Let's talk about a real accidental nuclear accident - it's economic collapse, tied to poor security, that leads to deaths. In Brazil, while the economy collapsed in the 1980s, people tended to find scrap metal in buildings, including those that used to be hospitals, and those hospitals, in this case, had very dangerous radioactive materials left behind. Those get stolen, and a crisis is afoot!
Let's talk about a real accidental nuclear accident - it's economic collapse, tied to poor security, that leads to deaths. In Brazil, while the economy collapsed in the 1980s, people tended to find scrap metal in buildings, including those that used to be hospitals, and those hospitals, in this case, had very dangerous radioactive materials left behind.
Those get stolen, and a crisis is afoot!
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
Welcome to Doomed to Fail being historical disasters and failures
>> Taylor: In the matter of the people of State of California vs. Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA096. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you.
>> Farz: Hello. Hello, Taylor. Happy today, Whatever today is. How are you doing today?
>> Taylor: Good. How are you?
>> Farz: Pretty good. Yeah, it's been. It's been an interesting couple of days. Had a wedding I attended yesterday which was awesome and so much fun in the Texas hill country, which is absolutely stunning. So it was fantastic. It was a great weekend.
>> Taylor: I did. I just was like, what? No, that's awesome. We did. Yeah. We just been hanging out. I just kind of like was napping all morning. It was nice.
>> Farz: That's great. That's great. Yeah, I. I'm gonna be out planting a bunch of stuff later on. The weather here is just absolutely phenomenal, so fantastic. Fantastic. Times out in Texas. Do you want to introduce us?
>> Taylor: Yes. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Doomed to Fail being historical disasters and failures. And I am Taylor, joined by Fars. And today is Farz's turn to tell us a story, which is good because I don't have one.
>> Farz: Can you remind me which one of our listeners and mutual friends now told us about engineering disasters?
>> Taylor: Oh, Shannon, who is a friend of mine who works now somewhere else, but she used to be the librarian at the kids school, which was super fun.
>> Farz: Very cool. Very cool. Well, Shannon, you. You also inspired me to focus on, you know what? It's sort of an engineering disaster, but it's sort of just an accident and it's sort of just stupid. And yeah, my story is a little bit unique today, so I guess. I guess you can count as an engineering disaster. I'm going to be talking about a place in Brazil, which I literally had to keep looking up how you pronounce the name because they have one of those little accent things. You know, the pointy arrow accent. Yeah, I don't totally know what that is.
>> Taylor: I mean, last night, this is very relevant. We watched the first half of the New Anaconda with Paul Rudd and Jack Black.
>> Farz: So fun. I love it so much.
>> Taylor: So funny. I love it so much. I laughed so freaking hard the first we. We went to sleep because it was late. But we'll watch the rest of it later. It's so funny so far, but they do speak in Portuguese and Portuguese is insane. I love the part in the beginning when they're like, they made us a bleep out our movie because there's swear words in it. And like every word is a swear word. I like scream left like six Six times already. It's so funny.
>> Farz: Yeah, it was really funny. Yeah. I highly recommend the New Anaconda.
>> Taylor: But the point is Portuguese is impossible to understand. It's like sometimes you hear a Spanish word and sometimes you're like, what? And then nothing.
>> Farz: Well, I asked Claude to spell this out for me phonetically.
Goya Nija accident is a tragic story about rad radiation in Brazil
I'd be talking about a thing called the Goya Ni. Goya Nija accident, which is Guay Niha is a city in Brazil or province, I can't remember exactly which one it is. And something essentially happened there. Like I said, it's kind of an engineering thing. It's kind of like a regulatory thing. It's kind of like a failure of government and a failure of like people's understanding of the world and how it works. So it's kind of like a all in one wrapped up story that we're going to be covering today. So first and foremost, what is Guania? It is pretty heavily populated. Like, I didn't see what the population was when the story took place, but currently it's the 10th largest city in Brazil with a population about 1.5 million. The point I was trying to get out of this was it's densely packed. There's a lot of people here. So there's probably a lot of people back then in this time, which was 1987. So that's the main thing to know about Go.
>> Taylor: Okay.
>> Farz: Within Goyania in 1987, there was a private cancer treatment facility called the Goano Institute for Radiotherapy. I obviously translated that. It's not really called that, but I translate to English.
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good, good job.
>> Farz: Taylor, do you know why we use rad radiation in cancer treatments?
>> Taylor: It stops cells from growing.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah. It's just really bad for you. Right? Like it's.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: It's really bad for organic matter to be exposed to radioactivity. That's the whole point of it. It can disrupt the DNA process of cancer cells. But obviously in the process of doing that can also hurt the rest of your good cells. So there's a lot of like, it's, it's got a whole thing.
>> Taylor: I did do the mercury and that was like radiation, like the beginnings of it, right?
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah, that was. She, she, her and her husband got that, the ball rolling on that side.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: So there is a. Up until this disaster happened. And I'll tell you all the reasons why after this disaster happened why it's no longer the case. But a very prominent material that was used for radioactivity was a thing called Cesium CCM137, which is a non naturally occurring radioactive isotope. Essentially we have to create this thing.
>> Taylor: I don't love that.
>> Farz: Yeah. How this, how this all works isn't entirely relevant, but I'll describe the contraption that contains the cesium because it's going to become really important later on in the conversation. Okay. So I mean, I'm trying to think like a thing that's like a modern thing. We would, we would know. It's kind of like when you go to the dentist and they put those things in your mouth and you have to bite down on it and then they put the little thing right next to your face and they shoot radiation through you. From what I could gather, this device look like a very, like a much larger version of those with the thing that is aimed at you being the thing that contains the ccm. And I'm just going to describe how this looks. The container within which holds the cesium. They're basically just little capsules, little metal capsules. It's not just pure metal. There's a bunch of different alloys, there's tunks, and there's a whole layer of different materials that are kind of holding the CCM radioactive material. They're about 4 to 5 inches in diameter, maybe 6 inches tall. There's a bunch of them. And the whole point of its entire engineering and design is twofold. One is to contain the CCM in a safe way in the middle, and also to then reveal the CCM when it's time for the doctors to pass it through a patient's body. So it has a very narrow window that is closed most of the time until it's turned on. And then the CCM can just eject its radiation directly out, essentially.
>> Taylor: Okay.
>> Farz: In 1977, the Radiotherapy Institute purchased a machine that used these capsules with the CCM to apply radiation. And by 1985 that institute had opened a new facility. So you have the original institute was running, bought this thing in 1977. They shut down in 1985 and they moved their facilities elsewhere. Okay. The original institute had been built on land owned by a Catholic charity. When the institute had been built, the owners had leased the land from this charity. By 1985, when the institute had moved, the charity wanted to land back, but now there was a building on top of it. This resulted in a very long protracted legal battle between the two parties. The institute claiming that it owns the building and the charity claim that it owns the building because it's on top of its own on top of its land. That's kind of where we. Where we are at this point.
>> Taylor: That's hilarious.
>> Farz: So these two are locking horns on this issue. And it all happened before this institute could dismantle or relocate this device that contains this radioactive isotope. So they left, and they left it in this abandoned facility. The institutes moved on, essentially.
>> Taylor: But they didn't take it with them.
>> Farz: They did not take it with them.
>> Taylor: And why not? They didn't. They stopped doing that type of treatment.
>> Farz: I don't know if they stopped doing that kind of treatment or not. I know that. Well, they probably started using new machines and they're like, we're just going to leave this here and the court will figure out what to do with it, essentially.
>> Taylor: Okay.
>> Farz: The court granted an injunction in an. Sorry. The court granted an injunction saying that nobody can enter this facility until this dispute is resolved. The institute owners were like, there's a murder machine in here. We should go take care of this thing.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: It's unattended. It's sitting in the middle of this huge city, you know, totally empty and all that good stuff. The court noted how dangerous this was, and they decided that even though it's dangerous because of this injunction, nobody can enter and secure it.
Brazil in 1987 was in really rough shape. The currency there was worthless
But what they would allow is for these folks on their own dime to privately hire security to just be stationed outside and make sure nobody kind of goes in and messes with it or fiddles with it.
>> Taylor: How long. What's it. What would. How long would it take to get rid of it? Like, not long.
>> Farz: Yeah, I don't imagine it'd be that long. I don't know why the court was so. I didn't get clarity on why they were so stubborn about this. Even though, like, the records did show that a lot of people were like, this is really dangerous and you should do something about. And then court acknowledged that and still didn't care.
>> Taylor: Weird.
>> Farz: During this time, we're talking about 1987, Brazil was in really rough shape. So apparently annual inflation was 366%, which is a number that nobody in America will ever even remotely understand what that number means.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: The currency there was worthless. They would apparently churned through about four or five different types of currencies because they just became devalued so fast.
>> Taylor: Oh, wow.
>> Farz: People were basically just broke and desperate, which is going to create the exact nightmare fuel to what we're going to discuss here in a second.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: One way that people made money was they would break into abandoned buildings and scavenge materials that they could Sell.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Do you see where I'm going?
>> Taylor: I would literally do that. Like, no people did that. Oh, my God. I'm nervous because something bad's gonna happen, which I know is the premise of the show, but it's going to be bad.
>> Farz: This is definitely a doomed to fail situation.
>> Taylor: Crap.
>> Farz: On September 13, 1987, apparently the Security that these private companies had called or hired to work didn't show up to work. And on that same day, these two guys, a guy named Roberto Alves and Wagner Pereira, they broke into the facility with the objective to find in scrap metal. But the problem was, by this point, the facility actually had broken into quite a few times since it had been abandoned two years prior. So it really wasn't much to scrap. Except this cancer therapy machine.
>> Taylor: Oh, my God.
>> Farz: So they start disassembling parts of it, and they find these metal capsules inside. The ones I Described contained a CCM137. And the two put them in a wheelbarrow and decided to take them home.
>> Taylor: I mean, of course they did. They didn't know, right?
>> Farz: They didn't know.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: That night they both got sick. They were suffering from radiation poisoning. Immediately. They didn't know it was it.
>> Taylor: Were they inside like a. A lead box in the machine, whatever, like, essentially, yeah. Or are they always leaking radiation to the building or like they just, like, these guys, like, opened it?
>> Farz: No, one thing that was clear was, like, there was nothing wrong with the machine. There was nothing wrong with the capsule containing the cesium. It was a fill. It was like a regulatory failure and a failure of security, essentially. That was really what happened. So, yeah, that exact same night, they started getting sick from radiation poisoning. And obviously they don't know what's going on. They just assume they had food poisoning and carried on with their lives, Right?
>> Taylor: Yeah. Yeah.
>> Farz: One thing about CCM 137, that's pretty cool. It glows bright blue. So if you look up a thing called Cherenkov radiation, you'll see images of this blue radioactive color that shows up usually. It's funny, CCM137 was different. It always gave off this color. And I don't think that's the case with every other type of radioactive material. But if you look up chern cob radiation, you actually see it. Looks really cool.
>> Taylor: Pretty.
>> Farz: Also, CCM 137 of the powder, it's basically like salt.
>> Taylor: Oh, okay.
>> Farz: Yeah. Something to keep in mind. Three days. Well, that's actually going to be super relevant towards the end here. Three days after they had brought this stuff back home, and while they were already suffering the symptoms of radiation sickness, Roberto, remember when I told you that the way those capsules were engineered, they have to, like, once it's activated, it has to, like, rotate a specific way, and then once it rotates in that Segway, it beams the radiation directly from a hole inside the capsule.
>> Taylor: Got it.
>> Farz: What Roberto had done was he used a screwdriver to pierce a hole in the capsule. So he found where it comes out, and just like, sort of jamming a screwdriver in it until he got through.
>> Taylor: Oh, God.
>> Farz: He didn't think much of this. And by September 18th. So about five days after they. And they first broke in, he sold the capsules to a scrapyard owner named Devere Ferreira. The bear saw the light that was literally just concentrated radiation aimed straight at him, and he thought it was really cool. He decided he wanted to show his family and friends, so he took these capsules that had been punctured and pierced, fully exposing the radiation back to his house. His friends, some of them also thought it was cool and wanted to take it home with them, too. So what they would do is just literally scoop out the radioactive powder and just distribute it amongst themselves, and they would just, like, put in their pocket and take it home to show their families.
>> Taylor: Oh, geez.
>> Farz: By September 25, DeVere's wife, a woman named Maria, had started suffering the effects of radiation sickness. And DeVere was like, you know what? Like, I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Maria was like, hey, our lives started going really bad once you brought these things back home. Take them somewhere else. So DeVere ended up selling them to another scrapyard.
>> Taylor: Okay.
>> Farz: And this we do know that Maria the Verge's wife, was kind of the one that kind of connected these dots.
Four people died directly from contaminated capsules; 20 people required hospitalization
She thought the capsules had something to do with the fact that everybody around them are starting to get sick. And so she ended up going to the scrapyard that her husband had sold these two, collected them up and put them in a plastic bag, got on the city bus, fully exposing everybody to this stuff, and took him to the health department. Yeah. She apparently walked in and told some junior staffers that, quote, this is what's killing my family.
>> Taylor: She definitely. It's not her fault, but, like, it sucks.
>> Farz: Yeah. No, I mean, she. She didn't know. Nobody knew. Here's the thing. Tell you right now, like, these people didn't know what they were dealing with.
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
>> Farz: That was literally my next line. Like, she's at the Public health department. And even those people don't understand what's going on. It was entirely by happenstance that there was a physician who was visiting, like a medical physicist that was visiting, guy named Walter Ferreira. He just happened to be in the department that day and he heard about what was going on with this little baggie full of this like blue powder that was glowing. And he went and grabbed a device that he had in his hotel room called the scintillation counter, which measured radioactivity he tested on the bag. And the bag, it goes off of scale. It's like super radioactive, right?
>> Taylor: Oh my God. Yeah.
>> Farz: He contacts state, local and national officials to let them know what's going on as well as cne, which is their version of. I forgot what our version actually is. Never mind. It's the National Nuclear Energy Commission in Brazil. What was ours called?
>> Taylor: I have no idea.
>> Farz: Anyways, investigators started tracing every person who may have come into contact with the capsules or the CCM powder. And it was a lot. Right, because you're just like taking this stuff home. Is being traveled through the middle of the city on a city bus. 112,000 people were suspected of either irradiation or contamination. I learned what that means. Irradiation is when the thing is affecting you while it's like present and then it doesn't, doesn't affect you anymore. So that's good. Yeah. So if you go into a room with some stuff there but you're not super close to it and it's not fully exposed, like you're getting irradiated, but then you leave and like your cells just do their own thing. Contamination is like you're, you're cooked. Like your cells are already denatured.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Yeah.
>> Farz: So 20 people required intense hospitalization. Four people died directly, with two more dying later on for causes that you could say is probably attributable to cell damage, but it wasn't directly tied to contamination. So I'm going to call it six. But four officially died of this. This is like over like a week. Like it's not even that long.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Maria Dever's wife, who figured all this out initially, she died and she actually died on the same day as her six year old niece, a little girl named Lead Ferrera. And man, that one was a sad story. So her dad was this other guy I'm going to talk about here in a little bit because he also died. He took this powder home. He's one of the friends who just thought it was really fun and put in his pocket and Took it home to his kid and the kid was playing with it. It's a kid, it's like glowing blue powder and she was painting on her face and like it was. Yeah, it was one of those situations. But she died on the same day as Maria. So that would, that would have been the 23rd of October is when I think those two died. There was these other two kids, one's 18, one's like 22, getting Admilson, who was an employee of the scrap yard, he died of lung and heart damage. And then another one, this 22 year old kid named Israel, he also died of. I forgot what it was, but it was cell damage essentially. Dever himself also died and Leed's father, the one who brought this stuff home and let her play with it, he also died. So that's the universe of folks that are directly suffering because of this. The two guys who put all this in motion by stealing the capsules to begin with, they both ended up losing body parts. They lost fingers, arms. They suffered from radiation sickness. Really interesting. They never got, they never went to jail for it because they were like nobody we did. They didn't know. They didn't know what they were doing was potentially going to result in loss of life.
>> Taylor: Right. They didn't like kill. I mean they should, they, they shouldn't have stolen stuff.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Like they didn't know.
>> Farz: So they actually escaped all responsibility on this one. 41 homes were completely demolished. Furniture, family heirlooms, topsoil, all this different stuff was essentially buried. There was a storage facility that was constructed specifically for this purpose. It was basically sealed concrete bunkers and everything that they suspected had come into contact with this, with this product. Not product. It's like, it's like drugs or anything. With the CCM 137, all that went into the concrete bunker. It apparently has to stay there for about 300 years before the area is safe again.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: Which like even today this area is still more irradiated than anywhere else because of what happened in 1987. There was like a stigma around this stuff because people who were from this area, if they traveled to other parts of Brazil, discriminated against. Like, like you weren't allowed to like fly on airplanes or they were kicked off airplanes or not allowed to check into hotels. Also products that came from this area were also. I don't know what the word is for it.
>> Taylor: They were like shadow banned.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah, they were banned that people just didn't want to buy it. They thought it was too risky.
>> Taylor: There was by like Chernobyl, seltzer water.
Three people died in Georgia when they accidentally opened a radioactive generator
>> Farz: I mean, now I probably would. I don't know. That's kind of fun. So she was blue. Apparently. Apparently people in this area also were, like, protesting burying the dead in the cemeteries in town. They're like, well, now I can't visit, you know, gravestones that I want to visit. And what's interesting is, like, this keeps happening. So I forgot what the exact term for this is, but the lack of security in some parts of the world around radioactive material, it just keeps happening. So I found some. Several other examples. So in the year 2000 entirely. And three people died when someone literally opened a machine just like this There in the Republic of Georgia, apparently there's a thing where generators. Back during the Soviet Union days, they used a thing called strontium 90, another radioactive material, to generate electricity. And these things were just like, everywhere. Like, there's, like.
>> Taylor: In your house?
>> Farz: Well, no, in this case, it was in the forest. It was. Basically what happened was some forestry workers were, like, abandoned out in the forest, I guess. I don't know, whatever. They. Their mule broke down. I don't know what they do. And they found this generator and they're freezing to death. And so just like, cozied up next to it. As I was running, they're getting dosed with strontium 90 and they all died. And. And I was thinking, I was like. I was like, I. I should have researched this more. But I was like, how many of these things are all over the former Soviet Union? Like, it's got to be.
>> Taylor: I bet so many.
>> Farz: And the fact that they were just sleeping next to it, and that's what it took to get a. Get contaminated and die. It also happened in 2010 in India and 2013 in Mexico. It just keeps on happening. And there's a ton of, like, smaller events where people are contaminated, but then they don't die. I mean, at this point, I think it's safe to say we have, like, radiation going everywhere because you just hand it off to the next person because it's always on you, right?
>> Taylor: What are you supposed to do?
>> Farz: It was fascinating. They had to come up with, like, a practice on how to de radiate their urine and feces. And they had to, like, do all this. It was crazy. Like, the amount of work that goes in to try and contain this thing once it happens. I mean, it really just reminds me of, like, Covid and now Hantavirus. It's just gonna be that, like, it's just. It's like once the genie's out of the box. It seems like there's no point even trying to put it back in the box. But. Yeah, so, but yeah, that's, that's my story.
The CCM 137 powder is no longer a thing. They don't use this anymore
>> Taylor: Where does it, I don't know if you know this, like, where does it, where do you get it in the first place? You said it was like a man made thing. So like someone makes it for the specific purpose of a generator or a cancer medicine or whatever, right? Is that what happens?
>> Farz: Yeah, I think, I think let's take the generator equation thing out of the equation because that's USSR and who knows what the h*** their constraints are. But these are like these manufacturers of devices that require radioactive material. They're under such heavy regulation federally that, yeah, they get access to this material by virtue of what they're producing and they have a lot of oversight because of it. So it's not easy to get your hands on it now. They don't use this anymore, by the way, like the CCM 137, it's not, it's not a thing anymore. The reason for it is because of this kind of story, the fact that it is a powder. You know, one thing I didn't mention was that physicists, when he first found it, he, he freaked out. And what was gonna happen was the firefighters were called and they were gonna come over there and start spraying the thing. And he was like, I gotta get ahead of this because if they start spraying this, it's gonna spread this powder everywhere. That's how light it was. And now because of that, they don't use CCM137 at all for this, for this use case. They use solid materials and things like that because it can't spread. You can't just take a piece of it and give it to a little girl to play with and paint her face with.
>> Taylor: Right? Like it's not like a. As easily like you can put your hand and blow it on someone.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah, so. So that's a, that's another thing that changes is the useless powder is no longer a thing. But.
>> Taylor: Yeah, well, where's the, where's the building? Did they, did they knock down the building?
>> Farz: They knocked down the building. Yeah, yeah, they, they knocked everything down. They, I mean, everything. Like they knocked down the building, they knocked down the salvage yard, both of them, that contained some of this stuff. Like they had to basically take everything that could have been explosives and just shove it into that concrete bunker.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: So that's wild.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah, it really is.
>> Taylor: And I know there's like, aren't There, like, lost nuclear bombs.
>> Farz: Is that true there? I heard there was one in South Carolina. Right. Or something like that.
>> Taylor: I don't know. But some, like, idiot is gonna find it once.
>> Farz: You know, there's a great. There was a great john movie called Broken Lost Arrow.
>> Taylor: Broken Arrow, I think Broken Arrow, yeah,
>> Farz: That's what it was.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Missing nuclear bomb.
>> Taylor: Yeah. I feel like that's some. I mean, and I don't even think it's, like, necessarily gonna. Gonna, like, detonate. I think someone's gonna open it and be like, cool. What are these things? You know?
>> Farz: Yeah. 100.
>> Taylor: Is that, like, just like this and. Because, like, why wouldn't they?
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems to be more of a thing in less developed countries. But anyways, yeah, we're working our way up. Cool.
>> Taylor: I never heard of that. That's crazy.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: I feel so bad for everyone.
>> Farz: It was. It was sad. I felt. I felt the worst for the wife because I'm like, you know, her husband brings home stupid s***. She was like, please. Yeah, yeah. What? I was reading how, like, he just thought it was, like, magic or something. It was like, this is like some wondrous new discovery I've made and so I need to show it to everyone.
>> Taylor: Exactly.
>> Farz: And it was a new discovery for him, but it was very bad for
>> Taylor: me else, not for everybody else. Yeah, I was thinking that too. Like, also, if you don't know what it is, you would be like, this is magic or maybe like something divine or whatever, you know?
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Well, that's awful. And I feel sad for everyone.
>> Farz: Would you call this an entry disaster? Not really. Right. Maybe it's just an accident.
>> Taylor: I don't know. It's an accident. But, I mean, it's like a failure of a lot of people to, like, keep something safe that they should have. Keeping more safe.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: You know, it should have been. I mean, but I don't know if that would have, like, deterred them from going in necessarily. If it would have been like, like, oh, don't come in here. It's dangerous. They probably would have been like, well, you.
You know. So that was actually also part of the reason why they were never charged
You know.
>> Farz: So that was actually also part of the reason why they were never charged, because there was never any warnings about it anymore.
>> Taylor: Oh, yeah. Okay. That's not good.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Yeah. That's bad.
Black mold destroyed a Georgia woman's house. It ruined her husband's life
I watched, like, a really sad Forensic Files about a woman who. In Georgia, who, like, her whole life, all she wanted to do was live in a house that looked at the house and Gone with the Wind. And she got successful and she built it, and then, like, There was a, A leak in the floor and the insurance wouldn't let her fix it because they wanted to send someone out to look at it. So she didn't get to fix it for like a month. And black mold grew and it, like, destroyed the house. It ruined her husband's life. Like, he became a different person because it was like in his brain. And then she can't go to her beautiful house anymore. But people still go and, like, steal her stuff. But they steal her stuff and. And it's contaminated with all this black mold, you know, so she's like, I can't go without this, like, suit. And every time I go in to my beautiful house that I've, like, wanted my whole life, that night now is gone. More stuff is missing because people keep robbing it and they're just like pulling. Putting the stuff in people's houses, you know, like, you can't contain those things. Like, you have to do a concrete bunker. And then someday someone's going to open that f****** concrete bunker and be like, I wonder what the ancient people hid in here. And you'll be like, disease? Yeah.
>> Farz: 300. 300 years from. I mean, that's. Yeah. Like, how do you even convey the message 300 years in the future to the AI boss?
>> Taylor: You know, I actually feel like there are some things. God, is this true? Or that I, like, read it in a book or something where it was like they were putting, like, nuclear stuff somewhere and they had to like, draw picture pictures, you know, of like.
>> Farz: Yeah, that was. That was a 99 Invisible story where they were trying to figure out, like, something was it. It was like a 10,000 year thing. It was like something was 10,000 years. And they were like, all these signs were going back in history, like, what language survived that long? What has possibly survived that long? And like the thing they. I don't know if they did it or not, but basically, like, it was somewhere along the lines of stories across cultures, even cultures that no longer are around to changing time. But they, they get passed down. And so they were like, there needs to be a story about cats that glow. And if you see a cat that glows, don't go here. Something like that.
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is probably why, like, ancient Egyptians were like, don't open these tombs. And we did anyway. Literally had pictures of cats in them. We like to do this.
>> Farz: I know. And that was even 10,000 years ago.
Shannon, thank you for telling us about engineering disasters
Again, Shannon, thank you for telling us about engineering disasters. I know, again, this doesn't really fit that mold necessarily, but it Definitely got the wheels in motion on all things engineering related. I was actually going to cover some plane crashes. I was like, I'm kind of over plane crashes. So I went with this set. But if you all have other ideas, please tell us, because we are looking for them.
>> Taylor: Yeah, that's really. Yeah. It's weird that I never heard of that too. You know how these crazy things happen all over the world and, like, it changes lives permanently?
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
Do you have any fun listener mail? No, I don't have listener mail
>> Farz: So do we have any fun listener mail?
>> Taylor: No, I don't have listener mail. I am excited that Learned league starts tomorrow.
>> Farz: Yeah, I'm. I'm thrilled. For those that don't know, Taylor and I take part in this online trivia thing, and it is really challenging. It's really hard. It's fun. And I am number 27 out of 30 right now, so it's okay.
>> Taylor: We're gonna get better. It's gonna get. It's gonna get better. We got lots of. Lots of time still.
>> Farz: I think I hit a top five one time. Like, one week.
>> Taylor: You got really high at least once. So we'll see what happens.
>> Farz: See if we do it again.
>> Taylor: Cool. Well, thank you for that story. Thanks, everyone, for listening. If you have any ideas, let us know. Doomedtofailpodmail.com and doomed to fail on all of the socials to fail. Pod, it's us.
>> Farz: Please write to us.
>> Taylor: Yeah, tell us what you want to
>> Farz: hear or don't want to hear. Whatever. Just write to us. Sure. Sweet teller. I'll go ahead and cut it off there.
>> Taylor: Cool. Thank you.
>> Farz: Yep.
>> Taylor: Sam,