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

skyscraper episode 2: 2tall 2thin LIVE SHOW TICKETS: https://www.axs.com/series/30211/well-thereys-your-problem-at-union-transfer-ticketsLISTEN TO PRAXISCAST: https://praxiscast.podbean.com/FOLLOW ROB AND HIRE HIM: https://bsky.app/profile/trufflehog.bsky.socialLUTHERAN SETTLEMENT HOUSE TOY (AND OTHER ITEMS) DRIVE LINKS:food pantry: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/W2KKR1MFH39T/ref=hz_ls_biz_exfor teens: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/OPO3OYIL3CSV/ref=hz_ls_biz_exfor older adults: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/33JZADUKQ4TSE/ref=hz_ls_biz_exfor parents: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/2OLT3UIHUVYTL/ref=hz_ls_biz_exOur 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.

• 0:00Justin Roczniak?

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

• 0:05Justin Roczniak?

  The Zencastr is now going. Oh, look at the dog.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Also hello.

• 0:10Liam McAnderson?

  I'm gonna do it as Wav to piss off Devon next time.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Wait, does he not like, do they not like, uh, Wav?

• 0:17Liam McAnderson?

  I don't know. I just, I, I live to, I live to antagonize Dev, so.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:24Liam McAnderson?

  Love you, Dev.

• 0:24Justin Roczniak?

  I always sounded as Wav.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  I thought they told me in the past, no MP3, so I was doing it.

• 0:29Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:29November Kelly?

  It makes, honestly, I can say this, it makes no difference whatsoever.

• 0:35Liam McAnderson?

  No, but you look beautiful today.

• 0:37Justin Roczniak?

  A little.

• 0:37November Kelly?

  Thank you. Yeah, this is, this is, I'm, I'm experimenting with actually bothering to do makeup. Uh, or make eye makeup. Thank you.

• 0:45Liam McAnderson?

  Roz, you look terrible.

• 0:46Justin Roczniak?

  You have to, because the screen is recording.

• 0:48November Kelly?

  That's right, yeah.

• 0:50Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, all right, well, as long as we're doing that, uh, uh, hang on, so that people can get a glimpse of my face. There I am, I just came from work, hello? Now, show me the slides, Justin.

• 1:00Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, I'm, I'm, I'm going to the slides.

• 1:02Liam McAnderson?

  Faster peasant boy.

• 1:03Justin Roczniak?

  Here we are. Hold on, we have to.

• 1:06November Kelly?

  This is anti-Polish discrimination.

• 1:09Justin Roczniak?

  That was about to say.

• 1:10Liam McAnderson?

  He's also Norwegian. I, I'm Swedish, so he, we, I can't.

• 1:13November Kelly?

  Nor, Norway barely even had any peasants, because it's no arable land.

• 1:18Liam McAnderson?

  Who would want to live in Norway? Roz would.

• 1:21Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, Vikings.

• 1:22November Kelly?

  Hmm. Vikings wanted to not live in Norway.

• 1:25Justin Roczniak?

  You go out and, and go in a boat, and you go somewhere nicer, and, uh.

• 1:30Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, like England.

• 1:31November Kelly?

  Minnesota.

• 1:35Justin Roczniak?

  Um.

• 1:36Liam McAnderson?

  It's half Norwegian, half Somalia. That's the, that's the beauty of America.

• 1:39November Kelly?

  We do the sync point, and then we launch the podcast.

• 1:42Justin Roczniak?

  We should do the sync point, yes.

• 1:44Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44Justin Roczniak?

  Going to do three, two, one, mark, and then you clap. Three, two, one, mark.

• 1:52Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, good enough.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  Sorry, boy.

• 1:54Justin Roczniak?

  It's like full, full time.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  Every, every recording, he hates the clap, so. Oh.

• 2:00Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, that's unfortunate, but, um, it's over now.

• 2:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is a very clap-heavy podcast.

• 2:04November Kelly?

  Dog traumatized.

• 2:06Justin Roczniak?

  Dog traumatized by clap.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  Woke, left traumatizes innocent dog.

• 2:12Justin Roczniak?

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

• 2:25November Kelly?

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

• 2:30Liam McAnderson?

  Liam, hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he, him. I'm the person talking right now and, uh, Victoria, go, I guess. I don't know what to call you. Host, fourth mic?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  I think fourth mic, tempor- temporarily unemployed fourth mic.

• 2:44Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, welcome to the Well, There's Your Problem Make Work program.

• 2:48November Kelly?

  Experience, girl, Victoria.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Carrying on the, carrying on the, uh, the, the mantle of FDR. Uh, my name is Victoria Scott. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her and a guest.

• 3:01Justin Roczniak?

  And we have a guest.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  One more guest. Hi, my name is Rob. Uh, my pronouns are he and him, and I will be your elevator attendant for this episode.

• 3:10Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, you got like the, the handle as opposed to the buttons. Um, yeah, it's always, it's always funny when you're in an elevator with an attendant and they just press the button for you.

• 3:20Speaker 04

  Oh, like at Phil's Games, yeah. Yeah, I just, I just want a peaked cap. Like that's, this is all I want from life.

• 3:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, a freight elevator. The freight elevator in the BNY Mellon Center has a guy who just sits on a milk crate and he pushes the button for you.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Give the man a chair at least. God damn.

• 3:37Justin Roczniak?

  I know, right?

• 3:38Speaker 04

  I, I do have a bomb shelter in the basement, so when it really goes wrong, the elevator attendant will be in unlimited positions of power.

• 3:46Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point, yeah.

• 3:49November Kelly?

  Anyway, this is gonna be chaos because there are like five of us.

• 3:52Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 3:53Justin Roczniak?

  What you see on the screen in front of you is a very narrow skyscraper under construction.

• 4:00November Kelly?

  Oh my god. I hate this thing. I've been waiting to talk about it for so long.

• 4:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 4:05November Kelly?

  And knowing us, it's gonna fall down the day after we um, we sort of do the episode. Or an unusually skillful 9/11 is gonna take it out for us.

• 4:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 4:15Speaker 04

  This is a challenge mode 9/11, that's right.

• 4:18November Kelly?

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

• 4:25Speaker 04

  To be fair, there's a whole like, rove these things, we'll get into it. So like, you could like, pinball it, like, just hit the first one right and then just do it.

• 4:33November Kelly?

  Doing a kind of Takeshi's Castle of 9/11s down Billionaires' Road.

• 4:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is, this is 432 Park Avenue. There's some strong arguments that it is not supposed to look like that.

• 4:50November Kelly?

  One of the worst buildings in America, if you ask me.

• 4:53Justin Roczniak?

  It's not very good, yeah.

• 4:55Liam McAnderson?

  It's, it's, it's poor. I, I'm on 432parkavenue.com, uh, well, I would be, except the, oh, fuck, I didn't pause my torrents, hold on.

• 5:03Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, yeah, let me, uh, well, that's gonna give a moment for, uh, you know, all of the, the, the right-leaning YIMBs to, uh, turn off the podcast right now. As we said, 432 Park is bad.

• 5:16Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, they could suck my ass.

• 5:17Speaker 04

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

• 5:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, this is, this is, this is the, the, the middle finger to God, really.

• 5:24November Kelly?

  I have a question. If, um, we have a painting for California housing policy, what do we have for New York City housing policy?

• 5:33Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that's later in the episode.

• 5:36November Kelly?

  Oh, perfect.

• 5:36Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, thanks, dude. I appreciate you, uh, keeping that gag going. Yeah.

• 5:40Justin Roczniak?

  No, that was all Rob.

• 5:42Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, well done, Rob. Yeah, Roz, you sucked. You're terrible. Roz, when you go home for Thanksgiving, I'm right, we'll talk on there.

• 5:49Justin Roczniak?

  Wednesday.

• 5:49Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, thanks.

• 5:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. But before we talk about 432 Park Avenue and other pencil towers, we have to do the goddamn news.

• 6:01November Kelly?

  Oh, fuck, that's me.

• 6:11Justin Roczniak?

  Obviously so much national news going on that it's incomprehensible. So we need to talk about extremely local news. The ongoing Septa polycrisis has worsened.

• 6:21Liam McAnderson?

  Polycrisis is a terrific word.

• 6:26Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah, we're going down to one form of public transportation and knowing us, it would be buses.

• 6:31Liam McAnderson?

  Buses, yeah. Well, Corinne will be thrilled. None of us, none of the rest of us will be, but at least Corinne will be thrilled. Make the 15th of the subway, goddammit.

• 6:39Justin Roczniak?

  So the, uh, the situation on the ground at this time, um, so, uh, Septa, the southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, my local public transportation provider, um, has now lost the trolley tunnel as well as a good deal of regional rail capacity.

• 7:01Justin Roczniak?

  As well as who knows what else is going on. Apparently someone had the bright idea that to reduce wear on the overhead lines, to replace the contact shoes on the trolley poles of the trolleys. These are from, I want to say a, uh, earlier order from a couple, from a decade ago when we thought we were going to go in on an order of trolleys with Toronto.

• 7:29Liam McAnderson?

  Was this supposed to be what happened with like Germantown where they laid down track and then never used it? Or is it something else?

• 7:35Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, this is after that.

• 7:36November Kelly?

  How do two grown North American cities not have trolley bus money between them?

• 7:42Liam McAnderson?

  We have trolley buses.

• 7:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. No, the trolley buses are fine. It's the trolleys that are fucked.

• 7:47November Kelly?

  Oh, excuse me.

• 7:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Um, so the, uh, yeah, they replaced the overhead contact shoes with these bigger ones that were from Toronto, with the idea that they would reduce wear. Problem is they're a little bit deeper than the older shoes. So when they went through the tunnel where the wire is much more highly tensioned, um, those contact shoes both wore down to nothing and then knocked off all of the insulators and, you know, the holders and, you know, basically everything down there just got wrecked.

• 8:22November Kelly?

  The whole inside of the tunnel getting a perfect Schwinnigan handshake.

• 8:27Liam McAnderson?

  For sale, trolley shoes, never worn.

• 8:30November Kelly?

  They, they, they use the Canadian inch is the problem.

• 8:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:36Justin Roczniak?

  By, by understanding, I forget if this was in the Inquirer article or not, was that some, uh, essentially load bearing employee either left or was fired. It was basically the guy saying, no, don't use these contact shoes. I know we have a billion of them. They won't work.

• 8:53Justin Roczniak?

  And, uh,

• 8:54Liam McAnderson?

  Load bearing employee is gonna stick with me for a long time.

• 8:56Justin Roczniak?

  You know, once, uh,

• 8:58November Kelly?

  They're called bottoms.

• 9:00Justin Roczniak?

  Once, once that call is gone, someone's like, hey, let's use these and see what happens. Uh, bad things, as it turns out.

• 9:07November Kelly?

  Stroke of genius. Someone who is not woke by training, but is woke by inclination, trying to refer to the concept of a gay employee.

• 9:23Justin Roczniak?

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

• 9:29Liam McAnderson?

  Just you wait there, bud.

• 9:30Justin Roczniak?

  This morning, Governor Shapiro delivered a really big speech, uh, at the Fraser yard, saying they had, you know, come up with $220 million to, uh, you know, restore regular capital funding. Uh, but I don't know where he got that from. It, it, if he could just magically pull money out of his ass, he should have done that months ago.

• 9:50Liam McAnderson?

  Why don't we fund CETA, right?

• 9:53November Kelly?

  But yeah. Doing Eric Adams and like come back from Istanbul and be like, don't worry about it. It's fixed.

• 9:59Justin Roczniak?

  Why do all the trolleys say Turkish Airlines on them now?

• 10:02November Kelly?

  Don't worry about it. Armenian detector on the front of every trolley.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  For like six months, we had a Turkish Airlines, uh, wrapped street car in Seattle and we were continually joking that it was Adam's signal that he was gonna run for mayor of Seattle next.

• 10:17Speaker 04

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

• 10:28Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, so this, this, this crisis is continuing to worsen. Um, and I, I think things are going to get uh, much worse before they get better. Um, you know, uh, I, you know, uh, I, I, I'm getting used to living entirely within like a five block radius at this point.

• 10:46November Kelly?

  It's, it's fine. It's fine. It's

• 10:48Liam McAnderson?

  15 minutes.

• 10:49November Kelly?

  Degrowth is happening to you.

• 10:50Justin Roczniak?

  You're here. Yeah. I've been forced into a 15 minute city.

• 10:53Liam McAnderson?

  Mandatory 15 minutes of here.

• 10:55November Kelly?

  Klaus Schwab is like successfully curtailing your freedoms.

• 11:01Justin Roczniak?

  God, I just wish that there were a store that had nice toilet paper.

• 11:03Liam McAnderson?

  Directed pen dot, directed pen dot to transfer money set aside for emergencies from the public transit trust fund to Septa.

• 11:12November Kelly?

  I just hope there aren't any emergencies. I guess this is an emergency. It's just an emergency.

• 11:16Liam McAnderson?

  It's a constant emergency.

• 11:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, um, yeah, things, things are bad here in Southeast Pennsylvania, but

• 11:26November Kelly?

  Could be worse. You ever tried being a math core violinist?

• 11:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, or

• 11:33Justin Roczniak?

  or in other news.

• 11:36Justin Roczniak?

  Have you ever tried flying an MD 11?

• 11:40November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, McDonnell Douglas keeping true to its corporate culture, which is of course, as we all know, McDonnell Douglas civilian or military will kill you. Um, 100% lethality guaranteed.

• 11:54Liam McAnderson?

  We have the shirt. Buy the shirt.

• 11:56November Kelly?

  We, we do, we do. I was just going to allude to the shirt because I wasn't necessarily going to promote the shirt over, you know, the dead bodies, but sure, fine.

• 12:03Liam McAnderson?

  Oh yeah, it's been poor taste, but whatever.

• 12:05November Kelly?

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

• 12:11Liam McAnderson?

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

• 12:16November Kelly?

  Like help you process grief, new T-shirt.

• 12:21Justin Roczniak?

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

• 12:26November Kelly?

  God damn. Stay sexy and don't get socially murdered. Yeah. Uh, no. So, um, UPS put, um, put an MD 11 on the ground, not in the good way. Um, they, they perfectly 9 11ed a fuel storage facility in, in Louisville.

• 12:43November Kelly?

  Killing three of their own crew, 11 people on the ground. Um, and you go, that's crazy. How did this happen? Why do we have, uh, surveillance cam footage of a plane going in sideways? And the answer is because left engine fall off. Left engine fall off the plane on takeoff. Parts departing the aircraft.

• 13:04Justin Roczniak?

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

• 13:08November Kelly?

  No, especially when, especially when you're on takeoff and so it's throttled up. And so it just sort of spirals off and over the wing. Um, and then maybe kind of the, the sort of middle engine, because it's a trijet just dies. Uh, and then it, and then it augers into, uh, into whatever this is. Um, so yeah, uh, there are close up photos of the engine falling off. Um, NTSB says that, uh, they had fatigue cracks on the engine connection, which yeah, makes sense why it fell off. Um, there was actually a very similar DC 10 crash in 1979. Um, due to, uh, they had this weird like bad maintenance procedure where, uh, to remove one of the engines, you're supposed to use a crane to lift it off.

• 13:52November Kelly?

  But, um, I, I forget who it was, Republic, I think, uh, worked out it was quicker and cheaper to just balance it on the end of a forklift. Um, and this

• 14:01Justin Roczniak?

  What? What, what? That's excellent.

• 14:03November Kelly?

  And this, this like rocked the engine back and forth in such a way that it like overstressed the pylon. Eventually the engine fall off. If that's happened again, then that's really bad because that means that the sort of like 40 year old, uh, sort of maintenance procedures are sort of coming back. Um, I don't care.

• 14:22Justin Roczniak?

  Another, uh, load bearing employee there who was like, don't do it that way.

• 14:26November Kelly?

  Yeah. This is, this is

• 14:27Justin Roczniak?

  Fuck that guy.

• 14:29November Kelly?

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

• 14:41Speaker 04

  DC 10s, alright, cool.

• 14:45November Kelly?

  My question, my question is, if your package was on that flight, what do they put on the tracking update?

• 14:52Liam McAnderson?

  Plane crash.

• 14:54November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  Unexpected item in the bagging area somehow.

• 14:57November Kelly?

  Unexpected item in the bagging area, your package has left our, our, our storage facility. It's really left our storage facility.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Your package is consciously uncoupled from, you know, its transport means.

• 15:09November Kelly?

  Well, the thing is, one of the things that clipped-

• 15:11Speaker 01

  We'd de-gross your package.

• 15:12November Kelly?

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

• 15:27November Kelly?

  So, once again, UPS exploring-

• 15:28Speaker 04

  I mean, that is the kind of precision aiming you will need for like the main topic, so I'm not-

• 15:32November Kelly?

  Once again, UPS exploring new frontiers in the most expensive and deadly way to not deliver a package on time.

• 15:39Justin Roczniak?

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

• 15:48Liam McAnderson?

  God damn it, Roz.

• 15:51Liam McAnderson?

  I already made a joke about wearing a McDonald Douglas shirt to a funeral, which I guess is a fairytale.

• 15:55November Kelly?

  I mean, this, this Tri-Jet shit, it's literally just like, they're, they're, they're cheap and they're old and the only people still flying them are sort of Cargo Airlines, UPS and FedEx. And part of the reason why is because UPS and FedEx don't care about their employees and so-

• 16:11Speaker 01

  I, I, I am also personally bummed because they do fly them into not even Sea-Tac, but the Boeing field, which is even closer and lower to like the city of Seattle. So you can get like, it's like the 80s, it's like, I feel like I'm in the opening of like The Sopranos, you get Tri-Jets, like FedEx Tri-Jets landing like right over the freeway, it's so cool. Obviously, you know, I, I wouldn't recommend that we keep killing people to ensure that my Sopranos vibe is maintained, but still.

• 16:43Speaker 04

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

• 16:49Justin Roczniak?

  It's got a tack, a fourth engine on there, you know, for redundancy.

• 16:53November Kelly?

  The quadjet.

• 16:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 16:56November Kelly?

  For redundancy?

• 16:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, for redundancy.

• 16:58Liam McAnderson?

  For redundancy.

• 16:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so there's extra of them.

• 17:01Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, redundancy to do it again.

• 17:02Justin Roczniak?

  In case there's a problem with one, the other one, yeah.

• 17:06November Kelly?

  It's redundancy.

• 17:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Justin Roczniak?

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

• 17:20November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, this happened during the shutdown, which I don't think we're gonna talk about. Um, and, um, the, I, I just think about being on the NTSB like go team and having to do this unpaid, like unpaid labor to be like, let me just move, let me just move the chunky Maranara that used to be a person out of the way.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  The human being soup, right?

• 17:38November Kelly?

  Retrieve the, um, the sort of like, uh, recorder with their sort of last screams on it. Great, fantastic.

• 17:45Justin Roczniak?

  Probably gotta pay your own airfare to get out there.

• 17:47November Kelly?

  Oh, god damn.

• 17:49Speaker 04

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

• 17:56Liam McAnderson?

  Oh no, my buy snooze.com, which won't ship to the United States anymore, by the way.

• 18:01November Kelly?

  It's fine, but why is all of my snooze red? And why does it taste like pennies?

• 18:07Liam McAnderson?

  Normally does anyway, I don't care.

• 18:09November Kelly?

  God, where are you getting that?

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Buy snooze, well, not buy snooze.com anymore because they won't ship to the United States.

• 18:16Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that was the goddamn news.

• 18:21November Kelly?

  Some days terrorists are gonna end.

• 18:23Justin Roczniak?

  Now for announcements.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  Announcements, announcements.

• 18:28Justin Roczniak?

  Announcements, announcements, announcements. Um, we have.

• 18:32November Kelly?

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

• 18:38Justin Roczniak?

  Come to the live shows.

• 18:39November Kelly?

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

• 18:48Justin Roczniak?

  This is a really, really elaborate, like, you know, just like torture camp system.

• 18:54Liam McAnderson?

  Maybe it's a fetish thing, who knows? It's not my problem.

• 18:56Justin Roczniak?

  I, I, I don't, this is gonna, like, the history books are not gonna look kindly on this.

• 19:01Liam McAnderson?

  That's fine, they don't, they're not gonna look kindly on it anyway.

• 19:03November Kelly?

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

• 19:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, so anyway, uh, we have two upcoming live shows at the spaghetti warehouse in Philadelphia, which I understand is now called Union Transfer.

• 19:20Liam McAnderson?

  I like that you're gonna get there loaded and be like, what happened to the spaghetti?

• 19:24November Kelly?

  Name it every time.

• 19:27Justin Roczniak?

  We're there with the Quora Raiders podcast about questions from Quora.

• 19:33Liam McAnderson?

  The worst website on the internet. Yes.

• 19:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, we're gonna.

• 19:36Liam McAnderson?

  Non 4chan division.

• 19:38Justin Roczniak?

  It's the 14th and 15th of December, right?

• 19:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, sir.

• 19:42Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, yeah. No, I had a nightmare about it this morning where it was tomorrow and I hadn't written the slides yet.

• 19:48November Kelly?

  That's fine. We could get up there and read the phone book, but we won't. We'll put in a lot of effort. And because of that effort and because of the fact that I'm going to torture you if you don't, you should come to the live shows.

• 19:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 20:00November Kelly?

  That's a perverse incentive for some of them. If that makes you feel strange, I'm not going to torture you unless you come to the live shows.

• 20:06Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we will be doing the beat and greet.

• 20:12November Kelly?

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

• 20:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 20:18Liam McAnderson?

  We, oh.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  Do you have like various Patreon tiers? Cause like you could go from like, you know, one punch to severe mauling for the higher.

• 20:25Liam McAnderson?

  We do, we do. I am pleased to announce that we have upgraded the forgery of November signature. And we're now gonna rubber stamp November signature. So we don't have to write it anymore.

• 20:36November Kelly?

  You actually got it. Yes. Fantastic. I was wondering why you wanted me to send you like a PDF with a really clear scan of my signature and my credit card details and my fingerprints. Dental records was kind of tricky.

• 20:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Liam McAnderson?

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

• 21:05November Kelly?

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

• 21:09Liam McAnderson?

  Abhorring?

• 21:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, you whore violence.

• 21:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 21:13November Kelly?

  Video instantly requires content, requires like ID to watch.

• 21:18Justin Roczniak?

  Now, so let me get this straight.

• 21:20Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, bud.

• 21:21Justin Roczniak?

  We're threatening to beat people up if they don't come to the show.

• 21:24November Kelly?

  Yep.

• 21:25Justin Roczniak?

  But also if they do come to the show.

• 21:28Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's a win win.

• 21:28November Kelly?

  Yes, yeah.

• 21:29Liam McAnderson?

  Makes sense to me.

• 21:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yep. Okay.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  It's sort of like. The other one just like happens to you.

• 21:35November Kelly?

  It's sort of like a French army in like late 1916 disciplinary policy. And I think that'll work out for us about as well.

• 21:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, there's your problem. Come to our live show and we'll.

• 21:47November Kelly?

  You will be issued with a set of horizon blue sort of great coats and then beaten to.

• 21:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, there's your problem. The only podcast with Corvay labor. It's great.

• 22:01Justin Roczniak?

  Those were the announcements.

• 22:03Liam McAnderson?

  Wait, no, they weren't. No, they weren't. No, they weren't. No, they weren't. No, they weren't.

• 22:07Justin Roczniak?

  What was the other part of the announcement?

• 22:08Liam McAnderson?

  The other part of the announcement was to-

• 22:10Justin Roczniak?

  The press one. Oh, the press part. Yeah.

• 22:12Liam McAnderson?

  No, that was, oh. Yes, the press one. Please write nice articles about us. The only ones we have are a hyperall- a hyperallergic article for like 2021.

• 22:23Justin Roczniak?

  Part, part of getting November over the United States eventually, and I mean eventually being like, I don't know, 2028 after Trump's third term. Is, you know, the O1 visa process is really fucked up and complicated and it does require there to be a lot of press about us. So if you work for a newspaper of some kind, please write an article about us. It's too bad you don't know any journalists.

• 22:51Liam McAnderson?

  Does not have to be positive.

• 22:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it could be really mean.

• 22:53Liam McAnderson?

  I don't know how to read. Um, the other thing that I was gonna say is-

• 22:58Justin Roczniak?

  Get us in the post millennial.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  Does it have to be American media? Can you just like get, you know, what is it? Times of India, that thing that just like reproduces everybody else's content?

• 23:08Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, good question. I don't know.

• 23:10Liam McAnderson?

  Indian tour. Here we go.

• 23:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Oh, I wanna, we're gonna do the whole tour on a commuter train with no doors.

• 23:17Liam McAnderson?

  Yes. Led, led by Jay Satte.

• 23:22Liam McAnderson?

  But the announcement I was gonna make was the wish lists are live. I will link to them in the, in the description. These are for the seniors that I work with at Lutheran Settlement House. They are for the kids who need toys and Christmas donations.

• 23:39Liam McAnderson?

  If our compulsion to bring you to the live shows doesn't work, if you don't donate to the children, you will be, you will be mauled in some sort of- Hyper efficient way. I'm good at mauling.

• 23:50November Kelly?

  But also, you know, it's the dreams of children. You shouldn't need mauling to persuade you to do it.

• 23:54Liam McAnderson?

  I want to say that my favorite thing at work is when, so we get enough toys usually that we have surplus, which, but however, they are stored in the furthest corner of the creepy wet basement. So I always have to go, I said, like load myself, like make the side of the cross and load myself in to go in the furthest corner of the creepy basement. And I'm just like, and I pop out like Santa Claus. I'm just like, here's toys. And they're just like, why is that man screaming at me?

• 24:20Speaker 04

  Just for clarity sake, the toys are in the basement or the children? Which?

• 24:25Liam McAnderson?

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

• 24:40Liam McAnderson?

  All right. That was the end of the announcements as far as I'm concerned.

• 24:43Justin Roczniak?

  The announcements.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  All right.

• 24:48Justin Roczniak?

  All right. This is mostly a Rob episode.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  Hi, Rob.

• 24:51November Kelly?

  Let's go.

• 24:52Speaker 04

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

• 25:02Justin Roczniak?

  I can provide help where needed.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  So basically, why are we talking about this? Essentially, it is to make fun of some of the worst people in the world. Watch, watch them make each other miserable, watch them sue each other because they decided to build a fucking terrible billion building and then sell condos inside it for many, many millions of dollars. The condos all look hideous. We'll get to, we'll get to it. And this is one of those ones where apart from maybe some construction guys here and there, you don't have to feel sorry for anybody. Cause they all, you know, everybody involved is a piece of shit. So it's really fun. Here's, here's a small quote from the New York Times. "I was convinced it would be the best building in the world," said Serena Abramovich, one of the earliest residents,

• 25:49Speaker 04

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

• 25:57Speaker 04

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

• 26:06Justin Roczniak?

  You, die.

• 26:08Speaker 04

  Fuck you.

• 26:09Justin Roczniak?

  That's about the size of a. Good size, uh, West Philly, uh, you know, twin, you know, sort of one of the big mansion type houses.

• 26:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, but yeah, you know, we could have the podcast, uh, castle for, we have six of the podcast castles.

• 26:26Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  How many dank basements could that, could that afford you?

• 26:31Justin Roczniak?

  One.

• 26:32Liam McAnderson?

  Just one.

• 26:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:36Speaker 04

  Uh, and just, yeah, as a small credit where it's due, I started reading about this or researching this because of a long read in the New York Times from October of this year, uh, written by Dion Cersei, Stefanos Chen and Uvashi Ubaroi. I hope I pronounced those right. Credit where credit's due, New York Times, mostly terrible, but sometimes they do really good work.

• 26:55November Kelly?

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

• 27:03Speaker 01

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

• 27:11Justin Roczniak?

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

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I could not work out whether or not the private pool had like, uh, you know, had like a weird policy, but you know, maybe one day.

• 27:19Liam McAnderson?

  I'm downloading the penthouse brochure now. Oh, I'm gonna everybody in this building with my bare hands, man.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  You're not gonna need to.

• 27:30Justin Roczniak?

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

• 27:38November Kelly?

  Yes, fantastic. We have, we have the best graphics in the game. I don't care.

• 27:47November Kelly?

  So. High production values. I mean, like.

• 27:50Liam McAnderson?

  The one article that Hyperallergic wrote about us that I was mentioning, uh, says like in the second paragraph, this is nothing intricately produced like 99% or anything from NPR. It's like, I forget what they call us, but it's like aggressively DIY and relaxed.

• 28:09Justin Roczniak?

  As you all know, I was just recently in Europe for a while. Um, and I got to see the, uh, Trash Future offices, right?

• 28:16November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah.

• 28:17Justin Roczniak?

  Got to record an episode with Gareth of, uh, Britnology. Um, you know, we talked about US versus UK railways and sort of the general vibe. That's over on the Trash Future Patreon. You gotta be on the special high tier to listen to it, though.

• 28:31Liam McAnderson?

  Can you say that to me?

• 28:33November Kelly?

  Uh, no, no, give me $10. Give me $10, you cheating bastard.

• 28:39Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, I was in the offices and I got jealous. So I went into the Patreon, took out a big bunch of money. Uh, long story short, this is our new global headquarters building.

• 28:49Liam McAnderson?

  Where is it?

• 28:51Liam McAnderson?

  Are you gonna tell us where it is?

• 28:52Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, this is gonna go up in Center City sometime fairly soon.

• 28:56Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, oh, no, yeah, I approved this, actually. I was wondering where the big-

• 28:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is just a schematic. The actual building will look nicer. Um, anyway.

• 29:03Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, no, I'm sorry, you're never getting paid again.

• 29:05November Kelly?

  W Y T P.

• 29:07Justin Roczniak?

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

• 29:11Liam McAnderson?

  Don't inside.

• 29:15Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you're their problem.

• 29:16Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I'm gonna be their problem. Look, I, uh, I have, I have in all seriousness, looked into getting us office space for me and Roz to record. Uh, and just like in the shittiest place imaginable, like above bars and stuff. And I, I got so far as to sending an email and I got just a flat, we are not interested. Thank you.

• 29:34November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's crazy. Like owning a, owning a podcast studio, renting a podcast studio is, is, is a ridiculous expense. Um, so do not draw any inferences about Trash Future from this.

• 29:46Liam McAnderson?

  Well, no, but the thing is that once we approve these schematics, which we did, uh, by a vote of two that didn't vote.

• 29:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 29:53November Kelly?

  But by a vote of two, two, one of you has a stamp with my signature on it.

• 29:58Liam McAnderson?

  All right, three to none, three to zero on it. Let's do it, baby.

• 30:01Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, uh, this is, uh, about, uh, 70 stories tall, right? Uh, we got about 2 million leasable square feet. I think we only need a floor or two of this. So I'm pretty sure that with, you know, Center City office space going at a premium as it is right now, we're gonna make that money back, no problem.

• 30:20Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, that's why.

• 30:21November Kelly?

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

• 30:27Justin Roczniak?

  This is Roz running-

• 30:28Speaker 04

  You're the first, you're the first podcast to invent, you know, real estate scams. That's never been done before.

• 30:33Justin Roczniak?

  Look, it's not a scam. I lease office space out to people who want office space. That's called business. Business. This is landlordism. Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 01

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

• 30:52Justin Roczniak?

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

• 30:58Liam McAnderson?

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

• 31:05Justin Roczniak?

  So, um, anyway, I feel like this is a good place to go over some skyscraper systems, some ideas behind their design, so on and so forth, why they are the way they are, right? Um, obviously we did a whole bonus episode about this a while back. Um, I'm just going to do it again here, but shorter for convenience. Yeah.

• 31:25Speaker 04

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

• 31:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. So, you know, okay, you need some kind of frame that holds the building up, you know, that's usually just a grid of columns and floors and crap like that. That can be done in steel. It can be done in concrete. Here in the United States at least, usually office spaces in steel, usually residential is in concrete. This has something to do with the fact that the floors are closer together in residential buildings. So for whatever reason, it makes more sense to do it in concrete. I don't know the specifics there. You can also sometimes mix it up. So like the, uh, FMC tower, uh, near 30th street station.

• 32:11Justin Roczniak?

  That has office space on the lower floors and residential on the upper floors. So the bottom is this light airy steel frame and then on top of it, it's reinforced concrete. Looked goofy as all hell when it was going up. I wish I had a picture.

• 32:27Liam McAnderson?

  I think I might have one if you want me to send it to you.

• 32:31Liam McAnderson?

  When you, when you were into, when we approved this and now that we're building a skyscraper, uh, WTYP and Friends skyscraper building company.

• 32:40Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, never mind. Joke's gone. Sorry, folks.

• 32:43Justin Roczniak?

  What? No, we still have the plane too. Don't worry.

• 32:46Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, no, that was what I was. Yeah, I wanted to make sure you hadn't sold the plane that that definitely isn't stolen and definitely wasn't involved.

• 32:51November Kelly?

  What have I been signing?

• 32:53Liam McAnderson?

  Well, so here's the thing, right? Uh, you, we have a rubber stamp.

• 32:56November Kelly?

  And I enlisted into the Coast Guard?

• 32:58Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we have a literal rubber stamp of your signature. Our power is limitless.

• 33:03November Kelly?

  First of all, how dare you enlist me? I was holding out for a commission. Why did you sign for all those UPS packages? Is it what I want to know?

• 33:13Liam McAnderson?

  November is shipping me from, uh, buy snooze.com by the truckload.

• 33:19November Kelly?

  I think of the Garanto for your mortgage?

• 33:22Liam McAnderson?

  Why do these keep saying you fucking bastard on them?

• 33:27Justin Roczniak?

  Below the tower, there's, below the tower, there's gonna be some kind of foundation. This might be steel piles you drive in with a pile driver. These might be, um, concrete caissons where you get a big auger and you drill a hole in the ground that's like six or seven feet in diameter, sometimes more, and you throw in some reinforced steel caging, you fill the whole thing with concrete, right? Um, they might be a shallow floating foundation, depending on where you are. Sometimes that's sufficient.

• 33:59Liam McAnderson?

  Can you explain what you mean by shallow floating foundation?

• 34:02Justin Roczniak?

  So a floating foundation is just a big concrete pad and it sort of floats in the soil.

• 34:07Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, good enough. Thank you.

• 34:08Justin Roczniak?

  Right? So that's gonna be, you know, because there's stuff with like buoyancy in here, which I didn't do good in foundation design in school. I'm gonna be honest. That was never my forte.

• 34:17Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, but you have the degree, baby.

• 34:19Justin Roczniak?

  That's true.

• 34:23Justin Roczniak?

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

• 34:38November Kelly?

  All the way through the earth to a parallel counterweight building on the other side.

• 34:43Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that's where the mole people live. Yeah.

• 34:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, we had a 70-story tall mole people WTIP headquarters sticking out of the Antipode of Philadelphia.

• 34:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 34:53November Kelly?

  What is the Antipode of Philadelphia?

• 34:58November Kelly?

  So I Better be funny. Uh, it's a spot in the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia, says Come on, man. AI overview. Very annoying.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  That's where the, um, that's where the missing plane is. Which one? The MH77? Which one was the one that they never found?

• 35:11November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's on, it's on top of the helipad.

• 35:13Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, please don't, please don't disrespect our mole people, our mole people count, our counterparts. Thank you. Uh, so I'm on the website for Scoogle Yards to look at FMC Tower and the heading just says, this is a building.

• 35:25November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 35:26Liam McAnderson?

  That's it. You're, they're not wrong. Checks.

• 35:29November Kelly?

  You know exactly what it is, you know?

• 35:32Justin Roczniak?

  That'd be a good subject for the building show. Um, anyway, so several loads act on this building, right? On the frame, you have live loads, right? Those people walking around, that's furniture, that's, you know, um, papers, that's computers, that's all that crap, stuff you can move around.

• 35:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, fat man on a grotesquely heavy bicycle, et cetera, et cetera.

• 35:53Justin Roczniak?

  There's the dead load, which is the str- weight of the structure itself, you know, the steel beams, the floors, the, uh, I, even some of the, some of the more, uh, the fixtures you're not going to move around, you know, carpets, you know, uh, I don't know HVAC systems, you know, pipes, you know, so on and so forth, right? Um, then you have stuff that's more variable. You have like wind loads that they act on the building sideways, right? You have snow loads that acts on the building vertically. Um, you have rain loads, that's a little bit less important. Usually that's less than the snow load. And of course you have earthquake loads.

• 36:31November Kelly?

  Getting my sort of droplets of osmium rain.

• 36:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. You got earthquake loads. Those are pretty hard to deal with a lot of the times. They, they tend to be the governing code pretty much everywhere now, because at some point we acknowledged that the new Madrid earthquake occurred and maybe we should plan for this stuff, even if in your, you're in like New York City. Um.

• 36:54Justin Roczniak?

  So, you know, I'm not going to go into like load combinations right now. It's not important, but either you build the thing very heavy to withstand all these loads. Maybe you find a clever way around them, right? So, uh, one example, for the sake of comfort, you want to avoid excessive sway in the building uh, from wind loads, right? It's normal for a skyscraper to sway somewhat in the wind, you know, even like a foot off center. Um, but you don't want to go really far because that gets uncomfortable. So you might put a big ass weight at the top of the building, right? And you put it on hydraulic rams.

• 37:34Justin Roczniak?

  And then when there's wind, you sort of move it to the opposite side of the building. And then when the building starts to sway in that direction, you move it back. And you keep moving it counter cyclically in order to reduce the sway of the building. This is a tuned mass damper.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is also a spoiler.

• 37:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is getting more and more common in new buildings. There's also passive designs, so like the Comcast Center uh, in Center City, Philadelphia. They had a passive mass damper, which is just a giant tank of water.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, which sloshed around, uh, but it leaked so bad, they had to drain it. And they found out they didn't really need it anyway. So that just sits there now. Um,

• 38:26Justin Roczniak?

  um, now, other than our fundamental structural systems, right? There's other things going on. You have a facade, right? You know, if you're fancy, you call that a building envelope system, right? That's the thing that, you know, keeps people protected from weather. It protects them from falling out of the building, right? You know, all that good stuff. Uh, you have your big plumbing systems because you have to pump all the water to the top of the building because municipal water doesn't have that kind of pressure, right? Uh, you have big beefy sewage systems. You have heating, ventilation and air conditioning, also pretty beefy. Usually it's centralized, so you know, the, the ducting work is a big nightmare. Um, all, all these like huge HVAC systems have to do all kinds of weird things to maintain like multiple zones.

• 39:11Justin Roczniak?

  And so it's, it, it's, it's more of an art than a science. Uh, big HVAC, which is kind of weird. You got big electrical systems. A lot of times these buildings contain their own transformers. They take in like full mains power or at least like medium voltage and medium voltage here is like, you know, 13 kilovolts or whatever that is. Um, you know, stuff that uh, stuff that if you touch it wrong, it vaporizes you.

• 39:39Justin Roczniak?

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

• 39:51Justin Roczniak?

  Interior, there's lots of different building systems, right? Now, the size and shape of the building, they may be governed by local zoning laws or ordinances, right? So if you have like, this is sort of the classic art deco, you know, wedding cake step back.

• 40:09Justin Roczniak?

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

• 40:26Speaker 04

  I like that you've, you know, reproduced that at WTYP Towers. It's uh, I like that you're going for the retro look.

• 40:31Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, we haven't gotten this through the value engineers yet. That's the problem.

• 40:36Liam McAnderson?

  And we're not gonna. We.

• 40:39Justin Roczniak?

  I've already signed off on this though.

• 40:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, we thank you uh, for your contribution.

• 40:45Justin Roczniak?

  And a lot of those older pre-war buildings had small floor plates. What I mean by a floor plate? That's sort of like the cross-sectional area of the building. You know, so that was due to the need for natural ventilation. They did not have uh, air conditioning. You know, once air conditioning was invented, then you could suddenly start building big fat buildings. With, you know, huge amounts of office space on each floor. Uh, where you could stand in the center and you couldn't see the windows uh, anywhere.

• 41:17Justin Roczniak?

  You know, so yeah, that, that, the, the, this is uh, one way that the size of the building is governed is by local laws. And whether you have air conditioning. But all the stuff I just mentioned pales in comparison to the real limiting factor on building size, which is vertical circulation, right?

• 41:38Justin Roczniak?

  Which is to say, elevators.

• 41:42November Kelly?

  Elevators.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  Elevators.

• 41:44Justin Roczniak?

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

• 41:51Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 41:52Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 41:54Speaker 04

  Hi, Glenn.

• 41:57Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, Glenn.

• 41:59Justin Roczniak?

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

• 42:06November Kelly?

  Sure.

• 42:08Justin Roczniak?

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

• 42:19November Kelly?

  The like rocket fuel payload thing.

• 42:22Justin Roczniak?

  The tyranny of the elevator equation, yes.

• 42:25November Kelly?

  Yes, yeah. Konstantin Shokovsky launching a bunch of people to the top of a really tall tower.

• 42:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. We haven't yet built an elevator that can share an elevator shaft with another elevator. So each new elevator.

• 42:40November Kelly?

  Because the Otis Corporation refuses to innovate in the previous 125 years.

• 42:45Justin Roczniak?

  I think Tiss and Krupp had a prototype, but.

• 42:48November Kelly?

  But they're also not. Every advancement in elevator systems has been about you not dying. What if I want to die? What if I think, what if I'm the Gus Grissom of of of of elevators? And I think that dying in an elevator for accident is like worth the risk of conquering the elevator shaft.

• 43:06Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, this is, uh.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  Why don't you just like do like two?

• 43:09Justin Roczniak?

  It's called a pattern oster.

• 43:11November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  Why don't you just do two on like a counterbalance and like just run it through like a carabiner on the top? And then like, you know, just straight up and down.

• 43:19November Kelly?

  Just fucking like trebuchet.

• 43:21Justin Roczniak?

  That is called a pattern oster. They like it in the Czech Republic, but they go very slow.

• 43:27November Kelly?

  Just just crank that shit faster. I don't.

• 43:30Justin Roczniak?

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

• 43:36November Kelly?

  I skill issue.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, just half of Central Park filled with like trebuchets and catapults.

• 43:42November Kelly?

  Getting getting into the office and out every day is going like the the film Cube.

• 43:50November Kelly?

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

• 43:57Justin Roczniak?

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

• 44:09November Kelly?

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

• 44:17Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, love a jump chat. Love a higher.

• 44:19Justin Roczniak?

  Frank Lloyd Wright, when he designed the Illinois, he did acknowledge that there were probably not enough elevators, but he said by the time this building were able to be constructed, this would be solved using atomic powered elevators.

• 44:37Liam McAnderson?

  All right, man.

• 44:37November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 44:38Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah. Why not?

• 44:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 44:42Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 44:43Liam McAnderson?

  Elevators are too cheap to meter, I say, as I led to the stratosphere.

• 44:47Justin Roczniak?

  We still don't have the atomic elevator that solves this problem, but we have some ways to mitigate it.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Frank Lloyd Wright visionarily predicting the fallout series of games.

• 45:00Justin Roczniak?

  So you can have things like I have an express elevator, right? So I'm at the lobby. I want to go to a floor up here. There's an elevator that goes halfway up. It makes all the local stops. And then there's another elevator that goes all the way up here before it starts making stops. Right? That's an express elevator. That's one way to do it. Another way to do it is with sky lobbies, right? So I have, uh, uh, hold on.

• 45:31Justin Roczniak?

  I'm at the lobby, right? I, once again, I want to go to a floor up here. Well, the elevators here only go, ah, crap. I moved the mouse too much. God damn it.

• 45:45Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I can see why they said our production values were DIY.

• 45:48Justin Roczniak?

  Some amount, but there's a second elevator. It goes all the way to the top, but it only makes two stops, right? And those are at Sky Lobbies, right? And at the Sky Lobby, you can catch a local elevator that brings you to your floor, right? That's another option. That sort of takes some of the, the, the load off the elevators at the bottom. It also means you can stack these elevator shafts on top of each other, right?

• 46:16Justin Roczniak?

  You can also do things like have double decker elevators. That's usually combined with a Sky Lobby. So, you know, if there's, there's an elevator that's going to be very highly used, you can make a double deck elevator. You can do fancy dispatching systems where, um, rather than you being in the elevator hall and you push a button that says up, uh, instead you enter your floor and then the computer does beep boop bop and figures out the most efficient way to dispatch all the elevators to get as many people to where they need to go as quickly as possible.

• 46:50Liam McAnderson?

  Penn Medicine does this. Yeah. I don't like it.

• 46:55Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, but it's more efficient, but it's marginally more efficient is the thing. It's not, this is not like a total revolution in elevator technology, right? Ultimately, you know, when you have a big building with a lot of people need to move around, you just need a lot of elevators. And if you're in a building that's been under spec'd, like, uh, Liam, you may remember this, the Times Square Holiday Inn. Ah, one elevator, one of them. One elevator. 26 floors.

• 47:27Justin Roczniak?

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

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Congratulations on getting the free convention experience, Liam.

• 47:37Justin Roczniak?

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

• 47:48Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, the big thing about buildings that constrains their size and shape is elevators. It's all elevators. Everything else, who cares? Just elevators. Anyway, that's what I had to say.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Has anyone ever considered putting a big fireman's pole so that they elevators only have to go up and then you can just slide down?

• 48:09Liam McAnderson?

  I just need some really nice gloves.

• 48:12Justin Roczniak?

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

• 48:19Liam McAnderson?

  Are you talking about sideways?

• 48:20Speaker 01

  I don't want elevators that go down. I just want the pole.

• 48:22Liam McAnderson?

  Are you talking about sideways stories from Wayside School?

• 48:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 48:25Liam McAnderson?

  That book is an absolute banger.

• 48:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Elevators worked perfectly once.

• 48:31Liam McAnderson?

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

• 48:35Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  There is a where I was growing up, there's like a amusement park with a with a swimming pool inside and it has like all the fancy slides, but it has one that's like, it has two slides that are almost vertical, like they're just off vertical and they'll only for like, you know, you have to be 12 or older to ride or something. And I remember them because like the really steep one, several times you just completely let go of the water and you just fall through empty space until you hit the water again. Do that.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  That's where you could use that swimming pool that's empty in the the building in Philly. Their mass damper that leaked. Just have people just cannonball directly into it.

• 49:15Liam McAnderson?

  Eat shit.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  See, dual purpose mass damper now, like you put you put the corpses of multimillionaires in there, weighs a bit more, gets a bit more stable. Don't see a problem.

• 49:24Justin Roczniak?

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

• 49:26Liam McAnderson?

  Just take it, just take it forever. Just like, come on.

• 49:32Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, so yeah, skyscraper, it's mostly elevators. It's just elevators. Anyway.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  Anyway, before we start talking about the building itself, I thought we have to explain a little bit why we are and what we're doing here. So this is the view from Central Park looking south. And this is what's known as Billionaires Row now. Oh, I hate it.

• 49:54Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah, it's terrible. It's just a bunch of middle fingers to working people.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  It is just like, if you want like a highest concentration of where the worst people in the world live, it's this in Dubai. Like, that's kind of, you know, I'm not saying you could do some surgical strikes, but I'm saying they would be highly effective.

• 50:11November Kelly?

  Unlimited genocide on Billionaires Row. I'm just saying to the IDF that maybe I've identified three Hamas command centers.

• 50:23Liam McAnderson?

  I believe you have, November.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 50:27Speaker 04

  So specifically, the big five needle towers you see before you on the screen, those are the main five. There are others. There are, I think, a few more being constructed. And this is either where the worst people on earth live, or, you know, more commonly, it is where they speculate even more on their apartment being worth forever and forevermore in the future, because, you know, that's what you do with very expensive real estate. It's centered around West 57th Street, like I say, near the southern edge of Central Park. Why is it the southern edge? It's because it has the best views and also because it catches the most sunlight. So if you face the park, you have southern exposure, you know, and you can either, I don't think it's really good for wine growing because there's no slope angle,

• 51:12Speaker 04

  but, you know, like you have the south-facing side. And in November of 2025, just to give you a little bit of context, the top-floor penthouse, which is 11,500 square feet, or 1,070 square meters if you live in a real country, and

• 51:29Liam McAnderson?

  Who won the war?

• 51:31Speaker 04

  I think that The Soviets? Don't worry about that.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  And one of, I think it's, it went on to be sold for about like a hundred million dollars in the end.

• 51:43Liam McAnderson?

  Jesus, what?

• 51:45Speaker 04

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

• 51:56November Kelly?

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

• 52:00Speaker 04

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

• 52:07Speaker 04

  This is what you get for a hundred and some odd million dollars. I think this is, it's a big room.

• 52:14Liam McAnderson?

  It's a room.

• 52:15Speaker 04

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

• 52:18November Kelly?

  Yeah, you could, um, you could, it's sit down.

• 52:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you could.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I do like that there's like openable windows. You could crack open, you know, get a 47 mile an hour breeze. Blasting.

• 52:33November Kelly?

  That sounds pretty pleasant. Every German listening to this just sat forward in their chair like, okay.

• 52:39Justin Roczniak?

  He's probably only open like a crack is the thing.

• 52:43November Kelly?

  Yeah, probably.

• 52:43November Kelly?

  Also, it's worse. It's like a rifle shot.

• 52:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 52:48Speaker 04

  Just getting bird struck by opening the window. Just like fucking getting lashed by seagull.

• 52:54November Kelly?

  You could, you could look out of the window. You could, um, look at some of the little objects. It's got a lot of objects.

• 53:02Justin Roczniak?

  This is my large white carpet where I display my white furniture I never use, which, uh, the developer assured me was very expensive, but he actually got it from Crate and Barrel.

• 53:15November Kelly?

  Yeah. Good luck getting anything up or down from there. Um, also you're like exposed on three, if not four sides. So then you have the problem of like, okay, you can, you can sort of be in there, but what happens when someone flies a drone up to your window, which they will all the time.

• 53:32Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. The windows don't open. You can't just shotgun blast the thing back to hell. Yeah.

• 53:36Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you could shotgun blast it. You just spend a lot of money on windows.

• 53:39Speaker 04

  Just once, right?

• 53:42Justin Roczniak?

  Well, no, you could do it any number of times, but you know, the window would be.

• 53:45Liam McAnderson?

  I got a window guy on speed dial.

• 53:47November Kelly?

  Putting like foil over all the windows like a crack house?

• 53:50Liam McAnderson?

  Who's the, uh, who's the insane?

• 53:53Speaker 04

  Just get some plywood in there. Just like.

• 53:56Liam McAnderson?

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

• 54:04Speaker 04

  I mean, I suppose the one thing you could do all the way up there in, in, you know, your multi hundreds of millions of dollar penthouse is, you know, much like a very other tall towers, you could feel closer to God and God really likes it when, when you come closer to him, as, as we'll see during the presentation.

• 54:19November Kelly?

  Of course, that's why everyone in this tower speaks the same language. I, I guess the other thing is, if you're in here, this is, this is sky prison, right? Because not only are you sort of like up this high that you're fucking like, you know, swaying around, you can't open any of the windows, uh, but also if you're like, I feel like I want to go for a walk in Central Park, which is after all, basically on my doorstep. Uh, it's very nice. Uh, you know, I want to do the Kurt Vonnegut thing and go and buy an envelope or whatever. Oh, sure. That'll be, uh, like half an hour until I can get to the ground.

• 54:54Speaker 04

  I didn't check elevator times, but it'll be something along those lines. This is, I think the 80th floor, maybe it's something like that. It's 80 or 86th floor.

• 55:02Justin Roczniak?

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

• 55:13Speaker 04

  No, it has four.

• 55:13Justin Roczniak?

  When there's, there has four, but when there's only a hundred apartments, okay, fine, you know.

• 55:19Liam McAnderson?

  But what?

• 55:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's only a hundred apartments. Well, we'll get into how many apartments there are.

• 55:26Liam McAnderson?

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

• 55:34November Kelly?

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

• 55:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Where do you put the fan at?

• 55:43November Kelly?

  Because I'm, uh, you can show me this, this view and I'm like, cool. How do I watch movies?

• 55:50Speaker 04

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

• 55:56November Kelly?

  The glare.

• 55:59Liam McAnderson?

  It's Samsung.

• 55:59November Kelly?

  I can't, I can't game under these conditions.

• 56:03Liam McAnderson?

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

• 56:12November Kelly?

  Selling one of these to the world's richest trans woman and she has done this in order to like put one gaming chair.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  There's one floor that keeps color shift LED lighting at night.

• 56:24November Kelly?

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

• 56:32November Kelly?

  And some LGB, she's got an, and some LGB lighting. Shut the fuck up.

• 56:42Speaker 04

  Some Fortnite clan really regretting their investment that they're no, they can no longer get good.

• 56:47November Kelly?

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

• 56:55Speaker 04

  Do you imagine the ping is good up there because like you're just running more cable like, you know.

• 57:02November Kelly?

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

• 57:10Speaker 04

  Anyway, next slide, please.

• 57:15Speaker 04

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

• 57:25Speaker 04

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

• 57:40Speaker 04

  So it's, it's literally, it's proximity to Wall Street and the offices of hedge funds, you know, various new money cunts. This is, this is not where old money lives, by the way. This is where new money lives. Old money already has the nice button blocks that are directly on the park. This is where the new money lives.

• 57:55November Kelly?

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

• 58:03Speaker 04

  Well, I couldn't find it because it's literally not available online. But when they started marketing the apartments for this, not that you I think need to, but they still did. They did like a five minute movie with the guy, I forgot his name. Is it Philippe Petit, the, the high wire guy?

• 58:20November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  And he did a high wire walk to this building and it was filmed and like essentially the, the promo film, as I understand it, had no bearing to what you were actually buying. It was just like a series of artist shots. So I think technically you could high wire to your penthouse office in Morgan Stanley or wherever.

• 58:39November Kelly?

  I want to see them try it. That should be conditional for living there.

• 58:45Justin Roczniak?

  It would make you less dependent on elevators.

• 58:47Speaker 04

  Like a Tyrolean traverse, but like with with the wind speeds up there, if you didn't like get it right, like you would just like whirl around on it instead of like landing, you know, just. Yeah, I wanna see it. Let's fucking go.

• 59:01Speaker 04

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

• 59:07Speaker 04

  Yes, anyway, but like Central Park has historically been an area of extraordinary wealth. It was like that under the founder builds, the Morgans, they built all the other fancy apartments on specifically the southern side.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  Some of the people who live here or not either in Park 432 or other similar buildings include Bill Ackman, Michael Dell, Ken Griffin, Lloyd Blankfein, some Chinese billionaires, some Russian billionaires, just, you know, your favorite people all live there and they're also crucially, these are all money money storage facilities.

• 59:43Speaker 04

  They're all built on the assumption that they will increase in value or stay in value. And also the apartments are protected by US law, they are protected by a purchase price in the, you know, still reserve currency of the world. We'll see how long that lasts. And you also have a bolt hole in case, you know.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  When does this podcast get released again? That might be you.

• 1:00:06November Kelly?

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

• 1:00:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and I mean, I usually, in most circumstances, I tend to push back on the all these new apartments are vacant narrative for most buildings. But for these sorts of buildings, yeah, no, this is an investment vehicle first.

• 1:00:33November Kelly?

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

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  That that middle one, I believe, is 11157, which is the one that I was reading about before we recorded, because I got really fascinated by it because the developer's main goal with it was to be the tallest non-union-built skyscraper in the city of New York.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  Fuck my life.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  And they ended up actually like getting criminally charged with screwing over all their employees on like overtime wages and not contributing to like New York's like workman's comp fund. And they were all really guilty of it, but none of them went to prison and they finished the building.

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  I I believe they're currently the most expensive one of these buildings. Again, that's not in in part 432, but in another one, belongs to Ken Griffin of Citadel Security and arch-nemesis of the GameStop freaks. He bought it for $238 million, I think, a couple years ago. That's like the top end. That's just bragging, right? So at that point, you're just doing status symbol bullshit. Like, this is not.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's just just based on the images of this and like also, you know, all of the livability complaints that just you can buy like an incredibly nice turn of the century, like 9,000 square foot house in Seattle for like $2 million. I don't know what it is in New York. I don't I never I don't browse Zillow there, but like, why? I don't whatever.

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you can rent like a small apartment around here for that money. It's great.

• 1:02:07Justin Roczniak?

  You could if you wanted to spend that kind of money on an actual decent apartment, you could get it in some of the nice, big, pre-war apartment buildings that, you know, they have a huge, rambling floor plans and so on and so forth. They go for several, you know, tens of millions of dollars in these older buildings. The fun fact, you can also buy that in Chicago for $110,000.

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  I think for this money, you could probably buy like the other half of Detroit and then start like a rival police force to match that other freak who keeps buying private police forces there. You could you could do you could do the Warriors 2025 edition is what I'm saying.

• 1:02:48Justin Roczniak?

  I've created Windsor 2.

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  Anyway, next slide, please. So, these buildings are all quite new. This is from September 2007. And as you can see, none of them exist.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Not to be an asshole, but I do not believe this image is from 2007.

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

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

• 1:03:11November Kelly?

  I see something here. Two somethings, in fact. I was just listening politely and I was like, yeah, sure, I'll believe that, absolutely.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  A picture taken in 2007, but with a time machine.

• 1:03:31November Kelly?

  I said I would never do that, but I forgot.

• 1:03:34Speaker 04

  No, no, no, but it's whatever. I might have been slightly off, but my general point stands, these towers are all quite new. They were all built in the 2010s, essentially. Why were they built like that? Let's swiftly move on from the thing that didn't happen.

• 1:03:51Speaker 04

  So billionaires row and like the other needle towers in Manhattan were all built in the 2010s, like I was saying. But many of them are not quite as valuable as like the record prices for construction for the apartments is then achieved. What turns out to be really, really difficult is...

• 1:04:08November Kelly?

  Is there been some kind of downturn in the economy?

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

  This is post the big downturn, this is 2010s. So like, the hard thing is resale. So like, the first person to buy buys it for various reasons, as we discussed before. The second person to buy it, they might want to live in it and they don't like it as much. But essentially what you're looking at here is one of the results of the post 2008 recession. And what was happening in New York at the time is because most real estate had collapsed. And there was so much like stimulus and other money still like floating around looking for returns. And the bet was that a couple of these super expensive towers would attract like the only people left with real money in real estate,

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

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

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  Park 432 and the other towers were built in this time, at that time, because it was a bet that the real estate market in Manhattan was still functioning for people, for, for, for billionaires and for people for whom the 2008 recession fundamentally didn't matter to their bank account, like not really, not substantially.

• 1:05:27Speaker 04

  And so between 2009 and 2020, about 22,000 odd new units, new condos or whatever were built in Manhattan across 530 new buildings, so about 44 apartments per new build. So they're all quite closely cramped together and a lot of those were very, very expensive because they were specifically targeted at the ultra wealthy. The problem is though, very wealthy people don't need a 20 or 30 million dollar condo. They already have five houses. They probably already have an apartment in New York. So it's just a toy. And the people who buy these condos at the price premium of a new build versus a rebear,

• 1:06:08Speaker 04

  resale can be very high, like the, the new build, the first sale is super, super high. The resale is much lower. According to the New York Times, the developers would try to ask for about 118% more for a first sale than for a resale. Because like they have to get their money out. So like Park 432 cost like a billion, give or take to construct. They got three billion back in the end, but like the first sale was super important for all the developers to get their money out, also in case things go wrong, as we'll talk about in a bit.

• 1:06:42Speaker 04

  And this also means that like a lot of demand or like a lot of these apartments stay vacant. According to the New York Times, this is 2020, so it's a bit older, but like there were about 7,000 condos available for sale in New York. So that's represents about six years worth of inventory for Manhattan, for like, for Manhattan. And a normal market clears through its full inventory in two to three years. So what you're looking at is like an, an empty or an unsold housing stock that's sitting there twice as long. than a normal market would bear, but because it's Manhattan and because it's so expensive, normal humans do not buy these. So these things just sit there being empty. And I'm sure that

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  you know what you gotta do, man. Yeah, come on.

• 1:07:26Liam McAnderson?

  It's time to go, buddy.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Thousand dollars a month, rent control those suckers.

• 1:07:31Justin Roczniak?

  Very, very difficult to retrofit these buildings so that normal people could live.

• 1:07:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, I was gonna say it's a cruel thing to do to normal people. Yeah.

• 1:07:41Justin Roczniak?

  Maybe we use them as like prisons or something. I don't know.

• 1:07:44Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, it's like the Four Seasons when MBS did that whatever.

• 1:07:48November Kelly?

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

• 1:08:00Speaker 04

  You just filmed the next Judge Dredd movie in there. They just have like another sky tower to go into.

• 1:08:05Justin Roczniak?

  That's, that's how we punish the billionaires. When we finally take power, we make them live in the condos they own.

• 1:08:12Liam McAnderson?

  When our turn comes, we will make no mistake, we will make no apologies for the terror, but it's just you can't get doordashed.

• 1:08:17November Kelly?

  We will make no apologies for the making you live in your own apartment.

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. Imagine that, though. Like you, you get like an Uber Eats or something and you just wanted that your penthouse. It's gonna take half an hour. Like your burger is gonna be stone cold.

• 1:08:31November Kelly?

  It says, it says meat at lobby.

• 1:08:36Justin Roczniak?

  All right. Time to put on the adventure clothes.

• 1:08:41November Kelly?

  Lacing on the hiking boots.

• 1:08:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 04

  So basically, a lot of these towers, what they did fundamentally in the end, like where the situation is now, is create like a severe oversupply of some of the most expensive condos in the world, because it's such a tiny market that you're aiming for. And these people can afford to be incredibly choosy. So like Park 432 sold out 90% when it like when it opened, which was really high. But there have been other buildings we'll get into towards the end where like the sale rate has been a fucking disaster and like none of like right now, building one of these things is almost like a surefire way to lose money, which is, which is the good news. The bad news is, of course, next slide, please, is for everybody else who lives in New York City.

• 1:09:30Speaker 04

  So this is, there are many, many reasons that locals hate these buildings. But one of the big ones is they literally, they act like a giant sundial. They throw actual shade across the city because they're so high. This is one of them. You can see the sun move, you know, move. And this is where shade starts. So like you can, you can be sitting in Central Park, enjoying the sunshine. And then all of a sudden you are literally in the shade of one of these gigantic billionaire towers for like an hour or something, because it's just a giant sundial. It takes away the sun. It's Mr. Burns hours.

• 1:10:07Justin Roczniak?

  I'm gonna say this, New York City is disgusting swamp ass city. It's 90 degrees out for eight months of the year. If I'm sitting in the Sheep Meadow here, I want that shade. Give me that shade.

• 1:10:24November Kelly?

  Our new, our new plan, Roof New York City. We can get like one of the roofers unions in on this as well. We can get some nice sort of like DSA style art of Manhattan with a big eve over it.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Oh, this could be our office.

• 1:10:40Justin Roczniak?

  Buckminster Fuller already had that idea to build a geodesic dome over Manhattan.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:10:46Justin Roczniak?

  He said it would, he said it would pay for himself. It would pay for itself in snow removal costs in only 10 years.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Sure, man. You gotta do it like T-Mobile Park where you can like roll it off on like the three nice days a year. I don't understand why we don't buy one of these.

• 1:11:04November Kelly?

  Roof of New York. Yeah.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Covering Albany because you've like pulled the roof off of New York for the day. If you're fat, I'm gonna get mad. Everyone behave down there.

• 1:11:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, I would just wanna put myself down as pro shade.

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  I mean, you presume you could put it like in a big wall, like all those things you put on the outside of camper van to create like a little shaded area in the sun. So you just like, just create like a giant tube on the side on Staten Island or something. I mean, they're not using that for anything good. So like we'll, we'll do it like that.

• 1:11:38Speaker 04

  And obviously, of course, like the main thing is it's the grotesque inequality thing. You have to look at Oh, yeah. These quite ugly, horrible places where the worst people in the world live, you know, you know, try to build a tower towards God and, and, you know, they can't spit on you because they can't open the window, but they would if they could. And of course, none of, none of these towers contain any affordable or social housing. None of them, they just, they do not. They do contain servants quarters, which is fun, but we'll, we'll, we'll get into that in a moment, but. Oh, my God. Yeah. And also like i- if you build this high, even, you know, barring the elevator problem, there's very actual few, let me try that again.

• 1:12:22Speaker 04

  There's very few actual housing units for the amount of space, you know, on the ground or in the sky that they take up. So they're not exactly like removing the problem of overcrowding in Manhattan or in New York City. There's almost, you know, 80,000 unhoused people currently in, in New York. So, you know, they're, but they're not getting, for various reasons, they're not getting in here, but current zoning laws for this part of Manhattan do not require that any of these sites have any affordable housing whatsoever. So that these are only for the richest people in the world and like their servant class, like designated servants.

• 1:13:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, these, these sorts of luxury buildings, I mean, there's some places where they, they, there are like requirements for affordable housing. A lot of times you can get out of that by like paying into some housing trust fund that a lot of cities like to keep on hand. The problem is they never do anything with that money. So, you know, I, inclusionary zoning, I mean, that could be a whole episode. I mean, you know, in, in ice and theory, a lot of times it doesn't really work.

• 1:13:29Liam McAnderson?

  I, I look forward to our zoning episode in which we all. We would actually all have to ourselves. I've had this rude. Standing by.

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  You get the fucking abundance guys on and you just whine about California for, you know, a couple of hours and it'll be great.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

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

• 1:13:57Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  I resign right now.

• 1:14:02Liam McAnderson?

  I will be taking my, my stamp of Nova Signature with me. Thank you and good luck with your Super Bowl, guys, paper.

• 1:14:10Justin Roczniak?

  So like the reason- The editor of his podcast listens to this podcast, so.

• 1:14:17Speaker 04

  So like the reason these towers can or could, there's been some changes now, be built so high is due to some workarounds and like legal things to do with building in Manhattan. And that's because some of the interior of these towers is not actually apartments. They are what is technically or legally statutorily known as a mechanical void, where instead, instead of more apartments, you just have like-

• 1:14:40Liam McAnderson?

  Dang your name.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  A, a, a giant floor of, of nothing. Uh, next slide, please.

• 1:14:48Speaker 04

  So this is a representation of a mechanical void that's actually in use in New York City. This is a tower block on West 66th Street, which is a modest development by luxury standards. Uh, you can get in there for like seven, eight million US dollar for the small apartment. So, you know, not that bad. And the blue area you see on the right-hand side is the proposed or the built, I think this is built now, but I could be wrong, uh, mechanical void. So these are, have been banned, uh, since May 2019 by the New York City Council. Um, but a lot of these billionaire needle towers were built in the time where this is still allowed. So this is how it, how it worked before 2019. So city regulations cap the number of story,

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  uh, number of floors any building can have, which depends a lot on the location as well as the size of like the ground lot. But before 2019, it didn't set a limit on the height of any particular floor. And mechanical floors, where they put the HVAC, where they put stuff for the elevators, pumps, all that kind of jazz, these are exempt from counting as floor area under zoning laws. So what you do if you want to build a super high tower, but not like, you know, go over other limits, is you just put the HVAC in one floor that you just make five times the size of a normal floor. So you have just like this incredible like empty space in the middle of the building. Where just like the HVAC pumps live because you can make that four floors high or something.

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  Um, without transgressing technically. Um, any of the rules, there was one proposed building. I don't know if that was built or not. I think that was a proposal that got scuppered, but they were. Going to have a mechanical void of 161 meters tall.

• 1:16:30Justin Roczniak?

  That's 500 feet.

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  Feet, so 50 meters tall.

• 1:16:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33Speaker 04

  Uh, so like you could fit like the building of Grand Central Station in there comfortably with room to spare and it would just be. Empty space. So the apartments above with more view, you could sell for more money.

• 1:16:46Justin Roczniak?

  I'm gonna say. Really tall. Grand Central Station is the subway station. The building is Grand Central Terminal.

• 1:16:53Justin Roczniak?

  Thank you.

• 1:16:57Speaker 04

  So like one planner, when the New York Times, you know, talked to people about this particular sort of loophole. Uh, they said that like the max you would need for an actual mechanical void, because it is a real thing that buildings do actually need. Uh, including Park 432, that like. The maximum level you would need for like all the machinery, all the pipeworks, etc. Would be like about 15 feet.

• 1:17:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:17:23Speaker 04

  About five meters max.

• 1:17:24Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:17:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Justin Roczniak?

  These machines are big, they're not that big. Right? Um, even like if you have. I don't know, some of the stupid advanced new. Mechanical systems, you know, all the super energy efficient stuff. You know, which does have to be bigger a lot of the times. Um, nah, 15 feet's gonna be fine. Yeah.

• 1:17:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you know, 161 feet possibly a bit much. I mean. Again, I'm not sure whether or not that one was actually built, but there are like ones that are 40 feet, 50 feet, 100 feet high. Just empty, just empty space, just to raise the floor. On the expensive apartments that you actually want to sell above. It's just. Just it lunacy that they allowed this. Uh, there were two other things. These are, I think, a bit more well known. Next slide, please.

• 1:18:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is transfer of development rights. These are also known as air rights. If the building next to you hasn't maxed out on its number of floors, you can sell your extra floors, put them on top of the neighboring building and then they can build higher because collectively you are.

• 1:18:36Justin Roczniak?

  What?

• 1:18:38Liam McAnderson?

  This feels like carbon credits, like.

• 1:18:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there's no, there's a reason for this. I put on the next slide.

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  And the other thing, this is the floor to area ratio. This is, if you have a bigger floor, a bigger footprint, then you can build less buildings. If you only use half the floor, the footprint, you can build more floors on top. So one of the reasons that like, Park 432 has a ratio of 15 to one in terms of height versus floor is because it, that allows it legally also to be much taller than than anything else. That allows it to go so high up in the sky. So this is.

• 1:19:19Justin Roczniak?

  Floor area. Floor area ratio regulations are sort of what replaced the old regulations that made you step back on every floor. This is less prescriptive than that, which means that, you know, rather than having a nice old art deco building, I can have a plaza and then build, you know, the Seagram's building, right?

• 1:19:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. Anyway, speaking of air rights.

• 1:19:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So air rights, how did this happen? Right? This sort of goes back to the cause of all problems in the world. The Penn Central Railroad.

• 1:19:59Liam McAnderson?

  Man of worms, number one.

• 1:20:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:04Justin Roczniak?

  So everyone remembers the Pennsylvania Railroad, you know, in the early 60s, they decide, you know, we don't need this ratty old Penn Station anymore. We'll demolish it and put up beautiful Madison Square Garden.

• 1:20:17Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you.

• 1:20:18Justin Roczniak?

  And, you know, that's, that was of course an architectural landmark everyone immediately loved. No, that didn't happen, right? You know, they tore the thing down. Everyone got really mad. That led to all this outcry. Eventually the, I'm simplifying this a lot, but led to a lot of outcry in the creation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. So that no one could do something like that again. Right?

• 1:20:44Liam McAnderson?

  And all we have to do is watch the rags play.

• 1:20:47Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:21:01Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:21:08Justin Roczniak?

  So the first plan they come up with is the, the, the big hyperbolide, uh, tower. This is an IMPI, IMP, is it IMP or IMPI? I forget.

• 1:21:18Speaker 04

  Pay.

• 1:21:19Justin Roczniak?

  I am pay. I am pay. Why, my brain's not working. I should have had that immediately. Anyway, um, this was going to be 2,000 feet tall. It was going to be, you know, the tallest building in the world, so on and so forth. Of course, you completely leveled the head house, right?

• 1:21:35Justin Roczniak?

  This was actually proposed in, I think, 54. So that's prior to the landmark commission. It just never got off the ground.

• 1:21:43Speaker 04

  It's a real shame, you know, you had a real chance to install, you know, Sauron on top of there and then, you know,

• 1:21:50Speaker 04

  Mamdani would never have been mayor in that circumstance is all I'm saying.

• 1:21:54Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:22:00Justin Roczniak?

  But, uh, so this didn't happen. Grand Central Terminal was still around. So the railroad has to, you know, they're like, we're still going to try and figure out how we maximize the value of this downtown real estate, which is currently a useless train station. Right?

• 1:22:19Justin Roczniak?

  The second proposal was 175 Park Avenue here, which is just, okay, we're going to jam a big boxy office tower on top of Grand Central Terminal, right? And we're gonna, you know, we're gonna have like the foundations go straight through like the front of it. So I think this mostly preserved the main hall. A lot of the other space is gone, right? And the Landmarks Preservation Commission took one look at this plan and said, fuck you. And the railroad said, well, fuck you too. And they sued the city, right?

• 1:22:56Justin Roczniak?

  This case was Penn Central Transportation Company versus New York City. It goes right up the Supreme Court. It centers around this basic issue, right? Is the designation of a building as historic, thereby preventing modifications by private owners, considered a taking under the Fifth Amendment, right?

• 1:23:20Justin Roczniak?

  Or what that means is, okay, should, should the railroad be financially compensated for the loss of the use of their air rights?

• 1:23:31Speaker 04

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

• 1:23:41Justin Roczniak?

  So this was back when the Supreme Court was more liberal and they come through and they say, nah, nah, you don't have to do shit. You know, so historic preservation was saved. But this idea of transferable air rights sort of sticks around. People look at it and say, that's not such a bad idea. You know, so eventually they throw the railroad a bone and say, yeah, yeah, you can sell those air rights to someone else because you can't use them. So they can then use them to build a bigger building somewhere else, right?

• 1:24:20November Kelly?

  Yeah, like so carbon credits, as Victoria says.

• 1:24:24Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  Car culture wins again.

• 1:24:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Suck shit, Penn Central. But outside of this particular spot,

• 1:24:51Justin Roczniak?

  this has been very useful for these pencil towers, right? I want to say there is a good graphic of this, I think, in New York Times a while back. I couldn't find it, but one of the big ones, I think 157, they strung together a chain of historic buildings, several dozen lots long, to allow them to build it to the final height of 1,004 feet.

• 1:25:19Justin Roczniak?

  They just did like weird swaps of properties. So the property lines changed around and they touched like a dozen historic buildings, just barely. It's like, yep, that's an adjacent parcel. We gerrymandered a skyscraper. Fuck you.

• 1:25:38Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, and it's interesting. This, this system doesn't really exist outside of New York City, to my knowledge. I do not believe we have it in Philadelphia. I can't speak for everywhere because these laws are all very local. There's no national historic preservation law that has teeth. I mean, we have a national register of historic places, but that doesn't mean anything. If you have a national register building, you can just tear that down. It's fine. It doesn't matter as long as you don't use government money.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  In Seattle, our, our tallest skyscraper, because Seattle is so hilly, they just built it wide enough that it's got three, three floors of ground level retail, which they then daisy chained the bonus for height for each floor of retail. So they got to add like 30 extra stories on it versus what like Seattle was actually allowing at the time as maximum. And they were like, oh, cool. We're just going to build this all the way up. Then the FAA was like, guys, what the fuck? We have planes right here. And that's, that's the functional limit because the landing path for C-10.

• 1:26:41Justin Roczniak?

  Fuck you. I will just make a big hole in the building. The planes can fly through.

• 1:26:47Speaker 04

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

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Personally, I think every airport should be like Kai-Tec, uh, pre the demolition of, um, the Kowloon walled city where you get to like, look at people's, if you like kitchens as you land, but you know, that's just because I'm progressive. I'm all about that abundance mindset. I digress.

• 1:27:12Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:27:18November Kelly?

  Makes you get inventive with it, you know?

• 1:27:20Justin Roczniak?

  I know, right? Make, make them work for it.

• 1:27:23November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Justin Roczniak?

  Do some weird.

• 1:27:28Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:27:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. So anyway, in short, like we have now this series of needle towers in New York City. They're all new build. They are a market of the worst people in the world. They ruin the skyline. They create shadows. They don't build affordable housing. Um, they're only possible through various.

• 1:27:45Liam McAnderson?

  Do you like that for some reason?

• 1:27:47Speaker 04

  Architectural and regulatory loopholes and you know, they do not in any way, shape or form house, you know, people in some of the most congested and densely populated cities in the world with sky high demand. And you know, as I say, again, 80,000 unhoused people. Um, and let's see how that goes.

• 1:28:04November Kelly?

  Yeah. So just, just say how you've got us like all sympathizing for us, uh, for them.

• 1:28:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. And I just like that painting. It's there for no good reason. Don't worry about it.

• 1:28:13November Kelly?

  Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

• 1:28:15Speaker 04

  Um, also we're like 90 minutes in and we're just going to start talking about the building. So this is going well.

• 1:28:21Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:28:32Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, it's Justin. Uh, so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes. So you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

• 1:29:15Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:29:38Justin Roczniak?

  You got, you got me thinking, you got me thinking about one thing. Are these actually all new build? Cause I think there might be an exception, but that's only if a certain building that I, um, whatchamacallit. Uh, where are we? It's in lower Manhattan. I found it. Uh, shit, I'm not sure if it's a residential conversion yet, though. Uh, 70 Pine in lower Manhattan, one of the older office towers, which yeah, has, is now a residential conversion. I bet that is now retroactively a pencil tower.

• 1:30:13Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, this thing does look like a fox, though.

• 1:30:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, it's a good building, but it is very narrow and very tall.

• 1:30:20Speaker 04

  That is, yeah, but that's quite cool. I like that. That's, that's pretty sick.

• 1:30:24Liam McAnderson?

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

• 1:30:29Justin Roczniak?

  Okay. So we got one retroactive pencil tower.

• 1:30:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, anyway, next slide, please.

• 1:30:38Speaker 04

  So we are finally on the object of today's podcast.

• 1:30:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:30:42Speaker 04

  This is 432 Park Avenue. Just some general statistics. So you get the gist of it. Um, it was built on the site of the old Drake Hotel. The site was sold to the developers for about 660 million dollars in current dollar value. It moves through this incredibly complicated financial history due to the, uh, you know, financial crash 2008. Um, I got very sidetracked and I had to delete all those slides because we would never not be here anymore. Otherwise. I will only mention in passing the financial interest of one Paul Manafort, who at one time owned part of the site. Because he got some funding from a Russian oligarch called Dimitro Firtash, who is an alleged Russian organized crime boss.

• 1:31:24Speaker 04

  And he got the money through embezzling more money through, from Ukrainian natural gas extraction. So, you know, that's New York real estate really is, is quite something when it comes to money. Um, when it opens in 2000.

• 1:31:37November Kelly?

  It's nice to know, as I'm sort of like imprisoned in my kind of sky hell, that it was sort of like funded. Maximally unethically.

• 1:31:47Justin Roczniak?

  We'll also say.

• 1:31:48Liam McAnderson?

  Selling towards these fucking animals.

• 1:31:50November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Justin Roczniak?

  Drake Hotel was a nice old fashioned hotel building. Now, I mean, those are sort of a dime a dozen in New York City, at least the buildings. But it was an issue in that, you know, they did demolish a hotel for this. Uh, which is a problem because hotels are illegal to build in New York City.

• 1:32:09Liam McAnderson?

  What? Can you elaborate on that?

• 1:32:11Justin Roczniak?

  Hotels are illegal to build in New York City.

• 1:32:15Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that's right.

• 1:32:15November Kelly?

  Okay, sure. I'll incorporate that into my belief.

• 1:32:17Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:32:32Liam McAnderson?

  I hate that fucking, I hate that fucking place, man.

• 1:32:34November Kelly?

  New challenge for the listener.

• 1:32:36Justin Roczniak?

  Build a hotel in New York City.

• 1:32:40Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah. So when, when 432 Park opens, it's, it was at the time, the third tallest building in the United States and the tallest residential building in the world. It's since been superseded by two of its neighbors, Central Park Tower and 111 West 37th Street, which are, as you have seen, or if you remember the skyline, they're basically neighbors. Um, of the 106 apartment apartments available, about 40 are known as accessory suites. Um, and they are meant to house your accessories, uh, your nannies, personal assistants, personal chefs, you know, people that you want to have around, but you don't want to like see, you know, these are the servants quarters.

• 1:33:22Speaker 04

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

• 1:33:28November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:30Speaker 04

  The median unit sells at somewhere between 11 to 90 million dollars. Um, it achieves a 90% sale rate, which is pretty impressive. Um, about, and about 900 million in profit for the developers when it went on sale. In 2021, the penthouse, um, went up for sale for almost 170 million dollars. Um, and, you know, was last sold in 2025 for just 61. So, you know, it does not, your, your, your real estate doesn't always go, go up in value. Uh, because people just simply don't want it.

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  Damn, that's like a Hyundai IONIQ 5 depreciation.

• 1:34:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:34:14Liam McAnderson?

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

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

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

• 1:34:28Speaker 04

  It has eighty-four numbered stories and is segmented into twelve-story blocks, followed by a double-story open space, which allows wind gusts to pass through the building, because otherwise you'd have big wind problems. We'll get into that in a moment. And it also has, as best you can manage, with concrete, a pure white lattice exterior of port-in-place concrete, where the exteriors are made of Portland cement. That will be quite important later for, you know, how it's going now. We have to briefly talk about the architect. Next slide, please.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  What the fuck are these things?

• 1:35:09Speaker 04

  This is this.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

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

• 1:35:16Liam McAnderson?

  Losing my Mazda 3.

• 1:35:18November Kelly?

  This is really gonna put my kind of southwestern, like, growing city on the map, I feel.

• 1:35:26Speaker 04

  So on the left, you see.

• 1:35:26November Kelly?

  And I know one of the, one of these is the walkie-talkie, the one that has the death ray, the melted cars.

• 1:35:30Justin Roczniak?

  The death ray, yeah.

• 1:35:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So on the left, you see the architect, Rafael Fignoli. He's one of those, he's one of the big-time architects, like Zaha Hadid. Like, if you want to make a big fuck-off statement building that shows how rich you are, how cool you are, you get him, or you got him. He's since died, but, you know, he's one of those guys.

• 1:35:49November Kelly?

  Well, so Zaha Hadid, but it hasn't stopped her working.

• 1:35:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. You know, she's come from beyond the grave to hire lots of slaves in Saudi Arabia and cut her.

• 1:36:01Speaker 04

  Well, his son, I think, took over his architectural bureau or practice, so, you know, the name certainly lives on. Weirdly enough, he's originally trained as a classical pianist, and later in life, when he had a lot of money, he built what he called a piano house on his own compound to house his nine classical pianos, you know.

• 1:36:20November Kelly?

  I don't want to hear a single person have a pocket watching podcasters ever again. I don't have a fucking piano house, right? You should be getting mad at, like, two dozen architects.

• 1:36:32Justin Roczniak?

  Why would you?

• 1:36:35Justin Roczniak?

  Who do you hire to build a piano house?

• 1:36:38November Kelly?

  The piano man.

• 1:36:39Speaker 04

  He hired himself.

• 1:36:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, Bill Adolph. No, you you get Renzo. You get Renzo Piano to do that. Come on, it's his name.

• 1:36:51Justin Roczniak?

  God, you know, sometimes, you know, it's it's it's it's like a lawyer representing himself, you know?

• 1:36:58November Kelly?

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

• 1:37:03Speaker 04

  So, so yeah, like like November was saying, he also did the walkie talkie in London.

• 1:37:07November Kelly?

  Who will I hire to store all of my mediocre Australian lagers?

• 1:37:15Speaker 04

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

• 1:37:24Speaker 04

  So, yeah, like like November was saying, he also did the walkie talkie in London and the Vidara Resort in Las Vegas, both of which have one thing in common is they both love to focus sunlight on very small batches. The walkie talkie be quite famous for it. The Las Vegas one, apparently, for a while was hot enough to singe hair and melt plastic cups in the hotel pool, which is.

• 1:37:46Justin Roczniak?

  That may have just been normal Las Vegas heat.

• 1:37:50November Kelly?

  Yeah, how could they tell? The London one I remember because it melted cars. It like, not into like a puddle, right? But it would like burn off the paint on the bonnet or whatever. And because if you're parking a car in central London, you are also a rich psycho who you should be getting mad at for making too much money instead of me. And so like you would be able to go to the papers and get mad at the architect.

• 1:38:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:13Speaker 04

  I was reading an article about this on NBC. I'll just read you one quote from it. I said to the staff, I don't know if you know what's going on out there, but I was being burnt. And they're like, yeah, we know. We call it the death ray.

• 1:38:27November Kelly?

  That's beautiful customer service.

• 1:38:31November Kelly?

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

• 1:38:36Speaker 04

  I see you pretended, well, there's your problem live show.

• 1:38:41November Kelly?

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

• 1:38:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe we should make some, uh, make some alterations to the, uh, global headquarters. So we will have a focusable death ray.

• 1:38:52November Kelly?

  Yeah, hell yeah. Big magnifying glass on an extending arm.

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  One Archimedes place.

• 1:39:00Speaker 04

  So let's talk a little bit about the, uh, initial design because that is quite important. So this, the developer, a guy called Harry Maclow, wanted what he called a statement building. So he wanted a big.

• 1:39:12November Kelly?

  I hope that guy's nice.

• 1:39:13Speaker 04

  Show, uh, building and he commissioned Vignoli to make it work. So the demand was for a perfectly rectilinear building that was both super tall and super skinny. It has a, uh, ratio of 15 to one. So it's 15 high for everyone across, basically. The Empire State Building, just by comparison, only has a three to one ratio. And that's because it has, it's, it's an older building. So it has a flared base and it steps up rather than, you know, going straight.

• 1:39:44November Kelly?

  This, this thing not safely insertable. I was gonna say, yeah, we did it.

• 1:39:50Speaker 04

  So this, all this results in a building that is 93.5, uh, feet wide and long and 1,300.

• 1:39:56November Kelly?

  It's a fine building, but like, why did you put the tuned mass damper in such a way? That there's a sort of noticeable bulge about like a third of the way from up from the base? Don't worry. If you don't get that one, don't worry about it.

• 1:40:11Speaker 04

  Uh, it is almost, but not quite 1,400, uh, feet high. It tops out at 1,396 and it's a perfectly square design that is mirrored in the square windows and the cast concrete white exterior. It's all supposed to be straight, clean lines, white, you know? This is also why it has a, has a completely flat roof, which will also, uh, become important later.

• 1:40:35November Kelly?

  He, Vignoli said that this was inspired by a trash can, which if I was paying a hundred million dollars for an apartment, I would not want to say that, uh, I lived in the apartment building inspired by a trash can. But go off, I guess.

• 1:40:50Justin Roczniak?

  Well, the, the. It's confusing what rich people like.

• 1:40:53November Kelly?

  Sure.

• 1:40:55Justin Roczniak?

  Having worked on rich people's buildings before, I don't, I don't understand it.

• 1:41:02Speaker 04

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

• 1:41:07November Kelly?

  Oh, the trash is my favorite problem. Me, me forgetting the names of my podcasts. No, I genuinely.

• 1:41:16November Kelly?

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

• 1:41:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Speaker 04

  This is, uh, next slide, please.

• 1:41:28November Kelly?

  Join me, Mr. Chapo in the retail cube.

• 1:41:31Speaker 04

  It's it's it's mostly your sort of standard-ish skyscraper build. It's got a 30-foot reinforced concrete core with 30-inch walls that house the elevator shafts, mechanical services, etc., which is surrounded by open-floor apartments and an exoskeleton, which is connected to the inner tube by so by five outriggers that you can see on the right. Those are like open floors and they connect the skeleton firmly to the inner core, which houses the elevators, etc. This is what the exoskeleton, sorry, so the skeleton looks like. Next slide, please.

• 1:42:11Speaker 04

  So this is the exterior, um, uh, the facade of of Park 432, which unlike like a normal skyscraper, where like you sort of, for the bit that you see, the bit that's like, you know, the the decorative part that that people gaze upon, that's sort of like bolted to the outside and it's not really structural. It's just put on the outside of the of the metal frame. With this one, the frame, like the the facade is the is the part of the the the structure. It the building cannot stand without the exterior. It is it is an integral part. The facade is structure and the and the structure is the facade. So it's the same thing. So if.

• 1:42:55November Kelly?

  Sounds like Marshall McLuhan.

• 1:42:56Justin Roczniak?

  Presumably, presumably, they actually presented this drawing somewhere with all this fucking Z-fighting. Oh, my God.

• 1:43:02November Kelly?

  Yes, yes, since I signed off on this.

• 1:43:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you did.

• 1:43:07November Kelly?

  Where's the professional engineer, Stan?

• 1:43:09Justin Roczniak?

  Give me something I can look at.

• 1:43:13Speaker 04

  So like if if this like the outside bit, like I say, because the facade is structural, were to start, I don't know, developing cracks or something, that that that that might be bad. But, you know, this is simply a device known as foreshadowing. Um, the idea is that the exterior is but like it's not connected to your apartment directly. What you can see on the right hand side is because if if if the exterior were to be connected, like if your windows were to be like completely it set into and if the exterior walls were the facade, you would have like um too much wind movement. You would experience too much of the building swaying in the wind and moving about.

• 1:43:54Speaker 04

  So what they did is they essentially built like these steel cages um on every floor, on top of the concrete floor, but it is unconnected to the floor above. So like your apartment rests only on the concrete floor below. Then there's a gap and then the next floor happens. That's what you can see on the right hand side. The cage stops and that's like connecting tubes and whatnot. Um, but like your apartment rests only on the on the on the concrete floor below you. It doesn't, it's not physically connected to the one above you. That's also to help, you know, your apartment not sway around if all the floors were connected.

• 1:44:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this this gives you some advantages, like you got some space up here. You don't have to air condition as much, you know. That obviously you need the studs where you can mount the drywall and all that stuff. Um, you know, and it prevents like thermal bridging to the outside through these big, big concrete members, which otherwise, you know, they'd be bringing the hot and cold in as well as, you know, the uh the the movements from the wind and so on and so forth.

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  It'll also cost less to convert it to building air prison because the cages are already like pre-installed.

• 1:45:04Justin Roczniak?

  Good point.

• 1:45:08Speaker 04

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

• 1:45:15November Kelly?

  Is it good? Is it is it less than expected?

• 1:45:18Justin Roczniak?

  Is what I want.

• 1:45:19November Kelly?

  Is that why we're talking about it?

• 1:45:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:45:20November Kelly?

  We're talking about it because it's not an issue?

• 1:45:22Speaker 04

  Because it's not a problem. It's never been a problem. You know, Aeonus is our friend. It's it's fine.

• 1:45:28November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:30Speaker 04

  So what wind does to all very tall buildings, but specifically to these super tall needle towers, basically, the more tall, the more slender, the taller the building, the more likely it is to be lively. In severe storm weather with gusts of wind up to 100 miles an hour, a tower of 1,000 feet, so like a third lower than Park 432, might sway up to two feet in either direction. That, as you will imagine, will be noticeable if you live.

• 1:45:58November Kelly?

  Wiggly. Okay. Yes. No, that's that's the thing outside a car dealership.

• 1:46:03Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 1:46:05Justin Roczniak?

  It's not that bad, but it's not good. You would be unhappy.

• 1:46:09November Kelly?

  We made Bill Ackman live in the inflatable tube thing outside a car dealership.

• 1:46:14Justin Roczniak?

  Stuff won't fall over, but you will get seasick.

• 1:46:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Speaker 04

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

• 1:46:27Speaker 04

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

• 1:46:44November Kelly?

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

• 1:46:51Justin Roczniak?

  Very wet in terms of water.

• 1:46:56Speaker 04

  And so wind loading, so like these these deformations start to affect windows specifically, so like windows and window frames. If the width to height ratio is one in five and Park 432 is one, one in 15, so the effect is very, very strong. And if you don't control these impacts of wind. And your building is essentially going to do the deformation dance. Um, which isn't good for you or the building you live in. And even at a sub catastrophic levels can impact elevator movements because the shaft is no longer perfectly aligned and like wind tunnels shoot like wind forces shoot up through the elevator tunnel. That also stops elevators removing.

• 1:47:38November Kelly?

  Ooh, scary. Okay, sure. I, I live, I live in the Tacoma Narrows Bridge building.

• 1:47:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, it can warp the facade, it can deform or crack glazing.

• 1:47:49Liam McAnderson?

  Sliding around like you're on the deck of the Titanic, just like, oh no, my billion dollar couch. Somebody call my window slash shotgun guy.

• 1:47:59Speaker 04

  And also like even at like non catastrophic level of impact on winds. Like these dynamic motions can create like real discomfort if you live in these ultra high rise towers. Um, lateral acceleration, vibration, and even the perception of movement is enough to make people seasick or like.

• 1:48:16November Kelly?

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

• 1:48:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So like, and especially on the higher floors, even with all the insulation and everything they put in between you and the facade. You could still hear the building like creak and groan. And if you're on the eighty six floor of your needle tower and the wind is blowing outside, that may or may not be comforting to you. That, that's a.

• 1:48:44November Kelly?

  That's really gonna interfere with that puppy girl's league game.

• 1:48:50Justin Roczniak?

  What I'm seeing from this diagram though, right? Which is interesting. I mean, okay, you have actual deformed shape. I assume this is all exaggerated. Uh, from sheer and flexural, uh, deformation here. It does look a lot like when you add sheer and flexural.

• 1:49:09Justin Roczniak?

  You know, it's gonna move around a lot at the top. But it's basically in one piece, right? What's really gonna get you is somewhere like, I don't know. Ten or fifteen stories up where, you know, the whole building is just bending. You know, that's like, all of the forces are right concentrated there.

• 1:49:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, but don't worry, those are the, those, those are the floors where, where, you know, the service people live. So don't worry about that too much. They're, they're not really.

• 1:49:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it'll be fine.

• 1:49:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, like you can get another nanny. Our nanny's people.

• 1:49:42Justin Roczniak?

  Put some trash bags where the window was.

• 1:49:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:47Speaker 04

  Our Nannies people, longest threat in the history of forums. Next slide, please. So, so you get all of the deformation, you also get this, which is called vortex shedding, which is quite an awesome term, and it specifically affects these very tall buildings. Basically, the taller you build, the more wind impact you have, and the more vortex you

• 1:50:08November Kelly?

  Never want to get into what I think of as like helicopter aerodynamics, you know?

• 1:50:13Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:50:15Speaker 04

  I mean, I don't know what you're talking about, Nova, like helicopters are perfectly safe, never, never been any in accident with those, so like.

• 1:50:22November Kelly?

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

• 1:50:36Speaker 04

  So basically, when a vortex forms on the side of a building, it creates a suction force, the force then generated by this vortex is like, it's not so large enough itself that like, it can create like a catastrophic motion or anything like that, but the problem is, these vortexes form because of prevailing wind directions and, you know, your building not really going anywhere, they form in like well organized patterns and that rock the building as they move individually side to side, but they do that continuously quite a lot because winds do tend to come from one direction or the other, so like your, your building is constantly moving in the same directions and you need to account for that in your design properly and certainly, you know, if, if the facade is critical to the

• 1:51:20Speaker 04

  stability of the building, that's really quite important that you, you do that. And what makes it worse is if you were to say build a statement building with sharp 90 degree rectangular angles, because like.

• 1:51:35November Kelly?

  I was gonna say, you don't find a lot of like strictly rectangular forms in nature, do you?

• 1:51:41Speaker 04

  Not as many as you'd think, no, no.

• 1:51:43Justin Roczniak?

  Although box turtle is a thing.

• 1:51:45November Kelly?

  It's quite a sort of affrontive form.

• 1:51:48Justin Roczniak?

  Did you just say a box turtle is a thing? Yeah, I get it, because it's a box. Do you think a box turtle is in the shape of a box?

• 1:51:54November Kelly?

  Like in Minecraft?

• 1:51:55Justin Roczniak?

  Like in Minecraft? It's a box, it's in the name, dumbass.

• 1:52:01Speaker 04

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

• 1:52:08Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:52:13Liam McAnderson?

  Didn't one of those get Steve Owen? That's because we recalled this. Supernova?

• 1:52:18November Kelly?

  Yeah, Steve Owen was killed by a gamma ray blast, like a gamma ray burst that just perfectly micro-targeted his heart.

• 1:52:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:27November Kelly?

  The stingray, that was a cover up.

• 1:52:28Justin Roczniak?

  That was, that was, that was coincidental.

• 1:52:32Speaker 04

  So yeah, like a building with like these sharp 90 degree corners will create a greater vortex effect. That's like why a lot of, a lot of the really tall buildings are not that. They're either stepped or they're curved, which allows the wind to like more naturally flow past buildings. Not Park 432 though.

• 1:52:49Justin Roczniak?

  Or they're just thicker. You know, that, that's another option is just make the floor plate bigger, you know?

• 1:52:56Liam McAnderson?

  And possibly more rigid.

• 1:52:59Speaker 04

  The, the other thing you can do is um vary the height of the building. So like build steps in it. Um, or you can like have different uh shapes along different compass points. So that monstrosity tower that's now, I think the highest in the world, that thing in Dubai, with all the sort of drum towers that are like glued together. Part of the reason that's done that way is it's stepped and it's curved because if you bought like sort of non um sequential things together, the wind curves around it and sort of breaks apart because it can't create a vortex essentially. But again, Park 432 is designed specifically to be perfectly rectilinear, so it doesn't have any of these natural protections.

• 1:53:42Speaker 04

  What it does have is, uh, next slide, please.

• 1:53:46Justin Roczniak?

  Hold on.

• 1:53:47Speaker 04

  Is it has two main defenses, the first being um the open drums that you can see in red on the right hand side. Uh, these are literally uh two open floors. Um, where the wind passes through the building. So instead of just like slamming into it, they do break, they do break up this vortex effect and they allow the wind to pass through the building apart from the central drum. Um, and that allows, that stops the sway. It also stops these vortexes from becoming overly intense. The other thing that they have is um we already talked about it before, is these uh tuned mass dampeners.

• 1:54:27Justin Roczniak?

  Big block of concrete. Yeah. On hydraulics. Some springs. Yeah. On some spring. Yeah. Well, no, iron hydraulics. Springs aren't enough. You gotta move it actively.

• 1:54:36Speaker 04

  So these, these, these, um, Park 432 has two of these on opposite sides of the, of the central column, right on top of the building. You can see it on the right hand side on the top. It says tuned mast dampeners. They are on the tallest, like right beneath the penthouses. Essentially, um, as discussed, they are there to counter wind motion, um, and to sort of stop, like to counter, to prevent counterforce to the sway of the building. And it should be enough to stop the building from getting blown over in like a mega storm or something like that. So the two tuned mast dampeners in, uh, Park 432 are 600 tons each.

• 1:55:18Speaker 04

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

• 1:55:34Justin Roczniak?

  I wonder how they did that. If, if the tower crane was still operational or if they did something I like to call elevator abuse, um, which is actually fairly common in building renovations. One thing you can do, um, is you, you sort of, if, let's say I need to get a big steel member into an upper floor of a building. I don't have a crane. So what do I do? Well, there's a thing in the, in the building that already goes up and down, right? There's an elevator. So you cut out the weight sensors. You put the elevator on, you know, some kind of independent service and you sling the big

• 1:56:19Justin Roczniak?

  steel section underneath the elevator, drive it to the top of the building. And then you just have to open up the doors of the floor below the building and just sort of pull it out somehow.

• 1:56:33Speaker 04

  So like Guantanamo Bay, but for elevators.

• 1:56:37Justin Roczniak?

  Elevators. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You, you, you can torture an elevator to get heavy things to the top of a building. Um.

• 1:56:45Speaker 04

  Just blasting Metallica down the shaft to make it go.

• 1:56:49Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, exactly.

• 1:56:52Speaker 04

  I mean technically it's already in a stress position, so like you're halfway there.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  Are the open drums open to the public? Like if you're in the penthouse, you want to go out for a smoke and you just go down to like the closest one to your floor and just like...

• 1:57:03Speaker 04

  That'd be awesome. I'm not sure if you'd actually want to be there. I don't know what the wind speed is up there, but like, you know.

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I imagine it'd be pretty hard to get the lighter to work.

• 1:57:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I feel like there's gotta be a lot of wind.

• 1:57:13November Kelly?

  When it says windproof, it had best have mean.

• 1:57:16Liam McAnderson?

  We're gonna push windproof to the limit.

• 1:57:18Justin Roczniak?

  You're gonna lose your hat.

• 1:57:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, if I'm paying 170 million for the penthouse, I want at least like a complimentary Gore-Tex jacket so I don't freeze to death up there, you know, like that's, that's the minimum.

• 1:57:28November Kelly?

  Locking, locking my like carabiner or my climbing harness into like a hard point in this, on the sort of drum floor and just spooling out a length of, a length of cable like an astronaut doing an EVA.

• 1:57:45Speaker 04

  So yeah, like these, these open drum floors, like I say, the main function is for them to like, let the wind flow through. They're also, uh, at these five points there, like where the outriggers, um, like extra fix the facade exterior to the internal column. And that provides structural rigidity and sort of makes the, the, the whole thing thing go. Apparently though, like you don't, as regards the, the tuned mass dampeners, you don't strictly theoretically need them. The building, from the reading I've done, the building like shouldn't fall over if, if, if it, if it didn't have them, but they do provide a much more like comfortable way of living. Or any way of living maybe.

• 1:58:27Justin Roczniak?

  It's gotta be strictly, it's gotta be strictly for comfort because you want the building to stand up if there's a horrible windstorm, which then causes a power outage, which it might do. Um, so you can't like rely on the tuned mass damper to keep the building up. It has to be. Just, you know, it's there to provide comfort. It's not there to keep the building up.

• 1:58:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. But I mean, without it, it would be, I mean, and to be fair, there has been some proof because as far as I understood it correctly, there have been two or three occasions where they've had to repair these tuned mass dampeners and the building didn't fall over while they were doing that. So, you know, all as well, that ends well, I guess.

• 1:59:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:11Speaker 01

  I do like how rich people have invented an apartment building that if your power goes out, it gets significantly less comfortable to be in. Like even more so than the power went out.

• 1:59:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like, it's like a sort of more extravagant version of that.

• 1:59:23Speaker 01

  The ride in my condo has gone to shit.

• 1:59:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like a, it's like a more expensive version of that, um, that stupid app connected bed uh, from Amazon that all stopped working when there was a power outage when US East One went down from AWS and nobody's beds worked anymore, which was an incre- I can't remember the name of the company now, but was incredible. Um, anyway, next slide, please.

• 1:59:50Justin Roczniak?

  You could phone into the tuned mass damper and make it that make it actually exacerbate the sway because you want to be on a roller coaster.

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  Doing cool tricks with it like a low rider.

• 2:00:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:05Speaker 04

  So this is the exterior cladding or the facade or, you know, part of the structure of the building. Uh, this is poured in place because obviously like you can't prefab and then wind shit up, uh, eighty six floors. Um, and it's poured in place, concrete of this specific uniform shade of off white, almost white that gives the tower its specific, you know, landmark look. Uh, during construction, they poured more than seventy thousand cubic yards of concrete and twelve thousand five hundred tons of rebar were used for the superstructure to keep the whole thing going. Um, so like I say, it's cast in place and because you have to pump it up and it has to settle fast, this is a, um,

• 2:00:49Speaker 04

  pumpable, self consolidating mix with very little water in it. That will be relevant later. And according to Structure Magazine, the places you go for this podcast, the idea is you could have access to newly cast horizontal surfaces within five hours of placing. So it would dry super quick.

• 2:01:08November Kelly?

  I really hope that Structure Magazine has, uh, like a good review of building show.

• 2:01:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe right then, maybe they can write up, well, there's your problem that, you know.

• 2:01:19November Kelly?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:01:20Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 2:01:21November Kelly?

  I mean, I'm profiled in Structure Magazine.

• 2:01:24Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, you get a glossy, you know, feature in there. Yeah.

• 2:01:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:30Justin Roczniak?

  To my knowledge, I had to go, I am now like trying to think back to my materials class. I was never a concrete guy. I always knew the masonry a lot better. None of this is like wrong per se.

• 2:01:44Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 2:01:44Justin Roczniak?

  In terms of how you could put together a building, especially like when you're building a reinforced concrete high rise, a lot of the times, you know, because normally concrete doesn't reach its full strength until 28 days later as the, as the movie goes. Yeah. But in the interim, what you'll do in order to build the building higher while the concrete is still carrying is you put about one trillion shoring poles on each floor, right? As you build up and then again, 28 days later, when all the zombies are dead, you go in and remove them, right?

• 2:02:26Speaker 04

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

• 2:02:33Speaker 04

  they could like pour a whole floor and then three days later, put up the next one and three days later, put up the next one. So it was a really fast process because of the way this concrete, this concrete mix was specifically designed for Park 432.

• 2:02:49Justin Roczniak?

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

• 2:02:53Speaker 04

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

• 2:03:01Justin Roczniak?

  Cement ratio.

• 2:03:03Speaker 04

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

• 2:03:17November Kelly?

  They wanted, they wanted white concrete specifically. White, right? And not, not painted, no kind of like facade over it, just like the concrete itself has to be white, you know? I want the, I want the visual of my house being built on sand.

• 2:03:34Justin Roczniak?

  I am Ben Rusty on my material science, but fly ash here, fly ash is like, you know, coal ash from the power plant or something like that. It goes in, it, it performs much of the same function that like volcanic ash performed in Roman concrete, just to make it very, very durable for a very, very long time. Um, and, and mixing in fly ash in concrete is very common, like most concrete has it. That's why it's gray.

• 2:04:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, but if you have untimization.

• 2:04:07Speaker 01

  Is it like part of just the deal with getting concrete that it's gray?

• 2:04:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:04:13Speaker 04

  Or not. You know, like you could have this.

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  We're gonna build this building where this, it's got a concrete facade that's also happens to be structural and it's the tallest, thinnest building in the entire world. But also if the concrete's gray, I'll fucking kill you.

• 2:04:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:30November Kelly?

  I want my fucking Apple iPhone building.

• 2:04:33Justin Roczniak?

  You can also dye the concrete a different color if you want.

• 2:04:37November Kelly?

  That's cheating, but that's cheating.

• 2:04:39Justin Roczniak?

  You could do, you can do all kinds of shit with ad mixtures.

• 2:04:44Speaker 04

  Anyway, uh, building opens. Next slide, please.

• 2:04:49Justin Roczniak?

  What was the slump test on this thing? That's what I want to know.

• 2:04:54November Kelly?

  Well, so genuinely in the New York Times article, there's a lot of them going back and forth with their concrete people who presumably.

• 2:05:01Speaker 04

  Get into the concrete people and what they were.

• 2:05:05November Kelly?

  I've had a lot of headaches over this.

• 2:05:07Speaker 04

  Yes. Anyway, buildings open, the worst people in the world, uh, move in. Some critics love it, some hate it. Like I say, 90% of the apartments get sold. Jennifer Lopez and her boyfriend or husband, uh, A-Rob move in. Um, I found some apartments currently for sale in the block on Zillow of all places. Um, they go, they go from 10 million to 55 million. You can move in, maybe not tomorrow, but soon if you want. Um, the amenities that you get, but you do have to pay for.

• 2:05:39November Kelly?

  Subscribe to the Patreon.

• 2:05:42Justin Roczniak?

  We're already getting our own building.

• 2:05:44November Kelly?

  Yeah, but like I want a second home in New York City. Subscribe to the Patreon.

• 2:05:48Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Yeah. We gotta, we're not zoned for residential use, Roz.

• 2:05:54Justin Roczniak?

  No, Center City CMX5 residential use is fine.

• 2:05:57Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, you're right.

• 2:05:58Speaker 04

  But what if you called it a watch collection compound and technically it wasn't for permanent habitation?

• 2:06:03November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:04Justin Roczniak?

  No, it can just be for permanent habitation because it's legal.

• 2:06:09Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, but that's less fun.

• 2:06:10November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:11Justin Roczniak?

  We don't have to do illegal things sometimes.

• 2:06:13November Kelly?

  Piratical about it, but fine.

• 2:06:15Justin Roczniak?

  You're only doing illegal things because you want to at this point, not because you have to.

• 2:06:18Liam McAnderson?

  So what? What do you care?

• 2:06:19November Kelly?

  It's called illegalism, you know?

• 2:06:21Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, also pay my bail, Roz.

• 2:06:26Speaker 04

  So the amenities take up about three full floors. They include a private restaurant. That's what you see on the slide, uh, which is run by a Michelin star chef. There's a fitness center.

• 2:06:35November Kelly?

  Why does it look like, why, why, why does it look like a Four Seasons at the Führer bunker?

• 2:06:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:42Justin Roczniak?

  This is like a nice Marriott, um, you know.

• 2:06:46Speaker 04

  It looks just horrible and depressing. Like, I think I've had my grandmother's wake in there. I think that's very possible.

• 2:06:54Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, there's a, there's a billiard room you can into, an 80-seat movie, uh, room, a boardroom you can rent. There's a 75-foot indoor swimming pool.

• 2:07:02November Kelly?

  What are the, what are the house rules about if the sort of grotesque movement of the building fucks up your billiards game?

• 2:07:10Speaker 04

  I think you just get like a free do-over or something.

• 2:07:13Justin Roczniak?

  I think, I think the, the, the billiards are on the amenity floors, which are at the bottom of the building. So you don't.

• 2:07:20Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:21Justin Roczniak?

  The moment is mostly being applied to the floors where the staff live.

• 2:07:26November Kelly?

  Uh, okay. I, I was hoping when you were saying that it, that it was going to be applied like almost exclusively to Jennifer Lopez and Arold's apartment.

• 2:07:34Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, they're way up top. They're, they're experiencing a different deformation scheme.

• 2:07:40Speaker 04

  Uh, actually they're not anymore. They sold up, uh, sold up and took like a one or four million dollar loss on the apartment because they didn't want to be there anymore.

• 2:07:48Justin Roczniak?

  Ooh.

• 2:07:52Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:07:52November Kelly?

  I mean, listen, I, I think I have complaints about my apartment.

• 2:07:55Speaker 04

  There's, there's, uh, you know, the usual amenities. These do all come with like a, a monthly or a yearly cost, uh, including for, like if you want to have dinner in this horrible restaurant, you do have to like pay for your meal. Um, but at least at the beginning, uh, breakfast was included. So you could go and, you know, have. You know, go down in your slippers and you're on board.

• 2:08:15Speaker 01

  First appealing thing you've told me about this building.

• 2:08:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  If I could move in somewhere and they gave me free breakfast, I'd be like, well, you know, for 15 million, that's not bad, actually.

• 2:08:24November Kelly?

  They give you free breakfast in a travel lodge.

• 2:08:28Justin Roczniak?

  Some of the amenities of

• 2:08:30November Kelly?

  They don't give you free breakfast.

• 2:08:31Justin Roczniak?

  A higher tier Marriott hotel.

• 2:08:34November Kelly?

  Right.

• 2:08:37Speaker 04

  Um, anyway, so like this is part of the third to the next slide, please. This is, it's all going just fantastic. That's just a nice picture I found. Don't worry about it. Um, next slide, please. Uh, this is where we ask the question. Oh, it's, it's black. So.

• 2:08:53November Kelly?

  No, you've, you've, you've, you've made a mistake here. What you've done is you've applied some photos of like, uh, like small arms fire damage on buildings and like.

• 2:09:02Speaker 04

  But I mean, this is.

• 2:09:03Justin Roczniak?

  It's been standing for what 80, 90 years, right?

• 2:09:06November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's part of the history. You don't want to just sort of like patch that over. It's from, you know, that's actually anti aircraft fire on one of those.

• 2:09:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's like that bridge. Uh, is it of, uh, in Mostar in, um, Serbia?

• 2:09:20November Kelly?

  In Croatia. Yeah.

• 2:09:22Justin Roczniak?

  It's over the river. No, um, no.

• 2:09:26November Kelly?

  Mostar, Mostar Bridge is Croatia and I think Bosnia, because I know the Croatians did a bunch of war crimes on it. Um, and then that's, that's what the like poison drinking guy was doing. Uh, that's why he was in court in the first place. Uh.

• 2:09:41Speaker 04

  Oh shit. Yeah. Um.

• 2:09:43November Kelly?

  Mostar, Mostar, Mostar. Uh, yeah, it, it.

• 2:09:46Speaker 04

  Karadzic?

• 2:09:48November Kelly?

  Yeah, Karadzic, I think. Um, yeah, but it's, it's in Bosnia.

• 2:09:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:09:55November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:56Speaker 04

  Anyway, these are all not.

• 2:09:57November Kelly?

  I could be completely wrong about all of this.

• 2:09:59Speaker 04

  These are.

• 2:09:59Justin Roczniak?

  We're not gonna check ourselves now.

• 2:10:02Speaker 04

  Uh, these are, uh, said pictures of the, uh, concrete about nine years, uh, after the building, uh, was finished. Sorry, just as a technical question, are the bars black like in the final presentation? Because there are some words that are in there that are, it doesn't matter if they are like I can just talk about it. But like just to.

• 2:10:21Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, I, I, I.

• 2:10:23Speaker 04

  Just so I don't say, as you can see in the picture, there's words written on it.

• 2:10:26Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, no, they're black.

• 2:10:28Speaker 04

  All right, that's fine.

• 2:10:29November Kelly?

  It's fine. I mean, it's, it's, it's just about visible, but it's gray on black. I do know that one of them is, um, so these two on the left describe themselves as spoiled. And I'm used to spalling in the context of, um, armored combat. I'm used to that being a thing that armor does when it's hit by something from the outside. Is it like spalls on the inside and you get a bunch of like sort of sharp fragments of armor?

• 2:10:56Speaker 04

  Chips. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, concrete can do that just sort of on its own over a long enough period of time, especially if it has reinforcing bar. Especially if that bar is corroding or something, um, you know, but.

• 2:11:11November Kelly?

  Do not build your main battle tank out of concrete.

• 2:11:15Speaker 04

  Well, not white concrete. If you build it out of, out of, out of concrete, just put in some fly ash. I know your tank will look ugly and gray, but it'll be a lot more functional in the meantime.

• 2:11:25Justin Roczniak?

  I wanted my pure white tank to blind the enemy.

• 2:11:32November Kelly?

  Layer one of the survivability onion be seen in such a way that people go, damn, he's got that shit on.

• 2:11:40Speaker 04

  The pure rectilinear tank is incredible.

• 2:11:42November Kelly?

  This is, this is, this is the cavalry part of the household cavalry.

• 2:11:48Justin Roczniak?

  This is the, this is part of the new Vatican City army. Pure white tank with a cross on it.

• 2:11:56November Kelly?

  It's a little bit fucked up that the Vatican don't have cavalry anymore. They should maybe bring that back.

• 2:12:00Justin Roczniak?

  They probably should have a few tanks. Yeah, just in case.

• 2:12:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so spalling, yeah, is like it's when flakes fall off of the larger body. It's, it's, it's chipping. Um, and yeah, as, as we were saying, the most common cause is corrosion of the reinforcing steel bars. When steel corrodes, it can expand up to 10 times its volume, which stresses the concrete, which basically sort of like pings chunks of the.

• 2:12:27Speaker 04

  Off the side and it's not uncommon for like high rise to lose some material and chips as the building settles like that's that's an accepted part of like these these buildings of settling in but maybe not to this scale and maybe not nine years in like that that that's bad in general.

• 2:12:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, rebar has all kinds of fun trade offs, right? I don't know the specific details of construction in here, but yeah, so you have a you have your concrete section here and then you have some kind of curved bar that goes around over like this that repeats. Then you have your your bars that go like this and that and there and this is a cross section, right? Right? It looks kind of like a frog. Anyway, so but yeah, each one of these bars, you know, it if it gets affected by water in any way, which it does, they tend to corrode as they corrode, they expand in this really ugly way. One of the ways you can avoid that,

• 2:13:26Justin Roczniak?

  hold on, I'm gonna switch the color of the pen here to green because that's the color the plastic usually is, is you can coat each bar in green plastic. I don't know why it's green, but it's always green. And the interesting thing about that is it will completely protect the rebar from corrosion unless there is like a very slight nick in the plastic, in which case it will immediately corrode at like 50 times the rate from that place onwards.

• 2:14:01Speaker 04

  Are the Achilles plastic?

• 2:14:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:14:07Speaker 04

  So the other thing.

• 2:14:08Justin Roczniak?

  Electrolyte, the electrolysis, you know, that that sort of stuff. I mean, the the corrosion reaction is funny. It does funny things.

• 2:14:19Speaker 04

  So the other thing you see, which is on the top right hand side is called honeycombing. This is basically like small gaps in air pockets. This happens when the pour hasn't been done exactly right. And the mix doesn't quite fill the space between the rebar and the formwork, like the cast that keeps it in place while it settles. So this is just like, this is, this is just like a cast that's gone slightly wrong. Again, that's not massively a problem on this scale. You're always going to have a few casts that don't go 100% right. But again, when the facade is structural and all that stuff, it might be a bit more of a problem. The last thing-

• 2:14:58Justin Roczniak?

  I'm gonna have, I'll be honest, you know, if you're being this psycho about the facade. I just put some super P in there, super plasticizer, excuse me. Which just makes the thing like settle out instantly and no air voids whatsoever. Self-levels, all that crap.

• 2:15:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, but then like it wouldn't be pure white anymore. And then we wouldn't have miscegenation towers anymore and that would just be bad.

• 2:15:21Justin Roczniak?

  Nah, this is like just a little bit of something you put in there and it affects the chemistry. It'd be fine, probably. I don't know. Again, it's been a long time since I took material science. Someone in the comments might go, no, if you put super P in there, it collapses instantly. I don't know. I haven't played, I haven't played slump test for the PS3.

• 2:15:41Speaker 04

  Anyway, the last thing, bottom right, you see these are called surface voids. They're again, they're pockmarking in the surface and they are caused by water. That's trapped between the surface of mold and the concrete pour. Or air bubbles that are trapped in the mix because there wasn't quite enough mortar to fill in the space between the aggregates. So like, these are just flaws in the pour. And that leads to-

• 2:16:04November Kelly?

  I'm noticing that these look very bad. These don't look good. If I was, if I was paying $1 billion for the sort of like very smooth, very perfect, very white sort of-

• 2:16:14Justin Roczniak?

  You know, you know, it kinda, it kinda looks like travertine. You know, if you were going for that look, it would look great.

• 2:16:22Justin Roczniak?

  But I guess they weren't going for that look because they have no taste.

• 2:16:26Speaker 04

  But sadly, because instead it looks like, next slide, please.

• 2:16:32Speaker 04

  These are facade cracks. These are all different, like, you know, spalling, pop marking, voids. All of this you can now see on the outside of the building. These are pictures from October 2025. So last month.

• 2:16:46November Kelly?

  Normally, normally I appreciate stretch marks. But in this case, I think it kind of detracts from the overall look it's going for.

• 2:16:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:16:57Justin Roczniak?

  No, I think it looks better with this. I'm going to be honest with you.

• 2:17:01November Kelly?

  It's got the kind of suburban tiger pelt.

• 2:17:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is a better look than a pure white building.

• 2:17:08Justin Roczniak?

  Now, the fact that these are all structural problems with the structural concrete is a different issue.

• 2:17:17Speaker 04

  So I'm just going to read you a little bit. This is from a PDF of the suppliers of the white concrete mix because they were very proud of their efforts, as you understand.

• 2:17:28Speaker 04

  I'm just going to read you a little bit from it. White cement reacts more quickly and is temperamental, which meant that the construction crews needed to pay careful attention to the quality control process. Travel in trucks, the raw materials, adjusting for the weather, et cetera, et cetera. In order to have a very good consistency among the different concrete batches every single time. The rapid construction schedule was an additional challenge with the goal of one floor per week for a total of 90 floors. Thus, the combination of white exterior, the aggressive timeline, and the general requirements of building a superstructure made this one of the most challenging concrete projects that has ever been executed.

• 2:18:06Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, he did a bang up job with it.

• 2:18:07Speaker 04

  This is the promo material, mind you, I should just, you know, add. It's not, it's not the foreshadowing material.

• 2:18:13November Kelly?

  Yeah, just kind of, I got my concrete guys in and after a lot of kind of like yelling at each other and then me, they put something in the brochure that just says greater even than the gods.

• 2:18:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Cubris at 432 Park. You know, you got to think about the logistics here. You have a concrete plant somewhere offsite, you know. They they mix the concrete there at the plant. They put it in the concrete truck. The concrete truck has a certain time window where they can get to the building. It then needs to be pumped all the way up to the top. Then you put the concrete in and you know, probably you're you're you're doing like, I don't know, a dozen trucks per floor or something. You know, so it's got to be consistent over every single truck, right? You're doing these batches constantly forever. You get probably more than a dozen.

• 2:19:00Speaker 04

  And like you can drive trucks into downtown Manhattan, no problem. Like there's never any traffic or anything that you could like get jammed in or anything. No, I won't worry about that.

• 2:19:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, no. I mean, there's again, there's a window where you you can deliver the concrete and then there's a window afterwards where that's when you have to phone up your buddy and say, hey, do you have a you got a foundation you need pouring somewhere else, like a crappy one? Right? And then after that, of course, you have to go to the designated dump site.

• 2:19:28Justin Roczniak?

  Concrete logistics is insane, everything about it.

• 2:19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then and it's made easier if you just have to like pump it up 90 floors that that makes makes everything and it has to be this weird shade of light. So if you're asking yourself.

• 2:19:40Justin Roczniak?

  Pumping it up at that point, or if they were, you know, bringing it up in a bucket with a tower crane. Because I think after a certain, after a certain amount of floors, bringing it up with a bucket makes more sense. I don't know. I haven't done. I I did maintenance, not construction.

• 2:19:55Speaker 04

  So if you're asking yourself at this point, well, why is any of this like a problem apart from for the, you know, pricks that live inside it? Uh, next slide, please. Obvious ones, sure.

• 2:20:09November Kelly?

  One of the most strategically valuable places on earth. You could drop rocks with the power of dozens of nuclear bombs. Yeah.

• 2:20:18Speaker 01

  Why do you make me think about her?

• 2:20:20November Kelly?

  Never ever change. I, yeah.

• 2:20:24Speaker 01

  God.

• 2:20:30November Kelly?

  She's so smart. That's my president.

• 2:20:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the reason why it's bad is because if you have a building that's like a couple of feet short of 1400 feet tall, that means that any concrete chips that like ping off the side of the building has a very long way to travel down before it hits the deck. And essentially, there's no-

• 2:20:55November Kelly?

  Yeah, I did some reading about this, right? The Department of Buildings in New York City, their, their power, their sort of legal power about this is they can require you to build like-

• 2:21:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, shed.

• 2:21:06November Kelly?

  Uh, like plywood sheds over the, uh, like sidewalks so that, you know, if, if somebody drops like a scaffolding pole or a bucket full of nails or whatever, um, you don't die. But if, if what the thing that falls off the building at like terminal velocity is, is a sort of like chunk of extremely white concrete, there's no shed you can build-

• 2:21:29Speaker 04

  No, you're fucked.

• 2:21:30November Kelly?

  That that's not penetrating through and killing you stone dead. Clean thrill.

• 2:21:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, you can get taken out by a brick from like four floors up. Uh, you know, this is, this is not a, not a situation that you're, I mean, if there, if the concrete is falling, it's probably falling off on like pebble sized chunks. You know, you're not necessarily going to get, you know, a big, big rock of concrete, for lack of a better word.

• 2:22:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, I could, I could tank-

• 2:22:02Justin Roczniak?

  You could get a big rock of concrete.

• 2:22:04November Kelly?

  I could tank a pebble sized piece of concrete traveling at like 45 miles an hour.

• 2:22:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:22:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but when it's a big rock of concrete, all of a sudden it's breaking the sound barrier by the time it gets to you.

• 2:22:16Speaker 04

  Me, me standing on the sidewalk outside Park 3432, looking up screaming, "Come at me, coward."

• 2:22:24November Kelly?

  Just looking up and being like, "Are those shock diamonds?"

• 2:22:29Speaker 04

  So this, I'll read you a little bit from the New York Times. Is this from a report that the 432 condo owners commissioned by like an engineering consultancy firm when the things started going to shit? The report, quote, "Details the presence of new cracks, failing patch jobs, and missing chunks of concrete on the exterior of the 6th, 49th, and 54th floors. Loose concrete had to be removed from several areas of the facade, including from very high floors."

• 2:23:00Speaker 04

  This is a bit more from the same article.

• 2:23:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, there was, they've done some, there are some photos in the New York Times article that have some of the patch jobs on there, which are, again, really ugly and really clash with the sort of like jerk-off-motion vision of the building. Because they, because they had to use real concrete.

• 2:23:18Justin Roczniak?

  Also, you know, this is a very expensive fix, just because you need, you need the guys trained to work on the outside of buildings like this. A lot of people don't want to do that. You know, I, I used to do it and I decided I didn't like it. Granted, much shorter buildings, but, and I was in a mask climber, not a swing stage. But, you know, swing stage is like the window washer, you know, platforms, you know, that are hung from cables as opposed to the mask climber, which has two masts attached to the side of the building, which is usually more for heavy renovation. Anyway, that was...

• 2:23:56November Kelly?

  Yeah, but you don't want to be in a fucking bosun's chair on the side of this dodging chunks of concrete falling down on you.

• 2:24:02Justin Roczniak?

  No, sometimes I was either the floor guy or the roof guy for the guy in the bosun's chair.

• 2:24:10Justin Roczniak?

  Preferred being on the ground to being on the roof. I was never in the bosun's chair, though.

• 2:24:16Speaker 04

  Just, just doing it with like rope work, just doing like, you know, fucking dangling off the side of the building while the vortex winds like...

• 2:24:24November Kelly?

  Yeah, fuck it. I don't, I don't need shit for this. I can self-belay. I, I just, give me like a long enough length of rope.

• 2:24:31Speaker 04

  I'm going to fart.

• 2:24:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so you would, you would go over the side in the bosun's chair with a plastic bucket and a chisel.

• 2:24:39Speaker 04

  And a trowel.

• 2:24:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And chip off any loose concrete you find.

• 2:24:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:24:46Justin Roczniak?

  And drop it in the bucket.

• 2:24:47Speaker 04

  But but try not to drop the bucket, all the things inside the bucket, all the way, you know, down to the deck.

• 2:24:52Justin Roczniak?

  The bucket is attached to the rope. You can't drop the buck.

• 2:24:55Speaker 04

  Okay, a few.

• 2:24:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:56Speaker 04

  Problem solved.

• 2:24:57Justin Roczniak?

  Although theoretically, you could accidentally tip it out. I don't know. That's why there's someone on the ground to say, don't walk in front of the rope.

• 2:25:05Speaker 04

  I'll read a little bit more from the New York Times. Anthony Ingraffia, Ingraffea, I don't know, I'm sorry, an expert in concrete fractures and a Cornell University engineering professor emeritus who reviewed photos from the inspections, described some of the defects as cosmetic for now, but said that others have the potential to peel off the building and become, quote, "concrete hand grenades."

• 2:25:27Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, no.

• 2:25:28Speaker 04

  Honestly, just like lowering the lighting in your office like cosmetic now.

• 2:25:33Justin Roczniak?

  For now.

• 2:25:35Speaker 04

  "I would not sign off as a licensed engineer in the state of New York that this building will last forever," he said. "I would sign a document that says the Empire State Building will last. This building, I doubt it," which is good news for, you know, the ants living below.

• 2:25:53Speaker 04

  So what happened here? Next slide, please.

• 2:25:58Speaker 04

  So to make sure that this white concrete, which is a genuine engineering problem, was done properly, they made, I've read various sources, various points about this, but they made like 12 20-foot test columns off-site a couple of years before the construction started. I think this is a picture of one of those test columns. I think I have it correct. But engineering news record has a paywall that I couldn't get around. So, you know, I'm a little limited in my resources at the moment. But normally, when you test architectural concrete, you just do it once. They made 12, just.

• 2:26:36Justin Roczniak?

  Usually you're not using a proprietary blend that hasn't been used before. Usually you're using something that, you know, is like relatively well established. You know, cause it's uh, either you're fine with gray concrete or it's not the facade material. Um, but you know, this building has to be special. So I guess we gotta, we gotta really make sure this thing works. Um, which.

• 2:27:03Speaker 04

  Which it, which it didn't really, because like according to emails obtained as part of several lawsuits that are currently ongoing between the owners and the developers. Uh, this, uh, which I read a bunch of, um, said one representative from the architectural firm, so from the firm, uh, Vinod's firm, Vinod's firm. Quote, "This is an embarrassment. It seems to me that the concrete mix has been diluted by the two entities." Sorry, let me try that again. "It seems to me that the concrete mix has been diluted by the two entities, i.e. the, the construction company and the developers, "who have never done architectural concrete facade before, Lantley's and Maclowe Properties. "I believe that one of the financier groups is following what their team is telling them.

• 2:27:47Speaker 04

  "They are gonna, going down a dangerous and slippery path that I believe will eventually lead to failure and lawsuits to come. "This process of ignoring consultants' recommendations." So apparently.

• 2:27:58November Kelly?

  So that must be so satisfying to get your, you're gonna get sued, email subpoenaed.

• 2:28:07Speaker 04

  I told you. Apparently the, these test columns already started showing surface voids more than an inch across and water infiltration in the columns. And all 12 test columns showed cracked, showed cracks after a 12 month period, as it turns out. So they did 12.

• 2:28:25Speaker 01

  They build the columns? If they were like, oh, this shit's awful. Like, go ahead.

• 2:28:31November Kelly?

  No, this is perfectly emblematic of the whole thing. You build the test to give you the right answer. So that you can build the actual thing you want to build. And if it doesn't give you the right answer, then it's failed its purpose as a test bed. But you still build the thing.

• 2:28:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, you know, I'll give you, I'll give you the answer, actually. This is a bit from the New York Times. One of the, one consulting engineer recommended specifically adding this fly ash to the mix to make the whole thing more durable. But this is from the New York Times. "They will not accept fly ash," parentheses, "color is too dark," replied Hesey Mina, an engineer who was then a senior associate at one of the builders in a December 2012 email. "There were two options," Sylvian Marcus, a structural engineer consulting on the building, replied, "you can have color or you can have cracks," and they chose wisely.

• 2:29:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:29:28Speaker 04

  So despite several emails from, from this guy warning about the instability of the mix, the developer decided to begin pouring two months later, anyway, you know, whatever, shut up. Quote again in the New York Times. "Cracks emerged even at the start of the pouring process," according to the lawsuit. It said that the concrete supplier was still experimenting with design mixes three months after the start of the facade construction and without understanding the cause of the cracks or how to prevent them. So what if we build a super tall needle tower and just kind of went YOLO with it?

• 2:30:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, if the test didn't work, obviously, there's something wrong with the mix, so you should start fucking around with it while you build the building, right? That makes a lot of sense to me. That is standard practice. If I had a stamp, I would absolutely sign, no, no, don't do that. That's fucking stupid.

• 2:30:21Speaker 01

  Nova has signed off on this.

• 2:30:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:25Justin Roczniak?

  No one stamped, no one, anyone who stamped these drawings should have gone to prison.

• 2:30:30November Kelly?

  Listen, I don't know why you would do that to me. Sorry, buddy.

• 2:30:35Speaker 04

  So like I said, like-

• 2:30:37Justin Roczniak?

  I have to use the restroom. I'll be right back.

• 2:30:41Speaker 04

  Alright.

• 2:30:42November Kelly?

  It's fine, keep going, keep going.

• 2:30:44Speaker 04

  No, I need the, the next slide button for...

• 2:30:46November Kelly?

  Oh god damn it, Justin.

• 2:30:47Speaker 04

  I don't know who has the master switch.

• 2:30:51November Kelly?

  It's fine.

• 2:30:52Speaker 01

  Imagine the next slide.

• 2:30:54November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:55Speaker 01

  There's an engineering disaster on it.

• 2:30:58Speaker 04

  We have like, five more slides of content and then we're, and then we're at shake hands with the angels, so... Oh, this is reaching Everest levels of episode.

• 2:31:07November Kelly?

  I'm so sorry.

• 2:31:08Speaker 04

  I thought, I'm not gonna be, I, this is my fault, they're like, mostly my slides.

• 2:31:13November Kelly?

  Ah, it's fine.

• 2:31:15Speaker 04

  Ah, man. My dog has given up, he's given me, he gave me like, and a half hours worth of dirty looks and then fucked off to bed.

• 2:31:25November Kelly?

  I'm, I, I'm looking at the cover of Wired magazine, uh, which has, uh, Tactical Girlfriend on it and The Hard Left Shooter's Leading A Gun Culture Revolution.

• 2:31:37Speaker 04

  Oh, fuck.

• 2:31:40November Kelly?

  These, these, these, these...

• 2:31:44Speaker 01

  I, I really...

• 2:31:48November Kelly?

  You, you...

• 2:31:50Speaker 01

  Every day is Friday.

• 2:31:52November Kelly?

  You, you, the, the, the, the has too much money transsexual, and I indict myself here, is a scourge on our community, but when you are the, "I can drop $2,000 on my special interest at the drop of a hat" kind of special interest transsexual, and your special interest is rifles, and then you allow yourself to be photographed with them, you're gonna get us all fucking killed.

• 2:32:17Speaker 01

  Hey, on the bright side, like, that one...

• 2:32:20Speaker 01

  will kill me first.

• 2:32:22November Kelly?

  Yeah?

• 2:32:22Speaker 01

  You're probably fine, because you don't have any guns there.

• 2:32:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, no, that's true, but, you know...

• 2:32:27Speaker 01

  They'll kill you for other separate, worse reasons.

• 2:32:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, I don't know. I just, I find it, I find it embarrassing and unreflective and like a lot of sort of left gun culture, you know?

• 2:32:43Justin Roczniak?

  Back.

• 2:32:44November Kelly?

  Hi, Roz. Hey, I was uncontroversial in your absence in this. I either can or can't stay in.

• 2:32:51Justin Roczniak?

  Damn.

• 2:32:53November Kelly?

  How do you feel about guns?

• 2:32:54Justin Roczniak?

  Guns? Oh, pretty cool.

• 2:32:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, they are, right? They are, they are. Yeah, you can shoot bottles and cans off a fence. I've been clear about the sort of bonuses, the benefits of that.

• 2:33:04Justin Roczniak?

  You can shoot deer with them.

• 2:33:05November Kelly?

  You can, yeah. You have to. I'm not getting pride disease. You're getting pride.

• 2:33:08November Kelly?

  And that's good eating, unless it's got CWD, in which case it's bad eating.

• 2:33:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's bad.

• 2:33:12November Kelly?

  It's scary.

• 2:33:13Justin Roczniak?

  Your brain implodes, yeah.

• 2:33:14November Kelly?

  Ah, hmm.

• 2:33:17Justin Roczniak?

  If you had a gun, you could stop them from pouring this bad concrete.

• 2:33:22November Kelly?

  That is true. Alright, so the conclusion we've come to is, I'm the New York City Department of Buildings. Yeah. Zoran, I am like three handshakes away from having your phone number. Like, we can make this happen together.

• 2:33:35Justin Roczniak?

  You need commissars in the Department of Buildings.

• 2:33:39November Kelly?

  Yes. Yeah, that's true, that is true.

• 2:33:42Speaker 04

  Either that, or, you know, the only thing that stops a bad developer with shit concrete is a good developer with shit concrete.

• 2:33:51November Kelly?

  They put it in a, they put it in a latex suit. They put it in a latex enclosure.

• 2:33:57Speaker 04

  So, while the building was going up, yeah, ah, let me try that again. So, while the building was going up, because everybody could see, and you know, the builders and developers were noticing all these cracks, they brought in like this series of consultants to fix the problem and help them out, because it was obviously not going quite according to plan. And most of them recommended this elastomeric coating, which is the stuff you see above.

• 2:34:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, consultants sort of like hurriedly kicking a bottle of Viva Shine out of shot of the webcam. What you need is to put this coating on it. Don't worry about it.

• 2:34:35Speaker 04

  I would just bring in a really big roll of duct tape.

• 2:34:40Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, this probably would have worked.

• 2:34:41Speaker 04

  Like, just be like, this is now the Cristo building.

• 2:34:45Justin Roczniak?

  If you used, if you used the normal concrete and put an elastomeric coating on it, that probably would have been fine.

• 2:34:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:34:53Justin Roczniak?

  It would have been white. Everyone would have been happy.

• 2:34:56Speaker 04

  Ha, well, you say this-

• 2:34:57November Kelly?

  Apart from all the people who had to look at the building, or, well.

• 2:35:00Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah.

• 2:35:01Speaker 04

  You, you say this because, quote again, the New York Times, "But the coating would give the building a glossy sheen that clashed with the developer's vision. As you can see in the slide, it does look quite glossy."

• 2:35:12Justin Roczniak?

  Oh my god. What you have to do, this is because it's fresh. It, don't worry, it looks mad and garbage. It looks mad and garbage in like, a few weeks. Um, no, there's a solution for that. Even if you somehow got the glossiest one, you go down to your local hobby shop, you buy up the entire stock of Tester's dull code and you spray it over the building. Done. Easy. I fixed it.

• 2:35:37November Kelly?

  Just a few, a few weeks exposed to like, New York City air, you know?

• 2:35:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. No, it's, that'll, that's not gonna stay glossy. Um.

• 2:35:47Speaker 04

  Instead, Mr. Maclow, again, the, the main developer, suggested that workers apply a clear coat finish, similar to the product he used to patch a yacht he raced in European regattas.

• 2:35:58November Kelly?

  Are you suggesting that a Manhattan property developer is some kind of idiot Philistine?

• 2:36:05Speaker 04

  I, I would never do such a thing, but that, you know.

• 2:36:10Speaker 04

  So they did eventually settle on like, sort of a clear sealant for the concrete, uh, but rejected the elastomeric stuff that would probably actually, uh, work. Uh, and then we turn to the pages of the New York Times. "The severity of the problems with the concrete was beyond concerning. It is deplorable and should be embarrassing to anyone associated with the project with even the slightest level of care for quality." David Dodds, then a top executive involved in the construction with Mr. Maclow's firm, wrote in the same email thread-

• 2:36:40November Kelly?

  Imagine working around this guy, being like, "Can you use the clear coat I use on my yachts?"

• 2:36:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:36:47Speaker 04

  I assume yacht racing and you know,

• 2:36:49November Kelly?

  Sure.

• 2:36:50Speaker 04

  Needle towers are, air and water are the same thing, right?

• 2:36:54November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:56Justin Roczniak?

  Someone, someone was definitely at the end of their rope when they signed off on that one. Like they quit the next day.

• 2:37:06Speaker 04

  So the other thing that, so that's the problem with, with like the concrete as the mix. The other thing that they may not have actually solved properly enough was wind. Next slide, please. So this is,

• 2:37:19Speaker 01

  This is the cow in the wind tunnel.

• 2:37:22November Kelly?

  I remember, I remember those early COVID graphics as well.

• 2:37:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:30Speaker 04

  So like the concrete mix is probably definitely part of why the facade is cracking. But the question is, did the open floors that they put in, you know, five times and these tuned mass dampeners on the upper floor, actually solve the wind sway and the twist issue on this perfectly rectilinear building with the flat roof, roof with no tapering or, you know, anything that would structurally work it. The answer is probably not. It's kind of hard to work it out as we, as it stands. Like I said before, it didn't really help that the tuned mass dampeners already needed several repairs in the last few years. So they're definitely, they are or weren't quite working as supposed to be. And, you know, like I was saying before, the perfect rectangle isn't, you know, known for its aerodynamic properties.

• 2:38:15November Kelly?

  Well, it's going to get more building still because bits of it fall off.

• 2:38:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:21Speaker 04

  And the building still sways and turns in the wind, but like within tolerances, that's kind of normal for a building like this. But once the concrete starts cracking as it twists and sways more, and as more concrete fails and chips, the more it sways and twists and that, so on and so forth. This is a vicious cycle that reinforces itself. Because like the more stressed the building gets, the more cracks it appears, the more stress it puts on the mechanical systems until one day.

• 2:38:50Speaker 04

  Probably, you know, will it fall down? Probably, building fall down? Probably not. But will you be able to take an elevator? Maybe, maybe not. And, you know, if you can't get to the 86th floor in, in comfort and style in your elevator, then, you know, what's the point of having this building in the first place? Because the first point of,

• 2:39:12Justin Roczniak?

  You come to the real fun question, how do you demolish a building like that?

• 2:39:16November Kelly?

  Oh, that's fine. Don't worry about it. Like, I genuinely, a bunch of, like, in this country, we don't require a demolition plan for a tall building. Like, you just don't need one. If the shard ever needs to come down, no, it doesn't.

• 2:39:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, buildings stay up. Shut up.

• 2:39:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, gotta hire some guys from the Middle East for this one.

• 2:39:39Speaker 01

  Honestly, though, I mean, I feel like this does, like, you could just convert it to, like, an 86th floor walk-up, and then it might actually be affordable.

• 2:39:49Speaker 04

  Think of your calf muscles, like, you would be so fucking ripped, like, after a year of living there. Like.

• 2:39:57Speaker 01

  Inviting your friends over and being like, now, I understand, like, if you come upstairs with me, you're really my best friend, I swear.

• 2:40:08Speaker 04

  That's gotta be, that's gotta be rough on, like, Tinder or something, though, like, you know, you're like, oh, buddy, come home with me, just like, here, put on this compliment to a pair of mountain boots.

• 2:40:20Justin Roczniak?

  Really, really finally get that splendid isolation experience like Warren Zevon sang about.

• 2:40:30Speaker 04

  So, like, I mean, what we were saying before, like, lift is problem, quote again, the New York Times, from 2021.

• 2:40:39November Kelly?

  One really long ladder.

• 2:40:43Speaker 04

  A management email explained that a high, that a high-wind condition stopped an elevator and caused a resident to be entrapped on the evening of Halloween 2019 for an hour and 25 minutes. Windsweag can cause-

• 2:40:58November Kelly?

  This is not what we should be doing to all billionaires, but this is a good start.

• 2:41:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:41:02November Kelly?

  Right? And it's embarrassing for any organized left movement that in terms of praxis, you are getting outdone by helicopters and wind. The left has to get more aerodynamic with it.

• 2:41:15Liam McAnderson?

  Well, we're gonna struggle here.

• 2:41:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, like a fish swimming-

• 2:41:23Speaker 04

  Wind sway can cause the cables in the elevator shaft to slap around and which is what you want when you know you're in it. And leads to slowdowns or shutdowns, according to an engineer who doesn't want to be named because the elevator shafts are so tall. If the wind gets in, it just like whips like a vortex.

• 2:41:42November Kelly?

  Oh, what if it was Bill Ackman from Bill Ackman until 0111?

• 2:41:53Speaker 04

  And according to one of the lawsuits filed by some of the owners, the wind doesn't like just gust up the elevator shaft. It also gusts up garbage chutes, doorways and hallways, making, quote, the New York Post, spooky noises.

• 2:42:09Speaker 04

  And apparently, the the garbage that people throw down the chute, because it falls so far, just sounds like a bomb goes off every time like a bin goes.

• 2:42:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's my favorite thing. Also, I don't believe Bill Ackman tweeted for a couple of days around Halloween 2019. So.

• 2:42:30November Kelly?

  New theory unlocked. But yeah, the the straight down garbage chute is easily my favorite thing about this building. Also, if I if I lived on the top floor, I would have the intrusive thought of hurling myself down the garbage chute to see what would happen.

• 2:42:48Justin Roczniak?

  All I can think is you could never have small children in this building. No, this is a death palace. Absolutely not.

• 2:42:54Speaker 04

  No, you just have like the same thing.

• 2:42:55November Kelly?

  Because they also have the intrusive thought of hurling themselves down the garbage chute to see what would happen.

• 2:42:59Justin Roczniak?

  No, they'd hurl their brother down the garbage chute.

• 2:43:04November Kelly?

  You have fewer brothers.

• 2:43:07Justin Roczniak?

  Toddlers are durable. They're not that durable.

• 2:43:14Speaker 04

  No, what would happen is what happens in every movie is if you drop down the elevator chute, there's just like a big, you know, linen basket. But because this is 86 floors, it's just a really big linen basket. You're fine. Don't worry about it.

• 2:43:26November Kelly?

  The laundry chute.

• 2:43:28Speaker 04

  My, my wife has just brought me some like hot spiced apple juice because I have been podcasting for a long time.

• 2:43:34Speaker 01

  I love you so much. This is a wife appreciation podcast.

• 2:43:38November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 2:43:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:41Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm, you've been wife mogged horribly here, I'm afraid. I, I just, I, I, I love my wife.

• 2:43:51Speaker 04

  Podcast, podcast, garbage chutes, other unpleasant.

• 2:43:54Speaker 01

  I also love your wife.

• 2:43:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, no, she knows.

• 2:43:59Speaker 04

  I've never met her, but you know, from what I've seen, she seems lovely.

• 2:44:02November Kelly?

  Sure she's lovely, right? Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:44:07Justin Roczniak?

  Wonderful camerewoman.

• 2:44:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh, anyway, there's one more thing we need to talk about a little bit shortly, uh, next slide, please. And that is water because water damage has been occurring inside, um, the tower as well. So because obviously like the problem with pumping water so high in the sky for people who take, you know, showers and do the dishes and whatnot, uh, is that you need like a shit ton of pressure in the system to get it all the way up.

• 2:44:32November Kelly?

  I fire up my, I fire up my sort of, uh, my power shower on the 89th floor and I'm killed instantly.

• 2:44:40November Kelly?

  They can't even get like a stretcher up to me. They throw them down the garbage chute, you know?

• 2:44:44Justin Roczniak?

  This would be worse for people on lower floors.

• 2:44:47November Kelly?

  Oh, you're right. Cause the pressure is still higher. Yeah.

• 2:44:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:53November Kelly?

  Yes. Oh, I, I, I fire up the shower and a massive water hammer explodes the pipe, killing me instantly.

• 2:45:02Speaker 04

  I mean, you say lower floors, but if you are above, you know, the fake mechanical, uh, void floors, then you know, what floor are we really talking about? So like you do huge.

• 2:45:12November Kelly?

  Maybe, maybe that's why it needs to be that high, the mechanical void.

• 2:45:17Speaker 04

  So like, what has happened already is a flange blew on the high pressure feed on the 60th floor.

• 2:45:26Speaker 04

  And a pipe burst on the 74th floor, the first of which caused such severe leaks that a $130,000 rug was damaged. Which, again, I remind you, don't feel bad about any of the fucking people who live in this thing, but yeah.

• 2:45:43November Kelly?

  A 100 for a 130, if a rug cost me $130,000, if I stand on it, I better die.

• 2:45:53Justin Roczniak?

  So I would assume, I would assume this is the supply pipe. Because that's going to be pressurized to something ridiculous.

• 2:46:01Speaker 04

  I mean, it's possible, yeah. I couldn't find the finer details of what burst, but.

• 2:46:05Justin Roczniak?

  As opposed to the return pipe or the pipe that goes down, you know, that's going to be. Well, I don't know how the water system works because I assume, like every New York City building, it has an old timey wooden water tower on top.

• 2:46:22Justin Roczniak?

  That's not even a joke. They still make them.

• 2:46:26Speaker 04

  But you can't do that because that would ruin the perfect, you know, square, rectilinear look of the building.

• 2:46:31Justin Roczniak?

  That's why you got really high parapet walls. I'm actually going to look at this on Google Maps right now.

• 2:46:39November Kelly?

  And the most, your most expensive rugs, because like, a rug that's like, a historical object, you know, example of the textile arts, whatever. Is either kind of like literally priceless, like no one, like irreplaceable. Or, you know, Sotheby's or whatever has auctioned it at like, you know, millions of dollars or whatever. Fine, sure, whatever. That's evil rich people shit, but I get that in the sense that it's a historical object, right? A $130,000 rug is like, that's just a normal style rug that you're paying too much for because you're rich.

• 2:47:14Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:47:15November Kelly?

  Surely.

• 2:47:16Speaker 04

  Probably, yeah.

• 2:47:17November Kelly?

  I'm gonna go insane.

• 2:47:20Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, there's no old timey wooden water tower on top. There's two chillers and sort of an unidentified mechanical space. Cowards. But it's a lot of these, a lot of new buildings in New York City still get built with old timey wooden water towers. Because you don't, you don't need a crane to put them together. You just, you just haul them up in the elevator or up the stairs or something. And they form like this protective layer of moss on the inside. That actually improves the quality of the water and they are all made in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Oh, yeah. Fun fact about old timey wooden water towers. They're not that old timey.

• 2:48:04Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway.

• 2:48:04November Kelly?

  Incredible.

• 2:48:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:05Speaker 04

  So the other thing that.

• 2:48:06Justin Roczniak?

  That's a tangent, but.

• 2:48:08Speaker 04

  The other thing that happened was the burst pipe on the 74th floor. And that caused water damage to the point that two of the four residential elevators had to be closed for several weeks. Does, you know, increasing commute times by several standard hours, one can assume at this point. Uh, there's one more thing.

• 2:48:28November Kelly?

  He says it caused $500,000 in total damage or three rugs.

• 2:48:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that, well, this is a part of the thing that like, I mean, we'll get into the lawsuit in a moment, but like. These absurdly rich people have absurdly wealthy everything. So if there's any water damage that comes through a wall that seeps through a thing. If there's any shearing, if something cracks, then like, it's not just like you have to go to Ikea and get like a new rug. It's, you know, these people have.

• 2:48:56November Kelly?

  Thinking about the like, I have to go to Ikea, by which I mean, I have to get one, the one non-broken lift down 80 floors. Drive to Ikea, get the like Malmu rug, load it into a car, drive the car back. Load the rug into the lift, get the lift 80 floors up, get stuck for an hour and a half on the way, then put it in the thing. That's, that's an honesty.

• 2:49:21Speaker 04

  Then, then unroll it. Remember that you've forgotten the Blahaj and then you have to go all the way back.

• 2:49:26Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, no. They're not shopping in Ikea.

• 2:49:27November Kelly?

  I like the Jungu scog better.

• 2:49:29Justin Roczniak?

  Right. They're going to like, you know, you know, design within reach and how everything is out of reach there.

• 2:49:36November Kelly?

  No, I don't know this, but this sounds apt.

• 2:49:39Justin Roczniak?

  No, yeah, designed within reach. Everything's really expensive there. You can't afford any of that shit. They have a special version of that, which is designed outside of reach. You know, which is where you go buy, you know, $800,000 worth of furniture.

• 2:49:56November Kelly?

  I'm developing a conspiracy theory here. What if there's a parallel rich people Ikea? Cause like Ingvar Kamprad, as the name suggests, Nazi, major Nazi, right? What if there's a kind of secret Ikea like bunker, right?

• 2:50:10Justin Roczniak?

  There's evil Ikea underneath every Ikea.

• 2:50:14November Kelly?

  You get like the, the kind of Ikea Christmas adventurers, you know, like, and you can, you can go in there and you can buy like the Billy bookcase that's actually good or whatever, but you can get the.

• 2:50:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But you got the, uh, you got the, uh, you go to the cafe and they serve you one extremely nicely plated meatball.

• 2:50:40Speaker 04

  Well, speaking of extremely well played, well plated meatballs, next slide, please.

• 2:50:45November Kelly?

  Getting the shirt that finally gets us sued.

• 2:50:51November Kelly?

  The shirt that finally gets us sued and it's me doing rich people Ikea and it's just that logo.

• 2:50:59Speaker 04

  It's run by blue, by the blue and yellow skull.

• 2:51:02Justin Roczniak?

  It's called Eki. It's called Eki, right? A E K I.

• 2:51:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fuck you. So because I can't not briefly talk about the private restaurant because it is also very funny. So, you know, as I said at the start, like you had to pay for dinner, but at least you got breakfast for free. And in order for, you know, the upkeep.

• 2:51:23Justin Roczniak?

  What a deal.

• 2:51:23Speaker 04

  You have to pay like yearly costs, like sort of maintenance costs, um, to whatever association runs that stuff.

• 2:51:31November Kelly?

  Uh, at first that was. It was a co-op, wasn't it?

• 2:51:34Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:51:34November Kelly?

  Or something like.

• 2:51:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have to pay 12, at the start, when it opened in 2015, you had to pay $1,200 a year in like sort of communal area charges, which included the restaurant. But since 2021, as part of a new requirement by the building management, which I think at that point was still the developers and not yet the people living there. Um, that residents are now mandated, this is not optional, to spend at least $15,000 in the restaurant.

• 2:52:05Speaker 04

  Or face penalty.

• 2:52:06November Kelly?

  We pick as I'm dragged in for my mandatory foie gras.

• 2:52:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, because otherwise you have to pay penalties and you know, worst of all worlds, the breakfast is no longer free.

• 2:52:17November Kelly?

  Okay, so genuinely, if you're rich enough, you can live the life that we all want to of torturing rich people in strange sort of squid game ways. Like you can make them spend $15,000 a year in one restaurant. You can make them live in the kind of wind cell. You can, like, all rich people have the ability to inflict suffering on other slightly less rich people. Like Elon Musk can make you be around Elon Musk. There's like all kinds of options, right?

• 2:52:50Justin Roczniak?

  Well, a lot of the buildings around Central Park, especially on Central Park West are co-ops. And that's where celebrities go to yell at other celebrities about, you know, um, why won't you let me install a fire pole in my apartment or something?

• 2:53:06Speaker 04

  It's my apartment, I paid for it.

• 2:53:07November Kelly?

  Do you think it's like genuinely legitimately sucks being in the like 0.1%? Because what that means is you have been enrolled as part of the like cast of like hostile torture porn for the 0.01%.

• 2:53:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's a good question. I could, I could imagine living in one of like the older co-op buildings on like Central Park West. Cause that would, I feel like it'd be a little bit more chill.

• 2:53:32Speaker 04

  Or all money chill is genuinely a different vibe.

• 2:53:35November Kelly?

  Oh, because these are all co-ops, as we say, right? I think the question is then what kind of debauched awful things do you have to do to get past the co-op board to be able to buy of an apartment there? Like, what do these old fuckers want from you? You are gonna have to be jerking off in a coffin or some like real like yawn secret society shit.

• 2:53:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, no, at least like a bare minimum, you're like worshiping the big owl. Like, there's no fucking way around that.

• 2:54:05November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, you gotta, you gotta like, you gotta be worshiping the owl.

• 2:54:12Speaker 04

  So yeah, like the fee rise in the in the in the first six years was more than 1,200%, which made everybody furious. And also specifically for the restaurant, all the chefs who work in these places, because like all of these towers have their own like private restaurant. They're all miserable because like everyone who comes there has impossible standards because they all eat in three Michelin star restaurants all the fucking time. These people don't know any better, but at the same time, they don't want to eat at home. Because if you have that much money, why would you eat at home when you can go to the three Michelin star restaurant around the corner every night? Because simply you can. So there's an art.

• 2:54:50November Kelly?

  Eating eating in this Michelin star restaurant and you're literally your attitude is I'm just here so I don't get fined.

• 2:54:56Speaker 04

  Hmm. Pretty much. Yeah. So there's an article in the in the New York Times about this as well, which talked about a restaurant, not in this one, but in a very similar needle tower, where there was only one couple, they finished their food at seven and then the place stayed entirely empty because the two other parties simply didn't show, which they can do because the in-house restaurant can't charge for no shows. Because obviously you live there, you own the place.

• 2:55:23Justin Roczniak?

  This would be, this feels, yeah, just like running like of any place like this. Because you know, there's stuff they probably had to prepare in advance or something.

• 2:55:33November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah. You're getting in early for this. Like, it's just rotting and it's going into a locked dumpster. I this is the most efficient system for allocating the resources of the planet possible. And I think this probably does great things to chefs as well, like mentally to be like, yeah, I'm getting paid a lot, I guess, but probably not as much as I should be to not cook. This is this is how you get a the menu situation.

• 2:55:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:56:01Speaker 04

  The article that I read had like, uh, it was, again, it was not in Park 432, it was a different one. But the guy there was clearly like, I mean, he was supremely well trained. He'd worked in Michelin star restaurants, like he was really, you know, he had a staff and he was, at first he was like, super keen to be there. And I think he just kind of, like, existed in limbo, basically, because he's well paid enough and like, he can close the restaurant down at, you know, 10pm every night and go home and see his kid, tuck his kids into bed, which like, as a Michelin star chef, you never get to fucking do that. So like, he was sort of like trapped in this hell of, you know, making these dishes that nobody ended up eating. Nobody wants.

• 2:56:42November Kelly?

  Yeah. This is, this is, this is Kafkaesque.

• 2:56:49Speaker 04

  Anyway, all of the, all of this has of course resulted in, next slide, please.

• 2:56:56Speaker 04

  A series of lawsuits.

• 2:56:58November Kelly?

  Okay, so if we're, here's the thing, right? If we're, if we're thinking about this as a kind of pyramid, right? 1% getting obscenely tortured in some way. 0.01% doing the torturing. If you're a service employee of the 1%, and I include lawyers in this, you can just, you can just carve the meat right off the bone, you know, like, I'm looking at this and I'm going, yeah, I'm representing the co-op board of like, the most expensive apartments in the world, against the developer and constructor of the most expensive apartments in the world. Um, I'm not too worried about my billing for this one, or really anything ever again, I think.

• 2:57:43Justin Roczniak?

  You got, construction law is very lucrative.

• 2:57:47November Kelly?

  Yes, yes it is.

• 2:57:49Justin Roczniak?

  One of the most lucrative cases in construction law.

• 2:57:54November Kelly?

  It's, it's really like, you know how Dickens was always sort of like skewering the British, sort of like, that like Chancery Court for like, you know, uh, like settling wills and stuff, because no one involved has any incentive for it to go on, anything less than a hundred years, like, until everyone involved is dead. Um, very similar mindset here, I think.

• 2:58:18Speaker 04

  So this lawsuit is, this is the first one. There's another one since. But according to a engineering consulting report filed on behalf of the condo board at least, there are at least 616 pending or future items to repair as part of what they say are original or construction defects and the estimated costs just for repair minus damages are just a hair over $239 million. So, you know, just like a fifth of the original construction cost essentially. So.

• 2:58:54November Kelly?

  And the funniest thing is to some of them, that's pocket change.

• 2:58:57Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:58:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. But of course, these people will never pay. They will like, you know, pay, you know, a fucking piranha show of lawyers into infinity rather, you know, and pay over the odds rather than actually like just spend the money fixing thing be done, you know, like.

• 2:59:17Justin Roczniak?

  This is a common problem in rich people's co-op buildings is they think if they hire enough lawyers, the building will get fixed on its own.

• 2:59:29Speaker 04

  And also fantastically, at least according to the New York Times, most times boards that run these condos are not able to get insurance to cover the cost of construction defect. So whoever's paying, it's not an insurance company. Somebody's like on the hook for, you know, fixing the rods from God facade essentially.

• 2:59:52Speaker 04

  The other thing that this lawsuit does, or these two lawsuits are doing of course, and because this is like, there's an insane amount of press about these lawsuits because obviously immediately the developers started leaking that the condo board was full of maniacs and couldn't be trusted, which is probably also true.

• 3:00:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 3:00:10Speaker 04

  You know, and also like, but all this has done is like smear into the papers and in everybody's brain that this is a horrible crack dying shit house of a place where everybody hates each other. So why would you possibly move in? Therefore, all this has done so far is massively depressed the price of the condos, hence the penthouse going from $169 million to $60 million because nobody wants to live there anymore.

• 3:00:39November Kelly?

  Incredible. It's incredible. I, I love the most expensive apartments in the world rapidly becoming not that because they built it bad.

• 3:00:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. Anyway, there is an upside to all of this. Next slide, please.

• 3:00:55Speaker 04

  You can all go to hell. I hate everyone involved.

• 3:01:01November Kelly?

  You can lose money on your investment.

• 3:01:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Elevators go up as well, as well, down as well as up.

• 3:01:11Speaker 04

  So the upside of this is like, the condos in this building are worth much less than first sales. I tried to work out how many of them were for sale. That's almost impossible, basically. Like, you can't, because so much is on secondary markets or private listing, you can't get an idea of how much of this tower is currently standing empty. But the good news is, they're not alone. New York Times, "Construction on one seaport in the South Street Seaport neighborhood of Manhattan has been stopped in the wake of lawsuits after the tower was found to be leaning. And in Brooklyn, only a handful of units have been sold in the Brooklyn Tower, the borough's first stupital, which has been plagued by financial drama and also the drama

• 3:01:53Speaker 04

  of, you know, ruining yet another neighborhood with more of these ghastly pieces of shit."

• 3:01:59Speaker 04

  So yeah, like, it turns out that the market for super expensive needle towers meant exclusively for the worst people in the world is bad. Your clients are supremely litigious and also just horrible, and your terrible design decisions make you liable for flaws and fuck-ups for years to come. But, you know, if you live in New York City, maybe, maybe not underneath Park 432, just like, until they build that-

• 3:02:25November Kelly?

  Just don't walk fast, walk fast.

• 3:02:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. Until they build that unobtanium shed, you're fine.

• 3:02:30Speaker 01

  It does make you think that, like, the worst punishment that you could possibly do to rich people, aside from all the stuff we're gonna do in the near future, is making them live with other rich people.

• 3:02:40November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:40Speaker 01

  That is pretty bad. The stuff that's gonna happen is so much worse.

• 3:02:44November Kelly?

  Motherfucker. I mean, this is the thing, right? Genuinely. If we, if we, like, do the cool zone, right? And we get to say, "Up against the wall," motherfucker, to every rich person. This can be the wall, the wall of 432 Park Avenue. And then that way you just-

• 3:02:59Speaker 01

  We're gonna cause more spalling.

• 3:03:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, you just wait.

• 3:03:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. And in the meantime, how was other Ackmans, you know, like, it's fine, it's.

• 3:03:10Speaker 04

  Anyway, uh, final slide from my side, please.

• 3:03:15Speaker 04

  Uh, anyway, that's, that's been the tale of Park 432. I genuinely and sincerely hope that everybody who lives there is involved in its construction. Apart from just like the normal construction workers and, you know, whoever's the fucking janitor around there. I hope you have like a, you know, I hope everybody's fucking miserable. I'll leave the last words to the same resident that we started with all the way at the start. Uh, quote, this is again from New York Times. "The tension in the building has been simmering for years," Mrs. Abramovich said. "Everybody hates each, that everybody hates each other here."

• 3:03:51Speaker 04

  Good.

• 3:03:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:53November Kelly?

  I really like Rust Energy, so like, honestly, if she wants to have a nice apartment, that's fine.

• 3:04:01Justin Roczniak?

  I, I gotta say, you know, another thing I don't think we mentioned, but I have this on good authority from someone who worked on the building. Apparently, the fit and finish on everything in there sucked on day one.

• 3:04:16November Kelly?

  Just snapping off a door handle, you know, as I move in, moving into my, my hundred and sixty million dollar penthouse apartment where nothing can possibly go wrong.

• 3:04:26Justin Roczniak?

  Electrical outlet is wobbly, you know.

• 3:04:28November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's just little stuff, you know.

• 3:04:33Speaker 04

  That is the fun thing, though. Like, I mean, because this shit, I mean, in a UK context at least, like shitty new builds were always like just kind of for normal people, you know. Barrett Homes would famously just like give you, you know, the paint socket and, you know, the, the fucking bricks that fell off. And the fun thing is now everybody gets that treatment.

• 3:04:53November Kelly?

  Yeah, I, I, I, I hear that too, is that like, the quality of housing in this country is always bad, it's just the expense that varies. Like, it gets really bad on the, you know, the lower you go, obviously, but like. Even at the top, apparently, still bad. So.

• 3:05:10Justin Roczniak?

  Anecdotally, you hear about projects that were designed as, you know, low income and somehow halfway through the financing stopped penciling out. So they were like, well, this is luxury now. So they swapped the materials on the countertops and call it a day.

• 3:05:26November Kelly?

  So much of what gets built in this country is luxury student housing. And I think so badly. I feel so badly.

• 3:05:32Justin Roczniak?

  That's an oxymoron.

• 3:05:34November Kelly?

  I know. But so imagine you were the sort of like child of like, I don't know, provincial Chinese official. And it's like, okay, cool. Go get an education in somewhere. We've been reliably informed that Leeds is a fantastic place to go to university, right? Whatever it is, you know, and you're going to get sort of like Western culture. Go to Leeds. You go to Leeds and they put you in a sort of like new build high rise that has had all of the building materials and a bunch of the builders stuff just kind of like left in the drywall. It's sort of like leaking through every surface and none of the electrical works at all. And you think

• 3:06:19November Kelly?

  the Chinese century can't come soon enough, quite frankly, and everything, every possible vengeance must be visited upon the United Kingdom. And to be honest, I agree. So.

• 3:06:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 3:06:31November Kelly?

  Britain, Britain too. But I mean, America too, probably.

• 3:06:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I mean, what, what, what do you learn from this ultimately?

• 3:06:39November Kelly?

  Build the building good? I don't know.

• 3:06:41Justin Roczniak?

  No one's built a good building since we invented air conditioning.

• 3:06:46Justin Roczniak?

  You know, that was, that was the start of everything going downhill. You know, I, I mean, so many like new construction buildings are exactly as bad at this. They aren't at the like top end of the luxury market. They're still pretty bad, but it goes to show that you can go to the top end of the luxury market and the building is still bad.

• 3:07:09November Kelly?

  I should have kept building them all out of brick, you know?

• 3:07:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we should have had, you know, apartments with cross ventilation. You should have, you know, big rooms, you should have, you should have all kinds of stuff. But no, that's lost technology. So I don't know. I guess the moral of the story is, are you a wealthy person who wants an apartment in New York City?

• 3:07:33Speaker 04

  Give it to us. Just give us your money.

• 3:07:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Number one, sign up for the Patreon. That's really at the Bloomberg tier.

• 3:07:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:07:40Justin Roczniak?

  Number two, number two, get apartment in a building that was built before like 1939.

• 3:07:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:07:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. What we've learned is that strong buildings create good times and good times create a weak man.

• 3:07:56November Kelly?

  What we've learned is put the, put the latex suit on your building.

• 3:07:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, apparently. I mean, that, that probably would have nipped a lot of these problems in the bud. But I don't know. You know, I, I guess it really does matter what material it is specifically. If you're looking at the building from the street and it's 1,400 feet high.

• 3:08:22November Kelly?

  You know, you know what else the lesson is? The lesson is unlimited war on celebrity architects.

• 3:08:28Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 3:08:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's not a lot of those guys who I think turned out very good.

• 3:08:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:08:37Speaker 04

  Celebrity Design Prison Camp is, is, I'm okay with that. Just, you know, just, just combine Vignoti and Zara Hadid Studios and say, make the world's most, you know, luxurious holiday camp. And then we just go from there.

• 3:08:55Justin Roczniak?

  I still got a soft spot for Rem Coolhouse because his name is Coolhouse.

• 3:09:00November Kelly?

  Yeah, he's the guy. Who do you think I had build my cool house?

• 3:09:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:09:09Justin Roczniak?

  So we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

• 3:09:16Justin Roczniak?

  Shake hands with danger.

• 3:09:19Justin Roczniak?

  Hello Devon, Justin, November, Liam, and all guests, past, present, and future.

• 3:09:24November Kelly?

  I forgot about Victoria, transphobic.

• 3:09:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true. Today I write in to share with you the story of how I by pure chance narrowly escaped gruesome injury while working on a roadway marking crew for my state's Department of Transportation 10 years ago.

• 3:09:42Justin Roczniak?

  I worked this job during the summer off of college, thinking that one day it would be valuable experience as a then aspiring traffic engineer.

• 3:09:50November Kelly?

  Oh, you moron.

• 3:09:53Justin Roczniak?

  No, I have since recovered from such delusions and now work in the concrete industry.

• 3:09:58November Kelly?

  Oh, I just finished this like super tall needles out. You wouldn't believe the things I've seen.

• 3:10:05Speaker 04

  I am not personally liable for what happened in the.

• 3:10:11Justin Roczniak?

  Interesting as and interesting and educational as some of the work was, it was also miserable. Hours in the hot sun, working in the middle of the road, painting stop bars and turn arrows at busy intersections. This work involves the use of a specialized piece of equipment we simply called and quote, semi-colon, the cart and quote, semi-colon.

• 3:10:38Speaker 04

  The letters delved.

• 3:10:40Justin Roczniak?

  That didn't, that didn't transfer right.

• 3:10:44Justin Roczniak?

  Imagine if you will, an awful ice cream cart that instead of tubs of frozen treats, featured a propane heated kettle of 400 degree Fahrenheit thermo, thermoplastic paint and a hopper of tiny glass beads instead of sprinkles.

• 3:10:59November Kelly?

  All right, I'm already hungry. You don't have to sell it to me.

• 3:11:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Hand operated cart extrudes this paint onto the road surface while simultaneously depositing glass beads onto the wet paint to make it retro reflective.

• 3:11:17Justin Roczniak?

  Amid our crew of four, I had the honorable task of blowing the paint dry with a leaf blower.

• 3:11:24November Kelly?

  I see leaf blower boy indicated on the slide there.

• 3:11:31Justin Roczniak?

  Leaf blower pictured here.

• 3:11:35Justin Roczniak?

  At the end of one day, we had just finished up at a busy T intersection, diagram attached.

• 3:11:43Justin Roczniak?

  And we were packing up the equipment in the back of our enclosed trailer. Picture it here. The truck and trailer were parked in a widened area of the shoulder just past the intersection with the rear ramp door open over here.

• 3:12:02Justin Roczniak?

  I had just stowed the leaf blower in its place in the trailer when the incident took place.

• 3:12:07November Kelly?

  Oh no.

• 3:12:08Justin Roczniak?

  I was stepping, I was stepping down the ramp door. Then several seconds passed where I must have blacked out. Because the next thing I remember was being knelt down screaming obscenities, gawking at the Mitsubishi Eclipse that had neatly parked itself into the back of the trailer at over forty miles an hour.

• 3:12:35November Kelly?

  Your Mitsubishi Eclipse is cold outside. Let it into the back of your trailer.

• 3:12:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, it simply wants to, you know, the thermonuclear ice cream, as do we all.

• 3:12:47Justin Roczniak?

  The first coworker to rush over after seeing that I was in one piece proceeded to try and help the occupants of the wrecked car. I watched in a daze as he helped a confused toddler from the backseat who was thankfully unscathed and then a very frightened, though also unscathed, cat.

• 3:13:07November Kelly?

  Oh. The, the, the illustration makes more sense now. I thought that was just a general expression of anxiety.

• 3:13:16Justin Roczniak?

  The driver looked to have suffered a broken nose and likely a concussion as well. Somehow, the only injuries I received was a painful strike to the elbow from the passenger side mirror and an abrasion on my neck from where the trailer door, ampersand, pound sign, thirty-nine, semicolon, S. Spring cable assist caught me as I reflexively threw myself to the ground.

• 3:13:42November Kelly?

  Car crash survivor, getting hit by a car survivor.

• 3:13:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I did, however, spend a good ten minutes after the accident, pale as a ghost, crying in the truck as I truly contemplated my own mortality for the first time.

• 3:13:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's not supposed to happen to the leaf blower boy. Yeah, you're a hero.

• 3:14:02Justin Roczniak?

  This is supposed to be a relatively safe job. Apparently, the driver had been bringing his cat to the vet, but he had it loose in the car.

• 3:14:12November Kelly?

  That's a wild way. Sure, why not? Go for it.

• 3:14:16Justin Roczniak?

  As he approached the intersection, the cat had crawled down by the pedals and the driver bent down to fish him out, causing him to veer off into the shoulder and into the back of our trailer, getting deep enough to give the paint cart a good bump. How lucky it is then that I was not still in the trailer, or else I may have been laid out on the hood of this guy, ampersand, pound sign, thirty-nine, semicolon, S, Eclipse, pinned against the still quite hot paint cart. I can say I learned at least two things from this experience. Number one, to always remember that safety cones and high vis gear are never a guarantee of safety when working near traffic.

• 3:14:59Justin Roczniak?

  And also, number two, to always ensure that any feline cargo is properly secured for transportation.

• 3:15:07November Kelly?

  Can confirm.

• 3:15:09Justin Roczniak?

  Despite the first

• 3:15:12Justin Roczniak?

  Despite the first lesson, I continued to work on the paint crew for the rest of the season because I needed the money.

• 3:15:20Justin Roczniak?

  Um, as I have been binging your podcast for the past few months, I become ever more grateful for leftist content as entertaining, as elucidating as yours and speaking as someone.

• 3:15:30November Kelly?

  I don't need to read Mitsubishi Eclipse because I have the marks of Mitsubishi Eclipse all over my body.

• 3:15:39Justin Roczniak?

  Speaking of someone who was largely ignorant of the gap in their civic and historical education for far too long, thank you for cursing me with the knowledge of just how fuck everything is.

• 3:15:49November Kelly?

  You were hit by a car. Talking to Americans will legitimately be like, well, I never, until I heard about this DSA thing, I never knew things could be bad in America. And you go, oh, what was your life like beforehand? And it's like, oh, they used to pay me to like scrape the nuclear waste out of reactors by hand. I didn't have healthcare.

• 3:16:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I had the worst summer job in recorded history and almost, you know, died in a flash of white paint. But sure, you know, your engineering podcast as well has opened my eyes.

• 3:16:23November Kelly?

  I really don't like attributing that level of importance to us. This leaves now. It's like decades of material conditions of the most abject nature. And then fucking idiot podcast is the thing that that like radicalizes you is is just that's really, really funny.

• 3:16:45Justin Roczniak?

  We're very good at propaganda here in America. So good that no one realizes that it exists. Um, yeah.

• 3:16:55November Kelly?

  Are you saying, Justin, that we serve a useful role and part of a leftist political project? Oh, God.

• 3:17:01Liam McAnderson?

  I didn't sign up for that.

• 3:17:03November Kelly?

  I'm out.

• 3:17:04Justin Roczniak?

  I, I, I, I don't, I don't, I don't like the, you know, think so highly of myself. But, you know.

• 3:17:12November Kelly?

  But if, if people are like, yeah, every morning I would clock into work and my boss would shoot me in both kneecaps with a gun. Listening to your podcast was the first time I ever thought that things might be unfair. I don't know what, what else to take from that.

• 3:17:34Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, we used to dream of being shot by a gun.

• 3:17:38November Kelly?

  Yeah, nice pick when I started.

• 3:17:40Justin Roczniak?

  My boss had a cannon.

• 3:17:45Speaker 01

  That used to be a Mitsubishi Outlander, but the concept is actually making more humane.

• 3:17:49November Kelly?

  That's incremental reform, you know?

• 3:17:54Justin Roczniak?

  For forming a union to get the boss to reduce the caliber of the gun.

• 3:18:01November Kelly?

  Long line, we're not saying stop doing it. We're willing to work with you on this one. It's a facilitative union.

• 3:18:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Could you drop it down to a 22?

• 3:18:11Speaker 04

  Wiggism is when you get hit by a cyber truck. Yeah.

• 3:18:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:17November Kelly?

  The arc of the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards you getting hit by a smaller Mitsubishi.

• 3:18:31Justin Roczniak?

  Thank you for cursing me with the knowledge of just how fucked everything is while getting me to laugh about it. The show is great. All of you are great. From Leaf Blower Boy.

• 3:18:40November Kelly?

  Thank you, Leaf Blower Boy.

• 3:18:42Justin Roczniak?

  Thank you, Leaf Blower Boy.

• 3:18:43Speaker 04

  We're sorry.

• 3:18:46Speaker 04

  Trying to explain class relations to an American that's like, well, imagine the Mitsubishi.

• 3:18:53November Kelly?

  Now, could this Mitsubishi be like a metaphor for anything else in our society?

• 3:19:03Justin Roczniak?

  See, the ruling class are like a guy with a cat under his gas pedal.

• 3:19:14Speaker 04

  Mark's talked about the cat in the grunt recently.

• 3:19:18Justin Roczniak?

  I thought, yeah, I thought he mentioned it in, you know, Capital Volume 3. That's where all the other stuff is that I don't pay attention to.

• 3:19:27Speaker 04

  It's a very famous, the fragment on the feline, I think, if I remember correctly.

• 3:19:36Justin Roczniak?

  That was.

• 3:19:37November Kelly?

  We just, there's, there's, there's a far side cartoon, right? Where there's a guy in hell, whistling and like moving the wheelbarrow amid still the flames. And one of the devils is talking to the other devil. And he's like, you know, we're just not reaching that guy. That's how I feel as a communist all the time.

• 3:20:01Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that was safety.

• 3:20:08Justin Roczniak?

  Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

• 3:20:13November Kelly?

  Praxis Cast.

• 3:20:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, listen, listen to, uh, listen to my podcast, listen to podcasting is Praxis or at Praxis Cast on Blue Sky mainly because we just are placeholders on Twitter now. Um, we do, you know, it's the usual stuff. It's more Britain focused if that's really your, you know, if you really want to get into the depths of that. Um, and it's also essentially whatever happens to come into my brain and what I feel like talking about.

• 3:20:40November Kelly?

  It's, it's great. I've been on, we've been on, it's, it's cool. We should have done this upfront instead of at the end of three hours, but we'll put a thing in the description.

• 3:20:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 3:20:49Speaker 04

  And on a more personal note, I have been applying for jobs for a while now and I can't compete with AI written garbage because everybody sends in 5,000 letters a day and it's depressing me. If you live in Switzerland and if you need a researcher or somebody to do shit in communications, my DMs are open. Please, I would like a job because the taxman would also like, you know, his cut. So, you know.

• 3:21:14Justin Roczniak?

  Higher up.

• 3:21:15Speaker 04

  Higher up.

• 3:21:17Justin Roczniak?

  Right now.

• 3:21:18Liam McAnderson?

  And also come to the live shows. We could kill two birds with one stone. That bird may be you.

• 3:21:24November Kelly?

  I'm driving my Mitsubishi into the live show.

• 3:21:30Speaker 04

  Get the celebrity architect you're beating. Don't get like any, you know, random.

• 3:21:36Justin Roczniak?

  We're going to wedge a cat firmly under the break.

• 3:21:40November Kelly?

  You know, you know, you know, the like awful nerd shit where the Proud Boys do where they do like it's kind of like mockery of getting jumped in, but it's like naming breakfast cereals. We're gonna make you name celebrity architect. You're gonna get the shit kicked out of you. You're gonna be like Santiago Calatrava. Mies van der Rohe.

• 3:21:58Justin Roczniak?

  Louis C.

• 3:22:01Justin Roczniak?

  All right, end us.

• 3:22:04Justin Roczniak?

  All right, that was a podcast. Bye, everyone.

• 3:22:06Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 3:22:06Justin Roczniak?

  Bye bye. Bye bye.