Transcript

EP17 Engineering Victory with Elon

From Dan Carlin · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 42 min · 18,854 words · 107 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "EP17 Engineering Victory with Elon", an episode of Dan Carlin published December 13, 2021 (1 h 42 min, about 18,854 words). It mentions 13 people, works and ideas, including World War II, Elon Musk, Nuclear Bomb, P-38, William Sasha Riley.

What this episode is about

The main topic revolves around the impact of engineering on military warfare, particularly during World War II, as discussed in a conversation with Elon Musk. Key points include the historical significance of engineering innovations in warfare and specific examples, such as the P-38 fighter plane, highlighting the ongoing dialogue about the role of engineers in shaping military strategies and technologies.

Key takeaways

  • Engineers win wars: technology trumps tactics in the age of advanced warfare.
  • The P-38 isn't just a fighter; it's a testament to the innovative spirit of WWII engineering.
  • Musk's insights reveal that warfare engineering is an unsung hero's tale in military history.
  • From Archimedes to SpaceX: history shows engineers shape battles, not just weapons.
  • In war, having the 'laser from space' advantage makes historic tactics obsolete—talk about a game changer!

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Elon Musk, World War II, William Sasha Riley, SpaceX
  2. – 20:00: World War II, Sherman Tanks, Laser Beams
  3. – 30:00: P-38, F-6F Hellcat, World War II
  4. – 40:00: Battle of Britain
  5. – 50:00: Sherman Tanks, Battle of Britain, World War II, Nuclear Bomb
  6. – 1:00:00: P-38
  7. – 1:20:00: Vietnam, V2 Rockets
  8. – 1:30:00: V2 Rockets, Elon Musk, Laser Beams, Vietnam
  9. – 1:40:00: World War II, Elon Musk, William Sasha Riley, SpaceX

Notable quotes from "EP17 Engineering Victory with Elon"

  • Especially military aircraft in the second world war at times it got very specific you know the p-38 american fighter plane in the second world war but i was having a discussion with elon musk and.
    about P-38 · at
  • Appreciate and just in case his own knowledge wasn't enough he brought in one of the best engineers at spacex mr bill riley to come in and back him up on this stuff so one way…
    about William Sasha Riley · at
  • You had talked a lot about how this was an engineer's war and i thought to myself that the second world war of course was not the first engineers war you can go back into…
    about World War II · at
  • Obviously an extremely good example of that would be perhaps the best example would be the nuclear bomb if you go anyone who got nuclear bombs that you now win that's it.
    about Nuclear Bomb · at
  • That's not so sexy for a war gamer things like is it better or where's the sweet spot to build a lot of one design where you already have the production line geared up to build…
    about Sherman Tanks · at
  • Or had been come back to a very limited degree the hellcat was actually intentionally designed so that someone who had a small number of flight hours would be able to fly it safely because.
    about F-6F Hellcat · at
  • Themselves but the tactics the strategies and all this stuff can you think i think the battle of britain's got to be the most impactful mostly concerned with a fighter…
    about Battle of Britain · at
  • Right here's what meant one means but yeah i mean certainly no question the united states could have won the war in via vietnam if even if it had the will to do so and andrew is willing to be do a lot more civilian casualties but i.
    about Vietnam · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Elon Musk — Person · Main guest / main speaker · 5 mentions · first at
    Central participant in the discussion, arguing that engineering/technology advantages often decide wars and using WWII aircraft, fuel, and innovation as examples.
    In any case i hope you enjoyed this discussion with elon musk talking about well i guess it started off with him saying that engineers don't get enough credit in warfare and.
  • William Sasha Riley — Person · Co-guest / supporting technical expert · 3 mentions · first at
    Brought in as “one of the best engineers at SpaceX” to add engineering depth, especially around innovation rate, materials, and aircraft performance factors.

Companies & orgs

  • SpaceX — Company · Affiliation · 3 mentions · first at
    Mentioned in the context of discussing modern engineering and technology in warfare.
    Appreciate and just in case his own knowledge wasn't enough he brought in one of the best engineers at spacex mr bill riley to come in and back him up on this stuff so one way…

Products & tech

  • P-38 — Product · Case study · 7 mentions · first at
    Discussed as an example of American fighter plane design and its advantages in WWII.
  • F-6F Hellcat — Product · Case study · 2 mentions · first at
    Presented as an example of effective fighter plane design in WWII with a high kill ratio.
  • Sherman Tanks — Product · Case study · 4 mentions · first at
    Discussed in the context of production trade-offs and technological evolution in warfare.
  • V2 Rockets — Product · Case study · 3 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as an example of German engineering in WWII and its limitations.
    Technology in the second world war if the other side had developed it first so we all know the germans were working hard on jet aircraft i would say jet fighters are jet…

Concepts & topics

  • Nuclear Bomb — Concept · Key argument · 2 mentions · first at
    Highlighted as a decisive technological advantage in warfare.
  • Manhattan Project — Concept · Key argument · 1 mention · first at
    Discussed as a pivotal example of engineering and scientific collaboration in warfare.
    That you now win that's it end of story and the reason for the us manhattan project which i'd like to emphasize was very much a function of the physics community.
  • Laser Beams — Concept · Hypothetical scenario · 3 mentions · first at
    Used as an example of a decisive technological advantage in warfare.
    So let me ask you this then because we were just talking about choices in warren if you have the laser beam and the other guy doesn't they're through but i mean one of the…

Places & events

  • World War II — Event · Core topic · 9 mentions · first at
    Central theme of the episode, discussing the impact of technology and engineering on warfare during WWII.
  • Battle of Britain — Event · Case study · 3 mentions · first at
    Discussed as an example of the impact of fighter technology and tactics in warfare.
  • Vietnam — Event · Comparative example · 4 mentions · first at
    Used as a case study to discuss the limitations of technological superiority in warfare.

Full transcript with timestamps

it's hardcore history so my apologies if um today's show sounds a little like you're joining a conversation that's already in progress but this has happened with me before where i'll be talking with someone about something usually over a long period of time messaging back and forth or whatever it might be and i'll think to myself usually a little too late in the game wow you know should have thought about making this a podcast i mean more people than just yours truly might want to hear what's being said here and that's how today's show got started just an ongoing discussion that at a certain point um you look at it and you go well i should have started recording a long time ago but uh so if it sounds like you're picking up the conversation in the middle of it you might be i've never been that good in the conversations or the interviews as you probably know if you've heard me i've really liked setting it up and starting

at ground zero and building from a from a place of no knowledge and eventually getting somewhere in the conversation that's interesting we just go right to the interesting and i hope we can all i hope it all makes sense without having all the background but that's what today's program will be like so i had a conversation that was ongoing about of all things um military aircraft especially military aircraft in the second world war at times it got very specific you know the p-38 american fighter plane in the second world war um but i was having a discussion with elon musk and um we were talking about uh the role of engineers in warfare and that's a famous history right go back to archimedes supposedly killed by the roman soldier when he's doodling in the sand and he didn't want to be interrupted and he'd made all those supposedly i think mythbusters well in their own way figured out that some of

this stuff probably wouldn't work but you know they're not archimedes either but you know the history of warfare with these engineers creating weapons and of course in the modern world those people are monumentally more important than they were in primitive times although somebody invented a bow and arrow someday the early military engineers um but mr musk and i were talking about this and at a certain point i thought okay this is a pretty good thing to just have a podcast about now my worry was that we were going to get into the minutia of like turbo supercharged engines and the performance of different aircraft at different altitudes based on the octane rating in the fuel and i'm not saying we didn't do any of that i'm just saying it turned out to be more interesting than i thought it was going to be when we did get there i want to issue a little disclaimer at the outset i am the worst person in the world to

talk to about engineering if there's any sort of engineering knowledge required in the conversation on my end i'm a guy that can't you know hammer a nail into a board so i'm an idiot so um if i don't look like i know what i'm doing here well you know not only that but if you wanted to say which of the three branches of service in the 20th century militaries you know land scenario that i was least confident uh that i wouldn't look like an idiot talking about it would be aircraft so we're just gonna hold on and see if we can keep up with a guy who loves this stuff and understands it at a level i'll never be able to um appreciate and just in case his own knowledge wasn't enough he brought in uh one of the best engineers at spacex mr bill riley to come in and back him up on this stuff so um one way or another we should get this stuff right i would think with the three of us in any case um i hope you enjoyed this discussion with

elon musk talking about well i guess it started off with him saying that engineers don't get enough credit in um warfare and well you know we'll touch upon a little high octane fuel and turbo supercharged engines along the way without further ado elon musk and mr bill riley from spacex so what i thought was i'll give the background about how the hell this even you know got started in terms of our conversation and then what i thought maybe we could start off with you know you had talked a lot about how this was an engineer's war and i thought to myself that the second world war of course was not the first engineers war you can go back into history and you can find these moments the famous uh the romans inventing the corvu device to help them win the naval war in the first punic wars all those kind of things but those are so rare because of the pace of technological change being so much more

slow and then you get to something like the franco-prussian war maybe but certainly in the first world war where aircraft development becomes a race and that if you develop the next new thing you might control the skies for the next four or five months until the other side catches up so maybe you could tell me a little bit about this whole engineer's war kind of concept yeah absolutely um so for a lot of books on strategy on war actually don't address technology or address it in a tangential manner but obviously if there is an overwhelming technology advantage that side will win even if the odds are dramatically stacked against them from a numerical standpoint or that they are even if the other side has better general ship and is very smart if there is a big technology discontinuity then the the side with the advanced technology will wear and as you alluded to most battles in history because technology moved very

slowly uh it was more about maneuvering and about tactics and strategy and and whatnot but uh to use sort of an extreme example if for example you can shoot lasers from space to at to any point on the ground by just by like pointing at it um it would not matter if you're fighting julius caesar uh you know uh heinz gadarian napoleon they just got lasered from space so there's no it's it's sort of uh you know when there's a technology discontinuity it that just fundamentally flips flips the whole situation and in the in the wars in the modern era we were very much a technology race war like they were just how fast can we uh uh innovate the technology that i mean obviously an extremely good example of that would be uh perhaps the best example would be uh the nuclear bomb if you if you go anyone who got nuclear bombs that you now win that's it end of story and the reason for the us manhattan project which i'd like to

emphasize was very much a function of the uh the physics community more than it was the government people think that like this was a government thing the government certainly supported it but it was a decision by the physics community without which this it certainly would not have happened and and and the physics community simply came to the conclusion that we cannot have let let hitler have the bomb obviously and so we must make it first and be certain of it so the but that's that's an example of like okay you've just got some super weapon that anyone who gets it wins uh no better example than uh nuclear reference so but but i think these technologies played a much stronger role in a war than is generally um understood and technology is to be viewed in the broadest sense you could you also think of it in the sense of say do you have a a better phalanx do you have uh spheres that are bronze or iron or steel

that's a big difference and one of the things that the romans had were um they had actually quite good metallogy so they they had their swords there's two general general phases uh still uh uh smart and martensite their swords were more martensitic uh and so that source that did not bend as much and so they're something that often be fighting others who had swords that were much more ductile um and basically banned over a roman sword so obviously if you've got if you're in a sword fight and your sword just bends like like a noodle it doesn't work as well after that so the romans actually i think won their wars through technology uh obviously the internal wars they were they were more you know equal technology footing but when fighting outside uh the roman empire they would when they were or sometimes lose their wars for technology uh so when the romans fought the scibians or sibbians the

they really did not have a good counter to the mounted war archer and especially if they get lured into terrain that is flat and easy to maneuver for uh horses then uh they're pretty much helpless against the technology of a mounted war um archer mounted archer and genghis khan took full advantage of the of the whole mounted arch thing obviously as like most people who study anything about this now but looking at say um the world war ii and fighter plane advancement bomber advancement it's perhaps uh interesting to go into how things started out and then how fast things innovated uh and the the the war of uh specifically going into the um fighters and certainly bombers of world war ii and uh i'd like to say that you know i think there's those very impressive design work around fighters done by many countries so japan the u.s germany uk russia and others had had some very impressive fighter designs and then and then the us

obviously completely questioned on the bomber front so but but things didn't quite start out that way at the beginning of world war ii when there would be fights between say in the pacific theater between u.s aircraft and japanese aircraft there would sometimes be case there were cases where the entire u.s squadron was shut down for zero losses on the japanese side it was just you know total ko and uh because the u.s fighters really began world war ii were were not very good um and nor were the tactics and nor was the training so it's basically uh the tactics terrible the aircraft are terrible and uh and the training is not not correct well wait you bring up something interesting though because i mean you brought up lasers earlier and i think we can all agree that if you go to some primitive planet where everyone's in caveman type times and you have lasers it's game over yeah but there's but there are smaller

levels of technological discrepancy right bronze weapons versus iron weapons or or the latest aircraft versus the aircraft from five minutes ago right or you mentioned a second ago tactics well you know one of the things that you know there's so much that you learn when you first start learning about the the world wars for example and then as you delve farther into it you learn many of the of the more intricate things like tactics so for example how american fighter pilots would have tactics to try to overcome the fact that they're flying inferior machines right um um the thatch weave and all these sorts of things where they try to take advantage of the best weave is a great example exactly um the you know the theft tree is it was a great example of improvement in tactics um if you've got if you're fighting a nimble business was developed in in the us in response to the japanese fighters which

were very uh uh agile nimble very nimble yeah nimble and so if you're fighting if you're if you're in a thing that's sort of more like a tank and but you're fighting something which is you know extremely nimble but but you're not nimble but you've got better armor then the the if you basically want to just let the the nimble fighter get on your tail and then let your squad squadron mate come back and come behind you and and and shoot that plane down while it's trying to shoot you down but it takes a long time to shoot you down because you've got a lot of armor so so that's like a in a nutshell the fast wave and you could do that back and forth uh it's um it made a big difference well and you also have the stuff that always drives me crazy that i was always so worried you were gonna take me into this territory when we talked and i was gonna look like an idiot but i mean for example things like uh super

turbochargers and being able to take the enemy to altitudes where your plane's better than their plane i mean the intricacies and all this stuff yeah okay so so so let me ask you this then because we were just talking about um choices in warren if you have the laser beam and the other guy doesn't they're through but i mean one of the things and and it's funny that i could be a history major and all these things for years but it took a video game to make me really think about some of the production trade-offs right the stuff that's not so that's not so sexy for a war gamer things like is it better or where's the sweet spot to build a lot of one design where you already have the production line geared up to build sherman tanks or t34 tanks or is it better to to build a much smaller amount of much more sophisticated things so hitler making multiple choices on jet fighters and jet bombers or maybe would you rather have

twenty thousand t-34s or eleven hundred tiger twos how does one how does one if if i put you in charge if i said elon come in here in second world war help us make these trade-off decisions um do you have any thoughts on those kinds of trade-offs well i think it's going to be kind of like in a war game you know so if you've got let's say you have something with a particular kill ratio but if your kill ratio is three and the thing costs twice as much then you should still do that thing because you're going to be better off you get it you it only costs twice as much but it has a three-to-one kill rate sure so what about something like then um adjustments so like when i think of um you know one of the things they used to teach us in in the military history classes was that if you're facing another opponent the side that has the technological advantage is that its greatest um disparity at the very

beginning of the conflict and that the longer the conflict goes on the more time the adversary has to adjust and come up with counter measures so that's how tribal peoples in afghanistan maybe adjust to being the technologically inferior side um could one make a case today that there are examples of that you know the u.s still i would i would assume correct me if i'm wrong the technological leader there in military technology but if you're uh the russians or the chinese and we end up in a war in 20 years are there ways that they can compensate for the fact that they're behind on certain i mean is an electromagnetic pulse attack something that helps compensate for a satellite discrepancy um i know we're jumping around here that's how i'm jumping around i i do think if i could jump in though i think there's there's an interesting thing here too which is your rate of innovation might be the key after the

first opening salvos because if you're able to innovate faster you can make up ground for example you know the first mustangs had the allison engines and they weren't good at altitude but you put a rolls royce turbo supercharged and then you get a really good all-around fighter so it might be that the rate of innovation and ability to adapt to like the basically the game of rock paper scissors that elon and i often talk about like when there's a better scissors out there you need a better rock or the butter battle book by dr seuss but you know you're always chasing the next widget rate of innovation is the key um okay so what about the reverse engineering aspect then so famously one of the stories from the second world war is the u.s getting their hands on a relatively intact zero fighter i think it was in the aleutian islands and being able to take that apart and maybe maybe gain six months of time that they

wouldn't have had before in the development phase um any thoughts on those kinds of things the ability to to maybe uh learn from your adversary yeah um i i i if we sort of put ourselves in the position of like hey it's our job to design advanced spiders for sure we'd love to see uh you know get say an enemy fighter or even allied fighter and take it apart and take a look at the the small engineering decisions that we think would be interesting what materials they use what joining methods like you know if it's a circulating engine how you know you know what what pressure were they running the cylinders at uh what what are they using for o-rings it's a ton of things like that but for example something like just like material properties that you can count on make a big difference so if you're using say a high-strength uh aluminum uh sheet for a stress skin wing you may have material properties

depending on how that alloys made that could be ver it could be variable and then that that forces you to use the the lower end of what that variable strength might be and thus make the skins thicker this makes the plane heavier and then you've got a knock-on effect where if the wings are heavier now that landing gear needs to be heavier energy needs to be more powerful you get this recursive effect of mass so on the other hand if you can count on very tight material specs now you can you can design the plane to use uh thinner wingscans because you don't have to account for the fact that maybe this this bachelor of aluminum was was not that good i think things like that actually make a big deal are a big deal in world of two with the fighter situation a big factor was what what octane rating could you count on uh for for the the engine the fuel yeah the americans had the high octane stuff

yeah really um so if you you know you're going to like that adam two's book we were talking about because one of the things that he focused on that i'd never heard about in terms of second world war importance was he was talking about the rare materials the tungsten type stuff and all the all the sorts of things i couldn't tell you five little things about and they were talking about what a huge deal it was for i mean the germans would invent this wonderful new weapon like a something like a cone bore gun for example but required tungsten to make it work so the scientists have created this wonderful new weapon but the the state does not have the the ability to get the basic materials you need to have that weapon work and the huge part of the whole war thing was who has the the rare materials and where do you get them from and how do you how do you jury rig it when you don't have it you know domestically um

that's fascinating stuff yeah that's right up your alley yeah absolutely germany and and i think japan as well we're really operating from a position of really not having good access to access to um high quality fuel and limited access to rare materials but i think it's not so much the rare materials that that matter is just like if you if you need that you really want a plane's body and frame going to be primarily aluminum and a simple thing like can you count on on what what's your what's your what are your a basis material allowables b basis basically do you have to make attempt the skin 10 thicker to account for variability in the quality of the aluminum or aluminium as it should be called uh that's if your plate is now 10 heavier at a structural level because of of strength variation in the in the aluminum that you've been sent then that will actually have a knock-on effect on everything else the the

recursive effect sure speed maneuverability everything yeah but there's a recursive effect of mass so it's a massive it gets mass as we say right yes massba gets mass so you know if your primary structure is 10 heavier because you have to take 10 knock down because of variable materials now everything's going to have to be a heavier two you need a more powerful engine to to go at the same speed and especially the climate stain speed you need bigger landing gear you need more fuel uh because you're carrying a heavier plane all these things amplify the mass of any one so you increase fast in one area it actually causes mass of everything else to increase as well and um uh germany actually did a ton of clever things to try to improve the the the octane rating of fuel like tons of additives and all sorts of things because they would they would just get random fuel that was pretty bad whereas the us

had awesome fuel and so they really took took it to the very very high octane and um as bill was saying the the merlin engine and really the the the best millennium was the one made in the u.s that was the turbo supercharged merlin made in the u.s for the p-51 with such a kick-ass engine it's insane i mean and quite frankly that's kind of thing where uh i'm sure that the germans captured uh some aircraft that had um just the sort of state-of-the-art you know a p-51d uh you know uh that would have been late war though 44-45 yeah yeah but but it like that's the case where you could you could hand it to them and the blueprints and it wouldn't matter because that engine is it is is is actually so difficult to make that it's irrelevant isn't that a british is that a british engine originally it's originally a british engine which was then uh enhanced uh uh in the u.s okay okay and so the actual best one

the best one was the the the in my opinion maybe different opinions out there but the best one was the the the british militant engine sign and but but then further enhanced uh uh with the us turbo supercharging um which led to a the the mustang being the incredible long-range high altitude fighter and uh but but you you couldn't if you got low octane fuel-ed engine you'd have real problem so okay but let me talk about that because this is something most people yours truly included don't understand and you might have to use small words with me elon for a minute so but but but like if if dan carlin looks at the aircraft performance i'm gonna look at the the the the firepower i'm gonna look at the armor i'm gonna get the turn radius i'm gonna look at the top speed i'm gonna look at the climb rate and i'm not gonna look at the octane level but the americans had the extreme octane fuel which i was reading

that as the war went on and the and the out and the axis fuel got worse and worse quality that this advantage became more and more pronounced what does it mean to have higher octane fuel if you're a pilot what can you do that the guy with a lower octane fuel can't so if if you have the lower octane fuel you you get pre-combustion so basically get knocking so uh reminds me of the old gasoline commercials the knocking and the pinging yeah exactly the the the air fuel mixture ignites before you're ready for it and in a non-optimal way that robs power and can lead to mechanical failure essentially okay so so is your so if you're the if you're the other pilot with the lower octane fuel besides the knocking and the pin pinging and the lower power does that mean you lose you know so if conceivably your plane should be able to go 400 miles per hour but you're using inferior fuel does that lower your top

speed i'm trying to figure out how it works for the pilots involved when they're trying to make their calculations yeah you would see it show up as power and then your power as you go to different altitudes yeah and then you you can so what's the role of that what's the role of the supercharger then is that a high altitude low oxygen thing um yeah the the two charges on supercharges are increasing the the the combustion pressure so uh like basically in enabling you you're you're basically if you go up high you're you're you're there it's very thin so if you're just taking air with a normal carburetor you're gonna be oxygen stopped just as a human as oxygen stock so you've got to pressurize that air coming in and feed the engine very high pressure air so that it can it can uh continue to produce high power at altitude and you're also going to have a major cooling problem that's the why the mustang had that that

gigantic uh cooling thing on the uh under the fuselage which is then also made dual use of as kind of like a jet it has a slight jet effect that's named for i forget but um even the meredith effect meredith effect exactly so it offset the drag of the gigantic radiator basically that's um that was done to the fuselage of p51 but but frankly if the octane is is is not high enough you you will get mechanical damage to the engine and the plane will break you know so the engine will fail so it's not just a hey it's not as good it's like uh also it might clunk out on you while you're over the pacific or over you know enemy territory and that will be not great so octane is a super big deal this is this reminds me of another conversation you and i had and it's made me think ever since and it had to do with uh with the plane i think is one of your favorites the p-38 lightning and and and this is another this is

another problem that happens to you when you study this like i do as opposed to flying these planes like other people do which is you had said to me having the two engines would be really important if you lost one of them and i remember thinking for sure yeah but but i mean that's not the kind of thing when you're thinking about this in a wargaming sense or an overall strategic sense you're not thinking about an individual pilot or whatnot but that was that was a revelation for me um so for those who don't know the p-38 is the one that looks like it's two planes sort of fused together uh it's a classic american design we ended up making with the p61s like that too i think um tell me a little about that plane because you you waxed eloquently on that for a while to me before um came out in like what 38 39 the design yeah it didn't really get good until a couple years later and and i think they actually could have

taken the p-38 lightning much further than they did like if you put for example state-of-the-art uh mullet engines uh like like the p51 got like the mustang got man that would be an epic plane insane uh but yeah p38 was it's worth noting like i believe um most mostly top american aces if not all were flew p38s and um now the p38 is is is not like was as designed it was not great in any theater for it was but it was great in the pacific theater but it was ultimately superseded by the uh f6f health gap which you know this is an interesting bit of trivia if you say what was the most effective fighter plane in world war ii and the actual answer is the hellcat because what was the criteria you used for that the the the kill ratio so okay okay well that has a there's a lot of other variables though that go in there yeah but i mean if you're in a battle that's what that's the thing that matters

so uh yeah but what about but you got pilot skill we just talked about octane fuel there's uh tactics as i mean i can think of a lot of things that might go into what what accounts for kill ratio besides just the i mean would you rather have a a hellcat than a a corsair or a mustang uh well you couldn't really have a mustang unless you've got a not a carrier aircraft it's a land-based plant no it's a land-based yeah yeah so first of all like if you're if on on a carrier you're constrained in volume um like you can't have like a giant plane or you're playing there's some locations on plane size you've got to fold the wing so you're going to lose you're going to have them right weight added because you've got a folding wing but the the soul speed has to be super low so that you can land this thing on on a very tiny runway that's in the wind it's carrier like there's not long so as you say you're gonna have to have a

slow slow speed or slow landing speed that also impedes the design of the vehicle but really i mean for for its day uh there was no better plane in the pacific theater than the f6 the hellcat it was just crushingly good like it it was it did the best at the rock paper scissors situation and i believe had uh something like a 13 to one kill ratio so that's that that's a 90 number it's just nutty and this is this is a pilot skill uh is is not i would say there was not a significant factor in this because most of the pilots of of those planes had never been in combat or had been come back to a very very limited degree the hellcat was actually intentionally designed so that someone who had a small number of flight hours would be able to fly it safely because besides being shut down by an enemy aircraft there's also landing on the carrier and not scratching which is yeah it's a subtle point yes

yeah these things are land themselves um so so elon wait a minute so you talked now a couple of times about the rock paper scissors dynamic when it comes to aircraft now in naval development that's easy we say speed armor gunfire what does the rock paper scissors apply to in air combat or air development sure um and both if you please wait and when whatever you'd like um but you know if you take specific data for specifically for a while you have the uh the zero which is really an awesome design extremely agile and uh you know really cool in a lot of ways light light and really really effective and like i said in in the early air battles in pacific the the zero would absolutely dominate it and they had they had better pilots in the early war too though that does come into play doesn't it those are veteran pilots flying those zeros um flying in china flying you know all of that stuff yeah um

i mean u.s started off with the kind of the the worst planes the worst tactics and the worst training that's true i'm not going to argue with that no i'm not going to hurt you very bad really i mean it's rough seeing some of those early battles where man those kids never stood a chance no so the you know the zero was for sure the superior thing in the beginning to the uh u.s fighters so but very very quickly uh the u.s evolved the training uh the tactics like and the technology and then the the thing is like okay so if the u.s starts up with paper and the and say japan has scissors what what's a rock in this case so the rock in this case really was the the best rock uh and this is just you know looking at actual battle stats uh was the carrier-based f6f hellcat now this is not a pretty plane and the reason they're they're not they're very few of these around is because it's it's not the best looking aircraft

frankly they're bulky aren't they they're kind of bulky like p-47s are bulky the brewster buffalo was baltimore it's bulky and frankly not not a handsome plane and kind of cool but this is blocky and not like that good but it's a kick-ass uh fighter it's the it's it is then the rock to the the scissors that is the zero and so with with the f65 really great sign it's literally designed like with the intent of we're going to have a whole bunch of new pilots who've never been in combat never in combat have had that have landed very few times on a carrier and and you know some of them are just not that good there's not that good at flying really so uh they just got conscripted and they were like you know riding a tractor in kansas until not that long ago so it was designed with that in mind it's like it's like let's make this thing easy to fly easy to land so non-combat casualties low easy to maintain uh make the the wings

easy to fold so you can you know stow them really real fast and and getting ready for flight real fast we're going to give them heavy guns we've got 50 cals and we're going to give this thing a lot of armor okay so it's got a lot it's got a lot of it's got a lot of power this is a big it's actually quite a big plane it says you see the size of this thing it's it's looks like a bull i think almost four times the power of the zero right so big big big ass engine and just really robust to fight air especially to uh lower caliber bullets so if it's being shot with like 303s or something like that lower caliber bullets it it it's like basically like taking a shower it doesn't care you know did they have self-sealing tanks and all that kind of stuff too the japanese were not bigger yeah okay totally so you get you get fuel tanks to steal themselves it was it was very carefully armored because it had like heavy-duty armor in

the right places and so what would happen is uh zero would get on the back on the tail of uh of a hellcat and would just be peppering the thing like guns blazing pressing the fire button it's going and that's this thing is just not coming down okay so it didn't matter the hellcat was not that maneuverable so you know what though you're making me think of a whole different class of planes though and i hope you don't mind me shifting here because now you've got me thinking about um for you know one of the planes i was always kind of interested in was was something like you know henshaw was making a ground attack aircraft they had a 126 and a 129 and they were a combination of super heavily armored planes really not very maneuverable not very fast because they were they were flying tanks and then a gun that was more suited to a tank too and trying to figure out you know how you handle a massive recoil of a heavy

gun in an aircraft and what not um any thoughts or any insights into into something like the ground attack aircraft because these days we would look at aircraft as being uh and all during the cold war the idea of how the u.s was going to compensate for this massive armored thrust through the fulda gap in central europe or something was going to be with aircraft that just took out all these tanks which of course is really a second world war development any thoughts on the idea of ground attack aircraft yeah um so if you it's like since it's just think of these things it's very much rock paper scissors and you know it's hard to be master of all trades so so you really want to have like the right aircraft for the right use and ground ground tech aircraft you really need to be heavily armored on the bottom and around the engine cali but because that's where the bullets are coming from and if you're wondering you're probably

pretty pretty fast uh you don't want to be staying down on the deck for too long uh if you're doing spray paint runs but like for example the the p-51 was an amazing high-altitude fighter but it was not so great as a ground attack aircraft because it was vulnerable from the bottom the the armor on the bottom was was much more limited and it had the oil cooler uh that you know that well cooper is talking about that provided some thrust using the meredith effect uh was uh vulnerable from the bottom so it was it was the mustang was geared towards you know your combat with with fighter aircraft and so was was quite good in that respect very good in that respect but they had a lot of planes down because of ground attacks where they're basically at some point this weren't any more fighters to deal with so the mustangs would go down and do ground attack but but like they got shut down quite a bit in ground attack because they were

just they weren't well suited for that you'd want something that's got a lot like a lot of heavy armor from the direction the bull's coming which is in the bottom and and not not you don't have too much vulnerable stuff there assuming if you're doing strengthening runs and if you think bombing is that's a whole different subject so you know i'm trying to think about the most the most impactful fighter war of all time right because you know like you said bombing's a different thing but to me i'm thinking of like when fighters and fighter development not just in terms of the development of the planes themselves but the tactics the strategies and all this stuff can you think i think the battle of britain's got to be the most impactful mostly concerned with a fighter technology sort of thing and you have spitfires and hurricanes on one side you have foca wolves and messerschmitts on the other

any thoughts on the battle of britain and the whole ebb and flow of the technological rock paper scissors game going on in that one uh sure uh so yeah the britain mostly had like spitfires and hurricanes and um now the spitfires target also went through very rapid evolution so you say spitfire you say which one literally right which very a b c d they all sound like that right they were rapidly iterating versions of the spitfire hurricane so quick and fast that uh you have to like say uh which month or maybe even which part which week in which month uh what was that fighter bolt so that you know britain did actually an incredible job of rapidly evolving fire and hurricane and uh and actually did a great job too um the the [ __ ] [ __ ] wolf and president were amazing uh but they're they're really operating at a significant disadvantage uh from a range standpoint so the you know if you're doing these sort of

like these maneuvers all over the place where at you know just cranking full throttle and climbing and diving you using a lot of fuel when you do that so they're climbing far certainly and the german fighters were coming over from airfields in france or midlands or basically not close and so they would they would reach uh london or something like that and only have maybe 20 minutes of combat time whereas the merge planes might have an hour of combat time and very quick to refuel and be back up from the air so you can and if you get shot down you're shot down over friendly territory yeah you shut down for any territory but but you can think of like the if you have x number of fighters but but then like here's an additional nuance is what percentage of the time can they be useful and so even if you're attacking from far away and you have 20 minutes for argument's sake 20 minutes of of uh flight time of

a fighter time of combat time and your the opposition has an hour of combat time that's that's it's almost like having three times as many planes oh interesting way to look at it yeah so and very easy for them to bring up reinforcements dynamically so it's like oh uh let's let's uh because you know if if being outnumbered is uh what a great way to win like if you you know if it's like six planes against you know 20 planes the six planes are in trouble they should run away just run away so it was obviously pretty easy to see that okay these how many planes are coming where are they headed and you had radar assistance and everything and and say okay let's let's have a let's concentrate the defense fighters in this you know right right here and just and very very quickly fly up reinforcements so i think the the uh obviously battle britain was was was not a smart uh move in any way um on for

you know for germany to do that that was it's just it's just it was not going to work so german strategic decision making leaves something to be desired yes for sure yes i think that i think i think their tactical abilities and their abilities in in scientific design and whatever uh uh sort of shielded them from the the the mistakes that they made strategically to some degree speaking of that i want to ask you because one of my favorite sections in any book on the development of military aircraft is the inter-war years because you get a chance to see a whole bunch of designs that eventually turned into like dead end designs and i'm fascinated by some of these experiments you see it in the soviet union a ton but even we were just mentioning the battle of britain where they unleashed the the supposedly you know game-changing messerschmitt 110s and it proves to be those those for those who don't know this is a larger

fighter and the idea was it was going to use use firepower and size but it turned out to just be total meat to the smaller more nimble fighters they could get on their tail um do you have any favorite of these dead end designs or something that you wish you know that had been stuck to a little bit longer and would have maybe in your mind made more of a difference um maybe there is no dead end designs you like let's leave the door open to that possibility well i mean there's an argument that on the german side they should have perhaps focused on the focal wolf 190.

it was a great plane yeah great vocal 190 was really great playing and just doubled down on that and and made that uh primary plane that wasn't that was an excellent plane they built a ton more uh of the messerschmitt 109 versions though than that ton more yeah it didn't make total sense because the uh 190 was in my my opinion a the better way to go but i mean apart from the fact that the battle burn was just a not not a wise uh strategic decision uh it if you are going to do that you should definitely have long long range fighters that have good well dwell capability and with drop tanks and that kind of thing but it was just it was just a pointless i i don't i i it's just like such a such an odd thing to do because that strategically the battle burn just i think had had uh you know not quite zero percent chance of success but pretty close that's why strategy trumps tactics for sure yeah um

so so i have a star trek episode in mind that i want to involve you in um if i take you back to one of these engineering rooms whether it's in london or in washington it wouldn't be washed it'd probably be in southern california someplace like that but take you to one of the allied aircraft engineering rooms and just say okay elon you're working with whatever those people have to work with what's the what's the easiest quickest thing that you can suggest to them that they can do that will make a difference in other words you can't do anything too sophisticated they can't get from here to there but you could say something like you know you guys are missing something really obvious here that you'll discover five years from now i mean is there anything right away that you look and you just go if they'd only done this sooner or something like that uh well nuclear bombs but but a perfect but that's a perfect

example of what wouldn't work in this question because nobody would have known but there might have been some i didn't know if there was some little thing that they weren't doing with aircraft that they would do later that would have made a huge difference bang for the buck wise but now you get into nuclear weapons so let's talk a little about that because we're going to go ahead and try to answer the involved variously here was there something simple yeah something they were missing you know i never understood why they didn't replace the sherman it seemed like there was time to iterate on that and come up with something better well they did with the pershing but it was just really really like last couple of months but it just i don't know i never i never delved into this but it seemed like the the sherman's just had a terrible time and iterating on that faster where you maybe they had all the energy going to

the fighters i don't know it just always seemed odd to me well we were talking about this earlier was a little bit about the is it worth retooling the production lines for a new uh a new version or would it be just better to just keep cranking out the old versions and i remember somebody telling me he says yes yes yes yes yes you'd rather have a tiger ii tank for sure but if you've got 25 times as many shermans wouldn't you rather just have a tank sometimes versus no tank and so i absolutely i mean as you know as a guy who wargamed with the americans forever nothing makes you angrier than to sit there with a bunch of sherman tanks and be picked off by by german gunnery before you can even see them um but what but what one guy always said to me he goes well but you got to give yourself then 20 tanks for every one of theirs if you want to replicate what was going on in the war and then you've got to have

what elon was talking about earlier the ground attack aircraft and everything else but you know what's crazy is that we ended up exporting those sherman tanks as you both probably know well for many years they upgraded them um for example in israel with a with a better gun and these things were still being used in the early um in the wars in israel i don't know how many they were called super sherman's i don't know how many they were using in the 60s in the late 60s but they these things were still rolling around you know come off the assembly lines in 43 and they're still using them 20 years later in some theaters okay that's i think pretty desperate to be using sherman 20 years later but yeah i mean if i was strategically against um you know tiger tanks or something like that in in world war ii and i had germans uh my strategy would be to just run around in a circle drive around a circle until the

sherman until until the tiger breaks down or runs out of fuel usually they just and usually elon they just parked them in some wonderful zone and let them but you know what that's what art as my as my old friend used to say that's what artilleries yeah no they they they they're big i mean it was an incredible tank uh tiger but it used a lot of a lot of fuel and the reliability was it was heavy it was heavy heavy heavy it was heavy and reliability was not great i think that's right that does show the yeah the complexity and the the like the lack of parts and interchangeability and the the diver like they had so many different flavors that they couldn't service them and keep them running so clearly the the single lots of the single tank has lots of advantages yeah i would just honestly the small move just like it's just retreat and until and eventually that tire's going to run out of fuel or break down

and then it's a sitting duck i had a professor who said you can compare these things to the car manufacturers for the various countries involved and they said that the the germans built fantastic tanks and a lot of them were the same companies that build fantastic german cars but they're really precision instruments and they require a lot of maintenance and you got to take care of them and you know the the combat situations just don't allow for that so while you'd much rather have a german tank than a russian tank until they break down and then you've got to have the right spirit the hearts and the right the technicians and then you'd rather have something that's just more of a tin can that works on a couple of strings you know well i think you can have like arguably the best of both worlds is most of the best of both worlds is is possible um but it it certainly is not a good idea to have you know uh 27

different or fragments say like different designs of a tank especially if you're on the eastern front and a zillion miles from where the spare ports are uh this is this is really unwise um because you know you can get you stuck because of one you know you blew a little valve in the engine and now okay now you're five five thousand miles from where the spare part is like wait a second and the allies are bombing your ball bearing plants and all that sort of stuff absolutely so uh you definitely want like field replaceable field repairable situations uh but it isn't you know in terms of like uh excellence in operation it is um if you look at world war two fire races on on wikipedia and see how long you have to scroll before you find someone that isn't german have you have you done that yes but i would argue that there's other things going into it so tell me what you think is going into that number

um okay what accounts for that in your mind um well okay so part part of it is that the uh in the beginning the the russian planes were were not very good and so uh or the polish planes or the french planes or you know keep going right the czech planes yeah so i mean there's a there's a few cases where um uh german pilots were fighting battle of britain um and would have like you know um i think one of them actually had had zero zero kills in battle burton and and he was one of the top three or top five german aces uh and had 200 or some crazy number of kills um uh outside of battle britain mostly on the eastern front um so you know i think yeah it's the early planes uh uh that russia had were or so you had were were not very good and so you could really take them out um very easily uh as as the war progressed the the soviet planes obviously did get much much better and and uh and and the service had air

superiority at the end i i tell you that one of the theories i like and i can't prove it and i'm not smart enough to to delve into it too deeply but i love the concept it's called it's the the idea of the non-firer and the idea that there are most most of the people in war don't even fire their weapons and that the damage is done inordinately by the people who do and the specific examples that the author that i was reading gave where he said it was most pronounced was in the air war among fighter pilots and he was talking about aces and he said that the aces he said most people would get up in the air and fly around and never shoot at anybody but he almost he almost described the people who were aces as as true killers and they went out there and caused the majority of the damage on both sides um does that does that ring i was trying to figure out because you know we're talking so much about

engineering and designs and those kinds of things which seems to take out the human element i grew up next door to a fighter pilot and and he designed he was trying to design an aircraft anyway his whole life in the 1970s after he retired from lockheed but he would talk to me so much about pilot pilot pilot skill skill skill training training training how how does one i mean would you rather be the better pilot in the worst plane or the worst pilot in the better plane um i mean to totally frank the i would say the worst part in the better plane could just bear in mind also worst plane means this thing might fall out of the sky but how much worse how much worse yes biplane versus uh versus jet fighter yeah with the pacific i mean you're i mean the pacific is very big and you're flying long-range mission pacific and you and your plane is in trouble i mean they're probably never gonna see you again so

no this was your p-38 extra engine argument right there if i think i'm definitely pleased the p-38 that would be my favorite by far um just because at least the probability of coming back live from engine travel is super is way better um the pizza 30 i i would have you know i think um you know obviously this is like some serious armchair contract quarterback here but the the i would have taken up the p38 and i and actually double down on that one like i said given it the turbo supercharged merlin's double the power of that plane double it and improve the fuel the fuel efficiency and allowed to fly super high there are some improvements needed to the airframe as well uh to make it more maneuverable it has some some issues um i think in dives and rolls but you it's easy you to upgrade the the uh control surfaces no no they're hard and and and they do some of that with the p61 though i mean didn't they

do some of that didn't they do some of that with the the p61 black widow i mean wasn't that sort of a a super p-38 yeah i think that didn't get it was late but yeah that's that's the kind of that that basically just uh major upgrades of the the p-38 i think would have been the the yeah the black widow is basically like that uh do you think it was wasn't it or i think it might have had uh radial air cold so kind of a different kind of a different thing but yeah the double boom with the double engine and i don't know anything about the supercharger any of its power or any of those kind of things i know they used it for a night fighter i think yeah i think there's another element here which might be interesting which is uh it's the pilots obviously have a lot of respect for the pilots my great uncle bill overstreet was a with the 357th fighter group flying mustangs and had a lot of great stories but it's also

interesting to look at the engineers and like the you know the mustang was designed by a german immigrant to the us imagine if he'd been over there working on german designs and so you like the p-38 was i think kelly johnson had a role in it who went on to do the srs you know later stunt works so it's also interesting to look at the folks driving the engineering design and the you know the rate of innovation like we were talking about and like the the higher the higher innovation rates are those driven by a few key folks i i don't know but it's an interesting thing to look at you know what but bill you bring up something now and maybe it's the obvious jumping off point from what we were just talking about where you and i are admiring the skill of the pilot so much i feel like we're entering the era of the pilotless plane i mean i was i was doing some heavy-duty research trying to understand the impact of the drone

warfare happening over the nagorno-karabakh area of the armenian azerbaijani conflict that happened recently and it seems it seems the logical next step and you know elon you and i have talked about how the first world war was so so particularly deadly because you had all those years of development but without practical testing to see how major powers new equipment would all work and then you you know you want to lease them on each other i feel like the drones over armenia are the same kind of thing where we haven't had a major war between major powers where both sides are using cutting-edge drone technology and then we get into that dynamic we've talked about right the continually upgrading you know the variant g variant h very um what do you think about the future of the whole drone warfare um when it comes to and maybe not just aircraft but i mean one could make a case that they're working on it for armored vehicles on

land too and ships yeah i mean i mean it's interesting future um there's no question like if if you wanted to have a more effective fighter bomber tank whatever the case may be the best thing to do is take the pilot out of it at this point um we're already there you think yeah um you'd rather have a computer doing it than a human being in there at this point already so bobby fischer's losing to the computer already in the chess game we're losing you know you right okay that's it but see to me right there that's fascinating yeah i mean it's something i just want to separate this stuff it's not like i want the computers to the drones to take over but if you say like if you have a well-designed unmanned fighter or something like that and uh with with you know basic ai we're talking primitive ai it's really going to crush up the best human it can go through super high g turns it can do things a human can't do

um and not black out you know you can do a 10g like whatever the fuselage can handle it can handle and it has simultaneous awareness and processing of all the sensors you know like a guided missile is in some ways like like that you know where's the guard muscles sort of the computer it's a computer controlled basically kamikaze plane so you're saying if you take the meat computer out of the cockpit the performance of the mechanical systems left over are so superior yeah i mean so much of the plane is oriented towards keeping the pilot alive and allowing the pilot to interact with the plane's computer systems and one fighter jets that's fly by wire so it's it's really you're just telling the computer what to do but the plane would get dramatically lighter cheaper faster pretty much better in every way if it did not have a pilot in it i i want to emphasize i like flying planes and i i'm a pilot personally

so this is not like you know it's not some anti-pilot thing it's just that this isn't the m5 computer on star trek and you're replacing captain kirk and everything no i mean i mean that works out well you want to have these you want to have like the you know uh fire control you know circle kill decisions so require a human i think you know we don't we don't computers just we don't want terminator here you know so but but i think the reality is like if you if you've got a a tank without humans or fighter without humans you're just gonna win because it's going to have it it doesn't have to go to all the trouble of trying to keep the the humans who are quite delicate and and uh easily killed alive it's very difficult to do that um yeah i'm curious what you might think you know you and i have talked about this also the idea of um of of people trying to deal with technology or integrate or come up with systems and approaches for

technology in circumstances where there's no way to train for it before the circumstance breaks out so i had a conversation with a guy who's a first world war historian and he's a big fan of general douglas hague who gets called uh a butcher by some people but the but the argument for the anti-butcher crowd is that he was in a situation where there's there he's he's in a learning curve right he's a cavalry commander from the late 19th century trying to figure out how to integrate aircraft with armored battleships with tanks on the field and all these kinds of things that are that are far beyond the world he grew up in and this goes back to what we were talking about about how quickly the pace of change began to speed up how do you think the generals and and by the way they're they're a very interesting group our modern day generals in terms of continual learning and all that sort of stuff how do you think they're going

to do with all the new crap that's been developed since the second world war when the last time major superpowers faced off how do you think you're going to do integrating all these new systems against another power that also possesses all these new symptoms systems when both sides have drones when both sides have computers when both sides have uh the gulf war technology that we were using yeah so so this is an interesting thing that happened like so when we obviously once we developed nukes like wars between superpowers became a decision to destroy humanity or not or destroy civilization you'd get some pushback on that from some military leaders you would no but i mean it's just like the stakes are very high like you can't just go around using nukes uh without getting getting nuked yourself basically so so like i can get wars between super super powers like serious wars or we're not going to happen because

it would just be mutually short destruction uh at least there was a very there's a too much risk of such a thing to have a superpower however drones now move that completely in the other direction now you can have a drone war where very few people died or maybe no one dies in a drone war and whoever's drones are successful they won the battle and and this may actually reduce the the risk of a war sorry reduce reduce the risk of reduce the penalty of a wall and increase the risk of having any war because it it's it's you know it's it ends up being battlebots you know and and so that could be one of the things that happens is that it's just it's it's now it's now now the stakes have gone super high with nukes to actually not even having human casualties could result in potentially more wars down the road but yeah i do i think it opens up the door yes so let me ask you then because something

happened this last couple of weeks uh in space you uh um and it had and you could have to correct me on this but had to do with the uh the the the russians i always want to call the soviets this is how old i am now uh it's the it's the russians shooting i believe a missile into space and blowing up something and infecting satellites and all i could think about when i was reading it was this is the this is going to be looked back in the history books as the very early stages of the first um i don't even know what you would call it uh we called it the peaceful version of it a space race i don't know what you call this but but i'd be interested in your take on uh what this means and i mean um and what a space war would look like and if something like that is a near future or long future thing i mean can you give us a little insight from you're dealing with this every day what was your reaction to that um that

incident well we're certainly surprised to see that happen i think a lot of people in russia were surprised to see what happened but it was it was something that was just on the military side and russian civil space wasn't even aware of it so um i i do you know i think that is uh that was that was not not not great for russia to do that not great not great sub-optimal because there's not a bunch of debris that's going to take a a wild steel but and some of that debris potentially puts the space station in trouble which has russians on it so i think that uh that was a regrettable incident but you know clearly you know at least uh russia china and the us have demonstrated anti-satellite weapons the the us actually has extremely good anti-satellite weapons a demonstration that was done a few years ago actually was a u.s the u.s deorbited a satellite and while the satellite was de-orbiting this was coming back into the atmosphere

fired anti-satellite missile at satellite and and went and hit the fuel tank of the satellite while it was de-orbiting you know this is sort of like the you know western equivalent of like flipping the the silver dollar in the air taking out the six gun and going bam shooting the whole thing with the dollar so that was cool um but but that was like a satellite was that was de-orbiting so it didn't cause orbital debris um yeah and it's this little public information so you can look at it on the internet there's also direct directed energy weapons or space to lasers and microwave lasers majors yeah um so it's basically so is that the first thing that happens elon in the next war is the first thing that the satellites get blinded and knocked out i mean is that if if you're if you're wargaming the next major superpower war and this goes back to what you and i were saying earlier in this conversation about how

you how you compensate for an opponent that's technologically superior to you i mean if if we're the superior higher ground uh satellite country and someone else can knock out our satellites isn't that a great equalizer um is that the first step in the next in world war three is the knocking out of the satellites man true world war iii we never have one of those uh i'm a you know i'm a pessimist on human nature and i just think i think that that it's just what was the old line that uh bertrand russell said right expecting a man to walk a tightrope forever i mean uh the odds seem against it to me i agree that given enough time the probability of that the probability of a third world war is is high if you just give it enough time you know to extend the like how fast how far could you walk on that type rope before falling off not forever no but i think the logical thing would be to push it too i think you'd have a

miscalculation where it's the old line about where um during the early phases of the nuclear era where they were talking about what if some country pushes pushes pushes in little teeny chunks so that it's never enough so you'd want to risk a nuclear exchange over but it's enough to change the map um i mean i feel like something like that's a classic human first world war type miscalculation rather than people sitting down calculating the odds of winning a third world war does that make sense yeah i guess that's that that is how these things tend to happen that's a very unsatisfying answer to be right on that i just want you to know it's very unsatisfying for the pessimist view to work yes thank you that's it i hope i'm wrong exactly but yeah i think certainly one of the things that would occur in any kind of significant world war even non-nuclear would be to take out the space assets of the

of the others and this can be done with either kinetic and uh weapons like a you know muscle of some kind or an emp an emp's uh man uh you you can love the nuke into the uh upper atmosphere or above the others uh into space and basically just fire it and it actually would cause no or no no it wouldn't it would not cause uh anyone to die on the ground from the from the explosion itself but it would it would the electromagnetic pulse would probably take out any satellites in the vicinity and possibly uh power grids on the ground so that that's uh but but that's also that man that is a big move to do that stuff also emts do not discriminate so uh you know you can take out all the satellites in that area not just uh you know the enemy satellites so i don't know if they'd be gone for the emt but i think the more likely situation would be anti-satellite missiles uh or ground-based directed energy

uh you know laser is light amplification to stimulate emission radiation specifically in the you know maybe 400 to 1500 nanometer range with a that 1300 nanometer being an infrared laser uh which is just sort of heated up essentially although those don't work too well if there's a if things are cloudy you're not heating the cloud instead of the you know what you're aiming at and you know when i hear you talk about that though elon i think about because i think you're probably right in terms of of emps don't discriminate and all those kinds of stuff which would seem to indicate that it would not be a smart move for uh for us a nation state uh how far because i realize there's capabilities involved here how far away are we from having terrorists have a capability like that well if terrorists can launch a nuke into the upper atmosphere that they they could also nuke whatever else that you know cities or whatever

you know so but would one nuke hitting and don't get me wrong i love i love these conversations where we give terrorists ideas but i feel like all the ideas but i mean but i mean would you rather would you rather have a nuclear weapon if you're a terrorist hit an american city or would you do more damage to knock out the satellites and i don't know which is the right answer but maybe you could i mean would we be more discomforted by the satellites going out than uh than the us because if you're in new orleans you don't i mean los angeles being hit's a disaster but it doesn't affect new orleans that much whereas you take out the satellites and we're all in trouble i mean have we got that right yes i'm gonna go that that makes sense yeah for sure um bill have we left you out of this discussion has there been anything we've talked about that that prompts any thinking from you where where either

we're i'm totally way off base or we're missing something really intriguing here in the last bit of conversation i think i just like to look at it back through the lens of the rock paper scissors and there's a lot of new rocks papers and scissors out there and it's just a tread development the the the rock paper scissors treadmill rock chamber so maybe maybe let's let's take it a little farther back elon cause you know you and i were talking about engineers a while back and you you you were teaching me about what an engineer does and all these kinds of things and i started to go back to you know we were talking about the importance of engineering as the pace of change speeds up but then i keep thinking about guys like archimedes or even earlier i mean the stuff in prehistory once upon a time somebody invented the bow and arrow or somebody took a bow and turned it into a compound bow or a composite bow these people lost

it so talk to me a little about engineering and warfare is this just a facet of what engineers do to our whole life or is there something very specific to warfare and and the development of engineering in your mind yeah and and to be clear i i don't mean to um uh in any way downplay the value of general ship you know tactics strategy uh and like they're all integrating about or anything like that i just think that um engineering in general is underrated in its impact on the outcome of wars so it's it's it's uh you know to be clear it's just i'm just trying to adjust for the importance of technology uh in in in warfare that that is often overlooked uh as an important factor for example sun tzu are bore there is no chapter on technology i mean that's that's an interesting book i read that i've heard that many times and uh but then and lots of interesting elements to it a lot of wisdom there but

i don't think clausewitz deals with it either now yeah i know exactly typically it's on classrooms onward it really isn't alludes to it but does not really uh uh there should be a chapter saying if you have a decisive technology advantage you you can you can actually win with minimal casualties to your side at least and you mentioned uh earlier in the conversation i think there's the the war with prussia against austria they had fast loading guns and an australia did not that was a made a big big difference in the in the was that the needle gun it was a i think it no this is like no 30 years a precursor to the needle gun it's something it was like 30 years ago essentially that the the firing rate for that that prussia had against the war with austria was dramatically higher right and so the effectiveness of of troops is really like in one video game you'd say for any given weapon what is the damage per

second dps just boil it down to dps and um and in the uh napoleonic wars for example the uh british had rifles you know a rifle is just basically scoring the inside of the barrel to to rotate the bullet so that's what the rifling is right yeah right rifling is basically just you you put a it you you score the inside of the barrel with the rotation to put the spin uh into the bullet it's very little x here so you might have like little baby sounds um that's okay that's i like that before comedic really so uh anyway so so the british had rifles in the metallic napoleonic wars especially towards the end they had i i think that you know and it's a situation where it sounds like the rifles weren't enough to really make a difference but actually they they did uh because i think they had uh maybe a couple hundred meters extra range and the british would snipe the the french officers and the artillery pieces and there's

three pieces exactly so so you don't actually need a lot of they're basically early day sniper rifles right and and they were they were given to units that were like sniper units because your average soldier carried the unrivaled musket but you're right the specialist units carry the and we did that in this country too but if i recall correct me if i'm wrong you almost had to like hammer the bullet down the barrel i mean there was a long reload process in a day when it was already a long reload process yeah the rifle had i think um it was a while before the rifle reload time was was was faster than the basic basketball reload time but i think that's the war you just talked about the austrian prussian one right i mean that's that's i think that's what part of it was it bolt action something was going on there that allowed um the rate of the the rate of reloading to go fast exactly 30 years ago that i write about it

um but but it was it was it was a decisive element because it just the damage percent second or damage per minute of the prussian forces is much higher the damage permitted of the austrian forces you could also lie down where because then you didn't have to stand straight up for reloading which meant you got away from the the linear warfare of the napoleonic revolutionary war era and all that yeah i mean the whole idea the whole dispersion starts and just firing musket balls at each other seems insane to me like the death lottery and and with a high chance of winning yeah yes yeah don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes right like but anyway i just say like there's just examples of like the the british use of rifles and and towards the end of the napoleonic wars was much more decisive than it would seem based on the sheer number of rifles but because they um they specifically aimed at the uh french

officers and at the artillery and so that's like that's like giving you know if you lose your officer you don't know what to do but i think and correct me bro i thought that rifles of a headshot you know i don't think anyone had a a monopoly on rifles i mean i think that's how lord nelson the famous admiral was shot when he was shot by a well that might not have been a rifle he was shot by a french guy in the uh in the rigging of an enemy ship but but you're right that's the taking out of the officers if you could kill one lord horatio nelson how many average sailors is that worth yeah um by the way i think wellington is underrated um well well is it not as an irish guy i'm going to agree with you um okay well well listen is there anything because you know you and i have been talking about doing this for a long time is there anything we didn't talk about that was part of what you wanted

to get into here and this includes you too bill i don't know what what you wanted to get into but i want to make sure that during the course of the conversation we touch upon these things i mean there's so much i could still ask you about i mean i wrote down chemical warheads on v2 rockets did i lose you guys are you still there are you there i'm here are you guys objecting to the fact that there was no actual question in that question you guys thought you were gonna get questions i didn't know if we actually addressed the last topic change dan or if we kind of hopped around but we'll hop back well i don't know exactly where we were headed on it was kind of interesting like the idea i mean i think elon was basically saying it's it's not it's all these different aspects and the it's the generals and the bravery but the engineering it's an interesting lens to look at through and talk about it that's kind of

what i was thinking back to well i mean so so maybe one could make the case that we've seen the the ratio of importance of all those various elements generalship heroism engineerings we've seen the ratio and the importance in the terms of a triage level may be changing over time maybe this gets us into a nice bow tie with the beginning of the conversation about the importance of science and engineering once you reach the late 19th early 20th century um when the rate of change of technology is high such that there is a big technology difference between one side and the other that then then technology uh dominates uh and that and you get a lopsided victory so but then what happens in afghanistan you see what i'm saying i mean i i think that that what you're saying makes sense most of the time but there are enough examples we can use that just say otherwise it would be why even fight the war right it's a foregone conclusion how

come it didn't win in vietnam there's other elements right well the the us um uh is just does not engage in in unrestricted warfare so i you know i by no means so i mean suggest that the that that everything america does is is is good but um and i'll probably get a lot of flack of saying this but that's probably a lot but i i actually think america is the the greatest sort of forceful benevolent outcome of any country in history on balance that doesn't mean everything america is good you know so you can always say like america went to the moon why can't they do why can't america do everything that it's like like you know america is like a person person you know might do something brilliant but doesn't mean everything they do is brilliant so but because you know yeah you know here in america we aspire to be the good guys and may that ever continue and uh uh if if if the if if the wolf is truly allowed to be

unrestricted you can just carpet bomb the enemy until they're not there anymore i mean we could use nukes but let's not but let's not pretend that that's a moral question always i mean the reason you don't nuke north vietnam is because then you're gonna risk the full-on nuclear exchange with the soviet u i mean in other words you might have wanted to turn north vietnamese uh territory into glass but it might not have been an option on the table right there's multiple there's multiple factors going into all these decisions that that that constrain your options right yeah but nukes would not have been required to defeat uh the vietcong that could have been done with conventional weapons but it would have resulted in a lot of civilians dying so then the question i saw like are you willing to kill a large number of civilians the united states is not willing to do that so therefore lost i'm thinking of korea and i think we

destroyed almost all those villages um and ended up in a stalemate i just i think i think there's an interaction going on here and i think that the technology is just one aspect of this but i do believe and i think this is something you've alluded to that as the as the technological sophistication becomes so overwhelming and so dominant that it starts to shrink the importance of all those other factors that we talked about that play into the overall equation right like you said if it's laser beams versus cave men that's pretty that's a pretty that's a pretty decisive situation yeah or even yeah if you simply have air superiority and you don't you're not don't have the advantage of extreme ground cover in in sort of a heavily jungled situation there's just having your superiority that you're going to win you know so but it depends on what win means too right here's what what meant one means

but yeah i mean certainly no question the united states could have won the war in via vietnam if if even if it had the will to do so and andrew is willing to be do a lot more civilian casualties but i i mean i think that that would not be a good thing but you know the united states just just doesn't believe in you know the united states cares about if lots of civilians die you know and this is actually relatively unusual in in you know they're they're in all in all the walls in all history and all the protagonists most of them did not care about killing civilians the united states does and made it be that way now you've got my brain so you got this is what i like about these conversations is you've got the wheels turning now so now you've got me wondering about technology in the second world war if the other side had developed it first so we all know the germans were working hard on jet aircraft i would say jet

fighters are jet bombers but apparently they couldn't make up their minds um so let's talk about the nuclear weapons we know that they uh you know there's some rumors of the japanese working on them but we know that the germans would have liked to have gotten them um so if they had gotten them first realizing that you know there were not many bombs even when we had them um how much of a difference does that make if in 44 i don't want to say 45 because i think the war is over already but but let's imagine during a time period where there's still something going on um how decisive is something like that if the germans get the nuclear the atomic weapons first in your mind they win of course do you think so yes hmm i wonder because they got the v2 rockets right i mean no no but the damage potential i mean they put this way if they have both um long-range rockets the v2s and the and the yeah it's game

the other side just lost interesting i i still wonder why they didn't i mean look when you realize that that regime was was so terrible that that nothing is beyond the pale of what they might do i don't know why in 44 they didn't just say we have all this territory we're occupying uh if if you don't want something really bad to happen to all these occupied people you know you'll come to the negotiating table right now i mean i always wonder why things didn't if a science fiction writer were having some fun with that they'd be holding you know whole countries hostage for a good deal and maybe maybe that dovetails into something you said earlier you really think it's game over if the germans get new is there a time period where they could get nuclear weapons where it's too late i mean if they get them in in january 45 is it too late or is it such a game changer it doesn't matter when they get them

uh well if they've lost air superiority then i think it would be tough um so they lost that in 43 probably don't you think not fully no they still uh you know they they didn't have it over over britain or whatever but they that i don't think they lost their superiority in 43 over germany or in that area it basically it's like contested and that's either got to be a long-range bomber or a long-range missile so but you know it's you know clearly they wouldn't have bothered using troops on solingrad if they had a nuke they'd be like oh that used to be a city not anymore so okay well now i wanna now i wanna ask a question that might be a good time to wrap this up because it might be a good good so i've always it's always been my contention that the germans um of the first world war were a stronger power and a more formidable foe than the germans of the second world war and one of the reasons i always used was that

the germans in the second world war deliberately got rid of a lot of the things that would have helped them in the second world war for reasons that had nothing to do with military superiority at all so for example a lot of jewish people fought patriotically for germany in the first world war a lot of those same jewish people that would have done it in the second world war were in other countries by the time the second world war was fought because of they weren't welcome at home and that's saying it mildly but you take a guy like einstein and we know that there were several besides einstein who would have been involved in um assuming that they were patriotic germans fighting for the german cause as they would have in the first world war um a guy like einstein and and his compatriots might have been helping the germans develop atomic weapons how much of a difference do you think it might have made had the

people that were in the u.s atomic weapons program or the u.s space program or anything like that if they'd stayed in germany and had fought and and used their uh scientific skills for that side as opposed to our side how much of a difference does that make in your mind no i think that would have made a tremendous difference and the person you'd want is not einstein but leo zillard okay yeah yeah yeah so uh zillard was the one who really uh was pushing the nukes and and frankly i think there were others that kind of knew they're probably a fair number that knew it if this would probably work but they did not want uh to to send their mind in that direction but zillow zillard and i believe zlatan was hungarian so yeah so if if you know they literally had them right yeah guys like fuchs though claus fuchs was there i mean they're people like that exactly so you know if if they'd gotten um if if they had in fact

not been been anti-semitic uh and just generally alienated a lot of people and pushed apart alienated said at least then then they there's a good chance germany i would say germany probably would have had the nuke before anyone else yeah is there anything elon and this applies to youtube bill is there anything i didn't get into and that that's an interesting piece of of of information on this subject we've been dealing with that i just either didn't ask you about or was not intelligent enough to even know it was sitting out there in plain sight um i always hate to just leave anything on the table so so what haven't we dealt with that would have been intriguing well i mean we could certainly talk for for a long time and and i'd be open to talking again in the future if you'd like um but uh man there's so much we could talk about uh well you know what you can save it for next time then this this gives us a

wonderful jumping off point next time and i hope bill would be nice enough to join us as well sure we could grow maybe more into more specifics about particular battles and that kind of thing well we could we could maybe get into some of the things you guys wanted to talk about instead of my pet issues also uh yeah no i mean we're just basically trying to emphasize that um you know in in some conflicts technology and engineering these were kind of engineering wars and uh and that that is often overlooked uh as we mentioned not not in sun two not in class with its own war and um but but obviously uh extremely decisive if you have um you know a big technology advantage maybe that's the fun part to jump off next time i'll do some research and try to find out when you first start seeing discussions of technology advantages and whatnot in the in the written historical record that might be fascinating well there's

that isn't whatever else matters we have the maximum gun and they've got the maxim gun and they have not yes well you know it's funny because there's um there was some stuff written and i'd have to look it up i remember reading it in arthur farrell's book on warfare where he was talking about as the roman empire is starting to decline they were starting to push some ideas or some people their versions of elon musk were starting to push ideas of secret weapons and super weapons and ways that they could somehow compensate for the other areas in warfare that they were losing whether it's territory where they could recruit soldiers from or or what have you and it was stuff like you know scythe chariots and all kinds of interesting we all know that they had greek fire and a bunch of other interesting things be fun to look at um the impact of technology in earlier warfare before we could even really

recognize it as technology totally in my opinion the the romans won their wars for many reasons but one of the this decisive elements was the romans uh were the best engineers absolutely it's like assyrians were great engineers too yeah um from the chinese oh no that's about that but but the romans really were great engineers and uh i mean they'd lay down roads and it's like you're trying to march somewhere man roads are roads beat the heck out of some you know little windy path through the forest um and uh you know it's totally the non-sexy side of war too but it's so important you seriously need roads it was kind of a theme like the supply chain like the the octane high octane fuel the roads gets the legions where you need them to fight the celts the supply you know like didn't um napoleon say an army marches on its stomach right right which i think maybe actually falsely attributed to

defoliation i have found that it's dangerous for me to quote anybody anymore because everybody i've ever quoted and every quote i've ever i've ever repeated seems to be wrong when people double check it so apparently nobody ever said anything that's attributed to them in history that's all i can figure it's it's right i i i end up digging deep into the etymology of things for whatever reason as as as claire knows i you own animals i literally bought etymology.com um you did not yeah yeah but i actually know a lot of i guess i judged you for buying that but then i realized you actually really do care about that i really do care about etymology that's hilarious um well listen i guess this means we have another show coming eventually whenever you know uh with your spare time and your schedule it'll be in about 25 years but we'll be right on okay we can go to the etymology of things like balls to

the wall because that that's the problem that's actually super interesting nobody just say that one just say that it's so interesting it is cool okay that's a perfect thing to end up what is the etymology of balls well um these days it may be confusing when you hear balls the wall because presumably you're not suggesting that someone if they're you know have balls uh put them on the wall because why would you ever want to put your balls on a wall um but uh and so the etymology of this goes back to many different things certainly um in uh world war ii for example both the wall would be if it would be max throttle so the the tips of the um of the the throttle lever would be balls and so balls to the wall would be max throttle um however there's something that arguably predates that which is um um the way you would control a steam engine was by having uh two bulls spinning um on a cable or a rod

or a i think cable and then depending upon um how um much stronger you wanted you'd you would uh either crank the balls in or crank them or crank them out um and so if you crank them out bolsterball would be again mean a full throttle for the steam engine um i don't know how we didn't start with that man the whole situation i kept going even like deeper into balls of the wallet yeah anyway uh i i sense an entirely new topic taking over okay well listen listen man i've really enjoyed this i've enjoyed having all three of you on and let's do this again soon okay yeah actually one final etymology uh yes when you say to someone give it the whole nine yards do you know what that means i don't okay well this is again a debatable etymology but the the one of the possible origins is the length of an emma belt in in world war ii was uh on the order of nine yards so giving it the whole nine yards means just emptying the entire

ammo belt on it i'll tell you what you made me think of it it's the craziest thing to have cut have come from what you just said but i got a tour once of the westminster school which is attached to westminster abbey uh in london and it's been around since forever i mean like the middle ages practically so they're giving me the tour the students are giving me the tour and between classes they have it's not a handball court but it's a place where they kind of play something like handball and it's in a in a specific area that just is you know where there's walls to bounce stuff off of and everything and the guy says to me we have all these house rules like if the ball goes over there it's two points if the ball goes over there it's out of bounds and i said oh i said well when did they make these rules he said in the middle ages he said so all of the little house rules that they still played with

and you said balls to the wall that's what it was it was a ball on the wall and all i could think of was here are a bunch of students today who have no idea really of history or anything like that and yet they're playing a game where the house rules that they still play under were invented centuries ago i just thought that was helpful yeah so i could go i don't know the etymology okay it's english stolen from latin about 500 years ago and it means nothing like the lack of latin phrase do we want to know what it means or is this something you'd better leave the audience hanging with well casey sri is like whatever we will be um is uh but it's it's actually technically an english phrase because it's it was bastardized from latin but the phrase in latin doesn't mean the same thing and um a lot of people think it's spanish or italian something like that but it's it's actually an english english phrase

uh been used for like 500 years um and it actually it means it basically implies uh a cheery fatalism my thanks to elon musk and bill riley from spacex for coming on the program today and you know it was funny as i was listening to that during editing it reminded me of my concept of hardcore history when it first appeared in my brain before we'd done any work and it evolved in any way shape or form i thought about it as a continuation of the sorts of conversations that we used to have as history geeks when i was a history major in college and questions like would you be would you rather be the better pilot in the inferior aircraft or the inferior pilot in the superior aircraft i mean that kind of thing that in my head i thought okay this is what we'll do with this hardcore history thing now it didn't obviously go in that direction um but this is the kind of thing where i could talk about this all day this is the the

light conversation i like to have which is my my sister always said you're so weird but you know there are worse things right um speaking of you know the strange and perhaps hard to purchase for for the holidays uh you know you may have a loved one or family member that you're having a hard time finding a good gift for them because they're interested in the extremes of the human experience and you just can't get that at the local big box store always uh you can't get it off our website though um the old shows that are no longer on the free feed are available from the website you can we have a new system to purchase them too if you want to use it called the glow system should make it easier for people with certain kinds of podcast players we have gift certificates for loved ones we have some new merch with new designs that is just you know dropped t-shirts hats that kind of thing so if you're interested in all that

stuff it's out there dan carlin.com uh i won't go into it too deeply just to say that there are some you know some uh illnesses and infirmities in the family right now that are preventing me from getting to the big hardcore history recording which never goes as quickly as we'd like anyway so i apologize for the lateness of it all not just that but it's one of those topics that we're trying to be very careful with a little incendiary in our current um zeitgeist for lack of a better word so um apologies patience please we'll get to it and hopefully you think it's worth it when we do finally um i do want you all to know and i mean this i mean people say things all the time that are just sort of platitudes uh it's been historically speaking a hard last two years for us all i mean on a global level i don't know what the next year holds but um you know i hope it's better for all of us and i think here's the thing you know

history can obviously break any number of different ways and i'm a little pessimistic usually so i always assume the worst but let's not forget that things can turn on a dime in strange directions and that means directions that are improvements for all of us as well whatever you might consider improvements to be regardless um let's remember whatever your beliefs your thoughts wherever you may live and whatever your circumstances believe it or not as strange as the sounds as much of the platitude as this sounds we're all in this together and i always um like to think that if you and i whomever you may be simply sat down over a cup of coffee or tea or something um we could have a good conversation find commonalities and ways to get along and enjoy each other and that's my story and i'm sticking to it and that's coming from a person who's basically pessimistic so if you're optimistic the sky's the limit

stay safe everybody have a wonderful 2022 and i hope i'm talking to you a lot over the next year support us with patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash dan carlin or go to our donate page at dan carlin dot com forward slash dc dash donate you may have heard me talk about battle guide virtual tours recently um it's a it's a group of folk in um in europe who were doing live tours when kovid hit and had to try to figure out like so many other people how you reimagine a business for you know during a time of of a pandemic and they came up with something that it's one of those things that you never would have thought about it if you hadn't been forced to because of something like the pandemic but because you came up with the idea it's a brilliant idea and it brings battlefield tours to all sorts of people who couldn't be expected to make it out to all those battlefields in person and even if you're lucky enough to make

it to one or two um wouldn't it be nice to be able to go to 20 or 30 well maybe you could do that virtually and now with battle guide virtual tours you can it's one of those things you kind of have to see to get a sense of but basically they combine satellite and drone imagery a live historian um eyewitness accounts period footage i mean it's all blended blended together to give you a real sense of a given battle and what's going on and what the challenges are and what it was like on the ground and visually give you a real sense of of what you're seeing battles are notoriously difficult sometimes to get a real sense of this is probably the best way to do it and if you want to get a sense of what that's like um you know throwing my name around can get you 50 discount right now if you go to battleguide.co.uk forward slash dan hyphen carlin and uh and get a look at it and just see what we're talking about here there were

two kinds of tours basically the live ones where if you catch it when it's going on you can participate it's a q a kind of thing um and it's happening you know while you're watching but then those things are saved to be accessed later and you can go watch all the the previous tours and and access it that way at your convenience also lots of different options including gift certificates for people you know that might be a little bit difficult to buy gifts for find something unusual maybe they'd like you know a gift certificate giving them several battlefield tours but as i said why don't you take the fifty percent offer here and check it out for yourself at battleguide.co.ukforwardslash dan hyphen carlin and take a you know virtual battlefield tour yourself at battle guide virtual tours

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP17 Engineering Victory with Elon"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Elon Musk (Guest), Bill Riley (Guest).

What is "EP17 Engineering Victory with Elon" about?

The main topic revolves around the impact of engineering on military warfare, particularly during World War II, as discussed in a conversation with Elon Musk. Key points include the historical significance of engineering innovations in warfare and specific examples, such as the P-38 fighter plane, highlighting the ongoing dialogue about the role of engineers in shaping military strategies and…

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

13 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including World War II, Elon Musk, Nuclear Bomb, P-38, William Sasha Riley, F-6F Hellcat. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP17 Engineering Victory with Elon"?

The episode runs 1 h 42 min; the transcript is about 18,854 words in 107 timestamped sections.

More from Dan Carlin

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 26, 2026.