Episode 190: 432 Park Avenue (and other pencil towers)

Okay, I got the video recording going. I got my local going.

The Zcaster is now going.

Oh, look at the dog. Also, hello.

I'm going to do it as WAV to piss off Devin next time.

Wait,

do they not like WAV?

I don't know. I just,

I live to antagonize Dev.

Okay.

Love you, Dev. I always sounded as WAV.

I said, they told me I got

MC3, so I was doing it. Oh, yeah.

Honestly, I can say this. It makes no difference whatsoever.

Nova, you look beautiful today. A little.
Thank you. Yeah, this is this is, I'm, I'm experimenting with actually bothering to do makeup.
You look terrible.

Thank you. Roz, you look terrible.
You have to because the screen is recording. That's right, yeah.

All right. Well, as long as we're doing that,

hang on so the people can get a glimpse of my face. There I am.
I just came from work. Hello.
Now, show me the slides, justin okay i'm i'm i'm i'm going to the slides faster peasant boy here we are

hold on we have this is anti-polish discrimination and we have to say he's also norwegian i well i'm swedish so he's

no norway barely even had any peasants because there's no arable land who would want to live in norway roswood vikings

and not live in norway you go out and go in a boat and you go somewhere nicer and yeah like england minnesota

um

it's half norwegian half somalia that's the beauty that's the beauty of america we do the sink point and then we launch the podcast we should do the sink point yes yeah yeah yeah going to do three two one mark and then you clap three two one mark

okay good enough sorry boy it's like full for

every recording he hates the clap so

That's unfortunate. But it's also a very clap-heavy podcast.
Dog traumatized. Dog traumatized.
By clap. Woke left.
Traumatizes innocent dog.

Hello, and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.
I'm Justin Rozniak. I'm the person who's talking right now.
My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go. I am November Kelly.
I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her.
Yay, Liam.

yaliam hi i'm liam mckanderson my pronouns are he him i'm the person talking right now and uh

victoria go i guess i don't know what to call you host fourth mic

i think fourth mic of temporary temporarily unemployed fourth mic yeah welcome to the well there's your problem make work program we can have a

experience go victoria carrying on the carrying on the uh the the mantle of FDR. My name is Victoria Scott.
I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her.
And a guest.

And we have a guest.

One more guest. Hi, my name is Rob.
My pronouns are he and him, and I will be your elevator attendant for this episode. Oh, you got like the handle as opposed to the buttons.

It's always funny when you're in an elevator with an attendant and they just press the button for you. Oh, like at Phil's games, yeah.

I just want a peaked cap. Like, this is all I want from life.

The freight elevator in the BNY melon center has a guy who just sits on a milk crate and he pushes the button for you give the man a chair at least god damn i know i mean

i i do have a bomb shelter in the basement so when it really goes wrong the elevator attendant will be in unlimited positions of power that's a good point yeah

um anyway this is going to be chaos because there are like five of us yeah

What you see on the screen in front of you is

a very narrow skyscraper under construction.

I hate this thing. I've been wanting to talk about it for so long.

Yeah. And knowing us, it's going to fall down the day after we

sort of do the episode. Or an unusually skillful 9-11 is going to take it out for us.
Yeah.

Yeah, this is challenge mode 9-11. That's right.

New game plus, you sort of get in and you're like, okay, now let's do a slightly harder one.

To be fair, there's a whole like row of these things. We'll get into it.
So like you could like pinball it, like just hit the first one right. And then just

doing a kind of Takeshi's castle of 9-11s down billionaire's road.

Yeah,

this is 432 Park Avenue.

There's some strong arguments that it is not supposed to look like that.

One of the worst buildings in America, if you ask me. It's not very good.

It's poor. I'm on 432parkavenue.com.
Well, I I would be, except the, oh, fuck, I didn't pause my torrents. Hold on.
Yeah, let me.

That's going to give a moment for

all of the

right-leaning Yimbys to turn off the podcast right now. As we said, 432 Park is bad.
They could suck my ass.

This is a tower of abundance, if you will. Yeah,

this is

the middle finger to God, really. I have a question.

If we have a painting for California housing policy, what do we have for New York City housing policy? Oh, that's later in the episode. Oh, perfect.
Oh, thanks, dude.

I appreciate you keeping that gag going. Yeah.
Oh, that was all Rob. Oh, well done, Rob.
Yeah, Roz, you suck. You're terrible.

Roz, when you go home for Thanksgiving. Never mind.
We'll talk about it. Wednesday.
Okay, thanks. Yeah.

But before we talk about 432 Park Avenue and other pencil towers,

we have to do the goddamn news. Oh, fuck.
That's me.

Obviously, so much national news going on that it's incomprehensible. So we need to talk about extremely local news.
The ongoing SEPTA poly crisis has worsened. Polycris.
They tried monogamy.

Oh, yeah. We're going down to one form of public transportation.
And knowing us, it would be buses. It's buses, yes.

Well, Corinne will be thrilled.

None of the rest of us will be, but at least Corin will be thrilled. Make the 15 to the subway, goddammit.
So,

the situation on the ground at this time.

So,

SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, my local public transportation provider,

has now lost the trolley tunnel, as well as a good deal of regional rail capacity, um

as well as who knows knows what else is going on apparently someone had the bright idea that to reduce wear on the overhead lines um to replace the contact shoes on the trolley poles of the trolleys these were from i want to say a uh earlier order from a couple

from a decade ago when we thought we were going to go in on an order of trolleys with Toronto.

Was this supposed supposed to be what happened with like Germantown where they laid down track and then never used it? Or is it something else? No, no, this is out of the way.

How do two grown North American cities not have trolley bus money between them? We have trolley buses. Yeah.
No, the trolley buses are fine. It's the trolleys that are fucked.
Oh, excuse me. Yeah.

So the, yeah, they replaced the overhead contact shoes. with these bigger ones that were from Toronto with the idea that they would reduce wear.

Problem is, they're a little bit deeper than the older shoes. So, when they went through the tunnel, where the wire is much more highly tensioned,

those contact shoes both wore down to nothing and then knocked off all of the insulators and the holders. And

basically, everything down there just got wrecked. The whole inside of the tunnel getting a perfect Schwinnigan handshake

for sale, trolley shoes, never worn.

They use the Canadian inch is the problem. Yeah, exactly.

By understanding, I forget if this was in the Inquirer article or not, was that some essentially load-bearing employee either left or was fired.

It was basically the guy saying, no, don't use these contact shoes. I know we have a billion of them.
They won't work.

And the load-bearing employee is going to stick with me for a long time. You know, once

they're called bottoms.

Once they're gone, someone's like, hey, let's use these and see what happens.

Bad things, as it turns out. Stroke of someone, someone who is not woke by training, but is woke by inclination, trying to refer to the concept of a gay employee.

So, yeah,

we're extra fucked. I don't know what else can go wrong.
I'm sure plenty of stuff will.

Just you wait there, there, bud. This morning, Governor Shapiro delivered a really big speech at the Fraser Yard saying that he had come up with $220 million

to

restore regular capital funding.

But I don't know where he got that from.

If he could just magically pull money out of his ass, he should have a fucking money. Why don't we fund SEPTA? Right.

Just do an Eric Adams and come back from Istanbul and be like, don't worry about it. It's fixed.

Why do all the trolleys say Turkish Airlines on them now? Don't worry about an Armenian detection. We do have every trolley.
For like six months, we got a Turkish Airlines

wrapped streetcar in Seattle, and we were continually joking that it was Adams' signal that he was going to run for mayor of Seattle next.

Yeah, it's like we have, you know, restored funding to public transport, but we do have to refer to the Armenian genocide in quote marks now. It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

But yeah, so this, this, this crisis is continuing to worsen. Um, and I think things are going to get uh much worse before they get better.
Um,

you know, uh, I, you know,

I'm getting used to living entirely within like a five-block radius at this point. Uh, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine.
It's 15 minutes growth. It's happening to you.
They're here.

Yeah, I've been forced into a 15-minute

mandatory 15-minute

Klaus Schwab is like successfully curtailing your freedoms.

God, I just wish there was a store that had nice directed PennDOT

directed PennDOT to transfer money set aside for emergencies from the Public Transit Trust Fund to SEPTA.

Just as long as there aren't any emergencies, I guess this is an emergency. It's just

a constant emergency. Yeah.

Yeah, so

yeah, things are bad here in Southeast Pennsylvania.

It could be worse. You ever tried being a math core violinist? Yeah, or

in other news,

have you ever tried flying an MD-11?

Yeah,

yeah.

McDonnell Douglas keeping true to its corporate culture, which is, of course, as we all know, McDonnell Douglas, civilian or military, will kill you.

100% lethality guaranteed.

We have the shirt. Buy the shirt.

We do. We do.
I was just going to allude to the shirt because I wasn't necessarily going to promote the shirt over the dead bodies, but sure, fine. Oh, yeah.
It's important to taste it.

It's fine. It's fine.
Step over the sort of mangled ruins of people and buy a shirt.

Just poke the dead body with a stick, get 10 more million more followers. It's fine.

Help you process grief. New t-shirt.

Bury them in our shirts. Think of us like a true crime podcast.

God damn it. Stay sexy and don't get socially murdered.
Yeah.

No, so

UPS

put an MD-11 on the ground, not in a good way.

They perfectly 9-11ed a fuel storage facility in Louisville,

killing three of their own crew, 11 people on the ground.

And you go, that's crazy. How did this happen? Why do we have surveillance cam footage of a plane going in sideways? And the answer is because left engine fall off.

Left engine fall off the plane on takeoff. Parts departing the aircraft.

It's usually, usually not a good thing when parts fall off the airplane.

Especially when you're on takeoff and so it's throttled up and so it just sort of spirals off and over the wing.

And then maybe kind of the sort of middle engine, because it's a trijet, just dies.

And then it augers into

whatever this is.

So yeah, there are close-up photos of the engine falling off.

NTSB says that it had fatigue cracks on the engine connection, which

makes sense why it fell off.

There was actually a very similar DC-10 crash in 1979 due to they had this weird like bad maintenance procedure where to remove one of the engines, you're supposed to use a crane to lift it off.

But I forget who it was, Republic, I think,

worked out it was quicker and cheaper to just balance it on the end of a forklift.

That's

what, what, what, that's excellent. And this, this, like, rocked the engine back and forth in such a way that it like overstressed the pylon and eventually the engine fell off.

If that's happened again,

then that's really bad because that means that the sort of like 40-year-old sort of maintenance procedures are sort of coming back.

I don't care another load-bearing employee there who was like, don't do it that way.

This is what they need to do.

I don't care how cool you think a trijet is, and neither does the FAA, because they have grounded all MD-11s, also all DC-10s, if anyone was still flying those.

DC-10s?

All right. Yeah.
Cool. My question.
My question is.

If your package was on that flight, what do they put on the tracking update? Plane. Frowny face.

Yeah,

you expect an item in the baggage area.

Alex Frex item in the bagging area. Your package has left our storage facility.

It's really left our storage facility.

Your package has consciously uncoupled from its transport means. Well, the thing is, one of the things that

clipped on the way in was UPS's own warehouse. So it was entirely possible that the tracker would show that it had left the storage facility and then, I guess, come back briefly.

So once again, that is the kind of precision aiming you will need for like the main topic.

So I'm not sure once again, UPS Exploring New Frontiers in the most expensive and deadly way to not deliver a package on time.

And usually that's what I'm hearing. I think

the film that'll eventually be made about this will, of course, be entitled Return to Sender.

God damn it. Bras.

I already made a joke about wearing. a McDonnell Douglas shirt to a funeral, which I guess.

I mean,

this trijet shit, it's literally just like

they're cheap and they're old and the only people still flying them are sort of cargo airlines uh ups and fedex um and part of the reason why is because ups and fedex don't care about their employees and so

i i i am also personally bummed because they do fly them into not even sea tac but the boeing field which is even closer and lower to like the city of seattle so you can get like it's like the 80s it's like you i feel like i'm in the opening of like uh the sopranos you get trijet like fedex trijets landing like right over the freeway.

It's so cool. Obviously, you know, um,

I wouldn't recommend that we keep killing people to ensure that my Sopranos vibe is uh maintained, but still.

I mean, if they blast like the music on the freeway while you're driving to work or something, that'd be that'd be good.

It's got a tech fourth engine on there,

you know, for redundancy. The quantitative, yeah,

for redundancy, yeah, for redundancy, for the redundancy, yeah, so there's extra of them. Yeah, redundancy to do it again.
In case there's a problem with one, the other one. Yeah.

It's redundancy. Yeah.

Well, you know, all we can say is I guess we'll wait for the NTSB report to come out. You know, we don't know what happened specifically yet.
I don't think.

Yeah, I mean, this happened during the shutdown, which I don't think we're going to talk about.

And

I just think about being on the NTSB go team and and having to do this unpaid, like unpaid labor to be like,

let me just move the chunk of Indianara that used to be a person out of the way. It's just being super

retrieve the sort of like recorder with their sort of last screams on it. Great.
Fantastic. Probably got to pay your own airfare to get out of there.
Oh, God damn. Yeah.
I mean,

your package arrives four months late and like the cardboard's still a bit soggy and it's just a bit horrible in the end.

Oh, no, mybuysnus.com. Which won't ship to the United States anymore, by the way.
It's fine, but why is all of my snus red? And why does it taste like pennies?

Normally, does anyway? I don't care.

God, where are you getting this? Buy snooze. Well, not buy snooze.com anymore because I won't ship to the United States.

Well,

that was the goddamn news.

Someday these tariffs are going to end. Now for announcements.
Announcements. Announcements.
Announcements. Announcements.
Announcements. Announcements.

If my previous threats were insufficient, the threats will intensify. Come to the live shows.
Come to the live shows. I know, I know.

I'm going to find a way. I'm going to escalate from threatening to kill them to threatening to torture them.
You know, are you attached to your kneecaps? Would you like to stay that way?

It's a really, really elaborate, like, you know, just like... torture camp system.
Maybe it's a feather stay. Who knows? It's not my problem.

I don't. This is going to, like, the history books are not going to look kindly on this.
That's fine. They don't.
They're not going to look kindly on this side.

I think I'll be remembered in the context of my time. And the context of that time was not selling enough tickets to live shows.
Yes.

So, anyway, we have two upcoming live shows at the Spaghetti Warehouse in Philadelphia, which I understand is now called Union Transfer. I like that.

You're going to get there at loaded and be like, what happened to the spaghetti? Name it every time.

We're there with the Quorators podcast about questions from quora um the worst website on the internet yes yes we're gonna um non-fortunate

it's the 14th and 15th of december right yes sir okay yeah no i had a nightmare about it this morning where it was tomorrow and i hadn't written the slides yet that's okay that's fine we could get up there and read the phone book but we won't we'll put in a lot of effort and because of that effort and because of the fact that i'm going to torture you if you don't you should come to the live shows yes um That's a perverse incentive for some of them.

If that makes you feel strange, I'm not going to torture you unless you come to the live shows. Yeah,

we will be doing the beat and greet.

Every fan gets punched square in the nose, and then we sign something, if you like. Yes.

Oh,

do you have like various Patreon tiers? Because you could go from

one punch to severe mauling for the higher. We do.
We do. I am pleased to announce that we have upgraded the forgery of November signature.

Oh, and we're now going to rubber stamp November signature so we don't have to write it on the show. We actually got it, yes,

fantastic. Yeah, I was wondering why you wanted me to send you like a PDF with a really clear scan of my signature and my credit card details and my fingerprints.

Dental records was kind of tricky. Oh, yeah,

yeah, cool.

But

yeah, come to the live shows. Roz won't be willing to beat you with a hammer because he abhors violence, but I sure don't.

So yeah. You do the opposite of whatever the opposite of abhorring is, is what you do about violence.
Abhoring? Yeah, you abhor violence.

Yeah.

Video instantly requires content, requires like ID to watch.

Let me get this straight. Yeah, bud.
We're threatening to beat people up if they don't come to the show. Yep.
But also if they do come to the show. Yeah, it's a win-win.
Yes. Yeah.
Makes sense to me.

Yep. Okay.
It's sort of like

the other one just like happens to you. It's sort of like a French army in like late 1916 disciplinary policy.
And I think that'll work out for us about as well.

Yeah. Well, there's your problem.
Come to our live show and we'll kill you. You will be issued with a set of Horizon blue sort of great coats and then beaten to d ⁇ .

Yeah. Well, there's your problem.
The only podcast with Corvée labor. It's great.

Those were the announcements. Wait, no, they weren't.
No, they weren't. No, they weren't.
No, they weren't. No, they weren't.
What was the other part of the announcement?

The other part of the announcements was... The press one.
Oh, the press part. Yeah.
No, that was.

Yes, the press one. Please write nice articles about us.
The only ones we have are

a hyper-allergic article for like 2021.

Part of getting November over to the United States eventually, and I mean eventually being like, I don't know, 2028 after Trump's third term

is, you know,

the 01 visa process is really fucked up and complicated, and it does require there to be a lot of press about us.

So, if you work for a newspaper of some kind,

please write an article about us. It's too many don't know anything about

the other thing that I was going to say is get us in the post-millennial.

Dolphins. Does it have to be American? Media.
Can you just like get, you know, what is it, Times of India, that thing that just like reproduces everybody else's content? Oh, good question.

I don't know. Indian tour.
Here we go. Yeah.
Ooh.

We're going to do the whole tour on a commuter train with no doors. Yes.

Led by Jay Satay.

But the announcement I was going to make was the wish lists are live. I will link to them

in the description. These are for the seniors that I work with at Lutheran Settlement House.
They are for the kids who need toys and Christmas donations.

If our compulsion to bring you to the live shows doesn't work, if you don't donate to the children,

you will be mauled in some sort of hyper-efficient way. I'm good at mauling.
But also, you know, it's the dreams of children. You shouldn't need mauling to this way.

I want to say that my favorite thing at work is

when, so we get enough toys usually that we have a surplus, which, but however, they are stored in the furthest corner of the creepy wet basement.

So I always have to go like load myself, like make the sign of the cross and load myself in to go in the furthest corner of the creepy basement. And I'm just like, and I pop out like Santa Claus.

I'm just like, here's toys. And they're just like, why is that man screaming at me? Just for clarity's sake, the toys are in the basement or the children, which

the children are upstairs.

Oh, and I will be, I have, I have authorized my wife to spend the company money on a custom-made Santa suit. So look forward to that expense on our taxes.

All right. That was the end of the announcements.
As far as

the announcements.

All right. So this is mostly a Rob episode.
Hi, Rob. Let's go.

Yeah.

So as usual, I have, you know, my engineering qualifications through my Master's degree in English literature. So if I fuck up, then it's not my fault.

I can provide help where needed.

So basically, why are we talking about this?

Essentially, it is to make fun of some of the worst people in the world.

Watch them make each other miserable, watch them sue each other because they decide to build a fucking terrible

building and then sell condos inside it for many, many millions of dollars. The condos all look hideous.

We'll get to it.

And this is one of those ones where, apart from maybe some construction guys here and there you don't have to feel sorry for anybody because they all you know everybody involved is a piece of so it's really fun yes um here's here's a small quote from the new york times um i was convinced it would be the best building in the world said serena abramovich one of the earliest resident

one of the earliest residents of 432 park She, by the way, is married to an oil and gas tycoon, so fuck her too.

They are still billing it as God's gift to the world, and it's not. She and her husband bought a 3,500-foot apartment for almost $17 million as a second home.
Fusser!

Die.

Fuck you. It's about the size of a good size West Philly,

you know, twin, you know, sort of one of the big mansion type houses.

But yeah, you know. We could have the podcast castle.
for we could have six of the podcast castles oh yeah

how many dank basements could that afford you?

One, just one, yeah, yeah.

Uh, and just, yeah, as a small credit where it's due, I started reading about this or researching this because of a long read in the New York Times from October of this year, uh, written by Dion Cersei, Stefanos Chen, and Uvashi Uberoy.

I hope I pronounced those right. Credit where credit's due, New York Times, mostly terrible, but sometimes they do really good work.

Yeah, I also read this same article, and yeah, I read it, and I was like, this is for us. This is perfect.

The story was fantastic, except for that segue where they started blaming trans swimmers for why it was built poorly.

Well, yeah, they should have come in first place.

Yeah, I could not work out whether or not the private pool had like a, you know, had like a weird policy, but you know, maybe one day we'll get to that. I'm downloading the penthouse for sure now.

Oh, I'm going to kill everybody in this building with my bare hands, man. You're not going to need to.

i i i i thought it'd be a good idea to go over some basic uh skyscraper design here right

yes fantastic we have we have the best graphics in the game i don't care who knows that

um so high production values I mean, like the one article that Hyperallergic wrote about us that I was mentioning says, like, in the second paragraph, this is nothing intricately produced, like 99% or anything from NPR.

It's like, I forget what they call us, but it's like aggressively DIY and relaxed.

As you all know, I was just recently in Europe for a while and I got to see the Trash Future offices, right? Hell yeah. Got to record an episode with Gareth of Britainology.

You know, we talked about US versus UK railways and sort of the general vibe. That's over on the Trash Future Patreon.
You got to be on the special high tier to listen to it, though.

Can you send that to me?

No, no, give me $10.

Give me $10, you cheap fucking bastard. So, anyway, I was in the offices and I got jealous, so I went into the Patreon, took out a big bunch of money.

Long story short, this is our new global headquarters building. Where is it?

Are you going to tell us where it is? Oh, this is going to go up in Center City sometime fairly soon. Oh,

this is just a schematic. I'm going to do this, actually.
I was wondering if it was a good idea. Yeah, this is just a schematic.
The actual building will look nicer.

Anyway, yeah, no, but you're never going to get you.

No, you're supposed to read it from left to right, not yours.

Well, you're their problem.

Look, I uh

I have, I have, in all seriousness, looked into getting us office space for me and Roz to record at just like in the shittiest place imaginable, like above bars and stuff.

And I got so far as to send an email and I got just a flat, we are not interested. Thank you.

Yeah, it's crazy. Like

owning a podcast studio or renting a podcast studio is a ridiculous expense.

So do not draw any inferences about Trash Eature from this. Well, no, but the thing is that once we approve these schematics, which we did by a vote of two to didn't vote.
Yeah.

By a vote of two to two, one of you has a stamp with my signature on it. All right,

three to zero zero it is. Let's do it, baby.
So anyway, this is about 70 stories tall, right? We got about 2 million leasable square feet. I think we only need a floor or two of this.

So I'm pretty sure that with center city office space going at a premium as it is right now, we're going to make that money back, no problem. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, it's like us, us, and Dreessen Horowitz for five floors.

Just Rawson.

You're the first podcast to invent real estate scams. That's never been done before.
Look, it's not a scam. I lease office space out to people who want office space.

That's called business. Business.
This is landlordism. Roz,

have you ever considered writing one of those books that's like the 10 tips of successful business minds or something? I feel like you're on to something here.

Sell things that people want to buy what they don't teach you at Drexel University.

What they don't teach you at Drexel University. and it's Raw's fist by the guy from Anderson Horowitz in a parking lot.

So anyway, I feel like this is a good place to go over some skyscraper systems, some ideas behind their design, so on and so forth, why they are the way they are, right?

Obviously, we did a whole bonus episode about this a while back.

I'm just going to do it again here, but shorter for convenience. Yeah.

Or just go back and listen to the old one. Just pause this and like, why don't you do your own homework? Fuck me.
Yeah, exactly.

So, you know, okay, you need some kind of frame that holds the building up. You know, that's usually just a grid of columns and floors and crap like that.
That can be done in steel.

It can be done in concrete. Here in the United States, at least, usually office space is in steel.
Usually residential is in concrete.

This has something to do with the fact that the floors are closer together in residential buildings. So for whatever reason, it makes more sense to do it in concrete.
I don't know the specifics there.

You can also sometimes mix it up. So, like the

FMC tower near 30th Street Station, that has office space on the lower floors and residential on the upper floors.

So, the bottom is this light airy steel frame, and then on top of it, it's reinforced concrete.

Looked goofy as all hell when it was going up.

I wish I had a picture. I think I might have one if you want me to send it.

When we approved this, and now that we're building a skyscraper, WTYP and friend skyscraper building company.

Oh, never mind. Joke's gone.
Sorry, folks. What? No, we still have the plane, too.
Don't worry. Oh, no, that was what I was.

Yeah, I wanted to make sure you hadn't sold the plane that definitely isn't stolen and definitely wasn't involved. What have I been signing? Well, so here's the thing, right?

We have a rubber stamp of the sign. Enlisted into the Coast Guard? Yeah, we have a literal literal rubber stamp of your signature.
Our power is limitless. First of all, how dare you enlist me?

I was holding out for a commission. Why did you sign for all those UPS packages? Is what I want to know?

November is shipping me from buysnoos.com by the truckload.

They call the Garantor for your mortgage. Why do these keep saying you fucking bastard on that?

Below the tower, there's going to be some kind of foundation. This might be steel piles you drive in with a pile driver.
These might be

concrete caissons where you get a big auger and you drill a hole in the ground that's like six or seven feet in diameter, sometimes more, and you throw in some reinforced steel caging.

You fill the whole thing with concrete, right?

They might be a shallow floating foundation, depending on where you are. Sometimes that's sufficient.

Can you explain what you you mean by shallow floating foundation so a floating foundation is just a big concrete pad and it sort of floats in the soil okay good enough thank you right so that's going to be you know because there's stuff with like buoyancy in here which i didn't do good in foundation design in school i'm going to be honest that was never my fourth day yeah but you have the degree baby that's true

So, you know, anyway, you've designed the foundation in such a way you don't have like excessive settling and it's strong enough to bear the weight of the building, send it either into the soil or into the bedrock or, you know, whatever you need to do, right?

There's lots of loads that act on the building. All the way through the earth to a parallel counterweight building on the other side.
Oh, that's where the mole people live, yeah. Yeah,

we got a 70-story tall mole people WTYP headquarters sticking out of the Antipode of Philadelphia. Yes.
What is the Antipode of Philadelphia?

So this better be funny.

It's a spot in the Indian Ocean, southwest of Australia, says

AI overview. Very interesting.

That's where the missing plane is. Which one? The MH77, which one was the one that they never found? Yeah, it's on top of the helipad.
Yeah.

Please don't disrespect

people. Our mold people

counterparts. Thank you.

So I'm on the website for Schuylkill Yards to look at FMC Tower, and the heading just says, this is a building.

Yeah, it is it.

They're not wrong. Checks.
You know exactly what it is.

That'd be a good subject for the building show. Anyway, so several loads act on this building, right? On the frame.
You have live loads, right? Those people walking around. That's furniture.

That's, you know,

papers. That's computers.
That's all that crap. Stuff you can move around.
Yeah, fat man on the grotesquely heavy bicycle, et cetera, et cetera.

There's the dead load, which is the weight of the structure itself, you know, the steel beams, the floors, the

even some of the, some of the more

the fixtures you're not going to move around, you know, carpets, you know,

I don't know, HVAC systems, you know, pipes, you know, so on and so forth, right?

Um, then you have stuff that's more variable. You have like wind loads that they act on the building sideways, right? You have snow loads that act on the building vertically.

You have

rain loads. That's a little bit less important.
Usually that's less than the snow load. And of course, you have earthquake loads.
I'm just getting my sort of droplets of osmium rain. Yeah.

You got earthquake loads.

Those are pretty hard to deal with a lot of the times, but they tend to be the governing code pretty much everywhere now because at some point we acknowledged that the new Madrid earthquake occurred.

And maybe we should plan for this stuff, even if you're in like New York City.

So, you know, I'm not going to go into like load combinations right now.

It's not important, but either you build the thing very heavy to withstand all these loads, maybe you find a clever way around them, right?

So, one example, for the sake of comfort, you want to avoid excessive sway in the building from wind loads, right?

It's normal for a skyscraper to sway somewhat in the wind, you know, even like a foot off center,

but you don't want to go really far because that gets uncomfortable. So, you might put a big ass weight at the top of the building, right? right?

And you put it on hydraulic rams.

And then when there's wind,

you sort of move it to the opposite side of the building.

And then when the building starts to sway in that direction, you move it back and you keep moving it counter cyclically in order to reduce the sway of the building. This is a tuned mass stamper.
It's

this is also a spoiler. Yeah.

This is is getting more and more common in new buildings. There's also passive designs.

So, like the Comcast Center in Center City, Philadelphia, they had a passive mass stamper, which is just a giant tank of water. Cool, yeah.
Yeah, which swashed around,

but it leaked so bad they had to drain it, and they found out they didn't really need it anyway. So that just sits there now.

Now, other than our fundamental structural systems, right, there's other things going on. You have a facade, right? You know, if you're fancy, you call that a building envelope system, right?

That's the thing that, you know, keeps people protected from weather. It protects them from falling out of the building, right? You know, all that good stuff.

You have your big plumbing systems because you have to pump all the water to the top of the building because municipal water doesn't have that kind of pressure, right?

You have big, beefy sewage systems. You have heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, also pretty beefy.
Usually it's centralized, so you know, the ducting work is a big nightmare.

All these like huge HVAC systems have to do all kinds of weird things to maintain like multiple zones. And so

it's more of an art than a science,

big HVAC, which is kind of weird.

You got big electrical systems. A lot of times these buildings contain their own transformers.

They take in like full mains power or at least like medium voltage and medium voltage here is like, you know, 13 kilovolts or whatever that is.

You know, stuff that stuff that if you touch it wrong, it vaporizes you.

You know, you have trash chutes, you have mail chutes, you have stuff like that, right? You may have like a glycol system if there's like servers in there or something.

Interior, there's lots of different building systems, right?

Now the size and shape of the building, they may be governed by local zoning laws or ordinances, right? So if you have like, this is sort of the classic Art Deco, you know, wedding cake step back

that was from like most pre-war skyscrapers in New York City were built that way because there was a law that said you needed to step back the building at certain height in order to allow for natural light and air at the street level, right?

Yeah, I like that you've, you know, reproduced that at WTYP Towers.

I like that you're going for the retro look.

We haven't gotten this through the value engineers yet. That's the problem.

And we're not going to.

Well, it's apparently I've already signed off on this, though. Yeah, exactly.
Well, we thank you for your contribution.

And a lot of those older pre-war buildings had small floor plates. What I mean by a floor plate, that's sort of like the cross-sectional area of the building.

That was due to the need for natural ventilation. They did not have air conditioning.

You know, once air conditioning was invented, then you could suddenly start building big fat buildings with

huge amounts of office space on each floor where you could stand in the center and you couldn't see the windows anywhere.

You know, so yeah, that that the the this is uh one way that the size of the building is governed is by local laws and whether you have air conditioning.

But all the stuff I just mentioned pales in comparison to the real limiting factor on building size, which is vertical circulation, right?

Which is to say, elevators.

Elevators. Elevators.

It's all elevators. Ignore everything I just said.
The only thing that matters is elevators.

Thank you.

So.

Hi, Gwen.

Hi, Gwen.

The taller your your building is, the longer it takes for the elevator to get to the top of it, right?

Sure.

The taller your building is, presumably the more square feet it holds, meaning there's more people in it who all need more elevators to get like the rocket fuel payload thing.

The tyranny of the elevator equation, yes. Yes.
Yeah. Konstantin Shaukovsky launching a bunch of people to the top of a really tall tower.
Yeah.

We haven't yet built an elevator that can share an elevator shaft with another elevator. So each new elevator.
Because the Ocis Corporation refuses to innovate in the previous 125 years.

I think Tiss and Krupp had a prototype, but

there are no. Also, every advancement in elevator systems has been about you not dying.
What if I want to die? What if I think, what if I'm the Gus Grissom of

elevators and i think that dying in an elevator for accident is like worth the risk of conquering the elevator shaft oh this is uh they invented that dude they like they invented that it's called a pattern oaster yeah why don't you just do two on like a counterbalance and like just run it through like a carabiner on the top and then like you know just

straight up and down just like they invented that it's called a pattern oaster they like it in the czech republic but they go very slow um

just just crank that shit faster i don't

Well, they have to move continuously and you have to figure out how to jump on and off. That's the problem.

Skill issue. Yeah.
Just half of Central Park filled with like trebuchets and catapults.

Into the office and out every day is going like the film Cube.

I'm the cube from the film cube. Was that the cube from the film cube?

Wow.

The practical result of this is for a given site, there's some practical upper limit to the height of a building, or at least its occupancy, because otherwise the building would be entirely elevators.

Your sort of like mile-high Frank Lloyd Wright concept building does not work unless you have some kind of like VTOL aircraft with a lot of landing pads.

Love it, Job Chat. Love it.
Frank Lloyd Wright, when he designed the Illinois,

he did acknowledge that there were probably not enough elevators, but he said by the time this building were able to be constructed,

this would be solved using atomic-powered elevators. All right, man.
Yes. Hell yeah.
Why not? Yes.

So elevators are too cheap to meter, I say, as I led to the stratosphere. We still don't have the atomic elevator that solves this problem, but we have some ways to mitigate it.

Frank Roydwright visionarily predicting the Fallout series of games.

So you can have things like: I have an express elevator, right? So I'm at the lobby. I want to go to a floor up here.

There's an elevator that goes halfway up. It makes all the local stops.
And then there's another elevator that goes all the way up here before it starts making stops, right?

That's an express elevator. That's one way to do it.
Another way to do it is with sky lobbies, right? So I have,

hold on.

I'm at the lobby, right?

Once again, I want to go to a floor up here. Well, the elevators here only go, ah, crap.

I moved the mouse too much.

God damn it.

Yeah, I can see why we only said our production values were DIY. Some amount.
But there's a second elevator. It goes all the way to the top, but it only makes two stops, right?

And those are at sky lobbies, right? And at the sky lobby, you can catch a local elevator that brings you to your floor, right? That's another option.

That sort of takes some of the load off the elevators at the bottom. It also means you can stack these elevator shafts on top of each other, right?

You can also do things like have double-decker elevators. That's usually combined with a sky lobby.
So, you know, if there's an elevator that's going to be very highly used,

you can make a double-deck elevator.

You can do fancy dispatching systems where

rather than you being in the elevator hall and you push a button that says up,

instead you enter your floor and then the computer does beep boop bop and figures out the most efficient way to dispatch all the elevators to get as many people to where they need to go as quickly as possible.

Pen Medicine does this. Yeah.

I don't like it.

But it's more efficient.

But it's marginally more efficient is the thing. It's not, this is not not like a total revolution in elevator technology, right?

Ultimately, you know, when you have a big building with a lot of people who need to move around, you just need a lot of elevators.

And if you're in a building that's been underspecced, like Liam, you may remember this, the Times Square Holiday Inn.

One elevator.

One of them. One elevator.
26 floors

with eight hotel rooms on each floor. Fuck y'all.
Give me my money back.

Congratulations on getting the furry convention experience, Liam.

They did have warnings on each floor saying elevator wait time can be up to 15 minutes. And they weren't lying to their credit.

So, yeah, the big thing about buildings that constrains their size and shape is

elevators. It's all elevators.
Everything else, who cares? Just Just elevators. Anyway, that's what I had to say.

Has anyone ever considered putting a big fireman's pole so that the elevators only have to go up and they can just slide down? I just need some really nice gloves.

Yeah, I heard about the school where they had elevators that only went up and elevators that only went down.

Are you talking about sideways stories? I don't want elevators that go down. I just want the pole.
Are you talking about sideways stories from Wayside School? Yes. That book is an absolute banger.

Yeah.

The elevators work perfectly once. We've taken an elevator that worked perfectly once.
We were in New York, a city that hates us. Oh, yeah.

There is a, where I was growing up, there's like an amusement park with a, with a swimming pool inside, and it has like all the fancy slides, but it has one that's like, it has two slides that are almost vertical, like they're just off vertical, and they're only for like, you know, you have to be 12 or older to ride or something.

And I remember them because like the really steep one, several times you just completely let go of the water and you just fall through empty space until you hit the water again. Do that.

That's what you can use that swimming pool that's empty in the

building in Philly with their mass damper that leaked.

Just have people just cannonball directly into it.

Eat shit. See, dual-purpose mass dampener.
Like you put the corpses of multi-millionaires in there, weighs a bit more, gets a bit more stable. Don't see a problem.

You got to wait for them to decompose so they slosh around.

Just take it forever. Just like, come on.

anyway. So, yeah, um, skyscraper does it's mostly elevators, it's it's just elevators, anyway.

Anyway, before we start talking about the building itself, I thought we have to explain a little bit

why we are and what we're doing here. So, this is the view from Central Park looking south, and this is what's known as billionaire's row now.
Oh, yeah, this is oh, yeah, it's terrible.

It's just a bunch of middle fingers to working people.

It is just like it, if you want like a highest concentration of where the worst people in the world live it's this in dubai like that's kind of you know

i'm not saying you could do some surgical strikes but i'm saying they would be highly limited genocide on billionaire's row

i'm i'm just saying to the idf that maybe i've identified three hamas command centers i believe you have november

Yes.

So specifically the big five needle towers you see before you on the screen, those are the main five. There are others.
There are think a few more being

constructed.

And this is either where the worst people on earth live or, you know, more commonly, it is where they speculate even more on their apartment being worth forever and forever more in the future because, you know, that's what you do with very expensive real estate.

It's centered around West 57th Street, like I say, near the southern edge of Central Park.

Why is it the southern southern edge? It's because it has the best views and also because it catches the most sunlight.

So if you face the park, you have southern exposure, you know, and you can either, I don't think it's really good for wine growing because there's no slope angle, but you know, like you have the south-facing side.

And in November of 2025, just to give you a little bit of context, the top floor penthouse, which is 11,500 square feet or 1,070 square meters if you live in a real country.

Bo on the the war.

I think that

and one of, I think it went on to be sold for about like $100 million in the end.

That was a discount, though. First time it's sold when the tower was just completed, it went for $165 million.
So, you know, your asset may depreciate in value as well.

I feel so bad for whoever's asset depreciated in value. Well, you know,

wait until you get a look at what, you know, that money buys you. Next slide, please.

This is what you get for $100 and some odd million dollars. I think this is.

It's a big room. It's a room.

Yeah, it's the hotel lobby in the sky. Yeah,

you could

sit down.

Yeah, but you could. I do like that there's like openable windows so you could crack open, you know, and get a 47 mile an hour breeze from blasting.

That is pretty pleasant.

Every German listening to this just sat forward in their chair like, okay.

These probably only open like a crack is the thing. Yeah.
Oh, so it's worse. It's like a rifle shot.
Yeah.

Just getting birdstrike by opening the window, just like fucking getting launched by a seagull.

You could look out of the window. You could look at some of the little objects.

It's got a little yeah objects this is a large white carpet where i display my white furniture i never use which uh the developer assured me was very expensive but he actually got it from crate and barrel um

yeah good luck getting anything up or down from there um also you're

exposed on three if not four sides so then you have the problem of like

okay you can you can sort of be in there but what happens when someone flies a drone up to your window, which they will all the time?

Yeah, the windows don't oppose, you can't just shotgun blast the thing back to hell. Yeah, well, you could

just spend a lot of money on windows just once, right?

Well, no, you can do it any number of times, but you know, the windows putting like foil over all the windows, like a crack house. Who's the uh,

just got some plywood in there? Just like

I got Holland and Holland on speed dial. Coincidentally, does anyone have a good window guy?

I mean, I suppose the one thing you could do all the way up there in, you know, your multi-hundreds of millions of dollar penthouse is, you know, much like a very other tall tower, is you could feel closer to God.

And God really likes it when you come closer to him, as we'll see during this presentation. Of course.
That's why everyone in this tower speaks the same language.

I guess the other thing is, if you're in here,

this is sky prison, right?

Because not only are you sort of like up this high that you're fucking like you know swaying around you can't open any of the windows uh but also if you're like i feel like i want to go for a walk in central park which is after all basically on my doorstep uh it's very nice uh you know i want to do the kurt vonneger thing and go and buy an envelope or whatever oh sure that'll be uh like half an hour until i can get to the ground

Yeah, I will check elevator times, but it'll be something along those lines. This is, I think, the 80th floor, maybe.
it's something like that. It's 80 or 86th floor.

There's some floor plans later on. My understanding is this building.
If this, no, this is not 432 Park. I believe 432 Park has two or three elevators.
No, it has four.

It has four. But when there's only 100 apartments, okay, fine, you know.
But what?

Yeah, there's only 100 apartments. Well,

we'll get into how many apartments there are.

I understand it's a nouveau riche, but that's still too many apartments. I'm taking the opposite angle on this.
This is too much density.

You want to hear some real girl roster? When I looked at this image, my first thought was, Where do you put the big TV? Yeah,

where do you put the bayonet? Because I'm you can show me this view, and I'm like, cool, how do I watch movies?

Yeah, yeah, well, and also, like, with that much window space, all the time, you'll just have sun like hitting your screen.

Yeah, it's Samsung.

I can't game under these conditions.

Yeah,

I have the aluminum foil over the windows like a crack house, but that's just so the glare doesn't bother me when I'm like out of strike

selling one of these to the world's richest trans woman, and she has done this in order to like put one game. There's like one

floor that keeps color shift LED lighting.

There's like the cheapest possible dog cage in one corner. She's got a Steam deck

or some LGBT

lighting.

Shut the fuck up.

Some Fortnite clan really regretting their investment that they're not going to get.

Listen, she's gaming like an angel, but to get to, like, you have to walk across that carpet, which is like crunched in Cheeto dust.

Do you imagine the ping is good up there? Because like, you're just running more cable. Like,

It's literally,

it's like hardwood at this point, you know, but

anyway,

next slide, please.

So the other question, of course, is why is this particular part of the world so stupidly expensive? Well, the first is it has colonial limits.

My people are a vile tribe, I readily admit, you know, like it's, it's, it's why I no longer live there. I haven't done for 15 plus years.
I now live in Switzerland, where it's all normal.

Do not have me.

So it's literally his proximity to Wall Street and the offices of hedge funds, you know, various new money cunts.

This is not where old money lives, by the way. This is where new money lives.
Old money already has the nice apartment blocks that are directly on the park. This is where the new money lives.

You still have the kind of verticality problem where it's like if your office is two blocks over, the fastest way there is to rig up some kind of a zip line

well

i couldn't find it because it's literally not available online but when they uh started marketing the apartments for this not that you i think need to but they still did they um did like a five minute movie with the guy i forgot his name is it philippe petit the the high wire guy yeah and he did a high wire walk to this building and it was filmed and like essentially the the promo film as i understand it had no bearing to what you were actually buying.

It was just like a series of RT shots. So I think technically, you could high wire to your penthouse office in Morgan Stanley or wherever.
I want to see them try it.

That should be conditional for living there.

It would

be a coin or like a Tyrolean traverse, but like...

With the wind speeds up there, if you didn't get it right, you would just whirl around on it instead of landing.

Yeah. I want to see it.
Let's fucking go.

Getting bird strike in the middle of you know my commute,

yes.

Anyway, but like Central Park has historically been an area of extraordinary wealth.

It was like that under the Vanderbilts, the Morgan's, they built all the other fancy apartments on specifically the southern side.

Some of the people who live here or not, either in Park 432 or other similar buildings, include Bill Ackman,

Michael Dell, Ken Griffin, Lloyd Blankfein, some Chinese billionaires, some Russian billionaires. Just,

you know, your favorite people all live there. And they're also, crucially, these are all money storage facilities.

They're all bought on the assumption that they will increase in value or stay in value. And also, the apartments are protected by U.S.
law.

They are protected by a purchase price in the still reserve currency of the world. We'll see how long that lasts.
And you also have a bolt hole in case, you know.

When does this podcast get released again? It might be.

Bill Ackman's sort of very, very long 4 a.m. tweets make more sense when I consider that he might be having to sleep like sort of half a mile into the sky.
Yeah. Yeah.

And I mean, I usually, in most circumstances, I tend to push back on.

all these new apartments or vacant narrative for most buildings but for these sorts of buildings yeah no, this is an investment vehicle first. Um,

they're also all like not to be sort of trad and based here, they're all ugly as sin

that uh that middle one, I believe, is 111 57th, which is the one that I was reading about uh before we recorded because I got really fascinated by it because the developer's main goal with it was to be the tallest non-union built uh skyscraper in the city of New York.

Fuck my life. Jesus Christ, Christ.

And they ended up actually getting criminally charged with screwing over all their employees on overtime wages and not contributing to New York's workmen's comp fund.

And they were all really guilty of it, but none of them went to prison and they finished the building.

I believe currently the most expensive one of these buildings, again, that's not in Park 432, but in another one,

belongs to Ken Griffin of Citadel Security and Arch Nemesis of the GameStop freaks. He bought it for $238 million, I think, a couple of years ago.

That's like the top end, but that's just bragging, right? So at that point, you're just doing status, simple bullshit. Like, this is not.

Yeah, I mean, that's

just based on the images of this and like also, you know, all of the livability complaints.

You can buy like an incredibly nice turn-of-the-century, like 9,000 square foot house in Seattle for like $2 million.

I don't know what it is in New York. I don't, I never, I don't grow zillow there, but like, why? I don't, whatever.
Yeah, I mean, you can rent a small apartment around here for that money. It's great.

You could, if you wanted to spend that kind of money on an actual decent apartment, you could get it in some of the nice big pre-war apartment buildings that, you know, they have a huge rambling floor plans and so on and so forth.

They go for several, you know, tens of millions of dollars in these older buildings. The fun fact, you can also buy that in Chicago for

$110,000.

I think for this money, you could probably buy like the other half of Detroit and then start like a rival police force to match that other freak who keeps buying private police forces there.

You could do the Warriors 2025 edition is what I'm saying.

I've created Windsor too.

Anyway, next slide, please.

So these buildings are all quite new. This is from September 2007.
And as you can see, none of them is. I'm not taking not to be an asshole, but I do not believe this image is from 2007.

It was according to the caption on the website where I immediately acquired it from.

Two somethings, in fact.

I was just listening politely, and I was like, Yeah, sure, I'll believe that. Absolutely.

I forgot to take it. I didn't

do that that with a time machine. I said I would never do that, but I forgot.

No, no, no, but it's whatever. I might have been slightly off, but my general point stands, these towers are all quite new.
They were all built in the 2010s, essentially.

Why were they built like that? Let's swiftly move on from the thing that didn't happen.

Billionaire's Row and like the other needle towers in Manhattan were all built in the 2010s, like I was saying, but many of them are not quite as valuable as the record prices for construction for the apartments as then achieve.

What turns out to be really, really difficult is

this is post the big downturn. This is 2010.

So like

the hard thing is resale. So like the first person to buy it buys it for various reasons, as we discussed before.
The second person to buy it,

they might want to live in it and they don't like it as much. But essentially what you're looking at here is

one of the results of the post-2008 recession. And what was happening in New York at the time is because most real estate had collapsed

and there was so much like stimulus and other money still

floating around looking for returns. And the bet was that a couple of these super expensive towers would attract like the only people left with real money in real estate, which is people

with ultra-high net worth, with disposable cash, who still want super fancy apartments or want an investment for later. So that's why

Park 432 and the other towers were built in this time, at that time, because it was a bet that the real estate market in Manhattan was still functioning for people, for

billionaires and for people for whom the 2008 recession fundamentally didn't matter to their bank account, like not really, not substantially.

And so between 2009 and 2020,

about 22,000 odd new units, new condos or whatever were built in Manhattan across 530 new buildings. So about 44 apartments per new build.
So they're all quite closely crammed together.

And a lot of those were very, very expensive because they were specifically targeted at the ultra-wealthy. The problem is, though, Very wealthy people don't need a $20 or $30 million condo.

They already have five houses. They probably probably already have an apartment in New York.
So it's just a toy.

And the people who buy these condos at the price premium of a new build versus a resale can be very high. Like

the new build, the first sale is super, super high. The resale is much lower.
According to the New York Times,

the developers would try to ask for about 118% more for a first sale than for a resale. Because like they have to get their money out.

So like Park 432 cost like a billion give or take to construct they got three billion back in the end but like the first sale was super important for all the developers to get their money out also in case things go wrong as we'll talk about in a bit

and this also means that like a lot of demand or like a lot of these apartments stay vacant uh according to the new york times this is 2020 so it's a bit older but like there were about 7 000 condos available for sale in new york so that represents about six years worth of inventory for manhattan for like for Manhattan.

And a normal market clears through its full inventory in two to three years.

So what you're looking at is like an empty or an unsold housing stock that's sitting there twice as long than a normal market would bear.

But because it's Manhattan and because it's so expensive, normal humans do not buy these. So these things just sit there being empty.
And I'm sure that you know what you got to do, man. Yeah.
Come on.

It's time to go, buddy.

$1,000 a month. Rent control, those suckers.

It would be very, very difficult to retrofit these buildings so that normal people can live.

Yeah, I was going to say it's a cool thing to do to normal people. Yeah.

Maybe we use them as like prisons or something. I don't know.
Oh, it's like the four seasons when MDS did that whatever.

That's inhumane. Yeah.

I don't think it's ethical to turn a sort of like respectable, honorable, ordinary criminal into Bill Ackman, you know?

you just filmed the next judge dredd movie in there they just have like another sky tower to go into

that's that's how we punish the billionaires when we finally take power we make them live in the condos they own

when our shirt comes we will make no mistake we will make no apologies for the terror but it's just you can't get door dashed we will make no apologies for the making you live in your own apartment

oh my god imagine that like you you get like an uber eats or something and you just want it at your penthouse it's gonna take half an hour like your burger's going to be

it says meet at lobby

all right time to put on the uh adventure clothes i'm lacing on the hiking boots yeah

so basically a lot of these towers what they did fundamentally in the end like where the situation is now is create like a severe oversupply of some of the most expensive condos in the world because it's such a tiny market that you're aiming for And these people can afford to be incredibly choosy.

So, like, Park 432 sold out 90% when it like when it opened, which was really high.

But there have been other buildings we'll get into towards the end where, like, the sale rate has been a fucking disaster. And, like, none of like

right now, building one of these things is almost like a surefire way to lose money, which is, which is the good news.

The bad news is, of course, next slide, please, is for everybody else who lives in New York City.

uh so this is it

there are many many reasons that locals hate these buildings but one of the big ones is they literally they act like a giant sundial they throw actual shade across the city because they're so high this is one of them you can see the sun move you know move and this is where shade starts so like you can you can be sitting in central park enjoying the sunshine And then all of a sudden you are literally in the shade of one of these gigantic billionaire towers for like an hour or something because it's just a giant sundial it takes away the sun it's mr burns hours i'm gonna say this new york city is this disgusting swamp ass city it's 90 degrees out for eight months of the year um if i'm sitting in the sheep meadow here i want that shade give me that shade

our new our new plan roof new york city we can get like one of the roofers unions in on this as well we can get some nice sort of like dsa style art of manhattan with a big wee buy over it oh this could be our office buckminster fuller already had that idea to build a geodesic dome over manhattan no no he said it would He said it would pay for himself, it would pay for itself in snow removal costs in only 10 years.

Sure, man.

You got to do it like T-Mobile Park where you can roll it off on like the three nice days a year.

Yeah, under sniff, like we don't want the roof of New York. Yeah.

Covering Albany because you've like pulled the boss in New York for that day.

Everyone behave down there.

Yeah, I

just want to put myself down as a as pro-shade.

I mean, you presumably

put it like a in a big roll, like all those things you put on the outside of a camper van to create like a little shaded area in the sun.

So you just like, you just create like a giant tube on the side on Staten Island or something. I mean, they're not using that for anything good.
So, like, we'll do it like that.

And obviously, of course, like the main thing is it's the grotesque inequality thing. You have to look at

these

quite ugly, horrible places where the worst people in the world live, you know,

try to build a tower towards God. And,

you know, they can't spit on you because they can't open the window, but they would if they could. And of course,

none of these towers contain any affordable or social housing. None of them.
They just

do not.

They do contain servants' quarters, which is fun, but we'll get into that in a moment.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, and also, like, if you build this high, even, you know, barring the elevator problem, there's very actual few.

Let me try that again. There's very few actual housing units for the amount of space, you know,

on the ground or in the sky that they take up so they're not exactly like removing the problem of overcrowding in manhattan or in new york city uh there's almost you know 80 000 unhoused people currently in in new york so you know they're but they're not getting for various reasons they're not getting in here but current zoning laws for this part of manhattan do not require that any of these sites have any affordable housing whatsoever so that these are

only for the richest people in the world and like their servant class, like designated servants.

Yeah, I mean, these sorts of luxury buildings, I mean, there's some places where there are like requirements for affordable housing.

A lot of times you can get out of that by like paying into some housing trust fund that a lot of cities like to keep on hand. The problem is they never do anything with that money.
So, you know,

inclusionary zoning. I mean, that could be a whole episode.
I mean, you know, in Ice in theory, a lot of times it doesn't really work.

I look look forward to our zoning episode in which we all

we would actually all have to kill ourselves

the madness rude standing by

you get the fucking abundance guys on and you just whine about California for you know a couple of hours in a row it'd be great

whoa whoa whoa whoa when I when I signed up for this you did not tell me that I was gonna have to talk to Ezra Klein I'm out I quit yeah

I resign right now

I will be taking my stamp of Nova signature with me. Thank you.
And good luck on your Superfund skyscraper.

So like the reason the editor of his podcast listens to this podcast.

So like the reason these towers can or could, there's been some changes now, be built so high is due to some workarounds and like legal things to do with building in Manhattan.

And that's because some of the interior of these towers is not actually apartments.

They are what is technically or legally statutorily known as a mechanical void, where instead of more apartments, you just have

a giant floor of nothing. Next slide, please.

So, this is a representation of a mechanical void that's actually in use in New York City. This is a tower block on West 66th Street, which is a modest development by luxury standards.

You can get in there for like seven, eight million US dollar for the small apartment. So, you know, not that bad.

And the blue area you see on the right-hand side is the proposed or the built-I think this is built now, but I could be wrong, mechanical void.

So these have been banned since May 2019 by the New York City Council.

But a lot of these billionaire needle towers were built in the time where this is still allowed. So this is how it worked before 2019.

So city regulations cap the number number of stories, number of floors any building can have, which depends a lot on the location as well as the size of like the ground floor.

But before 2019, it didn't set a limit on the height of any particular floor.

And mechanical floors where they put the HVAC, where they put stuff for the elevators, pumps, all that kind of jazz, these are exempt from counting as floor area under zoning laws.

So what you do if you want to build a super high tower, but not like, you know, go over other limits, is you just put the HVAC in one floor that you just make five times the size of a normal floor.

So you have just like this incredible, like, empty space in the middle of the building where just like the HVAC pumps live, because you can make that four floors high or something

without transgressing technically any of the rules. There was one proposed building, I don't know if that was built or not.

I think that was a proposal that got scuppered, but they were going to have a mechanical void of 161 meters tall.

That's 161 feet, so 50 meters tall. Yeah, uh, so like you could fit like the building of Grand Central Station in there comfortably with room to spare, and it would just be empty space.

So the apartments above with more view, you could sell for more money.

I'm gonna say really tall

station is the subway station, the building is Grand Central Terminal.

Thank you.

So, like, one planner, when the New York Times, you know, talked with people about this particular sort of loophole, they said that, like, the max you would need for an actual mechanical void, because it is a real thing that buildings do actually need,

including Park 432, that like the maximum level you would need for like all the machinery, all the pipeworks, et cetera, would be like about 15 feet.

Yeah, so about five meters, maximum. It's like,

you know, you're talking like stuff like big pumps, you're talking like recirculating chilled water, all that sort of stuff.

These machines are big. They're not that big, right?

Even like if you have, I don't know, some of the stupid advanced new mechanical systems, you know, all the super energy efficient stuff, you know, which does have to be bigger a lot of the times.

Nah, 15 feet's going to be fine. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you know, 161 feet possibly a bit much.

I mean, again, I'm not sure whether or not that one was actually built, but there are like ones that are 40 feet, 50 feet, 100 feet high, just empty, just empty space, just to raise the floor on the expensive apartments that you actually want to sell above.

It's just

lunacy that they allowed this. There are two other things.
These are, I think, a bit more well known. Next slide, please.

Yeah, so this is transferable development rights. These are also known as air rights.

If the building next to you hasn't maxed out on its number of floors, you can sell your extra floors, put them on top of the neighboring building, and then they can build higher because collectively you are.

What?

Because it's like carbon credits.

There's a reason for this I put on the next slide.

And the other thing, this is the floor-to-area ratio. This is

if you have a bigger floor, a bigger footprint. then you can build less buildings.
If you only use half the footprint, you can build more floors on top. So one of of the reasons that like

Park 432 has a ratio of 15 to 1 in terms of height versus floor is because that allows it legally also to be much taller than anything else. That allows it to go

so high up in the sky. So this is

floor area ratio regulations are sort of what replaced. the old regulations that made you step back on every floor.

This is less prescriptive than that, which means that, you know, rather than having a nice old Art Deco building, I can have a plaza and then build, you know, the Seagrams building, right?

Yeah.

Anyway, speaking of air rights,

next slide. So, air rights, how did this happen, right?

This sort of goes back to the cause of all problems in the world:

the Penn Central Railroad.

Many World's number one.

So everyone remembers the Pennsylvania Railroad, you know, in the early 60s, they decided, you know, we don't need this ratty old Penn station anymore.

We'll demolish it and put up beautiful Madison Square Garden. Fuck you.

And, you know, that was, of course, an architectural landmark everyone immediately loved. No, that didn't happen, right?

You know, they tore the thing down. Everyone got really mad.

That led to all this outcry.

Eventually, the create, I'm simplifying this a lot, but led to a lot of outcry in the creation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission so that no one could do something like that again, right?

And all you have to do was watch the rags play.

Yeah.

So the Pennsylvania Railroad, merged with the New York Central Railroad, suddenly found themselves with another ratty old trade station that they wanted off their books, Grand Central Terminal, right?

The problem is Grand Central Terminal was now landmarked, whatever the hell that meant, right?

So the first plan they come up with is the big hyperbola tower. This is an IMPI, IMP.
Is it IMP or IMPI? I forgot.

Excuse me. IMP.

My brain's not working. I should have.
had that immediately. Anyway, this was going to be 2,000 feet tall.
It was going to be, you know, the tallest building in the the world, so on and so forth.

Of course, you completely level the headhouse, right?

This was actually proposed in, I think, 54.

So that's prior to the landmark commission. Just never got off the ground.
It's a real shame. You know, you had a real chance to install, you know, Sauron on top of there.
And then, you know,

Mamdani would never have been mayor in that circumstance or landscape.

I hate to say it is actually a pretty good-looking building.

But

so this didn't happen. Grand Central Terminal was still around.

So the railroad has to, you know, they're like, we're still going to try and figure out how we maximize the value of this downtown real estate, which is currently a useless train station, right?

The second proposal was 175 Park Avenue here. which is just, okay, we're going to jam a big boxy office tower on top of Grand Central Terminal, right?

And we're going to, you know, we're going to have like the foundations go straight through like the front of it. So I think this mostly preserved the main hall.
A lot of the other spaces gone, right?

And the Landmarks Preservation Commission took one look at this plan and said, fuck you.

And the railroad said, well, fuck you too. And they sued the city.
Right.

This case was Penn Central Transportation Company versus New York City. It goes right up to the Supreme Court.
It centers around this basic issue, right?

Is the designation of a building as historic, thereby preventing modifications by private owners, considered a taking under the Fifth Amendment, right?

Or what that means is: okay,

should the railroad be financially compensated for the loss of the use of their air rights?

And in a six to three decision, they came back and said, well, we don't care, but it does have to have separate bathrooms. And they didn't explain themselves anymore.

So this was back when the Supreme Court was more liberal. And they come through and they say, nah,

nah, you don't have to do shit.

You know, so historic preservation was saved.

But this idea of transferable air rights sort of sticks around.

People look at it and say, that's not such a bad idea, you know, so eventually they throw the railroad a bone and say, Yeah, yeah, you can sell those air rights to someone else because you can't use them.

So they can then use them to build a bigger building somewhere else, right? Yeah, like so carbon credits, as Victoria says. Yeah, exactly.

Usually, this is restricted to adjacent parcels of of land, which did screw over the Penn Central because Grand Central Terminal is entirely surrounded by a road, and therefore there are no adjacent parcels.

Car culture wins again. Yeah.
Suck shit, Penn Central.

But outside of this particular spot,

this has been very useful for these pencil towers, right? I want to say

there is a good graphic of this, I think, in New York Times a while back.

I couldn't find it, but one of the big ones, I think 157, they strung together a chain of historic buildings several dozen lots long to allow them to build it to the final height of 1,004 feet.

That's insane. They just did like weird swaps of properties so that property lines changed around.
and they touched like a dozen historic buildings just barely.

It's like, yep, that's an adjacent parcel we gerrymandered a skyscraper

so yeah and it's interesting this this system doesn't really exist outside of new york city to my knowledge i do not believe we have it in philadelphia um i can't speak for everywhere because these laws are all very local um there's no national historic preservation law that has teeth i mean we have a national register of historic places but that doesn't mean anything.

If you have a National Register building, you can just tear that down. It's fine.
It doesn't matter as long as you don't use government money. In Seattle, our tallest skyscraper,

because Seattle is so hilly, they just built it wide enough that it's got

three floors of ground level retail, which they then daisy chained the bonus for height for each floor of retail.

So they got to add like 30 extra stories on it versus what like Seattle was actually allowing at the time as maximum.

Oh, shit. And they were like, oh, cool, we're just going to build this other way up.
And then the FAA was like, guys, what the fuck? We have planes right here.

And that's the functional limit because the landing path for C-TAC.

I'll fuck you.

We'll just make a big hole in the building. Planes can fly through.
Yeah. Just

slide like a business card across the table that says McDonald's Douglas. And they're like, okay,

okay.

Personally, I think every airport should be like Kytak pre the demolition of of the Kowloon Walled City, where you get to

look at people's

kitchens as you land. But, you know,

that's just because I'm progressive. I'm all about that abundance mindset.
I digress.

I like fun regulatory nonsense like this. I think it's fun.

Makes you get inventive with it.

I know, right?

Make them work for it. Yeah.

Do some weird shit.

So, yeah, that's what I got on that.

Yeah. So anyway, in short, like we have now this series of needle towers in New York City.
They're all new built. They are a market of the worst people in the world.
They ruin the skyline.

They create shadows. They don't build affordable housing.

They're only possible. Well, as you like that for some reason,

architectural and regulatory loopholes. And, you know, they do not in any way, shape, or form house.

you know, people in some of the most congested and densely populated cities in the world with sky-high demand. And, and you know, as I say again, 80,000 unhoused people.

Um, and let's see how that goes. The painting is just

how you've got us like all sympathizing for us. Uh, for yeah, yeah, yeah,

and I just like that painting, it's there for no good reason, don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah, sure.

Um, also, we're like 19 minutes in and we're just going to start talking about the building, so this is going well.

Yeah, well, there's your problem, dickheads. It never ends.

Hi, it's Justin.

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

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month.

Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for.

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

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

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

Join at patreon.com forward/slash WTYP pod.

Do it if you want, or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that.

Back to the show.

You got me thinking about one thing. Are these actually all new build? Because I think there might be an exception, but that's only if a certain building that I

watch McCall it.

Where are we? It's in Lower Manhattan. I found it.

Shit. I'm not sure if it's a residential conversion yet, though.

70 Pine in Lower Manhattan, one of the older office towers, which, yeah, has is now a residential conversion. I bet that is now retroactively a pencil tower.

This thing does look like it fucks, though. Yeah, no, it's a good building, but it is very narrow and very tall.
That is, yeah, but that's quite cool. I like that.
That's that's pretty sick.

Yeah, guess what? We make the rules. You don't.
Fuck you. Yeah.

Okay, so we got one retroactive pencil tower. Yeah,

um, anyway, next slide, please.

So, we are finally on the object of today's podcast. Yes, this is 432 Park Avenue.
Just some general statistics so you get the gist of it. Um, it was built on the site of the old Drake Hotel.

The site was sold to the developers for about $660 million

in current dollar value. It moves through this incredibly complicated financial history due to the

financial crash 2008.

I got very sidetracked. I had to delete all those slides because we would never not be here anymore otherwise.

I will only mention in passing the financial interests of one Paul Manafort, who at one time owned part of the site,

because he got some funding from a Russian oligarch called Dmitro Firtash, who is an alleged Russian-organized crime boss.

And he got the money through embezzling more money through from Ukrainian natural gas extraction. So, you know, that's New York real estate really is quite something when it comes to money.

When it opens, it's a lot of money. It's nice to know as I'm sort of like imprisoned in my kind of sky hell that it was sort of like funded maximally unethically.

Well, also. It's a selling point to these fucking animals.
Yeah.

Drake Hotel was a nice old-fashioned hotel building. Now, I mean, those are sort of a dime a dozen in New York City, at least the buildings.

But it was an issue in that, you know, they did demolish a hotel for this, which is a problem because hotels are illegal to build in New York City.

What? Should I elaborate on that? Hotels are illegal to build in New York City.

Oh, that's right. Okay, sure.

You can't build a hotel in New York City.

It just, it doesn't, no one can do it. It doesn't pencil out.
It is effectively illegal. I'm not sure of the specifics, but I was asking about it.
You can't build build a hotel in New York City.

I hate that fucking

new challenge for the listener. Build a hotel in New York City.

Yeah, so

when 432 Park opens, it was at the time the third tallest building in the United States and the tallest residential building in the world.

It's since been superseded by two of its neighbors, Central Park Tower and 111 West 57th Street, which are, as you will have seen, or if you remember the skyline, they're basically neighbors.

Of the 106

apartments available, about 40 are known as accessory suites, and they are meant to house your accessories, your nannies, personal assistants, personal chefs, you know, people that you want to have around, but you don't want to

see.

These are the servants' quarters.

These are, of course, housed on the lowest floors because the upper floors are for the real people, where the real people live.

The median unit sells at somewhere between $11 to $90 million.

It achieves a 90% sale rate, which is pretty impressive,

and about 900 million in profit for the developers when it went on sale. In 2021, the penthouse

went up for sale for almost $170 million

and

was last sold in 2025 for just 61. So, you know, it does not, your, your, your real estate doesn't always go, go up in value, uh, because people just simply don't want it.

Damn, that's like a Hyundai Ionic five depreciation. Yes.

I think I dropped there, but hopefully my stream is still

it. It really is the carbon, it's like genuinely, this is like the carbon credits of buildings.

Uh, it has 84 numbered stories and is

segmented into 12-story blocks, followed by a double-story open space, which allows wind gusts to pass through the building, because otherwise you'd have big wind problems.

We'll get into that in a moment. And it also has,

as best you can manage with...

concrete a pure white lattice exterior of port in place concrete where the exteriors are made of portland cement that will be quite important later for you know how it's going now.

We have to briefly talk about the architect. Next slide, please.

What the fuck are these things?

This is

these look like cities, skylines, like achievement buildings. I'm so happy to see you.

Those are my Mazda 3. This is really going to put my kind of southwestern

growing city on the map, I feel.

So on the left, you see. I actually know one of the one of these is the walkie-talkie, the one that had the death ray, the melted colour.
The death ray. Yeah, yeah.

So on the left, you see the architect, Rafael Vignoli. He's one of those.
He's one of the big-time architects, like

Zaha Hadid. Like, if you want to make a big fuck-off statement building that shows how rich you are, how cool you are, you get him, or you got him.
He's since died, but

he's one of those. That's Zaha Hadidid.

Yeah, exactly.

I think his

grave to

hire lots of slaves in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Well, his son, I think, took over his architectural bureau or practice.
So, you know, the name certainly lives on.

Weirdly enough, he's originally trained as a classical pianist.

And later in life, when he had a lot of money, he built what he called a piano house on his own compound to house his nine classical pianos.

I don't want to hear a single person ever pocket-watching podcasters ever again.

I don't have a fucking piano house.

You should be getting mad at like two dozen architects.

Why would you you

who do you hire to build a piano house? The piano hired himself, he disappeared. Yeah, Billage All no, you you get Renzo, you get Renzo piano to do that.

It's his name,

you know. Sometimes, you know, it's it's it's it's like a lawyer representing himself, you know.

But I have to have someone to store all of my sarinins.

So yeah, like November was saying, he also did the walkie-talkie in London. Who will I hire to store all of my mediocre Australian lagers?

Yeah, this is the Foster's building of my compound.

So yeah, like November was saying, he also did the walkie-talkie in London and the Vidara resort in Las vegas uh both of which have one thing in common is they both love to focus sunlight on very small patches um the walkie-talkie being quite famous for it uh the las vegas one apparently for a while was hot enough to singe hair and melt plastic cups in the hotel pool which is sad

may have just been normal las vegas heat

yeah how could they tell the london one i remember because it melted cars it like not into like a puddle right but it would it would like burn off the paint on the bonnet or whatever.

And because if you're parking a car in central London, you are also a rich psycho who you should be getting mad at for making too much money instead of me.

And so like you would be able to go to the papers and get mad at the architect.

Yeah.

I was reading an article about this on NPC. I'll just read you one quote from it.
I said to the staff, I don't know if you know what's going on out there, but I was being burned.

And they're like, yeah, we know. We call it the death ray.

That's beautiful customer service.

I see you've experienced our torture device. We have a cute name for it.

I see you've attended the well, there's your problem life show.

Yeah, we know. We call it the death ray.

Maybe we should

make some alterations to the global headquarters so we will have a focusable death ray.

Oh, yeah. Big magnifying glass and an extending arm.
One Archimedes place.

So let's talk a little bit about the initial design because that is quite important.

So this, the developer, a guy called Harry Maclow, wanted what he called a statement building. So he wanted a

guy's nice

show

building, and he commissioned Finoli to make it work.

The demand was for a perfectly rectilinear building that was both super tall and super skinny. It has a ratio of 15 to 1.

So it's 15 high for every one across basically um the empire state building just by comparison only has a three to one ratio and that's because it has it's it's an older building so it has a flared base and it steps up rather than you know going straight

this thing not safely insertable i was gonna say yeah we did it

So this all this results in a building that is 93.5 feet wide and long.

It's a fine building, but like why did you put the tuned mass damper in such a a way that there's a sort of noticeable bulge about like a third of the way up from the base?

Don't worry, if you don't get that one, don't worry about it.

Uh, it is almost but not quite 1,400 uh feet high. It tops out at 1,396,

and it's a perfectly square design that is mirrored in the square windows and the cast concrete white exterior. It's all supposed to be

straight, clean lines, white. You know, this is also why it has a

completely flat roof, which will also become important later.

Vignoli said that this was inspired by a trash can, which

if I was paying $100 million for an apartment, I would not want to say that I lived in the apartment building inspired by a trash can, but go off, I guess.

It's confusing what rich people like.

Having worked on rich people's buildings before,

I don't understand it.

I mean, the trash will become a feature of some of the many problems to do with this building.

Oh, the trash is my favorite problem.

Me forgetting the names of my podcasts. No,

genuinely.

We'll get to it. But the trash solution in this building is my favorite thing about it by far.
Yeah.

This is

next slide, please.

Join me, Mr. Chiapo, in in the retail cube.

It's mostly your sort of standard-ish skyscraper build.

It's got a 30-foot reinforced concrete core with 30-inch walls that house the elevator shafts, mechanical services, etc., which is surrounded by open-floor apartments and an exoskeleton which is connected to the inner tube by

five outbreakers that you can see on the right. Those are like open floors and they connect the skeleton firmly to the inner core, which houses the elevators

etc

this is what the exoskeleton sorry so the skeleton looks like next slide please

there

so this is the exterior um uh the facade of of park 432 which unlike like a normal skyscraper where like you sort of for the bit that you see the bit that's like you know,

the decorative part that people gazed upon, that's sort of like bolted to the outside. It's not really structural.

It's just put on the outside of the metal frame. With this one,

the frame, like the facade

is the part of the structure.

The building cannot stand without the exterior.

It is an integral part.

The facade is structure and the structure is the facade. So it's the same thing.
So if... Sounds like Marshall McLuhan.

Presumably, they actually presented this drawing drawing somewhere with all this fucking Z fighting. Oh, my God.
Yes. Yes.
Since I signed off on this.

Yeah, you did. When did I get from the back? Come back and engineer something I can look at.

So, like, if this, like, the outside bit, like I say, because the facade is structural, were to start, I don't know, developing cracks or something,

that might be bad, but you know, this is simply a device known as foreshadowing.

The idea is that the exterior is, but like it's not connected to your apartment directly. What you can see on the right-hand side is

because

if the exterior were to be connected, like if your windows were to be like completely

set into, and if the exterior walls were the facade,

you would have like

too much wind movement. You would experience too much of the building swaying in the wind and moving about.
So what they did is they essentially built like these steel cages

on every floor on top of the concrete floor, but it is unconnected to the floor above.

So like your apartment rests only on the concrete floor below, then there's a gap, and then the next floor happens. That's what you can see on the right-hand side.

The cage stops and that's like connecting tubes and whatnot.

But like

your apartment rests only on the on the on the concrete floor below you. It doesn't it's not physically connected to the one above you.

That's also to help you know your apartment not sway around if all the floors were connected.

Yeah, this gives you some advantages. Like you got some space up here.
You don't have to air condition as much.

You know, obviously you need the studs where you can mount the drywall and all that stuff.

You know, and it prevents like thermal bridging to the outside through these big, big concrete members, which otherwise, you know, they'd be bringing the hot and cold in. as well as, you know, the

movements from the wind and so on and so forth. It'll also cost less to convert it to billionaire prison because the cages are already like pre-installed.

So at this point, we have to spend a little bit of time talking about the effects of wind on super tall needle towers. Next slide, please.
Is it good?

Is it less than expected?

Is that why we're talking about it? Is it why we're talking about it because it's not an issue? Because it's not a problem. It's never been a problem.
You know, Aeolis is our friend. It's fine.

Yeah.

So what wind does to all very tall buildings, but specifically to these super tall needle towers, basically,

the more slender, the taller the building, the more likely it is to be lively.

In severe storm weather with gusts of wind up to 100 miles an hour, a tower of a thousand feet, so like a third lower than Park 432, might sway. up to two feet in either direction.

That, as you will imagine, will be noticeable if you lift it. Quigley, okay, yes.
no, that's that's the thing outside a car dealership. Yes, yes,

it's not that bad, but it's not good. You wouldn't have made Bill Ackman live in the inflatable tube thing outside a car dealership.
Stuff won't fall over, but you will get seasick. Yeah,

yeah, you put Bill Ackman in the wiggler, and you know, that's that's just the life you live.

So, because 432 Park is twice as tall as any of the other surrounding buildings, you know, apart from its more taller neighbors now, and New York City is quite close to what we affectionately known as the sea or the ocean, it catches like a lot of high winds and high wind speeds.

What we affectionately know as the sea or the ocean is accidentally a perfect trump phrasing.

I've never been proud of it.

And so wind loading, so like these deformations start to affect

windows specifically, so like windows and window frames, if the width to height ratio is one in five. And part four three two is one in 15.
So the effect is very, very strong.

And if you don't control these impacts of wind, your building is essentially going to do the deformation dance,

which isn't good for you or the building you live in.

And even at sub-catastrophic levels can impact elevator movements because the shaft is no longer perfectly aligned and like wind tunnels shoot, like wind forces shoot up through the elevator tunnel.

That also stops elevators from moving.

Scary. Okay, sure.

I live in the Tacoma Narrows Bridge building. Yeah.

It can warp the facade. It can deform all crack glazing.

Sliding around like you're on the deck of the Titanic, just like, oh no, my million dollar couch.

Somebody call my window slash shotgun guy.

And also, like, even at like non-catastrophic level of impact on winds, like these dynamic motions can create like real discomfort if you live in these ultra-high-rise towers.

Lateral acceleration, vibration, and even the perception of movement is enough to make people seasick.

See,

now with like ultra-processed food, gout is no longer a disease of the rich. So it's good that we still have diseases of the rich.
Yeah. Yeah.

So like, and especially on the higher floors, even with all the insulation and everything they put in between you and the facade, you can still hear the building like creak and groan.

And if you're on the 86th floor of your needle tower and the wind is blowing outside, that may or may not be comforting to you. That's a

really gonna interfere with that puppy girls league game.

What I'm seeing from this diagram, though, right? which is interesting. I mean, okay, you have actual deformed shape.
I assume this is all exaggerated from sheer and flexural deformation here.

It does look a lot like when you add sheer and flexural,

you know, it's going to move around a lot at the top, but it's basically in one piece, right?

What's really going to get you is somewhere, like, I don't know, 10 or 15 stories up where, you know, the whole building is just bending.

You know, that's like all of the forces are right concentrated there.

um but which is don't worry those are the those those are the floors where where you know the service people live so don't worry about that too much they're they're not yeah i guess so they'll be fine

like you can get another nanny there's a window are nannies put some trash bags where the window was yeah

are nannies people longest threat in the history of forums um next slide please so So you get all of the deformation.

You also get this, which is called vortex shedding, which is quite an awesome term. And it specifically affects these very tall buildings.

Basically, the taller you build, the more wind impact you have, and the more vortex you need. You never want to get into what I think of as like helicopter aerodynamics, you know? No, no.

I mean, I don't know what you're talking about. No, Nova, like helicopters are perfectly safe.
Never, never been any an accident with those.

So, like, crashing an experimental secret version of 432 Park Avenue onto Osama bin Laden's compound in what they're calling the most ironic revenge.

So basically, when a vortex forms on the side of a building, it creates a suction force.

The force then generated by this vortex is like, it's not so large enough of itself that it can create a catastrophic motion or anything like that.

But the problem is these vortexes form because of prevailing wind directions and you know your building not really going anywhere.

They form in like well-organized patterns and that that rock the building as they move individually from side to side.

But they do that continuously quite a lot because winds do tend to come from one direction or the other.

So, like, your building is constantly moving in the same directions, and you need to account for that in your design properly.

And certainly, you know, if the facade is critical to the stability of the building, that's really quite important that you do that.

And

what makes it worse is if you were to say, build a statement building uh with sharp 90-degree rectilinear angles, because like

you don't find a lot of like strictly rectangular forms in nature, do you? Not as many as you'd think, no, no,

although it's

a frontive

uh form. Can you just say a box turtle is a thing? Yeah, get it

like in

Minecraft, like in Minecraft,

it's in the name box.

Yeah, it's weird. You don't also don't see as many death rays naturally occurring, but you know, one day, maybe.

You know, there's a supernova like every week. Come on.
I mean,

yeah, Steve Own.

Yeah, Steve Owen was killed by a gamma ray blast, like a gamma ray blast.

Just perfectly micro-targeted his heart. Yeah.

The stingray, that was a cover-up.

That was coincidental.

So, yeah, like a building with like these sharp 90-degree corners will create a greater vortex effect. That's like why

a lot of the really tall buildings are not that. They're either stepped or they're curved, which allows the wind to like more naturally flow past buildings, not park 432.
Or they're just thicker.

You know, that's another option is just make the floor plate bigger, you know,

and possibly more rigid.

The other other thing you can do is

vary the height of the building, so like build steps in it,

or you can like have different shapes along different compass points.

So, that monstrosity tower that that's now, I think, the highest in the world, that thing in Dubai, with all the sort of drum towers that are like glued together.

Part of the reason that's done that way is it's stepped and it's curved because if you bolt like sort of non-sequential things together, the wind curves around it and sort of breaks apart because it can't create a vortex essentially.

But again, Park 432 is designed specifically to be perfectly rectilinear, so it doesn't have any of these natural protections. What it does have is, next slide, please.

Hold on. Yeah.
Is it has two main defenses. The first being the open drums that you can see in red on the right-hand side.

These are literally two open floors

where the wind passes through the building. So instead of just like slamming into it,

they do break up this vortex effect and they allow the wind to pass through the building apart from the central drum.

And that allows, that stops the sway. It also stops these vortexes from becoming overly intense.
The other thing that they have is

we were already talking about it before, is these

tuned mass dampeners.

Big block of concrete. Yeah.
On hydraulics some springs yeah on some spring yeah well no iron hydraulics springs aren't enough you gotta move it actively so these these these um

park 432 has two of these on opposite sides of the of the central column right on top of the building you can see it on the right hand side on the top it says tuned mass dampeners they are on the tallest like right beneath the penthouses and essentially

As discussed, they are there to counter wind motion and to sort

stop the, like to counter, to prevent counter force to the sway of the building. And it should be enough to stop the building from getting blown over in like a megastorm or something like that.

So the two tuned mast dampeners in Park 432 are 600 tons each.

They consist of mast steel plates. They were ferried up in individual sections and then bolted together.
on top of the building. And they are attached to the building by, yeah, by springs.

I think pistons, I think,

in this particular building. I wonder how they did that.

If the tower crane was still operational, or if they did something I like to call elevator abuse,

which is actually fairly common in building renovations, one thing you can do

is you you sort of if let's say i need to get a big steel member into an upper floor of a building i don't have a crane. So what do I do? Well, there's a thing

in the building that already goes up and down, right? There's an elevator. So you cut out the weight sensors.

You put the elevator on, you know, some kind of independent service and you sling the big steel section underneath the elevator. drive it to the top of the building.

And then you just have to open up the doors of the floor below the building and just sort of pull it out somehow.

So like Guantanamo Beba for elevators.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

You can torture an elevator to get heavy things to the top of a building.

Just blasting Metallica down the shaft to make it go.

Oh, exactly.

I mean, technically it's written in the stress position. So like, are the open drums open to the public?

Like, if you're in the penthouse, you want to go out for a smoke and you just go down to like the closest one to the floor and just like

that'd be awesome. I'm not sure if you'd actually want to be there.
I don't know what the wind speed is up there, but like, you know, I mean imagine it'd be pretty hard to get the lighter.

Yeah. Yeah.
I feel like there's got to be when it says windproof it had better mean

you're going to lose your hat. Yeah, I mean, if I'm paying 170 million for the penthouse, I want at least like a complimentary Gore-Tex jacket so I don't freeze to death up there.

You know, like that's that's the minimum.

Locking my like like Carabina or my climbing harness into like a hard point

on the sort of drum floor and just spooling out a length of uh a length of cable like an astronaut doing an EVA.

So, yeah, like these open drum floors, like I say, the main function is for them to like let the wind flow through. They're also

at these five points there, like where the outriggers

like extra fix the facade exterior to the internal column and that provides structural rigidity and sort of makes the whole thing thing go.

Apparently though, like you don't, as regards the tuned mass dampeners, you don't strictly theoretically need them.

From the reading I've done, the building shouldn't fall over

if it didn't have them. but they do provide a much more like comfortable way of living or any way of living.

It's got to be strictly for comfort because you want the building to stand up if there's a horrible windstorm, which then causes a power outage, which it might do.

So you can't like rely on the tuned mass damper to keep the building up. It has to be

just, you know, it's there to provide comfort. It's not there to keep the building up.
Yeah. Yeah.

But, I mean, without it, it would be, I mean, and to be fair, there has been some proof because as far if I understood it correctly, there have been two or three occasions where they've had to repair these two miles dampeners, and the building didn't fall over while they were doing that.

So, you know, all's well, that ends well, I guess. Yeah.

I do like how rich people have invented an apartment building that if your power goes out, it gets significantly less comfortable to be in.

Like, even more so than the power went out. Yeah.

It's like a sort of more extravagant version.

Yeah,

it's like a more expensive version of that

stupid app-connected bed from Amazon that all stopped working when there was a power outage when US East One went down from AWS and nobody's beds worked anymore, which was an incredible.

I can't remember the name of the company now, but it was incredible.

Anyway, next slide, please.

Amper and make it actually exacerbate the sway because you want to be on a roller coaster

doing cool tricks with it like a lowrider. Yeah.

So, this is the exterior cladding or the facade or you know, part of the structure of the building.

Uh, this is poured in place because obviously, like, you can't prefab and then winch it up 86 floors.

Um, and it's poured in place concrete of this specific uniform shade of off-white, almost white, that gives the tower its specific, you know, landmark look.

Uh, during construction, they poured more than 70,000 cubic yards of concrete and 12,500 tons of rebar were used for the superstructure to keep the whole thing going.

So, like I say, it's cast in place. And because you have to pump it up and it has to settle fast, this is a

pumpable, self-consolidating mix with very little water in it. That will be relevant later.
And according to Structure magazine, the places you go for this podcast,

the idea is you could have access to newly cast horizontal surfaces within five hours of placing. So it would rise.
I really hope that Structure Magazine has like a good review of building show.

Yeah, maybe right there. Maybe they can write up, well, there's your problem.

Yeah. Yeah.
There you go. I'm profiled in Structure Magazine.
I think, oh, you get to get a glossy, you know, feature in there. Yeah.

to my knowledge, um, I had to go, I am now like trying to think back to my materials class. I was never a concrete guy, I always knew the masonry a lot better.
Um, none of this is like

wrong per se, no, in terms of how you could put together a building, um, especially like when you're building a reinforced concrete high-rise, a lot of the times, you know, because normally concrete doesn't reach its full strength until 28 days later, as the uh as the movie goes.

Yeah.

But in the interim, what you do in order to build the building higher while the concrete is still curing is you put about one trillion shoring poles on each floor, right, as you build up.

And then again, 28 days later, when all the zombies are dead, you go in and remove them, right?

Yeah, I think I have this in a slide later, but I think when when they got really efficient with it,

they could like pour a whole floor and then three days later put up the next one and three days later put up the next one.

So it's a really fast process because of the way this concrete, this concrete mix was specifically designed for Park 432.

Yeah, three days a floor is about average these days. Yeah.
Yeah.

And like it also had, like I say, a really low water to cement materials ratio. And another thing that they

that they refuse to do is they refuse to mix in fly ash, which like creates some much more like stronger, more stable concrete, but it also causes the concrete to darken and grey, which they didn't want.

They wanted white concrete specifically

and not painted, no kind of like facade over it, just like the concrete itself has to be white.

Yes, i want the i want the visual of my house being built on sand

again rusty

material science but fly ash here fly ash is like you know coal ash from the power plant or something like that it goes in it it performs much of the same function that like volcanic ash performed in roman concrete just to make it very, very durable for a very, very long time.

And mixing in fly ash and concrete is very common. Like, most concrete has it.
That's why it's gray. Yeah, but if you have

such an issue. It's part of just the deal with getting concrete that it's gray.

Yes.

Or no.

You know, like you can't have.

Oh, we're going to build this building where this dude's got a concrete facade that also happens to be structural and it's the tallest, thinnest building in the entire world.

But also, if the concrete's gray, I'll fucking kill you. Yeah, it has to be white.

I want my fucking Apple iPhone building. You can also dye the concrete a different color if you want.

That's cheating, but that's

you could do, you can do all kinds of shit with admixtures.

Anyway,

building opens. Next slide, please.
Yeah.

Some slump test on this thing. That's what I want to know.

Well, so genuinely, in the New York Times article, there's a lot of them going back and forth with their concrete people who presumably get into the concrete people and what they would say. Yeah.

I've had a lot of headaches over this. Yes.
Anyway, buildings open. The worst people in the world move in.
Some critics love it. Some hate it.
Like I say, 90% of the apartments get sold.

Jennifer Lopez and her boyfriend or husband, A-Rob, move in.

I found some apartments currently for sale in the block on Zillow of all places.

They go from 10 million to 55 million. You can move in, maybe not tomorrow, but soon if you want.

The amenities that you get, but you do have subscribers. Subscribe to the Patreon.

No, we're already getting our own building. Yeah, but like, I want a second home in New York City.
Subscribe to the Patreon. Yeah.

We're not zone for residential use, Roz.

No, Center City CMX5, residential use is fine. Oh, you're right.
But what if you called it a watch collection compound and technically it wasn't for permanent habitation?

Yeah.

No, it can just be for permanent habitation because it's legal.

Yeah, but that's less fun. Yeah.

We don't have to do illegal things sometimes. Piratical about certain.
You're only doing illegal things because you want to at this point. So do I? What do you care? It's cold illegalism, you know?

Yeah. Also, pay my bail, Roz.

So the amenities take up about three full floors. They include a private restaurant, that's what you see on the slide, which is run by a Michelin star chef.
There's a fitness center.

Why does it look like a four seasons at the Fuhrer bunker? Yeah,

this is like a nice Marriott.

You know,

it looks just

depressing.

I think I've had my grandmother's awake in there. I think it's very possible.

Yeah, there's a billiard room you can into, an 80-seat movie room, a boardroom you can rent. There's a 75-foot indoor swimming pool.

What are the house rules about if the sort of grotesque movement of the building fucks up your billiards game?

I think you just get like a free do-over or something.

I think the billiards are on the amenity floors, which are at the bottom of the building. So you don't

get a doo-loom. It's mostly being applied to the floors where the staff live.

Okay. I was hoping when you were saying that it was going to be applied almost exclusively to Jennifer Lopez and Ayrod's apartment.
No, no, they're way up top.

They're experiencing a different deformation scheme. Actually, they're not anymore.
They

sold up and took like a one or four million dollar loss on the apartment because they didn't want to be there anymore.

Yeah, anyways.

I think I have complaints about my apartment.

There's, you know, the usual amenities.

These do all come with like monthly or a yearly cost, including for like if you want to have dinner in this horrible restaurant, you do have to like pay for your meal.

Um, but at least at the beginning, uh, breakfast was included. So you could go and, you know, have,

you know, go down in your slippers and your own. It's the most appealing thing you've told me about this building.
Yes, for sure. So I could move in somewhere and they gave me free breakfast.

I'd be like, well, you know, for 15 million, that's pretty bad, actually.

They give you free breakfast in a travel lodge.

Some of the amenities

A higher-tier Marriott Hotel. Right.

Anyway, so like, this is part the third. So the next slide, please.
This is, it's all going just fantastic. That's just a nice picture I found.
Don't worry about it.

Next slide, please.

This is where we ask the question. Oh, it's black.
No,

you've made a mistake here. What you've done is you've applied some photos of like small arms fire damage on buildings.

This hasn't been standing for what 80, 90 years, right?

Yeah, it's part of history. You don't want to just sort of like patch that over.
It's from, you know, that's actually anti-aircraft fire on one of those. Yeah, it's like that bridge.

Is it over in Mustar in

Serbia? Bosnia. Croatia.
Yeah.

It's over the river. No.

No.

Mustar bridges Croatia and I think Bosnia because I know the Croatians did a bunch of war crimes on it

and then that's that's what the like poison drinking guy was doing uh that's why he was in court in the first place uh oh yeah

um

yeah it uh

yeah karadzic i think um

yeah but it's it's in bosnia yeah

Yeah. Anyway, these are all not.
I can be completely wrong about all of this. These are

pictures of the concrete about nine years after the building was finished.

Sorry, just as a technical question,

are the

bars black, like in the final presentation? Because there are some words that are in there.

It doesn't matter if they are, like, I can just talk about it, but like, just to... Oh, yeah.

Just so I don't say, as you can see in the picture, there's words written on.

Yeah. No, they're black.
All right, that's fine. That's fine.
I mean, it's just about visible, but it's gray on black. I do note that one of them is

so these two on the left describe themselves as spalled, and I am used to spalling in the context of

armored combat. I'm used to that being a thing that armor does when it's hit by something.
For the outside, it like spalls on the inside, and you get a bunch of like sort of sharp fragments of iron.

Yeah, like

yeah, yeah, yeah. Concrete can do that just sort of on its own over a long enough period of time, especially if it has reinforcing bar, especially if that's a normal tank or something.

You know, but do not build your main battle tank out of concrete. No, not ideas.

If you build it out of out of concrete, just put in some fly ash. I know your tank will look ugly and gray, but it'll be a lot more functional in the meantime.

I want a pure white tank to blind the enemy.

Layer one of the survivability onion be seen in such a way that people go, damn, he's got that shit on.

The pure rectilinear tank is incredible.

This is the cavalry part of the household cavalry.

This is part of the new Vatican City Army. Pure white tank with a cross on it.

It's a little bit fucked up that the Vatican don't have cavalry anymore. They should maybe bring bring that back.
Yeah, they probably should have a few tanks, yeah, just in case.

Yeah, so so spoiling, yeah, it's like it's when flakes fall off of the larger body, it's it's chipping. Um,

and yeah, as we were saying, the most common cause is corrosion of the reinforcing steel bars.

When steel corrodes, it can expand up to 10 times its volume, which stresses the concrete, which basically sort of like pings chunks off

the side. And it's not uncommon for like high-rise to lose some material and chips as the building settles.

Like that's that's an accepted part of like these buildings of settling in, but maybe not to this scale and maybe not nine years in, like that, that that's bad in general.

Yeah.

Rebar has all kinds of fun trade-offs, right?

I don't know the specific details of construction in here, but yeah, so you have a, you have your concrete section here, and then you have some kind of curved bar that goes around over like this that that repeats then you have your your bars that go like this and that and there and this is a cross section right right um it looks kind of like a frog anyway um so but yeah each one of these bars you know it if it gets affected by water in any way which it does um they tend to corrode as they corrode they expand in this really ugly way One of the ways you can avoid that, hold on, I'm going to switch the color of the pen here to green because that's the color the plastic usually is.

Is you can coat each bar in green plastic. I don't know why it's green, but it's always green.

And

the interesting thing about that is it will completely protect the rebar from corrosion unless there is like a very slight nick in the plastic, in which case

it will immediately corrode at like 50 times the rate from that place onwards.

The Achilles plastic.

Yes.

So the other thing. The electrolyte, the electrolysis, you know, that sort of stuff.
I mean, the corrosion reaction is funny. It does funny things.

So the other thing you see, which is on the top right-hand side, is called honeycombing. This is basically like small gaps in air pockets.

This happens when the pull hasn't been done exactly right and the mix doesn't quite fill the space between the rebar and the form work, like the cast that keeps it in place while it settles.

So this is just like you, this is this is just like a cast that's gone slightly wrong. Again, that's not massively a problem on this scale.

You're always going to have a few casts that don't go 100% right. But again, when the facade is structural and all that stuff, it might be a bit more of a problem.

The last thing... I'm going to have to...

I'll be honest, you know, if you're being this psycho about the facade, I just put some super P in there, super plasticizer, excuse me, which just makes the thing settle out instantly and no aerovoids whatsoever, self-levels, all that crap.

Yeah, but then like it wouldn't be pure white anymore, and then we wouldn't have miscegenation towers anymore, and that would just be bad.

Nah, this is like just a little bit of something you put in there, and it affects the chemistry. It'd be fine, probably.
I don't know. Again, it's been a long time since I took material science.

Someone in the comments might go, No, if you put Super P in there, it collapsed instantly. I don't know.

I haven't played slump test for the PS3.

Anyway, the last thing, bottom right, you see, these are called surface voids.

They're again, they're pockmarking in the surface, and they are caused by water that's trapped between the surface of the mold and the concrete pore, or air bubbles that are trapped in the mix because there wasn't quite enough mortar to fill in the space between the aggregates.

So, like, these are just flaws in the paw. Um, and that leads to that these look very bad, these don't look good.

If I was paying one billion dollars for the sort of like very smooth, very perfect, very white sort of thing, you know, you know,

it kind of looks like Traverteen. You know, if you were going for that look, it would look great.
Um,

but uh, I guess they weren't going for that look because they have no taste, but sadly, because instead, uh, it looks like next slide, please.

These are facade cracks. These are all different, like, you know, spalling, pockmarking, voids.
All of this you can now see on the outside of the building. These are pictures from October 2025.

So last one.

Normally,

normally I appreciate stretch marks.

But in this case, I think it kind of detracts from the overall.

Yeah.

No, I think it looks better with this. I'm going to be honest with you.

I think that's a good idea. I think this is a better tiger pelt.
Yeah. This is a better look than a pure white building.

Now, the fact that these are all structural problems with the structural concrete is a different issue.

So I'm just going to read you a little bit. This is from a PDF of the suppliers of the white concrete mix because they were very proud of their efforts, as you understand.

I'm just going to read you a little bit from it.

White cement reacts more quickly and is temperamental, which meant that the construction crews needed to pay careful attention to the quality control process,

travel in trucks, the raw materials, adjusting for the weather, etc. etc., in order to have a very good consistency among the different concrete batches every single time.

The rapid construction schedule was an additional challenge with the goal of one floor per week for a total of 90 floors.

Thus, the combination of white exterior, the aggressive timeline, and the general requirements of building a superstructure made this one of the most challenging concrete projects that has ever been executed.

Oh, they did a bang-up job with this. This is the promo material, mind you.
I should just, you know, add.

It's not the foreshadowing material.

Yeah, just kind of, I got my concrete guys in, and after a lot of kind of like yelling at each other and then me, they put something in the brochure that just says, greater even than the gods.

Yeah. Cubris at 432 mark.
You know, you got to think about the logistics here. You have a concrete plant somewhere off-site.
You know, they mix the concrete there at the plant.

They put it in the concrete truck. The concrete truck has a certain time window where they can get to the building.
It then needs to be pumped all the way up to the top. Then you put the concrete in.

And, you know, probably

you're doing like, I don't know, a dozen trucks per floor or something. You know, so it's got to be consistent over every single truck, right? You're doing these batches constantly forever.

It's probably more than a dozen and like you can drive trucks into downtown Manhattan, no problem. Like, there's never any traffic or anything that you could like get jammed in or anything.

So, I don't worry about that.

Yeah, no, no, I mean, there's again, there's a window where you can deliver the concrete, and then there's a window afterwards where that's when you have to phone up your buddy and say, Hey, do you have a you got a foundation you need pouring somewhere else, like a crappy one?

Right. And then after that, of course, you have to go to the designated dump site.
Um,

concrete logistics is insane, everything about it.

Yeah, and then it's made easier if you just have to like pump it up 90 floors. That makes it makes everything, and it has to be this weird shade of white.

So if you're asking yourself, if they were pumping it up at that point, or if they were, you know, bringing it up in a bucket with a tower crane, because I think after a certain, after a certain amount of floors, bringing it up with a bucket makes more sense.

I don't know. I haven't done, I did maintenance, not construction.

So if you're asking yourself at this point, well, why is any of this like a problem apart from the pricks that live inside it? Next slide.

Sure.

The moon is one of the most strategically valuable places on Earth.

You could drop rocks with the power of dozens of nuclear bombs.

Brianna would never change. Think about her.
Never, ever change.

Yeah.

God.

She's so smart.

That's my president.

Yeah, so the reason why it's bad is because if you have a building that's like a couple feet short of 1400 feet tall, that means that any concrete chips that like ping off the side of the building has a very long way to travel down before it hits the deck.

And essentially, there's no shit. I did some reading about this, right?

The Department of Buildings in New York City, their power, power, their sort of legal power about this is they can require you to build like wooden, like plywood sheds over the

sidewalks so that, you know, if somebody drops like a scaffolding pole or a bucket full of nails or whatever,

you don't die. But if what the thing that falls off the building at like terminal velocity is,

is a sort of like chunk of extremely white concrete. There's no shed you can build

that that's not penetrating through and killing you stone dead.

Clean through.

Yeah, I mean you can get taken out by a brick from like four floors up.

This is not a not a situation that you're I mean if they're if the concrete is spalling, it's probably falling off on like pebble-sized chunks.

You know, you're not necessarily going to get, you know, a big, big rock of concrete, for lack of of a better word. Yeah,

I could tank a big rock of concrete. I could tank a pebble-sized piece of concrete traveling at like 45 miles an hour.

Yeah. Yeah, but when it's a big rock of concrete, all of a sudden it's breaking the sound barrier by the time it gets to you.

Me standing on the sidewalk outside Park 3432 looking up, screaming, come happy, coward.

Just looking up and being like, are those shock diamonds?

So this, this, I'll read you a little bit from the New York Times.

This is from a report that the 432 condo owners commissioned by like an engineering consultancy firm when the thing started going to shit.

The report, quote, details the presence of new cracks, failing patch jobs, and missing chunks of concrete on the exterior of the 6th, 49th, and 54th floors.

Loose concrete had to be removed from several areas of the facade, including from very high floors.

this is a bit more from the same article there was they've done some there are some photos in the new york times article that have some of the patch jobs on there which are again really ugly and really clash with the sort of like joke off motion vision of the building because they because they had to use real concrete

also you know you this is a very expensive fix just because you need you need the guys trained to work on the outside of buildings like this a lot of people don't want to do that um you know, I used to do it and I decided I didn't like it.

Granted, much shorter buildings, but and I was in a mass climber, not a swing stage.

But, you know, swing stage is like the window washer, you know, platforms, you know, that are hung from cables as opposed to the mast climber, which has two masts attached to the side of the building, which is usually more for heavy renovation.

Anyway, that was a yeah, but you don't want to be in a fucking boatswain's chair on the side of this, dodging chunks of concrete falling down on you.

No, sometimes I was either the floor guy or the roof guy for the guy in the boatswain chair. Um

preferred being on the ground to being on the roof. Imagine doing a bosun chair, though.

Just doing it with like rope work, just doing like, you know, fucking

dangling off the side of the building while the vortex winds like. Yeah, fucking.

I don't need shit for this. I can self-belay.
I just give me like a long enough length of rope. I'm doing it.
But it's not.

Yeah, so you would go over the side in the boatswain's chair with a plastic bucket

and a chisel. And a trowel.

Yeah.

And chip off any loose concrete you find. Yeah.
And drop it in the bucket.

But try not to drop the bucket or the things inside the bucket all the way, you know, down the road. No, the bucket is attached to the rope.
You can't drop the bucket. Okay, if you

problem solve.

Theoretically, you could accidentally tip tip it out. I don't know.
That's why there's someone on the ground to say, don't walk in front of the rope.

I'll read a little bit more from the New York Times.

Anthony Ingraffia, Ingrafea, I don't know, I'm sorry, an expert in concrete fractures and a Cornell University Engineering professor emeritus who reviewed photos from the inspections, described some of the defects as cosmetic for now, but said that others have the potential to peel off the building and become, quote, concrete hand grenades.

Oh, I'm sleeping. Just like lowering the lighting in your office like cosmetic.
Now, for now.

I would not sign off as a licensed engineer in the state of New York that this building will last forever, he said. I would sign a document that says the Empire State Building will last.

This building, I doubt it, which is good news for the ants living below.

So, what happened here? Next slide, please.

So, to make sure that this white concrete, which is a genuine engineering problem, was done properly, they made.

I've read various sources, various points about this, but they made like 12 20-foot test columns off-site a couple years before the construction started.

I think this is a picture of one of those test columns. I think I have it correct.

But Engineering News Record has a paywall that I couldn't get around, so you know, I'm a little limited in my resources at the moment.

But normally, when you test architectural concrete you just do it once day my 12 just

usually you're not using a proprietary blend that hasn't been used before usually you're using something that you know is like relatively well established you know because it's uh either you're fine with gray concrete or it's not the facade material um but you know this building has to be special so i i guess we gotta we gotta really make sure this thing works.

Which

it which it didn't really, because like according to emails obtained as part of several lawsuits that are currently ongoing between the owners and the developers,

which I read a bunch of,

said one representative from the architectural firm, so from the firm Vinodi's firm, Vignodi's firm, quote, this is an embarrassment.

It seems to me that the concrete mix has been diluted by the two entities.

Sorry, let me try that again. It seems to me that the concrete mix has been diluted by the two entities, i.e.

the construction company and the developers, who have never done architectural concrete facade before, Lentley's and Maclow properties.

I believe that one of the financier groups is following what their team is telling them.

They are going down a dangerous and slippery path that I believe will eventually lead to failure and lawsuits to come. This process of ignoring consultants' recommendations.
So apparently...

That must be so satisfying to get your you're gonna get sued email subpoena.

I told you.

So apparently these test columns already started showing surface voids more than an inch across and water infiltration in the columns.

And all 12 test columns showed cracked, showed cracks after a 12-month period, as it turns out. So

why did they build the columns?

If they were like, oh, this shit's awful.

you build you build a test you know this is perfectly emblematic of the whole thing you build the test to give you the right answer so that you can build the actual thing you want to build and if it doesn't give you the right answer then it's failed its purpose as a test bed but you still build the thing yeah

well you know i'll i'll give you i'll give you the answer actually this is um a bit from the the new york times one of the end one consulting engineer recommended specifically adding this fly ash to the mix to make the whole thing more durable But

this is from the New York Times, they will not accept fly ash.

Parentheses, color is too dark, replied Hesimina, an engineer who was then a senior associate at one of the builders in a December 2012 email.

There were two options, Sylvian Marcus, a structural engineer consulting on the building, replied, You can have color or you can have cracks. And they chose wisely.

Yes.

So, despite several emails from this guy warning about the instability of the mix,

the developer decided to begin pouring two months later anyway. You know, whatever.
Shut up.

Quote again in the New York Times. Cracks emerged even at the start of the pouring process, according to the lawsuit.

It said that the concrete supplier was still experimenting with design mixes three months after the start of the facade construction and without understanding the cause of the cracks or how to prevent them.

So

what if we built a super tall needle tower and just kind of went YOLO with it?

Yeah, I mean, if the test didn't work, obviously, there's something wrong with the mix. So, you should start fucking around with it while you build the building, right?

That makes a lot of sense to me. That is standard practice.
If I had a stamp, I would absolutely sign. No, no, don't do that.
That's fucking stupid. Nova has signed off on this.
Yeah,

no one stamped. No one, anyone who stamped these drawings should have gone to prison.

Listen, I don't know why you would do that to me.

Sorry, buddy.

So, like I said,

use the restroom. I'll be right back.

All right. It's fine.
Keep going. Keep going.
No, I need the next light button for... Oh, god, damn.

I don't know who has the master switch.

It's fine. Imagine the next slide.

Yeah.

There's no fear of disaster on it. Imagine the next slide on your mind.
Right. We have like five more slides of content and then we're at shake hands with the angel.

Oh, this is Ruthru Everest levels of episode. I'm so sorry.

This is my fault. They're like mostly my slides.
Ah, it's fine.

Oh, man.

My dog is giving up.

He gave me like a half hour's worth of dirty looks and then fucked off to bed.

I'm looking at the cover of Wired magazine, which has a tactical girlfriend on it, and the hard left shooters leading a gun culture revolution.

Oh,

these, these, these, these.

I, I, really.

You,

you apply.

Every day is Friday. You're, you, the, the, the, the, the has too much money transsexual, and I indict myself here, is a scourge on our community.

But when you are the I can drop two thousand dollars on my special interest at the drop of a hat kind of special interest, transectual, and your special interest is rifles, and then you allow yourself to be photographed with them, you're gonna get us all fucking killed.

Hey, on the bright side, like that one

will kill me first.

Yeah, you're probably fine because you don't have any guns there, yeah. No, that's true, but they'll kill you for other separate stab vest

reasons.

Yeah,

I don't know. I just, I find it, I find it embarrassing and unreflective and

like a lot of sort of left gun culture, you know?

Hi, Rods. Hey, I was uncontroversial in your absence in this.
I either can or can't stay in. Oh,

damn. How do you feel about guns? Guns are pretty cool.

Yeah, they are, right? They are. Yeah, you can shoot bottles and cans off a fence.
I've been clear about the sort of bonuses, the benefits of that.

You can shoot deer with them. You can.
You have to. I'm not getting problems.

And that's good easing. Unless it's got CWD, in which case it's bad easing.
Yeah,

scary. Your brain implodes, yeah.

If you had a gun, you could stop them from pouring this bad concrete. That's true.
All right, so the conclusion we've come to is I'm the New York City Department of Buildings. Yeah,

Zoran, I am like three handshakes away from having your phone number. Like, we can make this happen together.
You need commissars in the Department of Buildings. Yes.
Yeah.

That's true. That is true.
Either that, or, you know, the only thing that stops a bad developer with shit concrete is a good developer with shit concrete, bro.

They put it in a latex suit. They put it in a latex enclosure.

So

while the building

was going up,

let me try that again.

So, while the building was going up, because everybody could see and, you know, the builders and developers were noticing all these cracks, they brought in like this series of consultants to fix the problem and help them out because it was obviously not going quite according to plan.

And most of them recommended this elastomeric coating, which is the stuff you see above. Yeah, because it would get a little bit more.

It's a cool consultant sort of like hurriedly kicking a bottle of ViviShine out of shot of the webcam. What you need is to put this coating on it.
Don't worry about it.

I would just bring in a really big roll of duct tape.

I mean, this probably would be a good thing.

Like, just be like, this is now the Cristo building.

If you used a normal concrete and put an Elastomeric coating on it, that probably would have been fine. Yeah.
It would have been white. Everyone would have been happy.

Well, you say this. We had to look at the building or, well, well, yeah.

You say this because, uh, quote again, the New York Times, but the coating would give the building a glossy sheen that clashed with the developer's vision.

As you can see in the slide, it does look quite glossy.

What you have to do, this is because it's fresh.

It looks matte and

building. It looks matte and garbage in like a few weeks.

No, there's a solution for that, even if you somehow got the glossiest one.

You go down to your local hobby shop, you buy up the entire stock of tester's dull code and spray it over the building done easy i fixed

just a few a few weeks exposed to like new york city air you know yeah no it's that'll that's not gonna stay glossy um

Instead, Mr. Maclow, again, the main developer, suggested that workers apply a clear coat finish similar to the product he used to patch a yacht he raced in European regattas.

Are you suggesting suggesting that a Manhattan property developer is some kind of idiot Philistine?

I would never do such a thing, but that, you know.

So they did eventually settle on like sort of a clear sealant for the concrete, but rejected the elastomeric stuff that would probably actually

work.

And then we turn to the pages of the New York Times. The severity of the problems with the concrete was beyond concerning.

It is deplorable and should be embarrassing to anyone associated with the project with even the slightest level of care for quality.

David Dodds, then a top executive involved in the construction with Mr. Maclow's firm, wrote in the same email thread.

Imagine working around this guy being like, Can you use the clear coat I use on my yachts? Yeah,

I assume yacht racing and

needletons are air and water are the same thing, right?

Yeah,

someone, someone was definitely at the end of their rope when they signed signed off on that one. Like, they quit the next day.

So the other thing that though, so that's the problem with

the concrete as the mix. The other thing that they may not have actually solved properly enough was wind.
Next slide, please.

So this is...

This is the cow in the wind tunnel diagram.

I remember those early COVID graphics as well. Yeah.

So, like, the concrete mix is probably definitely part of why the facade is cracking.

But the question is, did the open floors that they put in, you know, five times and these tuned mass dampeners on the upper floor actually solve the wind sway and the twist issue on this perfectly rectilinear building with the flat roof with no tapering or, you know, anything that would structurally work it?

The answer is probably not. It's kind of hard to work it out as it stands.

Like I said before, it didn't really help that the tuned mass dampeners already needed several repairs in the last few years so they're definitely they are or weren't quite working as supposed to be and you know like i was saying before the perfect rectangle isn't you know known for its aerodynamic properties um well it's gonna get more

because bits of it fall off

yeah yeah

And the building still sways and turns in the wind, but like within tolerances, that's kind of normal for a building like this.

But once the concrete starts cracking as it twists and sways more, and as more concrete fails and chips, the more it sways and twists and so on and so forth, this is a vicious cycle that reinforces itself.

Because, like, the more stressed the building gets, the more cracks it appears, the more stress it puts on the mechanical systems until one day

probably, you know, will it fall down? Probably building fall down, probably not, but will you be able to take an elevator? Maybe, maybe not.

And, you know if you can't get to the 86th floor in in comfort and style in your elevator then you know what's the point of having this building in the first place uh because the first point

you come to the real fun question how do you demolish a building like that but oh that's fine don't worry about it like i i

genuinely uh a bunch of um like in this country we don't require a demolition plan for a tall building like you just don't need one um yeah if if the shard ever needs to come down, no, it doesn't.

Yeah, buildings stay up. Shut up.
Yeah.

Hire some guys from the Middle East for this one.

Honestly, though, I mean, I feel like this does, like, you could just convert it to like an 86th floor walk-up, and then it might actually be affordable.

God,

think of your calf muscles though. Like, you would be so fucking ripped, like, after a year of living there.

Like,

inviting your friends over and being like, now I understand. like if you come upstairs with me you're really my best friend i swear

that's got to be that's got to be rough on like tinder or something though like you know you you're like oh but you come home with me just like

here put on this complimentary pair of mountain boots

really Really finally get that splendid isolation experience like Warren's even

saying about.

So like

what we were saying before, like

lift is problem, quote again, the New York Times from 2021.

One really long ladder.

A management email explained that

a high wind condition stopped an elevator and caused a resident to be entrapped on the evening of Halloween 2019 for an hour and 25 minutes. Windsway.

This is not what we should be doing to all billionaires, but this is a good start. Yes.

And it's embarrassing for any organized left movement that in terms of praxis, you are getting outdone by helicopters and wind. The left has to get more aerodynamic with it.

Well, we're going to struggle here.

Yeah, like a fish swimming.

Windsway can cause the cables in the elevator shaft to slap around,

which is what you want when you know you're in it um and leads to slowdowns or shutdowns according to an engineer who doesn't want to be named because the the elevator shafts are so tall that if the wind gets in it just like whips like a vortex into the

011

and according to one of the lawsuits filed by some of the owners the wind doesn't like just gust up the elevator shaft.

It also gusts up garbage chutes, doorways, and hallways, making, quote, the New York Post, spooky noises.

And apparently, the

garbage that people throw down the chute, because it falls so far, just sounds like a bomb goes off every time like a fucking bin goes.

Yeah, that's my favorite thing. Also, I don't believe Bill Ackman tweeted for a couple of days around Halloween 2019.

new theory unlocked. But yeah, the straight down garbage chute is easily my favorite thing about this building.

Also,

if I lived on the top floor, I would have the intrusive thought of hurling myself down the garbage chute to see what would happen.

All I can think is you would never have small children in this building. No, this is a definitely.
Absolutely not. No, you just have like the same thing.

They tend to have the intrusive thought of hurling themselves down the garbage chute to see what would happen. No, they'd hurl their brother down the garbage chute to see what we're doing.

You have fewer brothers.

Toddlers are durable. They're not that durable.

No, what would happen is what happens in every movie is if you drop down the elevator chute, there's just like a big, you know, linen basket.

But because this is 86 floors, it's just a really big linen basket. You're fine.
Don't worry about it.

The laundry chute.

My wife has just brought me some like hot spiced apple juice because I have been podcasting for a long time. I love you so much.
This is a wife appreciation podcast.

Yes. Yeah.

You've been wife mogged

technically here, I'm afraid. I just,

I love my wife.

Podcasts, podcasts, garbage shoots, other unpleasant apps. I also love your wife.

Yeah, no, she knows.

I've never met her, but you know, from what I've seen, she seems lovely.

Sure, she's lovely, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Wonderful camera woman. Yeah.

Anyway, there's one more thing we need to talk about a little bit shortly. Next slide, please.
And that is water, because water damage has been occurring inside the tower as well.

So, because obviously, like the problem with pumping water so high in the sky for people who take, you know, showers and do the dishes and whatnot, is that you need like a shit ton of pressure in the system to get it all the way up.

My, I fire up my sort of uh, my power shower on the 89th floor, and I'm killed instantly.

They can't even get like a stretcher up to me, they throw the meeting at the garbage chute, you know. This would be worse for people on lower floors.

Oh, you're right, because the pressure's still higher, yes, yeah.

Just

oh, I fire up the shower, and a massive water hammer explodes the pipe, killing me instantly.

I mean, you say lower floors, but if you are above, you know, the fake mechanical void floors, then, you know, what floor are we really talking about?

So, like, you know, maybe, maybe that's why it needs to be that high, the mechanical void. Yeah.

So, like,

what has happened already is a flange blew on the high pressure feed on the 60th floor

and

a pipe burst on the 74th floor, the first of which

caused severe leaks that a $130,000 rug was damaged, which, again, I remind you, don't feel bad about any of the fucking people who live in this thing. But yeah, the $130,000.

If a rug cost me $130,000, if I stand on it, I better die.

So I would assume, I would assume that it's a supply pipe, because that's going to be pressurized to something ridiculous.

I mean, it's possible, yeah. I couldn't find the final details first.

As opposed to the return pipe or the pipe that goes down, you know, that's going to be.

Well, I don't know how the water system works because I assume, like every New York City building, it has an old-timey wooden water tower on top.

That's not even a joke. They still make them.
But you can't do that because that would ruin the perfect, you know, square rectilinear look of the building my alabaster

that's why you got

really high parapet walls um

i'm actually the most expensive rug

maps right now and the most your most expensive rugs because like like

a rug that's like a historical object you know example of the textile arts whatever is either kind of like literally priceless like no one it like irreplaceable or you know Sotheby's or whatever has auctioned it at like you know millions of dollars or whatever

fine sure, whatever. That's evil rich people shit, but I get that in the sense that it's a historical object, right?

A $130,000 rug is like,

that's just a normal style rug that you're paying too much for because you're rich. Yes.
Surely. Probably.

I'm going to go insane.

Okay, there's no old-timey wooden water tower on top. There's two chillers and sort of an unidentified mechanical space.
Cowards.

But it's a lot of these, a a lot of new buildings in New York City still get built with old-timey wooden water towers because

you don't need a crane to put them together.

You just haul them up in the elevator or up the stairs or something. And

they form like this protective layer of moss on the inside that actually improves the quality of the water. And they are all made in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Oh, yeah.

Fun fact about old-timey wooden water towers. They're not that old-timey.

And incredible. Yeah.
Yeah.

So the other thing that's a tangent, but the other thing that happened was the burst pipe on the 74th floor, and that caused water damage to the point that two of the four residential elevators had to be closed for several weeks.

Thus, you know,

increasing cubic times by several standard hours, one can only assume at this point.

There's one more thing. So he says it caused $500,000 in total damage or three rugs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, this is a part of the thing that, like, I mean, we'll get into the lawsuit in a moment, but like, these absurdly rich people have absurdly wealthy everything.

So, if there's any water damage that comes through a wall that seeps through a thing, if there's any shearing, if something cracks, then like, it's not just like you have to go to IKEA and get like a new rug.

It's, you know, these people have

talking about they're like, I have to go to ikea by which i mean i have to get one the one non-broken lift down 80 floors drive to ikea get the like malmu rug load it into a car drive the car back load the rug into the lift get the lift 80 floors up get stuck for an hour and a half on the way then put it in the thing that's that's an odyssey then then on roller remember that like you've forgotten the blahajj and then you have to go all the way back oh no they're not shopping i like the jungle scog better right they're going like you know you know design within reach and how everything is not within reach there

no i don't know this but this sounds apt no yeah design within reach uh everything's really expensive that you can't afford any of that they have a special version of that which is design outside of reach um you know which is where you go buy you know 800 000 worth of i i furniture i'm developing a conspiracy theory here what if there's a parallel rich people IKEA?

Because like Ingvar Kamprad, as the name suggests, Nazi, major Nazi, right? What if there's a kind of secret IKEA like bunker, right?

There's a whole Ikea underneath every IKEA. You get like the kind of IKEA Christmas adventurers, you know?

Like, and you can, you can go in there and you can buy like the Billy bookcase that's actually good or whatever. You can get all of it.

I thought it was all the other bookcases. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. But

you go to the cafe and they serve you one extremely nicely plated meatball.

Well, speaking of extremely

well-plated meatballs, next slide, please.

The shirt that finally gets us sued.

The shirt that finally gets us sued, and it's me doing Rich People IKEA, and it's just that logo.

It's run

the blue and yellow skull.

It's called Eeki. It's called Eeki, right? A-E-K-I.

Backwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Fuck you. So because I mean, I can't briefly talk about the private restaurant because it is also very funny.

So, you know, as I said at the start, like you had to pay for dinner, but at least you got breakfast for free. And in order for, you know, the upkeep.

You have to pay like yearly costs, like sort of maintenance costs

to whatever association runs that stuff. At first, that was a lot of.
It was a co-op, wasn't it? Yes, something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So

you have to pay $1,200. At the start, when it opened in 2015, you had to pay $1,200

a year in like sort of communal area charges, which included the restaurant.

But since 2021, as part of a new requirement by the building management, which I think at that point was still the developers and not yet the people living there, that residents are now mandated, this is not optional, to spend at least $15,000 in the restaurant

or face penalty. I'm not waiting as I'm dragged in for my mandatory foie gras.
Yeah, because otherwise you have to pay penalties and, you know, worst of all worlds, the breakfast is no longer free.

Okay, so genuinely, if you're rich,

you can live the life that we all want to of torturing rich people in strange sort of squid game ways. Like you can make them spend $15,000 a year in one restaurant.

You can make them live in the kind of wind cell. You can,

like, all rich people have the ability to inflict suffering on other slightly less rich people. Like, Elon Musk can make you be around Elon Musk.

There's like all kinds of options, right? Well, a lot of the buildings around Central Park, especially on Central Park West, are co-ops.

And that's where celebrities go to yell at other celebrities about, you know, um, why won't you let me install a fire pole in my apartment or something? It's my apartment. I do.

I think it's like genuinely, legitimately sucks being in the like 0.1% because what that means is you have been enrolled as part of the like cast of like hostile torture porn for the 0.01%.

Yeah, that's a good question. I could, uh, I could imagine living in one of like the older co-op buildings on like Central Park West because that would, I feel like it'd be a little bit more chill.

Um, but in these chill is genuinely a different vibe.

Because these are all co-ops, as we say, right?

I think the question is then, what kind of debauched, awful things do you have to do to get past the co-op board to be able to buy an apartment there? Like,

what do these old fuckers want from you? You are going to have to be jerking off in a coffin or some like real like Yale secret society shit.

Yeah, yeah yeah no at least like maybe you're a late bare minimum you're like worshiping the big owl like there's no fucking way around yeah yeah you you gotta you gotta like you gotta be worshiping the owl

so yeah like the fee rise in the in the in the first six years was more than 1200 which a made everybody furious and also specifically for the restaurant all the chefs who work in these places because like all of these towers have their own like private restaurant they're all miserable because like

everyone who comes there has impossible standards because they all eat in three Michelin style restaurants all the fucking time. These people don't know any better.

But at the same time, they don't want to eat at home because if you have that much money, why would you eat at home when you can go to the three Michelin star restaurant around the corner every night?

Because simply you can.

So there's an eating, eating in the sort of Michelin-style restaurant and you're literally, your attitude is, I'm just here so I don't get fined.

Pretty much, yeah.

So there's an article in the new york times about this as well which talked about a restaurant not in this one but in a very similar uh needle tower where there was only one couple they finished their food at seven and then the place stayed entirely empty because the two other parties simply didn't show which they can do because the in-house restaurant can't charge for no shows because obviously you live there you own the place

this would be This feels, yeah, just like running like a any place like this. Because you know, there's stuff they probably had to prepare in advance or something.

Oh, yeah, you're getting in a chip early for this. Like, it's just rotting and it's going into a locked dumpster.

I, this is the most efficient system for allocating the resources of the planet possible.

And I think this probably does great things to chefs as well, like mentally, uh, to be like, yeah, I'm getting paid a lot, I guess, but probably not as much as I should be to not cook.

Um, this is this is how you get a the menu situation.

the article that i read had like uh uh it was again it was not in park four three two it was a different one but the guy there was clearly like i mean he was supremely well trained he'd worked in michelin style restaurants like he was really you know he had a staff and he was at first he was like super keen to be there and i think he just kind of like existed in limbo basically because he's well paid enough and like he can close the restaurant down at you know 10 p.m every night and go home and see his tuck his kids into bed which like as a Michelin star chef, you never get to fucking do that.

So, like, he was sort of like trapped in this hell of

making these dishes that nobody ended up eating. Nobody wants.
Yeah,

this is, this is, this is Kafka-esque.

Anyway,

all of this has, of course, resulted in. Next slide, please.

A series of lawsuits.

Okay, so if we're, here's the thing, right?

If we're thinking about this as a kind of pyramid, right?

1%

getting

obscenely tortured in some way. 0.01%

doing the torturing. If you're a service employee of the 1%

and I include lawyers in this,

you can just carve the meat right off the bone, you know? Like, I'm looking at this and I'm going, yeah, I'm representing the co-op board

of like the most expensive apartments in the world against the developer and constructor of the most expensive apartments in the world.

I'm not too worried about my billing for this one or really anything ever again.

You got construction law is very lucrative. Yes.
And this is

one of the most lucrative cases in construction law. It's it's really like, you know how Dickens was always sort of like skewering the British sort of like, like, chancery court for like, you know,

like settling wills and stuff because no one involved has any incentive for it to go on anything less than 100 years, like until everyone involved is dead.

Very similar mindset here, I think.

So this, this lawsuit is, this is the first one. There's, there's another one since.

But according to a engineering consulting report filed on behalf of the condo board, at least, there are at least 616 pending or future items to repair as part of what they say are original or construction defects.

And the estimated costs just for repair minus damages are just a hair over $239 million.

So, you know, just like a fifth of the original construction cost, essentially.

And the funniest thing is to some of them, that's pocket change. Yes.
Yeah. Yeah.

But of course, these people will never pay.

They will like, you know, pay, you know, a fucking piranha show of lawyers into infinity rather, you know, and pay over the odds rather than actually like just spend the money, fix a thing, be done.

You know, like.

This is a common problem in rich people's co-op buildings. is they think if they hire enough lawyers the building will get fixed on its own

and also fantastically, at least according to the New York Times, most times

boards that run these condos are not able to get insurance to cover the cost of construction defect.

So whoever's paying, it's not an insurance company, somebody's like on the hook for,

you know, fixing the rods from God facade, essentially.

The other thing that this lawsuit does, or these two lawsuits are doing, of course, and because this is like, there's an insane amount of press about these lawsuits, because obviously, immediately the developers started leaking that the condo board was full of maniacs and couldn't be trusted, which is probably also true.

Yes, you know,

and also like, but all this has done is like smear into the papers and in everybody's brain that this is a horrible, crack, dying shithouse of a place where everybody hates each other.

So, why would you possibly move in?

Therefore, all this has done so far is massively depressed the price of the condos, hence the penthouse going from $169 million to $60 million because nobody wants to live there anymore.

Incredible. It's incredible.

I love the most expensive apartment in the world, rapidly becoming not that because they built it bad.

Yeah.

Anyway, there is an upside to all of this. Next slide, please.

You can all go to hell. I hate everyone before.

You can lose money on your investment. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Elevates go up as well as well, down as well as up.

So the upside of this is like

the condos in this building are worth much less than first sales. I tried to work out how many of them were for sale.
That's almost impossible, basically.

Like you can't, because so much is on secondary markets or private listing, you can't get an idea of how much of this tower is currently standing empty. But the good news is they're not alone.

New York Times. Construction on one seaport in the South Street seaport neighborhood of Manhattan has been stopped in the wake of lawsuits after the tower was found to be leaning.

And in Brooklyn, only a handful of units have been sold in the Brooklyn Tower, the Burroughs First Stupator, which has been plagued by financial drama and also the drama of, you know, ruining yet another neighborhood with more of these ghastly pieces of shit.

So, yeah, like

it turns out that the market for super expensive needle towers meant exclusively for the worst people in the world is bad. Your clients are supremely litigious and also just horrible.

And your terrible design decisions make you liable for flaws and fuck-ups for years to come. But, you know, if you live in New York City, maybe

not underneath Park 432, just like for until they build that. They're trying to walk fast.
Walk fast. Yeah.
Until they build that unobtainium shed, you're fine.

It does make you think that the worst punishment that you could possibly delots are rich people, aside from all the stuff we're going to do in the near future, is making them live with other rich people.

Yeah,

stuff that's going to happen.

I mean, this is the thing, right? Genuinely.

If we do the cool zone, right, and we get to say up against the wall, motherfucker, to every rich person, this can be the wall, the wall of 432 Park Avenue. And then that would be a lot of fun.

That would have caused more spalling. Yeah, you just wait.
Yeah.

And in the meantime, hell is other Ackmans, you know, like it's fine. It's.

Anyway, final slides from my side, please.

Anyway, that's been the tale of Park 432. I genuinely and sincerely hope that everybody who lives there is involved in its construction.

Apart from just like the normal construction workers and, you know, whoever's the fucking janitor around there, I hope you have like a, you know, I hope everybody's miserable.

I'll leave the last words to the same resident that we started with all the way at the start.

Uh, quote, this is again from the New York Times: The tension in the building has been simmering for years, Mrs. Abramovich said.
Everybody hates each that everybody hates each other here.

Good, yeah,

I really like Rust Energy. So, like, honestly, if she wants to have a nice apartment, that's fine.

I,

I got to say, you know, another thing I don't think we mentioned, but I have this on good authority from someone who worked on the building.

Apparently, the fit and finish on everything in there sucked on day one.

Just snapping off a door handle, you know, as I move it, moving into my...

My $160 million penthouse apartment where nothing can possibly go wrong.

Electrical outlet is wobbly, you know. Yeah.
Yeah.

little stuff you know

that is the fun thing though like i mean because this i mean in a uk context at least like shitty new builds were always like just kind of for normal people you know barrett holmes would famously just like give you you know the paint socket and you know the the the fucking bricks that fell off and the fun thing is now everybody gets that treatment yeah i i i i hear that too is that like the quality of housing in this country is always bad.

It's just the expense that varies. Like it gets really bad on the, you know, the lower you go, obviously.
But like

even at the top, apparently, still bad. So

anecdotally, you hear about projects that were designed as, you know, low income and somehow halfway through the financing stopped penciling out. So they were like, well, this is luxury now.

So they swap the materials on the countertops and call it a day.

So much of what gets built in this country is luxury student housing. And I think so badly, I feel so badly

moron. I know, but so imagine you are the sort of like child of like, I don't know, a provincial Chinese official.

And it's like, okay, cool, go get an education in somewhere. We've been reliably informed that Leeds is a fantastic place to go to university, right?

Whatever it is, you know, and you're going to get sort of like Western culture. Go to Leeds.

You go to Leeds and they put you in a sort of like new build high-rise that has had all of the building materials and a bunch of the builders stuff just kind of like left in the drywall.

It's sort of like leaking through every surface and none of the electrical works at all. And you think

the Chinese century can't come soon enough, quite frankly. And everything,

every possible vengeance must be visited upon the United Kingdom. And to be honest, I agree.
So.

Yeah, I mean,

Britain, Britain, too. I mean, America too, probably.

Yeah, I mean, what do you learn from this ultimately?

Build the building good? I don't know. No one's built a good building since we invented air conditioning.

You know,

that was the start of everything going downhill. You know, I mean, so many like new construction buildings are exactly as bad at this.
They aren't at the like top end of the luxury market.

They're still pretty bad, but it goes to show that you can go to the top end of the luxury market and the building is still bad.

Yeah,

I should have kept building them all out of brick, you know. Yeah, you should have had apartments with cross-ventilation.
You should have, you know,

big rooms. You should have, you should have all kinds of stuff.

But no, that's lost technology. So I don't know.
I guess the moral of the story is:

are you a wealthy person who wants an apartment in New York City? Give it to us. Just give us your money.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Number one, sign up for the Patreon.
That's really at the Bloomberg tier.

Number two.

Number two, get an apartment in a building that was built before like 1939.

Yeah, what we've learned is that strong buildings create good times and good times create weak men.

What we've learned is

put the latex suit on your building.

yeah yeah apparently i mean that that probably would have nipped a lot of these problems in the bud but um i don't know uh you know i i guess it really does matter what material it is specifically if you're looking at the building uh

from the street and it's 1400 feet high

you know you know what else the lesson is The lesson is unlimited war on celebrity architects. Yep.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. There's not a lot of those guys who I think turned out very good.
Yeah.

Celebrity design prison camp is,

I'm okay with that.

Just, you know,

just combine Vignodi and Zara Hadid Studios and say, make the world's most, you know, luxurious holiday camp. And then we just go from there.

I still got a soft spot for Rem Coolhouse because his name is Cool House. Yeah, he's the guy.
Who do you think I had built my Coolhouse?

Yeah, exactly.

So,

we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Hello, Devin, Justin, November, Liam, and all guests, past, present, and future. Sure, I forgot about Victoria, transphobic.
Yeah, that's true.

Today, I write in to share with you the story of how I, by pure chance, narrowly escaped gruesome injury while working on a roadway marking crew for my state's Department of Transportation 10 years ago.

I worked this job during a summer off of college, thinking that one day it would be a valuable experience as a then-aspiring traffic engineer. Oh, you moron.

No, I have since recovered from such delusions

and now work in the concrete industry. Uh-oh.
Yeah, I just finished this like super tall needles now. You won't believe the things I've seen.

I am not personally liable for what happened in the brief.

Interesting and educational as some of the work was, it was also miserable. Hours in the hot sun working in the middle of the road, painting stop bars and turn arrows at busy intersections.

This work involves the use of a specialized piece of equipment we simply called and quote semicolon the cart and quote semicolon

the leather still hungry

that didn't that didn't transfer right

um

imagine if you will an awful ice cream cart that instead of tubs of frozen treats featured a propane heated kettle of 400 degree fahrenheit thermo thermoplastic paint and a hopper of tiny glass beads instead of sprinkles all right i'm already hungry.

You don't have to sell it to me. Yeah.

Hand-operated cart extrudes this paint onto the road surface while simultaneously depositing glass beads onto the wet paint to make it retro-reflective.

Amid our crew of four, I had the honorable task of blowing the paint dry with a leaf blower. I see leaf blower boy indicated on the slide there.

Leaf blower pictured here.

At the end of one day, we had just finished up at a busy T intersection, diagram attached.

And we were packing up the equipment in the back of our enclosed trailer.

Pictured here.

The truck and trailer were parked in a widened area of the shoulder just past the intersection with the rear ramp door open Over here.

I had just stowed the leaf blower in its place in the trailer when the incident took place. Oh no.

I was stepping down the ramp door.

Then several seconds passed where I must have blacked out.

Because the next thing I remember was being knelt down, screaming obscenities, gawking at the Mitsubishi Eclipse that had neatly parked itself into the back of the trailer at over 40 miles an hour.

Your Mitsubishi eclipse is cold outside. Let it into the back of your trailer.

Yeah, it simply wants to, you know, the thermonuclear ice cream, as do we all.

The first co-worker to rush over, after seeing that I was in One Piece, proceeded to try and help the occupants of the wrecked car.

I watched in a daze as he helped a confused toddler from the back seat, who was thankfully unscathed, and then a very frightened, though also unscathed, cat. Oh,

the illustration makes more sense now. I thought that was just a general expression of anxiety.

The driver looked to have suffered a broken nose and likely a concussion as well.

Somehow, the only injuries I received was a painful strike to the elbow from the passenger side mirror and an abrasion on my neck from where the trailer door ampersand pound sign 39 semicolon s

spring cable assist caught me as i reflexively threw myself to the ground car crash survivor getting hit by a car survivor yeah i did however spend a good 10 minutes after the accident pale as a ghost crying in the truck as i truly contemplated my own mortality for the first time.

Yeah, that's not supposed to happen to the leaf blower boy. Yeah.

You're a hero. This is supposed to be a relatively safe job.

Apparently, the driver had been bringing his cat to the vet, but he had it loose in the car.

So that's a wild way. Sure, why not? Go for it.

As he approached the intersection, the cat had crawled down by the pedals, and the driver bent down to fish him out.

causing him to veer off into the shoulder and into the back of our trailer, getting deep enough to give the paint cart a good bump.

How lucky it is then that I was not still in the trailer, or else I may have been laid out on the hood of this guy, Ampersand, Pound Sign 397S Eclipse, pinned against the still quite hot paint cart.

I can say I learned at least two things from this experience. Number one, to always remember that safety cones and high-vis gear are never a guarantee of safety when working near traffic.

And also, number two, to always ensure that any feline cargo is properly secured for transportation.

Can confirm.

Despite the first lesson, I continued to work on the paint crew for the rest of the season because I needed the money.

As I have been binging your podcast for the past few months, I've become ever more grateful for leftist content as entertaining, as elucidating as yours. And speaking as someone.
someone.

I don't need to read Mitsubishi Eclipse because I have the marks of Mitsubishi Eclipse all over my body.

Speaking of someone who was largely ignorant of the gap in their civic and historical education for far too long, thank you for cursing me with the knowledge of just how fucked everything is.

Well, I'll be like, you were hit by a car.

Talking to Americans will legitimately be like, well, I never, until I heard about this DSA thing, I never knew things could be bad in America. And you go, oh, what was your life like beforehand?

And it's like, oh, they used to pay me to like scrape the nuclear waste out of reactors by hand. I didn't have healthcare.

Yeah, I had the worst summer job in recorded history and almost, you know, died in a flash of white paint. But sure, you know, your engineering podcast as well has opened my eyes.

I really don't like attributing that level of importance to us because

we're working on it. it's like decades of material conditions of the most abject nature.
And then

fucking idiot podcast is the thing that like radicalizes you. Is just that's really, really funny.

We're very good at propaganda here in America. That's right.
It's so good that no one realizes that it exists.

Yeah.

Are you saying, Justin, that we serve a useful role in part of a leftist political project? Oh, God.

I didn't sign up for that. I don't love outro.

I don't like to, you know, think so highly of myself, but you know,

but if people are like, yeah, every morning I would clock into work and my boss would shoot me in both kneecaps with a gun.

Listening to your podcast was the first time I ever thought that things might be unfair. I

don't know what

else to take from that.

Oh, we used to dream of being shot by a gun.

Yeah, nice pick when I started. My boss had a cannon.

It used to be a Mitsubishi Outlander, but the eclipse is actually

many more humane. That's incremental reform, you know.

For forming a union to get the boss to reduce the caliber of the gun.

Long-doing it.

We're willing to work with you on this one. It's a facilitative union.
Yeah. Good.
You drop it down to a 2020. Wiggism is when you get hit by a cyber truck.
Yeah. Yeah.

The arc of the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards you getting hit by a smaller mitsubishi

union.

Thank you for cursing me with the knowledge of just how fucked everything is while getting me to laugh about it. The show is great.
All of you are great. From Leaf Blower Boy.

Thank you, Leaf Blower Boy. Thank you, Leafblower Boy.
We're sorry.

Trying to explain class relations to an American. It's like, well, imagine the Mitsubishi.

Now, could this Mitsubishi be like a metaphor for anything else in our society?

See, the ruling class are like a guy with a cat under his gas belt.

Mark's talking about

Grunt Reese.

Yeah, no, I thought he mentioned it in Capital Volume 3. That's where all the other stuff is that no one

pays attention to. Yeah, it's a very famous fragment on the feline, I think, if I remember correctly.

That was. We just, there's a there's a far side cartoon, right? Where there's a guy in hell whistling and moving the wheelbarrow amidst all the flames.

And one of the devils is talking to the other devil. And he's like, you know, we're just not reaching that guy.
That's how I feel as a communist all the time.

Well,

that was

safety for

shake hands with danger. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.
Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Praxis Cast.

Yeah,

listen to my podcast. Listen to podcasting is Praxis or at Praxis Cast on Blue Sky mainly because we just are placeholders on Twitter now.
We do, you know, it's the usual stuff.

It's more Britain focused if that's really your, you know, if you really want to get into the depths of that.

And it's also essentially whatever happens to come into my brain and what I feel like talking about.

It's great. I've been on.
We've been on. It's cool.

We should have done this upfront instead of at the end of three hours, but we'll put a thing in the description. Yes.

And on a more personal note, I have been applying for jobs for a while now and I can't compete with AI written garbage because everybody sends in 5,000 letters a day and it's depressing me.

If you live live in Switzerland and if you need a researcher or somebody to do shit in communications, my DMs are open.

Please, I would like a job because the tax man would also like, you know, his cut.

So, you know,

hire Rob. Hire Rob.
Hire Rob right now.

And also come to the live shows. We could kill two birds with one stone.
That bird may be you.

I'm driving my Mitsubishi into the live show.

get the celebrity architecture beating. Don't get like any, you know, random.

We're going to wedge a cat firmly under the brain.

You know, you know, you know, the like awful nerd shit that where the Proud Boys do, where they do like as kind of like mockery of getting jumped in, but it's like naming breakfast cereals.

We're going to make you name celebrity architect. Yeah, you're going to get the shit kicked out of you.
You're going to be like, Santiago Calatrava,

Mies Van der Roe,

Louis Kahn.

All right, and us.

All right, that was the podcast. Bye, everyone.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.