Post WWII, where did all the Rocket Scientists go? Specifically, where did all the GERMAN Rocket Scientests go? Essentially, they went to the highest bidder; some, like Werner von Braun, went to the US, and others went to Russia. Today, we'll tell the story of the race to get a bigger and better ICBM - and how, in a rush to show strength, an undetermined number of people were reduced to ash in The Nedelin Catastrophe.
Post WWII, where did all the Rocket Scientists go? Specifically, where did all the GERMAN Rocket Scientests go? Essentially, they went to the highest bidder; some, like Werner von Braun, went to the US, and others went to Russia. Today, we'll tell the story of the race to get a bigger and better ICBM - and how, in a rush to show strength, an undetermined number of people were reduced to ash in The Nedelin Catastrophe.
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
Taylor: My cousin Lindsay brought us some weird Japanese snacks
>> Taylor: In the matter of the people of State of California vs. Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA097.
>> Farz: And so, my fellow Americans, ask not.
>> Taylor: What your country can do for you.
>> Farz: Wait, we are back. And we were recording. Taylor, how are you doing today?
>> Taylor: Good. I just went to the kitchen and I. And I told you that my cousin Lindsay was here, but she brought a bunch of cool stuff from Japan. Like cool snacks and stuff. So I'm excited to eat a bunch of cookies that she brought and like little candies and just like weird Japanese stuff.
>> Farz: You know what? Rachel came back from Armenia a little while ago.
>> Taylor: Oh, yeah. I talked to her a little bit on Instagram. Looked like that was really cool.
>> Farz: Oh, nice. Yeah. So she came back with some goodies. One of them was Crab Flavored Lays.
>> Taylor: I feel like I've seen that. The legend. How was it?
>> Farz: So I didn't try it and I didn't want to try it. But I asked her how she liked them and she was like, it is the single most disgusting thing I've ever put in my mouth off. I was like, cool. It's hard.
>> Taylor: Like, we got this. My friend Karen always brings us stuff from Trader Joe's because we don't have one close by. So she brings us like weird, random, and she brought us this like snack mix. And it's like cashews and then like little crunchy things. But it tastes like Tom Yum soup. And like it just. It does. And it's just weird. It's just like too much. It's like it does its job too well that you're like, I don't think I can eat Tom Yum soup like this.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: You know what I mean?
>> Farz: She makes some flavors just don't need to be in the format that the world presents them to us in. Yeah, it's my theory.
Doomed to Fail brings you history's most notorious disasters, Epic failures
Cool. Well, we can go ahead and dive into my story and let me do an introduction. Oh, yeah, I forgot we have to do those.
>> Taylor: Hello. Welcome to Doomed to Fail. We bring you history's most notorious disasters, Epic failures, fun stories and I am Taylor, joined by farce.
>> Farz: I'm Fars. I am joining Taylor and we are going to tell you a Fars oriented story today. Tell. Do you have any ideas what it could be about?
>> Taylor: Plane crushes.
>> Farz: You're so close. You're so close. Rockets. Yeah, I. I don't know how I ended up on this topic. It was my. You know, it's funny, it's like anytime somebody listens to this, I can, like, they can make a lot of Assumptions about what the social media algorithms feed me in terms of random content.
>> Taylor: That's so funny.
>> Farz: Showed up. But I'm going to be covering. Well, actually it's kind of topical because we were talking a lot about ICBMs a couple of weeks ago. Covering the ICBM program in Soviet Russia rooted around this one particular disaster that occurred that was terrible and gave me a little bit of goosebumps situation going on. so that's it. That's kind of the topic for today.
>> Taylor: That's exciting. I can't wait. I can't wait. Is it like a we almost died?
>> Farz: No, no, it's, it's. People died and they died in a horrible, horrible way that I didn't know was possible. So yeah, it's kind of a worse way to die kind of a situation too. So.
>> Taylor: Nice. Nice.
>> Farz: Do you know what ICBM stands for?
>> Taylor: Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.
>> Farz: Great. Do you know what they're using? Yes, yes.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Shooting other continents ballistically.
>> Farz: Great. Using. Yeah. The idea is you use it to deliver a very powerful super long range payload to a desired target. Usually the range has to be over 3,400 miles. It needs to be kind of transoceanic and all that stuff. So the development of the ICBM really started at the end stages of World War II in N*** Germany. Was. We are so lucky that they started as late as they did. Otherwise we'd all be speaking German. Actually, I wouldn't exist. Taylor, you'd be speaking German.
>> Taylor: We've talked about this before. Yeah. If like they had gotten the nuclear.
>> Farz: Bomb first, they were so close.
>> Taylor: You wouldn't be here and I would be speaking German.
>> Farz: So close. It's unbelievable how close they were. So we've all heard the name Werner von Braun, who was an actual rocket scientist. Scientists. And sure, you can be a N*** and you can still be brilliant because this guy was like brilliant. Like he knew his stuff way before anybody else knew their stuff when it came to rocket technology. And it's just by happenstance that the regime fell and the US could kind of scoop him up and bring him over over there because if he had enough time, he would have figured this out.
>> Taylor: Oh, 100. Did you know that Kennedy visited him in Florida the weekend before he died?
>> Farz: That's so fun. That'd be so fun. What do you think they had? Tea and crumpets. He's so cute.
>> Taylor: Yeah. I don't know. I don't. I just. There's just so much you have to do in your brain to be like, my back hurts because I was a World War II fighter pilot fighting you people.
>> Farz: That's right. I forgot that I lost. My brother Joe died fighting you.
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah, just. And then to be like, but you're the best scientist in the world. So, so here.
>> Farz: I don't know if this is true or not. I also have a theory that like, if you're the upper echelons of society and you're trying to live your life, you kind of have to be part of the party. Like you're like, I'm a rocket scientist. Like, yes, I have to wear this stupid pin and then raise my hand when Hitler's in front of me. But like, I don't know, I feel like, I feel like someone like this is like too smart to actually believe in also he has to be too smart to believe in it. Because if you recall so much what was going on with the Oppenheimer movie and all that was that like the, the Jewish science as they called it, was being booted out of the country. And only real scientists actually realized like that was actual science and not the nonsense that the Germans wanted them to use. So like we had to have known better.
>> Taylor: But I don't know, I, like, I mean it's, I mean obviously this is like really complicated, but I just heard got recommended a book called what We Knew About. It's called what We Knew, Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in N*** Germany. And I wanted to go buy it and get from the library. Like it's not available because a lot of are reading it currently. But I think it talks about, you know, the day to day stuff like, you know, how do you live your life?
The first iteration of an ICBM was the V2 rocket
You know, if you just want to like be a person.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what he was working on at that point was a multi stage rocket to be able to deliver a bomb from Germany to New York and other primary targets within the US So like this was not like a hair brain scheme, this was like in the works. Like they were getting somewhere with this Von Braun, like I said, he's, he was way ahead of the game in terms of understanding multi stage rockets, which is what you need, right? You have to burn one stage of fuel to get the thing high enough in the air, another stage to accelerate it towards destination and more cells like it. It's really complicated process and I'm not a rocket scientist. When World War II ended, the US anticipating the need for ICBMs in the oncoming battle against communism, recruited Von Braun along with a bunch of other N*** war criminals under Operation Paperclip. To join the US in furthering his research and testing. Which like, they're like, hey, you can either get hung at the Hague or we'll give you a bunch of money and land and let you run free range here and there was like, yeah, I'll take that, I'll take that option.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Smart enough to take that deal at the very least. Yeah, you know, yeah.
>> Farz: So with World War II done, the US and the Soviets both got to work on trying to perfect the designs that von Braun had started in Germany under the V2 rocket program there. So that was what they had actually developed to be able to. The first iteration of an ICBM was the V2 rocket. It was real, it was real, it flew. It just wasn't of the quality and capabilities that the new era of warfare would actually require. And the goal was to make a promise, longer range and a bomber type that was capable of carrying a substantial payload. The V2.
>> Taylor: When you say payload, what do you mean?
>> Farz: Bombs? A bomb.
>> Taylor: That's just like the amount of the weight of the bomb.
>> Farz: I'm going to tell you.
>> Taylor: Bomb Venus.
>> Farz: I'm going to. Yep, that's so. So here's an example, okay. When the, when von Braun developed the V2 rocket, the problem it had had to do with its range, accuracy and payload. As an example, the V2 was capable of flying 200 miles. It used a gyroscope for targeting, which was an imprecise at that point. Already a super outdated method of targeting. You could be off by many, many multiples of miles using that and it was limited to 2,000 pounds. So an explosive that weighed 2,000 pounds was the maximum you could fly for 200 miles on a V2 rocket. Here's the problem with that. The atomic bomb the US dropped over Hiroshima weighed 10,000 pounds.
>> Taylor: That, that, that's a lot of my question.
Many common themes that differentiate US and Soviet principles of how to achieve goals
Okay, cool.
>> Farz: So it's funny in researching this, so many common themes that differentiate the US and Soviet principles of how to achieve goals became obvious. I also found this super interesting because like, I think like being in America, even like Europeans looking at Americans or Americans looking at themselves, other cultures are a lot more finesse in how they approach things. And it feels like America is very much like a sledgehammer country. Like it just like, just bash, like just like. It's super interesting because like the way I kind of was researching this was the outcome this research came to was that in the US the science of your principles that drove development was we have a problem to solve, we're going to look at all Potential options. When you go in 10 different directions, these directions will get us like 80% of the way there, not completely. So we're going to start development on those over there and then we're going to keep continue finding a solution. And then like over time things kind of match up. And then like, okay, we went off on this thing and the development here and it's five years later and now that thing is done, now we can come back to it. Like it was, it was like a very, like let's just dump resources and manpower to think to solve it the best way we possibly can. By comparison, it seemed like the Soviets philosophy was just more power, just the most like brute strength approach to like development out there. And that's what they did about it before.
>> Taylor: Like even if it's not true that you're constantly moving up, you still tell yourself you are.
>> Farz: So in this case they actually succeeded. So their logic played out because they won the race to develop the first true icbm. The Soviets were the first to that target and by a significant margin by about a little over two years. So they launched their first ICBM on August 21, 1957. The US was over two years late, launching their first successful one in October of 1959. That's even though they had von Braun and all the N*** scientists working on this.
>> Taylor: Oh wow.
>> Farz: But there was a difference in what they launched. So again the Soviets, they optimized for faster development which came with higher risk. And their overall philosophy was just add more power to the thing and that'll achieve the goals. So as a result, their rockets were massive. They were very difficult to store and to fuel. They required a huge support network that could be easily targeted during any armed conflict. And they also had accuracy problems because they never actually advanced the gyroscope technology out of the V2. Instead they just added larger warheads so the blast radius would make up for the fact that it would be off target by up to three miles. That was the way they addressed being inaccurate.
>> Taylor: Yeah, I guess you can just more power. Yeah, just like if you're gonna miss, just like get, get it anyway, you know.
>> Farz: 11.
>> Taylor: Yeah, this one goes to 11.
>> Farz: So yeah, there you go. The one advantage that the Soviets had was that they were entirely willing to sacrifice as many humans as necessary to their objectives. So like they had that going for them like generally in most countries that are like that, they can just like whatever it blew up, it killed 17 scientists. Get 17 more like.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: The Soviets did realize that their design philosophy was not practical and set to work after the successful launch of the world's first ICBM to improve on that design. That was called the R7 by the way. That was called the R7 ICBM. The new rocket was the R16. And its purpose was for it to be mass producible and a huge leap forward in terms of being like a viable war weapon rather than just like a sitting duck. The way the R7 ICBM was, the differences here were dramatic. So the. Between the R60 and R7, it reduced launch time from around 8 to 12 hours to only 20 minutes. It could be deployed from anywhere. It didn't need a massive containment structure and support mechanisms all around it. And it used cutting edge fuel. And I don't know a lot about that stuff, but fuel seems to be like the central toughest nugget to crack when it comes to this kind of stuff. Which I'm going to go into a little bit more detail here in a second.
>> Taylor: Right. Because rocket fuel is like actually a thing and it's different than other things.
>> Farz: It's interesting because it's actually not even rock. Like rocket fuel is what little I know. Rocket fuel is also like subdivided into like different categories of rocket fuel between like solid state fuels and liquid state fuels and gases that are formed. Like it's, it's a really. These guys like know their stuff.
>> Taylor: All these smart rocket scientists. I think those guys know their. Know their stuff.
October 24, 1960, was when the R16 was ready to be tested
>> Farz: So let's get to the disaster on the day of. So we can go into details here. So October 24, 1960, that's when the R16 was ready to be tested. And this was, this was supposed to be like a huge deal for the empire and for the Soviet communist movement. The R16 was supposed to be like. I think the R7 is mostly known as like a d*** measuring contest against the US whereas R16 was like, no, now we are going to be legit about this. We're actually being smart about it and all that.
>> Taylor: Does that also imply like a failed R8 through 15?
>> Farz: No, no, actually from what I. So there was an R9, but that. But it's weird, that one did have a failure. I'm going to get into. But that didn't happen until three years after this. So like they did use the R nomenclature, but it wasn't sequential.
>> Taylor: Got it.
>> Farz: Very interesting. So this test would go on to become the deadliest accident in the history of the space race. Since ICBM rockets serve dual purposes. In addition to delivering nuclear weapons across the ocean, they're also used in the initial stages of launching things into orbit. So it's counted as a space race accident. In the run up to launch, the rocket was placed on its launch pad and pre launch testing as well as launch preparation was being done simultaneously. That's a really important point. This was because the mission commander there was a guy named Mitrofan Nederland, and this is known as the Netherland Catastrophe because it's named after him. He was the guy in charge. And he wanted this launch to occur before the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution for obviously stupid reasons or patriotic reasons, whatever you want to call it. Bolshevik Revolution in November. This is on October 24th. We got to rush this thing. We need to get this thing up and going so we can prove to the world that we're the best, that communism is great and all that stuff. So they were still working on the rocket as the thing was being fueled with the type of fuel that is known colloquially in Russia as Devil's Venom. Not good.
>> Taylor: I mean. Oh, wow. How would you even get there? Tell me more about it. Tell me what it does. I don't get it.
>> Farz: So Devil's Venom is a type of fuel known as hypergolic fuel, which means it does not need an. Sorry. Which means it does not need an ignition source. So it's super volatile. Even getting into contact with air will set it off. Like that's the degree of volatility we're talking about here. That's why it's called this, because literally you'd like move it a little bit and it gets p***** off and it just like fires off.
>> Taylor: Right. So it doesn't. So it's just like the most flammable thing you can think of. This is flammable by like being able. Explodable.
>> Farz: Yeah, flammable to an insane temperature. Right? Because like things can only burn at the extent to up to the heat that it has something to consume to generate the heat. In this case, this is super, super flammable. But it also doesn't burn off immediately so that the fire can keep growing in intensity because it has a huge fuel supply beneath it. So the fact that this thing doesn't need an external ignition source was great for rockets because it reduced the amount of internal mechanisms the rocket needed to actually do its thing. So that was the idea behind it, by the way. That's part of the reason why the US Was late on the development. That's why the US Was two years. It's so actually I didn't even think about this until just now. There were two years late to Launching the first successful ICBM using a liquid hypergolic gas source. Fuel source. But. But they worked on that for those two years and these guys just worked on launching something with big s*** strapped to the side of it instead of working on this process which they then tried to do a year after the US had launched. So that's actually a really. I didn't think about that until just now.
>> Taylor: It's just like we want to show as much might as possible, right?
>> Farz: That's it. Yeah. Even with a nuclear explosion. The biggest nuclear bomb ever tested and exploded was the Tsar Bomba, which was a Soviet bomb just to show how big they could build it. So the team is working on the rocket while fuel is being added to it and they're running their tests, are doing pre launch plus testing all the same time. The analogy ChatGPT came up for this for me because I asked it to, is it would be like you trying to jumpstart your car while a mechanic is working on the engine. The gas tank is being fueled and you tell like a hundred people to come just like check out the car. Look how cool this is. That's kind of it. This is actually another fun one. I asked you to come up with several of these. They were pretty good. So this is another fun one. He goes. Doing all this is like trying to fix a bad wire on a live grenade while the pin is pulled. And also telling everyone to come watch you do it.
>> Taylor: I like that. Like, hey, everyone, come here. This can't be.
Russian government says 54 people were killed; some estimates range between 300
>> Farz: So while this thing was being loaded up and worked on, a short circuit triggered a spark in the main engine which was directly over the main fuel tank, which given the volatility of fuel, was enough to set it off. I'm going to give definitions here in a second. I actually didn't know what this means. In an instant, like literally in a split second, somewhere in the range of 54 to 300, Soviet rocket scientists and mechanics were vaporized. I'll explain that range in a bit. But as an example of a hot this thing got. These fuels produce temperatures between 4,500 and 5,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: At that temperature, you're not being burned. You're literally just turning into dust.
>> Taylor: Right. You're just.
>> Farz: When it hits you. So this is interesting. It produced the same. Sorry, it was a little. It actually produced more heat. It produced a little bit higher heat by several hundred degrees than the heat produced by the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
>> Taylor: Oh my God.
>> Farz: Is that crazy?
>> Taylor: That's.
>> Farz: Why does the sun, like so, so, so Hiroshima bomb. Here's the thing. You can, for the maximum damage, you can't have it touch the ground. It has to blow up above the ground by the time it gets to you. It's what started as a sun becomes like several thousand degrees Fahrenheit.
>> Taylor: Got it.
>> Farz: So what's interesting is nobody at this time knew about this. And that's why the death ranges are so vast.
>> Taylor: Did you see where they are? Where are they? They're just like in the middle of, like.
>> Farz: They're not in Russia. They're in. Oh, man. It's one of the Soviet bloc countries like Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. So it was somewhere around there. Like, it was not in Russia. Russia hid the disaster until Gorbachev with his like, theory of openness, revealed 30 years after this date in 1989. What happened? And then once the world heard about it, they started seeking out people who might know more about the deaths and the death ranges and the estimates. And the Russian government officially provided. The Russian government officially said 54 people were killed. Some estimates range between that number and 300. So it was a pretty sizable difference. Like the guesses that I'm hearing from like somewhat legitimate bodies that research this stuff. It was probably somewhere in the 120 some odd range. Russia at that time or Soviet Union, they didn't tell anyone. And what they instead did was some of these really high power Soviet nuclear rocket scientists who, who everybody's gonna miss. They're gonna know. They didn't show up to work the next day. Notice what they told the public when they told the families. Is that so? And so they die in a plane crash. They died here. They died. They come up with like nonsense reasons why they died. That was how they got around that.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: Yeah. Yeah.
>> Taylor: You can't. You have. You can't. That's it.
>> Farz: Yeah. What are you gonna do?
>> Taylor: You're not like, follow up.
>> Farz: Yeah, exactly.
>> Taylor: Show me the plane.
October 24 is celebrated for the Bolsheviks revolution. It's called Black Day
No, it doesn't exist. Yikes.
>> Farz: So the program continued. It only took about four months after this disaster for the Soviets to actually successfully launch an improved version of the R16 rocket. And it became the first mass producible rocket for ICBMs for delivering people and cargo. People, as in being used for the space. Not like. Yeah, nobody's flying on it.
>> Taylor: Right. You're not taking it to like a vacation.
>> Farz: Right?
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Interestingly enough, I said this a little bit earlier. So there's another rocket called the R9 that went into testing three years after this event. Three years after the Netherland catastrophe at the exact same launch site in the country that I can't recall anymore, where this thing happened on the exact same day, October 24, that also blew up due to an Aaron Spark killing seven people on the platform.
>> Taylor: Oh my God.
>> Farz: Yeah. So apparently from that day forward, the Soviets and now Russia, they will conduct no testing on October 24th of any year. It's called Black Day. Like they literally.
>> Taylor: That was like. That was the problem.
>> Farz: That was the problem. The day was the problem.
>> Taylor: That is so funny. That is like. That's obviously not the problem. I think they should have testing with less people next to it.
>> Farz: Maybe that. You know what's funny is the US is not out of the woods on this one. So the US actually had another disaster that's not as deadly as this, but it's pretty dang close. It was about 52 people died in Searcy at Arkansas back in the day when an ICBM was being maintained or repaired or something inside of its silo. Given the fact that it had to have fuel dumped and that there was bad ventilation. They were inside of a silo and there wasn't room to do stuff. They caused a spark that lit up vapor gases around the silo and killed a shitload of people and blew up the silo. So it's not, it's not a purely Russian thing. I mean, this was probably. I don't know. You're playing with really dangerous.
>> Taylor: Exactly, exactly. You're really, really, like. I don't know, like it's not like the safest thing to be around.
>> Farz: Right, Right.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: So.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: Yeah. I thought that'd be fun. That's my story for the day. Hopefully people enjoyed it and learned a little bit of something. Yeah. That's all I got.
>> Taylor: I hadn't heard of that.
>> Farz: I love finding disasters that I've never heard about. It's like the most excited I get.
>> Taylor: Yeah. That is wild. It's just so wild that it's like, I don't know, that they didn't tell anyone for so long. You can keep that. You know, people must have seen it and heard it and like all those things.
>> Farz: You know, I love the idea of these guys being in the break room the morning of and one guy like getting his coffee and been like, hey, Gregory, do you know where we put the devil's venom today? Like, you know, I mean, like, it's just, it's just like, how do you even talk about this thing?
>> Taylor: Yeah. Why were there so many people around?
>> Farz: Because they were doing the testing. Plus the pre launch Preparation simultaneously. This guy was like being a ball buster about, hey, we have to launch as soon as we possibly can. So it's celebrated for the Bolsheviks revolution.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: He was apparently a part of the revolution. Like, he had a really personal tie to it. And so.
>> Taylor: Yeah, and that's like. That's literally exactly what happened. Not exactly, but very similar to Chernobyl. They were like, well, we can't stop having our media celebrations.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah.
>> Taylor: So let's just make sure that we continue to get able to do that even though the air is poison, you know?
>> Farz: Yeah. Cultures like that, it seems like the iconography and like the imagery of things, it's like really, really important. The optics of things are really. It's better to just get it done than to do it. Right. It sounds like.
>> Taylor: Exactly, exactly. Or I mean. And you're just gonna like, pretend that it's right.
I will say that our military parade seemed kind of bummer
>> Farz: Anyway, I will say that our parade, our military parade seemed like it was kind of bummer.
>> Taylor: It did seem. It did seem kind of lame, which is, you know, a thing. But. But that's not. We're not. That's not our culture.
>> Farz: But also. Also like, vibe. Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, bad vibes all around. But also it's like, dude, the coolest part about the US military is that there's like $50 trillion worth of equipment that we will not know, our grandchildren will not know existed. Right?
>> Taylor: Yes, sure.
>> Farz: North Korea, it's cool. He can put an ICBM out there. That's super cool. Whatever. Like, they think that's great. Top technology. Like we've created stuff that we think are aliens. Like.
>> Taylor: Exactly.
>> Farz: Launch that and show it to the entire world.
>> Taylor: Yeah, exactly. They're like showing you like three decades old stuff.
>> Farz: Yeah, like that helicopter that crash. We're trying to kill bin Laden. I didn't know there was such a thing as a stealth helicopter that flew below radar. And like. And then when it crashed, they had the presence of mind to blow it up so nobody can find it.
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah.
>> Farz: That's what's metal about it. It's not the fact that we have bombs and stuff. It's better. There's a crazy technology going on that we don't know about.
>> Taylor: Exactly. That, like, it's a secret. That. That is cool. Yeah, I see. Like. Well, I haven't. I don't say anything obviously, like, crazy, but I do see some things every once in a while, like that fly because we're right next to the base here in the 29 palms base. And also, you know, they had those like helicopters that have like, instead of the one thing, it's like the two wings and they each have like a fan. Yeah. Like, I see those a lot. And sometimes even just like on the road, like going in and out of town, there'll be like a convoy. Just like the biggest f****** tanks I've ever seen. You know, just these like huge machines that you just. I can't even imagine how giant they are. And they'll be like bringing them in and out of town.
>> Farz: I was like looking into the B2 bomber. I forgot how old it is. It's like its design is like 40 something years old.
>> Taylor: Mm.
>> Farz: And that's what made me think about this too was when they used the B2 to go drop the bomb on the bombs on Iran. And I was like, all the news Source recovering the B2, its capabilities and all that. I was like, wait a minute, so everybody knows this thing exists? What else is there? Like, there's like. If we all know it exists, there's got to be some crazy stuff out there.
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah. It's all in like maybe under the bombs in the silo. There's like an extra part where it's like, that's where they're doing the alien technology.
>> Farz: Very fun. Very fun stuff. Anywho, that's all I got.
If you have a niche disaster that you've heard of, please let us know
What do you got, Taylor?
>> Taylor: I don't have anything else, but yeah, stuff that we haven't heard of would be awesome to cover. So if you have like a niche disaster that you've heard of, please let us know. We'd love to dig into it.
>> Farz: The SR72 was developed in the 1960s. That thing went Mach 4 or something. Like, remember I covered that in an episode. That's the Blackbird. And like, and like, like we, we did that in the 70s. Like, I know there's got to be such crazy stuff out there these days. I mean. Yeah, yeah. If you work for the NSA or the CIA, write to us and tell us. I mean, I can't say this out loud. I'll probably go be thrown into it.
>> Taylor: They're not going to. But, but, no but, but that's so. I don't know. That's exactly right. That's so interesting because you're like, if we could do that, then just imagine what we can do now, you know, that we like don't even know about.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Or just robots fighting each other and oh yeah, they'll die. And the robots keep fighting till there's one robot left and then he says, I'm lonely and dies.
>> Farz: There was one thing I was listening to a podcast about. Or AI, which was like, we keep thinking about AI replacing us, about how it's like humans, but it was like they can't actually create anything that doesn't already. Like, they don't have the capabilities, like, think outside of the parameters of the universe that like, they live in. Whereas humans, that's like 95% of our productivity is like, in that realm of like just envisioning something and then creating it.
>> Taylor: So, I mean, I hope so. I think. Well, actually my. So my cousin who's here, who was here just. I just left. She's a professor and she has her students do like, really interesting things with AI, like projects, like. Because just having them write papers now is boring and like, impossible, you know, so she has them doing like, art things and like, other things, because otherwise they're just writing the same boring paper because everyone's using ChatGPT to write it.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah. What? Do you think AI is going to be able to make a podcast as good as this?
>> Taylor: Probably.
>> Farz: Taylor?
>> Taylor: No, thank you. We. We are the value add.
>> Farz: We are the value add. Wow, thank you.
Sam: I'm putting together some compilation episodes that are not original
>> Taylor: So wait, I have one more thing now that I mentioned that I'm putting together episodes that I'm going to put out in the middle of the week that are not. That are just like compilation episodes. Because I did a thing where I'm like, if you're interested in different parts of history, we actually can tell like a cohesive story. You just have to like, pull them from there. So I labeled a lot of our episodes and there's like a lot of labels, obviously, but I have one that I will do soon on medieval stuff. And if you actually go from the very beginning of the medieval period to the Renaissance, we have like 1, 2, 3, like over 10 episodes that cover medieval history.
>> Farz: That's great.
>> Taylor: Which is cool, right? So we have like the Nika riots at the very, very beginning. We have Olga of Kiev, the Battle of Hastings, Tower of London, medieval executions, Chaucer, Poggio, Broccolini, peasants, revolt, the ball desserts, Jan Zizka and Czech Republic, the Guanches, Nostradamus. And then we'll end with the Mona Lisa. So I'm going to list all of that out. And then we have like, you know, engineering disasters. We have a bunch of those. And murders, a bunch of those. And like, so I'm gonna kind of like putting em into little, little frames and sharing that with folks. If you haven't gone back and listened to everything, maybe there's some stuff that you can like in there.
>> Farz: So that's, yeah, Taylor has had a much more cohesive storyline than I have.
>> Taylor: but you do, but there's a lot of like, I mean there's just, there's so many, you know, some of the stuff that like, I, I, I think maybe I'll do the engineering ones. That C gen, that's like the Bhopal disaster, that mall and Korea.
>> Farz: Yep.
>> Taylor: Yeah. That the, like there's so many.
>> Farz: Yep.
>> Taylor: Yeah, Yeah, I love that idea. Cool.
>> Farz: Sweet.
>> Taylor: I'll be doing that.
>> Farz: Well, thank you as always to you, Taylor and for the people that are listening. Please write to us@duneflpodgmail.com, find us on the socials at duneflpod. Tell us what you think, tell us what you don't like or do like. We'd love to hear from you.
>> Taylor: Cool. Thank you.
>> Farz: Sweet. Cut it off there.
>> Taylor: Sam.