Annie Jacobsen: How One Lab Leak Ends the World in 6 Days - #564

Annie Jacobsen on BIOLOGICAL WAR: how a single lab leak could take us from outbreak to anarchy in six days — and why bio may be scarier than nuclear. WIN a signed copy of BIOLOGICAL WAR or NUCLEAR WAR, a meteorite & more — enter free: https://briankeating.com/annie (Join there for the free Biological War Scenario Simulation and Source Dossier + early access to my next Nobel-laureate interview.) Covid killed ~1% of the people it infected. Pneumonic plague, untreated, kills nearly 100% within 24 hours. In her new book Biological War: A Scenario, bestselling journalist Annie Jacobsen war-games what happens when an engineered pathogen escapes — drawing on interviews with presidential advisors, secretaries of defense, STRATCOM commanders, epidemiologists, and directors of Operation Warp Speed. We get into gain-of-function, the Soviet bioweapons program, mirror life, AI and bioweapons (including her conversation with Sam Altman), the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter — and why the first 24 hours decide everything. ENTER THE GIVEAWAY + GET THE FREE SOURCE DOSSIER: https://briankeating.com/annie GET THE BOOK (Annie narrates the audiobook): https://www.amazon.es/Biological-War-non-fiction-thriller-bestselling/dp/1911742035 https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details?id=AQAAAEBqvjj-QM 0:00 Covid was 1%. Pneumonic plague is 100%. 1:31 Why this conversation matters (please subscribe) 2:05 Don't judge a book by its cover — Biological War 4:54 "You can only mitigate extermination" 5:50 Reporting a classified world without a clearance 9:00 Gain-of-function: cure or weapon? 11:22 BSL-4, Vektor & the Siberia lab leak 15:28 Katalin Karikó & the two sides of the lab bench 18:06 Paul Berg & when biology turned dangerous 20:42 Paranoia as doctrine: why the Soviets cheated 23:13 Tailored bioweapons & genetic privacy 27:16 Could it happen again? What Covid taught us 33:40 The WHO "not airborne" mistake & the collapse of trust 36:52 Both sides failed: the vaccine politics 39:48 The "euphoria" enhancement — dark-hearted evil 44:02 Why "airborne" changes everything 45:50 Climate vs. AI: the next scenario? 48:12 Biological twilight & "devolution" 52:52 Fritz Haber and the hubris of genius 54:36 AI + bio: the real threat 1:00:34 Mirror life: the extinction-level horror 1:04:44 Trinity Day, Iran & "the atomic weapon" 1:08:26 The Fermi Paradox & the Great Filter 1:09:34 A gift for Annie (a meteorite + a piece of the Moon) 1:16:36 Igor Domaradsky's secret notes 1:21:12 Daschle, anthrax & "inhuman things just to survive" 1:21:56 If you were President: shutting down the internet 1:27:18 Who dies first — first responders and mothers 1:33:02 Sam Altman, ChatGPT & the change OpenAI made 1:37:26 "You want me on that wall" 1:40:00 A hopeful ending ABOUT ANNIE JACOBSEN Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Nuclear War: A Scenario, Operation Paperclip, Area 51, and Surprise, Kill, Vanish. GO DEEPER • Katalin Karikó — the mRNA breakthrough: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3oPZMPMlzsEFEyvVHA5dAE • Jay Bhattacharya — Follow Science, Not Scientists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTnJNXYFg9M • Freeman Dyson — Into the Impossible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egpsFbbpkHQ A FEW SOURCES FROM THE BOOK (full dossier at https://briankeating.com/annie) • "Confronting risks of mirror life," Science (2024): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ads9158 • Ken Alibek, Biohazard (the Soviet program from the man who ran it) • Biological Weapons Convention (1972): https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destruction/biological-weapons/biological-weapons-convention SUBSCRIBE so guests like Annie keep saying yes: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Newsletter + meteorite offer: https://BrianKeating.com/edu: https://briankeating.com/annie Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M. A. G. I. C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M. A. G. I. C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join What scares you more — nuclear war or biological war? Tell me in the comments. #AnnieJacobsen #BiologicalWar #Bioweapons #Pandemic #BrianKeating #IntoTheImpossible #NuclearWar #MirrorLife #AI #Biosecurity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

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• 0:59Speaker 02

  COVID had a 1% death rate. 1%. Pneumonic plague, you get it, and you don't get antibiotics. Inside of 24 hours, you're dead with 100% case fatality rates.

• 1:11Brian Keating?

  Is it up to us? And what can we do?

• 1:13Speaker 02

  I'm talking to presidential advisers, secretaries of defense, stratcom commanders, epidemiologists, directors of Operation Warp Speed, people who have their hand on the pulse. He gave me this line, which just floored me. He said, you know, Annie, in a large-scale biological attack, there's nothing you can really do to prevent it. You can only handle mitigating extermination. Essentially, a kid in a basement with the help of a computational system, an AI system like Claude, could potentially make this kind of bioweapon. And that's the fundamental danger. Bio is very, very, very different. I take readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days. Instead of being home, under the covers,

• 1:58Speaker 02

  not infecting people, you're out disco dancing in a very crowded place. And you're essentially in the middle of a super-spreader event. That's straight-up, dark-hearted evil. If there is a lab leak, if the outbreak can be shut down in the first 12 to 24 hours, you can actually prevent the dystopian ending. But once it's 24 hours, once it's 48 hours, 96 hours, it's out of the bag.

• 2:25Brian Keating?

  What scenario scares you more? Nuclear war or biological war? Quick thing before we start. Most of you watching this aren't subscribed. If you've ever gotten something out of one of my conversations, subscribing is a single thing that decides whether guests like Annie say yes to the next page. The Scenario book that you've written this time is also kind of in a similar genre as your previous book, which is just some of the... I call it hard science fiction. You call it science fact. I agree, except up to the point when there's actually a disaster that's going to take place in this book.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  You know, I sometimes say in my tweets and such, spoiler alert, it has a dystopian ending.

• 3:05Brian Keating?

  That's right. And for those, you know, 10 of you out there who haven't read Nuclear War, you will have two treats in store for you because these books are both incredibly historically accurately researched. You're a journalist. You're trained as a journalist. You actually do the hard work of being a journalist. But you see it from the eye of a storyteller. You write for television. I guess the first place I'd like to start is, yeah, with what you're not supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. So I want you to take us through this incredible new book, Biological War: A Scenario. So tell us about the cover, the title, and the subtitle, which is just a scenario.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Well, it's a beautiful cover, and I have to give credit to the art department for that. And you've been to a lot more places, a lot more radical places around the globe than I have. You've been to a continent I haven't been.

• 3:51Brian Keating?

  Yet, yeah, we may take it there.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  You know, Biological War: A Scenario follows in the vein of Nuclear War: A Scenario. Not that I expected to write a follow-on book, although when I was reporting Nuclear War, a number of my sources said to me, Annie, you have to look at bio next. These are people who work in counterproliferation, a fancy word for, God forbid, you know, we need to make sure that this kind of an existential threat doesn't happen. And, you know, they're similar in terms of the title and the front, but, oh my goodness, they are different. New animals, they are different scenarios. One note on your, like, science fiction versus science fact. What I like to say is it's, you know, it's hypothetical.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  It's a hypothetical scenario based on war gaming that is done at the Pentagon. And you will note, I list my sources in the front of the book, not the back. My first six books have the sources in the back. But I want readers to realize, because I am now writing Scenario, that this is who she spoke with. And so you realize I'm talking to former presidential advisers, secretaries of defense, you know, stratcom commanders, epidemiologists, directors of Operation Warp Speed, people who have their hand on the pulse, if you will. And one of the individuals in this book I was fortunate to interview was Colonel, retired Colonel Tom Erhart,

• 5:24Speaker 02

  who worked in the Pentagon for a very famous office there called the Office of Net Assessment inside the office of the Secretary of Defense. It was run for decades by a guy called Andy Marshall. They called him the Wizard. And the war gaming that was done in there is deeply classified. But Colonel Erhart helped me to understand what it is, how it works. And most importantly, he gave me this line, which just floored me and became a lot of the scenario, which is when he said, you know, Annie, in a large-scale biological attack, there's nothing you can really do to prevent it. You can only handle mitigating extermination. And that freaked me out,

• 6:09Speaker 02

  and that became a real locus of this book.

• 6:11Brian Keating?

  Yeah. It's impossible not to compare the two. I know that's like, you know, asking you to compare your children. Although when I do that with my mom, you know, she'll say, oh, it's like comparing my left hand to my right hand. I say, Mom, you're left-handed. I mean, that's pretty obvious with when you like better. But when you think about these, the role that I thought of as a physicist was how important, like you just said, you call it war gaming. We would call it simulation. How do you back that up with the report? How do you get this gripping, you know, just violent, mind-melting detail without compromising? I mean, you don't have security clearance. I mean, right? How do you do that on a practical level? How do they give you the access that you have? And how much of it has to be kind of, you know, conjecture on your part, shall we say?

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a really interesting, long conversation. But the short version of it is, and first of all, you're absolutely correct, that I don't have a security clearance. And also, really important to know is I do not receive classified information. People often, I'll be on other podcasts, how'd you get all this classified information? I don't get that because my sources would be violating their security clearances if they gave me that information. And so what's interesting is I'm taken up to the edge of what can legally be known. And that has to do with the fact that many of these operations that are highly classified, there are parts of them that become unclassified or are declassified. And the public doesn't really ever know about them.

• 7:32Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  And a lot of times, that's me learning keywords that I might use to request something from the National Archives. And so I'm always sourcing my stories. They're kind of like a big puzzle. And there's different pieces of the puzzle. Firsthand sources, always in quotes. You know, you can go to the notes and see, oh, she found this out in the National Archives. That's where this from. Or other journalists' work. I stand on the shoulders of many, many incredible reporters who come before.

• 8:04Brian Keating?

  Before this gets any darker, it's worth saying what Annie thinks the point of her book actually is. The really challenging part for me with your writing is that you're so damn good at it. It's terrifying. I told my wife I was talking about it. She's like, how does Annie sleep? Like, when you talk about these things, I mean, you know, spoiler alert, Nuclear War goes through 24,000 years of human history, you know, from 88 minutes ago to 24,000 years in the future. Biological War takes place on a much sharper timescale. Plus, it's very vivid. You know, we haven't been through, you know, none of us really live through, you know, Hiroshima and things like that. We can talk about it abstractly. But we all lived through COVID. And we all saw what happened. And there's many parallels in here. You do a very careful job distinguishing

• 8:49Brian Keating?

  between what would be used as a weapon versus what would be used for rational, you know, sort of production. And the thing that, you know, most struck me when I had Catalina Carrico, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology for the COVID vaccine. We'll talk about her in just a bit. But, you know, I said, is gain-of-function, is that really so bad? I mean, I kind of, when I had COVID, I had COVID once. I had a vaccine. I didn't have all the boosters. And I just couldn't take it after a while. And, you know, so I did have the vaccine. I had a booster, and that was it. But when I had COVID, after getting the vaccine, after having the booster, I lost my sense of taste and smell for a while. And so I lost weight. I like to say I dropped five pounds from my chin to my stomach. Now, I dropped five pounds. I lost weight. And I thought, well, you know,

• 9:34Brian Keating?

  what if there was, you know, God forbid, because there are millions of people died. The vaccine definitely saved millions of people, right? And my friend, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's now the director of the NIH, who's been in this chair, so to speak, he was a very big proponent of the vaccine. So let's not get too politicized unnecessarily. But are there beneficial reasons that the average person might say, you know, maybe we shouldn't stop gain-of-function, which is, you know, plays a role in this book, which we'll talk about? Is gain-of-function always a bad thing?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Gain-of-function for people who are listening or watching, who aren't professors and didn't almost win the Nobel Prize, gain-of-function is like, it's very much like it sounds, gaining function. So it's a form of genetic modification, of genetic engineering, where you're looking at a pathogen. And of course, for viewers, listeners, a pathogen can either be a virus or a bacteria. In the Scenario, I go with bacteria for reasons we get into. But you are genetically modifying that so that it gains new function. And... The three most important functions to be gained when you're thinking about modification

• 10:43Speaker 02

  in this world of is it really dangerous or is it really positive is do the risks outweigh the rewards in this debate would be virulence, right? Like you can make something more lethal, transmissibility, you can make it more contagious, and can you make it defy a medical countermeasure?

• 11:06Brian Keating?

  Hmm.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  So can you make it sort of override an existing immunity that you might have from a vaccine? Can it override an antibiotic you might take in the case of a bacteria? So the proponents of gain a function will say, absolutely, the reason we do those experiments is we need to be prepared in the event of a pandemic, an epidemic or a pandemic, we have to be able to get at it fast. And the only way to do that is to understand what a bad guy could maybe do. So it's this very catch 22 situation, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Now, the people who are against, like sort of very anti gain of function, including Colonel

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Earhart, who called it evil, including Andy Weber, who was, you know, has decades in the office of the Secretary of Defense, served under the Obama administration, back to the Reagan administration, he's really a veteran in understanding this. He told me that he believes that gain of function is a euphemism for biological weapons engineering.

• 12:10Brian Keating?

  Yep.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  And biological weapons engineering is illegal.

• 12:15Brian Keating?

  To understand why an accident is the scenario, you need to know how many of these labs there are now and where they are. To me, that does sound, yes, of course, we have to talk about, you know, the lab leak and the kind of, the way that it happens in this book, you know, is sort of unexpected. I mean, nuclear war, you know, when I saw the title for that book years ago, and I fell in love with it, you know, I thought, oh, Russia's launching a war, you know, and it was right after the invasion of Ukraine. And everything was just like, everything you do is like very topical, very timely. I was like, okay, so it's coming from North Korea and that, you know, obviously spoiler alert, but for four-year-old, right? So we could spoil it, right? And in that, in that context, that was a little bit of surprise. And then everything goes haywire, right? And that was an intentional act of war on the behalf of North Korea. We're not really

• 13:00Brian Keating?

  sure why, but you know, it does happen, right? Here, it's not, it's sort of the munitions of a war that are being created. So we should set the stage. The premise of this book is different. It's not an active attack. It's a sort of a passive attack. The results are equally as catastrophic, some ways more horrifying, as we'll talk about. But let's set the stage for the listener or viewer who hasn't read it, because it comes out today. So go out and get it. I recommend the audiobook because Annie reads all of her books. And I just, you have a great voice. I mean, there's no denying it. It's very mellifluous is the way I describe it.

• 13:32Speaker 04

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• 13:45Brian Keating?

  So let's set the stage. Let's go back to where it is. It takes place, I have my handy globe here.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:53Brian Keating?

  So it takes place in Siberia. So let's start there.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  The inciting incident, yeah.

• 13:56Brian Keating?

  The inciting incident. So it's in Siberia. Let's take us there.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Yes. Before I do that, let me just set the stage with this concept, which is that in looking at doctrine of how biological war is looked at, both at the Defense Department and at FEMA, okay, and also at the US Department of Health and Human Services, which would be in charge of like the nation's public health were something to happen in the United States. In all of that doctrine, planning doctrine, listed in biological, in the BW category, is a biological, a catastrophic biological incident or attack.

• 14:38Brian Keating?

  Hmm.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  And that is, when you are a reporter and you suddenly ding, ding, ding, that is a moth, mic drop moment, because you realize, oh, this is not just biological warfare in the old school sense of like, you know, let's, let's drop some biological bombs on them. An incident means an accident. It means a lab leak. It means a lab escape.

• 15:04Brian Keating?

  Regardless of how it happens.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Regardless, and that is profoundly dangerous. I mean, throwing out a number here, BSL four labs, biosafety level four, the, you know, the space suits and that everybody sees in the movies.

• 15:15Brian Keating?

  Threats, yep.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  There were two in the United States before nine 11. There are now 17, 15 or 17, two of them are being constructed. BSL three labs, which you can work with plague, hantavirus, I mean, this, these are, these are serious pathogens. There are 3,500 around the world.

• 15:35Brian Keating?

  Yeah, there's some here in San Diego.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  And they are, many of them in 110 countries are in places that are actually current war zones. And so now consider the idea of an incident as a lab leak or a lab accident. And then you might realize why I began the scenario that way, because you cannot, there can be no arguing of like, that could never happen because accidents happen.

• 16:03Brian Keating?

  Hmm.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  And so there is a lab accident in Siberia at a very famous BSL four lab called Vector. And there was a accident at Vector in 2019 where a building caught on fire. And I always want readers to know, I do those little references to that. So you can realize you are reading science fact, not science fiction.

• 16:27Brian Keating?

  Yes. I want to go back to what you just said about any modality in which it escapes, you kind of divide things, biological warfare before escape, before accident, before intentional leak. I want to start with that because to me as a scientist and having interviewed benchtop scientists, biologists, Nobel Prize winners, like I said, like Catalin Carrico, perfect example. She was working on, you know, recombinant DNA, which you also plays a role in the book, which was a step, you know, first discovered and won the Nobel Prize in 71, I think you talk about in this book. They're doing things for the sheer scientific thrill, the challenge, the desire and curiosity that all great scientists have. And, and then maybe later it'll have some application, although in her case, she had a torturous

• 17:11Brian Keating?

  career. She was threatened with deportation by her postdoc advisor. She's a stoic. She actually ended up forgiving him and he tried to have her removed from the country with a young child. She had her, all of her lab equipment thrown out of the bench at UPenn, lesser of the Ivies compared to Brown and Princeton. And it was, you know, thrown out unceremoniously, she was kicked out. And then, okay, when she wins the Nobel Prize, then they try to retroactively reinstate her as faculty, to which she said, quite rightfully, F you. And basically.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  What a story.

• 17:37Brian Keating?

  She's an amazing person. I'd love to introduce you guys. Next time she's, she visits here quite frequently. But she explained in such, getting chickens' eggs from her father in Hungary to do, you know, simple tests on how different bacteria and salmonella and things as a child. And then that carried through to her and sustained her as an adult. And then you have the people on the other side of the lab bench, the, what we call translationalists that take it from a laboratory, from a university, from a research setting, and then they want to make money or they want to make weapons with it. Well, what you do in that situation, how do you advise a young scientist, many of whom are listening, Nobel laureates, listen to this podcast? How do you advise them? Because like at a certain level, where does it stop with? A lot of the nuclear scientists that you talk to deeply regretted their involvement, as you talk about in your book, in Area 51

• 18:22Brian Keating?

  and, and the paperclip as well, right? You did the firsthand research, a lot of them, including our late, great mutual friend, Herb York, regretted it to some extent. How do you stop them? Or is it ethical to stop them? How would you, how do you handle that? Do you kind of kill baby Hitler? What level do you intervene? Or do you not? Is it not right to intervene?

• 18:42Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm not a scientist, so I don't, I can't answer that question, but I can certainly and always do, in all of my books, raise that issue for scientists to think about for themselves. And I am just simply relaying stories of, you know, historical stories of scientists on the record.

• 18:59Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Struggling with this, you know, complex question, usually later in their life, after they have done something often that they regret.

• 19:08Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  And, or maybe regret is too strong of a word. Maybe it's sort of wish they had thought through a little bit more. And the best example, or certainly in this book, is you mentioned Paul Berg, who really has that origin story of recombinant DNA. Again, sounds just, it is just like it sounds, like you recombine DNA. And this was done in 1971 in a lab in Stanford University. And I quote Berg, giving interviews later, he won the Nobel Prize, talking about how we weren't even thinking of nefarious use of this, you know? And then later he says, or one of his colleagues says, we should have. Because

• 19:51Speaker 02

  that time, that moment in time in history is so important to the question you're raising from a sort of real, like locus of the shift about biological weapons. So for, for, many people don't realize that once upon a time, biological weapons were legal. They were legal in the United States. They were, they were, meaning they weren't illegal.

• 20:13Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  And the United States was building a massive arsenal of biological weapons. This is on the record known work, primarily at Fort Detrick in Maryland, but also at several other places around the country. And In, starting in 1969, President Nixon just sort of mysteriously, there's air quotes around that, decided to give up the biological weapons arsenal. You know, he talked about them being repugnant to the conscience of mankind. And the treaty, as a result, the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty, which is also known as the BWC, that was signed by all of these nations, starting in 1972, including Russia. And the reason why I choose

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Siberia, Russia, as the lab leak, the vector lab, is because there's historical precedent of Russia absolutely kind of crossing its fingers behind its back. As they signed this treaty, they began, by their own admittance of their scientists that defected to the United States, they began a colossal biological weapons program. And so, when everyone else, like the United States, was destroying its arsenals, the Soviets were not only not destroying theirs, but they were building new weapons using recombinant DNA technology that they, in essence, stole from BURK.

• 21:34Brian Keating?

  What do you think is their motivation? I mean, they have more nuclear weapons than they did for a long time. The missile gap was closed in the 60s. What would be their motive? I mean, play armchair psychologist for a moment. What is their rationale? I could see a rogue state wanting to do it because it's a poor, you know, crazy warlords version of a nuke. But why would they do it?

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Well, I don't have to play armchair speculosa because it's on the record. Because this, a number of the Soviet biological weapons engineers defected to the United States in the 1990s. And they came here and they told us what they were doing. And they told us why they were doing it. And the reason was twofold. One, they were told by their powers that be, their military minders, that of course, the United States was cheating on the treaty. Of course, they were making biological weapons. That was the one, which, you know, historically is not true. As far as I know, that is not true. As far as I

• 22:32Speaker 02

  know, we really did spend 214 weeks destroying our arsenal. They were told that. And then the second point is that they were told, listen, America, the West hates the Soviet Union so much, they will do anything to annihilate us. And so, we have to do anything to annihilate them. You know, lie, cheat, steal, kill, et cetera, et cetera. And those two really disquieting concepts underpin the whole narrative. You know, this idea of paranoia, this idea of you cannot trust anyone. So if there's any sort of, you know, ballast to that, that

• 23:16Speaker 02

  I think the book offers, it's to try and really have people reconsider how dangerous mistrust and paranoia are, both as in an individual and in a nation.

• 23:27Speaker 05

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• 23:42Brian Keating?

  Do you feel somewhat paradoxically more hopeful now that no nukes have been exchanged in this current conflict in the Ukraine? Or do you feel even that we're still on this razor's edge?

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Well, certainly, it's like a profoundly great thing that no one has been crazy enough to use a nuclear weapon. And Russia often threatens tactical nuclear weapons, which they have in their arsenal. We do not, right? And we do not for a reason, because they would be too easy to use. But, you know, I make it really clear in nuclear war, that from my experience and my understanding and everything I have learned about it, is that everybody in the business of preventing nuclear war knows that if nuclear war begins, it only ends in one way, which is total annihilation. And so, I would say, you can't use nuclear weapons. So is it a good thing? Of course it is. And is it make you wince every time,

• 24:35Speaker 02

  you know, Putin or Lavrov or somebody suggests that they might be used? I mean, I just, you know, hold my breath. Bio is very different. It's, and again, that idea of an accident, an incident, a lab leak.

• 24:50Brian Keating?

  Hmm. So not far from this campus is Illumina Genomics, great many Nobel laureates, including, you know, hopefully future guests, Frances Arnold from Caltech, hopefully she'll be, she's a board member. And they're sort of the industrial version or the professional version of 23andMe, which recently went through bankruptcy, then emerged, and there was a great, you know, concern that, you know, people's DNA would be used against them to tailor, you know, handcrafted bioweapons. Is that scenario doesn't take place here per se. But, but that came to me sort of, you know, that you could basically have a much better weapon. If you could tailor it, you know, Putin happened to spit in a cup someday, and, you know, Zelensky wants to get him out, they could just take him out

• 25:30Brian Keating?

  by having some pathogen that could get to him. Are there more, less, you know, catastrophically, you know, world-ending scenarios where bioweapons could be more humane, you know, that they could be targeted to just specific incidents, and that could be viewed as a proper tactic of war? Or are they always and for all time to be never used in any scenario?

• 25:50Speaker 02

  I think of that more in the category of targeted assassination, which is something I wrote about in another book, about the CIA's paramilitary called Surprise, Kill, Vanish. And people have been targeted, targeting and killing one another with poisons, with toxins, since time immemorial. So, you know, and there's actually an interesting anecdote from one of the Soviet defector scientists, where he talks about, and this is like back in like, let's say, the late, like, probably the early 80s, where he talks about someone from the Politburo coming into his office. The person I'm referring to, his name is Ken Alabeck. And he kind of famously wrote a book called Biohazard. I think he published

• 26:32Speaker 02

  right around the millennium. And he tells the story in that book, and I'm repeating it, paraphrasing it, which is that Politburo guy comes in and says like, hey, if we wanted to, like, let's just say hypothetically, there was somebody I wanted to get rid of. And if we were to put Ebola, let's say, on his steering wheel, would he get it and die? You know, I mean, it was literally that specific. And I'm pretty sure the pathogen was Ebola. And then you can read the book and see, you know, Alabeck's reaction. And it's like, yes, it would kill him, but it would probably kill, you know, a bunch of other people. And so, though, I think what you're speaking to is very interesting in terms of science and computational science and where we are today, and realizing you can do, the answer

• 27:15Speaker 02

  is yes. Any, any question you ask me, yes. Can we target, fill in the blank, yes, yes, yes, yes. All of this can be done. This is a major concern of everybody working in the business of preventing biological warfare. And even scarier is, you know, whatever it is that they're working on can also escape from the lab.

• 27:36Brian Keating?

  Yeah. And so, would you advise somebody not to get these kinds of anoptic, synoptic genetic testing? I mean, just for the off chance that they may become, you know, the next Kardashian, and then they do an interview on a podcast, and they, their saliva gets used to go to, you know, some malevolent DNA processing. Anyway, would you advise people just like your own kind of digital hygiene, now genetic hygiene? Should we be more cognizant of that?

• 28:01Speaker 02

  I am always going to fall into the category of me not advise, I'm not going to advise anyone of any, anything, except for maybe my kids. Actually, it's good, now that they're over the age of 18, it's more like, here's what I would suggest, or here's what I would do. Um, one of my favorite sayings is just don't make me do it, you know? And that literally, like, so that's why I'm all about information. I just think information is beautiful. Information is illuminating. And information is so satisfying because you have, you get to make personal decisions for yourself, for somebody who asks for your opinion that you care about, based on the information you have. And you can also say, like, this is just the information I have.

• 28:44Brian Keating?

  If you had written this book, you know, in 2019 or something like that, you know, before COVID, would it have been different? Would you have, you know, maybe gotten some things wrong or, or, you know, in your projections, or maybe this scenario? Would it be different?

• 28:57Speaker 02

  I don't think I could have written this book in 2019, because I think I would have gotten some pushback from myself and others, maybe of like, this hasn't happened since 1918, since the Spanish flu or the influenza pandemic. Let me say this, it's like,

• 29:14Speaker 02

  When you read the book, as you have, and you know, I think people that have read the book say to me, wow, it really made me think about COVID differently. So in other words, they didn't say, wow, that's really interesting, your opinion of COVID. Because you don't know my opinion of everything from the lab leak, or the origin story, or what I think about vaccines. None of that's in there, it doesn't need to be, you don't need my opinion. What I do is give you the facts, and I give you quotes from people that are in the know. And you get to think, what, what did that really, what does that mean? What happened? But maybe even more importantly, could it happen again?

• 29:55Brian Keating?

  Could it happen again? And I keep thinking about that. And as I'm reading the book and I'm seeing the reaction, and I'm just like, it was sort of, there was an element of PTSD at some level, I have to be honest. But that's just an indication of vivid you are as a writer. And, and just, again, I wish you weren't so damn good, because it really did give me some sleepless nights. And it'll give you, it's the best type of thing. I joked on Twitter recently, you know, like, I have to write a book, Bedtime War, because I need some kind of antidote to how just extraordinary you are at telling facts and speculation. But you're very careful in both books. You say, this is not the scenario. This is not guaranteed, this is, this is avoidable. But I thought back to January 15th of 2020.

• 30:37Brian Keating?

  I was at a Shabbat dinner with a bunch of, you know, my friends, and I was talking. And one of my friends is, you know, he's a businessman, he travels around the world. And, and I said, you know, have you ever been to China? Because I just got invited to view this astronomical telescope in China, to maybe be one of their external advisors. And he's like, where? And I was like, it's actually in Tibet. No, I'm sorry, I said it's China, but I meant Tibet. And it's at 50,000, you know, it's at 15,000 feet in Tibet. And it's a big honor for me, and I've never been to China, you know, I've been to other parts of the planet, like you said. But he's like, well, when do they want you to go? And I said, March, April of 2020. He said, I think you better hold off a little bit, because, you know, have you heard of COVID? I'm like, no, you're like, it's coronavirus. And I'm like, I've heard of coronavirus, who cares? A common cold's a coronavirus.

• 31:21Brian Keating?

  And he said, well, just hold off, you know, do me a favor, I've been to China, it'll still be there. It's been there, you know, 5900 years, it'll be there a little bit longer. How did he know? Like, that kept coming back to me throughout the year. Like, we spend trillions of dollars, all the three-letter agencies there. I mean, you interview, like you said, there are references. This book has more references than my PhD thesis. I mean, it's so thoroughly researched.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  From you, that's a very serious compliment, thank you.

• 31:46Brian Keating?

  I mean, everything, you define, like, I forgot to do, gain a function. What does it mean? Here's the actual first reference to it. I mean, I read, and I wish that you, I would listen to the, to the index read by you, but unfortunately, you wisely decided to skip it. But, but at a certain point, I kept thinking, you know, if, and, and they still don't know it in 2026, when this book takes place, right? They, they don't know, with their trillions of dollars, their satellites that can see a plume of, you know, a puff of a cigarette over yaktuks or whatever, they don't know what my friend knew. Like, two months before it really hit here, it was shut down in March, March 13th, 2020. He gave me two months' notice, and I actually did start preparing, I sold some stocks, you know, busting. I actually had a huge supply of masks, right?

• 32:29Brian Keating?

  Not, not like full chemical suits, but we ended up, you know, having this good discussion. And then I felt like, with trillions of dollars and the three-letter agencies sprinkled on it, they knew nothing. They didn't help us at all. In fact, there was a lot of disinformation. You talk about fomite, like the ludicrous, you know, idea that you're going to wipe down a package from Amazon that's going to prevent you from getting COVID. It was insane, yet we did it. How come with all this apparatus, we knew nothing, more than my Yenta friends at a Shabbat dinner?

• 32:56Speaker 02

  I mean, for starters, COVID showed us two very specific and frightening things. One, which is precisely what you just say, which is that all of the billions of dollars on bio-defense, we were completely unprepared. And two, as a result of the, of the misinformation, and, you know, just use any synonym for that word.

• 33:17Brian Keating?

  Six-foot distance, the, sit down in a restaurant, but don't stand up.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  The fracturing of public opinion just became intense, and it has only gotten worse. And if there's another thing I would hope about people reading the book, is they would go, whoa, why am I wasting my time? I mean, obviously, some people's careers were ruined, and that's a, but like, just your average Joe or Jane is like, you know, I have this big opinion about, okay, enough of that, why don't you just like, really start to learn about actually what we're up against? Because that's really valuable for yourself and for your family. To your point about, like, the January 20th date, and what did we know? You know, I learned how uncertain biology is. And this is, I interviewed, like, I use the plague pathogens, spoiler alert, you know, pneumonic plague. I mean, it is a killer.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  COVID had a 1% death rate, 1%.

• 34:08Brian Keating?

  This is 20.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  One out of 100 people died. Pneumonic plague, pneumonia as in the lungs, not bubonic plague, which is in the lymph system. Pneumonic plague, you get it, and you don't get antibiotics into your body inside of 24 hours? You're dead, with 100% case fatality rate certainty, okay? That is shocking. One of the people I interviewed at length in this is a former USAMRID bacteriologist, Dr. Henry Heine. Brilliant person, spent his entire life working with Yersinia pestis. And, you know, he explained to me that anyone who tells you they understand the immune, the human immune system, how any, really, how a lot of this works, is lying to you.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  And so I loved the, here you have this brilliant person who knows so much about something, and he's the first person to admit that he can't possibly know everything. And we got so much wrong information right out of the gate. May I give you one specific example, which is, okay, so, I reprint in the book, a tweet sent out by the WHO, the World Health Organization, sort of the world's, sort of, you know, people look to it as like, they must know. They know what's going on, they don't use the word, they must know what's going on, although now they might. Because at the end of March, Trump had already closed the borders. End of March, they tweeted out, COVID is not airborne, and they put not into, in big letters.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  And this was retweeted by the CDC, this was also the CDC's position. COVID was airborne. How on earth could they have made that mistake, months into the pandemic? And why, more importantly, why have they never admitted that and said, we are deeply sorry, here's why? That's what I want to know, because I want them to say, we can't know everything, we don't know everything. We didn't know it was airborne. We had a lot of scientists who didn't want it to be airborne.

• 36:09Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  We had a lot of scientists who wanted it to be fomite transmissible. And for those who don't know what a fomite is, that means if you, if some, if the bacteria is on a surface, I can get it by touching it. As it turns out, that 1 in 10,000 cases of COVID comes from fomites.

• 36:30Speaker 00

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• 36:59Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it was performative theater that made you feel good about it. But a lot of human psychology depends on the theatrics being there for a reason. Why do you turn off your phone on an airplane? Is it, I'm a pilot? It does nothing, absolutely nothing. But it's a form of control. If we get you to do that, we can get you to do other things.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Why did WHO, because they certainly haven't answered my question, despite repeated requests, why didn't they say, listen, we don't know if it's airborne, we want to think it's not? Why didn't they say?

• 37:25Brian Keating?

  Remember there were things like protesting, you know, it was also the George Floyd, you know, situation, two months after COVID, really broke here. And they said things like, you know, it's protesting, Black Lives Matter, these are public health issues that supersede, remember in LA, there was huge riots, and, and the local health coordination said that those were, those were sanctioned. They didn't say that you should not gather for those. They later would say things like, yeah, you can't have more than five people at your July 4th barbecue. But in the beginning times, I think that ignorance, but also perhaps motivation, it thrives in low-information environments, that they really wanted to have, you know, some sense that somebody was in control. Everyone wanted to feel it. But, but I think the mark of a good scientist is to say you don't know. And I think there were a lot of good scientists.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Uncertainty, uncertainty.

• 38:11Brian Keating?

  My friend Jay Bhattacharya, director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, double PhD, the PhD MD, Stanford University, now a director of the NIH. He did us just a simple study, like, you know, we should, you know, if there is a vaccine, we can't get herd immunity, like, you know, it's just gonna, I'm sorry, herd immunity is the only approach for early-stage, you know, mitigation, and trying to avoid it by quarantining is actually doing, is counterproductive. He was investigated by Stanford, he had funding taken away. Fauci and Collins made a public declaration that he needed to be taken down publicly. There's, you know, FOIA requests for that information was revealed. He was called a fringe epidemiologist by Collins, which is horrible. But, but he was asking, he was saying, look, this thing, and, and when the vaccines came out,

• 38:52Brian Keating?

  I interviewed a very famous person, I'm not going to say who it is, because I've lost a lot of respect for this person. This person was a very, very stringent, you know, strong opponent of Donald Trump, hates Donald Trump, is, is very active, one of the leading scientists online, hates Donald Trump. And he, when the Warp Speed was successful, he was one of the many people, along with former Vice President Kamala Harris, I wouldn't take a vaccine, and I don't think you should take a vaccine. Which meant, because he would later say, everyone needs vaccines, boosters, everything else, and she would say the same thing too. That they're partially responsible for some people dying. They thought they were doing so much good opposing Donald Trump. Now, on the other side, my friends, you know, are right wingers will say, oh, the COVID vaccine, you know, you're just a control.

• 39:36Brian Keating?

  Like, there'll be people in this interview, I predict, say, how many boosters? This guy looks like he had boosters. There's, you know, did she, how many did she get? You can say whatever you want. You've all had vaccines out there. There's not a single one of you listening, hasn't had a vaccine. So you're in the club too, buddy. Even if RFK has had vaccines, right? So, but the point is, it was developed by Trump. So, wait, so you're now you're this pro-Trumper and you think you're MAGA and everything? But you also are now rejecting the, the, one of the greatest, you know, contributions to science. And like I said, Carolyn Carrick, greatest contributions in record time, right? So both sides are to blame. The scientists on both sides, there are, there are the politicians on both sides. I think it was awful and I don't think anything's changed. I think things have gotten worse.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  I believe they have gotten worse, but I think that the uncertainty component of it can, can and should really be leaned into. And you almost have to put on earmuffs against like your political opponents if you are in a position of leadership and work with a gifted team from both sides of the aisle to decide how to convey uncertainty with a certain degree of authority. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it's not like, but if you say, you would do this with your kids, I was like, guys, I don't know. And then they're like, at least mom's like, got some authority about what she doesn't know.

• 40:48Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Because that is the truth. And, you know, information is king. Just to learn that COVID was a novel virus. What does that mean?

• 40:57Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Just like it sounds, new. Okay. Mother nature mutates. And so, yes, a novel virus can come out of mother nature. A novel virus can also come out of a lab. And then you begin to realize, well, if something is new, not only is there no immunity against it, not only is there no existing medical countermeasure, but it's going to take some serious, you know, you know, get your hands dirty work to figure out a medical countermeasure. That kind of basic science, as far as I recall, was not even really conveyed ever. It took me writing and researching this book to understand what we didn't know, what people were never explained.

• 41:39Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  The next part is the detail I couldn't stop thinking about. It literally gave me nightmares. It wasn't invented. It comes from what the Soviets were actually working on.

• 41:49Brian Keating?

  The thing that was so fascinating and that you did, and again, it's a spoiler, but that's okay, is that the virus by itself, you know, has lethality and has transmissibility, but it didn't have the social engineering aspect of it until you brought it to mind. Now, your novelty and the Jacobsen, you know, variant of this, you're saying the past is, was to add in a social enhancement called euphoria. What made you come up with that? And what is the key enabling vector that that, that element provides? I found it fascinating, terrifying, as usual.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  Even more terrifying is that's not from my imagination. That's from history. So here, okay, so for listeners and viewers, in the scenario, you learn very quickly that, you know, whereas mnemonic plague, mother nature's mnemonic plague infects you and you're just like, your lungs are shedding necrotic debris. I mean, you are dying, you know? You're coughing up blood. Your head feels like there's an axe in it. And so you are like on the floor or in bed. And instead, in the scenario, people are experiencing euphoria.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  And in, so instead of being home, under the covers, not infecting people, you're out disco dancing.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  In a rave.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  In a very crowded place. And, and you're essentially in the middle of a super spreader event. Now, that is not from my imagination. That is from Dr. Henry Heinz sharing with me that when he was at USAMRAT, that is the US Army's medical research place, Fort Detrick, which is where biological weapons were, you know, worked on when they were still illegal and now countermeasures are worked on. And Heinz, one of the world's leading experts in plague, told me that they learned that the Soviet bioweapons engineers were doing precisely that. So that is his reference and it's noted in, in the book, which is just, and he, he said,

• 43:54Speaker 02

  we realized that was some pretty evil stuff.

• 43:56Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  And that, and that's why I chose that, because you literally can't, that's straight up, dark hearted evil.

• 44:05Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it's, it's mal-evolution. You're going against evolution, which would make it very, if something's very transmissible and very lethal, it doesn't spread, right?

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:12Brian Keating?

  The only way to death that is to override it, which makes it like anti-Darwinian. I mean, this is the most evil. And the people that are working on it are medical, are physicians, the Hippocratic Oath, you're talking about this. And I just feel like knowing other scientists and knowing, you know, people have this oftentimes, and I think even you to push back with a little love and respect, this, this kind of image of some scientist maybe as being just, you know, just above everything, just so curious, they don't have, I always say, look, scientists are like children. They're curious, they're imaginative, they're creative, but they also don't like playing with others. They don't want to share their ball, they're jealous, they're petty, they're spiteful, they'll do any, you know? And so there's both sides. So I, I wouldn't say that I'd put it past anybody, but in the realm of, you know, the

• 44:55Brian Keating?

  bioweapon, and the thing that makes your writing terrifying in these two books, and not, not as, I should say, not all your books are terrifying. These two are, are particularly gripping because they're a cut from cutting edge, you know, scientific back research and, and first person accounts and, and archival research. You're just like, you know, such a pro at what you do. What makes both these two books in general terrifying to me is that there's only one thing, I always joke with my kids, there's only one thing that's literally free, right? Water costs money, but the only thing that's really free besides love, okay, all my kids love, I give them love for free, is air, right? The only thing, we don't pay our air bill, right? I mean, you live in LA, which is a lot smoggy, and then San Diego, I used to live there. It's gotten better, but then the fires came, which make a romance book.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  AC bill.

• 45:37Brian Keating?

  AC, yeah, sorry. And you talk about the, the fires in this book and just, again, another public policy that's scientific, that could have been avoided, that's a public policy disaster, but let's, but you're not political, I want to make that very clear. But air, air is something we get for free and it's both the mechanism and the medium by which this disease is transmitted and the most of the fallout and the death and destruction come from new, what is it about air? I mean, there's, you know, famous from breath to air or how, when breath becomes air about, you know, someone who's dying of a lung disease, right? What is it about air? Why is it, this vehicle, it's life giving, but it's also the thing that connects us? And what's your, what's your take on it? How do you react to that?

• 46:16Speaker 02

  I love the way you framed that and it makes it sort of very sorrowful to think about that. But in the realm of biological war, air really means airborne. And airborne is terrifying. Because unlike Ebola, let's say, which is, has a case fatality rate of between 60 or 90%, depending on the variant, you know? And you bleed out your eyes and, you know, you bleed to death. If you had Ebola and you were over on the other corner of that room, I would not catch Ebola. I would have to physically hold you. That's why loved ones, that's why first responders, doctors and nurses get Ebola and die of it. It is contact.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Airborne is totally different. If either of us had an airborne pathogen in our lungs that was a killer, you know, it would linger after we were gone. The CDC keeps a list called Tier One Select Agents. And it's kind of shared with the Defense Department, with FEMA, and this is what they're most afraid of. These are the pathogens that to their eye are most likely to be used, this was kind of developed in the sort of post nine 11 world, to be used as in a biological weapons attack, which was thought to originate from terrorist organization. And the Tier One Select Agents always, almost always involves something that is airborne.

• 47:42Brian Keating?

  I think one of the things that I keep thinking about, and obviously it's impossible when you write books to not think about what you're not, you, Annie Jacobsen, not me or one, what your next book is going to be. And I kept thinking about this air, you know, again, and I thought of, well, what's another thing that's in the air, either in the zeitgeist, you know, in the German air, in the air and the spirit, a spirit, air, respiration, right? So that's what that means. But is, there are two things that I think about with regard to air. One is physically in the air and then that's climate change. And the other one is AI. And I think, you know, of those two, I guess, which will be the next topic for an Annie Jacobsen book? Because they're both airborne, they're both, you know, kind of in this, in this, in this realm, non-physical realm, at least that you can't see.

• 48:27Brian Keating?

  Which one would sort of terrifies you more as an existential threat? Which one could plausibly be a next scenario? Global warming, global climate change, catastrophic, you know, engineered, maybe malevolently or AI, which is, you know, could obviously be not, first non-human scenario, which ends human life. Which of those two could, maybe if you're working on one, you don't have to give it away.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Again, I like the way you framed that because it's, it really speaks to the world we are in now and moving into the future, you know? But many of the subject matter experts I work with, work in these cross disciplines because they're looking at counter proliferation of these threats. And so I have been given a number of ideas. Whereas you posed that as a question, it's been posed to me like, more of like a suggestion, like, here's what I think you should do. And so that's interesting, but it's also, it's also encouraging because, you know, I write this, two books now with these just like horrific dystopian endings. And yet I'm a very optimistic person and I do sleep at night.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  And that is because the point of the books is not panic. The point is pressure.

• 49:40Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  The point is to sort of, within your own self, your own family, within your community, to kind of demand more than what we have. We can get into the real spoiler alert, which is act three of the book, which is really what happens, which is really what the Defense Department, which is what all of the planners are afraid of happening in a case like this, which is anarchy and insurrection. The wheel was brilliant, but the road made it iconic. Electricity was powerful, but the grid brought it to every home. Innovation needs infrastructure. AI is no different, especially in finance, where AI can't run.

• 50:20Speaker 06

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• 50:35Brian Keating?

  I don't want to do that, but I'm gonna do that. But but first I want to touch upon what you just said, because it's really a beautiful passage. So, parallel structure between the two books is you talk about nuclear winter, which Carl Sagan popularized and many other very highly qualified scientists have written about it, including folks here and elsewhere, but also the controversy around it. That's not universally accepted. You talk about that, the end of nuclear war. But in this book, there's a parallel, biological twilight. So there's the nuclear winter and biological twilight. You talk about act four now, I guess this is long after.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  That's called the day new month.

• 51:07Brian Keating?

  The day new month, that's right. You literature major, no, you weren't a literature, were you? Okay, you say this beautifully. Humans are a paradox, brilliantly endowed with the capacity to imagine and create, often also incapable of restraint. If biological war scenario like this one comes true, it will mean that the same mind that mapped the cosmos, which really struck me, that landed machines on planets in the moon and charted galaxies, again, every single dot there almost that's not, that doesn't have a six pointed star is a galaxy in distance. That's from the James Webb Space Telescope. And charted galaxies billions of years away could not safeguard its own biosphere. What do you make of that? These, these, you know, chimp primates that can do such incredible things is do this

• 51:51Brian Keating?

  and do all the, the, the things that get destroyed at the end of nuclear war, which brings tears to my eyes when I think about it. Just the, the record of mankind, maybe what's responsible for the erasure of mankind. How do you balance this tension between, you know, the, the beast and the angel that we all have within us?

• 52:08Speaker 02

  So here's where the literature major in me comes, you know, comes to bear. Because I think about this idea of evolution when you're talking about the chimps and that, you know, we've spoke of, of Kubrick's 2001 before. And that idea that we have evolved into this incredible, you know, species that can do all of those scientific maneuvers that you just mentioned and a zillion more. And how, what a remarkable time to be alive. And then I think of the spoiler alert, the, the third act, which I learned that the government has a plan in place. Okay, so hold the thought, the word evolution, this is the literary major reference.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  You know, then you find out if you're Annie Jacobsen in your research, wait a minute. The government has a plan in place. If this all happens and anarchy and insurrection takes over, for itself, they have a plan in place for itself. And it's not all of government, it's a tiny group of people. And the plan is called devolution. So it's like putting a D in front of evolution. And it's exactly like it sounds, I mean, it actually derives from like a British term of like a secondary group of people that dot, dot, dot. But it really is the devolving of evolution. It's going in the other direction.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  And so that is our fatal flaw, hopefully not fatal flaw, but that is certainly something that must be looked at.

• 53:42Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  In the world in which we exist, where technology is outpacing law and justice and democracy and all of it. It, it must be looked at in a new, through a new lens.

• 53:52Brian Keating?

  That's fascinating, because just hearing you say that and remembering in the book that that's what it was called. But and also thinking about nuclear war, where you talk about the study that you read about apes and how they do battles and what's the origin of warfare in general. But also it seemed to me like, like a normal Darwin studied, you know, finches and they don't go back, you know, they don't like lose, you know, their, their.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  You don't lose your tail.

• 54:15Brian Keating?

  Your, your thumb, right?

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Well, we did lose our tail. You don't.

• 54:18Brian Keating?

  But you.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Grow its tail, hopefully.

• 54:20Brian Keating?

  That's right. Yeah, unless you're a salamander or something. But we must be, yeah, this, this only species so capable of, of doing such great things as creating, you know, life and, and meaning and culture and music and arts. And again, all the things that get destroyed in nuclear war, but maybe come back at the very end, tens of thousands of millennia later.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  The literature major in me, by the way, really thinks your fatal flaw is hubris.

• 54:42Brian Keating?

  How so?

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Because it always is. It always is, look at anybody without mentioning any names that you admire, that suddenly you don't, you no longer admire them, right? And again, I really believe that the, the personal is the political. Like, if you look in your own personal life, you can pretty much figure out anything in politics, how it works, which is why I don't write about politics, why I don't write about my personal life. But, but you can see, like, you see somebody that you really admired and you go like, God, their downfall or their shift. And it's like, if you really look at it objectively, without having to publicly announce it, you can pretty much track it as hubris.

• 55:19Brian Keating?

  That came across vividly in this book when I thought of Fritz Haber, who was a German, of course, German Jew, very nationalistic, very patriotic. He invented nitrogen fixation that, that you and I benefited from a couple hours ago. We got coffee and a croissant, right? Fertilizer, we wouldn't exist, we couldn't support 8 billion people without his invention. And yet, what else did he do? He not only invented chemical weapons, he witnessed them personally at his own desire as part of the German science corps. He would go to the trenches in World War I and he would witness the, the horrific. I mean, biological war, yeah, it'll happen over a couple, it's awful, right? I mean, but people in the book live a couple days, some of them, right? Not, not a great way to live or to die, rather. But these people horrific chemical burns and their faces ripped off,

• 56:02Brian Keating?

  like kind of a hybrid between nuclear and biological war. Maybe that's your next book, Chemical War. In this case, he lived to see so much tragedy from what he'd, he saved, you know, millions and he killed, or he killed millions and he saved billions. So how do you reconcile that? And again, the scientist is this, as this, you know, all charitable, all, you know, giving, knowing and curious, it's just not true. I mean, we have our pettiness, we have our desire. I mean, he, like I said, he won the Nobel Prize after World War I. I mean, they knew what he did and they still, and then his, his own family was murdered by Zyklon gas produced in the very same chemical processes and factories that he helped build for Germany. So.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  The, the hubris in that, I must add.

• 56:41Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  Is that the man he was trying to please was Adolf Hitler.

• 56:45Brian Keating?

  Yes, exactly.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Who murdered his family. And, and, and he was exiled to, where was it, Austria?

• 56:51Brian Keating?

  And his.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  And he died a miserable death.

• 56:53Brian Keating?

  His wife committed suicide, one of his kids committed suicide. No, it's.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  What a, what a fascinating cautionary tale.

• 56:59Brian Keating?

  Yeah. And to think about this goal, like Prometheus, you know, desiring the technology, wanting to, I could call it like the Tower of Babel, you know, like, we want to be, and maybe AI is that thing. Maybe AI is, you know, some would say humanity's last invention. I have my doubts, we'll talk about that over lunch maybe later, but.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Well, just to jump in there, I mean, and this comment I'm going to make has been rapidly increasing in the past three months, like not six months, not, not three months, that presidential advisors on bio, who also have kind of, you know, look at, at AI.

• 57:34Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Look at LLMs are increasingly, rapidly increasingly getting concerned that bio is actually the threat in AI.

• 57:44Brian Keating?

  Claude, which is made by Anthropic, they have a new product. It just came out, it's called Claude Science. This is great, you know, gonna be able to discover the mysteries of the universe and find out exactly what's going on with those aliens over there. It has genomics, it has a database, has NIH, it has all these papers, PubMed, blah, blah, blah. Nothing, not one topic had anything to do with anything other than bio or biochemistry or genomics. All these things are centered around bio. Bio is not the only science. I hate to break it to my biology colleagues and my friend, Gentry Patrick, past guest, my cousin. There's other things besides bio, but this is all the AI is really. When they, if you ask Dario Modi or Sam Altman, you know, who, what does a scientist need? Oh, they needed like a genomic protein fold. No, they don't. We need stuff for physics.

• 58:28Brian Keating?

  Physics is the core of all science in many ways. And I think just as you said this, yeah, it's no, it's no surprise, because these tools are somehow, they're, first of all, they're neural networks, right? They're optimized, they're modeled on the brain. I got a brain over here somewhere. And they're modeled on human, they're modeled on biological systems. So, yeah, they're, they're very good, like you've heard about quantum computing. Quantum computers have one killer application, and that's predicting how quantum computers will work. You know, they're very good at understanding quantum systems. Neural networks are really good at understanding brains. The people that get jobs nowadays that are writing the best books about AI, they're not computer scientists, they're cognitive scientists. Princeton, a professor I just talked to, Tom Griffiths, amazing. He's a cognitive science professor and, and a computer science. Yeah, you're absolutely right.

• 59:12Brian Keating?

  They should be worried about it, because these tools are now like a 12 year old, you know, or whatever, it's a 50 year old in, in some, you know, place on the map here can have the cutting edge Nobel quality research delivering and maybe optimizing things for, for. And that's maybe where the greater threat could come, both on the, you know, personalization of, you know, the kind of vector that's so precise it can target individuals or that is so indiscriminate that can kill nations. It's a really gripping, you know, thought to think about. I want to get to some of the research that you do, because there's some, there's just so many like Easter. For nerds like me, I mean, for my audience as well. You talk also about like thalidomide in the book and how, you know, who's, who's designed the anti-nausea medicine? I remember like my mom was like debating whether she should take it.

• 59:57Brian Keating?

  She told me she didn't take it. Yeah, in the late 60s with my older brother, he, she didn't take it, so he's. But it was to, to solve something really important for mothers, you know? I don't understand how it feels to be have morning sickness. You know, I've never not wanted to eat in the morning, but, but my wife went through it. But talk about that, these things that like, they do evolve, they do pathologize from some, you know, maybe they're actually really good. It was very good anti-nausea medicine, fortunately caused horrible birth defects. And it's related to something called mirror life that is really terrifying. If you're not terrified already, you'll get there in a few minutes when we talk about mirror. Talk about thalidomide and, and how that came from these Nazi scientists, basically, and then percolated through, and then the Russians really kind of abandoned it, didn't use it.

• 1:00:39Brian Keating?

  Talk about what role that played or what that is emblematic of in this book and science in general.

• 1:00:44Speaker 06

  The wheel had roads. Electricity had the grid. Innovation needs infrastructure. Plaid makes AI work in finance. Visit plaid.com/ai to learn.

• 1:00:56Brian Keating?

  More.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  I think it's emblematic of, you know, you called it, what did you call it? You had a term earlier, which was malscience. It's like malevolent.

• 1:01:08Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Having written the book on Operation Paperclip, the Nazi doctors, in addition to just being horribly evil, and their goal was to really push science and put in the field of biology. What they were doing is trying to find medical cures for things for their own pilots. And for example, the thalidomide link is has to do with the fact that a lot of the chemists that were developing chemical weapons and biological weapons, they wanted to know, they were trying to find antidotes. Right? So, and they were, what I learned from going to the Bundesarchives in Germany and the National Archives, and the real tragedy is that we, the Americans, knew a lot of this and declassified this, these papers,

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  which I was able to get declassified. The Nazi scientists were experimenting in the concentration camps on the Jewish prisoners because they considered them no different than guinea pigs or rabbits. And they would, you can't really find the antidote properly without testing on a human. You just have to spend so much time testing on an actual guinea pig.

• 1:02:18Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  Then you move to primates and you're doing human testing. Once all these trials, you can't just like kind of cowboy your research. And that's what I found so horrified. And that's the sort of thalidomide component of it is that the German, you know, pharmaceutical company had hired a bunch of Nazi scientists who had skipped through a lot of the trials because they were experimenting on humans.

• 1:02:41Brian Keating?

  Right. There's a passage in the acknowledgements of Annie's book that isn't in the story itself. I asked her to let me read it out loud and she graciously agreed. This is so horrible to think about, but again, I cannot not mention. I mean, it's, it's fair game. It's in your book and, and I just, you know, I, I don't want to look at it, but it's like a car accident. You, you must confront it because if we don't confront it, like you said, we can still do something about nuclear war, about biological war, about bedtime war, whatever. We can still, we have the agency. And I think people surrender their agency to influencers. We'll talk about the pernicious elements of social media later perhaps. But I want to read this passage about so-called mirror life, which is in the acknowledgements. Now, beyond the surveillance-driven biotechnical future lies an even greater horror.

• 1:03:23Brian Keating?

  I mean, that's saying something for a book that's about one of the most horrific, you know, hopefully fictional for all time, but, but very hard science fact-driven scenarios that you could ever imagine. Okay. Beyond that lies an even greater horror. I learned that there exists a hypothetical concept within synthetic biology called mirror life. Hmm. That sounds fun. You know, mirror, look at myself. No, that could extinguish the entire human race. This is an area of science we should forbid, says Stanford University professor and White House Science Advisor David Relman. Mirror life means engineering an organism with a reversed form of biology. A mirror molecule, this is called the chimeric chiral biology. The DNA has right-handedness and this will be making identical copy, but with left-handed DNA.

• 1:04:05Brian Keating?

  A synthetic organism that if created, the human immune system will almost certainly not recognize and could not be controlled, contained or stopped. People at the highest level say, holy bleep, this sounds really hard, but we can't allow this to happen, Roman tells us. And yet, when it comes to making sure no one ever creates mirror life, he says the responsibility gets deflected back to the scientists. As of now, there are very few legal constraints. We have a sort of form of mirror life, at least mirror chemistry. So these are called isomers. These are different forms of, of chemicals, as I said, that have a different handedness. So actually, one of them is you probably have in your, I've eaten a lot of it. It's basically synthetic sugar, you know, which has instead of right-handed structure for sugar, sugars will also be right-handed or left-handed. They make left-handed and the body doesn't digest it, so it excretes it.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  That's saccharin.

• 1:04:50Brian Keating?

  It's nutritious, we are equal. Yes, the blue packets, exactly. So that is basically left-handed sugar. So you can't digest it, so your body excretes it. It's not deadly, but left-handed or mirror life. So you take a DNA molecule, put it in a mirror, it becomes mirror life. And this is almost certainly happening. So how, how do, how do we sleep? And I, I mean, do you, do you accept the fact that somewhere someone is working on this? Perhaps aided with the aid of AI? Is it in the lab now? I think so almost certainly, yeah.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  That is from an interview with David Relman, who is like one of the most respected science advisors to the president, to many presidents. And he did that interview with me on the record. You know, I chose not to put it in the narrative because it's just too horrific. But the point was I wrote biological war, a scenario, not biological war, the only scenario, or biological war, the worst scenario. And so if you read this and you're freaked out and then you find out, wait a minute, there's even worse scenarios. And that was Relman's point in telling me. And there have been articles in the newspapers about mirror life. And the scientists that wrote those papers debated even making it public. But they decided they certainly needed to make it public for your exact point.

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  The bad guys are certainly doing that, some bad guy, whether it's, you know, and there's an incredibly low bar for entry with bio. Unlike nuclear weapons, which require thistle material. You have to have, you know, weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. And we hear all about that with what's happening in Iran. We know how difficult that is. And so nuclear weapons are controlled by a nation's command and control. It's safeguards, it's systems, and nothing like that exists in bio. And, you know, essentially a kid in a basement could potentially, with the help of a computational system, an AI system like Claude, like OpenAI, could essentially make this kind of bioweapon.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  And that's the fundamental danger. And I think Relman's point is very important is that what he was saying to me is he's going to the White House and, you know, elsewhere and kind of raising the alarm and being told, yeah, that's really alarming. So what are you guys doing about it? And hey, that's better than not raising the alarm, but that alarm needs to be ratcheted up in terms of what is being done about that. And obviously I don't have the answer.

• 1:07:14Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  I'm a journalist, but I would hope that bringing that to the conversation is moving things in the evolutionary direction as opposed to the.

• 1:07:24Brian Keating?

  Devolutionary. One thing, you know, that just came, struck me as you said that is that, so Iran's trying to get to where the US was in 19, you know, actually today is the, uh, July 16th is the Trinity test date. So happy Trinity Day to you, Annie. I was re-listening to Nuclear War the other day and I realized, oh, she's going to be here on Trinity Day. How wonderful. So that's July 16th, 1945. So at that time, what Iran's trying to do now is get back 81, whatever years, 81 years, back to that, to that timescale. So good luck, you know, but, but actually, as you talk about in this book, it's not a fission bomb. It's not like Fat Boy, right? It's the, it's the thermonuclear bombs, the atom bombs, hydrogen bombs

• 1:08:06Brian Keating?

  that caused the end of the world and nuclear war, uh, the end of civilization, at least as we know it. The world will still exist, probably, you know, still float around in, in space, but very, very much worse. But nowadays, the analog of a hydrogen bomb in biological war are these, you know, are already here. They're already here.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  That is the, you know, recombinant DNA is essentially the atomic weapon.

• 1:08:28Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  Because it was very rudimentary in 1971. And you think, and, and that is the point with the people I interviewed, who are the former handlers of the Soviet defector biological weapons makers, who in the eighties and nineties were saying, here's what we were working on. Here's what our plague super weapon looked like. And this is 40 years ago. And so you have to say, whoa, what is being done now? And that's, I think, Relman's point with mirror life. And that's obviously but one example.

• 1:09:00Brian Keating?

  Of course. Now, in the case of nuclear technology, we get a great deal of benefit from nuclear technology, whether it's in the medical room, whether it's in the, we have six nuclear reactors surrounding us in San Diego. You know, don't you feel great? You know, thankfully, as I said, as you're driving down from LA, I said, you know, you're going to pass by the two nuclear reactors at Camp Pendleton. But luckily you didn't put them in nuclear wars to give me even greater nightmares. You put it somewhere in Santa Barbara, that was taken out first or second. But in this case, we, we have benefits from it. Are there any benefits from the types of technology that, that feature in this book?

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Well, that is certainly the debate that we spoke of in the beginning, right? Which is really, I don't think, you know, is gain of function good or bad? It's like gain of function, and again, this is for people way above my pay grade. There needs to be guardrails on terms of what kind of, you know, manipulation of.

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  Pathogens can be done, should be done, is being done. And I think that all begins with a motion to really examine what it means that biological warfare is illegal, that biological weapons are illegal. And yet, the State Department is writing now in all of its annual reports about compliance with the BWC, is saying, we know Russia and North Korea have biological weapons programs. And we know that Iran and China have weapons, or rather have biology programs of concern, which is kind of a euphemism. I think it's pretty much clear that the State Department believes those four nations are actively working on biological weapons.

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  So if there wasn't so much stigma around what research is being done, if you didn't have this idea of people cheating and doing sort of offensive work, offensive biological work, work on offensive weapons, as opposed to defensive work, because there's a little clause in the treaty which says you can do work for prophylactic purposes, which allows for the medical countermeasures. So there has to be some more transparencies about what that actually means and more honesty about what it means. And then you can begin with, okay, so where do we go from there?

• 1:11:10Brian Keating?

  I thought of one thing as I was reading the book, that you could use the types of laboratories or research, and that's from an unlikely nexus between your previous books and this one, which has to do with a question first posed by Enrico Fermi, which is essentially, where are all the aliens, right? The universe is big, the galaxy is big, the galaxy is old, the materials that make life are abundant, you know, water is the second, third most common molecule in the universe, you know, carbon's extremely prolific. And a lot of that research was done here by my colleague, great colleagues, Jeff and Margaret Burbidge and Willie Fowler and Fred Hoyle coined the term, the Big Bang is an insult about cosmology at the time.

• 1:11:51Brian Keating?

  And Fermi asked this question to Herb York, was at the lunch with him in 1950, and it was interesting. So when Fermi asked that question of Herb York, and there were three other scientists at the table, so they talked about flying sausages in this New Yorker cartoon, and basically Fermi says, where is everybody? And York says, maybe they didn't last long enough, maybe they killed themselves.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  I did not know that.

• 1:12:14Brian Keating?

  I thought of that and then asked, obviously, which of these solutions are we gonna, but before I do, I'm gonna give you two gifts. So one of the ways I think that we could benefit from the apparatus, the tools, the researchers, the talent, the brain power that we have in this book is countermeasures, but not countermeasures against humanity. Because if, if life in the universe can be of one of the two mirror isomers, they are left-handed or right-handed, like our life is based upon, then it could be that life could come to the, to the planet, and they could be very different from us. In fact, they could be mirror life. They could be microbes, they could be bipedal, they could be sentient plasmoids, like apparently

• 1:12:57Brian Keating?

  Alina Luna's been talking about, interdimensional being. Anyway, we'll, we'll talk about that over, over a cocktail someday. But one way that material can get here is via what's called panspermia, which is something that Fred Hoyle worked on, and actually Francis Crick worked on, this, this idea that life on Earth could have originated elsewhere in the galaxy and then been brought here by meteorites. So this is a meteorite, it's one of many.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Not that idea, by the way.

• 1:13:20Brian Keating?

  So it is, it is. It's also one of those words that sounds dirty, but it's like a panspermia.

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Brian Keating?

  But here.

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  Peter Scharf, I think, is doing the work today.

• 1:13:26Brian Keating?

  Yes, Caleb is, he's been a guest on the podcast. So here I have a meteorite, which doesn't have any mirror life on it, because I've been, you know, playing with it for years and I haven't died yet. This is a real meteorite. This came from a star that detonated a nuclear implosion, a nuclear fusion device in space, and its contents then spread throughout our galaxy and eventually coagulated into make you and I in the core of the Earth. So it's very magnetic, and it actually joins up with this monolith on the back of, you know that I, you know, claim to have lost the Nobel Prize, that's a matter of debate, but this is the Keating Prize. So this is to you, Annie Jacobson, July 16th, Trinity Day.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  That is incredible.

• 1:14:05Brian Keating?

  And that's Arthur C. Clarke on the front.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  And I get the meteorite.

• 1:14:08Brian Keating?

  And you get the meteorite.

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  But can you tell me a little bit more about the meteorite?

• 1:14:11Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so actually, you will get a card that has information on it. I give those away to anyone with a .edu email address in the US that joins my mailing list. This is gonna be a special link just for Annie. We're giving away six copies of her book, signed copies, Biological War and Nuclear War, and you go to briankeating.com/anny, and you'll be entered to win one of these incredible gifts. You'll get a meteorite, you'll get a book potentially, and you'll also get, well, you won't get, they won't get this, but you're gonna get this, is a piece of the moon, okay? So this proves to you, Annie, the material, so this, a meteor hit the moon, blasted off material, and it landed in Northwest Africa 20 million years later, and it was collected about eight years ago. And I bought it from a collector that I know. I've got a dealer.

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  This is a moon rock.

• 1:14:57Brian Keating?

  That's a moon rock, that's a meteorite, and this one is rocky, so this is non-magnetic. This is a thousand times more expensive than that, so don't lose this one.

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  This is a thousand.

• 1:15:05Brian Keating?

  This is a thousand times more expensive than this. These are, yeah, if I can send them out to hundreds of people a month, they're not that expensive, but they're very interesting. This was found in Argentina, in Argentina in 1560 or something. It was discovered by the natives that lived in Argentina. It fell about 8,000 years ago, and has the exact composition, not only of the Earth's core, so it's showing that we evolved from this pre-Earth environment, but the iron in your blood has the same composition as the iron in this meteorite. And so you've got the specs, I'll show you the radiograph that we took of it, the chemical composition and everything, yes.

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  It's a variation on World Stardust.

• 1:15:40Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's right, exactly.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Wow, that's amazing, thank you so much.

• 1:15:43Brian Keating?

  You're welcome.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  That is, I have to say, that is a profoundly unique gift.

• 1:15:47Brian Keating?

  I like.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  Incredibly cool, and I have, I actually have a rock collection.

• 1:15:51Brian Keating?

  Oh, you do?

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  I do.

• 1:15:51Brian Keating?

  Oh, I didn't know that. I knew you were.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  And one of them is from the Sudan crater.

• 1:15:56Brian Keating?

  Oh, really?

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, where I went with Al O'Donnell from my Area of Ado One book.

• 1:16:00Brian Keating?

  That's amazing.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  So this is going right from there.

• 1:16:02Brian Keating?

  That is great, okay. And we could, yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  It is so much.

• 1:16:04Brian Keating?

  You're welcome. I'm so glad that you're here.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  It's really amazing.

• 1:16:08Brian Keating?

  So maybe of the two different scenarios, and maybe there's many more in that, in that enormously talented brain of yours, but what do you think of this great filter that civilizations like York is proposing? We don't live long enough, and so maybe there's no one out there to come to either rescue us or save us, or maybe to be concerned about bringing mirror life to destroy us?

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  That's probably why I love watching science fiction films and reading science fiction books so much, which, by the way, I have found out over the years that many more high-ranking Defense Department and public health officials and federal emergency management officials also love reading science fiction, which is where so many of the discoveries have come from. And scientists, you know, to find out that the scientists, this early skunk work guys who, you know, were developing these radical technologies were for science fiction, but Charles Townes.

• 1:17:00Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  Told me that the reason that he invented the laser, like, was because as a kid, he was obsessed, he would lie in bed, he told me, with a flashlight, reading The Garand Death Ray by a Soviet science fiction writer. I mean, this must have been in the 20s.

• 1:17:18Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's incredible.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  You know, and he, he could see the death ray, and he could see the laser.

• 1:17:24Brian Keating?

  And that was his.

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he told me one other anecdote I have to share.

• 1:17:27Brian Keating?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:28Speaker 02

  Which is that he said that he brought, he was at Princeton, at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studying, and he'd been thinking about this, this is before the laser, and he took the idea to his two neighbor, to his two colleague neighbors there, like, you know, one was von Neumann and the other was Einstein, right? I said, well, what did they say? And he said, they had very different reactions. Von Neumann said, it'll never work. And Einstein said, that's a good idea. Keep trying. And, you know, and I said, well, what does that mean? Because you had to know from Charles Towne what it meant. And he said, he said, and I'm paraphrasing, it means that sometimes when you have a really great idea, not everyone wants you to win.

• 1:18:11Brian Keating?

  It is true, and I say, you know, for every great idea, there's an equal and opposite great idea. And I think that's a mark of a good scientist. Yeah, the scientists will, will, you know, they, they typically will think that we are right and our colleagues are wrong, but that's, lacks the so-called, the psychologists call theory of mind, like, I am thinking about what you're thinking about, like kind of a meta type of cognition. But that means that, like, if we all think that, then nobody's wrong or everybody's wrong, so we can't have it both ways. We can't think that we're always right and our colleagues are always wrong. So you have to be open to this idea that, yeah, you might be completely wrong, but you need the hubris, I like to say, you need these two different attributes. You need chutzpah and you need, and you need humility.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  You have to have a tinge of hubris, and you also have to have a tinge of humility.

• 1:18:54Brian Keating?

  And how do you keep those?

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  Or maybe not hubris, you just have to have some good, healthy ego.

• 1:18:58Brian Keating?

  Exactly.

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  Drive.

• 1:19:00Brian Keating?

  So one, one part in the book you talk about, and the acknowledgements are, you know, there's just, there's so, I love acknowledgements, because, you know, 99% of readers won't read it, but, but 99% of authors put so much effort into it, like, the book is not done until the book is done, and the copy editors, and they can all sign off on it, and then you're like, 80% done, right? But you talk about, a scientist, I'm gonna mangle his name even though I'm part Russian, Milton Leitenberg, gave you Igor Domiranjic ant typed pages, and he spent, Domiranjic spent his career inside the BioPreparat in the Soviet Union on plague genetics and antibiotic resistance. So one question I had is, is this, you're seeing it as, is it coming from him? You, you must have had things in those pages that couldn't make it into the book, like...

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  In Domiranjic's book?

• 1:19:43Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, you had it, but like, you had his personal handwritten notes. So what did you keep out? Were there things in there that were just too terrifying, maybe to conceive of or include?

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  That's a great question, and I hate to say this, but I wish there were, right? But it was actually, you know, I think what's interesting is... And before we were on, we were recording, you and I were talking about that book that you recommended, Galileo's Daughter. We're talking about Galileo writing letters to his daughter, who was a nun.

• 1:20:13Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  I can't wait to read that book because

• 1:20:15Brian Keating?

  Davis Homel.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  I would, I have a feeling that there's more, you know, of course, his, his, you have to think of who you're writing to. So of course, there's, you know, there'll be certain things that are not in there, but it would be maybe a little more revealing. Whereas Igor Dodorovski had, they were, they were typed, his, his hand typed notes, right? So the journalist reporter in me is like, okay, there's one degree of like this when you're writing it in your journal, like, you know, we all know that. And then like you type it up. So there's kind of, you've had a little time to edit yourself. And then also he shared them with Milton Leitenberg, who's now in his nineties. Every time I would interview him or want to come to his house, he'd say, I'm writing another book. I can't meet with you. And we would do a quick phone interview. You know, this guy's written more books than

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  you can imagine. He really is a giant. In the 1960s, he was the world's expert on, pretty much on biological weapons, right? And he's been working at it ever since.

• 1:21:10Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  He's got a book on the Soviet weapons, bioweapons program, which is like this thick. So to that point, I think there was a lot of editing that Dodorovski had done at that point. And also he was writing that from inside Russia after the wall went down. So he had to have an idea that the KGB was going to read it. So he didn't really reveal state secrets, but you do see intention. And he was the top plague expert in the Soviet Union for decades. And so there is a lot to learn from.

• 1:21:42Brian Keating?

  Wow. And the dog that didn't bark as often is interesting is the one that does. Khrushchev said, and you quote, you know, the, the survivors will envy the dead in nuclear war. It seems like, you know, most of nuclear war will actually, there'll be almost no survivors and the ones that do will die soon after, as you talk about. Biological war, you know, is different. It, it does seem like, well, do you think, what do you think Khrushchev would say? I mean, he undoubtedly knew about their programs. What do you think he would say? Is, is also the same thing? Will we envy all of the survivors? Unfortunately, we went through COVID, you know, originally it was thought to kill, you know, millions, hundreds of millions of people. Thank God it didn't. But what will be the aftermath scenario?

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  Khrushchev would have had a different take on this because the world was very different and most Russians couldn't really leave Russia.

• 1:22:30Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:30Speaker 02

  And had no interest in coming to the West, or at least the Russians didn't want them to. But, and, you know, biological war in the Cold War was very much simpler than it is now. The basic idea was create a vaccine for you, that you will then use for your troops and your people. That's what Dodorovski was working on. Okay. So create a vaccine. We, we make a plague vaccine for us. By the way, there is no plague vaccine in the United States. There is allegedly in Russia. Make the plague vaccine, vaccinate all of us, and then, you know, kill all of their troops with plague. And then we'll go in and take everything. We'll leave the infrastructure intact. True quote. Okay. So that was where

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  we were in the Cold War. That's where science was. Now things are so different. You can't have a situation without having essentially blowback. And so I don't know what Khrushchev would have thought, but I know that many people that read Nuclear War said, I, I would just want to die in the flash and I probably would. So that's the good news. Bio is very, very, very different. Very different. You know, I take readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days. And then when you learn that anarchy and insurrection just will happen, and this is in wargaming, you know, so fast as everybody scrambles to try and get what they think are going to be the medical countermeasures to save the lives of themselves and their

• 1:23:54Speaker 02

  family. That is really horrific. And there is a quote from Senate, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. And this is personal to him because he was the subject of

• 1:24:06Brian Keating?

  Anthrax.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  Anthrax attack right after nine 11. So some nut, we still don't know who it was, you know, the FDA had never solved the case, sent an envelope of weaponized anthrax to Daschle's office, to another congressman, and to media outlets. What he said to me, because he's been working on this issue for all the decades since, was biological war will be death. And he's talking about the different kinds of death that will happen. But then he ended what he said, and it's quoted exactly in the book with, people doing inhuman things to one another just to survive. And I don't think any of us want to be around for that.

• 1:24:44Brian Keating?

  In the book, there's a terror that's unleashed, which is, you know, 100% controllable and 100% unavoidable, which is the, the social plague that sweeps over, as you said, anarchy. But also, you know, desire, there are people in the book that are, that are just desperate, you know, to get Instagram, you know, and, and, and be seen and be famous and making AI generated images and, and misinformation and disinformation. That adds to the terror, right? I mean, Iran shut down the internet, you know, completely for the last two and a half, three months. In both books, you know, the president can do things to, to, you know, but there's, you know, how much people in underground that will, you know, things will get out. So since this, this hopefully will never happen, I

• 1:25:29Brian Keating?

  mean, what would be some of the, if you were a president, if you were, you know, on the upper echelons of power and, and, and you had the connections to, to make anything happen? I mean, what would you do in such a situation? I mean, this has happened throughout history. I mean, but as you make the point, we've had nuclear war and we've had biological war. We've had attacks in both countries. We've had chemical war, but this is the first time the confluence of them would arrive with social media war and, and information war. So what would you do? President?

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  Well, never mind what I would do in the scenario, spoiler alert. I, the president shuts down the internet. And I, the reason I did that is because I learned from the former deputy commander of cyber command, how that would work. Lieutenant General Charlie Moore took me through, again, what, what can be known? You know, there's certain classified components of that. And I think people will be surprised to learn that that can be done and how easily it can be done. And also that the Defense Department has its own channels, CIPRnet being one of them, to be able to communicate with that shutdown. You know, the general takes us through like what would remain and what wouldn't. But that's really fascinating that you can just pull the plug. But I think also readers will take away the point that the, the influencers are not to blame. They're just a product of where we

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  are right now. And also on balance, the internet, that real time reporting is a real place to see as a potential savior, because real time reporting is precisely what you need. If there's another takeaway of the book, it's that, oh my God, we're, if there is a lab leak, if it can be shut down, the situation, the outbreak can be shut down in the first 12 to 24 hours, you can actually prevent the dystopian ending. But once it's 24 hours, once it's 48 hours, 96 hours, it's out of the back. And so the internet, that real time reporting is how that could, you could get information out to the people. And you

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  see from, you'll see from my reporting that also like the WHO, which was very loath to kind of move off their old analog way of like, we will have the reports come in and then we will look at them. You know, it's so old school. They now have systems where they are really leaning into epidemic intelligence, using computational systems, delivering information in real time. And that is like a real place to look in terms of a positive future.

• 1:27:55Brian Keating?

  Interesting. That's really good to know on one hand, and also again, as usual, terrifying. Supposedly the South Pole, where I've been, as I showed you my, this was ICE about 10 years ago from the South Pole Antarctic Station. There were no cases of COVID there. Supposedly in the space station also, there were six people in the space station. They never got COVID. They actually go through a lot of screening at the South Pole to make sure you have no diseases because there's no doctor there most of the time. Or the doctor that you need is not going to be there. Dentist is not going to be there to pull your tooth out in the middle of July is much worse. Very isolated community. Actually, the NSF has studies on, you know, when they do open up the station on things like how depression spreads and how a lot of social viruses and then actual viruses spread. But why wouldn't we put, you know, like the president have another nuclear football or something?

• 1:28:40Brian Keating?

  I mean, it's very hard to imagine how these things would get there. But, but I mean, what are the kind of, you know, fallback measures, safety measures to protect, you know, at least some mode of leadership? We'll talk a bit about who that should be maybe. But yeah, why don't, why don't we have, you know, data centers on data centers and space and presidential footballs and different places? Is it really just the single point failure mode that that's probably likely to be the undoing if this should ever, God forbid, happen?

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  Maybe there are two different questions because I suspect that we do have a lot of, you know, fallbacks and fallbacks and fallbacks. But, you know, the speed at which the convergence happens of something going out of control is, happens so fast. And what are you falling back to? I mean, what good is the nuclear football if?

• 1:29:21Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  I mean, there is a threat and, you know, I have different generals tell me those threats that are being looked at in the Pentagon. When you have an outbreak like this and when the United States, in the event the United States was moving toward insurrection, how all nuclear forces go on, you know, alert because that would be the time that another nation would strike. But we know from COVID that the, the, any pathogens, you know, spreads how people travel. It's not 1950 Cold War where there's no Russians leaving for Russia.

• 1:29:55Brian Keating?

  Right. So there would be an own goal of the worst and greatest variety. I want to close with a couple of, maybe more on the human side of things. When I think about the, the people that are most vulnerable, or it's kind of ultra melancholic because the ones that give them, the first responders are the ones that die fast, right? And they die first. And the ones that are selfless. And we saw a lot of that in COVID, by the way. And we saw that in nine 11, firefighters rushing into buildings that people were fleeing out of. What do you make of that? I mean, there are these special people. I mean, you've interviewed so many of them and. Do they know? And you also make the point that, you know, women are more disproportionately likely to probably be the victim of this attack. So what do you make of that? Is that a flaw in our engineering?

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  Women would be the victims because the women are gonna always take care of your kids.

• 1:30:40Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, I quote contemporary literature from the 14th century. Bubonic plague, black death, you know, because you get to see survivors' accounts of how people behaved and how they changed and how people became incredibly solipsistic. They just needed to live alone. But I believe that that's after the women and the mothers die. Because, you know, a mother's gonna, your child is sick. I mean, unless you're a sociopath, you know, you're just like, your reaction is this.

• 1:31:14Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  That's your job. And also, the first responders have a similar vein to them. That is, people who go into that, I mean, I've interviewed countless people who, you know, call, you know, send me. There is that idea in law enforcement and fire, you know, first responders, that they're just like, I'm doing my job. They don't think about their own. I mean, they do, they think about their safety because they are trained to be, they are very conscious of safety, but they don't think about their own demise in the way that maybe the rest of us, a little more selfish do. And so that is a great tragedy. And there have been monographs written by the, by the army about that.

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  And the bottom line is, they're the first to go.

• 1:32:02Brian Keating?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, it's almost like you would have to engineer, again, something to de-evolve the maternal or the, or the first responder instinct that, you know, certainly many people much more brave than I have, but to overcome that, right? You'd have to engineer something. It would have to be something counter to our wiring. You know, it's one of the beautiful things about us, like, we can map the cosmos, like you said, but we can also love and give, you know, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when that means it might be our last act, right?

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  What's also interesting is the Defense Department, and I still call it the Defense Department until they change it in the Constitution.

• 1:32:38Brian Keating?

  What do you call the Gulf of Mexico?

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  Not the Constitution, but until they change it in, you know, by an act of wrongdoing. The Defense Department is in a different lane.

• 1:32:47Brian Keating?

  Although, pardon the interruption, but it would be great for your book, yeah. Department of Nuclear War, Department of Biological War, Annie Jacobsen's Department, I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 1:32:54Speaker 02

  But DOD, you know, looks at its soldiers, at its, at all of its personnel in their own lane. And, you know, various generals and colonels and soldiers took me through this, how not only do they have medical countermeasures, whether or not they're gonna work for a novel pathogen is a different story, but, you know, in their chem bio kits. And this has been studied intensely by Defense Department because there's been this idea that soldiers may encounter biological war on the battlefield. And so there is a different sort of plan for the soldiers. There's also the idea that the, or the fact that the Defense

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  Department has issued 1.7 million gas masks.

• 1:33:41Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  Which, to the airborne point of this, is necessary to not get infected.

• 1:33:47Brian Keating?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  And so, in my mind, when I write Biological Twilight, and this is the one area that is in Annie Jacobsen's imagination, the denouement, which is the biological twilight. I suggest that the world is not going to be a very holistic place because you're gonna have a lot of soldiers. The military is, you know, there are only 17% women in the military. So you got a lot of men with a lot of gas masks and a lot of guns. And then you have a lot of people who are sociopaths, very Machiavellian, who can, who would be willing to kill someone from a distance.

• 1:34:22Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  Not knowing whether they're infected or not. I mean, this is the science fiction that I'm.

• 1:34:26Brian Keating?

  They're trying on, yeah.

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  And so that's where you really have to say, oh, my God, what kind of a world. Talk about de-evolution, you know? That's not a world that, uh, that's suitable for most people.

• 1:34:37Brian Keating?

  You made me think about, you know, you mentioned people in the book, like, uh, mutual contact, maybe, that we have Peter Thiel, I met a couple times, and he's reportedly looking for places to, you know, bug out to in different places. And, and, uh, but it made me think of, you know, this company, Palantir, and these other, are there, you know, for-profit, we've only been talking about, like, like, nation-state actors, but are there, you know, for-profit actors, you know, is OpenAI have a bio lab somewhere? You know, are these people, I don't know, are there, you know, possibly not rogue countries, but rogue industries, rogue, you know, capitalists, or whatever you wanna term you want is, that, you know, are also a threat in a way that doesn't exist for nuclear. I mean, to have a thermo fusion device is a pretty challenging thing for a company to just port around with

• 1:35:22Brian Keating?

  them. But on the bio war side, is that also another, you know, kind of gruesome element that we haven't touched upon?

• 1:35:28Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know about, like, nefarious actors who are non-nation states. I don't know. I would hope that there's someone in the Department of Defense that's looking that, or, you know, examining that, keeping the FBI, but, you know, that would be their job. But what I do know is I had an interesting conversation with Sam Altman. Because I wanted to see if I could make ChatGPT do something that wasn't in the vein of creating a bioweapon, which I knew would be, you know.

• 1:35:59Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:00Speaker 02

  I'd be shut down, right? I wanted to see if I could make it tell me some classified information. And that's a spoiler alert, I'm not going to reveal, because I think it's interesting for readers to come upon it.

• 1:36:13Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:36:13Speaker 02

  But what I will say is that.

• 1:36:16Brian Keating?

  But it's a, I wanna say, it's not a fictional element. It's actually, what you bring up in this scenario is actual places, yeah.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  And I wasn't going to include it in the narrative, except for an interesting thing happened, which is, I had someone that I know mentioned it to Sam Altman.

• 1:36:30Brian Keating?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  And I had a conversation with Sam, and they said, Sam wants to know what you were able to make ChatGPT do. And I explained it to him. And he asked me a few questions of how I knew, and, you know, I explained it to him. And it has since been changed in ChatGPT, so you can no longer do this. And I explained to readers what it is.

• 1:36:49Brian Keating?

  Did you have to have your book reviewed by government agencies?

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm a journalist, so I, I don't have any clearances and no obligations. But I do have an obligation to safety in my own sort of mother.

• 1:37:00Brian Keating?

  Yeah, of course, right, yeah.

• 1:37:01Speaker 02

  But, but what was interesting is that, the point I thought was interesting in there is that OpenAI was very quick to make the change, which is great.

• 1:37:08Brian Keating?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:08Speaker 02

  But not everybody's a journalist, and not everybody has access to Sam Altman.

• 1:37:13Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:37:13Speaker 02

  And not everybody gets to say, hey, did you know it could do this? And not everybody makes that change really quickly. And that is obviously a place of concern. And I believe that that's what the leaders of these different, you know, of the CEOs of these big companies now know.

• 1:37:27Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:28Speaker 02

  Again, being advised by people like David Relman, saying, hey, because I'm not the only one had a conversation with David Relman about what I could do. Those are the people that are able to do it on a much more scientific pathway.

• 1:37:39Brian Keating?

  And now with, like, open weight models and Chinese models that are, you know, getting to be on parity with American, there's no control, so, right? Who's to say that what you, and again, we're not gonna reveal what it is, but because I think it's hard to, it's also gripping, you know, just a thriller, the story, in addition to being, you know, so heavily sourced and fact-based. But, you know, there's no constraints.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  So my final thought on that, which I think is an interesting thought, it's a conversation that people should be having, having, because you framed the question as if maybe someone had something nefarious in mind, which I have no reason to believe that is the case. But what I do know, and what you know, is that all business CEOs want their business to do better than the other guy's business. And so when I read in open source literature, whether it's the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or wherever, about these sort of battles of the tech bros, you know, and I have my own access to individuals and have different conversations, I wonder where the line is between competition. In other

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  words, I have heard discussions about, maybe this all needs to be shut down. What this all is, I could not define, but I know it has something to do with bio. Like, maybe we need to pull the bio lever. So is there a lane in these large language models that has to do with bio that can be partitioned off? I don't know, but they know.

• 1:39:03Brian Keating?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  And that is really the question is, and who is willing to do that? And then are you in a paradigm where I was talking about where if there's mistrust and paranoia, we certainly see that with, you know, the fight. When I look at the fight between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, I don't see necessarily, like, two guys, you know, I may not see, other people are saying, I'm seeing more like, what is getting lost in the safety component of all of this? Because the anger and the virulence and the vitriol is so great. What is, I mean, again, and I'm speculating here, but this is just as an observer, because that's human nature. And is safety being jeopardized at one wanting to beat the other?

• 1:39:46Brian Keating?

  I think it absolutely is. I just talked to Nate Sares, who wrote a book called, If Anybody Builds It, Everybody Dies. And spoiler alert for their book, whatever, it's also a year old, there's a biopathogen introduced by a super intelligent, uncontrolled, and unpredictable. The worst part, I'm told by people like Roman Yudowski, he believes that AI, because it's fundamentally unpredictable, means we can never control it. So to wrap up, you're from Hollywood, there's a scene in the movie A Few Good Men, where Jack Nicholson is, you know, kind of on his high horse, saying, you know, he says basically, you know, did you put, you know, did you order the code red? Again, spoiler alert, this is 40-year-old, 36-year-old, everyone's seen the movie, I love it, and the late Rob Reiner and this, Tom Cruise says, you know, what were you doing out there? And Nicholson says,

• 1:40:29Brian Keating?

  you know, guys like you, you don't know what we do. We are on that wall in the middle of the night, taking a watch, and you can sleep soundly in your bed, but what you don't know is, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. Did you order the code red? You're goddamn right. Do we have people on the wall? You know, and, and in both of these books, in these two most recent books. Are you confident? Are there people out there that are gonna, you know, take the watch and stand on the wall? Or are we, you know, or is it up to us? And what can we do?

• 1:41:01Speaker 02

  I interview mostly former... dot, dot, dot. So these are people who served and then they leave government, which makes them much easier for them to talk to me. It's, it's, it's a whole different kettle of fish if you're a reporter trying to get the story that's happening right now because of people's security clearances. And so the people that I talk to are always concerned of what's happening now. And I, you know, one can't know if that's because you're not there anymore. And you're saying, but I did a great job and who's doing it now? And if there is enough, you know, if nothing is happening, it's, it's, I think that's impossible for me to be the judge of it.

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  But I do know that much can be learned from the tales that we hear from those who served, saying, this is a danger point. This is a danger point. This needs to be looked into. And that always must be fused with the current consideration that we go back to the technology is moving at lightning speed. It is moving faster than any congressional hearings can be held on subject X, Y, or Z. And also that there's so much chaff in the zeitgeist, in the air, whether it's UFOs or algae in the, you know, in Washington DC, in the pond. Is that really important? Is that really an existential threat?

• 1:42:27Speaker 02

  And then on balance, maybe a lot of people don't want to think, they don't want to spend their 90 years on earth thinking about these existential threats and take the position of like, you know what? Life rolls on. So that's the her of York of conundrum. I don't know. But it's interesting for it to think about. You like thinking about, I like thinking about it and I certainly like talking about it.

• 1:42:48Brian Keating?

  Absolutely. It touches into everything and it really gives you this rare gift, which is to realize that you have right now a rare gift. That we can act, that we can breathe, that we are safe and that we can do things. We live in a free country. We can have influence over our politicians and our, and our government. And that there's hope. I think the definition of depression is when you have no hope and you feel helpless and you, nothing we can do. No, that's not true. This book is a hopeful book despite the, you know, the, the gut wrenching gripping moments. But I just want to thank you for the work that you do, the writing that you do. I mean, from Princeton University to Pulitzer shortlist to, I think you played ice hockey. You have so many different talents. You're just a rare, you know,

• 1:43:28Brian Keating?

  polymath, multi math, and such a treat to, to talk to someone who's absolutely at the peak of their craft and what you do to inspire. As I said, it's a hopeful book. It really is. And I hope that you all get it and listen to the, I, I recommend the audiobook. I think you get more royalties on the audiobook than, no, but, but in any case, get the book, any format that you get it in. We're giving away four to six copies, Nuclear War, Biological War, signed by Annie with a meteorite. I hope that you'll take advantage of it. Annie Jacobsen, thank you for coming all the way down and being such a, just a phenomenal intellect to, to talk to today. Thank you for being a scholar and a gentle lady.

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  Wonderful conversation. Thank you so much.

• 1:44:06Brian Keating?

  Thank you. If Annie's books terrify you as much as they do me, that's good. I mean, she's making a difference. I plan to have Annie on again. And until then, I want you to watch this conversation with Neil Ferguson about existential doom. It's linked on screen and don't forget to subscribe and leave a comment.

• 1:44:23Speaker 00

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