1367: Annie Jacobsen | The Genes and Germs of Biological Warfare

Bioweapons are cheaper and deadlier than nukes — and we're not ready. Biological War https://amazon.com/dp/B0FY5WRTVC/?tag=jordanharbing-20 author Annie Jacobsen breaks down how close we are to catastrophe. Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1367 https://jordanharbinger.com/1367 What We Discuss with Annie Jacobsen: The Soviet bioweapons program was not dismantled after the Cold War — it was absorbed. The State Department says Russia and North Korea run active illegal programs; China and Iran are of concern. Bioweapons have a low barrier to entry, needing no uranium or missiles. Experts say one could be made in a basement with basic biology and AI help. The Pentagon rates bio the greatest overall WMD threat. Pneumonic plague is 100% fatal without antibiotics within 24 hours. The US has roughly 100 special-pathogen beds for 340 million people, so hospitals would be overwhelmed on day one. Soviet scientists inserted a euphoria gene into plague so the infected feel good, stay social, and spread it widely instead of staying home in bed. Annie Jacobsen's message is pressure, not panic — a human-made problem has a human solution. Pause risky gain-of-function research, depoliticize the threat, and communicate clearly so leaders can act in time. And much more... And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/id1344999619?mt=2&ls=1 — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking https://jordanharbinger.com/course — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course https://jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser https://www.jordanharbinger.com/news/ newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanHarbinger/! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors https://www.jordanharbinger.com/deals/: Article: Visit article.com/jordan for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more https://article.com/jordanBetterHelp: 10% off first month: betterhelp.com/jordan https://www.betterhelp.com/jordanBoll & Branch: 15% off first set of sheets: bollandbranch.com, code JORDAN https://www.bollandbranch.com/Progressive Insurance: Free online quote: progressive.com https://www.progressive.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 1:00Speaker 01

  Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  The revelation is, the Soviet program was not dismantled when the wall went down, but rather absorbed. They signed the treaty, they crossed their fingers, their hands behind their back and say, oh yeah, we're definitely on board, no biological weapons. And what do they do? They begin a colossal, illegal biological weapons program involving genetic modifications. And among the weapons was the super plague weapon that was designed to kill tens of millions or hundreds of millions of their enemies in the West.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes to authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional neuroscientist, war correspondent, former jihadi or hostage negotiator. If you're new to the show, or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of

• 2:25Speaker 01

  everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today's guest asks us to imagine an American walking into a packed Frankfurt nightclub with 102-degree fever. He should feel like death. Instead, he feels euphoric because the plague multiplying in his lungs has been genetically engineered to make him want to socialize. He dances until dawn, then he boards a flight to Dallas with 400-plus other people. Annie Jacobson's new book is not about a bomb that explodes once. It's about a living weapon that copies itself, travels through our airports, exploits our compassion, and attacks not only our bodies, but our trust in medicine, the government, and in one another. How much of this nightmare is documented history? How much of it is plausible extrapolation?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  And what can be done before the clock runs out? Here we go with Annie Jacobson.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  This book is actually quite scary. Nuclear war was scary because everybody dies, but this is scarier because everybody dies, but also way more gruesomely, and it takes longer.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  You know, nuclear war is, in that book, I take the readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter in 72 minutes. In this book, I take the readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days. So it seems like a long time, relatively speaking, but that's super fast. But as you learn, what happens after day six is really distressing.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  That's the scariest part. Look, dying of a horrible disease is pretty bad, but watching all of your friends and family get dragged into the street and killed because you have creamed corn in your basement is scarier somehow. Like with nuclear war, you just go, I want to be one of the first people to die, not one of the last people to die.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  I haven't thought about creamed corn in a while, but now I'm not going to be able to get that visual out of my head.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  So take us into that Frankfurt nightclub. There's an American, he's on the dance floor, he's got a little bit of a fever. Guy should be home in bed, but he feels great. So what has been done to this pathogen, and why might this euphoria be one of its most diabolical features?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Yes. First spoiler alert, the prologue of the book begins a couple days into the scenario. The scenario begins with an accident and a lab leak. But the prologue shows us what happens, that terrifying process of transmission, of infecting other people of a super-spreader event. And specifically, you're asking about why someone infected with pneumonic plague would be experiencing euphoria. And that is one of the most terrifying science facts I learned in reporting this book, not science fiction, sounds like science

• 5:07Speaker 02

  fiction. This comes directly from Dr. Henry Heine, one of the world's subject matter experts on plague, a former US Army bacteriologist, who told me that when he learned that during the Cold War, the Soviets were genetically modifying plague, and this is, mind you, decades ago, when genetic modification was in like the first stages, they were modifying it with, by inserting a gene for euphoria. And he talks about how sinister and how malevolent this is. And the reason is, very simple, has to do with transmission, has to do with how many people you infect. If you are sick with something like plague, really any sort

• 5:52Speaker 02

  of respiratory illness, you're going to be home in bed, under the covers, not infecting other people. And the idea that the Soviets had was, insert a gene for euphoria because it makes you want to go be social.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  And be around a bunch of other people, and therefore contamin- or infect them.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Be in a disco, disco dancing and breathing on other people. And that is precisely what happens in that infection phase of the scenario.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  I want to go through this man's journey. Take us from the nightclub to the hotel shower to the airport, and he's on, whatever, seat 8A on a flight that has 400 people on it probably also. At what point does stopping a disease like this become nearly impossible? Because it's probably even earlier than that.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. At this point, stopping a disease is impossible. And of course, the premise of, you know, stopping a biological catastrophe is making sure that an outbreak is mitigated, that you can, if you can move right in, whether or not you're public health officials, you're the military, whatever organization that could take action, time is of the essence when you have a lab leak, when you have the dispersment of a genetically modified pathogen. And if all hands are on deck and you can keep that outbreak localized, you can prevent it from becoming an epidemic or becoming a pandemic. But in the case of an airborne

• 7:22Speaker 02

  pathogen, as pneumonic plague is, pneumonia is, of course, pneumonic pneumonia, as COVID was, by the way, airborne, we can talk about what that really means, being airborne, then you have a situation where it's almost impossible to control.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  I remember early in COVID, I studied Chinese online with a Chinese teacher, and they're live and they're in China. And I remember she was like, everyone here is really sick, and it's getting worse. And I said, oh, well, it can't be that bad if you haven't seen it on the news. And then I remembered that they control the media in China, right?

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Wow, famous last words.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And then she got really sick, and then I had a substitute, and that substitute got sick. And then I was like, geez, this is probably going to make it over here. And then, I think it was February, and I thought, maybe we dodged it because it's been six weeks. And my parents were here visiting, and then they flew back to Michigan. And like, two days later, it was, don't go outside, everyone's getting this COVID thing, it's like SARS. And I thought, like, oh, too bad there was no poly market back then. I could have made a fortune betting that this thing was going to come to the United States because I had a little bit of an early warning. And I had bought masks from China through my mother-in-law. I was like, I need like 2,000 masks, because everybody in China was buying masks. And then I remember trying to reorder those masks, impossible, because they had stopped shipping PPE out from China.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  So this reminds me a little bit of that, except for, this is designed to be transmitted, maybe it's, because with COVID, I don't know about you, I didn't feel like going to a disco. I felt like crap. I stayed inside and watched Netflix. This is designed to move through the populace, and COVID was maybe not that.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  That's right. And again, this is something that Soviet biological weapons engineers were actively working on. They were designing, they were thinking through the most nefarious, most evil kind of ways in which to infect the most people. And that is enough to really make you pause. Coupled with the idea that this was decades ago, and that is why there are such alarms inside of the Defense Department, inside of HHS, CDC, inside of FEMA, which is a component of DHS, all these multiple agencies, I learned in reporting and writing

• 9:33Speaker 02

  this book, all have big red flares about the threat, and essentially, very little plans about what to do to protect us.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  That's not good news. Yeah, it is quite scary, that, and DHS, Department of Homeland Security, for people who don't know. So this is a real disease that exists, or it was something they tried to make, and we don't know if it exists, or it doesn't exist, it was only existing on paper? Would you, do we?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, OK, so basic, let's start with a few basic facts for listeners, because I think it's super helpful to understand that, for starters, there is the concept of pathogen. So we have viruses and bacteria. Covid was a virus. Smallpox is a virus. Ebola is a virus. Bacteria, just as deadly. Anthrax is a bacteria. Plague is a bacteria. So germs are everywhere. We have germs in our gut. It's called a pathogen when it can be deadly. And so genetic modification to a pathogen is commonly done in biosafety labs across the country and around the world,

• 10:42Speaker 02

  under the premise that these scientists are developing medical countermeasures.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  That's the point, right. So we're going to develop something bad, controlled environment, develop the vaccine for it in case something similar ever happens. Because my question is, weren't the Soviets like, hey, if we launch this at New York, it's going to be in Moscow in like a week, so.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And through the lens of history, that makes perfect sense, but at the time, it was a little different. So, OK, another important fact is biological weapons are illegal. Biological war is illegal. Unlike nuclear weapons, which are actually legal to the nine nuclear armed nations that own them, they are doing everything they can to keep them out of anyone else's arsenals, hence Iran. But biological weapons, because of this treaty that was signed by everyone, starting in 1972, everybody agreed, this is odious to the conscience of mankind. That's the kind of language that is used when discussing biological weapons, for precisely the reasons you mentioned.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  You let one off, everybody's going to get it. The concept is blowback.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Right, like the most sort of rogue states are the ones that are least capable of dealing with. Like North Korea, we don't care if everyone dies. You know that you're all going to die because you barely have a health system. Oh, yeah, maybe we should stick with nukes.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  This is the madman theory, yes. So, but as far as the treaty is concerned, everybody signs this treaty back in 1972, but the Soviets, by their own admittance, because a number of these scientists defected to the United States after the wall came down, they sign the treaty, they cross their fingers, their hands behind their back and say, oh, yeah, we're definitely on board, no biological weapons. And what do they do? They begin a colossal, illegal biological weapons program involving genetic modifications with technology they stole from the Americans. Good old intellectual property theft writ large. And they were developing these weapons

• 12:42Speaker 02

  completely unbeknownst to the CIA or the Defense Department. This is a known fact. It was only when a defector named Vladimir Peseshnek, just for a crisis of conscience reason, defected to the UK. And I interview in the book his handler, Dr. Christopher Davis, to whom he confessed what the Soviets had been up to. And among the weapons that he was told, Davis, that he was designing, was the super plague weapon that was designed to kill tens of millions or hundreds of millions of their enemies in the West,

• 13:24Speaker 02

  to kill all the people and keep the infrastructure intact. That was the actual idea. It's so dark.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Come in and take the over New York or something? Is that the idea?

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Nuclear weapons, you're just going to have a barren wasteland that's radioactive.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Biological weapons, march in and you're good to go. That was the idea, the fantasy.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  The fantasy, right? Because what's more likely to happen is you kill hundreds of billions of people and whoops, we have a terrible healthcare system over here and a bunch of our people died too. Now you have St. Petersburg, which has the infrastructure intact and no people in it. Great, mission accomplished, guys. I don't really understand what they were thinking. Did they think that having a minefield between that and us is going to stop this pathogen from spreading?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  The minefield's a good analogy, because that was a bit of their point. Now, remember, when the wall was still up, when Russia was Soviet Russia, there was a Cold War mentality, but there was also a bit of a fortress, you know? Russians couldn't just come and go as they please.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  And furthermore, the Russians were working on their own plague vaccine, very intensely. And I look at the journals of the lead scientist in that program, a guy called Igor Doromirovsky. And you see the efforts that they were making in this vaccine became essentially biological warfare, Cold War 101 style, which was vaccinate your own people, kill all of them. Whether or not that would have worked.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Of course, I mean, look at how much we had to distribute the Covid vaccine in 2023 or 2022. This was going to happen in the 70s and 80s? Give me a break. Sorry, folks, I don't buy it. I think this is just going to end up killing an equal number or possibly more, because again, your healthcare system is not as developed. Sure, you have a vaccine. How many doses do you have? And did your political people sell it to, you know, away from? Because like, look, 2020 hindsight of the Soviet system, not exactly the most efficient machine for doing a lot of these things. What's happening to this guy's body when he thinks he has a hangover? He probably thinks, I don't know, I have jet lag and a cold. I can go out, right? Because he's euphoric. How easily can these symptoms be mistaken?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not, you're not instantly going to a hospital bed. The whole point was to be fine and feel great for a while, so you could spread it to a couple thousand people, maybe?

• 15:45Speaker 02

  You've brought up a wonderful point, or horrible point, which is that so many of these deadly diseases begin to infect the body and reveal symptoms that can easily be mistaken from anything from, you know, a hangover to a really bad cold. With a plague pathogen, which is actually called Yersinia pestis, you're going to have a rapid onset of symptoms, much faster than usual. But again, in the beginning, you just think, wow, I feel terrible.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yikes. Yeah, it's scary to think that then this person's going to fly on an airplane. And I just go back to the Soviets thinking they can be immune from this. East Germany and West Germany were a stone's throw away from each other. They had plenty of cross-traffic. It's not like the border between the Eastern Bloc and the West was not porous. They had diplomats, they had trade. This just doesn't seem like a well-thought-out plan. Also, how difficult was it to corroborate what this defector said? Because I would imagine the former Soviet scientists didn't all come rushing to confirm what he had said when he defected to the UK.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Those are exact questions I asked Dr. Davis. The UK, British intelligence, gathered as much information as they could from Peseshnek. They were stunned, shocked, horrified, and immediately shared it with their intelligence community partners in the United States, aka the CIA. Dr. Davis himself flew to CIA with Peseshnek, sat in a room, described that to me. And then the CIA sent Joshua Letterberg, who was the Nobel laureate, leading biologist at the time. They sent him to the UK to do more work with Peseshnek, to really drill down on if what he was saying was legitimate.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  And as he later told Congress, it all checked out. And that was a moment of, oh, my God, mic drop moment.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Do you think they finished this thing? Or did they only get 60% there and then burn it all? I hope.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  The most recent State Department report on the Biological Weapons Convention, and by the way, this is also echoed in the report before that, that was in the Biden administration. So this is a nonpartisan situation. You have it across administrations. The revelation there is that the Soviet program was not dismantled when the wall went down, but was rather absorbed. That's actually the word that they use. And for that reason, the State Department will tell you today that it is their position that Russia and North Korea both have active biological weapons programs, both illegal, and that China and Iran have programs of concern. That's a bit of a euphemism, too.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Of concern, meaning we don't really know what they're doing. We just see the facility and it's alarming what they've been dragging in and out. That whole thing freaks me out. Again, the book is spooky. I mean, nuclear winter, fine, OK, I'm already dead. This, watching everybody get sick and die, and then maybe you just get murdered by your neighbors for food, is worse. I don't know. It's a coin flip. Which way do you want to go? Actually, I was going to ask you this. Which way would you prefer to go? Would you, would you prefer nuclear winter? Or is the bio-threat, you can roll your dice with that?

• 19:01Speaker 02

  You know, one of the most prolific comments I got from readers of nuclear war was exactly what you're talking about. They said, you know what? I read your book. It was terrifying. I stayed up all night reading it. I want to go in the flash of blinding light.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  The first wave.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Take me out, you know?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm moving closer to Manhattan and DC, just so I'm gone first. Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  And then in biological war, or rather, a biological incident, because it doesn't have to be an attack. That's what's so crazy. A biological catastrophe, a near extinction level event, can happen from an accident, from a lab leak. And so I'm of the Nikita Khrushchev quote, which was actually said in reference to nuclear war back during the Cold War, which is, the survivors will envy the dead.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly how I feel about this, especially. I mean, it's.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  You know, I interviewed former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Your younger listeners will certainly not remember that, right after 9/11, there was an anthrax attack.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  And originally, it was attributed to terrorists. The FBI was never able to solve the mystery, the crime. Lots of debates on that. Not a rabbit hole we need to go into right now, Ken, if you want to. But the Tom Daschle had direct personal experience here because his office was targeted with an envelope of weaponized anthrax.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Right. I was gonna say, I remember vaguely, they were opening up envelopes that would be white powder. It would get all over the desk in their hands, and they'd probably inhale some of it. And then it was like, let's test this. It's probably nothing. And it turns out to be anthrax. And yeah, the rabbit hole, I believe, insofar as I went down, is who has access to this? Oh, well, people in labs and like, foreign states, but they're not gonna deliver it by sending a letter to Tom Daschle. You know, what's the point of that? So it's just a crazy Unabomber science person? I don't know.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Tom Daschle said this to me, which really echoes in my brain. Because he has spent the decades since dedicated to biodefense. He really has been looking hard at this issue, trying to get a whole-of-government approach to a solution. And what he said to me was that biological war would be death governmentally, death physically, death of everything you know. But this is what really got me. He said, "It will be people doing inhuman things to other people just to survive."

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's gonna, it was like The Walking Dead or something, The Last of Us, some zombie show. Because you'd, obviously, you'd kill your neighbor if they had antibiotics, and your wife was dying, or your kids were dying, if you needed to get those, or you just need food, or you're, there's just a criminal element that's gone unchecked because the police force has checked out and they're taking care of their own fa- I mean, it's just, that's really scary.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Or the police force is dead because first responders are the first to go.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Sure, nurses, doctors, police, fire, yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  But inserting here a sort of comment, which is that the point of my writing this book is not panic, it's pressure. Because this is a human-made problem. This is not an asteroid coming to Earth, like, that took out the dinosaurs. This, like nuclear, this is a human-made potential catastrophe. Therefore, the optimist in me must believe that there is a human solution.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  What do you think the solution is? Just be prepared with a ton of vaccines and a distribution system, or a-

• 22:29Speaker 02

  That is certainly one component. And then you get into sort of biodefense utopia and a biological, technological, military, industrial complex, potentially. Different subject matter experts will tell you different ideas for the future. What I know, as a journalist and as a storyteller, my lane is giving you the narrative. Giving you the scenario of what can happen, to educate you, so that you have a better understanding of what to be aware of, and also what to trust and what to ask questions about. I mean, it was stunning to me that I went through COVID not even really understanding how airborne pathogens are just in a wildly different category than anything else.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Here's a little anecdote. That anthrax we were just talking about, weaponized anthrax. When Tom Daschle and others opened the, or Tom Daschle didn't open, but one of his staffers had opened the envelope, which had weaponized anthrax in it. The spores had been milled so small that they kind of were like baby powder, so they could be breathed in. Anthrax is what's called a dead-end host.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  It kills the host.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  It kills the host, and only the host.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Meaning, it's not transmissible.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Which is remarkable to think about. And so it's really not nearly the same potential pandemic provider as something like pneumonic plague, as something that is airborne. COVID was airborne. COVID had a case fatality rate of 1%. Pneumonic plague, without antibiotics, has a case fatality rate of 100%.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Wow. So if you, if you survive, you're just a rounding error, you're a statistical anomaly.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  No. You are not a statistical anomaly. According to Dr. Henry Heine, one of the world's experts on plague, you get pneumonic plague, you are, without medical countermeasures, you're dead. You are dead.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  There's no scenario in which you accidentally live. That's crazy.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  There's no immunity, there's no asymptomatic carriers.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  You get it, you're dead. You have to have antibiotics in your system within 24 hours.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  That's really horrifying, because of course, the question is, how quickly can we distribute antibiotics to literally everyone? And I'm gonna guess, it's not within 24 hours.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  It's not within 24 hours, and that is why, in all of the Pentagon declassified war games I looked at and discussed with sources, and also the unclassified war games, pandemic exercises that are done by public health officials, in all of them, the idea of anarchy and insurrection is top threat, for precisely the reason you're saying. Everybody is scrambling to get antibiotics, to get medical countermeasures, vaccines, for their family members, under extraordinary conditions, willing to do whatever is necessary.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure, absolutely. I can understand that. I mean, the airplane delivery system is, is kind of a funny thing for me in the book, as funny as it can be in a book about biological warfare. Because I remember during COVID, they made such a big deal of how, hey, the air's filtered in the airplane, you can't even infect the person next to you, look at this diagram we drew. And it's like, well, wait a minute. That's not gonna happen at all. You're just gonna infect everybody else on the plane, or at least the, several of the people around you. And so, that kind of flies in the face of what they told us, what American Airlines or whatever told us during COVID when they wrote their op-eds in every major newspaper. You can fly. We filter the air. It's totally fine.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  It's such a bad look, giving out bogus information.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  I'm gonna give you an anecdote here, which is just the leading example of this. COVID was airborne.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  For the first three months of COVID, the CDC, America's premier public health agency, in charge of things, and the WHO, the international community's chief in charge, these two organizations repeatedly tweeted out, "COVID not airborne." N-O-T in capital letters.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  I reprinted one of the tweets in the book, because it's almost impossible to believe. And yet, COVID was airborne.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  COVID was airborne. And even more distressing to me is the fact that, all these years later, neither the CDC nor the WHO has provided an explanation, or rather, sort of like a, you know, a sort of apology for being wrong, which is perfectly understandable when you are dealing with biology. It is squishy science. There are many unknowns. But at least let the American people, let the world know, hey, guys, we made this mistake, and we're gonna work toward not making the kind of mistakes in the future. But by saying nothing, extraordinary conspiracies have developed because of this. Extraordinary alternative narratives.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  As I prefer to call them.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Also, they said, hey, don't buy masks, they don't work. And then it was, hey, so the masks do work, we just need them for the first responders. And then, after that, people were kind of like, okay, I just don't believe anything you say, you're a completely non-credible source of information, which is pretty dangerous when you're talking about the two bodies that everybody should go, hey, it was the WHO and the CDC, let's follow their instructions. Even me, who, I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all, everybody on the show, I'm kind of the opposite of that. I do a lot of shows against it. Now, I'm thinking, well, if they tweet, next, hey, don't buy masks, the first thing I'm gonna do is go buy masks, because I've seen this movie before. So they've completely blown it. And I don't know how you recover from that.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  And I don't believe that there was any sort of mal-intent in any of it.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  No.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  It was just simply unknown. Here's another one. Do you remember in those original months, when everyone, we were told that you could catch COVID from this tabletop, for example?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  I vaguely remember, yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  And, and I remember, because trying to buy Lysol at Target was impossible, it was sold out.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  People would sanitize their grocery delivery, which was completely pointless.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  People are wearing those blue gloves that they didn't need to. And this went on and on and on. And that is called fomite transmission. That's like the fancy scientific term for it, okay?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Fomite is when you touch a surface?

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  I've never heard that.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Fomite transmission. Okay. All these years later, now the statistic on how you can catch COVID from a fomite is 1 in 10,000. So-

• 29:02Speaker 01

  I see.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  That's- Completely bad information to have pushed for several months. Now, that the CDC entered into a partnership with Lysol, to my eye, is extremely distressing.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Wait, that happened?

• 29:18Speaker 02

  That happened. And again, sourced in the book, your friendly partner, Lysol.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  That is insane. So it's almost like, hey, I bet we can sell a lot of Lysol if we just convince the CDC to say that it'll disinfect co- I mean, that is so sinister and insane to me.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  And again, I have no reason to know that Lysol executives were sitting around pulling their mustache, coming up with ideas. But that is what happened.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  After writing Nuclear War, which you came on the show before to discuss, what made you decide that biological war was the next thing? And God knows, what are you cooking up now? Should I even, am I even allowed to ask?

• 29:53Speaker 02

  When I was reporting that, I was talking to sort of cabinet-level officials and presidential advisors. And time and again, people would say to me, we're talking about nuclear, but you have to look at bio next. And that was extremely unnerving because it was always said in a way that felt like the shark in the water, you know, a kind of-

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Like, oh, you're afraid of nukes?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Let me tell you.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  And here's the real spoiler alert. It's a chart I show in the book also, which is that I found what's called a threat spectrum. It's a presentation within the Defense Department, unclassified, but for official use only, that demonstrates WMD, weapons of mass destruction, and where they sit on the scale of destructiveness. And of course, nuclear weapons are the most destructive.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  But biological weapons are considered the greatest overall threat.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Because you need a missile, you need an ICBM to launch a nuke. They can be detected, your program can get intercepted. Whereas, I don't know, the bio stuff, what do you need? Like, a university laboratory to not follow safety protocols one time?

• 30:59Speaker 02

  With nuclear, there's an extremely high barrier for entry. You have to have fissile material, uranium, weapons-grade uranium. Look at the news about Iran. We all know about that. Nuclear weapons need a delivery system, a very complex ICBM, submarine, bomber. So these nuclear weapons are kept inside the command and control systems of the nations that have nuclear weapons. That is one argument why we have not had an incident, an accident, or an actual nuclear use in 80 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Biological weapons, totally different animal.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  The barrier for entry is painfully low. With officials, defense officials, public health officials, anyone in the business of preventing this will tell you, a biological weapon can be made in a basement by a high school student with a very limited knowledge of biology, thanks to AI computational systems. That is terrifying.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Good news, you survived airport security. Bad news, the guy coughing up blood in 7A might have brought a genetically engineered souvenir from Siberia. We'll be right back.

• 32:19Speaker 00

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• 33:17Speaker 01

  Here's a little inside scoop many of you do not know, or may not know. When you use our promo code, you're not just scoring a discount, you give the show a big boost. We don't earn commissions directly from sales, but when companies see that listeners engage with the ads on the show, it does encourage them to keep supporting us. So if you're planning to sign up or buy anything, please use our code. It is often, Jordan, but double check on the website. It's a win-win. You get an awesome deal, and you help keep the show going strong. We truly appreciate your support. Now, back to Andy Jacobson.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  We were talking about this before we hit record, which is that I've done shows on synthetic biology and things like that with Rob Reed. I don't know if that name has come across your desk, but he was saying on the show that eventually there'll be 3D printers that can print biological material. But even before that, like you said, a high schooler who's got a really good chemistry set can ask AI how to make different component parts and order things off the internet. You can order viruses from a lot of places. Maybe they've clamped down on that a little. I don't know. But if you're a researcher, you can order things from places and they will send it to you. And they'll maybe make sure you have a real laboratory, but maybe they also won't. Or you'll get somebody who's too busy to do that that day. Or your name looks like, similar to somebody who they've seen before, and they let it go. It's just really scary how little sort of oversight there is.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  This is not, you're not getting something from the CDC. You're getting something from a supplier. And like you said, you don't have to be a crazy genius to do it. Someone could even do it almost by accident, trying to make something else. And certainly, there are smart people that would love to kill a huge number of people. I mean, look at the Unabomber. Remember that guy? He was a genius. And you've got nation-states that might decide they have nothing to lose by planting this somewhere and making a dead man switch. I mean, it's just really scary if you've got a good imagination to see how this could all be used or misused.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Which is part of the point, I think, of it's not about panic as much as it's about pressure. To your point that there is oversight, that some oversight is in place, and this is largely because of incidents that have happened in the past, where someone orders plague in the, you know, Yersinia pest is in the mail, gets it, and then makes an announcement, hey, look what I did, to make a point, because it's not illegal, or it didn't used to be. And that's crazy. But to your point, all it takes is one madman. And you see in these unclassified war games I was referring to, and I mention a number of them in the book, kind of as these little history lesson-type vignettes, officials

• 35:43Speaker 02

  in the United States gaming out different bad actors that might attempt to do this. And so it's not like it's not on the minds of government officials. The question is, how to tighten the bolts?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, oh, man, it starts to really, you might have trouble sleeping the night after you read this book, just saying. It's very interesting, and I recommend it, but it, read it on a Friday so that you can sleep in on Saturday if you have a little bit of a rough go falling asleep. How do researchers decide whether a dangerous biological experiment should even proceed? Because a lot of this stuff is dual-use, right? Yet I kind of hope somebody here is looking at this stuff so that if Iran, or the Soviet Union, or North Korea, or whoever, sorry, the Soviet Union, no longer quite a threat, if maybe Russia, that bioweapons program that's been absorbed, I want to know that we have a vaccine, or they've seen something like this, or they thought maybe it would happen, and that there's at least a document that says what needs to be done.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  But also, I don't know, that same research project that goes to make the vaccine could also have a sample of this frozen somewhere that ends up getting out in the middle of Maryland, right?

• 36:52Speaker 02

  And you've touched upon the essence, the dark heart of the debate, because this is called dual-use research of concern. Genetic engineering began only in the early 1970s, when a scientist at Stanford University named Paul Berg, who'd go on to win the Nobel Prize, was the first person who was able to genetically modify a germ, right? And he was doing it for exactly the reasons that you speak of. Like, we are going to be able to solve medical mysteries in the same way that Pasteur, in developing penicillin, was able to essentially stamp out all of these deaths that were occurring

• 37:37Speaker 02

  from infection, from bacterial infections, among them plague. And this idea that a scientist wants to do good is the premise, is how it all began. But very quickly, and in Berg's own interviews, he says, we weren't thinking about biological weapons, and we should have been. Because that is precisely what someone else is going to be thinking about, always, always. And so there you get into the other question that you raise, which is, and this is where it's called gain-of-function research, which almost no one in the world but a group of scientists had ever heard of before COVID. Now, a lot of people are familiar with it, gain-of-function.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Exactly like it sounds, you are trying to get a pathogen to gain new functions, to become more virulent, to become easier to transmit, to make something that wasn't airborne, and most nefariously, to defeat an existing immunity to something. So those are the basic components of biological weapons engineering. But in these same labs, you have scientists saying, we need to be able to create the really bad pathogens so that we can test how to defeat them with medical countermeasures. Now you have a chicken and the egg scenario, which is what's happening.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  I mean, this is the logic behind almost every arms race, right? We need to develop AI capability to do, for warfare, so that we can game it out when China does it first. And everybody's thinking the same thing, especially with bioweapons.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  On that point, like, the more countermeasures you do, like, you create a ICBM, and then you create, you know, interceptor missiles to shoot down the ICBMs. Well, now you have the other side saying, wait a minute, they're preparing to shoot ours down. That's actually an aggressive move, not a defensive move. It's why nuclear treaties, one of the most powerful ones that's now fallen out of effect, was to limit the amount of interceptor missiles that a country could have because it kind of forecasted to their adversaries, their enemies, an offensive posture, if you will.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Right, we're trying to erase your deterrent ability.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Yes. And so, this is classic catch-22.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is very disturbing. And the Soviet program, I'd love to go back to this, because this, I think it was called, like, BioPreparat or something like that. I don't speak Russian, so.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Good job on the pronunciation.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Is that close?

• 40:01Speaker 02

  BioPreparat. I mean, how you want to transliterate it, we get the idea.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  But this facility in Oblensk was pretty creative. It was supposed to look like, what, an asylum or something like that? Tell me about this place, because it's straight out of a Bond movie, this whole thing.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Sometimes the details you get from primary sources are amazing, and thank you for noticing one of them. Igor Domorodsky, I mentioned him earlier because he was the, sort of, the originator of a lot of the Soviet plague-related biological weapons work. But he was also a leading scientist that was working on plague vaccines for the Russian people. And after the wall went down, he ended up spending time in America with a now 90-plus-year-old subject matter expert in biological weapons named Milton Lightenberg, whom I interviewed, who lent me Domorodsky's hand-typed diaries over a number of years.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Wow. They're in Russian, though, yeah?

• 41:04Speaker 02

  No, they were translated into English. I think Domorodsky, or someone translated them. I was reading them in English. But Lightenberg FedExed me this group of documents, saying, you have to FedEx them back to me immediately, which I did. But I share them with readers because you get original details, which are mind-blowing, and really make it human. And the one you point out, Domorodsky explains, there was a facility that was dealing mostly with bacterial pathogens. The Vector facility was dealing with viruses, that's in Siberia. Oblensk was, interestingly, not far from Moscow, something like 50 miles south. And that is where they were weaponizing bacteria. And they were weaponizing plague.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  But he explained to Lightenberg in these journals that they wanted to keep what was happening there out of the awareness of the evil Americans who were spying on them from space with our early satellite systems in the 70s. And so, they dressed people up in pajamas and had them playing volleyball, as if the facility was a mental institution and the people were the patients.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Jeez, that's crazy.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  The lengths at which you go to try and trick the other side is really creative.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Imagine having that job. Like, Sergey, it's negative 5 degrees, but we need you outside.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Put your pajamas on.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Put your pajamas on.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Get the volleyball.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Get the volleyball and go outside. It's only four hours. Just play for four straight hours. Sorry, comrade. Aren't you glad you got a PhD?

• 42:36Speaker 02

  It's so remarkable, because I do know a bit about space satellites. And the satellite systems in the 70s, I'm not so sure they could really tell the difference between an army uniform and a pair of pajamas. It speaks to this idea of the Soviets' perception of American technology.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  We had them scared, I guess. Actually, if you know about spy satellites, early spy satellites, did they just make digital cameras in the 60s and 70s? Or did they have film that dropped out into, and then went and got it? What?

• 43:07Speaker 02

  So when I was writing Area 51, I interviewed the CIA's first director of the Directorate of Science and Technology. It didn't exist before the 19, early 1960s, and then it suddenly did. And now it's, like, arguably the most important component.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Sure, this is the Q branch type.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, absolutely. So, Dr. Bud Wealon, head of S&T, it was called, was also, by his own qualifications, the mayor of Area 51. He was in charge of the U-2 spy plane and the A-12 OX cart spy plane, both CIA programs, espionage platforms, being developed out at Area 51, in the middle of a nuclear test site, because it would keep everybody away. But Wealon is also the father of satellite technology. He developed the very first American system called Corona. And in our interviews, this was back in 2010, he took me through a lot of that early technology, which was remarkable. And you're absolutely

• 44:07Speaker 02

  right. The first Corona satellites, literally, they took wet film, actual wet film made by Kodak.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  The film would drop out of the sky with a parachute attached to it. The film would literally be in a sort of basket-like contraption. And then, an Air Force plane would work with a hook to try and hook the falling. I kid you not, there are actually photographs that have been declassified. You can go to the NRO website and look at them. So, you think about the trial and error. If the aircraft misses and is unable to, you just lost all the satellite photos into the sea.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Really? They didn't float? Come on, guys.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Well, they would be waterlogged. I interviewed different pilots that were assigned to go and find the missing footage, because God forbid, somebody else gets to know of it. It's really interesting, old-school tech.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  That is so insane to me. And then they go and they develop this, and it's like, all right, what's it at these coordinates? And they're like, um, a bunch of crazy people playing volleyball in the snow. That's it? Yeah, good thing we flew over the ocean and zapped this film basket, because this is all we're getting from it. That, to me, is just absolute madness. It's.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  I have the great fortune of having interviewed a lot of these, sort of, individuals right there at that cusp of history in the 60s, when technology was really shifting. And by the way, so much of it came out of the Vietnam War. And it's fascinating to look at that and consider where we are now, with science and technology moving not just at the speed of light, but faster than any kind of governance can keep up. Certainly faster than the courts, faster than democracy itself.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  I've got a friend who's, I actually don't know what he does, for real, but he's got all kinds of crazy stories. He's an older guy. And before Vladimir Putin was the enemy of the West, he was maybe a friend of the West. And so, he was teaching Vladimir Putin stuff about Western economics. And he said that Vladimir Putin called him once after he was dropping his kids off at school.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  He said, Vladimir Putin calls my cellphone and says, hey, do you have a minute? And he says, sure. And he goes, great, pull into the next driveway. Well, not the next one, the one after that. Literally. So, he wanted, he goes, he wanted me to know he was watching me in real time. And I thought, oh, that's real? Because I assumed that was some nonsense movie stuff. And this is, like, 2001, probably, or 2002. I don't remember when Putin sort of, when we decided he was up to no good, maybe 2005, 2008. So, this is early enough where I thought, you can't really watch someone live from a satellite. Apparently, the Russians could already do that, even then. So, God knows what they can do now. Take your temperature? Probably.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  That's a great story. It's very spooky.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very spooky. And this is an older guy. He's not, this was not even a, I'm 100% sure he's not making it up. He's just one of those types of guys. So, the technology is unreal.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  They also might have had tagging, tracking.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  They could have been watching him on the road, too.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  On him, yes. You don't know, but that's an important part of all of it, is this sort of paranoia factor. The idea that you would make someone think, oh, my God, they can see me anywhere. And make them wonder, are they watching me from space? Is it a tagging system? Do they have cameras on me on the ground? That's all part and parcel to kind of control and paranoia.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good point. Now that I think about it, I wonder how he knew they were watching him from space and not just some guy in traffic behind him, which is a far more plausible, actual explanation for that.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Either way, same result.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Same result. You get this feeling of omniscient power.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was his, the whole point was to intimidate him, which is strange, because he was, like, going to Vladimir Putin's dacha to teach him stuff. He's like, why, you don't need to do this. Like, I already, I'm already, I understand that you control a massive army and spy force. You don't have to freak me out. There's no benefit to this. And the phone call was pretty benign, apparently. It was like a logistical phone call. The whole point of the phone call was to actually scare him. The message wasn't even important, apparently.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That's how they keep people on their toes.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. What was going on in this building? They're doing the bacteria gain-of-function research. Is it specialized by floor? I'm so curious about this villain lair.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really interesting. I refer to a, an event, a conference, that took place there in 1989. And we know about this from the memoir of Ken Alabeck, who was the deputy director of BioPreparat. We know about this from another Soviet bioweapons engineer that it's since affected to the United States, named Sergei Popov. And the men gathered in an auditorium, which was in the middle of this building. And by the way, you can Google Oblensk, and you can see images of this facility. It's very spooky.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  It's still there.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  It's still there now, by all means. But the images from, like, I believe it was the 90s, it looks like a giant whale. It's like a glass whale.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  I see.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  It's very spooky.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  I Google-mapped it. I didn't think to look for older photos.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  And then, there's an auditorium in the side, inside, in the very middle with no windows. And the scientists were not allowed to bring any notes inside. Or rather, they could take notes, but they weren't allowed to take them with them. So, the minders picked up all the notes. From what I understand, research of the different bacterial pathogens were being worked on, on different floors. You know, you'd have anthrax on one floor and plague on another floor.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  What a cheery working environment that must have been.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  But in this 1989 conference, that was a very groundbreaking moment, because it's when. Sergei Popov, who was an engineer who had been sent to Oxford in England to commandeer genetic modification techniques from the West. Of course, actually, it was Cambridge, I believe. They had no idea what he was doing there. They just thought, oh, nice Russian scientist on sabbatical. And he had been ordered to steal the secrets and then brought them back. And with his team, worked on what became known as a booby trap weapon. So nefarious in nature.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  And not only was it built to defeat medical countermeasures, but very specifically, it had a super paranoid, evil component to it, which is it was designed to insert a pathogen into the pathogen. So that when you took, like, let's, they were working with plague. You would take plague. You would get plague. You would immediately know, I must take antibiotics within 24 hours or I will die. But the Soviet bioweapons engineers had then manipulated the plague pathogen so that in taking the antibiotic, it would trigger, like a booby trap weapon, a second disease, encephalitis, the swelling of the brain.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Oh, my.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Which would kill you in an equally horrific way.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  But even worse was the idea behind it. They wanted Americans to die en masse with the last thought in their mind being, I've been betrayed by my government that told me to take this antibiotic and now it's killing me.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Then people are going, don't get the antibiotics. That actually kills you faster. I mean, it kind of reminds me of the disinformation around COVID. Like, oh, the ventilators are killing people. Well, no, you're very near death already and this is the last resort. So it's like a causation thing. But here it really was causing.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  The encephalitis.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  When you consider that that sort of dark nefarious idea was built into the biological weapon, it really sends a shiver up the spine.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Because it's so based in paranoia, it's so based in disinformation, and it's a really big plug for why good information, good dialogue in the United States of America today is such an important ideal that people, I believe, must be working toward. Call me a Pollyanna, but if we continue on this path of tribalism and scorekeeping and self righteous indignation about the other individual's idea about what COVID really was, rather than taking a real hard look at what happened and what we can do better.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  We're just destined for a really bad situation in the future.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  I agree 100%. I was, I was pretty fired up about COVID and disinformation. I still am. But it's a, I've become a little bit more sympathetic, maybe, or empathetic to people who had distrust in the medical system, especially people who are, this sounds very, I suppose, lefty, and I'm not that guy, but people who've been mistreated by the medical system historically. No wonder, of course, they don't trust what's going on. What reason did poor black people in the South have to trust the medical system in the beginning? Like, your grandpa was in the Tuskegee experiments. Of course you don't trust this, or you have a distrust for the system in general. So that, that whole thing, I've gradually come around a little bit more on this. And that's, of course, going to be a big problem when we face a real pandemic.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  It's so, one thing that's just occurred to me, the Russians, the Soviets back then, said, we're just trying to prevent this from happening to us, right? That was the justification. We're trying to engineer this so that we can make a vaccine against it. But that whole sort of Trojan horse with the second encephalitis virus in there, I don't know, that makes it seem far less credible that this is just them trying to prevent something.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  Oh, well, hard correction there if I misspoke. In the Cold War, in, from the sort of advent of genetic modification, from the signing of the BWC, the treaty, all the way through the defector Peseshnik coming and revealing the biological weapons program, which happened in the late 1980s. That entire time, the Soviets were absolutely doing biological weapons engineering. They were building an arsenal of biological weapons.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  I see.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  They were not called medical countermeasures. People like Domirovsky was also working on vaccines so that Cold War bio warfare 101, vaccinate your own people, kill theirs.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  I see.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  That, yes, you want to have a medical countermeasure of your people, but there was no, absolutely no question that what they were working on were biological weapons to kill tens of millions or hundreds of millions of their enemies in the West. Because, now here is a real hinge, according to the Soviet defectors, when people would ask them, but wait a minute, you're a scientist. How could you have done this?

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  It's so dark. And they said, because we were told by our handlers, the Americans are cheating and doing this too.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Right. But we so far were not doing that? Or did you find any evidence of us doing it also?

• 55:20Speaker 02

  As far as I know, there exists no evidence that the United States was working on biological weapons during the Cold War period. After the signing of the treaty.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  I see.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  We most certainly had built a colossal arsenal of biological weapons before. I write about this in Operation Paperclip.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  I see.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  Not even a question.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  We brought Nazi scientists who were running Hitler's biological weapons program over here. So we were not saints. Everyone was building biological weapons. Treaty happens, 1972, okay, we're all going to destroy our arsenals. Not only did Russia not destroy their arsenals, but they amped up their program and we now know that is actually on the record true.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  And in theory, they're still doing it?

• 56:05Speaker 02

  According to Russia, when the wall came down, they had a big denouement where they were like, we are so sorry. They even admitted to having this, or at least Yeltsin sort of did. We will dismantle it. There are a number of people, some of whom I interview in the book, who went to Russia in the years after the wall came down, Andy Weber among them, who worked really hard with Russian scientists to destroy these arsenals, but more importantly, not to sell them.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Because think about how poor everyone was.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  And for example, Andy Weber tells me a story that at the vector research facility, the BSL 4 lab, where he was in the early 90s, dealing with the chief scientist negotiating, like, let's destroy these, or at least we'll take them and destroy them, the Iranians were there at the time.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  I was just going to say, yeah, but this guy from Iran offered me $10 million. Your offer is to take it and wreck it? No, thanks.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. Well, you know, if you could meet their price, they would destroy it. And Weber was responsible for a lot of that. He'd be a really interesting person.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  I bet.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  To come talk to you because he has decades of experience in this world. And interestingly, he has a very, you know, on the one hand, he's very practical about understanding what the threat is, but he also does have a kind of belief that biotechnology can solve a lot of these problems, can result in medical countermeasures to quickly deal with outbreaks. At the same time, he calls gain of function a euphemism for biological weapons engineering.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Apparently dual use technology means it can either cure cancer or erase humanity, depending on which grant proposal gets approved. And now capitalism. If you liked this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do. Take a moment, support the sponsors. They make the show possible. They're all searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. If you can't remember the name of the sponsor or you can't find a code, please do email us, [email protected]. We are more than happy to surface codes for you. Yes, it's that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Annie Jacobson. I think a lot of people are scared of gain of function research. You listen to Sam Harris, he's got a few episodes on this, and it is terrifying.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Like, oh, we just want to see if we can make, I don't know, smallpox airborne and more deadly. Okay, you did it. Congratulations. You have a solution for this? Yeah, but it's a solution that runs, it's, what's that thing they say about lying? It's halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on? The plague is going to be halfway around the world before the vaccine gets its shoes on. At least in the United States, judging by our COVID countermeasures or lack thereof. And that was what, 1% deadly? So imagine something that's 98% deadly or 90% or just 50, a mere 20%.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Look, there are lots of other diseases that are, like, hantavirus has a 30% case fatality rate.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Right. I did think of that when I read the book.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  And imagine COVID 1%. Okay, so just 2%. Think of twice as many people dying. I mean, this is really on a scale of disaster, of catastrophe.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Was this a great intelligence failure of the Cold War that we didn't know about this place in advance?

• 59:18Speaker 02

  Most certainly, yes.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  So Peseshnik defects. Did he go to the Canadian embassy first and get tossed out the door? That's a little terrifying.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  He did. Another anecdote that's pretty shocking. They didn't believe him. He said, you know, I'm part of a Soviet weapons program and I need to talk to someone. And they said, bug off.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Jeez.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Then he called the British. They took him very seriously. And a day later, he found himself in a safe house in London across from Dr. Christopher Davis, who at the time was a surgeon commander with the Royal Navy and also had the job title of, you know, handling biological weapons, which was almost, as he explained to me, a On job because no one believed that anyone was actually making biological weapons.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Right. He was the man in charge of fighting ghosts. And it's like, okay, buddy.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  It was like the X-Files, you know, and then this guy walks in and he realizes, oh, my God. And he became this incredible source for of information and actually ended up winning the highest, one of the highest honors from the Queen of England.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  It's really scary that this guy walks into an embassy and a State Department, well, Canadian State Department official just says, I don't know, I'm hungry. This is a bunch of crap. I don't believe it. And not like, maybe I should refer this to the US and see if they care, but just get out of here. That is really, really scary because we basically came this close to missing him because what he could have done is gotten killed by the Russians on his way out the door, gone somewhere else and said, screw it. I'm just going to go to Venezuela and live out the rest of my life and disappear. No one's going to believe me. But luckily, he gave it another swing and managed to get a hit. I mean, that's just luck at that point.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  It is. And even more remarkable is the fact that the Seshnek was one of a very rare group of individuals, you can probably count them on one hand, who were actually allowed to leave Russia. He was on a laboratory equipment buying trip.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  And like Domorodsky, for example, in his notes, he explains how he was always trying to leave. He'd be invited to these conventions. And at the last minute, the Russians would refuse him, you know, the ability to leave. He'd have to tell everyone, you know, I broke my leg, you know, something like that. And so, Poseshnek was so important that he not only had all this information, but he was important because he needed to go buy the sort of unique laboratory equipment and disguise what he was doing as public health related and not weapons related. And he had this moment of a crisis of conscience where he was like, I can't keep doing this.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Wow. He must have known some absolutely just very disturbing. He was losing a lot of sleep, I think, over this. Did he describe how they planned to disperse this? I'm curious. What do you do? Do you spray it somewhere? Like, how does it work?

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  Yes. What's interesting now where we are, this idea of an airborne pathogen is so simple and so clear that the weapon system, the delivery system, is essentially the human lungs.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  So you don't need cruise missiles. But back in the Cold War, the idea was to fill a warhead with a biological weapon and fire it in an ICBM at the United States, which involved so much engineering. When you think about temperature, you know, you're talking about a living weapon. You have to keep it alive. I mean, it was incredible what they were doing. And then they developed systems to fire cruise missiles essentially out of submarines, sneak up close to the east or west coast of America, fire a missile that would go under radar and then let loose a warhead and disperse plague or anthrax

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  or smallpox over the population. It was a lot of work. And Poseshnek was also in charge of that engineering team, which added serious credibility and threat level to what he was describing, first to his British handlers and then to the CIA.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  What's crazy is then, of course, you know, it came from, you'd know immediately it came from the Soviets. You could fire nukes back. Boom, everybody dies. It's nuclear winter at that point. Now you could do it with, you could hire 200 girls off of Instagram, infect all of them and say, all right, we're sending you to party. We have sending a cameraman with you to make some content and send them to every major Western city. Just dance with a bunch of guys. I mean, that's really all you would need to do to disperse something like this now. It would cost you a few million dollars.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Attribution is a huge problem. But, you know, working against that is, of course, this idea that biological catastrophe, the unleashing of a genetically modified pathogen with a high case fatality rate, everybody's going to die.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  You can't save yourself. And so, you're into the madman theory of use, of intentional use, or you're into the lab accident conundrum.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Didn't, wasn't there a guy who, Ustinov or something, he'd injected something into his thumb?

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  That's right. That was the vector lab.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  These little anecdotes or stories, rather, that one is able to source from firsthand sources. Sometimes people write memoirs and they reference these things. And also, looking at declassified documents are really insightful. It's kind of a weird word. And I write them out as little history lessons in the book to kind of pause from the horrific drama going on to give you some context, again, that while a lot of this reads like science fiction, it is science fact based.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  That man who injected the Marburg virus into his thumb, he documented his own death. So what, what were his last days like?

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  So Dr. Ustinov was working with Marburg. It's a viral hemorrhagic fever that's like a cousin to Ebola.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Oof.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  So it's just horrifically gruesome. It, you know, you bleed to death out your eyeballs and your ears and your nose and your mouth and every other orifice. And there is no cure. The Soviets were weaponizing it inside the vector lab, which is the locus of the inciting incident in my scenario, biological war scenario. And this was in the 80s. And Ustinov is working, he's working to weaponize Marburg to make it more transmissible because it's transmissible through fluid contact.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Just like Ebola, right?

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  Yes. So, you know, it's good to know that like, if somebody in the other room has Ebola, you and I are not going to get Ebola.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  No. I might leave anyway, but yeah.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  You and I might go out the window or out the fire escape.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:55Speaker 02

  But if somebody in this room has pneumonic plague.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Which is too late for us.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  We're going to get pneumonic plague. That's airborne. And so, Ustinov was trying to make this more transmissible, among other things. And he is injecting Marburg into a guinea pig, a small animal to kind of test this. And he injects himself. It goes into his body. And there is a death sentence immediately. He calls his superior. You can kind of imagine like him picking up one of those red analog phones.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  You know, and the superiors like go to, you know, the biosafety facility slash hospital, which is really just a room. And he goes in there and there is a notebook left by his bedside table, which he writes his thoughts as he dies over the next two weeks, bleeding out. And those who saw the notebook describe it as being, you know, spattered with blood.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  Well, I guess they couldn't help him. But you think like, they didn't even euthanize this guy. They wanted the journal? I don't understand. Why did they leave him alive for so long?

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  Euthanizing him, it would probably cause unrest among the other scientists, maybe.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  He was probably begging for it by day three, though.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  I mean, they gave him what we would call here in the West palliative care, you know, when you know someone's going to die and you're just trying to make them more comfortable.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  But what was also interesting is after he died, they came up with this idea because when a pathogen moves through the body, it mutates. This is by Mother Nature's own design. And we saw that with COVID, whereby there were different strains that would happen.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Delta variant.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  And then it became less deadly, I believe, over time?

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  And that's what happens as the pathogen moves through people, through the environment. And so, they wanted to look at Ustinov's organs after he died. And they harvested them very quickly. And they came up with this idea that they could make bioweapons out of his organs. And so, allegedly stored in that vector lab is what's called Marburg variant U for Ustinov.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Patient zero, basically, ready to be thawed out. That is really grim. Do you think they're still there? Organs just sitting in a freezer somewhere?

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  I think transparency is something that is radically missing from all of this, you know?

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  You think?

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  Well, look, it's why the nuclear treaties were so important. We're now out of them. But nuclear treaties meant that weapons inspectors could go and look at what a country was holding.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  And if you could do that with bio, it would take a lot of the mystery out of it. It would take ultimately a lot of the paranoia out of it. And that is certainly something in my push for pressure, not panic, you know, most certainly should happen. And diplomats in the United States will tell you that time and time again, that were there some kind of a come to Jesus moment about bio, then

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  Weapons inspectors could look at what people have. And the individual nations would be perhaps a little more inclined to destroy the most deadly, most nefarious pathogens that are clearly for nothing other than being a biological weapon.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, my gosh. That is really grotesque that they recovered his organs and then froze them for research material. I mean, that's just, this is like watching a low-budget horror movie, where it's just, you go, oh, OK, they're straining credibility a little here. It's a little extra, but this is actually real. It's unbelievable. The hypothetical was the explosion in the lab, correct?

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  Actually, quite the opposite, because the reason I chose that as the inciting incident is because there was an actual explosion.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  At the Vector lab.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  OK. So I wrote this down, and I was like, ask if it's a hypothetical, just a very realistic one. So there was an explosion in a bio lab?

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  In 2019, there was an explosion at Vector, at the BSL4 lab.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  In Siberia, in Russia. And allegedly, no pathogens were released, because allegedly, the explosion occurred in a building where pathogens weren't stored. But that is not the case in the scenario that you're in.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Right. So just luckily, the place where all the pathogens were stored wasn't the building that blew up. Buildings are not typically supposed to spontaneously explode. Do we even know what caused the explosion?

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  I think they blamed it on a gas leak.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Of course they did.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  No. But Vector is a very big facility. I mean, look, if you want to see a big facility, look at the BSL4 lab in Fort Detrick. That is just one of many labs on that campus. So the facilities where biological research takes place, sure, they can be very small. I went to a BSL3 lab, by the way, in an office building that looked a lot like the office building we are in. And it was just a few miles from Orlando Airport.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  That's a BSL4 lab, 3 lab, where you can work with anthrax and plague. BSL4 labs are high-containment facilities, and they have different sets of where they can be. But nonetheless, they are often located right in the middle of a city with millions of people.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  What was the lab in Wuhan? Do we know which one, what level that was?

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  That's a terrific question. I mean, some will tell you it was a BSL3 lab, but others will say it was a BSL2 lab.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  OK.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  And there are photographs that you can look at, where you see the lab in disarray with very few safety protocols. So that's a whole other discussion.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's scary. It's a totally different show, but I'm so curious what the safeguards are on 3, maybe 4, that's classified and you're not even supposed to know. I don't know. But obviously, airlocks, but what else? I mean, I'm just, my imagination's running wild.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  A BSL4 lab, like, you think about, you know, the submarine airlock system, right? Like, you, that is, you have to go through double doors. The scientists are taking a chemical bath before they step out. They're wearing suits where, if there is a cut, the air goes out, not in.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  Right. Was that called positive pressure? Yeah, they get sprayed, and then they got to take the suit off, and then, I don't, I don't know, it's just, it's so interesting to me, like, what sort of safeguards are there? Because whatever it is, it's not enough, right? Whatever it is, it's not enough to...

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  I have a statistic on that that will not make you sleep well.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  And first of all, there is no government organization, either in the United States or internationally, that is keeping track of all the BSL4 and BSL3 labs. We, the public, relies upon the good work of academics and scientists, whom I credit and source in the book, if anyone wants more information.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  OK.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  Here's their statistic. There are 3,500 or more BSL3 labs around the world, 91.6% of which have no safety standards.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  So how does it have a safety classification, but no safety standard?

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  There's no safety standard.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  So they're just working on things that should be protected under biosafety lab, level 3, but they just didn't bother doing that?

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Exactly. Well, those are the pathogens that they're supposed to be able to be working on.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Right. So they got smallpox, and it's like, hey, this should be BSL3, and they go, whatever, we wash our hands when we're done.

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  Precisely.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  There are no specific protocols. And the BSL4 labs are really interesting and worrisome, because before 9/11, actually in the late 90s, there were two BSL4 labs in the United States of America, two only. One at Fort Detrick, which is the Defense Department's only BSL4 lab, and the other in Atlanta at the CDC.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  OK.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  After 9/11, there was an explosion, no pun intended,

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  of BSL3 and 4 labs, to the point where we now have 15, and another two are under construction, so 17. And that is what has just been sourced by the scientists and academics. So that is essentially the figure that the public has.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Right. So if the military has made other secret ones, we just don't even know about those. Why is there such an increase? I mean, is it just because now we can edit genes more easily, so pharma's getting into the game? Or what's the reason?

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  It's tied very specifically to the war on terror. It's tied to 9/11, to the anthrax attacks.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  It's tied to the Bush-Cheney administration. Dick Cheney himself was terrified of a biological weapons attack. I write about this in other of my books. And so after 9/11, there began a buildup of a new industry, the biodefense technological military industrial complex. There was an extraordinary amount of money that suddenly got pumped into this, most of it happening behind closed doors, because most of it was classified.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  So it's kind of a double-edged sword, right? Oh, good, we're bringing attention to this, we're bringing pressure, there's funding now. OK, great, now instead of 2 labs, we have 17. It's like, oh, that's not exactly what I was hoping for.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  And the reason that I point this out is not necessarily to bring, you know, self-righteous indignation to the table of my, at the feet of my own government.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  But rather, those are the facts. And what happened as a result, which I think speaks a bit to our discussion on measures and countermeasures, and offense, defense, and paranoia, and your enemies and adversaries wondering what you're doing, what was happening in the United States had a ripple effect around the world. Suddenly, all these other countries, from China to India,

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  they're all in the game now. And they are saying, America is doing this, we must do it too. And that is why now, today, there are 110 BSL4 labs in 34 countries around the world, some of which are at war with their neighbors.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Sure. So Pakistan and India kind of situation?

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  And when you're thinking that there's, like, kinetic explosions going off, that, you know, certain areas of said city is under the control of rogue bad guy, it's really raising a lot of concern about the safety and security of what's in that lab.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  Especially when you realize that the BSL4 is just the classification of the pathogens in the lab, not the level of safety that the lab actually has. It's the level of safety it's supposed to have.

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  That's really scary.

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  Yes. And you have to believe that in many countries, certainly in more modern countries, scientists that are working there are seriously concerned about their own health and safety. And so they would, one would presume, be very, you know, adamant about having proper gear. But in other labs, the BSL2 labs and 3 labs, in countries that are not as scientifically advanced or experienced with this kind of research, you can run into a problem with a lack of knowledge.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Sure. Especially if it's maybe an authoritarian regime. What's the scientist going to say? Hey, look, I'm not going to work under these conditions. My hazmat suit has a puncture hole in it. They're going to say, here's a roll of duct tape, comrade, get after it. We got work to do. You know, you can't just go work for a competing lab.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  That is a wonderfully terrifying point.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  Imagine earning a PhD in molecular biology, only to spend four hours wandering around outside in the winter in pajamas, so American spy satellites think your bioweapons lab is a psychiatric hospital. Your parents must be thrilled. We'll be right back.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Come check out our newsletter, We Bit Wiser. It is specific and practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions. Psychology, relationships, in under two minutes, just about every Wednesday. Actually, that's kind of a lie. It's often on Wednesdays. How's that? And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Annie Jacobson.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  So you're advising, this is a hypothetical as well. You're advising the president. We know BSL 4 lab has an explosion, little gas leak, in air quotes, but we don't know what escaped. What are the first five questions we should be asking?

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  You mean, what is the intelligence community and the Defense Department

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  doing in those moments immediately after it?

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, essentially that.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  Yes. And I take the reader through precisely that because it's profoundly interesting. Only later do we learn that the Defense Department only takes the lead in the initial investigation and then has to let US Department of Health and Human Services take over, which is its own set of problems.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  But initially, it's really the work of the intelligence community that is looking at the facility from space, looking at the facility from the ground where there may be covert sensors, using signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, satellite images, trying to discern if a pathogen got out and then what pathogen got out. And you learn, as I take readers through this and kind of the first act of the narrative, that this is a complex and really frustrating journey because unlike nuclear weapons where you know, that's an ICBM, there's a nuclear weapon in the warhead, essentially. You don't know, and there are so many different pathogens.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  And so you have all these different components of the government working to try and determine what it is. And at the same time, in the United States, you have the president's Biodefense Council, now beefed up because of COVID, working overtime to try to figure out, when are we going to brief the president?

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  So you have to figure out what organism was maybe present there and if it was breached. And I suppose there's some pretty bleak options, right? Because you have to go, okay, is the foreign government responding in a way that we think is honest? Because if Russia says, we had an explosion at a BSL level four lab, we're going to be honest, guys, there's some pretty gross stuff in there, heads up, right? Like, Chernobyl exploded, we're not trying to hide this anymore, we're not giving you propaganda numbers, there was some research stuff in there that looks a lot like smallpox or hantavirus, but way more contagious, we don't think anything got out, we're working on it. That's one thing. But if they go, gas leak, no problem, it was just the cafeteria, and the intelligence agency says, that was not the cafeteria, we've seen liquid nitrogen trucks going in and out there, we've seen all kinds of stuff going in, they're lying to us.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  What do we do? Do we drop a tactical nuke on the whole facility and anything around it? I mean, we have to sort of decide what we're going to do. Are we going to start World War III over this because it could kill everybody anyway? Or what? And that might not even work if you wait too long to make the decision, right?

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  Thank you very much for the precise read, unprecisely what happens

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  in the book, which, by the way, comes to me from different sources in the field who have explained to me exactly as you describe it, in a little bit longer form. And yes, once the president convenes, once the SecDef is there presenting options, once you learn very quickly in the scenario that I write, that Russia is essentially gaslighting everybody, like, no, no, no, not even responding, which often happens in these situations when something illegal is going on. Then you have the SecDef, in the scenario I write, bring to the table the idea of using a nuclear weapon against a biological weapons facility. And again, this is not from Annie's imagination.

• 1:21:48Speaker 02

  This is an actual program that existed in the late 1990s and was revived during the Bush-Cheney administration, the details of which were leaked to The Washington Post. And I take readers through what that looks like. Now, we don't know if in 2026, this is still a viable program, but I have a strong feeling that it probably is. And then it would be classified under something called a PEED, a Presidential Emergency Action Directive, which would allow for nuclear use against a biological weapons facility. Now, people may say, why not just put a couple 2,000-pound bombs on it? And the reason is very-

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we want some heat, right?

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  You want incineration because 2,000-pound bombs, as the science reveals, the blast wave would likely push the pathogens out into the atmosphere, whereas a nuclear weapon with its extreme temperatures would incinerate everything before it had a chance to be pushed out.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Whoever's designing this is, they've got their work cut out for them, right? And making a decision like this would be so hard because you would almost have to say, look, Russia, we think you're lying about this, we're going to drop a tactical nuke on you. We're not trying to start a war, we just want to contain this and we don't believe that you're doing a good job. Imagine how that's going to go over with the Russian government.

• 1:23:12Speaker 02

  Of course. And, you know, my understanding, from having looked at a lot of this, if I had to speculate here, would be, that would be one level of consideration. Were it a biological weapons facility in, you know, said nation with a terrorist organization as having a host country? That would be, or maybe even a North Korea situation, probably not because they have nukes. But as soon as you're considering using a nuclear weapon against a biological weapons facility inside a nuclear armed nation, that's endgame right there because we know, no matter how nuclear use begins, it ends only one way.

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:54Speaker 02

  Total annihilation.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  I mean, you would almost have to say, either you put a tactical nuke on it or we're going to, and North Korea says, we don't have the capability to do it, go ahead, but we're going to protest about it and make a big deal about it, but we're not trying to kill everyone. I mean, how do you even begin to negotiate that particular scenario? I mean, it's actually totally insane to think about.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  Which is why you need to be having these conversations before. You need to be having these conversations now.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  I do not envy the people who have to put their you-know-what on the line and make a decision like this. That's just absolutely, this brinkmanship is just crazy to me.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  In my experience interviewing so many of these individuals who are dedicated public servants, who've been working on counter non-proliferation their whole lives, they have brilliant minds and great ideas and possible solutions that are not based in, drop a nuke on it.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  That's a relief, I suppose.

• 1:24:47Speaker 02

  Yes, that are based in diplomacy, that are based in, let's revisit certain treaties. But, you know, these individuals, as they explained to me, they can only get so far. Another one of the problems is always that you've got, these efforts take years, and administrations change, and suddenly they have a whole new idea about bio or about nuclear, which is why I believe the United Nations is so important. And I think it's so distressing to see the United Nations, and by the way, the WHO is a component of the United Nations. It's very distressing to me to see these international organizations lose their stature

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  in the world in which we live today because I think we need these outside international, allegedly non-political organizations to be leading the charge on behalf of everyone.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  Here in the States, if we have an outbreak like that, I think a lot of people will go, all right, we just have to send a few thousand people as soon as they get symptoms into the hospitals that can contain it. And then you wrote about how many beds we have for these kinds of things, and it's like 100 for some, and for the most severe stuff, it's like two.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  That's right. These special pathogen suites are required for patients with what's called a tier-one select agent airborne disease, like pneumonic plague. This is where, by the way, those who were on the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak situation, many of them were taken to these special pathogen suites.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  Was that airborne, by the way? I don't even know anything about hantavirus.

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  Hantavirus was very complex because it's transmissible, it's fluid transmissible. So if you spit on someone, you know, and then you wipe the spit and you by accident put it in your nose or your eye or your mouth, now you're talking you could have the disease. It is not airborne, true airborne is aerosolized.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  I see. But you're just one sneeze away.

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  It can float in the air.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  And you're one sneeze away, and there was a lot of unknown uncertainty around that strain of hantavirus, whether or not it was something called the Andy's strain, of which there's only been one or two scientific papers written that I know of that suggest maybe it could be airborne. So this was a lot of unknowns. I actually followed that pretty closely and felt like

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  I bet, yeah.

• 1:27:10Speaker 02

  the WHO did a responsible job in tracking that. It's a longer conversation, but the special pathogen suites are essentially like a mini bio safety fortress. And there are only about 100 beds in the entire United States of America.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  In a country for 340 million people. And so, one of the things I learned very quickly in reporting this is that the medical facilities in America become overwhelmed on day one.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  Because if you're on a plane and you spread it to everyone on the plane, now there's 400% or whatever, more patients than we have beds for just landing an SFO.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  And those people disperse because they don't know that they're ill.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  And there was so much to learn about- For example, what a super spreader event is, you know, a term that kind of only came out and came into the public consciousness because of COVID. But a super spreader event, there's no metric agreed upon about what it exactly is required.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  The metric that is scientists use is kind of based on COVID. It was times four. So in other words, the transmissibility of a pathogen is very important. If it's airborne, if it's fluid transmissible, or if it's likable, it's in the other room, you're not going to get it. Or if there's a dead end host like an anthrax, there's those components. But then there's also, how contagious is it? So that's called the R naught or the R zero.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Oh, I remember learning about this.

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  And the most transmissible with an R naught of maybe even 18, again, all these are approximate, is measles. Another one that's super contagious, chickenpox. It has an R naught of 12. COVID had an R naught of about 2.5. When it mutated into the Delta variant, it was about five. So what that means is each person is going to infect 2.5 more people. Or in the case of chickenpox, 12 more people. So you kind of get the idea.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  This was explained on this show, again, I think by Rob Reed, where he said something like it was, he did a better job and it's been years. But it was like, if you walk into an elevator and somebody had COVID in there right before you, you're probably not going to get it. But if somebody took the elevator and they had measles and then you went to lunch and came back and went in that same elevator, you might actually get measles. And it was like, just whatever analogy he used was very scary. So something that has an R naught of 18 or whatever it is, is just, you're just infecting a gazillion people with it.

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  And with a super spreader event,

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  you multiply the R naught times four. So if COVID was 2.5, in a super spreader event, like the Diamond Princess cruise, which is what we now know, how COVID spread outside of China. That was the first super spreader event. And I interviewed the number two at HHS at the time, Admiral Brett Giar, who was in charge of rescuing, sending two epidemiologists in hazmat suits to rescue the 300 and some odd Americans on that ship after they got out of quarantine.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  Crazy.

• 1:30:18Speaker 02

  And the super spreader component was that it was times four. So what ended up happening, because everybody was self-contained on the ship, one original patient with COVID, with the SARS-CoV-2 virus in his lungs, ended up infecting 712 other passengers.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:30:38Speaker 02

  Many of whom disembarked in Hong Kong, a city of 7.5 million people.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  Holy moly. I mean, it's, when you think about this, it just seems impossible to stop anything like this from happening.

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  It is impossible.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Unless you get it in the first 12 to 24 hours. Again, the reason why communication is so important, you're, you know, when you were telling me, replaying the scenario to me, if you did call Moscow in a situation like this, or if Moscow called the United States and said, look, we have a real problem. This happened, we need help. I mean, I spoke to military commanders who would say, we would deploy soldiers immediately to help. Now, sure, that's easy to say in an ideal world.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  And Russia would never go for it because they would believe it was some kind of a sneak intent

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  to get information to hold against them.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  The paranoia is real. I had John Mendez on the show. She was, do you know who that is? She worked for CIA, head of disguise, but it was like in the eighties and she worked in Moscow.

• 1:31:41Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, Argo, the Argo story.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Yes, so her husband organized that. And she said that one day they had, I think, a fire at the US Embassy in Moscow. And they were like, well, we, obviously you call the fire department. And the CIA people were like, no, you can call the fire department, but we're not letting them on it, whatever, the fifth floor. So they were in there with an actual fire, throwing documents into another fire, which is, you know, their incinerator. And then she said the fire department that showed up all had like brand new boots, brand new equipment, totally untouched, everything. And some of the guys looked pretty out of shape. And she was like, this is not the fire department. This is the KGB.

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

  Touche.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, but like, I get it because we would do the same thing.

• 1:32:23Speaker 02

  Yes. That's that degree of paranoia. And of course, paranoia plays a major theme in this book because that is a hallmark of Soviet Cold War thinking. And to my eye, that lingers. And it has also kind of infected the United States. Whether or not that's intentional or just a byproduct, I don't know. But when people refer to conspiracy theorists, which I prefer to call, you know, alternative people who think in wildly alternative narratives,

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  there is often a degree of paranoia underpinning that. Now, what's the saying? It's, if it's real, it's not paranoia?

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  Yes, so there is that. You know, you want to have healthy, it's not even skepticism, what would be the word? You want to have a healthy mistrust balanced with a desire to trust.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  The old Reagan adage, you know, trust then verify.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  Yes, so let's suppose the pathogen kills a bunch of, a couple billion people. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who are left are, sorry, but a bunch of politicians and the people who live in the woods and don't trust anyone already. That's a rough kernel to rebuild civilization. That's a rough start to the new humanity.

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  Yes, you know, in nuclear war, I end the book with a section on nuclear winter. And again, sounds like science fiction, but totally science fact. And I had the great fortune of interviewing one of the last remaining original authors on the nuclear winter theory with Carl Sagan. His name is Professor Brian Toon. He's still working on nuclear winter. In looking at biological war, there is no nuclear winter version of that on the books. And so I wrote something called Biological Twilight, where I imagined, it's the one part of the book that is speculatively about the future of what the world would look like,

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  literally after time passes, the kind of stage that you're referring to. And one of the conclusions I came to was, and this also has to do with having looked at contemporary writings from the 14th century, the Black Death, the actual bubonic plague epidemic, pneumonic plague epidemic, pandemic. Who would be left? Would be mostly male, because a lot of the survivors in the United States would be military. The Pentagon has issued 1.7 gas masks, full respirators to military personnel. You would most definitely need one of those to keep yourself from inhaling genetically modified airborne plague in the scenario I write.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  And the US military has only 17% women. So now you're talking about mostly men. And you're also talking about a world that is filled with, you know, Machiavellian type

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  psychopaths and solipses, people who would be willing to kill someone from a distance because they think, I can't have anyone around me.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  They might infect me.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  That is a very dark and grim world.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's some Mad Max type of stuff right there. Really, really crazy. So, okay, let's wrap with something possibly slightly optimistic. If you could force governments in the scientific community to make one change tomorrow, that would, well, attempt to reduce the chance of the scenario ever happening, what would it be?

• 1:35:46Speaker 02

  On a practical level, I don't think there is a single magic button. I think it's a long, deliberate and whole of government effort to devise a list of priorities of what has to happen. You know, certainly, the current administration stopping gain of function research until more is known, is in my, a very solid move in the right direction. Because that is making, it's drawing a line in the sand, also for other nations to follow. So there's that. And then there is, you know, and this is probably because I'm in the business of dialogue. I'm in the business of conveying information, of communicating with my fellows.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  I think there must be an effort to depoliticize the threats of weapons of mass destruction, both nuclear and bio.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  You said, or you wrote, I should say, that there are scenarios that are far worse than the one in the book. Without giving anybody a blueprint, what is the category of threat that you deliberately chose not to put on the page?

• 1:36:49Speaker 02

  Most certainly, AI-enabled biological threats.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  You know, that is something that the presidential advisors that I interviewed are very concerned about. And interestingly, over the past year, as I was kind of winding down my research, really focusing on the reporting, and then even moving into production when I'm still doing interviews so that I could prepare for dialogues like this, the threat of AI systems mixed with biology has grown dramatically in my discussions with people, to the point now where it is an actual major topic of discussion. I was invited to a Q and A at DARPA's summer session with its BSAT organization. That's the Biological Science and Technology Study Group.

• 1:37:38Speaker 02

  That's a bunch of Nobel laureates based out of Caltech, just last week. And I was participating in obviously, an unclassified component of their work. But on the table, and heavily discussed, with a very serious sort of fear factor built in, and I do not say that lightly, was the threat of biology and computational systems with the human in the loop, losing control of the ability to control the AIs as far as bio is concerned.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  So what would that look like? The AI just decides, I'm going to make a weapon and we can't do anything about it?

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  That is exactly what it would look like.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  And this is DARPA talking. And by the way, the solution is even more haunting, I learned, again, not classified. The hurdle is that the six individual CEOs who are running the world's AI companies have to, to the Defense Department's eye, be persuaded to agree to actual, quote, pull the plug on bio plus AI. And so that really threw me because being someone who essentially wrote the book on DARPA called The Pentagon's Brain, I was a Pulitzer finalist for it, this was

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  In 2015, I can no longer say that, based on listening to the DARPA scientists themselves, in essence, saying, the CEOs of these AI companies have more control than we do.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's really scary. So you're actually going to be speaking with a group of senators on this exact topic in the next few days. I mean, we had to rearrange this so that it could happen. So tell me about that.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  That's right. And maybe I'll report back in. We'll do another podcast on. But what's interesting is, I am a journalist. I am a storyteller. I am going to the Senate to talk to senators about what I write about in my book, Nuclear War. And, you know, the general public may be saying, my God, what good can she do? I mean, aren't these guys really supposed to be in charge of what's going on here?

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  We all saw the Facebook thing where they didn't know how the internet worked. So you're, they need your expertise.

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  But I think this is an interesting, and, you know, it's sort of like a, it's positive in an enigmatic way. When I was asked to speak at the United Nations about nuclear weapons, I was truly speaking to the world's subject matter experts, because these were all the individuals that are responsible for trying to get us back into the treaties or in this new treaty, the TPNW that's on the table. And one of the leading diplomats said to me at a small reception afterwards, he said, Annie, thank you for doing what we subject matter experts forgot to do, which is make this subject easy to understand. And so that gives me hope that you need subject matter experts with their high level understanding

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  of systems of systems, of weapons of mass destruction. But you also need the storyteller, like me, to perhaps bring it home.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:40:39Speaker 02

  In a very easy way. And so I am going to the Senate, and then I am going to the White House at the behest of HHS to bring them some books at their request, Biological War: A Scenario, so that they can get a jump on reading it.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  Hopefully, they do. And hopefully, they lose enough sleep over it, like I did, but actually are able to do something about it. That would make me rest a little bit easier. Is the final failure of human imagination that we could not foresee this, or that we foresaw it perfectly, in fact, and just continued anyway?

• 1:41:12Speaker 02

  I think the latter, because I think, having lived through COVID, we all now know that a pandemic actually can just happen. It seemed to have come out of the blue. But that no longer should be the ostrich head in the sand approach, because we know better.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  Annie Jacobsen, thank you very much. Well, again, people even just listening to this are going to have a little bit of trouble falling asleep tonight. I do recommend the book. I think it's a good read. And I jokingly say that it'll make you nervous. I think it's an informative and fun read. It will make you a little nervous, but I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. I think people should be thinking about this, even if you quote unquote, can't do anything about it. I think it's good to have this even in the back burner of your brain, because it's a hell of a lot more likely than nuclear winter.

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  The point is pressure, not panic.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  That's right. Thank you.

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  What could happen if humans mess with genes and if labs leak superbugs? In this clip, Rob Reed chats about DNA printers that could either save us or, well, not, by churning out vaccines or viruses right from our living rooms.

• 1:42:17Speaker 04

  The terrifying thing is COVID is pretty damn benign compared to what could have easily happened this time around, or what could very easily happen next time around, particularly if the next bug is maliciously designed. Society produces a certain small, but terrifying percentage of people every year, who, for whatever reason, go to such a dark place that they become suicidal mass murderers. And their death toll is limited only by the weapons that they have. Technology is the force multiplier. The 1918 flu virus, which killed at a much, much, much greater scale than COVID, and the smallpox genome,

• 1:42:59Speaker 04

  both of those are online, and anybody could find them within a short number of minutes. The time would soon come where somebody could take that and reanimate that. And something which scares the bejesus out of me, which is an influenza virus, not a coronavirus, is H5N1 flu, that kills 50 to 60% of the people that it infects. Two independent research groups, one in Holland and one in Wisconsin, took it upon themselves, and they basically made it capable of aerosolized transmission through the breath. No lab is secure enough to keep this stuff running out.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:35Speaker 04

  And this is a pathogen that could quite literally topple civilization if it's contagious enough. If the lights shut off on a countrywide basis, after a shockingly small number of days, civilization starts to teeter and eventually topple.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  For more things that'll keep you up at night, and whether we can handle the power we're playing with, check out episode 510 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  Annie Jacobsen's new book is Biological War. It'll be linked in the show notes. Please use those links on the website if you buy the books from our guests. It really does help support the show. A lot of people go, the link is not in the show notes. Yes, it is. The show notes is not the little blurb in your app. It's on the website at jordanharbinger.com. Anyway, this is scary stuff, huh? America has roughly 100 high-level isolation beds for more than 340 million people. So what, once patient 101 arrives, we unfold the plague cot and put it next to the vending machine? What happens then? After researching this book, Annie, she purchased respirators, protective suits, emergency supplies. I bought a case of bourbon and changed my Netflix password. I don't know. Maybe I still have some work to do here. But a biological catastrophe would not actually require society to stop

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  functioning. That's kind of the spooky part here. It would use our functioning society, airports, hospitals, technology, compassion, and distrust to spread itself. And the most disturbing possibility of all may not be that we failed to foresee such a disaster. It may be that we foresaw it in extraordinary detail, ran the simulations, documented all the failures, and then just continued on exactly as before. All things Annie Jacobson will be in the show notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

• 1:45:29Speaker 01

  And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Tadisidlouskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in scenarios like these, war games, biological threats, or just a little bit of sci-fi that might not be sci-fi, unfortunately, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

• 1:46:07Speaker 05

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