Somewhere near the confluence of engineering, politics, history and comedy lies “Well There’s Your Problem,” a deeply irreverent podcast (with slides) about engineering disasters. Co-hosted by Justin Roczniak, ‘16, B.S. Civil Engineering; November Kelly and Liam McAnderson, the show brings a leftist, anti-establishment sensibility to its premise. Sometimes the podcast subjects are neither engineering nor disasters, per se, but all involve some hubris.
The podcast’s confounding use of PowerPoint slides as a visual component is perhaps the best insight into its nonconformist ethos. That ethos is what makes their critical re-evaluations of well-trodden disaster sites so engaging.
Roczniak started the podcast with Kelly in 2019, and 225 episodes later, it has been his longest-running online endeavor (aside from posting). What began impromptu on his YouTube channel, donoteat01, has since opened doors to writing a New York Times op-ed piece and is sending the trio on an East Coast live show tour. With such a unique perspective on the field of engineering, The Triangle spoke with Roczniak about his experience with a Drexel engineering education and the pitfalls of the engineering profession that continue to produce disasters.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Ryan Keating: Can you introduce yourself?
Justin Roczniak: Hi, I’m Justin Roczniak. I’m the person talking right now. My pronouns are he/him. [laughs]
I run the podcast “Well There’s Your Problem.” Well, I don’t run it, because the podcast is organized as a co-op, so I’m one-third of the people who run it.
I went to Drexel University to study civil engineering, and through a long series of events involving being very bad at doing actual work, I came to the position where I run a popular engineering disaster podcast.
RK: How did you come to Drexel, being from Northern Virginia?
JR: I’m from Northern Virginia, yes. So, how did I go to Drexel? Well, the answer is, I was very under-motivated applying to colleges… but Drexel was in this situation at the time where they were trying to build up a lot of capital. This is back when Towers Hall was three to a room.
So just because I had a very weak application didn’t disqualify me from going to the most stupidly expensive private school in the country. Since that’s the only place that accepted me, there I go. Also, one of the things that encouraged me to apply was, “Okay, this is the university with the most trains going through campus.”
RK: Were you always inclined towards engineering?
JR: No, I wanted to do architecture.
RK: There’s a lot of engineers in that boat.
JR: They’re kind of similar – it’s just how artsy you are, you know? And ultimately, what happens? Okay, you go into the industry, and you’re doing door schedules. [laughs]
RK: Were you always inclined towards politics and history? Were they lifelong interests, or was there a lightbulb moment?
RK: It’s weird, because I was much less political when I was in college. Afterwards. you get the experience of applying for jobs and trying to get something competitive, and it was like, oh my God… I had been applying to jobs for like a year and a half, and I got one e-mail back, you know? It’s like, jeez, we probably gotta fix this economy, guys. I know I’m not that incompetent.
But politically, when I was in college, I was much more conservative, I would say. Not conservative, but I wouldn’t go out and say, “I’m a communist.”
I think it was actually at this newspaper, the woman who succeeded me as opinion editor, we had a discussion about the Black Panthers at one point, and I was like, “Yeah, I should probably start turning left.” I wouldn’t say that was the defining moment. But it was at The Triangle, also, that I was introduced to the concept of transgender people existing.
Politically, I don’t think I got really into politics until after college.
RK: Where would you say you identify politically now, or how would you describe yourself politically?
JR: Uh… a communist. I mean, you can get into like a bunch of different nuances, but, eh, just give me “communist;” it’s fine. Or democratic socialist, whatever, sure.
RK: To tie back into engineering, people tend to draw a line between the worlds of politics and engineering, the idea being that engineering is scientific and politics are politics.
JR: Yes.
RK: Would you agree with that division? How would you characterize that distinction?
JR: How do you draw that line? I mean, it’s difficult because to a large extent, you have to look into who’s providing the money, right? I can say, “Hey, we need to improve traffic in the city by building a superhighway.” And I get the money from people who say that is the way to go. And you go in there and you build that, and to some extent, yes, you’ve introduced more cars into the city, yes, it’s faster to go, but also, you’ve destroyed a lot of people’s houses, and you’ve caused a lot of problems.
…[T]he decisions we make, the judgments you make, are very political, and they are very much controlled by, “Okay, who is paying the engineers?” Who is going to pay for the superhighway, or maybe the metro system in an ideal world that we’ll never see?
RK: The problem-solving of it…
JR: The problem solving itself – ultimately, the equation is going to stay the same, but it’s [about] who are we doing this for, and why?
RK: What are other things that you think people should really understand about engineering, but don’t necessarily?
JR: I was watching, at my friend June’s house recently, an Adam Curtis documentary… about nuclear power and Chernobyl, you know, and I was very frustrated the whole way through because I was like, “Okay, all this sounds like a bunch of antinuclear [expletive].”
And then there’s a Soviet scientist that comes on at the very end of the documentary, and is like, “Our engineers designed the reactor wrong because they didn’t read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.”
And I was like, “Oh [expletive], this is basically my entire argument.” And this school, definitely, it felt like when you learned engineering, everything was sort of floating in a vacuum. You never got humanities, you never got any kind of social sciences. You never understood, especially if you studied traffic engineering, for instance – that’s essentially a social science that’s been beaten into an engineering mold.
You have to have the human component to do the engineering component well. I need to understand the risks I’m creating for other people.
RK: What went into starting the podcast?
JR: Starting the podcast was… November made a post that “it would be really funny to make an engineering disasters podcast with donoteat on Twitter.” The other one was, Liam and I tried to start a podcast on our own, and it was completely unfocused and there was nothing there.
The first episode of “Well There’s Your Problem” was [called] “Untitled Engineering Disaster Podcast[-like Content].” That was also very bad. But then you put all three people together, and it works.
RK: So was that something you didn’t expect to turn out like this?
JR: No, I was still applying for jobs. I was like, damn, just give me one job. Just one. One job. I’ll work for – what was the wage back then? Like, $15/hour? That’d be great.
RK: “Podcast with slides” does not exactly neatly fit within the podcast genre. It’s kind of its own weird format. Is that something that was a function of necessity?
JR: I just think PowerPoint is a great way to structure your thoughts, at least for me. The strategy is that you can have some slides that are just pictures. Honestly, I would say that two people inspired me here: my freshman year of high school history teacher, who did this big presentation like, “Hi, I’m a Marine machine gunner, and I’m gonna tell you how to make a PowerPoint: no text, only pictures.” Which was fantastic.
And it was also, who just retired from here, Dr. Mark Brack, who did architecture history. He did fantastic presentations. I don’t know how he did it, because it was like every week, we would sit down for three hours, and he would just go. And his slides, they weren’t even on a PowerPoint; they were on an old slide projector.
RK: On the note of three hours, what was the longest you ever expected an episode to run for?
JR: I wasn’t thinking about that. I just thought we’d go until it was done. I figured we’d keep it to an hour, and then they just kept getting longer and longer and longer.
It wasn’t until we had [guest co-host] Séamus Malekafzali on [the Gulf States vanity projects episode] that he started getting antsy around the three-hour mark, and I thought maybe we should start bringing this thing in. But I think now everybody knows, if you’re coming in for the podcast, you’re coming in for the long haul.
RK: When you’re actually recording an episode, do you feel any pressure to cater to the audience or an algorithm, or is that not really something that you’re thinking about?
JR: I don’t know how the algorithm works… I have no idea what’s going on. I just talk into the microphone. I think we’ve been very anti-algorithm. I’m not going in there and changing the thumbnail to see how the audience reacts. I don’t know how search engine optimization works. I don’t put tags in the description. Every time I hear something that helps you with the algorithm, I’m like, “Don’t do that.” [laughs]
RK: I think that very noncommercial nature is part of what keeps people coming back, but what else do you think has caused people to really connect with the podcast?
We do actively abuse the audience, which some people like. [laughs]
What else? The whole thing’s word-of-mouth. You know, it’s sort of right on the heels of the broad left-wing podcast environment that started in 2016. We started the podcast in late 2019. So, how are we connecting with the audience? I don’t know. You know, it’s just like I put out this podcast, and now 20,000 trans women follow me on Twitter. Also, we’ve got November, who’s a bit of a ringer.
RK: So this is the second set of live shows you’ve done?
JR: Now we’re doing the first tour. We’re going [from] New York City [to] Somerville, Somerville, New York City, Washington D.C., and then here at the Fillmore in Philly, where we do need to fill-more seats. I think we’re about three-quarters sold out.
RK: If you could pick one episode to qualify as a PDH [continuing education credit for engineers], which would it be? Or would it be a new episode that has yet to be?
Whew. It has to be something very, very educational here. If I’m doing continuing education… I gotta go through the list.
[D]oes it qualify if it’s just a polemic about man’s hubris, or does it actually have to get very technical? Because most of them are just a polemic about man’s hubris. If it’s continuing education, then it has to be something a little more obscure than the Hyatt Regency collapse, or…
RK: The Tacoma Narrows disaster.
JR: Yeah, or the Tacoma Narrows. And I understand that people don’t know what Bhopal is anymore.
RK: [The Bhopal disaster] was something that, oddly enough, I had to present on in elementary school as a fourth or fifth grader. I have no idea how they assigned me, an 11-year old, to do a presentation on one of the worst peacetime disasters ever –
JR: Probably ever, yeah. It has to be one where: here’s what happens when engineers don’t [take] humanities, right? That this is the result of people having never read a book. Or – you know what? The [1953 Federal Express train wreck] would also be a good one.
RK: I think you blazed a trail in terms of actually connecting people with these engineering realities in a way that is beyond what a channel like Practical Engineering does, which is very digestible, but doesn’t necessarily get into the human factors of it.
Yeah, we’re doing impractical engineering. [laughs]
Ultimately, I think if you’re not looking at the political aspect of it, it’s kind of like, “Okay, what are you doing here?” There’s always gonna be some extent [to which] you can say, well, the beam failed because there was this amount of stress at this point, and so and so forth, but when you start digging into, “Why was it built that way? Who did it? Who paid for it? Who did all the stuff?”
Again, engineering is a tool for analysis. You’re not gonna fix society by being an engineer. You might wind up at Lockheed Martin building bombs.
RK: That’s something about the show I’ve been struggling to articulate.
JR: Yeah, because… you can do an engineering show which is like Practical Engineering – not that I don’t like the guy – but like, [it] is very hands-off on the political aspect.
I do feel like there should be an engineering show telling you, just straight up: listen. Do not go to Lockheed Martin and build bombs… Do not use your skills to bomb a wedding, please. Use these powers for good.
RK: Do you think that shortchanging people on a broader, slightly more liberal-arts background, is the biggest shortcoming with how engineering is taught?
JR: I’d definitely say, when I was here at Drexel, it did feel like they actively discouraged you from pursuing any liberal arts if you were taking an engineering degree. It was, you’re gonna go through here and get the raw equations – I didn’t even have an engineering ethics class. It was baked into engineering economics or something…
I think to a large extent, at least at this school, people are not doing a good job about making sure that if you study engineering, you come out of here thinking like a normal human being. Not that I’m saying that I think like a normal human being, being extremely online, but that should be the goal.
“Well There’s Your Problem” can be found on YouTube, Spotify and more. See their website for information on the live tour.