Episode 193: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster

joe bowden's wild well control of spring texas yee-haw *whip crack* sign to stop offshore drilling, or at least to express your displeasure with it: https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/stories/stand-up-to-offshore-drilling Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address:Well There's Your Podcasting CompanyPO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liam McAnderson?

  It doesn't, yeah, there it is. Now it's failed.

• 0:02November Kelly?

  Oh, brutal.

• 0:03Liam McAnderson?

  Alright, alright, alright. So November, I would like to introduce you to Magic the Gathering.

• 0:07November Kelly?

  No, no, this is an act of violence. You're threatening against me and I'm entitled to defend myself.

• 0:12Liam McAnderson?

  You're a trans woman, you like either Magic or D and D.

• 0:15November Kelly?

  The people of Europe have suffered under the yoke of unpredictable American insanity. Yes, yeah. And, you know, ever since I saw Macron wearing those sunglasses, I was like, I knew, I knew that we have to, we have to rejoin the EU so that you can never make me play Magic the Gathering. And I personally have a nuclear weapon that is hooked up to my heartbeat. And if it goes over the sort of like, you are playing the Magic the Gathering.

• 0:43Liam McAnderson?

  There's a new lore one, we're playing it, friend.

• 0:46November Kelly?

  Dusted.

• 0:47Liam McAnderson?

  We're doing a cube draft and we're going to town. Roz doesn't know how to play Magic, you don't know how to play. Victoria, can you play Magic?

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Absolutely the fuck not.

• 0:54November Kelly?

  My wife taught me to play Mahjong recently. Does that count for anything?

• 0:58Liam McAnderson?

  How do I have two trans women and Roz and none of you can play Magic?

• 1:04November Kelly?

  It's because you're talking to two trans women with jobs.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't have a job, but I'm broke. So like, I've seen what this is. The most I know about Magic is that I have had people come through my home that I have printed out Magic cards for, to build their decks, because it costs apparently somewhere around the price of like a used Honda Civic, to build a decent deck.

• 1:26November Kelly?

  Also, also every trans woman I know who's really into Magic has a job. So it's kind of like, that was kind of an unfair thing that I said. I don't, I play Mahjong. I play Rishi Mahjong, okay?

• 1:37Liam McAnderson?

  Victoria, can you play Warhammer?

• 1:39Speaker 02

  No, but my wife likes to build the models.

• 1:41Liam McAnderson?

  Oh my god.

• 1:42November Kelly?

  I'm playing, I'm playing.

• 1:43Liam McAnderson?

  This one's for you.

• 1:44November Kelly?

  I'm playing shit named like a distant plane counter insurgency in Afghanistan with the little counters, okay?

• 1:50Speaker 02

  I, I was, I was homeschooled my entire childhood. I did not make friends until I was 19 years old.

• 1:59Liam McAnderson?

  Which one's harder?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  I might be getting to play like a tabletop role playing game for the first time this year.

• 2:05November Kelly?

  When you come back out here, I'm teaching how to play Twilight Struggle. Okay?

• 2:10Liam McAnderson?

  Roz and I once played Magic the Gathering and he got, and he got, he was just really bad about you.

• 2:15Justin Roczniak?

  I didn't understand it at all.

• 2:17Liam McAnderson?

  Hated it.

• 2:18November Kelly?

  Quick question, quick question for the floor. How many news items do we have on this episode?

• 2:22Liam McAnderson?

  At least nine.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  We still haven't clapped also.

• 2:25November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 2:26Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, we need to clap now. We need to.

• 2:28Justin Roczniak?

  I didn't like the concept of Magic the Gathering. I'm a man of science. I want science the gathering. Science, science, the symposium.

• 2:37November Kelly?

  Science the gathering or um primitive accumulation.

• 2:40Liam McAnderson?

  That's just blue. That's just mono blue control, my guy. And I play that.

• 2:45Justin Roczniak?

  All right. All right. I'm gonna do three, two, one, mark.

• 2:49November Kelly?

  Three, two, one, John anyway.

• 2:50Justin Roczniak?

  One, mark. Okay, close enough. And we have to do, we have to do a podcast. Right? Yeah, that's, that's what we do here is podcasts.

• 3:01November Kelly?

  It's true. We do do those.

• 3:03Liam McAnderson?

  Occasionally when.

• 3:04November Kelly?

  Oh, my voice is fucked by the way.

• 3:07Liam McAnderson?

  When someone's not doing surgery on us.

• 3:09November Kelly?

  Yeah, this is true. Um, there's, you know, the podcast who has had surgery, the podcast who is currently having surgery and the podcast who hopes to have surgery yet to come, you know?

• 3:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I, I wouldn't recommend surgery. I, they, they did. They were like.

• 3:23November Kelly?

  Okay, you don't have to be like, you know, fucking.

• 3:26Liam McAnderson?

  I'm not being transphobic. I'm saying for me. Number two. Uh, they, they were like, oh, you're a little nervous. Here's, we're gonna shoot the good shit right to your veins.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Mmm, love that shit.

• 3:37November Kelly?

  You were in the 1% regret rate because you got it just kind of on a whim. You're not even trans. It was like, I just feel like.

• 3:43Liam McAnderson?

  Cut me open, bro.

• 3:46Liam McAnderson?

  They were like, uh, hey, do you know what, like, what's happened to you? And I was like, yeah, you're doing, you're cutting my scrotum open. And they were like, yes. I was like, yeah, what, what, what? You're cutting my scrotum up. What are you not cutting?

• 3:58November Kelly?

  Easy ways to say this.

• 4:00Liam McAnderson?

  My shit open? Are you not cutting my shit open? You're cutting my shit open. What's the problem?

• 4:03November Kelly?

  Suddenly you're weird for like saying it in those terms.

• 4:05Liam McAnderson?

  Right. I'm like, oh, you're a doctor. Okay. Yeah. Look at my balls some more. I don't give a fuck.

• 4:13November Kelly?

  Seven years of balls medical school to look at your balls and then they're gonna make you look like you're the freak for saying, yeah, you're gonna cut my balls off.

• 4:20Liam McAnderson?

  You're gonna cut my balls off. That's what you're fucking doing.

• 4:26November Kelly?

  Oh, god damn. Okay, so many people died in this one.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  One of my favorite things is the person who who got rid of mine. Um, I actually-

• 4:34Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, no, they gave me a third ball.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Oh, damn.

• 4:36November Kelly?

  I know you say person instead of doctor. Was this one of those, like, you drive up to a barn upstate jobs?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  No, no, I went to a doctor, but like, um, this doctor did a bunch of, uh, my friends also. And so I gave her a copy of the book and was like, here, I think you've done like four different women surgeries that are contained within the pages of this photo book. Consider it a gift from the community.

• 5:00Liam McAnderson?

  I regret to inform you, my doctor went to Virginia.

• 5:03Justin Roczniak?

  Ooh.

• 5:04Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, I have, I have finally met a Virginia alum I like.

• 5:08Justin Roczniak?

  Wow.

• 5:09Liam McAnderson?

  Finally, I have met one good Virginia alum. Burned UVA to the ground and everybody in it.

• 5:15Justin Roczniak?

  Speaking of burning things to the ground.

• 5:17November Kelly?

  Mastiffal.

• 5:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 5:19November Kelly?

  Attaboy.

• 5:19Justin Roczniak?

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

• 5:33November Kelly?

  I am November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking right now. I am desperately trying to salvage my completely fucked voice and my pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam.

• 5:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yay, Liam. Hey, I'm Three Ball Anderson. Uh.

• 5:47Liam McAnderson?

  My pronouns are he and him. Okay.

• 5:48November Kelly?

  From your, from your days as a pitcher.

• 5:50Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah. I, yo, I throw a nasty fastball that I just, I go into my scrotum and I just yoink and just, boh.

• 5:59November Kelly?

  They actually banned that in, in Major League after Old Hoss Radbourn tried that at the World Series in 1911.

• 6:06Justin Roczniak?

  They call him Three Ball because he's never been walked.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Um, hi, my name is Victoria Scott. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Uh, today I have prepared an episode mostly that I hated making. It's awful. Um, this is the semi-submersible drilling, oil drilling rig, the Deep Water Horizon. And as you may have guessed by now, it should not look like that. I'm done. We can go back to balls.

• 6:35Justin Roczniak?

  About to say, we gotta-

• 6:36Speaker 02

  It's gonna be way better than the rest of this episode. Doing the news slides.

• 6:40November Kelly?

  Detail heavy.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Oh, my god. I, I went, so obviously, everybody knows at this point that I read the comments of these. So I went and looked at the last episode I was in to see the comments to make sure everybody like either was like tolerating me still or like had suddenly turned on me and hated me because you know.

• 6:55November Kelly?

  Everyone say nice things about Victoria and tell her that she worries too much.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  You wake up at three in the morning, you have these anxieties, but I just looked through and every single comment is like, ah, yes, 2025 before context happened. So this is our first episode with a full news section since that, which was recorded December 23rd. Um, and, uh, we've had a few of the weeks where decades happen.

• 7:20November Kelly?

  We took a long vacation. We took, we picked the wrong week to quit doing the news segment.

• 7:27Justin Roczniak?

  I picked the wrong week to quit drinking and yet I did it anyway.

• 7:30Liam McAnderson?

  Well, we're all proud of you. Everyone say nice things to Roz or you will be shot.

• 7:35November Kelly?

  Absolutely.

• 7:36Liam McAnderson?

  And Devon, leave that in.

• 7:38Justin Roczniak?

  I'm still having two beers today.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  There's no way that we're keeping monetization on this video. YouTube is actually going to come to our.

• 7:44Liam McAnderson?

  We're not monetized. Although people have been saying they're getting ads now, which like I.

• 7:50Justin Roczniak?

  They're forcing ads on everything.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  YouTube is going to come to our houses and to kill us.

• 7:55Liam McAnderson?

  I welcome, I welcome them with open arms and by which I mean my 12 gauge.

• 8:00November Kelly?

  Well, the reason why that we opened the episode with sort of like eight minutes of ball surgery talk is to try and establish a strong bond between us and the listener. It's like we went to like boot camp together, right? And so that means you're locked in. You're not leaving because of like some fucking ad for Squarespace. And now granted, the solemn promise on our end is we're never, we're never going to be responsible for the ad for Squarespace or whatever the fuck it is.

• 8:22Liam McAnderson?

  Right, right, right.

• 8:23November Kelly?

  We're never going to sell you underwear or like pre-made food.

• 8:26Liam McAnderson?

  We would try to sell you buy news.com, but you can't get it imported to the United States anymore. Thank you, President Trump, you Nazi piece of shit.

• 8:33November Kelly?

  Shit that we were interested in, which means dipping tobacco, uh, niche board games, airsoft guns, uh, like high-end camera equipment.

• 8:44Liam McAnderson?

  Computer parts, please.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  The thing is, you know, only, only discontinued high-end camera equipment.

• 8:49Justin Roczniak?

  This is probably a bad time to mention it, but I did accept the teaching position at Prager University.

• 8:57Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, can you get us in the back door?

• 9:01November Kelly?

  Once you've got tenure at Prager, you know, then.

• 9:05Liam McAnderson?

  You've really made it, yeah. By which I mean, it's a suicide soup.

• 9:10November Kelly?

  Operating the Prager U D I program.

• 9:14Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 9:15Liam McAnderson?

  No, he is Polish.

• 9:16Justin Roczniak?

  I'm in the engineering department.

• 9:18Liam McAnderson?

  And Catholic. Sort of.

• 9:21Justin Roczniak?

  Trying to figure out how to make engineering more conservative than it already is.

• 9:26Liam McAnderson?

  People being like, I don't think there's any queer women in engineering. And I'm like, we do not hang out with the same group of fucking people, do we? Fucking nerds.

• 9:35November Kelly?

  We're making more all the time.

• 9:37Liam McAnderson?

  We are cracking eggs like we're farmers.

• 9:42Justin Roczniak?

  So before we can talk about Deepwater Horizon exploding, we have to do all of the goddamn news.

• 9:58Liam McAnderson?

  I gotta say, the, the reuse of classical paintings is my favorite gag on this program.

• 10:05November Kelly?

  I love it. I love the California housing policy one most of all, of course, with Hieronymus Bosch. You can go and see, this one's called Pandemonium. You can go and see it in the Louvre. You know, and then, you know, take a sort of handful of tiaras on your way out as well, if you're quick. And yeah, there's a lot of stuff to get through. If you were one of the people who complains in the comments about like, why aren't they talking about Deepwater Horizon? The thing is, if you want to find out about Deepwater Horizon, you could find literally any other source. And the one thing we can promise you is that literally any other source on Deepwater Horizon is not going to include a bunch of stuff that was happening on the 22nd of January, 2026, and eight minutes of ball surgery.

• 10:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Once again, once again.

• 10:51November Kelly?

  Safety board, take that out of the videos.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  The, the CSB did a video on this that I watched five times to make sure I had fully understand, understood the disaster before I even wrote the slide deck. You should probably just go watch that if you don't want to see four people discuss like various genitalia. Related operations.

• 11:12Liam McAnderson?

  Whatever, no, you you come for the bald talk, you stay for the horrific disregard for human life.

• 11:18November Kelly?

  The CSB, they don't let the CSB do jokes is the thing, and they should, but they don't.

• 11:23Liam McAnderson?

  They barely let us do jokes.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  But the CSB does do jokes.

• 11:26November Kelly?

  Yeah, but only the kind of like Ibsen, like the Ibsen, like kind of dramatic irony kind of jokes, you know? It's not, they're not, they're not doing, they're not on our level, or we're not on their level, one of the two.

• 11:36Liam McAnderson?

  We're not on their level.

• 11:37November Kelly?

  That's definitely true.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have like a really nice like graphic design team and like all that they got the 3D modeler guys.

• 11:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we got a guy with the I love you too.

• 11:46November Kelly?

  We we got we got news.png saved at the bottom of my downloads folder from four years ago that goes on as an overlay on all of these, and I'm the only one who has the high res. So if anything happens to me, that's my insurance policy, that's my leverage.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  I actually wanted to ask you about that because I was like, I should just start throwing in the cryon so that, you know, Nova can do less, but I I forgot that that was actually your bus insurance.

• 12:13November Kelly?

  I have to like turn the sort of second key on the news item, you know? Otherwise, otherwise you're gonna get a really low resolution question.

• 12:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, I just I just copied them from previous slides, yeah.

• 12:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's it's really the sort of photocopy of the photocopy of the photocopy thing, you know?

• 12:30Liam McAnderson?

  That's how you know it's authentic.

• 12:31November Kelly?

  Yeah. I hate going to PragerU Engineering and your professor hands you a like photocopy of burnt to fuck printout that just says communism killed 80 billion trillion people.

• 12:42Liam McAnderson?

  Good, should have killed more.

• 12:43Justin Roczniak?

  Can't even see the number of zeros.

• 12:47Liam McAnderson?

  I mean, I'm not a communist, because again, I'm not five years old, but this time, fine, sure.

• 12:53Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, news.

• 12:55Liam McAnderson?

  Hit me with it.

• 12:56November Kelly?

  News.

• 12:58November Kelly?

  All right, we got a YouTube.

• 12:59Liam McAnderson?

  Every single one of them.

• 13:01November Kelly?

  Seriously, start back. I don't know how much clearer I can make it, like, what the fuck is it going to take?

• 13:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 13:09November Kelly?

  Jesus fucking Christ, you need to kill people, and I am 100% serious, it's not a joke.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Tensions are high.

• 13:17November Kelly?

  It's what it's in the Declaration of Independence, if you, you know, purport to give a fuck about that is if people.

• 13:23Liam McAnderson?

  That presupposes we know how to read as Americans.

• 13:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, sure. But like if agents of the state just roll up on you and murder you in the street. You live in tyranny and the point of being an American texturally is that you are supposed to revolt against tyranny. Now, granted, all the guys who wrote that were hypocrites, but still, you gotta.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  You can't say that on YouTube.

• 13:44November Kelly?

  Just bleep every verb, I guess.

• 13:46Justin Roczniak?

  That was a lot. That was a lot of bleeps right there. Yeah.

• 13:50Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Hi, David. I assume you're on hour 28 of this. So, love you, bud.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  Love you too, buddy.

• 13:57November Kelly?

  I just, I just, I need, yeah, I, I need.

• 14:00Liam McAnderson?

  Position of this podcast is.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  You know, but you can't say that.

• 14:03November Kelly?

  Yeah. I, I, I think, I think we all need to know that we're on the same page here. I think the listeners are too. I hope so. Um, and I just.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  If you somehow live under a rock, I suppose it's worth mentioning that, you know, uh, an ICE agent decided to unload a handgun into Renee Ginn's face. It murdered her in the street in Minneapolis and now the city of Minneapolis is federally occupied to an extent that is like, schools are not in session. People are scared for their lives. Um, court observers are getting pepper sprayed at point blank range. Uh, they just abducted a five-year-old kid and sent him to a facility where the food quality is so bad. They're having, they're giving like children nervous breakdowns. Um, it is pretty much like, it's weird for me personally, uh, to talk to like the kind of like well-meaning cis liberals that I know in my life, who are all kind of like, oh, wow, this is so crazy. I can't believe this is happening.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  It's like, well, we blew past every other fucking warning sign on the way here and now we're here and everything is fucking horrifying. Um, Minneapolis is like one of my favorite cities in America and I have a ton of friends there. So it's like, I can't fathom what people there are going through constantly. Um, obviously the media made it their fucking life goal as soon as, um, Renee was murdered to try to erase the fact that she was a lesbian who was in the car with her wife, uh, and that, you know. The administration position rapidly became, well, this do-gooder liberal kooky lesbian deserved it. Yeah. Now, Devin, if you would not mind holding the bleep button, genuinely, genuinely,

• 15:40Speaker 02

  I am going insane. I don't know. Like, and this is the thing about trying to convince, like, the well-meaning, like, cis-liberal people I know is like, you, all of the fucking signposts that we've been ignoring for, like, five years, we have blown past, and now there is literally no answer left except moderate position. You must, you have to try everybody in ICE, if they have ever been even close to any document regarding deportations or any of this shit, you have to-

• 16:08Speaker 04

  We're all very upset.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Like, yeah, like, Kristi Noem actually has to-

• 16:13Speaker 04

  You can't say that on YouTube.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  In a judicially sanctioned manner, for America as a concept to continue existing, or this place has got to fucking balkanize.

• 16:22November Kelly?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and put this in, I'm gonna try and thread the needle here, right? Because there's been a lot of, like, libs, like, the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, future No Gods, No Mayors episode, doing the tone but not the content of being, like, "Listen up, fuckers, we're gonna do nothing," right? I'm gonna try and, try and convey the thing in a way that we don't have to bleep, right? Which is, just ask the question, how do you imagine this is going to end? With someone getting elected? With the passing of a law? Because if you don't imagine that either of those is possible or sufficient, then you have to imagine something else. That's the button.

• 17:03Justin Roczniak?

  I add, add minimum, you gotta do, like, debathification, you know? I mean, this is-

• 17:09Liam McAnderson?

  They, these people need to-

• 17:10Justin Roczniak?

  Completely dismantling the agency and-

• 17:12Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, dismantling the agency is a good start, but these people need to be tried for crimes against you, man.

• 17:17November Kelly?

  I was reading, I was reading.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  You can, that should not have to get bleeped.

• 17:23Liam McAnderson?

  No, no, that was not, that was not a bleep thing. The next segment is the bleep thing.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:29Liam McAnderson?

  Which is, these people should be-

• 17:30Speaker 04

  You know what he's saying, but I can't let you actually hear it.

• 17:32Liam McAnderson?

  I mean, every ice agent should be terrified for their fucking lives. They should go door to door waiting for the day, waiting for their day to come home to the Lord. And when they get to Saint Peter's Gate, Saint Peter will have, I assume, the button that opens a trapdoor directly into hell. Please flashback to the last slide.

• 17:51Liam McAnderson?

  I mean, if you are, genuinely, I am pleading with you if you are an ice agent and you are somehow, you have slipped through the crack, you are listening to this. Take your service weapon, put it in your mouth and-

• 18:01Speaker 04

  It's been a long day.

• 18:02November Kelly?

  I don't want to tell them to do that. I want to tell them to-

• 18:04Speaker 04

  I have to take that out of the episode.

• 18:06Liam McAnderson?

  Also that, also that.

• 18:07November Kelly?

  There is such a thing, as the good ice agent, the ice agent that I sympathize with, and that's the ice agent that-

• 18:14Speaker 04

  This is no longer a question of demonetization. It is not legal for a British person to say that.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Watching the-

• 18:20Justin Roczniak?

  Male men can do it, so can ice.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  I probably shouldn't say that, nevermind. Well, actually.

• 18:28November Kelly?

  Say it and trust in Devon to keep us all out of Secot, you know?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Please keep me out of prison, Devon, thank you. The thing is, is every single time I watch a video of these motherfuckers fucking stomping around Minneapolis, they have absolutely no awareness whatsoever. I watched these guys deal with a crowd that they were tear gassing and one dude just like peel off and kind of like, turn his back at a whole crowd so he can pepper spray one person in the face. And it's like, dude, the minute that you can, that you can no longer do that with impunity, they are going to-

• 19:00Speaker 04

  Can't put that in the podcast episode.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Feed you to dogs. Like, they are so fucking incompetent that it would be so easy to-

• 19:09Speaker 04

  I can't leave that in the podcast.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  It is a testament to the fucking insane patience of every single person with a soul in the city of Minneapolis. No, no ice agent has been [BLEEP].

• 19:20Liam McAnderson?

  And they should be, we should be very clear.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  I mean, I understand-

• 19:24Liam McAnderson?

  Should be [BLEEP] and/or [BLEEP]. I'm thinking, I'm thinking a Heaven's Gate kind of situation.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  I have my brain. So here's the other thing, too, is like, and I know that this is very much like, this is the crux of sort of like, living as an American during horrible things that America is doing, which is like, I am not front and center. Seattle is not a key focus city for ICE. I really can't do a whole lot. I don't have very much money. I don't have like, I have whatever influence this podcast gets me, which I know from experience is not, you know, I am not going to fix anything. So I just kind of sit here and I'm like, well, I shouldn't be focused on this because I'm not really the main impact, obviously, like this, there, there are other people, this is materially harming, who are scared for their lives. But I will admit, I can't fucking think at all. And I feel like I'm completely insane because I just, I don't know how you watch this, kind of like,

• 20:16Speaker 02

  with the horror of like, an avalanche bearing down upon your location and just say like, well, you know, I'm gonna go like, pick up medications from the pharmacy that's about to also get wiped out in the avalanche in the span of, I don't know, a week, a month, who knows?

• 20:31November Kelly?

  I guess, I guess the, the only thing that's sort of a benefit to doing this podcast, not the only thing, but the only thing in this context, right? The only offset there is you can't get us fired for saying these things, right? Like, you, like, you might be able to get someone's arrest, we hope not, but like, you can't get like, if you call my boss for the remarks that I've been making about ICE, you are going to get through to Justin, you know? Hello?

• 21:00Justin Roczniak?

  So I listen to all of it. I'm fine with it.

• 21:04Liam McAnderson?

  Confusingly, confusingly, if you call my boss, you get November.

• 21:08November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's weird.

• 21:09Justin Roczniak?

  If you call my boss, you get Liam, yeah.

• 21:14November Kelly?

  It's a kind of circular ownership structure.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  I, and the thing for me is like, I've fully given up on the idea that this economy will ever sustain me having a job again, no matter how bad I want to get out of my fucking apartment. So it doesn't matter anyway. Like, I mean, the thing is, at this point, like, in future slides, I'm sure we'll get to it, but like, the United States is just, we have crossed the event horizon into dollar is no longer world reserve currency and the US economy is just going to collapse to Agree that like, I think most people here don't have not really, I mean, I'm sure poor people have reckoned with it because like, I've been poor and I've thought about it a bunch and a lot of my friends have, but like, I feel like people who are still kind of like, ah, this will be fine. Like, you know, the Democrats will win the midterms and like, we can reform ICE. Like this, this kind of moderate bullshit thinking is like, no, we are past the event horizon.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  The minute the AI bubble collapses, we are all so goddamn fucked that like, go ahead, try to get me fired from podcast or I won't have a job ever again or whatever. It's fine.

• 22:11November Kelly?

  If the podcast collapses, I'll what are you gonna do? Get me fired from being dead? Anyway, besides that, like, everyone's, the best job you can get is gonna be banging two rocks together. So like, are you gonna call my fucking grug supervisor? I, I don't want to suck myself off too much and be like, oh, I'm so brave for saying all the stuff that we're gonna bleep, right? But I am aware that it's a privilege to get to say the stuff that I know a bunch of you are thinking and cannot say publicly.

• 22:40Liam McAnderson?

  Exactly.

• 22:41November Kelly?

  And I try not to take that lightly. And I hope that you are in agreement with me about this stuff, the stuff that we can only imply or allude to.

• 22:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, they, you can't, I want to be very clear. You can't fucking fire us.

• 22:58Liam McAnderson?

  I answer to no one except Justin G. Rossi, I could possibly buy snooze.com and also possibly buy

• 23:05November Kelly?

  You're gonna get a stern letter from by snooze.com.

• 23:08Liam McAnderson?

  It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Dominus is shut down. I can't fucking import the shit anyway.

• 23:16Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, the one, the one saving grace here, I suppose, you know, is these ICE guys, they're all, you know, sort of Keystone Cops types.

• 23:23November Kelly?

  Doesn't stop them from killing people, but I guess not as many people as they might have.

• 23:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, if they were good at it, they'd have killed a lot more.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Every single time I see a story out of one of these detention centers, though, of which we have one in like the, in the Puget Sound, there's one in Tacoma, that we still, for some reason, allow to keep fucking operating because we won't do anything that would piss off the feds because we're, again, moral cowardice infects every fucking level of the United States government, state and federal.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  But like, every single time I read a story out of it, it's like, oh, these are, these are concentration camps in like, the literal textbook definition of the term, in that the people are not, they're not getting medical care, they're not getting food, they don't have adequate, like, safety or shelter, or lodgings, and nobody really cares about what happens to them, there's, we're learning about deaths in custody all the time. So like, yeah, the Keystone Cops thing is good, but they're still like rounding up people by like, the plane load, and putting them in these places where they're expected to basically disappear or die. And it's just, I, like, I mean, it's weird, because it's like, I feel like there should be some sort of tone that I could strike here that was like, lighter, but it's like, no, this is fucking endgame shit. It's been endgame shit.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  We didn't stop it before now, and now it's just gonna, the next couple of years are going to be unfathomably bad for so many people. No matter what we do, it's just, it's, I mean, unless you [bleep] tomorrow.

• 24:48November Kelly?

  [bleep].

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Tomorrow, and then maybe things will be fine. You never know.

• 24:52November Kelly?

  Verb every single noun.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can't, I can't.

• 24:54November Kelly?

  Climb every mountain, like, yeah, you, you, you know, you know.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  I'm really good at not saying things in recordings, but y'all have pushed me over into saying things in recordings. I shouldn't do that.

• 25:04Liam McAnderson?

  No, that's, that's the whole point. All these, all these people should [bleep]. All right, what, what do we got?

• 25:09Justin Roczniak?

  The reckoning's gonna be ugly.

• 25:11Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, and I want to be very clear on something, the reckoning always comes.

• 25:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Liam McAnderson?

  Um, R P Renee, good, uh, you were, you were better than the rest of us. Yep. And you deserved a lot better than you got.

• 25:25Justin Roczniak?

  In other news.

• 25:28November Kelly?

  This one seems almost quaint in comparison.

• 25:31Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, yeah, we, uh, we, we, we, we

• 25:34Liam McAnderson?

  We black bagged a guy.

• 25:35Justin Roczniak?

  For some reason.

• 25:36Liam McAnderson?

  We black bagged a guy.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Hey, we did kill, like, we, we did kill like, 80 people in the process of black bagging him, so.

• 25:43Liam McAnderson?

  We can't fucking do anything right. Goddamn, this country's so fucking stupid.

• 25:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Well, hey, my, my fa- okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, because I know everybody's already seen all this shit already, but my favorite part of this is that he got, part of what they arraigned him on was federal assault weapons charges.

• 25:59Liam McAnderson?

  They're his guns! He's a sovereign.

• 26:02Justin Roczniak?

  It's his country, they're his guns.

• 26:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. They're supposed to be there.

• 26:07November Kelly?

  We, we, we sort of await to see whether or not sovereign immunity is still a thing in the United States, and, you know, God help us if it isn't, because his defense is, justifiably, "I am president of Venezuela."

• 26:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 26:22November Kelly?

  What the fuck?

• 26:24Justin Roczniak?

  I I'm not not. I didn't. I didn't commit any crimes here.

• 26:28Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Why are you doing this? I am a sovereign.

• 26:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, like, OK, sure, he stole the election to be president of Venezuela. Fine, I'm not gonna dispute that.

• 26:37Liam McAnderson?

  We didn't. We didn't black bag him.

• 26:38November Kelly?

  Exactly.

• 26:39Liam McAnderson?

  We should have. We should have.

• 26:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, he's the reason we're in this mess.

• 26:43November Kelly?

  We should have. Just like a bunch of a bunch of guys in helicopters ice Bush's entire Secret Service detail and then take him to trial in Caracas.

• 26:52Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 26:55November Kelly?

  What laws does Venezuela have about, like, assault rifles? Um, yeah, so Nicolas Maduro.

• 27:01Liam McAnderson?

  Find out. Get her another Spanish buddy.

• 27:03November Kelly?

  Is now in prison with Luigi Manjoni, uh, just in fucking Arkham Asylum in Manhattan, I guess.

• 27:10Liam McAnderson?

  Are they cellmates? Because that shit would rule.

• 27:12November Kelly?

  I hope so. I think that would be cool. Um.

• 27:15Justin Roczniak?

  Hang out at the lunch table.

• 27:17Liam McAnderson?

  I'd watch that buddy comedy.

• 27:19November Kelly?

  I I I mean, basically, I think the way the way to understand this.

• 27:23Liam McAnderson?

  Hashtag Cafe Beat Cute, hashtag, uh.

• 27:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, Coffee Shop AU. I.

• 27:27Liam McAnderson?

  Slow burn.

• 27:28November Kelly?

  Yeah. So in terms of what this actually has been, right, in the history of, like, US intervention, it's not new, but it's newly sort of brazen, right? That we're doing all this stuff in the open and we're not sort of making any bones about it. And it's more honest in a way. Um, and it's more of a license to for any state anywhere to just do the the sort of like epic shit that they've always wanted to do. Um, so we'll see what the.

• 27:58Liam McAnderson?

  Israelis who have been who have made.

• 28:00November Kelly?

  Well, exactly, right.

• 28:01Liam McAnderson?

  We'll make no bones about assassinating people out in the open, but other countries have been too polite.

• 28:05November Kelly?

  We'll see what sort of what what comes out of Pandora's box on this one. Um, but, uh, we also know now, the remove of a few weeks, that his own vice president set him up, um, which is an insane move. Um, and, uh, I would have said treason, I guess. Um, but this is the thing about a dictatorship, right? Is you end up with a lot of people at the top who are sort of like corrupt and sort of. Self-interested to the point of doing this. I'm not gonna sort of burnish the supposed leftist credentials of Venezuela because you don't need to to say that this is a fucking illegal, criminal, stupid thing to do.

• 28:43Justin Roczniak?

  Very dumb.

• 28:43November Kelly?

  And if there is rule of law in the United States, which is still kind of up in the air, then they gotta acquit him and then funnier, they gotta bring him back.

• 28:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 28:55November Kelly?

  I know they won't, right? Because I'm not stupid enough to have faith in American courts, but like, it would be funny if they were mandated to bring him back and put him back where they found him.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  That is the funniest part about this entire fascist project, is that they were like, maybe three years out from getting the courts completely in line, but they just couldn't fucking wait, probably because Trump knows he's gonna die soon and he's like, I gotta fucking finish the project while I'm still alive, because God only knows what the hell is rattling around up there.

• 29:26November Kelly?

  There was a weird kind of private admission of weakness about this. I was reading the New York Times as deep dive into the FBI under Cash Patel, right? And a lot of it was like, lib to like center-right FBI agents being like, wow, wow, wow, my poor FBI, we used to love following the Constitution and now we don't, right? Which is, fuck you. But, one of the like MAGA appointees, as they were firing one of the FBI agents, very kind of Sicario vibe, was like, do you wanna get, like, investigated for, like, violating the Constitution now by us, or in four years' time by the Democrats? And so, on some level, some of these people know that maybe, there is gonna be some kind of like, legal consequence to this.

• 30:09November Kelly?

  I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope for it, but at least, it's nice to know that they worry.

• 30:13Liam McAnderson?

  My favorite part of this. As a, as a, as a, I'm gonna turn on my, my, my inner lib brain.

• 30:19November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 30:22Liam McAnderson?

  Hang these people for fucking treason.

• 30:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, straight. No, absolutely. I, I, I got really, because I was like, oh, you're an anarchist, which I am, but before that, I'm an annoying, wine-drinking, brunch-momming lib. And, and, and, what we should've done, we should've had-

• 30:44Liam McAnderson?

  People in the fucking streets for treason.

• 30:46November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 30:47Liam McAnderson?

  Donald Trump. Oh, God, I can't. Nope.

• 30:50November Kelly?

  But here's the thing. Do you think Gavin Newsom has the sauce to do that?

• 30:53Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my God.

• 30:54November Kelly?

  Do you think Gavin Newsom's gonna get up there, grasp the grasp the lectern at the inauguration and be like, pronouns are back and Donald Trump is being executed?

• 31:03Liam McAnderson?

  No, he's gonna, he's gonna, this sniveling, fucking, I don't know, the trans, the trans people belonging in, in, in girl spaces. Fucking Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump. We can.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  You know, you can't say that.

• 31:14Justin Roczniak?

  You could make Donald Trump homeless and then Gavin Newsom would do something about it.

• 31:27Liam McAnderson?

  From fucking street lamps.

• 31:29Justin Roczniak?

  My favorite part.

• 31:31November Kelly?

  I love my work. I love you guys.

• 31:33Justin Roczniak?

  My favorite part of all this is how Trump was like, look, Venezuela is open for oil development. And the oil company is all set.

• 31:41Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, boy. I don't know, man.

• 31:44Justin Roczniak?

  Nah, we don't want to do that.

• 31:45Liam McAnderson?

  My favorite thing is I were like, well, it's been seized before, you know, and I'm just like, all right, listen again, again, CEO of ExxonMobil, kneel him over a ditch, Donald Trump, kneel him over a ditch, Gavin Newsom, kneel him over a ditch. Am I forgetting anybody?

• 31:57November Kelly?

  No, I don't think so.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, probably thousands.

• 31:59Liam McAnderson?

  Cash Patel, nail him over a ditch. Every ICE agent, I'm gonna make him dig their own. Welcome to Liam Stalin.

• 32:08Liam McAnderson?

  I've changed my mind.

• 32:11November Kelly?

  Listen, eventually you wait long enough and what you, as a, as a Marxist Leninist, you will be proven right. There's a tweet going around that's like, listen, vulgar psychoanalysis and vulgar Marxism, get you to 1,000% percent like correct predictive power of events. And yeah, turns out.

• 32:30Liam McAnderson?

  All right, so we're gonna get my dad some sort of walker with guns on it.

• 32:34November Kelly?

  I think we must. Yeah, we have to.

• 32:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 32:37Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, the, the cane with the gun in it is no longer cutting it. So we must get him a walker with like two Tommy gun strap to it.

• 32:44November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Kind of a Gundam like situation at that point, isn't it?

• 32:47Liam McAnderson?

  He can't see real good, so.

• 32:51November Kelly?

  It's fine. Just, just, just don't be. Down to I the thing the person.

• 32:54Justin Roczniak?

  You're gonna have to give him an aim bar.

• 32:56Liam McAnderson?

  Give my dad a Gundam.

• 32:58November Kelly?

  The person I feel the most schadenfreude about in this whole situation is Putin, right? Because the plan here of there is a, you know, a guy in charge of what should be in our minds, our client state, who's doing stuff we don't like. We're gonna go in, kidnap or kill him, depose him, and the government's gonna be friendly to us. And we're just gonna run the whole thing from a distance. That was Russia's plan in Ukraine, and it didn't work. And so all of those dead Russian paratroopers watching the Americans pull their shit off by successfully talking to the right person ahead of time, that's very pleasing to me.

• 33:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, and then Trump got a Nobel Peace Prize for it.

• 33:40November Kelly?

  Well, he got handed someone else's Nobel Peace Prize.

• 33:42Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, and the Nobel Committee got real indignant about it, which is funny. I, I, I know we're not supposed to do the like, uh, you know, Air Bud playing basketball or whatever, but it is funny that the Nobel Committee was like, nah.

• 33:56Justin Roczniak?

  And yet it happened.

• 33:58Liam McAnderson?

  Well, it doesn't matter because I don't recognize Venezuela as a country, so.

• 34:05Liam McAnderson?

  All nation states are bad. I've been consistent on this line.

• 34:08November Kelly?

  Oh, I mean, listen, we, we did Trash Future and, um, we had a guest on and I, I got told that, you know, it's not our role as leftists to critique or to analyze, uh, like regimes in the global south that are left-aligned or whatever. And it's like, is it my role as a leftist to have fucking eyes? Because I've had hemorrhoids that are red of the mudura.

• 34:27Liam McAnderson?

  Exactly. Yeah. Uh, ooh, that's, you should probably get those checked out.

• 34:33Liam McAnderson?

  Can we, can someone, uh, while we're, while we're, while we're 35 minutes, 50 seconds in, can someone, uh, whoever did the illustration of my dad as Chairman Bill, can you also do my dad piloting a Gundam for me, please?

• 34:48Justin Roczniak?

  In.

• 34:49Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 34:50Justin Roczniak?

  In additional news.

• 34:54November Kelly?

  This is the one that's been driving me the most insane. We're recording this right as, right after Trump went to Davos and sort of walked it back.

• 35:02Liam McAnderson?

  Puked his pants is basically what he did.

• 35:05November Kelly?

  The line started to go down. Maybe somebody from the Joint Chiefs said, hey, this probably, we couldn't do this the way you wanted.

• 35:12Liam McAnderson?

  Not today, chief. Right.

• 35:14November Kelly?

  And, and so he kind of sort of backed out of this idea that the US was gonna like invade and occupy Greenland.

• 35:24November Kelly?

  For no reason I could tell other than that Greenland's big on map.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  He thought about it in 2019 and this presidential term, he's decided he is going to chase after everything he couldn't do before. That's why he destroyed the east wing of the White House, which again, doesn't matter in the scheme of things.

• 35:39November Kelly?

  Yeah, good riddance, bitch.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  But real fucking funny. It is really fucking funny.

• 35:43November Kelly?

  I, here's, here's the thing. Here's the thing. Donald Trump, as a pedophile, right? He yearns for an island. And when his best friend died and lost, I guess, lost custody of the island, Donald Trump lost access to that island and now he needs a new island. And of course, being Trump, he wants the biggest one so that he can do the most pedophilia.

• 36:03Justin Roczniak?

  What if he dug a moat around the White House, then it might...

• 36:08November Kelly?

  Call it White Castle.

• 36:09Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:10Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I like White Castle.

• 36:11Justin Roczniak?

  I like White Castle too.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  I do think it's... Do we, does this mean that now that NATO is dead, we have to actually say critical support to Donald Trump?

• 36:20November Kelly?

  Yeah, it does. I, I said, I said on TF that, you know, I, I wanted NATO to die in my lifetime, but I didn't expect it to be in such a stupid fucking way.

• 36:28Justin Roczniak?

  Very, very dumb.

• 36:29Liam McAnderson?

  Nope. That's it. I'm going full Naffo. Let's do it, baby. That's right.

• 36:34November Kelly?

  I've been that woman in my life. All right. Like, I, listen, I need, I need you to...

• 36:39Liam McAnderson?

  You can't quit. You literally cannot quit.

• 36:41November Kelly?

  Within the corners of my soul, there is a little like fucking reprehensible NATO dog man, right? And anytime anyone on any podcast says some shit about Ukraine, uh, I bite, I like bite it back and I'm like, listen, you don't fucking know what you're talking about, right? I don't say that. And in return for that, I still get yelled at in the comments. Uh, this is just my burden. It's fine. I'm not... Mad about it, honestly. But yeah, so basically what we need, I guess, is multipolarity. And that means, you know, Europe is really deciding, you know, maybe we can't rely on.

• 37:17Liam McAnderson?

  We're gonna go it alone. Right. All right. So welcome to the new world capital.

• 37:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 37:23Justin Roczniak?

  My favorite part about this is that even like the, the foreign policy, like conservative foreign policy wonk guys are like, they can't figure out why Trump did this. No one can figure out why Trump won't.

• 37:36Liam McAnderson?

  They're just like, oh, the Lintards. So you don't know, you don't know fucking anything either. All right, cool.

• 37:41November Kelly?

  It's real dumb guy shit, right? Because as an American president, right, you're allowed to disrespect the Europeans to a point, right? Because we are slime and we love that shit. And our leaders are craven and will sort of like bend the knee to a point. There is a limit on that and that limit is kind of threatening to invade Danish territory, right? And, and, you know, where this leads, I have no idea, but I think it's, you would have to be very stupid as anyone of influence in a European, in a European capital to say, we, we can't decouple ourselves from the Americans, right? Whatever they do, every four years, 10,000 of them in swing states get insane about seeing like, you know,

• 38:24November Kelly?

  a trans woman grade an essay in a way they don't like and decide to initiate World War V? Fuck that. Absolutely not. Because the one thing about China is it's predictable. It's predictably bad, but that you can work with that. The US is unpredictably bad.

• 38:41Justin Roczniak?

  You know, it's, it's like, okay, we're gonna build military bases. You're already allowed to do that.

• 38:46Liam McAnderson?

  Don't we already?

• 38:46Justin Roczniak?

  We're gonna mine for resources.

• 38:48Liam McAnderson?

  We already do all this.

• 38:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, we do.

• 38:50Justin Roczniak?

  We're gonna mine for resources. They've been actively seeking American investment for decades now. So far, they've got one Ruby mine. That's the only thing that's given a return because it's so damn difficult to mine up there. There's like nothing there.

• 39:05Liam McAnderson?

  I think what we should do is simply, no, I can't say that or I'll be shot.

• 39:10Justin Roczniak?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 39:11November Kelly?

  Maybe we can push China left.

• 39:13Justin Roczniak?

  Trump is like really into fisheries now. That's why he's going after Greenland.

• 39:19November Kelly?

  You also got it confused with Iceland a bunch of times.

• 39:22Liam McAnderson?

  Three times, three times. And Carolyn Leavitt was like, no, he didn't. Yes, he fucking did. You dumb, you dumb scag. I can't use a gender.

• 39:30November Kelly?

  Old man's brain is melting.

• 39:34November Kelly?

  The Biden Ray got him. The fucking Cobalt 60 source embedded in the Resolute Desk that just makes you senile in a matter of days got to him, you know?

• 39:44Justin Roczniak?

  Have to come up with an Anglicanized name for Reykjavik.

• 39:47Liam McAnderson?

  Fuckface.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  I mean, the thing is, is like, I remember, um, I remember 2024, unfortunately. I just remember the past, which is a curse and a burden.

• 39:58Liam McAnderson?

  I try not to say that.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Neither of them looked very good that year. I think he may have already been going senile. I think the exposure to the Resolute Desk from his first term had already taken full hold.

• 40:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  The thing is, is just like, at a certain point, um, you know, we deserve to, we deserve the whole world, uh, telling us to fuck off. Uh, the US dollar crash is gonna be crazy. Uh, I'm already building a Jeep Cherokee with spikes on the front bumper. And like a skull and crossbones flag mounted from a bullwhip antenna.

• 40:29Liam McAnderson?

  Take me with you.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  And I, I intend to, uh, rule, um, I5 as a god king.

• 40:36November Kelly?

  You know, I'm signing up for Mandarin courses.

• 40:40Justin Roczniak?

  Go find an ice agent to use as a blood bag.

• 40:44November Kelly?

  I, I am, I am memorizing the phrase, this is what cisgender women look like in my country. Trust me. And I am just getting that down.

• 40:53Liam McAnderson?

  I, I do want to say, uh, as someone who also is condemned to remember the past, I, it's, it's so, it's so funny because you see these, I, I, a good friend of the show, Tom Payne, was pointing out that like Europeans are not so good with, with the racism thing.

• 41:10November Kelly?

  No, this is true.

• 41:11Liam McAnderson?

  And it's just like, I, I, the thing is about American hegemony. It's like, you, you're absolutely right. And I really wanted to speak on your point about like, at least China is predictable. Every day I wake up to make sure Reykjavik is still there.

• 41:25November Kelly?

  Do you want, do you want to hear some absolute realpolitik in a way that's like really reprehensible?

• 41:30Liam McAnderson?

  Honestly, god, I do.

• 41:31November Kelly?

  Okay. So, um, I, I heard this from.

• 41:36November Kelly?

  The line amongst people who are in favor of sort of aligning more to China is China is like having a neighbor who beats their kids, right? It's bad. You don't like to see it. America is like having a neighbor who beats his kids and then wants to come over and beat your kids, right?

• 41:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 41:54November Kelly?

  You see, you see the difference. And it's like, if that's the calculation for a, as Mark Carney puts it, a middle power, fucking hell, right?

• 42:03Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I don't, right, exactly. You can't fault these people. Like, it's just, it's just, we, it's, it's, I know that we're gonna get yelled at in the comments, being in America is so goddamn embarrassing. Yeah. We don't care. I want to be very clear on that. Victoria might, November might, Roz might, I fucking don't.

• 42:20November Kelly?

  I don't read the comments when I feel bad about myself. I search the like Reddit.

• 42:25Liam McAnderson?

  Shit open a week ago. You could, you could suck my surgically mangled balls. Gargle them if you will.

• 42:32November Kelly?

  Jesus, dude.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  All three.

• 42:34Justin Roczniak?

  All three.

• 42:35Liam McAnderson?

  All three balls. That's right.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  I know. I, here's the thing. I care what people think of me in terms of like, I want them to find me personally agreeable. But if people want to yell at me for not liking NATO, that's fine.

• 42:47Liam McAnderson?

  You like NATO?

• 42:48November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. Get the fuck out of here.

• 42:52Liam McAnderson?

  NAFO Victoria, that's what your name is.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  On the webcam stream.

• 42:58Liam McAnderson?

  It's actually called NAFO, North Atlantic Victoria Organization. It's wild. We replaced the star with just your face.

• 43:07Justin Roczniak?

  Thing about NATO is they don't have all the starting vehicles. So you gotta, you really gotta use the Soviet custom house to start out.

• 43:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, true, actually.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  I know there's a, there's a trans woman I know who walked into my home once with a trans flag NATO pin. And I made her leave and take it off.

• 43:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, she, she sent me one of those as well. I have one in my house. I did not get rid of it. I still have mine.

• 43:31Liam McAnderson?

  Can you mail me yours? Cause my, my brother-in-law is gonna like that.

• 43:37November Kelly?

  I can, I can, she, I can probably have her reach out to you, actually.

• 43:41Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  It glowed with the, with like brightness of 10,000 suns when I held it.

• 43:45November Kelly?

  Somewhat evil objects, but I do still, I do still have it. Well, listen, you know?

• 43:51Speaker 02

  It's like the one ring. I can hear it whispering when it's in the same room as me.

• 43:57Liam McAnderson?

  I, the, the worst is, uh, listening to my dad defend NATO as like an ardent communist and being like, listen.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  What, what the?

• 44:05November Kelly?

  Well, they, they did prevent a genocide that one time. You do have to give them that.

• 44:09Liam McAnderson?

  That's where, that's where it starts and where it stops. Yeah. That's, that's basically my defense of NATO as well.

• 44:14November Kelly?

  Well, I say prevent, but end, they ended a genocide that was sort of like ongoing, right?

• 44:18Speaker 02

  But like, I think on the whole, you know?

• 44:21Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  I'm still gonna say bad.

• 44:23Liam McAnderson?

  I can't blame you. I mean, Navo is a, is a tough organization to get into, northern, northern authoritarian organization. Uh, somebody make that shirt up, please.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Please do not. I beg of you. I beg of you. Nobody, uh, of, uh, if any of the, if you hate me on this show and you'd like me to never see me again, I guess make the shirt, but otherwise, please.

• 44:43Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, bud. Yeah. No, I don't know if you noticed.

• 44:45November Kelly?

  All I can say is like, we're not, we're not an organization.

• 44:48Liam McAnderson?

  One second, one second.

• 44:49November Kelly?

  God damn.

• 44:49Liam McAnderson?

  Well, there's your problem. Make work program is mandatory.

• 44:55Liam McAnderson?

  See you next Wednesday.

• 44:57November Kelly?

  It's more of a corvee. Yeah. I, we're not, we're not a podcast with a party line. Each of us ourselves are somewhat politically incoherent. Uh, like I, I, I, programmatically, I am a Marxist-Leninist, right? I know what that means. However, it doesn't mean I don't have sympathies. And so like, I can look at NATO and I can be like, yeah, but you know, where the fuck, I don't know.

• 45:19Liam McAnderson?

  Fine.

• 45:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 45:21November Kelly?

  Yeah. So, um, I don't know. It's the time of fucking monsters is what it is. And I think you'll forgive all of us for being a little bit sort of like, um.

• 45:30Liam McAnderson?

  They cut my shit open a week ago. I'm a little delirious.

• 45:33Justin Roczniak?

  I have my criticisms, but it is the only thing stopping Germany from invading Poland.

• 45:40November Kelly?

  I think Poland might be the only thing stopping Germany from invading Poland at this point.

• 45:45Liam McAnderson?

  Ross with like one G3 just laying there in the folding gap, just ready to go.

• 45:52Liam McAnderson?

  It's like a half smoking cigarette. Ross is like, yeah, come at me. Let's do this. I remember 1978.

• 45:59Justin Roczniak?

  It'll just happen. They'll relapse instantly.

• 46:02Liam McAnderson?

  What's that November?

• 46:03November Kelly?

  The first secretary general of NATO, the British general, and he said that the point of NATO was to keep the Americans up, the French in, the Germans down, and the Russians out, right? And like, that was the idea, and it was always rigged in the Americans' favor. And now America, for some reason, has decided that it doesn't want to play the game of poker that it rigged anymore.

• 46:28Liam McAnderson?

  How many times has Article Five been invoked?

• 46:31November Kelly?

  Oh, I mean.

• 46:32Liam McAnderson?

  One, one time after nine eleven. This is the dumbest shit in the world.

• 46:37November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 46:37Liam McAnderson?

  Go to bed, grandpa. And again, if you support Donald Trump, if you support ICE, we'll move on after this.

• 46:44November Kelly?

  What the fuck are you doing here?

• 46:45Liam McAnderson?

  What the fuck are you doing here? What the fuck are you doing contributing to our Patreon and insulting my friend? I blocked you, by the way. And yeah, put a gun in your mouth.

• 46:56November Kelly?

  Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm so sorry, Devin.

• 47:00Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'm not.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  I feel kind of bad.

• 47:03Liam McAnderson?

  I do actually feel kind of bad, sorry.

• 47:05November Kelly?

  I feel bad for making Devon do the work, but not, yeah.

• 47:09Liam McAnderson?

  Don't go into nightclubs.

• 47:10November Kelly?

  Every nightclub is a death trap.

• 47:12Liam McAnderson?

  This was ever.

• 47:14November Kelly?

  This afro ski bar doesn't have a fire exit.

• 47:17Justin Roczniak?

  What was it? This was a bar in Switzerland.

• 47:20November Kelly?

  Montana in Switzerland, yeah.

• 47:22Justin Roczniak?

  Switzerland, yeah.

• 47:23November Kelly?

  Very, very crowded New Year's party. And as you see here on somebody's phone video, that is a bunch of sparklers, like fireworks sparklers, the ones that get up to like something crazy, like eight billion degrees or something, stuffed into the necks of champagne bottles, being lifted to the ceiling, which is covered in flammable insulation.

• 47:45Justin Roczniak?

  Flammable acoustic insulation.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  It was always kind of like a uniquely American kid that we just treated sparklers like they were toys and children, like waved them around at the Fourth of July or whatever. Cause I'm like, this is crazy. Those are so hot. You can absolutely do serious damage with those. But no, I guess it's just everybody is like, eh, it's fine, fire indoors.

• 48:04Justin Roczniak?

  If you recall our episode on the station nightclub fire, you may notice that this is an example. Exact identical incident, except the acoustic panels are on the ceiling as opposed to on the walls.

• 48:18November Kelly?

  Yeah, and and the pyro is being like hand carried by the like. I it's just, you know, the obviously like this killed a bunch of people.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  I believe, I think forty was the last.

• 48:31November Kelly?

  Which is, which is for for a nightclub fire is not unusual because you have a lot of people trying to evacuate a crowded space. If the evacuation is in any way compromised, then all those people fucking die, right?

• 48:42Justin Roczniak?

  Also, there were a lot of people just like taking videos of the fire on their phone like, whoa, that's cool.

• 48:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, which I don't, I don't want to condemn because like you're out to have a good time, not to be in a fucking CSB video. You you maybe you're drunk. How how many times have you actually like seen a fire spread enough to know when it's dangerous? Like, you don't know how fast this stuff spreads across acoustic insulation. And the answer is a lot. And as we did on Station nightclub fire, the fumes it emits are very noxious.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  That is the one thing that you could like, if you take any lesson from this podcast ever is if you see something on fire and you're indoors, you should get out of doors immediately.

• 49:22November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  Just don't fuck around with it. It's bad.

• 49:25Justin Roczniak?

  The real practical solution here is we need to dramatically increase the listenership of the podcast so that everyone can recognize these problems from the lessons we have taught them.

• 49:35November Kelly?

  What we need is a kind of like, you know, European film level of cultural funding to be like, you know, the EU fund on fire prevention has hired us to do like safety PSAs. That's like every, every fire is an emergency and it is the, check this shit out. It's your license to go ape shit. You're allowed to shout. You're allowed to scream, encouraged even. It's a good idea to hit the fire alarm.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  I wonder if during woke two, we can get the CSB on board with this podcast.

• 50:04November Kelly?

  I hope so. Yeah. I'm, I mean, listen, they made podcasters the in charge of the FBI, right? Like, I I should hope at the very least, we could all get like deeply consequential jobs and ruin things in the other direction. But yeah, no, I I just, you you gotta, you gotta, if you, if you see a fire, especially in this kind of crowded environment, you you have to not panic and freak out, but you have to panic and freak out, you know?

• 50:30Justin Roczniak?

  Panic and freak out in a productive way.

• 50:33November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 50:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 50:34November Kelly?

  Which is get out of the building, get everybody else out of the building.

• 50:37Justin Roczniak?

  Get everyone else out of the building. Yeah, exactly.

• 50:40November Kelly?

  Pray to God they haven't like padlocked the fire exits because all nightclub owners are scum who would just like paint the image of a fire door onto a wall if they could get away with it.

• 50:50Justin Roczniak?

  I've always been like, yeah, I don't understand how nightclub owners get away with so much so frequently. I mean, it seems like every, I don't go into nightclub for this reason. Yeah, exactly.

• 51:01November Kelly?

  Maybe not in this specific case, it could be something else, but a lot of the time when you ask the question, the answer is bribes.

• 51:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, it's sad. Know where the exits are, folks.

• 51:10November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 51:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but yeah, so like, I think 40 people were killed in this. Well, that's what the notes say, so probably.

• 51:17November Kelly?

  Yeah, we started the new year with a disaster.

• 51:22Justin Roczniak?

  A mass casualty event. Yeah. So, anyway, if there's fire, leave. It's true. Another news.

• 51:32November Kelly?

  Now, this is one we should really have Gareth back on to explain.

• 51:35Justin Roczniak?

  About to say, there's, there's, there's a lot going on here.

• 51:38November Kelly?

  Renfei is having the, the sort of terrible, horrible, very bad, no good set of days.

• 51:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 51:46November Kelly?

  There have been like two huge train crashes and then like two more minor ones.

• 51:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 51:52November Kelly?

  Uh, in Spain in the space of a week.

• 51:54Justin Roczniak?

  Big one is this, um, Irio high speed train, uh, derailed, um, between, oh God, I forget where it was.

• 52:03November Kelly?

  I also don't, right? It was, it was a train collision, I believe.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, the one derailed and the, the another train hit it after it derailed.

• 52:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, there was a, as Denzel put it, a wreck on a wreck.

• 52:15November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 52:16Justin Roczniak?

  Apparently there was some kind of broken rail which caused the Irio train to derail. Irio is, uh, Freccia Ross's brand in, uh, Spain as the Italian state railway operator. Um, and it derailed in such a way, like it wasn't a great derailment, uh, you know, to start out with, but it derailed in such a way that it fouled the adjacent track, uh, and a second high speed train came along and that one derailed much worse.

• 52:44November Kelly?

  Yeah. As as you would imagine.

• 52:45Justin Roczniak?

  As as you do.

• 52:47November Kelly?

  And this killed, I think, forty five people at time of recording.

• 52:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 52:53November Kelly?

  Real bad. I mean, Spain has like the largest high speed rail network in the world outside of China, I believe.

• 53:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Really?

• 53:02November Kelly?

  And yeah, genuinely, like, it's a huge point of, like, sort of national prestige and everything. But that also means that, you know, very occasionally you get sort of like bad accidents like this. And it's it's just like, you know, sort of ruinous. The other one is, I think it was a retaining wall collapsed onto the track, derailed another high speed train.

• 53:27Justin Roczniak?

  I think that was just a commuter train, but yeah.

• 53:29November Kelly?

  Oh, was it? Okay. Well, I mean, as far as I know, that only killed the driver, but it like injured like, you know, two dozen people, three dozen people. So huge crisis in confidence. I know I know the the Renfe Union is calling for like a three day strike just to be like, we got to stop doing trains until we can figure out what the fuck's going on.

• 53:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, three, three, four derailments in like a week. You know, you're nearly doing American Class One railroad numbers.

• 53:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just like statistical clustering, as far as anyone knows, but like, it's shitty luck to, again, to start the year on, you know, it's like.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  It does feel like it's been a bad January.

• 54:11November Kelly?

  We're not even, yeah, we're not even fucking out of January yet. The one thing we're celebrating is, hey, the US didn't invade Greenland yet.

• 54:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  And I will admit, like, they're still amassing forces up there. It's not off the table. Like, by the time this episode drops, people could be posting like, oh, remember January twenty second? How sweet and naive they were.

• 54:31November Kelly?

  One of one of the funnier possible things to have happened, yeah, is a fucking Danish SFer in like an Operation Flashpoint situation out there and like we just put out the episode that's like, hey, uh, seems like he's backing down. Frump always chickens out, you know?

• 54:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, well, I can have.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  There was also, didn't make it into the slide, but there's also a train crash in Thailand when a crane fell onto a train, which that killed like thirty something people too.

• 54:57November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 54:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, then another crane collapsed the day later. Yeah, I mean, these are all happening. Everything's happening all at once.

• 55:04November Kelly?

  This is all Lennon's fault. I'm speaking for Liam here.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  I do actually want, I mean, this is.

• 55:10Justin Roczniak?

  You're right. I'm just eating chips.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Probably not related to like the Spanish train crashes. But I do wonder if there's just going to be more operational errors this year as everybody's like psychic load of not knowing if we're going to World War III or not constantly. Kind of takes a greater and greater toll on them.

• 55:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  And more and more corners on top of all the corners that have already been cut for the past, like, you know, several decades, plus the five years since COVID where everything just got worse and everybody's doing five jobs. Like at a certain point, like the deaths have to come due. And I'm wondering if like it's, these things are just going to happen at higher and higher frequencies. Where it's like, geez, we sure have compounded all of these failures into, you know, just a complete clusterfuck. Because everybody's gone insane because it's kind of hard to like function normally when you're like, damn, the, we might have, who knows what's going to happen tomorrow. Maybe there'll be like a nuclear strike.

• 56:00November Kelly?

  Well, the good news is, the good news is that it's, it's harder to fuck up doing a podcast in a way that kills someone like.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  I think I could do it.

• 56:09November Kelly?

  Well, we hope not. We do our best.

• 56:11Justin Roczniak?

  I am excited for when Macron nukes America. That will be, that will be a fun day.

• 56:17November Kelly?

  A great war of justice that turns the American, American soils to ashes. Yeah.

• 56:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think we're quite at nuclear war phase yet, but I mean, it just, it does feel like things are kind of insane all the time. And maybe that's just my perspective as an American.

• 56:31November Kelly?

  No, it feels that way here too.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. Everybody I talked to.

• 56:34November Kelly?

  I mean, maybe you're like, I don't know, listeners, maybe you're in Chengdu having like eight different kinds of lesbian sex in one day. And you're sort of like looking up from your apartment that's like 40 degrees indoors with the air conditioning on full blast. And you're like, I don't know what you're talking about. This is great.

• 56:52November Kelly?

  I want to move to Chengdu, but I genuinely think the heat would kill me.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  In which case, can you please, can you please convince them to get cool about trans men real quick? Cause I will learn Mandarin, please.

• 57:02November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 57:03Justin Roczniak?

  Well.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that's an hour.

• 57:06Justin Roczniak?

  What's Mandarin? What's Mandarin for that was the goddamn news?

• 57:10November Kelly?

  Uh, you know what? I have no idea, but I have a drop that sounds like this instead.

• 57:17Justin Roczniak?

  All right, all right, here we are in the podcast finally.

• 57:22November Kelly?

  Listen, a lot of shit's been happening, okay?

• 57:26Speaker 02

  All right, well, I made this slide to show you. Well, actually, the EPA made this slide and then I modified it slightly.

• 57:34November Kelly?

  I didn't notice him until now.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  To, uh, to, we have to understand how Deepwater Horizon, the movie with Mark Wahlberg happened, we first have to ask how Deepwater Horizon, the disaster happened. And to understand that, we have to ask, how do you drill for oil? Oil is-

• 57:52November Kelly?

  I saw a movie about this. What you do is you, you, you take your son with you everywhere.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  No, the most, the most frustrating fucking part of researching this episode for me, because I came into this like, I know about cars. I didn't know about like, the finer points of like drilling for oil. But I wanted to learn as much as possible in the span before we recorded, so I could try to give us as accurate a depiction of what happened as possible, because accuracy matters to me. Um, which is why I've also started doing flashcards of the pronunciation of various river names in the Pacific Northwest.

• 58:25November Kelly?

  Meanwhile, I'm just playing turmoil like, oh yeah, you drill down, you avoid the fucking like rocks, easy.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  The really, the really frustrating part is that I realized I had heard most of this terminology in that stupid fucking movie with Bruce Willis, where they have to go blow up the asteroid. He actually did have some points about how hard it is to drill for fucking oil. I don't see why it would have applied in space, but it, they did actually get some drilling guys on the set of that movie, apparently. Um, anyway, so the oil is underground, so you gotta dig to go get it. You, you do this with a combination of tools. The ones that I'm going to focus on here are going to be the drill bit, uh, the drill string and the collar.

• 59:07November Kelly?

  Can I, can I just say, thank you so much for not including the photo of Drake's well?

• 59:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:12November Kelly?

  First time we've talked about oil in six years that hasn't involved that photo Drake's well.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Of course, of course, of course. So you, the, the, the bit is what you're actually going to think of when you're going to do oil drilling, you know, it's the grindy thing at the front that kind of like chews through the earth. And then the collar is essentially a big weighted pipe that sits atop the bit to help force it downward. The part that is going to be, I think, most interesting and going to help us the most here is talking about, next slide, please, the drill string and how that, how we, because that's really what's going to let us actually dig downward. The, the string itself is basically a massive length of pipe that transmits torque from the rig above ground and all the cutting fluid, because otherwise you can't just, you

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  know, drill dry, you got to go in wet, I guess.

• 1:00:05November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  You know, uh, you, you don't want to, you, there would be too much friction and heat otherwise. You have to, you have to send down a cutting fluid, and this is known as drilling mud, so that you transmit that through the drill string down to the bit to allow you lubrication for when you're digging into the earth.

• 1:00:21November Kelly?

  All right, so it's a big drive shaft and also a kind of like lube dispenser.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much, yeah.

• 1:00:27Justin Roczniak?

  It helps keep the pressure so that the well stays open.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  Yes. And yeah, so you, you, you basically, you can see in the second diagram here, there's, you, you dig down a bit with a wider bit, and then you put in a length of pipe around the outside that you've just dug, and then you pour cement in behind that. And then you keep stepping these down further and further in as you dig further and further into the earth. So you have to have a rough idea of like how far you're digging, you can't just start and be like, oh, we'll dig when we hit oil. You need to actually have like a target depth for this kind of thing, which people who know how to drill for oil probably knew this already. I did not before I was learning about.

• 1:01:06November Kelly?

  This is some real like dirt science.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Oh, it's, it's insane. It turns out.

• 1:01:13Justin Roczniak?

  Always the most complicated one.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16November Kelly?

  That's why they get paid the big bucks, also because it's, you know, destroying the planet.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like crazy evil. So I imagine that it's like to also make you feel less bad about the fact that you're like actively ruining the earth.

• 1:01:29Justin Roczniak?

  Pays usually really good, yeah.

• 1:01:30November Kelly?

  Probably keeps you really busy as well because you're like, oh, I'm destroying the earth, but it's like super complicated. I gotta work really hard on it.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, and you know, it's not like, like the rest of us aren't, you know, relying on this, like all of global commerce requires it. So I mean, it's not, it's a, I, this is still, I still feel like, you know, being the earth scientist who's, who ends up going into oil and gas is like, it's still a few rungs below like Lockheed, Lockheed Martin, like weapons developer. But you know, probably not.

• 1:01:57November Kelly?

  I'm troubled by what Lockheed Martin wants from a dirt scientist, you know?

• 1:02:04November Kelly?

  What the hell are they building in there?

• 1:02:06Justin Roczniak?

  They're finally building the land submarine.

• 1:02:08Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, yes. From the Incredibles? Already.

• 1:02:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  So anyway, as you, you dig down with the drill string and you, you lower in this pipe that's called the casing into the bore hole. And then you pump in a cement slurry into the, the void between the, the earth that's been dug and the casing that you've just installed, that, that area, that space that the cement is going to fill is called the annulus. And you do that basically to fix it in place. Cementing it, you know, prevents contamination of fresh water that might be also like in the ground where you're trying to, you know, dig oil up through. It prevents the upper formations of what you've dug from caving in and like collapsing onto the drill string and making it stop.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  Or, you know, digging a giant cavern on accident that would greatly hamper your ability to get oil and gas out of the ground.

• 1:03:03November Kelly?

  Like weird Minecraft stuff gives you a nice, clean stronghold.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And it, it provides a, a strong foundation to, to throw in the, the drilling mud because you're going to need more of that and thicker as you dig deeper. Because as Braz pointed out, like you're using that mud for a couple of purposes. One is like, you're using it as a cutting fluid, but you're also. Also using it as you get further down to keep pressure on the bottom of the hole and keep the oil and gas that you might be hitting from blowing out the top. We'll get to that in a minute.

• 1:03:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, it will deafen your son and then, you know, set him on a sort of life against you in the end.

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then, you know, obviously it's like, it also gives you a smooth bore so you can like actually drop in the equipment you used to extract out.

• 1:03:47November Kelly?

  Smooth bore, technically making an oil well a shotgun.

• 1:03:52Liam McAnderson?

  Damn it, you beat me to it. It sounds like you beat Roz to it too.

• 1:03:56Justin Roczniak?

  It's more of a flamethrower when you get right down to it. We'll get to that.

• 1:04:01November Kelly?

  Rifling my oil well?

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so as you're digging down, you know, you, you pump all the, the drilling mud down through the string, through the bit, and then it comes back up through the bore hole that you've just dug. That's the blue inside this diagram that I stole, but I did credit. I don't know if it's actually gonna be visible in the thing, but it was a really useful diagram and I, you know, I was like, so thank you to.

• 1:04:25November Kelly?

  Once, once, once you put CC by SA on there, it's like, whatever, man. Like, thank you. We appreciate it. You have, you have left your car windows open and the stereo running. Like,

• 1:04:38November Kelly?

  thank you, C Strickland.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good, it's a good, um, it's a good diagram. You pump out at the bottom and then that blue inside the pipe there is like, that's all of your drilling mud that you're recirculating back up. You're, you're pulling off all of the sediment, which is called the cuttings. And then you reuse the cutting fluid again. And as the pressure builds, that's what keeps down the oil that you're gonna strike. And if the pressure of that fluid spikes, you're, you're gonna like run into some issues. If it spikes too high, that's called a kick. If it spikes way too high, next slide, please.

• 1:05:17Justin Roczniak?

  It's a gosh.

• 1:05:17Liam McAnderson?

  I just, I just ate some. Here, look.

• 1:05:21Liam McAnderson?

  Don't worry about it. It looks like a condom pack and I don't know.

• 1:05:27November Kelly?

  I'm not gonna, okay, sure, fine.

• 1:05:30Liam McAnderson?

  I, what I do is I like to stick my balls in the gushers and then, you know, it's okay.

• 1:05:35November Kelly?

  Hmm. So what, once the well, once the well has been taking some like zinc and um.

• 1:05:41Liam McAnderson?

  It's got the zinc stack. Yeah.

• 1:05:43November Kelly?

  Exactly. How the fuck do you know about that, Liam?

• 1:05:48Liam McAnderson?

  I am too fucking online.

• 1:05:51November Kelly?

  Well, aren't we all? But that's some deep knowledge.

• 1:05:57Liam McAnderson?

  I'm not, I, I am making Napoleon at Osterlitz look like a coward.

• 1:06:06November Kelly?

  Okay, sure. Fantastic. Um, Victoria?

• 1:06:12Liam McAnderson?

  Right, yes.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  I believe the, the exact quote I had put in here, which is gonna sound really funny now, is eureka, baby.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, anyway, if, if you get too, too strong of a kick, it overwhelms the drilling mud and it will spray out the top of the rig. Um, and the, you know, it creates an oil gusher. Um, this is what's technically known as a blowout. Uh, and you know, this is how you know you struck it, you struck it rich in like the early 1900s is, oh my God, this oil just spraying all over the landscape and like coating everything around it. Uh, it turns out that's bad.

• 1:06:47Liam McAnderson?

  Like a Lutet's cartoon, yeah.

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't.

• 1:06:50Justin Roczniak?

  It's fine, it's natural.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  You don't actually want the oil to do this. Um, oil is.

• 1:06:55November Kelly?

  That's money, you know?

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  Well, it's money. It's also flammable. Um, and also like it's, uh, you know, the, the picture here is of the, the spindle top gusher. Uh, for the, started the Texas oil industry. It sprayed like that for nine days.

• 1:07:11Liam McAnderson?

  Oh dear.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  And spilled 16 million gallons of oil.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  An eyewitness account of hitting a gusher from the era goes as follows. Quote, "With a roar like a hundred express trains racing across the countryside, the well blew out, spewing oil in all directions. The derrick simply evaporated. Casings wilted like lettuce out of water as heavy machinery writhed and twisted into grotesque shapes in the blazing inferno."

• 1:07:40November Kelly?

  I say this, they could write back then.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  I know, I know. I really need to like bring that kind of thing. I need to do like a car review that's written like that.

• 1:07:47Liam McAnderson?

  You can review my wife's RAV4.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  What year is it?

• 1:07:51Liam McAnderson?

  Twenty-four.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it's pretty good. It is what you buy if you buy one unit of SUV.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  Look, I'm sorry, I am fucking furious at the Toyota Motor Corporation ever since Akio went out to a racetrack in Japan wearing the Trump Vance shirt. He's dead to me. Toyota's dead to me. All their good cars were made in the 90s. Everything they make now sucks shit. Fuck you, Akio.

• 1:08:19Liam McAnderson?

  All right, no, I'll tell my wife. That's actually perfect for me. Thankfully, there's no problematic history with Volkswagen, so GPI or Golf R.

• 1:08:27November Kelly?

  I just assumed that you'd be taking this to Corinne and going, okay, so when can we buy the Viper?

• 1:08:34Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, obviously.

• 1:08:36Liam McAnderson?

  Chrysler owns Jeeps. Jeep won the war.

• 1:08:42Liam McAnderson?

  Or Stellantis or whatever the hell is going on.

• 1:08:45November Kelly?

  Technically, one of those like fuds who's like, I'm not switching to 40 Smith and Wesson because 9mm killed more fascists than anything else put together, right? Where it's like, yeah, therefore I'm gonna, whatever Chrysler slop, you know, I'll buy it.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  Technically, like they're French now and like the French make the best cars.

• 1:09:02November Kelly?

  Stellantis.

• 1:09:05Justin Roczniak?

  I have you know, it was actually Gorky Automotive Design Bureau that won the war.

• 1:09:10November Kelly?

  I drive the Dodge Viper. I knew Macron would get that way when I saw him in the sunglasses.

• 1:09:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:17Liam McAnderson?

  Calm down there, grandpa. Joe Biden already exists.

• 1:09:21November Kelly?

  We have Joe Biden at home and it's Emmanuel Macron.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  Next slide, please.

• 1:09:31Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, this man looks haunted.

• 1:09:32November Kelly?

  Hmm. Do you remember that tweet that's like sees someone chewing gum? No need to hog the wand, boy? Give this citizen a chew?

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  Foundational humor. I quote that in my apartment like three times a month.

• 1:09:48November Kelly?

  This guy looks like that.

• 1:09:50Liam McAnderson?

  That except it's dip.

• 1:09:53Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, there's no smokeless tobacco on this airplane. Yeah, we'll find out American Airlines.

• 1:09:59Liam McAnderson?

  I'm getting to my destination. I'm pulling this slide. One of two options. You let me spit this cop, we're gonna have some problems.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Um, anyway, this is, this is James Abercrombie.

• 1:10:10Liam McAnderson?

  Roz, what are you doing over there?

• 1:10:12Justin Roczniak?

  What am I doing? I realized I screwed this up. There should be, uh,

• 1:10:16Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, the other thing behind here.

• 1:10:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. Hold on. How do I?

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:10:21Justin Roczniak?

  Send to, there we go.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you. Yeah.

• 1:10:23Justin Roczniak?

  Amazing.

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  Sorry, a fire truck is driving down my street.

• 1:10:26Liam McAnderson?

  What kind of fire truck?

• 1:10:28November Kelly?

  I, I, I really love an American fire truck. They're so like kid coded. They're like, oh, shut up. Huge and red. They're like twice as large as they need to be and they make incredible noises.

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  Fucking pedestrian safe streets in Seattle is because the fire, every time they're like, hey, what if we installed like a separated curb so that we don't like have a death toll of bicyclists that resemble that of like the Battle of the Somme, uh, every year?

• 1:10:53November Kelly?

  I need, I need my big red truck with a massive American flag hanging off the back. I, a firefighter is a kind of Labrador to me, right? They're a kind of stupid dog.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Like, there can be like, oh my God, a guy stubbed his toe and you would think, okay, they'll bring out like the light duty ambulance. No, fucking full ladder response every single time.

• 1:11:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, that would heal me instantly. Like, I, mm, okay.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  I do like seeing them, but also like at the same time, it's I recognize that it's a, you know, it's kind of like cars, you know, it's like, this is probably a huge societal ill, but I saw like a, an Eagle four by four sedan for sale today with a swapped in.

• 1:11:32Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I saw that too. I said that to Jay.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, with the, with the straight six out of a Jeep Cherokee. And I was like, damn, that's bitchin'.

• 1:11:40November Kelly?

  It, it just, it, the thing is, if you bought like European fire engines, it would look wrong. It, they would do the same job so much better. Like you could have your nice pedestrianized streets and everything, but it would not be right, you know, like you're supposed to have the fucking Pierce Eagle Burger fucking thing like you, you need it. That's part of what makes you the country that you are.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  I, I know. And I, I'm again, I, I'm, I'm urging any Chinese listeners, please convince them to get cool about trans and I will move and I will learn Mandarin. And you can, I don't know, I don't know what you even need me for. I can't get a job here. But like, I gotta imagine there's some sort of like, you know.

• 1:12:15November Kelly?

  Sick new EVs.

• 1:12:17Liam McAnderson?

  Sick new EVs.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that sounds sick. Honestly, please. Anyway, uh, James Abercrombie is the guy, the haunted man.

• 1:12:23November Kelly?

  Inventor of Abercrombie and Fitch.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  He, um, he actually, I couldn't, he seemed like a nice guy. I didn't see anything horrifying about him.

• 1:12:33November Kelly?

  He doesn't, he doesn't look it. He looks horrifying. He looks like he comes from a fucking Twilight Zone episode.

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  He did like a ton of philanthropy and he invented, he got together with his friend, Harry Cameron, and the two of them invented and built, um, a threaded ram device. You can see the patent drawing right there. Uh, it's called the Cameron Ram Type Blowout Preventer. Um, and basically what it does is it, it clamps down on either side of the, uh, drill string more sort of, it depends on the variation. I'll get into that. Um, and, uh, like just shuts down all the fluid coming out. So, um, it's a very simple design. You like the original one is just a threaded mechanism. You, you turn, uh, and it basically just provides a a seal so that you don't have blowouts that like wreck all of your equipment. You get a kick, you close this.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  And then ideally, you know, you won't have just like uncontrolled oil pouring from the earth. Um, so the cutaway diagram here is. The various types of of like rams that are in use today. And most of these are like very similar like to the original design. They're hydro like a lot of them are hydraulic. They started changing to that in the 40s. But fundamentally, the design has always been kind of the same because the interest is that it just works. Because this is your, this is what prevents, you know, the the Derek from exploding. So you want something that is straightforward and going to work every time. So A cutaway here is the basic blind ram, which you pull out the drill and the piping and you just slam it shut. And that is the most basic kind. So you can just like shut off all flow.

• 1:14:08Speaker 02

  B, which has the the circle cut out in the center there, is the pipe ram, which allows you to keep the pipe in, but you can shut down the space between the bore and the pipe. So this is going to go in like that's a that's in a way its own like little annulus that it closes that area down. So you can keep everything in if you're still actively drilling, but it prevents backflow.

• 1:14:29Justin Roczniak?

  Right.

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  And then C is your, oh, fuck, something has gone wrong. That is your blind, that is your, that is your shear ram, which cuts off, cuts through the pipe, cuts through the drill string, and it just closes it as fast as possible because otherwise, you know, oil is going to spill everywhere. That is your, that is your last resort.

• 1:14:51November Kelly?

  Yeah, because you were just like trapping a bunch of your equipment just like in the thing.

• 1:14:55Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Justin Roczniak?

  That's all stuck down hole forever now.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:59November Kelly?

  I have created a kind of expensive bomb.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a pain in the ass and you don't want to, you know, technically speaking, like that the one that's pictured as a shear ram, which cuts through the pipe, there's the blind shear ram, which just like I believe cuts through slightly more. Difficult to get exact cutaway diagrams of all this stuff. Somebody can yell at me, but that's your basic concept, right? It's like the one that you use to cut through everything is like your day is going really bad. You're having a fucking January 2026 day on the rig.

• 1:15:27November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  So, next slide, please. In the interest of making this episode not nine hours long, which I have already failed at.

• 1:15:36Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck them fans.

• 1:15:39Liam McAnderson?

  Die, hogs die.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  I'm going to simply state that sometimes oil is underwater. And you need a big floating oil rig to dig down from. That's what this is. This is the Deepwater Horizon. It is a semi-submersible floating drilling platform.

• 1:15:56November Kelly?

  There's, there's a bunch of different kinds. And they all look weird as hell. The, the, this kind, it's got like, um, like big kind of mass like piers. Uh, like a big hole under the waterline that you can't see. What the ones that really fuck me up are the tension leg ones where like you see them being, you can see them off of Scotland being transported. And it's like, they're too high in the water and it's like, oh, it's got legs. Fucking hell, like those go all the way down. Very, very frightening.

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  Catcalling the oil rig? Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:32Liam McAnderson?

  I got some gams, gams on ya, ha ha.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so mostly you, you, you position this over where you want to like drill for oil. And then you drill for oil, like there's a bunch more to it, but like, again, the main that, the fact that this was a floating drilling platform is not really what actually caused the problem. It was just drilling for the oil. That's the main issue here. The fact that it floated just meant that it could go wrong much worse. So this, this, this one specifically, uh, the Deepwater Horizon had a maximum drill depth of 30,000 feet, uh, with a maximum operating depth of 8,000 feet of water, which is terrifying to consider. It was built by Hyundai, um, and it was owned and operated.

• 1:17:19November Kelly?

  Hey, I want a semi-submersible drilling rig and a midsize family sedan.

• 1:17:24Liam McAnderson?

  Holy shit, you're not gonna believe this.

• 1:17:28November Kelly?

  I guess we're making semi-submersible drill rigs now.

• 1:17:31Liam McAnderson?

  I also need a electric multiple unit for my commuter rail network. That's not built very well, then we'll shut the factory down, then we'll complain to everybody else that it's somehow our, not our fault, even though we ruined everything.

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  There's no word if Hyundai used child laborers to build this rig like they do EVs in Alabama, but that is why I'm no longer an automotive journalist. Anyway.

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  It was, this rig was owned and operated by.

• 1:17:56Liam McAnderson?

  My name's Victoria and I have principle.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  It's not so much principles, it's just like, I'm just not, you know?

• 1:18:02Liam McAnderson?

  I can't swallow that. Yeah, I got you.

• 1:18:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06November Kelly?

  Hey, I really want to buy a K1 main battle tank.

• 1:18:10Liam McAnderson?

  I, again, the official vehicle of this podcast, there are two, is the K1 main battle tank.

• 1:18:16November Kelly?

  Yeah, we all played War Game Red Dragon, right? And we all played the campaign because we didn't have any friends, so we didn't want to play the multiplayer and get called slurs. And so we played the really repetitive, defensive, like, South Korean one, because it was the easiest one and we got scared trying to play anything else. And we just sat all of our K1 tanks, nice and, nice and sort of quiet in the forest, sniping at incoming North Korean tanks. And it was lovely.

• 1:18:41Liam McAnderson?

  One Viper.

• 1:18:44Liam McAnderson?

  Jan one Viper, side dump exhaust, eight liter V10.

• 1:18:51November Kelly?

  You know, you know, you know, my dream purchases. You know, my dream purchases is not the Viper.

• 1:18:58Liam McAnderson?

  All right, well, I guess, I guess it's been cool being friends with you and I'll see you later.

• 1:19:01November Kelly?

  I mean, listen, I would, I would, I would love a Viper, but here's my money no object thing right now is I saw, I saw like a Japanese guy who makes, like, hand makes shoes. I saw the process, like, start to finish, hand stitches, everything, like, 500,000 yen, which I understand is a lot of money. Not money I would ever spend on a shoe, but they're beautiful.

• 1:19:25Liam McAnderson?

  You look real cool doing it, though.

• 1:19:27November Kelly?

  Oh, I look really cool wearing them, but you know, I think my wife would beat me to death with a hammer and then my bank would beat me to death with a hammer. So as it is, I just have to think about it forever.

• 1:19:38Liam McAnderson?

  I'm gonna get Roz a Nixie Tube Watch. I've decided for his birthday.

• 1:19:42November Kelly?

  Ooh, okay.

• 1:19:44Justin Roczniak?

  That's gonna be a big surprise now.

• 1:19:45Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  I bought myself.

• 1:19:49November Kelly?

  Alright, so he doesn't know the plan to get him, the plan is to get him the K1 tank, right?

• 1:19:53Liam McAnderson?

  Right. And which is contained the Nixie Tube Watch.

• 1:19:58Liam McAnderson?

  We tried to do it the other way around, but we haven't mastered that yet.

• 1:20:02Justin Roczniak?

  Guys, I don't know how to drive this.

• 1:20:06November Kelly?

  I mean, the thing is, it's sort of like, you know, if you owe the bank a million dollars, it's the bank's problem. If you don't know how to drive a tank, it's everyone around.

• 1:20:17Liam McAnderson?

  That's the damn truth.

• 1:20:19Speaker 02

  Um, I bought myself corkerans recently. That was my fancy shoe purchase because I wanted to have big stompy leather fetishist boots. Um, women seem to like them, so.

• 1:20:29November Kelly?

  Subscribe to the Patreon so that we can keep Victoria in boots.

• 1:20:32Speaker 02

  I mean, it was like.

• 1:20:32Liam McAnderson?

  And to replace that person who was super transphobic and gross.

• 1:20:35November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  Oh, was it?

• 1:20:38Liam McAnderson?

  Nope, they're banned.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:20:40Liam McAnderson?

  I, I sent them, I sent them from my personal Patreon account, an incredibly cruel message, and then banned them from the podcast account.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.

• 1:20:52Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, no, leave my friends alone or you will be one hour, 24 minutes, 20 seconds in, shot, and then knelt over a ditch and then shot again.

• 1:21:03Liam McAnderson?

  Please continue.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Okay, anyway, so this was owned and operated by Transocean on behalf of British Petroleum.

• 1:21:11November Kelly?

  Hope it does.

• 1:21:11Liam McAnderson?

  What kind of hormones do you need for that?

• 1:21:16Justin Roczniak?

  Just straight oil. Just inject oil.

• 1:21:19November Kelly?

  I've been injecting this oil weekly and I feel fucking terrible.

• 1:21:23Liam McAnderson?

  Roz, it's called sis oil. Can you be respectful, please?

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Point, point two, four milliliters of straight crude into the thigh, baby.

• 1:21:34Liam McAnderson?

  Texas Sweet ain't got nothing on me. Let's do this.

• 1:21:39Justin Roczniak?

  It's how you transition to be in Texan.

• 1:21:43Liam McAnderson?

  I'm going to Austin in a few weeks. So I'm just like, all right, what will you let me shoot him?

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  Imagining, imagining you get like one of those little vials they give us our Ian, but it's just a barrel. It's a little glass barrel.

• 1:21:55Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that would buck. Yeah, I'd like.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'd be awesome.

• 1:21:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, I do my own sublingually.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  Anyway, BP was leasing this. This is crucial because it means that the cost of money when they are digging holes with this BP is actively spending money to dig holes. Um, and as you may have remembered from the last episode about BP, which was, yes, the last episode I was on, I've been on an anti BP kick lately. I don't know why.

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  They don't like spending money.

• 1:22:23Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I don't get that.

• 1:22:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  So in 2010, this oil rig, the, or this semi-submersive, semi-submersible floating drilling platform, I can't call it an oil rig. Was 48 miles off the coast of Louisiana, researching what was known as the Macondo Prospect, which was a, you know, oil vein. With a specific lease they had from the US federal government, uh, there was roughly 5,000 feet beneath, uh, the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. The goal was to dig the bore hole, tap the oil, and then you cement over the hole you've dug, uh, for another rig to come in later. And actually extract from. So this is just your exploration rig.

• 1:23:01November Kelly?

  It's your little like Pathfinder. Yeah.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. You're going to have somebody else come later and actually like bottle this and, you know, sell it. You're just trying to dig the hole. Just to make sure that we have every base covered. Halliburton was also here. They were doing the concrete work.

• 1:23:17Liam McAnderson?

  They made good luggage.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  Halliburton?

• 1:23:19November Kelly?

  Zero Halliburton makes cases. I've always kind of wanted one of the Attache cases.

• 1:23:24Liam McAnderson?

  I tried to convince my wife to let me buy one today.

• 1:23:26November Kelly?

  It's like, what the hell use would you have for an Attache case? And then you have to go to the woman that you love and you go, what if I have to do some spy stuff?

• 1:23:37Liam McAnderson?

  I got that same lecture.

• 1:23:39Justin Roczniak?

  It's a good point.

• 1:23:40Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. So as it turns out, um, she's like, I don't get nice luggage because you're just going to destroy it anyway, Liam, which like, A, true, B, shut up.

• 1:23:49November Kelly?

  My like, main luggage is like, um, uh, like a Pelican case that has, is covered in WTYP stickers, has been like bounced off of every airport tarmac in the world. I love it to pieces.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  Oh, Jesus Christ, I just realized, I'm the wife. My wife is someone who comes to me and is like, "Hey babe, check this out." I'm like, "We, we don't need that, love." You'll have it like, "What if?"

• 1:24:11Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, "What if?" "What if?" "What if?" You know how many times I have to go to fucking, uh, this fucking Dizzy World?

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  My feet had to be wet all winter for me to convince myself that I did actually need to get a new pair of boots.

• 1:24:25Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, that seems like someone else's problem. Just fucking love it by the cash case.

• 1:24:29November Kelly?

  You know what wouldn't solve that problem but would make you feel better is a Zero Halibut Natasha case.

• 1:24:35Liam McAnderson?

  We, the fact that this Patreon makes money is a goddamn, absolute fucking miracle.

• 1:24:41November Kelly?

  What you're enabling, is not so much buying the thing as, as, as coveting the thing. How many tabs do I have open of shit that I want and will never be able to afford right now?

• 1:24:54Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:57Speaker 02

  Alright, well, next slide, please.

• 1:24:58November Kelly?

  ADHD is a curse.

• 1:25:00Liam McAnderson?

  I don't care.

• 1:25:06Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, it's Justin. Uh, so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. Uh, people are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is, you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month. Uh, sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks, you get what you pay for. Um, 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.

• 1:25:49Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Uh, join at patreon.com/WTYPod. Do it if you want, or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  It's a BP episode, so I'm gonna get to the part where everyone knew this was coming.

• 1:26:15Liam McAnderson?

  Say the line, Bert, and then you, where's your cat?

• 1:26:19Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know. Oh, he's sleeping on the table behind me.

• 1:26:21Liam McAnderson?

  You can't wake him up.

• 1:26:22November Kelly?

  It's 11:00 PM. Do you know where your cat is?

• 1:26:26Liam McAnderson?

  He's just like this.

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's passed the fuck out.

• 1:26:29Liam McAnderson?

  My, my parents have a cat named Margot, who looks like a cow. She's very cute. So she has discovered, I've not done yet, she has discovered.

• 1:26:41Liam McAnderson?

  Margot has discovered that if she lays like, like, I can't even, like that, she gets, she gets belly rubs. So she'll tolerate belly rubs for exactly 15 to 20 seconds. And then, and then you just get fucking annihilated. She just starts biting you. So she's like, rub my belly. I'm so sweet and innocent. Fuck that cat. I love that cat.

• 1:27:01November Kelly?

  She's so, she's so real.

• 1:27:06Liam McAnderson?

  Please continue. I'm sorry for interrupting you or whatever.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Oh, why would you? No, I'm, I'm fairly certain I have to defer to you. Well, I don't know. It depends on the order of who's my, it depends on who's the order of who's, who's boss here.

• 1:27:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I.

• 1:27:20November Kelly?

  I think you, I think you're my direct report or I'm yours. I don't remember.

• 1:27:24Liam McAnderson?

  I believe that we all have to file into Corin.

• 1:27:31November Kelly?

  So BP knew it was gonna happen.

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

  So weeks before the events of this episode, there was a confidential survey commissioned by Transocean that found that workers were concerned about the safety practices onboard the vessel. And they were pretty certain they were gonna get, you know, actual reprisals if they reported mistakes or other problems.

• 1:27:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  The survey raised concerns, quote, about poor equipment reliability, which they believed was a result of drilling priorities taking precedence over maintenance. End quote. The survey found that, quote, many workers entered fake data to try and circumvent the system. As a result, the company's perception of safety on the rig was distorted.

• 1:28:09November Kelly?

  Amazing. Just like a big thumbs up. Yeah, everything's fine. Please don't fire me.

• 1:28:14Liam McAnderson?

  That's what I do on our safety report still.

• 1:28:16November Kelly?

  Yeah, but ours, ours, we don't work with like petroleum much.

• 1:28:20Liam McAnderson?

  No, Drake's well.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  Emails showed that as early as the second week of March in 2010, and you know, disaster did not take place till April. BP was enlisting help from a Houston-based firm that advised energy companies on how to respond to oil spills, just because they kept having close calls.

• 1:28:37November Kelly?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:28:38Liam McAnderson?

  Come on, really?

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  By April, you know, this, this well, digging this well is way overdue. It is costing BP millions of dollars because the rig is leased from Transocean and it's not owned. So every day they're out there, I couldn't find an exact number, but it's estimated between 500,000 to a million dollars to BP in costs for extra leasing fees, basically. So imagine going over mileage on like, you know, your three-year-old crossover, but instead it's a million dollars every time you put an extra mile on it.

• 1:29:09Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  By April 9th, the, the well drilling itself was complete, which left the decision for how the last bit of the well should be lined. Now, if you remember, there's that, there was that slide, a couple of slides ago about how you put in the casing and then you throw in the cement. That was oversimplified. There are a lot of ways you can do this, especially when you are at 18,000 feet, you know, below the earth. The physics gets a bit weird and you know, you kind of want a lot of redundancy. There were two options for-

• 1:29:39Liam McAnderson?

  Not to mention the 5,000 feet of water.

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:42November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  There were two options for the last-

• 1:29:44November Kelly?

  Again, you, you are, you are sitting on top of a gigantic bomb that you have made, and every day you put some more dynamite in the bomb.

• 1:29:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Learning about what, what like methane does when it goes from 18,000 feet below the seabed to sea level through a pipe was crazy. It doesn't like doing that.

• 1:30:07November Kelly?

  The fluid dynamics of making stuff do things it really would rather not. Yeah.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  Um, yeah. So by, by April 9th, they finished drilling the well. So they'd actually, you know, dug all the way down, but they got to, they got to case the, the hole that they've dug basically so that they can get equipment in and out and actually, you know, extract oil. Uh, so there's two options. Just put in a liner and a second tube called a tieback that helps prevent annular flow, you know, around the outside of the pipe in case of a kick. Um, or just do a semi-single liner and rely on the cement job to hold. Um, everybody that I could see, like, there were like a lot of emails for this. I mean, there are like six different post incident reports. The White House commissioned one, like Obama was doing speeches about it. Like, I don't know if, for those of you who are younger, this is horrifying to conceive of because this happened in 2010. But like, it was a really big deal. Uh,

• 1:30:57Liam McAnderson?

  This is back when environmentalism was a real thing. Yeah.

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And Obama was president. So it was kind of like, you know, the United States was perceived as a relatively stable place.

• 1:31:06Liam McAnderson?

  Dumbass.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:11Speaker 02

  Um, you know, and, and I think everybody was, you know, we were all kind of reeling from the sort of, uh, institutional complacency about ruining a bunch of people's lives that we saw in 2008 during the global financial crisis. So like, there was a lot of,

• 1:31:24Liam McAnderson?

  Victoria, how old are you?

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Huh?

• 1:31:25Liam McAnderson?

  How old are you?

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  Me?

• 1:31:26Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 1:31:27Speaker 02

  I am 30.

• 1:31:28Liam McAnderson?

  Okay.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  So I was,

• 1:31:29Liam McAnderson?

  Continue.

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  I was 15 when this happened.

• 1:31:31Liam McAnderson?

  Okay.

• 1:31:32Speaker 02

  And it is one of, like, I started reading the news, local newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, when I was 12, because I'm on this podcast, like, obviously, I was not gonna be like a

• 1:31:42November Kelly?

  This is one of the things you have to be like to,

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  Healthy child as a kid. Um, but I do remember this.

• 1:31:48November Kelly?

  Wow, okay. I mean, yeah, you're not wrong.

• 1:31:51Speaker 02

  Sorry. I'm sorry, Nova. Come on.

• 1:31:53Liam McAnderson?

  Not wrong.

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  We bitched about our moms way too much for me to have any illusions.

• 1:31:57November Kelly?

  Uh huh.

• 1:32:00Liam McAnderson?

  My mom just called me in the middle of recording and she was like, well, you told me to call you. And I was like, yeah, no, but I forgot.

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  Well, I don't, I don't, you might have had a healthy childhood. I don't know.

• 1:32:10Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, yeah, it wasn't that bad.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Liam McAnderson?

  I mean.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  It's just the trans house. If you're, if you want to be transgender and I'm, well, there's your problem.

• 1:32:18Justin Roczniak?

  Digression.

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

  Your, your mom has to really fuck you up bad.

• 1:32:22Liam McAnderson?

  I, I, my.

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  Is that fair? Is that true?

• 1:32:26Liam McAnderson?

  My mom is a saint, uh, literally. She's in my phone as Saint Anne. Uh, and, and if you're mean to my mother, uh, I will, I will gut you like a carp. But I'm sorry about your childhood, Toria, and I'm sorry about Cleveland.

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  That's fair. That I, I thought that we were, I was gonna get away without, uh, getting roasted for that, but that's, that's fair, honestly.

• 1:32:45Liam McAnderson?

  Roz and I used to live with a woman from Cleveland and, uh, I, I always pitied her immensely.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, Cleveland during the great financial crash was not super happening.

• 1:32:56Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, well, I, I, I, I briefed aggression, uh, because we're already an hour, 35 minutes, 48 seconds. Uh, I went to, uh, Thanksgiving with, uh, said aforementioned person Roz and I used to live with. And, uh, she ran a turkey trot, which is a thing that should be illegal.

• 1:33:12Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, what?

• 1:33:13Liam McAnderson?

  A turkey trot. You run a 5K the morning of Thanksgiving. Don't ask me why I don't run. I'm built for power, not speed.

• 1:33:18Justin Roczniak?

  Insane. Ridiculous.

• 1:33:20Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 1:33:21Speaker 02

  Just like the Dodge Viper.

• 1:33:22Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, shut up.

• 1:33:23Justin Roczniak?

  Running, running, running in general should be avoided. That's why God invented the bicycle.

• 1:33:28Liam McAnderson?

  That's right. More of a segue, if you prefer. Uh, and, uh, I was with her mom because we did the, the one, the 1K fun walk. It was not fun, but we, we did it. And I, and she was looking for her daughter and I was like, oh, there she is. Uh, and there her daughter was, the woman in question that we used to live with, looking about as miserable as a human being has ever looked. She goes, how did you pick her out? I was like, you know how many times I've seen that face directed at me?

• 1:33:56Liam McAnderson?

  All right. Uh, now that I, I, I, I go back into my, uh, my hobble.

• 1:34:01Speaker 02

  Um, anyway, yeah, I was 15 when this happened. So there were, there were a lot of like post incident reports. There was a lot of, a lot of research. So basically this is, you know, every single email that BP had sent for the past five years about this project was uncovered and everybody got to go through all of it.

• 1:34:18November Kelly?

  Back when there was still an EPA.

• 1:34:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  There was an EPA. Well, they, yeah, this, just because the perception was the US was better. I don't, it was pretty, it was pretty poorly managed. Um, but we'll get to that. That's, it's gonna, you're, again, you have strapped the fuck in for a four hour podcast episode and you better be goddamn ready for us to keep going. I still have not hit the incident.

• 1:34:40Liam McAnderson?

  With her face just like this, like, yes, sweetie, this is what pays the bills.

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  Um, so, um, the, we go back to, to, you know, the, the email chain of like, how, how do we do this? Do we do the tieback method that everybody thinks we should do? Uh, or do we just, you know, cement it and pray? Um, because, you know, you're 18,000 feet below sea level. Um, and of course, every single qualified person was like, we should do the tieback just to be safe. Uh, and by safe, I mean, like even somewhat reasonably confident this will work. Uh, however, not running, quote, from an email from some asshole, I had it written down and I lost it, but somebody at BP who didn't go to prison for this.

• 1:35:25Liam McAnderson?

  Fuckface Jones.

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  Not running the tieback saves a good deal of time and money.

• 1:35:30Liam McAnderson?

  Oh boy.

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  So on April 15th, BP estimated that using a liner instead of a single string of casing would add seven to $10 million in the completion cost. And again, a lot of that is because they are trying to get this done as fast as fucking possible because every single minute they are on the deep water horizon is costing them money because they are leasing it. So, six days before the events of this episode, Brian Morel, a BP drilling engineer, emails a colleague, quote, "This has been a nightmare well which has everyone all over the place," end quote. Oh, is it a good thing to have read into the congressional record?

• 1:36:03November Kelly?

  Yes. Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  April 15th, Morrell infirms Halliburton executive Jesse Gagliano that they are planning to use six centralizers. So basically, when you're casing the last bit of this bore, you want to keep the casing itself centered in the cement you're setting, best as I can tell. And this is they're cementing like quite a bit of it at once. And they have simulation software to see how many of these they should use, because every single one you use is more equipment and more money and more time to set up. And so you want to go with as few as possible. So the Halliburton executive says, hey, you should use 21, because any less than that we're simulating, it's not going to actually set right, because the concrete is like 18,000 feet below the seabed.

• 1:36:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, but what if we did it cheaper?

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  Morrell says in an email, in a reply-

• 1:36:54Liam McAnderson?

  I don't like that Victoria had that response ready to go. I will say that.

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's too late to get any more product on the rig. Our only option is to rearrange placement of these brackets, six centralizers, end quote. So fuck you, we're gonna use six. Like, who cares? We'll make it work.

• 1:37:12November Kelly?

  Yeah, less than a third of the thing that you should be using. But it's fine, though, because it just will be.

• 1:37:18Speaker 02

  Gagliano from Halliburton, you know, then recommends like, okay, well, at least circulate the drilling mud, you know, the dense lubricant slash, you know, pressure segment that you've got at the bottom of this borehole to keep the oil from rupturing out. Like, hey, circulate it from the bottom of the well all the way up, at least once, to get rid of all the gas pockets, because then it will help like the cement set. And BP doesn't do that. They're just like, eh, we'll recycle a little bit. And then they just kind of like, nah, fuck it. It's fine.

• 1:37:49November Kelly?

  Listen, ADHD can strike at any time. I'm five tabs deep into eBay for like used to zero Halliburton attachee cases.

• 1:37:57Liam McAnderson?

  Pick me up while you're there.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:00Liam McAnderson?

  Thanks bud.

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  And of course, this well has been so unstable to dig and the pressure inside it has been so inconsistent that they are using a harder to control nitrogenated foam cement to set the annulus of this casing, which is harder to control and much, much more challenging to get the set right. So you probably would think to yourself like, hey, we should probably be really certain this cement worked, right?

• 1:38:26November Kelly?

  It's like, you know, the Swiss cheese failure model? It's like watching someone with a hand drill go, go to like a block of Edam, you know? It didn't have holes until you drew all of them yourself.

• 1:38:38Speaker 02

  I didn't get to use the image in this diagram because all the PowerPoints I could find were too low resolution. But they, they were eight fucking slices of cheese in their, in their post incident report for this. It is so many layers of failure. It's incredible. Uh, next slide, please.

• 1:38:54Justin Roczniak?

  Imagining this nitrogenated foam cement and it's just, just an ordinary cement, but they use Guinness as the uh...

• 1:39:03November Kelly?

  Just every time you go to a nice restaurant now they're like, oh, and this is served on our nitrogen foam cement? I'm like, huh?

• 1:39:10Liam McAnderson?

  We want plates.

• 1:39:13Speaker 02

  So, 7:00 AM, April 20th, 2010.

• 1:39:17Liam McAnderson?

  Uh oh.

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  BP cancels the cement bond log test because it would have taken nine to 12 hours and would have cost them a little over a hundred thousand dollars, about a hundred twenty-eight thousand dollars.

• 1:39:29November Kelly?

  You know, and it's very logical, time is money.

• 1:39:32Speaker 02

  By cancelling that test, they saved a bit over a hundred thousand dollars. So, congratulations. That was, you know, good investment. We will find out later how well that paid off for them.

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  But they were like, no, we're not going to do the cement bond log test. And this may not have caught the cement issues, but it would have just been another level. Canceling this, that, you know, roughly 12 hours before you caused the greatest ecological disaster in human history is what one would call a bad look. So they do an acoustic check, which I don't know how that works. I'm not gonna lie to you. Somebody can tell me in the comments.

• 1:40:07November Kelly?

  It's a lot like a regular check, but it has more of a kind of slowed down, more intimate vibe. You feel a bit kind of closer to the guy doing the check and it's got a kind of richer, warmer tone.

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, this, this next well we're digging is shoegaze.

• 1:40:21Justin Roczniak?

  I would imagine they're just doing some kind of, I, something with like, you know, either ultrasound or even just regular sound, listening for the echo, how faint it is. They're going to be able to determine some amount of information from whatever's going on with the cement way down hole.

• 1:40:37November Kelly?

  This is just bullshit, regular sound.

• 1:40:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:41Speaker 02

  So they do that.

• 1:40:42November Kelly?

  We're using all three kinds of sound, regular, ultra and Bakersfield.

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  They do a positive pressure test where they, you know, pressurize the inside of the, the well to make sure that the, the bore, like the casing itself is good. They're like, yeah, it's fine. It's good. At this time, I couldn't get exact hours, probably sometime around noon. A bunch of BP officials gather on the rig to celebrate seven years without an injury on the Deepwater Horizon.

• 1:41:12Justin Roczniak?

  Right.

• 1:41:13November Kelly?

  Join us for a hubris party.

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  So there is one, before they can pull all the drill, so the, at this point, the, the well is dug. They've got their casing in place. They've got the cement in the annulus. They have, they have capped the bottom of the well, uh, so they can move this rig off. They have to do one more test, um, which is a negative pressure test. So they, there's a lot of ways in which this failed and it requires a very thorough understanding of how this test works. So it is outside the purview of this podcast, but allow me to state that it failed really obviously. On like several levels and several people seemed to notice this, but for some reason it just never went up the chain of command.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  Nobody ever actually like raised the concern high enough that they stopped what they were doing and were like, oh God, the cement at the base of this that is. Keeping all of the oil from exploding outward and destroying the ocean didn't work. There's oil coming up. There's two, the negative pressure, there's, we can't get no pressure in here. That we still pressure. It's because there's, there's oil coming in from both the sides of the well and also like, from the, from the plug at the base. But again, oops.

• 1:42:31November Kelly?

  Whoops.

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So let's just keep going. So what you do at this point, if you're going to keep going, is you replace the drilling mud that's inside that last segment of the well you've dug, with a mixture of seawater. And, you know, you pull out all the mud, you strain out all the, the tailings or whatever you, I don't know if they keep it for reuse later. Some of it they, they kind of pour overboard. But,

• 1:42:53November Kelly?

  It's just really the ocean is the kind of solution to all of your problems on a, on one of these rigs. It's just like, well, we need something to put in this. How about seawater? Well, we need something to put this in. How about seawater?

• 1:43:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:43:04Liam McAnderson?

  The solution to pollution is dilution. I think that's, I'm sure that's what they meant. Just dump it into open ocean.

• 1:43:11November Kelly?

  Certainly.

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  But as you'll remember, the drilling mud, the drilling mud is what's keeping the pressure on the base of this. So when you remove the drilling mud, then you start replacing it with much like lighter seawater, the oil is going to get a chance to press upward.

• 1:43:28Speaker 02

  So you will see this graph. And this graph is showing when the oil and gas starts entering the well bore, and inexorably marching upward toward the deep water horizon. Because the concrete has failed, the oil is rushing up the pipe through the riser, you know, up 18,000 feet, and then another 5K to the surface of the ocean, where it will, you know, eventually start popping out the top of the deep water horizon. There are plenty of, as early as like 9pm, there are plenty of indications of a very severe kick. And again, everybody just misses it. Like, I, it seems to be human error. People were overworked to death on this thing because they were trying to get this thing done as fast as possible.

• 1:44:12Speaker 02

  But they just never seemed to be like, oh, we should, there's a kick, we should shut this off. Probably because they were like, oh, we're done. Let's get the hell out of here. So from the bottom of the, from where the hole actually begins at 18,560 ish feet below the surface of the ocean to sea level, methane can expand by about 100 times. So you start getting some in at the bottom of this and by the time it's like at the riser, it is massive and extremely fast. People aboard the, the deep water horizon would later compare it to a freight train.

• 1:44:46November Kelly?

  It's sort of less like a bomb and more like a rocket at this.

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:44:50November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 1:44:51Speaker 02

  At 9:41 PM on April 20th, 2010, a geyser of seawater erupts 230 feet high from the top of the rig. This is the pressure pushing all of the water out and they're like, oh shit, that's a problem. So they closed the annular preventer, but it is too late because there's already oil and gas inside the riser. And also crucially, the annular preventer does not work. So this is the, there's a basically an inflatable doughnut that goes around the outside of the pipe itself that is meant to keep anything that is like flowing up the annulus, you know, that would be caused by like a concrete failure from rising upward and it just didn't work. And again, crucially, even if it had worked, they already

• 1:45:34Speaker 02

  have like methane inside the riser. So that's already coming up. It's too late. They, it keeps going. They keep having, you know, a geyser of shit flow out of the top of the rig and they're like, all right, let's close the pipe ram. And that closes and seals, but it's too late because the seawater geyser is now turning to drilling mud and then all of the methane that was, you know, 23,000 feet below them has finally made its way up. And instead of pouring them, this mix overboard, which is like the emergency, get this the fuck out of here immediately. They have it routed to a gas and mud separator, which is completely overwhelmed immediately and starts spewing oil directly onto the floor of the rig and all the methane gases like at the level of the machinery. And yeah,

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  there's a bunch of running diesel engines. And as you may remember from the last episode, British Petroleum and running diesel engines.

• 1:46:24Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 1:46:25Speaker 02

  There are bad things that happen when you give diesel engine combustible air.

• 1:46:29November Kelly?

  Sucks in whatever there's around it.

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  Next slide, please.

• 1:46:33November Kelly?

  Oh God. Yep. Mm hmm.

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  That's what happens. At 9:56 PM on April 20th, 2010, the methane ignites and the Deepwater Horizon is engulfed in a series of explosions. It's kind of unclear what exactly happened, because it all went real quick.

• 1:46:50November Kelly?

  That's bad, like in itself, that you're like, yeah, we can't pick back through an exact sequence of events here, because this is like just fused in on itself.

• 1:46:58Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, and it's like, it's like, yeah, there's a bunch of methane everywhere aboard the rig. Something, all it needs is one spark, right? Then the whole thing goes up and then everything explodes. Because again, the deck of it is coated in oil and shit from the oil gas separator getting overwhelmed. And, you know, there's so much, there's, there's still stuff coming out of the riser. So the explosion kills 11 workers and injures 17 people. The rig loses all power from the explosion. At this point, the Deepwater Horizon would be a bad disaster, right? Like 11 people are dead. It is a many hundreds of million dollar valued, extremely high technology drilling rig. It would be still worthy of an episode,

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  probably.

• 1:47:44November Kelly?

  Yeah, but that's like, what, like a 10th of the number of people who died on like Piper Alpha?

• 1:47:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:51November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:51Speaker 02

  Um, and at this point, it should all be roughly over. Well, actually, yeah, it should be all roughly over because, you know, the loss of power should trigger, trigger the final emergency brake. This whole disaster is averted. Just as an aside, I have this in here and I probably could have worked it in better, but just to like clarify how fucking bad it sucks to work on this oil rig. Seven of the 11 dead workers had pulled 24 hour shifts the week they were killed.

• 1:48:21Liam McAnderson?

  Fucking Jesus.

• 1:48:22November Kelly?

  Yeah, I'm never gonna complain about a four hour podcast again. I mean, I am. I'm lying. I absolutely am, but like, still.

• 1:48:30Liam McAnderson?

  Jesus, I don't want to be a roughneck.

• 1:48:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, and it's just, it was just like, you know, and everybody aboard is kind of like, this shit is clearly not going well. And people are cutting corners at every possible opportunity. And, you know, and a lot of it also is like, you kind of get why people miss so many warning signs in these disasters, because they are overworked to death and they cannot comprehend the information that is in front of them. Now, next slide, please. All right. So this, this is why I had to talk about. Abercrombie and Fitch earlier was, um, at the base of the seafloor is this massive mechanism. And this is a series of blowout preventers connected in a string, essentially.

• 1:49:12Speaker 02

  Up top, you have your two annular preventers, um, one of which they had inflated before the explosion and had failed completely. And that's like, you know, your inflatable donut that keeps oil from coming up the annulus. And then you've, and then beneath that, in the lower section of this, you have five separate blowout preventer rams of different intensity. Uh, one of these is converted to a test ram. There's still five in there. Basically.

• 1:49:35November Kelly?

  On a scale of one to five, how badly are you screwed?

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. It's like, you know, so the pipe ram is when you're like, oh shit, okay, we gotta, we should close this down. And that, you know, worked temporarily, but there was already so much methane and gas inside that, um, it may have worked temporarily. I don't actually know if that were, that one worked temporarily. It doesn't matter. It went worse later. But, you know, at this point, all of, all of this segment had been bypassed to cause the initial explosion. Because like the methane and gas was already in the riser and the riser is the segment of pipe connect between the floating platform and this. Um, and so by the time it's in the riser, there's nothing else you can really like do about it. There's no more blowout preventers or whatever. You're supposed to have caught this down here. Like this is when you would have had a chance to stop the kick is you would have engaged something down here, you know, at nine o'clock when you notice the kick.

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  Versus, you know, when there's seawater coming out of the top of the, um, the deep water horizon, because then you're, you're fucked. So this one failed in a funny way, but it's still kind of worked. I mean, this is funny at this point. I don't know.

• 1:50:36November Kelly?

  I think so. It can be.

• 1:50:37Speaker 02

  The podcasting delirium is setting in. It's hard to tell. It's humorous.

• 1:50:40Justin Roczniak?

  They're gonna do some funny stuff to this thing coming up. Don't worry.

• 1:50:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true. All right. So when the deep water horizon is rocked by a series of explosions and loses all power and communications to this device at the seafloor, 5,000 feet below it. This is supposed to have a like dead man switch that chokes off the oil supply immediately with the blind sheer ram, which cuts through everything.

• 1:51:03November Kelly?

  The big like guy with an axe.

• 1:51:04Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. This is the, oh, fuck, everything is fucked. And so there are multiple redundancies inside this mechanism. There's a, they had a blue box and a yellow box. And these are their transponder units essentially that contain solenoids that would engage the blind shear ram. Each of those boxes contain a 27 volt battery and two nine volt batteries. One of the battery, one of the 27 volt batteries is completely dead. So that one was just not working at all. I think that was the blue box. And then the yellow box had a, was so, was wired so incorrectly, the solenoid was never actually going to physically be able to trigger to fire the-

• 1:51:44November Kelly?

  Been at work as an oil rig electrician for three straight days. I'm wiring shit to shit. I don't even know what it is. I'm soldering. I'm trying to solder stuff to the ocean.

• 1:51:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. And luckily, however, one of the nine volt batteries has gone dead. And so the mechanism still works because it's not aware the nine volt battery has gone dead. And so the solenoid can still magically function. The CSP video does a really good job explaining it. It's not materially that important to how this disaster happened. It's just kind of like, wow, they really were not-

• 1:52:17November Kelly?

  It's kind of so bad to be like, you, you fucked up so bad at work that it's not even consequential because it looped back around to being fine?

• 1:52:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and also like, it was, it was kind of one of those things. This was like the, the made on a Friday Fiat of blowout preventers, which, you know, you generally don't want, but, but anyway, it doesn't matter because it's still somehow by the grace of God manages to get the blind shear ram to close. The pipe is severed. The dead man switch worked. There is perhaps still proof of a loving God. No, actually, there is. And this is why it was ultimately like immaterial. Like, yes, the blind shear ram did actually work in that it fired. However, the pipe inside this mechanism, because there is a pipe all the way up through the center of this, that all of

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  these rams operate upon. And that pipe has been under such immense pressures with the like various- Firing and like the amount of like methane gas that's been in here that it has caused the the pipe itself to buckle um and it has bent so that it is no longer really well in the path of the blind shear ram um the blind she rams are generally designed to cut through like a weaker section of pipe and it needs to be like aligned correctly um and that's not what happens here the pipe bends the blind she ram like misses and so now the blow up preventer is doesn't work at all

• 1:53:48Speaker 02

  so now the oil is like spraying into well the oil is spraying into the riser at this point in time um and of course there's like you know deep water horizon up above is like on fire so next slide please

• 1:54:02November Kelly?

  A fire that is going to keep going more or less indefinitely because it is being constantly fed with fuel

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  Yeah on April 22nd 2010 the the deep water horizon sinks after burning for two straight days it it does appear that they didn't coordinate the firefighting response to this super well again it probably wouldn't have mattered a ton um but uh you know it sinks and you will remember so at this point the coast guard is like we don't think there's an oil spill we think everything's okay and that is because it is still going up the riser however when this sinks it shatters it breaks the riser um and uh this is when it's like okay we have an oil leak that's it's probably fine though right like it's probably it's not gonna be a big deal BP immediately sends like a deep sea submersible vehicle under the ocean to try to close the

• 1:54:50Speaker 02

  blow up preventer and this of course fails because the blow up preventer is closed it you know it functioned as best it could which is not well at all but it it's not a matter of the fact the dead man switches and get activated um and BP is like it's probably like 5,000 barrels a day don't don't worry about it it's it's no big deal meanwhile internally they're sending emails they're like oh my god we're leaking 100,000 barrels a day in the ocean

• 1:55:13Speaker 02

  The, the true number is closer to about 60,000 barrels a day. Which is, I believe roughly to four full Olympic swimming pools per day.

• 1:55:22Liam McAnderson?

  40,000 barrels of oil between friend.

• 1:55:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, 60,000 barrels of oil.

• 1:55:26Liam McAnderson?

  Oh my, oh, it's saying the difference, 60 to 40.

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, that's, yeah, no, I mean, you know, a little rounding error here and there, never hurt anybody. So, this leads us to the next phase of the Deepwater Horizon fiasco, which is, you know, it's bad enough that this exploded through extremely ridiculously obvious to see corner cutting and has killed almost a dozen people. But now, uh, there is four, there are four Olympic swimming pools worth of oil being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico every single day. At a depth of 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean.

• 1:56:02Liam McAnderson?

  Oh my god.

• 1:56:03Speaker 02

  Which is a little difficult to get to.

• 1:56:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. How do you, how do you plug this damn thing?

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  Yes, this is, I will now hand the keys of the podcast over to Roz. Uh, please take this Dodge Viper of a episode and slam it directly into a wall at terminal velocity.

• 1:56:20Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah. So, okay, uh, here, here's two vessels that are going to be important here in front is, uh, uh, the Discoverer Horizon. This is a, uh, it's a drill ship, right? Back here is the Q4000. This is a drill, uh, maintenance or it's a well maintenance doohickey thingy ma-ba. It looks like a tiny oil plant.

• 1:56:42November Kelly?

  Yeah, I work on the doohickey.

• 1:56:44Justin Roczniak?

  I work on the thingamabob, yeah. There's a lot, in, in the, in, in this industry, there's a lot of thingamabobs and doohickeys.

• 1:56:53Justin Roczniak?

  So, once they figure out, right, the blowout preventer is fucked. Everyone knew fixing this is gonna be a long process, right? The correct, permanent method to sealing this well is to drill a relief well, right?

• 1:57:10Justin Roczniak?

  With the whole other drilling rig. So you're gonna drill several thousand feet down and then several hundred feet sideways. Hopefully you'll hit the well.

• 1:57:20Liam McAnderson?

  So you're trying to tap into it to relieve the okay.

• 1:57:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:57:24Liam McAnderson?

  Sure, man. Yeah, that sounds dumb as shit. Let's do it.

• 1:57:26Justin Roczniak?

  Now, now you've relieved pressure off the original well. So it's easier to seal the top. And since you have control over the relief well, you can pump high pressure mud and then cement down there to seal that well from the bottom, right?

• 1:57:41November Kelly?

  This is, this is bomb surgery.

• 1:57:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. You're trying to hit.

• 1:57:46Liam McAnderson?

  Give me the suit.

• 1:57:47Justin Roczniak?

  You're trying to hit a dry spaghetti with a wet spaghetti, right?

• 1:57:54November Kelly?

  And also the dry spaghetti is on fire.

• 1:57:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So this process actually starts almost immediately. There's drill rigs in place by May 2nd to try and get these relief wells done. They do two of them at once in case one of them misses, right? Um, the trouble is.

• 1:58:09Liam McAnderson?

  Are they more or less going in blind here?

• 1:58:11Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, so I don't know exactly how this stuff works. Um, I think there's like highly accurate accelerometers that sort of let you know where the end of the drill string is.

• 1:58:25Liam McAnderson?

  Heard.

• 1:58:25Justin Roczniak?

  I am not an expert in this.

• 1:58:26Liam McAnderson?

  No, that's, that's fine. No worries.

• 1:58:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So they need, this is going to be a months long, high precision process. You can't really rush it. Uh, at this point, it will look really bad if they rushed it anyway, right? So you need some stop gaps in the interim. Cause not only are you damaging the environment this whole time, you know, you're losing product, right? And like a lot of things in oil extraction, services like these, you know, controlling out of control wells. They're not in the purview of the oil companies themselves. They're provided by smaller specialized firms. So the, uh, the BP and Transocean and Halliburton, they call in the professionals, right? Joe Bowden's Wild Well Control Spring Texts, yeehaw.

• 1:59:14November Kelly?

  I was about to say before you went on to the slide. This is the ultimate level Chud job, right? Like is to be the guy, the one guy who can do the thing. And the thing is tough. It's manly and you gotta go to some suit in an air conditioned office and spit on his floor and be like, you're gonna pay me 58 billion dollars that I'm gonna direct immediately to the Trump campaign.

• 1:59:42Liam McAnderson?

  Entirely, entirely paid in the mixture of Copenhagen wintergreen and gold bullion.

• 1:59:50November Kelly?

  Guy speaking with an accent you haven't heard before, saying he is gonna build a house out of vipers.

• 1:59:57Justin Roczniak?

  He makes, he makes, uh, he makes Foghorn Leghorn sound like JFK.

• 2:00:10Liam McAnderson?

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:00:13Speaker 02

  I, I'm just gonna say, I, people who follow me on Blueskaire, they'll probably see that I occasionally put together like cowgirl fits and stuff. Cause I, you know, lived in Idaho for long enough for it to do actual like psychological damage to me. I would literally kill somebody with my bare hands for that belt buckle.

• 2:00:31Liam McAnderson?

  Me too.

• 2:00:31Speaker 02

  That was insane. Holy damn.

• 2:00:35Liam McAnderson?

  So hard.

• 2:00:36Justin Roczniak?

  This is apparently part of a series. They have a lot of them. I have some more later on, don't worry. Yeah.

• 2:00:42Speaker 02

  Now I'm gonna need my wife to step in and be like, babe, babe, this is my Halliburton briefcase.

• 2:00:50Justin Roczniak?

  This is my Joe Bowden's wild well control belt buckle.

• 2:00:54November Kelly?

  Oh, Jesus, they do have a series and these are incredible. This one looks like it was engraved onto the side of Hoover Dam.

• 2:01:04Liam McAnderson?

  50 bucks, 40 bucks? Oh, fuck, side my ass off, yes.

• 2:01:08November Kelly?

  You can buy a polo shirt and it's only an XL, which sounds about right.

• 2:01:13Justin Roczniak?

  There's, there's a lot of companies that do this sort of thing. They are in fact all like that. Cause it takes a certain kind of person to see a 200 foot column of flame coming from an oil well and say, yep, I can fix that.

• 2:01:27November Kelly?

  Kind of like a prince of Chuds.

• 2:01:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:33Justin Roczniak?

  So they have, they have an idea of how to, this is not a permanent cap. This is a stopgap, right? They build this thing. This is the containment dome, right? So in order to understand the containment dome, we have to understand the situation on the seafloor. Right? You know, you have, here's the seafloor. Here, here's the blowout preventer. It's a box. Here's the well down here. That's underground. All right. Let me add some lines here so everyone knows this is the ground. Right? And then here, here is a, here's a fish. Right? So you know, that's the water. Okay. So on top of the blood preventer, normally there's the riser. It goes straight up. Well, that's not the case anymore.

• 2:02:15Justin Roczniak?

  The oil rig sank, so it now goes like that, right? Um, it's on the, it's on the ground, right? Most of the oil is going up through the blood preventer where a blowout was not prevented. Some of it leaks out of here, but most of it goes down the riser and out over to here where there's a lot of it coming out the end of the riser. Right? So there's also a third leak somewhere. Apparently that was plugged really early. I don't know where that was. So, you know, the, the idea here, right? We're going to put a containment dome over the end of the riser. So this was constructed by, again, Joe Baden's, excuse me, not Joe Biden's. No, they'd kill me if I said that.

• 2:03:00November Kelly?

  It's funny.

• 2:03:01Justin Roczniak?

  Joe Baden's Wild Well Control, Spring, Texas. Yee-haw.

• 2:03:04Speaker 02

  No, but you're muted.

• 2:03:06November Kelly?

  Joe Biden's Wild Wings of Danforth, Connecticut.

• 2:03:10Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God. This was designed, the whole thing goes over the end of the leaking riser pipe, right? That's what this big door shaped opening is for. And then it's going to sink into the ground, right? Until it reaches these big flaps here. That's going to stabilize it, right? Everything's going to be in place and all of the oil and the gas is going to go up and it's going to come out this pipe at the top and go to be stored on. A ship on the surface, right?

• 2:03:44November Kelly?

  I mean, shit. Okay.

• 2:03:45Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, man.

• 2:03:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So there was a concern here that under high pressures and low temperatures, right, these things called methane clathrates could form, right?

• 2:03:55Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:03:56Justin Roczniak?

  Sort of a full explanation of this is outside the scope of the podcast, but essentially, well, water isn't going to freeze in this environment because it's too high pressure and water expands when it freezes. It's one, it's very unique in the world of chemicals and doing that. Methane also isn't going to freeze in this environment because its freezing point is very, very, very, very, very low, right? Water and methane together will readily freeze into a weird methane-bearing ice, which is only stable at high pressure and low temperature.

• 2:04:28November Kelly?

  Clathrates. Yeah, I love these things. Water, one of the only effective carbon capture and storage systems besides trees in the sense that like, uh, one of the things that climate scientists are really worried about in terms of like tip over points is methane clathrates melting and releasing all that methane.

• 2:04:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, that's, that's the fun scenario where we go to like plus 12 C in like a month.

• 2:04:48November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's, that's the real like sort of nuclear bomb of climate. Sorry.

• 2:04:53Speaker 02

  Why would you tell me this? I don't sleep well as it is.

• 2:04:56November Kelly?

  I, I give and I take away. I also just texted you a link to an eBay store full of vintage belt buckles. Ninety percent of them are oil related.

• 2:05:05Speaker 02

  Oh, god damn it.

• 2:05:08November Kelly?

  I'll put it in the fucking Zankas to chat. God damn it.

• 2:05:11Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 2:05:12Justin Roczniak?

  Here's the thing about the clathrate gun hypothesis is it's probably not real.

• 2:05:17November Kelly?

  I hope not. I hope not.

• 2:05:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, uh,

• 2:05:20Speaker 02

  Holy shit, you can get a Kenworth belt buckle.

• 2:05:24November Kelly?

  We saw ADHD here.

• 2:05:28Justin Roczniak?

  So,

• 2:05:28Speaker 02

  Sorry, sorry.

• 2:05:30Justin Roczniak?

  The formation of clathrates was anticipated. As such, there was the tube that brought the oil up, but there was a second tube surrounding it that brought surface water down and it would circulate, warm water would circulate up here and prevent the formation of clathrates, right? But apparently it wasn't enough warm water. So the containment dome clogged up with methane and ice and it floated away.

• 2:05:56November Kelly?

  This is the last time in history that there was a problem caused by the ocean being too cold.

• 2:06:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So it's May 8th now. This has not worked. Which brings us to the next attempt. The next attempt is the pipe, right? Here's the end of the riser.

• 2:06:13November Kelly?

  They appear to be trying to cut it with a big pair of scissors.

• 2:06:16Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, oh, that comes later.

• 2:06:19November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 2:06:19Justin Roczniak?

  So the drilling companies take back over with, okay, this seems like a fairly obvious stopgap solution, right? What if you took a smaller pipe and put it in the big pipe with a big stopper around it and siphoned off the oil, right? So they put a six inch pipe in the 21 inch riser with a stopper around it, all using ROVs, which is very difficult because ROVs kind of suck for this sort of stuff. They managed to put a mile of pipe inside the pipe by May 14th and they're able to siphon off most, but not all of the leaking oil, or what they think is most because they don't know what the flow rate is yet.

• 2:06:59Justin Roczniak?

  This is not a long-term solution, but it works a bit until an ROV bumps the thing, dislodges the stopper and damages the pipe. So they have to go get another pipe and they put that one in on May 16th, right? And there's still at this point, lots of oil leaking out. So they're trying to find, okay, can we do something more permanent than the stupid pipe, right?

• 2:07:23November Kelly?

  We have to have something with a much cooler name.

• 2:07:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. So we try the top kill.

• 2:07:30November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah. I don't know what that is, but I approve of it.

• 2:07:33Justin Roczniak?

  There's connection points on the blowout preventer where you can connect a pipe, right? And you can pump stupid amounts of drilling mud at stupid pressures to try and kill the well, right? Now, if there's an uncontrolled blowout like this, half the stuff goes out the top. So you need to use a lot of it, right? So you're just trying to overwhelm this with sheer pressure and volume.

• 2:08:00November Kelly?

  Quality has a quantity all its own, or no, the other way around.

• 2:08:03Justin Roczniak?

  The other way around, yes.

• 2:08:06Liam McAnderson?

  There's no replacement for displacement.

• 2:08:12Justin Roczniak?

  Once you've overwhelmed the oil, of course, that's when you start pumping in stupid amounts of cement to seal the well, right?

• 2:08:19November Kelly?

  Yeah, you just, you just have to kind of like feed liquids into it until it assumes a kind of submissive posture, I guess.

• 2:08:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. You have to completely overwhelm the pressure from 18,000 feet of earth.

• 2:08:32November Kelly?

  This is how bartenders treat me.

• 2:08:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:37Liam McAnderson?

  What?

• 2:08:38Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 2:08:38November Kelly?

  Don't worry about it.

• 2:08:39Liam McAnderson?

  Missed it.

• 2:08:40Justin Roczniak?

  The thing, the thing about a top kill, it generally doesn't work very well without a functioning blowout preventer. And it did not work in this case.

• 2:08:49November Kelly?

  Oh.

• 2:08:50Justin Roczniak?

  So there was another strategy, the junk shot.

• 2:08:56November Kelly?

  Even, even the, even the verbiage is getting like more and more chub here.

• 2:09:06Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 2:09:06Liam McAnderson?

  Junk shot. Oh, yes. I love LeBron's junk shot.

• 2:09:08November Kelly?

  Junk shot, baby.

• 2:09:11Justin Roczniak?

  This is, this is a method. I'm not actually certain they did this, but there's a lot of environmental groups who got mad about it. Right? Apparently this worked great in Kuwait 91.

• 2:09:23Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah. You showed me this documentary.

• 2:09:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, that was a different, different well, uh, uh, plugging company. That was, uh, boots and coots.

• 2:09:32Liam McAnderson?

  That was not, uh.

• 2:09:33November Kelly?

  Boots, coots, coots.

• 2:09:34Liam McAnderson?

  Excuse me. That was not Joe Bound's wild well control spring tech.

• 2:09:43Justin Roczniak?

  So if just pumping drilling mud in there isn't enough, here's what you do. You're going to throw lots of crap into the blowout preventer.

• 2:09:53November Kelly?

  This is the Chernobyl thing. You get a, you get an, uh, like an MI8 with a, like a, an excavator bucket full of like basalt or whatever the fuck, uh, like used razors, uh, cinder blocks, et cetera. And you just keep dumping it in there until the Geiger counter says it's okay.

• 2:10:11Liam McAnderson?

  Fire in the hole.

• 2:10:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. In this case, it's golf balls, tennis balls, old rope, shredded tires, any old crap. They could fit down the high pressure pipe and into the blood preventer with the hope that it would.

• 2:10:23November Kelly?

  What if we just dump a bunch of shit in there?

• 2:10:26Justin Roczniak?

  It would then get wedged-

• 2:10:27November Kelly?

  Come down to Crazy Justin's Well Plugging Incorporated.

• 2:10:31Justin Roczniak?

  It would get wedged against the partially closed blowout preventer and restrict the flow enough that they could then start pumping in the drilling mud and then eventually the cement, right?

• 2:10:44November Kelly?

  Can we, do we think that as well as t-shirts, we can just sell them a Crazy Justin's Well Plugging Company belt buckle?

• 2:10:51Liam McAnderson?

  We can try.

• 2:10:53Justin Roczniak?

  So, so they, I am again, not sure if they actually tried this, but it seems like, wow, I don't see why they wouldn't. So it, this also did not work. Um, it was now May 29th. The thing has been leaking for nearly a whole month, right? In, in the meantime, of course, the spill is reaching the surface, right? There are ways you can contain big oil slicks like that. You can have a big floating boom on the surface, right? That doesn't work in rough waters.

• 2:11:26November Kelly?

  Democrats, when they get the, when they get the presidency back.

• 2:11:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:31November Kelly?

  I love the smiley face.

• 2:11:32Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:11:33Justin Roczniak?

  You can try and remove the oil. There were a lot of small skimmer boats that are doing that, just skimming the oil off the top. There was also a specially equipped skimmer ore oil ship. It could carry ore or oil. It was called a whale.

• 2:11:51November Kelly?

  More ships should be named kind of conceptually like that.

• 2:11:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Um, this didn't work very, although I did, I did get a picture of it in there just because it, you know, really big, like super tanker, but it can also carry ore. And you can see, oh, look, there's a whale on, on the, on the.

• 2:12:07November Kelly?

  I will note that a whale has been named three different things and each one of them comprises a different kind of transgender. It's been a whale, very non-binary. It's been Madison Orca, very trans femme, and it's currently Cosmo Ace, very trans mask.

• 2:12:26Justin Roczniak?

  And funnily enough, it's called A, it was called A whale cuz the other ships in this class were B whale, C whale, all the way up to H whale. But I think, I think it's funny to, it's a whale.

• 2:12:39Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, these methods worked okay, but heavier duty solutions eventually had to be implemented, namely chemical dispersants and controlled burns, right? Both of these things were pretty nasty, but you know, they, they worked to a certain extent. It's better to burn off the oil than have it, you know, wash ashore. The chemical dispersants aren't great, but they're better than the oil.

• 2:13:05Speaker 02

  Right. To an extent, yeah. I've got some stuff about the dispersants later, and I think that they may have actually made it worse.

• 2:13:14Justin Roczniak?

  Ah.

• 2:13:15Speaker 02

  It's difficult to say because nobody really did, like, there are studies on specific aspects of this, but because of it, it just, you poisoned the entire Gulf of Mexico for two months.

• 2:13:26Justin Roczniak?

  It's such a big thing. Yeah.

• 2:13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's hard to say like, well, you know, it probably helped in some aspects and it probably hurt other aspects.

• 2:13:32November Kelly?

  And the Gulf of Mexico is already mostly poison.

• 2:13:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:13:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I lived in Houston for a while. I know. You go down to Galveston and like dip your toe in and watch it turn to shrivel and fall off your body.

• 2:13:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, and this is also where the media circus starts around the whole thing. I mean, it's obviously there would be cuz it's a horrible environmental disaster. No one can really understand why it takes so long to plug a hole. Plug in this hole is very difficult, as it turns out. Um, you have these wild rumors. People are suggesting all kinds of crazy shit, like BP should nuke the well to seal it, right?

• 2:14:09November Kelly?

  Just, yeah, give, give BP the nuclear weapons directly. That'll be.

• 2:14:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:14:15Liam McAnderson?

  You can trust us. See, we have a smiley face.

• 2:14:18Justin Roczniak?

  The Soviets tried it three times or four times and it worked three of those times. So.

• 2:14:25November Kelly?

  It's like, yeah, make the Gulf of Mexico also pretty radioactive.

• 2:14:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. People are like, okay, the relief wells are gonna be doomed to failure. DP BP knows all that, you know, all kinds of crap, you know, it was, um, you know, it was, it, it, it was a big, it was a big thing for a long time. I mean, I remember watching all this on television.

• 2:14:46November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 2:14:46Justin Roczniak?

  You know, so, all right, the, the, the oil companies have, have done their piece and it didn't really work too well. So let's talk about the top hat, right?

• 2:14:55November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 2:14:55Justin Roczniak?

  So if at first you don't succeed, you try, try again. And that was exactly what Joe Bowden's Wild Well Control Spring Texas, yeehaw, was about to do, right? So they learned from their failures. They're now wise to the ways of the methane clathrate. They have figured out how to defeat it.

• 2:15:16November Kelly?

  I need to hear Joe Bowden of Joe Bowden's Wild Well Control Spring Texas, yeehaw, whip crack, pronounce methane clathrate.

• 2:15:23Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:15:24November Kelly?

  Anything.

• 2:15:28Justin Roczniak?

  So the top hat is much smaller than the containment dome, right? This is only about five feet, or excuse me, four feet in diameter. Now that I'm looking at the diagram, right? It is designed to fit snugly over the end of the riser, which an ROV cuts into a cleaner shape, right? Uh, this is their other logo down here. You can see there's.

• 2:15:51November Kelly?

  Incredible.

• 2:15:52Justin Roczniak?

  I know, right? Look at that.

• 2:15:58Justin Roczniak?

  They have a, they have, I, I looked at their website. They have unfortunately gone with like a, a more corporate thing now.

• 2:16:05November Kelly?

  Pussy. Ah, this is bullshit.

• 2:16:07Justin Roczniak?

  I know, right? So the top hat is smaller, is designed to fit on top of the riser, which has been cut into shape for it, right? And the top hat continuously circulates methanol, you know, wood alcohol, the type that makes you go blind, uh, into the oil stream, right? And that prevents the formation of methane clathrates, both chemically and because it's hot, right? And this works. K ish. It's limited by some unforeseen problems, right? In order to place it on top of the riser, it has several relief vents on top, right?

• 2:16:47Justin Roczniak?

  And that way you didn't have to like force it down on top of there with an ROV, which is something an ROV can't do. But once it was in place, the ROVs couldn't close the relief valves. So a big chunk of the oil just went in there and then went out the top. Or it came out the front, right?

• 2:17:06November Kelly?

  Highly vented top hat. Like you go kind of like the like, you know, perforated bit around the top.

• 2:17:12Speaker 02

  Top hat by Under Armour.

• 2:17:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but there's still, you know, during, during the pipe, during the period where the pipe was inserted, the Discoverer Enterprise collected something like 22,000 barrels of oil in total. But with the top hat in there, they were collecting 15,000 barrels of oil each day.

• 2:17:30November Kelly?

  Jesus, okay.

• 2:17:31Justin Roczniak?

  But they could still do better, right? The blowout preventer itself is still leaking right at that nasty kink, right on top, right up here.

• 2:17:40Liam McAnderson?

  Nasty kink, you say?

• 2:17:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:42November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's leaking.

• 2:17:43Justin Roczniak?

  So they can design a better top hat, the top hat 10.

• 2:17:48Liam McAnderson?

  Top hat 10, yeehaw!

• 2:17:50November Kelly?

  Do I have to have seen the intervening eight top hats?

• 2:17:53Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know what happened. I don't know what happened with those. Top hat 10 was designed to fit snugly on top of the blowout preventer. All they had to do was cut the riser at the blowout preventer. All you have to do is cut the riser. It's easy. You just get a nice, clean cut on the riser. Just get a nice, clean cut. It's not so hard. Just do that.

• 2:18:16Justin Roczniak?

  So they broke a diamond saw and fucked it up.

• 2:18:22November Kelly?

  Is that the cut?

• 2:18:23Justin Roczniak?

  That's the cut.

• 2:18:24November Kelly?

  Oh, okay. Yeah. Nice, nice, clean cut, as you can see.

• 2:18:27Liam McAnderson?

  God, it's like I did this.

• 2:18:30November Kelly?

  Have you ever seen some completely inexperienced Carver turkey?

• 2:18:37November Kelly?

  Have you ever watched someone try to cut bread with a non-serrated knife?

• 2:18:41Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 2:18:43November Kelly?

  I mean, like a sourdough, you know?

• 2:18:47Justin Roczniak?

  The oil.

• 2:18:51Justin Roczniak?

  The oil was now flowing into the Gulf completely uncontrolled. No one knew if they could fix it now. This was so stupid and bad.

• 2:18:59Liam McAnderson?

  This was so stupid and bad. Oh, it's baby black.

• 2:19:02Justin Roczniak?

  I don't want.

• 2:19:03Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, it's added like the.

• 2:19:04Justin Roczniak?

  I don't care about Java runtime environment.

• 2:19:08Justin Roczniak?

  All right. So they deploy top hat number 10 anyway. They bring it down.

• 2:19:13November Kelly?

  That's the belt buckle. That's the fucking belt buckle.

• 2:19:15Justin Roczniak?

  That's the belt buckle with the, with the guy and the aviators. Yeah.

• 2:19:19November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:19Liam McAnderson?

  That does look kind of like Joe Biden.

• 2:19:25November Kelly?

  Ooh, arthritis. Thanks for the crude oil.

• 2:19:29Speaker 02

  God damn it. Oh my God. Why would you make me remember that?

• 2:19:33Justin Roczniak?

  Top hat number 10 is put in place. It makes a tight seal around the piece of shit cut and the blowout preventer. It is entirely successful. It works beautifully.

• 2:19:45November Kelly?

  Amazing.

• 2:19:46Justin Roczniak?

  You may have not believed it. You didn't think they could do it, but Joe Biden's Wild Well Control Spring, Texas. Yee-haw has contained this week, channeled all of the oil to the surface. Now, who am I kidding? I, I, I always had faith in them. I knew they were gonna do it.

• 2:20:01November Kelly?

  I knew if you gave them five or six or 10 tries, they would eventually do it.

• 2:20:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. This was now still a problem though, because there was too much damn oil coming out. Between Discoverer Enterprise and the Q4000 drilling platform, they could process 25,000 barrels of oil a day, which was not enough. They still have no way of restricting the flow. And you know, I, I don't know exactly what they do with what they can't process. I assume they're either eating it off. Well, I don't think they're even, I don't think they're even burning it. I think burning it is part of the capacity there. I think they're probably just tossing it overboard.

• 2:20:40November Kelly?

  Cool.

• 2:20:41Justin Roczniak?

  Eventually they bring in more ships, but it's, it's still a delicate situation, right? And they, they, you know, eventually they managed to get the big gun in, right? Something a little bit more permanent, the capping stack, right? I don't know what took them this, this long. I assume it's lead time because it's a complicated. Piece of equipment, but um essentially this is a small blowout preventer. They could put on top of the normal blowout preventer. It's July 12th when this thing is installed. It's the thing that's finally gonna let them get a handle on the situation, right? And so they try closing the, the, the well very, very slowly.

• 2:21:22Justin Roczniak?

  They want to, they're, they're testing it as cautiously as possible because they don't know if there's some break further down. The well, which if they change pressure rapidly, might just change where the oil is blowing out to somewhere underground. Which is going to be much more difficult to fix. Uh, and considering it's already a very difficult situation. You don't want that. So on July 16th, on what was supposed to only be a test, the capping stack did its job. The flow of oil stopped, but there was still reason to be uneasy, right? This pressure in the well was much lower than expected, but no one could quite find a leak.

• 2:22:03November Kelly?

  Amazing, like, like sort of like waking up and like, you know, your, your hand is wet, but you don't know why.

• 2:22:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes, pretty much. Now at this point, Tropical Storm Bonnie tries to ruin everyone's day. The site was evacuated on July 22nd and then the storm just disperses. It doesn't happen. So everyone comes back. The well was still not leaking. They begin something called a static kill on the well on August 2nd. Which is essentially the same process as the top kill, but much easier because the oil was not flowing. And this works, but they don't want to take any chances. The first relief well breaks through in mid September, which allows the process of the bottom kill to start. Right? They plug the whole damn well with cement.

• 2:22:53Justin Roczniak?

  It was done. The well was dead. Hallelujah.

• 2:22:57November Kelly?

  They finally did it and all it took them was 10 tries.

• 2:22:59Liam McAnderson?

  Nothing bad happened.

• 2:23:01Justin Roczniak?

  But you know, I, I'm gonna hand it back to Victoria here. The environmental damage had been done.

• 2:23:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. So this is the, uh, this is from NOAA. This is the oil spills extent and where they closed down all of the federal fisheries because the federal government essentially like lets fishermen go out in these areas. Um, so they closed down like most of the Gulf, um, for 2010 through 2011. Um, and so fiscally, like, I'm not even going to talk about the environmental damage yet. Uh, just the fiscally, the fishing industry alone lost about $8 billion. Um, because there was oil from Texas to Florida along 1,300 miles of shoreline. That is the linear distance from New Orleans to New York City, uh, covered like that has some sort of

• 2:23:50Speaker 02

  oiling impact on, on these beaches. Um, a slick, this, this slick ended up being the size of the state of Virginia, uh, 43,300 square miles. Uh, no, tourism is completely annihilated. Although, and this is, I'm going to say his name because I don't want him to ever get to sleep again, is, uh, Tom Sessler, an official blogger. Tom Sessler, you say. Tom Sessler. Tom Sessler. An official blogger on the BP website, reporting from Huma, 30 miles north of the Gulf, wrote around, uh, sometime after the disaster responses in like July, "Much of the region's other businesses, particularly the hotels, have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other, um, oil emergency response teams." So, you

• 2:24:35Speaker 02

  know, that was his positive spin on it. Is he, "Yeah, we destroyed the economic livelihood of like, you know, tens of millions of people and wiped out this entire ecosystem for a decade." But like, the hotels aren't doing bad because we have to have people here to cap the well.

• 2:24:49November Kelly?

  Yeah. Joe, Joe Bowden, Joe Bowden's employees.

• 2:24:53Speaker 02

  Maybe Joe Biden was there too, because like he was Veep at the time. He might have been down there. What was Joe Biden doing in 2010?

• 2:24:58Liam McAnderson?

  Watching Will and Grace and eating a shit ton of ice cream. I don't know.

• 2:25:01Speaker 02

  He's probably driving.

• 2:25:02November Kelly?

  Doing cameos on Parks and Rec.

• 2:25:05Speaker 02

  I know they won't let the president drive a car, but will they let the vice president drive a car? Was he out rocking the Corvette?

• 2:25:10Liam McAnderson?

  Probably not, probably not.

• 2:25:11Speaker 02

  They should.

• 2:25:11November Kelly?

  They they they should they should let the president drive a car. I mean, they should let Trump drive a really unsafe car, but like they should let all presidents drive a car.

• 2:25:18Liam McAnderson?

  Nail him over a ditch.

• 2:25:20November Kelly?

  Well, like, part of the reason, part of the reason why they're they're so like weird is because they're divorced from the everyday experience. America is about driving your car, right? That's that's what your country is, and they don't let you do it if you're in charge of it, which is fucked up.

• 2:25:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the end result for BP is they pay out $4 billion in criminal fines after pleading guilty to four fourteen different felony counts, some of which are clean water, some of which are EPA. I don't just, yeah, we fucked up, we will plead guilty. They end up paying about $20 billion in damages total. They're actually still paying out for another six years as of this recording, so they are still paying out to environmentally remediate this to 2031.

• 2:26:04November Kelly?

  When I was in law school, my commercial law professor was a guy I admired a lot because one of his deals was you got to put people in prison, and I mean, serious prison for corporate malfeasance. Like, you just you just have to.

• 2:26:20Liam McAnderson?

  We're gonna do corporate supermax. I don't mean like whatever private prison shit. I mean, we're gonna do supermax. We're gonna do the shit they did to, uh, what's his name? The the the guy who just died, the Aldrich.

• 2:26:34November Kelly?

  Charlie Kirk?

• 2:26:35Liam McAnderson?

  Aldrich.

• 2:26:37Liam McAnderson?

  No, Charlie Kirk had it coming. I don't give a shit.

• 2:26:43November Kelly?

  I but like he'd he'd like done his his like research on this and his his thing was like, yeah, you can, you know, sort of corporate instructors do adapt to having to send someone to prison, but ultimately it is it is in some ways an effective deterrent if you really do just do it and just like identify senior executives and hold them personally criminally liable.

• 2:27:06Justin Roczniak?

  Seems to be working good for China.

• 2:27:07November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean.

• 2:27:09November Kelly?

  I mean, not as good as it could be, but fuck a lot better than us, either of us.

• 2:27:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, well, anyway, they paid out $20 billion damages total. They're still paying out till 2031. It's the largest settlement against a single entity in American history. No one went to prison. I should just make that clear.

• 2:27:24November Kelly?

  That's, yeah.

• 2:27:24Speaker 02

  Nobody went to prison for this.

• 2:27:26Liam McAnderson?

  That in itself is a malfeasance. Yeah.

• 2:27:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Next slide, please. You really want to be upset?

• 2:27:31Liam McAnderson?

  I do.

• 2:27:32Speaker 02

  There is a picture of the oil slick as seen from the International Space Station on May 24th, 2010.

• 2:27:39November Kelly?

  Hmm, grimy.

• 2:27:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. It, I mean, like, however big you're thinking this is, it's huge. Again, for the zoomers in the audience who don't remember this, it was really, it was bad. And the thing is, is like, it, it ended up being somewhere around 60,000 barrels a day, uh, leaking into the ocean when all was said and done. And it was undersold for a while. It didn't become clear that that was the flow rate until like, towards the end of the, the capping process. Um, and, you know, uh, all told, it was, uh, 134 million gallons of oil over the 87 days that it was actively leaking.

• 2:28:15November Kelly?

  I mean, honestly, they should have just taken the whole board of BP and just like dumped them on a raft in the middle of this.

• 2:28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I would take that. I think, I think it should be televised, but you know, do some Mr. Beast shit to them. I don't give a shit. Just like, let me watch them. Um, so yeah, within, within a matter of weeks, uh, they're finding polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or.

• 2:28:38November Kelly?

  I haven't gone to that one yet. I'm still part the way through Polysecure.

• 2:28:43Speaker 02

  Please, no, you can't.

• 2:28:46Speaker 02

  Please, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta make, we gotta just, we gotta bring back cooler language for this stuff. We're making being gay sound nerdy.

• 2:28:53Liam McAnderson?

  Aldrich Gage is who I was thinking of, but, uh, he died in, uh, FCI Cumberland. I thought he was in, in, in Supermax. But no, regardless, we don't even need prisons for these people. Just line them up.

• 2:29:05November Kelly?

  You can't say that on YouTube.

• 2:29:07Speaker 02

  Um, yeah. So these are, these are oil spill linked hydrocarbons that are extremely toxic and they're found like eight miles away and 3,000 feet deep in the ocean. Within weeks. And because they are using so many dispersants, they are breaking this oil up into component chemicals that are arguably even worse for the environment. But they, again, they have no real decision here. I mean, you could also say that BP was, now, you could say this, I don't think you legally could and not get sued, but you could make an argument if you wanted to, that like BP owned the company that made some of the dispersants, and so they were making money off the fact that they were using so many dispersants. And also, they were just trying to get the optics to look better. And if you coat a bunch of baby seals in oil, everybody gets mad at you. And if you kill off all

• 2:29:50Speaker 02

  the baby seals because you've just poisoned the ocean for a generation, then people are likely to have forgotten about it in hopefully five years or whatever. But you, again, legally, you can't say that, but you could postulate it.

• 2:30:03Liam McAnderson?

  We're doing so good here.

• 2:30:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 2:30:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, this whole episode is like, I don't know, people with, really like me or really hate me after it. I guess we'll find out. I hope there isn't like an avid NATO fandom in, in the, well, there's your problem, listener base. Like, yeah, but you're an anarchist. So like, I'm not.

• 2:30:22Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it'll count. It's fine.

• 2:30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:27November Kelly?

  Listen, it's simple. Half of the fanbase are FBI agents who listen for fun, and half of them are FBI agents who listen for work.

• 2:30:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, and the use of dispersants also makes the oil leach into the beaches and then the groundwater a lot quicker because it's been broken down. And so you see all of this coastline erode really rapidly because all of the vegetation has been killed by the oil and the dispersants, which causes like a lot of economic damage. In 2012, Hurricane Isaac brought over 500,000 barrels of oil ashore, which was more than had been removed from the Gulf in the eight months prior, which suggested the deep ocean two years later was still like incredibly heavily polluted, which was a really big concern because the food chain requires that there's like sediment dwelling microorganisms that bed, burrow under and kick up all the sand and oil that's going to be buried at the bottom

• 2:31:21Speaker 02

  of this. And then, of course, things upstream are going to eat them, and it's going to poison everything forever. Of course, like, three years later, they're still finding tar balls washing up on the coast of Mississippi. So like, the government said, and this is again, this is during the Obama administration. This is a massive oversimplification, so don't get too mad at me. But like, mostly, everything was fine. The oil settled back down, it's all clean now, don't worry about it. There are quite a few university researchers who did not agree with that assessment. And said, the ecological damage is going to be like, it's gonna take generations to fully understand it. The next slide, please. What we do know is that, I have numbers for a lot of this.

• 2:32:00Speaker 02

  A hundred and five thousand four hundred seabirds, seven thousand six hundred adult and a hundred and sixty thousand juvenile sea turtles were killed in the immediate aftermath. There was roughly half the dolphins in Barataria Bay in Louisiana died. Dolphins that the researchers were finding years later were like sickly and anemic and missing teeth, full of birth defects and like, not longing for this world. Like, anecdotally, like, people who

• 2:32:30November Kelly?

  And it's so fucking like, you get to go to, you know, like, anything for sort of like people with corporate jobs, with email jobs. You get to go to like the nice restaurants or whatever and be like, yeah, I work for BP. I'm like a dolphin poisoner. And people

• 2:32:48Justin Roczniak?

  I'm the reason you throw up when you eat seafood in New Orleans.

• 2:32:51November Kelly?

  Yeah, and you just get to do that, you know? Not only do you face no kind of like criminal sanction, you don't even face any social sanction because nobody knows who the fuck you are.

• 2:33:01Speaker 02

  Well, that's what's kind of wild to me is like, it's the, I don't know. Obviously, like, I have pretty complicated feelings about having worked even tangentially related to the automotive industry for a while. And I tried to do good with it as I, when I could, and I don't think I did as much as I should have.

• 2:33:18Speaker 02

  But like, I just, I don't understand how people don't like grapple with their role in the system we have built more. And I guess I'm finding out as kind of like I watched the United States systemically prove itself incapable of grappling with anything that anybody's doing ever. That they just don't, I don't know. When I I used to be a software engineer and like, you know, I worked at NASA for a bit and I could have quit there and gone and developed weapons. I wasn't very good as a software developer, but they'll just give you a ton of money to do that. And I was like, no, I don't want to work for the military industrial complex. That's crazy. And then I watched a bunch of other people do it who I previously held in high esteem and it was just baffling. Um, but I, I don't know. This is a sidebar for no purpose, other than I don't think I understand how other people work.

• 2:34:02November Kelly?

  I don't, I mean, I don't know how any of this works, other than again, like vulgar Marxism, which seems to be, you know, getting by.

• 2:34:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's fair. Anyway, yeah, the guy who's job was to poison dolphins.

• 2:34:15Speaker 02

  Like fishing, like people who had historically fished this area said that like fish and shrimp were covered in lesions and born without eyes. And, you know, they didn't even have eye sockets and it was just like, it was horrifying for years. And, um, you know, the dispersants that they were using were known mutagens. So that was probably making things worse. Um, if the oil wasn't enough, the dispersants probably would have been. Um, this, this incident killed 17% of the entire known population of Rice's whales, which dwell in the Gulf of Mexico. And now today they are critically endangered. Um, that's like the most obvious, like here is the lasting effect we have today. You know, 15 years later, um, that I could find in the, you know, at the time, we knew that anywhere between four and eight and a half billion oysters were rendered dead or toxic by the soil spill.

• 2:35:01Speaker 02

  Um, but it's really difficult to find out exactly like how.

• 2:35:03November Kelly?

  At least if you're the dolphin poisoner, you don't get to order the oysters at the nice restaurant anymore.

• 2:35:08Speaker 02

  I love oysters. I'm sorry.

• 2:35:11November Kelly?

  I, I, I have had like, uh, literally oysters, the one time in my life and I got really sick. So, uh, never again.

• 2:35:20Justin Roczniak?

  Same here, actually.

• 2:35:21Speaker 02

  Yep. I, I would simply risk it every time. Oysters are delicious.

• 2:35:26Justin Roczniak?

  And I had oysters in New Orleans, which may have been poisoned by Deepwater Horizon.

• 2:35:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, you've got a little bit of dolphin poison in you.

• 2:35:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so and of course, like, you know, we we know that like, there is there's extensive damage to coral reefs, there's probably still a ton of whale down there. I mean, granted, this is 5,000 feet underneath the surface of the Gulf, so it's difficult to tell exactly like, what's down there still. And Matt will probably never know the full extent of it, because we've destroyed every single scientific research program that America has, because we live in hell. But, you know, the Gulf is hitting record high temperatures every year now, and has been for the past like, five. So, maybe everything would have died off anyway, and it won't matter in the end, as it is. Next slide, please.

• 2:36:09Justin Roczniak?

  Happy.

• 2:36:10Speaker 02

  Damn, I really was not in a good mood when I wrote these slides, was I? I'm sorry. So, the the sort of quote I chose to encapsulate this entire disaster was from William Riley, who was the co-chair of, I believe, the White House investigation. And he said, "The series of decisions that doomed Macondo," that specific, you know, prospect that they were drilling on, "evidence to failure of management, and good management could have avoided a catastrophe." But we didn't have good management, because it was fucking BP again. This this whole incident is kind of considered like, the textbook example of like, ecocide, which is where you fuck up the environment so bad, that it will never

• 2:36:51Speaker 02

  be the same again. Like, the shoreline is erased, and, you know, the repercussions on like, fishing communities, and tourism, and just the general ecological health of the Gulf is permanent and can't be undone. Even like, going, if you would like to ever make yourself incredibly depressed, I recommend going to Wikipedia's page on the Deepwater Horizon, and just scrolling through the mental health impact section of the aftermath. And it's really like, every study is like, everybody was like, alcoholic and depressed, because their entire livelihood and community had been wiped out by this, basically. From basically Houston to like, the panhandle of Florida. But, you know, that's an area of America that we historically don't care about. So, you know.

• 2:37:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's something that like, had this kind of huge disaster happen, and then would, is having been fucked over by the climate anyway.

• 2:37:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this, this slide is from BP's own website. This is from 29th of September 2025. BP approves the Tiber Guadalupe project in the US Gulf of America.

• 2:37:59Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 2:38:01Speaker 02

  Which is 250 miles off the coast of Louisiana, even deeper this time, trying to pull out 80,000 barrels a day by 2029. In the same area, in the same region, there's a bunch of projects to drill there again, because like, why not? I mean, there's oil there and we're certainly not transitioning off it anytime soon. So just money, I just drill in and, you know, if you destroy the earth again, who the fuck cares? Like, what is the EPA gonna like arrest you for it? Anyway, now it's the Gulf of America. So like, you know, in closing, we live in hell.

• 2:38:30November Kelly?

  Yeah, and America, which is spiritually and physically poisoned.

• 2:38:34Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, there was a, there was a discourse today, which I'm sure will be quaint by the time this episode releases after, you know, we have begun the military invasion of Reykjavik, because we got confused about where we were actually trying to head. But it was like, is America, you know, is, is America actually bad? Or is it like?

• 2:38:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:38:54Speaker 02

  And it's like, are you seriously doing this? Are you like, come on, like, we can, we can try to make America good if you want. Like, if that's your, if that's your proposal is like, make America good, cool, sure. I mean, there's a lot of people here, I think we should make it good instead of bad. But like, you cannot sit here and be like, well, I think America's always had very high ideals. No, no, fuck you, absolutely not. This was when I was 15 years old and the environment is still fucked from it and now they are drilling again. This is why I fundamentally do not think things can get better in America. I'm just ranting, I'm sorry. I'm kind of losing my mind.

• 2:39:29Justin Roczniak?

  We only have eight to 10,000 years until the next ice age comes and the glaciers roll over and restore all these.

• 2:39:35Liam McAnderson?

  Can't come soon enough.

• 2:39:36Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah.

• 2:39:37Liam McAnderson?

  Wipe us out, let the chimps have a turn.

• 2:39:41Speaker 02

  I know, I think we should go back to, I think we should let, like marine life have a go at it.

• 2:39:45Liam McAnderson?

  No, I like chimps, I think they're neat.

• 2:39:48Speaker 02

  Okay, so my obsession lately is otters.

• 2:39:51Liam McAnderson?

  Otters hold hands.

• 2:39:52November Kelly?

  They're adorable.

• 2:39:53Speaker 02

  I, I love to death. My wife, when I get really stressed out, will put the Monterey Bay Aquarium recording of otters hanging out off the California coast on the TV. Just to, and it like always works. I feel like, I feel like an infant and then it's like, oh, sweetie, you're, you're anxious. Here, look at your otters. But it, it does work every time.

• 2:40:14November Kelly?

  Tricking your own brain is one of the things that like works the like best for something that is like feels so insultingly dumb. It's just like, oh, you, what's up fucking like idiot dipshit organ? Are you like this because you haven't had water? Do you want some more water? And then you drink some water and your brain's like, yeah, okay, sure, whatever. I guess we didn't mean all that stuff we said earlier.

• 2:40:36Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:37Justin Roczniak?

  I saw an otter once in the wild. It was in the Creek and Rittenhouse Town Park. I was surprised. I didn't think otters lived in the city of Philadelphia, except at the zoo.

• 2:40:51Liam McAnderson?

  We should go to the zoo.

• 2:40:52Speaker 02

  My, my wife and I for Christmas went to Oysterville, Washington, which is a real place. I did have oysters there. They were fucking delicious. Um, but we went to-

• 2:41:02November Kelly?

  The whole time you're eating, they think, you know, really enhanced this is a bunch of British petroleum dumped all over them. Yes. Like crude oil as a side, you know?

• 2:41:12Speaker 02

  We went to a nature reserve while we were staying out there and I did get to see an otter in the wild for the first time and I shit you not, it was probably the happiest I've been in the past. Like, I, I don't know how long has it been since I got married? It's been that long. It was just like, I was like, all right, happiest days of my life.

• 2:41:27November Kelly?

  When you come back out here, we've got to find some like nature. I think they still make it up here.

• 2:41:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Do you have otters?

• 2:41:32November Kelly?

  Yeah, probably. Scotland otters.

• 2:41:34Speaker 02

  They call them Scotters.

• 2:41:36Liam McAnderson?

  Oh.

• 2:41:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, they could do.

• 2:41:38Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that's funny.

• 2:41:39November Kelly?

  We have about 8,000 of the guys. So, yeah.

• 2:41:42Justin Roczniak?

  It's a little, little otter in a kilt and he's got some bagpipes.

• 2:41:46November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:41:47Speaker 02

  That's so cute. God damn. Somebody should make a shirt with that.

• 2:41:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:51Speaker 02

  Anyway, I'm done now. I'm sorry. That last half, that last little bit of that episode was not very fun. I apologize.

• 2:41:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:57November Kelly?

  It's, it's this or therapy. And to be honest, I should probably get therapy as well, but you know, that's, that's, that's, that's a, that's a thing to get over.

• 2:42:04Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, I've decided that when these episodes go to about three hours, we are, we are here for a bad time and a long time.

• 2:42:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:11November Kelly?

  This is true.

• 2:42:12Liam McAnderson?

  Well, it never ends.

• 2:42:14Justin Roczniak?

  The thing about therapy is they have to email you back eventually.

• 2:42:17November Kelly?

  Oh, God. No, I don't, don't talk to me about the prospect of getting a new therapist. My God.

• 2:42:25Justin Roczniak?

  So what did we learn?

• 2:42:28Liam McAnderson?

  Kneel these people over ditches.

• 2:42:29November Kelly?

  Uh, there need to be serious, violent criminal consequences for corporate executives. Um, capitalism is not only the worst and most insensible way of, not insensible, nonsensical way of organizing our resources. It's also literally poisoning you. And granted communism will poison you too, but like, you know, it's the people's poison. So fucking suck it up, right? Get in there. Um, just.

• 2:42:51Speaker 02

  We, we have to get off oil.

• 2:42:53November Kelly?

  Yeah. And it's, it's very plausible to do. Um, and, and when we do, the only way that we're going to get to the kind of solopunk yogurt ad future where everything's nice is if there is like some kind of justice for the people who decided that our energy system was going to be this way when they knew about the consequences, including this.

• 2:43:15Speaker 02

  So after you Nuremberg for the ice agents, we got to Nuremberg for the oil executives.

• 2:43:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 2:43:19November Kelly?

  Literally, yes.

• 2:43:20Speaker 02

  Just like.

• 2:43:21November Kelly?

  I will be running Batman fucking scarecrow show trials.

• 2:43:27Liam McAnderson?

  I'm with you.

• 2:43:30Speaker 02

  Um, I would also like to shout out Devon at this point. Thank you for not getting me arrested and sent to federal prison.

• 2:43:37November Kelly?

  Well, we don't know. We don't know if they, if they have or not, you know, you could have been.

• 2:43:41Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. We, you might be, you might be listening to this in the future.

• 2:43:47November Kelly?

  You might be listening to this from prison and you're like, damn, we did a good job. Wish they'd, wish they'd done some more beeps though.

• 2:43:53Justin Roczniak?

  But I think the other thing we learned is that if you have a well that's blown out, you need to call Joe Bowden's Wild Well Control of Spring, Texas. Yee-haw.

• 2:44:04Justin Roczniak?

  And they will get it fixed in as few as three tries.

• 2:44:12Justin Roczniak?

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

• 2:44:19Justin Roczniak?

  Greetings to all involved in production.

• 2:44:22November Kelly?

  Nah, too general.

• 2:44:23Justin Roczniak?

  That's right. Production of crude oil. That's what we do on this podcast.

• 2:44:27November Kelly?

  That's Maslow's hierarchy of needs ending in death.

• 2:44:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:33Justin Roczniak?

  Three wells producing 10,000 barrels a week.

• 2:44:39Justin Roczniak?

  Today, I'd like to talk to you about the cannabis industry in the state of Michigan, a sleeper state for the highest quality, cheapest, and most abundant legal weed in the United States of America. No photos because I'm under an NDA. I worked at one of the larger grows in the state and a few years back, we hired a new head of maintenance and facilities, a job that also put him in charge of safety and security at our facility. You'll be about as pleased as I was to hear his background. Retired Air Force Colonel, then Amazon Warehouse Director. And he deigned to come all the way to Michigan to pursue his middle-aged dream of working with weed.

• 2:45:22November Kelly?

  Season four for All Mankind, Ed Baldwin. That's for five people, but they'll be thrilled I said it.

• 2:45:29Justin Roczniak?

  Working with weed, which all old guys think is cool as fuck.

• 2:45:35Justin Roczniak?

  He was famous for losing his temper and screaming at employees in front of a bunch of other people and being extremely weird.

• 2:45:42November Kelly?

  Well, you said he was a Colonel and a Colonel is kind of the mayor of the military. You have a lot of power in a kind of localized way a lot of the time. And also it's as high as you can get with one of the really oppositional personality disorders.

• 2:45:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, and you can like finagle that into still being a Colonel, but running Libya. It was decided by the powers that be that we would start fogging with ozone in order to disinfect grow rooms and our processing facilities. Ozone or ozone. Three is an oxygen molecule that has three atoms of oxygen instead of two. And for whatever reason, that extra oxygen atom makes it great at killing pests and microbes.

• 2:46:24November Kelly?

  Plus. Binding preferentially or something. I don't know.

• 2:46:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Plus, it's organic. Unfortunately, ozone is as toxic to humans as it is to pests and mold, including perhaps especially the humans that worked in the facility being disinfected. See hilarious figure below unrelated to the poison thing.

• 2:46:45November Kelly?

  Is this Maslow's hierarchy of needs where the sort of like baseline need is lung function deprimates?

• 2:46:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:46:52November Kelly?

  Gotta have my lung function decrements.

• 2:46:55Justin Roczniak?

  A new thing Google is doing is that when I copy the text of these emails into the notes, when there's an image, it adds an AI generated description of the image.

• 2:47:06November Kelly?

  Oh my god, we have to kill every Google executive as well.

• 2:47:10Liam McAnderson?

  That's all right. Throw them in the pile.

• 2:47:11Justin Roczniak?

  Here is, it says a pyramid of healthcare with the Mediterranean Sea in the background.

• 2:47:18November Kelly?

  Literally none of that's right. It's not even a pyramid.

• 2:47:21Justin Roczniak?

  Hold on, hold on. I'm drawing it in.

• 2:47:26Justin Roczniak?

  There should be, what's, that's in the Mediterranean. Right. That's right. The Colosseum.

• 2:47:31November Kelly?

  It does say AI generated content may be incorrect, which is true in the sense that, you know, this is not financial advice, kind of baseline disclosure.

• 2:47:40Justin Roczniak?

  Right, right.

• 2:47:41November Kelly?

  It's not enough. AI generated content is almost always incorrect and is always stolen.

• 2:47:47Justin Roczniak?

  This is a pizza, right?

• 2:47:49November Kelly?

  And it's almost deeply upsetting to look at as well.

• 2:47:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So anyway, I corrected it. So it's more similar to the AI description. Anyway, ozone fogging initially took place on the second shift, where they would close foggers in unused rooms, which were not airtight, adjacent to rooms that second shifters were hard at working.

• 2:48:13November Kelly?

  Oh, see, I thought this was going to be a kind of that one scene from Tenet situation. But instead what you're doing is just like fumigating the entire building.

• 2:48:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. When second shift started to complain about the overpowering metallic smell of the ozone giving them headaches, our head of facilities and maintenance, Mr. Amazon, magnomously decided that fogging would be done on the third shift instead.

• 2:48:37November Kelly?

  It's like, oh, I guess you don't want to have your sinuses cleared out. I'm sorry.

• 2:48:42Speaker 02

  Excuse me.

• 2:48:43November Kelly?

  To be fair, like-

• 2:48:43Speaker 02

  It's Colonel Amazon to you.

• 2:48:45November Kelly?

  To be fair, we've been in the air force, like, everyone in the air force has been, like, splashing around in big puddles of toxic waste that they paint all the stealth aircraft in all day. This is true, yeah. So, like, being in the air force gives you every kind of cancer eventually.

• 2:48:57Liam McAnderson?

  It's true.

• 2:48:58Justin Roczniak?

  Nobody worked in the building between 10:00 PM and 5:00 AM at the time, so all the teams setting up the foggers needed to do was to put them on a timer and then head home for the night. Well, I guess we just couldn't figure out the timer situation.

• 2:49:12November Kelly?

  Building full of weed employees asks to work timer. It writes itself, I'm sorry.

• 2:49:21November Kelly?

  Hey, don't forget people who are around weed all the time. And maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm profiling them, maybe, like, maybe all of these people have great short-term memory.

• 2:49:31Justin Roczniak?

  We're at the sober weed factory.

• 2:49:33November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:37Justin Roczniak?

  We don't get high on our own supply. Anyway, one day, first shift came in, and we had to wait an hour and a half for the smell to dissipate before we could go into the building. The one airtight room in the facility happened to be the one I worked in, which stank of ozone and made me and my two coworkers ill within an hour of exposure. We submitted incident reports to Colonel Amazon and went home for the day. Fogging went back to second shift to avoid further delays on first shift, with no mention of why it was okay for second shift, which had no management, to get exposed every single working night for eight hours. But first shift, which was all the management, was not allowed in the building while the smell persisted. Turns out that prolonged exposure to ozone can cause permanent breathing issues like

• 2:50:20Justin Roczniak?

  COPD, which is amazing to have in a building full of workers that have been smoking weed since they were 13.

• 2:50:26November Kelly?

  I, I profiled correctly then, I see.

• 2:50:30Justin Roczniak?

  A sharp spike in asthma attacks on the second shift and a couple of fainting spells and a heart attack on first shift-

• 2:50:37November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 2:50:37Justin Roczniak?

  -sent a few people to the hospital the next town over, ultimately culminating in the hospital, calling Michigan OSHA on our facility.

• 2:50:47November Kelly?

  Jesus Christ. Okay. I mean, shout out to the hospital.

• 2:50:51Justin Roczniak?

  Turns out Colonel Amazon had been throwing out any incident reports related to ozone exposures, almost 50 of them, right? Which is incredible considering there were maybe 20 people on second shift at any given time. And there's no satisfying end to this story, really. Colonel Amazon kept his job for almost a year after this fiasco, right up until he cussed out one of the executives at headquarters. We did stop using ozone as a fogger, and it seems like instances of medical distress sharply dropped, but we still regularly applied pesticides in rooms that aren't airtight when workers carried on in the adjacent grow rooms. Thanks for podcasting and keeping me

• 2:51:31Justin Roczniak?

  entertained on my 10-plus hour shifts at the old weed factory from full legal name.

• 2:51:37November Kelly?

  Thank you, full legal name. Your shift is now half done.

• 2:51:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:51:42November Kelly?

  And remember, never climb Maslow's Pyramid of Cardiac Arrest.

• 2:51:46Justin Roczniak?

  Do not do that. Yes. Well.

• 2:51:48November Kelly?

  I'm stealing this and I'm posting it on Twitter. So yeah, as when this episode comes out, you will have seen it tweeted about two weeks before.

• 2:51:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:51:56Speaker 02

  You should put on Blue Sky.

• 2:51:58November Kelly?

  I, I, I, Blue Sky. They don't, they should invent people who get jokes on Blue Sky.

• 2:52:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, that is a difficult part about that platform. Well, that was safety third.

• 2:52:12Justin Roczniak?

  Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

• 2:52:16November Kelly?

  Oh, listen to all of the podcast. If you are a Chinese automotive journal editor, employ Victoria.

• 2:52:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:52:26Speaker 02

  If you're really, like, if you're from any other country aside from America and you're cool with trans women there, you should hit me up.

• 2:52:33Liam McAnderson?

  Do that.

• 2:52:33November Kelly?

  No, I want to come visit you. I want to come visit you in Chengdu where it's, and, and like boil to death. I want to just like fry directly onto the pavement the second I step out of the airport.

• 2:52:43Justin Roczniak?

  Too late. Victoria's gonna be covering the Albanian motor industry.

• 2:52:51Speaker 02

  There was a, I don't know if this episode is gonna come out in time for it, so I'll probably post it on my Blue Sky. But given the specific topic of this podcast, they are trying to open up offshore drilling off the coast of California and Alaska and the Gulf of, what they now call the Gulf of America again. And there's an period for public comment and Monterey Bay Aquarium.

• 2:53:14Liam McAnderson?

  I got a fucking public comment, let me tell you.

• 2:53:16Speaker 02

  The, the aforementioned people who make the otter videos have asked for public comment saying, what the fuck are you doing? Please stop this. And as a fool who still hopes that somehow we can avert every disaster all at once, I was gonna link that. So that people could be like, hey, you know, maybe don't do this. It's a bad idea. The, the key thing, the key takeaway from this is I tried to research, could this happen again? Was absolutely yes. Nothing has changed. So the only way to really stop it is if we don't do more offshore drilling, which is difficult because the federal government controls whether or not people get to do that.

• 2:53:52Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 2:53:52Speaker 02

  Or if you're a BP and you're listening to this somehow, quit your job right now and tell your boss it's because you fucking hate everything you do.

• 2:53:59Liam McAnderson?

  Shallow grave, shallow grave, shallow grave.

• 2:54:02Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna advocate for actual violence at work.

• 2:54:04Liam McAnderson?

  Shallow grave, shallow grave. I am.

• 2:54:08Justin Roczniak?

  So that, that link will be in the description. Please give them a piece of your mind.

• 2:54:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Other than that, I don't think so. I think that's everything.

• 2:54:17Justin Roczniak?

  All right.

• 2:54:17Liam McAnderson?

  Bye, everybody.

• 2:54:18Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I guess that was a podcast.

• 2:54:19Speaker 02

  It was only three hours, which I feel like.

• 2:54:21Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, we managed fine.

• 2:54:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. All right.

• 2:54:23Liam McAnderson?

  Amazing. And the side business. Business.