Chris Winterbauer & Lizzie Bassett - Starfish Prime

Summary

SNAFU with Ed Helms
Episode S4E21: Chris Winterbauer & Lizzie Bassett - Starfish Prime
February 25, 2026

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Episode Overview

This engaging episode of SNAFU dives into "Starfish Prime," the infamous 1962 Cold War-era nuclear test in space. Host Ed Helms is joined by Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett, the dynamic hosts of the “What Went Wrong?” podcast, for a lively, insightful exploration of the wild story, its catastrophic effects, and why “nuking space” is a prime candidate for the history books’ biggest blunders. The conversation hits on themes of scientific hubris, unintended consequences, Cold War paranoia, and parallels with contemporary issues like artificial intelligence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Guest Introductions and Warmup (02:10–03:55)

• Ed introduces Chris and Lizzie, noting their background as writers, producers, directors, and podcast hosts.
• Lizzie explains the premise of their show: exploring chaos behind movie productions—"Every movie is a miracle because of how incredibly hard they are to make, even the bad ones." (03:28)
• Chris shares his perspective: "Sometimes you think you're making a terrible movie and somehow it turns out great... making movies is humbling. They're so hard." (03:55)
• Ed agrees, emphasizing moviemaking's unpredictability and teamwork.

2. Setting the Stage: The Starfish Prime Event (04:37–06:13)

• Ed sets a vivid scene of the Hawaii night in 1962 as Starfish Prime detonates overhead.
• “So picture this. You’re on vacation in Hawaii... It’s a warm July night in 1962... suddenly, a massive flash lights up the sky. A red glow streaks across... It’s not aliens, although that would be a reasonable guess.” (05:12)
• The entire premise: During the Cold War, the U.S. wasn't afraid to "nuke space" as part of the arms and space race.

3. Why Nuking Space? Cold War Logic and Experimentation (06:19–09:35)

• Chris quips, “Let’s put some radiation inside of a closed system and see what happens. We’re going to shake the snow globe with uranium.” (06:52)
• Lizzie and Ed discuss the questionable logic: Was it about weaponization, science, or just bravado?
• Explanation of Operation Fishbowl, a series of high-altitude nuclear tests (including Starfish Prime), under Project Dominic—36 detonations in the Pacific in 1962 alone.
• Comment on the innocuous, almost “Sea World” code names (Fishbowl, Starfish, etc.)
  • Ed, humorously: “Operation Fishbowl sounds less like a nuclear testing program and more like something you’d win tickets to see at Sea World.” (09:36)

4. Pop Culture Parallels—Nuclear Cinema and Sci-Fi (09:47–12:32)

• Discussion of favorite nuclear/Cold War movies:
  • Chris: The China Syndrome, War Games, The Iron Giant (“The movie ends with a nuclear device being detonated in space... could a weapon decide not to be a weapon?”) (11:12)
  • Lizzie: Dr. Strangelove: “You needed to explain the existence of the Doomsday Machine... They just built it. You’re 10 steps ahead and 15 steps behind. That feels applicable.” (10:27)
  • The Americans as a TV parallel.
• Ed points out the resonance of "boys playing dangerous games" with nuclear weapons, similar to the "War Games" film.

5. Early Failures in Operation Fishbowl (12:32–14:48)

• The first and second high-altitude test missiles malfunctioned.
• “The second test, the Thor missile malfunctioned again, and the warhead once again had to be destroyed mid flight, showering the Pacific Ocean with plutonium contaminated confetti.” (12:38)
• Jokes about “special underwater ordnance disposal teams”—"Those are just people with a fancy name." (13:34)
• Lizzie: "It seems like you should stop." (13:05)
• Chris: Raises the pointlessness of the risks involved: "Now I'm going to die for my country for an ambiguous test... to what end?" (14:02)

6. Public Spectacle & Propaganda (15:32–17:10)

• The government publicly announced the tests in news headlines, with colorful, even festive descriptions:
  • “In blast tonight may be dazzling.” (15:51)
  • “The white fireball is expected to spread across the sky, changing colors as it grows.” (16:08)
• Lack of transparency on radiation dangers; a sense of nuclear "entertainment" for the public.

7. What Was Known About Nuclear Risks? (16:53–18:41)

• Ed provides historical context: "There's a lot still unknown... their judgment was clouded by how little they knew." (17:10)
• Lizzie: Asks whether they understood the health and environmental impact.
• Ed: Suggests the partial awareness after WWII but also a deliberate underplaying of real dangers, reflecting attitudes of the era.

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Deep Dive: The Starfish Prime Test and Its Fallout

8. The Starfish Prime Explosion (21:59–25:49)

• July 9, 1962, 11pm: A Thor missile launched from Johnston Atoll (remote Pacific), detonating 1.4 megaton warhead 250 miles up (same altitude as today’s International Space Station).
• Visible from 870 miles away—“the most spectacular far-flung effects of any man-made event in history.” (25:41)
• Created a massive, colorful artificial aurora; a glowing plasma bubble distorting Earth's magnetic field and "carving a temporary cavity in the ionosphere."
• Chris: “The atmosphere is the only thing maintaining life on our planet. Let’s poke a hole in it. Let’s see what happens.”

9. Modern Reactions and Historical Parallels (24:00–29:48)

• Discussion of public and personal reactions to the spectacle:
  • Chris: "To me, man has created an artificial sun. An artificial sun that lights up half of the world... It feels apocalyptic, Promethean." (28:03)
  • Ed: Raises questions about uninformed islanders—“must have thought the end of the world was happening.” (29:41)

10. Consequences: EMPs and Technological Vulnerability (29:53–36:23)

• The explosion’s Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) disabled electronics—including 300+ streetlights, burglar alarms, phone systems—nearly a thousand miles away in Hawaii. (29:53)
• Eyewitness accounts: Some were disappointed ("no mushroom cloud"), others in awe.
• Chris draws a line to pop culture (The Matrix, One Second After), dangers of EMPs destroying infrastructure and society’s deep reliance on electronics: “You’d be back to the Stone Age.” (34:01)
• Lizzie: "That's why we should all go to trade school." (35:37)
• Preppers, old-school mechanical tools, and the vulnerabilities of modern tech emerge as themes.

11. The Radiation Belt & Damaged Satellites (37:23–42:41)

• Fallout included creating an artificial radiation belt around Earth—not just an immediate EMP, but persistent dangers that lasted a decade.
• One-third of satellites in Earth orbit in 1962 were damaged—including the pioneering TV satellite Telstar 1.
• NASA had to change an astronaut’s flight plan: “...realized that their astronaut would be killed by residual Starfish Prime radiation if he flew over 640km in altitude.” (41:53)
• The Van Allen Belts—Earth’s magnetic shield—were altered, raising the stakes for future space travel.

12. Global Reaction & Aftermath (42:41–44:08)

• The Soviet Union condemned the test; Russian radio called it “a crime perpetrated by American atom maniacs.” (43:15)
  • Ed: “The atomaniacs, which I think we kind of live up to.”
• Despite the chaos, the test was labeled a “success” by U.S. officials.
• Starfish Prime proved a turning point: the most powerful and consequential of eight nuclear space tests.
• President Kennedy subsequently canceled the next test, which was planned to be three times higher. (44:08)

13. Ban on Space Nukes: Treaties and Lessons (45:03–46:12)

• The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty and 1967 Outer Space Treaty were direct responses—banning nuclear tests and weapons of mass destruction in space, underwater, and in the atmosphere.
• Ed: “Nuking space is a great way to get everyone to agree on a few ground rules.” (46:16)

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Big Ideas & Parallels to Today

14. Institutional Recklessness: Nukes, Space, and Artificial Intelligence (46:12–51:44)

• Ed broadens the conversation: likens the blind experimentation with nuclear weapons to our current unregulated rush into artificial intelligence.
  • “The way our governmental and military institutions approached testing of this nature... feels a lot like the way we’re lurching blindly into this artificial intelligence era.” (46:38)
• Lizzie: "If we don't do it, someone else will. It's about control and hubris—exactly what Kubrick is mocking in Dr. Strangelove. There's so much hubris in thinking you can control what's uncontrollable." (46:58)
• Chris delivers a passionate critique:
  • “AI is being sold as an existential conflict... but there is very little actual evidence that these tools make anybody more productive... it’s management selling to management.” (47:28)
  • “Cognitive abilities decline quickly when you stop thinking for yourself... The tragedy is, with AI, the nuclear bomb is being detonated inside every home.” (49:00)
  • “We need to come up with some way of regulating it...” (50:11)
• Ed: AI development can be like seeking “first contact” with something superhuman; similar compulsions drove nuclear research. (50:46)

15. The Call for Curiosity—But with Prudence (51:44–52:49)

• Lizzie: "There's too much here... so much unexplored. I don't necessarily see the appeal of rushing to know what’s out there, with AI or in space."
• Chris: Stresses the need for healthy curiosity, but not reckless abandon—"It cannot simply be a zero sum game of reckless abandon..." (52:18)

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Notable Quotes

• Ed Helms:
  "This is America, baby. That's right. We are literally nuking space in this moment." (05:40)

• Chris Winterbauer:
  "Let’s put some radiation inside of a closed system and see what happens. We’re going to shake the snow globe with uranium." (06:52)
  "Now I'm going to die for my country for an ambiguous test that we're not sure why we're doing at the end of the day." (14:20)
  "You’d be going basically back to hunter gatherer." (35:00)
  On AI: "The tragedy is, with AI, the nuclear bomb is being detonated inside every home." (49:00)

• Lizzie Bassett:
  "I just didn't shed a single tear [for The Iron Giant]. So maybe I have no soul." (11:52)
  About the arms race: "There was some level of mass psychosis happening...where people were just like, yep, good plan, go right ahead." (39:05)
  "There's too much here. There's so much unexplored here... I do not see the appeal necessarily of feeling the need to go out and know what's out there." (51:47)

• On the press coverage:
  "In blast tonight may be dazzling." (15:51)
  "The atmosphere is the only thing maintaining the life on our planet. Let's poke a hole in it. Let's see what happens." (24:00)
  "The atomaniacs, which I think we kind of live up to that." (43:17)

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Key Timestamps

• 02:10–03:55 – Guest intro & podcast premise
• 06:13–09:35 – Cold War arms/space race & Operation Fishbowl
• 10:27–11:44 – Cold War films, Dr. Strangelove, Iron Giant
• 12:32–14:48 – Early test failures & clean-up “teams”
• 15:32–18:41 – Government press releases & public spectacle
• 21:59–25:49 – The Starfish Prime event: launch, detonation, aurora
• 29:53–36:23 – EMPs fried Hawaii electronics, pop culture, societal vulnerability
• 37:23–42:41 – Artificial radiation belt harms satellites, risks to astronauts
• 42:41–44:08 – Global reaction, test considered a "success" (!), Kennedy cancels next step
• 45:03–46:12 – Test ban treaties post-Starfish Prime
• 46:12–51:44 – Parallels to AI, regulation, philosophical reflections
• 52:49–53:39 – Close and playful discussion of using EMPs in rom-coms

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Memorable Moments

• The hilarious pitches for turning nuclear disaster into a rom-com, e.g. “EMPerfect for Each Other.” (53:22)
• “Operation Fishbowl sounds less like a nuclear testing program and more like something you'd win tickets to see at Sea World.” (09:36)
• Ed’s dry summary: “Nuking space is a great way to get everyone to agree on a few ground rules.” (46:13)
• Chris’s prepping anecdote about a former colleague's EMP-proof tractor (36:23)
• Philosophical musing: “It cannot simply be a zero sum game of reckless abandon…” (52:18)

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This episode expertly balances history, humor, cultural references, and sobering cautionary tales. For those unfamiliar with the story, it offers a captivating retelling of a high-stakes experiment gone awry, the enduring lessons it left, and why humanity’s “toddler with nukes” reputation is far from over.

Transcript

[Ed Helms]

Operation Fishbowl sounds less like a nuclear testing program and more like something you'd win tickets to see at Sea World.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I don't know which is more depressing.

[Lizzie Bassett]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

[Ed Helms]

This is Special Agent Riegel, Special Agent Bradley Hall.

[Special Agent Riegel / FBI Agent]

In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world.

[Narrator of The Sixth Bureau Podcast]

The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets.

[Special Agent Riegel / FBI Agent]

Listen to the 6th Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nancy Glass]

I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt season two podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything.

[Narrator of The Sixth Bureau Podcast]

I was a monster.

[Nancy Glass]

Listen to Burden of guilt season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Lizzie Bassett]

What if mind control is real?

[Chris Winterbauer]

If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

[Ed Helms]

When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

[Ed Helms]

I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Can you get someone to join your cult?

[Amanda Knox]

NLP was used on me to access my subconscious mind games.

[Lizzie Bassett]

A new podcast, exploring nlp, AKA Neuro linguistic Programming. Is it a self help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

Welcome to snafu, the show about history's greatest screw ups. I'm Ed Helms and today we'll be covering Starfish Prime. This was actually a royally nuclear screw up in our history. I'm joined today by a dynamic duo. Both are talented artists combining skills of writing, directing, produc and together they host the critically acclaimed podcast what Went Wrong? Which you guys have self described as a bi weekly podcast exploring moviemaking mayhem behind your favorite films. Welcome to snafu. Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Thank you.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Thank you so much for having us, Ed. Although we have since gone weekly, we will say now we need to update our text clearly and we are just gonna start off with just blowing your audience away. They can have twice as much of us as they thought they might get previously. So that's exciting.

[Ed Helms]

Do not correct me on my own podcast. How dare you. What are you.

[Chris Winterbauer]

If I may, a couple of other mistakes that we should just start off with.

[Ed Helms]

Did I say your names? Greg. That's actually an important thing to point out. You guys have a really cool podcast. Tell us a little bit about it, Lizzie.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Thank you. Well, yeah, each episode of our podcast dives into the story behind a different movie. And the theory is sort of that any movie is a miracle because of how incredibly hard they are to make, even the bad ones. And so we're just exploring, you know, the absolute manic mayhem behind movies, which you two both, I think, know a lot more about from experience than I do. I just research it. Yes, yes, he does.

[Chris Winterbauer]

But I know, Ed, I'm sure you can appreciate, I'm sure you would agree. Nobody goes into a movie hoping they're gonna make a bad movie. Nobody wants to make a bad movie. And in fact, sometimes you think you're making a great movie and it just still doesn't turn out very good. And sometimes you think you're making a terrible movie and somehow it turns out great. And so it's like, it's. I just want. I remember I used to be such an asshole when I would watch movies and think I would have done this and I would have done that. And then I made a movie and I hit my first test screening and there was that asshole who said, you should have done this. And I said, you don't. I know that, sir.

[Ed Helms]

Right, right.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I couldn't. And so we hope that we can get people to appreciate movies and the people that make them that much more because they're just so hard. They're so hard.

[Ed Helms]

I love that. In particular, I love how you're just making such a great point about how humbling the moviemaking experience is. And it does teach you to appreciate movies in a different way. The more hours and days and weeks and months that you've spent on set, the more you realize, like, this is incred. The amount of cooperation and collaboration and luck that it takes to pull something together. It's just crazy that any movie actually gets made. Well, I'm really excited to dig into today's story because it feels like something out of a movie or that should become a movie. I'm sure screenwriters have been pulling details from this event for plenty of doom worthy plots over the years. Today's snafu takes us deep into the paranoid void of the Cold War, at the point where the Space race meets the arms race. So picture this. You're on vacation in Hawaii. Maybe you're having dinner at a beachfront bar in Waikiki. It's a warm July night in 1962. You're listening to a Navy band play some classy dance tunes, when suddenly a massive flash lights up the sky. The band goes quiet. A red glow streaks across the sky like someone just opened a zipper to hell. It's not aliens, although that would be a reasonable guess. This is America, baby. That's right. We are literally nuking space in this moment. Apparently during the Cold War, literally nothing was off the table.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Is this a Michael Bay movie?

[Ed Helms]

It's 1962. Cold War had pushed the US and the Soviet Union into this intense arms race. It turns out it extended far beyond Earth. So scientists were asking really hard questions, like, what happens if we set off a nuclear bomb in outer space? Because obviously, if you aren't sure of the answer, the safest and most productive solution is just to do it and nuke it and see what happens. Because that's science. This is, you know, that's. I guess it's like using our entire universe as a guinea pig. Feels safe to me.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, right. It's a closed system. Let's put some radiation inside of it and see what happens. You know, it's a. We're going to shake the snow globe with some uranium.

[Ed Helms]

We're a resilient species, right? We can handle our own. Our own fallout.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Is there a why here? Like, is there a reason why it would be advantageous to be able to nuke space?

[Ed Helms]

It's a great question, Lizzy, and I think that the answer is just the Cold War brought out terrible judgment in, especially in our sort of military weapons testing apparatus. People got real excited about nuclear capabilities and just wanted to see what they could do. And so, of course, they just go way out over the middle of the Pacific and just start setting off nuclear bombs. I think they just wanted to see if this was. Would be an effective weapon. It turns out it kind of is, but in a way that no one quite expected. So.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And at this time, too, we're detonating. I mean, I believe we've detonated nukes underwater, we've detonated them underground, we've detonated them at varying altitudes above a theoretical populated area. It's like, what is the maximal effect that we can create by detonating them in these various ways?

[Ed Helms]

And just logically, it seems like the higher you go, the greater the impact to Earth.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Certainly in terms of fallout. Right. You would Expect.

[Ed Helms]

And so it just seems the higher you go, the dumber the experiment. Yeah, we're not there yet.

[Lizzie Bassett]

The least effective potentially at what you're trying to do. Like, if this is ideally something targeted, the higher you go, the wider a swath it covers. Right.

[Ed Helms]

That's the logic. And that's why they did it out over the Pacific without a lot of expectation or knowledge foreknowledge about what could happen. Turns out a lot. So ever since World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been on again, off again testing nukes. And in the late 50s, the Soviets had decided tests were very much back on. In response, the US Launched Operation Fishbowl. It was a series of high altitude nuclear tests using Thor missiles. Fishbowl was part of a larger project which involved 36 nuclear detonations in the Pacific, all done in 1962 alone. Fishbowl launches had their own maritime themed code names. Bluegill, starfish, kingfish, et cetera. Very creative. Right.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Also, I love how anodyne they sound. Right. It's very innocuous. This is not a big starfish, jellyfish,

[Ed Helms]

clownfish.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Nuclear Megalodon swallows your entire world. Let's not give it a scary name doing this thing.

[Ed Helms]

No, you're right.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

Operation Fishbowl sounds less like a nuclear testing program and more like something you'd win tickets to see at Sea World.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. I don't know which is more depressing, but yes.

[Ed Helms]

I'm curious if this is conjuring any Cold War movies for you guys. Do you have a favorite Cold War movie that's sort of nuclear oriented?

[Chris Winterbauer]

The China Syndrome always comes to mind as a favorite of mine.

[Ed Helms]

That coffee cup, the little. The tremors in the cough in the. Right, that's where you first see it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Oh, boy, that's so it's about that visceral, that theoretical China Syndrome. A nuclear meltdown could go through the core of the earth to, you know, the antipodal point on the other side of the planet. I always loved that one. And then like War Games was always a big one for me growing up. Lizzie, I'm not sure if there are any that come to mind for you.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Definitely. I mean, you know, immediately, as soon as you were starting to explain the sort of like race to blow up more and more and bigger and bigger nukes, it immediately makes me think of the doomsday machine and Dr. Strangelove, of course. And just the whole concept there being that you needed to explain the existence of the Doomsday Machine in order for it to be Effective, but they didn't do that. They just built it. And I love the sort of. You're 10 steps ahead and yet also 15 steps behind on that one. That feels applicable. And then I just always. It's not a movie. But, man, I loved the Americans.

[Ed Helms]

Oh, yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That show is so good. And such an interesting exploration of the, like, mentality behind both the American and Russian sides of the Cold War.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And it's interesting. What you're describing is very much the. It is the climax spoilers of the Iron Giant, which. The movie ends with a nuclear device being detonated in space because the Iron Giant, as I wept, flies up to meet it and sacrifice himself to protect humans. And that. That movie is very much about, like, could a weapon decide that it didn't want to be a weap. Which is a really interesting concept when you have all of these incredible nuclear technologies that could be used for energy and were being used to greater and greater explosive effect.

[Ed Helms]

Yeah. Wow, that got deep.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Sorry.

[Special Agent Riegel / FBI Agent]

Well done.

[Chris Winterbauer]

No, watch the Iron Giant. It's a great movie. Lizzie disagrees.

[Ed Helms]

It is a classic.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I didn't say it wasn't a great movie. I just didn't shed a single tear. So maybe I have no soul.

[Ed Helms]

I'm cutting your feed, Lizzie. I'm cutting your feed. This, to me, is very War Games. Also that one that you brought up. And I think mainly that movie was such a big deal to me as a kid. I saw it on hbo, like, over and over and over again.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. And like, are these men exploring the frontiers of science, or are these little boys playing very dangerous games? Like, by putting it in that context, it really draws a really stark juxtaposition. That's interesting and I think forces some compelling thoughts from the audience. I still think that movie's really effective to this day.

[Ed Helms]

Let's get into operation fishbowl. On June 2, the first attempt at a high altitude test failed.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Failed.

[Ed Helms]

When the tracking system lost the missile after it fired, the Navy scrambled to destroy it before it could detonate. Thank God they did. In the second test, the Thor missile malfunctioned again, and the warhead once again had to be destroyed mid flight, showering the Pacific Ocean with plutonium contaminated confetti. Apparently, this led to special underwater ordinance disposal teams sweeping the ocean for the next two weeks.

[Lizzie Bassett]

It seems like you should stop.

[Ed Helms]

Right?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Maybe stop.

[Ed Helms]

I don't know if I'm getting into their heads. They're probably like, well, we haven't learned the thing we set out to learn yet.

[Lizzie Bassett]

We have learned how to poison the entire Pacific Ocean.

[Ed Helms]

We've made a terrible mess or two,

[Narrator of The Sixth Bureau Podcast]

but

[Ed Helms]

we cleaned it up.

[Chris Winterbauer]

There's all this sushi around we can eat.

[Ed Helms]

You know, it turns out we have special underwater ordinance disposal teams that we can dispatch at any time.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Those are just people. That's just people with a fancy name.

[Ed Helms]

But you're right, Lizzy. Like, do you actually have that? Or is that something you hastily scrambled together in the last episode?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Is it just like a fishing net that you're, you know, casting wide across

[Ed Helms]

the ocean and then you just gave it a very official sounding name?

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

If you were like, in the army, what would be your enthusiasm level for joining that cleanup crew? If your superior was like, guys, put on your wetsuits so low.

[Chris Winterbauer]

But. Because. But there has been such incredible bravery from certain, you know, the Fukushima event in Japan and the individuals who, like, went in knowing they might never. They wouldn't survive, you know, to clean that up. Or the divers in Chernobyl that went through the water system and did survive. Like, those people are, you know, heroes. And those. Those things could have melted down even worse. What's terrible about this in such, like a catch 22 way is the pointlessness. Like you're saying. And they're. The question is, to what end are we even doing this to begin with? And now I'm going to die for my country for an ambiguous test that we're not sure why we're doing at the end of the day. I think that's the real tricky thing here. I would say no, and I would be court martialed, I'm sure.

[Ed Helms]

Does it call to mind any particular or specific film set disasters?

[Lizzie Bassett]

It definitely makes me think of the abyss because I believe they shot a lot of that inside of an old nuclear reactor. That's. That's what he filled with water in order to get all of those underwater sequences. And because it's James Cameron, he's like strapping concrete blocks to his shoes and going underwater with a camera and punching his safety diver in the face. Cause he can't get up fast enough. And that movie sounded such a nightmare to work on.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It also reminds me the end of Ghostbusters all just the marshmallow everywhere. And then they're just like, all right, let's clean it up, call it a day. You know, that sort of thing.

[Ed Helms]

All right, well, so just to be clear, all of these tests that are being conducted, they're not secret. The joint task force conducting the tests warned the public with Press releases on June 20. One Honolulu headline read, quote, in blast Tonight may be dazzling.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Good view.

[Ed Helms]

Likely in blast. I guess everyone understood that would be a nuclear blast. And for some reason they didn't want to say nuclear in the headline. I don't know.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I can think of some reasons.

[Ed Helms]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Why you want to spruce it up a little bit?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Let's save on some ink on that one. And. And blast.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Okay.

[Ed Helms]

It was even reported that the time was set for 11pm and that quote, the white fireball is expected to spread across the sky, changing colors as it grows. I mean that sounds kind of festive.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I did.

[Ed Helms]

I just.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Again, let's give it a positive spin. John Wayne. Let's go shoot the conqueror. In an old nuclear testing site and everybody is involved. A lot of folks ended up getting cancer and it's kind of like a. That's another Hollywood tragedy. We need to cover it at some point. There was not a lot of understanding around the nuclear. There's a radiation disposal site that's not very well managed in the San Fernando Valley over by Woodland Hills that I didn't know about until I lived there briefly.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Spooky Ed, what did they know about the effects of nuclear testing like this at the time? Like, did they had enough time passed since, you know, they were actually detonating these bombs that they understood the long term health effects on people or were they just kind of like, ah, blow it up in the sky?

[Ed Helms]

That's a great question. I mean the first nuclear reactors were built in the 50s. We're in 1962 now. There is a lot still unknown. I covered another nuclear disaster, a reactor meltdown in Canada that Jimmy Carter showed up to help fix when he was a young soldier. And part of that story is how the rescue mission to prevent the reactor from melting down. Their judgment was clouded by how little they knew. And that was just a few years before this. Obviously we're post World War II, so the, the horrible effects and fallout from the Japanese detonations of hydrogen bombs were well known and the radiation fallout and so forth. But the specific dangers at play, I think that they're sort of trying to figure that out with these experiments. This is a weird thing because they're putting these ads in the or not ads, they're putting the news in the newspaper and encouraging the public to sort of like have fun with the spectacle of unimaginable destructive power. It's almost like pull up a lawn chair and just watch this horrible thing. And I do think that part of that may have been a little bit of a propaganda angle to just sort of be like hey, don't worry, it's not that big a deal. But it also reflects a lack of awareness about the actual dangers at play.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Support is available 247 with VRBoCare.

[Nancy Glass]

We're here day or night, ready whenever

[Lizzie Bassett]

you need help, because a great trip starts with the right support.

[Amanda Knox]

In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief.

[Chris Winterbauer]

The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history.

[Amanda Knox]

Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict. A villain. A nurse named Lucy Letby.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Lucy Letby has been found guilty.

[Amanda Knox]

But what if we didn't get the whole story?

[Ed Helms]

The moment you look at the whole

[Chris Winterbauer]

picture, the case collapses.

[Amanda Knox]

I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast the Case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it. To ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was.

[Lizzie Bassett]

No voicing of any skepticism or doubt.

[Ed Helms]

It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong.

[Amanda Knox]

Listen to Doubt the Case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Special Agent Riegel / FBI Agent]

China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside.

[Ed Helms]

This is Special Agent Riegel, Special Agent Bradley Hall.

[Narrator of The Sixth Bureau Podcast]

This MSS officer has no idea the US Government is onto him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast?

[Ed Helms]

I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer. No doubt, no question of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It was unbelievable.

[Special Agent Riegel / FBI Agent]

This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets.

[Narrator of The Sixth Bureau Podcast]

Listen to the 6th Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nancy Glass]

I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt season two podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumprite became the victim of a random crime.

[Chris Winterbauer]

He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground.

[Nancy Glass]

He identified Jermaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Jermaine was sentenced to 99 years.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I'm like, lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth.

[Nancy Glass]

For 22 years, only two people knew the truth. Until a confession changed Everything.

[Narrator of The Sixth Bureau Podcast]

I was a monster.

[Nancy Glass]

Listen to Burden of guilt season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

So after these early fireworks shows had failed twice, naturally they tried again. But this time, they just wanted to go even bigger, even higher and even stronger. So the third test had a new code name, and that is Starfish Prime. On July 9, at exactly 11pm, a Thor intermediate range ballistic missile carrying a 1.4 megaton W49 thermonuclear warhead launched from Johnston Atoll, a remote island in the Pacific. It climbed 250 miles into space and then detonated successfully. Now, that's the same altitude as the orbit of the International Space Station, which I'm only. It didn't exist at the time. I'm just telling you for sort of like comparison.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Thought they were just firing wildly into the sky and there's.

[Ed Helms]

I mean, they kind of are, but, yeah, true. For comparison, airplanes only fly as high as six or eight miles into the atmosphere. We're talking 250 miles up here. So there was no mushroom cloud. There was no shock wave, just a burst of light so bright it could be seen 870 miles away in Hawaii. So they're not even close to Hawaii. They are almost 1,000 miles from Hawaii. And yes, the expectant crowds were watching the sky, and they got a heck of a show. One newspaper said after the first blinding flash, the spot was haloed in greenish yellow light, which spread out, turning pink and then deep red. What followed was a swirling, glowing bubble of plasma that distorted the Earth's magnetic field and carved a temporary cavity in the ionosphere.

[Lizzie Bassett]

This sounds not good.

[Ed Helms]

These are big words. And I don't know if this is like, we'll get into the specifics, but it already sounds scary.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Like you said, Ed, it's like we didn't have a great understanding of how interconnected maybe our world is. And we're about to enter things like the hole in the ozone by the 80s and whatnot. And it is interesting. The atmosphere is the only thing maintaining the life on our planet. Let's poke a hole in it. Let's see what happens.

[Ed Helms]

You know, the New York Times story the next day described it as a luminous red rim around a fireball created solid walls of heavy color ranging from yellow oranges to deep reds. That's shimmered for a full 15 minutes, split by white lines that arched north and south parallel to one another through the reddish glow. So what's happening here is we essentially created an Aurora Borealis. This Is kind of a fun, nerdy film thing, I'm sure. You know, one of the complaints about the Star wars movies, especially the early movies, is the explosions in outer space are not realistic because there's no oxygen in outer space. So you can't have fire in outer space. And so how did these, you know, big fiery explosions happen? Well, I was sort of wondering the same thing here. So you might be wondering, wondering why an explosion that high would still be so bright and visible when, when there is no oxygen. The explosion caused a massive burst of charged particles that collided with atmospheric molecules, resulting in an aurora borealis. On top of that, despite the lower oxygen levels, the explosion produced such intense radiation that it excited the surrounding atmosphere, leading to the bright light. Another writer called it the most spectacular far flung effects of any man made event in history. And I have to think he's probably right. That's quite accurate.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

You know, if it's something seen a thousand miles away, I think solar flares,

[Chris Winterbauer]

I don't know if they were well understood at this time, but I believe there was a really big one recorded. I don't know if they knew what it was at the time back in the 19th century. So this would have been like pre industrial revolution, pre electricity. What's interesting, I know we're going to get to this is I think there's always this big concern that an enormous solar flare could have the same effects. Like this enormous radiation event could disrupt electrical systems, wireless systems, et cetera. And so it is interesting. I'm just curious if they knew, was there some thought, oh, is this going to be like a solar flare? Does this experiment confirm some hypothesis we had about, you know what I mean, like, like a man made version of a solar flare or is this really like let's put these lizards in a jar and see what happens?

[Ed Helms]

I think that's a very astute like question. And I'm not sure how much was understood about the effects of solar flares on electrical components at the time, but it's so much better understood now. That's a very cool question. I'd kind of like to dig into that myself. This created six full minutes of daylight in Hawaii in the middle of the night. So one Navy dance band playing at a beachfront hotel in Waikiki walked out of their gig to watch the night sky jo by hotel waiters. If you didn't know this was coming, or even if you did know it was coming and you're just like on that beach in Waikiki and you walk out and the sky just starts to glow these crazy colors.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I think it depends on, like, how. It depends on how much propaganda they've been fed at this point about the importance of nuclear power and, like, how cool it is that we've got it. Because I do wonder about that. I wonder if. If this was like, yeah, I'm gonna go sit out in my lawn chair and watch this. Like, heck yeah, get the commies. If people were excited. Because if you don't totally understand the fallout, literally and figuratively of this, then it might not be as. As alarming. I mean, it would be weird, for sure.

[Chris Winterbauer]

But it's also so biblical, right? I could imagine somebody. Let's say you don't know what it is. This is the star of Bethlehem times a billion, in a sense, right? There's something. To me, man has created an artificial sun. Not an artificial sun that exists in your living room. An artificial sun that lights up half of the world right at this point in time. And it feels apocalyptic, Promethean, you know what I mean? At the same time, I literally cannot imagine, because I know what I know now, and I have never seen anything like that before. And, you know, there are certain things I've seen. When the LA fires came through last year, you know, the Eaton Canyon fire and whatnot, you know, and seeing that up close, and you see the power of this natural. Well, it wasn't started naturally, but you see the power of fire as it rips through a seemingly sturdy neighborhood, you know, and it dwarfs a human right, and it dwarfs our attempts to stop it. And then you think about this, which is that with human growth hormone injected to it, you know, to an exponential level, and, I don't know, I could see somebody, like, weeping about it. I could see somebody feeling utterly hopeless and lost. I could, like Lizzie said, I could see somebody thinking, wow, we are going to dominate. The American empire is going to win. It would certainly warrant a strong reaction, you know, in any given direction.

[Ed Helms]

I'm also. I'm just wondering about populations on some of these remote. Oh, yeah, archipelagos. And just all around.

[Lizzie Bassett]

That's true.

[Ed Helms]

That never received any kind of notification and saw this stuff and just must have thought the end of the world was happening.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, it's a God arriving on our planet. It's like, how else could you explain this sort of thing?

[Ed Helms]

While it looked incredible, the shockwave of the explosion was, as you might guess from a massive nuke, pretty devastating. Almost immediately, the explosion triggered a powerful electromagnetic pulse which sent a power surge through the grid on Oahu again. Hawaii is almost 1,000 miles away. But the burst destroyed over 300 street lights, tripped burglar alarms and fried the equipment of a telephone company. Here are a few eyewitness accounts from the night collected by the Honolulu Star Advertiser. I love a newspaper that just calls itself an advertiser, by the way. We just sell ads. Oh, we have news, but like mainly we just sell ads.

[Chris Winterbauer]

YouTube should learn something from this, let's be honest.

[Special Agent Riegel / FBI Agent]

Exactly.

[Ed Helms]

Anyway, here are actual eyewitness accounts. One 11 year old was asked what he thought. He said he was both scared and a little let down because he'd been waiting to see a mushroom. He thought he'd see a mushroom cloud. And I'm just like, kid, where are your parents? Another guy who honestly doesn't seem that different from the 11 year old said he had been following along with the the news of all the different failed tests. Said he was actually a little disappointed and that it didn't quite live up to his expectations. I mean, what do you, what I

[Chris Winterbauer]

would love to see like the army general reading these reviews saying like, let's prep the bigger bomb. Yeah, let's do it. Let's show these assholes what we're capable of.

[Lizzie Bassett]

You know, that's what I mean. They've been advertising this like this has been set up for years at this point. Not this specific thing, but like the idea of nuclear power has become so ubiquitous for these for an 11 year old that he's like, heck yeah, mushroom cloud. Can't wait to go outside at 11pm and see it.

[Ed Helms]

A reporter embedded with a naval observation team in American Samoa said the men around him were cool as cukes. Most quote, simply stood or sat quietly by their equipment and watched it run, praying that it kept running. I think they're talking about their equipment not being affected. It was one of the earliest and most dramatic demonstrations of how a high altitude detonation could disrupt electronics over vast distances. Chris, this is the electromagnetic pulse which you brought up at the beginning. EMP as it's also known. It was a warning in bright neon lights about the fragility of our growing technological infrastructure. Does the EMP make an appearance in cinema?

[Chris Winterbauer]

The Matrix is the matrix.

[Ed Helms]

They use EMPs to fight the squiddies, the machines.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Right. Of course there is the book. There's a book, I don't know how well known it's called. It's called One Second after it's written by somebody who's long tried. Wanted to warn our government about the effects of an emp. Specifically, I believe detonated somewhere over Kansas, roughly central to the United States, which would effectively black out most of the country. And a lot of things that people. Unless your equipment is very specifically hardened or predates something or is in a Faraday box or whatever, it's gone. I mean, planes are going down, cell phones don't work. And by the way, it's like you said, Ed, it's fried. They cannot be rebooted. They cannot be restarted.

[Ed Helms]

They can't just be turned back on.

[Chris Winterbauer]

No, this is not, you know, blow in the cartridge, put the Nintendo 64 back on.

[Ed Helms]

Right.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's done. This again, this was my understanding when I read this book. And that is a much more terrifying outcome when you really think about it, than a detonation slightly above the surface in like Chicago, for example, which is the premise of House of Dynamite, which just came out, you know, the Catherine Bigelow film. Because ultimately you see the fragility of our entire system, which is based on electronic infrastructure. You know, not only is our power grid, all of our information systems, we really don't have, you know, paper based information system backups for most things at this point in time, of course, everything would fall apart. You know, your food system, your refrigeration systems, your medical systems, your utility systems. You'd be back to the Stone Age.

[Ed Helms]

This is a little. This is Blade Runner 2. Right.

[Chris Winterbauer]

There was, I believe, a nuclear setback or something like that. There was an information dark age in Blade Runner 2049 that they reference. Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

And I think they're back to paper.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yes. As a protective measure. And I think, I believe in Dune. I'm going to get this wrong. Somebody in your audience correct me. I think Frank Herbert, the way he describes their technology in Dune is like a different technological branch than the computerized systems that we used. I don't know if that's because of any sort of reference to EMPs, et cetera, but it's just again, it's an example of a different way of creating information systems than what we've relied on.

[Ed Helms]

It's wild to think about. It would set us back to roughly what, like 1850.

[Chris Winterbauer]

18, yeah. I actually would think earlier, because we don't have any of the skills that folks had, broadly speaking.

[Ed Helms]

That's a great point. So we don't have. We have to relearn all the. All of our.

[Chris Winterbauer]

You'd be going back pre agricultural, you know, revolution. I think you'd be going basically back to hunter gatherer. In a lot of senses you'd have. It's funny how you Realize how surface your knowledge really is. I could tell you that I vaguely understand solar flares. If anything goes wrong with any piece of equipment in my life, I could not diagnose it.

[Ed Helms]

Right, right.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Of course. To take it to the geek squad and they only know how to, you know, do X, Y or Z things. And it's. We've. That's been the benefit of specialization. Right. Is that you can make advancements on these specific tech trees, but you're very vulnerable if it's disrupted.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, that's why we should all go to trade school.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yes, yeah, exactly.

[Ed Helms]

This is why EMPs are also a big deal in the survivalist community because.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Ed Helms]

Yeah. There's a lot of obsession about, as you mentioned, Faraday cage protection, having vehicles that use no electronics.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah. All the push to start cars with computer chips. I mean, like, I think the average vehicle has dozens of computer chips in it by now.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Oh yeah. What could you even get something from like the early 90s and before.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yes.

[Ed Helms]

You'd have to go back to like a purely. Even the ignition has to be mechanical and not electrical. So it's a. Yeah, it's a wild. And yeah. You're going back to the 70s.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I worked with a gentleman when I was at intel years ago who was kind of a Mormon prepper and he had a homestead out in Arizona and he. Aside from a wall of guns and a wall of flashlights, he also had a tractor that I believe ran on like it was a wood burning engine.

[Ed Helms]

What, like a steam engine?

[Chris Winterbauer]

Effectively, yeah. And that was you actually, I believe, can see a version of it in the movie Train Dr. Which I also highly recommend. But anyway, he was a hardcore prepper and that was. He had all of these redundancies that did not require any electricity.

[Ed Helms]

Wow. Yeah, that's cool. Do you have his number?

[Chris Winterbauer]

You know, he didn't give it out to anybody. I don't know why. He just didn't want us showing up at his squad.

[Ed Helms]

He had the coordinates of that.

[Chris Winterbauer]

What are your skills? And I was like, I can craft a skill. Tight 90 minute podcast, sir.

[Narrator of The Sixth Bureau Podcast]

Yeah.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Would you let me in?

[Ed Helms]

So the EMP waxing the power grid was bad enough, but the long term effects were worse. So the military had made sure that all the satellites orbiting Earth in 1962 were safely out of range of the blast. So we're good, right? Well, no, not quite because not only was the initial EMP blast way larger than expected, I love that, by the way. They just didn't know how big the explosion would be. The detonation also launched high energy particles into Earth's magnetic field. It created an artificial radiation belt that spread out from the spot we nuked. And it definitely was not harmless. It became a wave of radiation that caused extensive damage to satellites. American, Canadian, British and even one Russian satellite, including the first ever satellite to broadcast a TV signal, Telstar one. So that satellite's run in with the new Starfish radiation belt made it just the first victim. The charged particles lasted in our atmosphere for at least 10 years, zapping satellites that passed through it and damaging fully a third of all satellites around the Earth in 1962. I was not familiar with this story before a few months ago and was floored by this. Yeah, it just feels like the sort of scientific approach to this kind of experimentation is what a child brings to a bug. And it's like what happens if I smash it with a hammer? Like what? Let me just see. And it's just, it's kind of weirdly heartless and thoughtless, but it's like the curiosity is so powerful or something.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah, this is strange because, you know, we've talked about this quite a lot across this episode but like, no, they may not have known the exact effects of this. Clearly they didn't know that a lot of this was going to happen. But I feel like for sure they knew enough in terms of how powerful these things were that they should have been more careful than just, ah, just shoot it up there, try it again three times. Third time's the charm. Like, yeah, that kind of recklessness with something this powerful does feel crazy. Like it feels like there was some level of like mass psychosis happening in terms of the arms race where people were just like, yeah, yep, good, yep, good plan, go right ahead.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I think what makes it feel militaristic and not and, and candidly like unscientific is the lack of a hypothesis. And I don't, I don't know this story. I had never heard this either Ed, like you said. Instead it's more, well, maybe this will do something. And we should probably know what that is in case the Russians also try it. It's a fear based result as opposed to some sort of aspirational, optimistic, you know, let's push the frontier of human knowledge forward in a way that could possibly be beneficial for humanity.

[Ed Helms]

Wild One Navy sailor who told his story was onboard a ship near the launch site and so obviously a lot closer than Hawaii. He said the crew were given badges to measure their radiation exposure and ordered to do anti radiation washes. Off the ship. And years later, he said most of the men he served with on board had died of weird cancers, which is horrible. The EMP blast that knocked out electronics in Hawaii created a wave of studies about how an electromagnetic pulse could disable electronic systems from civilian infrastructure to military systems. It was a big moment in realizing that frying power grids with distant explosions might be a useful trick we hadn't thought about before. Also just another thing to be terrified of. On top of all the EMP fallout, there's the orbiting radiation. Not only did the radiation from the explosion slap satellites out of orbit, but it also disrupted Earth's natural zones of trapped charged particles called the Van Allen belts. Now, that definitely sounds like a luxury leather emporium, but these belts are like a protective shield around the planet, and altering them created a serious risk for future satellites and astronauts. That September, NASA changed their flight plans because they realized that their astronaut would be killed by residual Starfish prime radiation if he flew over 640km in altitude. So, wow, how wild is that? He had flown through that radiation? It just would have of.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I mean, well, and also, like, spaceships are hardened against radiation, right? Because when you break through our atmosphere, you're exposed to all the radiation from the sun. That is a lot of it is blocked or deflected right by our atmosphere. So then you think about this astronaut who's in a radiation hardened to a certain extent environment, right. Would still be killed by this amount of excess radiation sent, you know, lingering in our atmosphere in this moment. It's just. Yeah, it's not even like he's, like, naked out there. You know what I mean, Getting hit with this thing. It's just crazy.

[Ed Helms]

Obviously, this wasn't just a local issue over a particular spot in the Pacific Ocean. It affected the entire near Earth environment. The artificial radiation belt slowly faded, but the lesson lingered. Detonating nuclear weapons in space had consequences we didn't understand at the time. Nations around the world, especially the Soviet Union, were watching. Of course, Russian radio called the test a crime perpetrated by, quote, American atom maniacs. I love that term. Sounds like animaniacs.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Yeah, the atomaniacs, which.

[Ed Helms]

The atomaniacs, which I think we kind of live up to that. We're atomaniacs.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I was gonna say. They're not wrong. No, they're neither of those counts. Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

But even taking all of this into consideration, the test was consistent, considered a success. They were like, oh, wow, we did so much damage we didn't expect, and we got so much useful Data, look at what we're learning.

[Chris Winterbauer]

It's a win. Let's chalk it up to a win. Take the win, guys.

[Ed Helms]

In all, between 1958 and 1962, there were eight known nuclear tests in space. Four by the US and four by the USSR but Starfish prime was the highest, the most powerful, and the most consequential. And when US Satellites started falling, President Kennedy canceled the next high altitude test, which had been planned to go three times higher.

[Lizzie Bassett]

No, you don't need to. You just don't need to. I will be honest, and I'm curious what you guys think about this, but I have absolutely zero desire whatsoever to ever go to space. Like, I don't even understand the desire.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Other kids wanted to be astronauts, and I said, I'm good here. I just was never interested, even as a kid. It terrified me. It always terrified me. The idea of not having an exit is so scary to me.

[Ed Helms]

Oh, yeah, that. Well, that's claustrophobia. That's a whole separate thing. Is that what it is? That's my issue. I agree.

[Lizzie Bassett]

I don't like the void.

[Chris Winterbauer]

That's the point. Exactly. It's the void. It's that if I. I'm okay in a small space, if I know that there's stuff out beyond my small space. But this idea that I'm just out in a vacuum and not tethered to the only habitable rock at this point in time, is just existentially crushing to me.

[Ed Helms]

So I mentioned that President Kennedy canceled the next high altitude test. Turns out that was just a pause. Because they wound up doing at least a few more what they considered successful high altitude tests later in 1962. Ultimately, these crazy high altitude tests, in combination with the Cuban Missile Crisis, led to the 1963 partial test ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear tests in space, underwater, and in the atmosphere. And in 1967, the outer space Treaty followed, banning weapons of mass destruction from Earth's orbit and beyond. Because at the very least, nuking space is a great way to get everyone to agree on a few ground rules. That is our story. It's been fun taking these diversions with you already. And all of this, to me, like, I feel like we've gone to some sort of interesting philosophical places already. But I do want to pick your brains just a little bit more. Because the way that our governmental and military institutions approached testing of this nature, to me, feels a lot like the way that we are just lurching blindly into this artificial intelligence era. And of course, that also has reverberations Very directly to our business, our industry of filmmaking and television. But in a larger sense, we don't know. We have so many warnings and so many people saying that this could be so catastrophic, and yet it feels like we're just not taking any steps to mitigate that danger in the same way that they were just like, hey, we gotta just do it and see what happens with these high altitude nuclear tests.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Well, it's back to Dr. Strangelove, because the whole motivation to your point about AI is, well, if we don't do it, someone else is going to do it. And it's more important that this incredibly powerful technology is in our hands because we're the good guys and we understand how to navigate this. And that's exactly what Kubrick is making fun of with that movie. Because there's so much hubris involved in that, thinking that you can control what is essentially uncontrollable. But that is the path that we're all hurtling down.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Well, if I may, my anti AI screed briefly. I think the cynical difference with AI, it's being sold as an existential conflict. But what's interesting is that on the one hand, you have somebody like Sam Altman or The folks, the CEOs of these companies, or Elon Musk, and they're saying this is going to be universally beneficial in so many ways. AI is not going to replace your job. It's going to.

[Ed Helms]

Disney's not buying it.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Right, Right. I believe this is so much like an offshoot of the Silicon Valley desire for transhumanism. Could this be a stepping stone to uploading my brain? It's effectively a group of men, candidly, who are deeply uncomfortable with the fact that they're going to die at some point in time. And I think that the tragedy with AI right now is there is very little actual evidence that these tools make anybody more productive. You can look at the evidence that's presented for coding tools like, can you generate a great deal of code? The answer is yes. Is that code replicable, widely usable, bug free? No. It's oftentimes created in a way that doesn't make a lot of sense for the specific application that you're using it. And then it requires more time by the engineer to debug and to defrag this thing that's been created. But because it's been this incredible economic engine, we would be in a recession right now if it were not for AI. Investment like that is 100% true. And as a result, it is in the best interests of all incumbent parties to pump this as much as possible. But it's effectively just management selling it to management. These are just. The heads of these companies are saying to the heads of other companies, your employees could be five times more effective if they were using AI. But the truth is, again, a lot of studies have shown if you use ChatGPT frequently, cognitive abilities decline very rapidly. It turns out when you stop thinking for yourself, it's harder for you to think for yourself. And it turns out the brain is a muscle, and it turns out that you actually need to use it frequently. And I think the best thing that a human has is like, you know, semantic awareness and contextual understanding and judgment. The difference between the nuclear tests. Right. Yes. Maybe a lot of people were irradiated, and our government has done a poor job of providing recompense for the people who were affected by these, you know, impacts. But the difference is this nuclear bomb is being detonated inside of every home. And it's just insane that we're not regulating this. I'm not saying there couldn't be good aspects to this technology, but it's incredibly powerful and destructive, and we need to come with. Up, up, like you said, Ed, with some way of regulating it. But, you know, the Marc Andreessens of the world have convinced us that that. Or Peter Thiel has convinced us that regulation is literally the Antichrist. Anti AI screed. Done. I apologize. Boy, I just find it very frustrating.

[Ed Helms]

My headphones are on fire. That was. Yeah. My eardrums are burned, scorched, and I love it. These are some really, really salient points in there. Chris, I appreciate you going there. There's also within the AI, which. And I think this is related to sort of nuclear research in a way. AI research and rapid development also has

[Chris Winterbauer]

this

[Ed Helms]

almost like a supernatural component to it where there's this compulsion to be the first contact with this sort of alien. In the case of nuclear energy, an alien energy source or something. So, like, hitherto completely unknown to humanity. Much like you brought up Prometheus earlier in that way that, like, Prometheus was like that first touch of fire to man, and nuclear energy was the same. And with AI, it's that first contact with this being that we're creating that might be sort of bigger, grander, and more intelligent than all of us that is so intoxicating that certain people just cannot resist being that first. That one who's gonna get there first.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Yeah. Well, I think it comes back to the same thing about.

[Special Agent Riegel / FBI Agent]

About.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Chris, you and I not really wanting to Go to space, Ed, you were kind of asking why. And for me, the answer is that there's too much here. There's so much unexplored here. There's so much we don't understand here about people and Earth and everything that I do not see the appeal necessarily of feeling the need to go out and know what's out there. I don't know that I need to know. And I kind of feel the same way about AI I don't really need to know what it's capable of and what it can do. And we don't know.

[Chris Winterbauer]

And I want to be clear. I do think it's important in any society to have individuals who look at the hill and say, I want to know what's on the other side of that hill. Because otherwise you become stagnant and you don't move forward. So. But I do think there is. It cannot simply be a zero sum game of reckless abandon, as we, like you said, Ed, rush headlong into something we don't fully understand and simply point at the stock market and say, number go up. We're good as we move forward. So.

[Ed Helms]

Well, I think that's a great place to wrap it up. Thank you so much, Chris and Lizzy, for joining me on snafu. This was a really fun and stimulating chat.

[Lizzie Bassett]

Thank you so much for having us.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I'm about to go dive into Starfish prime and orbital nuclear explosions for the next couple hours. I'm excited.

[Ed Helms]

Feels like maybe we have a movie on our hands.

[Chris Winterbauer]

I will say the screenwriter in me thinks, great way to get pesky cell phones out of a script. Emp. Because they are so annoying when you're writing a script. Because the question is always like, why wouldn't they just look this up? Why wouldn't they just call somebody?

[Ed Helms]

I'm doing a rom com and I want them to be more like. But we're just gonna start it with

[Lizzie Bassett]

an EMP emperfect for each other.

[Ed Helms]

But then, like, it's pretty much just straight rom com from the 80s.

[Chris Winterbauer]

Honestly, I'd watch it. So let's make it happen.

[Ed Helms]

Me too. All right, guys. Well, thank you so much. Snafu is a production of iHeart podcasts and snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Post production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith. Our managing producer is Carl Nellis, our video editor is Jared Smith, technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley, additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt Gossen and the Collected Works Legal Review from Dan Welch, Megan Halson, and Caroline Johnson. Special thanks to Isaac Dun, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, and Nikki Ator. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book snafu the Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw Ups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com thanks for listening and see you next week.

[Lizzie Bassett]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.