Episode 41: Nine Eleven (just the WTC towers)

Well There's Your Problem | Episode 41: Nine Eleven (just the WTC towers) .ass file - download the video off of YouTube and play with your media player of choice .ytt file - feed the subtitle file to your YouTube(!) in this convoluted manner Corrections (please!) to haitch dubya ei zed you you dubya at the google mail service SEAN: (?) that slide, man. [laughs] With the title... JUSTIN: [laughs] SEAN: I'm sorry. JUSTIN: Um, alright. We're podcasting. Um, welcome to, Well There's Your Problem, a very solemn podcast about engineering disasters where we're not gonna make any jokes at all. NOVA: No, that’s right. JUSTIN: No. No jokes. SEAN: Zero. JUSTIN: Zero jokes. You know what I just realized? I didn't change the text from The God Damn News from the Joe Kennedy headline. NOVA: That's probably fine. JUSTIN: That's probably fine, yeah. Okay. NOVA: Nobody's gonna notice that. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. Uh. Liam, you’re very quiet. NOVA: Are you saying that you forgot something on the Never Forget episode? JUSTIN: Oh my God. SEAN: You're supposed to have total recall. JUSTIN: It's already happened. LIAM: Am I very quiet? How's that? JUSTIN: Uh, a little bit louder? LIAM: A little bit louder? JUSTIN: Uh, that sounds good. SEAN: No, you sound good to me. JUSTIN: Yeah. Um. SEAN: Not that I matter. LIAM: Oh, buddy. JUSTIN: No, you're quiet again. LIAM: I am goddamn working on it, man. JUSTIN: Okay. NOVA: Have you tried simply talking into the microphone? LIAM: Maximum gain. Maximum gain. JUSTIN: Okay. Here we are. NOVA: Should we start slightly over? JUSTIN: ...start the recording? Okay. Well, we're... I think we're going good. Welcome to Well There’s Your Problem, it's a podcast about engineering disasters. Today we're gonna talk about an engineering disaster that we can't forget what it is. NOVA: That's right. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: What is it I forgot? JUSTIN: Oh. Well you can't forget. LIAM: Oh, but I did. NOVA: You're supposed not to do that. JUSTIN: Don't forget. SEAN: Some disasters you sometimes forget, other disasters you never forget. LIAM: Not allowed. JUSTIN: Not allowed to forget, you just imprint it on your memory with, like, cattle brander, you know? It just says “9/11”. LIAM: “Cattle brander”. [laughter] SEAN: You're walking around some days, you're like, “Lusitania disaster”? I don't remember what that is. And then the twin towers pop into your mind and you know, you never forget. NOVA: That's right, baby, it's the 9/11 episode. JUSTIN: Yeah, we're gonna do 9/11 today. We're really only gonna do– NOVA: Oh, don't get me on any more lists by saying the phrase, “we're going to do 9/11.” JUSTIN: I'm not going... ...you can't do 9/11, because 9/11 has already been done. NOVA and SEAN: [laugh] LIAM: Again. Again. Again. SEAN: I believe a September 11th happens every year, Justin. JUSTIN: Yes, well... SEAN: They (?) up every year. JUSTIN: I think the next 9/11 that happens, it'll be something other than the twin towers of the World Trade Center being hit by airplanes, because there's only one of them now. NOVA: I mean, raising the curse of the prospect of, like, you know how you have Civil War reenactors? A 9/11 reenactor. SEAN: Oh my God. JUSTIN: I think the new tower would be a lot harder to take down, I'm gonna be honest, and we will get into that. LIAM: Wasn’t there that guy that tried to fly a plane into an office building in Florida, in like October of 2001? NOVA: Yeah, it was like an IRS building. LIAM: Yeah, yeah. JUSTIN: Oh, yeah, I remember that. NOVA: And he just, I think he killed one guy, one IRS guy in his office, who just got a Cessna through his window. And nobody else. JUSTIN: Turns out big planes do more damage than small planes. We'll get to that. Anyway. I'm Justin Roczniak, my pronouns are “he”/”him”, OK, go. NOVA: I am [November Kelly], my pronouns are “she” and “her”. LIAM: I'm Liam Anderson, my pronouns are “he”/”him”. NOVA: ...guest! JUSTIN: Yes, we have a guest. SEAN: And I'm a guest, I'm Sean KB, and my pronouns are “he”/”him”. NOVA: And you're here from The Antifada, which is an excellent podcast that you should listen to. SEAN: Yeah, thanks! I'm here from The Antifada, but I think I'm also here; you guys don't give your qualifications anymore, but I'm also here because– NOVA: Yeah, because I don't have any, and it makes me, like, salty. JUSTIN: [laughs] SEAN: Am I allowed to give my qualifications? NOVA: Oh yeah, go for it. LIAM: Knock yourself out. SEAN: I'm not simply a podcaster, I'm a long-time rank-and-file union building tradesman, and I work, you know, with big buildings, I work with structural steel, I work with concrete, I work with all the sorts of materials that we're going to be talking about in this episode, including nanothermite. NOVA: Yeah, local control demolition and allied trades 302. LIAM: Yes, local control is important. Local control is important. we can't outsource that demolition, man. NAFTA kills the demolition industry. SEAN: They want to send our buildings to China to be demoed. We can't... [laughter] ...home. JUSTIN: ...floated on a barge with a big crane, away it goes. Before we talk about 9/11, we have to do The God Damn News. [♪news jingle♪] JUSTIN: You can see I already forgot something in this episode, which is to change (?). [crosstalk] SEAN: “Bullying Works”? NOVA: Bullying buses... works... JUSTIN: This was yesterday... NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Excuse me, this was last episode when we were talking about, not even last episode, the episode before last, when we were talking about Joe Kennedy. NOVA: Yeah, but now we are bullying buses, and we're body shaming them, specifically for having batteries on them. JUSTIN: I think so, yeah. So our local transit agency– LIAM: Not officially a crack. Not officially a crack. You're an idiot. JUSTIN: Yeah. LIAM: SEPTA’s not idiots, you're an idiot. SEAN: It could be “bullying works” for these other top stories on the right here, like “Pennsylvania unemployment rate drops to 10.3%”, “hospitality and leisure still suffering”, maybe those workers are getting bullied. NOVA: Yeah, that's true. SEAN: There's not enough jobs in bullying right now, so bullying works by getting people to work. NOVA: They closed down the bullying factory. SEAN: That's right. JUSTIN: “I'm here with Bullying Local 103, NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: “we're a union of bullies, not affiliated with the police unions. “We are workers. NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: “We work to ensure nerds get their swirlies as needed.” SEAN: “For too many years, the good jobs, the good lockers have been sent down South and then overseas. We want to keep the lockers here, at home, so we can bully people and push them into those lockers... in our hometown.” JUSTIN: That's what you want doing a solidarity strike with you, is the bullies union. NOVA: Oh yeah. LIAM: Just taking, just absolutely taking some scabs, and just, like, pushing them into giant inflatable lockers. JUSTIN: It's actually just Teamsters. [laughter] SEAN: They really are the bullying union, that's true. LIAM: “Meet Scabby the Lockah”. [laughter] JUSTIN: So, last year, SEPTA bought a bunch of battery-powered buses, right? LIAM: Oh, they sure did. JUSTIN: And they... they decided to deploy them on former trolley bus routes, that's where they... had electric buses that draw power from overhead lines. LIAM: And they spit on the graves, yes. JUSTIN: Yes. And what happened is, apparently, they had to take the buses out of service last February and didn't tell anyone. And uh, cause all the frames cracked. Cause the batteries are too heavy. NOVA: Inside Job, 9/11, controlled demolition, Google “loose change SEPTA”. SEAN: They could have used lithium batteries, but instead they went with the much too heavy and bulky nanothermite battery. LIAM and NOVA: [laugh] NOVA: Investigate SEPTA. JUSTIN: What they could have used were the overhead lines. [laughs] LIAM: The wires are already up, we don't even have to say “put up some goddamn wires”. They're already up. NOVA: Couldn't do that. JUSTIN: This was just incredibly embarrassing, that they bought these new high-tech buses that use worse technology than what they already had, y'know, it's more extractive, they need these big lithium batteries as opposed to just some copper wires over the street. And they broke, just immediately, like. SEAN: Have you considered that perhaps the actual conspiracy is that they needed one more reason to overthrow governments in countries like Bolivia? NOVA: Yeah, that's right. Need to keep Jeanine Áñez in power. JUSTIN: I'll bring that up in the next board meeting. [laughter] JUSTIN: Um. Anyway. That was The God Damn News. We got a long episode today, we have to keep it short. [♪news jingle♪] NOVA: News. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: News you can use. JUSTIN: I was quoted in that article, I forget to mention that. LIAM: We're all very proud of you. Moving on. Moving on! JUSTIN: Okay, we're moving on. LIAM: Yeah, that's right, motherfucker. NOVA: Starting here with the retro World Trade Center. JUSTIN: Yes, actually, this was the world's largest office building for a while. Hudson Terminal in Lower Manhattan, right? This was on the site of the World Trade Center before the World Trade Center was there. So this was just a big office building for the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad. It had offices for the railroad, but mostly offices for other businesses, because the railroad wasn't that big, because it just went from Newark, New Jersey to Lower Manhattan. Right? NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: And this railroad connected three of the five big west shore of the Hudson Railroad terminals, those were Exchange Place, Pavonia, and Hoboken Terminal. And it went to Midtown and Downtown Manhattan, right, only Hoboken Terminal still in use. This railroad is now known as the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Railroad, or The PATH, right? Um. SEAN: Still kickin', to this day. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. LIAM: Oh yeah. SEAN: It's an outside transfer, though, so it's, I dunno, I barely use the fuckin' thing. Plus you'd have to go to Jersey. JUSTIN: Yeah, I've only used it, like, I think twice in my entire life. LIAM: It was, I will say... it was not a pleasant experience, in the one time I took it with you. JUSTIN: Well, I think that was more due to people, and not the trains themselves. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: No. That was due... NOVA: People are the natural enemy of trains. JUSTIN and LIAM: Yes. JUSTIN: So, you know, Lower Manhattan, in the early 1910s, this building was put up in... 1909. You know, Lower Manhattan, there's this tangled up mess of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, the Interborough Rapid Transit, the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit, and the Independent Subways, right? And this is why Lower Manhattan real estate was very valuable. This is where the first skyscrapers show up. They eventually spread to Midtown, right? And once Midtown becomes more valuable, the New York City Tunnel Authority was created, right, and it's to bring more people from Jersey into New York City. It was a bad idea. [laughter] JUSTIN: That was, you would think this is a Robert Moses thing, but it was not. This was from, this was headed by an angry old Norwegian man named Ole Singstad. LIAM: Oh, wow. SEAN: Am I allowed to use the S-slur on this show? NOVA: [laughs] What the fuck is the S-slur? SEAN: Okay, I'll say it quietly and gently. [whispering loudly] SQUAREHEAD. [laughter] SEAN: I mean, I work in the New York City building trade. Some of our unions, some of our locals were founded by squareheads back in the day. Some of them, up until like 30, 40 years ago, you could barely be an Italian, let alone an Irishman, and be in some of these locals, because it was all Norwegians, all Finns, blah, blah, blah. All Swedish. NOVA: Hey, couldn't get made because you weren’t full Swedish chef (?) SEAN: [laughs] They had to measure your head and make sure it was square enough. JUSTIN: Hinga dinga durgen. [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: That's news to me. JUSTIN: Leif Erikson Day is a big celebration. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: It's a thing out here in Philly, Leif Erikson Day, it just brings out the Nazis. LIAM: ...statue gets pushed into the river. SEAN: There's one stretch of the... in between where the BQE turns into the Belt Parkway called Leif Erikson... Way? Or–yeah, Leif Erikson Way, and that's because it used to be Little Norway, Little Scandinavia in Brooklyn. JUSTIN: Alright, because Robert Moses, that was like one of the first highways he drove through an ethnic neighborhood. SEAN: That's right, and it was the Swedes who got it. JUSTIN: Yeah, the Swedes got it first. Oh my god. NOVA: The canary in the coal mine. JUSTIN: Yeah. So, Ole Singstad, he got to work in the 1930s, his authority built the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Queens Midtown Tunnel, and he got through half of the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel before Robert Moses managed to fire him, because he didn't want anyone building anything that wasn't with Robert Moses's express permission. LIAM: (?). JUSTIN: They hated each other. Singstad and Moses. Probably not the least because Moses drove, like, the highway through the Swedish neighborhood. NOVA: [laughs] SEAN: Robert Moses, famously... insensitive to urban residents' needs. JUSTIN: It turns out he was kinda racist. NOVA: I'm learning so much, though, that he was racist against... I didn't even know Leif Erikson Day was a thing, I thought you were doing a bit about Columbus Day, and I was like, oh, that's a good joke, but no, it's a real thing. JUSTIN: Yeah, we really have Leif Erikson Day, yes. LIAM: I know this is crazy to you, person who lives in the United Kingdom, but there are actually places outside of the Commonwealth; I know. I know. NOVA: But it's not that there are people, like, places outside of it, it's that anyone takes Scandinavians seriously. LIAM: Aw, come on! Saabs are nice. I don't mind gravlax. [laughter] SEAN: I quite like (?). LIAM: The Swedes have produced snus, the greatest tobacco product known to man. SEAN: That’s right. LIAM: Shameless plug for buysnus.com, who I can no longer buy from, but who continue to send me about ten emails a day, and they mean it when they say overnight shipping, folks. JUSTIN: They’re better at social democracy than anyone else, but, y'know, that's because of the oil. LIAM: But you get to keep all your good American racism. JUSTIN: Ah, this is true, yeah. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: “If you like your racism, you can keep it.” JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: If you really want to fly a Confederate flag in Europe, the place to go is Scandinavia. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: You know what, it's so fucking weird, man, to see, like... like, obviously– and I understand that all Europeans basically are dumb as hell– that's right, it's a war against the whole continent now, baby– NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: That, like, we'll use Confederate flags as stand-ins for, like, Nazi and, y'know, other sort of super-nationalist flags, and it's like, yes, okay, so we need to ban it. And I, I'm not a big fan of federal government overreach, but I personally would support a lot, and if you're flying a Confederate flag on your private property, you just get shot. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] LIAM: Like, the National Guard comes in and just shoots you. SEAN: Did you guys...Oh, go ahead, sorry. LIAM: No, go ahead, Sean. SEAN: Oh no... Liam, did you see online that there's an account that's pushing the Scotch-Irish Trump movement, that's putting Confederate flags next to the Ulster flag? NOVA: [groans] I did see that, and it's like, yeah, yeah, they're this... what, “Corporate needs you to tell the difference between these two images,” “They're the same thing.” NOVA: Mm-hmm. LIAM: It's always so fucking weird when you see, like, an Irish Protestant in the wild, and you're just like, oh right, you dumb assholes actually exist. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] SEAN: You Ian Paisley-looking motherfucker, you. JUSTIN: Alright. SEAN: I hear a siren in the back. JUSTIN: Yes, that was the police coming to get me. SEAN: [laughs] For your Confederate flag you're flying? JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. LIAM: We once flew a Gadsden flag, and someone just took it, but it was also like right before Trump got elected, so I was like... I'm just so mad that the fucking, like, chud conservatives took the “don't tread on me” flag. That (?) genuinely pisses me off. I have the naval jack version. NOVA: What you should have had was the “come and take it” flag, because then you couldn't have been mad that someone did, in fact, come and take it. LIAM: Rocz has already made that joke to me. JUSTIN: Yeah. Yeah, this is true. LIAM: You're late, [Nova]. You're late, [Nova]. NOVA: Dammit. JUSTIN: Well, you also have a “come and take it” flag. LIAM: Yes I do. That's (?) flag. I like flags. I don't like (?) chuds. No, I just don't know where it is. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: It's a challenge to the listener: Take Liam's flag. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: It's hard to do if you lost it. LIAM: We were talking earlier about parasocial relationships, and how... if you come and try and jump our fence, you'll be shot. I will add to that, though. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: If you try and jump the fence, but you manage to take the flag, you will be allowed to proceed without being shot. SEAN: This is like the most dangerous game with more steps. LIAM: You know what? I get bored, Sean. I get bored. SEAN: Don't we all. LIAM: I sit and I look at the... the Ukrainian Orthodox Church across the street from me all day, and I just think to myself, why couldn't you just be Catholic? NOVA: [laughs] SEAN: Like the anti-Azov Battalion front. JUSTIN: The effect of these tunnels was to make Midtown Manhattan real estate easier to access from the Jersey suburbs by car than downtown, right? Since your suburban commuters could drive in more easily, and also like the big rail terminals were there that were in Manhattan, like Penn Station and Grand Central, right? So by the 1940s, Downtown Manhattan had started to get real cheap, right? Companies started moving out, there were a lot of vacant office buildings, there's not a lot of restaurants, cultural amenities, whole place looked like a ghost town after five o'clock, right. So the idea is, how do we revitalize this area? And what the New York City government came up with was “more office space”. They start thinking about building a “World Trade Center”, right? LIAM: A “World Trade Center”? JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: Crazy. JUSTIN: So there's lots of World Trade Centers out there, right? What's a "World Trade Center"? It's a fancy office building which has paid for a license to call itself a “World Trade Center” from the World Trade Center's Association. NOVA: Wait, that's actually like a protected term? JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: That was one that honestly blew my mind. SEAN: You can't just slap up a “World Trade Center” sign on your (?) NOVA: What are they gonna fucking do? You know? LIAM: Well, the other thing is, what's the benefit of calling yourself, like, why not just Trade Center? Or like, One Trade Center? NOVA: It's a brand, a brand that is now forever associated with horrific act of terrorism. And who doesn't love that? SEAN: People don't think that the World Trade Center has power, but, you know, if you fuck around, you might find out they might send you one of those memes that Saudi Arabia sent to Canada. NOVA: [laughs] Are we saying here that the World Trade Center Association did 9/11? SEAN: [laughs] LIAM: I like the idea, actually, that, like, unlicensed World Trade Center, just like, NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: a crack team of World Trade Center organization lawyers and operatives just comes in, doesn't do like a bombing campaign, but like, what the Mossad did after the Munich Massacre, NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: like, that sort of thing, for 14 years, they're just like shooting building supers in the streets. [laughter] NOVA: Yeah, if you open a bootleg World Trade Center, sleep with one eye open. SEAN and JUSTIN: [laugh] SEAN: Wake up in a... with a horse head in your bed. [laughter] JUSTIN: But it’s a horse from a foreign country. NOVA: You just wake up with (?) inflatable globe. SEAN: [laughs] A bloody globe. JUSTIN: So, like, there's a World Trade Center in Boston, there's a World Trade Center in Montreal, which is of course called... NOVA: Those things look like malls. SEAN: Centre de Commerce Mondial. LIAM: What about, hey, I noticed you didn't mention the Baltimore one. You're too good? You're too good for the Baltimore one? JUSTIN: No, I wanted to see the... LIAM: It looks horrible. It truly does. It's honestly one of my favorite buildings in Baltimore, because it's just so goddamn ugly. JUSTIN: Well, I got the Dallas one, because I think it's the most ominous, right up here. NOVA: Yeah, it looks like an NSA building. JUSTIN: Another one is the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC. LIAM: That's the one you (?). A good food court. It has a good food court. JUSTIN: Does have a good food court, the Ronald Reagan building. NOVA: It's got a million jelly beans. JUSTIN: Yeah. SEAN: You're gonna have ketchup and it counts as a... NOVA: [laughs] vegetable, yeah. JUSTIN: It's actually kind of a weird way that the World Trade Center's association was formed. So the first World Trade Center was in New Orleans, actually. SEAN: Also looks like shit. NOVA: Yeah, also true. JUSTIN: And this was–emerged from a series of simple concepts, right? So someone realized people like to make money by buying and selling commodities. Right? NOVA: Boo. LIAM: Boo. JUSTIN: But also, people like daiquiris. NOVA: That is true. LIAM: You don't like daiquiris. JUSTIN: I've never had a daiquiri, actually. NOVA: I wish I had a daiquiri. LIAM: I know! LIAM: I tried to give you a daiquiri once and you just yelled at me. You weren't even coherent, you were just, “no! “I... rum throw up!” That was the sentence I got out of you. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah. Yeah, cause I was like, I've had too much to drink, and rum does nothing good to me. Um. LIAM: I will say, I was in New Orleans... When were we in New Orleans? Last April, apparently. And I just, I followed in the footsteps of my dad in New Orleans, where I was just like up 7 fucking AM, Bloody Mary, baby, like. It's so good to watch joggers and people coming home from the bars, not to the bars, from the bars, at like the same time, just waving to each other. NOVA: Yeah, but did you, did you buy and sell commodities? SEAN: I would last like six months there, in New Orleans, if I lived there. LIAM: I thought that. I was just like, it's, like, I'm a pretty heavy drinker, you know, I'm a good Irish boy, and people there are like frighteningly drunk all the time, but in the way, like, an SEC strength coach gets fucked up, JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: and you're just like, man, what hap– where are you? What is going on? It's just like, yeah, it's like 11 AM, and there's like these 55 year old, like, Mississippi dudes in like, windbreakers, just the drunkest they've ever been outside a hotel bar, and I'm just like, yep. I can't keep up here. NOVA: Also, you've gotta add in the food, right, so like, even if the booze doesn't kill you, you will find yourself, like, eating gumbo at five in the morning, and you will just die that way. Yeah. SEAN: Justin, I have a question for you. JUSTIN: Yes? SEAN: Is the World Trade Center in New Orleans the same as the World Trade Mart owned by Clay Shaw? JUSTIN: Um... NOVA: Oh, shit, that's a good question. SEAN: I hate to get into conspiracism here on this 9/11 episode. NOVA: Triangulation–[laughs] LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: So there was an International Trade Mart, which started in New Orleans, right? SEAN: Okay. That might be what I'm thinking. JUSTIN: And there was with an accompanying International House Hotel, right, and that started actually before World War II. And this was sort of the– NOVA: Okay, the World Trade Center Association did not do 9/11, but they did kill JFK. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] SEAN: They sent their operators down to Dallas. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So this, this building actually opened in 1968, one year before the World Trade Center in New York City, and that's where the International Trade Mart moved to, right. And basically, your idea here is if you wanted to do trade with the United States, your World Trade Center, or your International Trade Mart, had a bunch of resources to assist you in doing trade, right, and you could also come to New Orleans to do it and drink daiquiris. Much better than buying steel from Toledo, you come to New Orleans and buy the steel and then get drunk. NOVA: And both the steel guy and you get to drink the daiquiris, better for everybody. JUSTIN: Yes. JUSTIN: Exactly. NOVA: Okay, so we take that thing of, like, New Orleans, a place where people like to go, which has good drinks and good weather, and then we apply that to Lower Manhattan. JUSTIN: Yes. Which has neither of those things. NOVA: Which is not–[laughs] neither of those things. LIAM: ...My favorite thing is, like, the few bars in New York left that are good, it's just like, none of them are in Lower Manhattan, notably. SEAN: Yeah, no. They're not. LIAM: Tempest Bar! Tempest Bar! New York City, baby! Their webpage is one page, and it's them complaining about other bars. [laughter] JUSTIN: You have a right to (?) because it's really good. There's no one there, it's cheap, it's right next to Penn Station, so you can get fucked up before your last train out. It's fantastic. LIAM: Unless you miss the train, in which case, bad things happen there. JUSTIN: Well, we did do that. LIAM: No, we didn't–Did we? Oh, well, we did. We did. JUSTIN: Yeah. SEAN: There's the Patriot Bar downstairs. Or downtown, rather. That's a good (?) place. But it's also got some... pretty bad clientele. LIAM: I'm stunned, I'm stunned that the clientele at the Patriot Bar is bad, Sean. SEAN: By that I mean people like me. Like dirty (?) [laughter] NOVA: Do not attempt to form a parasocial relationship with any of us. Do not come to these bars. LIAM: You will be shot. SEAN: (?) let listeners away. JUSTIN: Once the DSA moved out of Lower Manhattan, the Antifada crowd moved in. [laughter] SEAN: The vanguard of gentrification. JUSTIN: Yeah. The DSA was actually headquartered in Lower Manhattan for most of its existence. SEAN: Sounds about right. JUSTIN: Yeah. SEAN: Barbara Ehrenreich (?). LIAM: The Yippie Museum was there too, I think, I don't know where it is now. JUSTIN: And part of that is because of the World Trade Center. There's so much goddamn office space it actually kept rents low. Enough for, like, a socialist organization to rent office space there. SEAN: There's an anarchist group that has... an entire loft down in Lower Manhattan, not far from Zuccotti Park, and a lot of the... organizing and sign making and stuff for Occupy Wall Street happened in this giant industrial loft, like, right by Wall Street, because it's so fucking cheap you can afford it. NOVA: ...The same thing is happening in London right now, where we in Trashfuture are looking for office space for our studio. And, like, it's entirely plausible. LIAM: Oh, look at this girl! With office space! With office space! NOVA: Yeah, I know, right. NOVA: But it turns out, as ridiculous as that sounds, now that the economy has imploded, you can get that for nothing. The Shard is entirely empty, and they're just begging you to, like, fill space. SEAN: ...that's up in the Shard, holy shit. NOVA: That's what I'm saying! Yes. JUSTIN: No, I would go with the Gherkin. [laughter] JUSTIN: I would definitely go with the Gherkin. NOVA: “...You want to guest on the show? Sure, “our address: the giant penis building.” JUSTIN: Yes. Alright. SEAN: Oh, I (?) the Trashfuture building. NOVA: That's right. JUSTIN: Oh, for naming rights, yeah. JUSTIN and SEAN: [laugh] NOVA: Look, if Trump can do it, we can do it. SEAN: I can't wait to eat Trashfuture steaks. At the restaurant. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: Do you want to spend $88 on a Trashfuture branded necktie? Of course you do. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: I honestly would. SEAN: Ironically, I would, too. LIAM: Don't love that it's $88, I'll tell you that, [Nova]. [laughter] SEAN: Make it a Patreon goal or something. NOVA: Yeah, on the back we've got sewn in, “Made in ‘America’”, with air quotes. JUSTIN: America with three Ks. [laughter] SEAN: Just get a bunch of unemployed gig workers and get some really cheap office space in Downtown Manhattan to make the ties there. NOVA: Maybe we can make some shirtwaists. JUSTIN: We can re-reopen the textile mills. SEAN: Yes. JUSTIN: ...triangle shirtwaist, too. Um. But the triangle is the... Trashfuture logo. [laughter] JUSTIN: Alright. So. Unlike the International Trade Mart in New Orleans, the World Trade Center in New York was not– was gonna not only not feature daiquiris, it was also gonna be publicly financed. Right? LIAM: Boo. JUSTIN: David Rockefeller, who was president of Chase Manhattan Bank, he went in with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey– SEAN: Big boo (?). JUSTIN: Yeah. To build the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, right? There were a couple sites that were considered, but what eventually they settled on was on top of the H&M's Hudson Terminal, right? This was sort of towards the tail end of the massive expansion of public authority's powers, which were sort of pioneered by Robert Moses, but Robert Moses was not directly involved with this project, and, y'know, they wanna do this big revitalization project. The World Trade Center was supposed to be ten million square feet of office space, right? It's just, they're gonna build a shitload of offices, and this is gonna cause office space to be more desirable, right? NOVA: Mm-hm. Famously, when you increase supply, you also increase demand. JUSTIN: Yes, that does work for highways, it does not work for office space. [laughter] SEAN: (?) Robert Moses, he was confused about that. LIAM: ...love the idea of Robert Moses just like, being like, “Alright, we're gonna build a World Trade Center, “we're gonna put a highway through it.” You guys (?) that hotel in Disney World where the monorail goes right through the basement? That's exactly what we're gonna do. NOVA: This goes in and out a bunch of times. JUSTIN: That was a real plan he had. LIAM: That–fucking what was a real what? [laughs] JUSTIN: That was a real plan, there was supposed to be a Midtown– SEAN: Lower Manhattan Expressway. JUSTIN: Oh yeah, the Lower Manhattan, but also the Midtown Highway, which never got built. LIAM: Jesus Christ almighty. NOVA: Just two freeways, just going through at different angles at different heights, circling back around and curving through both towers. LIAM: You guys ever been to Triple Crossing in Richmond? It's like that. But, uh, you die. You just die. JUSTIN: The Midtown one was supposed to be built at a height of a hundred feet, through the, uh, on about 34th Street, I think. LIAM: What the fuck. SEAN: Our (?) has the renderings of it in there, and it would have been an unmitigated fucking disaster. NOVA: So, the second of our candidates to possibly do 9/11 after the World Trade Center Association is Robert Moses, with a freeway. [laughter] JUSTIN: “A second freeway has hit the towers.” [laughter] LIAM: I cannot wait for the comments on this. NOVA: Jesus Christ. I don't even want to think about it. LIAM: The same shit as always, don't get mad at us, people who are making a podcast about it 19 years later, get mad at the government that choked and get mad at, uh, terrorism. We didn't do anything, we're just here making jokes. NOVA: Simply get mad at the Saudi government. JUSTIN: Yeah, and Bush. You can get mad at Bush. LIAM: You can get mad at Bush. JUSTIN: And... H.W. Bush. LIAM: And Clinton, actually. JUSTIN: Yeah, Clinton, yeah. NOVA: And... Reagan. SEAN: Get mad at every president, get mad at the system that creates these presidents, get mad at the political economy, ...system that creates the United States, just get mad. But don't get mad at us. NOVA: That's right. LIAM: Yeah, that's actually, that's basically how I feel about it. Like, people, you know, whatever, the respectability, concern bullshit trolling, but like, also, like, yeah, I'm not the fucking one that... that flew a plane into the World Trade Center, man. I'm just an asshole JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: in a hotel room in Portland, Maine, drinking a Narragansett hard tea, which by the way, Rocz, is disgusting. [laughter] NOVA: Would you say it's likely to be better or worse than the dark fruit cider I had last time? LIAM: So, the one thing I can say in Twisted Tea's favor is that it's not carbonated. This shit is carbonated more than, like, a soda. So I'm trying to, like, choke down that, like, schoolyard iced tea, you know what I mean? But it's also been carved (?) within an inch of its life. NOVA: That’s grim. LIAM: And uh, not feeling it. NOVA: No. JUSTIN: Okay, so, the government's just gonna build a huge fucking office building, with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is sort of a quasi-government agency which has some powers of government and some powers of a private corporation. It’s confusing and irritating, we're not gonna go into it right now. SEAN: But importantly, importantly, they can leverage the income that they get in order to float bonds, in order to get more and more money, so they can build and build and build. JUSTIN: Yes, which... LIAM: Look at them! JUSTIN: Damn, I wish they would still do that. [laughs] SEAN: Yeah. They did a good job for a while with that. JUSTIN: Yeah, I know, they were doing very well. Robert Moses perfected that. You know, the trick was to keep yourself in debt to the extent that you had an excuse to float more bonds, but not in debt so much that those were a financial burden. You had to have a nice balance. SEAN: And all those little nickels falling into those toll machines on the Triborough Bridge. They added up. And then if you fucking leverage... those nickels, then it turns into a lot of fucking money. And then you create six or seven or eight or ten or twelve different authorities that are all getting different incomes, that are all floating different bonds, and you could fuck up an entire city that way. An entire metropolitan area. NOVA: Yeah. First the Swedes, then the Norwegians, then the Finns, and you just go from there. JUSTIN: Well, I think the... who do you fuck up after the Swedes? I think it was the Jews after that, mostly. SEAN: Yeah, and the Bronx... [crosstalk] JUSTIN: Yeah. But, Port Authority is outside of Moses' control, to a large extent. And I think by this time, Moses was kind of on his way out. But yeah, the government was just gonna, Port Authority was just gonna build a huge office building and lease it, right? A lot of people thought this was a dumb idea at the time, y'know, kinda cause it was. NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] This is just, y'know, the government nakedly getting into leasing office space, y'know, supposedly as... y'know, revitalization, but you would figure you'd build something that had more of a public purpose, like, I dunno, housing or something? SEAN: Yeah, this is a weird definition of "infrastructure" here. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. NOVA: Are you telling me that, like, Cantor Fitzgerald and their, like, 300 Rodin casts aren't a public good? Okay, you can't just wander in off the street and see the Rodins, but they're up there, and knowing that they're up there, that's a public good. JUSTIN: Yeah. Now, there was at least some public purpose to this, as part of this deal, the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad would be owned by the Port Authority, that's how they renamed it PATH, right, and they were gonna construct a new railroad terminal underneath, which would be more efficient than the one that existed beforehand, right, but that was about the limit of the public benefit here, otherwise it's just like, yeah, we're gonna build a big office building, and say... this is good government right here. NOVA: Hmm. It's fine, it's got a train station. Sort of. JUSTIN: Yeah. That's why we need to talk about, um, Sean had a bit about Co-op City and construction in the 70s. SEAN: Oh, yeah, yeah. Um, like, before I get into this massive project that happened at exactly the same time as the World Trade Center coming together, people have to realize that New York City, through the 60s and all the way up to like 1974, was basically like a municipal social democracy, which is why it sounds crazy for the Port Authority of New York to be like, to be creating an entire complex of office buildings, even to lease out, in order to bring business back to lower Manhattan, but there were like public hospitals, there's a free public university, there was, um, a whole municipal, like, welfare system that existed. So this happens, like, alongside that. This is part of the post-war New York City social democratic polity, as they call it, which comes to a screeching halt, of course, with the New York City financial crisis, the fiscal crisis of '75. But, with that said, before that, here's a quote, this is about Co-op City, from the New York Times. "Co-op City occupies a special place in the imagination of New York. "It is not only the country's largest cooperative apartment complex, it is a sort of working class utopia where, at least according to the original ideals, firefighters, post office workers, plumbers, carpenters, and clerks could afford to buy apartments in which to make homes." So... the city of New York, through what's called the Mitchell-Lama Project, which was a way to subsidize low and middle income housing, decided, as they kind of ate up all the other, like, big public housing areas for public housing in the city, to create the largest... residential complex in the country and in the world in 1968. And they did that by building 15,000 apartments. I mean, can you guys imagine that? They just threw up these buildings, 15,000–there's 35,000 people that live there, and they just put it up like Le Corbusier Towers in the park, you know? NOVA: Weird how all you ever hear about 70s and 80s New Yorkers, like, urban decay, the Warriors, like burning cop cars and shit, and not this. Weird. JUSTIN: No... SEAN: Because, like, because both the World Trade Center and Co-op City live in this weird, like, liminal period in history where the sort of, like, Promethean social democratic impulse is still alive, and they're still building, like, half-billion dollar, like, working class, like, cooperative apartments funded largely by trade unions, by the way. You know, this was put up by a coalition of New York City trade unions. That exists, but then that's why "Ford to City: Drop Dead", that famous Daily News... cover, right, where the federal government says no bailout for the city. That's why it was such a shocking thing, because, like, New York City had been this, and this is the process of it, like, not being that, very violent, if that makes sense. So basically, built with union money, built through the Mitchell-Lama, 1968, same year as the World Trade Center, it starts to go up. Within a few years of building this, right, while the World Trade Center is still going up and while these buildings are completed, then people start moving in, they start to realize little things about the way that these buildings have been constructed. Number one, the windows kept falling out. LIAM: Jesus. SEAN: Number two, you'd go out on your balcony and it would collapse. Your balcony would just fall down thirty stories and hit the ground. JUSTIN: Oh, that's not good. I would wanna avoid that one. NOVA: I would simply not go out on the balcony. JUSTIN: I like balconies. As long as they're not too high. NOVA: You know what I like? Balconies. You know what I don't like? Falling thirty stories. SEAN: Because Co-op City is built on this marginal land, like way up in the north of the Bronx, it's built on marshland, you would think, engineering people out there, that you would do some sort of, I don't know, deep foundation, maybe drive some piles, maybe put the buildings up over the piles. LIAM: Oh, fuck that, Sean. JUSTIN: Shallow foundations are always fine. A hundred percent of the time. SEAN: Turns out, it wasn't quite that it was just a slab, but some of the smaller buildings were literally just slabs. The parking garages started to subside within a couple years. The main big buildings, like the thirty-story ones with the balconies that fell off, those stayed up okay, but the rest of them just started to sink into the fucking swamp. Not good. Then, last but not least, there was supposed to be a thing called reinforced bar, rebar, in the concrete, and about half of this entire complex didn't have any rebar in it. JUSTIN: Oh my god. LIAM: Jesus. NOVA: In their defense, isn't rebar extremely irritating to put in? JUSTIN: [laughs] SEAN: I honestly, I say abolish rebar myself. I am willing to stand here on this podcast and say to my brothers and sisters out there, not just in the trades, but all Americans, all the workers in the world, we must come together, we must fight, we must abolish rebar. Not because it's bad, but because it's a pain in the fucking ass. That's what these workers were doing back in the 60s and 70s, they're trying to get ahead of abolishing rebar, and we should respect them for that, however, concrete without rebar? Not so good. JUSTIN: Well yeah, we should go back to unreinforced masonry. SEAN: That's right. LIAM: Yeah. Yes. JUSTIN: Um, you know, maybe, especially in, like, low earthquake zones, I don't know, like, in the west coast you might have to do some bullshit with like, I don't know, you might have to throw some, some bars in after the fact, you know, but I think you can get away with unreinforced masonry, most places. NOVA: What's that you say? Did you say, did'y say "oriented strand board"? LIAM and SEAN: [chuckle] JUSTIN: That's, that's the opposite of masonry. NOVA: I'm pretty sure you said "oriented strand board". LIAM: I am also pretty sure you said "oriented strand board". NOVA: Oriented strand board. JUSTIN: No, no oriented strand board. NOVA: No, we're doing have oriented strand board. JUSTIN: None. LIAM: Yes you do. JUSTIN: No. SEAN: So there's, there's two takeaways from the Co-op City story. The first is that it's set off among the residents who had, working class residents who had moved in there, in there, many of them who were tradespeople themselves, the largest and most sustained, the biggest rent strike in American history from 1974 to 1975 for 13 months against the city and state who were trying to make the residents pay for this fuck up. That was actually a successful rent strike and they won and they made the state eat it incredibly in a time of like, intense austerity where the city was out of money and they were laying people off. These 35,000 New Yorkers came together and like, basically held tens of millions of dollars of rent and said, fuck you, and then finally the city and the state, they gave up. But the other important thing is that this Co-op City, these residences were built under the same conditions, often by the same workers, certainly some of the same contractors as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and presumably, Building 7 as well. So when we're looking for the engineering disaster of the World Trade Center, right, of it collapsing on 9/11, maybe... we might want to take into account that a similar project of a similar scale, just 10 miles north had mobbed up contractors who stole tens of millions of dollars worth of material and labor. And you had whole situations where things like rebar weren't... weren't even put in. So you could read the as-built drawings on what Co-op City looked like or what the World Trade Center looked like, but is that what was actually produced? Is that what a bunch of drunken, doped up, awesome, heroic Chad (?) New Yorkers... NOVA: [laughs] SEAN: actually put in there, or was it just a pipe dream? NOVA: The as-built say that this is rebar, but actually the reinforcing element in this is mostly mob snitches. [laughter] LIAM: Chemically treated to make them actually, like, hold up. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: Yeah, it's mostly Hoffas(?) down here. LIAM: You gotta dump some guy in a Kiwanis and be like, "Alright, listen, "you're gonna have to hold this." LIAM and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: I want an "anti-rebar aktion" sticker now. SEAN: Yeees. JUSTIN: [laughs] SEAN: Talk about a patron's goal, man, I love that. SEAN: Workers in the 70s knew, man, it was a very radical time for labor. They knew that when the apprentice showed up in the morning, he better keep the cooler full of beer, cold beer, and they also knew "abolish rebar". By that I mean, just don't put any rebar in. JUSTIN: Bringing back the spirit of Frank Furness, really, who's, um... he always said, he kept interns in his architecture office to keep the drinks cold. NOVA: [laughs] SEAN: Yeah. SEAN: Not as an apprentice, but just a dirty intern, you know? JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] So, with that in mind, 1970s New York City construction, let's look at how these buildings were put up. SEAN: Mm, allegedly put up. JUSTIN and LIAM: Allegedly put up. JUSTIN: Alright. Oh boy, this is a lot less legible, now that I've switched the background to black. Um. NOVA: It's fine. Goth diagram. JUSTIN: They hired... put the architect notes on two slides ago. They hired architect Minoru Yamasaki, right? He decided to use a relatively new form of structural design called tube frame construction. NOVA: He also decided to design it, uh, to, like, have... Middle Eastern architectural features, which is... like, he designed it to evoke the Great Mosque at Mecca, which is very strange and ironic. JUSTIN: Well, cause he had previously worked on a big airport terminal in Saudi Arabia, which of course the contractor for that was Saudi Binladin Group. NOVA: Well, of course. LIAM: Jesus. JUSTIN: Well. SEAN: Put a pin in that name there. JUSTIN: If you work on any kind of construction in the Middle East, you will work with Saudi Binladin Group. They are big players over there. This picture, like, describes mostly the elevator concept, which will be important later, but sort of the whole concept of the towers here, with your tube frame construction, is that there's one acre of column-free office space on every floor. NOVA: Open plan. You know, the way of the future. JUSTIN: So, there's a whole bunch of columns on the exterior, they're placed 18 inches apart, and those handle a lot of the weight, and then there's columns in the core, and those also handle a lot of the weight. Those are thicker. But then this area in between? No columns whatsoever. Just open and airy. Right? SEAN: Put a pin in that, too. JUSTIN: Yes. And then, your elevator system is interesting, right? Rather than having elevators that start from the ground floor and bring you to any floor, you have a system of local and express elevators, right? So you start at the lobby, right, and then there's a system of local elevators that get you through the first... thirty-or-so floors, but if you gotta go higher than that, you take the express elevator to the first sky lobby, and then get on the local elevator there, but you gotta go higher than that, you get on the other express elevator to go to the third sky lobby, and then there was actually another elevator just for tourists, and then of course there was the service elevator, where the contractors go and they have to wait a long time for it, and y'know, there's a guy who sits on a crate in there, he's pushed a button for you, y'know? Cause you're not allowed to push a button for some reason. NOVA: Yeah, you gotta lug over, like, explosive charges in there. JUSTIN: Yeah. LIAM: [laughs] SEAN: Yeah. Could only hold so much nanothermite at one time, but it was pretty effective. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah, I mean, usually those service elevators are pretty big. SEAN: [laughs] Have you guys ever, did you guys ever go to the towers? I guess [Nova] wouldn't have gone, but. NOVA: No... LIAM: I had. SEAN: You did? LIAM: Yes, I did. SEAN: Oh, cool. LIAM: I stayed at the World Trade Center Marriott, and Windows on the World, and they never fucking replaced Windows on the World with a good restaurant, which I'm very upset about. SEAN: You went too, Rocz? JUSTIN: I never went to the towers. I did go to New York City once before 9/11, and I was very small and also terrified of the tall buildings. SEAN: They were so fucking tall. We used to skate down there all the time, cause there were a good place to skate by the Brooklyn Bridge, and you'd stand in between the two towers, and because of the way your vision was, it would look like they were leaning in on you. It was like, the most... they were absolutely fucking insane. Like humongous, it's hard to even understand the scale of them, until you've been in them or stood under them But I'm sorry, go on. JUSTIN: Yeah. So, so there's a couple interesting features here, one of which is, y'know, why were the columns spaced so closely together? It's not actually for any structural reason, that's an architectural decision, because... what's his face, the architect. How do I pronounce his name? Yamasaki was afraid of heights. And here he was, designing the tallest building in the world. [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: So, and then the elevator situation, the idea is you save space on the core of the building, right? Because after parking minimums, the main limit on the height of the building is the elevator system. If you ever played SimTower, you know that. [chuckles] Which is (?) NOVA: You can see the stairwells here in the core, this has three visible, but there should be four in each core. JUSTIN: The old code would have required six, but the new code that had just been in effect after these buildings were designed only required three. I think you would need four now? I'm not sure. I don't know anything about New York City codes. SEAN: Certainly upgraded the code after 9/11. JUSTIN: Yeah. LIAM: Oh yeah. LIAM: It's one more. JUSTIN: One of the results of this is that the World Trade Center towers were incredibly light and airy. You can see the sun just shining straight through. You can even see through the core of the building. Right? This is partially because, um, this was designed during a particularly lenient period in building construction, where they didn't actually need any concrete in the core of the building, it was all steel. NOVA: Cool. Sounds fine. JUSTIN: Yeah. We'll talk about how the fireproofing worked in a bit. Another factor is, we have the bathtub down here, they had to excavate out all the way to bedrock to build this whole complex, and they had to build this big slurry wall to hold back all the water, to avoid affecting the water table. You can see here how the 1909 tube from the PATH trains just penetrates straight through the building. They just supported the tube on a bridge while they were building it. LIAM: Oh, that's terrific. SEAN: ...Foundations are my work, and I'm looking at this on the right and I'm just so proud of my people. Good job... Beautiful. NOVA: Those retaining walls, y'know, held up like a champ. JUSTIN: You can see here a set of trusses, and those sorta help keep the building together below grade, they also help tie... the outer columns into the core. The main thing we wanna look at is you see the load-bearing exterior columns, right, these are all... every single, like, piece of facade had a load-bearing column behind it, right. You can also see, I think "Atlas Machine Works" is what these columns say on them... It's an interesting thing they did, is they bid out every individual lot of steel, individually, so they got them from all these different manufacturers, because they thought it might be cheaper. SEAN: Just like the New York City financial crisis basically created neoliberalism in the United States, this is happening right before that. Just bid it out to like a thousand different fuckin' factories. Roll that steel and, yeah, just get in under bid. You'll be good. LIAM: Just hope it works out. Yeah. NOVA: These two large Italian men want to come to your office to discuss your steel bid. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: Okay, so, a huge amount of... although they bid it out to several companies, a huge amount of the building was built out of basically identical three-story high sections of steel, you know, you have these three columns, you have three spandrels, right, and that was over three floors, right. You have your structural steel, clad in some fireproofing, probably spray-on on the outside, and then, y'know, there's some aluminum panel outside of that, right. SEAN: All I can think of when I look at this, these pieces of steel, being a welder, I'm like, that is a lot of fucking work. LIAM: [laughs] SEAN: That is a lot of lovely man hours of welding and making union rate right there. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. ...yeah, these are probably pretty thick sections of steel, yeah. SEAN: Great work if you can get it. JUSTIN: Exactly. And then your floors are of, y'know, fairly light but fairly standard construction, you've got concrete over a metal deck, which is over your... steel joists, right. JUSTIN: Your truss joists. NOVA: Because they don't need to be heavy, because all of the weight is in the outside columns and the core, right? JUSTIN: Yeah, you're just bracing into the columns on the outside, and you're bracing into the core on the inside, and then there's some funky stuff that happens in the corners, which I'm not quite sure what it is. Yeah, so your main purpose of this is you're bearing the weight from office crap, right? SEAN: There's nothing structural in the center, it's just completely open plan, and these are just basically, yeah, they just run from the center to the outside but they're bearing almost no load at all. JUSTIN: Yeah, your concrete here is mostly just to give you a smooth surface to put flooring on than anything else. LIAM: Ornamental concrete. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: [laughs] Yeah, it's carrying, like, stockbrokers, rather than anything heavier. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah, so your load rating is gonna be something like, I think at the time it was 80 pounds per square foot. SEAN: There's just, there's not even a lot of rebar–allegedly, rebar is just like wire mesh, you're just throwing mesh down and then you're pouring, like, like four to eight inches of concrete on top of it? JUSTIN: I think it did–yeah, I think it did serve a purpose to sorta tie the exterior columns into the core, but that was spread out over a hundred and ten floors, right, so... it wasn't... no individual truss is doing a lot of work. And the other part of that is because of the hat truss, we'll talk about in a second. So yeah, you get some more detail here, you can see there's, um, you know, you have your exterior column, you have, sort of, it's bolted in with this sort of angle bracket here, with bolts and slotted holes, right, that lets it sorta expand and contract as needed, cause the building sways with the wind. NOVA: Why wouldn't you just make it less flexible and stronger? [laughter] SEAN: I was gonna say, your main character from that bridge episode came out in the (?) gusset plate. NOVA: That's right. SEAN: The villain is back. [laughter] JUSTIN: Wow, if it just didn't have expansion joints it would have been fine, I don't know why they didn't build it... [laughter] I don't know why they built it with expansion joints. Here we go, expansion joints did 9/11, folks. NOVA: That's right. [laughter] NOVA: Having any flexibility in your building system at all is, like, added to list of 9/11 perpetrators after Mothman. SEAN: And so it's rigidity, really, did 9/11. Or lack of rigidity. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly, like... Some people say, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, but [Nova] wants just to be a rock. NOVA: Yeah, float like an anchor. JUSTIN: Yes. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: But yeah, so, you can sort of see how these assemblies were bolted into the, um, exterior spandrels here on each floor, right? This is all the same crap we were looking at before. This is before the concrete was poured. And then at the top of the building was something called the hat truss. LIAM: Oh boy. JUSTIN: Why do you call it a hat truss? NOVA: Because it looks like a hat. SEAN: I'm guessing you're gonna be distributing something up there, you're gonna be moving things toward the center, it looks like? JUSTIN: It is, cause it's at the top of the building, like a hat, yeah. SEAN: It's just a hat. JUSTIN: I's just a hat, yeah. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So, the hat truss, it's at the top of the building, and it's a very strong structure, right here, it ties in the top of the building to the core of the building, the exterior, the... SEAN: Can I ask a question real fast? That hat truss between the top of the building and then the foundation of the building is the only thing that's tying all of these columns, these vertical columns together? JUSTIN: Oh no, there's 110 floors of, uh, trusses as well. SEAN: Yeah, but those little weak, like, pussy trusses, right? JUSTIN: Yes. SEAN: Interesting, okay. JUSTIN: Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I'm not the architect. [laughs] SEAN: I'm just trying to think of this, like, in light of the inevitable disaster that's gonna happen later on. JUSTIN: The hat truss is the big thing that's holding everything together, yeah. SEAN: A very heavy thing that, if you watch the video of what happened to the tower, kinda falls by itself at a certain point, and then everything else collapses. NOVA: Yeah, listen, nothing's gonna sever a bunch of those columns. JUSTIN: Yeah. It'd be impossible. LIAM: Planned explosives. Planned explosives. JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] Yeah, so the hat truss is, y'know, it's the main thing that holds it together, everything else is kinda like, just those weak-ass floor trusses, right, and y'know, there's concrete on top of them. Y'know, main thing you're worried about is, like, wind loads. I don't know if they were talking about earthquake loads back then, in New York City, cause I believe you have to do that now, but you didn't then. NOVA: Yeah, probably not. I mean... JUSTIN: I think earthquake loads are basically the governing code everywhere now. But yeah, this is just to prevent the outside from moving independently of the inside. NOVA: Yeah, which would be bad, if that happens. SEAN: Quite bad. JUSTIN: Yes. So, in 1973, they finish the buildings, bunch of tenants move in, they're the tallest building in the world, they're the buildings with the most floors in the world, tube construction was proven, which meant a lot of other buildings were built with this form of construction, Citicorp Center, which we'll talk about later, the Sears Tower, and nothing bad happened. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: No. SEAN: Famously. JUSTIN: Yes. This is where [Nova] takes us on. NOVA: That's right. [laughter] Welcome to my short explainer about how nothing bad happens. [laughter] NOVA: So, if you listen to our episode about the Salang Tunnel Fire, we talk about how the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This has been widely held to be a very bad move, not least because, as part of the, like, psycho Reagan Doctrine anti-communism, the US and the US's friends in Pakistan and Israel and so on, trained, armed, and funded a mixture of Afghan and foreign, mostly Saudi, Islamist fighters to fight the communists. And the good news is– SEAN: Put a pin in that, yeah. NOVA: Yeah, put a pin in that, running out of pins. The good news is– well, depending– the good news is they win. Next slide, please. JUSTIN: That's how the buildings fell down, you ran out of pins. [laughter] NOVA: Put another pin in this guy. LIAM: They will always be a grateful ally. [laughter] NOVA: In this, in this, uh... this article from, I think, 1991, "Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace". SEAN: Robert Fisk, he's still out there. NOVA: Yeah, still writing. So, after they win, some of them go on to form the Taliban government of Afghanistan, others of them, like this guy, are just kind of wandering. Like, thus this article, about how this cool guy, who like never worked for the CIA or anything of that nature, is now building roads in Sudan, and he's like, he's put his army on the road to peace and he's doing humanitarian work. JUSTIN: "Hey, I brought him into the family business." [laughter] SEAN: "Yeah... they sent us up to the Bronx, "we're gonna build these, um, residential towers, yeah." NOVA: [laughs] SEAN: Bin Laden committed Co-op City. JUSTIN: Saudio Binladio Group. [laughter] NOVA: Three more... LIAM: "...plot of terrorism here." NOVA: Three more bad things happen, in order: Russia, post-USSR Russia, invades Chechnya; Serbians kill a bunch of Muslims in Bosnia; and then, lastly, George H.W. Bush invades Iraq, which requires stationing US troops in Saudi Arabia, which a Saudi Arabian Islamist, like Osama Bin Laden, could get very upset about. And all in all, it becomes very easy for guys like this, who have been like, who have found themselves in this world of uh, jihadism, I suppose, to then sell this idea that the West, right, including Russia but also the US, is at war with Islam. And this leads to the foundation of Al-Qaeda, and what Al-Qaeda start doing is blowing up American stuff abroad, embassies, the USS Cole, which I think kills, like, six sailors... Next slide, please. JUSTIN: He's basically doing Falling Down. NOVA: [laughs] Yeah. A disgruntled former US contractor. SEAN: I don't know what's funnier, is imagining Michael Douglas dressed like Bin Laden or Bin Laden dressed like Michael Douglas. [laughter] NOVA: Please Photoshop that and send it to us on Twitter– Either way. Preferably both. So, then the terrorist attack happens, but not that terrorist attack. In 1993, an, I think Egyptian, guy called Ramzi Yousef figures out, hey, there's a vulnerability in these twin towers, you can just drive into the parking garage under here, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna fill a van with explosives, park it next to a column, and set it off. And hopefully what's gonna happen is one of these towers is gonna collapse, fall into the other tower, they both come down, a huge win for Jihad. This does not happen, you can see a little diagram here on the left hand side of what does happen, which is essentially he blows a big goddamn hole in three or four floors of the parking garage. Kills like, six people. But there's a few more details to put pins in, so I hope you have pins ready. SEAN: Well, I would say real fast– JUSTIN: I was plucking them out of the towers, actually. LIAM: Also, Ramzi Yousef was, I believe, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks, and he is still sitting on Guantanamo Bay, and we're never gonna try him because we are a broken and diseased country. NOVA: Yep. SEAN: And also I would say too, you can critique this plan, this 1993 plan, but the guy in question was named the Blind Sheikh, so he might not have been the best planner of this operation. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: No, perhaps not. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, by the way, waterboarded 273 times by the CIA. LIAM: That seems a bit excessive. SEAN: 272 more than Christopher Hitchens. JUSTIN: ...say, like, I don't know, maybe–if they had done it three more times he might have confessed. [laughter] NOVA: Take three more pins. Pin number one, i's very difficult to evacuate the towers, because when Ramzi Yousef's bomb goes off in the parking garage, smoke just goes straight up that core, it chokes the entire lobby, it floods up the core through the elevator shafts, and so people are trying to evacuate through this, the firefighters have to break out windows so that the smoke can get out. SEAN: They just built two giant chimneys. NOVA: Yeah. That's one pin. Second pin, you'll notice, on level B1, there's the Port Authority Control Center. That gets destroyed, which means the Port Authority's communications infrastructure for telling people to evacuate and stuff, instantly destroyed. And pin three, when they get there, the New York Fire Department put their command post right outside the lobby of the North Tower, and you can see, on the right here, the photo of the street outside, covered in emergency vehicles. Apart from that, nothing bad is gonna happen. JUSTIN: Can't help but admire the RTS bus, right here. LIAM: He also tried to assassinate the Pope, didn't he? NOVA: Yeah, there was a lot of weird stuff like that, a lot of cockamamie schemes that kind of didn't go anywhere. SEAN: They were a bunch of loser jerk-offs, right, NOVA: That's true, yeah. SEAN: like they fought one heroic battle in fucking Afghanistan and then they're like, we're out of work, what do we do? And they just, y'know... JUSTIN: How do you try to assassinate the Pope, but then get away with it NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: to an extent that you failed but are still able to do further terrorism? NOVA: Huge L for the Swiss guards. LIAM: He got arrested, I believe in 95, maybe in Pakistan, and now he's serving two consecutive life sentences in supermax. So he didn't do it that good. NOVA: Hey, but at least he didn't get water-boarded. That we know of. JUSTIN: So did he try... how far did he get into assassinating the Pope before he was later able to do this? NOVA and SEAN: [laugh] LIAM: Okay, my god, I–close after the Iranian shrine bombing, y'know what, you do that, all... this was supposed to be going on the next slide. JUSTIN: You're asking me, the Catholic on this podcast, to assassinate the Pope. SEAN: You don't own Catholicism, buddy. You do not own Catholicism. LIAM: I'm telling you that he tried to assassinate the Pope. SEAN: Guys, we're fighting amongst ourselves, okay? [crosstalk] LIAM: He was gonna be a suicide bomber dressed as a priest. NOVA: Jesus. JUSTIN: Oh my god. LIAM: Apparently, that did not– NOVA: Fuck off, that's not real. LIAM: According to Wikipedia, "Phase I: Pope assassination plot", it is. [laughter] NOVA: Ohh, fucking clown shoes. Okay, so. This is a memo. It's called the President's Daily Briefing, the CIA collates it, they give it to the President every day. This one is highlighted, and it's declassified now due to public interest because it's headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US". And what this tells you is, the President, at the time, George W. Bush, meant to have read this, probably never did, that Bin Laden wanted to follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and bring the fighting to America. And you have your cause and effect quite neatly here, because after US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington. And so... LIAM: Went over, buddy! SEAN: He went over, buddy! [laughter] NOVA: So the CIA already kind of know that Bin Laden wants to do this, but they don't want to share information with the FBI, the FBI don't want to share information with the FBI, the NSA don't want to share information with the FBI, and so, basically– SEAN: None of them are snitches! The CIA and the NSA aren't snitches, they're not gonna go– NOVA: Yeah, ACAB. I guess the lesson here is that FBI agents are incredibly unpopular and no one likes them, because you end up with all of these memos al flying back and forth between FBI agents that are like, "hey, we know all of these al-Qaeda guys are in the US and have multiple entry visas and some of them are at this flight school. Should we do something about that," and then they just get things back like, "eh, nah." SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: "Probably fine." NOVA: Feds, baby. JUSTIN: Yes. SEAN: ...Who would wanna hang out with an FBI? They're all Mormon, they don't even fucking drink, they never let down. (?) man. I wouldn't snitch out if I was in the CIA. Which I'm not. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: He said, not quite convincingly. SEAN: [laughs] NOVA: This is how you get the, like, 9/11 conspiracy theories that, like, not Bush did 9/11, but Bush allowed 9/11 to happen, is that, like, it seems so implausible that you could have all of these, like, kind of near-misses, where the FBI are like, huh... [crosstalk] If you think that's... If you think that that's an implausible level of incompetence for the federal government to display, I would ask you, have you seen anything the federal government has done in the last twenty years? SEAN: It's a good point. JUSTIN: Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. NOVA: Mmhm. JUSTIN: I feel like that's the fundamental tenet of Marxism. [laughter] NOVA: So that's me, that's my little, like, potted explanation of how 9/11. And of course we know what happened on 9/11, apart from unless you're in our audience as Zoomers, in which case you may not. So I guess... LIAM: Building blow up go boom. NOVA: Yeah, yeah, 19 of bin Laden's guys fly one airliner into the North Tower, then like an hour later they fly another one into the South Tower, a lot of people get killed, a lot of people get trapped above the impact site because the plane, like, severs all or all but one of the stairwells in the core. Those people are just fucked. And you get, like, really grim photos of people hanging out of windows, and like 911 calls. People jump out, people fall. Grimmest thing, one of them lands on a firefighter and kills him... JUSTIN: Then they whacked a plane into the Pentagon, and then Amy McGrath shot down Flight 93. NOVA: [laughs] Yeah, that's right. I was gonna talk a little bit about the actual emergency response, because that's a disaster in and of itself. So, as with last time, the fire department just sets up a command post in the lobby of the North Tower, and you can see it there on the top left. The Port Authority announcement system that was in the basement, it does not get blown up this time, so that's working. And they get on the radio and they say, okay, everybody just stay where you are, we know how much of... how much of an effort it was, how chaotic it was to evacuate last time, it's safest to keep everybody where they are, and you fight the fire. It's shades of Grenfell, right? In fact, a lot of people in the South Tower come down to ground level when the first plane hits the North Tower, and people tell them to go back up. Some of them do, some of them don't. JUSTIN: Oh my God. It's just the worst instruction I can think of. Like, LIAM: Yeah, absolutely. JUSTIN: but I can also see why people would do it. NOVA: Mmhmm. LIAM: Like, who knows what the fuck to do if the building you're currently standing in has just been hit by a plane. NOVA: No. LIAM: That's not fair. SEAN: I'd like to think I would do the right thing and just walk the fuck out and go home, but, y'know, it's capitalism, y'know, you have a job back up there, oh, the people down, the security down there, the firefighters, the cops are saying it's safe, go back to work, okay, I'll go back to the accounts tomorrow, do more accounting. JUSTIN: Yeah, that fire's like 40 stories above me, I don't care. NOVA: I remember reading one survivor talking about how, like, he gets down to the lobby and a Port Authority guy with a bullhorn, like, yells in his face to go back up, and he's like, I don't know how I didn't punch the guy but I just walked past him, because what was he gonna do, arrest me? So, y'know, some people do. Also, of note, is I want to talk about radios a little bit, because at this time– SEAN: Talk about how Giuliani fucked up the radios with the bidding of the contracts, I'm assuming that's what you're gonna say right now, right? NOVA: That's exactly what I'm gonna say. So– SEAN: Thank you, thank you. SEAN: Famous, famous story in New York, people talk about this all the time, like, we had– LIAM: I thought Giuliani loved America. I was told that Giuliani loved America. [laughter] NOVA: Noun verb 9/11, yeah. SEAN: ...New York City and talk to people here both before and after 9/11 and see how much fuckin' people love Giuliani. He's the mayor and he fucked, he screwed the pooch on this one. NOVA: ...There's actually two bad Giuliani decisions. LIAM: I feel like if I say, "Rudy Giuliani loves America", anywhere in New York, I'm gonna get laid out, and I'm gonna deserve it. SEAN: Don't say that at the Patriot Bar, man, just don't say it. NOVA: So, there's actually two Rudy Giuliani horrible 9/11 decisions. One is the radios, one is, like, basing pretty much all of the New York City's emergency operations center in Building 7, like, directly across, along with a bunch of, like, incredibly hazardous chemicals for some fucking reason? Like he was a Batman villain? But yeah, anyway, radios. So, because of shitty low bidding, the FDNY and the NYPD and the Port Authority Police all have separate radio systems. They can't interact with each other, they can't talk to each other. NYPD and Port Authority have UHF, ultra-high frequency radios, which work quite well in buildings. The Fire Department has VHF, very high frequency, which don't. SEAN: We've heard Al Yankovic, we know. NOVA: Yeah. And... there is a Port Authority repeater in the building, that you use to increase that signal strength Nobody quite knows how to operate it, it sort of works, it kind of works. And so you have this incredibly chaotic thing where people are coming down, people are coming back up. You have firefighters trying to go up the stairwell, there's a picture of that on the right hand side. That guy, Mike Kehoe, survived, by the way. And... as they're doing this, their radios don't work, and so when the second plane hits the South Tower, the FDNY orders an evacuation, and none of the firefighters up there can hear it. And so... LIAM: Jesus fuck. NOVA: Kills... JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: 343 firefighters, one guy from the fire patrol, who you can see there in the red helmets, a fire marshal also, bunch of cops, but at least they had some warning, whereas the firefighters absolutely did not. LIAM: Jesus. NOVA: And as ever, there's... all of the dispatchers instantly overwhelmed with 911 calls and radio communications. The in-cab terminals that you have now, those were new at the time, and they just kind of stopped working. And so if you were an FDNY commander and you wanted to know what units you had available to you, the dispatcher would have to read that out to you, and that would take like five, ten minutes of just uninterrupted airtime. Everybody's talking over each other, because the handful of channels are overcrowded, and of course, you still have, as you see in that diagram on the bottom right, everybody's just parked right outside, because that's.. that was how you staged things. And so you just end up with this... SEAN: I just want to say that ACAB, but also AFAW, All Firefighters are Wonderful. It's heartbreaking to hear this story, because firefighters do nothing but good. They're like a municipal service that does nothing but help people. There's like a slew of people out there to help you out and get you safe and put out the fire. Good people. NOVA: Yeah. LIAM: Like, I've done a lot of shit in my life, but like, I could, like, again, with firefighters, it's just as simple as, like, I don't, and I will never have the fucking balls to, like, run into a burning building with my radio not fucking working. I'll just be like, yep, this is a Tuesday! This shit blows ass! NOVA: Yeah. Catch me running in the opposite direction, and not wanting to be a firefighter anymore. LIAM: I am, in fact, a pussy bitch baby. That's why... SEAN: AFAW. All firefighters are wonderful. NOVA: That's right. So this of course sets up for, like, a massive disaster in the emergency response, and it's why the death toll is as high as it is. I don't know if there's... lessons you can learn from this, aside from fucking evacuate a building when a plane hits it. Because it's not something that you can really, like, prepare for, you can't say, oh, the fire department didn't have enough radios, because, like, they were never going to, you can't keep that many on hand just in case 9/11 happens. SEAN: There's a certain inertia, too, like, you keep coming back to, you keep putting a pin in these plans, what happened in... in 1993, and what happens at 9/11, and it seems like... like, the mists of time, like it seems like forever ago, but if you were there, it was only eight years apart, right? You had this plan then, and we have this plan now, and it wasn't that far apart from one another. NOVA: Well, like, somebody... I remember the Port Authority guy said at the time, like, he was telling people to stay put over the announcement thing, and the phrase was like, I'm gonna keep doing this until I get authority not to from the fire department or somebody, and of course, the fire department's kinda busy at the moment, and so you just... LIAM: Somebody has to go, you know, put out a fire. NOVA: Yeah. Just don't get that. JUSTIN: There's also, like, a lot of precedent for tall buildings not falling down at this point, y'know? Even ones where they really thought it was going to, like One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia, they were like, this building's definitely coming down, and they evacuated most of Center City, cause they thought it was gonna come down, and finally the fire got high enough to hit a floor that had sprinklers on it, tamped the fire down. SEAN: Can I, uh... [Nova], are you done with the part where Giuliani puts the staging in Building 7, and the city stuff? ... NOVA: Yeah, this is me done with my slide here. So I figure if we all have anything else to contribute about the actual day of, this is kind of where it belongs. SEAN: Well, if I could, like, and I think that was a good presentation, NOVA: Thank you! SEAN: we have to get back to the political economy of it, right? Because we're talking about the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, this like, mongrel, disgusting, public-private entity with a ton of money and a ton of power that kind of exists outside the structure of the city and the state, both states, but kind of lives in it at the same time, has the ability to create all these hundreds of millions of square feet of office space, even when it's needed or not, like there's a whole, like, economic world that's existing here, and part of the reason, as I understand it, and again, like, I'm a New Yorker and like, people still talk about this, the reason why Giuliani ends up putting all those essential services in the World Trade Center complex is because the World Trade Center, from the fucking get, from the 1970s with the fiscal crisis and all the way up to the time when 9/11 happens, was an unmitigated fucking disaster. It was a boondoggle. They never leased out all that fucking space. So what do you do? You get another government agency to lease out the space, to bail out the Port Authority, to try to get private people to come in and lease it, but they don't, so you bring another public entity in there, and you just keep, like, filling this thing as much as you possibly can to make sure it doesn't lose all the fucking money. It's no... NOVA: So incidentally, incidentally why, you see this in, like, conspiracy theories, which we'll talk about in a second, but like, they'll be like, oh, why did the FBI and the CIA and the NSA have an office in the World Trade Center? SEAN: They were bailing them out! NOVA: Yeah, because they were bailing them out! Because you can always get money by, like, having the feds be tenants in your building, and that's what was happening. JUSTIN: Yeah, if the buildings were still up, they'd have the DSA as a tenant by now. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] SEAN: Oh yeah, they'd have... They're half-feds, yeah. [laughter] JUSTIN: I'm sorry. SEAN: I should know. (?) with you on that one. (?) a break and use the bathroom real fast? NOVA: Yeah, go for it. JUSTIN: Yeah, go ahead. LIAM: Go for it. JUSTIN: Alright. [drum banging(?)] JUSTIN: Get some drums there. SEAN: Hey, guys. NOVA: Hey. SEAN: Hey, uh, my roommate just got back from a few months away because of COVID, and he informs me that a woman named Ruth Bader Ginsburg died an hour ago. NOVA: Yeah, you hear about that? NOVA: Our very own 9/11 on the 9/11 episode. SEAN: [laughs] LIAM: She... she died on Rosh Hashanah, which, if you need any further proof that God hates the Jews... [laughter] NOVA: Yeah–How's that year going for you? LIAM: Yeah, we're starting off real good, dude. I... I don't want to get into it too much, because I don't want to deal with the snarky bullshit; Ruth Bader Ginsburg should have retired, because that's not really here nor there right now. But just, absolutely fuck Mitch McConnell, absolutely fuck, fuck, like–just fuck this whole thing, man. SEAN: Fuck everything. Fuck it all. LIAM: That's how I feel, man. I just... like I said, I'm not doing the, you know, blame... I'm not getting into the "blaming her for her own death" bullshit right now, but I just absolutely... SEAN: You kinda (?), though. [laughs] NOVA: Yeah, I might. I might indulge myself. LIAM: I will say, and I... don't want to even speak these words, but like, if you live in a state where there's a Senate race, and you can vote for someone who's not, like, a literal baby-eating monster, please, please do that. I don't really give a fuck about the vote for President, but like, please, at least in the Senate, like. SEAN: This is really early, it just happened, but isn't Mitch McConnell just gonna jam this through the Senate? LIAM: Yeah, yeah... NOVA: Oh yeah. LIAM: In the statement acknowledging her death, he also basically turned around and was just like, but we're gonna nominate our person. SEAN: And the Democrats won't filibuster, because they're fucking cowards. NOVA: Yeah, and it's gonna be some slavering dogfucking psycho. LIAM: You know who's gonna have to save us? Mitt fuckin' Romney. NOVA: Please God, no. LIAM: He's gonna have to take one for the team– You, you don't want to see that, [Nova]? You don't want to see Mitt fuckin' Romney stabbing Mitch McConnell on the floor of the Senate with some sword he got from his dad in, like, 70s Detroit flea market? You don't want to see that? Yes you do. SEAN: If there's one thing I share, sentiment I share with some of the protagonists of our story: fuck America, man. NOVA: [laughs] SEAN: Not in the way that they said it, but just like, ugh, what a fuckin' unmitigated disaster. JUSTIN: Bernie Sanders is the only senator I... know of who has a sword. SEAN: [laughs] NOVA: There's gotta be more than that. LIAM: I believe–there's... there's some wackadoodles in Congress that I imagine have swords. SEAN: There's gonna be QAnon senators soon, so I'm sure that'll happen. JUSTIN: Oh my god. LIAM: Oh god. JUSTIN: We have a QAnon senator before we get, like, a Social Democratic one. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Oh my god. LIAM: I am so tired of the QAnon people, man. I'm just like, why do you believe... NOVA: Speaking of! SEAN: I'm doing a QAnon episode with Matt Christman next week, it's gonna be great. JUSTIN: ...fun. NOVA: I'm sure he's gonna take this news extremely well, and with the, like, equilibrium we know him for. JUSTIN: What happened? SEAN: I just saw his girlfriend, she was going over to his house, and I feel a little bad for her. She's gonna hear it. JUSTIN: What just happened? I didn't understand the last discussion we had, I showed up– EVERYONE ELSE: Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. JUSTIN: [hysterical laughter] NOVA: Well, Rocz has become the Joker, ladies and gentlemen. JUSTIN: ...I'm sorry. SEAN: Welcome back, baby. [crosstalk] NOVA: Do you remember that, like, a few weeks ago, she officiated a wedding, and like, they posted it on Twitter, and they were like, hey, um, no, guess who officiated our wedding? Nobody's wearing a mask, but... don't worry, we all got tested. SEAN: [laughs] NOVA: I'm grinning and giving a double thumbs up into the microphone right now. SEAN: Covid got her? Holy shit, oh man. Ugh. NOVA: Wedding influencers have just perpetrated a greater act of terrorism on the United States than Al-Qaeda. JUSTIN: That was a hell of a... That was a hell of a bathroom break I took that I missed that. SEAN: [laughs] My roommate, I was saying, my roommate came in, he just got back from COVID quarantine and he told me about that, it was, uh... That's quite interesting, it really puts a new shine on this whole, uh, electoral contest here. JUSTIN: Oh man, it's gonna be really funny when they ram someone through before the election. [laughs] SEAN: This is... But, you know how good this is for content? Because you can use that break as a break and do part two, and then part two will... us basically be doing a cold open of when we found out that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, that's great content. NOVA: Yes, that's a really good idea. JUSTIN: Yeah. SEAN: Really good content. So, anyway, with that news, that, uh, The Notorious RBG is dead. NOVA: God, don't even. JUSTIN: So, we all know Bush put bombs in the towers, right? Twirling his mustache, bringing up big crates marked ACME in the service elevator, right? NOVA: Yep. LIAM: Just the one service elevator, the rest of it has to be for other shit. The designated bomb service elevator. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: There's usually, like, one service el–I don't know, I've... I've been up a... The main tall building I've been up is the BNY Mellon Center in Philly, they only had one service elevator. And it was slow as hell. NOVA: How many bombs could you fit in it? SEAN: How many... How many items of nanothermite do you think you could have brought up? JUSTIN: Oh, it was big, I could have brought a shitload of nanothermite, but I couldn't have concealed that I was doing it, because they have a guy sitting on a crate who pushes the button for you. SEAN: The nanothermite checker. He just checks to make sure you don't have nanothermite. JUSTIN: No, I think he just has a really good union, and he's the elevator operator still. SEAN: That's the IU elevator operator, hell yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah. We're gonna talk about how these towers came down, and then we'll talk a little bit about the conspiracy theories around it, y'know, controlled demolition theory, right? And I've worked on controlled demolitions, well, a controlled demolition. NOVA: Yeah, 9/11. SEAN: [laughs] "Roczniak did 9/11". NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: "It was the Poles!" NOVA: Added to the list of suspects. JUSTIN: "The Poles did it!" NOVA: Did you know no Poles went to work that day? [laughter] SEAN: Put a pin in this podcast. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Implying the Poles have jobs regardless. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Alright. Terrorists whacked two big planes into the buildings, and for some reason a lot of folks think that isn't enough to bring a building down, and instead, y'know, Bush called up the ACME Company and put the bombs in the buildings. So we're gonna talk about thermite, we're gonna talk about squibs, we'll talk about the explosions in the lobby and the basement, we'll talk a little bit about Building 7. I don't know if we can talk too much about it, just because of, uh, time constraints. But first we're gonna talk about the official explanation for the collapse, which I think is basically correct. And I wanna say this, we planned this episode before TrueAnon... Bush Did 9/11, Episode 3 came out; we're not doing this in response to that, I don't wanna start a podcast beef. NOVA: I mean, still, though. JUSTIN: That being said, I learned most of this from that episode, and it's not very convincing. SEAN: I'd also like to note, the kind of wildcard I'll just be floating over all of the content here was what I presented earlier, which is that construction in the late 60s, early 1970s maybe wasn't up to... up to the codes that were demanded, maybe the as-builts looked a little fucked up, so, something to think about moving forward. JUSTIN: I have some pictures of that, actually. SEAN: Ah, yeah. Good man. JUSTIN: So, a plane whacked into... one of the World Trade Center towers, right, and you can sort of see, y'know, looks like a lot of columns– NOVA: Plane-shaped hole. JUSTIN: Yeah, it's a plane-shaped hole. NOVA: Real, like, ACME, like, Looney Tunes shit, you have like a plane-shaped impact hole. JUSTIN: You've got the fuselage, you've got the wings, you can see as the wings get thinner, y'know, less stuff is impacted, right. It's ripped the cladding off, right, it's severed some of the columns, certainly right here there's like two or three floors of columns just pffft, gone, right. These are a few diagrams that I found of estimated damage caused by the impacts, right. And this is in Tower 1, the North Tower, and Tower 2, the South Tower, respectively. So one of the things you can sort of see here is that the impact did a lot of damage. This is mostly showing what happened to the core. A lot of the core columns were just... just whacked. Just gone, by, y'know, the plane ramming into the building. SEAN: These are prefabricated sections, we saw those three story sections that are being flown in and then put in place and then welded together, so, in terms of a column coming apart, it could simply just be a weld breaking. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Mmhm. NOVA: Yeah, and that's why you can't be like, jet fuel can't melt steel beams, it's like, you know what can destroy steel beams, is, like, a plane. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: Or paper burning really hot? Because as it turns out, NOVA: Also true. LIAM: if you've got a lot of paper, you know, this is... JUSTIN: Plastic, (?) computers. SEAN: ...as a welder, I would be happy to, like, you know, stand my beads up to anybody, but if you flew, like, really fast and really hard steel and aluminum into my welds, I'm not sure they would hold. I don't know. LIAM: Fair enough. JUSTIN: As someone who's welded at some point in my life and was never very good at it, you'd definitely fly a plane into my welds. [laughter] SEAN: That's the new American Welding Society certification is, can you fly a plane into the welds? [laughter] SEAN: Yeah, I got my AWS. JUSTIN: Alright, once this plane whacks into the building, right, it causes a lot of fire, it severs some columns. And since we're severing the columns, we need to start thinking about the load path through the building, right. And you can see here, we have another view of the hat truss. We're looking along a different chord, that's why it looks different. Right? NOVA: Yeah, kind of a more sombrero vibe this time. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. We've gone from... sort of trilby to sombrero. SEAN: Different phases, different hipsters doing different styles, different eras. JUSTIN: Once the plane hits the building, it cuts through the exterior columns, a couple things happened. Number one, it sets the building on fire. A lot. There's a lot of fire, right. The jet fuel burned up really quickly, office supplies and shit kept burning, right. It stripped off the fireproofing, that's something we will talk about in the next slide more extensively, and your exterior columns are hollow tubes, so the fire can get inside, right. It severs the pipes in the core, which lead to the sprinkler systems, right, and also all the other pipes. So, if you shat yourself when you were in an upper story, and you needed to use the bathroom, the toilet's not gonna refill. NOVA: That's not so good. JUSTIN: I know, right. LIAM: I love... I love that your scenario is just, "if you shat yourself". NOVA: I mean, I would. SEAN: This is the Virgil Texas guide to 9/11. NOVA: [laughs] Yeah... First of all I'm in 9/11, and second of all I've got IBS, why would I not? JUSTIN: Yeah. LIAM: I'm sorry about your stomach, [Nova]. NOVA: Thank you. JUSTIN: But number four, it changes the load path of these columns, right? So there's these exterior columns, they're taking the weight from these floors here, right, and originally they would transfer the load down, right? Now they're cut in half, so the lower part's still transferring the load down, the upper part is transferring the load up, to the hat truss, the hat truss brings it across into the core columns, which bring them down. NOVA: It's fine. The hat... hat truss is strong, it's fine. JUSTIN: In addition to this, a whole bunch of the core columns have been severed. Right? So, although they're much thicker, much stronger, they are also now being subjected to much much higher loading than they are designed for. Now, you have a very strong safety factor on these things, you have a very strong safety factor on all of these things, and of course, if there was one thing these exterior columns had, it was redundancy. Right, you can see just how many columns there are on every side, I think there's– SEAN: 18 inches, you said, that's a lot of columns. JUSTIN: Yeah, especially when there's one acre of floor space on every floor, right? But, again, there's a lot of fire, right? And it's hot, initially, it gets hotter with paper, it starts to cool down later on, we'll talk about that in a second. And there's a few recordings which, taken out of context, say firefighters thought they could knock down the fires with one or two lines, and that was referring to some of the lower areas of the fire, not like the... the main areas of the fire where there was... NOVA: Yeah, 'cause they're working their way up. JUSTIN: There was a lot of fire. JUSTIN: So now we have to talk about the fireproofing system. All right, and this is where I– NOVA: Is that good? Is that supposed to look that way? JUSTIN: Oh boy. Alright, so this came from... Let me remember what it is. Fire Engineering Magazine. I think it was an article in... SEAN: Oh... I get that every week. JUSTIN: [laughs] I forget where it was, I will link to it in the description, just to make... I got these images from there. Um, fireproofing. It's kind of relative, right? It's rated for however many hours of protection at whatever temperature, if it's properly applied, right? SEAN: Mmm. Our Co-op City people are taking the pin out of that right there. NOVA: Mmhm. Just moving these various pins around. JUSTIN: So the temperature of the fire is lower, it might last longer, if the temperature of the fire is higher, it might not last as long, this depends on chemical composition, what kind of fireproofing it is. Right, so this is why you want fireproofing to be installed completely and adequately, and there are standards and tests which exist now to ensure that fireproofing is applied properly. NOVA: Yeah, plus fewer large Italian men coming to your office to talk about the fireproofing contract. SEAN: It looks like shit on the right there, I just gotta say. If that's actual, like, what it looked like, that looks like shit. JUSTIN: This is from inside the towers; it's not from one of the floors that was hit. But, yeah. SEAN: [laughs] That looks like shit. JUSTIN: It looks like, it looks like shit. SEAN: That's (?) ? SEAN: That's garbage, man. Someone phoned that in. JUSTIN: So, yeah, so the... the sort of tests we do today to ensure fireproofing is installed adequately didn't exist when World Trade Center I and World Trade Center II were put up. SEAN: Thank God, it was the era of the working man. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: No rebar, no fireproofing, simple as. SEAN: No problems. JUSTIN: There's barely any concrete in these buildings, so you didn't need rebar. SEAN: It's the future we all want. JUSTIN: World Trade Center I and II had two fireproofing systems, one was spray-on fireproofing, that was on the floor joists, and most of the structural members. You can see the metal deck has spray-on fireproofing, you can see the floor joists here mostly have spray-on fireproofing. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Well, some of it has spray– the upper cord has spray-on fireproofing. [laughter] JUSTIN: So... SEAN: That's just an honest day's work right there. [laughter] NOVA: It's fireproofed, on average. SEAN: ...I would feel good about that going home at the end of the day. [laughter] LIAM: "I did it. I did a good job." JUSTIN: I'm just trying to... yeah, the upper cord is the one in tension, and the lower co– no, the lower cord's the one in tension, it needs the fireproofing more. Um. Fuck. SEAN and JUSTIN: [laugh] JUSTIN: Alright. Anyway. One was spray-on fireproofing, what we're seeing here are two parts of the building. On the left, actually, is a section of the core. And this had–previously had spray-on fireproofing applied. This is a column, right, this is, I think, three or four stories tall. SEAN: You can see the weld up at the top, too. JUSTIN: What you're looking at here is... this spray-on fireproofing, you can see where it's still applied, right, it adhered well to the surface of the column when it was put on, but the surface of the column was, y'know, it had been exposed to the elements for a while, so it rusted. They sprayed the fireproofing on the rust. NOVA: I mean, if it was put on at the time they, like, put the building up, that's what, seven years? SEAN: No, this is 1992, and the building was built in what, 73, or something like that? You're talking like 15, 16 years, something like that? JUSTIN: That sounds... I don't remember when it was, 68? 69, maybe? SEAN: It started in 68, and I think it wasn't, it wasn't completed until like 70, or 72, so you're looking like... Yeah, a decent amount of time. Twenty years, maybe. JUSTIN: But they put the fireproofing on after the column had developed a layer of surface rust? Sooo, it just peeled off. At some point the fireproofing just started flaking off on its own, right, and, y'know, this section, according to the article, was on the 78th floor, I'm not sure of which tower, and the author noted that this condition was still evident in June of 2000. SEAN: Not good. JUSTIN: And on the other side, we, we already talked about how this fireproofing is not well applied, and this is not necessarily the fireproofer's fault, because a lot of times fireproofing is applied last, before other systems are installed, which makes applying fireproofing to joists like this very difficult. It's difficult to start out with, because it's a complex... y'know, system of shapes, right? SEAN: Don't say Justin doesn't stand for the working man, okay? He understands. LIAM: No, he's not. [laughs] JUSTIN: So the building was also–the buildings were also both built during the transition from asbestos fireproofing to newer non-asbestos fireproofing. NOVA: Another pin. JUSTIN: Yeah, which we were... y'know when Trump says something incredibly stupid which is also right? NOVA: Mm-hmm. SEAN: Mmhmm. All the time, yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah, which is– NOVA: Like when he said about the forest fires that they should rake the forest, but the reason why was that trees explode? He was right, trees do explode in forest fires. JUSTIN: Yeah. And it was like, y'know, asbestos was something that we knew how to apply when these buildings were built, and then we were looking for new non-asbestos fireproofings, which were ordered to be applied when these buildings were half-built. [laughs] SEAN: So this, like, similar to the political economy of it, it's kinda spanned two eras, like the asbestos era and the post-asbestos era. NOVA: Yeah, you have just enough asbestos in there as seasonings to make sure that everybody gets mesothelioma. JUSTIN: So I believe this is high enough that it's all gypsum-based fireproofing. But we didn't, it didn't adhere as well, and it was also just not– it was either not applied well, or it was, we didn't have good adhesives back then, I'm not sure exac–I... Again, I'm linking to the article which has more details, I just took these images to show that, like, this was representative of the amount of fireproofing inside the buildings. There was also a second form of fireproofing in the building. Right. Mostly protecting the core. We saw how there was a hole through the core earlier. Right. NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: So the World Trade Centers did not have concrete cores like a modern building would. They had, it was all steel, protected by spray-on fireproofing, but also you can see some panels here, and I believe that is a different kind of fireproofing. I'm not sure if that's exactly what it was, but I do know for a fact that the other thing that protected the cores was gypsum wallboard. LIAM: Oh good. SEAN: A classic, classic choice. JUSTIN: Also known as drywall. SEAN: Mmhm. NOVA: Thus making the 9/11 hijackers the first Kyles to punch holes in drywall. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: They were not the first Kyles. NOVA and SEAN: [laugh] JUSTIN: Plenty of people punched holes through drywall before 2001. LIAM: Yeah. Yeah. NOVA: Let's say the deadliest Kyles. JUSTIN: That does mean World Trade Center 1 and 2 were Grovertower. [laughter] LIAM: I would watch The Deadliest Warrior, but only with Kyles. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So, alright, drywall is actually pretty good fireproofing, right? That along with the spray-on gypsum waterproofing, you know, gypsum is about half water by weight, the way it works is there's water crystals in the structure, right, in the molecular structure, and as the fire burns the gypsum, the water vaporizes, becomes steam, right, and that keeps temperatures low enough, because there's so much... so much heat required to vaporize the water, that you can get these good fireproofing ratings out of it, like 1 hour, 2 hour, 3 hour, right? But, gypsum is bad with impacts. SEAN: Mm, yes. NOVA: Back to the Kyles. JUSTIN: Yeah. So they Kyled their way through the towers and basically negated the fireproofing. LIAM: That'll do it. SEAN: If anyone's ever dropped a... piece of drywall when you're walking with it and the thing just goes bleh, it crumbles, like, yeah, it's not, not the strongest with that sort of, um... shear, right, it shears very easily off. JUSTIN: And I believe there are, there's... stronger versions of drywall with a bunch of–with a bunch of glass fibers in them, which I assume is probably what they used, but they're probably not aircraft impact rated. SEAN: [laughs] That's an impact rating they only brought on after 9/11. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: Why don't they make the whole building out of the black box? JUSTIN and SEAN: [laugh] JUSTIN: Alright, so, how does your whole bunch of fire translate to the building collapsing, right? And there's a few things that go on here with the floor plates. Right. So step one is the impact happens, and that causes a hell of a lot of damages to the building, right... The fire's kinda gravy on this, the impact did most of the damage. Y'know, it Kyles its way through the drywall, starts a big fire, the floor trusses start to sag from the heat, right. And the fire is interesting, cause it starts out kinda cool from jet fuel, right, and then it gets hotter from paper and shit, right, and then it starts to cool off, right, after the floor trusses start bending. Right. And once the fire starts to cool off, the floor trusses start to contract, and they pull the exterior columns in with them as they do. So that causes these columns to buckle, and that reduces the amount of load they can carry, in addition with all these core columns being exposed to unrestricted flame, and many of them being severed, right. JUSTIN: So you can see this, here's a series of lines imposed, or, what's the word I'm looking for, not "imposed"... JUSTIN and NOVA: "Superimposed". SEAN: "Imposed", but better. JUSTIN: Yes, exactly, over, y'know, where you would expect the columns of the World Trade Center to be, right, and you can see one of them right here, and you can see how these actual columns are bending inwards and then back outwards, right, and you can sort of see that here as well. Right. SEAN: They're vertically buckling. JUSTIN: Yeah, and this is a subtle bending, but it's very significant, right, these columns have been turned into the equivalent of wet noodles. And, um, also several of them have been severed. NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: So, in the meantime, right, these are events leading up to the collapse, not the actual collapse, under the intense implied heat, the remaining intact parts of the building start to twist, you know, writhe under these incredible forces that are being put over, and your load... distribution over the whole tower becomes eccentric, lateral loads are introduced into structural columns designed only for vertical loads that are being pushed and pulled, and generally they're not having a good time, right? SEAN: Can I say, real quick? JUSTIN: Yeah. SEAN: (?) to a welder, although welding, y'know, works for this too, I also use the oxyacetylene blowtorch a lot, and you'd be surprised by what a giant, heavy steel H-beam will do under heat. Like it will twist, it will turn. When you're putting that much heat on it, the thing no longer stays structurally as it's supposed to be, I've seen that in real life. JUSTIN: Yeah, I mean, she just... goes. You know, it–oh crap, I wasn't supposed to switch the slide. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: And so, at some point, a few structural members go, one floor collapses into the one under it, and the top half of the building starts coming down, right? Each successive floor pancakes down onto the next one, and those floors aren't able to put up a lot of resistance to, y'know... NOVA: Just like a few inches of concrete. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. A few inches of concrete, some shitty floor trusses, not much resistance you can put in. NOVA: A bunch of stockbrokers. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: There's not a lot of resistance that, like, a stockbroker has to compression, is the thing. SEAN: They should have got load-bearing stockbrokers. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: And, um, y'know, the falling mass increases with each floor, right, the columns and trusses, of course. The columns themselves are misaligned at this point, so the columns are not really putting up any resistance. They're unable to effectively impede the mass of the building, it's just a hundred psf floor trusses which are resisting this whole building coming down. At its fastest, one floor was collapsing into the next within a tenth of a second. And one thing is, I just wanna explain these, these are computer simulations here. These are done by something called finite element analysis. What you're looking at here is using something called exaggerated deformation, right, when you do these sorts of computer simulations, to illustrate what is happening, usually the deformation is subtle enough that you can't effectively display it graphically without exaggerating it significantly, right? So if you're– NOVA: Yeah, it's difficult enough to see with the superimposed lines. JUSTIN: Yeah, like these things are, these things might fail, y'know, when it's just out of alignment by a couple inches. SEAN: But the twisting and the deformation is real. That's really happening with all those. JUSTIN: Yeah, so, y'know, when it's a couple floors doing this, even if it doesn't look exactly like this, it's still pretty bad. NOVA: Yeah, and also it's fast enough that it's, like, only possible to reconstruct that it's floors pancaking on each other, from slowing down the footage a lot, or from first principles, right? Like, to anybody watching, it just looks like the whole thing comes down at once. JUSTIN: Yeah, and another thing is– NOVA: Almost as if someone had staged a series of explosives around each floor, and so on and so on. LIAM: Aha! SEAN: No spoilers, dude. JUSTIN: Yeah. [laughs] Another thing is, like, a lot of people say this... this building was designed to withstand the impact of a 707. Which, the engineers said it was. NOVA: Engineers would never exaggerate. JUSTIN: Here's the thing. They did not have analytical methods to determine what that impact would be in the 1960s. NOVA: No, it's like Liam saying that, like, he could fight Sean McElwee, like, he doesn't actually have an empirical basis for that. It's just something he's pretty confident about. LIAM: Yes I do. Yes I do. SEAN: I have to see a computer simulation of Liam fighting Sean McElwee. LIAM: I can do it. NOVA: You have to, like, exaggerate both Liam and Sean in order to, like, y'know, analyze this. LIAM: We're both supposedly 6'2", like, he's, I'm sure, got tiny little baby hands. [laughter] JUSTIN: And, like, there's so many variables there, like, maybe they were thinking, like, a 707, but it was on approach to an airport so it was going slower, y'know, and they also would have been like, okay, this is a point load applied to one part of the building, we have to consider that. NOVA: Also, probably not, like, full of fuel. Also, like, airlines did get– airliners did get heavier, is the thing. JUSTIN: Yes. So this building could withstand a 707 impacting it, assuming the 707 was spherical with a uniformly distributed mass. NOVA: [laughs] Assuming a perfectly circular hijacker. JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] Alright, so when these buildings came down, it was the floors that went first, right, and we can sort of see this through how it collapsed, right. NOVA: It goes in a wave, right, it goes top-down and then partway up it starts going bottom-up, too. LIAM: Yeah. JUSTIN: Well– Okay, yes. So, the top comes down, but it's mainly the floors doing the work, right, which is why you see very large pieces of facade, largely intact, that landed around the site, right. And you can also see pieces of facade which were in freefall well past, y'know, the actual front of the collapse. Cause the floors impacted themselves, the facade stayed intact, cause it was the main structural part, until the top part of the building came down and sheared them off, right. And actually, the core stayed intact of at least one of these buildings, like, 25 seconds after the main–the floors had all collapsed. I would throw some video in here, but I've given up on putting video on these, cause we keep getting copyright strikes. LIAM: I'll tell ya, I don't need to see video of it again, to be quite honest. SEAN: And also, YouTube watchers are very rational, reasonable people, they can just imagine this happening and they'll agree with this assessment of it. NOVA: So just, visualize 9/11. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: Go to 9/11 in your mind. SEAN: [laughs] NOVA: Go to whatever the opposite of a happy place is. [laughter] JUSTIN: So, these buildings collapse– NOVA: Are you done visualizing 9/11? Good, let's move on. JUSTIN: These buildings collapse from the inside out. Um, now we have to talk about conspiracies. Right? NOVA: Mmhm. JUSTIN: We're not a conspiracy podcast. I don't like conspiracies, I think they're counterproductive to, um... NOVA: Psychologically, psychologically, they're a way of explaining how something, uh, like, how an atrocity... [crosstalk] JUSTIN: Except Gladio, which is true. NOVA: Yes. ...Every conspiracy theory about Italy is true, but 9/11 did not happen in Italy. Yeah, no–conspiracy theory is just a way of explaining how something that profoundly affects your life and has a lot of meaning can't just be random. JFK can't just get shot by some guy. It has to be the mob and the CIA and so on and so on and so on, and so, like, 19 assholes can't just murder 3,000 people and, like, change the entire course of history. It has to be the Feds or Mossad or whatever. SEAN: ...Personally, I'm an agnostic on a lot of conspiracy theories, but I think we always need to be careful, because I think that, you know, true things like Gladio do exist, we always have to be careful to attribute things to agency that we should be attributing them to structures. NOVA: Mm. LIAM: Mmhm. NOVA: Yeah, well, what's the materialist explanation for 9/11? It's, well, the Reagan Doctrine, and then... the fall of the Soviet Union, and... just arming and funding whoever. Like, that's the conspiracy, right? It's like, that was an illicit series of acts. It's, like, that's not something you need to theorize. JUSTIN: I am fine with saying Bush did 9/11, to be honest, I'm fine with that. But the materialist and structural explanations we're gonna get through here, but in a literal sense, not in a... not in a... structure in terms of, like, economic structure or whatever. NOVA: Yeah... NOVA: Bush himself, either of them, did not, like, go there with a hatchet and start knocking down beams. SEAN: But–and Dick Cheney didn't take the Flight 93 passengers off the jet that landed in, uh... NOVA: Ghost jets. SEAN: Kansas or whatever and just shoot them one by one person. NOVA: They weren't, They weren't secret missiles disguised as jets. JUSTIN: Because Amy McGrath shot down Flight 93. SEAN: Right. Amy McGrath did it, and Dick Cheney is part of an entire systemic looting and destruction of human life and society anyways that comes out of being the Vice President of the United States. You don't need him to be personally executing people on the runway in order for him to be, in some way, complicit in 9/11. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: Pretty gruesomely evil, yeah, exactly. JUSTIN: That'd be pretty funny if he did, though. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: He stole one of their (?). NOVA: We know Dick Cheney didn't kill any of the victims of 9/11, because he didn't demand that they apologize to him like that friend of his he shot. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: Let me tell you about... controlled demolition, right. SEAN: Speak your truth, Justin. JUSTIN: This is–alright, so, controlled demolition is like the big 9/11 conspiracy theory, Bush put bombs in the towers or whatever, right, while he was twirling his mustache and bringing up big crates of ACME sticks of dynamites, right. So there's a few specious pieces of evidence which support this, which we'll get into, but let's talk about how controlled demolition works. Controlled demolition, a lot of times people say this is a building implosion, right, but it's not. It's not an implosion, there's a small set of shaped charges, right, they're made out of high velocity explosives, they cut critical structural members, which usually means almost all the structural members, and gravity does the rest of the work, right. Usually you– NOVA: It's actually what Ramzi Yousef was trying to do, just not successfully. JUSTIN: Usually you use, well, he would've used multiple truck bombs if he wanted to make it work. NOVA: Mm. Not to give him tips or anything, while he's in supermax, but... JUSTIN: Well, he's not exactly about to take down the World Trade Centers. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Someone else did that. [laughs] SEAN: Mission accomplished, if you will. JUSTIN: So usually, you're using plasticized explosion... Plasticized explosives, right, RDX, y'know, C4, the plastic explosive, stuff like that, that lets you shape– NOVA: Oh, you mean that stuff that's easy to detect? JUSTIN: Yes. So it lets you use less explosive overall, it lets you shape the charges, it lets you produce less noise, which is very important, right. Your high velocity explosives produce those very sharp, short booms, right, as opposed to a bomb, which would do a big loud kaboom. LIAM: Right. SEAN: Like the Beirut explosion. JUSTIN: Yeah. Which would then shatter windows, cause widespread damage, so on and so forth, right. Cause you wanna prevent damage in adjacent buildings. You want gravity to do the work, so most of the blasting happens at lower floors, right. Sometimes you might do blasting on upper floors, if you need to bring down the building in a certain pattern, if there's a confined space, which, y'know, there usually is, but of course World Trade Center's came down in an extremely sloppy fashion, so you'd think they would do the blasting at the lower floors. Right. This is a picture of the Queen Lane apartments, this is a controlled demolition I worked on. SEAN: Well, congrats, Mazel Tov. (?). JUSTIN: Yes, it was me, I tore down public housing. [laughter] JUSTIN: So you can sort of see, here's part... part of the building's coming down here, right, cause they took down the columns here, and usually you bring it down sort of one set of columns at a time, that way the building starts to sort of lean into itself, and that helps it fall into its own footprint, right. LIAM: Right. JUSTIN: Now, your... your prep work is, a lot of times, very long, extensive, and complex, right, and it was, y'know, you remove facade materials, you remove all the windows, right, you strip the building down as much as possible so you know absolutely what it'll do when you blow it up, right. You apply the charges, a lot of times there's a bunch of protective tarps you put around the... the explosives in order to ensure that, like, the explosion only happens on the column, and it doesn't– NOVA: Yeah. Crucially, you want to remove the, like, brokerage firms, and, like, arbitrage offices, those kind of get in the way of your explosives and the tarps and things of that nature. SEAN: You want to get all the job liquidation assets out of there. JUSTIN: Ideally, you blow up the building when there's no one in there. LIAM: I like "ideally", like, sometimes you've just got it, NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: ...guy hasn't moved, and you're like, "fuck it, we said 9am, we meant 9am." [laughter] JUSTIN: All right, so– NOVA: Hey listen, there's a whistle, there's a horn, at some point it's on you. SEAN: One of those 19th century boxes from the cartoons you pressed down on? JUSTIN: Okay, I worked on this project, I was... I was put in charge of, I guess, basically doing a lot of public outreach on this, which involved, I'd worked for PHA at the time, I didn't work for Controlled Demolition, Controlled Demolition did the demolition. My job was to, like, you know, do a bunch of maps showing where, the, um, where people shouldn't be, and where you were gonna inhale a lot of dust if you were nearby, then there were some groups who were charged with trying to persuade residents to evacuate around the demolition, determine who could not evacuate, and then there was this third group which was like, you can evacuate, and what we're gonna do is we're going to bring around a judge who will issue a writ of eviction on site so the police can come take you out of your house and put you away for an hour and a half while we, um, demolish this building. LIAM: Congratulations, Rocz, this is your fault. JUSTIN: I, Listen, I was not around when the building actually came down. LIAM: Mmm. Way to pass that blame, brother. JUSTIN: These demolitions, like, there's a lot of weird stuff that happens around them. You know, it's like, literally, you had to evict residents in your surrounding blocks, just so no one would get hit with debris, which might happen. Didn't happen, though. SEAN: It was a very controlled enterprise, this is very logistically complicated, there's a lot of people on it. JUSTIN: Well the fact you had to get a judge involved to just, y'know, hand people evictions, and two hour evictions, not like an actual eviction, it's just like, you can't be here for two hours. It's a bizarre profession. There's... There's very few people who do this job, because there aren't too many controlled demolitions, it's usually like a certain height of building, right. I believe the tallest building that's ever been implosively–or... explosively demolished was the Hudson Department Store in Detroit, right. And they had to do all kinds of strange prep to it. They had to actually fill all its basement levels with dirt, because if the building collapsed into its basement, it would knock down the buildings across the street. LIAM: Nice. SEAN: Makes sense. JUSTIN: Sometimes they do kinda goofy stuff for movies, which is fun, they do like pyrotechnics, they take buildings down in weird ways, y'know, they do that in Las Vegas a lot. NOVA: Yeah, stunt building. JUSTIN: Yes. The biggest piece of evidence for me that this was not a controlled demolition, other than the fact that it would be logistically impossible to rig these buildings for demolition with no one noticing, is that the collapse started where the plane hit the building. Right? And not from the bottom, which is where you would start one of these. So you could do (?). NOVA: Alleged plane. LIAM: [laughs] SEAN: The hologram hit the–yeah. NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: ...Yeah, the holographic plane hit the building there, and then it started from there, and that's how– oh my god. I didn't know where to start anymore. SEAN: Just as an engineer, this whole thing just throws you for a loop, huh? JUSTIN: I... and it's like, well, it was a hologram of a plane. Well, then they put the explosives up there, I guess, as opposed to where they would logically put them. Unless it was a hologram of an expl– you might as well make the whole building a hologram at that point! NOVA: [laughs] We're now getting into the... JUSTIN: The building never existed! NOVA: Jean Baudrillard thing. Yeah, 9/11 didn't happen. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: [indistinct] SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: It's the phantom time hypothesis, the Earth is flat! SEAN: Quantum mechanics on that shit. JUSTIN: Oh my god. So, a lot of conspiracy theorists disagree, like, no steel-framed skyscraper had collapsed because of fire before the World Trade Center did. NOVA: Well, crucially, nobody had flown an airliner into one before. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Like, granted, they flew a small bomber into the, the Empire State Building, but, like, the Empire State Building also had a bigger core, it was, like, it was a smaller plane... JUSTIN: Entirely different structural system, yes. SEAN: Yeah, it wasn't going as fast, it was like lost in fog. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Yep. JUSTIN: Yeah, they were going pretty slow. Much much much smaller plane. NOVA: And then there was that one guy who flew a Cessna into the IRS building, but like, come on man, it's a Cessna. SEAN: [laughs] Oh, look at this website. Justin, I did spend some research time here myself, I read this entire PDF. JUSTIN: I... I didn't read the entire PDF. I didn't realize they had a 50 page PDF until SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: just (?). NOVA: I am not a crackpot. JUSTIN: But I did look at the goddamn Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth page. LIAM: Huge mistake. Huge mistake. JUSTIN: All I can say is, like, 33,000+ people with PEs and AIAs believe this shit. LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: I mean, you get... you get, like, anti-vax doctors and stuff, it's... I dunno, you can be good at some stuff and then also really dumb... I don't know how else to explain it, man. JUSTIN: Education doesn't work. NOVA: No. JUSTIN: Um, alright, so we're gonna look at some of the evidence, there's the lobby explosions, squibs, concrete pulverization is a big one, logistics of Bush secretly putting bombs in the towers, and of course thermite, um, one of the things they said is, for months after September 11th, the investigators were unable to persuade FEMA to obtain basic data, like detailed blueprints of the buildings that collapsed. NOVA: Sure. NOVA: You're telling me that FEMA is, like... negligent? JUSTIN: I mean... LIAM: I don't know what you're talking about. JUSTIN: One of the things about buildings, right, is that, we talked about the as-builts earlier, here's the as-builts rant. The as-builts are essentially the blueprints, right. They're not blue anymore. Right. Here's a sense of as-builts I had to work with– NOVA: Oof, photocopy burn. JUSTIN: when I was still working at one of my earlier jobs, right. One of the earliest subjects philosophers pondered was the nature of knowledge. Right? NOVA: Oh boy. LIAM: Jesus. SEAN: Epistemology. JUSTIN: Yes. What can we know– NOVA: Behold, Plato's World Trade Center. SEAN: [laughs] LIAM: Did you pay for the license for that World Trade Center? NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: What do we know, what can we know, can we know that we know? Is knowledge possible? This is called epistemology. LIAM: I'm gonna beat (?). SEAN: ...Known unknowns, and there's unknown unknowns. NOVA: That's right. SEAN: As a wise man one said. LIAM: Yes. Yes. Sean Rumsfeld, I believe, was his name. SEAN: [laughs] LIAM: Sean, where were you in early 2000s? NOVA: Added to list of suspects. LIAM: I have not seen Sean and Saddam Hussein in the same room at the same time. NOVA: [laughs] SEAN: All I gotta say is, put a pin in me, okay? JUSTIN: Modern construction has settled these questions once and for all, the only thing we can know is that we know nothing. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: After the work of architects, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, contractors, subcontractors, and dozens of project managers come together, there are two distinct end products. The building, and the as-built documents, showing how the building was finally built. And they bear a tenuous relationship at best. SEAN: They sure as fuck do. Go off, go off, King. JUSTIN: As-built documents display for all to see our lack of knowledge of our own creations. And as such, to hide our shame, we usually store them in a rusty filing cabinet, under a leaky water heater, in a locked closet to which only two people have the keys, both of whom are retired. [laughter] Then, ten years later, when some major alteration or renovation occurs, these waterlogged documents are removed from their prison, scanned, saved as a low-resolution PDF, and handed off to an intern, to clean up the photocopier burn as best they can so design work can commence. SEAN: Sounds like Justin might have been that guy at one point. JUSTIN: Contractors are given these designs and then throw them out, and work from actual field conditions, requesting change orders as needed and cursing design professionals all the while. Once the work is substantially complete, design professionals return to survey the work completed, and create a new set of as-builts, built based on the original photocopied set, and the cycle continues. SEAN: Yes. Can I tell an as-built story? JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Please. SEAN: We were building a, this was six, seven years ago at this point. We were building a... new hotel slash residential, right by the Staten Island Ferry, on the Staten Island side. And it was a complicated job because we had to do the foundation around the Staten Island Railroad, which ran under this property. So, there was a bunch of piles drilled and whatever, there was just like a whole bunch of shit. But one of the things that had to be done was a ton of tiebacks. Justin, what's a tieback? JUSTIN: Tieback is when you, um, you're throwing a cable back to hold a retaining wall, right? SEAN: Thank you. Yes. So we're throwing cables back to hold a retaining wall, and that involves drilling into the ground. When the contractor looked at the as-builts, they said, oh, this drill rig here can clearly, with no problem, with no danger whatsoever, drill into the soil of Staten Island in this area, because this high tension power line running under the ground is about 10, 15 feet away from where we're building, where the as-built says it was. We're working on like a Tuesday morning, and all of a sudden, the fucking stoplights and all the lights around us go off, and we see this one guy in the, uh, in–an operator, in the operator's union, just like shitting his pants. And we realized that that as-built was horribly, tragically wrong. And he had drilled with his drill rig directly into half of the power for downtown Staten Island. JUSTIN: Oh my god. [laughs] SEAN: I don't know how many volts were in that fucking machine, and all the guys standing in it, and because we were drilling piles too, there was fucking water everywhere, people were standing in puddles. But thank God, nobody actually got hurt on that. But essentially, as-built almost killed like 15, 20 people, because it said the line was in one place, and it ended up being the other. So fuck as-built, man. NOVA: Well, you got to call 811. SEAN: [laughs] Yeah, 811 has the fucking as-builts... [laughter] JUSTIN: That's one of the weird things, I know the Philadelphia Water Department has legendarily accurate maps of underground utilities, which is why the city's trying to privatize it all the time. Um. LIAM: They will never, ever succeed in privatizing it. Ever, ever. I mean, they probably– NOVA: The city's in the pocket of big filing cabinets. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: We live in hell, but like, Philly Water is amazing because it's impossible to open an account there. Like, Philly Water actively just does not want your money. They might want your landlord's money, but they don't want you to pay them. SEAN: Cool. LIAM: So like, it's impossible to, like, set up an account or close an account, so I think everyone in Philly is just sort of stuck in this hell where sometimes we just send Philly Water like 90 bucks every so often, and I assume they just spend it on like, you know, weed, maybe they go to dinner or whatever. NOVA: Extremely accurate subsurface mapping. JUSTIN: I've never paid for water in this city. Yeah. SEAN: ...Municipal service. Yeah. JUSTIN: My God. So yeah, as-builts are useless. This is an example of an as-built I was provided. You can see a wide variety of lines that should be there, which are not. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: You can see... miles of(?) photocopier burn... NOVA: A wide variety of lines that should not be, that are. SEAN: [laughs] Right. JUSTIN: I believe the date on this document is 1930-something. NOVA: Uh-huh. LIAM: That's that good old school photocopier burn. SEAN: All the drunk people that made that site are long dead? You can't even ask them? JUSTIN: Well– LIAM: Oh no, they're still around. You could go ask old Jim where he put the power lines. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: The building itself looks very good, I will say that. Some people may be able to identify it, I'm not gonna identify it on the podcast because I don't want terrorists to take this document and figure out the lighting profile of the 24th floor of Suburban Station. Um. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: "Names have been changed to protect the guilty." JUSTIN: Yes. SEAN: [laughs] LIAM: Yeah, this is an urban station. SEAN: "Urban-type station". NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So, alright. So, we're back to a slide we already showed. One of the 9/11 conspiracies, right, was that there were a couple of explosions in the basement, and on a few floors, including the lobby and sky lobbies, which occurred after the plane hit, or depending on who you ask, before the plane hit. Right. And the official explanation for this is either you don't acknowledge it, or you say, there was some jet fuel that poured down the elevator shafts and it ignited, which caused explosions further down the building, right. Some people think this is kind of unlikely. Was there really that much jet fuel, or did Bush put some bombs in the towers, right? NOVA: Well, like, I put this in, but remember that in 1993 the same fucking thing happened in reverse, where you had an explosion in the basement and it just sent smoke up. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. It makes a lot of sense, if a building goes through the–excuse me. "If a building goes through the planes..." No, if a plane goes through the towers... [laughter] NOVA: Just extreme cop mindset 9/11 hijackers, like, "the building was involved in a plane-involved crashing. [laughter] "I was in fear for my life, I had to, like, fly the plane into it. I had a gun." JUSTIN: I forgot I was gonna say something back when we were looking at the, um, the fireproofing that was shit, which is– NOVA: "Those buildings? No angels." JUSTIN: ABAC. SEAN: ABAC. JUSTIN: All Buildings are Cursed. [laughter] JUSTIN: So you get a plane that crashes through the buildings, right, she dumps a full shitload of jet fuel over several floors, then it'll go down a couple of elevator shafts, that'll hit the sky lobby first, right, that'll hit also hit the elevator that goes down to the main lobby, right. SEAN: The proletariat elevator. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. That'll also probably hit the service area elevator. NOVA: Setting off all of the thermite that's stored in there. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly, right. And, y'know, this fuel, it may not be much, but it will be certainly pretty well atomized, you'll have a good fuel-air mixture to cause a real big boom, right, and it's being confined by... drywall. Um. [laughs] SEAN: Oh, so it comes down, and then when it's actually released into the air it explodes. JUSTIN: Yes, exactly. SEAN: It's confined and it's not any longer. That makes sense. JUSTIN: So yeah, it'll cause some big explosions further down the tower. The other thing is, like, it wasn't like everyone was killed in these various areas, it was like, there's a big boom, lots of stuff was disheveled. So yeah, it... and the other thing is, like, if this was because Bush put bombs in the towers, they didn't work. Because, you know, presumably he would want below-grade explosives. LIAM: Yeah, he's allegedly the plane's insurance policy, duh. NOVA: Yeah. Bombs, actually holograms. JUSTIN: Planes and the bombs were holograms. Okay. Yes. Y'know, these bombs didn't work, because it would've taken down the towers, like, there's no reason to weaken structural members underneath where the plane crashed, which comes... SEAN: We have four hours before it falls, like, just have some rad-ass(?) explosion. JUSTIN: Let's bring us to our next one, this is a picture from Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. LIAM: Oh fuck. JUSTIN: Which are squibs. Not like the "Matt Christman complaining on livestream" squibs with, uh, but the, um, squibs, which are explosions of debris which, um, are the result of explosives in the towers, right? NOVA: Which are just placed randomly, uh, always conveniently a few floors below the, like, collapse? JUSTIN: Yeah, so these are supposed to be puffs of smoke from explosives which are detonating further down in the towers, right? So there's a couple things which we have to look at here, one of which is something called detonation velocity, right? Detonation velocity is sort of the speed at which an explosive explodes, right, in the most literal sense. This is why, when there was that big explosion in Beirut, some internet nerds were immediately able to look at it, get sort of a bearing on the distance and the time, and they're like, yep, that's ammonium nitrate, alright. Cause that's a known detonation velocity. Right? So if you look at these squibs on video, um, there's sort of like, a sort of a slow expulsion of debris that then gets faster, then it gets slower, again, I gave up putting video in here because it was too goddamn difficult. SEAN: Hate to get sued by Loose Change dot–uh, Loose Change LLC. LIAM: Dot net. SEAN: [laughs] Dot net. LIAM: They have an EarthLink email address, but they are very serious about copyright infringement. SEAN: They're very litigious. JUSTIN: This is for educational purposes, we are fine. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: I thought this was for parody purposes. JUSTIN: Both. SEAN: This whole episode's satirical, by now. JUSTIN: Yes. JUSTIN: No, actually, we do think Bush put bombs in the towers, yes. [laughter] JUSTIN: So... NOVA: Wait, were you saying that to ensure that it's parody? JUSTIN: Yeah. He's twirling his mustache, he's bringing the bo–okay. Anyway. So... [laughter] SEAN: (?) bombs, yes, go on. JUSTIN: This does not indicate, like, any kind of high velocity explosive, this indicates that there's some pressure pushing down from, like, say, floors collapsing inside the towers, there's a bunch of air that rushes out the path of least resistance, which turned out to be the one window that had a slightly bad installation. Right? NOVA: Mmhm. JUSTIN: Y'know, cause if it were an actual explosive, it would start out fast, and then go slow. As opposed to start out slow, then go fast, then go slow. Right. And they also don't– they don't follow any pattern you would expect for controlled explosions. If you're gonna take out columns in order to allow this to proceed unimpeded, you don't take out one or two random columns in this building with a million columns on every side... you take out the whole damn row. NOVA: Save on explosives. SEAN: [laughs] It's neoliberal terrorism. NOVA: That's right. JUSTIN: ...So, okay, yeah, it was terrorism, it just didn't work... The planes did the job. The planes did it. JUSTIN: This is the main argument. [laughter] NOVA: Added to suspect list. SEAN: [laughs] SEAN: They put in redundancy just in case. JUSTIN: Yeah, they put in really shitty redundancy. NOVA: Or, we just do the Ustica thing, which is, Bush was trying to blow up the towers, and then, coincidentally, 9/11 happened. SEAN: That's kinda how I feel JFK happened, but that's (?) [laughter] NOVA: Yeah, you just have some, like, CIA mafia team sighting him up, and then his head fucking explodes anyway. SEAN: That's like the Don DeLillo theory, if anyone's reading... NOVA: Oh yeah, Libra, yeah. SEAN: ...Great book. JUSTIN: Here's... [beer can opening] Here's one, which I always thought was a little bizarre. One thing which I've never quite figured out, whether it's indication of it was a controlled demolition, or is also not indication that it's a controlled demolition, which is that the towers were in freefall the entire time they came down, right? NOVA: Oh yeah, that's where you get, like, dude measuring the, like, falling speed and like, slow-mo on, like, early YouTube. JUSTIN: Yes. Now, the biggest hole in this theory is that the towers did not come down in freefall. LIAM: Ugh. JUSTIN: Yeah. A lot of–every floor absorbed kinetic energy from the floor falling behind it, or on top of it, right? This whole mass then kept coming down and down and down, again, pancaking, right, every time the next collapse took shorter than the last one. Right, but it still was not enough to arrest the collapse of the building, right. There's a man named Dr. Frank Greening who did a paper on this that I'll link in the description, he does a lot of really extensive calculations involving energy and mass, right, and how much it would affect the velocity of the collapsing section of the building. And the timing of the collapse was estimated by local seismometers, right. The first World Trade Center fell in 12.6 seconds, right, the second one fell in 11.5 seconds. Freefall from the– NOVA: Once again, just visualize 9/11. SEAN: Mm-hm. JUSTIN: Freefall from the top of the building would be– SEAN: Go to your 9/11 place and imagine this happening. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: If you drop something off the top of the building, freefall would be 9.1 seconds, right. And this is complex and annoying calculations, but the overall energy of the collapse would have been about 272 tons of TNT, or about a quarter of a small atomic bomb, right. SEAN: Well, how much nanothermite, though? JUSTIN: Oh my god. SEAN: [laughs] Put away your graphing calculator, I'm joking. JUSTIN and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: So the other thing is, like, is this enough to pulverize all the concrete in the building, which is one of the big... one of the big conspiracies, like, ah, there were no big chunks of concrete in the, uh, in the debris. And it's like, well, y'know, as we discussed– NOVA: That wasn't that much concrete in the building. JUSTIN: ...Not that much concrete in the building, yeah. It was all drywall. [laughs] SEAN: Eight inches of concrete with, like, presumably wire mesh, just to hold it together. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: And it's like, yeah, it is there, it's just in a, like, a single pancake layer with a bunch of like, dead firefighters sandwiched in between it, like, great, cool. JUSTIN: It's mostly just completely pulverized into dust, yeah. Despite the energy of this collapse. SEAN: I don't know if this even needs to be said, but as, again, somebody that works with a lot of, like, finished concrete, too, like, I don't know if people need to hear that concrete will pulverize really easily, but it does. [laughs] It's not gonna hold together all that great if you've got the force of a building coming down on it, but anyway. LIAM: To be fair, NOVA: Simply don't worry about it. LIAM: (?) I'm not gonna hold up to, uh... Yeah, if the building's coming down, it's... the building's coming down. NOVA: Yeah, you know what else isn't gonna hold up to that force, is me. LIAM: Or organs, yeah. SEAN: Or stockbrokers, for that matter. NOVA: Yeah, that's right. LIAM: Load-bearing stockbrokers. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: Another question is, how difficult is it to rig up a building with explosives, right? Is there like a precedent for a job this big being done in secret? Which, funnily enough, there kinda is, um. SEAN: I love that. Go on. JUSTIN: In 1978, a college student at Princeton University realized that, owing to the recently completed Citicorp Centers, that's this guy here, very strange structural design, it was more heavily affected by quartering winds than perpendicular wind loads. Which are the usual load case engineers test it for. Right, quartering winds is when it comes at the building diagonally as opposed to perpendicular against the wall, right? Now, since during the construction of this building, Bethlehem Steel had managed to sub out welded connections for bolted connections. SEAN: Sure, sure. JUSTIN: It meant the building was significantly weaker than expected, and... SEAN: ...just sub out an entire work process and make a different one happen. [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] SEAN: Love to see that. JUSTIN: They found out that about a 16 year storm, assuming the power went out and the tuned mass damper stopped working, a 16 year storm might just knock the building clean over. SEAN: Cool. JUSTIN: So, for about three months, construction crews entered the building after the office workers went home, they welded plates over the bolted connections, and they, y'know, they left before office workers came in the next day, right? ...The engineers discussed evacuation plans with city officials, the city government almost went through with them, because Hurricane Ella looked like it was about to hit New York City before the work was done, but it veered out to sea. This was in 1978. This was kind of secret, but you had a huge number of guys involved with the work, right? It was kinda like, if someone asked, like, uh, hey, what are you doing? It's like, I'm doing reinforcement work, cause they fucked up the building. Oh, okay. Um. NOVA: Mm. It's like, It's not public knowledge, necessarily, but it's like professional knowledge. JUSTIN: Yeah, it's not like... It's not like you're doing something bad. You're just trying not to tell anyone about it. SEAN: ...telling certain people what exactly is you're doing, and they don't ask because they're accountants and they just go home at five o'clock and then you come in and then you leave in the morning. You probably get a nice chunk of overtime out of it, too. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. You get a shitload of overtime, you're not gonna talk to anyone. So no one knew about this until 1995 when the New Yorker wrote a story about it, right? There's also a press strike at the time, which helped a bunch. NOVA: Hmm, still, though, successful conspiracy. To do the opposite of demolishing a building. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. So... I mean, if you're keeping something which is slightly unethical but beneficial to the public a secret, I think that's maybe not so hard, but if you're trying to get the same amount of people to put bombs in the building... NOVA: Yeah, like, how many, like... Sean, how many– how bad do construction workers hate stockbrokers that you could convince all of them to be like, yeah, we're just gonna kill all of these guys, also probably a bunch of firefighters and cops and shit? Don't tell anybody, though. SEAN: All I gotta say is, like, when you were knocking off at like 8.30, 9 o'clock and walking down the stairs and the stockbrokers were walking up the stairs, a lot of them would have been fucking shoulder checked. It would have been a messy fucking scene and there's no way that some guy (?) yell in the other's face like, listen, you cocksucker, [laughs] [laughter] I'm putting a stone in your gutter so you could fucking live, I'm welding gusset plates on there, fuck you buddy, fuck you. You can't imagine it happening in a calm and orderly fashion. Fuck those guys. [laughter] Fuck the individual stockbrokers that worked in the City Court building back in the 1970s. Fuck them. NOVA: [laughs] Yeah, if you're listening to this and you worked in the City Court building as a stockbroker, fuck you. JUSTIN: Yeah, fuck you. LIAM: [laughs] SEAN: [laughs] Always. JUSTIN: So, I mean, but, for Bush to put bombs in the towers, you need to find a couple hundred workers who were just A-OK with cramming an occupied building full of explosives, and also, even if you find that many unethical people, you need to also make sure they're not worried about liability in any fashion, right? SEAN: You'd have to pay me triple time, at least. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah, I was about to say– NOVA: And you (?) stop anybody from finding the explosives, or noticing that, like, you and your guys are, like, coming into their offices and moving shit around and putting shit on columns? JUSTIN: Yeah, and like, probably coming down in the swing stage on the outside of the building to do the outside of the column... [laughter] SEAN: Can I get into the conspiracy shit real quick, cause I watched fuckin', um, Loose Change, the one that came out, like, it's like the most recent one, like the final Loose Change that came out. LIAM: How are there like six versions of this fuckin' movie? JUSTIN: I didn't realize there was more than one, I only watched one of them. SEAN: They keep on– NOVA: Because people keep debunking them, yeah. JUSTIN: They keep finding more change in their pockets. SEAN: Tons of change, more change than you could even fuckin' imagine. JUSTIN: You're just digging into the sofa. SEAN: I'm watching this thing... SEAN: in anticipation of this, and, you know, like, normally with conspiracy theories, you just kinda like let them wash over you, you know, you're watching, and you're like, oh yeah, maybe that checks out, maybe this checks out. But there was this whole segment in that movie, it wasn't long, it was like, just a few minutes, but they're like, one of the commercial residents of the World Trade Center was a company called Turner Construction. Turner Construction was connected to George W. Bush, and they were also connected to the National Institute of Safety and Testing, or whatever it's called. And I'm looking at this, having worked for Turner Construction before, I literally did a job for Turner, they're this like– NOVA: Yeah, 9/11. [laughter] SEAN: They're one of, there's like, Turner and Skanska, and Saudi Binladin Group, are like the biggest fucking ones in the entire world. And this idea that they're trying to make these connections between Turner Construction and the NIST, and like George Bush's family, it's like, oh, good job guys, you like, you came up, you discovered the idea of there being a ruling class. Of course the... CEO of Turner Construction knows George W. Bush, because they are part of the capitalist class, they fucking rule us. But it was like, done in this sort of nefarious way, which we're supposed to think that Turner, because they had a spot in the building, they were part of like, contracting out, putting in the nanothermite or whatever, it's like, it's not that complicated, okay? The ruling class sticks around, they all know each other, and if you're like, at Turner Construction, of course you've institutionally captured the NIST, and have a lot of power over that. It's not fucking complicated, you don't need a conspiracy. JUSTIN: Yeah, I was about to say, Turner's a big fucking firm, y'know, it's like... The only bigger ones are like Bechtel, and like, I don't know, um... NOVA: Yeah. SEAN: All the ones in the Iraq War, like, um... NOVA: Yeah, Kellogg Brown & Root, and Halliburton. Yeah, I guess the point is that you don't need, uh... There can be a conspiracy, but it's not a conspiracy to do 9/11, it's just to, like, make as much money as possible, and, like, secure their class position. SEAN: Secure the bag. NOVA: Yeah, exactly. SEAN: That's the structural (?) that I was talking about... NOVA: A bag full of nanothermite. SEAN: [laughs] That's the structural shit I was talking about before, like, you don't need to impute agency to these Turner executives, like, sneaking a bunch of us up there at night to try to put in this thermite, when they were simply taking a contract. Y'know, and they simply stayed in the building and they simply knew other members of the ruling class. Not complicated. JUSTIN: Which is where we get to our next subject. –I swear to God, we're getting close to the end–thermite. One of the problems for the conspiracy theorists is that there wasn't any explosive residue at the site that might be left by RDX or other blasting materials, which is– NOVA: Which, as we said, easy to detect, those whole piles were like... LIAM: RDX [indistinct] NOVA: climbed all over by every, like, explosives detection dog in half of the US. LIAM: I like the idea that a plane did hit the World Trade Center, but it was that, whatever, Iranian F-16 that ended up at the side of the hill in Italy. NOVA: Yeah... [laughter] LIAM: ...Or, uh, Libya. JUSTIN: Libyan plane, yeah. NOVA: Getting really lost. JUSTIN: The explanation is that these buildings were taken down by thermite. You know, noted explosive thermite, right? And thermite is made out of iron oxide and aluminum powder, there's some variations on this, right, both of which are found in quantity at the collapse site, on account of the building being made of steel with aluminum cladding. Thus making it the perfect crime. NOVA: [laughs] "Shot with an ice bullet." JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: But hot. JUSTIN: So the big problem here– SEAN: I think (?) built the explosives into the building, that's what it was. JUSTIN: Even if they did that, I don't think they could have cut the columns with thermite. JUSTIN: One of the problems is that thermite is not an explosive. Thermite is a powder that burns very very hot, right? Hot enough that it can melt steel, yes, but you need a hell of a lot of it to melt the steel, right? Especially if you're melting it for the intention of cutting it. It's very very good at welding, and that's one of its most common use, they use it to weld railroad tracks, right? But if you wanna cut the steel, you need... you need a huge quantity of thermite per the amount of area you want to cut through, right? SEAN: ...It would be the equivalent, like, instead of using, cause... we cut steel with oxy, right, oxyacetylene, you would need to put the thermite on top and let it, like, work its way through the columns? JUSTIN: ...You would need to, like, build a big hopper, right, around... the column, and of course these are the exterior columns, so they're hollow, right? SEAN: Right. JUSTIN: And then you fill that hopper with thermite–this is my best approximation. A couple people have tried to prove this, and they're like actual 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and they've all screwed up. And none of it worked, and a lot of times they're doing horizontal columns and not vertical ones. And the vertical column is particularly difficult because the worst, what you might wind up doing is just this entire thermite, y'know, it melts, it adheres to the outside of the column, and suddenly, instead of– NOVA: Oh, it's made the building stronger, JUSTIN: Yes! NOVA: we've just added an extra weld. JUSTIN: Yes, exactly! [laughs] That's what you'd wind up doing... SEAN: The opposite 9/11. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] Reverse 9/11. JUSTIN: Reverse 9/11... [laughter] JUSTIN: "The towers just got ten stories taller." [laughter] NOVA: You just badly inconvenience the FDNY because they have to recruit, like, a hundred more firefighters to just appear. [laughter] SEAN: I'm looking at the hopper idea, and I believe you that this is the best idea for it. And the idea of just, like, you're pouring thermite into it and then letting it go through the column on the outside, you're, like, directing it downwards into one place? Couldn't it also flow through the hopper, and then just, like... you know, whatever. NOVA: Don't worry about it. JUSTIN: You would also need, like, a magnesium strip here, you'd have to ignite with some kind of electric igniter, right, and magnesium– NOVA: Yeah, you see a guy going round on, like, the swing stage with a lighter? SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: No, that's the other thing! You'd have to get access to the outside of the building with a swing stage or something like that in order to get this thing installed. SEAN: I didn't see any of those on the outside of the building in the video, wouldn't you see, like, a little thermite hopper, like, on the outside? JUSTIN: I would assume it would fit inside the cladding, but you would have also seen a bunch of window washers taking off the cladding. [laughter] NOVA: ...A bunch of CIA window washers, base jumping to safety. JUSTIN: Are there enough CIA guys who are brave enough to get in a swing stage? [laughter] SEAN: Oh, shit. Okay. We're punching a bunch of holes in the thermite thing. JUSTIN: That's more holes than the thermite would punch in the steel. NOVA: Yeah. [laughter] SEAN: It's either not happening, or you're adding floors to the building. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: Okay, so what if, what if, instead of thermite, you use... thermite-but-it-behaves-the-way-I-want-it-to? [laughter] JUSTIN: Yes, nanothermite. SEAN: Nanothermite. JUSTIN: Alright, so this is a real material. It's a real thing that exists, okay, and that's what Bush put in the towers when he was twirling his evil villain mustache, right? NOVA: Was nanothermite. LIAM: How would he have had time? NOVA: He was the President, man! People were f– He had a schedule, [laughter] people were following him around with cameras, the Secret Service was there, how would he take the time off to go to New York, go to the World Trade Cen... [laughs] ...this theory!? No, I don't think it's very serious. I don't think George W. Bush, while being the President, commuted to his second job of putting nanothermite in the... [laughs] JUSTIN: It was Jeb, Jeb did it, Jeb did 9/11. [laughter] SEAN: Even if you don't go the, like, reductum ad absurdum... you know, route(?) here and say that Bush himself did it, regardless, if anybody, if they, if they contracted it out to Turner Construction International, it would be a lot of work. It would be, like, noticeable work, a lot of work, and really hard and complicated work to do. JUSTIN: No one's ever taken down a building with thermite. A lot of buildings have been taken down with high velocity explosives. Which is why nanothermite comes in here. Nanothermite is an actual material, the idea is you make the particles of iron oxide and aluminum oxide very very very small, that's why it's nano. Some people also call it superthermite, right. And that increases the rate of reaction, so you get an actual explosion, as opposed to a, um, a slow but very hot burn. Right. And that would also mean less thermite would need to be used. So here's the big problem with that. No one's been able to synthesize nanothermite in quantities higher than, like, two or three grams. NOVA: Yeah, nobody except the CIA. JUSTIN: Yes, obviously– NOVA: They've just got a dumpster full of that stuff, and they're just wheeling it in. SEAN: [laughs] JUSTIN: Even to this day, no one's figured out how to synthesize it. SEAN: Just the entire black budget of the CIA is going to producing five tons of superthermite. JUSTIN: They're still paying off those debts, yeah. [laughter] JUSTIN: They can do this, but they can't prevent an F-117 from being shot down by a Serbian baker. Um. [laughter] JUSTIN: So yeah, this material, it exists, it's real, but, like, no one can figure out how to synthesize it. What I say is, like, thermite is to 9/11 conspiracies as adrenochrome is to QAnon, right? SEAN: [laughs] LIAM: Fair enough. JUSTIN: It's like a fairly simple and common substance which has been assigned magic properties, right? Adrenochrome is actually just oxidized adrenaline, which can be... has been synthesized in labs for over a hundred years now, by the way. You don't have to get it from a child's adrenal gland. Um. NOVA: It sounded like an infomercial there, just cracking open a child, and you're like, "If only there was a better way." JUSTIN: Yes, there is a better way. JUSTIN: Now, we have to get to Building 7. It's the reason I kept this short, because I knew it was gonna go this fucking long. [laughs] SEAN: Building 7, though, that is, like, the go-to thing, I mean, even I'm a little whatever about Building 7. Seems pretty sketchy. NOVA: Yeah, why'd it collapse, right? JUSTIN: It looks pretty bad from the video that's out. I will agree with that, it looks... it looks kinda weird. One of the things is, like, okay, Building 7 collapsed at about 5 o'clock, when the towers went down... NOVA: Like, 10-ish? JUSTIN: 10-ish, one was 9:50-something, I think? NOVA: Yeah, and, like, also, Tower 7, Building 7 is, like, also the one with all of the emergency operations shit in it, so. JUSTIN: It had the... NOVA: Like, that's another angle. JUSTIN: It had the SEC, it had the CIA in there. It had the DSA in there. SEAN: And like New York City municipal offices with all of the tax documents for all sorts of corporations and shit. JUSTIN: Actually, DSA was a couple blocks that way. Not affected in this disaster. SEAN: Do not pin this on Barbara Ehrenreich, okay? JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: Building 7 did not get hit by a plane, it didn't have the massive structural trauma inflicted on it. NOVA: "You did a 9/11, you did a no-growth." SEAN: [laughs] SEAN: "You did a thermite." [laughter] JUSTIN: But the thing is– SEAN: "You did a (?) transfer girder"... [laughter] JUSTIN: The thing is, this building burned for a very, very long time, right, and it burned on many, many floors simultaneously. Right. If you look at previous high-rise fires, like one Meridian Plaza or something like that, it was like one or two floors going at once, right. You look at further structural fires, there's stuff like Grenfell which is mostly on the exterior, and then like, there's actually been one or two, there's been two steel-framed skyscrapers that have collapsed from extensive fires since then, one in Iran, one in Sao Paulo, which I forgot to put in here. So, I'll link those in the description. What we said about fire ratings being kind of relative, I think, is relevant here. In this case, you know, Building 7 was rated throughout with fireproofing for two to three hours, two hours on the floor joists, three hours on the main structural columns, and it burned for seven hours. Right. SEAN: So it exceeded expectations. JUSTIN: Yes. And, y'know, mostly with your gypsum-based spray-on fireproofing, right, and this building was built in 1988, probably had a lot fewer issues than 1 and 2 World Trade Center. The other thing is it has a very fucked up structural system. So, above the seventh floor, relatively conventionally framed building, between floors 5 and 7, you had this system of transfer girders. This is because the building was built on top of a consolidated Edison substation, which was designed to be eventually overbuilt by a 25-story building. This is a 47-story building, so they had to make some changes. NOVA: You put in the giant overhang, I guess. SEAN: Just cantilever, like, millions of tons of steel and concrete and glass just right over that substation. NOVA: Just throw it over on its side, it's fine. JUSTIN: Which is fine. SEAN: That's fine. JUSTIN: That's fine. As long as it doesn't catch on fire on every floor. NOVA: Yeah. So long as 9/11 doesn't happen, you're okay. But then 9/11 happened. SEAN: This building would be great if there's no 9/11. NOVA: That's true, yeah. Famously, one of the weaknesses of buildings is when 9/11 happens. JUSTIN: Very few buildings have... have had a 9/11 happen to them. And of those, I think only one has survived, which was the Verizon building right over here. NOVA: Well, there was the Greek Orthodox Church. I think that made it through, okay. JUSTIN: Oh no, that got flattened. NOVA: Oh. JUSTIN: [laughs] JUSTIN: That was, uh, it was, uh, they're rebuilding it now. That's the one building of the complex they haven't finished yet. SEAN: The people that say, reject modernity, embrace tradition? Yeah, not looking so good there on that Orthodox Church. NOVA: [snorts] JUSTIN: Anyway, the official story here, and what I think is correct, look at column 79 here, right? Column 79 would be about right here in this diagram. Right, so... NOVA: "Approximate location of kink". JUSTIN: Yes. And the way this worked was, this is also kind of a tube-frame building like the World Trade Center, but the core was a little bit more substantial, but also, you can see there's a lot more columns on the exterior, but also it had these weird presses at the bottom, right? So, column 79 was the first to fail, that's why you saw the penthouse collapse in first, in the video. And you can sort of see the penthouse collapse into the building, see a bunch of windows break, and then the whole building seems to collapse from well below where the camera angle is, and that's why people say this is a controlled demolition, right? The thing is, and we can't go too much into detail about this because we're running out of time, once this column goes, on account of it's got no bracing, it started to buckle under extreme heat, it's basically in line with truss number 1 right here, right? It starts to pull on that. If truss number 1, which is again also under an extreme amount of heat, fails, that'll knock down a couple more columns, that's also gonna bring the whole structural system down real quick, just because, y'know, at some level, this building was extremely interconnected with the rest of the building. SEAN: No, I was just saying that, like, because you have that cantilever, when that thing essentially ripped off the side of the building, it brings all of the other truss, all the other structural steel down with it. NOVA: Yeah, and from the outside it just looks like it tears itself apart spontaneously, right? And so that's where you get the, I guess, controlled demolition (?) thing. JUSTIN: Yeah, I mean, it looks like it comes down from the bottom, because it did come down from the bottom, but it wasn't because of explosives, it was because of, well, this is how they built it. [laughs] NOVA: Poorly. SEAN: I don't understand, though, how is it ripping down from the bottom, though, what happened to the bottom, was that the weakness from the heat? JUSTIN: I imagine it's weakness from the heat, and, again, you got these big trusses, y'know, and if they're being pulled over, and you got the columns above, the columns which are, again, attached with whatever, the column 79, I... If one of these columns comes down and enough columns are attached to other columns with weird trusses, I imagine this whole damn thing comes down pretty quickly. The load paths here are weird. Y'know, that's the main thing, I would say. SEAN: It's like the building in Ghostbusters. This thing is weird, man, I looked at blueprints, this thing is weird, it's a (?) for Gozer the Gozerian. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: The other thing was, if it was a controlled demolition, it was pretty fucking sloppy. Um. And of course the main thing is, like, what if it didn't get hit by debris, what was the excuse for demolish... So, y'know, this is... but yeah, so, buildings... we don't have time to go into detail about this, maybe we'll do... I mean, we're not even talking about the Pentagon, which is another whole kettle of fish, so, obviously there's more to do, but... NOVA: Holographic kettle, holographic fish. JUSTIN: Holographic Building 7, holographic World Trade Centers. NOVA: New York City, hologram. JUSTIN: Hologram. SEAN: I'm living here. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: Yeah, people don't know this, but George Bush? Hologram. JUSTIN: Hologram. NOVA: The whole time, yeah. JUSTIN: Hologram. Um. JUSTIN: 9/11 at my school. Hologram. [laughter] JUSTIN: They didn't tell us about it. It was fucking weird. It was just like, wow, it's weird that a bunch of kids have doctor's appointments today. I believe it was Miss Esposito who came out during recess to say this but nothing bad is happening. Um. SEAN: Famously something you wanna hear when everyone's away. JUSTIN: My dad picked us up at school, he was like, bad news, guys. Um. NOVA: 9/11 happened. JUSTIN: 9/11 happened. [laughs] NOVA: And of course nobody knew what 9/11 was yet, so you were just like, what? JUSTIN: Well that's a conspiracy right there. NOVA: [laughs] SEAN: How did they know? NOVA: And, you know, what's the aftermath of this? Yeah. Well, I mean, you're living in it. This is what happened, history happened. Osama bin Laden's goal with the attacks was push America into a massive overreaction that makes it explicitly inimical to Muslims, destroys its economy, destabilizes it to the point of imperial collapse. I, yeah, all of that happened, and then he... he won, retired, I don't feel a lot better about that just because he gets killed eventually, like, in his retirement home. JUSTIN: I was about to say, you figure, I'm done with the job... why do you even bother killing him at that point? But, y'know. NOVA: And I mean, you see here some of the... slogans that various troops have written on... have written on bombs that were then dropped on Afghanistan and Iraq, and... SEAN: But Krugman told me that there was no anti-Muslim sentiment after this. NOVA: That's right. Yeah, no, famously not. Americans on the whole reacted very well. LIAM: I didn't even notice NYPD and NYFD patches were painted on, and I was gonna say, that is an incredible attention to detail... [laughter] SEAN: That's my local firehouse there on one of those patches, how do you like that? NOVA: Engine 277, ladder 112. Cool. SEAN: Parenthetically, my grandfather was a firefighter at that time. I mean, he was like a, he was like an older guy, he was like the chaplain or whatever, and he went down right after the, the towers collapsed and all of his guys were there, and he saw all the dust everywhere, and they told him to set up like a center, like a triage down there, and he said, go fuck yourself. And he's like, I'm going above 42nd Street. So he took his entire shit and he sent it up to Midtown, because he knew, like if you're rational, you knew that that dust was not good for you. It was a combination of asbestos and gypsum, and of course fucking concrete. Like nobody needs silicosis in their lungs. Even Giuliani and all them knew that that was bad. But obviously a lot of people couldn't– NOVA: They knew, and they tried to screw all of those guys out of, like, any compensation for it for years. SEAN: They did... JUSTIN: ...And they're still doing it, yeah. SEAN: Disaster. NOVA: And I mean, 2,977 people die, total global war on terror deaths, conservatively, like, well over half a million. Still going up, like, every day, like today. There's not, like, America was doing torture and it was doing assassinations before, but like, after 9/11 there stopped being any pretense that, like, that was something that America was, like, above. You don't need me to tell you that that created a massive expansion in the exact same Salafist jihadist ideology that produced 9/11 in the first place, that then necessitated more military intervention and begets ISIS and al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda and wherever. And I mean, I did some maths, and... fewer people would have died if the US response had been to do nothing. And fewer people would have died if the US response had been to load up a couple of passenger airplanes with Marines, fly them into the two tallest buildings in Kabul, and then do the same thing every day for six months. It doesn't, like, those numbers don't really... it's difficult to comprehend exactly how much destruction was wrought as a consequence of 9/11, and the sort of, I guess, the political consequences of making war on Afghanistan and Iraq and the aftermath of it, and... yeah, no. Classic blowback. Don't fund these psychos. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: [sighs] And they still do it! They still do it, every time. There's someone in the US or the UK who's like, no, okay, I've... I've got this one jihadist guy, but, like, I'm pretty sure I can control him. And you know, enemy of my enemy, right? And so, you know, and eventually this happens again. The same thing happened with the Manchester arena bombing, where MI5 walked a guy into and out of Libya to go fight Gaddafi, and then he comes back and he blows himself up... I–you know... It's just depraved, man. SEAN: It's far be it for me to plug other random podcasts on here, but Blowback Pod, which came out like four or five months ago, is tremendous in not just the timeline, but understanding what happened after 9/11. Understanding what was happening in Iraq, and how Iraq became the sort of fulcrum, became like the target for the United States, and of course what the consequences are since then. NOVA: It's so wild how much, like, how much of that's just gone in the memory hole. SEAN: Yep. NOVA: How people were thinking, how people were acting after 9/11, and now you can have Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate in Economics, just write on Twitter, on the whole, Americans didn't have this upswell of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab sentiments after 9/11. SEAN: It's not just the government officials, because they should all be at least in the Hague, if not worse. It's not the commanders that went over there and did the highway of death and all that shit. The fucking, the media. The people, our media, as we look on Twitter, or we watch TV news, or we read the newspaper, whatever it is, these motherfuckers who were directly culpable in helping to bring us into this war have suffered zero fucking consequences. Worse than that, they're still out there and they're still fucking peddling the same lies, and there's no consequences whatsoever. NOVA: It's also, to do a bit of a callback, like, when I make the joke about visualizing 9/11, the reason you can do that is, how many times have you seen that footage, and where have you seen it, right? It was the only thing that was running on every TV channel for weeks afterwards. And every time there was some new atrocity, every time, you know, you found out about waterboarding or Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, you would... LIAM: (?) 9/11. NOVA: Run that 9/11 footage back. SEAN: And the lead-up to that war, and trust me, I was a fully grown adult, because I'm old as shit at that time, the way that the media and the Bush administration, and the Democrats too, led us into that fucking disas–that human disaster, half a million, one million fucking Iraqis dead and counting, was a fucking travesty of what this country is supposed to mean, what truth is supposed to mean, what governance is supposed to mean. I watched it happen in real time and it was fucking disgusting. These motherfuckers led us by the nose into a fucking massacre. NOVA: And I mean, in that sense, proved Osama Bin Laden's theory about America and how America would react to an act of terror correct. Not great. SEAN: Not great. JUSTIN: Yep. LIAM: Not great. JUSTIN: Well, y'know, what can you do. NOVA: It's history, man, we're just living it. JUSTIN: Yep. Well, on that note... I was about to say, on that bombshell, since we have several on screen right here... [laughter] NOVA: On that holographic bombshell. JUSTIN: Yeah. JUSTIN: No, these are also holograms–We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. SEAN: Oh yeah! NOVA: I gotta do the drop. Fuck, where's my Safety Third drop? Uh. Uh. [♪Shake hands with danger♪] JUSTIN: Oh my god. Alright. SEAN: This excites me as a guest but also a listener of Well There's Your Problem. JUSTIN: Alright. So we have one from... well, he says his name. So, "Hello, Well There's Your Problem podcast people, my name is Mike, and I used to work as a mechanic "at various bowling alleys for seven years. "I have lots of stories of safety issues, but I think I will tell you all my favorite time from when our safety standards broke down. NOVA: Yeah, this time on 9/11, when a guy came in and bowled a perfect game. [laughter] JUSTIN: "Prior to my employment at the company, OSHA had come through and forced rigorous lockout-tagout safety standards on the company, as a result of a couple of mechanic deaths at other locations. SEAN: Ooh, Jesus. JUSTIN: "Simply put..." LIAM: What a hell of a way to die. NOVA: Yeah, you just get caught, your, like, arm comes back up through the ball return. JUSTIN: These things look like those, like, Victorian child-murdering textile mill things. SEAN: It's like the satanic mills of Victorian England. NOVA: Mm. OSHA came through due to a couple of mechanic deaths caused by inserting their heads into the Shine-o Ball-o. JUSTIN: [laughs] "Simply put, the lockout-tagout standards we used meant that a special L-O-T-O, LOTO, power switch was installed on every pin-setting machine, and we were forbidden from working on, climbing on, or even touching the machines unless the lockout-tagout switch was padlocked in the off position to cut off power to the pin setter. "This was considered necessary because the particular model of pin-setting machines I worked on were designed during the 40s and 50s, released in 55, and built with various modifications until 1988." Right? NOVA: Awesome. Also reminds me of my favourite lockout-tagout actual tag, which is, sometimes you attach them to the padlock, and one of them had a blank field for, "if energized, [blank] will happen." And it was, "explosion will result, killing all within 50 foot radius." LIAM: Cool. Great. JUSTIN: [laughs] SEAN: At least they were honest. JUSTIN and NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: "As a result, these machines were almost entirely mechanical and have few electrical components. "The entire machine is run by a single one horsepower motor, through a gearbox and a series of cams, levers, and belts. SEAN: That sounds like a fucking deathtrap, holy shit. JUSTIN: "Most of the machine is built with steel, and there are no sensors of any kind monitoring it. "In other words, if a person were to be inside the wrong part of the pin setter when it was running, it would not stop, and would just crush them and keep running." NOVA: Yep. Get your pins set. JUSTIN: Incredible what one horse can do. NOVA: [laughs] Form a human being into perfect pin shapes. [laughter] JUSTIN: Never look at a horse the same way. [laughter] JUSTIN: "One particular morning I came in to find that one of our 32 pin setting machines was down unexpectedly. "The mechanic from the previous night left a note saying that it had blacked out, and he ran out of time to fix it before he had to leave for the night. "Now, a blackout is the most dangerous kind of state these machines can be in for a mechanic. "98% of the time, a blackout is caused by the jam switches. "Each pin setter has two jam switches that cut power to the machine if they are opened by certain parts of the pin setter, getting jammed in place, such as when a bowling pin gets stuck between them, right? "This is to stop the machine from destroying itself trying to continue running, which it absolutely would if it was not shut down immediately. "What makes this dangerous is that it requires a mechanic to climb into the machine to remove the stuck pin, which then closes the jam switches and immediately restores power to everything. NOVA: Hoo no. JUSTIN: "Now, lockout-tagout completely cuts power to the whole system, allowing this work to be done safely. NOVA: I'm sensing a "however". [laughter] JUSTIN: "However! [laughter] "It turned out this machine had not lost power due to a jammed bowling pin. "This was one of those 2% of the times it was something electrical at fault. "Now, on top of each pin setter was an electrical control box, with all the machine's electronics inside, as well as two simple glass fuses. "These take zero time at all to check, so I decided to start troubleshooting there first. "However, I remembered an incident from a previous bowling alley I had worked at that did not have lockout-tagout. "Another mechanic on the machine next to me removed the smaller of the two fuses and got a small electrical shot–" "Shock", not "shot"– "causing him to drop the fuse deep into the machine, and we did not have a spare. "It took us until 3am to find it, and all could've been avoided–" "all of that could have been avoided had he simply unplugged the main... "main power cable from the electrical box first," right. SEAN: Not this particular type of job, but I remember being, like, uh, a part-time shitty worker when I was a teenager, and stuff like that would happen all the time. You'd be there till like 2am on a school night, trying to figure out some dumbass fuckin' problem to fix. Ugh. JUSTIN: "So, I already had lockout-tagout in place so there was no possibility of getting shocked by the fuse, but I decided to add an extra layer of safety by unplugging the main power cable as well. "Now, the cable hangs from the ceiling above each pin setter, so I unplugged it and let it hang nearby while I checked the fuse. "The fuse was still good, so I put it back and grabbed the power plug to plug back in as well. "The plug arc flashed in my hand. NOVA: Nope. JUSTIN: "In my peripheral vision, I saw what appeared to be a softball-sized ball of fire where my hand was when this happened. SEAN: Hate when that happens. [laughter] JUSTIN: "Instinctively, I jumped off the seven foot tall pin setter and ran until I regained my senses a few seconds later and looked for injuries or a potential fire. "There was no fire and I had not received any burns or even a shock. "By sheer coincidence, I had grabbed the large cylindrical plastic plug around the side and the arc flash had come out the top of the plug where the cable enters, leaving me unscathed. "But why was there any power at all when lockout-tagout was applied correctly? "Well, it turns out the company installed the lockout-tagout switches themselves and connected them to a small box directly on top of the pin setter's control box. "The main power cable plugs into this other box from above. "Thus lockout-tagout only isolates the circuit box below that point and the main power cable always remains live, unless a circuit breaker is shut off in another part of the building. SEAN: Oh, fuck. That blows. JUSTIN: "This was not known to me, or anyone else in the company, it seemed. SEAN: ...It wasn't on the as-builts. [laughter] JUSTIN: "We were all trained that lockout-tagout removes all electrical power all of the time. "When I told my supervisor about this, not only did he not believe me when I told him what happened, he accused me of violating lockout-tagout. "Years later, at a company training session, I was a part of a group being trained by one of the highest technicians in the company. "This was the guy who wrote the lockout-tagout standards for the company alongside OSHA. "When I told him about this incident, he refused to believe it was possible, even though other mechanics in the training session backed me up with their own experiences. "So that is the story of how this company, even with OSHA-mandated safety regulations, still manages to leave my safety up to personal responsibility." SEAN: Ugh. Always. NOVA: Always only hold the plastic part. And, um, uh, yeah. Don't, don't work at a job. Um. [laughs] JUSTIN: Yes. Good start. SEAN: It's great. It's like when you get into the union, they give you, like, the insurance package, and you find out you get like $200 for a finger, $800 for a hand, like $35,000 for an arm... NOVA: What I would recommend is simply not being employed anywhere at any time. The safest way to avoid on-the-job accidents is to never be on the job. SEAN: To abolish work. NOVA: That's right. JUSTIN: Yes. SEAN: And rebar. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: And rebar. JUSTIN: Anti-rebar aktion. Alright, so... NOVA: We made it. JUSTIN: That was an episode. That took some time. NOVA: ...They hate it when we split them, but we may not have any choice. JUSTIN: I might. SEAN: Who cares. JUSTIN: Whatever. NOVA: I care. I don't want the hogs to, like, be the... SEAN: Yeah, that's fair. JUSTIN: We'll burn that bridge when we get to it. Anyone got any commercials before we go? SEAN: I could do a short plug, I guess. NOVA: Yeah, go for it. SEAN: Yeah. Yeah, everybody, you can follow me, Sean KB, @as_a_worker at twitter.com, and of course check out my podcast, which is called The Antifada. I've got some really good history episodes coming up with our friend Matt. Really good stuff, so, uh, yeah, give us a listen and I hope you like it. NOVA: Hell yeah. JUSTIN: Yes. Listen to The Antifada. Um. I'd say, uh, so... NOVA: You can't tell people to vote for Jess Scarane anymore, but she did her best. JUSTIN: Oh yeah, cause we got owned. NOVA: Yeah. Sorry, Jess. JUSTIN: Get real owned. Um. JUSTIN: Well, you know. Sometimes you get owned. NOVA: Between that and Grenfell, where we told people to vote Labour, I'm starting to think that our endorsement is a curse. SEAN: [laughs] Like a reverse 9/11 but for voting. NOVA: [laughs] So yeah, vote for Donald Trump, keep America great. JUSTIN: Yes, exactly. NOVA: Four more years. JUSTIN: Yeah. LIAM: Four more years of election interference. JUSTIN: I am the Russian election interference. NOVA: So you're the Polish election interference. JUSTIN: Well, that's basically the same thing. NOVA: Yeah, but it's got a screen door on it. SEAN: [laughs] NOVA: Well, never forget, everybody. JUSTIN: I don't remember what we were talking about. NOVA: I don't–something about holograms? SEAN: It's been a long time, man, there's been a lot of podcasting. JUSTIN: Yeah. Oh my god. Alright. Um. What do we do now? LIAM: Alright, goodnight everybody. JUSTIN: Goodnight, everyone. SEAN: Alright, Goodnight, everyone. NOVA: Yep. SEAN: (?) with you guys, that was fun.