Part Four: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

ICBMs made it possible to end the world in 15 minutes or less. Robert tells Margaret about the nightmarishly incompetent first draft of the Minuteman, a nuclear weapons system almost perfectly designed to end the world on accident. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about how everyone might die in nuclear hellfire. This is part four of our series on the bastards who built the doomsday device that we all currently live under, the looming sword of Damocles, above all of our heads, the several thousand nuclear weapons, ready at a moment's notice to destroy everything any of us have ever loved or cared about. Back with me to really get into some shit, because I did not expect it to take this long to get to the mid 50s, but there's a lot to talk about. Margaret Kiljoy, how are you doing?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  I'm good. I've come up with a strategy. And the strategy is, I've decided I believe you are telling me Warhammer 40k lore.

• 0:44Robert Evans?

  That would make this a lot more comforting.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Uh huh. This is just something that some space orcs have decided to do.

• 0:52Robert Evans?

  There are orcs in space in Warhammer. That's a very important part of the setting.

• 0:59Speaker 02

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• 1:03Speaker 03

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• 1:33Robert Evans?

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• 2:38Robert Evans?

  So I'm going to start this episode with something that happened concurrent to the last couple of years that we've talked about in part three, right? As, you know, the kind of fallout from the Korean War is going on and the US and the Soviet nuclear stockpiles are ballooning from the hundreds to the thousands. Curtis LeMay had, as I noted, become obsessed with the idea of being able to land a first strike that would compromise or cripple the Soviet ability to strike back. In public, President Eisenhower was very careful to only discuss a US nuclear response in defensive terms. But in 1954, the Eisenhower Dole's Declaration announced that the US would respond to Soviet provocation anywhere, even using conventional weapons, quote, "at places and with means of our own choosing."

• 3:22Robert Evans?

  The term massive retaliation came to symbolize the Eisenhower administration's promise to the Soviet Union, right? Basically, if you provoke us, if you fuck with us, we'll kill everybody, right? That's, that's kind of the idea. You know, that's not exactly it, but it's, we will retaliate massively. And that, that, that isn't, that means nuclear, right?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  It's like trying to have a fistfight with someone who has like a suicide vest on and you're just in a room.

• 3:46Robert Evans?

  Which, by the way, is the best way to get into a fistfight, which is why if you want to buy one of our patented suicide vests today, you know, never get beat up again.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:54Robert Evans?

  Or get beat up exactly one more time is probably a more accurate way to look at the way the suicide vest works.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Well, we've actually, we've workshopped it. They're called life vests now.

• 4:02Robert Evans?

  They're called life vests now. We're, we're currently suing the boat people over their life vests, but I think this is going to work out well for us.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  The lawsuit worked really well because we went in wearing our product.

• 4:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we wear, wore our product and we can't, we brought a life ray too.

• 4:15Speaker 05

  I stop encouraging him.

• 4:18Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. So this whole idea of the Eisenhower-Dolis declaration, it's not a promise that we actually keep, right? Eisenhower, I think there's a degree to which, I mean, elements of this are things that the US will do at other times without using nuclear weapons. But Ike is fundamentally a guy who, he has some respect for human life, right? So there's this big conflict between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China that comes very close during his presidency to exploding into nuclear hostilities. Like, we're seriously considering using nukes to, like, basically, like, clear Taiwan's flanks, right? Because they're, they're in a rough strategic situation for us to respond to with anything else. But Eisenhower proves

• 5:00Robert Evans?

  less willing to massively retaliate than he was willing to talk about massive retaliation. And the situation eventually resolves without the use of nuclear weapons, thank fucking god, right? Yeah. So it is this situation where Eisenhower is, he wants to, he wants that threat to be out there, but he really does not, and none of our presidents really do after Truman, they don't want to nuke people. They're really anti-nuke, because they're, they're not insane as a general rule. Like Nixon kind of is, but even he's not that crazy for the most part, right? Yeah. For the most part. "The evolving nature of nuclear warfare meant that units across the globe are now, by the mid to late 50s, armed with nukes meant for defensive purposes. This becomes an obsession for the military as a whole. The idea was that nuclear weapons

• 5:45Robert Evans?

  could be launched to airburst and destroy entire fleets of Soviet bombers or naval vessels at a time. Now, by the mid 1950s, every American was well aware of the horrors of nuclear war, and one of the few comforting thoughts they could rely on was the fact that only the president could order a nuclear attack." That was a lie. Turns out that's not, that was not true. In the book 15 Minutes, L. Douglas Keeney reveals, and I think this is a thing that was, like, came to light while he was writing his book as a result of, like, information requests and stuff that he was filing. But in 1957, this was not known until very recently. In 1957, President Eisenhower issued a presidential authorization that provided instructions for field commanders to use nuclear weapons. In specific defensive situations without any outside approval.

• 6:29Robert Evans?

  A small number of authorizing commanders in chief even had the ability to launch and command a retaliatory nuclear strike on the Soviet Union after a direct attack on the United States, right? It was never really true during this period of time, like at least not after the middle of the Eisenhower administration, that only the president could order a nuclear strike. For one thing, there's no governor on these. So theoretically, anybody who had one could have made the decision. But also Eisenhower gives field commanders the ability. And this is mainly meant for, with the exception of those guys who had that small number of guys who could do retaliatory strike. Most of these are guys who, if they see a fleet of bombers incoming, they can fire anti-aircraft nuclear artillery, right? Like it's that sort of thing.

• 7:11Robert Evans?

  So it's not as crazy as it could have been, but it's pretty crazy, right?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Like would that have, would that have brought on, like if we had been like, oh, fuck these bombers and nuked them in the sky, would that have like brought on USSR's retaliation?

• 7:26Robert Evans?

  I mean, at that point, they're already sending a bomber fleet over, right? So, I mean, they probably would have continued to fight.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:34Robert Evans?

  It's, you know, at this point, because we don't have ICBMs, we still might have had a nuclear war that didn't kill everybody, right? Because you could have theoretically had one that was devastating enough that the major powers are not able to keep fighting, but everything doesn't get expended because we can't just launch thousands of ICBMs at a moment's notice, right? That's not really an option right now. What makes this dangerous, though, is that by the late 1950s, there are nuclear weapons, US nuclear weapons, fucking everywhere, all over the world at all times. Curtis LeMay had insisted from the beginning, because he's really obsessed with the SAC's readiness, right? And so he, from, from the jump is like, our bomber crews have to train regularly by flying test missions with functional nuclear weapons onboard. It's not a real test if they don't have an actual nuke.

• 8:20Robert Evans?

  On the plane, right?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Okay, I don't understand why, but sure.

• 8:24Robert Evans?

  Well, because he's the craziest man who ever lived, or second next to MacArthur, maybe.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can only dry fire with bullets in the gun.

• 8:31Robert Evans?

  Right, right. It's fucking insane. And what this means practically is that, from this point on, thousands of nuclear weapons are flying across the US and the world every year. There are always nukes flying around, at all times, tons of them.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  That's so scary.

• 8:45Robert Evans?

  It's fucking insane.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  That's so scary. It's all Warhammer lore.

• 8:50Speaker 05

  Oh my god.

• 8:51Robert Evans?

  In the early 1950s, LeMay had developed the beginning of a strategy to keep what he called an air fleet in readiness, with planes always armed and always in the air with nukes, ready to divert their course to attack the Soviet heartland or other targets at a moment's notice. The reasoning for this seemed sound to the men doing it. If the Soviets knew that they could get away with a first strike on the US, they might try. The best way to make sure they never did was by always having bombers in the air and ready to fight at all times, which meant, at all times, dozens to hundreds to even thousands of nukes might be out in the world. And this meant there would always be nukes going missing, right? If you are flying thousands of flights a year that have nukes on them, a percentage

• 9:34Robert Evans?

  of those bombers are going to crash, or are going to need to drop their nukes in order to deal with some sort of like engine trouble. That is going to happen, and it does in fact happen, right? I'm gonna guess people are aware that this has happened once or twice, generally.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm aware of like a couple.

• 9:49Robert Evans?

  There was one off like the coast of Spain.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  That's the one I know of, yeah.

• 9:53Robert Evans?

  The reality is it happened constantly. This happens so much more often than you would have get... It's fucking shocking how many nukes we just straight up lose. LeMay and his successor at the SAC, General Power, considered it a necessity that the US always have armed nuclear bombers in the air. And a consequence of that is, of course, all of these things getting lost. I'm gonna provide you with two examples. Operation Reflex was an SAC training mission to switch crews on ground alert every 21 days. This is kind of the start of what allow, like, we always have a fleet of bombers that are like six to 15 minutes away from being in the air. They have a nuke on them. They're loaded up and fueled up on the tarmac. They have a crew in a bunker nearby that can run onto the plane and take off at a moment's notice, right? And we also have, I think

• 10:38Robert Evans?

  it's like 10 or 11% of those planes are flying with a bomb in them at any given time, right? That's what operate, it starts as a testing plan to see if this is feasible. And in July of 1957, we make this like the SAC standard plan. Each B-47 bomber flying out on reflex overseas or heading home, carried a 6,000 pound, four-megaton MK-39 hydrogen bomb. These are these thermonuclear death machines.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:03Robert Evans?

  That same month, a B-47 in Texas crashed, killing the four-man crew. The crash listed the bomber as part of the emergency war plan load, but as Keeney notes in the book 15 Minutes, "As of this writing, no 1957 bomber crash in Texas is included in any official document disclosing accidents involving nuclear weapons." And there are several of these where, well, we know that plane crashed, and based on how it was coded, we know it should have had a nuke on it, but they never reported losing a nuke because they covered it up. So this nuke presumably just blew up in Texas, and they kind, they covered it up, you know?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  How often are they just being like, oh, whoops, it fell off the back of the truck? Or any nukes falling off the back of the truck?

• 11:45Robert Evans?

  Yes. No, not off a truck. They're falling out of plane.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Oh, so I mean, like, are they being stolen? Like, are they ever like?

• 11:50Robert Evans?

  Not that we know. Not that we know. There's not evidence of that. What's actually happening is much dumber than if they, like, someone stealing a nuke.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:59Robert Evans?

  And scarier, to be honest. There are several examples like this, you know, where a bomber that we know should have been loaded with a nuke crashed, and no report was ever made of a nuke getting lost. But cover-ups weren't always possible. The same month that General Power takes over SAC Command from LeMay, who goes on himself to become the Vice Chief of Staff and then Chief of Staff for the Air Force, "A C-124 cargo plane bound for an airbase in Morocco with three atom bombs encountered engine trouble between Rehoboth Beach and Cape May, New Jersey. The pilot ejected two out of three nuclear bombs on his plane to lighten the load. These fall in the ocean, and the Navy searches

• 12:39Robert Evans?

  for the bombs and doesn't find any of them, ever, even though the ocean's just 150 feet deep at some parts of the potential drop zone."

• 12:48Speaker 01

  So like new treasure quest is just dropped.

• 12:50Robert Evans?

  There are, folks, listeners, if you live in the Jersey area, you could be the owner of an MK5 atom bomb if you just spend some time swimming around in the ocean, you know? And once you've got a nuke, for one thing, you're not paying taxes anymore. I'll tell you that much, brother.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 13:08Robert Evans?

  You can, you got a lot of, you got a lot of leverage if you get your, if you become a nuclear armed state in and of yourself.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  It always goes well.

• 13:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So again, both 3,000 pound MK5 bombs are missing to this day. These are never found. The number of times this happens is fucking shocking. 1957 is a key year for our story because it is the year that we start being 15 to 30 minutes away from nuclear catastrophe at any given time. On August 26th, the Kremlin announces their first successful ICBM test. Their new missile, the SS6 Sapwood, could travel 6,000 miles, carrying a warhead Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev bragged could make Europe or the United States, quote, "a veritable cemetery." A couple of months later, in October, Spudnik entered orbit. If you're wondering why that freaked out Americans so much. This is one of those things, I actually, I have a little more empathy for like, why

• 14:01Robert Evans?

  so many people, because, oh, because they also fired an ICBM right before that. Yeah, that's a little scary. Okay.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  So they invented the ICBM?

• 14:10Robert Evans?

  They, they get, they have a functional ICBM before we do. They have a successful test before we do. Not long before, because between those two events in September of 1957, the, so after the Soviets launched their ICBM before Spudnik, the US Air Force tests its first Atlas ICBM successfully. Now, it can't really hit things accurately yet, but the idea is you're going to stick a thermonuclear bomb on this thing probably, so it doesn't really matter if you're off by a couple, by a mile or two even.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:38Robert Evans?

  Like, you'll do some damage probably. In November of that year, General Power revealed to the public for the first time that the Air Force was maintaining a fleet of ground alert bombers in a permanent state of readiness. 11% of the SAC's fleet was always parked on a runway loaded with a live nuke, ready to take off in less than 15 minutes, and a certain number of bombers were kept up in the air at all times. Lemay admitted, "They are bombed up and they don't carry bows and arrows."

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Bombed up?

• 15:04Robert Evans?

  Bombed up, baby. Yeah, it sounds like he's, it sounds like he's kind of horny for these things.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:10Robert Evans?

  In this period, after the IC, so the ICBMs exist now, but they're not a viable weapon system yet, right? We've had, we have our proof of concept, but we don't, we don't immediately go from testing an ICBM to having them ready to fire, right? Right, totally. It takes a little bit of time, you know? That's just science, right? So during this kind of awkward interstill period, the actual odds of an accidental nuclear war are extremely low for one reason: the only way to deliver an atom bomb is by air, right? I mean, you could drive it somewhere, set it off on the ground, but really, like, realistically, you're going to be using like a bomber or artillery. You, you, you can't launch it across continents yet, right? Unless you're flying it. That means that you could theoretically, if you send out a bomber fleet to start a

• 15:52Robert Evans?

  nuclear war, you could, because you're in contact with these guys, you could theoretically recall that bomber fleet right up to the last moment. You can't do that with ICBMs. People think you can. People think you can do it with like the sub-mounted nukes. We cannot. It is not possible. Once they're launched, they're heading for their targets, right? That's how these things work. But you can recall bombers, if you can reach them, up until the last minute, right? Right. Now, if you can reach them is a key part of this, because that presents a conundrum to the SAC. This is the fucking late 50s. Comms aren't as good as they're going to be. But we're starting to figure out stuff that will allow us to stay in regular contact, you know, in all sorts of situations, but it's not nearly good enough for us to gamble the survival of the human race on, right?

• 16:37Robert Evans?

  And the SAC has another problem, which is that nobody outside of their weird little death cult is comfortable yet with the idea of nukes being sent off without a way to recall them. And while radio, you know, it's just not, there's not a great, perfect way to guarantee you can reach these bombers, and that's really important. And this brings us to one of the most interesting innovations in nuclear war, and it's honestly the simplest. This doesn't require any technology whatsoever, and it's maybe, it may have saved the world, right? We may all exist because of this. It's called Project Fail-safe.

• 17:12Robert Evans?

  Now, rather than relying on technology, which could fail, the way failsafe worked is that all dispatched bombers were under permanent orders to return without dropping their payloads, no matter what they were ordered to do, unless they were transmitted a go code, right? The innovation of failsafe, isn't that a go? This is important. The go code does not trigger the bombing, right? Instead, the default is in all instances, return home without bombing unless you're given the code. And that's a meaningful distinction, right? That means there's no room for a bomber probably be like, "Well, they didn't give us the go code, but we're right over the target. Should we do it?" No, you fly home unless you get the code, right?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:54Robert Evans?

  And that's tech proof. It doesn't matter if your comms are out, right? And that means the default assumption is we should err on the side of not dropping the bombs, right?

• 18:04Speaker 01

  No, that seems so obvious in retrospect, but it makes sense that that was like literally a technological development.

• 18:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it was a development by a single dude at the Rand Corporation named Albert Wolstetter. He visualized failsafe. And again, you could argue this guy might have saved all of humanity in doing so. Yeah. Good idea. Thank you, Albert.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  It's the opposite of a dead man switch, you know?

• 18:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a, I guess a live man switch. I don't know. Speaking of a dead man switch, I have one that will launch a nuclear attack unless you spend money on the products and services advertised on this show.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 18:46Speaker 06

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• 19:14Robert Evans?

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• 20:13Robert Evans?

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• 20:24Robert Evans?

  We're back. So, we've just hit the point where fail-safe has been implemented. And

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Which would fit on your knuckles, I'm just gonna point out.

• 20:32Robert Evans?

  Right. Oh, actually, yeah, that's a pretty good idea. Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:35Robert Evans?

  I've been meaning to get a knuckle tattoo. So, yeah, we've now reduced the risk of some guys starting World War III because a radio goes out, right? Which is a good thing to do. Now, in February of 1958, the Strategic Air Command has another nuclear error. A bomber and a fighter wing in Florida were doing a training mission, which for some reason required a trio of fighters to try and intercept a pair of B-47 bombers armed with actual 1.6-megaton MK-15 nuclear bombs. One of these fighters fucked up and crashed into one of the bombers, damaging its engines. The bomber had to come in for an emergency landing, but the nearest airfield was under construction. And to make a long story short, the pilot was worried that when landing, they would crash into something that would send the nuke in their bomb bay, launching forward like a bullet into the crew cabin.

• 21:20Robert Evans?

  In order to protect the crew, the pilot dropped a nuclear bomb somewhere over the Wasa Sound, east of Savannah, Georgia. It may have been two bombs, it's a little unclear to me. These are never found. This bomb is never found. It is theoretically still some east of Savannah to this day.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Oh my god, I'm gonna write terrible fiction about a crew of people who go and find these things.

• 21:42Robert Evans?

  Go nuke hunting, let's go find them, let's get us a nuke, yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:45Robert Evans?

  We could be the, we could be finally a nuclear armed podcast. This is, this is what podcasting's been missing. Um, so it's obviously big news that we dropped atomic bombs on our own Georgia, not even the one overseas, and the good people of that state expected the Air Force to recover the nuke. A study of the Air Force press releases around this matter is useful. Their first message denounced the jettisoning of a portion of a nuclear weapon and added that no one knew, quote, "whether the nuclear device landed in the sea or on land." Great. There's a chance some hillbilly's just been passing this nuke down to his kids for the last, like, um...

• 22:23Speaker 01

  That's what I want, they'll be like, "Take some pride in our family, we are a nuclear power."

• 22:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, now, don't, don't touch it too much. I don't really know how it works.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:33Robert Evans?

  Now, when they dropped these, this bomb or bombs, both pilots took coordinates down for where they thought they were when they dropped it, but they both write down different sets of coordinates, which is a real high watermark for the competency of our brave boys in the SAC. After several days of searching with no luck, the Air Force issued another press release elaborating that the bomb had been carried in transportable condition. This means nothing. The Air Force defined that, when asked what transportable condition means, as "a form carried for safety reasons," which again, means nothing. If you're wondering what they might have been trying to avoid saying, here's another excerpt from 15 minutes. "Those in Savannah made little sense of this warding, but they took it to mean that the

• 23:16Robert Evans?

  weapon was perhaps disassembled, or in crates, or perhaps it shouldn't be considered a weapon at all. The second press release, however vague, nonetheless seems to have had the intended effect. It was calming. But then the Navy announced that another ship, the USS Bowers, had arrived. The Bowers brought with it 14 more divers and men from the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit in Cedar Keys, Florida. The Air Force explained the stepped-up activity by saying that the objective component was "a very expensive piece of equipment." So the Air Force is like, "Ah, it's not even a real bomb, we are sending the bomb squad in, though." There, the bomb squad is actually absolutely looking for this thing. Trust us, not a functional bomb. Definitely, we do fly exclusively with functional bombs for missions like this, but this one isn't.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:56Robert Evans?

  You're good.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, yeah.

• 23:58Robert Evans?

  I mean, and they did sometimes they would have like the fissile material outside of the bomb so that when they dropped it, they're just, but that didn't happen in a lot of cases and we don't know that it happened in this case.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  What is their argument for like, clearly a dummy that is exactly the same size and weight is the only thing that makes sense. I can't understand the argument.

• 24:19Robert Evans?

  Lemay and powers want them to be training with real nukes and they want them to be testing those nukes regularly to make sure they will go off at a moment's notice. That is very important to them.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  I'm gonna invite him to a paintball game with AR-15s. What?

• 24:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. But this is like, this is super important to both Lemay and power. Right? We're kind of in this period where they're transitioning at the SAC. So by this point, it should be clear to you, we don't know and never will know how many nuclear bombs our government lost on US soil.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  But there's a couple, at least, just sort of lying around. So again, folks, get your metal detectors out.

• 25:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Have some fun with it. What could go wrong? That's what we'll call our scavenger hunt.

• 25:09Robert Evans?

  What could go wrong? Now, you asked earlier about stealing nuclear weapons and I don't, I have, I've seen no evidence that that happened, but it could have very easily. It was for a long time startlingly easy to hijack a nuclear weapon. The only thing stopping it from happening, if indeed it was stopped from happening, is that no one was ever crazy enough to try. In her book Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson tells a story about a visit a Los Alamos scientist named Harold Agnew paid to a NATO base in Europe in December of 1959. This was one of the bases where US nukes were in NATO hands, as they are to this day. Jacobson writes, quote, "During the trip to the NATO base, Agnew noticed something that made him wary. I observed four F-84F aircrafts sitting on the

• 25:54Robert Evans?

  end of a runway. Each was carrying two Mark VII nuclear gravity bombs," he wrote in a document declassified in 2023. What this meant was that custody of the Mark VIIs was under the watchful eye of one very young US Army private armed with an M1 rifle with Eight rounds of ammunition. Agnew told his colleagues, the only safeguard against unauthorized use of a nuclear bomb was this single GI surrounded by a large number of foreign troops on foreign territory with thousands of Soviet troops just miles away. Maybe a bad idea. Like, I feel like I've got a decent chance of stealing a nuke from that guy, right?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  I know.

• 26:26Robert Evans?

  One 18-year-old with a rifle?

• 26:31Speaker 01

  I like those odds.

• 26:32Robert Evans?

  And this is all part of the whole, all that matters is bombers. All that matters is the nukes, right? Because one of the things that guys like Lemay and Power are doing, that the SAC is doing, is like, we don't need to be putting money into infantry. We don't need to have like dudes on the ground doing stuff like watching our nukes and planes. That's a waste of resources. More nukes, more planes, less guards.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  This is like how they're treating AI. Like, it's just like, we don't need anything else. We just need this.

• 26:59Robert Evans?

  No guardrails, no governors, make it illegal to put any safety measures in. Fuck it. Now, after returning home, this is actually how we get the nuclear football. It takes a while, but this is what starts that process. Because once he gets home, having this startling moment, Agnew pairs up with an engineer at Sandia Laboratories, and they try to figure out how to insert an electronic lock into nuclear weapons that would prevent a rando from arming a bomb they gained access to. This eventually led to a lock encoded switch, which required a three-digit code to be entered to arm the weapon. It would take several years until the Kennedy administration for the president to actually order these locks placed on bombs, right? But that's where this leads, right? That's why we get the nuclear football in the system we have now, where like you have to use codes to activate the ability to deploy these weapons, right?

• 27:44Robert Evans?

  That starts with Agnew realizing like, oh, fuck, someone could just take these. There's just like a kid standing in a field with a rifle, and there's four nukes. Shit.

• 27:57Robert Evans?

  Eight fucking bullets? At least give him another couple of clips. Jesus Christ.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Totally. Send a unit of people you hate first and then...

• 28:06Robert Evans?

  Jesus, yes, send more guys. Fuck it. There had to be more 18-year-olds. My God. I'm getting ahead of myself here because we don't immediately put the, it takes some time to figure out how to build these locks, right? There are two key inventions from the late 1950s that helped set the doomsday device into motion. The first is what we'll spend the least time discussing in these episodes, and it's the distributed system of radar stations in the middle of the ocean and other inaccessible points that first provided us with an effective early warning system of Soviet attack. Obviously, the Soviets are building their own versions of this too, right? But the early warning systems, right? These aren't a major topic of these episodes because just wanting to know if someone's about to murder you isn't really fucked up in the same way as, for example, building 12,000 nuclear weapons.

• 28:51Robert Evans?

  But all of these early warning systems are flawed and capable of generating false positives. And in fact, we have, both us and the USSR have several near-nuclear catastrophes because we get false positives. Like, one of these radar installations thinks it sees missiles coming in, or thinks it sees bombers coming in, and it causes problems, right?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  It's like geese or some shit.

• 29:11Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. All these early warning systems are flawed, you know, and that's still the case to this day, right? And so, it's both understandable that you'd want to have these, but also the fact that these are flawed and the fact that our strategy increasingly becomes "launch on warn" moves us a lot closer to midnight, right? So, by far, the most influential move, from an approaching the apocalypse point of view, was the deployment of ICBMs. These made it possible to launch nuclear weapons in a way that could not be recalled. There was and is no failsafe for ICBMs. The idea that we can cancel them is just disinformation. If we or anyone else launches an ICBM, they are almost impossible to stop.

• 29:55Robert Evans?

  You can only really stop them by shooting them down, and we're terrible at it, right? We have this thing, the bullet, basically, that we use to shoot them down, and it works about half the time in tests, and we have like 44 of them.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd want more magazines than like

• 30:14Robert Evans?

  I'd probably want more.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  44 bullets isn't enough.

• 30:16Robert Evans?

  If it's That's not a lot.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  You have to stop the end of the world. Here's a magazine and a half of bullets.

• 30:22Robert Evans?

  And the enemy has 3,000 missiles or something like that.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  So good luck, private.

• 30:29Robert Evans?

  Now, our first ICBM is kind of a piece of shit. The only good thing about the Atlas-C, which is declared operational in September of 1959, is that it can't be kept fueled for long periods of time. It has to be fueled right before launch, something to do with the kind of fuel that they're using, right? Which means that you can't have these things ready to go in a matter of minutes, you know? Like, you need more lead time to do that. Atlas's are stored above ground also. We're starting to build hardened silos, that is the plan, but those are not constructed yet. US war planners were worried that the USSR would be able to see our arsenal because we've got these ICBMs just parked out, like, on bases and stuff. And they are. The Soviets are, they have, you know, surveillance and stuff. They are able to see them.

• 31:10Robert Evans?

  But this also causes another near calamity, because the Soviets don't assume that we just have these things parked in the open because we're not finished building silos. They assume we have them in the open because we plan to use them as a first-strike weapon. Right?

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:24Robert Evans?

  So this is another thing that, like, ramps up the paranoia between everybody.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:29Robert Evans?

  Because the Atlas was such a shit weapon system, and it is a bad ICBM, by the 1959, the US was already hard at work at its replacement, the Minuteman. This was a missile with a stable fuel mixture that could be stored for long periods of time in launch-ready conditions. So you can have a Minuteman ready to fire, and in fact, it's called a Minuteman because you can literally, from the moment you get the order, you can have it in the air in a minute or less. Right?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:53Robert Evans?

  Again, they're just starting to explore this technology. This is very new, and they don't have the kinks out, right? Which is a problem, because they're going to be immediately putting nukes on these things and putting them underground. So there's a whole aspect that they have to figure out. None of this is immediately obvious, right? How this is going to work? How nuclear silos are going to work? How our warning system will work? How these things will be triggered to fire under what conditions, right? It is important you remember, there's no locks on these missiles yet, right? So every Minuteman is stored launch-ready.

• 32:26Robert Evans?

  And every minute man's silo, no locks at all, right? Well, there's a lock in that in order to fire it. So you have, you have like these two man teams in like a command bunker. And each of these two man teams can launch 10 missiles, right? That are each held in separate silos that are like a decent distance from each other. So you can't stop them all if you nuke them, right? If you nuke the silos, that's one of the reasons. So each two man team, if they, if both men turn a key at the same time, it will fire the missile, right? And then, as we'll talk about, the, it will start a process of firing all of the other missiles. So that means two guys have the ability, if they both decide to turn a key,

• 33:09Robert Evans?

  to fire 10 nuclear missiles across the world into Russia, right?

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, or one guy who like, are they in the same place? Are the keys next to each other like in movies? Cause in which case it's like, or one guy beats up his friend.

• 33:21Robert Evans?

  That, that's a great, that's a great point you brought up because the air force did consider this, right? That this is an immediate problem as soon as they start planning this. What if a crazy person winds up in a silo? Would he just be able to start World War III on his own? And the answer's no, because the air force comes up with a brilliant deterrent to that kind of behavior, Margaret. Both guys in the silo have guns and they're separated from bulletproof glass.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  So they're just ready to go insane.

• 33:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this way one guy can't threaten to shoot the other guy if he doesn't launch a missile, right? Like that's literally the plan is like, we'll give them both guns and put them behind bulletproof glass. It's fine.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Also, it's like, people can hotwire cars, right? This is an electrical system on some level.

• 34:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's so much worse than that, Margaret.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Okay, cause I feel like you could probably figure out a way to give the positive signal over this electrical wire.

• 34:11Robert Evans?

  It's, it's good that you bring that up. That's what we're going to be talking about a lot of the rest of this episode, because this is so much worse than you're, than you're guessing. So another issue with the Minuteman program is that. Because of some errors in how they construct this thing, they basically make what is potentially an automatic doomsday device. This is not known by Air Force planners when they start putting this stuff out and constructing these silos and putting out the plans of how they're going to use it because they don't like thinking about this sort of thing. We only know about the immediate, the initial problems with the Minuteman system because of a confessional that was written in 2008 by one of the architects of our nuclear war infrastructure, John H. Rubell. And Rubell is, he's both a hero and a victim in this story.

• 34:55Robert Evans?

  He's one of these guys who may have saved all of our lives because of the story I'm about to tell, but he also is an integral part of building this system. Born in 1920 to a wealthy Jewish German family in Chicago, Rubell moved to Los Angeles as a kid after his father died. He graduated as an engineer from Caltech in 1942. His older brother died in action fighting the Nazis and Rubell was inspired to do his bit for the war by moving to Schenectady with his wife and becoming a junior engineer at GE. After the war, he moved back to Los Angeles to work for Lockheed Martin. By 1956, Rubell was a successful executive at Hughes Electronics, directing their avionics business. That's Howard Hughes's company, right? He was featured in an ad by his employer, which described him as "America's new kind of man."

• 35:40Robert Evans?

  This meant he was an expert and a successful professional in a field that had not existed just a couple of years earlier: defense electronics. And from that ad, "At Hughes, we have 2,700 of these men in our research and development laboratories, men like John H. Rubell, brought together from all over the country to solve urgent new problems of national defense. They have already successfully carried out developments that rank among the most formidable scientific achievements of our time, and the work they have done is so basic it is already contributing vitally to the peaceful use of electronics." And Sophie's going to show you the ad just because I want everyone watching the video to see what a 36-year-old man looked like in the mid-1950s. Look at those crow's feet.

• 36:17Robert Evans?

  That's what you get when you're just consuming lead every day. Just huffing it right off the back of a car. It's beautiful stuff.

• 36:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so anyway, three years after this photo was taken in early 1959, Rubel left Hughes Aircraft to become the Assistant Director of Research and Engineering for Strategic Weapons over at the Pentagon. He would receive several promotions over the next four years, becoming the sole Deputy and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in 1961. He is a very highly placed civilian within our military research and defense infrastructure, right? This rapid advance was because he was the only guy at the Pentagon who was at all concerned about whether or not we might be about to kill the whole planet accidentally. In 1959, he starts sitting down for presentations by the Air Force, because the Air Force, as they're getting ready to deploy the Minuteman, they have this missile designed and they

• 37:11Robert Evans?

  have these silos under construction, but they're not operational yet. And so the Air Force is sitting down with high-ranking civilian DOD employees and explaining all their different nuclear retaliation systems, including Minuteman. According to Rubel, he has conversations with a number of military officers, and he comes to realize that their primary fear is a fatal surprise attack, right? And if an adversary, again, the logic the military has is that if an adversary thinks they can survive launching a surprise attack against us, they might do it. So the only way to avoid a nuclear war is to have, quote, "first-strike capability and the way to use it," AKA "launch on warning." Quote from Rubel's piece.

• 37:54Robert Evans?

  "Consider, however, launch on warning almost necessitates an automated response. The electronic warning signal itself in this scenario would trigger our first-strike missiles, many of them ready to go in a minute or so. The will to use the strategy would require no high-level decision-making or intervention." Now, this is extremely dangerous. And this is the thinking that leads to the Minuteman, right? And when Rubel talks about the Minuteman, he's referring to both a single missile and, quote, "to the aggregate of more than 1,000 of them, comprising a system of missiles and control centers, spread across hundreds of miles of prairie lands in states like North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana." Right? That's what the Minuteman system is. It's about 1,000 of these missiles, split up into groups of like 10 and 50, and spread

• 38:37Robert Evans?

  out all over these kind of plain states, right?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  That makes sense.

• 38:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Minuteman was not yet in effect, right? That doesn't happen until 61. But two aspects of the program, the wide dispersal of missile silos, and the fact that each silo was hardened to withstand anything but a direct nuclear hit, came from suggestions made by Rand thinkers. Rubel makes the important point that all these defense nerds and all of the high-ranking Air Force officers behind these plans are only concerned in using automation to guarantee that we would be able to fire our nukes if the government was destroyed. He writes, quote, "Equally important considerations, such as flexibility of command and control of these weapons, provisions to prevent unauthorized or accidental launch, design provisions to ensure the malfunction or failure of a critical component would not result in a missile launch, or some comparably dreadful catastrophe, were treated little or not at

• 39:26Robert Evans?

  all." Right?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  I was expecting this sentence to end very differently.

• 39:30Robert Evans?

  It's unethical and wrong to even try to delay the system and make it safer. Because anything that you do to like make the Minuteman system less dangerous is reducing its automation, right? Which is increasing the odds that we don't fire back if we're all killed. And that's unacceptable.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Right. Partly because the game theory thing is that they need to know that even if they kill the president and whoever comes after that, they still lose too.

• 40:02Robert Evans?

  As a result, all these officers get extremely angry when people are like, "Well, but like, are you not worried about maybe something going wrong and the missiles all launching accidentally?" And they're like, "Well, that's not nearly as scary as the missile's not launching." You know? That really is how all these guys are thinking. And you know who else thinks that way, Margaret?

• 40:20Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Uh, is it the Life Vest?

• 40:23Robert Evans?

  Yes, uh, yes, the, the makers of the new Life Vest. Uh, get one today, you know? Um, get two, get three, get one for the whole family, you know? Everyone should have one of these vests.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 40:33Robert Evans?

  And a society where everyone's wearing a suicide vest at all times is a polite society. Probably.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  That's what everyone says.

• 40:41Robert Evans?

  We'll see what happens, you know? We'll see what happens.

• 40:46Speaker 03

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• 41:15Robert Evans?

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• 42:14Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 42:25Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Yeah, Margaret, how you how you taking this revelation?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  I, you know, okay, so I can't remember if we talked about on mic or not, but I we we talked about the the dark forest theory and the

• 42:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  The the books, I can't remember the name of.

• 42:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the by that that Chinese sci fi author about.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, the dark forest theory, folks, if you're not aware, is this basically this idea that if there's life out there, the chance that it's hostile is so high that everyone would be basically be trying to either hide or fuck up other life first, right? Like, it's it's a bunch of hunters wandering around a dark forest is kind of where the name comes from. But it's it's more game theory stuff, right? But trying to imagine how aliens would think. I actually don't entirely agree with it, but whatever.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  No, I don't either. And it's not shocking that it's a right wing author, but like,

• 43:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  which doesn't make the opinion in it wrong necessarily, but I'm just like, not surprised.

• 43:23Robert Evans?

  No, no, people speak very highly of the books. I thought the show was good. Like, I I don't have to agree with someone's politics to be interested in their.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I find it so interesting because it is so much of it is around this idea of like,

• 43:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  whoever is controlling the mutually assured destruction button need, we need to make sure that they're reliable. And by reliable, we mean not thinking, not thinking about the consequences of their actions. And it's like, right, because to me, I clearly shouldn't be in charge of mutually assured destruction, because I'm like, I would rather I die and everyone I know die than all humanity die. Like, it just

• 43:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  It just seems so obvious to me, you know?

• 44:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, I don't, I don't. And this, I guess, is just the difference between different kind of value systems. I don't think American lives are worth more than any other kind of life.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 44:15Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:17Robert Evans?

  I don't think they're worth more than Russian lives, or Chinese lives, or Latvian lives.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 44:21Robert Evans?

  And I guess my, I don't want to get nuked, but my preference would be if someone's going to get nuked, that not everyone gets nuked, right? That's better to me than, anyway. That is not how these people think.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Right. Even if the leaders of another country are my enemy, that doesn't make every single person who, whatever, anyway, yeah.

• 44:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The leaders of every country are my enemy. They're all assholes, but I still don't want nukes firing off.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  I know. Get them in a room. Anyway, yep.

• 44:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 44:50Robert Evans?

  So, one of the things that I think is valuable here to get into is Rubel talks about, when he starts realizing how this system works, he has this realization, which is that our whole nuclear deterrent system is what he describes as dangerously unstable, right? And this is valuable, just in terms of understanding how like military planners think and kind of the logic that this guy's going through as he's trying to deal with this problem, right? Quote from Rubel, "Instability arises most dangerously in the contemporary world when vast arsenals of horrendously destructive weapons end up ready to go in minutes. If one side does go for any reason, or even for none, the other is set to respond and must respond. Strategic weapons, I soon realized, could often determine policy by their very design.

• 45:32Robert Evans?

  Military instability arises when the actions of one side will, unless countered in a timely manner, give it a decisive military advantage. It is worsened as the interval defining a timely manner shrinks to almost nothing, as it does in the missile age." Right? He's describing this doomsday device that's being built, right? It's an unstable system, right? Because of how fast everything works and how destructive these weapons are. Rubel, in no uncertain terms, described the ideology behind launch on warning as, quote, "flawed and terrifying," and quoted Herman Kahn.

• 46:04Speaker 05

  No shit, my guy? No shit, my guy?

• 46:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He quoted Herman Kahn in calling this arrangement "a doomsday machine." And he discussed, he wrote about something that happened in World War I as an example for like, why he considered all this so frightening. And I'm going to quote an extended piece here. "On a visit to France in 1963, I came across the remains of a World War I catastrophe near a small village along the Canal de Nord, northeast of Paris. There, one discovers a crater about 50 feet deep and a couple of hundred feet in diameter. Postcards on sale in the village identify it as Le Tonnerre, a melancholy reminder of what happened in a pre-war landmark and its unfortunate human occupants. Before World War I, a small hill stood where only the crater remains. The little hill was a formidable obstacle in the path of the French on one side and the Germans on the other, each holed up in extensive trenches.

• 46:51Robert Evans?

  Unable to see the enemy on the other side of the hill and likely to get blown away if they dared appear over the top, an obvious solution occurred to each side: mine the other side and blow it up. Each side began mining the hill. The process went on for weeks as tons of earth was excavated to form tunnels extending under the German side, dug by the French, and under the French side, dug by the Germans. Eventually, the tunnels were filled with TNT by each side under the part of the hill occupied by the other. Then one day, somebody on one side or the other, nobody will ever know which side or who it was, detonated a charge that ignited all the French and all the German explosives. Who knows? Maybe it was an accident. Either way, accident or on purpose, this little mountain with hundreds of luckless humans in trenches on it, or still tunneling beneath it, was blown to kingdom come, leaving only an impressive crater to remind an occasional

• 47:35Robert Evans?

  visitor forever what military instability can mean. It was not too early in 1959 to envision a ghastly replay of this little-known drama on a global scale."

• 47:45Speaker 01

  That's such a good metaphor, and it's such a shame that it's like, it took a lot of people dying to give us that metaphor.

• 47:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, he's, he's right here. Now, Rubel first sits down with the Minuteman project manager, who's a former Hughes Aircraft guy named Bob Bennett in the spring of 1959. He noticed that despite their friendly relationship, Bob was squirrely and didn't like to give out information when asked basic questions like, "How do these missiles actually fire?" and "How many missiles fire at once?" Right? At this point, the Minuteman system was being billed as a second strike. But there was no reason you'd need a weapon like the Minuteman for a second strike. It was clearly meant for a first strike in a launch on warrant scenario. The Air Force was just lying to everybody, right? In order to make this seem less dangerous. Each Minuteman was to be aimed at all times at a different city in the USSR or China.

• 48:36Robert Evans?

  We don't have good computers back then, right? So the way these things are targeted is there's a system of gyroscopes inside each of these missiles, rotating on frictionless ball bearings at all times, which will guide the missiles when launched towards a specific set of coordinates. Missiles cannot be re-targeted on the fly. Once you fire these, no matter who you're launching them at, no matter who starts the war, if the missiles fire, they go towards the preset targets. Are you seeing a problem potentially?

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, also, I'm impressed by that method of figuring out how to aim things.

• 49:06Robert Evans?

  It's incredibly impressive. Like, these people are very smart and very stupid at the same time.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. 20th century engineering.

• 49:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, there's a very high chance with this that we wind up nuking a country that has not fired at us because we're just launching all of our shit and some of it's targeted towards them, right? We'll talk more about that in the last episode. Now, this is a problem because each squadron of 50 missiles is divided into five groups of 10, and each squadron of 10 would be fired by just two guys. If two men chose to insert their keys at the same time, the launch control center they were in would be considered to have voted to launch, and all 10 missiles would fire. If two or more centers voted yes within a short period of time, all 50 missiles in the squadron would fire. Each missile is targeted to a city. We have no way of knowing who might provoke us, which means by default, our automated

• 49:57Robert Evans?

  response was to nuke both the USSR and China, even if one of those nations did nothing to piss us off or threaten us.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Oh my god. When did China get nukes?

• 50:06Robert Evans?

  China detonates their first nuke in October of 1964. So they don't have it yet, but, you know, military planners at this period of time, even before China has nukes, are thinking of China and the Soviet Union as one unified communist bloc. They are not. As Nixon will make very clear, those countries don't like each other, really. Like, they have a fraught history. But our assumption is we gotta start by nuking them both, right? So, it actually gets even worse than this, which we'll talk about in the last episode, but I think this is a good point to end here, just with the dread of how fucking dangerous this system is.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  God, I'm so glad that this is just in this weird nerd game that you play called Warhammer.

• 50:54Robert Evans?

  Certainly not real.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  If this was, if this was real, this would be like, big news.

• 50:59Robert Evans?

  Terrifying. What a nightmare.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. How does anyone sleep?

• 51:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah. If this was all real and people actually tried to build a, build a system like this, we would have to throw them all in prison, right?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  I assume so.

• 51:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We wouldn't let them retire with millions of dollars. That would be crazy.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 51:18Robert Evans?

  All right. Well, Margaret, pluggables?

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a Substack. I write about the things that I talk about on my show and my Substack. Margaret Kiljoy, you can find me on all of the various internet things that I'm on and not the ones that I'm not on. And I'm not aware of any other Margaret Kiljoy, except apparently a Disney character where she, from the second Fantasia movie or something, where she's a nag, like a misogynist character that...

• 51:45Speaker 05

  Oh boo.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  I actually could be have this character. It might be, I might have the movie wrong. I don't know. Someone just pointed it out to me recently. But I'm not a misogynist stereotype from Disney. I am instead everyone's nightmare of, if you're a transphobe, I'm your nightmare. And you can find me by Googling me. That's what I got.

• 52:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I actually am a misogynist nightmare from a Disney movie. I was the inspiration for Gaston. A lot of people don't know that.

• 52:12Speaker 05

  No comment.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  I don't have a counter argument. I've met you in real life.

• 52:19Speaker 05

  Podcast is over.

• 52:21Robert Evans?

  All right.

• 52:25Speaker 05

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

• 52:49Speaker 06

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know those little promises you make to your future self? Tomorrow, I'll put my phone away earlier, or stop rehearsing arguments in the shower. Tomorrow, I'll stop saying yes to everything, or stop overthinking that conversation.

• 53:32Speaker 06

  Most of us aren't trying to become completely different people. We're just hoping to feel a little better every day. That's what's great about BetterHelp. With them, better is personal. It's matching with a therapist who gets you and having someone in your corner. Better doesn't have to come from major victories. It can be from the small habits you create and how you honor your needs on a daily basis. So many of us are great at prioritizing even the smallest things for our loved ones. But what about ourselves? With thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries, BetterHelp is making therapy more accessible so more people can keep moving forward, one conversation at a time. Better is personal. Therapy should be too.

• 54:17Speaker 06

  Visit betterhelp.com to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com.

• 54:23Speaker 04

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• 54:53Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.