Doomed to Fail - Ep 262: AI Apocalypse - We've been here before

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Everyone, calm down! Let's talk about more end times! We'll chat NORAD (which is not an acronym) and the Cold War - we'll tell you about some of the possibly hundreds of times that we almost went to war, again. Like when Stanislav Petrov made the decision not to alert people when he thought that maybe war was starting.What could possibly go wrong???? 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]

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortenthall James Simpson, case number B.A. 019. And so, my fellow Americans. And what your country can do for you. Boom. Hey, Taylor. How are you? Good. Guess what's in my water bottle?

Is it water with ice? Coffee. This whole thing is full of coffee. Yesterday I had got two ice coffees from two different places and I was carrying them both around, but I kind of didn't finish them. So I just, now this is just a giant water bottle of ice coffee. Do you think, Taylor, maybe there's like an inflection point where we are aging at the same time that our responsibilities are increasing and it's just catching? I feel so unfair.

That we're aging or that things are getting... Things are getting harder and we're getting older and like, in my age, I just want to go to sleep. I know, I know. And now sounds so good. And I was thinking, as I said, I'm going to Dallas and I'm thinking it's just a three and a half hour drive. Get there, got 30 minutes. I got to get dressed, go out to dinner. be social.

It's just thing, after thing, after thing. But it can be worse. We could have nothing going on in a living in our parents' basement. That's true. I saw some yesterday where it was like,

someone was like, why aren't millennials retiring so we can like take their jobs? And someone was like, we're in our 40s. Like what you want from us? The AIs will have our jobs anyways. I know.

We're all going to die. It doesn't matter. Right. Right. That was literally Belmar's. skit this weekend or Friday was who cares about the national debt, we're all going to die anyways. I was like, yeah, he's

got a good point. He does and that's I don't know, we'll see what happens. Well, do you want to go ahead and introduce us? Yes, hello everyone. Welcome to doomed to fail. We bring you historical disasters and failures and I am Taylor joined by Fars. Yes, I'm here and I'm going to tell us a tale, but it's a convoluted one.

So buckle up. But it won't be a super long one. As it should be. I will I will admit that I have probably AI pilled myself to death with the doomsday scenarios. It have been like thinking about it probably more than I should because there's something I can do about it. So why even bother? But obviously if you were paying any sort of attention I think going on in the news, you are seeing that every couple of weeks at this point,

something breaks about some AI company having hacked some external systems, yada, yada. And what I was thinking about was, has there ever been a situation in history that is analogous to what we're currently experiencing? And there actually have been. There's been a few. That's good. I feel like our job is to tell people of those things. So thank you for bringing it up. Yeah. Yeah. And analogous to some extent, analogous to the extent that we were dependent on computers and engineering and software to solve our problems and realize that human. intervention was actually necessary to solve those problems. And I don't know, there might be like a school of research there around what human instinct

actually means versus robot instinct. I think we should probably explore that at some point. But that is the broad scope of topic that I'm going to go over today. And predictably, like we just talked about, this inflection point where technology got to the point where it met humans. ability to destroy each other and we land in the cold war. So that's what I've been there a lot. I think it feels like it feels like the Cold War right now.

It does. It does. Yes, I agree with you. And I'm going to go through this and there's going to be two parts, two sides of this equation. One is when the U.S. almost destroyed the USSR by accident and when the U.S. are almost destroyed the U.S. by accident. Because these happened way more frequently than I ever ever understood or knew.

The starting point of this is an acronym, which I have heard a million times. I never actually understood what it was NORAD. Do you know what that stands for? No, I don't. No, I'm ahead. N-O-R-A-D. R-A-D. No-O-O-O-O-O-olating rats.

You're on the right track. No, but I do know. I did. The one thing I know about NORAD is, that they track Santa every year, and it's lovely. It is very cute. And it gets the kids to go to bed because you're like, he's almost here. Get your ass scared.

It's so much more quaint than what it actually does. Oh, no, I feel like it's like, I'm excited if you tell me how, what it actually does, but they do like one sweet thing a year. Yep, yeah, 100%. So NORAD is the acronym that stands for the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Okay, I was going to, okay, the N-O-Space Defense Command. The N-O for being North, that's cheating. Oh.

Right? Because that's not an O word. I was going to say North American, but then I felt like, no, because it didn't go N-A. It went an O. Wait, it still doesn't light up. North American aerospace. It should be N-A-A-D-C, not NORAD. Anyway, they're bad acronyms.

That's somebody learned about Norad. Yeah, wow. Even as I wrote that, I didn't realize. Even the, yeah, wait, that's not even an acronym. That's just letters. Oh, is this like an abbreviation? It's an abbreviation. It's not an acronym. Oh, God. Okay.

Okay. See, we learn in the moment with these conversations. So I don't, I'll be honest, I don't totally understand. I never understood what Norad did. There's so many government acronyms or abbreviations out there and they're all kind of somewhat interconnected. So I spent a bit of time digging into what Norad actually is because that is the central. hub and all the mishaps that could have happened during the cold war. So the way to think about NORAD is it's kind of like the central brain of the defense apparatus within the United States. The operation here is a North American alliance between the U.S. and Canada that formed

shortly after World War II to create this central repo, I guess you'd call it, of all these disparate systems and programs to potentially catch. any sort of hostilities being deployed across North America, the U.S. and Canada. It kicked off in 1957. In between that point and today, it's moved around from different Air Force bases. Right now, it's located. The H.Q. The Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs.

But we're most familiar with the Cheyenne Mountain Range one, the one that's, like, very deep inside the mountain range. That's actually not the HQ. That is the alternate, if they ever need to use it. which we hope they don't. That's cool in there. Yeah. During its founding and leading up to the advent of ICBM, sitting for intercontinental ballistic missiles,

the point of NORAD was to watch for slow-moving aircrafts, basically entering North American territory. Eventually, we developed nuclear weapons and fast-moving ones, and so then it started expanding out even further from where it was originally looking, and then it evolved into drug interdiction purposes, and now it's also aimed in. word after 9-11 for things that could be happening within the country. So that's what it is, broadly speaking, the central brain. How many aliens have they seen a lot? So many. So many.

They're all in that giant mountain base. Because that's what flies slowly across the sky. I don't know. If you watch some of those videos, they're not, they're not that slow. Okay. The other day in the car, Miles asked me a very adult question. And I would was not prepared to answer it. And then I think, and then we saw a plane flying really slowly. And I was like, a UFO.

And then we, I deflected. And we moved on. Do we not ask what the question was? I mean, it was just like, yes, about how my babies are made very specifically.

And I was like, I, uh, uh, you got to prep me. You got to prep me for this. Like, I got to be ready.

I'm not ready. So we, but the alien saved me. It was a slow moving aircraft. Perfect. Yeah. Aliens do it. It's so different than saying the historic.

brings them. Yeah, I like it. So basically both countries, the U.S. and Canada, most of the U.S., but also Canada, have a ton of different defense programs running. I started researching these because it's just like a acronym and now abbreviation soup of different defense programs. There's like a ton of them. And I realize that like trying to discuss these, it's way too complicated. The way that I broke this down in terms of what NORAD is capable of is within like a three paradigm script. one being you have sensors, which are watching what's going on, those are satellites, whatever, you understand it, I don't need to go into details. You have computer systems who are digesting and absorbing that information,

everything that's coming in from the sensors, then you have kind of like the counter response to that, which is when things leave NORAD and go up the chain of command for the military to actually take action. Norad is the central feed that captures everything coming in from those sensors and interpreting it so that understands

what it can send up for the counter response. If a legitimate threat comes through, NOAA connects to all these disparate systems. Like, usually it seems like it routes to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the one that decides exactly which response entity takes flight because of it. But that I couldn't actually clean from the research. Now that we have that set up,

let's get into an event with NORAD that nearly launched World War III, again, several times. You have November 9th of 1979 where NORAD detected 200 submarines launched ballistic missiles. Automatically and immediately, that alert was conveyed up the chain of command, and the Air Force started getting its planes in the air, mostly because at that time it was a self-preservation. They didn't really know what was going on, but they were like, whatever's going on, we're going to need planes,

and if they're attacking us, they're going to hit our bombers first. So let's get them in the air so that at least they're safe. Oh, interesting. That's scary. I don't like it. I don't know why that feels scary. Yeah, it's a continuity of government stuff. Well, I mean, I feel like, I think it's like the plane itself, like, being on like adding that like other dimension of being in the air and being like this will keep me safe. Yeah, I mean, it would.

It would work. Yeah. So six minutes after this happens and after further analyzing the data, the Pentagon using their own satellites, can't find any evidence of an inbound attack. Like, we have no idea what this is. Like, we have no idea why we're getting this sent these, alerts and these sensors. And they started trying to dig into what's going on.

And they realized that they were looking at a testing environment in the live environment. So again, again, not to draw to find a point between this in AI currently, but there's all this stuff about we're in a testing environment, but then it breaks down to a live environment. And then that's kind of like the analogy I'm kind of drawing here. Because we did talk about some of the tests that they do because they do look at a full on test. You talked about like the Archer, whatever, I don't know a while ago. Abel Archer. Abel Archer, yeah. So that's true.

And in this case, the idea was that for war game purposes, basically, the long-street short, this is when Norad was complete, like, construction of Norad was complete. Everybody was pissed. Everybody was pissed because this thing ran so far over budget and took so much longer that it was supposed to, that one of the things that they wanted to do was to build a, not a redundancy system,

but like a system where they could run testing on, but to do that, you'd have to basically double the budget and they were already, every already lost. Fun fact, Gary Hart was a part of this. Huh.

But he was, he was one of the senators that was approving budgets and stuff for this. It's really interesting. But essentially, what they could do is with this specific IBM computer

that apparently weighed 22,000 pounds, it was insane looking. There's an ability to switch it from live to test mode in the absence of having a separate system to do this and they just didn't do it. And so they loaded this into a live system as a war game and it set off all these alarms.

Jesus Christ. Eventually, they agreed, the government agreed to building a $16 billion separate system for testing purposes. They didn't destroy the world. They thought $16 billion was better than this. And because these Soviets were really, really pissed because they're watching all this.

They're watching all this and they're like, hey, the U.S. is scrambling, its jets are scrambling their fleet. We know we didn't do anything, which means you were going to do something offensively to us. And this is going to put us into a like a wartime posture. Well, it's like that secret, that secret room where they have that thing between us and Russia. It was just like a beep. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, and it just like in a 9-11, they said, we're going into like DefCon 3, but it's not you.

And then like moved on. Yeah. Yeah. Which apparently it sounds like the Soviet government was really. really pissed and was like screaming at Jimmy Carter back in the day because you were like, you can't have these stupid mistakes happen. It was very ironic. I'm going to talk about the exact same thing four years later happening.

I was going to ask who the president was during this time, Carter. Yes. The key element to this was that the human judgment kind of overrode that computer's mistake. And if that's not enough, this was 1979. There were two more incidents just like this one that happened in June of 1980. than a year later, there were two of them within a single week in June of that year. What ended up happening was essentially the Strategic Air Command, which again, doesn't, it exists, but not in its current form.

And there was a whole different acronym for it. And I'm not even going to go into it. We're just going to call it Strategic Air Command. Those are the folks that deploy the planes. And the Pentagon, they both showed about 200 submarine-based ballistic missiles coming straight for the United States. And they went directly into launch the bombers, like in. immediately mode.

Apparently there was like a threat assessment conference call that happened with a White House, the Pentagon, and everybody else. And they were like discussing like, are we attacking or what's going to happen? And interestingly enough, NORAD itself didn't pick up on any of this. Like, why is everybody losing their shit? It makes no sense. We're not detecting any inbound missiles. And that's the same number.

The same number. There's a lot of. Okay. So, so. I didn't actually write any of this down, but I'll try to explain it the best I can. Basically, what ends up happening is that the system's always doing a monitor of what's going on.

And when it detects nothing, it returns zeros. It's zero, zero, like all the way down, right? If it detects something, it introduces the number. But there was some faulty, I'm going to explain it right now. It's called a multiplexer. It's this system that takes the inputs and determines which ones should be valid and rendered correctly. And for some reason, the two input was faulty within this 46-cent piece of electronic equipment.

So it kept showing two, two, two, two after the zeros. They're like, oh, that's how many are being launched right now. That's what ended up happening. Oh. It happened twice. It actually happened twice within like two or three days. and apparently this is a whole sidebar that happened with Jimmy Carger where he was like, can someone please explain me why this chip malfunctions,

but it's this 146 cent chip is the reason why this keeps happening. So we're replacing that and it's not going to keep happening. Good. On the other side of that equation, and much later on, about three years after that latest event in 1983, you're on the USSR side of the equation. And you have this guy, this poor, poor guy, his name is Stanislav Petrov. And on September 25th of 83, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Force.

And his job was to monitor Soviet satellites to look for nuclear and missile launch activities, just like we described the NORAD was doing. There was a lot of tension in the air anyways. But in this time, there was a lot of tension because three weeks before this night, the USSR shot down a commercial Korean jet killing 269 people. We did that one. We did that one. And if you recall, it's GPS gave faulty readings and veered it into Soviet airspace. And the Soviet Union thought this is a intelligence plane from the United States and shot it down.

Somebody's really mad at the Soviets. This is around the time that Reagan called it the evil empire and things were not getting less tense the results of that, right? Yeah, no one likes being called that, I guess. I guess. So the night of September 25th, in 1983, Soviet satellites picked up on ICBMs, lifting off from the U.S. And this poor guy gets all the alerts and is like, what's going on after Trump had all this and figure out what to do with this information. He looked at the volume of ICBMs and he was like, there's no way this can be an attack because you only caught five coming inbound from the United States. It was like, that's a really bad strategy.

you launch five, we can launch another 500. So why would you only launch five? It only makes sense to launch ICBMs in this capacity if you launch thousands to completely destroy the country. Otherwise, you're just going to get destroyed in return. Right. So he was like either the strategy was terrible or all this data is wrong. And he leaned towards the data being wrong.

What apparently happened is some unique combination of sunlight and high altitude clouds. And that created a bit of, reflection within the satellite system that looked like the heat signature of missile exhaust. Whoa. And again, like, he couldn't have single-handedly launched World War III. He would have had to have passed this up the chain of command. But still, he was the one that, like, you don't know how tense those guys are.

He saved us. He saved the world. Yeah, exactly. And so, apparently, nobody was happy with him about this, even though he did save the world. They were like, I read something about how, like, he wasn't. keeping like his logs accurate during this time. He was like I was on the phone. I was interpreting these

this data like that's why I wasn't doing like what you thought I should be doing which was writing down my notes and he wasn't rewarded. He was eventually kicked out of the military and he ended up being pretty poor. I heard that his wife had like brain cancer and he had to take care of her for the longest time and he had to grow potatoes outside of an apartment building he lived in

to feed his family which is like kind of sad. It's super sad. It was a friend to save the world. Yeah, and it wasn't until 1983, or sorry, 1998. So 15 years later that we even learned who this guy was because there was somebody else in that room. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he wrote a memoir, and he was like, this happened. Eventually, a bunch of news people tracked him down, journalists tracked him down and figured out that he was the real guy who did this that night. And eventually he was rewarded with the World Citizen Award by the United Nations for not...

killing everyone. And so... I'll include some money. It didn't. It didn't. What's funny is it did include a trip to a... They were called Minuteman ICBMs. It's a type of ballistic missile.

He was allowed to tour the insides of a Minuteman silo. And apparently that was really cool to him. So that's what he got. Yeah, what's funny is he died. I think... I forgot what the date was. It was 2017. thing. Nobody knew he died for like three months.

It was like it was all without any fanfare. And then eventually one of his friends had reached out to one of his kids. It was like, I can't get in touch with Stanislav. And he told him that he was dead. And he was like, okay, well, thank you for what you did for the world. So that's it. Yeah. I, in the middle of this, I actually found another situation.

And I did, I'm not, I think I'm belaboring this point. There's another situation where we came one person away from pulling the trigger on a nuclear detonation, and that happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And there was one chief of staff person on a Soviet nuclear submarine who was the only one who was between the captain pushing the button to launch a nuclear warhead. So, yeah, there's been a few of these. But humans intervene and humans should intervene, and that is my lecture today. Yeah, yeah, you've got to have someone looking at it because

I don't know, like the AI isn't going to, job isn't to save us. It's probably going to kill us. Definitely not to save us. So I don't know what to do with that information other than to spread the message to folks that to whatever extent you want to share your opinions with anybody who might listen, humans should probably be in the loop with this stuff. Yeah. And I messaged Taylor yesterday just.

so every you list is listening knows and told her that I finally reached the point where I'm bullying my AI because I'm upset with how it responds to certain things. And so... Don't do that. That's probably also not going to be good for me. Yeah. I know. I know. It's bad. Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's scary and a lot. And I think, like, those things that, I mean, how many times this happened and we don't know? A thousand? You know? Like, those are times that, like, they've told us. but they don't want to admit they've made mistakes.

So I think John and I only came out like two days ago, three days ago, saying it was months ago that they had the similar situation as Open AI. Yeah. So like they're and like, you know, we're telling us like very small bits and pieces, you know. Yeah, it's going to be very interesting. At least the future is what was that saying, Taylor? Like I can't wait to live in precedent at times. Yeah, exactly.

Just regular precedent at times. Oh my God. One day. One day. But that's my story. Did you see that like last, earlier this month, they made new uniforms for the Space Force and they, this, it sounds fake because it's so stupid. They were like, oh, we modeled them after the movie Starship Troopers. And you're like, in Starship Troopers, they were Nazis. Oh.

Did you not know that? Just because Neil Patrick Harris is kind of fun in that film doesn't mean that they weren't white people living in Boyd's areas and it was assumed that the Nazis had won to get us to the point of Starship Troopers. I never saw Starship Troopers. I didn't know the plot. It's so good. Like if they don't talk about it, they don't talk about it, but it's like implied. I think in the book it's like much, much more implied. But, no, Starship Troopers, it's great.

You should watch it. You'd love it. But it's just like someone think two, think one step ahead. someone. They do look like Darth Vader-esque. Who's also a bad guy, by the way? Who's also a bad guy?

Yeah, yeah. That's fun. That's funny. Yeah, that's scary. That's scary stuff. You never know what they're doing out there. Did you also say that news helicopter that crashed? Did you see that?

In LA? Yeah. Like a news helicopter crash on the freeway while they were doing like a car crash report. It was awful. I know. It was awful. Because I got there because I see like military helicopters all the time because I live next to a military base.

And I'm always like, what are you doing? What are you reacting to? What's happening? What are you practicing? You know? Yeah, yeah. Maybe how to solve for the future apocalypse. Yeah.

maybe they're going to drop flowers from their things until everybody's going to be okay. You think so? No. I don't think so at all. Quite the opposite. I think it's going to be quite bad. That's cool. That's scary.

And yeah, and I think the, yeah, like you're saying, the biggest problem is when, like, there's zero people involved, you know? And it's just, like, at some point, like, no one's going to have to do anything. Like, Gmail writes my emails for me. my voice now. Does yours do that? I, so the first time I even touched Gemini was

yesterday when I messaged you that I'm starting to bully it. Because I didn't want it to be very plugged in with my stuff. Yeah, no, I can't even get it to turn off. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, I think

yeah, there's like a weird like a blood brain barrier that I'm trying to avoid crossing with AI to some extent. But yeah, I learned yesterday. I was like, okay, there's, like, I probably don't want this thing that, that much closer is what I learned. No, I hear that. I hear that. Like, it's just, it's wild.

Like, I think, I guess I was on Instagram. You can't even, like, search Instagram without searching it AI mode. I'm like, literally why? I just want to, like, look at my friends and look at what they're doing. Like, I don't, this isn't. this isn't super complicated just you know what it's really good at though

I have noticed on Reddit it's really really good because on Reddit if you don't before if you didn't match the exact kind of question that's being asked then it would never find a direct result you'd have to go through a bunch of stuff but now

if you just type it in the search part it uses AI to kind of match it up with what your intent was across what was already there that is actually really useful right and that's what it's doing all over, like all over the internet. Right. I read a book called, okay, I know you have to go.

I read a book called The Kill Chain a while ago. My cousin who's in military suggested it. And it's older now, but it basically was like the systems inside of the military are insane. And like, so outdated. And like basically like they need Salesforce and they don't have it, you know, or they need like some sort of like CRM or like a tool to be able to like, talk to each other and they just don't. And so, like, they're building these things.

Like, whenever a company's like, oh, we're going to build our own thing. I'm like, are you? Like, just someone's already solved a problem. Buy something else, you know? Which is, like, what you're saying, like, why is that cost, like, billions of dollars in 1970 to make this thing? It's because of the government. I don't know.

I think, I don't know. I think, like, from what I understand, Palantir is trying to solve a huge chunk of that. But also, yeah, like, your issue. is it's all the government bureaucracy, it's all the regulations and all that that slows everything down and makes it archaic. Yeah.

I heard that Palantir bought the ORA ring. Oh, really? They didn't buy it, but now they work together. Seriously? Mm-hmm. But I guess maybe something big of a deal, or is it a big deal? No.

ORA uses the Palantir technologies as a secure cloud hosting environment for its enterprise platform, the U.S. Department of Defense. Yeah, I don't want them to know my sleep schedule. It's weird. Why does ORA have a database in the Department of Defense? I'm taking this thing off.

Yeah. Wait, were you wearing one? I'm sorry, I didn't know. Yeah, literally. Like, here. Like, why does the DOD need to know what my heart rate is? Exactly. Exactly, exactly. I mean, it's like women, if you are still tracking your period on a period app, don't do that.

Like, because that's not private and they can follow people, I wish they've done. I know everything at this point anyways. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you for your service. Yeah, do we have any. I do. Morgan texted me, what did she text me? Something about 9-11, I think.

Oh, I think just, you know, just. people responded to like the 9-11 stuff how like you know we need to get more paperwork now and do all these things because of the air and all of that and how everything like what was juliani supposed to do like tell everybody they can't go home that's a huge like just what are you supposed to do in that situation it's crazy so just a little bit of like chatting about that so i think that was it yeah yeah it sounds like an impossible situation exactly it's impossible you could ever could prepare for it i mean maybe but you couldn't You couldn't have imagined. Right. I don't think. You know. So, yeah, that's it. But yeah.

Well, I'm going to also, well, when I post this, I'll post a bunch of things that, because this reminds me of when we did war games. And then we also did, like, other, like, Cold War things. So I'll put in some other further listening, if you haven't listened to our other episodes about. And I also posted the SR 71 yesterday. Yes, I saw that. That movie, May Day, with Ryan Reynolds, which I had not watched,

but seems like I might watch it. It's very fun. It's cute. Yeah. Well, please write to us at Dunifelpod at Gmail.com. Find us on the socials at Dunifelpod. And that's it, Taylor.

Cool. Thank you, thank you. Sweet. We'll go in and kill it there.