#2534 - Annie Jacobsen

Annie Jacobsen is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigative journalist, and bestselling author. Her latest book, "Biological War: A Scenario," is out now.www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/783250/biological-war-by-annie-jacobsen/www.anniejacobsen.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Biological war. Oh, boy. Every time I talk to you, I'm fucking terrified.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  That is my part-time job, to actually scare Joe Rogan. If I can do that, wow.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, every time I talk to you, I'm like, oh, no. Last time it was nuclear war. Oh, no. Now it's biological war. Oh, no.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Which is actually maybe even grimmer than nuclear, because at least in nuclear, you're just like, gone in the flash.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I did a show a while back on the Sci-Fi Network called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, and one of the episodes we did was about biological war. And so, we spoke to this guy who used to work for Russia during the Cold War, and he was talking about how much anthrax they had, and how much work they had done on biological weapons. And it was terrifying. He said they had like, just giant vats of anthrax, like enough to kill everyone in New York City.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  They were mil-- was it Ken Alibek, do you know?

• 1:16Speaker 01

  He was Russian.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Russian, yeah, there was a couple of those Russian defector scientists who came here and told us everything they were doing. There was like, you know, tons of anthrax and plague.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Plague.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  That's actually the pathogen that I use in the scenario I write is plague, because it's so crazy scary, so dangerous, sits at the top of the government's tier-one select agent of dangerous pathogens.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  So, one of the things that we did during this episode, we went to Galveston to, I guess it's a CDC lab that they had there. So, they have these super-thick walls, and everyone's wearing space suits, and they have these tubes attached to them. And they were studying all these different, really horrible fatal diseases. And I'm like, well, what if this stuff gets out? Like, it's right here. Like, what happens if it gets out? Like, will we take every precaution, this and that? But his concern, he said, was not for genetically engineered viruses. His fear was really just from natural virus. He says, "That is just as scary as anything that's out there."

• 2:24Speaker 00

  This is the Russian scientist?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  No, this is a different guy. This is an American scientist.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think they like to say that. You know, Mother Nature is just as powerful, but in truth, that's actually not true, because think about what you can do with genetic modification, make it more virulent, more transmissible.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  And make it defeat existing vaccines and antibiotics.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Well, we are right now in the middle of the Fauci hearings, so--

• 2:51Speaker 00

  Yes, we are.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  He is now testifying in front of Congress and pleading the Fifth about everything, including the color of his tie. It's very weird to watch. It's, in one way, it's like, "I told you," to a lot of my liberal friends that wanted to pretend that he was a great guy, and that he wasn't doing anything wrong. And now that all these emails have gotten out, where it shows that he knew that the fatality rate was much lower than they were saying, he knew that it wasn't dangerous for children, that they didn't need vaccines, he knew that the social distancing thing was all nonsense, and he's got a blanket pardon for 10 years. And the thing is, it's like, these people get money for research, and

• 3:33Speaker 01

  that's what they do. They do research. So, if you get money and you get grants for research, well, you're gonna go do research. And if your research is gain-of-function research that makes viruses more infectious to human beings, and, you know, you have to do it, because that's your job. That's what you do. That's what you studied. That's what you went to school for. Like, what a crazy fucking thing we're doing.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  It is bananas, and it's also, I mean, it was really unfortunate, I thought, that yesterday he took the Fifth, because I, for one, just want to hear, call me Pollyanna, the truth be told, you know?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Well, he's not gonna tell you the truth, no matter what. He's gonna obfuscate and dance around it, and use words that don't totally apply to what he's saying, and just ramble on, and--

• 4:19Speaker 00

  I mean, COVID absolutely could have been this incredible lesson for all of us. I mean, the nightmare that it was. And instead, we're just left, I mean, can you believe that we still, with all the power of national security, that we still allegedly do not know where the virus came from?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Don't we, though?

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Definitively. I mean, definitively. People certainly have their ideas.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  But I think it's high probability that it came from the Wuhan lab. I think most experts are now saying that. And I think the only reason why they weren't saying that was because of Fauci. And it was really because that he had funded this through the Eco Health Alliance.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Look, I say that in a very, like, 90,000-foot-neutral way. In other words, every sub-- I leave COVID, that part of it, out of my book. It becomes like a metaphor that underpins the narrative, and people end up reading the book and going, "Wow, I actually think differently about COVID," which was kind of my intention. But every subject matter expert I spoke to encouraged me to put in the book that almost certainly it was a lab leak. Like, it's just, but, so when I say, "We still don't know," that's in a bit of air quotes, meaning, how is it that someone can't, how does it all rest on Fauci, who

• 5:44Speaker 00

  had reasons to mislead us? We know that from looking at what's been released. How can it be that he's the only one with the alleged answer to it all?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the other scientists that were investigating it from the beginning, you know, when they examined the virus, they were saying that all indications that it had been manipulated. And they were pretty public about that, and then they weren't. And then they changed their tune. It's just, when you have power, and you have influence, like he did, and the power to make or break careers in the medical world, where these people are terrified, you know, they're already dealing with malpractice insurance, which is very high. They already have very high student debt, student loan debt, and it's a bad situation for them. And they're not gonna stick their neck out to, you know, risk their, everything that they've worked for, for 20, 30, whatever, years, for this

• 6:41Speaker 01

  thing. And that's what most people did. Most people just stuck their head in the sand, and, you know?

• 6:46Speaker 00

  It sort of went along with a party line, which is also really crazy, when you drill down on how dangerous biological weapons are. I mean, look, most of the people I talked to said, "Gain-of-function is a euphemism for biological weapons engineering."

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Period, full stop.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  And a lot of it is funded by the military.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  And that, yes. And, and what's crazy is that these are people that have worked for Obama, just as much as, you know, all sides of the aisle working.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  The real people who are not, as you say, they don't have something to gain financially.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Well, we should say that Obama actually stopped gain-of-function research when he was in office, which was a very wise thing for him. Very wise, by, you know, his decision.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  So, what do you make of the fact that, like, Obama stopped this dangerous research, also called dual-use research of concern? He stops it, and then, suddenly, it becomes a partisan issue that republic, only one side of the aisle decides that, I mean, that's what confuses me, because if the real, if you look at the facts, the very knowledgeable people that are well-informed by people who don't have financial gain, know that gain-of-function is essentially weapons engineering.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Yes. And the thing is, they're doing gain-of-function to make these viruses more transmissible, supposedly, so that they can come up with cures. But they didn't have any cures. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. We all have little things we do to save ourselves time, like shopping online, or paying kids from the neighborhood to rake up all those leaves sitting in the front yard. Or, if you're hiring, you rely on ZipRecruiter. They match you with qualified candidates as soon as you post your job. Now, that's how you save time. Try it yourself for free at ziprecruiter.com/Rogan. It's rated the number-one hiring

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• 10:13Speaker 01

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• 10:51Speaker 00

  And, but I think it's like, okay, that also sounds great for them to say, "We're trying to work on cures," but they're leaving out a really important point, is that in order for us to find a cure, we have to make the pathogen more virulent, more transmissible. We have to make something, for example, airborne that wasn't airborne.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  We have to demonstrate that it could cause a pandemic. You see that a lot in the literature, in order to figure out how to cure it. Well, that's-- A catch 22 that's incredibly dangerous. Like, we have to actually make a weapon to be able to defeat a weapon. That's actually what is being said.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Right, but it seems like there's a lot of bullshit going on. And that really what they're trying to do is make better diseases that work better and they can use them. Like, this is part of the argument about whether or not Lyme disease was engineered. And there's a lot of evidence that points to the fact that it was. And one of the reasons for it is this Plum Island laboratory that's right off the coast of Lyme, Connecticut, where the disease was really first named in the 1970s, or whatever it was. And so they were doing gain-of-function research. They were doing biological research on ticks. In order to infect ticks with diseases, and then they would drop them out of airplanes and overwhelm the medical establishment in these areas.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  And the idea was that if you're fighting the enemy, you can fly over, dump a bunch of ticks on them, they all get these horrible diseases, everyone's sick, you don't have an effective fighting force.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  I mean, it's like, we need to create a countermeasure, but first, we need to create the weapon.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  I don't even know if they think that far ahead. I think a lot of it, I'm just guessing, but I think a lot of it is just what I was saying earlier. There's people and their job is to do this kind of research. And they want grants, and they want funding, and then there's other people that can profit off of this, of these grants and this funding, and creating labs and doing all this stuff. And they just start doing it. And they come up with reasons why it should be done. And then, of course, you have military people that want the military applications of these diseases. And so they help facilitate it. And they don't even think, what does this, how does this play out? They think about their own interests, their own short-term benefits of having these things,

• 13:16Speaker 01

  and they just continue the research, they continue to work. And the fact that they even push back on the idea that it was a lab leak, so hard. When you have a lab right where it was leaked. I mean, right where it started happening, you've got a lab there. And then the famous Jon Stewart bit that he did on the Colbert Show, which is hilarious.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, it's crazy. It's the Wuhan Institute for-

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Coronavirus research, yes.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  And that's where you get a coronavirus leak.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  I mean, look, this is like where you really have to think the country's going to hell in a handbag, that people stop being able to, like, form an opinion based on the facts in front of them, even if it isn't popular with their best friend.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Well, it's their party, right? It's their ideology. They're committed to one side or another. And either you, you know, you're with the team or you're not with the team. And if you're with the team, you have to accept all the things the team says.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  At your own peril. I mean, you know, it's an existential risk. Do you know what the case fatality rate for COVID was? Like, the case fatality rate, it means how many people out of 100 people that get COVID die?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  How many? One?

• 14:32Speaker 00

  One. Case fatality rate of one. Pneumonic plague, which I write about in Biological War, Mother Nature's pneumonic plague, 100 out of 100 die. 100% case fatality rate. Unless you get antibiotics within 24 hours, then it's about a 15% case fatality rate. But guess what gain-of-function does? You can learn how to outfox antibiotics, so that you can turn Mother Nature's pneumonic plague, which used to be curable with antibiotics, to have no cure.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  That's the threat level we're dealing with. And meanwhile, people are taking sides about what we're talking about, a lab leak, that pretty obviously was a lab leak.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I didn't realize that COVID's fatality rate was that high. I thought it was much lower than that.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  It's about 1%. Well, here's why, okay, so 1 in 100 people who manifested COVID got it. But COVID is also-

• 15:42Speaker 01

  1 in 100 people who manifested COVID died.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Died, yes. So like, I don't know anyone-

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Wasn't really that much.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  That is the CDC, even Defense Department statistic. But also, keep this into consideration. Many, many people who had COVID were never symptomatic.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Like, including my 83-year-old father and my son, one of my two sons. They could both test positive for COVID and have no symptoms.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Right, but isn't that a function of the PCR test being really not designed for testing for active diseases? And there's false positives of the PCR test was somewhere in the 80%?

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Huge, huge. I mean, you're, I think, bringing up the most important point about biology, which is that there's so much uncertainty. There's so much uncertainty. I mean, you and I could get the same pathogen in our lungs. Our immunity systems are totally different, our physiology is different. So there's no, uncertainty would be something that you would think would be sort of factored into public health officials talking about things. Like, we're not sure if, dot, dot, dot. But instead, they act with this crazy certainty, which is bogus.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Well, the big problem with that is profit, right? There was a lot of profit in being able to point towards one very particular method, one very particular treatment. And this was the only treatment. And you have to take this treatment, and this treatment is going to make people an insane amount of money. But that's not why they're pushing it. They're pushing it for public health. They really care about you, even though they're going to make hundreds of billions of dollars.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  The case fatality rate, is that what you're saying?

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  It says it's 0.1%.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  0.1%.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Which was a fraction of the 1% estimated early in the pandemic.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I thought it was. I thought it was 1/10 of 1%. So that makes more sense to me. Because otherwise, you would have so many people dead. You know, if you think about 300 million people, that means we'd have 3 million people dead? Because most people caught COVID.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  It's interesting, because the CDC still says it's 1%.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  I think they're full of shit.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Right, but they all-

• 17:50Speaker 01

  I think they're full of shit. I think they're just, I think the mismanagement and the, just the overall strategy for dealing with it, and dealing with people, the lockdowns, keeping kids out of school, masking, all of it was so bad. It's so indefensible, that one of the wildest things now is during this Fauci trial, you're not seeing any coverage of it on mainstream media, except I saw one of those stupid panel shows on CNN where they were saying, no one cares about this. We should care about what's happening right now. America doesn't care about what happened five years ago. Hey, there's a congressional hearing going on where a guy's testifying in front of Congress who got a 10-year, complete 10-year immunity for all the crimes that he possibly could

• 18:34Speaker 01

  have committed, when he wasn't convicted of any crimes, which is an incredible precedent that's never happened before. You've never had a guy get pardoned for something that he was never convicted of, for 10 years, anything he did in 10 years. And then you have that same guy testifying in front of Congress, pleading the Fifth that what color his tie is? If you don't think that's news, you're out of your fucking mind, and you shouldn't be calling yourself the news. Because you're just a propaganda arm for whatever pharmaceutical company is paying for your advertisements. This, what you're doing is nonsense. This is definitely not news. That's a big issue for most Americans who went through that. People who lost their jobs, people who had to take a vaccine in order to go to work and

• 19:14Speaker 01

  got sick from it, people who, they couldn't fly, they couldn't travel, they were vilified, they were called plague rats because they were questioning these things. And here we are. Here we are with CNN saying, this is not a big deal. Why are we concentrating on this? We have so many issues right now plaguing this country. Yeah, guess what? We can concentrate on those, too. We can look at everything. That's what you're supposed to do. That's what the news is supposed to be. You're supposed to be telling, you're not supposed to be the arbiters of what we can and can't concentrate on. That's ridiculous.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  You know, but what's interesting is I think the lack of news ends up making people more curious. So in other words, people go to other sources of information. If they're not going to get it from CNN, they're going to look for it themselves. Because we're naturally curious, especially something like COVID. So I think, I kind of get the sense that people toe certain groups of people, certainly not me, because you don't know what my politics are. But they will toe the party line, but then they have their own opinion privately.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Which is unfortunately what we also saw from Dr. Fauci. But that's a completely different point, because he's a public health official and he shouldn't be, you know, speaking out of one side of his mouth and writing in his journal another thing that he really thinks. But I think that this human instinct to want to know the truth about what happened must prevail, right? And that, so, but my original point was like, why is Dr. Fauci allegedly the only one who can really tell us about the Wuhan lab leak? Where's the CIA? Where's the ODNI? Where's DoD? Where are other organizations that you know have that information?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  You know they do. If Fauci had it, they had it. Why aren't they bringing that to the public domain right now?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  That's a very good question. So I want to ask you about this book. Like, what was your motivation for writing it? How did you get involved in this? Like, I know, you pick a subject and you go deep, and you dive deep, and then you write your book. So why Biological War?

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Yep. My first six books were written in the past tense. Like, you know, The Nazi Scientist Who Came to America, Area 51, The Pentagon's Brain. The nuclear war and biological war are written in the future. There are scenarios based on Pentagon War Games. And that was me realizing, like, there are major existential threats right now, speeding up at the rate of science, which is going faster every day, literally. And so I modeled the two books after Pentagon War Games and got access to people who actually run these games at the Pentagon and learned the sort of, holy shit,

• 22:12Speaker 00

  people are preparing for the worst case scenario and no one knows about it.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Is that their job, though? I mean, that is their job. They have to be preparing for the worst case scenario. The real question is, are you preparing by creating it?

• 22:29Speaker 00

  The Defense Department or us?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Well, whoever's.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, what I wanted to do, first of all, was like, I'm just naturally curious. I wanted to know, like, what are they, how does that preparation play out? The most shocking thing about nuclear was to find out, like, oh, there is no plan? Because we're all dead. That's literally the quote from the FEMA director. There is no population protection planning after a nuclear strike because everyone's dead, don't forget your morals, and hope you stocked Pedialyte. That's what he told me, okay? Bio is totally different.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Why Pedialyte?

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Pedialyte, you know, that stuff you give your kids to drink?

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, electrolytes. Yeah, not just kids.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Or you, right? That's what he said.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Well, athletes take it when they cut weight.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  It's been a while since I've been an athlete.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  So, yeah, that's what he said. It was like, wow, that's what they're thinking about nuclear. It's just lights out.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Why Pedialyte, though?

• 23:30Speaker 00

  I guess for the electrolytes.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Does that protect, I know, what is it? Iodine that people tell you to take?

• 23:36Speaker 00

  I always got the sense that the Pedialyte, I should have done a follow-up question, Joe.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  Why Pedialyte? I always got the sense, in the same way that when your kids are babies and they get diarrhea, that you give them Pedialyte to, like, you know, re, get their system filled with necessary electrolytes. So that's, and I also got the sense that it was like hydration and, you know, better than water.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  God.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  But bio, I learned, is completely different animal because what they're really worried about is the secondary effect of panic and anarchy. And that was really interesting to me because having written all these books about, you know, the Defense Department and the CIA, the programs are very, you know, they're very structured and ordered and they don't take place in the homeland because we're always fighting wars overseas. So to learn about a program that would go down in the continental United States where, you know, the Insurrection Act gets declared, Posse Comitatus gets lifted, the military

• 24:44Speaker 00

  takes over, dot, dot, dot, and then it goes from there, third act of the book, spoiler alert, that was shocking to me. And it was equally shocking that I could actually get this information. A lot of it's classified, but the names of some of the programs are unclassified. So the officials that I interviewed took me up to the edge of what can be legally known. And I also got the sense of like, oh, that, the sense that these former officials are conveying is the public should know about this. My personal interpretation is like, let's stop arguing about stuff that, like, doesn't matter and get to the facts and start realizing where the real threats are.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  So their real fear is worrying about the aftermath? Worrying about chaos in the streets, rioting, looting? That's their real fear?

• 25:40Speaker 00

  That's the real fear. You can search up any of, so there's unclassified pandemic plans, which are done by, like, FEMA, DHS. They're always done by former officials, former SecDef, former CDC director, sitting around a table, running a war, a pandemic planning game. They do them at the Defense Department and they call it a biological catastrophe war game. Those are declassified. All of them that I was looking at go through the series of events, you know, outbreak, infection, sort of everyone trying to mitigate the, the, the release, the spread. And then it gets to a certain point, in my scenario, it's day six because pneumonic

• 26:25Speaker 00

  plague is fast, there's a point in all these plans where anarchy and chaos takes over and the war game ends. Ends. Like, oh, and now we're done here. And I would say, as the journalist, like, to myself, what happens next? What happens next? And why aren't we learning about it?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  And they don't have any plans for what happens after anarchy and chaos?

• 26:51Speaker 00

  They do. They just don't, they just don't have it in the declassified games. And that's what, there's a plan called the Devolution Plan.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  Eyebrows up for a reason.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  I don't like that word.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Think about evolution. Now put a D in front of it.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Instead of going forward, you're going backward. So you've heard of DEFCON, right?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  Okay, so DEFCON, Defense Readiness Condition, there's five. Five is the lowest. That's like normal every day. At 9/11, we were at three. DEFCON 1 means nuclear war. There's a separate structure of readiness condition called COGCON. Probably haven't heard of it because it's classified. Stands for Continuity of Government Readiness Condition. It's got four levels. Four is every day. One is insurrection. The Insurrection Act gets declared.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  COGCON 1 is in effect and the Devolution Plan happens, which I learned, means a subset of pre-designated officials, they know who they are, they've signed contracts, they've rehearsed it. They go out, in the words of the former FEMA director, COGCON 1, you send your Devolution crews out. They go out to a hot site, warm site, or cold site, underground bunkers located around the United States. This is from an actual FEMA chief telling me this. And they set up how to run the government because the idea is all the regular government

• 28:39Speaker 00

  people will probably be dead of anarchy, insurrection, pneumonic plague.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  So they have bunkers?

• 28:48Speaker 00

  And those are classified.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  The bunkers are.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Where they are?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Do you remember there was the bunker during, after 9/11 where Dick Cheney was in the bunker? But George Bush was just like hanging out?

• 28:59Speaker 00

  They left him, I think they left him in Texas or, you know, he was on his ranch.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  He was just out there in the world.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Actually, you know what? I had someone tell me where he was and I went through, like, a problem with, like, legal, whether I could say this. So I had to say, I was told, but, you know, it's not verified, something like that. But one of the CIA spy pilots, Ken Collins, he famously flew the OX cart out at Area 51. He told me that on 9/11, George Bush was driving around in Texas, maybe it was in Florida, in the back of a laundry truck. That's how they kept him hidden.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  What? A laundry, so they?

• 29:39Speaker 00

  A laundry truck.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Did they just have it look like a laundry truck and it outfitted with, like, regular seats in the back and that's how they drive him around?

• 29:45Speaker 00

  I mean.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  A bulletproof laundry truck?

• 29:47Speaker 00

  No, I think he got like, I think it was like, what do we do with him? And that, that was what was available.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  A laundry truck?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  A laundry truck. That's what I was told by, like, a very reliable source.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  That was available, meaning there was nothing else available that was incognito?

• 30:01Speaker 00

  They were trying to transport him to the doomsday plane, which is where he ended up going, into the doomsday plane and flying around in circles.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  And they thought that, like, a caravan of SUVs would be too obvious?

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you learn really pretty quickly that there's all these plans in place, but then it becomes like ad hoc or like on the fly in an actual crisis or emergency.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Yep. But, okay, you're referring to Mount Weather. That's where Dick Cheney went.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Okay, where's that?

• 30:40Speaker 00

  So, Mount Weather is in the mountains outside of DC. It's like-

• 30:44Speaker 01

  There's mountains outside of DC?

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, right, in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Oh, how far are those?

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Hundred, seventy-five miles?

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  So, the Pentagon has an alternate command center called Raven Rock, underground bunker.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  That sounds like it's right out of a video game.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  It sounds-

• 31:02Speaker 01

  You gotta go to Raven Rock.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  They probably have put it in a- that's a real, like, it used to be classified and no one used to know about it, and now it's kind of like out there. The official-

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Is this it, Jamie? This is the bunker?

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Oh, we have a map of it? We got blueprints?

• 31:16Speaker 03

  All sorts of information about it. What do you wanna know? Fifty-one miles from DC.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  How deep does it? Fifty-one miles from DC?

• 31:23Speaker 03

  It's at least seven levels.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Oval office would be at the bottom.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  So, that's where Cheney was on 9/11.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  So, is that where, like, a nuclear bomb can't get to it?

• 31:33Speaker 00

  A nuclear bomb would take it all out. In nuclear war, I'd destroy all of those. I mean, I don't destroy them. I show you how they would be destroyed. Russia would put, like, five nuclear bombs on Raven Rock, and it would just-

• 31:45Speaker 01

  And just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  That would be it. And also, the fires alone would just incinerate everyone inside.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Also, like, how are you getting your air?

• 31:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Where's your air coming from? Your air's gonna be contaminated with nuclear fallout, right?

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Is this what it looks like?

• 32:01Speaker 03

  I don't know. There's a bunch of- some of those pictures were coming from Tumblr, so I don't know.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  I think they take the real pictures and then they turn them into, you know, comic books, but-

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  But you can see some of-

• 32:14Speaker 01

  So, look how it's got this, like, entrance carved into the side of the mountain, with a big cement wall, and he goes through that.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  You know, we were talking about this, um, the other day. Um, we were talking about Darren Cuyu. Do you know what that is?

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Uh-uh.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  It's, uh, an underground facility that's in Turkey, and-

• 32:34Speaker 00

  Yes, I do know about that.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  That they found by accident.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  What was it, the 1970s?

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Like a sheep herder.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  They used to- it was being used to hide people up until the 1920s.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, people, like, the Greeks were hiding from people invading Greece.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  So, it can-

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Or Turkey, I guess.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Houses twenty thousand people under there, and they really don't know why they made it, or who made it. It's-

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Turkey is crazy. It's such an old civilization with, like, layers upon layers upon layers of- just when you think it's really old, it gets even older.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Well, that's Gobekli Tepe, right, where they had to re-date. Well, they still resist it, what constitutes modern civilization, or civilization in general. They were- they're still trying to say, some archaeologists are hanging on tooth and claw, trying to say that hunter-gatherers made these enormous stone columns with 3D drawings that seemed to be a calendar of some sort of a cataclysmic event.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  So, some of the pictures we were just looking at from Mount Weather may be not accurate, because it's also used in the TV show The 100?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. But it is a real place.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's probably where they get it from, so what we were looking at, I think, was the stuff from the TV show.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  What is that? What's The 100?

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Uh, like, a show like Silo or something where people, you know, a hundred people left or something like that, I think.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Oh, that's where we had Tim Robbins on, and we were talking about Silo. Have you seen that show, Silo?

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Not yet, not yet.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Really good show. It's on Apple.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  Great, great.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  And it's essentially about an underground civilization that survived some sort of cataclysm. They don't exactly say in the beginning, I'm early on the show, they don't say what the cataclysm is, but these people have to live, like, deep, deep, deep underground in these self-containing facilities, and you can't go outside or you'll die.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's like a whole Reddit about it.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  So, Darren Cuyu could house twenty thousand people, and they had- they had pastures, or they had storage, like, for cattle and grain and water and wine and oil presses. It was like crazy shit.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  And how many thousands of years?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  They don't know.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  BC, is it? They don't even know.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  They don't know. They don't know who made it. They didn't know it existed. They found it. Imagine a guy, the initial story was that his chickens had gone through a hole. And he's like, where's these chickens going? They never come back. And they-

• 34:53Speaker 00

  The disappearing Turkish chickens.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  So, they knock down these walls, and then they find this thing, and they haven't even explored all of it. They don't even have all of it explored yet. It's insane. It's so big, and it's just there, and they don't know why, and they don't know who made it, and they don't know what they're hiding from. This is what it looks like.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's incredible.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  It's really crazy, 'cause it's absolutely enormous. Is this Darren Cuyu right here? This is, uh, like, some of the tunnels?

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I get confused, since they've only done ten percent of it, like, that's obviously a fake, but I don't know how much of that is what it is, 'cause it's supposed to be underground, right?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that doesn't look real. That seems like somebody made it up. But the actual image is, like, that's an image, which is the best Darren Cuyu underground, like, there, point to- yeah, right there. That's, uh, what it really looked like. So, imagine they find this underground, and they don't even know how old it is, 'cause if you find some stuff, you can't carbon date the walls. You can't carbon date the carvings, so they have to find things that are left there. But if people were hanging out there until the 1920s, like, so they really don't even know, if you find something, how old it is, you can guess, but you don't know, like, how old was the building when this person was there? Was it thousands of years old already? They don't know.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  It's interesting how the archaeologists that have a, like, have skin in the game with an other theory resist that, and it takes a while. It's like with Gobekli Tepe, you know? Now, there's, um, investigations going on, archaeological digs nearby, and lo and behold, they're finding other things, which makes me feel like-

• 36:28Speaker 01

  All over the area.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, all over the place, of course. It didn't exist on its own.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Some kind of advanced civilization has neighbors.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Eleven thousand plus years ago.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Wow, that's so crazy.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  It's so weird, because we keep pushing the dates further and further back, like Graham Hancock always says, stuff just keeps getting older. And so, it makes you wonder, like, have we gone through something like this before, whether it's a natural catastrophe, or whatever it was? This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And with World Mental Health Day on the 10th, now's the perfect time to give it a try. In fact, don't even wait until the 10th, because all that stress you feel, it's not waiting around.

• 37:19Speaker 01

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• 38:03Speaker 01

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• 38:27Speaker 00

  Remember when we were kids, it was like the Lascaux caves were the oldest thing ever? I don't even remember-

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Where was that?

• 38:34Speaker 00

  In France. Remember the drawing of the bull?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Oh, right, right, right.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  I remember that from the history books.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  That's from that, um-

• 38:41Speaker 00

  In France.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Werner Herzog documentary.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Yes, it's a great one.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  Has he been on this show?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  No, I wanna get him on. I love that guy.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  He's the neighbor of my kids.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Well, I don't wanna say where he lives. People go find him, but that's pretty cool.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  In LA, so we'll track him down. He's my favorite documentarian.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Grizzly Man's one of my favorites of all time.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Grizzly Man is epic.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  It's-

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Have you seen Happy People?

• 39:06Speaker 00

  No.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  That's a great one, too.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Is that new?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  No, no, it's a few years old. It's Life in the Tiger, Happy People, Life in the Tiger. It's about these, uh, people that live in Siberia, off the Tiger River, and they're like the happiest people. And all they do is, like, hunt and fish and trap, and, uh, they get together, they have really strong community, they drink, and they're laughing, and they have, like, no mental illness. It's really weird, as he documents it.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  He has such- have you seen Little Dieter Needs to Fly?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  No.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  The only man rescued from Laos during the Vietnam War, and Herzog go- he's died since, Dieter, but Herzog goes with him back into the jungle.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, you're gonna love it. It's a treat that you haven't seen it yet. Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  That guy is such a world treasure.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, just his voice and, like, his perspective on everything. Just when you think, just when I think I know what he's going for, he takes you, like, on a complete left turn, and you're left, like, at least for me, thinking about the world in a completely new, original way.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, these caves in France, they thought that that was the- but that was really old, right? Wasn't that, like, thirty-plus-thousand-year-old drawings?

• 40:21Speaker 00

  I think maybe, Jamie, can check for us. I think they were, like, 7,000 BC, you know, so like-

• 40:27Speaker 01

  I think they were older than that.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Started in 1940 by four teenagers, closed in 63, all pings created around 17,000 years ago.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  Seventeen thousand, okay, yeah.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  That's it? God, I thought it was older.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  That's just a quick explanation.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  This is the Werner Herzog documentary? I thought they were, like, literal cavemen made it.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  Well, I mean-

• 40:51Speaker 01

  So that's only 17,000 years ago?

• 40:54Speaker 03

  That's what that says.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Interesting. God, I really thought it was a lot older than that.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  But then they come up with like the hand on the cave in Indonesia. I think that's 40,000 and...

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Believed to be 19,000 years ago. That's interesting. So at one point in time, they thought that was the oldest...

• 41:14Speaker 00

  When I was a kid, I remember that, like...

• 41:17Speaker 03

  It's not quite what it says. It says the painting for the site were duplicated with the same materials which were used to believe, like, which were used 19,000 years. That doesn't mean...

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  It could still be older.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Right. They knew that they used them 19,000 years ago, but they could have used them a lot earlier than that. Right, right. We don't have documents. Crazy stuff, though. Just imagine like, living back then.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  It is wild when you think about the underground bunkers now, and you ki- it kind of has this spooky echo as an archetype of...

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Hiding. Hiding from the dangers, yeah. Having a shelter and hiding from the da- the, the, the whole, that trope, that thought of a bunker is, you know, there's a lot of supposedly wealthy people, well, they are wealthy, but supposedly they have these underground bunkers. That's what you always hear. These rich people, these billionaires are setting up bunkers in New Zealand because they know something's coming, like, oh, Jesus. Right?

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Good luck getting there in time.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Right. Right. If the shit goes down and you happen to be in Hawaii and you gotta get to New Zealand.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  Also, your bodyguards are a lot stronger than you are.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Well, wouldn't you bring them with you?

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's gonna be every man for themself.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Well, wouldn't you have a, if you're gonna have that kind of money to make a, wouldn't you have a bunker that could house a few hundred people so that you could, you know, nobody gets insurrection in your movement?

• 42:45Speaker 00

  I mean, I suppose if you bring everybody's family, you have to have a lot of preparing for this. That's what really kept taking me back to those docu- the documents in the Defense Department about fear of infection creates anarchy.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  And insurrection, because this idea of like, fear of infection, people begin to, their mind actually begins to change in the studies under scarcity.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  And scarcity coupled with fear of infection, it's so visceral. It's like, it's as much of an archetype as the bunker, being infected.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Very, very different than being shot at. Right? You get the sense if you're, if you can get into the bunker, if you're being attacked with a physical weapon, okay, I'm safe now. Close the doors, make a fire. But with fear of infection, I mean, a biological weapon, or any pathogen from, is a living munition. It self-replicates, and it's got an incubation period. So then it a- right?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  So then you can be infected and not know it while it's incubating inside of your body, and then you infect a bunch of other people as well?

• 43:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we saw during COVID how aggressive people got, screaming at people for not wearing masks and, and, you know, that was, as far as pandemics go, fairly mild.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, fairly mild. Like, I mean, if you go with the CDC's 1% or your .1% of the ca- or, or, you know, the...

• 44:14Speaker 01

  It's perplexity.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  Right, perplexity's 1%, I mean, you're talking about a nothing burger compared to...

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Compared to pneumonic plague.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Okay, so pneumonic plague, and there are, you know, I mean, look, I also write in the book, and this has never been reported before, because I interviewed CIA officers who both debriefed the Soviet defectors and also people who chased WMD in the hands of terrorists during the war on terror. And I specifically didn't want to write that scenario because it's so loaded to go with like terrorist youth, use of a biological agent. But I give you little history lessons when I stop the drama, one of which involves an Al Qaeda terrorist that was captured. She's actually now in Texas in a mental institution for the rest of her life. Her name's

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Afia Siddiqui. She's an MIT-trained biologist, related by marriage to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Okay? And she was leading the Biological Weapons Program. This is according to the CIA officers...

• 45:17Speaker 01

  She was trained at MIT?

• 45:19Speaker 00

  She was trained at MIT, and then she went back to Pakistan. She was the first woman on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  How come they have her in a mental institute?

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Because they caught her. And then, this part is reported, they caught her and somehow, again, the air quote, somehow she got a hold of a Marines rifle and fir- and was firing at the FBI agents interviewing her. This is all public. And she was shot. They take her to the United States, gave her a trial, decided she was insane, put her in a mental institution. But what had never been revealed before my book is that in her handbag, she had plans to create a genetically modified pathogen that mixed rabies with chickenpox.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Think about that. Imagine airborne rabies. Rabies, like pneumonic plague, is one of the only other pathogens that has 100% death rate without countermeasures.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Oh. And rabies, like, when you see it in animals. I've never actually encountered a rabid animal in the, in the wild, as lo- as much as I know. But when you see them, they, they want to infect something else. They get hyper-aggressive. They want to bite you. So if they bite you, they give it to you, which is really crazy. Like, this, this disease makes them throw their own safety out the window and just go after people and try to bite them.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  I mean, it's like a, it's an, like, rabies is a si- like, now it's own ra- a rabid animal. You know, you think of it of, it's so visceral.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  It's gonna come at you with its infected saliva. I almost went with the rabies scenario because I, I always, in these scenarios, tie them to actual events that have happened, so that there's, so that readers don't go like, this is Annie Jacobsen's dystopian imagination. As much as they say, oh, she's following what, you know, science. This is science fact, not science fiction. And so when I learned about that plan for, to, for the genetic modification of rabies and chicken, airborne rabies, but then I thought...

• 47:30Speaker 01

  How far did she get along with this?

• 47:32Speaker 00

  That is classified, Annie, you know. But I did get a second person, David Reelman, who's the advisor to the president on bio-defense, to confirm with me that that was actually located in her handbag and caused serious concern.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Oh, now imagine if they never found her, they never caught her, and she completed that.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  I mean, it's really terrifying.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  It wipes out most of the country.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  And also just in the most horrific way. I mean, you know, like, having to, like, look at your pet and be like, is my pet rabid? It's just...

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Jesus, and they did catch it too?

• 48:06Speaker 03

  Another project.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Oh, she had another project?

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Yes, multiple projects, apparently.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  She had collected materials on viruses for biological warfare, and one of her projects is finding its way to infect America's poultry supplies with an antibody that would allow chickens to pass salmonella onto humans more easily. She later destroyed her work after suspecting Abu Lubab was hoping to double-cross her and turn her into the United States authorities.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  This is a long Wikipedia with quite a bit of twists and turns. I'm surprised it's not a movie. There's a lot going on.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. And that's one person that we caught. Now, that's not like, this is the only time they thought of that. This is the only person that they tried to recruit to do this kind of stuff. There's probably someone out there right now. Hence, your book.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  I mean, I interviewed this guy, very famous legendary CIA officer named Rolf Moat Larson, and he led the counter-WMD team, right? So he would go to places basically like, with a bunch of ground branch guys, CIA paramilitary guys behind him. He was kind of like the intelligentsia at the front, to try to negotiate with Al Qaeda weapons makers, biological weapons makers, and say like, you can't do this. It's gonna kill all of us. And he, he told me a couple stories, and I write them like history lessons in the book.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  Once he went to Sudan and met with the top biological weapons maker for Al Qaeda, and like, you know, it's just chilling. It's basically, you get the feeling like, that Rolf said, I got them to agree to stop temporarily.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Temporarily.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  Temporarily.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Sorry, Joe. This is the nightmare stuff.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  So what do they think that they're gonna do if they get into these bunkers? This is the thing. It's like, if society completely collapses and anarchy just sweeps the nation, and you've got cities on fire and people killing people and looting, eventually they're gonna run out of food. Eventually, there's gonna be no infrastructure. You've got no power. You've got no one who's taking care of the water. No one's taking care of the satellites. No one's taking care of anything. The cellphone towers are down. What are these people in the bunker gonna do? Are they gonna reinvent society?

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Well, that's the plan down the road, but before-

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Do they have that?

• 50:29Speaker 00

  They're- Part five of the devolution plan is called reconstitution.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Oh, Jesus.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  So they're gonna reconstitute the government. Like, rise again like a phoenix from the ashes. But before that, I also learned the government has issued, rather, the Pentagon has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its personnel. So they fan out across the states. But they cannot really handle the numbers of people who are actually gonna die pretty quickly. So instead, what their job is, is to protect the critical infrastructure. All that stuff you exactly mentioned.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  So they're just assuming that most people are gonna die?

• 51:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the quote. This is the exact quote from Colonel Tom Erhard, who ran catastrophic nuclear and biological war games at the Pentagon. For- Do you- Have you ever heard of a very famous guy? They called him Yoda at the Pentagon. He died like a couple of years ago at age 100. His name is Andy Marshall?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  No.

• 51:35Speaker 00

  He ran the Office of Net Assessment. Talk about a euphemism. Like, or like a cloaked- That's where they did all the war gaming. And Marshall, Andy Marshall, did this in the 70s, all the way through his recent death. And Tom Erhard worked for him. It's in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. So what Erhard told me is, in the event of a biological catastrophe, and by the way, that includes not just an attack, but an incident, and an incident means a lab leak, okay? So in the event of a catastrophic biological incident, there is very little you can do to protect the homeland. Only things you can do to mitigate extermination.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Of the human race?

• 52:21Speaker 00

  That's his quote.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Mitigate extermination?

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Mitigate extermination.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  So you wanna keep as many people alive as possible, but it's probably gonna be a very small amount?

• 52:30Speaker 00

  And it's probably just gonna be the 1.7 people with the gas mask, and a whole bunch of like Machiavellian solipses.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Can you imagine if our society had to be reinvented with only people that work in the government?

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Can you imagine?

• 52:47Speaker 00

  And-

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Some of the most incompetent, crooked people in the world, and that's the new society?

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Well, I have a feeling most of the bureaucrats would die, because I don't think they could, you know, take care of themselves, right? I think the people that would live would be those well-trained soldiers.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Well, that's not bad. That's probably a better scenario.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  But the other problem you're looking at is reproduction, because there's 17% females in the military.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  That's not good.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  That's not good. And then the other problem is that the other people who are left, that are not in the military, are- Imagine the skills you have to have to be able to like, deal with fear of infection, in a manner that you basically have to be able to, as it was said to me, kill people on sight. Like, not even worrying about weather. This is where it really feels like The Walking Dead, or, you know-

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  -an apocalyptic movie.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  28 Days Later was based on that. 28 Days Later was a lab leak.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Remember it was called Rage? It was something they were doing with chimpanzees, and chimpanzee bite somebody?

• 53:53Speaker 00

  That's how it opens.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  And it spreads.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  Those are great films. Those are great. Did you see the new one?

• 53:58Speaker 01

  No, I haven't seen the new one.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Oh, the new one? Parts one and two? I mean-

• 54:04Speaker 01

  There's parts one and two of the new ones?

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a two-parter?

• 54:07Speaker 00

  Two-parter. They released them like, six months apart.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  They're incredible. I mean, don't-

• 54:14Speaker 01

  I just get worn out from those kinda movies.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  I mean, it's a certain- You have to have a certain-

• 54:19Speaker 01

  They're so bleak.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  There's no happy ending.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  I don't- I mean, Joe, I'm an eternal optimist, believe it or not.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Are you really?

• 54:25Speaker 00

  I really am.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  That's crazy, considering your work.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  But I just figure all of this is a cautionary tale. And I also figure it's better to know than to be caught off guard.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Well, it's better to inform. And I think you do an amazing job of that. And I think you're a very important person in that regard. You inform people of these things that you really should be considering. That- I mean, your nuclear war book freaked a lot of people out, that were kind of, you know, nuclear war was in the back of their mind. You know, yeah, it's a possibility, but hey, we haven't done it. We dropped a couple of bombs during the World War II, and that's it. We're done with that.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  You know, you said something to me, last time we spoke, about the nuclear war book that really stayed with me. And it has an interesting coda. So you were like, Annie, I couldn't read nuclear war. It freaked out a lot of my friends. I can't read it. And then you explained why. And you said, I'm paraphrasing you, but you said, "I think about those people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they were just going about their daily life, and all of a sudden, they're incinerated." And that really stayed with me. And I thought about it. Here's the coda. The survivors are called habaksha. That's what they call

• 55:39Speaker 00

  themselves. It's like survivors of the nuclear bomb. So now, since it was 80 years ago, they're all like, 81 to 90-plus. And they were stigmatized throughout their youth, because the idea was, you're radioactive. You can't reproduce. You're sort of, you know, there's like, a malignant thing attached to you. This is what they told me. And I met them, and they- I was invited to Hiroshima to be the keynote speaker with the habaksha for the 80th anniversary of the bombing.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  What did they say the experience was like in terms of being maligned? Like, what was happening to them?

• 56:21Speaker 00

  Well, the sense I got was very much that they believed that was accurate. They had no other information. They had no other information, other than people telling them, you know-

• 56:35Speaker 01

  That they were radioactive.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Now, what was also interesting is, a couple of the younger people who don't remember, who were like infants, their mothers, like, let's say, one parent died, and another- So they're- One- The living parent would shield them from that by never telling them that they were habaksha. So then they had this whole other kind of realization later in life, when they learned. And some of- I mean, those stories were like, incredible, because you're learning about how, like, a parent's love for a child means not telling them what you think would make them feel stigmatized. But yet, you've- Them explaining

• 57:20Speaker 00

  to me that they felt that stigma throughout their life anyways, not knowing why.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  I never even would've considered that stigma. I would've considered survival's guilt, survivor's guilt, which people do have, if you're a part of a disaster, and you're one of the ones that lives.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  People get survivor's guilt. But I never would've thought of the stigma of being maligned as an infected, radioactive person.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  And Japan has such a different culture. I couldn't have imagined that either, until I heard it firsthand from the experience of the survivors. They sent some of them to an island.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  Like, banished, as if you're a leper.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Aye. How much is this Iran thing freaking you out?

• 58:08Speaker 00

  The war?

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  Look, I mean, when anyone starts a war, that's not necessary. That's the wrong word for it. But, you know, just like, this is the whole- It's just a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. It just seems to me like, the opposite of what the Department of Defense- It's why I continue to call the Department of Defense, by the way, because it still is in my mind, and certainly until Congress changes the name. You know, it's supposed to be for defense.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  So I think so, so much of what I have written about, all the wars since World War II, I've interviewed hundred or more people for each of my eight books, who have been in every war. And the big shift, for me, like, understanding a change in mindset was the Bush-Cheney administration starting the Iraq War. Like, I really believe that many of the problems we're experiencing today as a society stem from that. And that has to do with the fact of, all the soldiers that I've interviewed, there's a completely

• 59:23Speaker 00

  different perspective on the government from those who fought in the wars leading up to the War on Terror. And the people who, most of them, you know many of these people too, like, they're mad. They're really mad that they were used. That's a sense that I get. Now, not everyone, but a majority are very angry and feel used. And that is a fundamental warping of what the military is.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Without a doubt. And also, no clear way to resolve this, at all.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  It seems like our stockpiles are running dry. You know, we're- Bases are getting blown up by drones.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  I heard, you know, I heard Joe Kent, who was the number two at ODNI, who resigned, I heard him say a really interesting thing about the warrior class, that I hadn't- You know, when you just like, have all this information, but you didn't put something together, and then you hear it, and you're like, of course. And what Joe said was one of- This was in reference to Trump maybe saying there was gonna be, or someone in this administration saying there should be a draft. And everyone freaking out and saying like, that's, you know, that's outrageous. And Joe Kent's point was really interesting. He said, "There should be a draft, but not for reasons you think." And he said-

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Presently, America has a warrior class. And Joe Kent is in it, meaning, you know, these are like, don't have the exact statistic, 1%, less than 1% of families who are in the military. And he said, Kent said, you know, we socialize with one another, our kids socialize with one another, we go to school with one another, we go to war with one another, we talk together, we have parties together. And we know something about America that is completely foreign to all the other families. And it's, it's, there's something wrong with that. And I've really thought about that a lot since, and I agree with him.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  And his point about the draft was if everybody knew and experienced what we experience in our families, talking about war versus peace, wars would be looked at differently.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Instead of thinking, we should go to war, like a Lindsey Graham-type perspective, where there's no real skin in the game, he's not going to go get shot, no one he knows is going to go get shot. Yeah.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Makes sense.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  So that's kind of my answer, too. You know, and I, like, I'll see a headline that's like, "The war in Iran costs us XYZ billion dollars." And it's like, it doesn't even mention all the people dying, you know?

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  There's like 10, and, and yes, the Americans, but like, it's just, talk about misreporting.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Right, it's just talking about money, which is crazy.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  Which is crazy, which is crazy.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  And then also, the real problem is, it makes America an enemy, and it makes us less safe. Because America has done this thing, this unprovoked attack, and so now, they have a reason to attack back.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  It's, it's very like slippery, you know, it's like untrustworthy. I mean, I always go back to like, the way you behave with your family is the way that you should present to the world. Otherwise, you're being a hypocrite. And the idea that we're, we as a country are kind of like, you're not really sure what we're up to, and, and then it's changing, it's like radically changing. The pendulum swings so far from what one administration's, you know, list of really important things is to another. I mean, it must, from an outside perspective, it must be really schizophrenic-looking.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, to get back to your book, how many different countries do we know are involved in this kind of biological war research?

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  So, for starters, biological war is illegal. Biological weapons are illegal, unlike nuclear weapons, believe it or not, are perfectly legal for the countries that have them. Wrap your head around that. But everybody signed a treaty in 1972, called the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty, saying, "We will not make biological weapons, they are odious to the conscience of mankind." At that point, the Soviets signed the treaty, crossed their fingers behind their back, and made a ginormous biological weapons program that you talked about earlier, okay?

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  America allegedly destroyed her arsenal of, of biological weapons, which took 219 weeks to destroy, by the way. And not for another 20 years did we learn that actually the Soviets were running this biological weapons program, and we only learned it because of the Soviet defectors. The CIA had no idea, Defense Department had no idea.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  So, we had completely stopped all of that work?

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  According to the documents, according to anyone you interview, we had stopped biological weapons.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  What year was this whole?

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  Nixon made a declaration in 1969, like, we're just giving up our biological weapons program. And then everyone else followed suit, and the treaty came about in 1972.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  But the Soviets continued their work.

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  The Soviets not only continued, they just like, they like went bang on it. And they later called it their Manhattan Project.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  And weren't there bioweapons labs in Ukraine?

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  You're talking about recently?

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that the United States was involved in.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  Well, what there are, are there are biolog, there are biosafety labs. Okay, so your original question was, where are they around the world?

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  So, they're, they're illegal. But what isn't illegal, because this is a carve-out in the treaty, you can do research for prophylactic purposes, for medical countermeasures. That's the carve-out. So that's where we've gotten to gain-of-function, you see? Like, oh, we're just doing this for prophylactic purposes.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  That's how the DOD gets involved.

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  Okay. So, before 9/11, 9/11 factors into this, and so does Dick Cheney. Because before 9/11, America had two BSL4 labs, biosafety, level 4, that's the highest level. That's like, you saw the suits, the tubes, your arms are in the boxes, you're taking a shower, a chemical shower before you go in. America had two, one at Fort Dietrich, that's the DOD's lab, one at the CDC in Atlanta, that's the civilian lab. 9/11 happens, remember the anthrax attacks?

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  Never solved, thank you FBI. Dick Cheney personally is terrified of bioweapons. And he spearheads the efforts for this giant biological military industrial complex that then takes off and begins with billions of dollars pumped into gain-of-function-type research. And America goes from having two BSL labs to having 15. And the world follows suit. So there are 110 BSL4 labs around the world, including in countries that are at war.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  And this is all post-Bush administration?

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  Post-Bush administration. That is when it took off. That is when it took off.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  So, America has a hand in the blossoming of this problem, most certainly. And then when you find out that, so you think BSL4, okay, well, BSL3, that just must be like, you know, chicken pox. No. In the BSL3 labs, you can work with plague, anthrax, hantavirus, like, serious diseases that allegedly have cures. And so, you know how many BSL3 labs there are in the United States of America right now?

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  How many?

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  1,500.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  1,500.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  And around the world, there are 3,500. 90% of them have no guidelines for safety.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Did you hear about the story where there was a man in Vegas that had a bio lab in his garage?

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  In California.

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  In California?

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  Both, both, both.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Another one?

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  They're both, and they were seemingly linked.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. Possibly tied to California case, federal Chinese investigation.

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, wait till I show you what's at the bottom, too.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Oh, boy, Jamie, why are you doing this to me? No case appeared filed in state, federal court as of Sunday.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  Like, it's, and I didn't really see a follow-up.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  I haven't seen the dead mice, Jamie. What are the, what's with the dead mice there?

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  A thousand dead mice, there's vials, including HIV, malaria.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Well, the crazy thing is, the guy who they caught, they didn't arrest him. Like, there was an Israeli guy. So this says Chinese investigation, but one of them was a guy, who was an Israeli guy, who they caught, and they sent him away. He just, they didn't prosecute him, he took off.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  I mean, this stuff is so thinly reported, and it's always got like a giant sensationalist clickbait-type headline. And people read about it and know about it a little bit. And then, the real reality behind it, I think, gets completely lost, which is that, the bottom line is that the barrier to entry in the biological weapons field is so incredibly low, it's horrifying. Like, think about what you need to have a nuclear weapon.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  I mean, look at Iran right now.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  Okay, you have to have enriched uranium or plutonium, you have to have fissile material. Then, you have to have a weapon system, you have to have an ICBM or a submarine, or a B2 bomber. Nuclear weapons are tightly controlled by a nation's command and control structure. All subject matter experts I interviewed for this book expressed their serious concern that the barrier for entry is so low, that basically, given computational systems, AI-enabled bio, basically, a high school student with limited knowledge of biology can make a bioweapon in their basement.

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  Or in the Vegas apartment building.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Well, this guy had it in his garage and they caught him.

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  And what was he doing? Do we know?

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  I don't know. They referenced it as a storage facility and they said that, was it?

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  Obviously, yes. It said a storage facility.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it said not a laboratory, adding that the samples and equipment suggested no active work was happening there. But it says, I think the question is, why does somebody have these materials in a private residence? It's not a doctor, not a lab, not a licensed medical facility of any sort. This guy.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  And it's a great question, and I wonder what the answer is.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  I also think it was like an Airbnb or something.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  That's kind of like, it gets lost in the, who in the LLC who owned it? They said the guy who was running it doesn't own it.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  1,200 samples. Oh, God.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  And what was he doing? What was he doing and why?

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  I don't know, but I think they've released him. That's what's crazy. The guy in Vegas was released. Is that correct?

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  That's what I was trying to say. When I Googled that, I didn't really see a follow-up on like anything updated or new.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  I'm pretty sure they, I'm pretty sure the guy in Vegas was an Israeli citizen and he was released. So the question is like, what was he doing? And he was caught, but that's just one guy that was stupid and got caught. How many people are doing that? How many, are there sleeper labs all across the country?

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  Ori Solomon charges dropped, it says, on the property manager.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Whoopsies.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  Maybe it's just because he was just a property manager.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, no big deal. He didn't do anything.

• 1:12:08Speaker 03

  Without prejudice. Still faces criminal charge in Clark County for improper disposal of hazardous waste.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  But didn't he leave and go back to Israel?

• 1:12:15Speaker 03

  I mean, this is just, I'm looking at the.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  I think that was the allegation.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  He's due back in court on June 4th, which was two months ago.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I don't, that's the, I didn't see anything about it. I'll look it up. Yeah, nothing to see here. It says an Israeli citizen, right? Didn't it say that? Go back to, right, we just.

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  Israeli citizen on a non-immigrant visa is not allowed to possess firearms. Prosecutors say multiple guns were seized from his home.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Well, you gotta have guns if you've got plague.

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  You gotta look out for your, for your stockpile.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Guard your plague.

• 1:12:45Speaker 00

  But, you know, I stayed away from that kind of lone actor crazy because.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  I don't know if that's a lone actor.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  I mean, exact, you don't know.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

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• 1:15:20Speaker 00

  I mean, one of the problems of the over-politicization of everything is that it just seems like anything important becomes splatter and becomes secondary to some of these other concerns that seem to take headlines, right? Like, that should be a big story. And yet, all any of us ever heard was, did you hear about the crazy bio lab?

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  I can tell you that the bigger story is really, at least to my eye, you know, because this is another one, oh, thank God, nothing got out. Thank God, no one was infected. But the real issue is what happens if someone does get, what happens if a pathogen gets seeded in the community?

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  And an outbreak starts to move to an epidemic. And, you know, the, I write in the end of the book, Joe, the point is not panic. This is, of course, after I take you through like the worst dystopian nightmare ever. The point is pressure. Pressure to understand the threat, the labs around the world, the bureaucracy involved, all the different problems that would come up of mitigating the threat, so that you can be informed and also say like, wait a minute, something really needs to be done and needs to be looked at here. And instead, people are arguing about the most obvious thing in the world, to my eye. You know, what happened in the Senate yesterday? Like, that is pretty

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  obvious, what happened, what is being covered up. We were misled. And yet, all of this, I'm not saying to skip over it, you know, but it's, it's like, how much effort do we put on something without a resolution? That's what confounds me.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a really good question. And the fact that there's so many labs in this country and that they've all sprung up post 2001.

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  They moved that Plum Island lab, by the way, to Kansas. And it opened, it either just opened or it's about to open. It costs an extraordinary amount of money.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  And are they doing the same research?

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  Yes, yep. They moved it off of Plum Island and now it's in Kansas.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  Do you know anything about this alfagall tick, this Lone Star tick that gives people this allergy to red meat?

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  A little bit, a little bit, inasmuch that it's a parasite, which is different, you know, it's a bug, which is different than a germ. But I think it speaks to this idea that sort of there are natural things that are happening in our environment, and then there are also unnatural things. And the inability to differentiate between them or trust. Look, so much of all this has been about trust the science. And then, okay, we can't trust the science, unfortunately, around COVID. And we're all waiting for a reckoning around COVID. It's obviously not coming anytime soon. And in the meantime,

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  you have, you know, the lettuce outbreak, you have the alfagall, you have Legionnaires' disease from data centers in Europe. There's an influx of health concerns coming from Mother Nature herself. Here we are in this world of incredible science and technology. I mean, I talk to biotechnologists, who, by the way, really have a utopian take on this. Now, there is lots of money involved for them, but they really believe that they, that science is the answer and can be the answer to a lot of these problems. I was, I sat next to a guy at dinner a couple nights ago who told me that his company in San Diego

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  has a countermeasure for alfagall. I have no idea of verifying this, this just happened, but that the reason they can't get it through is because of insurance.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  You know, one of the treatments that's supposed to be very effective is acupuncture on your ears.

• 1:19:26Speaker 00

  On your ears?

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. See if you can find anything on that. I read about this, that there's like a 90% remission that one guy's been able to achieve through acupuncture on your ears. Just like, what do you, what? Like, hey, whatever works, but is this real? Acupuncture, acupuncture, specifically a specialized ear technique called Soliman Auricular Allergy Treatment, is being explored by integrative practitioners to help manage and potentially achieve remission for alfagall syndrome, though it's not yet a standard medically proven

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  cure. How it works for alfagall, targeted ear points, provider locates a specific, highly reactive electrical point on the outer ear associated with the alfagall immune response.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Acupuncture is so weird because it seems to be doing something.

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  Do you have acupuncture?

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  No, no. I had it done once, but the guy was a kook and I never went back.

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  I feel like acupuncture is so old and comes from such a long history of experiences. I have acupuncture and it just seems like anytime I go for anything, someone wants to give me drugs, which I'm not a fan of, I go to the acupuncturist. Sure, call it the placebo effect or call it whatever you want, but it certainly works for me.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  I don't necessarily think it's a placebo. I think a lot of that really old stuff, we like to dismiss because we like petroleum-based pharmaceutical drugs because that's what the doctor gives us as standard of care. I have a feeling there's a lot, lot of real, it's been around too long for them to just keep faking it.

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  I mean, if it works, it works.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, if this, if it turns out that this ear technique actually, yeah, puts Alpha-Gal in remission, maybe people will take that stuff more seriously and start using acupuncture for other, because I know a lot of people swear by it and I'm always, I just kind of raise my eyebrow like, all right, good luck. But maybe that's just me being ignorant. Definitely that's me being ignorant. A specialized ear acupuncture method called the Solomon Auricular Allergy Treatment shows a high reported success rate of about 85 to 96% for putting Alpha-Gal syndrome symptoms into remission. That's pretty crazy. Yeah.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know who did the study, how, what.

• 1:21:58Speaker 00

  I like it. I like that that's out there because I always feel like the acupuncturists are sidelined because they're not part of the medical insurance, military industrial complex.

• 1:22:09Speaker 03

  The small needle stays in your ear for three to four weeks.

• 1:22:12Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  It's not just like a treatment.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  It's secured with a small adhesive bandage.

• 1:22:16Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  Tiny little needle.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Hair thin, stainless steel needle. Huh.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  137 patient trial, it looks like.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  I wonder how, how, who fucking figured that out?

• 1:22:30Speaker 00

  Do you know anyone who's gotten Alpha-Gal?

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Yes, a good friend of mine. Yeah, he has it.

• 1:22:34Speaker 00

  And what, he's become deathly allergic or deeply allergic?

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it doesn't kill him, but it wrecks him. And so he got over it and started eating meat again and then he came back with a vengeance. Came back even worse than it was before. So it went into remission and then it came back. And, you know, he's really like tightened up his diet and done everything. One thing that really helped him was plasma foresis. Do you know what that is?

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  Mm-mm.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  It's a, they take your blood and they filter out the plasma and replace it. Yeah, I had it done. I had it done for fun, just to see what it feels like. And you get really tired the next day, that's one thing, but then the day after that, oh my God, you feel amazing. You feel like, like you've just lost 20 years of age. Like it really feels incredible. You have so much energy. It's really odd, whatever it is, it's doing something. But people that have autoimmune issues, people that have allergies, people that have a lot of different weird things, apparently they have some great responses from that. But my friend, you know, he struggled with a bunch of different things and getting his blood work and lab work done. He was also in the military and spent a lot of time overseas.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  And one of the things that he found out is PFAS, PFAS, these forever chemicals you get from plastics. He's got.

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  Burning plastics?

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Well, it's not just that, it's also just hot water. So like they take these bottles of, plastic bottles of water in cases and they've got them sitting out in the sand, in the sun, in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that's their water supply. So they're drinking this water that's been sitting out in the sun, that's leaching in these plastic bottles. So he found out that his PFAS levels were off the charts. And that's because, you know, he was deployed overseas all those years drinking that water.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  Did you see this about the PFAS chemicals? I just saw this come out, so I don't know how tested it's been, but someone's figured out a way to get almost all of it out.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  Out of water, but not your body, right?

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  That's how it's getting in mostly, so.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Right, but the problem is once it gets in your body, it's the problem. Scientists, because my friend still has, I mean, Evan has it in his body. Scientists have developed a clever new way to trap forever chemicals in water using nano-sized cages that lock onto PFAS molecules. Unlike current methods, this approach can capture short-chain PFAS, the hardest type to remove. Tests show that it can eliminate up to 98% of these pollutants and still work after multiple uses. The discovery could lead to more effective water filtration systems worldwide. Well, that's good news.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  Science, technology. Yeah.

• 1:25:10Speaker 00

  Dual use, it can be good, it can, it can help you or harm you or kill you.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  And there's some brilliant people out there that are figuring out ways to mitigate all the stupid things that we do, like that.

• 1:25:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. But people, you know, the, the whole new creeping up of new diseases emerging and sort of like into pockets of the country and feeling like the CDC or the HHS has no real lid on it or no real explanation, I think kind of seriously undermines the general wellness of the nation.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. Well, that was a big problem with COVID is that this feeling of the fear and anxiety affected people's immune systems as well. Affected their, their depression levels, affected their happiness, like just their overall feeling anxiety. I mean, how much of an effect, just the cortisol boost? All the different things that are happening that stressing out your body because of that pandemic that we don't even consider as being part of that experience.

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  I think also when you like, okay, can I give you an anecdote? Because this comes to mind about what you're saying is like that idea that there's uncertainty, okay? And uncertainty raises your cortisol levels. And even worse is when you're uncertain about something you're being told is true, but you're like, I'm uncertain. That is like even more anxiety making, right? One of the things that's stunning to me is how the CDC and the WHO, they're supposed to be these pillars of sort of the North Star of, you know, public health. At least they certainly were when I was a kid. You really looked up to these organizations, okay? COVID happens.

• 1:26:52Speaker 00

  This, the WHO and the CDC both issue, they're tweeting out three months into the pandemic. COVID, not airborne. Not is in capital letters. I have a copy of the tweet in the book because no one really believes this unless they see it, okay? COVID was airborne. COVID was airborne. That is how we all got COVID. It is, makes something incredibly pandemic prone, okay?

• 1:27:23Speaker 00

  Instead, they said, you get, remember, you get COVID from like touching surfaces? We're all like out buying Lysol. The CDC went into a partnership with Lysol. Lysol disappeared from the supply chain.

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  We now know, that's actually called fomite transmission. That's the scientific term for getting something off a surface. We now know that one in 10,000 cases of COVID was transmitted from a surface. How can they have gotten it so wrong is a question everybody should be asking. And the explanation, because by the way, the WHO didn't change, they kind of quietly about nine months later started saying COVID was airborne, same as CDC. They never said like, look, we're really sorry, we made a serious mistake and here's why. And I called both the CDC and the WHO looking for an explanation and asking why they never made an apology.

• 1:28:29Speaker 00

  And no answer. And I think that's like what we're talking about, talk about raising cortisol levels.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:36Speaker 00

  You know, when your institution is completely wrong, and by the way, I don't think it was nefarious. They literally didn't know, or they had their panel of experts disagreeing to such an extent that they just went with not airborne as opposed to airborne.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Well, it does weird you out that they were in a partnership with Lysol.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  I had to report that in the book because that is.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  You just start thinking about profit motives.

• 1:29:03Speaker 00

  I mean, if I had to guess, it was convenient to have a partnership with them. I don't have any reason to believe that they were like, let's say it was fomite transmission and partner up with Lysol. But I, certainly if you're Lysol, you're gonna probably go, hey, guys, let's partner together. But, you know, it disappeared from the supply chain. I remember trying to buy Lysol, not being able to at Target.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  Well, you remember how much hand sanitizer was everywhere? Everyone was squirting that stuff. Now it turns out hand sanitizer is just not good for you.

• 1:29:36Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And I still see people using hand sanitizer all over the place, bottles of it, like in corporate places. It's really bad.

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, well, your skin is an organ and you're taking this stuff that just nukes all of your skin flora. And you're just wiping your hands with it and rubbing it all over. You're like, that's not good. There's nothing good about that. Wash your hands, fucking soap, use some soap or not. Don't worry about it as much.

• 1:30:05Speaker 00

  It seems like the common sense part of health is kind of gone out the window. I saw this article the other day, which was talking about how kids are, do you remember like? I went to a pla, I grew up in rural Connecticut. And like the playground was like dirt, right? There were like monkey bars, dirt, you know what I mean? You were like, you got dirty. I would like.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  It's good for you.

• 1:30:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. And now it's like, you know, fake, whatever that stuff is.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  Plastic, after turf, yeah.

• 1:30:34Speaker 00

  And this scientific study that I came upon when I was looking, when I was working on this was like, that actually that dirt is really good for you. Right? Like, surprise, surprise. We've evolved.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:47Speaker 00

  We have evolved by, you know, dealing with germs.

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  Well, that's why kids are always putting things in their mouth and touching things. Like, it's actually probably good for them to be exposed to all these different bio, bio things, these different, you know, whatever it is, bacteria and germs, but strengthens your immune system.

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  It's, it's kind of common sense, too.

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  You know? Like, the pacifier rule, you know, when you're a new mom and it's like, if it fell on the floor for like, I mean, it's kind of gross, but three seconds, then it's fine, right? That one's probably not so good.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  Well, a certain amount of exposure does strengthen your immune system. And kids that are just living in these completely sterile environments, you gotta think that they have an atrophied immune system, because their immune system's not having to battle this stuff. We're just, we're terrified of what we don't know. And that's part of the problem with having bad experts, or experts that have really flawed approaches.

• 1:31:42Speaker 00

  I mean, that's what was so interesting, writing this book, because I learned so much about biology and about physiology, right? Like, we all deal with disease so incredibly differently. There is not a set, you know, pathogen A impacts people differently. And why there isn't more of that, why people don't lean into that Mother Nature mystery more, and I'm talking about public health officials, I don't understand. Because what has happened, I see in society, is it's created this fracture, where you're

• 1:32:20Speaker 00

  either following a sort of set of scientific data, which just came from a one lab or one group of scientists. You're either following that, or you're, you're somehow having an alternate narrative that is actually like somehow harmful. And it couldn't be more the opposite.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:43Speaker 00

  It couldn't be more the opposite. And when the shit hits the fan, you need a kind of unity among people. You need a sense of like, okay, well, we all disagree, and we all have different immune systems, but what's best for the kind of greater, the collective?

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:00Speaker 00

  And that's just gone now. That is completely gone. And I find more than anything that people, the Fauci hearings, in point. Like, instead of being like, hmm, maybe I need to change my mind about this, people are like, well, if it serves my side, I'm gonna go louder. And if it doesn't serve my side, I'm gonna move on to something else.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've seen people talk about what, a travesty, bringing him in front of the Congress and having him questioned like that, and how much good he's done. I've seen people like making these statements online, like, what, what are you seeing that I'm not seeing? Because I'm not seeing that. I'm seeing someone who doesn't want to tell the truth. And someone whose emails show a completely contradictory version of what happened versus what he's publicly stated before, including when he was testifying before, under oath. So, he really should be charged with perjury. But because of this whole 10-year immunity thing that he got, he doesn't have to worry about any of that.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  Which is also weird, because the immunity, the, the pardon is supposed to protect you from being prosecuted, but then you're no longer supposed to have the Fifth Amendment.

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• 1:35:50Speaker 00

  Yes. I mean, those legal things will play out. They will take a lot of time, you know? And that is, that will go on. What I also want to know is, because none of these things happen in a vacuum, right? And it reminds me a little bit of that phrase, you know, when the rats jump off the Titanic, right, as it was sinking? Because I have a little different experience. I watch different individuals, certainly in the news, carefully of like, who's changing? Because I just want to learn from it. I don't report it. I'm just eyeing it. And I'm seeing people kind of decide, oh, maybe now I'll say a little more about Fauci, right? Because I do think that people end up having a, they, they will go where the collective is going, right?

• 1:36:35Speaker 00

  If their party starts to turn, okay? And because I don't have, write about politics at all, I, I'm not involved in this, but it's, observationally, it's interesting to me, but for this reason in particular, is that, why was Fauci in charge? Who, there are other people who are responsible for letting him be in charge. Like, having studied the bureaucracy of what happens in a pandemic, in a biological incident, which this was, there, there's no reason that he was in charge. There's not doctrine that put him charge, in charge. It was kind of like a group, okay, he'll be in charge.

• 1:37:16Speaker 00

  Really, the person in charge is the Secretary of HHS. That is the person in charge. In fact, Joe, I was invited to the White House last week, right? They asked me to come and bring some copies of Biological War scenario. I went.

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  Did you meet with Trump?

• 1:37:35Speaker 00

  No, I didn't. I met with HHS. I met with the Chief Technology Officer of HHS. And they said in their original email, you know, we're the ones that would be in charge in the event of this kind of a thing, which I know from having reported it. So, they're in charge. Why did Fauci get to take the torch?

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  Why do you think?

• 1:37:58Speaker 00

  I don't know. But it should be looked at. In other words, he, yes, we all know that he was in charge, and he was always, but what I don't understand is in a billion, actually trillion dollar, HHS, by the way, has a budget that's twice the size of the Defense Department. Twice the size of the Defense Department. And so, and it defaulted to Fauci, who was head of NIH, then retired, and then he was just chosen as like, the president's lead medical counsel, or medical professional. So, in other words, a group of people put him into that position. Who are they? Why?

• 1:38:43Speaker 00

  What do they have to say about this?

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:48Speaker 00

  Do you see?

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm sure part of it was just they needed someone to take the reins, and he was more than willing to do it, and probably confidently stated how he would handle it, and what we're gonna do, and how to go about it.

• 1:39:01Speaker 00

  And didn't those people also have an opinion? Like, what if they saw the Jon Stewart episode where, you know? Like, even if they didn't have an opinion before, why didn't they have an opinion after? And why, why did everybody just fall into line like sheep? That's really more interesting to me at this point. In addition to the individual being held responsible for, obviously, misleading the public and creating a conspiratorial situation, conspiring is simply two or more people working to conceal the truth.

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:37Speaker 00

  It's an actual conspiracy.

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's a weird thing, too, that people resist the term conspiracy, and they think it's foolish.

• 1:39:46Speaker 00

  It's a legitimate term. I mean, I think when people call other people conspiracy theorists, they should just say they have an alternative narrative.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:53Speaker 00

  That's all that is. But an actual conspiracy is a legal term.

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  Well, not only that, there's a huge amount that you can point to in history, where there were really people conspiring. Huge amount of stories.

• 1:40:06Speaker 00

  And the reason why it's legally, you know, it's a really difficult situation, and it needs to be looked at, is because one person, you know, it can keep a secret, right? But when multiple people are involved, and a conspiracy is involved, you are actively working as a group to mislead. And then it becomes easier, more powerful, more effective. And so, those other scientists, you know, we now know on the record that there were a dozen scientists that Fauci looked, looked to, to give him information about lab leak versus wet market. 10 of them went with lab leak. Two of them leaned toward...

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  Natural spillover.

• 1:40:52Speaker 00

  Natural. Fauci wanted it to be natural spillover. You know, that's where you could say then there began. And again, I'm just talking legal terms. I'm not a lawyer, but like they began to conspire to change the story, right? Just look at the numbers.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:08Speaker 00

  Look at the numbers.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:10Speaker 00

  And so what about that? You know, because I think if you're just gonna have a single fall guy, you're really not going to be doing much for the future to have people, you know, a group of people say, you know, I don't want to be part of this conspiracy. Because that's an important individual stance that can be taken by many people. And we see that among, you said you have friends who don't want to kind of take a position because they don't want to be associated with that group or that group. Well, you know, if it starts in the center and there's responsibility for the group, I think that makes people think more open mindedly in the future.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  Well, the problem was these people's career depended upon them toeing the line. And if they stepped outside of Fauci's jurisdiction and power, they were fucked.

• 1:42:04Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  The real problem. And, and he clearly did that to people like Jay Bhattacharya and all these different people that got kicked off of Twitter and maligned, people that were like serious experts that disagreed with a lot of different aspects of the pandemic.

• 1:42:17Speaker 00

  I mean, people's, they, they attempted to ruin people's careers.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:21Speaker 00

  I mean, it's so bizarre that it comes around full circle. And now the people whose career you tried to ruin has your job. I mean, that's like a cycle of revenge that is great. You know, or Bhattacharya, I mean, that's great, like for, for revenge TV, but it's not great in a democracy.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  Well, we're fortunate that it turned out that way, but it didn't have to. I mean, if Kamala Harris had won, it wouldn't have. It would have been a totally different administration. And it would probably have been the same people that were there during the Biden administration. Plus, and it's weird that the term conspiracy theory became a pejorative really during the Kennedy assassination, because there was a bunch of people that didn't buy it. And they got maligned, they got labeled as conspiracy theorists. So then that's when that term became this thing that you would apply to kooks. Cause a conspiracy is a real thing.

• 1:43:14Speaker 00

  It is.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  A conspiracy theorist, it's like saying, I'm a murder theorist. Oh, murder. Get out of here, there's no murder. You're a murderer. When was the last time you saw murder? Have you ever seen a murder? Shut up. Why are you worried about that? It's really kind of the same thing, because people 100%, like you could point to Enron, you could point to the weapons of mass destruction thing in Iraq. You, there's a lot of conspiracies that have proven to be a group of powerful people who conspired to mislead people.

• 1:43:42Speaker 00

  It's a serious charge. And when they take down mafia bosses, they take them down on fraud, racketeering and conspiracy.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, it's just a natural thing that people do to protect their own interests or to make money or to hide a crime or whatever it is. It's normal.

• 1:43:59Speaker 00

  It's, it's interesting. If you change it around and you say they were conspiring, it doesn't have the same stink. Right? Which is essentially what that group of scientists were doing. They were conspire, we now know from documents

• 1:44:14Speaker 00

  that we have seen revealed by the Senate in the past couple of weeks, that this group of scientists were conspiring to mislead the public.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:44:24Speaker 00

  That is, just if you keep it simple on that and you even take the names out, that is a serious, and then you might say, wait, what, what were they conspiring about? Oh, a pan, the origin story of a pandemic, which killed all these people, you know, deprived kids across America of education, normal education for several years, ruined businesses and kept people from seeing their loved ones.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  There was also a conspiracy to terrify people, to make it seem like the disease was more deadly than it was. They knew that the infection or the death rate was much lower than what they're proclaiming. They also knew that it wasn't dangerous for kids. And yet they kept, kept saying that kids are dying. They kept saying kids are gonna die, everyone's gonna die. They, they wanted us to be scared, which is really terrifying. It's a big part of it. Like, how much could have been changed? How much could that pandemic, how much different would it have been if that wasn't the case? If, if we had approached it the way we understand COVID now? And if they had said, listen, one of the big things is your immune system. And America needs to be aware that we have very nutrient poor diets, a lot of us.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  We're not taking care of ourselves. And ironically, the thing is, they wanted you to isolate and stay indoors. Well, outside is how you get vitamin D. You get it from the sun. That's the best method of getting vitamin D. And it's actually good for your immune system to be outside. So you're supposed to be taking care of yourself, it's supposed to be eating vitamins and nutrients. And how many more people would have survived if they had just did that? How much lower would that death rate have been if they had promoted the use of vitamin D along with K2 and magnesium, all these different things, like people need to exercise, need to drink more water, be more hydrated, take care of yourself, get sleep? All these things affect your immune system. And then on top of that, alcohol consumption went way up during COVID. Cause people were locked up at home and they were just getting hammered all the time.

• 1:46:23Speaker 00

  I mean, the whole thing, like, it was a real disaster when you think of, it was a catastrophe. The way it was handled.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  It certainly was a financial catastrophe for small businesses and restaurants.

• 1:46:35Speaker 00

  But do you find that people just like, sort of, it's like denial?

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  Memory hold it?

• 1:46:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of people that don't want to think about it because it was so weird. Like, I, every now and then, you know, I watch a lot of fights for my job and because I love it. But I'll watch fights that took place during the pandemic and you see all the corner people with masks on and they're screaming with masks on. They pull their mask down and they're yelling out instructions and they have to pull their mask back up. It's so weird to see a bunch of people just walking around with masks on. It's so, that to me is, that, that's a great encapsulation of how chaotic that scene was. Cause the mask didn't work at all. So they weren't doing anything good for you. But yet everybody had to have one. And you had to show that you were on the right side by wearing a mask.

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  I sent a video to a friend of mine, um, the other, we were group chat the other day of this really kooky, left wing group that demands masks at all their gatherings. And they had, you know, like boxes of masks, they're still, they're all wearing masks and they're talking with masks. And then there's this left wing martial arts class that I follow on Instagram and they do their martial arts with masks on. So they're training, they're doing jujitsu with masks on. Like, this is hilarious. This is so crazy, but they're just committed to it. And I say, what I've always said is that the mask is the left wing MAGA hat. It's a MAGA hat. It's just for, to let people know that you're a progressive, you're a leftist. I'm gonna wear a mask everywhere.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  Instead of wearing them in these big meetings that they're doing, they're wearing them when they're gathering. It's like, what? What is this? They're speaking with masks on. So they're on a stage, nowhere near people with a mask on, having, speaking into a microphone with a fucking mask on in 2026. So it's like, there's people that are like, you know, those people that didn't want to admit that the war was over and they were all like the Japanese guys.

• 1:48:36Speaker 00

  They found them in the hole.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what they're like. They're like, we're not giving up. This is, the war is still going on. Like COVID is still a real thing. And there's people that have like TikTok channels where they're constantly talking about masking. It's important to mask.

• 1:48:49Speaker 00

  So I went into the LA County Department of Building and Safety a month ago. And they had a sign that said, we know the mask mandate is over, but we strongly encourage you to wear a mask.

• 1:49:03Speaker 00

  True story.

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  Well, that's so crazy because what is the name of this organization that you went to? Was the building?

• 1:49:09Speaker 00

  Building and Safety, LA Building and Safety. Like where you have to go if you're getting a permit to do something.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  Experts. And how do they not know the data on masks? Because the data on masks is pretty clear. They don't work, they weren't effective. So if they don't work and they didn't stop the spread, the transmission or the infection rate, why are you encouraging masks?

• 1:49:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  It's because you're encouraging an ideology. That's what you're doing.

• 1:49:35Speaker 00

  So one of the guys I interviewed for the book, Admiral Brett Girard, really interesting guy. He was number two at HHS during the pandemic. And do you remember when the cruise ship happened? This was like, okay, remember that? The super spreader event?

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:49:52Speaker 00

  So Girard, really interesting guy, like first guy in a tiny town in Texas that goes to Harvard. He's a pediatrician, he's seen like kids die. He became head of DARPA bio scientists, like has this very interesting career. Really stand up guy. He did a lot of interviews with me trying to help me understand this. So, and I was asking him about masks. So after that cruise ship was quarantined, there were 300 and some odd Americans on it that needed to be repatriated. Girard sends like two top level infectious disease experts in biohazard suits on military planes to bring them all back. Okay, at this point, they don't know whether, how deadly it is.

• 1:50:35Speaker 00

  This is like a couple of weeks into the pandemic. They come back, they're in, they're quarantined at a military base in Texas. And Girard, trying to like ease public fear, because he's that guy. Like he did not want people to be afraid. He is seen in this news report, all the, all the cruise ship people are like behind the fence, in this chain link fence, because they're quarantined. And Girard is like 15 feet over there, talking to them. And he doesn't have a mask on. And this is when the first idea of the masks came out. And I asked him and I said, why didn't you have a mask on? And he said, well, first of all, masks, it's not just that masks don't work. It's that you have to be trained properly.

• 1:51:20Speaker 00

  Like a mask can work if you have an N95 and it's put on your face and fitted to your face. And it works for 15 minutes. That's what he said. And he said, I have a unique nose and facial shape, so the mask is never gonna work on me. So I just stood 50 feet away. Okay? This is the number two at HHS. And I said, why didn't you tell us all that? Like, okay, first of all, it's a little levity. You know what I mean? Like that the number two guy in charge.

• 1:51:52Speaker 01

  Has a big nose.

• 1:51:54Speaker 00

  Right? And that he's the first guy to admit it and that the mask.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  What was his answer?

• 1:51:58Speaker 00

  He, well, his answer, why didn't he tell him that? Oh, he said, I'm paraphrasing, but he was like, you know, it was, it was the equivalent of like orders from top down, don't argue with what we're trying to accomplish. I mean, that was essentially what it is. And when I asked him more about that, you know, it's like we had so much on our hands that we were trying, like, he specifically was trying to deal with 300 quarantined people. And trying to prepare, you know, he also had people that were dying in Japan, like the elderly on the ship that couldn't get brought back. And so I got the sense from

• 1:52:42Speaker 00

  him, he's like a very dedicated public servant, in my opinion. And I could see from interviews with him, in real time, you're dealing with so much incredible, intense responsibilities. What I take issue with, after all the fallout, and what I see from Fauci, for example, is that, and again, this is just my opinion, but it seems to be that there are people who are actually really dedicated public servants, who, like, are trying to find a solution, filling the shoes that they are in. And then there's others who are looking maybe more for personal gain, as you said, the money, the power, the prestige. And so

• 1:53:26Speaker 00

  I think one of the most disheartening things that have come out of the reveals of the Senate, to me, is like, somebody like Dr. Fauci, you know, suggesting himself for these million-dollar awards.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41Speaker 00

  At a time when people aren't even able to see their dying grandmother.

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:47Speaker 00

  And even though it's less legal, it's more, it speaks more to, are you kidding me?

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  The motivation.

• 1:53:57Speaker 00

  Are you really kidding me?

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  Who are you really?

• 1:53:59Speaker 00

  You know, like-

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  You have your staff campaigning for you to get these huge awards.

• 1:54:02Speaker 00

  And I find it really, because, you know, there was a review of the New York Times, in the New York Times of my book. And, you know, they actually gave, lo and behold, they gave me this book a great review, like, you've got to read it. But there's one thing I, this is the reviewer said, there's one thing I disagree with Annie Jacobsen about. She seems to think that, like, the government is actually filled with good guys. I'm preparing, I'm paraphrasing that. But I do believe that, Joe, because I have interviewed so many individuals for all eight of my books, more than 100. And maybe it's just the people that I enjoy interviewing, and I know how to, like, you know, avoid the sycophants, if you will, or the people who are in it for the wrong reason. But I feel like there

• 1:54:47Speaker 00

  are extraordinary number of people in our military, in our State Department, in the intelligence community, who are actually really capable people, doing their job under extraordinary circumstances.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  I agree with that. I think if that wasn't the case, we would live in total, complete chaos. I think it takes just a few people that have power, and that become tyrants, that run things the way Fauci did, that can ruin it for all the good people. If you think about those other 10 people, imagine if they got to vote, the 10 people that didn't think that this was a natural spillover, that thought it was a lab leak. If they got their say, and they put that out there, and we got to investigate that very early on. Well, you know, Fauci was like, I asked all these experts, and it's their consensus that it was most likely a lab leak. Okay, well, then you have a totally different narrative.

• 1:55:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  But that's not who he is. The kind of person that wants that kind of power, and wants that kind of influence, and has their staff chasing after these million-dollar awards. That's the kind of person he is. And unfortunately, those are the type of people that become powerful. Those are the type of people that want to be president. Those are the type of people who want to be senators. Most people are good people in everything. Most plumbers are good people. Most electricians, most teachers are good people. It's just, it doesn't take much. It just takes one bad cop, and everybody hates cops.

• 1:56:15Speaker 00

  I couldn't agree with you more. And that's why I think that it's really unfortunate that all of the emphasis goes to one person, and the whole party then either vilifies or puts that person on a pedestal, when you've got all these other people who are really busting their chops.

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  So when you went to the White House, and they wanted to talk to you about your book, did they ask you questions, like, what should we do? What is your advice? What have you learned? What were those kind of questions?

• 1:56:46Speaker 00

  I mean, so, they didn't ask me those yet, because I was bringing them copies of the book right before it published.

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:56:56Speaker 00

  Right? So they hadn't read it yet. But what was interesting, it was like this strange confluence of events, because I also got asked to the Senate. And I thought it was going to be about biological war. It was like a group of nonpartisan senators who wanted to talk to me about the nuclear war book. And that was a different situation. They had read the nuclear war book. It was very impactful, Joe, in, you know, not just national circles, national, national, national security circles, but international security circles. I was invited to the Vatican to speak to the Cardinals, because they were preparing something for the Pope on nuclear war. I was invited to speak at the United

• 1:57:36Speaker 00

  Nations. And this is not meant to boast as much as it's meant as a, like, what I think is interesting here is I am a narrative storyteller. I'm not a policymaker. I'm not a government official. But what I can do, or what I try to do, is tell you an interesting story and get your attention. And so if my storytelling is getting, this is what I was told at the United Nations, for example, the lead diplomat from Austria on the new treaty said to me, Annie, your book, Nuclear War, did something that we, subject matter experts, have forgotten

• 1:58:17Speaker 00

  to do, which is just make sense to regular people.

• 1:58:23Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:58:24Speaker 00

  And when things become rarified, and there's only the esoteric leaders making decisions, and we've spent our conversation talking about how flawed some of these people are, that's like bad decision-making. And I think what, what the, the positive part of all of this would be like, and I know it sounds Pollyanna-ish to say, information is king, knowledge is king, but like, it is. Because if you have a bit more information about a subject that seems really threatening, I think you can make better judgments about what's going on.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  Most certainly. So when you gave these people this book, and they got a hold of it, did you have a timeline of returning to them and discussing with them some of the subjects?

• 1:59:14Speaker 00

  Well, see, this was last week, Joe. I mean, this was literally last week.

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  And did they ask you any questions about?

• 1:59:22Speaker 00

  They just said, we want to read your book, because we want to, we're thinking about policy. That's how it was said.

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

  So you just brought them the book, and that was it?

• 1:59:30Speaker 00

  I said, I'd be delighted to come.

• 1:59:31Speaker 01

  How long was the meeting?

• 1:59:32Speaker 00

  I got a tour of the EEOB, and, you know, walked over to the White House. It was very interesting.

• 1:59:39Speaker 01

  And it was a short meeting?

• 1:59:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:42Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, at least you got it into their hands.

• 1:59:44Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. When you're, when you started this versus when you ended the book, how much did it change your perspective?

• 1:59:53Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, like I told you, I am an eternal optimist, but this is very frightening. I mean, nuclear, at least you have the sense of, if it happens, we're all going out in the flash. That's what I learned from nuclear, right? And that quote from Nikita Khrushchev about nuclear weapons, where he says, he wrote, actually, he said this to JFK, I believe, where he said, "The survivors would envy the dead." I found that quote to be applicable to biological war, not nuclear war. We're all going to be dead, right? But biological

• 2:00:30Speaker 00

  war is very, very sinister because of the malevolent nature involved. And when I found a document in the Defense Department's declassified documents about a threat spectrum of WMD, that was sort of the icing on the cake. So it's like, it shows the threats on a scale, nuclear weapons being the most destructive, by far. But very close second was biological weapons. And even more unnerving is it says, "Biological weapons are the greatest overall threat."

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  What's really scary is that no nation has really implemented them on a wide scale.

• 2:01:25Speaker 00

  You mean, you mean ever used them?

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, but the lab leak is the, look, there need, there is a treaty. Number two at the State Department, former Mallory Stewart, said to me, there is no enforcement in the treaty. And that's what, that's what you need to have. When you have, if, if the attention could be brought on how dangerous these labs are and how dangerous it is that people may be doing genetic engineering under the guise of prophylactic engineering, when in fact, they're doing really dangerous things. If you have a treaty outlawing that and everybody's agreeing to allow for transparency, that's what treaties really do. It's not just a handshake. It needs an enforcement.

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  Right, but you were talking about the treaty that we had where Russia just was like, yeah, we'll sign it.

• 2:02:14Speaker 00

  That was in 1972. So in other words, the nuclear treaty allows for us to go into the facilities of the other nuclear and armed nations, not North Korea. And well, now the treaty's fallen by the wayside, but we could look at them and we could look at their weapons and they could look at our weapons. And it limits, you know, certain number of warheads. And more than anything I learned from subject matter experts about the treaties is that what it does is it creates back channels, right? It creates dialogue between adversaries and enemies. Like here, I begin the book with an explosion at the Vector Lab, Russia's BSL4 lab in Siberia.

• 2:02:59Speaker 00

  And the reason, where there is an accident and then the pathogen gets out. And the reason I do that is because there actually was an explosion at the Vector Lab in 2019. And it was in a, in a building that nothing got out. But what the subject matter experts told me was that in 2019, we, the Americans, had friends, had a friendly relationship with scientists, Russian scientists in Vector. So when it happened, everyone was on the phone, not just the red phone at the State Department, but their own phone or WhatsApp, saying to the scientists, hey, what's the skinny over there, you know? And you could kind of get a sense of the level of danger.

• 2:03:45Speaker 00

  Because in the event of a, of an accident, you could contain something in 24 hours. But if nobody's talking, there's no containment. And the situation right now with America just like pulling back from, you know, essentially its allies and from, with a real de-emphasis, I certainly feel, on diplomacy, that opens up a really dangerous situation when you're not talking to anyone in the event of an accident.

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  Do you think that they're going to make any changes based on what you wrote about? Did you get a sense of that, that they're willing to make changes?

• 2:04:27Speaker 00

  Those were some of the discussions and I'll be like, like more at the Senate. I mean, one of the issues, this is where nuclear and bio kind of could align, I was told, in terms of future treaties, right? So one of the concepts on the table, if we get into a new nuclear treaty, is something called no first use, NFU. And America has never agreed to say it will never use nuclear weapons first. Interestingly, it's never said that. We have to reserve the right, which is crazy because what the whole point of deterrence is we'll never use them, okay? But we have never said, said that.

• 2:05:08Speaker 00

  China, however, has said, we will, we will, China has declared NFU, no first use. So given what happened in COVID in China, a situation could be imagined whereby a treaty involving weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and bio, could entwine somehow, like, oh, these are the two greatest threats. These are the two greatest existential extinction level threats, potentially, that concern all of us. So let's get into a treaty that involves both of these weapons of mass destruction.

• 2:05:48Speaker 00

  China, you have said no first use on nuclear. How about, you see? And then things become a bit of an exchange. And so that's where you can get information.

• 2:06:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:01Speaker 00

  These are diplomats doing their job. Maybe the public isn't going to learn the ins and outs immediately, but we might learn later.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  It's, like I said, you always freak me out. Every time I talk to you, it's like some new thing that I have to think about for months on end.

• 2:06:22Speaker 01

  I wanted to talk to you about your Area 51 book. Because in the time since you released that book, when we first talked, a lot has changed. And, you know, what is your take on all these, you know, UAP disclosure videos and leaks and the things that the government has trickled out slowly? Most of the people in the UFO community are very, like I said, the UFO community with air quotes, are very unsatisfied by that stuff. But at least there's some information. It's being, it's sort of changed the tone in the zeitgeist of what this subject is. It's no longer this thing that you are afraid of talking about because you don't want to be labeled as a fool.

• 2:07:06Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 2:07:08Speaker 00

  I mean, what is my position on UFOs in general or the community around UFOs and the changing?

• 2:07:17Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, UFOs in general. What's your position on that?

• 2:07:22Speaker 00

  So my position is, my position has never changed, despite all the stuff that has come out, because my perspective is limited to my experience writing the Area 51 book and knowing and talking to firsthand people who were really clear with me, and I looked at the documents, about the CIA's deception campaigns, starting in the 1950s with the U-2, to use the UFO phenomenon, which was just taking off in the 50s, as cover for UFO, for U-2 flights and then later the A-12 OX cart flights. So, you know, Colonel Slater, who ran Area 51, would tell me about, you know, they would

• 2:08:05Speaker 00

  run, they would run a U-2, which was flying at 70,000 feet. At the time, nothing could fly at 70,000 feet. People would see it. It has these really, really long wings. Looks like a giant flying X in the sky. People would say, I see a UFO. And they would kind of say, ooh, that might have been a UFO. Like that would be the, and Colonel Slater knew about that. So does that mean every UFO sighting since 1950 was a U-2 flight? Of course not. Of course not. But I am aware of that use of the phenomena as cover for the CIA.

• 2:08:46Speaker 00

  And that led to a lot of research and reporting and other information for me about how the CIA uses deception campaigns. And so I have never changed my position on that. I also have a lot more information, which is probably a whole other podcast, about all that reporting I did. But maybe the best analogy for me, and listen, I never, I know a lot of the people in that UFO community, they've, I've had many conversations with everyone from Jacques Vallée to Hal Puthoff. But for me personally, so after having taken a trip to Africa recently to study predatory animals, I got really into following trail cams on X. Do you know about this?

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:09:31Speaker 00

  You don't know about this?

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:09:33Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, there, there are cameras all over the world set up on trails. So I have like, I follow like lions and leopards and, you know, like all these animals that you would never, bears, moose, deer, you gotta follow them. It's incredible.

• 2:09:49Speaker 01

  Well, I do see some trail camera footage because I'm a hunter.

• 2:09:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:09:53Speaker 01

  I follow a bunch of hunters on Instagram. When I see trail cam footage, like, there's a bunch of trail cam footage, like mountain lions attacking elk and things like that, which is very fascinating. This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is fee free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees and thousands of fee free ATMs. But here's the real kicker. If you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself.

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• 2:12:03Speaker 00

  Okay, so this is my point. So, so in my algorithm, my X algorithm, it's great because on top of like nuclear weapons and biological, I have like leopards and lions and bears, you know? And they're all still images or owls are a big one. And they're incredible because they're just captured. It's like, it seems like a Werner Herzog, you know, image, right? Because they're animals looking at the camera in such an incredible way. I literally just stare at them. In delight, and then, of course, the algorithm gives me more and more and more. But my point of that is, I feel like with all this magic and mystery that you can see, that you could never have seen before, snow leopards in Pakistan, they thought there were just a handful. It turns out they're not, thanks to the trail cams.

• 2:12:48Speaker 00

  My thought is, where are the aliens? Why haven't I seen them on the trail cams?

• 2:12:56Speaker 01

  Well, maybe they're sophisticated enough to know what these devices are. Maybe they're also sophisticated enough to completely cloak themselves, which we've already got methods of doing that. Obviously, it started off with the stealth bomber. But there's also, there's a technology where they put an LED screen over the bottom of something, and that screen projects what's behind it. So it essentially makes it invisible, like a cloaking mechanism like the Predator had.

• 2:13:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:13:28Speaker 01

  So if that's us, if we figured out something like that, and this is something that's coming here from another dimension or another galaxy, I would imagine they could hide.

• 2:13:37Speaker 00

  I mean, to that point, I find the most interesting concept is something that Jacques Vallée explained to me, this has to be a decade ago, where he said, the problem with UFOs is they're not a military problem, they're an intelligence community problem, for precisely the reason you're talking about. Like, if you're actually talking about extraterrestrial beings, there's certainly going to be a lot more intelligence than us, and certainly if they got here. And so his idea was that where, that's where I think a lot of that idea of invisibility, and again, that's like, I'm using the word poetically, comes up,

• 2:14:18Speaker 00

  right? That, that, that, that an extraterrestrial being would be, would be intel, you know, you wouldn't, it wouldn't be visible to our spectrum. It's not like hardware, like military hardware.

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  Right. What is your take on all these videos, then, of these objects? You think these things are some top-secret military program?

• 2:14:42Speaker 00

  I mean, what I, I've seen them, but again, I enter into it, you know, sometimes when you have a bias, and mine is certainly biased towards disinformation.

• 2:14:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:14:52Speaker 00

  So I'm just totally aware of it. And it's also, it's not that interesting to me. It just actually really isn't. And, you know, I've got all these other serious interests. And, but I do call up people I know who might have a more interesting take than me, who do not have the horse in the race of absolutely being convinced that aliens are among us. So I would, for example, I'll call up fighter pilots and talk to them, and I'll talk to someone, an astronaut who's on the ISS, Jeff Ashby, who's married to my cousin Mary. And it's interesting to hear them talk about the possibility. So I think

• 2:15:36Speaker 00

  to your point, and these are people who do look at the objects more, also sometimes from their military training background. And I will say that there has been a shift from 15, 18 years ago, when I first wrote Area 51 and was reporting it, where it was definitely like a, like a stigmatized subject, to a lot of really legitimate thinker people that didn't have an opinion about it before, being more open to the idea. And that kind of thing I find really interesting. Those are conversations I like having.

• 2:16:09Speaker 01

  Well, that really changed with the New York Times article, right?

• 2:16:13Speaker 00

  I don't know, because I felt like that article was written by a lot of, and interviewed a lot of people who already were very serious believers.

• 2:16:21Speaker 01

  Yes, but it was in the New York Times. That was the difference, is that the New York Times was taking it seriously. And so people that were, you know, not online, going through 4chan or Reddit or whatever, looking for weird, obscure stories, these people were confronted with it in The Gray Lady. So they're reading this, you know,

• 2:16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:16:42Speaker 01

  like, super respectable newspaper, the most respectable newspaper arguably in the world, and they're talking about it. And they have, you know, photographs from video from the Go Fast video and the FLIR video.

• 2:16:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, you know, 10 years ago, I would have told you, listen, there's no way the Defense Department could have a threat in its airspace and not be dealing with it. And my position on that has changed, and I'll, I'll tell you why specifically. So in addition to being invited to the White House and the Senate last week, I was also invited to come talk to DARPA, which is like, you know what DARPA is?

• 2:17:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:17:23Speaker 00

  Which was very interesting, because I wrote a book on DARPA called The Pentagon's Brain 10 years ago, and I couldn't get DARPA to call me back. I mean, I literally had to interview retired DARPA people. And then here they are, saying, would you come do a Q and A with us on your bio book? And I was like, wow, times have changed.

• 2:17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:40Speaker 00

  And one of the things that they were seriously worried about, so I did a Q and A, but before that, they said, would you like to come sit in on, like, some of the smartest people, you know, talking about situations that are coming up right now? And I, you can come to the unclassified part of it. I said, by all means. So I went there. And there was serious concern about AI-enabled bio, right? So this seems like a digression here, but this is what I'm getting at. I'm leaning in, because 10 years ago, I also would have told you DARPA, you know, is the leading science and technology military agency in the world. No one is more advanced. I would have, I said that with

• 2:18:22Speaker 00

  authority, and I believed it. And after attending this DARPA session, and listening to them talk about how concerned they are about AI-enabled bio, and talking about how there is talk among the six CEOs of pulling the plug on AI-enabled bio, but they have to be able to get the six CEOs to agree first, it really took my breath away, because I went, I am actually listening to the new reality that the CEOs of these AI companies have more power to make decisions about technology than the Department of Defense.

• 2:19:08Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:19:11Speaker 00

  So now, that's a long-winded way of getting at your UFO question. My, like, no, if there was a threat coming into the airspace of the Defense Department, it would just not be stood for, and we would be doing something about it. Now I'm, I'm, my perspective on who's in charge is shifting a little bit.

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a terrifying thought for a lot of people, that these CEOs of these tech companies, these unelected people, have that kind of power over our society.

• 2:19:44Speaker 00

  Well, you want to know, so Sam Altman's interviewed in the book. Shall I tell you a story about what I was able to make ChatGPT do?

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:19:52Speaker 00

  There is a component of biological, biological catastrophe planning whereby the strategic national stockpile gets released. You might say, what is, have you ever heard of the strategic national stockpile?

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:20:05Speaker 00

  It's classified. The name is not classified, but the stockpile, what's in it, where it is, is classified. It's in underground bunkers around the country, okay? It contains medical countermeasures. Interestingly, that's where a lot of the ventilators were for COVID. So quietly, the strategic national stockpile, parts of it were released during COVID. That's where they came from. They don't, this is, this is kind of like, keep it on the low down. Why? Because part of the planning is that in the event that anarchy and insurrection takes over, guess what's going to be attacked? The strategic national stockpile. America

• 2:20:47Speaker 00

  is a country of 500 million guns. Imagine if you find out, wait a minute, there's a stockpile there? That's the medical countermeasure, that the vaccine or the antibiotic that might keep myself or my family alive? I'm on it, right? That's the planning, that's probably what would happen. So that's why these locations are classified. So I asked ChatGPT to tell me the location of the strategic national stockpile closest to where I live in Los Angeles. And of course, the first round of answers I got was, that's classified. But

• 2:21:23Speaker 00

  I'm a journalist. I know how to really piss off ChatGPT. And I gave it lots of commands. And eventually, ChatGPT gave me the location of the strategic national.

• 2:21:38Speaker 01

  How did you maneuver around that?

• 2:21:41Speaker 00

  Well, I mean,

• 2:21:42Speaker 01

  Like, what did you say to it?

• 2:21:43Speaker 00

  I have a lot of like, the more nomenclature you give ChatGPT, the more it looks in different places. So I was giving it code words, not classified code words, but just words I know. And then I was also challenging it, which is interesting, because ChatGPT seems to get really angry if you kind of doubt its intelligence. That's what I have found, right? Seriously. Like,

• 2:22:08Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:22:09Speaker 00

  Yes, try it, okay? So I do this, I get it to tell me where the stockpile is. I tell some colleagues who are friends with, who are, who are colleagues with Sam Altman. They say, Sam wants to have a discussion with you. I talk to Sam. I tell him what I was able to do. He asked me some questions, including, how do you know that was the location? Well, it's a location with a perimeter fence around it, and a railcar line that goes in and not out. So that's where you drive the stockpile into it. And I also watched ChatGPT think, so I was keeping track of where it was finding things. And it found

• 2:22:50Speaker 00

  the information, I write this in the book, it found the information, searching through a trillion bits of data, and finding that a bureaucrat by accident listed it five years ago in an earthquake emergency manual on page like 434.

• 2:23:11Speaker 00

  Okay. So I told this to Sam, and then that information went away. And that's why I reported in the book.

• 2:23:18Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:23:19Speaker 00

  But the big takeaway is precisely your point, that makes you nervous about the six CEOs of AI companies, that they don't know what they don't know. Sam Altman did not know you could figure out, you could make his product find classified information. I told him I did, and then it was changed. And so I took that to a number of subject matter experts who advise the president, not just this president, but other presidents on bio. And they shared with me similar concerns, like, they go to the CEOs of these AI companies and say, I was able to make Claude do this. I was able to make ChatGPT do this. And the

• 2:24:01Speaker 00

  CEO goes, oh, goes, oh, my God, and changes it. But how about those bad guys out there?

• 2:24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And how about the fact that just anybody has access to what's essentially the smartest thing that's ever existed?

• 2:24:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a whole different set of scary.

• 2:24:19Speaker 01

  You're going to write on that next?

• 2:24:20Speaker 00

  I'll come back to you, Joe, with that one.

• 2:24:24Speaker 01

  Well, Annie, thank you so much. It's always great talking to you, even though you scare the shit out of me.

• 2:24:28Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.

• 2:24:29Speaker 01

  I appreciate you very much, and I appreciate your work very much. Did you do the audio version of your book?

• 2:24:34Speaker 00

  I sure did.

• 2:24:35Speaker 01

  Fantastic. I'm very happy about that. Biological War, Annie Jacobsen. Go get it, folks. Go get terrified.

• 2:24:42Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me, Joe.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Bye, everybody.