True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 258: Cloud Cover
Aired: 2022-12-15
Duration: 01:17:58


=== Elon's Next Company? (02:02) ===

[00:00:00]  Are you excited about Fusion Energy?
[00:00:01]  No.
[00:00:02]  You don't like it?
[00:00:03]  No, look, here's the thing.
[00:00:05]  I don't want to be like party pooper.
[00:00:08]  Okay.
[00:00:08]  Well.
[00:00:09]  But like I said, you know, call me in 10 years when this is commercially viable.
[00:00:12]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:00:13]  Yeah.
[00:00:14]  Philippe, you have no idea how many times women have said that to me.
[00:00:18]  And every time I do call them, and then they're like, I met you when I was 18.
[00:00:23]  Why are you calling me at 28?
[00:00:24]  I just think that the papers are gassing up, you know, the good old boys in Bay Area or whatever that are working on this tinkering.
[00:00:32]  They're always tinkering out there.
[00:00:34]  And first of all, we knew this was like less than a year away, like a year ago.
[00:00:39]  So spoiler alert, we already knew.
[00:00:41]  For people paying attention at home.
[00:00:44]  We already knew.
[00:00:46]  Second of all, it's still not, it's not going to be, it's not like it's going to do anything for us for like 10, 15 years.
[00:00:51]  So what are they saying it's going to do?
[00:00:52]  There's going to be like power and such?
[00:00:54]  Yes, it's going to be power and such.
[00:00:56]  We fully already have that.
[00:00:57]  We do, yes.
[00:00:58]  It's going to be cheaper?
[00:01:00]  Cheaper, greener, cleaner, better, bigger.
[00:01:03]  Sounds fake.
[00:01:04]  I can't wait for crypto guys to get into it.
[00:01:06]  That's the thing is, if there's unlimited free cheap power, which is something I made up, I don't know if that's actually correlated to what you're talking about.
[00:01:14]  But won't that make Bitcoin too easy to make?
[00:01:17]  Here's my thing.
[00:01:18]  What if we could combine like a sort of solar city-esque project with fusion power, cryptocurrency, and chatbots?
[00:01:35]  What if?
[00:01:37]  Well, I think we've got Elon's next company.

=== Hello, Everyone: Son of a Woman (05:58) ===

[00:02:02]  That's right, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:02:04]  You hear first.
[00:02:05]  Elon Musk is gay.
[00:02:10]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:11]  Hello.
[00:02:13]  Welcome to Sexuality Hour.
[00:02:18]  What?
[00:02:20]  You're not doing this spin-off?
[00:02:22]  Or is it St. Louis episode?
[00:02:23]  What's your name?
[00:02:24]  My name?
[00:02:25]  Funny, you should ask.
[00:02:26]  Brace Belden.
[00:02:28]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:29]  Of course, we are joined by producer Jan Chomsky.
[00:02:31]  And Liz, let me tell you, I am fresh off watching Son of a Woman.
[00:02:36]  First of all, hello, everyone.
[00:02:37]  Welcome to Tronon.
[00:02:39]  Second of all, I cannot believe you've never seen that movie.
[00:02:42]  And what a weird movie to watch now.
[00:02:43]  Son of a Woman.
[00:02:45]  I don't know.
[00:02:46]  Two and a half hours long, Sen of a Woman is.
[00:02:48]  Yeah.
[00:02:50]  And this man's sniffing them out left and right.
[00:02:52]  For those of you who don't know, Al Pacino plays a character blind as a fucking bat.
[00:02:57]  I can't see shit in a grenade accident, which only took out your eyesight.
[00:03:02]  Yeah, that never made sense to me either.
[00:03:04]  He was just juggling grenades.
[00:03:06]  Anyways, he's doing that thing.
[00:03:09]  You know, I mean, well, I don't want to get too crazy about it, but I'm doing it.
[00:03:14]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:03:14]  I see what you're doing.
[00:03:15]  Yeah.
[00:03:16]  So he can't see shit.
[00:03:18]  Horny as the day is long.
[00:03:20]  Well, you know, it is Pacino.
[00:03:22]  But I was like, you know, Pacino, I've seen him horny before, right?
[00:03:25]  Seen him horny in lots of different circumstances.
[00:03:27]  But this is if they took the guy, just the scene from Heat where he's like, she got a great ass.
[00:03:33]  And they made that a movie about that line.
[00:03:37]  It's fucking insane.
[00:03:39]  I don't think it's a very good movie.
[00:03:42]  Yeah, I was shocked to learn how critically acclaimed it was.
[00:03:46]  They didn't know what.
[00:03:48]  What was going on?
[00:03:49]  They didn't have like other movies back then.
[00:03:52]  I don't know.
[00:03:52]  92?
[00:03:53]  Was that the year?
[00:03:54]  92.
[00:03:57]  Imagine being some shocker.
[00:03:59]  There's an election here.
[00:04:00]  No one knew what was going on.
[00:04:02]  Yeah, but you're in the Soviet, former Soviet Union, right?
[00:04:05]  Shock doctrine.
[00:04:06]  Your company's been taken over by gangsters.
[00:04:08]  You're starving.
[00:04:09]  It's cold.
[00:04:09]  And you're like, but silver lining, we get American culture.
[00:04:12]  And then you go and watch that and you're like, what the fuck is at one point?
[00:04:18]  He's like, he's explaining to this high school student, which, okay, it's cool.
[00:04:22]  And he knows it.
[00:04:22]  I know it, okay.
[00:04:23]  But he's explaining to this high school student on a first-class flight from Boston or whatever, New Hampshire to fucking New York.
[00:04:29]  He's like, some women's legs are like a Greek column.
[00:04:33]  Some women's legs are like a secondhand Steinway, which I'm going to be without some big legs.
[00:04:37]  He's like, it doesn't matter what the legs are like.
[00:04:40]  If you part them in between, it's paradise.
[00:04:44]  That's a crazy thing to say.
[00:04:47]  Some women's legs are like Greek columns.
[00:04:49]  That's your two options?
[00:04:51]  First of all, talking about parting legs is fucking disgusting.
[00:04:54]  It's nasty.
[00:04:54]  Very gross.
[00:04:55]  And also, don't say that to a high school student.
[00:04:57]  Also, a dice.
[00:04:58]  I was going to say, I think that it's crazy to pay for a first-class class ticket from New Hampshire to New York.
[00:05:04]  That is a very quick flight.
[00:05:05]  He wanted to get a job.
[00:05:06]  Also, probably a regional jet, and so you're not going to be getting a shuttle.
[00:05:10]  Yeah, you're not going to be getting the kind of service that you would on a transatlantic or across the country.
[00:05:16]  I want to sort of push back on him there, too, is a man of his age in that time period, right?
[00:05:24]  In this 50s, I think Pacino was 52 when he recorded it, when he filmed that movie.
[00:05:28]  Which for Pacino, very young.
[00:05:30]  Very young.
[00:05:30]  Guys like that were crazy about legs.
[00:05:34]  They loved games.
[00:05:35]  I will say that, yeah, legs were big.
[00:05:37]  Well, you had boobs and legs.
[00:05:39]  That was the kind of like 80s to 90s moment, right?
[00:05:44]  Kind of like a, yeah, yeah, yeah, red high heel, Barbie, Budweiser moment, as we all remember, of course.
[00:05:51]  He hated asses.
[00:05:52]  Yeah.
[00:05:53]  They all had kind of flat asses with those hot.
[00:05:55]  Yeah, anyway.
[00:05:55]  Really crazy.
[00:05:56]  Now, I will say I'm going to, you know, I don't, we'll cut this if it's saying too much.
[00:06:02]  No, we keep this in.
[00:06:03]  Brace, you're a leg guy.
[00:06:05]  Crazy about it.
[00:06:06]  I want to be clear here.
[00:06:07]  I don't want to do nothing to the legs, right?
[00:06:09]  Like, I'm not, like, trying to get in there or whatever.
[00:06:13]  It's like, because I feel like a butt guy and like a boob guy's like, oh, I want to touch the boobs.
[00:06:17]  And a buck guy's like, oh, let me use that as a pillow.
[00:06:19]  Leg guy, I'm just like.
[00:06:20]  You just appreciate it.
[00:06:21]  I'm just like, look at that pair of legs walking by right now.
[00:06:24]  Well, calm down.
[00:06:24]  You're pacinoing a little bit.
[00:06:26]  I think that.
[00:06:27]  I don't say it.
[00:06:28]  Here's my thing.
[00:06:29]  Uh-huh.
[00:06:30]  Columns.
[00:06:32]  Piano legs.
[00:06:33]  Yeah.
[00:06:34]  Are these the appropriate metaphors?
[00:06:36]  As someone who enjoys.
[00:06:38]  Horrible.
[00:06:39]  It makes no sense.
[00:06:40]  Horrible.
[00:06:40]  Greek columns, which to me are very sturdy and also indented.
[00:06:44]  Yeah, it could have been.
[00:06:46]  It could be twisty.
[00:06:47]  Twisties, yeah.
[00:06:48]  I'm like, so Greek columns, very like, you got no knees.
[00:06:52]  And then the Steinway, of course, the curve of the piano.
[00:06:56]  Yeah.
[00:06:57]  But also massive, Texas-shaped, too much knee.
[00:07:01]  Maybe he was more of a thigh guy.
[00:07:03]  But I'm telling you, but the style, neither of those, because the Greek columns, of course, have the little tops and the little bottoms, right?
[00:07:09]  So the thighs are like thin rectangles.
[00:07:12]  Yeah, it makes no sense.
[00:07:14]  Horrible.
[00:07:14]  Very, yeah.
[00:07:15]  And yeah, to me, it just seemed like a guy, like his character, of course, Lieutenant Colonel Slade, had made love one time, perhaps in the aftermath of the Korean War.
[00:07:26]  And that was the greatest night of his life.
[00:07:28]  And ever since then, he was such an unlovable jerk that no other woman would, you know, make love to him.
[00:07:34]  And now he is like 52 and blind.
[00:07:36]  He's like, oh, that was the greatest night of my life.
[00:07:38]  I got to get back to it.
[00:07:39]  It just, it seemed, he cut a pathetic figure.
[00:07:42]  I got to say, I do appreciate how much you paid attention during the movie.
[00:07:44]  I did.
[00:07:45]  And you know what?
[00:07:46]  I got to be honest too, to those who've seen the movie.
[00:07:48]  He pays everyone so much money.
[00:07:50]  At the end, he pays this kid, who, by the way, he's threatened with a gun $300.
[00:07:56]  Well, it was 1992.
[00:07:58]  I mean, it's, yeah, still.

=== Devin O'Shea Returns (07:47) ===

[00:08:01]  Hello, everyone.
[00:08:02]  Hello again.
[00:08:02]  Hi.
[00:08:03]  We do have a real episode for you today.
[00:08:05]  Very excited about that.
[00:08:06]  Our old friend, Devin O'Shea, Devin Thomas O'Shea, even.
[00:08:10]  He's coming back.
[00:08:11]  He's coming back to talk to us about more St. Louis history.
[00:08:16]  However, before we get to that.
[00:08:18]  What if they stop listening?
[00:08:20]  I'm so sorry to do this, but we have some tour dates that we need to talk about.
[00:08:25]  So whatever the running time is now, add about 45 minutes.
[00:08:30]  Because no, you know what?
[00:08:31]  We're going to do this really quickly and efficiently.
[00:08:33]  And we can even trade off, Liz.
[00:08:34]  Okay.
[00:08:36]  So on February 2nd of 2023, that is next year, the continuation of the fiscal year of the smile in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right near MIT at the Sinclair.
[00:08:49]  We have, and this is on the 2nd of February.
[00:08:52]  What was it expecting at that time?
[00:08:54]  Have a show at the Sinclair.
[00:08:59]  At the Sinclair.
[00:09:01]  Yes, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is next to Boston, but it's different, apparently.
[00:09:06]  I look forward to figuring out why in February.
[00:09:10]  We also have a show at the Sinclair in Cambridge on the 3rd.
[00:09:15]  However, sold out.
[00:09:18]  So we'd like to see you on the 2nd if you are in the Boston, Cambridge area.
[00:09:22]  Oh, we, the very next day, we are going north of the border to go to do something that's pretty bilingual.
[00:09:33]  We are playing in Montreal, Quebec at the Théâtre Fairmont.
[00:09:38]  That's the Theatre Fairmont in English.
[00:09:41]  Uh, that is on the 4th of February.
[00:09:43]  It will be our trip to Canada.
[00:09:46]  And let me tell you, Trudeau, you're through.
[00:09:51]  Yeah.
[00:09:53]  Yeah, we, I heard, I saw that they were banning trading on margin for crypto.
[00:09:59]  So.
[00:10:00]  Well, looks like our trip will not happen.
[00:10:02]  Anyways, the next day.
[00:10:05]  The next day, we are going to be in Toronto, in Ontario.
[00:10:09]  However, sold out.
[00:10:11]  You snooze, you lose.
[00:10:12]  We will not be seeing you unless you already bought tickets, in which case, we shall.
[00:10:17]  So, cut by several weeks when we're recording beautiful, wonderful true and on episodes for you to listen to until we get to December 16th of 2023.
[00:10:26]  That is not the right month.
[00:10:28]  Excuse me, February 16th of 2023.
[00:10:31]  February 16th of 2023 in Denver, Colorado, next to the rocky slopes of the snowy mountains at the Bluebird Theater.
[00:10:42]  That is still on sale.
[00:10:45]  Yeah.
[00:10:46]  And then literally the next day, somehow by magic, by hook or by crook, by plane, train, and automobile, we will be in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the Fine Line on the 17th of February.
[00:11:02]  And then even more very next day than that, on the actual next day following, on the 18th of February at the Far Out Lounge, better be close in the city or close to the airport because we're going to be heading straight there in Austin, Texas.
[00:11:19]  We are doing a show.
[00:11:21]  That is going to be the cap off of that little tour.
[00:11:24]  Austin, Texas.
[00:11:25]  And let me tell you, Liz, it's going to be crazy.
[00:11:28]  I mean, we've got some of the biggest tech Titans in the world moving to Austin.
[00:11:34]  We got Rogan.
[00:11:35]  He's coming to the show.
[00:11:36]  Oh, yeah.
[00:11:36]  We got Lex Fridman coming to the show.
[00:11:40]  And honestly, I might even be at the show.
[00:11:44]  Well, that would be fantastic.
[00:11:45]  One of the top tech guys in the United States.
[00:11:48]  There's almost nobody with more PayPal accounts than me.
[00:11:52]  You collect them all.
[00:11:53]  I collect, I got, I got so many.
[00:11:56]  No, but for real, though, that's our tour.
[00:11:58]  Please buy tickets.
[00:12:00]  I honestly, I, uh, Liz, I'm trying to listen to this part.
[00:12:04]  I've honestly been seriously considering killing myself.
[00:12:07]  Oh my God, why do you say that?
[00:12:10]  No, there's it's gonna be a real fun time.
[00:12:12]  We're going to the coldest places that we could think of for some reason.
[00:12:16]  It was crazy.
[00:12:16]  We were booking this tour.
[00:12:17]  It was like, I think while we were getting ready for the other tour, and so we got these dates, we're just like, yeah, And now we're like, man, that seems really cold.
[00:12:26]  Yeah, I don't even think I have clothes warm enough.
[00:12:30]  Well, good thing we're going up or moisturizer strong enough, which is actually something that I'm concerned about.
[00:12:35]  Catch ourselves a little Canada goose.
[00:12:37]  My little, my, my poor skin barrier, my ladies know.
[00:12:41]  If you have any tips for Canadian cold weather and the harsh climate and my skin and good salve options, I probably know all of them, but I would appreciate it if you hit it in the comments.
[00:12:56]  I'm going full face mask.
[00:12:57]  Yeah.
[00:12:58]  That's it.
[00:12:59]  Baklava.
[00:13:00]  Yeah.
[00:13:00]  Balaklava.
[00:13:01]  Baklava.
[00:13:02]  No, I'm putting baklavas all over my little potato.
[00:13:04]  Well, that would keep it quite moist.
[00:13:06]  Yeah.
[00:13:06]  Oh, olive oil.
[00:13:08]  Honestly, you guys are crazy.
[00:13:09]  I have no problems keeping moist.
[00:13:11]  Anyways, we have with us in studio via computer Devin Thomas O'Shea to Devin talk to us about some things starting now.
[00:13:38]  Ah, 1972.
[00:13:40]  This is sure going to be my year.
[00:13:43]  Can't wait to get off this Greyhound bus here in St. Louis, an industrial city that will never see population decline.
[00:13:51]  I can almost see us pulling in now.
[00:13:54]  In fact, I do see us pulling in now.
[00:13:56]  That great, big, beautiful arch of which McDonald's got its inspiration.
[00:14:00]  The steps of the bus are descending, and my soft little moccasined feet are pitter-pattering down.
[00:14:06]  California was so tough.
[00:14:08]  I can't believe they made me do ass in that apartment building in San Francisco while a CIA agent watched me make love to a prostitute.
[00:14:15]  But here I am, finally for my job at the good old factory here, which will never leave St. Louis.
[00:14:21]  And ew, I even have houses.
[00:14:23]  Housing, in fact, that's the word at the Pruitt Igo Housing Complex, which will never, ever be demolished.
[00:14:37]  present day.
[00:14:38]  Cut to two podcasters.
[00:14:41]  One, male, shirtless, one, female, clothed in ball gown.
[00:14:45]  Producer, upside down, moon boots.
[00:14:49]  On the screen, rider from St. Louis, Devin Thomas.
[00:14:53]  Oh, Shea.
[00:14:54]  Hello.
[00:14:54]  Welcome back to Truanon, our Truanon St. Louis correspondent here to talk to us about all sorts of things, but about a large group of buildings, public housing projects that were demolished very famously in 1972, but built only about 17 years beforehand.
[00:15:13]  And okay, fine, fair enough.
[00:15:15]  There's been documentaries, blah, blah, all that stuff on that.
[00:15:18]  But also talking about U.S. government chemical testing on the population of that public housing project and St. Louis at large, particularly the black and poor population.
[00:15:31]  Devin, welcome back to the show.
[00:15:33]  Thank you so much for having me.
[00:15:36]  And man, is it great to be back in the recording studio?
[00:15:44]  This is the third time that you've come on.
[00:15:46]  We're so excited to have you back.

=== Gigantic Segregated Solution (15:23) ===

[00:15:48]  You have, as Brace, I got to say, in terms of intros, that was very inspired.
[00:15:55]  I think it's one of the best in quite a while.
[00:15:59]  I really got to give it to you for that.
[00:16:00]  That's a fed bull I just drank.
[00:16:01]  Yeah, I do see that on the floor over there.
[00:16:04]  Remember to take that with you when you leave.
[00:16:08]  Devin, you have a new piece in Protean magazine.
[00:16:13]  Is that how you say it?
[00:16:14]  It's like a Greek style of protein.
[00:16:16]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:16:18]  It is called Pruitt Igo, a black community under the, quote, atomic cloud.
[00:16:24]  And I do think Brace kind of gave away some of this, but before we get into what you mean when you say, quote, atomic cloud, let's start first off, Pruitt Igo.
[00:16:36]  Can you explain the name of that and what is it that we're talking about here?
[00:16:40]  Sure.
[00:16:41]  Yeah.
[00:16:43]  Had you guys heard of Pruadaigo or the documentaries before this?
[00:16:47]  Yeah.
[00:16:48]  Yeah, I knew that I recognized the building complex.
[00:16:51]  I was like, oh, yeah, that's the name of it.
[00:16:53]  But I kind of, it's a very famous controlled demolition, right?
[00:16:56]  I mean, it was on TV.
[00:16:57]  It was a huge thing in the 70s, like you said, 1960.
[00:16:59]  You could say actually the second most famous in American history.
[00:17:02]  Ooh.
[00:17:03]  And in fact, related to the first.
[00:17:05]  No, but no, I'm familiar with the contours of the story.
[00:17:12]  It's a pretty famous, I guess it would be the most famous public housing project in America as a public housing project rather than like having some cultural cachet.
[00:17:21]  But I knew the general basics of the story.
[00:17:24]  I hadn't seen any of the documentaries.
[00:17:26]  You barely ever catch my ass watching a documentary.
[00:17:29]  Just the Dolphin Sex one.
[00:17:30]  Yes.
[00:17:31]  Well, no, that was lived experience.
[00:17:33]  But yeah, I knew about it a little bit.
[00:17:36]  I'll say that.
[00:17:38]  Yeah, I think that from sort of just my own talking to people about the article, a lot of people are exposed to Pruodaigo at college when they learn about it.
[00:17:50]  And there's usually, I guess the piece really is about like what Prudigo means.
[00:17:57]  And there's still a lot of debate about that, especially since there's a bunch of stuff that is still classified or, for instance, locked away in Stanford's library and they won't let anyone see it.
[00:18:11]  But the gist of it is that, I mean, we got to go into the Wayback Machine and think about a Midwestern city like St. Louis, you know, first owned by the French and then the Spanish for a brief little period.
[00:18:27]  It's a city that's like older than the country itself and through the Civil War, stays in the Union, and then a whole lot of freed slaves and black people who are fleeing the South end up going north.
[00:18:44]  And St. Louis is a stop along the way.
[00:18:47]  And there's a lot of industry in St. Louis at this time, at the turn of the century, that welcomes all kinds of people to work in factories and be a part of, you know, what we would know now as the Rust Belt.
[00:19:02]  And if you're a guy like Harland Bartholomew, who's a city planner around this time, he's sort of like the Robert Moses of St. Louis.
[00:19:15]  You are pretty convinced that St. Louis is going to become probably like bigger than New York.
[00:19:21]  You know, like we got a whole river.
[00:19:25]  We're at the middle of the country that just makes it.
[00:19:27]  Yeah, you got all the railroads.
[00:19:28]  You got all the industry.
[00:19:30]  First of all, there's two rivers here.
[00:19:32]  I know, but if you're Harland Bartholomew, a man named Harland, you know, a man named Harlan, you're fiercely racist, but you don't really say it.
[00:19:43]  So a problem develops in the city in the early 20th century where after the war, of course, the suburbs break out everywhere and drain the tax populace into the west of St. Louis.
[00:19:59]  This is like a very familiar story for basically every American city.
[00:20:03]  Wait, hold on here.
[00:20:05]  So prior to this even happening, though, I'm assuming St. Louis, and you know, without doing any research whatsoever on this, pretty segregated at this point.
[00:20:16]  Yeah, there's like, you know, a secret cabal of all of the business leaders who put on a Klan uniform and crown one of their daughters, the queen of love and peace, every year.
[00:20:26]  And they're kind of in charge.
[00:20:28]  So, you know, there's elected leaders, but then there's like the veiled prophet.
[00:20:33]  And the city is very segregated.
[00:20:36]  But interestingly, what we're going to talk about as a prime example of this is Mill Creek Valley, which was very black, but it also had a lot of bohemian immigrant communities.
[00:20:48]  And there were certain parts of it that were pretty integrated, which is also where a lot of the communist thinkers came out of in St. Louis at the turn of the century.
[00:20:57]  And yes, they were.
[00:20:58]  You're talking about Bohemian, like from Bohemia?
[00:21:01]  Like they're from Bohemia.
[00:21:02]  Okay.
[00:21:03]  Yeah.
[00:21:04]  There's also a pretty big population of like Jewish immigrants who are in these neighborhoods too.
[00:21:09]  But as a synecdee for racism, Mill Creek and the neighborhoods that get obliterated in order to put the interstate highways in, they are thought of as just black.
[00:21:23]  And also in the popular imagination, falsely, they're called dilapidated or blighted neighborhoods.
[00:21:31]  Classic.
[00:21:32]  Yeah, because like if you're Harlan Bartholomew and you're looking at a big map and you got the Italians over on the hill and then you got the rich people over in Ledue and downtown and you got to draw a big interstate highway through something, you know, the black community is like, well, I guess they're going to take this one on the chin.
[00:21:50]  Yeah.
[00:21:52]  So Mill Creek is systematically destroyed and a lot of black neighborhoods like it in order for the interstates to go in.
[00:22:01]  And the solution to this is the Pruadigo, or part of the solution, is the Pruidaigo housing complex.
[00:22:09]  And so St. Louis, you can just think of as split straight down the middle, and the north half is the black side of the city, and the southern half is the white side of the city.
[00:22:21]  And at the turn of the century, there is a vibrant, gigantic black community in North St. Louis.
[00:22:28]  This is where, you know, this is where all of the St. Louis black musical culture comes from.
[00:22:36]  And it is basically a segregated, self-sustaining rival city in North St. Louis, in the Ville.
[00:22:47]  And so sort of a little bit east and east of the Ville is a whole lot of sort of ash slum neighborhoods or what Harlan Bartholomew would call them ash slum neighborhoods.
[00:23:01]  It's basically the most impoverished people in the city living in blight because the tax base has been sent west.
[00:23:12]  Yeah.
[00:23:12]  And so this, like, I mean, it's really hard to, you guys saw like the pictures of Peru Digo from above.
[00:23:20]  Yeah.
[00:23:20]  Yeah.
[00:23:21]  I mean, it's massive.
[00:23:22]  It's 33 buildings.
[00:23:24]  Yeah.
[00:23:25]  Each building is 11 stories tall.
[00:23:28]  And they all look like sort of like white and tan dominoes all placed next to each other.
[00:23:34]  And so a huge swath of North St. Louis is cleared, just completely leveled.
[00:23:40]  And they build these gigantic high-rise stories, high-rise public housing units, which did you guys ever see that HBO miniseries show me a hero?
[00:23:55]  Absolutely.
[00:23:56]  Never.
[00:23:56]  Not everyone.
[00:23:58]  It's like Oscar Isaac, I think.
[00:24:00]  Yeah, I was going to say it was with Oscar Isaac, right?
[00:24:03]  He loves an HBO miniseries.
[00:24:07]  I wouldn't know.
[00:24:09]  Well, so wait, you're telling me here that they're all right.
[00:24:12]  There was this big, big black neighborhood, basically, with a bunch of little ethnic enclaves of these Europeans, the Jews and Bohemians or whatever in there too.
[00:24:22]  And then they were like, all right, we need a fucking highway to make this city, take this city to the next level.
[00:24:28]  Well, these people can't do shit about it.
[00:24:30]  We'll just destroy their neighborhood, put them up in these fucking big tower blocks.
[00:24:34]  So they're doing slum clearance, basically.
[00:24:37]  They did the same thing in San Francisco.
[00:24:38]  They're like, you can't live here anymore.
[00:24:40]  We're condemning all your buildings.
[00:24:42]  We're blowing all that shit up.
[00:24:43]  We're putting a fucking highway in.
[00:24:44]  I mean, now you got to live here.
[00:24:48]  And like sort of the thing in Show Me a Hero or like just public housing in the mid-century overall is like it is beneficial to society if you take public housing and sprinkle it through an urban area.
[00:25:01]  Yes.
[00:25:02]  So you get a mixed income sort of neighborhood.
[00:25:06]  But what if we said, fuck all that, let's build a gigantic series of high-rise public housing units in the blackest part of the city far away from everything else.
[00:25:20]  And that's what Pruitigo was.
[00:25:22]  So immediately where they decided to zone and put the project, doomed it from the start.
[00:25:30]  It doesn't make any sense to put all of the poorest people on the poor side of the city and then expect gains or flourishing to happen.
[00:25:39]  Yeah.
[00:25:41]  Well, because also the way it's funded, right, is the local tax base.
[00:25:44]  And so it becomes a kind of cycle of destruction.
[00:25:46]  I mean, I think in the piece, you compare it, you know, to the total difference to what happened in the UK when they were building all the council housing, which was coming out of, you know, a very progressive taxation policy, which allowed for like, you know, just like a much more robust communities to develop and flourish over decades, right?
[00:26:07]  Obviously, since then, they've, you know, cut into that.
[00:26:11]  Right.
[00:26:11]  But it's very different from the way it was sort of conceived of as, you know, conceived of from the start with the development of Pruitigo here.
[00:26:22]  Yeah.
[00:26:22]  And crucially in the financing of the project, you know, this is just an absolutely ridiculous thing to do, but the maintenance of the buildings was dependent upon rent collected from public housing, like from public housing populations.
[00:26:42]  So the upkeep keep of these gigantic buildings was all dependent upon like collecting rent.
[00:26:50]  It's kind of just insane.
[00:26:53]  And also that there was a sort of local and state or local and then federal coupled funding that was pretty precarious as well.
[00:27:04]  In the piece you call it organized sabotage and then you call it a clandestine site for radiological weapons experimentation, which maybe we should pivot for a second to that portion of the essay and talk a little bit about that because that's sort of no pun intended a bit explosive.
[00:27:23]  So it wasn't just that this public housing project was a way of kind of like wiping out and you know wiping out poor populations for development of a city, segregating them into one area and then like dooming them to fail.
[00:27:38]  Although it is.
[00:27:40]  It's also became what I mean you compare it to basically like a citywide laboratory for radioactive weapons testing.
[00:27:49]  Like can we talk about that for a second?
[00:27:51]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:27:54]  So there's another thing that's happening in St. Louis that's pretty strange throughout the early 20th century, which is a lot of Manhattan Project shit is going down.
[00:28:06]  And one of the things that's becoming very, so there's like a three-pronged thing to the Manhattan Project.
[00:28:13]  There's the bomb and nuclear power, and then there's radiation.
[00:28:17]  And you can study radiation for either chemo or as a radiological weapon.
[00:28:23]  So like this comes down to how do we take the deadly effects of radiation and put them into some sort of particulate and then spray the particulate into a trench for the atomic warfare of the future.
[00:28:40]  Right.
[00:28:41]  Because we have to get like, I think for this portion, we're going to have to put ourselves in the mind of the most paranoid Manhattan Project scientist possible and then think through like, okay, a nuke is going to go out like tomorrow and I got to figure out what that's going to do to a city.
[00:29:05]  So they start to develop, not in St. Louis, but in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the first atomic cloud studies.
[00:29:15]  And yeah, they get off to sort of a rocky start with the Minnesotans.
[00:29:24]  This is from Dr. Martino Taylor's book, Behind the Fog, which documents all this.
[00:29:32]  But the purpose of the studies was for the Army researchers to release and then measure a cloud travel of the radiological material and engage in penetration studies inside of residences and buildings, such as the aging brick structures of Clinton Elementary School in Minneapolis.
[00:29:53]  So what you're saying here is like they basically need to test if the brick wall of an elementary school, like how much radiation that'll keep out.
[00:30:03]  Right.
[00:30:03]  Yeah.
[00:30:04]  Because if a bomb goes off, how many of these kids are going to be able to duck and cover their way off?
[00:30:10]  Right.
[00:30:12]  And the answer we know now is like, no, that's going to be bad.
[00:30:19]  True and on tip here.
[00:30:20]  I'm telling you, nuclear bomb goes off, you're dead.
[00:30:24]  This is back then, though.
[00:30:27]  I know, but they didn't tell people I could tell you immediately.
[00:30:31]  Like, if I see a mushroom cloud in the distance under the desk, no, I'm going, I'm making peace with my maker.
[00:30:38]  My mom lived in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and she had constant, like almost every day, like similar, when I was a kid, we had earthquake drills.
[00:30:47]  Oh, yeah.
[00:30:48]  Obviously in San Francisco, big earthquake town.
[00:30:51]  But she had like missile drills.
[00:30:53]  And so they would say, okay, in the event of Russia launching the bomb, this is what you do.
[00:30:58]  And it was just duck and cover under the desk.
[00:31:00]  It was very similar to the earthquake drill, actually.
[00:31:02]  Yeah, it was also, we actually also just ducked and covered.
[00:31:05]  But that makes more sense because Atlanta.
[00:31:06]  Yeah, you know, you get away from the, you know, the glass breaking.
[00:31:10]  Yeah.

=== The Demon Core Experiment (13:40) ===

[00:31:12]  I mean, I guess, did you guys ever hear of the Demon Core before this?
[00:31:18]  Yes, which I have to say, it's been a second since I learned about Demon Core.
[00:31:22]  I mean, I don't remember when I learned about that long time ago, but best name ever for any.
[00:31:28]  I mean, I got to say, I know those, you know, whatever, those guys that were running whatever they were doing out in Los Alamos, like they had, they were doing some freaky deeky shit.
[00:31:38]  Of course, they would come up with a name called Demon Core.
[00:31:41]  But, and I don't support those fellows.
[00:31:45]  However, I do think that they, they were on to something with the sky.
[00:31:48]  I'm telling you, the guys come into the cafeteria and they're like, Brace, we made a demon core.
[00:31:53]  I'm like, can I touch it?
[00:31:55]  So I don't, all those guys that like touched it and shit, I don't really blame them because they're like, you got to let me touch it.
[00:32:00]  I think we know the full story of like what happened there.
[00:32:03]  There's like, you know, a couple, couple stories that are like, oh, he was like building around it.
[00:32:07]  He was doing all this thing.
[00:32:08]  I was like, I think he's just touching it.
[00:32:10]  Yeah, but hit us with the demon core.
[00:32:12]  Well, yeah, this might help us get into that Manhattan Project mindset where there's a guy.
[00:32:19]  I'm probably going to miss a couple of the details here, but the Demon Core like killed a couple scientists before this guy got a hold of it.
[00:32:27]  And his whole thing was like, if you have a piece of uranium, basically, and you cap it so that the whole thing is contained, that's what sets off a nuclear bomb, basically.
[00:32:39]  There's no pressure release.
[00:32:41]  And so he was doing these experiments where he would sort of barehand a cap on top of the demon core that's implanted in a table.
[00:32:49]  And then, you know, he was trying to get like the smallest crack possible in order to like measure the radiation levels coming out of it.
[00:32:57]  And he was sort of at like the end of this round of laboratory experiments.
[00:33:01]  So there's like 14 of his buddies in the room with them.
[00:33:05]  And they were like, damn, Steve, you're so good at this.
[00:33:08]  And he's like, yeah, man.
[00:33:09]  And then, of course, the cap slips and it covers the uranium and a giant blue flash erupts like out of nowhere in reality, like magic.
[00:33:20]  And it blinds everybody.
[00:33:22]  And he has to like slap the cap off of the table.
[00:33:28]  Caps.
[00:33:29]  He's slapping caps off the table.
[00:33:31]  Slapping caps.
[00:33:32]  And then he's like, well, that was it.
[00:33:34]  I'm probably dead.
[00:33:36]  And everybody ran out of the room.
[00:33:38]  Yeah, he was.
[00:33:39]  And he was like a week later.
[00:33:42]  But everybody, he made everybody come back into the room and mark.
[00:33:48]  He had everybody come back into the room and then mark where they were.
[00:33:52]  And then they measured the distance between the demon core and the guy.
[00:33:56]  And then they were like, okay, you got 10 years to live.
[00:33:59]  But because Dan was in the back of the room, he's got like 40 years to live.
[00:34:03]  This is another true and on tip.
[00:34:05]  Stand in the back.
[00:34:06]  They're messing with the demon core.
[00:34:07]  Stand in the back.
[00:34:08]  Or get out of the room.
[00:34:10]  Yeah, I'll tell you this.
[00:34:10]  I'll tell you this right now.
[00:34:12]  Don't mess around with uranium.
[00:34:14]  Okay.
[00:34:14]  Unless you're selling it to a warlord or like maybe transporting it between different colors.
[00:34:19]  No, if you're a middleman, you can middleman the uranium.
[00:34:23]  Don't be the guy who has it.
[00:34:24]  But also, the middleman is just, all you're doing is setting up the contractors.
[00:34:28]  Ah, yeah.
[00:34:29]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:34:29]  You're not actually moving it as the like, you know, way stop.
[00:34:33]  Don't be the waystop.
[00:34:34]  Be the middleman.
[00:34:36]  Yeah, highly agree.
[00:34:39]  So that's like a way of maybe just trying to wrap our heads around the very early scientific minds at work with nuclear power.
[00:34:50]  Yeah, these people were fucking crazy.
[00:34:52]  Yeah.
[00:34:54]  At one end, they were like in awe and you got Robert Oppenheimer saying like, I am become death.
[00:35:01]  Right.
[00:35:02]  But then on the other hand, you got a guy with a screwdriver, you know, messing with a nuclear core.
[00:35:09]  I think those two things are related, actually.
[00:35:10]  But yes, I agree.
[00:35:12]  Yeah.
[00:35:12]  I mean, this brings us to a guy that you talk about a lot in the piece, Phil Layton.
[00:35:17]  Phil Layton.
[00:35:18]  Who out of Stanford, who I got to say, this guy's a real asshole.
[00:35:23]  We still don't know that much about what he was all up to, but a lot of his work has some pretty serious implications on the city of St. Louis and, of course, the Prude Igo complex.
[00:35:39]  Yeah, there were some hiccups in Minnesota because the Army went around to a bunch of the neighborhoods and said, hey, we're going to be spraying some stuff and you need to be cool about it.
[00:35:54]  I got to be honest with you.
[00:35:55]  I'd be like, I don't think I want you to do that in my place.
[00:35:58]  But that's what they said.
[00:35:59]  The residents were really upset about it.
[00:36:01]  Yeah, they were kind of pissed.
[00:36:02]  Like, what are you doing?
[00:36:04]  What do you mean you're going to be driving trucks, billowing luminous powder into my neighborhood?
[00:36:11]  Totally.
[00:36:12]  And when push came to shove, there was like a little story about like, well, we might be coming up with like a cloud that's going to be able to cover an entire city and hide it from Russian bombers.
[00:36:23]  So that's kind of what we're up to.
[00:36:25]  So I'm sorry.
[00:36:26]  They were telling people that they were releasing from the backs of vehicles and from like little stations on top of some buildings and stuff.
[00:36:35]  They were releasing chemicals that would create an artificial cloud.
[00:36:40]  The purpose of which was to literally hide the city from high-flying Russian nuclear bombers.
[00:36:53]  Yeah.
[00:36:54]  That sounds like a Simpsons episode, actually.
[00:36:56]  Do you think anyone was like, can you imagine arguing with your neighbor that thinks they're actually going to do the cloud thing?
[00:37:01]  He's like, no, I'm telling you, man, like this guy in a fucking military uniform said they're making a cloud.
[00:37:06]  And that's because the Russians, I feel like I feel nowadays when I talk about chemtrails.
[00:37:10]  See the giant city-sized cloud, and I would just fucking drop that motherfucking nuke right in the middle of it.
[00:37:16]  Yeah, it just goes through cloud.
[00:37:17]  Yeah.
[00:37:18]  Nuke penetrates cloud so easy.
[00:37:20]  Yeah.
[00:37:21]  You don't need a penetration study for that.
[00:37:23]  Yeah.
[00:37:24]  That's true.
[00:37:24]  That does make sense.
[00:37:26]  So this was the ostensible reason they were going around telling people.
[00:37:29]  Yeah.
[00:37:30]  And the Minnesotans, to their credit, sabotaged the project and made it a big deal, and they were uncool about it.
[00:37:38]  And so they sent Stanford's only Philip Layton.
[00:37:43]  Maybe we could get the brace noise for Philip Layton's name.
[00:37:46]  All right.
[00:37:47]  I'll allow it.
[00:37:49]  And they send him to St. Louis to design a new series of cloud experiments.
[00:37:54]  And this time they're not going to tell anybody what they're up to.
[00:37:58]  Yeah, they learned a little bit.
[00:37:59]  The Levin learned.
[00:38:00]  Yeah.
[00:38:01]  Yeah.
[00:38:01]  And so Philip Layton designs this study on purpose to be hard to understand.
[00:38:07]  He has the U.S. Public Health Service release the chemicals.
[00:38:13]  And he is part of the Army Chemical Corps as well as Stanford.
[00:38:18]  So he's sort of a military scientist, you know, hybrid.
[00:38:24]  Hybrid, yeah.
[00:38:25]  Fusion.
[00:38:26]  And I think the thing to understand about him is that he's a climber.
[00:38:32]  Like he wants to be in charge of stuff.
[00:38:34]  And he's also involved with some other things that we'll talk about, like Operation Plumbob, which is awesome name.
[00:38:45]  These are the experiments in Los Alamos where they set off a nuke by firing it out of a cannon into the desert.
[00:38:54]  And then they turn to all the military guys in trenches and say, okay, go walk into that.
[00:38:58]  Yep.
[00:38:58]  There's very famous like photos and videos of these guys.
[00:39:01]  Yeah.
[00:39:02]  Yeah.
[00:39:02]  Really astounding footage.
[00:39:03]  I guess I'm walking into this.
[00:39:06]  I guess so.
[00:39:07]  It's frying my intestines, but I don't know.
[00:39:10]  I guess I'll just do as I'm told.
[00:39:14]  So there's also a thing maybe to understand about Philip Layton's psychology and the military scientists of the time in that they like all these guys, if they don't own their own phrenology calipers, they were there, the people who taught them had phrenology calipers.
[00:39:33]  U.S. medical side at the time still believes that there's like a vast difference between black and white people.
[00:39:39]  There's a corollary during World War I about mustard gas experimentations on troops, and they would do a troop of white people and then a black troop just to see, you know, make sure there's maybe no difference or more immunity.
[00:39:57]  And that all traces itself back to slavery where, you know, the belief that black people are less susceptible to malaria or heat sickness becomes a justification for laboring them in fields until they die.
[00:40:13]  There's also the, at the same time, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which are a horror, as are the experiments of injecting troops with plutonium that are happening at the same time.
[00:40:26]  Yeah, you have this quote here again from Dr. Martino Taylor, just to describe a little bit of what this actually looked like in St. Louis.
[00:40:34]  She writes, residents in some areas of St. Louis noticed unusual activity in the days and nights throughout 1953 and into 1954.
[00:40:43]  Large puffs of billowy powder were sprayed into the air by strangers in passing vehicles affixed with spray devices.
[00:40:52]  The luminous powder lingered in the air behind the slow moving vehicles.
[00:40:59]  Yeah.
[00:41:00]  I mean, it's kind of insane to imagine now.
[00:41:02]  I mean, you know, or just like to picture, but this was obviously one of a lot of different experiments that were going on at the time.
[00:41:08]  Yeah.
[00:41:10]  Yeah.
[00:41:11]  And It was also designed to target the poorest black neighborhoods because as a sociologist pointed out, there's parts of the military outlines for this that explicitly say if the people in the neighborhoods don't like what's going on, the police will be there to keep them in their place.
[00:41:38]  And so we can touch on also why St. Louis is, I've never heard this before, but when you think St. Louis, you're like, ah, yeah, the Moscow of America, right?
[00:41:50]  I would say maybe the Moscow, Idaho of Missouri rather than the Moscow Russia of Missouri.
[00:41:58]  Right.
[00:41:59]  There is, it's very bizarre.
[00:42:01]  I've never encountered anybody saying this, but according to the U.S. Army records, you know, the tests are planned in St. Louis because we got A, a large chemical manufacturing complex, including Monsanto Chemical and Mallancrock Chemical.
[00:42:18]  Sure, famous.
[00:42:19]  Famous.
[00:42:20]  And then a large petroleum refinery in Illinois, the Saucony Vacuum Refinery.
[00:42:28]  And then there is a large steel manufacturing complex in Granite City Steel.
[00:42:34]  And they were really interested in like, okay, what's going to happen to the steel machinery when an atomic bomb hits this place?
[00:42:44]  And they point to a Russian city called Kolpino, located in the Leningrad area on the Isora River as a corollary to St. Louis and also Moscow, kind of.
[00:43:00]  And in Kolpino, specifically, they point out that there is a large concentration of tall concrete apartment buildings comprising of densely populated urban areas.
[00:43:12]  So I would just like to maybe point out here that like these tests are designed in the 1960s and 10 years previous to the designs of the test, there was no, not even a plan to have large apartment complexes built in St. Louis.
[00:43:33]  Yeah.
[00:43:34]  So you don't think that it's too wild to speculate that that's not a coincidence, basically?
[00:43:41]  I think that there's some other maybe details to add too, that like, you know, if you see the pictures of Puradaigo, they do look like Soviet block apartments for a purpose that's like the modernist style.
[00:43:58]  And to have them all in one area is very strange as a sociological thing.
[00:44:06]  So yeah, I don't know.
[00:44:07]  I think it's definitely an interesting thread to pull on, right?
[00:44:10]  Because it seems like, yeah, I would just say that, you know, I think it's, you know, good to speculate and think about these things or think about how development and the choices that developers make and city planners and all of that coincide with larger plans for city populations and larger plans in the war machine and all of that, right?
[00:44:31]  Like it's not so much this was, you know, maybe these buildings and these populations, you know, these buildings were planned and these populations were moved in order for these tests to happen, but that a lot of these interests end up kind of finding common cause as, you know, development and history kind of moves forward, right?

=== Mixture Of Poisonous Substances (04:47) ===

[00:44:52]  Yeah.
[00:44:53]  Yeah.
[00:44:53]  I'm not sure if there's ever a singular person planning any of this out, but it does seem to be a confluence of several trends.
[00:45:03]  So the military experiments start up in St. Louis, and just like in Minneapolis, there are these sprayer boxes that are outfitted to light poles.
[00:45:14]  They're put on the tops of the Pruhdigo housing projects, which we should point out also the name Pruhadigo comes from Wendell Pruitt and William Igo.
[00:45:25]  Wendell Pruitt was a Tuskegee airman and that was supposed to represent the black side of the housing development.
[00:45:31]  And William Igo is a congressman from Missouri and he was, and the white section was supposed to be named after him.
[00:45:39]  Yeah.
[00:45:39]  Except none of the white people ever moved in.
[00:45:43]  So another congressman from Missouri that I got to mention, which is Dick Gephardt, a name that I haven't heard since I was in maybe seventh grade.
[00:45:53]  But he, the only reason we know about any of this stuff is because he basically uncovered a bunch of these papers when they were declassified under the Clinton administration.
[00:46:04]  And some of what we can kind of like pull out of this and what you've done a lot of work in trying to kind of figure out in your piece is what exactly were the chemicals that were being sprayed on these populations, right?
[00:46:18]  Because it's only listed as in the papers that were declassified, right?
[00:46:23]  It's only listed as FP2266.
[00:46:27]  Right.
[00:46:28]  And in those declassified papers, that is referred to as a harmless stimulant.
[00:46:34]  I've heard that one before from people in this very room.
[00:46:38]  No.
[00:46:41]  But this one is supposed to be used as a traceable chemical to measure debris from a nuclear fallout explicitly.
[00:46:50]  That's what FP2266 is supposed to do in the details.
[00:46:56]  But at first it's bought from New Jersey Zinc because the mixture that is sprayed is both cadmium and zinc.
[00:47:04]  We know that both of those are in the mixture.
[00:47:06]  Cadmium is radioactive, so that, and zinc is poisonous to inhale.
[00:47:13]  But FP2266 is later bought from U.S. Radium Corp.
[00:47:19]  And, you know, I feel like that would give you a little bit of a hint of what it usually be.
[00:47:26]  So you're saying that the product that U.S. Radium Corps produced called Radium 266 might have something to do with FP2266.
[00:47:38]  Well, listen, I'm no lawyer, but you know, inferences can be made, I feel like, here.
[00:47:44]  That's true.
[00:47:45]  So, yeah, I mean, that's the thing here is U.S. Radium Corps makes a product called Radium-266, and there is an unidentified substance called FP2266 that is being used in these studies that is being purchased from U.S. Radium Corps.
[00:48:04]  Yes.
[00:48:05]  And Philip Leighton, in his notes about the atomic studies, specifically says, hey, guys, you got to be really careful with this one thing that we're buying.
[00:48:17]  They had very detailed sanitation protocols around the sprayer mixture and FP2266.
[00:48:27]  And he explicitly said that the point of the sprayer mixture is to get the material to be small enough in microns, 0.75 microns, which is small enough to be deposited deep inside a lung.
[00:48:44]  So this is some real evil shit because it's designed to go into a lung.
[00:48:51]  That's why he wanted the mixture to be small enough.
[00:48:56]  And Layton knew that cadmium and zinc are poisonous to the human system.
[00:49:01]  We had known that since like the 1800s.
[00:49:04]  And, you know, he explicitly says 2266 is labeled with a poison warning for a reason.
[00:49:13]  And Martino Taylor also points out that the FP part of that could refer to fluorescent particle, which some studies say like, oh, yeah, that'll help it be visible.
[00:49:27]  But it could also be fallout particle, which is what a lot of the Manhattan Project stuff refers to, uses that abbreviation for fallout particle.

=== Pruit Igo's Toxic Legacy (15:20) ===

[00:49:39]  So that's pretty cool.
[00:49:43]  So there's U.S. Army vehicles and contractors being paid by the U.S. Army who are setting up spray boxes, spray cars, spray whatever, a bunch of spraying devices all around the Pruet Igo housing complex, which is a giant series of rather poorly constructed towers housing tens of thousands of poor black residents.
[00:50:11]  Yeah.
[00:50:12]  I actually think that the towers were pretty well constructed for what they were.
[00:50:18]  Okay.
[00:50:19]  But what you're thinking of is like, as we're talking about like the sprayer experiments, what's going on at Pruitt Igo is that it's in full tilt decline.
[00:50:30]  That's basically what I'm saying.
[00:50:31]  It's like it doesn't like the elevator.
[00:50:33]  Like you've seen or read the book High Rise, the J.G.F. Ballard book.
[00:50:37]  I really want to read that one.
[00:50:38]  It's great.
[00:50:39]  But the movie I didn't like the first time I saw it, and then I saw it again.
[00:50:42]  I'm like, you know what?
[00:50:43]  Not too bad.
[00:50:44]  I haven't seen the movie at all.
[00:50:45]  The book is fantastic.
[00:50:46]  Anyways, as the building starts to decline, I mean, that's a huge component of the book.
[00:50:53]  And it really, like, reading about Pruitt Igo is like, oh, there's some similarities here.
[00:50:58]  But just, I mean, there's a description of like urine-stenched elevators that you write about that just like don't even don't stop at most of the floors and you have to take the stairs where you'll get mugged or worse.
[00:51:09]  I mean, it seems pretty nightmarish at this point because, like you said, the upkeep is dependent on rent extracted from these very poor tenants.
[00:51:19]  And so naturally, upkeep is going to suffer and keep suffering.
[00:51:23]  These things would compound.
[00:51:25]  Yeah, there's a chronic problem of the elevators breaking down, the garbage incinerators would break down, and then garbage would just pile up in the hallways and catch fire.
[00:51:37]  And so by 1966, one of the local workers reports that when one drives or walks into Pruhadigo, he is confronted by a dismal sight.
[00:51:49]  Glass rubble and debris litter the streets.
[00:51:52]  The accumulation is astonishing.
[00:51:55]  Abandoned automobiles have been left in parking areas.
[00:51:58]  Glass is omnipresent.
[00:52:00]  Tin cans are strewn throughout.
[00:52:02]  Paper has been rained on and stuck in the cracked, hardened mud.
[00:52:06]  Pruhdigo from without looks like a disaster area.
[00:52:10]  I mean, and it was.
[00:52:12]  Absolutely.
[00:52:13]  I mean, I think that's like a key thing.
[00:52:15]  I mean, it absolutely was, because not just because of, you know, like how you call it, organized sabotage from a development and city planning point of view, but also, you know, obviously these experiments that were being inflicted upon the population, it didn't stop.
[00:52:33]  There was the second round that comes later on in the 60s, right?
[00:52:37]  Right, exactly.
[00:52:38]  There's, I mean, Philip Layton, our man, is not exactly great at designing a study because I think, like, if anybody thinks about like trying to measure things in a scientific capacity, putting a box that sprays stuff into the air outside and then trying to measure it some miles away, pretty difficult because of the wind and stuff like that.
[00:53:07]  Ah, damn wind.
[00:53:08]  I hate that stuff.
[00:53:09]  You know, that's my number one enemy is the wind.
[00:53:11]  I always talk about this.
[00:53:13]  My men knows.
[00:53:14]  When I hate the wind due to their hair.
[00:53:17]  Not only hair.
[00:53:18]  Skirt-like outfits.
[00:53:19]  Dresses.
[00:53:21]  Seven-year-itch.
[00:53:22]  Oh, my God.
[00:53:24]  That was something I really hated about San Francisco was the wind tunnels.
[00:53:26]  Wind tunnels everywhere.
[00:53:28]  But believe me, don't get me started on big buildings and wind tunnels.
[00:53:31]  Anyway.
[00:53:32]  Yeah.
[00:53:33]  Just the number one nemesis is the wind.
[00:53:35]  I think that Layton hated the wind also.
[00:53:38]  But he was on a trajectory in his career that we'll talk about at the end that was, he was going to be just fine.
[00:53:47]  But they went ahead and did a second round of cloud experiments.
[00:53:51]  And during these, they took some extra precautions to measure the dosages and to try to do like weather balloons that would sort of pick up the debris in the air.
[00:54:04]  And they dispersed like, I think it's one ton of material into the air over the course of two years with Pruittigo being in the center, but also there's a bunch of public housing in the same area.
[00:54:21]  And then there are also, so this is a shout out to Gumby4Christ on Twitter, who I helped out a whole lot with this.
[00:54:33]  But he points out that his relatives lived in an area near Clayton where one of the sprayer boxes was set up and they have had chronic cancer problems and health problems.
[00:54:48]  Oh, awful.
[00:54:49]  I actually was talking to somebody over the weekend about this and they were saying that they lived in a similar area and have, well, their family has weird health problems, part of North St. Louis and autoimmune diseases.
[00:55:06]  And the theory or a theory is that because the white residents never moved into Pruittigo, other places had to have sprayer boxes, including Clayton, which is predominantly white, and is also where Harlan Bartholomew retired to.
[00:55:25]  Interesting.
[00:55:26]  But this is Dr. Martino Taylor said she couldn't comment on that of like the design, if the design was trying to replicate those mustard gas experiments or not.
[00:55:39]  Well, it's, you know, it does remind me, we were talking about this before recording, but of like, you know, where the naval yards were in the Bay Area or like, you know, in San Francisco and Hunters Point, which is a almost entirely black neighborhood.
[00:55:53]  Huge cancer rates.
[00:55:55]  You know, there's been ongoing like scandals about fake cleanups of the lawsuits of sort of the radioactive sites.
[00:56:04]  And then in Treasure Island, too, which is also home to, I think now they're like trying to build like wineries and stuff on it.
[00:56:11]  But, you know, for most of, you know, my memory has been has been public housing, also, you know, radioactive in some parts, you know, high cancer rates, things like that.
[00:56:23]  Yeah, it's, I think that a big thing or a reason to talk about Harlan Bartholomew and Pruadigo and the Sprayer experiments is to understand that the north side of St. Louis is, if you go there now, extremely dilapidated.
[00:56:42]  If the buildings there, if they haven't fallen down on their own, they are sometimes burned down, sometimes by developers who just don't want to pay the cost to knock them down.
[00:56:55]  The people who are born on a certain, on the north side of Del Mar just have everything stacked against them.
[00:57:04]  And they live in sort of this community that's been trying to hold itself together for like a century and has all of these things stacked against it, including just like straight up government conspiracies to poison everyone.
[00:57:25]  And then, and so this is also my like biggest sticking point about Peru Digo is that the most famous part of it is the demolition in 1972, which comes after, you know, we should note a really incredible rent strike that breaks out in 1969 because of the insane conditions inside Pruadaigo, but it comes too late.
[00:57:50]  And in 1972, the Housing Authority demolishes the first three buildings on national television.
[00:57:58]  And the popular media interpretation of this, which persists today, I've heard friends tell me this shit before of the people who lived in Pruadaigo didn't respect the place they lived in.
[00:58:14]  That the reason that it fell down and fell apart is their fault.
[00:58:20]  And that's just fucking bullshit.
[00:58:23]  It's one of the most infuriating, persistent myths about Pruadigo.
[00:58:27]  It's sort of why the documentary is called the Pruadigo myth.
[00:58:33]  And the national news agrees.
[00:58:35]  And this is a big reason why in the American consciousness, every time public housing comes up, people want to point to Pruitt Igo and say, this is what happens when you give poor people nice things, is that they destroy them, you know, that they're unable to take care of them.
[00:58:55]  It's really, it's surprisingly persistent, I think.
[00:58:59]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:59:00]  So that's the demolition and that area is now an overgrown forest.
[00:59:07]  But maybe we should talk about the architect now.
[00:59:11]  Yeah, I think that's a good idea.
[00:59:13]  But I also, I do want to say, like, it's sort of astounding because, I mean, Pruitt Igo lasted for about 17 years, right?
[00:59:21]  Right.
[00:59:22]  From around, you know, 55-ish to about 1972.
[00:59:27]  And, which is not a long time at all, right?
[00:59:29]  Yeah, I would be much assumed.
[00:59:30]  You'd be born in Pruitt Igo.
[00:59:32]  And then by the time your house was destroyed, you wouldn't even be able to buy a pack of Palmaul cigarettes.
[00:59:39]  And it's just, I mean, the amount of money that it costs to build these things.
[00:59:44]  I mean, I think you note in the notes here that it almost about half, the equivalent of about half a billion dollars today.
[00:59:51]  I mean, it's truly extraordinary.
[00:59:52]  And then just like absolutely destroyed.
[00:59:56]  Well, yeah.
[00:59:57]  I mean, it's like it had, it didn't have any use anymore, right?
[01:00:01]  I mean, that's like what I think is so infuriating, like you say.
[01:00:04]  I mean, it's like, you know, this, this, I mean, I just keep going back to that quote from you, organized sabotage in a clandestine site.
[01:00:13]  Like it outlived its usefulness, whether it was for the purposes of like wrangling and managing poor residents or like corralling black population into one area away from developer interests, or it was for like insane radiological weapons experiments, right?
[01:00:35]  It had no, and so what was the, you know, the only choice was to demolish it and tear it all down and make a big show of it on national television, you know?
[01:00:44]  Again, so many beautiful interests intersecting right at one point, right?
[01:00:51]  Yeah, I mean, it's hard to understand how, like, in the local media, you know, in the last years before the demolitions, Pruitt Igo is a giant, a persistent metaphor of just like, it's so bad up there that the police won't even enter the buildings.
[01:01:10]  Right.
[01:01:10]  That they made the towers actually made for very good like drug trafficking places because you could stand a guy on the roof and he could see a cop car coming from like four blocks away.
[01:01:23]  And so it in the, it became like a literal monster in the local public imagination.
[01:01:31]  You know, it wasn't blown up with a nuclear bomb, but you know, there's something to be said about it all kind of coming full circle there, right?
[01:01:38]  Yeah, if you watch the demolition footage, I mean, it does, it is a giant ash cloud that erupts out of the bottom of the building and engulfs the whole thing, which is kind of strange or has a lot of similarities with the sprayer experiments and then some of the other stuff that Minaru Yamazaki designed.
[01:02:06]  So, Minoru Yamasaki was the architect of the Pruit Igo buildings.
[01:02:12]  And actually, you know, fairly, very famous architect in his own right, but I believe who is most known for designing the World Trade Center, the Twin Towers.
[01:02:21]  Beacons of democracy.
[01:02:23]  Exactly.
[01:02:25]  And as I call it as well.
[01:02:26]  And I got to be honest with you, the guy has not had an extraordinary amount of luck in keeping his building standing.
[01:02:34]  No.
[01:02:35]  Of the seven biggest projects, three of them have exploded.
[01:02:41]  I think if you're, yeah, if you're an architect, that's like the last thing you want on your CB.
[01:02:45]  You don't want your guys blown up like that.
[01:02:46]  Like, oops.
[01:02:48]  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of insulting, you know?
[01:02:51]  Unless that's what he was intending.
[01:02:55]  I mean, as it was pointed out by Boltzmann Booty on Twitter from a slate article, Yamazaki was a favorite designer of the Bin Laden family's patrons, the Saudi royal family, and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences.
[01:03:16]  I'm always saying that about the World Trade Center, that it merged, you know, architect, you know, it merged modernism with Islamic influences.
[01:03:22]  Frankly, to me, Pruit Igo is in both life and death.
[01:03:25]  You know, some of my favorite things in the world are what I like to call East Meets West, right?
[01:03:31]  Sure.
[01:03:31]  Fusion.
[01:03:32]  Yeah, fusion, absolutely.
[01:03:35]  I mean, I've been called the godfather of fusion in my own time.
[01:03:39]  But Pruit Igo to me, I mean, it really, it's like, it's like, it's honestly, it's Mecca meets Manhattan.
[01:03:45]  Wow.
[01:03:46]  Wow, that's nice.
[01:03:48]  Yeah, I don't know what that quote means.
[01:03:49]  You know, I'm no architecture guy.
[01:03:51]  Hell, I don't really like buildings that much.
[01:03:54]  But I don't really see that in several in the buildings that I've seen from the guy.
[01:04:01]  Yeah, especially when we're talking about Pruit Igo and then the thing next, which is the Military Personnel Record Center in St. Louis.
[01:04:10]  It seems like he's more of a modernist.
[01:04:13]  I looked into that, and the Islamic influences are like arches at the doorways and sort of flourishes around some of the spare edges of the design.
[01:04:25]  I'm not sure.
[01:04:27]  Well, you mentioned the Military Personnel Records Center.
[01:04:29]  That's another building of his set does not exist anymore.
[01:04:33]  So the other building in St. Louis that Yamazaki designed was Lambert Airport, made famous by up in the air, the 2011 rom-com with George Kaluni, but also the U.S. military's personnel records center in St. Louis, which one year after the Pruitt Igo Towers began being demolished,

=== Sixth Floor Fire (03:07) ===

[01:05:00]  burst into flames and burned for 22 hours, smoldering for two days and destroying about 16 million to 18 million official military personnel records.
[01:05:13]  God.
[01:05:14]  Well, that's unfortunate.
[01:05:16]  Yeah, that's a bummer.
[01:05:19]  How did that happen?
[01:05:21]  Well, there's some debate about whether or not the fire was electrical or maybe there were just a lot of people smoking a lot of cigarettes in the sixth floor.
[01:05:32]  Those Damn Paul malls.
[01:05:35]  Yeah, but that's where the fire broke out on the sixth floor.
[01:05:38]  And as Dr. Martino Taylor notes, Yamasaki insisted that the sixth floor have modern sprinkler systems.
[01:05:51]  And the Department of Defense weirdly pushed back against that.
[01:05:57]  So then a fire broke out and 80% of the losses were from Army personnel discharged between 1912 and 1960, which is basically both World Wars and Korea.
[01:06:11]  Yeah, not a big time for U.S. military history.
[01:06:13]  Yeah.
[01:06:14]  Not a lot going on.
[01:06:16]  And there was something on the sixth floor called the Sixth Floor Vault, which contained the Navy file for the Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandaru.
[01:06:28]  Is that how you say that?
[01:06:29]  I think it's Papandrew.
[01:06:30]  Popindrew.
[01:06:32]  As well as Hitler's nephew, William Patrick Hitler's military records were destroyed.
[01:06:39]  Not only Hitler's nephew, but U.S. Army veteran and life magazine op-ed writer.
[01:06:45]  Interesting.
[01:06:47]  Oh, William Hitler.
[01:06:48]  I got to tell you, playing stickball with Willie Hitler back in St. Louis fucking 41 when before we even knew it would happen.
[01:06:56]  I mean, just some of those are some of the best years of my life.
[01:06:59]  Absolutely.
[01:07:00]  Just comrade Lee on the field, having a good time.
[01:07:04]  My first kiss was William Hitler, actually, at the barracks.
[01:07:08]  I mean, the man can French, good God.
[01:07:11]  Yeah.
[01:07:12]  But unfortunately, now records of the incident gone.
[01:07:16]  Totally gone.
[01:07:17]  But yeah, I mean, that's pretty extraordinary.
[01:07:19]  All of the millions of military records lost in This giant fire on a sixth floor of a building where the DOD insisted there was no sprinklers put in.
[01:07:30]  Yeah, designed by the same guy as the Pruod Igo complex and the World Trade Center.
[01:07:35]  Very interesting.
[01:07:37]  Very strange.
[01:07:38]  There's one last thing we should mention before we kind of wrap this up, which is, you know, you mentioned it in your piece, and I just as a kind of like little piece of history for some people out there that might not know about it, is the Baby Tooth Survey, which gave us some insight, a little bit more insight into the ramifications of some of the radiological cloud experiments that were going on, you know, in St. Louis and other places in the 50s and 60s.

=== Baby Tooth Survey Insights (06:22) ===

[01:08:07]  Yeah, like, so this came up in sort of the papers like 10 years ago where, you know, we can all imagine ourselves.
[01:08:18]  We're out at the Bush Nature Reserve.
[01:08:20]  It's late at night, and we are breaking into the Tyson Research Center, which is a former DOD ammunitions bunker that is now owned by Washington University, who have a lot of buildings named after Veiled Prophets.
[01:08:39]  But it's an environmental research station now in a storage area.
[01:08:44]  And we go down the steps and it's very spooky down there.
[01:08:48]  And then we open a filing cabinet and there's 300,000 baby teeth.
[01:08:53]  Just right there.
[01:08:55]  Sorry, wait, wait, hold on.
[01:08:57]  Sorry.
[01:08:57]  3,000.
[01:08:58]  300,000.
[01:08:59]  Excuse me.
[01:08:59]  300,000.
[01:09:00]  3,000.
[01:09:00]  Wait, baby teeth.
[01:09:02]  It's a couple of babies.
[01:09:04]  I know, but how much space do you think that would take up?
[01:09:08]  Well, maybe it's like the first drawer of many.
[01:09:11]  Like you keep opening all the drawers and they're all full of baby teeth.
[01:09:14]  Yeah.
[01:09:15]  That would be increasingly.
[01:09:16]  Or like you kind of like knock down one box and all of these baby teeth kind of like come out.
[01:09:21]  And then it's like it's a domino thing, sort of like a Pru-It-Igo sort of controlled demolition thing.
[01:09:25]  But instead of a cloud, it's like baby teeth.
[01:09:29]  That's a fucking nightmare, I gotta say.
[01:09:32]  That's a nightmare image for me.
[01:09:35]  You know what?
[01:09:35]  My brain is thinking when I find those baby teeth?
[01:09:38]  I'm opening up an Etsy store.
[01:09:40]  Oh, yeah.
[01:09:41]  Immediately.
[01:09:42]  Earrings, necklaces.
[01:09:43]  Yeah, very Portland.
[01:09:45]  Yeah.
[01:09:46]  So the point of the baby teeth, well, these baby teeth were rediscovered suddenly after decades of neglect.
[01:09:57]  They weren't actually all loose in a drawer somewhere.
[01:10:00]  They were all filed away.
[01:10:02]  But in the middle of the sprayer experiments, there was a secondary unrelated study sort of done by the RAND Corporation, but executed by a local entity in St. Louis, which was the Baby Tooth Survey.
[01:10:20]  And a bunch of scientists from Washington University asked everybody in the St. Louis region, all the mothers, to send us your baby teeth.
[01:10:28]  You know, don't worry about it.
[01:10:30]  Tooth fairy is so mad.
[01:10:31]  Tooth fairy is like, god damn it.
[01:10:32]  Exactly.
[01:10:34]  And instead of a dollar, they gave you like a little pin that said, I gave my tooth to science.
[01:10:39]  Well, that's actually where the tooth fairy takes your tooth fairy.
[01:10:43]  Yeah, tooth fairy actually works for a rail corporation.
[01:10:46]  Right, that's true.
[01:10:47]  That's what I'm going to tell my kids.
[01:10:50]  And the purpose of this was there was a story, or the scientists said, okay, there's a problem.
[01:10:57]  We did all those atmospheric detonations in Nevada, and all of that debris drifted into the mainlands, and it was eaten by cows, and those cows made milk, and then these stupid children drank the milk.
[01:11:10]  And that milk might be full of strontium-90, which behaves like calcium in the body and forms in the tooth.
[01:11:18]  So it goes into the teeth and the bones, probably.
[01:11:20]  Yeah.
[01:11:21]  But you're not going to ask for baby bones.
[01:11:22]  I guess that would be pretty.
[01:11:25]  No, that was a separate part of Project Sunshine that did work for and stole a lot of bones and other stuff.
[01:11:35]  So that's the cover story: is that it was atmospheric detonations, but there was also, like we just talked about, a ton of cadmium zinc and FP2266 being strayed into the air.
[01:11:48]  And what do you know?
[01:11:50]  The scientists were like, these baby teeth are packed with atomic metals.
[01:11:55]  And John F. Kennedy said, okay, no more atmospheric testing.
[01:12:00]  Now that we have the data, we know that it's poisoning the youth of America.
[01:12:04]  We're not going to do that anymore.
[01:12:06]  And everyone says, see, the baby teeth was a good idea.
[01:12:10]  It stopped atmospheric testing.
[01:12:13]  Don't look into the other local stuff that was happening.
[01:12:16]  Right.
[01:12:18]  So kind of a strange amount of atomic stuff happening in St. Louis over the last century.
[01:12:26]  Absolutely.
[01:12:27]  I mean, the piece is great.
[01:12:28]  We'll link to it in our notes.
[01:12:30]  I mean, we should say that, like, you know, you've done a great job trying to kind of put all of this in one place, all this information that's sort of in like disparate places, right?
[01:12:39]  And using Pruet IGO as a kind of like lens to kind of look at all of this stuff in these sort of disparate histories and kind of tie them together.
[01:12:49]  But a lot of the data and a lot of, you know, really what the government was doing and what's, of course, Stanford and Rancor and all these other places, what they were doing in the mid-century in places like St. Louis and probably in numerous other cities across the country.
[01:13:10]  We don't know about most of it.
[01:13:12]  I mean, either the records have been destroyed or they're not declassified, or in the case of, you know, the Stanford stuff, I mean, it's just locked away.
[01:13:20]  Stanford refuses to open up the archives to let people take a look at what was going on here.
[01:13:26]  Yeah, there's 15 linear feet of Philip Layton's documents stashed away that became classified as soon as Dr. Martino Taylor showed up to take a look at them.
[01:13:39]  Oh, like they immediately declassified them when she rolled up to the building.
[01:13:44]  They were like, she's asking for what?
[01:13:46]  Oh, no, we weren't supposed to have that available.
[01:13:48]  Sorry.
[01:13:49]  So this is just tip of the iceberg sort of stuff.
[01:13:52]  I mean, there's literal, you know, 15 feet of documents just relating to one guy's experiments that we don't know about.
[01:13:59]  I mean, who got, God knows how many other experiments by how many other guys there were that were going on concurrently that we just have no clue about.
[01:14:07]  Yeah, and I would really recommend Dr. Martino Taylor's book, Behind the Fog, because she's very, very detailed about this stuff.
[01:14:14]  And at the bottom of it, she's talking about how there are embedded studies in the secret embedded studies.
[01:14:21]  So there's like layers of obfuscation.
[01:14:24]  So there's no seal or basements to it.
[01:14:27]  It just kind of keeps going and going.

=== Tip of the Iceberg Documents (03:28) ===

[01:14:30]  Good God.
[01:14:31]  Well, the piece is fantastic, Devin.
[01:14:33]  I mean, well, like I said, and I'll say it again, we'll link to it in the notes.
[01:14:36]  Everyone should read it.
[01:14:38]  And I'm going to check out that book because I think it sounds fascinating.
[01:14:42]  This is something that I really don't know enough about.
[01:14:47]  But third time, I would say it's a charm, but the other two times have been a charm as well.
[01:14:52]  We got to thank you again so much for coming on.
[01:14:54]  That's what they call St. Louis Charm City.
[01:14:57]  They don't call it that.
[01:14:59]  They do.
[01:14:59]  Charm City?
[01:15:01]  Yeah, there they do.
[01:15:02]  Oh, well, that's nice.
[01:15:03]  Wait, do they actually?
[01:15:04]  I was kind of guessing that, but it rung a bell.
[01:15:06]  It is Charm City, right?
[01:15:08]  Yeah, it was named after the Native Americans who were very charming.
[01:15:12]  Yes.
[01:15:12]  There you go.
[01:15:14]  Yeah.
[01:15:14]  Thank you so much for having me on.
[01:15:16]  Always a pleasure.
[01:15:18]  There's only so many places like Protean Magazine that will pick up stuff like this.
[01:15:22]  And then there's only so many amazing shows like Truinon to come on and talk about it with.
[01:15:28]  Well, we will have you on anytime.
[01:15:31]  Always a pleasure.
[01:15:32]  I hope not.
[01:15:32]  He's always telling us about some horrible thing in St. Louis.
[01:15:35]  I hope this is it.
[01:15:36]  Devin.
[01:15:37]  I hope you never outride anything ever again.
[01:15:39]  And God help us if you ever move.
[01:15:42]  I will never move.
[01:15:43]  I'll tell you, once a St. Louisian, always a St. Louisian.
[01:15:47]  Yeah, it's true.
[01:15:48]  I'm bound to the place.
[01:15:51]  All right.
[01:15:52]  In the words of the great mayor of St. Louis, Adolph William Hitler.
[01:15:58]  Thank you so much, Devin.
[01:15:59]  him.
[01:16:13]  Good God.
[01:16:14]  Remind me.
[01:16:14]  You know, Liz, have I ever seen a little sprayer up on a pole?
[01:16:17]  Yeah.
[01:16:18]  I'm taking that thing.
[01:16:18]  You know what?
[01:16:19]  Actually, I'm going to fill it with fucking weed.
[01:16:22]  Imagine how crazy that would be.
[01:16:24]  Yeah, you climb up there.
[01:16:25]  You're like, oh, they're doing it again.
[01:16:28]  Hold on.
[01:16:28]  Climb up there.
[01:16:31]  What's that?
[01:16:31]  What are you doing?
[01:16:32]  Me pouring my weed pen in.
[01:16:35]  I crack my weed pen in half and I pour it in.
[01:16:38]  And everyone would faint.
[01:16:40]  Everyone would faint.
[01:16:41]  And then I'd be walking the streets all alone.
[01:16:43]  Ooh, what's in your pocket?
[01:16:45]  What do you have on your phone?
[01:16:46]  That's what you would do if everyone fainted.
[01:16:49]  You would just pour it pocket everyone?
[01:16:51]  No, I wouldn't.
[01:16:52]  Okay.
[01:16:52]  Okay, 28 days later situation.
[01:16:54]  Everyone's out on the and you're just rifling through.
[01:16:57]  What's in there?
[01:16:59]  Why do you gotta know?
[01:17:00]  Because he's a gamer.
[01:17:01]  What is that?
[01:17:02]  Oh, yeah, I gotta loot them.
[01:17:04]  I gotta loot.
[01:17:05]  Yeah, they could have rare items.
[01:17:07]  No, I just want to see what's going on in there.
[01:17:09]  You go in my pockets, Liz, you'll be fucking appalled at what you found.
[01:17:12]  Oh, I know.
[01:17:13]  No, you don't know.
[01:17:14]  It's like 18 different vapes.
[01:17:17]  One jewel.
[01:17:19]  Bunch of jewel pods.
[01:17:20]  Okay, there are tacks for some reason.
[01:17:22]  Loose.
[01:17:23]  You got loose.
[01:17:24]  You just ride them loose.
[01:17:26]  Uh-huh.
[01:17:26]  I got them loose in there.
[01:17:28]  Papers.
[01:17:29]  Somehow, you've got like precious documents.
[01:17:31]  I got docs in here.
[01:17:32]  Yeah.
[01:17:32]  Yeah, you're like a human Mary Poppins.
[01:17:34]  I got lots of pops.
[01:17:35]  She is a human.
[01:17:36]  However, you're like the human Mary Poppins.
[01:17:37]  I feel like she was a witch.
[01:17:39]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:17:39]  Yeah.
[01:17:40]  That's not at all.
[01:17:41]  Mary Poppins was not a witch.
[01:17:43]  Yeah, she was.
[01:17:43]  How'd she do magic then?
[01:17:44]  No.
[01:17:45]  She didn't do magic.
[01:17:46]  Oh, my God.
[01:17:48]  I love you.
[01:17:50]  I'm Liz.
[01:17:50]  My name is Brace.
[01:17:52]  We're joined by producer Young Chomsky in the podcast.
[01:17:55]  I can't even say it.
[01:17:56]  It's true, Nan.
[01:17:57]  We'll see you next time.