Episode 192: The Other Texas City Disaster

texas city 2: 2 texas 2 city support the RIT model railroad club: https://www.change.org/p/save-the-rit-model-railroad-club?recruiter=1392500672&recruited_by_id=1a9ac1c0-abb7-11f0-b291-5f916dd0aefeOur 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.

• 0:00November Kelly?

  Alright, so, uh, 23rd of December, we're recording this.

• 0:05Justin Roczniak?

  Christmas Eve.

• 0:07November Kelly?

  The, the season in which I get, um, adjective that gets the video sort of throttled by YouTube depressed, uh, for the whole season. So, uh, yeah, um, cool. Uh, looking forward to, to doing some jokes. It's great. I,

• 0:21Justin Roczniak?

  I, I, I don't know what it was, but you know, we got hit by that copyright strike today, but only in Russia for some reason.

• 0:29November Kelly?

  Well.

• 0:30Justin Roczniak?

  I just told, yeah. If you, if you are a listener from Russia, you, you probably know how to use a UPN.

• 0:38November Kelly?

  Yeah. Are we, are we sort of like allowed to have any left? Does, uh, does that constitute kind of like, uh, trading with a sanctioned entity?

• 0:45Justin Roczniak?

  I would assume we don't have any because they're all using VPNs.

• 0:51November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. They're on that, they're, they're on that US East Coast server. They're on, they're on the Albanian.

• 0:59November Kelly?

  They're on that US East Coast server, playing Counter-Strike GO and, uh, like calling you homophobic slurs.

• 1:05Justin Roczniak?

  Sukka blyat.

• 1:08November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's, that's one of them.

• 1:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. Wait, I don't actually know what that means.

• 1:13November Kelly?

  Uh, so a suka is, is like, it's a, it's a bitch, but like a prison bitch. Um.

• 1:18Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I see.

• 1:19November Kelly?

  What do you got, Roz?

• 1:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, like, like most notably in, uh, in, in, in the Gulag, they had, uh, in sort of late stages of the Gulag, they had something called, wait, no, not the late stages. Um, it was, when, when were the Sukka wars? But like, they, they had a kind of like civil war amidst like Gulag inmates. Uh, yeah, between 45 and 53. Um, because, because, you know, Sukki, like, uh, bitches collaborated during wartime, uh, whereas you're, you're sort of like, uh, your Vori, your thieves didn't, um, cooperate with the authorities, even under, under sort of war conditions. Um, and yeah, a lot of, lot of killings in prison. Uh, that's, that's just a little kind of like thing that I remember, so.

• 2:03Justin Roczniak?

  Damn, you know, that, that Gulag place doesn't sound very good.

• 2:07November Kelly?

  No, no, probably not.

• 2:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:10November Kelly?

  Blyat, by the way, is like a sex worker, right? Obviously not as sort of wokely framed as that, so.

• 2:18Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I see.

• 2:19November Kelly?

  A suka blyat is like a sort of, not just a prison bitch, but a prison bitch who is sort of like transactionally a prison bitch, right? Like, um, it's, yeah. My favorite, my favorite piece of Russian mat is a story that Milo tells. Um, I've seen a video of these, like a guy threatening the word that gets the video demonetized by the side of the road with a grenade, right? Like, he's just got a grenade and he's like, "I'm gonna do it." And there's two traffic cops, you know, like short sleeve shirts, big fucking patrol caps, watching him, and they're like, "No, he's not gonna do it." And then, of course, he does it and, you know, explodes. And the one cop looks to the other cop and just says, "Blyat, perfect, perfect."

• 3:03November Kelly?

  Actually, it might have been a pizdiets, but anyway. My, my, my point is Russian, one of the most advanced languages in the world for obscenity and profanity and, you know.

• 3:14Justin Roczniak?

  So if you wanna say that wokely, you gotta look up Russian for incarcerated sex worker.

• 3:22November Kelly?

  Doing, doing sort of like person-centered mat, yeah.

• 3:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 3:27November Kelly?

  Doing progressive stack, stacking the fucking prison colony.

• 3:35Justin Roczniak?

  So, and anyway, apologies to our, I don't know, three or four Russian listeners.

• 3:43November Kelly?

  I think, I think part of the promise of Russian liberalism when it was still a thing, you know, back before they, they killed Navalny was like, "We're gonna, we're gonna sort of like make our youth clean up their language in the CS:GO voice chat," you know? Like, "Eventually, you will be, you will be getting beasted on by a Russian teenager who will call you an incarcerated sex worker rather than, rather than a prison bitch."

• 4:06Justin Roczniak?

  Gotta do therapy, speak butt in Russian.

• 4:10November Kelly?

  That sounds impossible.

• 4:13November Kelly?

  Your, your lack of getting good causes me to feel negative emotions towards you.

• 4:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. All right. So, um, 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.

• 4:33November Kelly?

  I am just about still November Kelly. Uh, I'm the person who is speaking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam.

• 4:39Liam McAnderson?

  Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. I'm the person speaking right now. My pronouns are he, him, his. I've outwoken you again.

• 4:45November Kelly?

  Outwoking motherfucker.

• 4:47Justin Roczniak?

  Wow.

• 4:47November Kelly?

  God, just for that, she they.

• 4:50Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 4:51Liam McAnderson?

  Cowards they.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  I'm Victoria Scott. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her, and I have a better microphone this week, so I don't sound like shit.

• 5:01Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:02November Kelly?

  Yep.

• 5:02Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Those, those podcaster paychecks have rolled in.

• 5:07Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. Who takes the lead on this one?

• 5:09November Kelly?

  I was gonna say. It's another, it's another one of the, the things where it's sort of like the writing duties are split, isn't it?

• 5:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, I only did one slide. Victoria did all the other ones.

• 5:17November Kelly?

  In, in the same way as like together Albanians and Chinese comprise like half the world's population. Yeah, it's a split system of writing.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, today I was gonna talk about the Texas City disaster. Um, not that one, the one from 2005.

• 5:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Otherwise known as the BP refinery explosion.

• 5:35November Kelly?

  Multiple Texas City disasters. We're going back to our sequel.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Basically, if you like.

• 5:41Liam McAnderson?

  We've run out of ideas. We're actually just re, rehashing the first one.

• 5:44November Kelly?

  I knew we would run out of ideas eventually.

• 5:46Liam McAnderson?

  Silver Bitch 3.

• 5:48November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Now, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna mine the entire corporate history of BP for disasters for the next like three seasons of this show, I think.

• 5:57Liam McAnderson?

  There are no seasons. I love when podcasts have seasons. We fucking don't. We just take breaks without scheduling them.

• 6:02November Kelly?

  Blowback season trailer, but for like going back to Silverbridge again. Also, can I just say, I love this photo. It's got that beautiful kind of tilt shifted isometric thing going on. I love real time strategy games. Wish they'd make another one someday. Uh, this, this makes me feel like I'm playing the OSHA version of Command and Conquer Generals.

• 6:23Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. You, you just, uh, killed several dozen people with an isomerization unit.

• 6:30November Kelly?

  I'm I'm sort of like drag clicking and dragging with the left mouse button over the structure for any survivors and then I'm right clicking outside of them to move them outside of.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Now, this might be surprising, but it shouldn't look like that, by the way.

• 6:42Justin Roczniak?

  It should not look like that. Yeah. What you see on the screen here is a shed. It's been blown up. It's not supposed to have blown up.

• 6:50November Kelly?

  I have to say, the trucks look pretty cool in a kind of blown up vicinity. Like, I, I don't know, just as an object, they've yet to make a pickup truck that looks bad when it's been partially blown up, you know?

• 7:01Justin Roczniak?

  What about the Cybertruck?

• 7:02November Kelly?

  The Cybertruck already looks partially blown up. The Cybertruck's not a pickup truck. It's barely even a car. That shit's like a glorified word. I can't say without getting the thing demonetized machine for people with too much money.

• 7:13Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, the the people's demonetization word machine is the Dodge Viper, of course.

• 7:19November Kelly?

  Of course, but that's that's an honorable demonetization word, whereas like crashing your Cybertruck into a tree, the doors don't open, you burn to death. That's, I mean, that's disown.

• 7:31Liam McAnderson?

  Just kind of embarrassing.

• 7:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's embarrassing. It's shameful.

• 7:33Justin Roczniak?

  I'm I'm just here to point out the channel's not monetized. We get the money from Patreon.

• 7:38November Kelly?

  I don't mean monetization. I mean, whatever the thing that YouTube does where it makes you fucking show them your, like, passport.

• 7:46Justin Roczniak?

  The dealgorithmization.

• 7:47November Kelly?

  Yeah, the de algorithmization.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Age restricting.

• 7:51Liam McAnderson?

  Age restricted.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  And my goal was to get every video I'm on age restricted.

• 7:55Liam McAnderson?

  Don't do that.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  And I'm doing pretty well, I think.

• 7:57November Kelly?

  Age restricted, age restricted, banned in Russia, which that's not bad.

• 8:03Liam McAnderson?

  That's new.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  I am actually banned in Russia, but it's not as much fun that way. I wanted to go see cool stuff there.

• 8:09November Kelly?

  I know, I know. I would also like to go and see cool stuff in Russia. I went to Russia when I was a kid. I saw a bunch of cool stuff. Didn't have the brains to appreciate it then. Now I do. They should let me back in.

• 8:19Liam McAnderson?

  And that's how she died.

• 8:20November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  As she lived.

• 8:24Justin Roczniak?

  Instantly conscripted.

• 8:27November Kelly?

  Oh, this is embarrassing. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm on the fucking Donetsk. I'm on the Donbass front feverishly trying to make this a sort of like anti-imperialist squared circle. I'm like, I can do it. I can do it.

• 8:44Justin Roczniak?

  I'm I'm only gonna shoot the weirdest Nafo guys, I guess. I don't know.

• 8:52November Kelly?

  I mean, in fairness, I'm pretty sure the guys I just war crime'd were Nazis is like in a grand tradition of British warfighting. So.

• 9:01Justin Roczniak?

  This is true. Yes. But before we talk about why the shed has blown up, we have to do the goddamn news.

• 9:19Justin Roczniak?

  That was a flawless segue. I hope everyone was impressed by that.

• 9:22November Kelly?

  No, it was wonderful. It's good to have my my news button back at sort of like fully functioning capacity after the live shows where, as I understand it, I pressed the button and you received a kind of scream of internet noise.

• 9:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 9:36November Kelly?

  One of these days we'll play in a venue that has good wifi. One of these days we'll play in a venue where I can be physically on the stage is what we'll do.

• 9:44Justin Roczniak?

  That's right. It's our Novosibirsk show.

• 9:49November Kelly?

  We're doing the like Russian equivalent of a USO tour where it's just like us talking to a bunch of like doomed boyatians being like, okay, so here's a picture of the city of Bakhmut. It's not supposed to look like.

• 10:07November Kelly?

  We're gonna get yelled at so much. I'm the most normal and I'm the most like Ukraine supporting leftist who is still mentally normal and I still get yelled at by for not being pro Ukrainian enough. It's I don't know.

• 10:22Justin Roczniak?

  I did like trying to be really careful about the content in the Grozny show.

• 10:32November Kelly?

  God.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  Washington flooded.

• 10:36November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  That's the news. This is my hometown report. We got like over a foot of rain in the span of like 48 hours. Every river in the state overflowed. The Skaget River hit an all time record. Also, okay, just for the record, I know everybody already knows this, but I keep getting corrected of my pronunciation of. Washington place names. And I know, okay, I know I don't know how to pronounce anything here. I moved here. I'm a refugee from rural Idaho.

• 11:07November Kelly?

  You were a refugee from the Idahoans, the Idahoan century of humiliation.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  I am trying desperately to like, become cultured. All of my friends in Seattle are also trans women who are refugees from red states. So none of us know how to pronounce anything. I am, I am listening. I am learning. I am doing my best. I'm going to butcher.

• 11:29Liam McAnderson?

  Don't do that. Fuck them. Never change.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Well, I also, I mean, I, no, I mean, I gotta try, because I don't want to, if I, if they send me back to Idaho, I'm fucked. I cannot survive that place.

• 11:38November Kelly?

  That's the like shibboleth for like Cascadian, like Maoist citizenship in the Civil War universe is being given a list of place names to pronounce. And God help you if you don't get all of them.

• 11:49Liam McAnderson?

  That's what I wanted to do when Dr. Oz was running for senate.

• 11:52November Kelly?

  I, I hear the way I.

• 11:53Liam McAnderson?

  Make him pretend, like, can pronounce shit.

• 11:55Justin Roczniak?

  Make, make him say Shamoken.

• 11:59November Kelly?

  Shamoken handshake. I, uh, yeah, I, I was told, um, by someone in my, my Tumblr asks that, um, I, uh, received honorary Cascadian Maoist citizenship because of the Yakima Voice Labs joke I pulled off a few episodes ago. So, um, I'm, I'm sort of, I don't need to worry too much about how to pronounce the home, you know?

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, you also just pronounced it correctly. So fuck you.

• 12:23November Kelly?

  Oh, well, okay, cool. I mean.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  I'll move out. You can take my apartment, I guess. That's just how.

• 12:29November Kelly?

  It's fine. Here's the thing.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  I'll go back to the potato mines.

• 12:33November Kelly?

  If you, what we do is we switch and then you get stuck with all of the like, um, small town Scottish names, you know, like you have to, you have to pronounce like Kirkody and stuff.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like, as fucked as it is, I think right now, living in Washington is a safer bet than living in the UK.

• 12:50Justin Roczniak?

  God, that might be true. Oh, it's depressing. What is Boise but the Nova Sebresque of America?

• 12:58November Kelly?

  Please, are there, are there any, are there any American trans women who want to do, want to go in on a green card marriage with me? It will be, it doesn't even have to be a sham marriage. It's fine. I can fall in love with you. That's, that's on, that's in the wheelhouse, you know?

• 13:13Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, Eric. I already have a wife that I achieved, that I

• 13:16November Kelly?

  God damn it.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  through this podcast. She heard me guest here and that's why she slid into my DMs to ask if I needed a roommate.

• 13:25November Kelly?

  They're calling, well, there's your problem. The greatest dating app in history. We do.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  It's actually like, you're gonna start seeing those graphs of like, how did you first meet for couples? And like surpassing Twitter is like, well, there's your problem.

• 13:41November Kelly?

  Yeah, we're taking over the role that like, smoking outside clubs used to have. And yeah, it's just gonna be, it's gonna be us now.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So anyway, this, this Gaget River flooded. The Snohomish River is a foot over its all time record. Tens of thousands of people were under evacuation orders at peak. There's not really great numbers yet, but thousands seemingly of homes are destroyed. The Trans-Canada Highway washed out up in like, near Vancouver.

• 14:08November Kelly?

  This is, this is something I would experience as like a divine punishment against me specifically. Were we doing the Vancouver live show for instance?

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the, the Amtrak Cascades is out too. Like the link between Seattle and Vancouver is, is suspended for flooding damage. So it's just bad. Obviously like, it rains a lot up here, but it rains generally very lightly over a long period of time instead of dumping to, you know, a foot and a half of rain in the span of two days. And this is probably, I don't know. I'm sure that there's some way that this is climate change linked and that, you know, we haven't, we're, we're woefully unprepared, even though we've tried to, you know, be used to rain in a place where it's cloudy 300 days a year.

• 14:49November Kelly?

  It rains all the time. Yeah. All time. Yeah. It, it does seem, it's, it does seem likely that it's, uh, it's climate change on account of how fucking everything else is. Yeah.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think at the same time as this, they were getting like all time record lows in like Chicago. Um, and you know, feet of snow places. So the US is just kind of a mess. But again, I mean, I, Washington's pretty cool about letting me use the bathroom. So on the whole, I'd say, you know.

• 15:15November Kelly?

  The, the flooded bathroom. Yeah, as long as the river doesn't come out.

• 15:18November Kelly?

  You have to wade into it and wade out, but you know. Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  All gender.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Breached levy.

• 15:26November Kelly?

  Yeah, your reminder as a sort of public service that we like to do, don't get in the floodwater. Don't swim in the floodwater. Don't touch the floodwater because that's poop. That's mostly poop and you shouldn't, you shouldn't do it.

• 15:38Justin Roczniak?

  That does mean you can poop in it if you could figure out a way to do that.

• 15:42November Kelly?

  Like from a height, yeah, or if you're wearing like fishing waders or something like.

• 15:47Justin Roczniak?

  Fishing waders with like a, like a.

• 15:50November Kelly?

  Like a butt flap.

• 15:50Justin Roczniak?

  Port, yeah, butt flap, yeah.

• 15:52Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, it's like Christmas jammies.

• 15:54November Kelly?

  Oh, how fast. The, okay, we can't, we can't keep adding things to the list of merch we could make because that's one of the ones where you have to go to like a factory manager in China and be like, hey.

• 16:05Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, I'm serious.

• 16:06November Kelly?

  I'm a hundred percent serious. What I want is fishing waders with a butt flap. And the butt flap has to be like waterproof, waterproof once it's closed, but then allow a sort of easy transit of, of, of like, uh, shit through the butt flap, you know?

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Cocking my ass hatch shut for water tightness as I wade into the Skaggett River.

• 16:26November Kelly?

  I mean, it's not, people wax their car hearts and stuff. It's not any different, you know? People being like, yo, the new, well, there's your problem. Butt flap waders of like way worse. The quality is way worse. They don't use like the same materials anymore. It's just like, I'm sorry, this is supply crisis on.

• 16:45November Kelly?

  I've been watching a lot of menswear, like YouTubers. I, I, I've been watching.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Are you okay?

• 16:50November Kelly?

  No, no, I'm not, not.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  You posted, you posted some watches the other day and I, I'm, I always kind of interpret that as sort of like a call for help.

• 16:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, basically.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Especially if the watches are uglier and I really did not like the one you just posted. So I was like, ooh.

• 17:05Liam McAnderson?

  Get her ass.

• 17:06November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Look, why does it, I, the, the weird operator Roman numeral and like Arabic numeral mix is disgusting. That shit is awful. Get the fuck out of here.

• 17:19November Kelly?

  A California dial and I think it looks good. Maybe I think it looks good because something is wrong with my brain. I don't know. Uh, maybe that's why I'm watching a, a guy sort of walk around a woodland in upstate New York, talking about how Carhartt is bad now. I, I don't.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Wokenly taking you to electroshock therapy until your watch opinions improve.

• 17:41November Kelly?

  I'll circle back on that with you later. Um, yeah, so. The, the Pacific Northwest has been destroyed.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's all for that, really.

• 17:50November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  It just sucks and it was my local news.

• 17:53November Kelly?

  Yeah. They warned us about this in the film Pig.

• 17:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 17:57November Kelly?

  Don't worry about it.

• 17:57Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know that one either.

• 17:59November Kelly?

  You should watch it. It's a really good, Nicholas Cage, um, good, good film. Good, good, uh, Portland film.

• 18:05Justin Roczniak?

  I like a Nicholas Cage movie, yeah.

• 18:06November Kelly?

  It's, it's one of his like art ones. It's one of the ones where he's decided to do like a good movie.

• 18:11Justin Roczniak?

  Oh. Oh, okay. No, I don't like that. I want him in a bad movie.

• 18:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, you're a bad, a bad Nicholas Cage movie. Enjoy it. I'm a good Nicholas Cage. Enjoy it. It's fine. Two houses alike in Dignitas.

• 18:22Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. The yin and the yang.

• 18:24November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 18:24Justin Roczniak?

  Um, of Nicholas Cage. Anyway, and other news.

• 18:30Justin Roczniak?

  So, um, in, uh, in, we said this was going to happen news, uh, the, uh, HSTs that were sent down to, uh, Mexico for the, uh, interoceanico. Um, well, uh, one of the things Scooter predicted was they were gonna get taken out by a tanker truck. And look what happened. This one was taken out by a tanker truck.

• 18:51November Kelly?

  Yeah. You see what, you see the whole, the whole thing is the crumple zone?

• 18:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you see, well, there's no crumple zone whatsoever. You know, there's no driver protection. Somehow the drivers survived this.

• 19:02November Kelly?

  Just get out and run backwards, I guess?

• 19:04Justin Roczniak?

  I guess. I don't know what else you would do.

• 19:07November Kelly?

  Hmm. Build different industries. They cut that guy out of the thing and he was completely fine.

• 19:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Stop bothering me. Yeah. Went back, went back to work the next day.

• 19:19November Kelly?

  What's, what's the one fucking anime where the like insanely ripped guy is just like, um, uh, just like raw dogging being in a hospital bed with like one less limb? Just like that, you know? Uninjured, like mentally.

• 19:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, I think that was, uh, that was in Monty Python's Meaning of Life where the officer got his leg eaten by a tiger, a tiger.

• 19:39November Kelly?

  Yeah. It's a horrifying thought.

• 19:43November Kelly?

  Inventing the new worst smelling fan of anything, you know?

• 19:47Justin Roczniak?

  But the, uh, yeah, so you know, I, I, I would highly recommend, uh, uh, do not use your, uh, English rolling stock in Mexico, but they're gonna keep doing it.

• 19:59November Kelly?

  No, because they don't have great separation. We told you so. Go back and listen to the episode. I'm

• 20:03Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. It's a funny

• 20:04November Kelly?

  Still hopeful

• 20:05Liam McAnderson?

  Entire government of Mexico.

• 20:07November Kelly?

  Still hopeful that the Mexican Navy doesn't want us dead. Um, that we, that we kind of squashed that beef because I would like to go to Mexico as well. Um, but yeah, they, they got to do something about the train.

• 20:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they gotta, they gotta, you know.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Or just let this one engineer drive all of them.

• 20:22November Kelly?

  Well, I think, I think

• 20:22Justin Roczniak?

  Apparently, in one mortal, yeah.

• 20:25November Kelly?

  Uh, I mean, I guess like the reason why they maybe wanted to kill us was because we thought they were gonna kill Amlo with one of these things. And Amlo is not even president anymore. So I guess it's fine. And they couldn't even kill like one like train driver. So Well, I was like Has way less hit points than a president.

• 20:42Justin Roczniak?

  He's like the one punch man of locomotive engineers. So, you know.

• 20:47November Kelly?

  That is possible. It's like grading on a scale. Yeah. He's got like three health bars. Well, I'm glad he's okay.

• 20:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I'm glad, I'm glad he's okay. Yeah.

• 20:56November Kelly?

  This is, this is an unexpected death for a, for, for a great Western, um, high speed train though.

• 21:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, just, just whacking it. I understand they don't have any spare cabs. So while the locomotive may be mechanically fine, they can't

• 21:13November Kelly?

  Oh, it's just dead now.

• 21:14Justin Roczniak?

  And deserve, yeah, it's just dead.

• 21:16November Kelly?

  Well, that's the thing. The guy clearly doesn't need one. You, you bolt some kind of like Control panel to the front of this. He'll drive it open air and just be fine.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  I do really like the idea of a convertible high speed train.

• 21:30November Kelly?

  Yeah, well, it's, it's a convertible once, you know?

• 21:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, below a certain speed with trains, aerodynamics is fake. You don't have to worry about it. So yeah, why not?

• 21:39November Kelly?

  And they can't be running these things that fast, right? Like that was the other big kind of Point of the thing was that they were gonna have to run these really slowly because the track was, was dog shit. So

• 21:48Justin Roczniak?

  I, I want to say it's about 60 miles an hour and it's entirely in dark territory.

• 21:53November Kelly?

  Oh, well, huh. I, I guess maybe we just give the guy like a headlamp or something?

• 21:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, and if he sees a freight train coming, you know, head on, he's gonna have to one punch man his way out of there.

• 22:08November Kelly?

  Yeah, two trains destroyed, one Mexican train driver uninjured.

• 22:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 22:13November Kelly?

  Terrifying.

• 22:14Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, I wouldn't work here. Anyway, that was the goddamn news.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  All right. So to understand what happened in 2005 in Texas City, we must ask a very important question, which is, what is British Petroleum?

• 22:32November Kelly?

  A force for evil.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. It was really funny doing the research on this because I just kept hitting history's biggest shitbags.

• 22:39November Kelly?

  It's kind of like, oil companies in particular is really one of the ones where you can get sort of Bush era leftism, it's all about oil, because they've had a finger in fucking every evil thing that's happened, more or less. And you just keep like digging stuff up and it's like, oh, it was those guys again. Okay, sure.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm pretty convinced that we could probably record the longest, well, there's your problem, episode of all time on just the history of British Petroleum. I tried to keep this shorter than that so that, you know, we could go see our families for the holidays instead of, you know, recording for 36 straight hours.

• 23:16Justin Roczniak?

  There was a BP station near my elementary school that was so goddamn chaotic that they had to disaffiliate with BP because there were too many accidents going on there. This was like sometime after Deepwater Horizon. And it was like, apparently BP thinks this gas station in Burke, Virginia is worse than Deepwater Horizon.

• 23:43November Kelly?

  You're too toxic for our brand.

• 23:45Justin Roczniak?

  Now it's, now it's called the Express Stop. It's an independent gas station. Still completely chaotic.

• 23:52November Kelly?

  Independent gas stations.

• 23:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. But it's usually about three or four cents cheaper than all the other gas stations. So, you know, people drive their car at 60 miles an hour into it constantly.

• 24:07November Kelly?

  I love to, I love to refuel my car in GTA Online.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  This reminds me of one of the like formative experiences of my childhood that explains so much why I'm like this, which is when I stayed with my grandparents, they lived in Buffalo, New York when I was a kid and Buffalo is near a bunch of native reservations. And my grandfather used to take me for like what seemingly were like several hour long rides to drive way out to the country to these native reservations so he could fill up the tank on his car because the gas there didn't have to pay like the same degree of state taxes because it's like sovereign land. So he could save like, I don't know, 10 cents a gallon on gas.

• 24:46November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  I think he spent more driving out there than he saved.

• 24:50November Kelly?

  Yeah, but would you rob him of the joy of feeling like he's cheating the government?

• 24:55Speaker 03

  No, no, it was genuinely one of his happiest like times I remember seeing him. So. I'd say you know he was a real patriot.

• 25:02November Kelly?

  I know.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, driving a GM, driving a conversion van GMC Vandura with like a Pao Mia sticker on the back of it out to like the middle of nowhere upstate New York to, to fill up his 35 gallon tank with a dollar 75 gas instead of 183 at the Citgo down the street.

• 25:23November Kelly?

  Incredible.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Peak childhood memories. Anyway, he probably would have gotten along with this man pictured in this slide, William Knox Darcy, Darcy. Darcy, Darcy with an apostrophe.

• 25:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's, it's just Darcy, like Mister. Also, this is one of the most fucked up hair mustache combinations of all time. I'm, I'm deep in the Fallout three character creator on this guy. Like I.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, most of, most of the 20th century was this guy's fault. In 1901, he brokered a deal for the oil rights to the majority of Iran with significant backing from the British government because the British government believed it would help them in the great game against the Russians. And so they were trying to win influence over like the Middle East and they were like, all right, cool. We'll take control of most of Iran's natural resources, resources. This will help us.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  The terms of this deal, if you're curious, was that the Iranian Shah received £20,000 in cash, which is equivalent to about 2.1 million today. £20,000 worth of shares in the new like oil research expedition. And 16% of whatever annual net profits came from whatever oil was found. And in exchange, William Nox Sarsky received exclusive rights to prospect, explore, exploit, and transport all natural gas, petroleum, asphalt, and mineral waxes in 75% of Persia's landmass for the next 60 years.

• 26:59November Kelly?

  Surely this can have no downside.

• 27:01Justin Roczniak?

  This is where they get you. You gotta ask for a percent of the gross, not the net.

• 27:07November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's like Bob Evans, the Hollywood producer would tell you, you get points, you know? You get points on the picture, but I am glad that we did choose not to illustrate this with Drake's well clumsily Photoshop into Iran.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  It's the same thing, though, because here's the, oh, what? I knocked the sandbag that's holding up my microphone.

• 27:27November Kelly?

  It's good, it's emphasis. I do this thing sometimes where I get too mad and I bang my desk, but it always hits exactly on my wedding ring. So if you hear, or Devon has to edit that out, that's what that is. So yeah, we all have our little quirks. Also, because it's the 23rd of December and I barely give a fuck about myself, I am eating Pringles on the mic, but I am trying to remember to mute myself.

• 27:51Justin Roczniak?

  Eating Pringles, quiet. What kind of Pringles?

• 27:53November Kelly?

  These are Texas BBQ sauce. And weirdly, the sauce has a little apostrophe after it, but there's none at the start. So it's not speech marks. It's just, maybe it's a Texas barbecue sauce, or I have like counterfeit Pringles, like maybe it's a misprint.

• 28:09Justin Roczniak?

  It's interesting how it seems like over there, they will always qualify the region of barbecue versus over here, they do not.

• 28:19November Kelly?

  Texas BBQ sauce.

• 28:22Justin Roczniak?

  The region of barbecues are all here, though.

• 28:25Liam McAnderson?

  Maybe Texas is just easily identifiable.

• 28:28Justin Roczniak?

  As a barbecue location.

• 28:30November Kelly?

  In fairness, it does say like, this does this in all the European languages, since this is also sauce barbecue Texan and Texas barbecue sauce.

• 28:39Justin Roczniak?

  The real question is, do they have Carolina barbecue or Kansas City barbecue? I know the Burger Kings have Kansas City barbecue.

• 28:48November Kelly?

  Yeah, I it's weird. I mean, there's generally a layer of geographical abstraction over it, such as my favorite meal deal component, the the southern fried chicken wrap. But like, yeah, I've most commonly seen Texas barbecue when there's barbecue. I'm not sure what specifically makes it Texan. I don't think there's anything characteristically Texan about it, but these are, these are my Pringles. I hope you're excited for us keeping you on topic here, Victoria.

• 29:18Justin Roczniak?

  These are my Pringles. There are many like them, but these ones are mine.

• 29:22Liam McAnderson?

  This is my rifle. This is my gun. This one's for fighting. This one's for fun, but I'm just holding a can of Pringles. Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Texas barbecue is better anyway. That's that's my official stance on it. Texas City barbecue is when the when your Pringles can explodes and 15 people die. But

• 29:40Justin Roczniak?

  Too full of sauce.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  So anyway, speaking of Texas, Darcy, Darcy's company drills in Iran for eight years, finding basically no commercially viable oil fields. And they burned through a significant chunk of this guy's fortune. So he transfers

• 30:01November Kelly?

  That's kind of rough. If you're like, so the British government's cat paw in the sort of great game. And you're like, I'm gonna sort of extract all of this, this, you know, sort of this oil and become unfathomably wealthy. And then you just don't find it. And the government doesn't give a fuck because they're like, you know, whatever.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Well, well, he transfers all of his oil, personal oil field ownership to the Burma Oil Company in 1907, because he's just, he's like, I'm cutting bait. This is terrible. I'm not finding anything. There's no oil here. Burma tries for another year, and then they, the bosses at the company send a telegram that's like, okay, we're done here. Quit. While the before the foreman, like, had read through the telegram, he hit a 50 foot gusher and struck, you know, commercially piece of oil fields. And that that is the beginning of like,

• 30:50November Kelly?

  As as you as your eyes hit the cue and quit, there will be blood gusher goes off through the derrick, and then you hit one of the largest oil fields in the world.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 31:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you're like, damn, okay, I'm not gonna get killed in a bowling alley. All right. Thank God.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  So Darcy becomes chair of what becomes the Anglo Persian Oil Company, AP, the APOC, which is a subsidiary of the Burma Oil Company and it has exclusive handling for the Iranian fields. Next slide, please.

• 31:24November Kelly?

  Oh, this fucking guy. Why, he picked the most cursed image. He looks like he's pissing himself right now and he's happy about it.

• 31:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  I, it's really hard to find an image of him where he looks good. It's kind of wild that this guy got lionized so much.

• 31:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  I mean, just hanging out in a room with Roosevelt and Stalin, I guess, just gives you an aura.

• 31:46November Kelly?

  Hang out in a room with Roosevelt and Stalin. Roosevelt and Stalin are bonding and then bonding like at your expense.

• 31:52Liam McAnderson?

  Killing Nazis and then you cry.

• 31:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, say, say what you want about Churchill, but he did stop a lot of Nazis being, wait.

• 32:03Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, we know about Operation Paperclip. Leave us alone.

• 32:07November Kelly?

  Yeah. Guy, guy who's like sort of sole virtue, which he really sort of like beats to death was being anti appeasement eventually.

• 32:16Liam McAnderson?

  Uh huh.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  Well, so we have to start way before he was, he was the Winston Churchill we all know and hate now. He was the Winston Churchill, the Admiral. Um, in 1914, he urged the British government to buy a controlling stake in the APOC so that they would have a constant supply of oil for warships, um, which they then, you know, purchased a stake in it. The British fleet transitions off of coal and onto oil because now they own, you know, most of Varan's mineral rights.

• 32:47November Kelly?

  I, I'm, I'm raising my hand because the truth is so much more personally pathetic than this. Um, imagine being mad that you never got a commission. Um, so like Churchill, Churchill was, um, he was like a young cavalry officer for a bit. Was never an admiral per se. He was never a naval officer, but he was first sea lord. Um, which is like at that point, like. It's like being secretary of the Navy, right? Like, you're not sort of a, a, you're not a sailor, you're not, you're not a naval officer, you're a bureaucrat.

• 33:18Justin Roczniak?

  Sounds like something out of like Avatar, The Last Airbender.

• 33:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm willing to be corrected if I'm wrong about this, but one of my sort of abiding sort of facts about Churchill that I know is that among one of the sort of jobs that came with this, he was also in charge of Trinity House, which is the like bit of the British government responsible for lighthouses. And because that was a sort of like pseudo naval activity, that had officers and those had uniforms, which looked a bit like naval uniforms. If you ever see Winston Churchill in what looks like a naval uniform, he is stealing valor by wearing his lighthouse uniform to like to the war to be like, you have to take me seriously as a Navy guy, which he wasn't.

• 34:01Justin Roczniak?

  I'm a lighthouse keeper.

• 34:03November Kelly?

  Yes, yes, he is showing up to the thing in his like Admiral of Lighthouses uniform and being like, you have to take me seriously as a kind of naval thinker.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Well, he also had the ability to get them to buy an oil company.

• 34:17November Kelly?

  Yes, yeah, which is, which is.

• 34:20Justin Roczniak?

  You need oil to light the, the flame on the white lighthouse. So, you know.

• 34:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, perversely, this, this kind of ends the reason why the British Empire has a lot, had a lot of the places that it had as colonies and that like the more far flung stuff, a lot of the time was gotten at to be a like coaling station.

• 34:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 34:41November Kelly?

  You switch to oil, you need to refuel your ships a lot less. You can do it at sea more easily. And all of a sudden, you know, this stuff becomes a lot less important to you.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Well, he seemed to like it because after he was done, I guess, well, I, I had assumed that he had quit the Navy, but yeah, I suppose after he quit his lighthouse gig, his next job in the twenties was becoming an oil lobbyist.

• 35:04November Kelly?

  Man just loved oil, you know?

• 35:05Speaker 03

  He, he really did. His job as an oil lobbyist was to persuade the British government to allow the APOC to have exclusive rights to all Iranian oil fields. And he succeeded at that. At the APOC, it gets. Exclusive rights to all of Iran. And then he persuaded the Iranian monarchy to allow British people to continue like taking their oil for the next 30 years, basically without complaint. So, you know, we go to World War II, which is either the the absolute peak or the absolute nadir of the British Empire. I can never quite figure out which one it is.

• 35:44November Kelly?

  Sort of both at the same time.

• 35:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  In stereo.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  So after, after World War II, in 1951, the Prime Minister of Iran, Ali Razmara, is assassinated by someone acting on behalf of a group called Farian-e-Islam, which was considered to be the first Shia terrorist group.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  The main reason this group was created was because what is now the AIOC, the

• 36:17November Kelly?

  Anglo Iranian Oil Company.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Anglo, I should have written it down because I'm forgetting my acronyms as I go. Is wildly unpopular and is completely screwing over the Iranian government in like broad daylight. The population is furious and they treat all the workers like disposable shit. And so they're all also miserable about it. And so this kind of like

• 36:40Justin Roczniak?

  You gotta ask for a percentage of the gross, not the net.

• 36:44November Kelly?

  Call me Mr. 5%.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  And so the discontent over the AIOC is like what begins early Arab nationalism. Like it's basically all starts here in the early 50s because of the British government's controlling stake in the oil fields. So the now assassinated Ali Razmara is succeeded by Mohammed Masada.

• 37:11November Kelly?

  Masadiq.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  Masadiq, thank you. Yeah, again, this one, I'm

• 37:17November Kelly?

  I can, I can, I can, I can fill in bits and pieces because to an extent, this is like baby's first British imperialism that you learn as like a British leftist.

• 37:25November Kelly?

  So Masadiq, one of the things that he wanted to do was to audit the AIOC, right? Which they really didn't want to do because of the stealing, basically.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:38November Kelly?

  And Obviously, they they sort of perceived this correctly as sort of the first steps towards nationalization, right? That they were gonna try and actually take control of the oil that was coming out of Iran. And Iran was gonna try and make a profit off of it instead of just, you know, a bribe to the Shah. So there was there was this MI6 operation called Operation Boot, which actually sort of preceded Churchill. Like, Atlee was was was sort of like involved in this as well. So, you know, you do get a kind of bipartisan consensus on this, that you have to sort

• 38:20November Kelly?

  of use all possible means to prevent nationalization, which ends up with a like a boycott of Iranian oil while this is while this is going on, but also a lot of secret operations to attempt to destabilize Mossadegh's government.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, see, this is where the you learn about it from the American side of things, right? Because, you know, the Brits are extremely pissed that they have lost what I would describe as the infinite free money glitch they've had going on for the past 50 years.

• 38:49November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Churchill gets on the phone, and next slide, please.

• 38:54November Kelly?

  Oh, baby girl. Yes.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  I just, I love using this image.

• 39:00November Kelly?

  Monk straps as well. I'm sorry, I've been on too much like menswear stuff lately, but and they're like silk stockings? Jesus Christ.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  He served much more than just the American military.

• 39:20November Kelly?

  What's what's that one tweet? I love buying military surplus because somebody died in these pants and I'm still the first person to serve in them.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Uh, yes, this is for those of you who are just listening, this is Dwight D Eisenhower. He was, you know.

• 39:34November Kelly?

  It's what it's what history has called the baby girl photograph. Like, you're familiar.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  Our our dandy president.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  He is at this time, President of the United States and Churchill's like, hey, do you want to do a coup with me? So the nascent CIA Dulles Boys hatch up Operation Ajax. And the United States is like, hey, you know, nationalizing the oil fields and respecting the workers. That sounds like communism to us. So like, we can definitely get in on this. So they overthrow the Iranian Prime Minister, Mossad.

• 40:11November Kelly?

  Mossadegh.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Mossadegh, thank you. In exchange for getting some American companies in on the oil fields and, you know, getting, getting an in to train anti-communist guerrillas in the Middle East for the next, you know, 30 years.

• 40:25November Kelly?

  You know who the CIA officer who led this coup, Operation Ajax was?

• 40:31Speaker 03

  Not off the top of my head.

• 40:33November Kelly?

  Kermit Roosevelt Jr.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Oh, dear.

• 40:37November Kelly?

  That is, that is Teddy's grandson. Like, again, one of these guys that you can sort of like trace through history and be like, wow, a lot of evil shit you did. But yeah, they just, they overthrew Mossadegh and really sort of enforced or sort of like helped the Shah of Iran bolster his role as, as like an autocrat entail the Islamic Revolution.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, and now, now this, this foreign consortium, which is created, you know, this creates BP. They are sort of reborn from the ashes of the AIOC, you know, gets to own all the oil fields and the Shah gets his kickbacks again. He's got a, he gets a Western friendly prime minister installed underneath him. He gets his own United States trained secret police and death squad. Everybody's happy, like.

• 41:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, women could wear bikinis, which is, you know, the main indicator of a peaceful liberal state.

• 41:39November Kelly?

  So. As much as, as much as I sort of like lament that in the Middle East, the CIA managed to sort of crush and, and, and kill, the CIA and MI6 managed to sort of like crush every left wing popular movement in which I include Mossadegh and, and the National Union. I, I, I think that ultimately they were not able to withstand the sort of wave of like Islamist insurgency. You, you, I, I don't have to give it to them ideologically, politically, but if we're counting the rings, that's a better team that they put up, you know? And it's, it's just, it's rough. I don't, I don't like acknowledging that, but.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  If we're counting the rings is fucking, anyway.

• 42:23November Kelly?

  Yeah. Yeah. Incidentally, by the way, this, this kind of sets up a lot of like long lasting Iranian attitudes to both the US and the UK, like post Islamic revolution. You might be familiar with the, the description of, of the US as the great Satan, right? Like,

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:42November Kelly?

  That originally comes from, I, I think it was from any describing Britain as, as like the lesser Satan and America is the greater Satan, right? But weirdly, yeah, but weirdly, in like things that I've read, man, and the experience of, of like people that I've read, the instinctive Iranian sort of like suspicion for a long time, something that they had in common with, with Russia is Britain's really pulling the strings. We have more of a sinister vibe than you do. We just do. And, and so it's like more plausible to a lot of Iranians that like Britain is more actively evil than the US is. And you're just a kind of like clumsy

• 43:25November Kelly?

  dog that we're manipulating. And this is a big part of the reason why is because we did do that one time, very notably when we were like, okay, we're losing out on the oil revenue. We got to convince the Americans to go in on this.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean.

• 43:38Liam McAnderson?

  You know, no one's ever called us perfidious. Not once.

• 43:43November Kelly?

  No, you don't. You don't do a big line in perfidy. Mostly just do a big line in like the straight war crimes, you know?

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the US isn't really subtle about doing anti-communism either, whereas I feel like, you know, I feel like Britain is a little bit more subtle about its, uh,

• 43:56November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  You know, covert operations.

• 43:59November Kelly?

  We make better movie villains than you do, you know, for good reason.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  I mean, I, I don't know, the extent of what I know about MI6, admittedly, is not my specialty. Um, I defer to Nova for all, uh, spy knowledge, but I did really, I did really like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

• 44:15November Kelly?

  Great movie.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  It's a really good movie.

• 44:16November Kelly?

  Good film.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really, really good. Um, that's about the extent of my knowledge, though.

• 44:21November Kelly?

  Anyway, but yeah, so, so everybody dusts their hands, right? Because it's like, surely, um, liberalism, social liberalism under absolute monarchy forever, you can keep doing repression and, and sort of like torture as long as you like, and it's never, I, it's, I, I, again, very funny to be like leader of Iran and think, "That's fine, I can torture and execute my way into, into keeping in power forever." A lesson there, maybe, for the future, but who can say?

• 44:50Speaker 03

  As long as the bikinis keep flowing, though.

• 44:52November Kelly?

  Well, yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Shut up, bikinis doesn't work anymore.

• 44:54November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  That's why, that's why the US is so unstable right now. We've got this, we got, we got the violent repression and...

• 45:00November Kelly?

  Not enough bikinis!

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:02November Kelly?

  Death to the One Piece! Posting like Sydney Sweeney in the American flag bikini and being like average American girl before the revolution, you know?

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, so obviously you already got to this, but you know, in 1979, the Shah gets overthrown. BP is expelled from Iran, uh, in the wake of this. Iran was...

• 45:22November Kelly?

  It's like, you gotta look at the scoreboard, right? Like a bunch of do-gooding, bleeding-heart leftists just kind of got overthrown. Um, whereas you, you bring Rahalah Hameini, the guy who, um, like, was looking out of the window of the plane, taking him back to like become supreme leader of Iran. And a journalist asks him what he like thought about Iran, uh, what, what he like made of it, what it made him feel, and he said, "Nothing." Like, just a complete kind... Sadistic void who like, and because the Islamic revolution, there are a bunch of different directions it could have gone. There were like more moderate guys like Sharjah Madari. They

• 46:02November Kelly?

  were like, uh, like full on like communists involved. And, uh, yeah, how many of these guys were, were the guys who not only sort of won the sort of like, uh, revolution, but also then hanged a lot of communists afterwards. And then the Iran Iraq war. So.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  I think the real strat is that you just have, if you're going to do, uh, governmental overthrow from any direction, uh, Islamic or leftist or whatever, you've got to do it while Jimmy Carter's president. Otherwise it just doesn't work. Yeah. You think you can get anything past the steel trap that is Dwight Eisenhower?

• 46:38Speaker 03

  No, no. They, they, they, they, they went too early. You gotta wait for Carter to come around. So we gotta wait for the American Carter for, for anything to happen anywhere in the whole world ever again. Actually, this is.

• 46:49November Kelly?

  Implicates that original Jimmy Carter was not American. Jimmy Carter birtherism?

• 46:57November Kelly?

  Why not throw it in?

• 46:58Speaker 03

  I refuse to recognize Georgia as a valid US state.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, so.

• 47:06November Kelly?

  His real name is Jimmy spelled with a D Z H I M I. And his real last name is Carter Ashley.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  Uh, so yeah, so the, the, the consequence of, um, you know, the seventies basically is this, this rising wave of, uh, Arab nationalism kind of sweeps through all of the places that BP happens to have oil fields, you know, whether these things are related or not, who could ever say. But, uh, you know, in through the seventies BP loses its fields in Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Kuwait, and then Iran. So they have like no reserves left. Um, they went from one of the most like reserve rich oil companies in the world to basically having nothing, um, in the

• 47:46November Kelly?

  My infinite money, my money. Why eat that to purchase things?

• 47:46Speaker 03

  span of a decade.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Almost simultaneously with the, um, Iranian revolution, 1979, uh, Margaret Thatcher privatized.

• 47:59November Kelly?

  Thank you.

• 47:59November Kelly?

  That's right. That's right, Liam.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  Whenever, whenever Margaret Thatcher comes up, my wife does the, um, the old lady with the thick accent bit.

• 48:10Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  Steak through her heart, garlic round her neck.

• 48:13Justin Roczniak?

  And they're like, yeah.

• 48:15Liam McAnderson?

  Well, they're like, what a terrible thing to say about somebody. And it's just like, I don't care.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Too bad.

• 48:21Justin Roczniak?

  Too bad.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  Yes, that's just permanently embedded in my head with the thought of Margaret Thatcher, um, which I suppose is fitting. But, uh, but yeah, anyway, so BP gets privatized. It's no longer a state enterprise. So now there are shareholders and you know what shareholders love is, hey, could you make more money while also imperiling more people?

• 48:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  We need money right now.

• 48:46Justin Roczniak?

  Me money, me money now.

• 48:48Liam McAnderson?

  Me money now.

• 48:49Justin Roczniak?

  Money.

• 48:49Liam McAnderson?

  You give money now.

• 48:52Justin Roczniak?

  Sounds like we're all having a stroke simultaneously, baby.

• 48:56Justin Roczniak?

  Me money now.

• 48:57Speaker 03

  This is, that's the correct Christmas Eve, Eve recording energy, I think.

• 49:01Liam McAnderson?

  Fucking delirious. I'm, uh, nothing feels good. Let's do it.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  You, you should sleep sometime.

• 49:06Liam McAnderson?

  I'll get there.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  All right.

• 49:07November Kelly?

  I'll sleep when I'm done podcasting.

• 49:09Liam McAnderson?

  No, I gotta go back to back. Got to record with Tom later.

• 49:12Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, my God.

• 49:13November Kelly?

  Oh, my God.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so, you know, basically, uh, you know, through the eighties BP accrues one of the worst safety records of any oil company in the entire world. Next slide, please.

• 49:25November Kelly?

  Oh, I, I, I know this guy. This is, this is Lord Brown. And even if I didn't know who he was, I would recognize the uncomfortably high resolution of, uh, the, the sort of parliamentary portrait photographer, very distinctive style of view. These are all publicly available. They're all like, uh, crown copyright. If you wanna like a, like an 80,000 pixel to a side image of like any MP or Lord, they'll, they'll do that for you.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Uh, the full title is the Right Honourable Lord John Brown of Mattingly, which is, um,

• 49:56Liam McAnderson?

  That's a stupid name.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  It's amazing that people have taken the UK seriously for as long as they have.

• 50:01Justin Roczniak?

  He looks like, uh, he looks like evil Larry Krasner.

• 50:05Liam McAnderson?

  He does.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, let me break out the Hasselblad to get this. I don't know. I don't know.

• 50:13November Kelly?

  Yeah, interesting guy.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Uncomfortable. But anyway, in 1991, he becomes managing director of BP and his goal is to run a tighter ship while also greenwashing BP. So they become kind of the woke oil company.

• 50:29Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, dear.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  And New York Times profiles him shortly after he took over as an exec that is, quote, "as much at home in Silicon Valley as in the oil belt." So obviously, the first order of business is to fire like tens of thousands of people and start doing takeovers of every oil company that you can possibly buy immediately to try to rebuild the reserves. So the balance sheet looks better, basically. As a result of this strategy in 1998, BP merged with Amoco, which was the remnants of the Standard Oil Company, which is another episode, honestly, just in itself.

• 51:04Justin Roczniak?

  One of the several, one of the several remnants of it.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's funny how the entire first half of the 1900s was breaking apart a bunch of oil companies and then the second half was reconciling.

• 51:19Justin Roczniak?

  Putting them back together the way they were. Built brick by brick. Most of them became ExxonMobil. Not quite all of them, though, but most of them.

• 51:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, thinking, thinking about this guy is a bit of a time capsule as well because one of the things I remember him for is he is gay openly now.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  We're getting that, trust me.

• 51:41November Kelly?

  Oh, OK, sure. We'll talk about, we'll talk about this guy being gay.

• 51:45Speaker 03

  It's funny because, yeah, his, his being gay ends up being very important, much more important than the fact that he ran this company and killed 15 people, which is kind of a, it is, it is an interesting window into.

• 51:59November Kelly?

  Everybody says be gay, do crimes until.

• 52:02Justin Roczniak?

  Until it's time to do crimes against humanity. Yeah. Yeah.

• 52:07Justin Roczniak?

  All right, that's, that's, that's, that's the marketing scheme for Tel Aviv, I think.

• 52:13Justin Roczniak?

  Be gay, do war crimes.

• 52:15November Kelly?

  But also crucially, to like a decent segment of the population, do not be gay. We will stab you at the pride parade.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:22November Kelly?

  I think that one of the most, one of the most like Israeli stories of all time is the guy who, who like stabbed a bunch of people, killed one to my knowledge at the Tel Aviv pride parade. Went to prison, was sort of fated as, as a hero in prison by everybody up to the guards. Until they let him out of prison and then he went back to the next Tel Aviv pride parade and did it again. I, I, irredeemable, you know?

• 52:46Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know, the rent in prison is cheap. I mean, Tel Aviv is expensive.

• 52:50November Kelly?

  Some people just get, you know, institutionalized or whatever.

• 52:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  In any case, in 1998, I'm sorry, I'm not, I refuse to, I'm like, I have to still find a job. So I am not going to talk about the topic of Israeli pride parades.

• 53:06November Kelly?

  It's all good. You know what this is? What this is, is my, my mental health is in shambles and I am distracting you from doing the thing because my brain doesn't work. It's why I brought up fucking Mohammed Rassafar at Maderia earlier. Is because like I, it's all, everything is happening at once.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  No, I'm just explaining that I want a job again someday. And if I'm gonna deliver parts for the O'Reilly auto down the street from me, I need to not touch the third rail of Israeli gay pride parades.

• 53:36November Kelly?

  Oh yeah, like you delivering somebody's new like intake manifold requires you to acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist now in America because it's a normal country.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  Yes. In like 26 states, yes, I would need to sign a paperwork to that effect.

• 53:51November Kelly?

  God, America's so cool.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Not Washington, Washington, yeah, I don't think you have to do that. I'm pretty sure we don't have any laws about that here. So I do not need to sign the, um.

• 54:00Liam McAnderson?

  Israel is good to actually poison pill paper? That episode is coming. That episode is not coming.

• 54:05Justin Roczniak?

  It's one way, it's one way to solve like the, uh, the antisemitic dual loyalty trope is to make everyone have dual loyalty.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Anyway, BP merges the Emeco. They become the third largest oil company in the world. They change their logo to the green and yellow sun to show off how environmentally friendly they are.

• 54:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  Their slogan becomes beyond petroleum.

• 54:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 54:29November Kelly?

  Yeah. This is the point at which oil companies start becoming energy companies.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  The right honorable Lord John Brown of Mattingly swears that he will not cause any more catastrophic damage to the earth.

• 54:42Justin Roczniak?

  It's amazing how many oil companies rebranded to energy companies, right down to Octan. You know, the Lego oil company.

• 54:51November Kelly?

  I have a tweet about this, and annoyingly, it never popped off to the extent of the Lego police officer losing the smile over the years, but like, yeah, fucking Octan is an energy. You can buy an Octan wind turbine now.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  I wanted that set so bad when I was a kid, which probably says something about me.

• 55:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you have these companies that have like, you know, a trillion dollar balance sheet, but they advertise like, yeah, we're investing $10 million into green energy research this year.

• 55:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, Lego set 7747 has an Octan wind turbine in it. It's like, that makes up a catastrophically small amount of like Octan's energy generation.

• 55:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  I'm putting that on my next.

• 55:35Justin Roczniak?

  They only sell the like Octan refining and oil extraction sets in Saudi Arabia.

• 55:44November Kelly?

  Well, it's basic offshoring, you know, like you, you, you kind of like, you sell the wind turbines in the sort of developed world.

• 55:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there's a whole secret set of Lego.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  We don't do that. That was, that was another candidate for the goddamn news is that they, we've canceled all offshore wind turbine projects in the US because.

• 56:02November Kelly?

  If you let me do a Lego bonus episode, it will run about seven hours and culminate in me spending about $10,000 on myself on impulse and bankrupting myself.

• 56:12Justin Roczniak?

  I'm gonna have to go on bricklink.com and I'm gonna buy all the secret Saudi Arabian Lego sets.

• 56:21November Kelly?

  It's like the special 9/11 playset they only gave out on Saudi flights.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ.

• 56:28November Kelly?

  Listen, he who interferes in what doesn't concern him finds what doesn't please him.

• 56:33Justin Roczniak?

  There's a bunch of like, you know, different like pipe bricks that you can't get anywhere else other than Saudi Arabia. You know, that's, that's, that's a piece of advice.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  They have one, they have one, they have a couple of like really long bricks that were used as part of the promotional set for the line.

• 56:50November Kelly?

  I just, I just think it's.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  The Lego architecture, the line set.

• 56:55November Kelly?

  Yeah, trying to do the line and being like, I gotta go on Bricklink and order like 15 billion of these straight line pieces. I, I mean, the real thing is that no one wants to talk about like Octan rebranded to Octan Energy. But if you look at 60025, they do so much fucking sports washing and that's what really makes them a petro, uh, like a petro state.

• 57:15Justin Roczniak?

  This is true, yeah.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  I want to see, I want to see Kate Wagner's, um, like F1 story, but for the Octan Lego, uh, sports washing scandal.

• 57:25November Kelly?

  Octan, Octan do so much motorsport and it doesn't fucking have me fooled, you know?

• 57:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they, they do motorsport, they do, um, well, they make all the history textbooks, I know that much.

• 57:36November Kelly?

  Flipping to the back of my history textbook and it's got the green and red logo on there and it's like, god fucking damn it.

• 57:43Justin Roczniak?

  They make the voting machines. I used to be able to do that spiel from, from memory. I can't anymore. You gotta re-watch the, uh, Lego movie.

• 57:49November Kelly?

  Ah, it's like, regrettably, it's a good brand movie.

• 57:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Anyway, BP got a big refinery. Next slide, please.

• 57:58November Kelly?

  It's like, yeah, I'm having some trouble staying on topic on this one. I got 15 minutes in me about the Octan corporate.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  We keep, I feel like ever since I've started like writing these, I, you, I've been bringing like bonus energy to mainline episodes.

• 58:13November Kelly?

  Honestly, I love it. No, don't, do not ever feel bad about it. I love it and the listeners should love it. And if they don't, then thing that gets the thing, the algorithm.

• 58:22Justin Roczniak?

  Don't worry, guys. I'm gonna make the next one real boring.

• 58:26November Kelly?

  Just like they like it.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so.

• 58:30November Kelly?

  We're gonna explain stress and strain again.

• 58:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, oh.

• 58:33Speaker 03

  So do you see this? Do you see this image?

• 58:36November Kelly?

  I do see this image.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  This is the, this, this is Amoco refinery. Well, it's a lot of different companies refineries, but this is a refinery in Texas City. BP got from the Amoco merger.

• 58:48November Kelly?

  It gives me anxiety to look at.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  In America, it can refine 10 million gallons a day or 2.5% of the US's gasoline production.

• 58:57November Kelly?

  Good God. Gives me, it gives me anxiety to look at and it feels like it gives someone else cancer to live downwind of like.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Texas City is like just a super fun site.

• 59:06November Kelly?

  Nightmare, yeah.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  With a fucking city council.

• 59:09Justin Roczniak?

  I'm just thinking, wow, look at all these cool process units.

• 59:13November Kelly?

  That is, you're, you're, you're factorio-pilled right now.

• 59:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  This, this image, by the way, for this slide is via the Center for Land Use Interpretation, which is one of the coolest, like, photography and like. I don't even know. It's just a very cool project. I really like them a lot. So shout out to them for this photograph.

• 59:32November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, we are currently interpreting that land use right now.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:36November Kelly?

  So we're doing, we're doing the thing.

• 59:39Speaker 03

  So this, this refinery, despite making 2.5% of the US's gasoline, has been losing money for years. So BP immediately goes cost cutting mode at this place. They target budget cuts of 25% in 1999 and then another 12 and a half percent in 2005.

• 59:58November Kelly?

  All right. So everybody's interviewing for their job back, essentially.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. According to ProPublica, to save money.

• 1:00:06Justin Roczniak?

  What would you say you do here? I'm the one safety guy.

• 1:00:10November Kelly?

  Well, have there been any accidents? Green helmet. It's like, yeah.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  The, the, the level of ruthlessness was they eliminated safety calendars for $40,000 worth of savings.

• 1:00:22November Kelly?

  In fairness, if, if you're doing the kind of like big, it has been X hours since last incident thing from Starfield, a game only I played, I could see how that would be expensive and that would be a saving. But if we're just doing like, you have the Pirelli calendar that's like, don't bandsaw off your own thumb. Or like, don't swim in the benzene, the, the sort of message for July. You're not my supervisor. Maybe that's useful.

• 1:00:45Justin Roczniak?

  Is that, is that what a safety calendar? I don't know what a safety.

• 1:00:48November Kelly?

  I don't know. I don't know either. I'm thinking, I'm thinking novelty calendar.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  ProPublica did not go into detail about what safety calendars was specifically, so.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  I'm assuming that it was like-

• 1:01:00Justin Roczniak?

  It's gotta be like some kind of this procedure needs to be done on this. I'm looking-

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was kind of what I was interpreting it as.

• 1:01:08November Kelly?

  I like my Pirelli answer better, but sure.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  They also eliminated purchases of safety shoes for employees to save $50,000.

• 1:01:16November Kelly?

  Motherfucker, you have like, you are one of the largest corporations in the world, like-

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  They eliminated the safety awards as well to save $75,000.

• 1:01:27November Kelly?

  I just, making you like buy your own like sort of composite toe cap boots or whatever to go to work in a refinery and that's, you know, I imagine the kind of line of work that runs through boots pretty quickly and all of a sudden you're at the mercy of the fucking like vines calculus, you know?

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, they also got rid of TVs and cable from the employee lounges to save-

• 1:01:50November Kelly?

  Oh, you fucking Nazis.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  Reported $20,000.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  For comparison-

• 1:01:56Justin Roczniak?

  There's nothing to do out here. Fuck off.

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  In 2004, BP made $16.2 billion of profit on $215 billion of overall revenue.

• 1:02:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but- Safety calendar is in fact the novelty calendar with safety tips on it.

• 1:02:12November Kelly?

  Okay, maybe, maybe, maybe.

• 1:02:14Justin Roczniak?

  Maybe I might, I might, you know, say if it's costing us that much.

• 1:02:19November Kelly?

  But here's the thing, if it costs, if it costs you almost as much as like safety shoes, surely you cut the calendars and the safety shoes are now functionally free.

• 1:02:28Justin Roczniak?

  Day, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:02:30November Kelly?

  Or you could spend the same amount and do like fucking twice as many safety shoes. I don't know.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  Hell, they could have, they could have upgraded the cable package.

• 1:02:39November Kelly?

  That's true. Just like, so the safety calendar is gone and because of that you can watch Pluribus at work?

• 1:02:47November Kelly?

  That's a good idea. That's an actual improvement in your work day.

• 1:02:50Justin Roczniak?

  The only thing I can think of is, you know, the safety calendar probably has all the safety tips in larger print than the OSHA poster next to it that says all the same stuff. Also, there's a new thing every month. So your brain keeps working.

• 1:03:04November Kelly?

  We, we, the company bought Amazon Prime Extra Pro Added Plus. That means that you have slightly fewer ads to skip through. So, you know, check that out. We spent, we spent $50,000 on that. But turns out we were spending that much on the cutting off your thumb hurts.

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  See, but they, they might have needed the calendars because the, the safety record of this plant was not good. Even before BP took it over. There are, when I was researching this, I found stories of a worker dying because the safety railing he was leaning on was so rusted, it collapsed under his body weight and he fell to his death.

• 1:03:42Justin Roczniak?

  Jesus. Yeah. You know, and all these process units because they are, you know, frequently cycling like lots and lots of fluid, you know, and, and they, they're all tall, right? So you need all these exposed like galvanized steel sort of safety platforms all around them, you know, and it's, it's genuinely hard to inspect all of them just because there's so much of them, you know, that, that seems, yeah, I mean, that, that's one of the places you would see cost cut at first is like, oh, we didn't check this railing because we had, no one had used it in seven years.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and I mean, Texas City is like right on the ocean and it's continually covered in like salt spray. So it rusts. Yeah. In 2004, this, this specific refinery under BP's leadership suffered from three workplace fatalities, which was three out of 23 in the past 30 years at this exact plant. But at the same time, BP made, had 900 million in earnings off of this one refinery. So, you know, who's to say if drunk driving's bad and it gets a lot of people to work on time. But for an entire corporate strategy. Next slide, please. Now, you might ask yourself, did BP know this facility was a ticking

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  time bomb? They intentionally neglected for profit? According to this slide, the cost to benefit analysis of the three little pigs, I would say yes.

• 1:05:10November Kelly?

  Okay, so introducing levity to industrial accidents is our job. It's not the job of the guys causing the industrial accidents. That's literally adding insult to injury.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  This is one of those slides you just do not want printed and handed to you by a representative of the federal government.

• 1:05:28Justin Roczniak?

  This is some MBA shit right here.

• 1:05:34Justin Roczniak?

  I fucking hate people. Lots of people think like this. And it's like, I, look, look at this. Maximum justifiable spend. A piggy considers it's worth $1,000 to save its bacon. Come on, come on. Yeah. 1.0 piggy lifetime. What would, what would any of you put a dollar value on your life as?

• 1:05:59Liam McAnderson?

  About eight bucks, why?

• 1:06:01Justin Roczniak?

  Two packs of Marlboro Reds, frankly.

• 1:06:03November Kelly?

  When do I have to give you the money?

• 1:06:11Justin Roczniak?

  Ross might be believing it is a fatigable human spirit, but I fucking don't.

• 1:06:14November Kelly?

  Hold on, hold on, hold on here. I got, I got, I got, I got two pounds 25 on me. How does that strike you?

• 1:06:22Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, no, no, no. You're supposed to, you're supposed to say, how much money would it take someone to give you? But then they get to kill you.

• 1:06:33November Kelly?

  Oh, I mean.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  That's really a question for my wife, I think.

• 1:06:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's also really a question for my wife. Doubly so if she's the one killing me.

• 1:06:40Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, yeah, that's true.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, she's the one who's gonna have to like, you know, invest the money or whatever. I don't know.

• 1:06:47Justin Roczniak?

  I know that like, I know that like the FEMA has like.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Isn't she?

• 1:06:52November Kelly?

  I mean, I gotta be honest, I, I've never, and I'm gonna expose myself as a kind of financial illustrator here because I never expected to have a real job. I don't, I don't have like a pension or anything like, I mean, like. I don't, the death benefits for podcasting, to the best of my knowledge? Uh, yeah, not good. Like, um, if I, if I, if I, you know, uh, get hit by a falling microphone or something, uh, like, I, I don't know. It's, it's not gonna be good for the polycule. I'll tell you that much.

• 1:07:24Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I'm just, I, you, you look at this whole slide here, right? Cost benefit analysis of the three little pigs. Frequency, the big bad wolf blows with a frequency of once per piggy lifetime. Consequence, if the wolf blows down the house, the piggy is gobbled by the wolf, I would assume. Maximum justifiable spend, the piggy considers its life, it's with an apostrophe. That fuck.

• 1:07:50Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, so $1,000 to save its bank. Like, I got that one right. Um, right? So what, what type of house should the piggy build? You build the brick house every single goddamn time. Cause if you save money and die, you're still dead. You can't spend the money.

• 1:08:11November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's one of, that's one of those things that is in both capital and the Bible. It's how you know it's right. Moths have devoured your treasure or whatever. Yeah. It's remarkable how much those two agree, you know? If only I could synthesize.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  No, you're not allowed. Stop right there. Do not proceed any further.

• 1:08:33Justin Roczniak?

  We gotta introduce Bible study into MBA courses, obviously.

• 1:08:39November Kelly?

  Yeah. So based, based on this, you would imagine that Liberty University's business school would provide both the most moral and the most sort of efficient, uh, business graduates in the nation. And that's why we're hiring them exclusively.

• 1:08:54Justin Roczniak?

  Business secrets of the Torah.

• 1:08:59November Kelly?

  That's like a book that would have been written by like an antisemitic Russian officer in 1919. And everybody now who is like antisemitic believes it's real.

• 1:09:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Justin Roczniak?

  They call it the book of numbers for a reason.

• 1:09:13November Kelly?

  It's like Business Secrets of the Torah is some shit that like the Japanese militarists were inventing in their head when they were doing Plan Fugu.

• 1:09:24November Kelly?

  Anyway, I think, I think the correct move here is a little book entitled Everything They Teach You at Liberty University Business School. And then a second larger book called Everything They Don't Teach You at Liberty University Business School.

• 1:09:41November Kelly?

  I studied financial instruments and Utah called that Brigham Young money. That's just the name of a podcast that already exists that did that joke well before me.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  Next slide, please. This is, this is my favorite slide from that deck, which was from 2002 for the record.

• 1:09:59November Kelly?

  Okay, so this, this is a graph, a really poorly formatted graph that describes the intolerable environmental risk for a major operation that counts cumulative frequency on the Y axis and on the X axis outrage on a scale from local, national, regional, global, and then someone has extrapolated that beyond the grounds of the thing to something that is presumably like cites BP as like an intergalactic environmental criminal, but that is so rare, it almost never happens.

• 1:10:34Justin Roczniak?

  Some guys, some guys out on Alpha Centauri are like, damn, that's fucked up.

• 1:10:40November Kelly?

  BP causes the fucking Grey goo apocalypse.

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  This is also how I decide what jokes I'm gonna say out loud on the podcast. I have a graph in my mind where one axis is labeled outrage.

• 1:10:54Justin Roczniak?

  Well, this is also the interesting one here is outrage is like an abstract term, but they've decided, you know, we're gonna make one side scientific, we're gonna be, we're gonna do this by uh doing scientific notation for values that would make a lot more sense, not in scientific notation.

• 1:11:14November Kelly?

  Yeah, so presumably in this, BP, they're plotting that BP causes a global outrage one E minus four times a year.

• 1:11:28Justin Roczniak?

  One to, one to the negative fifth, which I believe would be 0.00005.

• 1:11:37November Kelly?

  BP causes national, causes global outrage way more than that.

• 1:11:42Justin Roczniak?

  Like, yeah.

• 1:11:43November Kelly?

  Every like, what, 50,000 years BP causes a global outrage that they're, they've covered the last, the next like 150,000 years.

• 1:11:51Justin Roczniak?

  I need some data points. I want some data points on this because it's gonna be like, I don't know, there's like, or excuse me, no, it's gonna be like, ah, yeah, actually, they're all over here.

• 1:12:02November Kelly?

  This lacks rigor.

• 1:12:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. There's like, I don't know.

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  Happens when you get an MBA.

• 1:12:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there probably were some, there were some like, uh, there were some data points that were like this. And then someone's like, I need a better R squared. Fit this to a linear equation.

• 1:12:20November Kelly?

  So, so, so my, just to kind of dox myself as a hereditary member of the professional managerial class, my dad has an MBA. And when he got it, I never knew what that was other than that my dad worked at the business factory, uh, which seemed to consist of going in really early, coming home really late, making phone calls, writing emails. The longer I've lived and the more experience, you know, admittedly kind of second and third hand of the corporate world I've, I've had, the more I'm finding that that's kind of what an MBA is. Yeah.

• 1:12:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, my mom got one and I think it was just like to allow her to like fill out insurance paperwork for a hospital.

• 1:12:59November Kelly?

  It's weird that to be a podcaster, one of your parents has to have a master's degree. It's, I, it's, it's the sort of a podcast theory of elite overproduction, you know, and like, we would have had real jobs last generation just by virtue of heredity, but, uh, we don't now because we, uh, produce too many elites.

• 1:13:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  I mean, I thought this was just the only job you could get as a trans, but I'm not gonna lie to you.

• 1:13:22November Kelly?

  That too.

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  I don't know about the rest of y'all, but like.

• 1:13:24November Kelly?

  That's also true. Yeah, yeah, that too, that too.

• 1:13:27Liam McAnderson?

  No, my, my parents are lawyers.

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  You can't even. You can't even be a grad student in half the universities in America anymore because somebody will write a paper like, "I love to, I love to, I love Christ." And you'll be like, "Hey, the paper was asking you to analyze like why the Civil War started." And then they get you fucking fired from your job.

• 1:13:47November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  Because we're, we're doing one-sided asymmetric warfare against all trans people and nobody is willing to recognize it as such. So, nobody can get me fired from this because, I mean, actually technically, all three of you could get me fired from this, but nobody else can.

• 1:14:01November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  Wait.

• 1:14:04November Kelly?

  We, we, we offer a crucial difference from,

• 1:14:08November Kelly?

  we, we offer a crucial difference from every other employer in that we're not transphobic. I, I, and speaking of, I got a, a, a few sort of Tumblr asks recently where people were like, "Yeah, I haven't listened to your podcast in like a couple of months or whatever." I, I, I, I stopped, I, I, there was somebody who was like, "I stopped listening for a while and I thought you were a new host." Like, uh, so I, I don't know if my voice has changed that much, but between that and the name change, I'm just happy to disorient and confuse people. Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  Yes. Taking a literal interpretation of like, "The old me is dead when you transition." But like, just doing it every time you change your name.

• 1:14:49November Kelly?

  Yeah. I got another few more of these in me.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  I mean, like, what, 25?

• 1:14:55November Kelly?

  Oh, some of those are gonna be rough.

• 1:14:58November Kelly?

  Do not ask me about the Papa year.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  No, I already made, I already made the joke that I'm everybody's dad last episode.

• 1:15:10November Kelly?

  Second, second choice is gonna be Sierra, obviously, and then you get to some really problematic ones, you know? India's pretty bad, Zulu's probably worse. Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  Anyway, so now that we've now that we've discussed the outrage graph, just for an idea of what conditions were like at BP, in January 2005, Thalos Group was brought in as an outside auditor. They they interviewed employees and stuff. This is a direct quote from somebody who worked at the BP refinery in Texas City. "Telling the manager what they want to hear, that gets rewarded. For example, one person who had cut costs, done a lot of Band-Aids with maintenance and quit, you had to quit your belly aching, quit your complaining attitude, was rewarded in the last reorganization. When his replacement was brought into his previous maintenance position, his replacement found that a single pump was fit for service. Air compressors, all that, not one spare was fit for service."

• 1:16:06November Kelly?

  Yeah, you cut a lot of costs by not doing anything.

• 1:16:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, one prediction from another employee was that the plant, quote, "kills someone in the next 12 to 18 months," end quote.

• 1:16:16November Kelly?

  What is that but a differently drawn outrage graph, you know?

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  Thalos Group, in their own conclusion, said, quote, "There is an exceptional degree of fear of catastrophic incidents at Texas City. We have never seen a site where the notion, 'I could die today,' was so real. These conditions you would never encounter at Shell, Chevron, Exxon, et cetera."

• 1:16:37November Kelly?

  When when when your when your auditor tells you this, is that good?

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  You know, largely this is because...

• 1:16:44Justin Roczniak?

  I don't think so. I think that's bad.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  The turnover was insane, the cost-cutting pressure was absolutely insane. You know, because basically they had developed a factory in which you put in dangerous conditions and get out $100 million a month. Like, yeah, just a direct input-output. So, obviously, there's nothing, nothing bad is ever going to happen here. And capitalism naturally sustains itself. And it never, the worsening conditions never impact anybody. So, we can...

• 1:17:14Justin Roczniak?

  Obviously not. Nothing bad happened.

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  Now we'll do an unrelated episode in the next slide about how we make gasoline.

• 1:17:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:17:22Speaker 03

  And then nothing else happens. That's it.

• 1:17:24November Kelly?

  Am I gonna see fucking Drake's well again?

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  Um, no.

• 1:17:30Justin Roczniak?

  Probably, but not right now. I will be right back. My main goal. Should we keep going?

• 1:17:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, she just, of course, she manages to skip out right when you start the organic chemistry.

• 1:17:42Justin Roczniak?

  That makes sense. Lucky her. Some people, some people just don't want to have the knowledge.

• 1:17:53Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:18:36Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:18:56Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, my, my goal for this podcast is of course, after you've listened to every refinery disaster we ever do, which will be all of them, of course, in order, you finally understand every single refinery process unit.

• 1:19:09November Kelly?

  Yeah, because every process unit has failed disastrously at least once.

• 1:19:13Justin Roczniak?

  I bet there's like some that probably can't, but I don't know what they are offhand. Like I, I think it'd be, you know, pretty crazy if like the asphalt blowing unit exploded.

• 1:19:22November Kelly?

  Yeah, it would be pretty crazy. If that's ever happened, that's an episode.

• 1:19:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. Now we got hydrogen synthesis down here. I don't know. Anyway, so we all know, we should know at this point, the big part of the oil refinery at the start, fruit oil goes in to the distillation column, right?

• 1:19:43November Kelly?

  Work out how heavy, well, to like separate stuff out based on, based on like length of hydrocarbon chain, I think. Yeah.

• 1:19:50Justin Roczniak?

  It's based on basically where it condenses based on temperature. So your lightest products are up here. And then your heavier products condense down at the bottom, right? The chemicals that come out of the bottom are called the bottoms. The chemicals that come out of the top are called the tops. In our Philadelphia refinery explosion episode, we talked about the bottoms, which went into the, where is it? Alkalisian unit over here, right? This is a very complicated process to create gasoline out of horrible nasty oil.

• 1:20:31Justin Roczniak?

  Now, here's the thing, there's also pretty good oil that comes out, right? So in order to, you know, a lot of stuff that, especially if you have lighter crude oil, you're gonna have more stuff coming out of the top. These are the tops. This is light naptha, right? So in order to turn the light naptha into gasoline, you know, well, first we feed it through the hydrotreater, right? And then I gotta get back to my notes here. You know, we do some minimum processing in order to turn it into the main product of the refinery. The vroom vroom beep beep gas, gasoline, right?

• 1:21:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, the gasoline we all know and love.

• 1:21:12Justin Roczniak?

  So the, this light naptha is largely what you would call alkanes, shorter chain alkanes, right? Saturated hydrocarbons. Used to call them paraffins. Does that make any sense to anyone?

• 1:21:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, I know what a hydrocarbon chain is.

• 1:21:30Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:21:31November Kelly?

  Sorry, I'm something about bottoms and tops.

• 1:21:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:33November Kelly?

  These are tops, but like, yeah, keep your, keep your mind on your work here.

• 1:21:37Justin Roczniak?

  But anyway, so a saturated hydrocarbon is a molecule where all of the Cs, those are in black here, bond with either other Cs or with Hs. That's carbon and hydrogen, right? Oh, I suppose I should have put a C here as opposed to a circle. Um, you know, so every, everything, it's saturated because there's like no open space where another atom could come in and say, hey, how you doing? Um, you know, cause sometimes that happens and that, that's.

• 1:22:10Liam McAnderson?

  Oh dear.

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  My god, sorry.

• 1:22:13Justin Roczniak?

  God damn it, Burt. That was Burt attempting to bond with an unsaturated hydrocarbon.

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  Jesus, man. Sorry.

• 1:22:32Justin Roczniak?

  I just, I just see like one flash of like an orange tail retreating.

• 1:22:38Justin Roczniak?

  Now, now attached to several carbon atoms. Yeah.

• 1:22:44Justin Roczniak?

  Let's talk about these carbon atoms. Exactly. So I want to get into like valence electrons or covalent bonding or all that bullshit. Cause I don't remember it too good. But your alkenes or excuse me, alkanes, alkenes are a different thing. Um, they're like CH4, that's methane or C2H6, that's ethane. C3H8, that's propane, right? But we want to talk about our good friend here, C8H18. Big long string hydrocarbon chain. Is, oh, this is nowhere near as long as it can get. Fuck. Yeah, no, this is octane, right? Like from Lego. Yeah.

• 1:23:25Justin Roczniak?

  So, so octane is a fairly common hydrocarbon. Uh, but it, it is, it can come in many forms, right? You may have heard of gasoline having an octane rating, right? That's a measure of how much it can be, you know, compressed in the engine essentially. Or that's a way to measure how much can be compressed. Um. Modern, high efficiency, high compression engines need high octane fuel because otherwise they're subject to engine knocking, which is when the fuel detonates at the wrong part of, you know, the suck, squeeze, bang, blow cycle.

• 1:24:02November Kelly?

  We used to have a technology to deal with engine knock, but due to woke, we're not allowed to.

• 1:24:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the liberals took the tetraath lead away from us.

• 1:24:12November Kelly?

  Goddamn government thinking it knows better than me. They, they took it away and now you're not allowed to use it anymore. And now you have to have a higher octane fuel.

• 1:24:22Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. Well, well, I mean, tetraath lead gasoline is high octane definition. Cause octane doesn't refer to the actual amount of octane, but rather sort of a proportional amount of compressibility. I don't fully understand it. I'm going to be honest with you. But there are plenty of chemicals that have an octane higher than 100, including some isomers of octane. We'll get to that in a second.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Aviation fuel is like 105 anyway.

• 1:24:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. And there's some, there's some that's even higher.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  Which is leaded to hell for the record, still in the US.

• 1:25:00Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:25:01November Kelly?

  That's why being around planes makes you dumber.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  That's why pilots are so right wing is because of all the lead in the fucking gas.

• 1:25:10Speaker 03

  You start off as like a tree hugging, like bleeding heart liberal when you start pilot school. And by the time you're done, you're like, ah, we should have, we gotta bomb them all.

• 1:25:20November Kelly?

  Well, of course, because bombing them all gets you more exposure to your beloved lead.

• 1:25:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, that's a good point. Wow.

• 1:25:26Liam McAnderson?

  I think I might add gas with depleted uranium just for some spice.

• 1:25:31Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know what the octane rating of depleted uranium is, but it's probably good.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  Struggling to get my 182 off the ground because I'm using 300 octane depleted uranium fuel.

• 1:25:45Justin Roczniak?

  No, it's not even depleted. Yeah. Put some, put some uranium hexafluoride in there. See what happens.

• 1:25:52Justin Roczniak?

  Everyone's favorite molecule.

• 1:25:55Justin Roczniak?

  Wait, you put six fluorines and it's uranium?

• 1:25:59November Kelly?

  What's the line about from, from that one chemistry book about fluorine, like fluorine compounds? You know, my advice in dealing with the, with a fluoride fire is a good pair of running shoes.

• 1:26:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So anyway, these high efficiency, high compression engines need high octane fuel. Otherwise they're subject to engine knocking, which is when the fuel combusts at the wrong part of the cycle. Right. Which, uh, you know, at the best makes a horrible sound. And at the worst makes the engine blow up, right?

• 1:26:32November Kelly?

  Bad.

• 1:26:33Justin Roczniak?

  That's why your Mercedes Benz only takes 93 octane.

• 1:26:37Liam McAnderson?

  And the GTI, yes.

• 1:26:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Liam McAnderson?

  That was a tune, but that was, that either you know it or there.

• 1:26:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. You got more compression. You need a better fuel. Yeah. So the octane rating is based around a hundred or a value of a hundred being a fuel, which is pure. Two, two, four, trimethylpentane. That's this guy here. Um, right. That's also C8H18. But yeah, you can see other molecules here at the top. This is regular old octane in one long chain. Uh, there's a lot of this in diesel fuel. Um, you know, this guy, as I said, two, two, four, trimethylpentane or isooctane. This is the standard for 100 octane. But most fuel friend, fuel brand, fuel blends are not purely this molecule.

• 1:27:24Justin Roczniak?

  Right. Uh, you also have different, uh, configurations like this guy down here is two, five dimethylhexane. Right. Which is also C8H18. They're all the same, uh, chemical formula, but it has more than 100 octane. Right. I don't fully understand the chemistry here, but you know, the important thing to know, these are isomers of, uh, the same chemical formula, right? It's the same amount of atoms just arranged in different ways.

• 1:27:56November Kelly?

  Yeah. And time was you could make a, a great deal of money being the person who understood this well enough to arrange the atoms in such a way that your Mercedes didn't explode.

• 1:28:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, exactly. And then, then, uh, along came a guy who said, what if we just put lead in there? And that worked better.

• 1:28:13Justin Roczniak?

  So for octane, there's a 23 different isomers, right? All of them have different properties. And so the purpose in the refinery of the isomerization unit right here, right, is to take the boring, low octane isomers and change them into the exciting, high octane isomers.

• 1:28:35November Kelly?

  And bang some atoms around until they get into the shapes you want.

• 1:28:38Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly, exactly. So you can then blend this into the final gasoline blend. Then you can get 93 octane and then you can finally make a fuel suitable for driving your BMW to the Topgolf and then park across six parking spots. Right? This sounds like a personal grievance, but yes.

• 1:29:00Justin Roczniak?

  And so, you know, how does this work? It's like almost every other process unit in a refinery. And you know, it's heat and a catalyst. It's just, it's all heat and a catalyst. I don't, I think the isomerization unit runs at atmospheric pressure. Some of them use pressure and heat and a catalyst. It's all heat and a catalyst. That's, you know, you know, there's a lot of complicated piping and safety devices. But when it comes right down to it, it's just heat and a catalyst, you know? The catalyst varies per unit for what it's going to do. I guess also people might ask, okay, what's your hydrotreater here? That's also along this process line. That is just a doohickey that removes the sulfur.

• 1:29:45Justin Roczniak?

  Cause we use low sulfur fuel for everything now. You know, and then I think on the next slide, there's another.

• 1:29:51November Kelly?

  The thing that decreases the amount of acid rain and increases the amount of climate change.

• 1:29:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, you know, everything's got trade offs.

• 1:30:00Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know, my, my, my roof is going to last longer. So I, you know, six to one, half a dozen of the other. I'm high enough on a hill that I'm not going to get flooded immediately. Anyway.

• 1:30:13November Kelly?

  Yeah, until you tear your own roof off because it's too hot, you know?

• 1:30:17Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, no, I'm American. I have air conditioning.

• 1:30:20November Kelly?

  That applies.

• 1:30:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:22November Kelly?

  Must be nice.

• 1:30:23Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, that's why we need this isomerization unit because we want the atoms to look different or the molecules to look different so that they have higher octane. Anyway, back to Victoria's slides.

• 1:30:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that was, thank you, Rouse. There's no way I would have remembered how to explain any of that. I was homeschooled, so my chemistry class was me self-teaching from a textbook as my mom got more stressed out.

• 1:30:50November Kelly?

  Why does it say Octane Corporation on the back of this?

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  The important part for, from BP's perspective, right, is you put no maintenance into this huge sprawling facility in Texas City and you get a hundred million dollars every month.

• 1:31:07November Kelly?

  Well, this is the, the, the whole refinery as a kind of process unit for capitalism.

• 1:31:12Justin Roczniak?

  No, it's multiple different process units.

• 1:31:16November Kelly?

  But metaphorically, wrongly, it's, it's a device producing United States dollars for shareholders.

• 1:31:22Justin Roczniak?

  So you take the whole refinery as a process unit of capitalism?

• 1:31:26November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's, it's sort of like a closed, yeah, exactly.

• 1:31:29Justin Roczniak?

  I'm gonna need a second.

• 1:31:30Speaker 03

  Texas City is kind of like a, just a geographic location where we isolate all of the nastiest things we do near a city in America. And then we also put them next to a place we haven't protected with a seawall. So if a hurricane comes through and just aims the right way, we, we cause the largest environmental disaster ever in history.

• 1:31:48Justin Roczniak?

  Amazing.

• 1:31:49Speaker 03

  And we have left this up to Texas to fund and build.

• 1:31:52Justin Roczniak?

  I'm gonna need another diagram to explain how the capitalist process works. This is the problem. This is the problem with Marx's capital. It should have been a large diagram rather than a book.

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  If he had had fucking slides, luxury automated space economy doesn't buy now.

• 1:32:10Justin Roczniak?

  Where does the refinery fit in all this?

• 1:32:13November Kelly?

  R.I.P. Karl Marx. You would have loved a searchable PowerPoint.

• 1:32:17Justin Roczniak?

  Are you imagine Karl Marx gets into Factorio?

• 1:32:21Speaker 03

  Do you think Karl Marx would have been a grungler?

• 1:32:24November Kelly?

  I think Karl Marx would have been a satisfactory guy more than factorio to answer the first question. To answer the second question, one of our surviving pieces of Marx's correspondence with Engels is one in which he volunteers that he has been lately dealing with extremely painful boils on his penis. And then sort of complains at length about his penis boils. I would think 100% he would have been hanging out with two girls. He may have been at the time.

• 1:32:51Justin Roczniak?

  Probably would have been a grungler, yeah.

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:55November Kelly?

  My other Marx fact is that apparently someone, another writer, I don't remember, who recounts this of him in a really baffled way, that occasionally when he was drunk, he would just start, he would just pick someone and just start saying, "I will annihilate you."

• 1:33:12Liam McAnderson?

  I've done that.

• 1:33:13November Kelly?

  And then get more and more drunk and keep saying this, "I will annihilate you," and making himself laugh. Until he was like completely insensible drunk and laughing, thinking about annihilating a guy.

• 1:33:27Justin Roczniak?

  So. It's actually, nah, so what you're saying is he would produce like a 50-page article called "Critique of the Grungler Program."

• 1:33:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, the grungreaser.

• 1:33:45Speaker 03

  Well, now that we've tackled that.

• 1:33:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:50November Kelly?

  Big tic on the to-do list, yeah. People think we don't script these, but we do.

• 1:33:54Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. Nah, that was on the to-do list from a while back.

• 1:33:58November Kelly?

  We don't script it, but we do have a big to-do list.

• 1:34:02Speaker 03

  This is, this is the isomerization unit at the Texas City plant, which refines the octanes, as Rod said. The simplest way to explain it is that the low-grade hydrocarbons, which are called raphinate.

• 1:34:16November Kelly?

  Insult just dropped.

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  Are implying that there's also a riffinate? The riff rap.

• 1:34:24November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's us. That's our role in the economy.

• 1:34:27Justin Roczniak?

  The raffinate, I believe, is derived from the archaic term, which is paraffin.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  Oh, OK.

• 1:34:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34November Kelly?

  Paraphinates.

• 1:34:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37November Kelly?

  Huh.

• 1:34:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they they pump this in.

• 1:34:40November Kelly?

  They cataclysmically cracked the first syllable off of that.

• 1:34:43Speaker 03

  To the to the raffinate splitter tower. And basically, like, parts of it get trickled down to the base and parts of it get, you know, fed back through the loop, more or less, again, until they are further refined. So this raffinate splitter tower is actually 170 feet tall, but only the bottom nine feet of the tower are designed to be filled with liquid. From there, the liquid, the higher distilled liquid is pumped to various storage tanks or recycled through the system for, you know, further refinement and blending into gaslights and all that kind of stuff. Next slide, please.

• 1:35:18Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, crap, hold on.

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  What happened?

• 1:35:20Justin Roczniak?

  I was I was busy annotating this and then I went to the next. Anyway.

• 1:35:27Speaker 03

  I apologize. Forgive me for shamelessly stealing from the CSB for this, but this is genuinely their greatest hits video. That like, they went back and re-rendered this in ultra-high def for the 15th anniversary celebration.

• 1:35:45November Kelly?

  You should never buy the fucking game of the year edition. It's such a fucking ripoff, you know?

• 1:35:51Speaker 03

  They made a whole new workplace training out of it and everything like this.

• 1:35:54November Kelly?

  I fucking hate when the CSB decides to re-release Texas City again and break all my mods.

• 1:36:04Justin Roczniak?

  If for some reason you don't know, you listen to this podcast, you don't know, CSB is the Chemical Safety Board. They have a good YouTube channel.

• 1:36:12November Kelly?

  It's like they're like us if we had production values and worked for the and had government money.

• 1:36:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and didn't make jokes.

• 1:36:19November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:20Speaker 03

  They, OK, they make a couple of jokes in their episode about Texas City. They're just really dry, right? Like, they have, they have, they have a sense of irony.

• 1:36:30Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, that's true.

• 1:36:31November Kelly?

  It's not as god, but you know.

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  They, my belief is that the people working for the Chemical Safety Board are the only people in the United States federal government who are actually, like, probably still communists. Like they, they got rid of most of us like from any kind of like government service job, you know, years and years ago, but I, I actually, based on the cadence of these videos and what, and how basically beginning with, well, it's later in the episode. I'm getting way too ahead of myself. I'm so excited about the CSB. God damn it.

• 1:37:02Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, again, it's uh,

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  This is basically-

• 1:37:05Justin Roczniak?

  One of the few things our tax dollars go to, which is good.

• 1:37:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is like, if you were trying to, you know that scene in Inglourious Basterds where he puts his hands up to count off three and it reveals that he's like not German? Asking a trans woman who is trying to be stealth about the CSB would be a way to get her to out herself.

• 1:37:28November Kelly?

  Yeah. What's your, what's your favorite three letter agency?

• 1:37:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  Be like, oh shit, no cis person would ever, ever admit to that. And yet every trans woman is always like, yeah.

• 1:37:40November Kelly?

  Yeah. Every, every trans woman has a favorite and least favorite three letter agency, CSB and TSA.

• 1:37:47Speaker 03

  Transition safety agency.

• 1:37:49November Kelly?

  No, no CSB agent ever groped me in an airport.

• 1:37:55Speaker 03

  Well, in any case, so this, this still is from that video, which you should go watch. Even if you like this episode, you should still go watch it. It's just like a really nice rendering, honestly.

• 1:38:04November Kelly?

  Yeah. It's, it's like this picture, except it moves and there are a lot more of them.

• 1:38:07Speaker 03

  And the, the, the guy who like transcribes his videos just has the best announcer voice, possibly in like American history.

• 1:38:17November Kelly?

  Oh yeah. Sure. I'm familiar.

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  Anyway, so at the bottom of the Raphinate Splitter Tower, there is this gauge, which you can see here. It is a glass tube that shows for the bottom nine feet of the tower that can be filled with liquid. And you're supposed to be able to look into it and see like, okay, where visually is this indicating how much fluid is in the bottom of the, in the tower? But BP hadn't cleaned this tube for like six or seven years. So it was too dirty to see inside of it. So they, and there was too little time to clean it on their turnaround schedule because they were, I don't know if this is the best place to put this in, but they were in the middle of doing a basically a refinery shutdown and restart process where they maintain a bunch of stuff

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  that has to be emptied out and then hurry as quickly as possible to boot everything back up and keep making a hundred million dollars a month. They were like, leave the tube.

• 1:39:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, fuck it. We don't need that. When you do, when you do refinery turnaround, that's always major, major heavy maintenance. And that means you have a lot more personnel on site. You might have temporary structures put up just for like additional offices or even like, you know, you know, it just played break rooms, all that kind of stuff. It, there's a lot more people on site at the refinery during the turnaround. Because you were either fully or partially taking offline the refinery. Maybe you're only taking offline some of the process units. But you try and get as much maintenance done as quickly as possible.

• 1:39:52Justin Roczniak?

  Because anytime these machines are turned off, you're, you're making gasoline less efficiently. Right? So you're losing a lot of money. Um, and also, you know, um, crap, what was the second thing I was gonna say? Some of these machines are difficult to shut down and start up. You know, I, it's, uh, so you, sometimes you don't wanna, you know, you, you, you wanna avoid like doing maintenance too frequently. Because the shutdown and startup processes, maybe they may take a long time. Or they may be dangerous, or they may be so on and so forth. Um, so the, the, um, yeah, a turnaround is just a quick,

• 1:40:35Justin Roczniak?

  but very intensive period of maintenance. Like everyone has to descend upon the process unit, you know, and, uh, like, like, like, I don't know, fire ants or something. And, uh, you know, just redo the whole thing. Chaos mode. Yeah. You have enabled chaos mode in your refinery. Yeah, okay. We need, we need, we, 1,000 man hours. Every man works for one hour.

• 1:41:03Speaker 03

  And restarting the isomerization unit is a known dangerous process because it's, you know, working with like explosive shit that you're heating and cooling and pumping all through, you know, a tower where we've got like a bunch of vapors and stuff. So it's not like they were, it's not like this is considered like a very safe part of the plant. It's considered difficult to start up. But in any case, this, this glass tube is dirty. We're not going to clean it. We're rushing and it doesn't matter because we've got two sensors to tell us how full it is inside. We've got like a, a high sensor, which is at like seven and a half feet. They've got like a high, high level alarm, which is like at eight feet. So it's fine.

• 1:41:42November Kelly?

  Off scale high and off scale higher.

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's still within the scale because like nine feet is technically the maximum, but you know, it's, it's whatever. Now, of course, the, the startup process for the isomerization unit, the written procedure is to fill it up to like, you know, four feet halfway. No one has ever done this because if the level drops too low, it can damage the heater, the heating furnace that's further downstream, because it'll like basically heat up the equipment instead of the liquid and, you know, cause damage. So they're always overfilling it. So they always fill the tower basically all the way up to nine feet to make sure that it doesn't, you know, drop as the startup begins and damage the equipment.

• 1:42:29Speaker 03

  So, and it very, very early in the morning at like 1:00 AM on March 24th, 2005.

• 1:42:36November Kelly?

  Oh boy. We finally got there, huh? After a mere hour 49.

• 1:42:42Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, I'm trying. I really.

• 1:42:43November Kelly?

  That's, that's on me. I, I said all of that stuff about the Iranian revolution.

• 1:42:49Speaker 03

  And octane, don't forget that.

• 1:42:51November Kelly?

  And octane.

• 1:42:52Speaker 03

  I'm worried that all the, all the fans are going to hate me because my, my episodes take forever.

• 1:42:56November Kelly?

  The fans, the fans love you as well. They should. The fans, on the other hand, would pick the, the sort of meat from my bleached bones.

• 1:43:06Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:43:07Justin Roczniak?

  I stopped.

• 1:43:08Speaker 03

  Anyway.

• 1:43:08Justin Roczniak?

  Well, no, no, they're, they're, they're hogs. They eat the bones too.

• 1:43:12November Kelly?

  Ah, fuck.

• 1:43:13Justin Roczniak?

  I learned that from the Guy Ritchie film Snatch.

• 1:43:15November Kelly?

  Yeah. Bricktop, a guy whose name is significantly hotter than he is.

• 1:43:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:23Speaker 03

  Um, so.

• 1:43:25November Kelly?

  You can't be called that. Like, you just, you just can't be called Bricktop. I'm sorry.

• 1:43:32Speaker 03

  They, they, they begin filling, they, we are filling this, uh, raphinate splitter tower to start the isomerization unit back up. They fill it to what they think is nine feet. Um, it is actually full of 13 feet of liquid. Of course, there's no way to tell how full it is because it turns out one of the two high level alarms was broken. So only the first one sounded and the level sensor is also reading just 99% full. And there's no way to visually check because the glass tube is too dirty. So they're like, yeah, sure. It's 99% full. Cool. It's like eight feet and, you know, 11 inches. Sweet. Let's keep going. So 5:00 AM rolls around.

• 1:44:13Speaker 03

  The guy who's running the ISOM startup in the satellite, uh, control room, briefs the central control room further away. Um, where he thinks the level inside the raphinate splitter tower is, and he leaves work an hour early. Don't know why. He was just like, eh, fuck it.

• 1:44:29November Kelly?

  You just can't. It's allowed.

• 1:44:30Speaker 03

  This job sucks in Texas city.

• 1:44:32Justin Roczniak?

  You're all the people.

• 1:44:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, like I, that's, he, he should, if it, if it sucks, hit the bricks.

• 1:44:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:40Speaker 03

  And I can guarantee you Texas city sucks.

• 1:44:42Justin Roczniak?

  There are situations you can just walk out of.

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  So at 6:00 AM, the guy who's going to take over the ISOM startup in the central control room comes in for his 30th straight 12 hour shift in a row.

• 1:44:59November Kelly?

  God damn, that's, that can't be good for you.

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  The CSB animation has the guy plop down in the chair and stare at the ceiling, which I believe is. True to life.

• 1:45:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  He reads a single line note and very cryptic information regarding the state of the raphinate splitter tank from the previous shift. And he's like, all right, generally speaking, the startup process isn't supposed to like be handled, like handed off like asynchronously like this. So he's already kind of starting at a disadvantage and then they gave him nothing to go off of. So it's like, okay, cool. I guess, I guess it's 99% full. Sure.

• 1:45:38Justin Roczniak?

  This is some extremely bad procedure to do it, you know, A, at a weird time of day and B, have the things, yeah, just split it through a shift. Yeah.

• 1:45:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. To add on to things, the head day shift supervisor arrives to the central control room at 7:00 AM over an hour late for his shift and never got briefed on anything because because he never saw the night shift controller because he came in so damn late. So nobody has any fucking clue what's happening. This is important. Next slide, please. Now, as the day shift begins, against best practice, they kept the automatic tower level regulator bell.

• 1:46:18Liam McAnderson?

  We love when something goes against best practice, right?

• 1:46:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so the supervisor was told that the heavy raphinate storage tanks were almost full and so they couldn't pump out heavy raphinate. But the operators beneath that supervisor believed the light raphinate storage tanks weren't supposed to be filled. So they are refeeding the light raphinate back into the feed. The heavy raphinate isn't going anywhere. So there's like basically like no outflow because of this miscommunication.

• 1:46:49Justin Roczniak?

  We have, we have, we have nothing going out the bottom and the stuff that comes out of the top is now being recirculated around and being sent back in.

• 1:46:59November Kelly?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:47:00Justin Roczniak?

  Along with, sure, I assume new product.

• 1:47:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:47:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:04Speaker 03

  They turn on the furnace burners and they crank up the raphinate in inflow and they begin the startup again at 9:50 AM. So yeah, we have no outflow and we have tons of inflow. At 11:00 AM, the supervisor of the central control unit leaves for a personal emergency and leaves no one watching this during its most dangerous period where they're pumping in explosive liquids.

• 1:47:28Speaker 03

  To try and get this process started again.

• 1:47:30Justin Roczniak?

  My understanding is the supervisor, the reason he came in late is he was having a very, very bad day.

• 1:47:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:37November Kelly?

  About to get worse, I feel like.

• 1:47:39Justin Roczniak?

  Wow, he won't be there for that.

• 1:47:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's one guy left watching three different refinery units, including this one. At this point, at about 11:00 AM, the tower, which is 170 feet tall and designed to hold nine feet of liquid, contains 67 feet of liquid. It is indicating that it has eight and a half feet full.

• 1:48:03November Kelly?

  Me, me, when I say I'll have a few small drinks.

• 1:48:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:48:10Speaker 03

  A few small raphinate.

• 1:48:14November Kelly?

  Oh, you know.

• 1:48:15Speaker 03

  So they, they just keep pumping in more liquid. And the level sensor, which is, has no fucking clue what it's doing at this point, starts reading that it has less in the tank as time goes on, the level gets higher. And because of the way they have this control room set up, there's no one screen that they can look at and say, okay, we have this much coming in and this much coming out, right? It's all split into different data feeds. So the operator who is currently watching three process units misses the fact that there is tons of raphinate going in and basically nothing coming out because there's so many different places for it to come out and in from, that there's no way to simplify this down to, okay, how much is going in and how much is going out? Just like, give me that

• 1:48:59Speaker 03

  information. That's not indicated anywhere. And even if there was indicated somewhere, the heavy raphinate outflow reading is wrong. It indicates that there are 4,100 barrels per day of heavy raphinate flowing out of the manual control valve, when currently there is none flowing out. So the, even if, even when you look at that, it's like, oh, it's not that bad. We still have a bunch pumping out. It's no big deal. There's nothing.

• 1:49:25November Kelly?

  You have unwittingly created a kind of closed loop.

• 1:49:28Speaker 03

  Yes. Meanwhile, the level.

• 1:49:31Justin Roczniak?

  It's an open loop, but it's an open loop in so much you can add product, you can't remove it.

• 1:49:36November Kelly?

  Oh, good.

• 1:49:37Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, you can remove it, but you won't wake up.

• 1:49:43November Kelly?

  The, the five year plan for nuclear energy generation has been fulfilled in point zero zero zero.

• 1:49:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:49:51Speaker 03

  This slide comes directly from the CSB report. This shows the 104 PM status of the Raphinate Splitter Tower, which is that there are, there's 158 feet of liquid inside the tower designed to hold nine feet. And the control board display has now dropped, showing that there is less than eight feet of liquid inside of it. So it's just fucking lying. Even if this guy wasn't like, even if the supervisor wasn't having the worst day of his life. And, you know, there wasn't one guy watching free process units. And they had consolidated some of this information to a single screen. The equipment is just so poorly maintained that it's just lying. And nobody can go look and check because again, the glass tube is dirty. Next slide, please.

• 1:50:36Speaker 03

  At 12:41 PM, a high pressure alarm goes off in the Raphinate Splitter Tower as the 100 plus feet of liquid inside it compresses the gas left at the top. And so there's, you know, there's sensors to indicate like, hey, you might have like an explosive situation here because the gas inside is too high pressure. And the controllers are like, what the fuck is going on? This doesn't make any sense at all. There's seven feet of liquid in here. And, you know, there's no indication that we've like run this process in a way that would cause like a buildup of high pressure gas. And they're like, okay, whatever. So they open up a manual release valve to vent the gases to what are, what is known as a blow down drum.

• 1:51:17November Kelly?

  The, the sort of oopsie valve, you know?

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:20November Kelly?

  The, the process unit for when, when you have fucked up so bad, you know?

• 1:51:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's, that's the, eh, you spend it somewhere and we'll handle that later. Don't worry about that.

• 1:51:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. In a civilized refinery and like a first world country. There's usually a flame at the top to burn off all the combustible left in the, whatever you're venting, because it presumably it's going to be some sort of like hydrocarbon dry product. It's going to be really flammable. But because this is BP, they've been using the same design since the 50s. And it's just a vent that just pushes the chemicals straight to atmosphere. Whatever. It's Texas City.

• 1:51:53November Kelly?

  Just like a dog.

• 1:51:54Justin Roczniak?

  Blow off, baby. Yes. Get out of here.

• 1:51:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's Texas City. Like, what are you going to do? Make it worse? I mean. I like Texas city is one of the places where like when right wing grifters are like, hey, you can buy a house in this like cool 50s neighborhood for like $40,000. It's like, oh yeah. Yeah. Your next door neighbor is a refinery who's like, it would be a super fun site if the EPA had inspected it in the past 30 years, but they're not allowed in.

• 1:52:22Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know, it's that that's unfortunately the case with all operating refineries.

• 1:52:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:29Justin Roczniak?

  It's kind of hard not to do that.

• 1:52:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. It's just, but like, that's the thing, right? It's like, you know, Texas city is like, it's a, I used to live like 20 minutes north of it and I would still occasionally get the shelter in place. Um, oh, alerts when something would explode and we'd be downwind and they'd be like, hey, there might be some nasty fumes coming your way.

• 1:52:50Justin Roczniak?

  Don't breathe those in, kids.

• 1:52:52November Kelly?

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  Texas. Yeah. Most of Houston, just like, you know, once a year, it's kind of like when, you know, um, the, the energy just goes out for a week or whatever. It's like, you know, once a year, the air is not breathable and then you get hit by a hurricane. It's fine.

• 1:53:06Justin Roczniak?

  It is funny to think of like some, some of those like, uh, trad fascist guys trying to get their 1950s Levittown experience and it's right next to the refinery.

• 1:53:19Speaker 03

  Now, like when I, my, my years and years ago, when I had, when I was dating somebody and I, we lived in Houston, we like looked at houses together and we looked at a, we looked at a place that we could actually afford. Um, and it was like suspiciously close to Texas city. And we were both like, oh, these houses are really cute and they seem like really nice. They're pretty cheap. And then I was like, hmm, I don't know though. Like see the flare stacks and it threw over the fence in your backyard.

• 1:53:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. It's the problem with, uh, Philadelphia energy solutions leaving. The rent's going to go up everywhere. The bellwether district. Oh, God.

• 1:53:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. So in any case, um, you know, they, they vent this atmosphere and they finally opened the outflow valve for the raphinate to send heavy raphinate to the storage tanks. Because they're like, shit, we should probably like, empty this as quickly as we can. They have no clue what the flow level is at this point, because again, it's been lying to them this entire time. By 104 PM, the tower has 158 feet of raphinate inside it. And it is the first time all day that the heavy raphinate outflow actually like matches what's being put into the tower. But again, they have no idea of this. So finally, we've achieved like neutrality, right? Like the heavy raphinate inflow is finally the same as what they're pumping out of it.

• 1:54:39Speaker 03

  So it should theoretically stay at 158 feet. It doesn't. The reason is because as they've opened the outflow valve, the, the raphinate has to flow through a heat exchanger before it can go to the, um, storage tanks. And this heat exchanger is also shared with the inflow loop. And so it, because all of this hot raphinate rushes through the heat exchanger, the inflow temperature rises dramatically and the heated liquid inside the tower makes all the gas left in it and like liquid expand and fill all 170 feet of the tower. Basically in this, like the blink of an eye, more or less.

• 1:55:19Justin Roczniak?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:55:22November Kelly?

  We just vent this safely out through the explosion machine. That's gone poorly.

• 1:55:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So this, this has a clever feature where when you pump out the stuff on the bottom, right? Because you have to heat the, uh, incoming light naphtha anyway. It goes through a heat exchanger and then into a heater. So you can use the residual heat to heat the incoming product while also, you know, cooling the outgoing product, right? So, you know, okay, this is very clever in normal circumstances. But, uh, here, not so good, not so good. I want to avoid that. Yeah.

• 1:56:00Speaker 03

  If you've filled your tower with 158 feet of liquid, it can be bad. But yeah.

• 1:56:05November Kelly?

  Learning this for the first time.

• 1:56:07Speaker 03

  So they, they instantaneously basically expand all of the liquid inside the tower. And you can see on like this temperature diagram. Bad.

• 1:56:17Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm. Yeah, no, this is probably, I mean, you're, you're probably, well, I doubt they're near like the supercritical fluid at this point, but, but you are, you are doing bad stuff to, to all of this.

• 1:56:30November Kelly?

  You're doing stuff to the, to the liquids that you've never really thought you, you, they, they ever would have done to.

• 1:56:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, this is not, this is outside of, uh, outside the, the design constraints of this device.

• 1:56:44Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, there are so many things that should have stopped this process before we got here, but nothing did. So we're here. So next slide, please. So the raffinate splitter tower is now, all 170 feet of it are completely full of liquid. So there is a tube at the top meant to vent gases that now is full of hot liquid. Um, so the, the pressurized heated liquid raffinate works its way through this tube, blasts directly through all three safety valves, um, and allows direct flow of the liquid to the blowdown stack. This isn't like the, the worst case scenario, because there is like a sewer at the base of the blowdown sta- blowdown drum,

• 1:57:25Speaker 03

  that is meant to just like collect all of the runoff, like liquids created by the plant and then we, you know, we sort of threw and disposed of later. So you're kind of like, all right, that's, you know, we can, we can deal with some of this. Unfortunately, um, 50, it's 52,000 gallons of liquid, which is much more than it's intended to deal with. So, uh, these, these flow into the, the blowdown drum and the liquid outflow alarm triggers and the operator's like, oh shit, there's like liquid in the, in the safety relief valves. That's crazy. Why do we have that? Unfortunately, the high level alarm for the blowdown drum doesn't trigger. So there's supposed to be inside the blowdown drum itself, another secondary like level alarm for your liquid is about to overflow.

• 1:58:10Speaker 03

  And that doesn't work. So they're like-

• 1:58:13November Kelly?

  Randy, your sticks alarm.

• 1:58:15Speaker 03

  What?

• 1:58:15November Kelly?

  Don't worry about it.

• 1:58:18November Kelly?

  I'm referencing a Tumblr post.

• 1:58:20Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, Jesus. I would, I would describe that as the hit the bricks alarm action.

• 1:58:24November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Get out. Yeah. Bye. Bye.

• 1:58:28November Kelly?

  Leave. Start lacing them up.

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Justin Roczniak?

  Your, your watch has ended.

• 1:58:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:34Justin Roczniak?

  It's time to leave.

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, because, you know, this is, this is, it should, you should never be triggering this. And yeah, that should, that would should be cause for incredible immediate alarm. But it doesn't trigger. So they're like, what is, we, we still fundamentally have some sort of gas problem. But we also have some sort of liquid problem that isn't the most pressing thing. What's going on? And they're, so they're kind of like, what the hell's going on? We don't know. They're, they're trying to figure out what's happening. And then a geyser of hot raphinate erupts from the top of the blowdown stack, uh, roughly 50 feet high, flooding the entire ISOM unit with incredibly flammable, high octane fuel vapor, um, which is bad. That's a failure mode.

• 1:59:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I mean, the, the, the chemical that caused this problem is the, the, the, the heavy raphinate, right? But you have to remember that this is generally, you know, on the lighter end of the petroleum spectrum. So, uh,

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  Well, and it's also they've been mixing.

• 1:59:31Justin Roczniak?

  This is bad. You don't want to be around this.

• 1:59:33Speaker 03

  They've also been mixing the lighter raphinate back into it, too.

• 1:59:35Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  So it's all of it. It's just 52,000 gallons of, uh, you know,

• 1:59:41Justin Roczniak?

  You are now surrounded by aerosolized racing fuel.

• 1:59:46Speaker 03

  Yes. Oh. Yeah. Um, and of course they should trigger an alarm.

• 1:59:51November Kelly?

  Good lead high off of this either.

• 1:59:53Speaker 03

  No, you're, you're going into the trash. Now, here's, here's where the, this is really where the Victoria special interest actually kicks into high gear for this episode. 25 feet away from the blowdown stack was a parked and running pickup truck that happened to have a diesel engine. Now, do we know what happens when a diesel engine is fed air that is full of flammable vapors?

• 2:00:17November Kelly?

  Yeah. So the thing about diesel engines, right, is that they just kind of combust everything that's around them, right? That's why they're kind of useful and they just kind of want to keep running.

• 2:00:26Justin Roczniak?

  They don't, uh, they don't need a spark plug. Yeah.

• 2:00:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Exactly.

• 2:00:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they don't need very high octane fuel either.

• 2:00:32Speaker 03

  So the intake. Uh oh, this feels like foreshadowing. The intake of this truck begins sucking in, you know, literally like aerosolized.

• 2:00:40November Kelly?

  Going to truck engine Valhalla as the kind of air around you fills with racing fuel.

• 2:00:48Speaker 03

  Doing the shiny and chrome bit, but as a vehicle.

• 2:00:52November Kelly?

  Spraying like quick start, like high octane shit directly into the like radiator grill.

• 2:00:58Justin Roczniak?

  It is one of the funniest things a diesel engine can do is a runaway engine.

• 2:01:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, which this truck immediately does.

• 2:01:07November Kelly?

  Yeah, my, my truck is fucking melted down.

• 2:01:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, we can't stop this.

• 2:01:14Speaker 03

  You know, the workers are like, what the guys in the truck are like, oh God, we gotta shut it off. And of course they can't because once a diesel engine is running away, you can't stop it without, you know, cutting off the, all of the, the air supply to it, which they can't do because the air is full of gas.

• 2:01:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the air, the air is gasoline. Yeah.

• 2:01:31Speaker 03

  The workers run away. The pickup truck backfires. Next slide, please. At 1:20 PM on March 25th, 2005, the ISAM unit at the Texas City refinery explodes when the backfiring truck ignited the massive cloud of explosive gas that it's.

• 2:01:47November Kelly?

  Last, last words before being vaporized. Hey, whose truck is that?

• 2:01:52Speaker 03

  The force of the explosion broke windows three quarters of a mile away. People in Galveston felt buildings shake. Galveston is not connected by land to Texas City.

• 2:02:02Justin Roczniak?

  That's all the way across the bay. Yeah.

• 2:02:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. 15 people die. 180 people are injured. 43,000 people have to shelter in place because of the explosive toxic gas cloud.

• 2:02:15Justin Roczniak?

  Jesus.

• 2:02:17Speaker 03

  Next slide, please. Now, do you remember earlier when we went on that tangent about this being a turnaround?

• 2:02:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:02:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so.

• 2:02:28Speaker 03

  BP had brought in thousands of contract workers to help with this process. And they just kind of put them wherever they threw up temporary trailers full of offices.

• 2:02:40Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:02:40Speaker 03

  Anywhere they could find on the refinery. And they decided to put like a dozen of them directly next to the ISAM unit. And didn't tell any of these contract workers what was happening or that it was starting up or that the ISAM unit was dangerous. Or that things could, you know, that they were within basically the blast radius of an incredibly dangerous process.

• 2:03:01Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, you are sort of in a refinery situation. It's like, well, we can put you next to this incredibly dangerous unit. Or we could put you next to a dozen other incredibly dangerous.

• 2:03:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, but putting like temporary, temporary trailers next to this does feel like not the best strategy, you know?

• 2:03:19Justin Roczniak?

  Well, then you put it next to, again, the other incredibly dangerous unit of some kind. The whole place is, the whole place could blow up at any time. It comes with the job.

• 2:03:30Speaker 03

  Really, that just describes living in Texas City, I suppose. Well, of course, nobody ever fired the alarm for, you know, hey, the whole plant's going to explode. So nobody had any idea what was happening. And they had 12 people inside one of the trailers having a meeting while the ISAM startup was taking place.

• 2:03:48Speaker 03

  And they all died because the trailer was instantly destroyed by the explosive cloud.

• 2:03:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:03:54Speaker 03

  So, you know, three more people died from a trailer in the satellite control facility. So like if they had had permanent structures or not positioned, mobile homes so close to like a tower full of explosive liquid, people would have lived through it. The CSB seems to think that this was something that was actually doable on site here. Like, I know that, yes, the whole thing is dangerous, but they did not need to, like, it was literally like stones throw 50 feet away from the Raphinate Splitter Tower. They had these trailers.

• 2:04:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I guess that's going to be a question of whether, you know, you could have moved this temporary structure like across, you know, another set of pipelines somewhere that's like less hazardous.

• 2:04:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:34Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, you know, I'm also kind of thinking like, well, you know, there's, there's a lot of things in the refinery that are hazardous, though, you know, it's, I don't know. Kind of comes with the territory. Also, this does also seem like, well, no one really thought that one through.

• 2:04:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the CSB said, in addition to a lot of other things, that they should have not put the, they should have known better than to put the temporary trailers there. And BP actually, like, had rules regarding where temporary structures could be placed. They just didn't really listen to them. So.

• 2:05:03Justin Roczniak?

  That's probably it, yeah.

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, next slide, please. You can see kind of like the extent of the damage to the trailers in the nearby area. Because, again, they were really fucking close. So the other reason that this, you know, became so catastrophic was that part of the, part of it was the 1950s era blowdown drum and stack design, which they had kept for decades because it was cheaper. Over the 10 years leading up to this specific disaster, there were eight times that the blowdown drum had vented dangerously, including six that had resulted in a big ass cloud of explosive vapors at ground level.

• 2:05:43November Kelly?

  Just you're, you're sort of like in the double wide next to this being like, oh, that's the thing that kills us instantly, almost killing us instantly again.

• 2:05:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:51November Kelly?

  Oh, you.

• 2:05:52Justin Roczniak?

  Bad, bad situation.

• 2:05:53November Kelly?

  I love doing refinery work, I guess.

• 2:05:56Justin Roczniak?

  You know, the worst situation possible is you're like a model engine hobbyist and you have your tiny, like, diesel engine running on your desk and it runs away and kills you.

• 2:06:06November Kelly?

  Yeah, first person to be killed by a, like, sterling steam engine desk toy. I, I mean, based on my, based on my kind of like menswear browsing lately, I feel like all of these guys were currently on different subreddits and like the last thing one of those guys was doing was writing a really a civic post on r/goodyearwelt, so.

• 2:06:28Justin Roczniak?

  Wow, it was, it was 2005, so they were on something awful, but yes.

• 2:06:34Speaker 03

  God. My wife used to use that site.

• 2:06:37November Kelly?

  Everyone used to. Everyone used to, yeah.

• 2:06:39Speaker 03

  I never used it. I didn't know what something awful was.

• 2:06:42November Kelly?

  You're better off not, not knowing. But it does offer you.

• 2:06:46Justin Roczniak?

  You pay 10 bucks and your brain gets destroyed.

• 2:06:48November Kelly?

  You, you, you pay a guy who's later gonna die in a basement $10 and as a result of that, you get to experience the wide world of sports and you get to experience emotions the likes of which you will never experience, you couldn't experience before and will never experience again, like the guy who I'm beefing with on the internet died in Benghazi, or potentially the guy who I'm beefing with on the internet got blown up in Texas City.

• 2:07:13Speaker 03

  Well, in any case, they changed the regulations after this to require the flare blow off instead of the, instead of just letting vapors blow directly into the atmosphere, because that would have probably helped with aspects.

• 2:07:25November Kelly?

  Safety regulations are written in Well, There's Your Problem episodes.

• 2:07:28Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 2:07:30November Kelly?

  Safety regulations are written in FYAD, right?

• 2:07:33Speaker 03

  The internal BP produced report found, quote, "The Texas City refinery had a culture of risk-taking coupled with a failure to understand the process safety implications of prior incidents. A long tradition of failure to comply with simple procedures, the desire to avoid conflict within its organization, and a penchant for placing persons in key roles who lacked adequate professional training." Ideal. End quote. They identified four specific executives who they were like, "You should fire these guys. It was their fault." And then BP fired none of them, but did fire a bunch of other lower-level people as scapegoats.

• 2:08:07November Kelly?

  Magnificent. Wow.

• 2:08:10Speaker 03

  The EPA did actually get a criminal federal Clean Air Act conviction out of this and a pretty hefty, I think it was $50 million fine.

• 2:08:18November Kelly?

  Exploding is something that the air does when it isn't clean, I guess.

• 2:08:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. This is also, like, so I mentioned the CSB video earlier and how they made a greatest hits, like, re-release for this disaster. And this really kind of was the heavyweight event of, like, the modern study of process safety, because there are so many parts of this, like, entire process that failed. And it also was when the then relatively new Chemical Safety Board got to, like, really go dive deep.

• 2:08:51November Kelly?

  This was their Al Capone, you know?

• 2:08:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. They sent 13 investigators to the Texas City site. They were there for months. They interviewed hundreds of people. Their final report from this was 300 pages long, with a slew of recommendations for not just BP, obviously. But really, this is kind of where they were like, "This is all of our safety tips for all refineries, all processes that you, that have, you know, anything similar to, like, this kind of danger, this is what you should be doing."

• 2:09:19November Kelly?

  Plus, it's where they got big on YouTube, which is why.

• 2:09:21Speaker 03

  It literally is. Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:09:24November Kelly?

  Once you, once you get that silver play button, it changes a person or an institution, I guess.

• 2:09:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, no, this is when the CSB went from, like, you know.

• 2:09:33November Kelly?

  The CSB's got a gold one. I'm checking this now.

• 2:09:38Speaker 03

  The backwoods, sort of like, you know, little tiny government agency, nobody really cares about to your, your favorite YouTuber's favorite YouTuber.

• 2:09:46November Kelly?

  Four, four hundred and four thousand subscribers. So obviously mugging us, which I, yeah, they're fair enough. Cause they have the production. They are literally a state actor. We are a non-state actor.

• 2:09:56Justin Roczniak?

  This is true. Yeah. Um, well, I mean, interesting. I mean, you know, the one thing is the way these, these, uh, oil refineries and chemical plants have been regulated before was largely, you know, by private trade organizations. Like, I'm not so familiar with, uh, refineries. I know chemical plants was largely, um, uh, what is it? I think it started out as the manufacturing chemists, chemists organization and it became American Chemistry Council now, which sort of was like, okay, we're going to regulate internally to make sure that no one fucks up so bad that the government has to get involved. And, um, didn't quite work in a lot of, uh, situations. Um.

• 2:10:36November Kelly?

  Well, I.

• 2:10:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. CSB was founded in ninety-six.

• 2:10:39November Kelly?

  Yeah. And they can't even, they can't even get a gold play button. Cause you gotta have a million subscribers for that. That's fucked up.

• 2:10:46Justin Roczniak?

  I would like to know where the CSB's, uh, silver play button is though.

• 2:10:50November Kelly?

  You could probably FOIA that. You could almost certainly write to them even, even without FOIA and just be like, hey, presumably you have one. Is it, do you keep hanging up in the office? Like?

• 2:11:01Justin Roczniak?

  They gotta have it hanging up in the office. They must've like sent it, sent a couple to a couple people. Um.

• 2:11:06Speaker 03

  I will note that like on the note of the, you know, the dramatic irony at the CSB, they specifically went out of their way to mention the 12 employees who were like, a bunch of the employees who were killed in the explosion had just gotten back from a lunch that they were, they were celebrating thirty accident free days.

• 2:11:26November Kelly?

  Oh, God, yeah. That's, you hate the dramatic irony. Okay. So the CSB literally has a press release about them getting their play button.

• 2:11:36November Kelly?

  Which includes-

• 2:11:37Speaker 03

  Good for them!

• 2:11:38November Kelly?

  The most, I mean, seriously, they've got like, uh, like 10 paragraphs of them hyping themselves up. And honestly, God bless them for it. Plus one photo that's the most clearly like government employee doing this on their phone. Photo of the play button just sitting in an office, like against a desk. It's, it's wonderful.

• 2:11:55Speaker 03

  Look, they, I fully admit they did a better job covering this disaster than I did.

• 2:11:59November Kelly?

  Well, again, they have government money. They're a federal agency. If I were a federal agency, I would have a team doing like CGI for, uh, for this shit.

• 2:12:09Speaker 03

  If I had been allowed to spend like six months and like hire 12 people to help me cover this, uh, the slides might've been better. Who knows?

• 2:12:16November Kelly?

  Also, also, to be fair, like the, the CSB, I, it comes with benefits, right? Like the CSB investigators aren't allowed to get on the thing and say that they're kind of like algorithmically depressed over Christmas, right? That's unprofessional when they do it.

• 2:12:32Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know. They, they put out videos less frequently than we do, so.

• 2:12:37Justin Roczniak?

  At least right now.

• 2:12:39November Kelly?

  Well, they can, they, people understand that it takes them time, whereas we're just, it's just like, when do we have three free hours in front of a microphone? And how long does it take Devon to do the heavy lifting of editing us?

• 2:12:50Justin Roczniak?

  Well, and you gotta write the slides.

• 2:12:52November Kelly?

  And you gotta write the slides. That's true. Yeah.

• 2:12:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

• 2:12:56Speaker 03

  In this one, I had to figure out how refineries work, which I didn't even know before. It was easy back when I did the car episodes, because people wouldn't get mad at me a lot. Now I've got like geologists mad at me, because I don't know what unsorted glacial till is. I'm sure people are gonna be like, if Victoria, you dumbass, raffinate doesn't work like that. I'm gonna be like, shit, you're probably right.

• 2:13:15November Kelly?

  Listen, fucking, uh, the, uh, when I said-

• 2:13:20Speaker 03

  I will respond-

• 2:13:22November Kelly?

  Took mercury pills, what I meant was antimony, you sons of bitches. I knew it was wrong the second I said it, because I didn't correct myself. You fuckers are in the comments.

• 2:13:35Justin Roczniak?

  You all need to stop reading the comments. Why are you reading the comments?

• 2:13:39November Kelly?

  No, no.

• 2:13:41Speaker 03

  You got, I want to know if people like me or not. I will take all constructive criticism labeled, you can send it directly to me as long as it's written on a Lego box for Octan wind turbine sets.

• 2:13:54November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, I also accept criticism in the form of Lego sets.

• 2:13:59Liam McAnderson?

  Same.

• 2:14:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:00Speaker 03

  Like getting, getting a Lego box, just like, got like metallic sharpie, you hack bitch. And, but I'm like, ooh.

• 2:14:06November Kelly?

  I'm, I also, I also, I also accept hate mail in the form of gold play buttons. If anyone wants to give us another like eighty, eight hundred thousand. How do you even do that without resorting to like the grotesquely on it?

• 2:14:20Liam McAnderson?

  Mr. B, Mr. B shit, yeah.

• 2:14:21November Kelly?

  Mr. Bist, yeah. How do you avoid doing Mr. Bisk stuff? How do, how do you avoid doing Cocoon Melon? You know, like, I, I don't, I'm not the best content creator in the world, manifestly, but like, I, I, I feel like the way that we do things is relatively ethical. Maybe we got to start like, um, just ruining kids' attention span or something.

• 2:14:45Justin Roczniak?

  All right, this video could have been 10 minutes and have four more explosions in it.

• 2:14:50November Kelly?

  Could have had subway surfers down the side.

• 2:14:52Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly, exactly. I don't know. I think unfortunately, um, we're all adults here. We have to present it in this fashion.

• 2:15:00November Kelly?

  It's true.

• 2:15:02Speaker 03

  Next slide, please. You may ask yourself, did BP learn anything?

• 2:15:07November Kelly?

  I saw, I saw that one Deepwater Horizon movie, so no.

• 2:15:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, in 2006, BP spilled 212,252 gallons of oil directly from the Alaskan Prudhoe Pipeline onto the ground. Because cost cutting caused inspectors to miss corrosion in the pipe.

• 2:15:26November Kelly?

  On the ground where oil is not supposed to be.

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:15:29November Kelly?

  Supposed to be in the ground.

• 2:15:30Justin Roczniak?

  Except in Los Angeles. Yeah.

• 2:15:34Speaker 03

  In 2007.

• 2:15:35Justin Roczniak?

  Notably not in Alaska.

• 2:15:37Speaker 03

  A hundred and forty-three workers were injured when toxic fumes were released from the Texas City plant again. Um, and here we go. This is, 2007 was also the year that John Brown resigned from BP in disgrace. Not because he kept killing employees or poisoned like the Alaskan prairie, but because he was gay and lied to a court about it. Because he desperately wanted to stay in the closet.

• 2:15:58November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, he, he was getting like injunctions against his ex to try and like, you know, stay in the closet. It was bad. Um, and I mean, that's a real sort of time capsule of, of, you know, pre sort of even Gen one DEI. You know?

• 2:16:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, woke one, you could poison the environment and be gay. Woke two, we're gonna try to fix both. We're gonna try to fix it so you can't, you can still be gay, but you can't poison the environment.

• 2:16:28November Kelly?

  Yeah, as opposed to, as opposed to anti-woke, which is the opposite of that, where you can poison the environment so long as you're not gay.

• 2:16:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, so in 2009, OSHA, uh, actually went to the Texas City plant, found hundreds of violations and fined BP eighty-seven million dollars. It was the highest ever fine levied by OSHA against any employer. And in 2010, the company was charged with running malfunctioning equipment and poisoning the air surrounding the Texas City plant on a systemic basis, instead of shutting down and losing.

• 2:17:00Speaker 03

  Then, uh, Mark Wahlberg wasn't on the oil rig, so we got, we got Deepwater Horizon.

• 2:17:09Speaker 03

  Um, so in 2012, they sold the plant to Marathon, uh, after killing four more employees. So I guess they kind of learned something, which is that they should make that plant somebody else's problem.

• 2:17:19November Kelly?

  Incredible.

• 2:17:20Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, that's, that's a lot, it's a lot of people to kill in that amount of time. I mean, ideally, you know, the amount of people to kill is zero, obviously. Bad safety record.

• 2:17:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean.

• 2:17:31Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, that's very bad.

• 2:17:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, consider like in a decade span, they had killed like 25 people. That's

• 2:17:38November Kelly?

  You know, that's just the people they killed explosively. If you count the sort of like downstream stuff.

• 2:17:43Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, if you look at like, if you I'm sure that cancer stats for Texas City are probably like, yeah, you have every cancer.

• 2:17:50November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 2:17:50Speaker 03

  It'd be it's Texas City. We should treat like Chernobyl, where we build the sarcophagus around it and evacuate everybody. But since we are, we would have to admit then that perhaps a petrochemical industry has negative effects. We can't do that. Um, and so instead we just sell the plant and say, oh, no, we I promise you safety is our primary concern. Um, please continue making a hundred million dollars a day. Uh, also where you can no longer watch The Sopranos in the break room.

• 2:18:16Justin Roczniak?

  It's fucked up. Yeah. Well, what did we learn?

• 2:18:18Speaker 03

  Don't work at a refinery.

• 2:18:20November Kelly?

  Especially don't work for BP. Jesus.

• 2:18:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but it was like it was like the highest paying internship at Drexel.

• 2:18:30Justin Roczniak?

  People made like 30 bucks an hour and you got to climb up the cool process units. Oh, my God. Everyone wanted the the PES uh internship because it was so cool. Um, you made so much money.

• 2:18:45November Kelly?

  In the I mean, listen, don't don't look at me when I was when I was in in law school. If you didn't want to do um corporate law, the only thing anybody really wanted to do was was prosecution. So. You know?

• 2:18:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:59Speaker 03

  In the well, there's your problem. Um, like horror movie, we can be certain that Roz would not be the final girl.

• 2:19:06November Kelly?

  Well, if if if things had worked very differently, if we hadn't done the podcast, it's well, there's your petroleum and and, you know, you you're sort of like doing that. And I I'm doing well, there's your prosecutor.

• 2:19:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I'd be like, I'd be like, uh, yeah, look at this cool ladder we get to climb. Yeah.

• 2:19:24November Kelly?

  You're still beefing with laser pick about the ladder safety thing.

• 2:19:28Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that would that would have still happened. Yeah.

• 2:19:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, but as as a kind of anonymous commenter.

• 2:19:36November Kelly?

  You're like ladder rings are actually less safe now. And he's having the reaction that I have to the Antimony Mercury thing where he's just seething.

• 2:19:47Justin Roczniak?

  Listen, this is a full arrest system. No, I, you know, based on my career in building inspection, no, I would have gotten terrified to hide still. And I'd be working in the control room.

• 2:20:00November Kelly?

  Podcasting, one thing I will say requires relatively little working at height.

• 2:20:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes, until we build the, uh, the podcast headquarters, of course.

• 2:20:09November Kelly?

  Oh, then, then of course we're all going to be on the girda like that one photo.

• 2:20:13Justin Roczniak?

  Oh no, I'm in talks with Tude Perani right now. Yeah.

• 2:20:18November Kelly?

  I guess what we learned is don't work for BP and the petroleum industry has been an unmitigated disaster for the human race.

• 2:20:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's pretty bad.

• 2:20:25November Kelly?

  CSP has a good YouTube channel though.

• 2:20:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:28Speaker 03

  Ride a bicycle.

• 2:20:29November Kelly?

  Yeah. Ride a bicycle. It's the most efficient method of human locomotion.

• 2:20:33Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, bad news. You still need the oil refinery to make the tires.

• 2:20:36Speaker 03

  Fuck.

• 2:20:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 2:20:38November Kelly?

  Oh, god damn.

• 2:20:40Speaker 03

  It's so over.

• 2:20:44November Kelly?

  Okay, we can have one oil refinery that makes tires.

• 2:20:47Speaker 03

  At least microplastics probably have no harmful impacts on human health.

• 2:20:51Justin Roczniak?

  Right.

• 2:20:52November Kelly?

  It's fine.

• 2:20:53Justin Roczniak?

  Bicycles make less microplastics. Anyway.

• 2:20:55November Kelly?

  Get this over with so I can go back to my 20 different tabs of boots I can't afford.

• 2:20:59Justin Roczniak?

  Okey dokey. We have a, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

• 2:21:08Justin Roczniak?

  Dear November Devon at all.

• 2:21:10November Kelly?

  Okay, I can't argue with that. I kind of like that one.

• 2:21:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:13November Kelly?

  Actually, no, that's fucked up to miss out Victoria.

• 2:21:18Justin Roczniak?

  I just, just, uh, uh, cis people don't exist. Yeah. I'm being erased. This is cis-er-ation.

• 2:21:25November Kelly?

  Listen, there's one way out of it.

• 2:21:30Justin Roczniak?

  So this may not be your usual safety third fare, but after growing up on a farm and witnessing my fair share of accidents, injuries and deaths, I decided to prioritize avoiding risks to my physical safety in my own career.

• 2:21:48November Kelly?

  Good idea.

• 2:21:48Justin Roczniak?

  Unfortunately, I neglected to consider threats to my psychological health.

• 2:21:53November Kelly?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:21:54Justin Roczniak?

  As evidenced by my decision to get a physics PhD. Foolish. After defending my dissertation, things did not improve. When I, when I left academia, I got a job working at a small aerospace company in Orange County, California.

• 2:22:13November Kelly?

  Very evil location.

• 2:22:15Justin Roczniak?

  Developing software to help keep satellites from crashing into each other. Part of this job meant obtaining a security clearance.

• 2:22:24November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, okay, sure.

• 2:22:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, I'm on top of it now, okay.

• 2:22:30Justin Roczniak?

  For reasons I obviously can't go into here.

• 2:22:33November Kelly?

  Would you, would you believe that this is not the first time I have been threatened with a safety third from someone with a clearance that is like, yeah, I would have to edit bits out of it, but I'm pretty certain I could send you a safety third.

• 2:22:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but because of the nature of the work, I had to do a lot of it in the closed room.

• 2:22:52November Kelly?

  Really, really missing out on the opportunity for a kind of west coast fed coded control game, you know, because like I love that game. I love fed horror, but it really was going all in on like east coast fed, you know?

• 2:23:03Justin Roczniak?

  The closed room is a room designed for lower classification work, not as intense as a SCIF.

• 2:23:11November Kelly?

  A secure compartmented information facility. It's like the, it's the room where they take your phone off you and you can't listen to podcasts while you work and then you come back out of it and you have to get your phone out of the locker and you've got like one million notifications.

• 2:23:26Justin Roczniak?

  All right. And if you, and if you, if you, if you violate any of those rules, they, they, um, they kill you. Yeah, they kill you.

• 2:23:33November Kelly?

  Unless you're a congressperson, unless you're a Republican congressperson.

• 2:23:37Justin Roczniak?

  They dump you in a dumpster out back that gets dragged onto a truck. I see why it's a skiff. Okay.

• 2:23:44Justin Roczniak?

  Not as intense as a skiff, but still secure. See figure A.

• 2:23:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's, that's a room, all right.

• 2:23:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's a room. It was a soundproof, windowless, vault-type room in the middle of the building where you couldn't bring your phone, but you could gossip freely about anyone outside.

• 2:24:05Justin Roczniak?

  This was mildly stressful at first, but the problems really began after a few months when a large megachurch, which you've doubtless heard of, bought the building.

• 2:24:16November Kelly?

  Uh oh.

• 2:24:17Justin Roczniak?

  For their new administrative and/or black ops needs.

• 2:24:21November Kelly?

  Oh, that feels bad. Why does Joel Osteen have a skiff, man? He doesn't fucking need that, and I don't want him to have it.

• 2:24:30Justin Roczniak?

  Well, he's, he's gotta, he's gotta talk about, um, uh, ba-ba-ba-ba. What's his name? John Goodman somehow.

• 2:24:38Speaker 03

  No, I, if I was actually gonna put money on like which megachurch would buy a skiff and need it, it would be like, it would be the Mormons.

• 2:24:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true. They already have, that's, that's what the temples are.

• 2:24:50Speaker 03

  That's where they get the tablets from.

• 2:24:52November Kelly?

  Also, they don't need to, they were ready.

• 2:24:55November Kelly?

  They don't need to like buy an office.

• 2:24:57Speaker 03

  Joseph Smith was able to get the tablets from God's skiff.

• 2:25:02November Kelly?

  Cause I, I don't think you'd describe Scientology as a megachurch. That's just a cult. I barely even think you'd describe Mormons as a megachurch. I think, I think this, this, this smacks to me of some shit that like Chris Pratt is in, that's, that's called like, I don't know, something trad and based and, yeah, fucking some shit like that.

• 2:25:20Justin Roczniak?

  These are, the, the, these are, these are mainline Protestants, yeah. Or excuse me, evangelical Protestants, not mainline Protestants.

• 2:25:28November Kelly?

  Okay, so you, you work in the office that the Christmas adventurers bought at the end of one battle after another. Gotcha.

• 2:25:35Justin Roczniak?

  They bought the building for their administrative, administrative and/or black ops needs, giving every tenant a year to find a new office. My employer was in the midst of expanding and had a new office ready to go, but the new building didn't have a closed room, and one would need to be constructed, inspected. And certified before we could move any classified work over. Figure B unrelated.

• 2:26:00November Kelly?

  I have such a sense of the person who sent this in because there is a subgroup, my favorite, my beloved subgroup of listeners, often subgroup, sometimes Dom group. If you are, uh, the email is Hyatt November Kelly, but there's a period before the LY. The, the people who are listening to this while also browsing non-credible defense. Um, the shout out to you, um, and, and all the things that you do, good, evil, moral hazardous, et cetera. And you still find the fact that Trump was keeping a bunch of like classified documents in his, in like his guest bathroom really funny.

• 2:26:37Justin Roczniak?

  That is funny. That's a good bit. There was plenty of unclassified work for everyone to do, but someone would need to keep an eye on the old closed room. And also make some progress on the relevant projects so we could keep the clients happy.

• 2:26:55November Kelly?

  It's just picturing two like NRO satellites just dinging off each other constantly making the source engine collision.

• 2:27:07Justin Roczniak?

  As the most junior engineer in the company, that responsibility fell to me. So after the fastest legally compliant ISO training possible is ISO. I don't know what ISO is here.

• 2:27:18November Kelly?

  Uh, that's just like international, annoyingly international organization for standardization, but the acronym doesn't match, which is just.

• 2:27:26Justin Roczniak?

  No, I figure this has got to be a security thing. I don't think it's that.

• 2:27:31November Kelly?

  Well, it's not one that's familiar to me. Liam?

• 2:27:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:33November Kelly?

  So again, I was using the bathroom. Does, does ISO mean anything to you besides the standardization guys? No. No.

• 2:27:40Justin Roczniak?

  Okay. After the fastest legally compliant ISO training possible, I was set to maintain the office and closed room by myself for the next month. Over a course of a week or two, everyone else in the company moved to the new building, leaving me alone in the closed room. This was okay with me at first, since it was only supposed to take a month for the new closed room to be ready. And as an extremely repressed egg, working at an aerospace company in Orange County, California, I was happy for the time away from my coworkers. However.

• 2:28:15November Kelly?

  Oh god, okay.

• 2:28:16Justin Roczniak?

  Oh boy. As the weeks went by, more and more of the other companies in the building relocated to new offices and the new closed room was delayed further and further. After two months, the building was unoccupied apart from myself.

• 2:28:29November Kelly?

  You, you, you can inherit my classified information if you spend one month in my haunted skip.

• 2:28:40Justin Roczniak?

  Eventually, janitorial service ended and I began bringing my own toilet paper and garbage bags to work.

• 2:28:46November Kelly?

  Isn't this, I, I've never seen an episode of Severance. But I understand it's some shit like this, right? Like.

• 2:28:55Justin Roczniak?

  During my lunch breaks, I roamed the halls of the now empty building, peering into the abandoned offices of dentists, HR specialists, and the like, as my mental health deteriorated. I began to worry, what would happen if I had an aneurysm while locked in the closed room by myself? Oh dude. How long would it take?

• 2:29:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, I also do this. I, I do this when my wife leaves so longer than half an hour at a time. But like, I, I just, I just think it's such a beautiful tapestry that like, this sort of clear, like, clearly resolved, like, satellite photos of, like, I don't know, the, the PLA Navy ship that's gonna sink the USS Trump in five years' time depended on one then-egg slowly going insane in an empty building. You, you were the Omaelus child, but like, by a sort of lot assigned.

• 2:29:48Justin Roczniak?

  How long would it take some, for someone to find me? Would it be worse if I were conscious but immobile, or if I died right away? Which coworker would be the one to discover me? And what would be the funniest scene I could arrange for them to discover? And so on. On one of my sojourns, I found a six-foot-tall decorative plastic tree, see figure C. Uh, hold on, that, that scrolled back up the notes. And I did what any normal person would, I named him Bradford and brought him into my office. Stationing him just outside the closed room.

• 2:30:23November Kelly?

  I'm on estrogen, I'm on progesterone, I'll cry about that, I don't give a fuck.

• 2:30:29Justin Roczniak?

  Blake Wilson and Castaway Bradford's presence calmed my mind and I chatted with him through the large soundproof door all day long. I cared for him as best I could, keeping ants from colonizing his faux soil and making sure to rotate him so each of his plastic leaves got some window exposure over the course of each week.

• 2:30:52November Kelly?

  Oh, this is a lockdown story, even if it's not chronologically.

• 2:30:57Justin Roczniak?

  Bradford was my truest friend and is not an exaggeration to say that without him, I would have suffered far worse psychological damage than I undoubtedly did.

• 2:31:08November Kelly?

  When, when something passing for like woke to gets into power, I'm gonna be writing a letter longhand to the new president, asking them to authorize a national defense service medal for a plastic plant now.

• 2:31:24Justin Roczniak?

  Four months after beginning my experiment in solitary office work, the new closed room was finished and I was finally stationed in the new office. Over January weekend, everything was transported securely and I came into work to find that Bradford had been dropped in a dumpster at the old building and was already in a landfill somewhere near Santa Ana.

• 2:31:46November Kelly?

  I'm gonna fucking cry.

• 2:31:50Justin Roczniak?

  My boss said something about my mental health and implied this was a benevolent act of shock therapy on the company's part, but I had learned the most important lesson of US employment. Management is not your friend and will dumpster everything you hold dear and expect thanks for it.

• 2:32:07November Kelly?

  I'm kicking this further upstairs. Bradford, I demand the Presidential Medal of Freedom be awarded posthumously to Bradford.

• 2:32:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. I consoled myself with the knowledge that even in the dump Bradford's plastic body meant he would outlive us all by centuries and resolved to find a new job with less risk to my mental health. Now I'm a scientist in a federal climate science lab.

• 2:32:35November Kelly?

  Oh, fantastic. And you kept the punchline until the end.

• 2:32:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Can't win them all.

• 2:32:42November Kelly?

  Oh, God.

• 2:32:43Justin Roczniak?

  Thanks for the laughs, the rage, and especially for cracking my egg at the 2023 live show. Keep up the good work and best of luck with November's visa process.

• 2:32:53November Kelly?

  Thank you. Thank you. Listen, I don't, um, I don't think it counts as like journalistic exposure if we get stuff written about us in, in the CIA's sort of internal stuff. What is it? Studies and intelligence? But like, you know, do that anyway.

• 2:33:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:33:10November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 2:33:11Justin Roczniak?

  From Liv.

• 2:33:12November Kelly?

  There you go. I don't think so. We may never know.

• 2:33:14Justin Roczniak?

  We, uh, yeah, exactly. Uh, thank, thank, thank you for sending that one in.

• 2:33:18November Kelly?

  Thank you, Liv.

• 2:33:19Justin Roczniak?

  That was, that was delightful, actually.

• 2:33:21November Kelly?

  I, this, this, this.

• 2:33:22Justin Roczniak?

  Sad at the end, but.

• 2:33:23November Kelly?

  Yeah, it, it pleased me, but it also made me upset. So justice for Bradford.

• 2:33:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, justice for Bradford. Yeah.

• 2:33:30November Kelly?

  And once again, this is the podcast that cracks eggs. This is the podcast that is here to tell you that if you're on the fence about it, you should transition.

• 2:33:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:37November Kelly?

  And if you're feeling weird and then like you're talking to the, the plastic barns at work, I don't know, maybe fucking try taking some hormones about it. Probably works.

• 2:33:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. That's probably, probably one thing you could do about it. Yeah.

• 2:33:47November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:47Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that was safety third.

• 2:33:53Justin Roczniak?

  Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

• 2:33:58November Kelly?

  Oh, listen to all of the other podcasts. Hire Victoria.

• 2:34:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:34:02November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 2:34:03Justin Roczniak?

  I have.

• 2:34:03Speaker 03

  Transition? Yeah. I want to shout out my wife. That's my advertisement.

• 2:34:07November Kelly?

  Can I shout out my wife as well?

• 2:34:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't see why not.

• 2:34:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, shout out to Gwen. My wife rules.

• 2:34:12Justin Roczniak?

  I, I, I don't, I don't have a wife, so I have to shout out something else.

• 2:34:16November Kelly?

  DM Roz, if you want to be his wife.

• 2:34:18Justin Roczniak?

  R I T Model Railroad Club. Um, R I T is Rochester Institute of Technology?

• 2:34:23November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 2:34:23Justin Roczniak?

  Hold on, let me. Yes. So, uh, they are being kicked out of their room at the university. So the university can repurpose it to house administrators, to administrate other administrators.

• 2:34:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, you gotta, you gotta house the office for giving Donald Trump and his supporters everything they want forever.

• 2:34:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, you know, this is, this is something that's been happening at universities across the country, but there is a, uh, no, I, I hate to say this, there is a change.org. Petition you could sign that could maybe convince the university to do something else. So I

• 2:35:01November Kelly?

  Okay, here's what you do. Here's what you do. Tigers. Yeah, you do that. Sure. Sign the petition. But then the next thing you do is you find like some kind of right wing influencer. You might have to change your profile picture. So you're wearing a MAGA hat and put like a, you know, like a Christ is King in your bio. And then you go, the woke transgender university administrators at RIT are taking away our Charlie Kirk Memorial Model Railroad.

• 2:35:27Justin Roczniak?

  Actually, though, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, that's one way to do it.

• 2:35:31November Kelly?

  And you just wait. Give it like a month, max. You're gonna be on CBS and Model Railroad Club is gonna be in a bigger room.

• 2:35:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess you gotta, you gotta find like, you're gonna have to find like a transgender fall guy, you know.

• 2:35:46November Kelly?

  It's a service I like to offer for the community.

• 2:35:54November Kelly?

  If you would like to be a sort of ablative heat shield.

• 2:35:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:59November Kelly?

  For the model railroads, then then get in touch with them.

• 2:36:04Justin Roczniak?

  God, this is part of like a really broad trend across the American university system of like, yeah, student clubs are fake and gay. We should get rid of all of them.

• 2:36:13November Kelly?

  It's not, going to university is not supposed to be fun. You're supposed to be learning about how to, you know, to fucking.

• 2:36:22Justin Roczniak?

  Well, the ideal university has no students and no professors and only administrators. Yeah.

• 2:36:28November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So anyway, I'm gonna drop that.

• 2:36:31November Kelly?

  They maybe need like one trans instructor that they can fire over and over again to keep the administrators in work.

• 2:36:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, they're gonna keep the Title IX office just buried in paperwork constantly.

• 2:36:44November Kelly?

  Not to, not to go back to a male us here, but it's really like every trans woman briefly has like a TA position at every university. We will just cycle between them getting fired for clout.

• 2:36:59Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 2:37:00November Kelly?

  It's a universal jobs program just for us, just for the dolls.

• 2:37:05Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, shout out to the RIT Model Railroad Club and really all university model railroad clubs. I wish I had one back in college.

• 2:37:14Speaker 03

  God, I was gonna say, if I had had a model railroad club in college, it would have been a lot less the algorithm word.

• 2:37:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:25Justin Roczniak?

  We hope you get your space back because that's model railroad club without a designated spaces, just some guys who sit around at a table and argue about trains.

• 2:37:36Speaker 03

  Well, five of those guys are not going to be guys for much longer.

• 2:37:39November Kelly?

  That's right. A model railroad club without a model railroad club room is just a podcast.

• 2:37:44Justin Roczniak?

  Pretty much, pretty much.

• 2:37:45Speaker 03

  They call that a carton because it's full of eggs.

• 2:37:51Justin Roczniak?

  I think that was the podcast.

• 2:37:52November Kelly?

  That was the podcast. Bye, everyone.

• 2:37:54Speaker 03

  Just under three hours. Hooray.

• 2:37:55Justin Roczniak?

  Bye, everyone.

• 2:37:55November Kelly?

  Oh, sick.