Nuked in the Midwest feat. Devin O’Shea (Premium E280)

totally overlooked milestone: this was FINALLY that

I aspire to doing what Devin does about St. Louis & Missouri but for Des Moines, IA to Madison, WI; & those states in general. Working on something right now (not for QAA, obviously—I’m not that cool) on the “Communist takeover” of Mosinee, Wisconsin.

Backing up that it would amazing if you could make this public, I joined the patreon just to listen to it and nuclear dumping/nuclear power is becoming a key election issue where I am. I would love to send this to some family members and friends. Lots of love to the gang from Australia <3

I live in St Louis! Please make this a public episode!! Id love to be able to share this widely in my network.

Man. This was so depressing.

I don’t think anyone understood what an atomic bomb would do to people on impact And it fucked up everyone after the 2 were dropped on Japan who were involved in development. I mean there’s your average IED or cannon style human body exploding all over with guts and brains and shit and then there’s people vanishing through 100% incineration into dust bc of the movement of all their atoms to like 1 zillion x speed and then days of skin falling off and bones leeching into dust and I think it was majorly surprising. We have always treated cancer as this unfortunate thing that most people get in some form but everything in this podcast definitely shows why it happens. There’s a reason that you can carbon date pretty much everything and that’s because we are just increasingly infused with nuclear material. So …. Yeah, eat your blueberries and do your best.

Whenever young ppl get creepy and strange cancers you know there is a problem. The 3 late teens kids died in terror and pain. A Swiss chemical company came to the pines in NJ and worked with the town to poison it

Toms river NJ person here. I know all about toxic contamination. I've known 3 people in a 5 mile radius who died from Ewing sarcoma in their late teens. They aren't counted as child deaths so the government can say look! We cleaned it up

I've been trying to get the link for the Discord - can someone pls post it or send me the link?

Liv Agar

@jake Ether: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NCBt1N-qps

LIV AGAR

Someone out there mistaken listened to this episode on the morning of their wife's birthday and you OWE THEM for that.

Timothy Morton reference!!

Liv Agar

New Jake story Captain Elon Sails the Bermuda Triangle

Nothing against our girl Liv here but, from a production standpoint, this ep should have been spearheaded by Travis with references back to Trickle Down, reminding listeners ‘we’ve heard this type of thing before, here’ and sending us into the vaults to listen again or maybe for first time. So, go listen to when Travis used to talk, folks. Trickle Down is pretty amazing and worth a re-listening if you were into this content.

I grew up in Florissant. I’ve known all about cold water creek- my aunts/uncles have lost 1/2 of their classmates at sacred heart/rosary high. All from extremely rare cancers - I still learned new info from this episode. Good job, I really enjoyed the pod guys.

Liv agar

if you don't listen really closely in the first 2 minutes, its a wild ride.

Actually way worse than the Times Beach disaster. Sold on St. Louis

Is this ep kinda quiet or am I finally losing my hearing?

Feels like one of the early episodes about in-person Qanon events in the early Trump days, but a more ominous sequel. We’re so back baby

On the topic of ether, it also gets you hungover without getting you drunk first. As for its nuclear applications it can be used in solvent extraction in the purification of uranium. Nowadays alkyl phosphates like D2EHPA are used. I did a PhD on uranium hydrometallurgy, so it's quite a familiar topic to me.

I have a buddy that has/had a research chemical license and got his hands on a bottle of ether.. we were all a bunch of drug addicts at the time so naturally we tried it. You basically just sniffed it it like poppers, it had a really sweet taste and felt exactly like whip-its. Apparently there's a thing that happens if you have it in a container with a screw on lid where it crusts up on the threads of the lid and the friction of opening it can cause an explosion

Always love seeing Devin on

Tim Morton mentioned 🗣️

Metal gear!?

Devin is my favourite guest by far

When I was in AP chemistry in high school, my teacher trusted me to do an ether rinse on some glassware. It is a clear liquid, kept in glass, volatile enough to the extent that it will always be putting off fumes at room temperature. It was so long ago now that I don't remember what it smelled like. But in the process of cleaning the glassware with the ether, I got some on my hand and it was cold to the touch, probably because of the volatility, I imagine it's very good at absorbing heat in order to turn into a gas. I definitely got some fumes in the process, and I felt extremely chill for a good hour. Maybe, maybe longer, hard to remember.

They're killing us out here always have been. Fuck man

i always thought poppers were ether?

Does Jake even see the real world, or is it all through an overlay of movies and products?

Staten Island! This explains so much of my childhood!

Bugs Bunny had the best ether episode.

Great, so this will make the New Madrid earthquake even more fun when it finally pops off. 🤪

As a volatile liquid, all you need to do to get high on ether is open a container and breathe in the sweet smell. Downsides are that the vapor is extremely flammable (like static electricity burns the building down flammable) and that dosage control is very tricky. It can be difficult to distinguish a dose that gives pleasant euphoria from a dose that knocks out or kills you. If you accidentally breathe enough to pass out you probably didn't close the bottle before losing consciousness. The open bottle will continue emitting the flammable/potentially deadly vapor into the air while you sleep.

Re the “hot car”: I worked with radiation in grad school and hot is actually a commonly used term for radioactive. In my lab we used the term “hot” way more than we used the term “radioactive”. When we used the term in lab it had nothing to do with the temperature of the material. It was like “this experiment uses a lot of p32 so it’s pretty hot”. That being said I never worked with barrels of improperly handled waste materials so I cannot speak to the temperature there lol

Ether is a volatile liquid, you pour it in a sock and huff it

Jake Jake Jake

Wait til you hear about late 18th Century nitrous parties

The American Chernobyl did happen, Santa Susana Feild Lab, sodium reactor meltdown where they just opened up the lab and let the radiation plume “air out” over the San Fernando Valley, sodium burn pits, toxic organic compounds leaching into the groundwater.

Julian was so good on Chapo 🫶

liv agar

On the concern of if they knew this was dangerous, they must have simply due to the trials of the radium girls only a few decades prior. We've known radioactive material was bad for us for a while, but I'd imagine the government, much like the radium clockwork company just didn't tell anyone.

Not to undermine the seriousness of the topic, but Coldwater? Severance reference?

I have been saying that the first episode of Chernobyl is the scariest horror movie I've ever seen for exactly the reasons you all point out. The creeping dread of environmental toxins...

As someone from stl area this is truly a day brighten er

Dark Waters (2019) is a very good movie about a different town that kills people. It’s definitely possible to make this kind of real life horror story.

Liv agar

This place is a message, and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location. It increases towards a center. The center of danger is here; of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

YES! DEVIN O'SHEA!!!!

"These guys do be inventing horrible shit and then dying before... Y-y'know to see the fruits of their uh, fruits of their labor" Jake 2025 Idk why I found that statement so funny

Can't listen to this until Part 2 of 2 Frenchmen at CPAC.... release it now damn it

Ooh ooh ooh. My dad worked at Y12 in Tennessee. Still amazes me he avoided turbo cancer when you find out how contaminated that place was.

'Mech Bae

Midwest correspondant Devin!

Liv Agar

I’ll edit it in a name later

Devin O'Shea