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Welcome to Atomic hobo. To get ad free listening plus bonus episodes, visit patreon.com Atomichobo
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AI is transforming customer service. It's real and it works. And with fin, we've built the number one AI agent for customer service. We're seeing lots of cases where it's solving up to 90% of real queries for real businesses. This includes the real world, complex stuff like issuing a refund or canceling an order. And we also see it when FIN goes up against competitors. It's top of all the performance benchmarks, top of the G2 leaderboard. And if you're not happy, we'll refund you up to a million dollars, which I think says it all. Check it out for yourself at FIN AI.
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What makes a leader worth following? What should you really care about in your job? As technology is changing so quickly, is it just gonna be about machines talking to other machines? I mean, should you quit your job and start something on your own? What would that take? What does success and risk look like in when we're all at the starting gate together, these are the questions we answer each week on Lead Human with Jack Myers and Tim Spengler. Join us each week and subscribe at your favorite podcast platform and YouTube. We'll tell stories, we'll hear from some of the best, and we'll try to figure this out together.
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48 million people in the United States are adolescents between the ages of 14 and 24. They're working, parenting, leading, sometimes all at once.
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I'm balancing work and being a mom at the same time, and I'm still on track to graduate with my bachelor's next year.
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So what do today's young people need to truly thrive? Tune in to Good Things from Lemonada Media to hear the six part Thrive series.
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In Threads before the bomb drops, there's a brief and wordless scene showing museum workers carefully lifting a painting from the wall. The implication, of course, is that the artwork is to be put away in storage somewhere safe. Because of course, the nuclear war will not be content with destroying just the physical world. It will also come for our art and literature. Everything that gives us the flimsy claim to be civilized. And so plans were made in the Cold War to protect art and the written word. But not just the good stuff. Not just priceless first editions. Not just Shakespeare and the Bible and the Declaration of Independence and the Mona Lisa. As we shall see, banks and businesses and dog food producers and chewing gum manufacturers also made plans to protect their company's records and contracts and blueprints and recipes. Because in the post apocalyptic world, it was hoped that one day survivors might again gaze upon Monet's Water lilies and enjoy some Wrigleys Double mint. When Americans refer to the nuclear triad, they of course mean the three ways they have of launching a nuclear attack. By bomber, by ground launch missile, or by submarine launch missile. Well across early Cold War America, when the awesome destructive power of the nuclear bomb became clear, libraries were asked how they'd protect their books in a nuclear attack. And the answer was a different kind of nuclear triad. Librarians worked out three strategies for protecting the written word. Vaulting, dispersal and duplication. The first is obvious enough stick all the precious stuff underground in some kind of protected vault. But it soon became obvious this might not be good enough, not if you're in a target area, not with the hydrogen bomb around. And so the other two elements of the triad came in duplication and dispersal. That is make copies of your material and take those copies out to some other hopefully safe location. And this secondary location will be known as your shadow library. These so called shadow libraries sprang up across America and didn't just hold copies of great literature, but also dull but essential things like government records, archives, maps and charts, details of bank accounts, tax information, copies of laws and legal documents, all the workaday stuff which arguably makes America what it is. A democracy full of free people who live by the law, own property and pay taxes. All that stuff needs boring old paperwork to back it up. Otherwise, in the chaos following a nuclear war, who knows what kind of grim dictatorship may arise, making its own rules. If the written framework of society and civilization, or at least copies of it, can be extracted from some underground shadow library, then there is hope for the so called continuity of government and the eventual rebuilding of democratic society. Although President Eisenhower was never so optimistic. In the book Raven Rock by Garrett Graff, it says he scoffed at the idea of piecing America or any free nation back together after the nuclear holocaust. One of his advisors is quoted as saying, the President said that of course, his imagination as to the horrors of a third world war might be overdeveloped, but he believed that every single nation, including the United States, which entered into this war as a free nation, would come out of it as a dictatorship. This would be the price of survival. So we'll look in a moment at the construction of shadow libraries. But what about the original libraries, the buildings themselves, your local library, found in every city and every town. They had a role to play in American civil defence. I suppose they're involved in the eternal struggle of trying to make the government see that they are popular and useful and therefore deserving of funds. And so lots of local libraries, especially in the 50s and early 60s, involved themselves in civil defence activities, either by setting themselves up as community spaces which could be used for civil defence recruitment events and meetings, hosting first aid classes and viewing civil defence films. And of course, they acted as an information point where local people could collect or consult civil defence booklets. Some libraries took this role even further and offered their building as a fallout shelter. Your local library might have served this purpose well, being a recognized and well known building in the area with a connection to government and authority. And there was another factor which made them potentially good as fallout shelters. It was suggested that all those rows of shelving stacked high with thick books would increase the building's protection factor. So books might physically protect you from nuclear fallout and then help rebuild society afterwards by allowing us to cling to a ragged notion of being civilized, of being more than just brutes who scratch around in the dirt. I may be a brute, you might say, as you drop half dead from exhaustion after a day scraping at the frozen earth, but I have a copy of Sense and Sensibility in my back pocket. So your local library might have done this bravely, offered itself as a shelter from the nuclear storm. Although Staten island warned its residents that all of their public libraries would be available as shelters, except the excellently named Great Kills Library. It's a wooden building, they explained, and so won't be of much use as a shelter. A wooden building stuffed with paper in a nuclear war. Great Kills, indeed. And what of the grand public libraries in America's big cities? The huge New York Public Library, with its thick walls and ornate marble, offered great protection, apart from the fact that it's probably slap bang in the middle of a target area. But it was never designated a public fallout shelter. Instead, in 1951, the library announced it would offer shelter to staff and patrons who were in the building when the siren sounded. Everyone present would be ushered down to the basement, where the walls were 12ft thick in places. There was enough space down there to shelter 800 staff and any additional visitors, that is, space for 1,500 people in total. And forget about the concept of silence in the library. The Boston Public Library formed a committee to prepare the building for nuclear attack, and one of its tasks was to survey the library staff to determine what skills or abilities they had which might be of use down in the library's shelter if the time came. The survey identified staff who had musical talent and who might be able to do a little song and dance number down in the shelter after the bomb dropped.
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Acast powers the World's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend
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if you've ever dreamed of quitting your job to take your side hustle full time, listen up. This is Nikayla Matthews Akome, host of Side Hustle Pro, a podcast that helps you build and grow from passion project to profitable business. Every week you'll hear from guests just like you who wanted to start a business on the side. If you can't run a side hustle, you can't run a business. They share real tips and so I started connecting with all these people on LinkedIn and I saw Target supplier diversity was having office hours.
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Real advice Procrastination is the easiest way
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form of resistance and the actual strategies they use to turn their side Hustle into their main hustle. Getting back in touch with your tangible cash and sitting down and learning to give your money a job like it changes something. Check outside Hustle Pro every week on your favorite podcast app and YouTube.
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Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere.
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Acast.com 48 million people in the United States are adolescents between the ages of 14 and 24. They're working, parenting, leading, sometimes all at once.
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I'm balancing work and being a mom at the same time, and I'm still on track to graduate with my bachelor's next year.
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So what do today's young people need to truly thrive? Tune in to good things from Lemonada Media to hear the six part Thrive series.
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So that is how existing libraries might have sheltered people and provided civil defense information. But what about the shadow libraries? These buildings, often out in rural locations, built to shelter copies of all of America's important books, papers, maps, documents, contracts and laws. But is it possible to protect paper, flimsy, flammable paper from nuclear attack? Well, in 1950, the Mosler Safe Company of Hamilton, Ohio, received a grateful letter from one of their clients, a bank, letting them know that the vaults which Mosler had built for them had performed very well. So they just wanted to write to offer a bit of thanks, a bit of feedback. The grateful bank executives wrote that the Mosler vaults had performed so well that even though the doors to the vaults had been badly damaged in a recent explosion, the contents within were perfectly safe. The Mosler vaults had even survived the destruction of the bank building itself, which had collapsed on top of the vaults. So thumbs up to the Mosler Safe Company of Ohio. The bank execs were very happy with their work. The bank in question was the Taikoku bank of Hiroshima. Mosler had installed their vaults before the war, and yes, they had managed to withstand the atomic bomb. On the strength of this excellent report straight from Hiroshima, the Mosler safe company won the contract to build a vault to protect America's precious Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in the event of nuclear war. Raven Rock tells us that these priceless documents are lowered using robotic arms into their vault each evening. And the archive which holds them has a direct line to the Pentagon, which can be used to give them quick warning of an incoming nuclear attack. Mosler also provided the doors which guard the vault at Fort Knox. But despite the excellent report straight from Hiroshima, the Mosler vaults still had to be subject to nuclear testing in America to check what they could withstand. So some of their safes were taken out into the Nevada desert for the Apple II nuclear test in May 1955. The purpose of Apple II was to evaluate how well various buildings and structures could cope in a nuclear blast. And so houses were built out there in the desert, what was nicknamed Doom Town. And the houses were decorated with furniture and curtains and had mannequins posed at the windows, seating at the dining table, and one in an armchair reading the paper. This was also known as Operation Q. And if you're a patron of the pod, you'll find a bonus episode on Operation Q in your feed. This was the test which resulted in all those famously creepy photographs of mannequins sprawled across sofas thrown around the houses by the nuclear blast. But as he mentioned, another aspect of Apple II was looking at which structures could provide protection for books and papers and microfilm. So the test site, as well as having the little houses built for Doomtown, also had safes and vaults and filing cabinets and tough corrugated cardboard boxes. These were all stuffed with papers and placed at 22 different locations across the test site. And of those 22 different locations, only six emerged with their contents intact after the bomb went off. So all of the units which had been placed within 10, 50ft of ground zero were destroyed completely, as were their contents, except for a safe which had been thrown 350ft by the blast. And although the safe was damaged on the outside, the contents were intact. These included a gold watch case, paper, postage stamps and microfilm, all of which were fine. The safes and cabinets, which were further out within a range of 1,270ft, were also destroyed. The door of one of these safes was found 700ft away. And thermal strips inside the safes showed that temperatures had reached 490 degrees Fahrenheit. As we know from the brilliant novel by Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns. So all the contents there were gone too. So the test showed us that we had to go to the safes and the vaults, which were 4,700ft away, to find records which had survived intact. So of course, it's no surprise to find that the best result is to have your safe or your vault both distant from ground zero and underground. But if you can't manage to get underground, have it in a good safe, preferably made by the Mosler Company of Ohio, and have at least 4,700ft from ground zero. And that should preserve all your stuff. And yes, those famous Mosler safes performed well at the Apple II nuclear test. But a company executive said, quote, I will admit, however, that the closest safes went around the world in a cloud of dust. So even a good old Mosler safe from Ohio can't protect you if you are too close to that thing. And before we move on from this topic, let me just tell you a funny wee fact that I discovered. Big businesses didn't just look to protect their papers from the bomb. A lot of them, especially the large companies, created entire alternative headquarters. Standard Oil, for example, had a duplicate emergency headquarters in Westchester county, upstate New York. The place was stocked and ready to receive its staff in an emergency. And they would often perform war games at that alternative headquarters, such as, imagine there's been a bomb at this location. Can you reconstruct the business using only the documents and papers and microfilm that is stored at the alternative headquarters? What can you reconstruct and how quickly can you do it? But in amongst all the supplies and all the paperwork at the emergency HQ was a big stack of checks. The checks had all been written out and were. So the post attack employees who found themselves there were could still be paid. Although a civil defence booklet which advised industry on this tactic said that if you do write out these checks in advance, be sure to mark that they are only good after a nuclear attack to prevent them being misused before the holocaust. So those were the options if you wanted to protect your records and your paperwork, you can put them in vaults, you can disperse, you can duplicate, you can build a shadow library. But there was another option. You could outsource the responsibility to a third party. This is America, so get a private business to do it for you, if you work in an office, you're probably familiar with the company Iron Mountain. You've probably seen their logo everywhere. They specialise in, to quote their website, protecting, unlocking and extending the value of your data. But did you know the company started life back in 1951 as the Iron Mountain Atomic Storage Corporation? The founder, Herman Nost, was a mushroom magnate growing mushrooms in New York State on the banks of the Hudson River. He purchased a disused iron mine, the so called Iron Mountain, and he used its cool, dark tunnels for his mushroom growing. He employed a lot of refugees from the Baltic States who had fled Europe after the war. And from them he heard tales of how families had tried to hide their valuables from the Nazis. And this gave Herman an idea. This big old iron mine he had, full of gaps and spaces and tunnels and caverns. Sure, it's great for growing mushrooms, but he's the mushroom king. He's got more mushrooms than he can count. So why not put the big iron Mountain to another use? By this point, it was 1951 and we were all terrified of the bomb, of course. So he took those stories he'd heard from the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian refugees about how they tried to hide their things from the German army. And he thought, well, this time it's the bomb who's threatening all our possessions. So, yes, we could still stuff things underground, hide them away, but from a different threat. But the principle is the same. Get that stuff hidden underground. And so he created the Iron Mountain Atomic Storage Corporation, renovating the iron mine to accommodate boxes and papers and valuables instead of zillions of mushrooms. An Iron Mountain wasn't the only deep, dark mine being used to protect possessions from the bomb. A salt mine in Kansas got in on the act. Lying deep beneath the town of Hutchinson, the salt mine is still being worked, but the areas which have been hollowed out and exhausted have been converted into vast underground storage space where you might keep things safe from the bomb. As it was a salt mine. The floors and the walls are white and sparkly with salt crystals and sometimes the floor crunches beneath your feet and you can taste salt on your tongue when you go in. And if Iron Mountain, over in New York State stores the boring but essential paperwork, the salt mine in Kansas has some far more interesting stuff. MGM have sent negatives there of every black and white film they've ever made, plus many colour ones, 13,000 in total. And George Clooney's Batman costume is down there in a glass case, as is one of Christopher Reeves Superman outfits. A Perfume manufacturer stores the recipes here, as does Purina, the dog food company. Pizza Hut keeps all the paperwork for the nationwide franchises here so that they might spring back to life after the bomb drops. And Wrigleys keep their secret recipes for their chewing gum here. Encyclopaedia Britannica store all the duplicates in the salt mine. And the American Bible Society, the puts in two copies of every Bible they publish. There are now thousands of Bibles down there amongst the sparkly, salty air. So you've got films, perfume, pizzas, Bibles, Batman costumes, and Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Everything you need to restart the cultural side of society. We just have to hope. Of course, there would be survivors to read the books, chew the gum and wear the costume. But of course, it's never as simple as that. So you've survived nuclear war, so you found the salty treasure trove below Kansas. So you go in and you put on a Batman costume, pick up a Bible, and you know how to make Wrigley's Spearmint gum. But now what? You crunch along the salty corridors, your Batman cape dragging along behind you, and you leave the sparkly halls and go back out into the gloom of the nuclear winter. Now what, Batman? Because as Threads teaches us, everything is woven together in a fabric. The Batman costume only has meaning if it's woven together with everything else. With the lore of the Batman films, the comics it came from, the backstory, all the pop culture which stands alongside it, all the fans who love it. The whole concept of good and evil and fighting the bad guys, the whole idea of hope and salvation. But that's all gone. And you're just standing there in the salt. A guy in a daft rubber suit. I hope you've enjoyed that episode. Let me thank my three newest patrons, Peyton Dyke, Treacle Verity and Zoe South. You guys now have your own podcast feed which will give you every podcast episode ad free, plus all the bonus episodes. I thank every one of you for supporting me.
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Acast Powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
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What if you laughed all through your commute? Or if you heard the funniest story while at the gym? Well, now you can. I'm Jameela Jamil, and guests on my new podcast, Wrong Turns share their most mortifying and hilarious disaster stories. I'm talking people like May Martin, Bob the Drag Queen, Katherine Ryan, Jake Johnson, Margaret Cho, Simon Pegg, Penn Badgley, and so many more. So listen, wherever you get your podcast, Wrong Terms, where dignity goes to die.
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ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere.
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Acast.com 48 million people in the United States are adolescents between the ages of 14 and 24. They're working, parenting, leading, sometimes all at once.
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I'm balancing work and being a mom at the same time, and I'm still on track to graduate with my Bachelor's next year.
- [27:44]
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So what do today's young people need to truly thrive? Tune in to good things from Lemonada Media to hear the six part Thrive series.
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When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry. So I went on to BetterHelp to try to look for a therapist to help me with that.
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That my relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help. I was ruminating a lot. Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life changing.
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Discover what better help online therapy can do for you. Visit betterhelp.com today.