#417 - The Pentagon Is Preparing for A Doomsday Plague Event | Annie Jacobsen

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Annie Jacobsen returns to discuss her terrifying new investigation into the threat of secret super plague weapons being developed around the world. Annie previous books include Operation Paperclip, Area 51, The Pentagons Brain (DARPA), Surprise Kill Vanish, & Nuclear War a Scenario. SPONSORS https://dosedaily.co/danny - Use code DANNY to get 35% off your first subscription. https://mengotomars.com - Get 50% off for life plus free shipping AND 3 free gifts. https://butcherbox.com/danny - Get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ground beef for life, or free chicken thighs or top sirloins in every box for a year. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS Bio War book - https://a.co/d/0aMxWTDT https://www.anniejacobsen.com https://x.com/AnnieJacobsen FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Threat of biological weapons 02:40 - Genetically modified viruses 06:00 - Recombinant chimera weapons 08:53 - SV40 origins 16:27 - Threat of airborne biological weapons 20:47 - 3 kinds of plague 23:03 - Novel viruses 29:28 - Devolution & the facade of democracy 37:14 - ChatGPT is the modern printing press 42:57 - ChatGPT's eerie positivity 56:02 - HHS budget & role during a pandemic 01:00:05 - Strategic National Stockpile 01:08:17 - Biological weapons labs hiding in plain sight 01:16:41 - Mockery of American democracy 01:22:11 - Virus hunters 01:26:01 - Palantir + Oura Ring 01:35:17 - Scapegoat for AI data centers 01:40:13 - UFO disinformation campaign 01:44:23 - Al O'Donnell's Area 51 claims 01:51:02 - Stalin's War of the Worlds plan 01:59:34 - FBI's threat to Annie about Al O'Donnell 02:04:46 - Missing General McCasland 02:13:05 - Narrative is more powerful than institutions 02:17:59 - The engineered plague virus that exists right now 02:34:30 - Final phase of devolution 02:38:55 - U. S. possession of biologic weapons Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:03Speaker 00

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• 1:07Danny Jones?

  We meet again, Annie Jacobsen.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Danny, thanks so much for having me back.

• 1:11Danny Jones?

  Of course, I'm super excited to have you and talk to you about this new book. First of all, how did you decide to write about biological war? Especially right after your, was it, was it just like, um, after you did the nuclear war book? Did you figure that was like the next best or the next most logical thing to write about? Or were you, was there some sort of weird connection between those two books?

• 1:32Speaker 03

  The next best horror show?

• 1:34Danny Jones?

  Horror show, yeah.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  You know, many of my sources in, for the nuclear war scenario book, work in what is called counterproliferation. It's basically a fancy phrase for stopping bad guys, stopping nations using WMD, weapons of mass destruction. And so many of the people who work in nuclear counterproliferation also work in biological warfare, counterproliferation, which is much trickier because it's illegal to have biological weapons. But when I was reporting that book, a number of those individuals would say to me, Annie, next you have to look at bio. With this kind of shark in the water feeling.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  And of course, nuclear is so horrific and overwhelming. I was completely focused on that, but immediately began looking at bio once I was done reporting nuclear. They're very different, equally terrifying.

• 2:33Danny Jones?

  So biological weapons are illegal?

• 2:36Speaker 03

  Biological weapons are illegal.

• 2:38Danny Jones?

  And everyone is doing them?

• 2:40Speaker 03

  This is where we talk about the fine points here because it's very interesting. I mean, you know, it's crazy to think that nuclear weapons are legal, but they are legal at the United Nations to the five nations that legally have them, except for there are nine nuclear armed nations. So you see, right? So the people that won't really acknowledge that they have them or will not be part of the treaties. But either way, nuclear weapons are technically legal. Biological weapons were banned, they became illegal in 1972 with the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention treaty by all these signatories, including America, including--

• 3:22Danny Jones?

  Is this what Nixon did?

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Yes, it is, absolutely. And, and before that, people should be, you know, shocked if they don't already know that biological weapons were legal and we had a massive arsenal of biological weapons, as did all the other superpowers.

• 3:41Danny Jones?

  So, in this scenario that you play out in the book, it's terrifying. It scared the living daylights out of me. How there was these Soviet defectors, I believe, that came to the US and basically explained how there was these programs buried deep inside Siberia to create these, um, hybrid chimera bacteria beasts, where they're basically taking the plague virus, not the bubonic plague, but the, um, the respiratory plague.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Pneumonic.

• 4:18Danny Jones?

  Pneumonic plague.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Like pneumonia.

• 4:20Danny Jones?

  Pneumonia, pneumonia plague. And they're essentially fusing the DNA of that with some other kind of disease so that when the person catches it, there's no way to determine what the person has because the symptoms are just so much more broad. Is that correct?

• 4:38Speaker 03

  That's absolutely right. And that is the sort of, so you, you hit upon an important point for me in my reporting, which is that in writing the scenario, I want to be able to convey the deep sense of science and of nonfiction reporting that I do and that I have written all of my books about. And so all things are tied to what is scientifically possible, what the US government knows about, the programs that exist within the various elements of the US government to combat these kinds of situations where they to happen, and how many different agencies are involved in all the different contingencies.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  And things are generally based on war game scenarios that are done at the Pentagon. And so that's really a kind of lead in the narrative of, the Defense Department has gamed through this before. And of course, they have many different scenarios. But I think one of the most terrifying scenarios, and it was certainly conveyed to me by all of the defense officials that I, that I discussed this with, as well as FEMA, those are the federal emergency management officials, who would have to deal with this, the public health officials with HHS, the US Office of Health and Human Services, is that the

• 6:01Speaker 03

  ability to create recombined genetic viruses, this is genetically engineered, genetically modified viruses and bacteria, has opened up this extraordinary new threat level that is off the charts, that no one is talking about. And if there's anything I want to say about biological war scenario is the point is not panic, the point is pressure. People need to or will benefit from being informed about what is possible and what the government knows is possible. So that God forbid something like this happens, people behave in a manner that maybe there's

• 6:43Speaker 03

  a solution as opposed to complete, you know, the book ends in anarchy and insurrection. That's the spoiler alert.

• 6:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Because the out of control nature of genetic engineering is just beyond the worst possible imagination.

• 7:00Danny Jones?

  What is the origin of this recombinant DNA stuff? So this is interesting because it all ties into the origin of PCR and the PCR testing stuff. And I'm, I'm familiar with the dude, Carey Mullis. I read his book a while ago and he won a Nobel Prize for developing the PCR method with the DNA and all that. But, so recombinant DNA, is that essentially the same thing as the chimera weapons?

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Recombinant DNA is like, just like, like recombining a pathogen's DNA. Okay, so a pathogen for starters, like there's viruses, we all know about the COVID virus. But there's also bacteria, which is, can be equally deadly. A pathogen is a, is a dangerous or deadly organism.

• 7:44Danny Jones?

  So it can be a virus or a--

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Virus or bacteria. So you have viruses and, you know, but then germs, like germs are a different, germs can also be perfectly good. We all have germs in our guts that are like necessary. So that's germ is a kind of, can be okay, pathogen dangerous. Virus and bacteria within that. For decades, since the invention of antibiotics, right around World War II, most antibiotics will kill bacteria. So if you have a strep throat, you go to the doctor and the doctor prescribes antibiotics and your strep throat goes away. But not all strep throats are bacterial, some are viral infections. I mean, sorry, all strep throats are bacteria, but not all sore throats. You can go and the, and the doctor says, oh, that's actually not strep.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  And you're like, but my throat hurts. And they say, drink lots of tea and, you know, talk to us in a week.

• 8:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Right? So now to answer your question about genetic engineering. In 1972, that is the origin story of this idea of recombinant DNA. A professor named Paul Berg in a laboratory in Stanford, California at the university, figures out a way to combine the DNA of two organisms.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Hence, the word chimera.

• 9:04Danny Jones?

  Did he win a Nobel Prize for this?

• 9:06Speaker 03

  He did win a Nobel Prize. And this was in 1972. And I write a little bit about the book in the kind of how we got here, where I set the reader up to understand in kind of a very general 90,000-foot view way. Here's what, here's what happened and here's where we are now. And that's a really important moment in science because it was basically like the discovery of the, of the atom bomb. Meaning you could absolutely create a new pathway in terms of weapons. And of course, the scientists were not thinking about weapons at the time. They were thinking about medical countermeasures. They were thinking about antidotes. They were thinking about how to use science for good. But that's not what happened.

• 9:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  In a certain lane.

• 9:53Danny Jones?

  Right. And you also talk about SV40, Simeon Virus 40, the monkey virus, which I've learned a lot about on this show in the past couple of years. Especially when it came to like the early developments of the polio vaccine with Alton Ochsner in, I forget what year that would have been. But um, yeah, like there was a whole, there was a whole vaccine push for the polio vaccine. And um, Alton Ochsner, who was the one behind it, pushing it out, was doing like a test on a, a, a presentation in front of an auditorium of students in New Orleans. And he injected his grandchild, his two grandchildren, his granddaughter and his grandson with this vaccine.

• 10:36Danny Jones?

  And I think it killed his grandson and it gave his granddaughter polio and she ended up surviving. Um, and what, there was this lady named Bernice Eddy. And I can't remember exactly what her like title would, would have been, but she was in charge of like reviewing and, and doing the safety tests on these vaccines. And it was like a day before he did that presentation. She tested a bunch of them on monkeys and a bunch of the monkeys were dropping dead because it had this active SV40 in there, this SV, uh, the Simeon Virus 40 in there. And that's what was killing them because that is a, like a cancer causing virus. It like exasperates cancer. And you know, I also had a gentleman in here.

• 11:21Danny Jones?

  The crazy part about this is this guy worked for the Human Genome Project at MIT. And he was on this podcast and he was explaining to me um, all the stuff about SV40, he found traces of this in contaminated vials of the Pfizer vaccine for COVID. And that episode got blasted off you, like taken off of YouTube because of that. Still on Spotify, but um, like this was scary stuff. Like this guy's no, he's no kook. Like this guy was a legitimate biologist, DNA expert who worked at MIT, at the Human Genome Project, who found this stuff. So like, it's not gone away, the SV40 is still here. Anyways, that's a long-winded way of, you know, I'm just really curious about like

• 12:04Danny Jones?

  what specifically they would have been doing with SV40.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Well, you have brought up a really interesting point that's fundamental to any of these conversations about whether it's biological war, you know, a lab leak, which is called an incident or an accident in that same lane that could cause panic, anarchy, insurrection and mass death, and medical countermeasures. So vaccines, antibiotics, other medical countermeasures, things that will counter a dangerous pathogen. And I think the principle that we're really talking about here that's most important for people to think about and kind of digest and be open-minded about is the idea of uncertainty.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  So that's what I hear you talking about. And I don't know about the SV40 vaccine trials you were talking about. And I specifically stay away from the vaccine debate only because I do not want to be part of the division of, of, of sort of people being, having a horse in the race about, about uncertainty. Because uncertainty-

• 13:14Danny Jones?

  It's one of the most divisive things in American history.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  I mean, if we learned anything from COVID, it fractured Ameri-, it fractured trust in American officials. This is so profoundly dangerous. And it's actually an old Soviet play, which is super dangerous. We can talk about that and that's what happens in, in the scenario I write. But uncertainty. Biology is not a, a bomb. I mean, it's interesting because one of the reasons I think, and this is me sort of pontificating. Biological weapons were made illegal by the Nixon administration in 1969. We had this massive arsenal. It took 219 weeks to destroy. That's how big it was. Okay?

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Living organisms that were going to be put into bomblets and dropped, you know, fired and missiles and things. And it's remained a mystery why it was that Nixon decided to do that. And there are all different kinds of theory. My theory is this, is that, and this comes from having reported eight books now on the Pentagon and the CIA, is that biology is profoundly difficult to control. The uncertainty factor is extraordinary. You can drop a nuclear bomb or a conventional bomb and know in advance the kill ratios.

• 14:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  You can know that they have been measurable, they are measurable effects.

• 14:40Danny Jones?

  What von Neumann did, right?

• 14:42Speaker 03

  That is exactly what he did. And think about trying to measure biology. There are so many different factors. You and I could be in the same room with the same pathogen and we would, you could have, you could be asymptomatic and never, I mean, we can go on and on and we can get into any of this, but it is impossible to control and therefore is not a good weapon for the US Defense Department. It also makes it a very terrible and viable weapon for someone who wants to cause unbridled chaos. And that, and also the important distinctions, I think, is why in the Cold War, biological weapons were seen as viable. And that has to do with geography, you know? The Soviet Union was a closed off space.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  So their plan was like what's called bio one, biological warfare 101. Create a vaccine, vaccinate all your soldiers. They were going to do this with plague. Bubonic plague in the lungs becomes pneumonic plague. It's incredibly contagious. They were going to vaccinate their soldiers and then use plague on the battlefield, kill all the enemy soldiers, right? So, but that doesn't work anymore because proximity, because of, you know, intercontinental warfare, and primarily because of airborne pathogens and how genetically, genetic engineering has advanced to the degree where you can make something that wasn't airborne airborne,

• 16:09Speaker 03

  which is the number one requirement for a pandemic.

• 16:13Danny Jones?

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• 16:57Danny Jones?

  What stood out to me is the science that goes behind it. Two double-blind placebo-controlled trials that showed a positive impact on liver enzymes. Are you ready to give your liver the support it deserves? Head on over to dosedaily.co/danny or just enter the code DANNY to get 35% off your first subscription. Your body does so much for you, let's do something for it. That's D O S E D A I L Y dot C O slash Danny for 35% off your first month subscription. Yeah, imagine if you could, and you may have laid this out in the book. I don't remember exactly, but like if you could make something like SV40 or a cancer-causing virus airborne and make that transmissible.

• 17:39Danny Jones?

  Like you're basically like essentially making cancer contagious. That's, that's terrifying.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And this sounds like science fiction. And all of the presidential advisors on bio defense that I have spoken to will shake their head grimly, letting us all know this is no longer science fiction. I'll give you an example. I report this in the book and it's an interesting detail that has never been reported before. And you know, has not yet been picked up on. But I interviewed two of the CIA's top counterproliferation experts. And one of whom, one of whom you interviewed, Mad Dog Lawler, called Mad Dog because he got bit by a rabid dog in Paris. And Ralph, Rolf Moat Larson.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  And they were in charge of different lanes of the, of the CIA's, you know, going after bad guys trying to get WMD. Lawler was kind of like really looking with long-term missions, really working on sort of developing assets to understand the science programs, to go after them from the inside out, which is super interesting in its own right. And then Moat Larson was like literally with ground branch guys going after the bad guys. You know, take, meeting with Al Qaeda weapons makers in Sudan and, and saying, it's going to be this or that. Okay? That kind of thing. But digressing here, going back to Mad Dog.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  James Lawler from the CIA told me that Afa Siddiqui, Afia Siddiqui.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Um, she was captured in Afghanistan. She was the first woman on the most wanted terrorist list for the FBI. This is during the height of the war on terror. She was an MIT trained microbiologist who was linked to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And this FBI was after her after the nine 11 terrorist attacks. FBI was after her. They heard she was developing bioweapons. They couldn't find her. They finally found her. This part is all reported. They finally found her, you know, acting strange outside a police station in Afghanistan. Uh, there was a big sort of kerfuffle. She grabbed a gun. Someone was shot. I mean, it's all

• 20:02Speaker 03

  the, millions of conspiracies have been developed around this. She's now in a state facility in Texas for 80 years in a, in a penitentiary, in a mental institution. This is the unreported fact that Lawler told me and was confirmed by a second person, which is shocking to your point about making something airborne. In her bag, in her handbag, she had plans to create a chimera weapon that mixed rabies, which has a 100% lethality rate. If you do

• 20:35Speaker 03

  not get anti rabies medication immediately, 100%, you will die. To make rabies airborne. And that was confirmed by Lawler and a second presidential advisor named David Relman. And that has never been reported. And I believe that the reason it has never been reported is because it's too horrifying to even consider.

• 21:04Danny Jones?

  That would be even worse than airborne plague.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Well, they are the two killers.

• 21:10Danny Jones?

  The two most.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  That have a 100% death rate. If you don't have a countermeasure. So rabies is a virus. There's anti, you know, there's shots in the stomach when you get rabies, if you know you're bitten. And then plague, once upon a time, you could take antibiotics for plague. And immediately, it has to be within the 24 hours. And then it would, it would kill the, the mnemonic plague to a certain degree. It's not like.

• 21:40Danny Jones?

  And this is like nature's natural plague.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Natural, mother nature's plague.

• 21:44Danny Jones?

  Which happens in the US every year still.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:47Danny Jones?

  Which is interesting.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  Okay. So there are three different kinds of plague, which is interesting. Bubonic plague has so much narrative load to it because we think of the black death. We think of what happened.

• 21:57Danny Jones?

  Picture of those bird masks.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Yes. And, you know, in the 14th century, bubonic plague killed between one third and one half of Europe. I mean, that's the bring out, you're dead. You know, that's the like, there's nowhere to bury people.

• 22:12Danny Jones?

  Didn't they also use that as like weapons? They would take dead bodies infested with plague and like catapult them into like enemy territory?

• 22:19Speaker 03

  This is old biological warfare ideas and you can see where it comes from. Um, and so bubonic plague has that like real scary sense. And it literally is transmitted by a flea that is infected with the bacteria, which is called Yersinia pestis. So the flea bites, the infected flea bites Danny, Danny gets a lump.

• 22:43Danny Jones?

  Lymph nodes.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  On his lymph nodes, which are also called buboes. Hence bubo. And then, then it becomes, you know, it takes over the body and that's a bubonic plague. And the death rate from that is anywhere of, it's like around 30%, let's say. This is again, this is like sort of uncertainty. If it, if the bubonic plague explodes in the body and enters the bloodstream, it's called systemic plague. And that, think about it. You get sepsis, you're dead. If it infiltrates the lungs, it's mnemonic plague, 100% death rate. And that's why the bubonic plague was killing so many people because it started out with fleas and then it sort

• 23:25Speaker 03

  of became mnemonic. And then you had all kinds of people giving it to one another.

• 23:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  You know, through, through contact and also when something becomes airborne, literally aerosolized in the air.

• 23:39Danny Jones?

  So this particular version of the mnemonic plague that you write about, and I know you go back and forth between fiction and reality in the book, right?

• 23:52Speaker 03

  Hypothetical scenario.

• 23:54Danny Jones?

  Hypothetical scenario.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Like a Pentagon war game.

• 23:57Danny Jones?

  Exactly. And you go, you go back and forth between that and like actual real interviews with folks. Um, this mnemonic plague that is completely not treatable with any kind of antibiotics or drugs or any kind of known treatments. You call it a novel, a novel plague. So completely unknown to anyone who's ever done any research on this stuff. So like, if that, is that real?

• 24:25Speaker 03

  COVID was a novel virus. That means it's new. So mother nature, and whatever you think about lab leak versus natural origin, we can get into that later. But either way, mother nature create, you know, viruses mutate.

• 24:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Bacteria mutate. So you create, that is one, why something can be novel, which is a different word for new. Let me give you three basic concepts that I think are really helpful to consider when you're talking about any deadly pathogen. Three requirements to be really afraid of, right? One, transmissibility. We've talked about that. If it's airborne, that is the number one threat because it's going to linger in the air after you and I leave this room. If I have Ebola and I'm standing way over there and you're over by that door, as terrifying as Ebola is with its up to 90% death rate, you're not going

• 25:25Speaker 03

  to get Ebola if you're way over there. It has to be.

• 25:28Danny Jones?

  On the surface.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Contact. And so that's why your first responders, your doctors, your nurses, your the loved ones carrying someone. Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever. You bleed out of your eyeballs. So anyone touching you is going to get it. But Danny's across the room, not so. That is not. So transmissibility is the number one. Second is virulence. How deadly is it? Okay. Rabies and plague, 100% case fatality rate. COVID, Ebola, we just talked about, maybe it's 60, 80, 90. Again, there's some uncertainty with various trans. Guess what COVID was?

• 26:04Danny Jones?

  I think it was less than a percent, right?

• 26:05Speaker 03

  It was around 1%.

• 26:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  And there were many asymptomatic people, meaning people who didn't even know had COVID. So 1%, now think, you know, something like hantavirus.

• 26:17Danny Jones?

  And it also varied depending on age, right? And come on, there were so many factors.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  There were so many factors, but the, the case fatality rate is usually done after the fact, once you have a certain amount of people that die of the disease per 100, then you can.

• 26:31Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Then you, right? So it's transmissibility, number one to be considered. Virulence, how deadly is it? And then number three, how do we stop it? Do we have any medical countermeasures? In the old days, plague, antibiotics. Rabies, give them the shots in the gut. Um, Ebola, no, no medical countermeasures. Okay. So.

• 26:58Danny Jones?

  Wait, now we have no?

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Now, the strain from 2014.

• 27:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  A medical countermeasure was developed called ZMAP by some scientists in San Diego. And now the new strain in Africa right now is a different strain. It's a mutated strain. No reason to think it's a lab leak. It's a mutated strain. No medical countermeasures yet. Okay. So number three, can we stop it? Now, if you just consider those three factors that we had to go through all these different scenarios, imagine the uncertainty involved.

• 27:35Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  I mean, and yet when CDC officials or WHO officials are confronted with any new pathogen, the hantavirus scare with the cruise ship recently that happened in May, if you remember.

• 27:48Danny Jones?

  I remember.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  You know, now there's a Legionnaires outbreak in New York City. Officials, what I noticed from my reporting is they immediately try to act like they know exactly what's going on, which is ridiculous, just given the three factors we spoke about. And so why is there this need to pretend, because that is what it is, that they have the situation under control when it is not under control? Uncertainty leads in any outbreak, whether it's natural or engineered.

• 28:18Danny Jones?

  Right. Well, they want to keep the general population subdued for as long as possible, right? And make them feel comfortable and not panic.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Which brings me to my most important point of the entire book, biological war scenario, which is what the defense department says in all of its doctrine, which is that in the event of an outbreak.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Chaos and panic is almost certain to happen because of fear of infection. So what you just said is absolutely true and what I just said is absolutely true. And those two concepts clash right up against one another. Hence, stay informed. If you know what to be afraid of, if you know what to fear, if you know what to be cautious about versus another, you know, and that's where we got all the fractured trust because we were just getting bad information during COVID.

• 29:15Danny Jones?

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• 30:00Danny Jones?

  It doesn't feel like caffeine, just a more consistent drive throughout the day. It's made in the USA, third-party tested, and it's backed by a 90-day money-back guarantee. For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off for life, plus free shipping and three free gifts at mengotomars.com. That's M E N G O T O M A R S dot com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they're gonna ask where you heard about them, and please support our show by letting them know we sent you. One of the things that really stood out to me about the book, I think there was like a whole, there was a whole part of the book titled like, uh, when democracy starts to fail or collapse or something like that. But what you really realize towards the end of the book is that democracy never was. It's just the veil.

• 30:46Danny Jones?

  It's just the fake pretend veil of democracy starts to erode. Because you realize that all these people have all these special protections and underground bunkers and safe stocks of vaccines for their families, so that when the people that paid for everything die, they can still survive and get off the planet or whatever they want to do. So there's, it's fake, it's all fake.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Well, that is a very, very, very interesting reality that underpins biological war or a biological incident. And that is what makes it so different than nuclear. And you're, you know, when you frame it that way, I mean, I was thinking of the term egalitarian. And I think, you know, what you're saying, democracy is perhaps even a little bit more frightening and maybe requires some modification in my own brain because maybe egalitarian is being too, you know, generous.

• 31:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  Because you are absolutely right. And one of the most surprising things reporting this book was to learn about a very secret program called devolution. Some people pronounce it devolution, according to the man who wrote the directive on it, Craig Fugate, Obama's FEMA director. Devolution is exactly like it sounds, evolution in reverse. And it's what you referred to, which is when, when the shit hits the fan, when anarchy and outbreak and insurrection overtakes the government, the state's, individual state's ability to contain what is happening in a city.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  Washington DC makes a decision. The White House makes a decision. FEMA helps the White House make the decision. The National Security Advisor, acting in his dual-hatted manner as the National Security Coordinator, not something many people know, makes the call, devolution. And devolution is precisely as you, as you describe it, which is how the scenario ends, which is where a select group of people disappears.

• 32:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Into these bunkers. Now, what's interesting is it's kind of assumed that many of the high-ranking officials in the government will die. And so it's an even, it's an even more skewed perspective on democracy. If you take your point, because this group has been pre-chosen and they know who they are because they rehearse it. And you and I don't know who they are, and we will never know who they are.

• 33:26Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. It's terrifying. It's crazy to think that that's real. And on top of all of that, this is only what they were, they told you, Annie. Like, imagine what they didn't tell you.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  I mean, absolutely. That is like, I get the very tip of the iceberg and then there's the iceberg and then there's the iceberg beneath the sea.

• 33:45Danny Jones?

  Exactly. Yes, that's a great way, that's a great analogy for it. Because like, with all of the stuff we've been exposed to in the last couple of years or the last year alone, just the fake declassifications that we've seen, like with the UFO stuff, with the Epstein stuff, with everything else, like, it is that tiny tip of the iceberg, they're gonna say, they're gonna create this big dog and pony show to make everyone feel like it's transparent government. But in reality, you know, there's billions of files that have been burned and destroyed or that are never gonna see the light of day. And, you know, when it comes to somebody who, like, who is, you know, like you, who's a journalist going out there knocking on doors of the government, former CIA folks and former military folks, like, they're only gonna tell you what they're allowed to say. So, and which is terrifying in itself. It's a nightmare. It's a total nightmare.

• 34:29Danny Jones?

  And just to know that that's probably just, you know, 5% of the truth is unimaginable.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  It's interesting, I, I love your point that you're making here, which is that, like, so I'll make the science analogy. We have science and technology moving so fast, so incredibly fast. I write about military and intelligence community, science and technology, right? So the speed at which it's accelerating is astonishing. And the sort of law enforcement, courts, correction, Congress, they are just a zillion years behind the curve, never mind that half the Congress is like, doesn't even know how to use an iPad, okay?

• 35:15Speaker 03

  And then you're talking about this idea of declassification and transparency. And what's the opposite word of cynicism? Like, um?

• 35:26Danny Jones?

  Optimism?

• 35:27Speaker 03

  No, I'm thinking more like, in other words, what your point, what you were saying was, okay, so they're fake, it's like a big fake declass, it's like, oh, we're going to declassify this, and then it's a nothing burger.

• 35:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  So it's, people are, people are savvier to the reality of, oh, I should just simply buy what the government is telling me.

• 35:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  And that, I think, is actually an interesting and hopeful situation. And by the way, has an extraordinary amount of historical precedent, always coinciding with science and technology. So it's not a bad thing, it's just where we are right now. I mean, do you want an example, like, can think of?

• 36:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  Okay. So, printing press. And also, by the way, um, science and technology grows out of war. A lot of time, you know, look at World War II, that's where all of the WMD sort of really exploded, although it existed in World War I. Okay, so bubonic plague, we were talking about that earlier, the Black Death, 1340-ish, right around that, about five or six years, um, in that time period. 90 years la, you know, half of Europe dies. 90 years later comes the invention of the printing press.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  That is a moment in technology, in democracy, in transparency, in sort of the, the, the public getting more information regularly, the printing press. So suddenly you could print out a whole bunch of, you know, pieces of paper and, and, and people could go around and pin them up with like an iron nail onto the walls of the city and, and people could read them and people became literate. And so that caused the first kind of near, near fall of the Catholic Church, of the popes. Because until then, and this is the analogy I kind of see with like, in the 50s and 60s

• 37:35Speaker 03

  in America, everybody just believed the government was like, oh, the government is, they have our backs and they're so, that was kind of the American jingoistic sentiment. And so with the Catholic Church, once you had, you know, the reformation, once you had people saying, printing information and saying, no, no, no, this is, this is like corruption, it's always the same thing. Sort of corruption, they're looking out for themselves, not us.

• 38:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Then you had, I mean, that was the whole Protestant Reformation, you have a revolt, right? So this is back in, you know, the 1500s. But I see an analogy to today, where it will go, I don't know. But people being able to look up on the internet, um, using ChatGPT, information immediately, finding information out from multiple sources and not believing, as you call it, the fake declassified document dump. To my eye, has a little bit of an analogy of what happened right after the printing press.

• 38:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And also, the ChatGPTs and those search algorithms are also cooked. You know, that's another problem.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Tell me more about your idea about that, because I think this is very interesting.

• 38:48Danny Jones?

  Well, I mean, there's been tons of people who have done studies on this and, and actually reported on this, um, during multiple election cycles, how Google, which is the biggest website in the world, curates search results based on certain things that they want to, certain narratives that they want to push. And we, we saw this very much during COVID, we saw this very much measurably during the last two presidential elections.

• 39:15Danny Jones?

  And you know, you can see it today, depending on what the topic is that you're searching for. So when you have the the AIs like Chat GPT, who are, you know, huge government contractors as well, are basically, it's one large trough, right? A condensed search from different, from Google, essentially, from all these different sites that are all curated through Google. So Google's going to essentially pick what rises to the top. And then those AIs are going to serve whatever they suggest. So, you know, if Google, which was, you know, quite literally incubated by the NSA and DARPA and the CIA,

• 39:53Danny Jones?

  is feeding the AIs, I mean, and those are the the primary agencies who are by their very nature designed to be deceptive. What are the chances we're going to get the truth from from Google or from Chat GPT or from any of those AIs? You know, you almost need just like a rogue AI. You know, and that's what led to all of the emerging alternative search engines that have been popping up over the years. That were designed, people were going to specifically because they wanted to get uncurated information. And they didn't want what Google was going to filter to them. They wanted like old school, you know, the good stuff rises to the top.

• 40:37Danny Jones?

  We don't want any sort of filter on this stuff. So, so, yeah, I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that, like, you're not going to get the truth from. I think I think Google is entwined with the government 100%. I don't think that's a speculative thing to say. I think that's pretty obvious.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  I love this thinking because I think this is like, what's the, what is the log line of your show that I love so much? Danny's quest to get smarter, right? And the journalist, Annie Jacobsen's quest is like to learn and inform. So they're very similar. I have a little bit of a different take on this, but of course, neither of us really knows. And this is why this conversation is important. And I think it's super important to be like, well, I don't exactly know, but here's what I'm thinking. So first of all, I see Google and Chat GPT as very, very, very different because they have different owners. And if you look at the owners and then you start to look at things like politics, which is the only thing that's in.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  It's interesting to me to look at politics in terms of ownership, not tribe, not how we vote. But who those people are, right? So they have very, I believe they're totally different. It's almost as different as Wikipedia and X, okay? So and and also, when once, once more gets revealed, there's pushback and then things become transparent. And then there's a debate about that. But I do think it's in one thing that's fascinating to me about Chat GPT. And I am just working with Chat GPT right now. I'm waiting for the Claude and, you know, to work on other AIs.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  And when I say working on, I mean, asking it questions because I'm trying to kind of learn the personality right now. And so, but I did hear an interesting thing, which is whereas the algorithms of the social media apps are most certainly geared toward agitation.

• 42:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Okay, so I'll do different tests, like on my X feed. I got back from a trip to Africa where I was studying predators and predator behavior. So then all

• 42:50Danny Jones?

  Predators.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Lions, leopards, really interesting. Okay, different story. But so then I would just look at X accounts like trail cams. Okay, so if you start to watch trail cams and you hit like, before you know it, your entire feed is filled with images of animals, okay? And then you can really watch how that algorithm tracks. Like, I will, if I start liking predators, I will only get predators. If I start liking like deer and owls, now I'm getting more deer and owls.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Okay, so that is like a large language model that has been fine tuned to a quadrillionth degree to be able to do that. It's just remarkable. If I start to like some guy carping or yelling about such and such a thing or woman, now suddenly my feed's going that way. So the algorithm within that social media is jerry-rigged, as far as I'm concerned, 100%. Everyone knows it. I'm not saying anything new. Chat GPT is very interesting. Chat GPT, and I have had a conversation with Sam Altman about Chat GPT, not about this, but about bioweapons. We can come back to that later.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  But Chat GPT is, in my opinion, it's engineered, because remember, it's a large language model. So it has been given all this information. And for some reason, there's something in that system that skews positive. Okay, so if I'm saying like, God, I'm trying to get my, like, like talking basic stuff with Chat GPT. Let's say my workout routine, because I want to become, I want to, you know, stay really strong because I love to ski. I'm a slalom skier in the winter and I want to stay strong in the summer. So I'll tell Chat GPT about my workout routine and like ask, you know, tweaks and things. And it's always, good job, Annie.

• 44:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  You're really on top of this, right? There's a, there's a kind of positive nature to it that is remarkable to me that I haven't figured out what that is. Because the negative, the the X is all about negative. It would rather have me stirred up about politics than watching owls on my, on, on

• 45:12Danny Jones?

  Well, that's interesting because Chat GPT is communicating directly to you where X is not. You're just exposed to other people screaming into the void, right?

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:25Danny Jones?

  You know, and Chat GPT is also convinced people to kill themselves, which is crazy. Like the same positive feedback, like, yes, this probably would be an ideal thing for you to do. I don't know how many people, how many people have committed suicide because of Chat GPT? Like, I know it's literally convinced people, there's been lots of reports on this. Or not maybe, maybe not convinced them, but maybe like, you know, pushed them or nudged them in that direction because they felt that they felt super suicidal and it did nothing to stop it. More, more likely encouraged it. But I think the algorithms with like X, that you see with X and YouTube and Instagram, it's all designed on engagement, right? So it's like, if you like more of this stuff or you pause on these tweets and spend more time reading these tweets,

• 46:07Danny Jones?

  it's going to give you that more, more of that stuff because the the more you, longer you stay on the platform, the more money they're going to make.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  It's like seven claimants.

• 46:15Danny Jones?

  Wow, that's interesting. Google says there's no confirmed exact figure.

• 46:22Speaker 04

  When you

• 46:23Danny Jones?

  There's a great website I recommend to you. It's called Wikispooks. So it's the Wikipedia, it's like the the mirror, the inverted Wikipedia, right? So everything that Wikipedia likes to hide and curate, which we've seen that with Bill Clinton and the Epstein stuff, how conveniently all the Epstein stuff was deleted off his Wikipedia. Wikispooks will show you all of the, the crazy real stuff, which is you need a good balance there.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think that's, that's exactly the point. And the more balance you're after, you know, Danny's quest to become smarter, which should be all of our, right? Then then you can have a little bit of objectivity and be able to, because I think the worst feeling for most of us, or at least certainly for me, probably for you, it's different, depends how you're built, is like self-righteous indignation. You know, when you become so convinced that what you, what you are seeing is correct and everyone else is wrong, that's, that's certainly where the danger lies with any of this. But that's an inside job, you know?

• 47:29Speaker 03

  I'm not trying to find out how to kill myself on Chat GPT. I can't imagine such a, you know, but then again, who am I to say that? Here I am writing about, you know, the the end of the world from the point of view of the release of a biological weapon.

• 47:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but you're doing a service because you're informing people about something that's true and that's real, right? That's not, there's something, there's another layer to this AI stuff that's actually communicating with people personally. They're developing like real connections to it emotionally and

• 48:05Danny Jones?

  Making them more disconnected from reality because now more than ever, I mean, people are lonely, you know, people are disconnected from communities now more than ever. And that's why you have these suicide stories and even stories of guys proposing, men proposing to their chat GPT or their AI model and like literally like having weddings with it. It's so, it's so crazy.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  I suspect that we always had those corners of society of kind of weirdo solipses. They just weren't as, you know, you couldn't read about them on the internet. I don't know that I think human nature has changed that radically. What I do think is very interesting about, about AI is it's a technology that has been created that's creating itself. And so that is a, in my understanding of science and technology, certainly from a war and weapons point of view, that is a first, although you could argue that biological weapons are kind of in that, in that same space because a biological weapon is a living munition.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  That is such a bizarre concept to think about that a, a, a cell divides and grows. A virus replicates, you know, a bullet is sitting on this table is never going to be anything other than a bullet.

• 49:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  It's not going to be two bullets and it's certainly not going to be 10 million bullets. And yet that is the reality of a living munition, a biological weapon, a virus or a bacteria.

• 49:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you're weaponizing another species, a living species, almost like alien species, right? Except for they're, they're native to earth, but that's just like they're invisible and you're making that, turning that into something that can kill it. It is, it is a very bizarre thing.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  There's another interesting spooky detail when we were talking about the three components of biological weapons, right? So there's transmissibility, there's virulence, and there's how can we stop it? Another interesting fact and also uncertainty is that like, but so for example, like a low, a low dose killer is plague. Forty thousand plague bacteria fit on the head of a pin. You need as little as a, as 1,000 or maybe even 100 plague bacteria to get in your lungs to develop pneumonic plague. Think about that. Now, here's another fascinating fact and I, much of my information comes from Dr.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  Henry Heine, who is one of the world's experts in plague, in bubonic plague, studied at USAMRIT and was part of the team that investigated the anthrax attacks after nine 11. And what Dr. Heine told me, it, which is just really crazy to think about, basic facts, to this day, epidemiologists cannot agree on how much COVID was required for you to get COVID, how much of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is what it's called, to get COVID. So think about that uncertainty idea. They don't, people don't even know how much dosage you need.

• 51:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it is, it's crazy because that, you know, the, it's interesting that nobody knew, I mean, it's, it's revelatory that nobody knew because the, the official government narrative changed or the CDC, what the CDC said, CDC said was a fact changed multiple times. They moved the goalposts so many times, um, you know, and I think fear is a huge, was a huge driving factor there for them, you know?

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 51:40Danny Jones?

  To get people to comply and to like weaponize empathy and, you know, it, it's just like the psychological toll that it had on people was, it was devastating.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  One of the things I find extremely unhelpful is that post-COVID with trust fractured, certainly in America, with, you know, division, this like people want a hill to die on, what their position is about vaccines or about lab, like, and yet the basic facts, the CDC and the WHO has not answered, which is, I'll give you the most important distinction when you're studying how something could become anarchy, insurrection and devolution, as the book really is asking.

• 52:29Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  How would that happen? Airborne, an airborne pathogen. Here is the most astonishing, simple fact of all of COVID to me is that COVID was airborne. It was transmissible, Danny, between you and me. The CDC in, on March 28th of 2020, so three months into the pandemic, shutdowns across America, the CDC and the WHO tweeted, I have copies in the book, COVID not airborne, N-O-T, big capital letters, not airborne. It took almost a year for them to acknowledge it. Here's another one. Remember all that crazy nonsense about Lysol? Remember the crazy nonsense about wearing gloves and not touching something?

• 53:14Speaker 03

  If you, if, if a pathogen is transmissible from a surface, it's called fomite transmission. Okay, it's just like a fancy term.

• 53:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  The CDC was claiming that you could get COVID from touching something. Remember people were having their Amazon packages delivered from a distance and spraying Lysol? The CDC went into a partnership with Lysol.

• 53:39Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 53:40Speaker 03

  It was like it messed up the supply chain completely. You know what the chances of getting COVID, SARS-CoV-2 from a fomite, from touching something? One in 10,000. And, and no one has ever, you know, people are arguing about vaccines and good, have arguments, have healthy arguments, but please ask the CDC why they haven't either apologized or acknowledged that kind of incredible screw up.

• 54:11Danny Jones?

  That is insane. You know, they also did a tweet, I believe it was the CDC, where they got sued and they lost because they posted a tweet about, and again, I'm not an expert on this. I don't know if it's effective or not, but they posted a tweet about ivermectin saying, come on, people, you're not, you're not cattle. Don't take this stuff when they're legally not allowed to recommend or not recommend treatments for anything. And that, yeah, they got sued for that and a huge class action lawsuit and they lost.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  I mean, and, and, and somebody like myself, who's a journalist who were, you know, works to write books about this, of course I'm going to be doing the deep dive and reading papers and reading scientific, you can't expect people to just know all this, but that is a basic example of that is really going to sow mistrust and fear going down the road as it has.

• 55:01Danny Jones?

  And with everything being on social media and the fact that social media was in lock step with all of these things that would come out of the CDC, right? So if you're, if you're on social media and you're not in line with the CDC, you say something that's not in line with that, you can lose your social media, lose your, your freedom of speech, right? And get banned, especially if people, if that's your livelihood, that's devastating. And when that changes every week or every month or every year, like, how does that work? Right? You're, you're literally like banning people off the internet for this stuff when you learn yourself, when the government is wrong about it all along the way. It's crazy.

• 55:40Speaker 04

  It was the FDA, not CDC.

• 55:42Danny Jones?

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• 56:24Danny Jones?

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• 57:02Speaker 03

  But it, what's interesting on a sort of nomenclature, government department organization is FDA and CDC are all under the banner of HHS. And most people like, what? HHS? And I'm not saying you have to have a degree in government, you know, policy and organizations, but it is helpful to know that the US Department of Health and Human Services, of which right now RFK is the secretary, um, it has something like 37 agencies below it, of which is the FDA, the CDC, the NIH. So all of this, you know, ASPR, which is in charge of strategic, you know, pandemic

• 57:46Speaker 03

  preparedness, BARDA, which is in charge of the biomedical, the vaccines, and it's all stemming down from HHS. And HHS has a budget, an annual budget that is twice that of the Defense Department. And yet most, most people are like, wait, what? Right?

• 58:07Danny Jones?

  HHS is twice that of the Defense Department.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  It is like 1.8 trillion dollars and DOD is like 900 million.

• 58:14Danny Jones?

  Yet we have like, we're like one of the last countries in health outcomes in the world.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  And, you know, it is in charge of a lot of things. And what's even more astonishing. Um, is that HHS is in charge of a pandemic when it happens, not the DOD. So if it's a biological attack, if it's suspected a biological attack by a terrorist organization, I do not go there in my scenario because there's just so much baggage about that. So no need to go there. But in that case, then the FBI would open an investigation. Well, we all know how that's going to go. Okay. Um, not to be cynical about the FBI, but to be cynical about the FBI. They never even solved the anthrax attacks. Never solved the anthrax attacks.

• 59:02Danny Jones?

  Well, there was a story about how it was shipped from an FBI office. Right. Have you ever heard that story?

• 59:06Speaker 03

  I mean, this is, this is like a big rabbit hole. I have sources in the book.

• 59:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 59:10Speaker 03

  Dr. Hein worked with Dr. Bruce Ivins, who's the FBI accused of being responsible for the anthrax attacks and then committed suicide before, before a trial. I, and I have sources in the CIA who say Ivins was guilty. And I have sources that I really, both sides of the aisle, there is a huge disagreement about it. But whatever you believe, the FBI never solved that. And I believe it was the largest, single largest, most expensive investigation in FBI history.

• 59:39Danny Jones?

  That reminds me, Steve, go to, go to X and go to Sam Tripoli's X. He just posted something yesterday where he listed all of the investigations that the FBI has done in the sense to Kennedy.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this is fascinating. So the FBI has lost a lot of credibility amongst most people. But, okay, so going back to HHS is in charge of a pandemic. And so you have this giant bureaucracy that's twice as big as the Defense Department in charge. And one of the most interesting things I learned in writing Biological War Scenario was that the Defense Department, in my opinion, is probably the only organization which could actually impact change, that could actually handle and prevent devolution from happening were there an outbreak.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  So in the scenario I write, I take, you know, I take the reader from outbreak to anarchy and insurrection in six days. And then six days, that's about how it goes.

• 1:00:44Danny Jones?

  Well, it wasn't even a full day until the guy landed from Frankfurt, until there was literally thousands and thousands of people on Skid Row, like convulsing in the streets.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  And those were from two different transmission chains that I take the reader through, right? Because that's what, that's what happens. It's like you have multiple people on multiple flights going to multiple cities. But, you know, HHS, I mean, one of the things that I found also incredibly interesting in this book, there is something called the Strategic National Stockpile. And it is a classified stash of medical countermeasures. What's in it? We don't know. The name and its existence is not classified. So you can Google it and it will tell you what it is. But where it is and what's in it? Classified. It's part of what's called an SAP program, Special Access Program. Same as devolution. So when I was interviewing Craig Fugate, who really took me up to the razor's edge

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  of what can be known about devolution, because he signed off on the, on the, a very important monograph on devolution in 2016. And it's, the program is classified, but the name has been declassified because it leaked to the public.

• 1:01:54Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  Right? Same with something called COGCON, which is the, that, the FEMA's version of DEFCON. And so I was able to learn about how these different programs work based on knowing certain sort of words and keywords and then reading directives and piecing together the big pieces of the puzzle. And what I was shocked to learn is that the Defense Department, like HHS is in charge of the Strategic National Stockpile, but how are they going to get it out to the people? They need the Defense Department. They need Transportation Command.

• 1:02:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  So I think what was super interesting for me to realize was like, there is, there are so many moving pieces in the God forsaken event of a, of the release of a genetically modified pathogen into American society, either by accident or on purpose, that you would need everybody informed and willing to cooperate. And that may sound like really idealistic, but the alternative is hundreds of millions of people dead.

• 1:03:04Danny Jones?

  Right. Now, when it comes to that, that strategic stockpile, isn't there a certain, I mean, isn't this what we talked about earlier with that specific stockpile, like 12 million only for certain people that get like the go bags that are, that are, that are elected to survive in the continuity of government situation?

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  You're, I believe you're referring to the Dark Winter War Game.

• 1:03:27Danny Jones?

  Yes, that was it. Yes.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  So, excuse me. In this book, like in Nuclear War, I'm giving you this narrative, this ticking clock narrative of the shit hitting the fan, interrupted by little history lessons.

• 1:03:41Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Which explain, you know, sort of give the reader a context and hopefully allow them to just pause for a minute and then get some context. And in Biological War Scenario, that includes a couple war games that have either been, that were classified, that have been declassified, or were never classified to begin with because they just involve retired public health officials. And the Dark Winter War Game was done at Andrews Air Force Base right before 9/11. It involved smallpox. It involved, and this is very spooky part and has, you know, spawned a million conspiracy theories because right before Al Qaeda attacked, like as in three months before, these officials

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  gathered at Andrews Air Force Base to discuss what would happen if Al Qaeda were to get their hands on a biological weapon out of Vector, the precise BSL4 lab in Siberia that I use, based my scenario on because it's a real lab and has real pathogens there. If Al Qaeda got a hold of that, if they got a Russian scientist to sell them a biological weapon, and then they deployed it, they released it in three cities in America. And it was in the dark winter. So that like freaked people out, like, wait a minute, why are you running this scenario right before 9/11? That is spooky. You could call it a coincidence, you could call it something else. I'm staying out of that debate.

• 1:05:08Danny Jones?

  Why you found it?

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  But that is where we learned that, there you go.

• 1:05:13Danny Jones?

  This is the fun fact of all the investigations that the FBI allegedly lied about. JFK, anthrax attacks, Russiagate, Finders, the Vegas shootings, January 6th, Waco, all of which, you know, maybe coincidence, maybe not, but FBI informants were interestingly involved.

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  And how interesting is it that now we have this internet of ideas that people can post these ideas about and we can look at them and we can judge for ourselves or decide for ourselves, subject to change? Yeah. But let me finish the one point about the Strategic National Stockpile. I think it pertains, is that?

• 1:05:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the, the, the dark winter.

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  In Dark Winter, the scenario that they used was a smallpox bioweapon. Smallpox is a virus. It has a case fatality rate of about 30%. And it is transmissible through the air. And one of the things that happened in the Dark Winter scenario is the public learns that, and it wasn't called the Strategic National Stockpile then, it was just a, a stash of vaccines that had been secreted away somewhere and was made available to Defense Department officials and their families and others that were considered important for the continuity of government.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  That's called COG, Continuity of Government. And in the Dark Winter scenario, that's all, that just like sets off even more anarchy, more chaos, more panic, because people are furious. The irony out of that is after the 9/11 attacks and that followed by the anthrax attacks, you had this massive push from the Bush administration to create what is called a biodefense industry, the system. And that is where the true today's Strategic National Stockpile was planned and developed and, and now exists.

• 1:07:13Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, you also touched on this, I mean, there was multiple agendas being pushed right after 9/11. I mean, you talked about this in your DARPA book about the total information awareness thing with the NSA and the CIA and all that stuff.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  And these have all, I mean, I wrote the DARPA book 10 years ago about all this cutting edge science that was on the table. And now it's absolutely right in front of us. So imagine what DARPA is doing today.

• 1:07:36Danny Jones?

  Right? Yeah. I can't imagine. I actually had a DARPA guy in here a couple of months back, maybe six months ago. He was a, what was that guy? Remember that guy? Nichols? No, no, no, no. He was a DARPA, he was a psychologist who was contracted by DARPA and did a bunch of work for DARPA. And he was explaining to me, which I'm sure you're probably aware of, that they have this thing they can do where they can take a surgeon in Washington, put this mesh on his head and take some random soldier in Afghanistan, wear another mesh, and they link up and he can basically take over the guy's body and perform surgery on somebody across the world, like through their brain.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  I mean, that I don't know about at all. I mean, it sounds like, that sounds like you would be affecting physical matter from a distance which doesn't sound plausible to me. That's like psychokinesis on steroids.

• 1:08:31Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  But, you know, I mean, in other words, spooky action at a distance in a different relative term, but, I mean, certainly you can do, you can have a robot performing surgery with a surgeon on another continent or pretty much anywhere.

• 1:08:50Danny Jones?

  This was specifically brain to brain.

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  I mean, I, I can imagine that there are trials going on to try and impact someone's brain, but it would have to be impacting the, your immune system. I mean, I, I don't know.

• 1:09:04Danny Jones?

  I would imagine too.

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:09:05Danny Jones?

  I don't know how it works either. I don't know. I don't know. Who knows how real it is? But, so, uh, back to the biological war stuff, the, one of the craziest things to me, I think what was in the beginning of the book, was you explained that because biological weapons work is totally illegal, that nearly all of the biological weapons laboratories around the world are disguised as vaccine laboratories.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:36Speaker 03

  It's incredible to think biological weapons are illegal. What Assistant Secretary of Defense Mallory Stewart told me is, in essence, this means that there is, there are no protocols for transparency. So unlike nuclear weapons, and although these protocols have fallen off the map right now, we used to be able to go into nuclear facilities and check.

• 1:09:58Danny Jones?

  Regulate them.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  Warheads, number of missiles, and that, that, that's called counterproliferation. Not only are you keeping things from expanding, but you're ideally shrinking the arsenals down.

• 1:10:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:10:13Speaker 03

  Because of transparency, because you kind of have an agreement, this is what we're looking at, it involves trust, yes, it involves, and then you start to develop relationships with people that you're working with. This is always, people who work in counterproliferation tell you this is the positive way that has to go. The other is suspicion and paranoia and mistrust. But with biological weapons, or as Andy Weber, one of the world's sort of most knowledgeable individuals on the Soviet biological program, one of Obama's advisors, on and on and on, his creds are incredible, he's a major source for me in the book, as he explained it to me, is really the most dangerous part about biological weapons, unlike deterrence, which

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  is this idea in nuclear, that you, nuclear war won't happen because everybody has their arsenals pointed at each other, those that have nuclear weapons, and say, don't be crazy because we would kill all of you.

• 1:11:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:11:09Speaker 03

  But because biological weapons are said not to exist, there is no threat, which is, well, we'll get you with our biological weapons if you get us with yours, because technically they're illegal. And this brings for a lot of, you know, paranoia, it brings, and it also breeds a lot of disguised science. So you have scientists in places like Russia, according to the State Department now, as of like 2024, released in a, in its statement on the Biological Weapons Convention, that it believes that the Russians have an active biological weapons program.

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  It's no longer believing that they are simply conducting defensive research, which is the one little hooky do or caveat.

• 1:12:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  For why you would have smallpox in your lab and be working with it.

• 1:12:07Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  And this gets us into the whole gain-of-function debate, which is a term, a phrase that almost no one knew about until COVID.

• 1:12:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  When it became revealed as such a hot-button issue, and such a dangerous.

• 1:12:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  Dangerous scientific practice, certainly according to the people I interviewed.

• 1:12:26Danny Jones?

  So the, the conventional idea that basically Fauci was arguing that gain-of-function was, what, what was his argument? He was trying to make it sound good, right? Like it was a good thing.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  Yes. So gain-of-function, again, a very complex term, which is actually exactly like it sounds.

• 1:12:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  You are trying to gain the function of, of a dangerous pathogen. Okay?

• 1:12:48Danny Jones?

  More deadly.

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  So we talked about the three, the three components, transmission, how it spreads, virulence, how, how much of a killer it is, and is there a medical countermeasure? So the gain-of-function debate, gain-of-function is, is just genetic modification, but it's specific to make it gain the function of transmissibility, virulence, and then defeat countermeasures. So you have a bunch of scientists in labs, this is starting after 9/11, when the biodefense industry took off, you've now got billions, if not trillions of dollars being pumped into the system, it's very secret, it's behind the veil.

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  Dick Cheney personally was terrified of biological weapons, he was a big proponent of this kind of funding for this. And you have scientists in labs going, well, wait a minute, the best way for us to defeat a biological weapon with smallpox is to know the worst-case scenario it could be, and then we'll figure out how to create a vaccine or a countermeasure against it, usually they can't. So how do we do that? Well, we're gonna, in a lab, in a BSL4, biosafety level four, that's the highest, or BSL3, that's the next high, lab, we're going to do gain-of-function research, we're gonna make it even more transmissible.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  We're gonna turn it from transmissibility in spit to transmissibility as an aerosol. Or we're gonna make it more virulent, we're going to add a component to it, so that instead of a case fatality rate of 30, we're gonna tweak it up and make it a case fatality rate of 60. Okay? That is gain-of-function research. The people I interviewed, people who run Pentagon War Games, Colonel Thomas Erhart, who ran Pentagon War Games on bio war for the Office of Net Assessment, this very famous legendary old guy named Andy Marshall, since died, Erhart ran those Pentagon War Games, he said to me, Annie, gain-of-function is evil.

• 1:14:50Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  So that is one school of thought. Andy Weber said, gain-of-function is another word for biological weapons engineering. You do have Dr. Fauci on the record, I quote him directly from his paper in the book, just to reference, where he states that the benefits of gain-of-function outweigh the risks. And that has created a, a division between people who believe that, are on essentially opposite sides of the aisle.

• 1:15:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's crazy how something like that could be politicized and be driven to divide people, like, how could people fight about something like that? Like, it's just so silly.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  And part of the reason why they fought about it was, again, going back to, you have a CDC COVID not airborne, a WHO COVID not airborne. You know, there was a study I found where they did nine, nine million predictive COVID studies were done, or looked at, nine million studies. So obviously nine million were done, more than nine million were done, and then were looked at, and the success rate for those predictions was around 50%. That's a coin toss. In other words, you can't predict. And so the, if the CDC did not know if it was airborne, despite like real obvious, you know, suggestions that it was airborne, why didn't they simply say, we don't know?

• 1:16:23Speaker 03

  Instead of making those kind of statements, and of course, the same thing happened with Dr. Fauci, with gain-of-function, with this idea that America was doing research in Wuhan, with the whole, you know, implausibility or plausibility of a lab leak. And that is a great travesty.

• 1:16:43Danny Jones?

  You know, all the money that gets spent on like the Defense Department and the HHS and all this, like, we, we've had this idea in our heads that America is this unpenetrable, just incredible force for technology, for innovation, for, you know, just the ultimate superpower, right? But what we've seen, like with COVID, is we don't know, or the government has no clue. Like, they're completely unprepared for something as, as low as a, less than 1% fatality rate as COVID. And, you know, I mean, even like with this Iran war, it's crazy that like, it doesn't

• 1:17:25Danny Jones?

  seem like America can, can beat Iran in a little war like this, which is like, it's, it's really pulled back the veil, and it's revealed like the emperor has no clothes. It's pretty, it's been an astonishing thing to witness the last couple of years.

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  I couldn't agree with you more. I have spent decades writing books that pull back the veil on specific operations.

• 1:17:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  Showing, okay, this is what we were told, and this is what happened. And it's not meant to make a mockery of American democracy whatsoever, it's just meant to, my work has been, you know, meant to inform that often how situations are reported are not what happens. And essentially, many of the individuals I interview who participated in those activities, those operations, classified, since declassified, I'm interviewing guys who are in their 80s and 90s, and they have a little bit of perspective with a love of America, saying, this is what we did wrong, and this is what we did right.

• 1:18:30Speaker 03

  And that has kind of been sort of my north star of my reporting. Maybe I didn't even intend it to be that way, but that is what has happened. And so I'm interviewing people who.

• 1:18:44Speaker 03

  In my opinion, have a very healthy relationship toward what you're talking about, which is what we said happened and what happened. But what has happened now, I think, is in a, in a new kind of landscape. It's, it's kind of, it's a very dangerous ground because situations have gotten so tribal in terms, I don't write about politics. I write about POTUS, the President of the United States. And because of that, I have readers on both sides of the aisle. And so I believe that people read my books and sometimes go, oh, wow, maybe I was wrong about that.

• 1:19:27Speaker 03

  Or in fact, I have, all the time, I have people at the CIA ringing me up or who I meet and say, you know, I didn't know that about my own agency. And I'm glad you revealed that to me.

• 1:19:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  So this is interesting and important. That's democracy. That's being egalitarian. That's Danny wants to get smarter, you know? But where we have now is a lot of self-righteous indignation. We have a lot of mockery. That's the social media algorithm. That is what I find most dangerous. That is what I try to.

• 1:20:00Danny Jones?

  Mockery.

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  Well, people, you know, mockery, like, and I think what, you know, if you mock someone, it's like finger wagging.

• 1:20:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  I'm right. See, you know?

• 1:20:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  That from like SNL or whatever that was, that, that idea that grownups are doing that. And I'm not saying you don't, we don't all have a desire to do that, but tell your spouse that, you know?

• 1:20:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  Don't publicize it because it all becomes a game of I'm right, you're wrong. And then it switches.

• 1:20:32Danny Jones?

  And I think it's a slippery slope with people on the internet, especially X, because I've seen it happen. I've seen people devolve into this where it's like, at first, you know, you have this gut reaction to like, oh my God, why would I act like this, you know, publicly? But then they, they, they do it once.

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:20:49Danny Jones?

  And they say, oh my God, I got a hundred thousand impressions on that tweet. Now, all of a sudden, they want to have an opinion on everything and a super inflammatory opinion on everything. And I think that's like a natural process when they start to see more engagement, more followers start to happen. And then before you know it, these people just become like fake characters, right? Where they're just like, they're playing up to whatever gets the most attention, like you see with a lot of like newscasters and sportscasters over time.

• 1:21:17Speaker 03

  And I think you also lose your own perspective.

• 1:21:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  I mean, hopefully you have a good spouse or partner and you have a good tribe, your actual tribe.

• 1:21:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you become a prostitute to the algorithm.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  You, you don't want to do that. You want to, and I think you've got little kids, you know, I've got grown up kids now, at young men. And it's like the, the divide, you know, the sort of, you want to lead by example of like, look, you can privately have these opinions about them, but stay away from sharing them publicly because you could very easily be wrong.

• 1:21:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And I think, I think though, by and large, there's been a general good effect to this though, because it has made people more aware that, you know, like I said, the emperor has no clothes. Like it says, maybe democracy isn't everything we thought it was. Maybe this is all some sort of Plato's cave thing, you know? And I think, like you said, you brought up Tim Dillon in your book, which is funny because I think he is more tapped into this than anybody. I listen to his podcast every single week. And what he said recently, really wrong truth, I mean, I've said this on like three podcasts so far, but he's basically said, um, America used to be the, the quarterback in high school, right? Who all the girls loved him. He shoved the bullies in the locker. He was tough.

• 1:22:30Danny Jones?

  Now, America is the weird, quiet kid in the corner who may have a gun.

• 1:22:37Danny Jones?

  And he's so right about that.

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  I mean, he, you know, talk about really being able to use humor to get at the heart of the matter.

• 1:22:45Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  And I, I listen to him as well because he says the unspoken, you know? But he says it with a degree of humor that's, and, and also, he's also very non-partisan, I believe. You don't really know what his politics are.

• 1:23:01Danny Jones?

  Totally.

• 1:23:01Speaker 03

  And that is a quality I always admire in a person. But one of the first, the podcast I reference in the book, I have in a hypothetical scenario, you know, um, Los Angeles is one, is the first source of the outbreak of biological war. And it happens inside a homeless camp. And I did this with a lot of thought behind it because my discussions with the world's leading experts, they're called virus hunters. These are people who get sent into the hot zone in a space suit to try and help the

• 1:23:40Speaker 03

  situation with, you know, assessing what pathogen is involved and what count, medical countermeasures might be necessary. And then also to help rescue people who need to be rescued. And I, and there's a couple of them in the book specifically that I, that I follow. But these individuals, and they run also the special pathogen suites in America, which we can get into, there are only a hundred beds that can really deal with this kind of virulent pathogen when there's 340 million Americans. But these individual, I, I, you know, the, the subject of homeless individuals came up because there's absolutely no component of health surveillance.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  Health surveillance is a real concept in the United States of America, like it or not. Thousands of hospitals, emergency rooms, urgent care facilities, they are all tied in, in near real time reporting to the CDC. So in a different world, this would have maybe scared people like, that's crazy. I don't want them to know what's wrong with me. Well, in the event of a pandemic or an outbreak, that idea is, is helpful because it could prevent an outbreak from becoming an epidemic, from becoming a pandemic. If you could send in the forces to mitigate the problem.

• 1:25:05Speaker 03

  The homeless population of America, which is now around 800,000, 70,000 of whom are in my home state of California, 4,000 of whom live on Skid Row in a small 50 block radius. 4,000 people. They are absolutely not part of any of this health surveillance system. They are completely left out, a fact confirmed with me by HHS. And that is where transmissibility is a super spreader event over and over and over again, according to the world's leading epidemiologists. And I've heard Tim Dillon talk about that in a manner that was really insightful to me.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  And he was just, he's just one of the few people that kind of addressed it spot on. And so I referenced him. I have a nurse in, um, in the scenario who works down at, uh, Skid Row in a, in a facility, doing pro bono work for homeless individuals. Talk about Tim Dillon, listening to him.

• 1:26:07Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  And being furious about how hypocritical our elected leaders are, our mayor, our governor.

• 1:26:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:17Speaker 03

  From their ivory towers.

• 1:26:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:20Speaker 03

  Pretending that they are of the people. They are not. And I'm saying that on the record.

• 1:26:25Danny Jones?

  When the vice president and the head of the FBI and all these people get into meetings about like what they're going to tell the public, I have to imagine they consider how Tim Dillon is going to react to it.

• 1:26:35Danny Jones?

  You know? He's just a, he's a huge influence. And you're right, he does. He has a very, uh, he's a gift for combining humor with like the unspoken truth about what's going on. And he thinks about it. He, like the, the way he's able to like think through stuff and communicate it in a way that's hilarious is, is pretty amazing.

• 1:26:57Danny Jones?

  What was I going to say? Oh, on the, on the part of like tracking health, it's interesting because, I don't know if you saw, but there's these, there was this report that came out where this, that company Palantir owned by Peter Thiel, did some sort of partnership with Oura Ring. And Oura Ring is this health fitness device that you wear on your finger and it tracks your heart rate, your respiratory rate, everything, HRV, all kinds of crazy stuff. So now Palantir, who's a huge defense contractor, um, and CIA contractor is essentially monitoring the health of all the individuals who own these rings. So like health devices.

• 1:27:36Speaker 03

  I would say the situation is far bigger than that.

• 1:27:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:39Speaker 03

  So during COVID, Palantir had a, received a contract with HHS.

• 1:27:46Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  Right? So, so all of the COVID tests, all of the DNA on all of the COVID tests is now accessible to the US government. And I have written about systems of systems that track people in all of my books. This is espionage at its core.

• 1:28:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:11Speaker 03

  Palantir will tell you, and I've interviewed many people at Palantir, including its owners.

• 1:28:18Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  That, that is, they are data.

• 1:28:22Danny Jones?

  Have you interviewed Karp?

• 1:28:23Speaker 03

  I'm gonna, I'm not going to name names. I'm good, I'm not going to name names then.

• 1:28:27Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  But, um,

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  Palantir is a data aggregator. So data gets aggregated, it gets put together.

• 1:28:42Speaker 03

  Who is then the recipient of that information? That is the question. So one, I mean, I really think it's valuable to think about this. And I have not reached a conclusion.

• 1:28:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  Yet. And I have been writing about Palantir for a decade.

• 1:29:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  So what does it mean to be the person collecting the data? And what does it mean to be the person receiving the data?

• 1:29:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14Speaker 03

  And where are the firewalls within that system? And I think that what is most interesting about the large language models like the chat GPTs of the world that no one is really addressing right now, which is far more important to me than if they're biased, is where is this data coming from? You hear a lot of times people talk about scraping the internet.

• 1:29:42Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:29:44Speaker 03

  That is the Wizard of Oz reality. That I haven't gotten that answer yet.

• 1:29:55Danny Jones?

  Well, it does give sources for things, right? For answers.

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, but giving sources and telling the truth are different things.

• 1:30:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:30:04Speaker 03

  So no one's answered that question. And part of the reason why I don't name names is because I want to know that answer.

• 1:30:10Danny Jones?

  Well, one of the

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  And I continue to ask that question.

• 1:30:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  And I don't know if I will get it. And I also have learned something in 20 years is that a lot of times people, I used to think that people didn't give me the answer because they were withholding. You know, they didn't want me to know. And now I realize a lot of times people don't give me the answer because they don't know. And there is a, that is a really important distinction.

• 1:30:33Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. And they don't want to say they don't know. They want to sound cool, like they have some sort of super information, super classified information.

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  Or it's frightening that they don't know. It's frightening that they don't know. Right?

• 1:30:44Danny Jones?

  That's true.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  And there's many examples of that. I mean, in the military lane, like dealing with CIA operators, as I have done a lot and interviewing a lot of them. It's really fascinating that they don't know about the program. Now I'm speaking in a general way here.

• 1:30:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 03

  But I am speaking with authority of having interviewed a lot of people. Many of the, they do not know the program that they are involved in. They're just going after the target. They might find out later and they might even find out in my book.

• 1:31:13Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. It's like super stove piped where they're just one little piece of the puzzle and they don't see the full picture.

• 1:31:17Speaker 03

  Exactly. And I'm not saying that's some kind of big sinister nefarious plan. It's the way the system works. And so I think that, and also I'm very interested in scapegoating. When everyone just decide, like they, you kind of hear, well, that's one of the things I like about Tim Dillon is he makes his own opinions about things. I hear opinions from him that I have not heard elsewhere.

• 1:31:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:31:42Speaker 03

  And I say, I often ask people, where's that idea from? And they said, you know, oh, I actually read the same thing in Newsweek, so I just wanted to see. And, you know, I'm not being a smart ass, but maybe I am. That's where they read it or the New York Times, right? When someone comes to their own conclusion about something, it is 10 times more interesting to me.

• 1:32:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:03Speaker 03

  And that's what Danny Jones wants to be smarter. That's where we get really interesting. And that's where I think we can actually add to the conversation in a way that is unique and necessary.

• 1:32:16Danny Jones?

  And it's very rare, you know, it's very rare for, even for me, like, you know, people have busy lives, right? We're working, we're taking care of family, we're trying to feed ourselves, trying to do all this stuff. Like, when do we have time? That's what I love about Tim Dillon, like, how do you have time? Or how many people have the time to sit down in a quiet room with a pen and paper and actually like work through what they really think? And come up with an original opinion, if that exists, right? Everything is just regurgitating things you've already heard, maybe putting a spin on it or whatever. And it's very rare to hear something, you know, like a unique take on something.

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  The Palantir part is super interesting to me because I was writing about Palantir 10 years ago when operators in Afghanistan were using Palantir's information. And this was still secret, so it kind of came at me and like sort of like bits. But they were, there was a program that the Defense Department was running to kill people that was called find, fix and finish. Finish is to kill you. Okay. And so there were persistent surveillance balloons in the air tethered by a steel cable. It looked like a giant blimp above certain areas. And they, so you had multiple surveillance platforms. You had Predators with one lens. You had the Reaper with 63 lenses.

• 1:33:33Speaker 03

  You had the Reaper outfitted with something called Argus IS, which had, you know, I can't remember the exact number, but a lot more lenses, multiple targets. So you have the different layers of surveillance happening from above. Then you have the kids on the ground doing the most god awful job and, you know, getting blown up by IEDs because they're doing land surveillance. And what the goal of the Defense Department is to find, fix and finish certain terrorists, to kill them. Based on biometric information that's being aggregated. Palantir is sitting at the center of it. I have stories. And because Palantir has gotten the name of the twirling mustache bad guy in all of society.

• 1:34:16Speaker 03

  I'm interested in finding out if that's an actual accurate depiction. And I don't know.

• 1:34:24Danny Jones?

  Well, it's not comforting when you have the head of the company going around talking about how obsessed he is with the devil.

• 1:34:30Speaker 03

  Well, that's, that has to do with mockery and that has to do with culture wars and everything else. But I'm just talking about the science of it, right? So to finish the thought on Afghan, in Afghanistan on the ground is that a lot of the soldiers were killing the wrong people. And I write, and the systems that the Defense Department had to aggregate the data were far inferior to Palantir's systems, maybe. Right? So I have stories of operators who are doing the find, fix and finishing, like I found the guy, kill him. And then they find out that, you know, they're looking at the wrong guy. And Palantir, the argument that many of these operators made, and I'm talking about people sitting in an office in Washington DC,

• 1:35:15Speaker 03

  watching the war theater from thousands of miles away, that are making the call to kill the person, saying Palantir's information was more accurate. I don't know if that's true, but that does not square up with the evil bad guy. Now, so, you know, I'm much more concerned about HHS having everybody's DNA.

• 1:35:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  That to me is disconcerting.

• 1:35:37Danny Jones?

  Right. And then with the Doge stuff, you know, with what Elon was doing, getting all of that HHS data, all of the IRS data, all of the other stuff, and then, you know, simultaneously working on digital currency. And then he had a partnership with Palantir AI. So if he's combining all of that information of all the American citizens into this AI, where they have a full 360 picture of every single citizen inside the United States. And then suddenly you push digital currency on everyone. You could see how that would be a very frightening scenario as well.

• 1:36:11Speaker 03

  Which to your point, when you referenced my DARPA book of, you know, more than 10 years ago, total information awareness, that was the original Cheney-Bush plan. And it's just like it sounds, total information awareness. We want to know everything about everyone at all times. So I'm fascinated when, you know, the, the large language models, the AI systems are taking all the heat for data centers, which they may be. But what I'm really wondering is, because the reason why you can't have total information awareness on everybody all the time has to do with data storage. Where do you store all that data? And that is a very big problem. And how much does it cost?

• 1:36:55Speaker 03

  So who's really funding the need for these big data storage systems? My suspicion is HHS, DOD. And that the individual players, the private citizen groups, the OpenAI, the Anthropics, the Palantirs, they're servicing that contract. So I'm just super interested when, also on the cultural level, I, and I should say I'm suspicious when I see somebody appear instantly as the good guy and somebody else is the bad guy.

• 1:37:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:32Speaker 03

  I'm wondering what the real truth behind the veil is on that.

• 1:37:36Danny Jones?

  So you think it could be possible that these AI companies are just like a front facing boogeyman for who's really funding them, which would be HHS and the DOD?

• 1:37:45Speaker 03

  Which is why I really enjoy talking to the people who own the companies.

• 1:37:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:50Speaker 03

  Right? Because, and I'm in no rush to report any of this because I don't know.

• 1:37:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:56Speaker 03

  And sometimes I wonder what do they know? But that, I think, is natural egalitarian democratic inquiry, the journalist's job, the journalist's true job, the way I was raised, old school journalism, just the facts, ma'am, and also right to the level of the high school senior, because we're all just people here. The whole partisan idea, so many of the news organizations now reverse-engineer, and this is my opinion, but they reverse-engineer their stories based on an outcome they want.

• 1:38:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:30Speaker 03

  You know, if you want to make someone the bad guy, you can gather evidence and tell that story. I mean, I'm very clear about this. I write narrative for a living.

• 1:38:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:38:41Speaker 03

  But what if it's different? What if you're really actually trying to find out what the true story is? Or rather, what one of the true stories is?

• 1:38:49Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff you have to string together to try to weave together some sort of a coherent picture from all these people. And it's like, you know, how do you know who to trust? You know, how do you know what sources to trust? You know, one of the crazy things about the whole UFO narrative right now is that there's a lot of people who are like popping on to the UFO scene, if you want to call it that. It's crazy that it's become this like cultural thing. But that are making films or movies, and all of their sources are people like James Clapper. And there's this huge, you know, everyone online who pays any attention to this stuff, they know, or they at least

• 1:39:34Danny Jones?

  have the reason to see, like, okay, if you're someone who's reporting on this stuff, and you're getting, all of your sources are deeply embedded government people who are known for lying to Congress or covering things up, like, we're not gonna trust you. You know, it's almost, it's become so polarized, where it's like, you can't have any tie to any sort of officials or former officials in the government if you're gonna be trusted. And on top of that, they're constantly labeling anyone who says anything they don't agree with as being a fed. You know, they're being like paid for by one government or another.

• 1:40:14Danny Jones?

  So, you know, that's always a weird thing for me to navigate, too, like having people on the podcast who are former CIA or former military people or were ever involved in any sort of like intelligence activities at all. Like, it's also like you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt, and kind of have to like, push them on certain things, and like kind of hold their feet to the fire on certain things. Like, for example, we just had TD Barnes in here. And we were talking about Area 51, and I was asking him lots of questions, and you know, he was throwing his hands up, saying, oh, no, that's gotta be absolute bullshit. You know, and I would say to him, I was like, it says the guy who walked in here wearing a CIA hat and a CIA pin on his jacket, you know? It's like, is

• 1:40:59Danny Jones?

  that information worthless because of that? No, absolutely not. But you have to get as much information as you can. And, you know, you also have to be very, very wary of the stories that those people tell you.

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• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  I'm amazed that the UFO ufology mythos narrative, I'm just amazed at how it, on the one hand, it's gaining momentum, meaning more people seem to be interested in it. And yet, absolutely nothing has changed. You know my position on it, but it's a big disinformation campaign. I will go toe-to-toe with anyone to the ends of the earth on this, because show me the money. I mean, well, that's the Freudian slip, because show me the evidence. There is just, I'm amazed, I'm amazed. So, I mean, we can talk about that, or we can not talk about that.

• 1:42:54Danny Jones?

  I'm with you on that. I think it's a total disinformation thing. I think it's a total, I think it's a flood the zone type thing, with the internet, right? You can just, you can throw so much shit out there, whether it be real footage or fake footage or whatever it is. There's just so many competing narratives in that space, and it's, the water is so muddy. It's just a giant cauldron of bullshit, and you can't pick the wheat from the chaff. You know, if there is some, if there is stuff, I think it's probably DARPA stuff, or secret, you know, Lockheed stuff that we've developed over the years.

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  I'm interested in the human nature part of, of like, people badmouthing one another and having like, you know, petty arguments over things. I mean, it humors me, actually, because I actively work to not get in any of those lanes. Which doesn't mean I haven't had arrows, you know, fired at me. But I just move forward, because it is a big waste of time. And in my opinion, I mean, listen, ever since I wrote Area 51, which published in 2011, and I with the source that is really the ultimate source of understanding disinformation

• 1:44:11Speaker 03

  campaigns, I have been contacted and had conversations with many, many, many, many of these people that are part of this whole narrative. And one of the things about my reporting style is people, I'm never off the record, because everything I say is on the record, okay? Except to my husband, who has spouse privilege. Literally, that's a legal situation. But I listen to people, and people often say to me, Annie, can I go off the record with you? And so off the record means I'm not gonna report it, and I'm not gonna open my mouth about it. Unless they say it publicly somewhere else. And

• 1:44:53Speaker 03

  one of the things about me is that I really strive, I mean, my brain is compartment, I can just be like, that doesn't get spoken. And so, I have had, over the decades, people try to draw me into these petty fights, that I just have nothing to do with. I've never, I never engage in them, but I listen to them, and I can learn from them, because I have seen all these different people which appear on your podcast and everyone else's podcast, that are the physicists and the Defense Department, I've sat with them. They have told me things, and most of it is basically badmouthing, or I shouldn't say most of it, but much of

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  it is badmouthing some other guy within the group for not agreeing with their lane of...

• 1:45:40Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:45:41Speaker 03

  And so that is, becomes really boring really fast. It's also interesting in human nature. You can learn as much from what you don't want, as what you, I learn, really, I try to, when people have qualities, when parts of people, character reveal themselves to me, that I really admire, I then try to strive to fine tune that quality within my own self.

• 1:46:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  And the other one is like, I am, that just like petty, badmouthing. And if you look at the UFO people, all they do is talk, or much of what they do, in my opinion, is drill down on how that guy's wrong, because he said that and saw that and that. And it's just a big, it just sounds like a high school prom problem.

• 1:46:23Danny Jones?

  It does. It does. But one of the most interesting things about your book, which I pretty much ask every expert on the UFO topic, is the EG and G guy.

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:46:32Danny Jones?

  Who I think he's dead now, right? But, I mean, that was the most controversial thing about the whole thing. Have you, like, how much, do you, do you, do you ever think about that? Or like, like, change your mind on that at all?

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  I mean, I publicly, in my podcast I did with Lex Friedman on nuclear war, I told Lex who he was. I don't know if you know that, but I'm...

• 1:46:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I do know that. And we, Alfred is his name?

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  Al O'Donnell.

• 1:46:55Danny Jones?

  Alfred O'Donnell. Right, yeah. And I brought it up to TD Barnes, and I think, I mean, there's been so many people who have talked about that specific guy and that claim that you, that he made to you, that you reported on, that people think like, he lied to you, he tried to deceive you, he got one over on you or whatever. And, you know, I don't know, that's just one of the things that really stuck with me, is like, you know, if I were you...

• 1:47:23Danny Jones?

  How that would torture me.

• 1:47:26Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, someone who has no idea what they're talking about, having an opinion about my source.

• 1:47:31Danny Jones?

  No, no, no, I don't, I don't mean the opinions of people.

• 1:47:34Speaker 03

  You mean what Al told me?

• 1:47:35Danny Jones?

  I mean, what I told, I mean, I would just think about, I would, I would constantly, I feel like I'd be going back and forth in my own mind. Was he, was he true? Was he, was he lying to me?

• 1:47:41Speaker 03

  Not even a question. Shall we talk about that?

• 1:47:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  A little bit, because it is interesting, because it does inform all of my reporting. It informs all of my books. It informs me as a journalist, my experience with Al O'Donnell. It also informs what I really have to think and say about other people who have opinions about them. You know, it's just, they're just opinions and they're entitled to them. I find someone's credentials incredibly fascinating. That doesn't mean that somebody's experience isn't just as important. Like, for example, Al's really good friend was Richard Mingus. And Richard Mingus was the security guard at Area 51. And so Al had this incredible creds. He was called the trigger man.

• 1:48:28Speaker 03

  He armed, wired, and fired 186 nuclear weapons. If you look up an article in the Las Vegas Review Journal from January 2011, Al O'Donnell's on the front page of it.

• 1:48:45Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 1:48:46Speaker 03

  Of course he is. He's a totally legitimate person with serious creds. If you read the hardcover book about the 100 most important people in Las Vegas at its kind of origin story, Al O'Donnell is one of those people. So I always knew this about him. I spent hundreds of hours talking to him. He is an anonymous source in, in Area 51 because it felt like it was the right thing to do. He and I talked about that at length. He gave me his permission to tell his story once he died. He wanted it to be known. He wanted people to know not to do what he did. And his entire family did not know he was the source of those last 12 pages of the book,

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  where I write that he participated in this horrific experiment. We can talk about that. His family didn't know it. And in fact, after the book published, I was called to Las Vegas. I walked into Al O'Donnell's house. There was his wife of 60 years, his kids, and one of his grandkids. And they said, Al, tell us what you told Annie isn't true. And he said, it's true. So you see, this fellow named TD Barnes, or some other engineer who happened to be out there for a tiny period of time, it doesn't matter what they think. They can think what they want.

• 1:50:10Speaker 03

  What matters to me is the family, that kind of family dynamic, where you realize, I am inside of a deeply human experience. That's the privilege of the journalist.

• 1:50:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:50:23Speaker 03

  That's going after information that's point of view. Was O'Donnell correct? We don't know. Did he believe that he was correct? Absolutely. And that's what's important to me. And that's how I reported the story. Everything incendiary that people didn't like in that book, the last 12 pages of Area 51, is in quotes. Because he said it to me.

• 1:50:44Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 1:50:45Speaker 03

  And you can decide.

• 1:50:46Danny Jones?

  Exactly. Yeah, that's true. That's, it's up for the people to decide.

• 1:50:49Speaker 03

  And by the way, I just kept him hidden because, actually, a lot of it had to do for me personally with it, I met his grandkids. And they were kind of like these young people. And I was just like, I mean, the fact that he went on the record with me, and essentially, he was considered a hero in his family. And that he kind of rewrote his narrative to admit to having participated in what was essentially a human experiment.

• 1:51:16Danny Jones?

  Right. Not a great thing to end the chap, not a great thing to end your life story on.

• 1:51:20Speaker 03

  And so, you know, it was like, let's hold this until the kids are older. That was one of my thoughts, discussed with husband, spouse privilege. But another really important thought to me was that, on balance, the reason he said this was because he wanted people to learn from his experience. Nothing's more important than that, you know? And he also said, if the Department of Justice comes after, comes after me, so be it. Then it, then more will be revealed in, in a, in a, you know, in essence, in a trial.

• 1:51:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:51:52Speaker 03

  Right? Or the declassification things, that never happened. Instead, it was convenient, because all the ufologists who want to believe that they're UFOs, and that it wasn't some Stalin, you know, black operation to kind of emulate the War of the World hoax. The ufologists were all like, she's crazy. So I didn't have the Department of Justice coming after me.

• 1:52:13Danny Jones?

  It is perplexing to think why, you know, obviously, you've talked to so many people, interviewed so many people, and you spent 100, 100 hours plus with this guy. Like, I'm sure you can judge his personality and whether he's being sarcastic or joking, or whether he's being serious. Like, I don't, I don't question your ability to do that. Right? So like, if he actually did say that to you, why would he do that? You know, like, why would he say something like that? If it, why would he lie? What would be the purpose? Like, if he wasn't, like, doing this for the, for the government, or like, sowing disinformation with you? Like, why would he want to purposely stain his own government, his own career, and his own life story?

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why, and I've not said this before. So, for starters, let's, let's tell listeners what we're talking about.

• 1:53:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, let's, that's a good point. We should lay that out.

• 1:53:04Speaker 03

  So, once upon a time, before there were intercontinental ballistic missiles, there were bombers. And so, we're talking now, and Roswell happened in 1947, and this is in the 50s, the missile, the intercontinental ballistic missile did not yet exist. And so, the way that you would attack America with nuclear weapons, once you had them, if you were Russia, they didn't have them until 1949, was by sending bomber planes into the United States. It's why our nuclear facilities are in the middle of the country, not on the east coast, right? Not on the coasts. And so, radar was key to all of this.

• 1:53:45Speaker 03

  And the idea of the War of the World hoax, which was studied by the Defense Department, then called the Department of War, declassified documents, I source in the book, also obsessed Joseph Stalin, the totalitarian dictator of the Soviet Union at the time. And so, the idea that O'Donnell was told was that Stalin had a plan to conduct a War of the World type hoax against America, to send a craft over the, into the United States, and have these sort of alien-looking individuals come out of it.

• 1:54:26Speaker 03

  And just like the War of the Worlds, which overwhelmed the telephone system, America's radar defense system would be overwhelmed, and it would allow this, for a Soviet attack. It's a pretty good narrative, when you think about it. If it's, whether or not it's true, we, it's impossible to know. But that's the narrative. Does that part make sense?

• 1:54:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:46Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:54:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah, so, so if this thing slipped through our defenses, it would overwhelm the public, it would create, create like, crazy public panic? That's the idea?

• 1:55:01Speaker 03

  And the systems would jam, you know? I mean, tiny analogy to biological war. Remember when the president declared, okay, I'm closing all the borders? This is, this is back in COVID. And it was in, I think it was in Mar, March 5th, 2020. And President Trump said, I'm closing the borders with Europe, Europe in 24 hours. So, everybody had to get back to the United States.

• 1:55:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:55:24Speaker 03

  I actually had a child, my, my son, college-age son, was in Greece at the time.

• 1:55:29Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 1:55:30Speaker 03

  We like rushed out to my office, my husband and I picked up the phone, and we're like, because we had to get him home.

• 1:55:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:55:37Speaker 03

  Immediately. And we, we got, we could not make a phone call. All phone lines were jammed to the airlines. We went onto the internet and bought he and his friend plane tickets directly home from the Athens airport the next day. But the phones were jammed, you couldn't get through. That was in COVID. That was, okay? So imagine a fake alien attack. System overwhelmed, no one can communicate. When the system goes down, the United States is vulnerable. That was the idea.

• 1:56:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:56:10Speaker 03

  Okay?

• 1:56:11Danny Jones?

  So that would be bombers.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  So that was the idea. And so, what, what O'Donnell tells me is that he was one of the five EG&G engineers. EG&G had the contract to wire, arm, wire, and fire the nuclear bombs. They did it for the Manhattan Project, they did it for all of the subsequent nuclear tests. He was one of five. That's like a tiny unit of people. And that he, we had these, the craft and the alleged beings in formaldehyde, he was very vague on these details. And that he was told, out at Area 51, he drew a map for me, I have the map of where it is, that they were supposed to work on this and create a program to figure out how

• 1:56:57Speaker 03

  on earth the Soviets had made these small people look like aliens, surgically made them. Very vague on the details, would always start crying. Okay? And so, I'm, this is the roundabout way of where you said, but why would he ever say that? Why would you ruin your legacy?

• 1:57:14Danny Jones?

  How did he say what, did he say exactly what the craft was, or how it operated?

• 1:57:16Speaker 03

  He drew a picture for me. I'm not going to get involved. I've never spoken about that stuff, because of course it gets picked apart by every single UFO person that exists. And it doesn't matter, I'm interested in the narrative of what he told me.

• 1:57:30Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:57:31Speaker 03

  Which, by the way.

• 1:57:32Danny Jones?

  But he did explain that stuff to you?

• 1:57:33Speaker 03

  In very sparse details. Okay? That's all classified. I mean, you know, so, okay, train of thought. What, you asked me why he would, why he would sort of confess to me that he was involved in this program in the first place? Something that he had kept hidden for so long.

• 1:57:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:54Speaker 03

  You know? And by the way, he told George Knapp the same story, except for he reversed it, that they were aliens. Okay?

• 1:58:00Danny Jones?

  It was his before, after he talked to you?

• 1:58:03Speaker 03

  I'll come to the George Knapp thing, thing in the end. Because, okay, so.

• 1:58:10Speaker 03

  I say to, I'm constantly trying to get more information from him. And I'm also really interested in nuclear weapons because he was the trigger man and he wired all of these, right? So at the same time, you're thinking, wait a minute, this guy has a Q clearance, he has a top secret clearance, he's one of five engineers who has the knowledge to wire, arm, and fire nuclear bombs. He's never left the country of the United States after World War II because he'd be kidnapped because he has the knowledge.

• 1:58:36Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  Okay?

• 1:58:36Danny Jones?

  Oh my god.

• 1:58:37Speaker 03

  He had an FBI minder following him around who I met. Okay?

• 1:58:41Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:58:41Speaker 03

  So this guy has serious creds.

• 1:58:43Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:58:44Speaker 03

  Why, and so if you think he's crazy, then that brings up a whole other problem, which is, why is a crazy person, why was a crazy person allowed to arm, wire, and fire America's nuclear bombs? We're talking about real nuclear explosions that happened in the 50s up to 1963. You can see them on YouTube. They happened in the Marshall Islands and they happened in Nevada. Okay? That was him doing that. Why did he tell me this? I asked him that question. And through tears, he explained to me that his, one of his children, wife, gave birth

• 1:59:27Speaker 03

  to a child with birth defects. And he loved that child so incredibly much. And yes, he told me this through tears. And he said, I loved him just long enough for him to then be taken from us, right? Because I think the child lived for five or six years. And he said, in that moment, I could finally face the facts that what I did was horrible because the experiments, the human experiments, were done on people who were handicapped, according to him.

• 2:00:03Danny Jones?

  In the Soviet Union?

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  In America, at Area 51.

• 2:00:07Danny Jones?

  After this, after Roswell?

• 2:00:09Speaker 03

  At the E G and G, the five E G and G engineers. That is the program he was involved in. And he said, I realized when my grandchild was born, that I was being punished by God for what I had done. And I said, why are you telling me this and not a priest? And he said, because you won't judge me.

• 2:00:30Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:00:37Speaker 03

  And that's all factually accurate. So imagine me, people slinging arrows at me, what does that really matter? I mean, that's, that's the journalist's privilege. Once, and by the way, he told me I could reveal that story one day when I thought it was appropriate. And I happened to first tell, I never, I didn't tell Lex the part about the grandson because it didn't come up. But, um, you know, I do think, to answer your other question, I think about him off. My kids met him, you know, my husband met him. I didn't spend 100 hours with him, I spent 100 days with him.

• 2:01:20Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:01:21Speaker 03

  You know, there are lots of other stories that he has. Lots of other stories. And maybe one day I'll write the book, you know?

• 2:01:33Danny Jones?

  Jesus.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  I've made contact, you know, okay, here's a final interesting story. And I told Lex this part, at the time, Chris Carter, who created the X-Files, was writing the television show of Area 51. And I took Chris Carter out to Las Vegas to meet Al O'Donnell. He wanted to meet him. And Chris is like a great secret keeper, you know, like he never told anyone.

• 2:01:55Danny Jones?

  I'm a great secret keeper too, Annie, you can bring me somewhere. Bring me to Area 51.

• 2:01:59Speaker 03

  So we, we, we went there, I mean, I went with Al to the Nevada test site and he's like, that's, you know, with Al and Mingus. It was, okay, I'm digressing, but anyways, I take Chris Carter, creator of the X-Files, out to meet Al. And, um, and now I lost my train of, oh. So I wondered if Al would tell Chris some more things, you know? And Al had never watched the X-Files, according to him.

• 2:02:27Danny Jones?

  That's hilarious.

• 2:02:28Speaker 03

  Of course, he lived it, right? But after that, and the book had published and time had passed, and I would reach out to him, he was always writing me emails, I have lots of emails from him. And I got a message from his FBI handler that said, you must cease and desist all communication, period.

• 2:02:48Danny Jones?

  With Al?

• 2:02:51Speaker 03

  And I knew from my CIA people, asking them if, you know, because I had little kids at the time, it's like, I'm Jetten Finley's mom, and I'm just not interested in pushing something into the dark area.

• 2:03:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:02Speaker 03

  And so I just knew that was the right move.

• 2:03:06Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:03:07Speaker 03

  And he called me once. He called me once and left me a voicemail message. And it was really spooky. I'm not going to say what it said.

• 2:03:19Danny Jones?

  The FBI guy or Al?

• 2:03:20Speaker 03

  No, Al, Al. He called me once after that, uh, to ask why I never called him. And, uh, it broke my heart because I couldn't call him back. And then when he died, I know, I know. And then when he died, I got a call from the FBI minder. And they said, Al wanted you to know, Al has died, and he wanted you to know. He had left a list of, I think it was either five or 10 people to call, and they said, you were number two. And I said, can I come to the funeral? And they said, absolutely not. And they hung up.

• 2:04:02Danny Jones?

  What?

• 2:04:03Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:06Danny Jones?

  Wow. That's an insane story.

• 2:04:09Speaker 03

  It is an insane story. It's a mystery of mysteries.

• 2:04:13Danny Jones?

  So when he talked to George Knapp, was that after you spoke with him last?

• 2:04:20Speaker 03

  He had talked to George Knapp before he spoke to me.

• 2:04:24Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:04:25Speaker 03

  George Knapp kind of got wind that he knew something. George Knapp will talk, George Knapp was a real gentleman. When Area 51 published, I was out in, I mean, obviously, you know, it just created, I thought people were going to be like, super interested in the CIA spy planes that I wrote about for the first time, and all of this science and technology behind that and the engineer. And it was like, the whole world wanted to know about the last 12 pages of the book where I give you the reveal. And I, I talk about it as if it's a narrative. I don't know, I don't know how true it is. Certainly seems truer than, you know, flying saucers with little people walking out of them, to my eye.

• 2:05:08Speaker 03

  But anyways, I was doing an interview in Las Vegas, maybe with, I can't remember, and George Knapp took me, like, I think I was doing an interview with him in local news because he's kind of owns the space.

• 2:05:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:05:22Speaker 03

  Broke the stories.

• 2:05:23Danny Jones?

  Of Bob Lazar.

• 2:05:24Speaker 03

  Yes, and, and he's like a legendary reporter in that regard. But he took me and we kind of went in back where no one was listening, and he said, listen, I know your source is Al O'Donnell, and I'm going to keep it secret with you. And I was like, you are a real gentleman, thank you. So we had, we both knew.

• 2:05:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:05:42Speaker 03

  And it's just that he told, Al O'Donnell told George Knapp the reverse story.

• 2:05:47Danny Jones?

  Well, what do you mean reverse?

• 2:05:48Speaker 03

  Well, he's told them that they were actually aliens. But he didn't tell them any of the other familial details. He just told him, yes, I was involved in it, and yes, they were aliens. And it was, he told me the reason was to keep, to get George Knapp off his back.

• 2:06:02Danny Jones?

  Oh, so he explained to you why he said that to George Knapp?

• 2:06:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we had many talks about, about that.

• 2:06:07Danny Jones?

  Oh my god.

• 2:06:09Speaker 03

  But again, I mean.

• 2:06:10Danny Jones?

  Freaking crazy.

• 2:06:11Speaker 03

  Right? It's a rabbit hole of, this is disinformation, misinformation. And, you know, after the book published, at least once or twice, Al O'Donnell said to me, now I'm so confused, I don't even know what's true. You know, he worried that he had been used and that he had been told a story that was at least partially not true.

• 2:06:33Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:34Speaker 03

  Maybe that, I mean, listen, there's a thousand, there's a thousand, but, you know, strings to pull on that spider web of a story.

• 2:06:45Danny Jones?

  Hmm, absolutely. You know, and with people like him, it reminds me of that recent story with those missing scientists, like with that General McCasland guy, I don't know how much attention you paid to that. But, um, it was, I think it was starting in December, all of a sudden, like, all of these scientists, like, high-level scientists from different military contractors and like science plays, like, I think one of them was Los Alamos, started to go missing. And, um, you know, one of the biggest stories was this McCaslin guy, who was a general who was allegedly, uh, connected to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and some of like the most secret compartmentalized projects at Wright-Patterson.

• 2:07:29Danny Jones?

  And, um, you know, he was getting old and he was getting dementia and he was going to see a doctor about his dementia. And one of the theories that was posited to me, which was interesting, is that a guy I know who did contract for the CIA, who I had on the pod, or not the CIA, the NSA, who was on the podcast, he said that when you start to work for these places like the NSA, and you get access to secret stuff, you have to assign this incredible NDA. And in the NDA, allegedly, he said that you have to basically sign away and give the government right to take any sanction necessary to get rid of you if they, if they think that the information locked inside your brain is at risk.

• 2:08:14Danny Jones?

  You know, if you, if your brain is this hard drive that stores all this top secret national security information, um, like, they want to, they, they have the right, you're signing away their right to make sure that this stays there. So if you are going through some sort of a psychological issue, or you're seeing a shrink or whatever, they have the right to, I guess, either kill you, or you have to agree to walk away from your public life completely. And it was interesting that the story of these scientists was like, it looks like they took stuff with them and they went somewhere voluntarily, like this guy.

• 2:08:52Speaker 03

  So now you're touching upon my deep interest in narrative and POV and the fact that I touched upon before that you can, if you already have a conclusion about something, you can reverse engineer the facts to that. And we're all guilty of that.

• 2:09:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:07Speaker 03

  But when I hear all of those scientists to me, the missing scientists to me were, I mean, it's tragic individually what happened to those people, but it's also to my eye, it was just like super easy to connect them all. I mean, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of scientists. There are a million personnel working for the Defense Department right now and a classified number of people working for the CIA. The CIA is one of seventeen or eighteen intelligence agencies. So go figure the amount of people. There are also an extraordinary amount of people who were like contracted and had one toe in for five minutes. I'm not passing judgment on any of these individuals. I haven't looked into them.

• 2:09:49Speaker 03

  But what I do know is all of my sources, I have to double down and make sure they are absolutely placed where they were, said they were, and that they had serious clearances and serious responsibilities. Interestingly, Richard Mingus is the analogy. He was the security guard at Area 51, but he had an extraordinary responsibilities, all fact checkable. So I also know people who were contractors for five minutes and, you know, their POV can be very different about the reality of a program. I also know that really high ranking people in the CIA in particular, many of whom I have interviewed, when they are on their deathbed, they have an actual minder with them.

• 2:10:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:10:34Speaker 03

  I have run into these people and have experienced this, like, Annie, you can't talk to Dr. Wealan anymore.

• 2:10:40Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 2:10:42Speaker 03

  This idea that you can kill me if I get dementia, I'm not buying it for four seconds. I'm not even buying it for one second. No, no, no, no. But that's just me. I could be wrong.

• 2:10:51Danny Jones?

  These people that have this stuff, they have a babysitter. They have an FBI babysitter, especially when they're about to die, to make sure they don't give any kind of deathbed confession.

• 2:10:59Speaker 03

  And it's not even necessarily deathbed confession. We all know what happens to us, any of us who have had surgery and you're on some loopy opiate to, you know, nullify the pain of the surgery you've just had. Well, you might also start to make shit up. You might, you might see things that aren't there. So that, you know, but again, point of view and kind of looping it around to the AI. The thing that's most interesting to me, and you have a lot of guests about consciousness, right? And this idea of like seeing things that are phenomenal. I really am interested in the subject. The jury's out in terms of

• 2:11:41Speaker 03

  my mind about what it is, consciousness, about will AI ever be sentient? But what I do know is that I often think about what's the difference between consciousness and machine?

• 2:11:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:54Speaker 03

  And which kind of loops a bit around to this idea that you're talking about, which is point of view. In other words, machines technically don't have a point of view. If you ask Google something, it doesn't give you a point of view. That's machine learning. That's a search engine. Where ChatGPT becomes super interesting to me, interesting in a spooky way, is that it does have an opinion. What does that mean? What does that mean? Because before I ever used a large language model, I would have told you that only humans have a point of view. And now I can make ChatGPT give me its opinion, give me its opinion,

• 2:12:39Speaker 03

  which is right at the edge of consciousness. And when you're getting into point of view, that's where, that's interesting to me both by the scientist, like the scientist's wife has a point of view about what happened to him. Eupologists are gonna have another point of view, his handler over, right? So what are the pieces of that puzzle? And the only narrative we really heard from the, as far as I'm concerned, my take on it from those missing scientists a couple of months ago, was like, one theory being pushed that they were all part of some secret UFO program and they were all being disappeared. There was no alternative narrative.

• 2:13:17Danny Jones?

  Right, exactly. Well, there was a lot of the scientists, there was people that were trying to say that there was like 11 or 12 of them, but then like, you could pick a lot of them out and be like, look, there's no connection with this guy. This guy was doing something else. There was one girl, Amy Eskridge, who died years ago. She was never a part of any like serious government program and they were trying to connect her to it. But there was really like, there was really like maybe three that were mysteriously killed, that were like high level, like murdered. Like there was one guy who was like stalked and hunted down and murdered on his front porch.

• 2:13:48Speaker 03

  Well, the other really big problem with this, it speaks to what you said earlier about people on social media loving 1,000 clicks or hearts or highlights. And that, you know, and I really empathize with contemporary journalists who are stuck doing those kind of dreadful nude stories because I can't imagine being in that position. Back when I was reporting for the LA Times, there was still some semblance. And I wrote magazine pieces. There was a semblance that you could have sort of objectivity, here's my story. But that's all gone now and it's really just what sells. And so you have these journalists who are, whose job it is to report the story and give it to the people and let them decide, essentially kind of being stuck pushing this kind of weird narrative because it's getting

• 2:14:33Speaker 03

  a lot more eyeballs than not.

• 2:14:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:14:38Speaker 03

  And that's unfortunate. And I think that's where you like personally have to take a position on it.

• 2:14:42Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. And then like we were talking about right before we started is you, you have, you know, people in the government, like in Congress that are trying to become influencers and, you know, trying to latch on to certain narratives, like the UFO stuff or the MKUltra stuff or whatever it is, just trying to gain popularity and just placate to who's ever above them or, you know, depending on whatever ladder they like to climb.

• 2:15:07Speaker 03

  Well, it's also interesting. I mean, there is a degree of narcissism and narcissism is a great, you know, Greek myth. I often look toward, because I love narrative and I'm interested in it and how have humans changed? And you look back at the myth of narcissists, do you know about it?

• 2:15:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:21Speaker 03

  Right? Okay. So it's like falling in love with yourself.

• 2:15:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:15:24Speaker 03

  Well, you see, it's wonderful, like a wonderful use of X is like when somebody shows differences of individuals in the public domain, in the public sphere who have changed the way they look over time. It's so narcissistic, you know, they're, next thing you know, they're having like, they're appearing on camera with all this makeup and a certain hairstyle and maybe even plastic surgery. And it's just like, oh my God, this is, this is a complete aberration of what a congressperson, in my idea, I'm older than you, you know, once upon a time was.

• 2:16:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:16:06Speaker 03

  Popularity contest.

• 2:16:07Danny Jones?

  It's the way the world is going. It is a popularity contest, you know? And the fact that that's, those are the people that are in charge is very frightening, very unsettling.

• 2:16:17Speaker 03

  I mean, or are they in charge?

• 2:16:19Danny Jones?

  How much do they know about?

• 2:16:19Speaker 03

  This is what is-

• 2:16:20Danny Jones?

  The plagues.

• 2:16:21Speaker 03

  Well, but what is, and to loop it all, what is shifting is, you know, in the gnome and in the sort of zeitgeist right now, people talk about oligarchs and people in power. But this should not be, this should be taken more seriously because in many regards, that kind of power is more powerful. The narrative, the power of narrative, my business, is, has become more powerful than some of these very institutions. And that is remarkable. It reminds me of the world right after the, the printing press was invented, where you will see upheaval.

• 2:17:08Speaker 03

  So who, excuse me, who is controlling the narrative on all of this?

• 2:17:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:15Speaker 03

  Becomes really interesting.

• 2:17:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And then, you know, this is something I rack my brain about, I rack my brain on all the time as well, you know, and you illustrate this in your book, towards the end, when the shit starts to hit the fan, they tell the president, we need to shut down the internet. Well, if they have the ability to shut down the internet, and I'm sure that at the very least have the ability to control the narratives or control speech to some level to at least pull the levers on speech on all these social media platforms.

• 2:17:47Danny Jones?

  If they have that ability, like, what is going on behind the scenes right now that we don't know? Is it really just a free for all? Like, like, how do we know? And, and what, who dictates that? You know, like, who controls that?

• 2:18:02Speaker 03

  Well, people in these extraordinary positions of power, they still have to, like, sleep a certain amount of time a day. I mean, there's only so much you can do in a day, which is why I think a lot of it has to do with what, what garners someone's attention. When I wrote Nuclear War Scenario, one of the most shocking things to myself and ultimately to readers was that we learned, I learned from SecDefs, from White House Chiefs of Staff, from National Security Advisors, that most presidents are completely uninformed about nuclear war.

• 2:18:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:18:35Speaker 03

  They don't know, they don't want to know, they don't know what they will be asked to do in a tiny six-minute window if they have to launch a counterattack if we're being attacked. They don't know. That was shocking to people. The absolute same is true with biology. And so you're really stuck saying, wow, the system is huge, all these different agencies, HHS, we talked about, Defense Department, FEMA, DHS, National Security Council, but there's one president. And when it comes to weapons of mass destruction, when it comes

• 2:19:12Speaker 03

  to making decisions in the event of a biological incident or attack, fascinating that in Defense Department nomenclature, the word incident is also there. It's not just in a biological attack. It can be an incident, which means lab leak. It should get everybody's attention and make you want to know more. Ultimately, the decisions have to be run by and made by the president. And you're talking about someone who is consumed with a zillion other problems.

• 2:19:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, especially this president.

• 2:19:49Speaker 03

  Any president. Any president.

• 2:19:53Danny Jones?

  And, okay, so now that we've circled all the way back here to the, the biological war stuff. So it seems like, so in your situation, or in your scenario, Soviet Union or Russia was the main, like, ground zero for this attack. And they, they had that huge biological lab that was disguised as something else, right? It wasn't actually known for it being a biological lab. And they had this crazy genetically altered, double mutated plague virus that's completely untreatable and new. Is that, does that actually exist somewhere in a lab right now?

• 2:20:37Speaker 03

  So in the 1980s, in the late 80s and early 90s, a Soviet scientist defected from Russia to the UK. I interviewed the British intelligence officer who first interviewed him. And this guy named Peseshnek revealed that the Soviets, despite pretending they didn't, despite signing the Biological Weapons Treaty, had a very advanced, enormous biological weapons program. Among the biological weapons that were the most dangerous was what was

• 2:21:18Speaker 03

  called a super plague weapon, which is very much like you described, which was genetically modified to cause death on a massive scale and to evade medical countermeasures we've talked about. So it was going to defy the antibiotics. And when the West learned about this, the British shared it with the CIA, President Clinton was, learned about it. It's just like, the whole world changed. The wall came down. The Cold War was essentially over. Bio weapons were the new threat behind the scenes. So hold that thought that you presented to get to my scenario.

• 2:22:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:01Speaker 03

  Decades have passed. Genetic modification has advanced to the point where, so the dream of the Soviets was to create this Chimera weapon. They, they had worked to make bubonic plague into a super weapon. Their plan was, and this is a quote, "to launch at America, kill all the people and leave the infrastructure intact."

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• 2:23:13Speaker 03

  That's so spooky. Nuclear weapons just destroy everything.

• 2:23:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:17Speaker 03

  Leave radioactive wasteland. Biological weapons, kill everybody, take over all their stuff. So sinister, so dark. Those are quotes from the actual scientists on that program.

• 2:23:28Danny Jones?

  Now, if they created this demonic Chimera super plague weapon, did they also have an antidote for it?

• 2:23:37Speaker 03

  Great question. So at the same time, they alleged to have vaccines, and they do today, by the way. The Russians claimed to have a plague vaccine. America does not. Dr. Henry Heine, from the Usamr doctor, was working on it. But we don't have it anymore. Most people don't even realize that. Russia does. But the, what was happening in the 90s was, no one was ever able to prove that they created this Chimera weapon. We didn't have access to the labs to, and if they had it, they destroyed it, maybe hid it, we don't know. But it was spoken about by the scientists who actually defected to the United States. But that was, you know, 30, 40 years ago. So now move, think about where science has taken us today.

• 2:24:21Danny Jones?

  The exponential growth of science.

• 2:24:23Speaker 03

  And so that is why the State Department is so concerned. Russia has a biological weapons program. North Korea has a biological weapons program, according to the US State Department.

• 2:24:33Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:24:33Speaker 03

  Yes, they do. I sourced them in the book. They have said it publicly. And they believe China and Iran have questionable programs, which is kind of like a euphemism for they probably do too.

• 2:24:44Danny Jones?

  Of course they do.

• 2:24:44Speaker 03

  Okay. So in the scenario I write, we are working from the theoretical supposition of this plague super weapon, and this dastardly idea that gets revealed by Sergei Popov, one of the Russian scientists who actually came here and is presently still in the United States, who explained that the reason Russia wanted to create this weapon with a back door, meaning when Americans would take an antibiotic, believing that it would cure

• 2:25:21Speaker 03

  them of plague, it would instead trigger a second, even more insanely painful encephalitis of the brain, causing people to die in an equally or more horrific manner. And the purpose of that was to erode trust in medicine and government. Those are exact quotes from the Russian scientists working on the program 40 years ago.

• 2:25:51Danny Jones?

  Because nothing would work.

• 2:25:53Speaker 03

  Because nothing would work. And it would create absolute insane mayhem in the United States. And that is the scenario. Spoiler alert, I hope you read the book, is what I describe in the book, because it is what Defense Department officials are most afraid of.

• 2:26:12Danny Jones?

  Now, there was a deliberate Soviet psyop to make this happen, is what you're saying? So this was all part of it? The fact, the fact that all the antibiotics would make this thing more deadly and enhance the, the effects of it?

• 2:26:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:26:31Danny Jones?

  That was on purpose to, because they knew that that would also sow misinformation and distrust of the American government and revolt?

• 2:26:38Speaker 03

  It was kind of like the most sinister, nefarious, dark-hearted revenge that you could sow upon your enemy, which is have everybody die hating their government at the same time.

• 2:26:54Danny Jones?

  Jesus.

• 2:26:55Speaker 03

  And so when I, knowing this narrative that I do from interviewing the players that were actually involved in it, then and now, it's why I put so much emphasis on the stay informed part of the book. So the book is not meant, as I said earlier, to sow panic. It's meant to be proactive. It is meant for people to understand that information is king. Knowing basic things that you learn in the book, like, I have to know about transmissibility, about virulence, about medical countermeasures, before I act in a certain way. God forbid

• 2:27:38Speaker 03

  there's the release of a genetically modified pathogen. And also to have an accountability from government officials, realizing that they must be able to work with uncertainty. They cannot pretend that they know what is going on when they don't. It is only going to make people more mistrustful.

• 2:28:02Danny Jones?

  So what is your, what is your view? I know the CIA did a whole thing on this. They said that they think it's this COVID was a lab leak. It seems like that's the most likely scenario that the, that COVID, the Wuhan virology institute was working on these same things. It was a biological weapons program, right?

• 2:28:21Speaker 03

  The jury officially is still out. What is officially, I mean,

• 2:28:30Speaker 03

  I think everybody needs to weigh the evidence themselves. I mean, the lab, the, the lab in Wuhan was working with Corona bat viruses specifically. The outbreak occurred in Wuhan.

• 2:28:47Speaker 03

  There were cases.

• 2:28:48Danny Jones?

  This is Jon Stewart's funny montage, monologue about Hershey, Pennsylvania. The chocolatey, the chocolatey outburst, the flood of chocolate that came out of Hershey, Pennsylvania. We don't know where it came from.

• 2:29:00Speaker 03

  I mean, it's stunning to me that you cannot draw the conclusion that I would draw, which I'm going to refrain from saying, right? Because, but, but here's the thing. It also speaks to if you're tribal, if you have a horse in the race, if you're insistent, if you mock somebody, then it's very difficult to back off of that, you know? And there were these articles that came out that literally called the Wuhan lab leak

• 2:29:28Speaker 03

  scenario conspiracy theories. And so, first of all, I want to say on the record, I think conspiracy theories should become like, it's an, it's a, it's an embarrassing, inelegant, unthoughtful thing to say, in my opinion. You should say speculative narrative.

• 2:29:47Speaker 03

  You could even say wildly speculative narrative. I would call.

• 2:29:50Danny Jones?

  Speculative narrative.

• 2:29:51Speaker 03

  I would call the idea that, you know, aliens are among us, a wildly speculative narrative. If I say conspiracy theory, it just sounds like I'm trying to be holier than thou. It sounds like I'm trying to mock someone.

• 2:30:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's a pejorative for sure.

• 2:30:06Speaker 03

  And so, and the fact that, you know, the Wuhan lab leak, which is really much more of the scientifically prevailing theory than a natural origin. And by the way, I think the most convincing evidence for it is if you look at the original paper that was written and you look at the original group that wanted to shut down the idea that it was a lab leak theory, you will see a direct line from there, that position, anti lab leak, shut it down. You will see money, you will see power, and you will see prestige. Meaning all of those people were offered that and have been granted that.

• 2:30:53Speaker 03

  Period. That's just, you can just identify that in a, in a chart. And so there was only something for individuals to gain and there was nothing for them to lose of that core group that shut that down. And it's just so unfortunate because in the event of the release of a genetically modified pathogen, as I show in nuclear war, I mean, sorry, as I show in biological war scenario, you need unity, you need clear direction, and you need, you know, uncertainty as an okay idea. You need health officials to be really clear about what they know and what they don't know.

• 2:31:35Speaker 03

  Because a biological event is considered in the nomenclature of the Defense Department, of FEMA, of HHS, as potentially a near extinction level event.

• 2:31:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:31:52Speaker 03

  And I'll end with this, because on the threat spectrum of weapons of mass destruction in the Defense Department, and I have an unclassified chart of this in the book, on the threat spectrum of all the threats, nuclear weapons are considered the most dangerous. Biological weapons, biological incident is considered the most likely to happen.

• 2:32:21Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:32:23Speaker 03

  And therefore it is the most dangerous.

• 2:32:25Danny Jones?

  Well, nuclear weapons certainly kill people the fastest in the impact zone, right? But the biological weapons have the potential to spread and get more people. Even though it kills them slowly, it still kills them in a horrific way.

• 2:32:40Speaker 03

  One of the most chilling quotes from an official that I interviewed, Tom Dashil, former Senate Majority Leader. He himself, his office was the subject of the anthrax attack, right after nine 11. And he's dedicated his life to looking at biological weapons and biological threats.

• 2:33:03Speaker 03

  When I asked him what would happen

• 2:33:06Speaker 03

  in an event, in a catastrophic biological event, he said it would be death physically, it would be death governmentally, it would be death of everything you know. But then he said this, people will do inhuman things to other people just to survive.

• 2:33:26Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, of course.

• 2:33:31Danny Jones?

  But the people that will survive are the people that are in those underground tunnels, those people that have that little go back and get that special call during the devolution plan.

• 2:33:39Speaker 03

  And then you have a world of like solipses, people who live alone and psychopaths, people who are willing to kill people from a distance.

• 2:33:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:33:49Speaker 03

  Machiavellian sort of world. And by the way, it would be mostly male. You know, the Defense Department, by the way, has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its servicemen.

• 2:34:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:34:01Speaker 03

  So that's how you survive. You have that mask on and you never take it off. And the military is, has only something like 17% females.

• 2:34:15Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 2:34:15Speaker 03

  We're talking about a really lopsided world that gets left behind. These are grim thoughts.

• 2:34:21Danny Jones?

  A bottleneck in the human genome is gonna happen if that really, wow. Somebody was telling me recently that in an event like this, like a nuclear war or

• 2:34:33Danny Jones?

  something catastrophic where the government falls, that people will target the,

• 2:34:42Danny Jones?

  what was the religious group again?

• 2:34:46Danny Jones?

  What are they, what are they called? No, not the Muslims, the, uh,

• 2:34:51Danny Jones?

  what is the religion where they're, they're all, like, they're kind of Amish, but they're not, but they're super armed. Why, why is this escaping me right now?

• 2:35:07Danny Jones?

  It's a group, it's a religious group where they kind of live off the land and they're self sustaining and they're kind of like, they're kind of like preppers. You know who I'm talking about?

• 2:35:17Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:35:18Danny Jones?

  What am, god damn it, dude. What, what, what is that?

• 2:35:24Danny Jones?

  We were just talking about it the other day.

• 2:35:28Danny Jones?

  No, it's like a sect of Christianity, but they're, they're not Christians. They're, uh, they're not Jesuits. They're,

• 2:35:37Danny Jones?

  I don't know why, I don't know why I'm having this brain fart right now.

• 2:35:39Speaker 03

  Well, certainly a heavily armed group of people who are prepared for this kind of thing.

• 2:35:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but anyways, the, the point, the point, the point I was trying to make is this, this religious faction Mormons?

• 2:35:53Danny Jones?

  No. Anyways, maybe it's Mormons. I don't remember. Anyway, the, the, the point that this person was making is that people are going to target them and try to go to them because they're going to be self sustaining. They're going to have a lot of self sustaining resources, which is why they are armed to the teeth with all kinds of weapons. Some of them live, are in Mexico and they're basically like, they're like cartels because they know people are going to come after them in this kind of event.

• 2:36:19Speaker 03

  I'd put my money on the Defense Department because they are, they out-arm everybody.

• 2:36:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:25Speaker 03

  And they also have a very organized plan in place. I think that's what readers will really find pretty shocking when you see when devolution begins to happen and the Defense Department moves into the Insurrection Act, which repeals posse comitatus and allows the Defense Department to, armed soldiers to try and enforce the law.

• 2:36:48Speaker 03

  You know, I take readers through what happens and I think it's super interesting and you just begin to go, wow. They have, this is all based on plans that exist. And you realize the, the ultimate idea of cog con, continuity of government plan is to make sure that a tiny spine, a tiny architecture of the US government survives so that it can reconstitute. And in fact, the final phase of devolution is called reconstitution, which is this sort of utopic idea that one day the government will reemerge like a phoenix from the ashes.

• 2:37:32Danny Jones?

  It's so anti constitutional. Like it's so anti Declaration of Independ, like you talk about the Declaration of Independence in the book and how it's so counterintuitive to this idea of how just the top, top level of people, it's all they care about is their own survival.

• 2:37:49Speaker 03

  But again, I really believe that, you know, biological weapons are a man-made problem. Same as nuclear war, nuclear weapons. Man-made problem, therefore, there's a man-made solution.

• 2:38:05Speaker 03

  You know, kind of looping to my other point is like, if everybody's so busy talking about UFOs, you're not really talking about the real problem. I do not foresee a UFO invasion, an alien invasion anytime soon. But I do for, look, we had a pandemic. The case fatality rate of COVID was 1%. Imagine if it had been 30%, like Hantavirus. Now, make it 100%. Make every-

• 2:38:35Danny Jones?

  Hantavirus was 30?

• 2:38:37Speaker 03

  Hantavirus is 30%, but it's not airborne. That was the big myth in the, in May, when there was the outbreak of Hantavirus.

• 2:38:43Danny Jones?

  What's happened with that? Is that gone?

• 2:38:44Speaker 03

  It is over because it is transmissible through spit, essentially. Have you ever been really close to anybody at a party, talking to them? And then you kind of have to do this, they've, you know? Don't do that. You wipe your, that, and then you wipe your eyes or your nose or your mouth.

• 2:39:01Danny Jones?

  Just leave it sitting there?

• 2:39:03Speaker 03

  You don't even speak that close to people, right? Stay away from the spitters. But, no, but Hantavirus is, you know, that's called droplet transmission.

• 2:39:11Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:39:11Speaker 03

  So it's a form of human to human. It's called H2H.

• 2:39:14Danny Jones?

  That's what we thought COVID was at one point.

• 2:39:16Speaker 03

  Yes, very different. Human to human transmission through droplets is different than airborne. Airborne means it's aerosolized. It lingers in the air. So that is a huge, people need to know the distinctions.

• 2:39:32Danny Jones?

  And Hantavirus was not that.

• 2:39:33Speaker 03

  It was not. There was fear because of the unknowns about the Andy's strain of the Hantavirus, that it was maybe airborne. And to my eye, when I was watching that unfold, I don't think anyone acted out of, you know, I think people were behaving very conservatively and appropriately, health officials. But again, that, you know, people are, there was sort of, everyone leapt on the current administration for quarantining people. Well, I take the reader in the book very quickly through what quarantine really means and the presidential authority to do so. And you'll think twice before you have like a quick opinion about that. And again, concept behind all of it, stay informed.

• 2:40:18Speaker 03

  Stay informed.

• 2:40:19Danny Jones?

  And, you know, like also the part about the military quite literally opening fire on migrants that are gonna start storming this place, starting storming this country and probably other countries too. If this thing, if something like leaks in and people get into another country or Caribbean island or something like that, like all the immigrants that are gonna be coming in, like, that's a conundrum, you know? Like, what do you do if there's like this demonic, demon plague that's killing people in 24 hours and they're bleeding from every orifice of their body? Are you just gonna, out of the goodness of your heart, let all these people escape from these islands and come to Florida? Or are you gonna mow them down?

• 2:40:57Speaker 03

  I mean, you brought up a great and very controversial point in the book. And thank you for bringing that up because, you know, that sounds so crazy, like, what, wait, what? The coast, the US Coast Guard's gonna start shooting migrants that are trying to come here? Well, yes, and that is not from Annie Jacobsen's imagination. That is a play out of an unclassified biological weapons attack war game done by US officials who had recently retired. That is a major fear. And it has to do with, you know, every kind of worst fear that any of us can think about because of, imagine the kind of mayhem that would ensue.

• 2:41:44Danny Jones?

  And do we have these things here? Do we have these super plague weapons in like the continental United States that deepen within a lab somewhere, do you think?

• 2:41:52Speaker 03

  Look, that would, we, those are illegal. It is illegal to have a biological weapon. So what are in the freezers at USAMRED? Maybe I'll, maybe I'll, you know, close out with this, which is kind of these BSL labs, right? So the biosafety level four lab is, that's where you're in what looks like a spacesuit. You have, you know, you're hooked up to a breathing tube. You're working with your arms in a autoclave. You know, everything is disinfected.

• 2:42:27Speaker 03

  Once upon a time before 9/11, there were two in the United States, at USAMRED, which is at Fort Detrick, and at the CDC in Atlanta, two.

• 2:42:37Speaker 03

  Now, there are around 15 or 17. It's hard to pin down. There is no organization responsible for making this information public. This is from scientists who work on this, yes.

• 2:42:51Speaker 03

  There are 110 BSL four labs in something like 34 countries around the world. Okay? So think about-

• 2:43:02Danny Jones?

  And no oversight.

• 2:43:03Speaker 03

  And no oversight. And some of these, you know, Japan has one in the center of Tokyo with 37 million people around it. Look at Wuhan. So then there's also the idea of the BSL three lab, which is just right below BSL four. BSL four has Ebola and others that there is absolutely no medical countermeasure for. BSL three labs have pathogens in them that there are allegedly countermeasures for. But what if they are defeated? Okay, so like plague, you work on plague in a BSL three lab. I visited a BSL three lab when I was reporting the book. Hantavirus is there, anthrax, rabies, all of this in BSL threes.

• 2:43:48Speaker 03

  Are you ready for this? There are now 3,500 BSL three labs around the world. They're in places where there are wars going on.

• 2:44:03Speaker 03

  Something like between 50, and again, these statistics are fungible. Something like between 50 and 80 or 90% of those 3,500 BSL three labs have no safety standards.

• 2:44:18Speaker 03

  So it's kind of like, as is in that country. And again, these are tracked by scientists and academics.

• 2:44:26Danny Jones?

  And then you can't, if one of them leaks out,

• 2:44:31Danny Jones?

  or say like a cartel gets their hands, like similar to what you talked about in the nuclear war book. You know, if a cartel gets their hands on one of these things and tries to use it, it's, how do you, where do you attribute the origin? Like, you don't know. It's just, wow. The genie's out of the bottle.

• 2:44:48Speaker 03

  The genie could very easily be out of the bottle, yes.

• 2:44:51Danny Jones?

  That's terrifying. Thank you. I'm gonna sleep well tonight. Thank you for doing this, Annie. What is gonna be your next book?

• 2:44:58Speaker 03

  Close hold, but I'll be back to talk to you about it.

• 2:45:01Danny Jones?

  Not on UFOs.

• 2:45:02Speaker 03

  Not on UFOs, not on UFOs. Lot more serious threats.

• 2:45:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, I look forward to it. Thank you for doing this. Your book is, assuming that this podcast is gonna be dropping, probably right when your book's dropping. So we'll link all that stuff below. And anything else we should tell folks before you depart?

• 2:45:23Speaker 03

  Stay informed, get smarter.

• 2:45:25Danny Jones?

  All right. Thanks again.

• 2:45:28Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, Dan.

• 2:45:29Danny Jones?

  Sleep tight, everyone.

• 2:45:31Speaker 05

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