I’ve got two friends who are interested in listening to WTYP, though they’re a bit cautious about it since I told them it was a podcast hosted by leftists that does get political at times. Trying to think of the best episodes to highlight to them (the ones where they don’t just fuck around for the first 30 minutes especially)? I feel like Grenfell Tower is pretty great. What others?
I would save the 9/11 episode for a little later.
Grenfel, Vajont Dam, Four-over-Ones, 1918 Flu.
Anything that fault lands squarely on lack of regulations and the free market
I’d add the One Meridian Plaza Fire, The Politics of Traffic Engineering and the Boeing 737 MAX episodes to that list.
Also since you said they were reluctant with it being a leftist pod you might want to keep the episodes where they shit exceptionally hard on capitalism, like the Grenfel Tower fire for later.
I’ll add Piper Alpha and Sampoong Department Store.
Sampoong Department Store is excellent. They do a really good job highlighting how fucking greedy the owner was to the point of killing all those people. I remember watching an engineering disasters show as a kid and saw it, and it never covered (🤔🤔🤔) just how profit-motivated this guy was.
I would say the episode on Groverhaus is a great place to start, because it’s an iconic bit of internet lore and it’s not serious. The Atmospheric Railway is the same - I don’t know if they’ve ever topped the jokes about horse viscera. The most topical recommend though is the Las Vegas Loop - watching how gadgetbahns go from sleek and impressive CG renders to poorly designed tunnels where fifty cars drive back and forth all day should be able to get anyone on the train gang.
The V-22 Osprey episode is a fun one because it talks about the pure wastefulness of the US military with some serving members, but yeah traffic engineering is probably a good one, that and the antifreeze wine
The one about urban sprawl and suburbanization was pretty good
