh, certainly not.

Oh, there are so many.

Yeah, there are so many.

There are hundreds.

Right.

Yeah.

Let me just put this down now as a marker because I was going to say this on the next slide, but I'll say it here.

This will happen again.

And it may not if it is when.

Yeah, 100%.

And it, you know, plausibly it could happen in Oakland again.

This is quite like that.

So many places like it could happen in London.

Like so easily.

I could give you the address of like three places that I've been to where this could happen.

Yep.

Well, the

auto body shop down the street in a very similar building burned down

like what two years ago, I want to say.

Yeah,

that was in the middle of the night, though.

So the

whatever karate studio or whatever was upstairs was unoccupied.

Thank you.

Mercifully, yeah, so

the sketchiest the sketchiest building I've ever been in was um was a squat right where the only door in or out was sort of like anti-barricade reinforced in case the cops came in with like a bunch of tires on the back of it and metal grates on the front of it and if you wanted to get in if you wanted to get out right you had to like open the inner door reach out through the grate unlock a padlock, and then sort of like unwind this whole chain, open the metal grate and get out.

And I just...

This seems...

Yeah.

As I was in there, I was thinking about the fact that I do an engineering disasters podcast for a living.

And I thought about how ironic that was.

And I thought about how this should not be a way in which people are forced to live, right?

Your sort of

sense of security for getting kicked out of your house should not depend on you having to like chain yourself in behind this like Rainbow Six Siege barricade shit.

Um, you should have like a door that locks normal style.

And I just like, I you should be able to have a weird, cool artist space that also isn't a death trap.

Yeah, like that, that's that's yeah, a hundred percent.

Um, so, so this

there's this legal aftermath, right?

Where they charge Almeina and Harris,

And

initially, the state offers this plea deal.

And

it's not a walk in the park, actually.

I think it's like some number of years.

It's not as many as it should have been necessarily, but then Harris probably shouldn't have been on trial in the first place.

And through all the victim impact statements and stuff, the victims' families do not want this plea deal to happen.

And so

the judge refuses it and it goes to trial.

And when it goes to trial, Harris is acquitted of all charges, which I think is difficult emotionally, but I think it's the right decision.

And Almeina gets like on paper, it's 12 years.

In practice, it's like 36 months of house arrest with a tag.

Wow.

It's like 18 months of like nominally a 12-year sentence.

And yeah,

if we go to the next slide,

that's the sort of sole criminal sanction as far as as far as that goes uh the the ngs eventually like file for bankruptcy they have to like they have to not be landlords anymore they liquidate all of their their shit um and most of it comes out of their insurance they they pay like i think it's like 12 million dollars and the city of oakland settles for like 32 million dollars um which is gonna

to to compensate the victims and like uh one guy who was like very badly burned but didn't die um

and

yeah yeah, this is absolutely something that will continue to happen.

I think, I mean, Oakland's been doing like trying to build more housing and we get back into housing policy and the sort of harrowing of hell here about, you know, what quality is that housing, what extent is, you know, how useful is that housing when you're sort of like demolishing homeless encampments.

But I think my sort of summary of this, right, is the kind of evil fucking hypocrisy of saying Oakland is a place with like a culture and an art scene that we are proud of, that makes it a sort of a vibrant and diverse place to live.

And we are doing everything we can to make the conditions of working in that kill you.

If you want your city to have culture and art that is not just like Jeff Kuhn's shit.

then it needs to house the people who make those things.

And if you want to not murder those people, then it needs to house them affordably and safely.

And no one is interested in doing it as far as I can tell anywhere and it's just it's so fucking bleak yeah no it's just not

it's it's not compatible with the modern financialization of real estate and you know buildings and stuff like that it's just you know

we're in a culture devoid of art and this is one of the reasons why

yeah absolutely um

so something something fucking werner herzog said

in his autobiography that one of the sort of impetuses for making all of his like weird shit is that he thinks that humanity is like running out of images, right?

That doesn't have new images anymore.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no.

I think when you make it impossible for people to create new images, you kind of like cut yourself off culturally.

I'll buy that.

Yeah, look at how much of the culture is focused around nostalgia these days.

I mean, you know, the whole goddamn thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, this has been, this has been the sad and angry presentation that Liam and I put together.

Um, what, what, what have we learned, if anything?

Uh, uh, I, I,

I don't know.

I, I just, uh,

I'm so fucking angry.

I did the research for this, and I'm still so fucking angry.

And I feel

just beleaguered.

Uh, like BlackRock CEO on,

I guess, is where we'd start.

What we'd need is old-fashioned Viennese public housing.

I just saw an article on that.

For artists.

Yeah.

And everyone.

It should be for everyone, obviously.

But I want a kitchen.

Please don't.

A lot of the

Viennese public housing had kitchens.

No, it doesn't.

This is sort of...

This is

the root of everything comes down to, you know,

it should just be cheaper to live.

Yeah.

You shouldn't need to live at the fringes.

And be punished for being there.

Yeah.

That's some bullshit.

You should not have to have a podcast in order to make a living wage.

Right.

This is undignified labor.

Yeah.

God.

Still like 600 bucks a month to live here.

I paid less than that in the same year to live in Philly.

It is legitimately insane in California.

It's not sustainable.

No, it's not.

And the fucking whole thing is going to signal.

It's got a whole room.

Yeah,

I know.

I paid $6.95 a month to live in West Philly with my ex-girlfriend.

So I paid like $350 in a one-bedroom.

I pray God my landlord never remembers I exist, right?

Because he doesn't do anything for me, but he never puts the rent up either.

So it's stayed at the low market rate for the last like 10 years.

It's an absolute shithole.

I hate it.

I can't wait to move to London.

But the problem is, every time I look at moving to London, moving to London becomes 5,000% more expensive.

Right.

You got to advertise yourself.

Good tenant, doesn't complain.

House won't burn down.

Yeah.

Just like a selfie of you, like smiling with like thumbs up.

Comes with husband.

Please help.

That's right.

Yeah.

Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Sure do.

Shake hands with danger.

I missed you, Safety Third.

Hello, Ross.

You too, Alice.

Oh, don't give it a voice.

Wow, it has the same voice as

the same voice as Steamboat Willie, now public domain.

Yes, Steamboat Willie 3rd.

We can do whatever we want.

I didn't realize Mickey Mouse hated cats so much until I watched it finally.

It's weird how much that makes sense on account of being a mouse.

Cats have done horrible things to the mouse people.

Yeah.

I've met Kitty Reichenen.

I remember that.

Kitty Reichinen.

Milkshake as well.

Milkshake has murdered several mice in the past few days.

Not Toby.

Toby just stares at them because he's a big fat ass and he's old.

Toby's just like, ah, I cannot be bothered.

I'm going to go lick myself again.

Yes.

Hello, Roz, Alice, Yay, Liam, and Schrodinger's guest.

No guests today.

Good enough.

Good enough.

By observing the lack of guests, we have collapsed that little quantum

position.

We actually murdered a guest and collapsed them into a non-guest waveform.

I mean, sort of many, many worlds.

We have murdered infinite guests.

Yeah, that's true.

And we'll do it again, Papow.

Yeah, yeah.

You do the danger five thing where you shoot someone over the phone.

Why not?

Yeah.

I decided for this safety third, I will tell you guys about an incident I had in one of the few years I worked at a cargo airport.

But before we continue, allow me to quickly load Chekhov's gun.

I am strongly in the camp of planes should be feared and respected, but not because the act of flying is magic and goes against gravity.

No, I fear and respect planes because planes are efficient ambush predators.

Let me explain.

While working at this airport, if you walked up to any ground crew member and asked them for a piece of advice about working ground crew, they would tell you, planes sneak up on you.

Oh, it's like trains in a train yard.

Yes.

They become scenery.

Yes.

I do not know how or why this happens, but my theory is that planes move kind of slowly when they are on the ground and you can't hear the engines from so far away that by the time a plane gets within 100 feet of you, your brain has turned any noise the plane makes into white noise and tunes it out.

Several times, I am persand hashed pound sign 39 semicolon been sitting around

I see Bilkshake has been at the controls again.

Yeah.

And get the feeling of being watched only to look up and see a plane barreling towards me.

So remember, planes sneak up on you.

All right, firmly in mind.

Yeah.

Now that Chekhov's galon is now loaded, Chekhov's gun, not Glun, gun, is loaded and on the table, we can continue on to the incident, TM.

I hate the incident, TM.

Yeah.

On that night, I was in charge of driving the belt around.

Seen here, I imagine.

Seen here, the belt.

If you have seen ground crew loading luggage into a plane, congratulations.

You've seen the belt.

If not, I include a picture of one.

What do you need to know about these belts in particular is that they sucked.

That would be the tube, surely.

Anyway, some were better than others, but not by much.

One night I had a really terrible one.

The engine would die on me randomly, and I have to spend a second turning the ignition a few times to get it back on.

I told my supervisor this, and he said the night was almost over.

Can you tough it out?

And then he changed the subject.

Then he changed the subject to tell me we needed to go to a plane on the other side of the building we were working off of.

If you've never driven on an airport ramp before, the planes have the right-of-way, and all other non-plane vehicles have to drive around the planes on a one-way road.

They are pretty big.

Non-plane vehicles might also have to cross the plane taxiway.

I'll include a picture, so hopefully, this makes more sense to the audio listeners like myself.

So

I'm

a little confused.

You know, the only reason I understand this is because I I grew up going to Washington, Dulles International Airport, where they had the big mobile lounges.

So you got the full airplane service vehicle experience whenever you went anywhere.

I'm just letting wash over me, you know?

Yeah, it's like, okay, back in the day before they did 9-11,

you could just go to the airport and look at planes.

Yeah, that was the good times.

But in order to get to the terminals where we could see the planes better,

you would have to take the mobile lounge out there.

So I, you know, got to go on the mobile lounge a whole lot and understand the process of not getting yourself killed by a plane.

Anyway, that's a tangent.

Well done, bud.

Yeah.

All was going well up until the moment I began to cross the taxiway.

About halfway across, my belt once again died, causing me to stop dead in the middle of the taxiway.

That's the star on the map here.

Oh, no.

Oh, dear.

Right in the middle of the junction.

Okay.

Yes, exactly.

No problem, I thought.

I had checked for planes before crossing, and every time this has happened throughout the night, one or two turns of the ignition turned the engine back on.

But this time, I was wrong.

Oh, boy.

No matter how many times I tried the ignition, the engine would not turn back on.

Quickly, I went into panic mode, trying to wave someone down to help me while calling my supervisor repeatedly and constantly trying the ignition.

Much to my dismay, no one noticed my frantic waving, and my supervisor was not answering my calls, and the engine still wasn't turning back on.

Anxiety nightmare.

Yeah, I sat there.

I sat there on the taxiway, trying this for about a minute before I remembered.

I need to be checking for planes.

I looked up, and to my horror, one had gotten off of the runway when I wasn't looking and was a few hundred feet from me on the main taxiway running parallel to the runway.

Not taking my eyes off the plane out of fear of losing it, I gave up on flagging someone down and calling my supervisor.

I quickly pocketed my phone, I unbuckled my seatbelt, got one hand on my backpack while the other hand was still relentlessly trying the ignition, and I decided that a plane turned towards me, I would ditch the belt and make a run for safety.

Much to my horror, the plane had begun its turn onto the taxiway I was stuck on.

I made up my mind I tried to try the ignition one last time before jumping ship.

And this, for whatever reason, was the golden one because the engine roared back to life.

Not wasting a single second to process what had happened, I slammed my foot onto the gas pedal and broke every airport traffic rule and speed limit, hauling it out of there and away from the plane.

Indiana Jones shit.

This is why the Top Gear Airport Service Vehicle Brace was actually a public service.

Yes.

I quickly made it to the dock I needed to go to, only to see my supervisor sitting on his phone.

I pulled the belt up and parked it so fast and so close to him that he probably thought I was about to run him over.

I still had one hand in my bag, and I wasn't buckled in, so I fell/slash jumped off of the belt.

Just the belt, the belt shows up at its maximum speed of 15 miles an hour, and this brown bucket just steals off of it, Like eyes the size of dinner plates.

I like how this submitter capitalized capital T, the capital B belt.

Got to respect the belt or the belt won't respect you.

My supervisor, upon seeing me, happily said, hey, I saw you called me.

What do you need?

Fuck you, man.

Despite the whole event, probably lasting only two or three minutes, I had called that man at least 100 times.

I began to scream and curse him out, and told him I had just played chicken with a plane because that hunk of junk, and I would not be stepping foot on it again.

His solution was not to call maintenance, but to point out another person, Ampersand Pound Sign 39 semicolon S belt

that had been left unattended nearby, and simply to use that one instead.

On GTA rules.

Yeah.

Knowing I wasn't going to win the battle, and maybe also coming down from an adrenaline high, I took a picture of my belt's identification number.

I walked over and took one else, Ampersand, Pound Sign 39, Semicolon S belt.

I spent the rest of the night with my ear to the ground, listening for another person to end up in my situation, but I never did.

Using that picture I took, I never used that belt again, even if it was the only one available.

Outstanding.

I'm scared of planes in a whole new dimension now.

Thank you for that.

You might run over the guy who drives the belt.

Yeah, right?

I don't want to harm the belt guy.

I don't want to harm ground stuff.

I'm only going to harm the catering truck.

You have this specific vendetta.

What's the catering thing?

The hierarchy of airport service vehicles.

Oh, yeah.

That catering truck's been getting way too up itself.

I was about to say, I was about to say, I only respect the belt and and the baggage trolley.

You don't respect the air stairs?

Air stairs?

No,

airstairs I don't respect.

That's why I get around by being a hop-on.

Yeah, if you're in that situation, don't even bother.

Just deploy the emergency slide.

The only reason I respect the airplane fuel truck is because it will explode if I fuck with it.

So, yeah,

I like this.

I like having airport safety thirds.

They're fun.

Oh, this is very good.

Yeah, give us an apple.

If you've had a comical experience with an airport service truck, please send it in.

100%.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Yeah, I got to do, for the sake of my autism and everyone listening, the end of the safety third segment.

That was safety third.

Oh, that was safety third, yes.

Now

we're out of practice.

We're out of practice.

That's right.

Now our next episode will be the Shinobo disaster.

Yeah, our commercials, we have a shirt that you can buy to cover your nakedness.

Yes.

We have done it.

We will put a link to it in the description, I hope.

And yeah, check out all of our other podcasts.

Thank you for your patience with us on this one.

And we will fix the workflow or perish.

Yeah, one of the two.

I'm really hoping for fixing the workflow.

I don't know.

We're fixing the work.

Yeah, um, I was on Trash Future, which was fun, but it's on their Patreon, so you have to give Alice more money to listen to it.

Yes, give me more money, please, please give me more money.

Um, I think that that's all the commercials, uh, yeah, that's all of them, yeah.

So, uh, we have a Patreon where you can listen to our bonus episodes.

We're going to record one right now, actually, and it'll be up in a bit.

It's on Art Nouveau, um,

yeah, so Art Nouveau.

Uh, other than that, I think that was all your contribution.

that is a podcast.

Goodbye, everyone.

Feed the Zen.