Doomed to Fail - Ep 216: Ancient Incendiaries - Greek Fire

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Let's go back to ancient warfare, shall we? We'll talk about all the things you can fill a clay pot with to throw at enemies—spikes, bees, boiling hot sand—use your imagination! Then, we will discuss the mysterious Byzantine weapon, Greek Fire. From a siphon, it could shoot white hot fire onto enemy ships, causing pain, devastation, and setting the water aflame. How Greek Fire was Used to Target Enemy Ships - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPUgvYZ5UDkThe UnXplained: Greek Fire Is Every Sailor's Deadly NIGHTMARE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0CvNL4k140What Do We Know about “Medieval Flame Throwers” Known as "Greek Fire"? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQt9nBh3ceM "Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World" by Adrienne Mayor Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A. 019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. And we are going to catch all the banter. But before we do that, something that we keep forgetting, we collectively keep forgetting, is our intro. So. Oh, I'll do it. Would you look, okay. You want to do it?

No, no, I want you to do it. Okay. Hello. Welcome to do it. to fail you bring you history's most notorious disasters and failures and fun stories and i am taylor joined by far as yes i've been on the lake all day and i'm recording this after a day in the sun and a little bit of years good for you good for you how's your weekend been tell me about great my mom came we had a great time she made chicken and peppercash which is like her

specialty meal so we made that together what is that it's great it's It's just like chicken in like a shit ton of paprika and then you make these like little dumplings and then you make these like vinegory cucumbers and you eat it all together. It's really good. Is that a cultural thing or is that? Yeah, it's like a thing that her grandma used to make. It's like Bohemian, which we had to look up, but Bohemia used to be like the Czech Republic area.

So it's like from that area of like Eastern Europe. Okay. Fun. Yeah. Do you do a lot of like Bohemian Czech cuisine in your house? No. It's just that. What do you make?

Like for my family? Yeah. That's such an interesting question. My daughter only eats dino nuggets and noodles, so I make her those. But Miles eats more stuff. I'll do like, I do tacos a lot with like fake meat. So I do like fake meat with a cannery fried beans as like the main part of it and like seasoning and then the other things. So make that into a salad or tacos or I'll do like a pulled pork or a pulled chicken in the crock pot or.

Wait, why fake meat? eat tacos if you do world pork i like the fake meat better in i like the fake ground beef better than regular ground beef because then you don't like accidentally get a gross part yeah i guess i'm cooking it so i like i like that a lot um and then one and i mean also one i've been making steaks pretty often i'll do that i made steaks and mashed potatoes over today it's really whatever i feel like i'm i'm in charge of food and it's whatever i feel like i was like i would love to have a private chef who just made me whatever they felt like making me um because that's what Juan has.

He really has no, he like just eats whatever I make, which is good. I've always thought that like when you see celebrities and how they get super fit and super in shape or lose a ton of weight, it can't be that hard when you can afford your own private chef to like get in an amazing shape.

Yeah, no, 100%. The member when like Rob Mack from all of a sudden, you got like really. Yes. And he was like, it's super easy, you guys. All you have to do is work out six hours a day, have a private chef, make your meal. and have fox pay for it you know like yeah it's totally doable it's totally doable if like it's

just when you have a life it's less so I know it's hard to do anything um but yeah that's usually what we make around here Florence loves noodles fun yeah um Rachel has been the sole chef at this household because if it's up to me I'll just like throw a steak on the skillet and then just but you made that great risket I mean yeah but that was only because you guys were here

because like who am I impress you why am I cooking for myself like what's the point of being nice for myself makes no sense it's hard because like well because like

Miles is just starting to eat like regular food this is my biggest failing as a parent is how bad they are eating but like I don't know I feel my mom used to make

like she'd make spaghetti she'd make tacos she'd make chicken dishes and jolly things we would all eat them so we'd have like a full dinner every night because she was home while

I was just, we got home, there'd be dinner waiting, but there were seven people in the house, and we all ate it. And I don't know why my kids don't eat anything. It's just the sound of the times. I think it's seven of the times. Yeah. Yeah. Not that I know anything about kids, but.

That's okay. I always tell them they're very smart considering. So imagine how smart they would be if they ate vegetables. No kidding. Who knows? Who knows? Or fish. So I think today is a you day.

Yeah. And are we going to, do hints or am I never going to guess it? You're never going to guess it. I don't know. This is kind of all over the place. Yeah. I think our listeners are used to that by now. I thought it would be better because I got a book on the subject and like the, I read the, I listened to the whole thing. And then they only talked about the actual thing I wanted to

talk about in the last like 20 minutes of the book. And I'm like, well, that was really unhelpful. And I spent the past two weeks reading us waiting for it. happen. So I did, so I do have other research that I did. So I'm not going to make you guess. But I will share the book that I read and some YouTube videos that I watched about this because I was thinking about napalm and the fire bombing of Tokyo. So that's what we did last time. I did it. And I wanted to focus on like incendiary weapons from the ancient past. So I'm going to talk about a mysterious and deadly weapon called Greek fire. Have you heard of Greek fire?

Yeah, I think the MythBusters did this. They probably did. Like, there's approximately 7,000 white dudes on YouTube who think that they did it as well. Technically, I'm not white, so I don't count as part of that demographic. But, yes, I probably consume the same contents. You know who I'm talking about. Yes. So they're all there.

The book I read was called Greek Fire, Poison, Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs, Biological, and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrian Mayer. It was good, interesting, but, like, very little bit. It was out Greek fire, and Greek fire is the biggest words on the cover. I'm like, I don't know, call your graphic designer. Do you, did you see the Battle of Black Rock on the Game of Thrones episode? No, but that, but that, yes, that's exactly right. Okay. That green, you know exactly where I'm going with this.

Yep, okay. That's, that's like the example. And like, they also did it in the Pirates of the Caribbean. They had like a thing with it. Okay. Yep. Same page. Um, so we saw.

napalm in the firebombing of Tokyo and a lot of like the other wars that have Indonesia like Vietnam and Korea there's that picture that is really famous of the little girl who is like running away and burned her name is Fan Tai Kimu I said that wrong but she's still alive he's only 62 um so she's you know not that old and the video the images of her kind of running away naked because all of her clothes have been burned off and she has terrible scars and we're just like burning villages of people. So fire has always been like a really dangerous weapon because you can't fix yourself even now, you know?

Yeah, it's horrible. It's horrible. So if we go further back into myth and into the Byzantine Empire, which is where we'll talk about Greek fire the most, there's some things that have a little bit of truth to them, a little bit of myth. And so I'm going to tell you, a little bit about different kinds of

biological warfare and like surprise warfare and like trying to create weapons with like ancient technologies and then I'll talk about the Greek fire one thing to mention is while you're making all these things you can totally die by accident you know

like if you are making something that is so incredibly flammable that it kills people immediately you're probably going to have a couple of those guys like blow themselves up you know I think that's like why they thought that Timothy McVeigh had accomplices

because they were like nobody could make something this powerful without like a ton of support like it seems like it's a big project right you need like one person stirring up hot and one person chopping the chicken

like if you're cooking like you can't just by yourself it's like the anarchist playbook except like it's about chicken for sea exactly exactly so also this type of warfare so We talked about, last time, I think we talked about, like, how bombing civilians and bombing cities is, like, terror warfare because you are trying to get the civilians to be like, I don't want to do this anymore.

Yeah. And how in most of warfare, it's probably, like, most of this is just people being like, I just want to live my life with my goats. Like, please, let me just live my life. Like, I don't want to be a part of your fucking war. But you have to, like, put the pot on your head. Like, we've talked about a bunch of times and, like, get your butt out there because you have to. Yep. um so they um so there was that and then this stuff started to happen where you had these like ways to like do these bombs that aren't really bombs and i'm going to tell you what they are but the but people thought it was kind of cheating they're like if warfare up until this point had been like i'm going to stab you in the face you stab me in the face like really like roman legions hitting each other then like ways to injure someone from afar was like new and maybe cheating which we could definitely say that now obviously

if it's like if we're just going to have drones kill ourselves kill everybody you know that's where we're headed but the idea of like shooting an arrow or throwing a grenade or having a flamethrower you know was a little bit of a like a oh you're not going to come up and stab me to my face yeah that's what they used to say about snipers i think in world war one or two i forgot it was like around that time line of like they were considered like the cowards of the Yeah. And I imagine, because like whenever I, whenever I see a sniper in the news, which is like almost never, but those guys are like, oh, I kill 500 people. And you're like, fuck. You know, like. It is interesting how that became like badass because I do get the sentiment of like it is much harder to kill someone face to face. Yeah, like we wouldn't do it really. Like there's something to like.

Like, it takes a different brain power to, like, be like, I got to account for wind and the gravitational force of the sun this hour of the day. Like, it is crazy, like, what they do. But yeah. I understand the sentiment on both sides. Yeah. And I feel like it's like something that will continue as we, like, get other, like, robots to fight our wars for us. So some of these are, like, kind of encased in myth and some of them aren't. But, like, for example, Hercules, like the Greek god.

he died because of a poison cloak. So there's a lot of like poison that happened in like the ancient world, people who were afraid of it. Things that like I don't understand, but I feel like the word like hemlock is, you know that's poison, you know? And so people would take like little bits of it to make themselves not,

to make themselves like immune, which is like similar to like, you know, just take a little bit at a time, trying to get your body used to it, things like that. So like a vaccine, exactly. So there's definitely less of poisons. They could really hurt you. And then also, like, I feel like the food could just kill you at any time up until like very recently.

Yeah, of course. You know, for like other reasons as well. So there's that to be worried about. Isn't that why they only drank alcohol is because there was the only safe version of a liquid you could have because you knew the bacteria would be killed? So it's like that I think, I mean, I think that that's like oversimplifying it, but I also think yes. So there's things that like during the temperance movement in America, one of the things that came out of that was water, mountains because there was no way to get water. Like you, it was really hard. There was like, don't, you wouldn't have like running water in your tenement. And you wouldn't go out like buy a

bottle of water. So you would just like, you know, yeah, like have beer and like have alcohol because it was distilled and like potentially safer than like whatever water you could just like find. So they made like public drinking fountains. You could go and get your own water. So you had some had another option even. You know, it's kind of fun. You only feed your kids beer. Sometimes you know, you're just like. Like, you're bud light thirsty. I'm so thirsty. I just want to drink a bed light.

I'm more of a Coors guy. I've never been into the Budweiser family. Interesting. Anyways, sorry. It's been a long down the lake. No, this is, again, excellent. I've been on Lake banser with you. I like it, Lake Talk.

Okay, so a couple other examples before we get to the fire, which I will explain in detail. One way that kind of combines the poisons and the harding someone from far away is obviously an arrow. and also a poison-tipped arrow. So, like, a lot of the gods in Greek myth would, like, dip their arrowheads in poison. The word toxin is from the Greek word toxin, which means bow, with your bow and arrow. Because poison arrows were so popular. Some cultures, even, like, in parts of, like, rural Africa now and, like, places, they will roast, like, poison frogs and, like, poison snakes. And all of the oil that comes out of the roasting pan, they'll put.

onto the tips of their arrows. But it's one of those things, like those are like, even like in South America, the kind of frogs is that like if you touch it, you will die. So you have to like spear it into the ground and like get its essence onto your arrow without dying and then never touch that arrow and then shoot someone with it. Yeah, it seems kind of hard. Yeah. Obviously you could do that with snakes as well and with the hemlock on your arrows.

Then this is like biological warfare before they even like knew it. But there's like, you know, obviously like throwing like, dead cows over fortified walls that were full of the plague and you know putting your dead bodies in a pile to like make sure that people got sick so the different ways like people without understanding the actual science behind it they're figuring out ways to make people get sick wait why did you say like hemlock that's that's a plant yeah but you could also put that on your arrow okay okay the other it's like another thing you use a poison your arrow um did you know that this the United States has is trying to this has been around for a while but like think of weapons to like calm people down and like like sounds and like things like make you feel like you're on fire but you're not on fire the department is called the Department of Defense non lethal weapons program and I like believe that zero yeah yeah I almost did an episode on this actually did you oh it's interesting so it wasn't on that department who had to do with their Cuban thing where a bunch of sound waves caused like fucking hammering

In, like, U.S. of mass, like, I'm absolutely. The fact that we, like, fly B-2 bombers over our adversaries, everybody knows what that is, means that, like, there's stuff that's, like, beyond our comprehension that is actually within use. I think we've said that before. This is, like, just, like, a whole secret stash of planes I've never seen. So, another thing in ancient warfare, there'd be animals,

so they'd be, like, bears and elephants, which is exciting. there were also grenades and I'm talking like when I say I'm talking like the year like 100 AD it's like the year 100 there were things like grenades but you would get like a clay pot and fill it with like either Greek fire which I'm promised we're going to talk about or things like bees and scorpions and you would capture poison scorpions and throw them at other groups and then the clay pot would shatter and then the scorpions would just like be everywhere. It was funny. Even when I've, like, hated someone, I've never gotten creative about how I want them to die. It's real creative. Like, I've never gone that far with it. Yeah. They would fill the grenades with, I'm going to say grenade, but you know what I mean? Like, they fill like the pot with shrapnel, like we do now. Like, people do that, like, all the time.

They fill it with, like, hot nails and things like that. They were also, one time, some army versus Alexander, the Great's Army, they fill. grenades with sand that was so hot it was like red and molten and they threw it on to the enemies it would break and then the hot sand would go into their armor and they would you know just be useless than it'd be terrible yeah it's crazy yeah people are terrible you know another one that i learned about another before i go talk about greek fire there is in the battle of syracuse in two 12 bc um and also in the latest india jones movie did you see that one one? No. I loved it. I don't know what the popular...

What's the latest? Like is that when Harrison Ford was 78? Yes. Okay. No, I didn't know. So anyway, the Battle of Syracuse is mentioned in it and Archimedes is there and he's like a philosopher, whatever. But what he did that probably worked in that battle is he had a bunch of mirrors going from like mirror to mirror to sun to sun and caught the boats on fire. And in 1973, some Greek scientists attempted to recreate it and it worked. They had 70 different mirrors, like, all over, but they caught a boat on fire in, like, seconds. That is the thing that MythBusters did. That is what I was thinking about. Did it work? Yeah, it did. Yeah.

That's really cool. It's pretty brilliant. Like, it's pretty brilliant. And you're like, and you wouldn't know what the fuck was happening. Like, all of a sudden, your boat is on fire. Damn, that's cool. It's coming from, like, the sun. Metal.

Yeah. So cool. So, yeah, so that is something that works. And so that leads us into Greek fire because we're talking about a boat catching on fire and how fucking dangerous that is, because if you're on a boat and it catches on fire, your boat is gone and you are going to drown or whatever, we're trapped in the fire, like burn to death on a boat. Sounds awful.

So Greek fire itself is a mystery, what it is actually made of. But essentially, it's like a flamethrower from a boat to another boat. And it wasn't like, it wasn't gunpowder. They didn't have that. But it was a flammable liquid gas that would be, you would be able to control. how it shoots out of like a I'll tell you about the mechanism but it shoots out of like a tube and catches other boats on fire and it catches the water on fire so everything is on fire it doesn't get doused by water it is a it is somehow like petroleum based thing there's a thing called naphtha that is like camp fuel that could have been used in it that's like very very very very hard to put out you need like vinegar or sand which you don't sound like the battle like rock because it's like it's like very very very I'm pretty sure that also dragons fire, I think they called it. The green.

Yeah, that also would work on water. Yeah, exactly. So, the flamethrower from boat to boat probably made by, there's like an engineer who perfected it. I'll tell you about him. But made by like, you know, it's made in like a cool secret ancient basement by like a guy, you know? Like when you're in a movie, like, maybe like in Game of Thrones,

but you're in like a thing and you go to the basement to like see your witch or It's literally Game of Thrones. Remember Nero had a witch? Yes, exactly. You go into the basement and there's a guy there and he's like, I got it. And he's like kind of burned and kind of smoky. Like that's exactly what it is. And like that all happened.

We don't know the recipe because it is such a good job keeping it a secret. So like Mythbusters or other people have tried to do it. But we'll never know exactly what it was. Constantine the Great told his family that it was a gift from heaven. He was the first Christian emperor and he said that an angel told him how to do it. There's other examples of like in saying. your advice is from China and Asia as well, but this is like the big one. They think that the actual components of whatever Greek fire was was made of like pine sap

from different trees and like the resin and then sulfur and like maybe that Nalfa petroleum-based stuff, just like other things. And then it catches on fire. Like as soon as you put a flame to it, it's just like goes like a lighter and a can of hairspray. okay i can see it in movies um so i literally did that to a wasp's ask once did you oh my god i was thinking the other day how when we were at your house you and rachel were trying to secretly kill wasps and it was really funny because we could see you and you were like trying to have to kill them as normal so this makes it really difficult to have like a sea battle because the water is going to be on fire because whatever it's made out of sits on top of

the water and like just like the gasoline would and it's definitely petroleum based and like because they had the natural resources to do it. It was mostly used in like between like the year 600 and 1500, which means that the good news is that in Greece and in that area, they got to use it against the Crusaders, which I'm all for. I'm all for that. But someone who said one of the descriptions from the Seventh Crusade says,

quote, The Tale of Fire that trailed behind it was as big as a great spear. and made such a noise as it came, it sounded like the thunder of heaven. It looked like a dragon flying through the air. Such bright light did it cast that one could see all over the camp as of what were day

by reason of the great masses of fire and the brilliance of light that it shed. It's like a thousand degrees. In this case, they shot it at a camp, but like, you know, it's a thousand degree wish of fire coming at you. It was used in the first Arab siege of Constantinople in 677.

So the Greeks, we mean the Byzantine Empire, and in this case, Arabs were the Umayyad caliphate and, um, they burned all of the ships. The Byzantine emperor empire just like burned all of the ships for it. Um, because an engineer named, um, Kalinikos, that's very Greek, he perfected it, probably in a dungeon, you know, like he would do as you do, a rope. Um, and then they were able to like start using it. So I wish, I feel like, I wish there was like a ton more, but like the fact is that it's a mystery, which is super exciting. Um, In 1109, they were saying that it was made from, again, pine, resin, sulfur, it burned on water.

It, the part of the mystery is that there was like thunder and much smoke, which people, made people think that potentially there was gunpowder involved, but gunpowder was not invented yet, so it definitely isn't that. But I think fire itself is just really loud, you know? I don't think that you remember how that fire has like a loud roar until you are like, in it i mean i think about like the i keep wanting to say event horizon because we've been texting about event horizon what is it called the horizon

the the BP guys the the oil well horizon whatever like whatever it's called horizon like that was all flames on ocean water like this isn't an inconceivable concept like can we not I mean here's saying

if you if you discovered oil but oil had no utility outside of this point then nobody gives a shit about it until it finds a commercial value with like internal combustion engines

like I don't know they could discover oil I mean this was the Middle East like they probably No exactly that's why they we don't think that there are things like this more north because it didn't have the natural resources

to be able to create it there you go exactly yeah exactly right so okay so it's a liquid okay here's how it works I'm just going to tell you there's a siphon you're in the boat it takes a couple guys to do it one guy so it looks like and I'll share a picture with the thing but it looks like there's a big tub of the actual liquid itself and it's being heated so the cauldron being heated below it with like a fire and there's a guy's job is to stoke the fire with like the blowing thing you know yes and then another guy's job is to pump it so kind of like it looks like a bicycle pump but like that idea so one guy's pumping like air through through the through the cauldron to push the liquid into another pipe where someone else,

so I think it's like three people, controls a valve to see how much of the fire goes out. And then there's that match, like a flame. And then the liquid goes through that flame and then it fires. And they can move it back and forth. So even Emperor Alexios I, his siphon nozzles, he had them be lion heads. It looked like a lion with spitting fire at you.

So cool. Which is kind of cool. And then you can aim it and control how fast it goes. It's not a perfect weapon because you have to be within 10 meters of the other boat. But once you got him, you got them. You know, there's no way to put it out. And then the wind just like continues to make it to make it worse. And then later by the 10th century, Emperor Leo the 6th, he had like overseen the invention of a handheld version of it.

So you could literally, it was just like a flamethrower now is just like it's gasoline coming out of the thing. and it's like the liquid coming out and you do it. So it's almost exactly like that. And so now they, they say that they use it for like, you know, clearing vegetation and other things. But I'm like, why would you ever actually need a flamethrower? But if you're really going to go in and like burn down a village, like that's how to do it. You know, and so that was, you know, in the 900s, they were doing that.

And then just to kind of like, just to like finish it out. So it kind of went out of fashion and like, you know, that's actually a mystery, like exactly what it was. But I do think that, you know, you. your boat is on fire, it is sinking, you are on fire, the water is on fire, like, um, thinking of like all of the people who died that way in the bottom of the ocean, burning. Yeah, you know what's sad has made me think about like the fires in Maui and how people ran

into the ocean, the ocean was also boiling hot. Yeah, that happens in fires all the time. That happened in the fire valley of Tokyo. People went into pools and they're boiled stuff. You know, you like assume that water will be helpful, it isn't if the water is like hot enough or also on fire because you have that like layer of some sort of petroleum based whatever that is that is like continually on fire and then with like the napalm which was a step further is that's actually sticky so what they were doing

in Tokyo was like a bomb would go like a bomb would drop and then it would shoot like arrows of napalm everywhere and it would just like splatter over a building and just be fire because also examples of other types of fire that just self ignites so you're like you have no you have no you have no chance of getting away from it we've done a lot of like explosive episodes remember the devil's venom oh yeah yeah we got into this quite a bit um also what this made me think of is like how we're modern like you and i and our listeners are modern humans the most part and if you were to put us in like the like if you were to put us with our current knowledge in like the 800 I couldn't invent this.

No, no, I think we're talking about this before. I do think we couldn't invent the printing press. That's the only one I think we could invent. Could you? At scale, could you honestly, could you at scale? I think I could suggest it enough and work with other people to make it. Like, I couldn't explain.

I'm the ideas, guy. I'm the ideas guy. You figure out how to make it work. I'm telling you we can do this. I'm telling you this is possible. It's going to change everything. It's going to change everything. Because I don't, yeah, I don't think I could,

like, you know, invent a telephone, but I think I could with a group of people figured out. Did you invent a flamethrower? Um, I think I could now. Really? Really? Really? Because I think if a couple of a couple tubes and some some

some really flammable liquid, I think I could do it. I think I could. I think I would start by like taking a fire like a candle and then like throwing something thrown on it. If you put a gun to my head, head and said create a pen here's all the materials i couldn't fucking do it i don't think i could

do that like how do i get the flu the the ink in the tube for one how do i do that and then how do i make the ink only release when there's pressure apply i think that's the pressure is how you get an and out i hope that in this hypothetical i'm stuck with you taylor oh my god someone put it's back in time into a dungeon and we'll make weird shit. And even if we don't know what it is, we'll be like, this is a poison. Give it to an enemy. Like a clock, would you be able to create a clock? Absolutely not.

I have literally no idea how time works. I don't know how time works. We're useless, useless. Absolutely. That's it. That is fun. It took me way back to the battle. of black rock and is it called black rock i don't know i feel like it's i had it's castle rock

everything mentions it because it's like the thing in game of thrones but it's it i haven't i haven't watched that much game of throons but i do think that's but it sounds like it i do remember the archimedes thing that was the one that i watched on oh it's it's in it says in game of thrones wildfire is stored in ceramic pots and used in a pivotal naval battle at Blackwater Bay. Blackwater. Isn't Blackwater an investment group? It is.

I think that they're both about it. They used it in Pirates of the Caribbean on Stranger Tides, the pirate black beard had Greek fire. And then it's in Assassin's Creed. There's a segment in Constantinople where the player uses Greek fire hand siphon on an Ottoman ship. I will say, like, my general perspective is like there's truths. there's truth and myths

like a lot of times there's a logic behind why the myth exists and like I don't know like now that you're talking about we like

that makes sense to me like if you found if you discovered oil but like it's like what am I going to do with this like who gives the shit like who cares about oil

it doesn't matter there's no right so just figure it out yeah and like what oh just like some dude found it and tripped over it

with a candle and he died yeah exactly it makes sense to me like I don't in my mind I'm like it's not a huge mystery it's not like a weird combination on pine nuts and this and that it's like somebody just discovered oil because they're in that part of the world anyways and then the pine made it sticky or maybe maybe that yes but yeah I know I think yes you're like what do I do with this thing then you're right I can't it's not worth what it is worth now for what we use it for now but I know that I can do it and like of course with everything you're like how come we use it to kill each other yeah that's the first that's literally where every you know to defend yourself but to kill people and like do all those things exactly that's fun i know i do love that that there's always somebody out there thinking about how can i kill people with this it's like like with no goals in mind how do i manipulate this to kill somebody how do i get these scorpions to someone faster and more violently it's it reminds me taylor of like that one death penalty they had in the ancient days where they would

like take the condemned and put them in a big old bag like potato sack with like a viper, a monkey, a dog, a leopard. It's like who got these animals? Like how many people died? Well that's exactly part of it too.

Like getting the poison off a poison frog is not easy. You know? You killed 20 people to be able to kill this one guy in this insane way. Remember in Hook when they put the guy in the boo box and it's full of Scorpions. Yeah.

It's stuff like that. It's like anyways. Yeah. That is fun. Yeah. Yeah. I love, I love creative

means of killing people. And I love every time we're like, oh, Georgia R. Martin just like read a bunch of history books. Dude,

which, kudos to him. Like that, like, I didn't know that's until you said it. Like, it's like,

it's like, it's like, it's like, no totally. Like, like, yeah, take all that

and repackage it and be creative and come with a really good story. Olga of Kiv had the red funeral When she killed those people at her husband's funeral, and they called it a red funeral. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

That's a true story. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. History repeats. Very fun. Very fun.

Just out of curiosity, how did you come up with this topic? I think it was because I was thinking about just like the fire bombing, but also I feel like I've heard. of Greek fire and how it was like a mystery and it just was like is there enough that I can like learn more you know that's fair yeah I would do it I'll tell you I'll tell you like my topic has nothing to do with this but I went down an insane web around the Ark of the Covenant okay they mentioned the Ark of the Covenant in this Greek Fire book and how like there might like it did it did kill people somehow that didn't read that part But not like Indiana Jones, but like it's potential that there was like a toxin in it that like makes it hard to be around. My whole thing was like, oh, it was like, is this real or is it not real? And like it was like nobody knows. Like it could be just totally made up and it could be real and nobody knows and there's someplace in Ethiopia. Yeah.

They like thinks they have it or they said they have it. Like nobody knows. It's fascinating. It's like this old history stuff, which is like if you all knew how much we would dwell on this stuff, you probably wouldn't have destroyed it or like you would have written it down yeah I think there's so many things I feel like in like Dan Carlin stuff where he's like

it's frustrating because the people are writing about these ancient battles skip over a lot because they just assumed that you know it yeah you know like oh like he was dressed you know like a like a Roman Legion great and then did it and you're like but what does that mean yeah yeah I want so many more details than that but there aren't there aren't any because

they assumed that you would know or something that was like a company like read out loud and accompanied like an actor wearing the thing you know Yeah. So you would have that visual that we're missing. So white people, write stuff down. You know what? We are the historical metric of this time period.

Hi, Miles. You can't hear me, but I'm going to wave. There we go. There we go. It's a wave. Spider-Man. Did he get anything for that? He did.

Oh, yeah, the tooth fairy came. The tooth fairy came. Yeah. Ten bucks. Can you believe? that inflation thanks obama 10 bucks from the tooth fairy dude i got like maybe one of those like horrible worthers candies for that that's funny it's so good like one at a time um cool well i have i do have some mail sweet let's hear um so i just wanted to tell you that ben who i talk about my

friend ben from the pilot he said he was like taylor call me if you have any plane questions because I definitely like in my plane crash episode intro the other day I was like he was talking about it so he was like calling if you need anything there's so much stuff that's happened after Tenerife like everything's fine

and then he suggested some shows that I feel like you probably watched but May Day air disasters or air crash investigations every single one both the UK and the American I've seen I figured I figured but I'll watch them I didn't also want to tell you that we watched

no way up last night with the shark with the plane crash that turned into the shark attack was that fun it was fun everyone every character i was like eh but like but it was a fun it was so stupid and so impossible but like i don't know it was kind of fun i know like what a fucking day you're playing crashes and then you get eaten by a shark when the scuba diver's outside waving at them it's like it's like it's like it's so dumb the scuba diver's leg just like floats past the window and they're like in

the fucking fuselage it's very fun it's very fun yeah for a free movie it's great yeah exactly thank you ben thank for writing it um i will um i will um Um, the green dot is my new favorite YouTube channel for, um, air disasters, mostly because, like, they actually, they don't do this thing that, like, May Day does, which is like, they tell you everything that happens and then they tell you the why, they tell you the why as the sequence of events were on locking. like every other every other plane show is like this plane took off with this many pastures on a holiday or whatever and then it crashed and then did you know they use this metric

green dot doesn't do that green dot like starts like yeah they loaded the plane up and they use the different measure of unit measurement for fuel capacity and the plane took off and at this point like it just tells you sequentially what's actually happening instead of just like pinging a story cool

I subscribed it's awesome and also the fact that like it's one guy doing it in the production values as good as it is it's incredible so anyways

um is that it for listener mail yeah I'm just well I have another one but I'm going to do the other episode but we have two

well thank you for sharing Taylor I love ancient history stuff so and you brought a lot memories back of Black Castle, Rock, whatever it's called. Yeah. So thank you. I'm also reading a lot of like romantic fantasy books these days. And it also is all like medieval warfare kind of.

You know what I mean? Like ancient warfare, but also there's magic and sometimes dragons and everyone is in love. Which is dope because like if you think about like fiction, a lot of those people who are like super well learned when they write fiction, like they're pulling on historical stuff. Right. If not making it up, like they... Yeah, you learn something. They're making up, like, the events and stuff.

Like, the fundamentals are probably being pulled from reality. From somewhere, yeah. Yeah. Sweet. Cool. Um, cool. If you do have more playing crush, um, calming words, we're at doomed to fill pot at Gmail.com.

We have a Patreon on doomed to fill pot and all the socials at doomed to fill pot. Green dot on YouTube, write to us full of God. If you're listening to this, I'm your biggest fan. I'm looking at like the, the, what is it called? like the images for the YouTube videos just like the still images and one of them just has like a plane nose down to the ocean

it says my god cool excited to get to that they know how to get you to click but I'm telling you like fundamentally from someone who's watching a lot of this stuff it is great content support this guy I guess five days ago

was a 40th anniversary of the JPL 123 you did that one right JPL oh yeah yeah yeah yeah seriously it's been damnble yeah So let's see. Well, if you want to learn about that one,

I don't know how I got here, but if you want to learn about the Japan. Yeah, that's when the stabilizer wing got blown off because, oh, you know what? I'm spoiling it. Never mind.

Yep. That is episode 205, so not the long ago. June. We did it in June. Cool. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for us. Wait.

We'll go out and cut it off there. Thank you.