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#067_STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman with Annie Jacobsen · INSPIRE STORY

0:04
Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
0:06
Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day.
0:15
Biological war.
0:16
Speaker 3: Oh, boy.
0:17
Speaker 2: Every time I talk to you, I'm fucking terrified.
0:21
Speaker 1: That is my part-time job, to actually scare Joe Rogan.
0:26
If I can do that, wow.
0:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, every time I talk to you, I'm like, oh, no.
0:30
Last time it was nuclear war. Oh, no. Now it's
0:33
biological war. Oh, no.
0:36
Speaker 1: Which is actually maybe even grimmer than nuclear because at
0:40
least in nuclear, you're just like gone in the flash.
0:44
Speaker 2: I did a show a while back on the Sci-Fi
0:46
Network called Joe Rogan Questions Everything. And one of the
0:49
episodes we did was about biological war. And so we
0:53
spoke to this guy who used to work for Russia
0:58
during the Cold War. And he was talking about how
1:00
much anthrax they had. And how much work they had
1:04
done on biological weapons. And it was terrifying. He said
1:07
they had like just giant vats of anthrax. Like enough
1:11
to kill everyone in New York City.
1:13
Speaker 1: They were– was it Ken Alaback? Do you know?
1:16
Speaker 2: He was Russian.
1:17
Speaker 3: Russian.
1:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a couple of those Russian defector scientists
1:21
who came here and told us everything they were doing.
1:24
There was like tons of anthrax and plague.
1:29
Speaker 2: Plague.
1:29
Speaker 1: That's actually– The pathogen that I use in the scenario
1:33
I write is plague because it's so crazy scary, so dangerous.
1:38
It sits at the top of the government's tier one
1:42
select agent of dangerous pathogens.
1:46
Speaker 2: So one of the things that we did during this episode,
1:48
we went to Galveston to I guess it's a CDC
1:52
lab that they had there. So they have these super
1:55
thick walls and everyone is wearing spacesuits and they have
1:58
these tubes attached to them. And they were studying all
2:03
these different really horrible, fatal diseases. And I'm like, well,
2:08
what if this stuff gets out? Like it's right here.
2:10
Like what happens if it gets out? Like will we
2:12
take ever precaution, this and that? But his concern, he said,
2:16
was not for genetically engineered viruses. His fear was really
2:20
just from natural virus. He says that is just as
2:22
scary as anything that's out there.
2:24
Speaker 1: This is the Russian scientist.
2:26
Speaker 2: No, this is a different guy. This is an American scientist.
2:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think they like to say that. Mother Nature
2:32
is just as powerful. But in truth, that's actually not
2:36
true because think about what you can do with genetic modification.
2:39
Make it more virulent, more transmissible.
2:42
Speaker 2: Yes.
2:42
Speaker 1: And make it defeat existing vaccines and antibiotics.
2:47
Speaker 2: Well, we are right now in the middle of the
2:50
Fauci hearings. Yes, we are. He is now– Testifying in
2:54
front of Congress and pleading the fifth about everything including
2:57
the color of his tie. It's very weird to watch.
3:00
It's– in one way, it's like I told you to
3:05
a lot of my liberal friends that wanted to pretend
3:07
that he was a great guy and that he wasn't
3:09
doing anything wrong. And now that all these emails have
3:11
gotten out where it shows that he knew that the
3:15
fatality rate was much lower than they were saying. He
3:18
knew that it wasn't dangerous for children, that they didn't
3:21
need vaccines. He knew that the social distancing thing was
3:24
all nonsense and he's got a blanket pardon for 10 years.
3:29
And the thing is it's like these people get money
3:32
for research and that's what they do. They do research.
3:36
So if you get money and you get grants for research, well,
3:38
you're going to go do research. And if your research
3:40
is gain-of-function research that makes viruses more infectious to human
3:45
beings … And you have to do it because that's
3:48
your job. That's what you do. That's what you studied.
3:50
That's what you went to school for. What a crazy
3:53
fucking thing we're doing.
3:55
Speaker 1: It is bananas and it's also– I mean it was
3:58
really unfortunate. I thought that yesterday he took the fifth
4:01
because I for one just want to hear, call me Pollyanna,
4:07
the truth be told.
4:08
Speaker 2: Well, he's not going to tell you the truth no
4:09
matter what. He's going to obfuscate and dance around it
4:12
and use words that don't. totally apply to what he's
4:16
saying and just ramble on.
4:20
Speaker 1: I mean, COVID absolutely could have been this incredible lesson
4:23
for all of us. I mean, the nightmare that it was.
4:26
And instead, we're just left. I mean, can you believe
4:29
that we still, with all the power of national security,
4:33
that we still allegedly do not know where the virus
4:38
came from?
4:39
Speaker 2: Don't we though?
4:40
Speaker 1: Definitively. I mean definitively. People certainly have their ideas.
4:44
Speaker 2: But I think it's high probability that it came from
4:47
the Wuhan lab. I think most experts are now saying that.
4:53
And I think the only reason why they weren't saying
4:55
that was because of Fauci. And it was really because
4:58
that he had funded this through the EcoHealth Alliance.
5:02
Speaker 1: Look, I say that in a very like 90,000-foot neutral way.
5:07
In other words, every– I leave– COVID, that part of
5:11
it out of my book, it becomes like a metaphor
5:15
that underpins the narrative. And people end up reading the
5:18
book and going, wow, I actually think differently about COVID,
5:21
which was kind of my intention. But every subject matter
5:25
expert I spoke to encouraged me to put in the
5:29
book that almost certainly it was a lab leak. So
5:34
when I say we still don't know, that's in a
5:37
bit of air quotes, meaning How is it that someone
5:40
can't– how does it all rest on Fauci who had
5:44
reasons to mislead us? We know that from looking at
5:47
what's been released. How can it be that he's the
5:52
only one with the alleged answer to it all?
5:56
Speaker 2: Well, I mean the other scientists that were investigating it
5:58
from the beginning, when they examined the virus, they were
6:01
saying that all indications that it had been manipulated. And
6:05
they were pretty public about that and then they weren't.
6:07
And then they changed their tune. It's just when you
6:10
have power and you have influence like he did and
6:14
the power to make or break careers in the medical
6:20
world where these people are terrified. They're already dealing with
6:24
malpractice insurance, which is very high. They already have very
6:27
high student debt, student loan debt, and it's a bad
6:32
situation for them. And they're not going to stick their
6:34
neck out. to risk everything that they've worked for for 20, 30,
6:38
whatever years for this thing. And that's what most people did.
6:43
Most people just stuck their head in the sand.
6:46
Speaker 1: I sort of went along with a party line, which
6:49
is also really crazy when you drill down on how
6:53
dangerous biological weapons are. I mean, look, most of the
6:56
people I talked to said gain of function is a
7:01
euphemism for for biological weapons engineering.
7:05
Speaker 2: Right, right.
7:06
Speaker 1: Period, full stop.
7:07
Speaker 2: And a lot of it is funded by the military.
7:10
Speaker 1: Yes, and what's crazy is that these are people that
7:14
have worked for Obama just as much as all sides
7:18
of the aisle working. The real people who are not,
7:21
as you say, they don't have something to gain financially.
7:24
Speaker 2: Well, we should say that Obama actually stopped gain-of-function research
7:29
when he was in office, which was a very wise
7:31
thing for him. Very wise by his decision.
7:35
Speaker 1: So what do you make of the fact that like
7:37
Obama stopped this dangerous research, also called dual-use research of concern.
7:43
He stops it. And then suddenly it becomes a partisan
7:47
issue that Republic, only one side of the aisle decides
7:51
that– I mean that's what confuses me because if the
7:55
real– if you look at the facts, the very knowledgeable people,
7:59
that are well-informed by people who don't have financial gain
8:04
know that gain of function is essentially weapons engineering.
8:08
Speaker 2: Yes. And the thing is they're doing gain of function
8:13
to make these viruses more transmissible supposedly so that they
8:17
can come up with cures. But they didn't have any cures.
8:22
Speaker 1: But I think it's like, okay, that also sounds great
8:25
for them to say. We're trying to work on cures,
8:27
but they're leaving out a really important– point is that
8:31
in order for us to find a cure, we have
8:34
to make the pathogen more virulent, more transmissible. We have
8:39
to make something, for example, airborne that wasn't airborne. We
8:43
have to demonstrate that it could cause a pandemic. You
8:47
see that a lot in the literature in order to
8:50
figure out how to cure it. Well, that's a catch-22
8:54
that's incredibly dangerous. Like we have to actually make a
8:59
weapon to be able to defeat a weapon. That's actually
9:06
what is being said.
9:06
Speaker 2: Right. But it seems like there's a lot of bullshit
9:09
going on and that really what they're trying to do
9:11
is make better diseases that work better and they can
9:15
use them. Like this is part of the argument about
9:18
whether or not Lyme disease was engineered. And there's a
9:22
lot of evidence that points to the fact that it was.
9:24
And one of the reasons for it is this Plum
9:27
Island Laboratory that's right off the coast of Lyme, Connecticut,
9:31
where the disease was really first named in the 1970s
9:35
or whatever it was. And so they were doing gain-of-function research.
9:39
They were doing biological research on ticks in order to
9:42
infect ticks with diseases. And then they would drop them
9:44
out of airplanes and overwhelm the medical establishment in these areas.
9:49
And the idea was that if you're fighting the enemy,
9:51
you can fly over. dump a bunch of ticks on them.
9:53
They all get these horrible diseases. Everyone's sick. You don't
9:56
have an effective fighting force.
9:59
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like we need to create a countermeasure.
10:03
But first we need to create the weapon.
10:05
Speaker 2: I don't even know if they think that far ahead.
10:08
I think a lot of it– I'm just guessing. But
10:10
I think a lot of it is just what I
10:12
was saying earlier. There's people and their job. is to
10:16
do this kind of research. And they want grants and
10:18
they want funding. And then there's other people that can
10:21
profit off of this, of these grants and this funding
10:24
and creating labs and doing all this stuff. And they
10:27
just start doing it. And they come up with reasons
10:29
why it should be done. And then, of course, you
10:31
have military people that want the military applications of these diseases.
10:35
And so they help facilitate it. And they don't even think,
10:39
how does this play out? They think about their own interests.
10:44
They're at their own short-term benefits of having these things.
10:47
And they just continue the research. They continue to work.
10:50
And the fact that they even push back on the
10:53
idea that it was a lab leak so hard when
10:55
you have a lab right where it was leaked. I
10:58
mean right where it started happening, you've got a lab there.
11:00
And the famous Jon Stewart bit that he did on
11:03
The Colbert Show, which is hilarious. I mean that's crazy.
11:07
It's the Wuhan Institute.
11:09
Speaker 1: For Coronavirus Research. Yes.
11:13
Speaker 2: And that's where you get a coronavirus leak.
11:15
Speaker 1: I mean look. This is like where you really have
11:18
to think the country is going to hell in a handbag,
11:21
that people stop being able to like form an opinion
11:26
based on the facts in front of them even if
11:28
it isn't popular with their best friend.
11:32
Speaker 2: Well, it's their party, right? It's their ideology. They've committed
11:35
to one side or another. And either you're with the
11:39
team or you're not with the team. And if you're
11:41
with the team, you have to accept all the things
11:43
the team says.
11:44
Speaker 1: At your own peril. I mean, it's an existential risk.
11:51
Do you know what the case fatality rate for COVID was?
11:54
The case fatality rate, it means how many people out
11:58
of 100 people that get COVID die.
12:00
Speaker 2: How many?
12:02
Speaker 3: One. One.
12:04
Speaker 1: Case fatality rate of one. Pneumonic plague, which I write
12:08
about in Biological War, Mother Nature's pneumonic plague, 100 out
12:13
of 100 die. 100% case fatality rate. Unless you get antibiotics.
12:23
Within 24 hours, then it's about a 15% case fatality rate.
12:28
But guess what gain of function does? You can learn
12:31
how to outfox antibiotics. So that you can turn Mother
12:37
Nature's pneumonic plague, which used to be curable with antibiotics,
12:44
to have no cure. That's the threat level we're dealing with.
12:49
And meanwhile, people are taking sides about what we're talking about,
12:54
a lab leak that pretty obviously was a lab leak.
12:58
Speaker 2: First of all, I didn't realize that COVID's fatality rate
13:00
was that high. I thought it was much lower than that.
13:04
Speaker 1: It's about 1%. Well, here's why. Okay, so 1 in
13:06
100 people who manifested COVID got it. But COVID is also.
13:12
Speaker 2: 1 in 100 people who manifested COVID died.
13:15
Speaker 1: Died, yes. So like I don't know anyone– Wasn't really
13:17
that much. That is the CDC, even Defense Department statistic.
13:21
But also keep this into consideration. Many, many people who
13:25
had COVID were never symptomatic.
13:28
Speaker 3: Right.
13:28
Speaker 1: Like including my 83-year-old father and my son, one of
13:32
my two sons. They could both test positive for COVID
13:37
and have no symptoms. Right.
13:38
Speaker 2: But isn't that a function of the PCR test being
13:41
really not designed for testing for active diseases? And there
13:47
was false positives of the PCR test was somewhere in
13:50
the 80%.
13:51
Speaker 1: Huge, huge. I mean, you're, I think, bringing up the
13:54
most important point about biology, which is that there's so
13:59
much uncertainty. There's so much uncertainty. I mean, you and
14:02
I could get the same pathogen in our lungs. Our
14:05
immunity systems are totally different. Our physiology is different. So
14:10
there's no– uncertainty would be something that you would think
14:14
would be sort of factored into public health officials talking
14:18
about things like we're not sure if dot, dot, dot.
14:22
But instead, they act with this crazy certainty, which is bogus.
14:27
Speaker 2: Well, the big problem with that is profit, right? There
14:31
was a lot of profit in being able to point
14:34
towards one very particular method, one very particular treatment. And
14:39
this was the only treatment. And you have to take
14:41
this treatment, and this treatment is going to make people
14:44
an insane amount of money. But that's not why they're
14:46
pushing it. They're pushing it for public health. They really
14:48
care about you, even though they're going to make hundreds
14:51
of billions of dollars.
14:52
Speaker 3: It's the case fatality rate. Is that what you're saying?
14:56
Speaker 2: Yeah. It says it's 0.1%, which was a.
14:57
Speaker 3: Fraction of the 1% estimated earlier in the pandemic.
15:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I thought it was. I thought it
15:02
was one-tenth of 1%. So that makes more sense to
15:05
me because otherwise you would have so many people dead.
15:09
If you think about 300 million people, that means we'd
15:11
have 3 million people dead because most people caught COVID.
15:15
Speaker 1: It's interesting because the CDC still says it's 1%.
15:18
Speaker 2: I think they're full of shit.
15:20
Speaker 3: Right.
15:20
Speaker 2: I think they're full of shit. I think they're just–
15:23
I think the mismanagement and the– Just the overall strategy
15:28
for dealing with it and dealing with people, the lockdowns,
15:31
keeping kids out of school, masking, all of it was
15:33
so bad. It's so indefensible that one of the wildest
15:37
things now is during this Fauci trial, you're not seeing
15:41
any coverage of it on mainstream media, except I saw
15:44
one of those stupid panel shows on CNN where they
15:47
were saying, no one cares about this. We should care
15:49
about what's happening right now. America doesn't care about what
15:52
happened five years ago. Hey, there's a congressional hearing going
15:56
on where a guy's testifying in front of Congress who
15:59
got a 10-year, complete 10-year immunity for all the crimes
16:04
that he possibly could have committed when he wasn't convicted
16:07
of any crimes, which is an incredible precedent that's never
16:10
happened before. You've never had a guy get pardoned for
16:12
something that he was never convicted of. For 10 years,
16:16
anything he did in 10 years. And then you have
16:18
that same guy testifying in front of Congress, pleading the
16:22
fifth that would color his tie is. If you don't
16:24
think that's news, you're out of your fucking mind and
16:27
you shouldn't be calling yourself the news because you're just
16:29
a propaganda arm for whatever pharmaceutical company is paying for
16:33
your advertisements. What you're doing is nonsense. This is definitely
16:37
not news. That's a big issue for most Americans who
16:40
went through that, people who lost their jobs, people who
16:43
had to take a vaccine in order to go to
16:45
work and got sick from it, people who– they couldn't fly.
16:49
They couldn't travel. They were vilified. They were called plague
16:51
rats because they were questioning these things. And here we are.
16:55
Here we are with CNN saying this is not a
16:57
big deal. Why are we concentrating on this? We have
16:59
so many issues right now plaguing this country. Guess what?
17:03
We can concentrate on those too. We can look at everything.
17:06
That's what you're supposed to do. That's what the news
17:08
is supposed to be. You're supposed to be telling– you're
17:09
not supposed to be the arbiters of what we can
17:12
and can't concentrate on. That's ridiculous.
17:15
Speaker 1: You know, but what's interesting is I think the lack
17:18
of news ends up making people more curious. So in
17:23
other words, people go to other sources of information. If
17:26
they're not going to get it from CNN, they're going
17:29
to look for it themselves because we're naturally curious, especially–
17:34
something like COVID. So I think I kind of get
17:37
the sense that people tow certain groups of people, certainly
17:40
not me because you don't know what my politics are,
17:42
but they will tow the party line, but then they
17:45
have their own opinion privately, which is unfortunately what we
17:51
also saw from Dr. Fauci. But that's a completely different
17:54
point because he's a public health official and he shouldn't
17:57
be speaking out of one side of his mouth and
18:01
writing in his journal another thing that he really thinks.
18:04
But I think that this human instinct to want to
18:09
know the truth about what happened must prevail, right? But
18:15
my original point was like why is Dr. Fauci allegedly
18:20
the only one who can really tell us about the
18:23
Wuhan lab leak? Where's the CIA? Where's the ODNI? Where's DOD?
18:29
Where are other organizations that you know have that information?
18:35
Speaker 3: Yeah.
18:35
Speaker 1: You know they do. If Fauci had it, they had it.
18:38
Why aren't they bringing that to the public domain right now?
18:43
Speaker 2: That's a very good question. So I want to ask
18:45
you about this book. Like what was your motivation for
18:47
writing it? How did you get involved in this? Like
18:50
I know you pick a subject and you go deep
18:53
and you dive deep and then you write your book.
18:55
So why Biological War?
18:57
Speaker 3: Yeah.
18:59
Speaker 1: My first six books were written in the past tense, like,
19:02
you know, the Nazi scientists who came to America, Area 51,
19:08
the Pentagon's brain. The nuclear war and biological war are
19:13
written in the future. They're scenarios based on Pentagon war games.
19:18
And that was me realizing like there are major existential
19:23
threats right now speeding up at the rate of science,
19:27
which is going faster every day, literally. And so I
19:31
modeled the two books after Pentagon War Games and got
19:35
access to people who actually run these games at the
19:38
Pentagon and learned the sort of holy shit. People are
19:43
preparing for the worst case scenario and no one knows
19:48
about it.
19:49
Speaker 2: Is that their job though? I mean that is their job.
19:52
They have to be preparing for the worst case scenario.
19:55
The real question is are you preparing by creating it?
20:00
Speaker 1: The defense department or us?
20:01
Speaker 2: Well, whoever is– yeah.
20:02
Speaker 3: Yeah.
20:04
Speaker 1: Well, what I wanted to do first of all was
20:06
like I'm just naturally curious. I wanted to know like
20:09
what are they– how does that preparation play out? The
20:15
most shocking thing about nuclear was to find out like, oh,
20:18
there is no plan because we're all dead. That's literally
20:22
the quote from the FEMA director. There is no population
20:26
protection planning after a nuclear strike because everyone is dead.
20:30
Don't forget your morals and hope you stalked PD alike.
20:33
That's what he told me. Bio is totally different.
20:38
Speaker 2: Why Pedialyte?
20:40
Speaker 1: Pedialyte, you know, that stuff you give.
20:41
Speaker 2: Your kids to drink? Yeah, electrolytes. Yeah, not just kids.
20:45
Speaker 1: Or you, right? That's what he said.
20:48
Speaker 2: Well, athletes take it when they cut weight.
20:50
Speaker 1: It's been a while since I've been an athlete. So yeah,
20:54
that's what he said. It was like, wow, that's what
20:57
they're thinking about nuclear. It's just lights out.
21:00
Speaker 2: Why Pedialyte though?
21:01
Speaker 1: I guess for the electrolytes.
21:03
Speaker 2: Does that protect– I know– what is it? Iodine that
21:06
people tell you to take?
21:07
Speaker 1: I always got the sense that the– I should have
21:09
done a follow-up question, Joe.
21:11
Speaker 2: Yeah.
21:11
Speaker 1: Why Pedialyte? I always got the sense in the same
21:13
way that when your kids are babies and they get
21:15
diarrhea that you give them Pedialyte to like get their
21:20
system filled with necessary electrolytes. So that's– and I also
21:25
got the sense that it was like hydration and better
21:29
than water.
21:30
Speaker 2: God. Yeah.
21:34
Speaker 1: But bio, I learned, is a completely different animal because
21:39
what they're really worried about is the secondary effect of
21:43
panic and anarchy. And that was really interesting to me
21:47
because having written all these books about the Defense Department
21:51
and the CIA, the programs are very– they're very structured
21:56
and ordered and they don't take place in the homeland
21:59
because we're always fighting wars overseas. So to learn about
22:03
a program– that would go down in the continental United
22:07
States where the Insurrection Act gets declared, posse comitatus gets lifted,
22:14
the military takes over, dot, dot, dot, and then it
22:19
goes from there, third act of the book, spoiler alert.
22:22
That was shocking to me and it was equally shocking
22:26
that I could actually get this information. A lot of
22:28
it's classified but the names of some of the programs
22:32
are unclassified. the officials that I interviewed took me up
22:36
to the edge of what can be legally known. And
22:39
I also got the sense of like, oh, the sense
22:44
that these former officials are conveying is the public should
22:48
know about this. My personal interpretation is like, let's stop
22:53
arguing about stuff that doesn't matter and get to the
22:57
facts and start realizing where the real threats are.
23:00
Speaker 2: So their real fear is worrying about the The aftermath,
23:06
worrying about chaos in the streets, rioting, looting, that's the
23:10
real fear?
23:11
Speaker 1: That's the real fear. You can search up any of–
23:14
so there's unclassified pandemic plans, which are done by like FEMA, DHS.
23:21
They're always done by former officials, former SECDEF, former CDC director,
23:27
sitting around a table running a pandemic planning game. They
23:31
do them at the Defense Department and they call it
23:34
a biological catastrophe war game. Those are declassified. All of
23:39
them that I was looking at go through the series
23:44
of events, you know, outbreak, infection, sort of everyone trying
23:47
to mitigate the release, the spread. And then it gets
23:52
to a certain point. In my scenario, it's day six
23:55
because pneumonic plague is fast. There's a point in all
23:59
these plans where anarchy and chaos takes over And the
24:05
war game ends.
24:07
Speaker 2: Ends.
24:08
Speaker 1: Like, oh, and now we're done here. And I would
24:11
say as the journalist, like to myself, what happens next?
24:15
What happens next? And why aren't we learning about it?
24:19
Speaker 2: They don't have any plans for what happens after Anarchy
24:21
and Chaos?
24:22
Speaker 1: They do. They just don't have it in the declassified
24:26
games and that's what– there's a plan called the Devolution Plan.
24:32
Eyebrows up for a reason.
24:34
Speaker 2: I don't like that word.
24:35
Speaker 1: Think about evolution.
24:36
Speaker 3: Yeah.
24:36
Speaker 1: Now put a D in front of it.
24:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.
24:39
Speaker 1: Instead of going forward, you're going backward. So you've heard
24:43
of DEFCON, right?
24:44
Speaker 2: Yes. OK.
24:44
Speaker 1: So DEFCON, defense readiness condition, there's five. Five is the lowest.
24:50
That's like normal every day. At 9-11, we were at three.
24:54
DEFCON 1 means nuclear war. There's a separate structure of
25:00
readiness condition called COGCON. Probably haven't heard of it because
25:05
it's classified. It stands for Continuity of Government Readiness Condition.
25:13
It's got four levels. Four is every day. One is insurrection.
25:22
The Insurrection Act gets declared. COGCON 1 is in effect.
25:27
And the devolution plan happens, which I learned means... a
25:33
subset of pre-designated officials. They know who they are. They've
25:38
signed contracts. They've rehearsed it. They go out. In the
25:44
words of the former FEMA director, COG CON 1, you
25:47
send your devolution crews out. They go out to a
25:51
hot site, warm site, or cold site, underground bunkers located
25:57
around the United States. This is from an actual FEMA
26:01
chief telling me this. And they set up how to
26:06
run the government because the idea is all the regular
26:09
government people will probably be dead of anarchy, insurrection, mnemonic plague.
26:16
Speaker 2: So they have bunkers.
26:18
Speaker 1: And those are classified.
26:20
Speaker 2: The bunkers are.
26:21
Speaker 1: Where they are.
26:22
Speaker 2: Do you remember there was the bunker during– after 9-11
26:26
where Dick Cheney was in the bunker? Yeah. But George
26:28
Bush was just like hanging out?
26:29
Speaker 1: They left him. I think they left him in Texas
26:31
or he was on his ranch.
26:33
Speaker 2: He was just out there in the world.
26:35
Speaker 1: You know what? I had someone tell me where he
26:38
was and I went through like a problem with like
26:42
legal whether I could say this. So I had to
26:44
say I was told but it's not verified, something like that.
26:48
But one of the CIA spy pilots, Ken Collins, he
26:53
famously flew the ox cart out at Area 51. He
26:56
told me that on 9-11, George Bush was driving around
27:00
in Texas. Maybe it was in Florida in the back
27:02
of a laundry truck. That's how they kept him hidden.
27:07
Speaker 2: What?
27:09
Speaker 1: A laundry truck.
27:10
Speaker 2: Did they just have it look like a laundry truck
27:12
and it outfitted with like regular seats in the back
27:15
and that's how they drive him around? A bulletproof laundry truck?
27:18
Speaker 1: No, I think he got like– I think it was
27:20
like what do we do with him and that was
27:22
what was available. A laundry truck. A laundry truck. That's
27:25
what I was told by like a very reliable source.
27:27
Speaker 2: That was available, meaning there was nothing else available that
27:31
was incognito?
27:32
Speaker 1: They were trying to transport him to the doomsday plane,
27:35
which is where he ended up going, into the doomsday
27:38
plane and flying around in circles.
27:40
Speaker 2: And they thought that like a caravan of SUVs would
27:44
be too obvious?
27:45
Speaker 1: Yes.
27:46
Speaker 2: Wow.
27:49
Speaker 1: Yeah. So you learn really pretty quickly that There's all
27:53
these plans in place, but then it becomes like ad
27:56
hoc or like on the fly in an actual crisis
28:01
or emergency.
28:03
Speaker 3: Whoa.
28:03
Speaker 2: Yeah.
28:05
Speaker 1: But, okay, you're referring to Mount Weather. That's where Dick
28:08
Cheney went.
28:09
Speaker 2: Okay. Where's that?
28:10
Speaker 1: So Mount Weather is in the mountains outside of D.C.
28:14
It's like– There's mountains outside of D.C.? Right.
28:16
Speaker 3: Really?
28:16
Speaker 1: In the Blue Ridge Mountains.
28:18
Speaker 2: Oh, how far are those?
28:19
Speaker 3: 175 miles. Okay.
28:23
Speaker 1: So the Pentagon has an alternate command center called Raven Rock,
28:28
underground bunker.
28:29
Speaker 2: That sounds like it's right out of a video game.
28:32
Speaker 1: It sounds– You got to go to Raven Rock. They
28:34
probably have put it in a– that's a real– like
28:37
it used to be classified and no one used to
28:38
know about it and now it's kind of like out there.
28:41
The official– Is this it, Jamie?
28:43
Speaker 2: This is the bunker? Yeah. Oh, we have a map
28:45
of it?
28:45
Speaker 1: Yeah.
28:46
Speaker 2: We got blueprints? We have all sorts of information about it.
28:48
What do you want to know?
28:49
Speaker 3: Yeah. 51 miles from D.C.
28:51
Speaker 2: How deep is it? 51 miles from D.C.? At least
28:53
seven levels. Wow.
28:56
Speaker 3: The Oval Office would be at the bottom.
28:58
Speaker 2: That's crazy.
28:59
Speaker 1: So that's where Cheney was on 9-11.
29:00
Speaker 2: So is that where like a nuclear bomb can't get
29:02
to it?
29:03
Speaker 1: A nuclear bomb would take it all out. In nuclear war,
29:06
I'd destroy all of those. I mean I don't destroy them.
29:09
I show you how they would be destroyed. Russia would
29:12
put like five nuclear bombs on Raven Rock and it
29:16
would just– Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That would
29:17
be it. And also the fires alone would just incinerate
29:22
everyone inside.
29:22
Speaker 2: Also, how are you getting your air? Where's your air
29:26
coming from? Your air is going to be contaminated with
29:29
nuclear fallout, right?
29:31
Speaker 3: Yes.
29:31
Speaker 2: Is this what it looks like?
29:32
Speaker 3: I don't know. Some of those pictures were coming from Tumblr,
29:36
so I don't know.
29:37
Speaker 1: I think i think they take the real the real
29:39
pictures and then they turn them into you know comic
29:41
books but um right but you can see some of.
29:44
Speaker 2: So look how it's got this like entrance carved into
29:48
the side of the mountain with a big cement wall
29:51
and he goes through that yeah you know we were
29:54
talking about this um the other day um we're talking
29:58
about darren kuyu Do you know what that is? It's
30:02
an underground facility that's in Turkey.
30:05
Speaker 1: Yes, I do know about that.
30:06
Speaker 2: That they found by accident.
30:07
Speaker 1: Yes.
30:08
Speaker 2: What was it? The 1970s? Like a sheep herder. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
30:12
Speaker 3: It was being used to hide people up until the 1920s. Whoa. Yeah,
30:16
people like the Greeks were hiding from people invading Greece.
30:19
Speaker 2: Or Turkey, I guess. So it can house 20,000 people
30:23
under there, and they really don't know why they made
30:26
it or who made it.
30:28
Speaker 1: Turkey is crazy. It's such an old civilization with like
30:33
layers upon layers upon layers of– just when you think
30:36
it's really old, it gets even older.
30:38
Speaker 2: Well, that's Gobekli Tepe, right, where they had to redate– well,
30:42
they still resist it, what constitutes modern civilization or civilization
30:48
in general. They're still trying to say– some archaeologists are
30:51
hanging on tooth and claw trying to say that hunter-gatherers
30:54
made these enormous stone columns with 3D drawings that seem
30:59
to be a calendar of some sort of a cataclysmic event.
31:03
Speaker 3: So some of the pictures we were just looking at
31:04
from Mount Weather, maybe not accurate because it's also used
31:07
in the TV show, The 100. Oh.
31:09
Speaker 1: Yeah. But it is a real place.
31:11
Speaker 2: But yeah, that's probably where they get it from.
31:12
Speaker 3: So what we were looking at, I think, was the
31:14
stuff from the TV show.
31:15
Speaker 2: What is that? What's The 100?
31:19
Speaker 3: Like a show like Silo or something where people are,
31:21
you know, 100 people left or something like that, I think.
31:24
Speaker 2: That's what we had Tim Robbins on. We were talking
31:26
about Silo. Have you seen that show, Silo?
31:28
Speaker 3: Not yet.
31:28
Speaker 1: Not yet.
31:28
Speaker 2: Really good show.
31:29
Speaker 1: It's great.
31:29
Speaker 2: It's on Apple.
31:30
Speaker 3: Great.
31:30
Speaker 2: And it's essentially about an underground civilization that survives some
31:34
sort of cataclysm. They don't exactly say in the beginning.
31:36
I'm early on the show. They don't say what the
31:38
cataclysm is, but these people have to live like deep, deep,
31:41
deep underground in these self-containing facilities. And you can't go
31:45
outside or you'll die.
31:47
Speaker 3: I think I read it about it.
31:49
Speaker 2: So Darren Kuyu could house 20,000 people.
31:52
Speaker 3: Wow.
31:52
Speaker 2: And they had– They had pastures or they had storage
31:56
like for cattle and grain and water and wine and
32:01
oil presses. It was like crazy shit.
32:04
Speaker 1: And how many thousands of years? They don't know. They
32:07
don't even know.
32:08
Speaker 2: They don't know. They don't know who made it. They
32:10
didn't know it existed. They found it. Imagine a guy–
32:16
the initial story was that his chickens had gone through
32:18
a hole. That's right. And he's like, where are these
32:20
chickens going? They never come back.
32:22
Speaker 1: And they– The disappearing Turkish chickens.
32:25
Speaker 2: So they knock down these walls and then they find
32:28
this thing and they haven't even explored all of it.
32:31
They don't even have all of it explored yet. It's insane.
32:35
It's so big and it's just there and they don't
32:38
know why and they don't know who made it and
32:40
they don't know what they're hiding from. This is what
32:42
it looks like.
32:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's incredible.
32:44
Speaker 2: It's really crazy because it's absolutely enormous. Is this Derinkuyu
32:50
right here? This is like some of the tunnels.
32:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, I get confused since they've landed on 10% of it.
32:55
Like that's obviously a fake, but I don't know how
32:58
much of that is what it is because it's supposed
32:59
to be underground, right?
33:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, that doesn't look real. That seems like somebody made
33:04
that up. But the actual image is like that's an image,
33:06
which is the best Darren Cuyu underground, like there. Yeah,
33:09
right there. That's what it really looked like. So imagine
33:13
they find this underground, and they don't even know how
33:17
old it is because if you find some stuff, you
33:19
can't carbon date the walls. You can't carbon date the carvings.
33:23
So they have to find things that are left there.
33:25
But if people are hanging out there until the 1920s, like,
33:28
so they really don't even know if you find something,
33:31
how old it is. You can guess, but you don't know, like,
33:34
how old was the building when this person was there?
33:36
Was it thousands of years old already? They don't know.
33:39
Speaker 1: It's interesting how the archaeologists that have a, like, have
33:42
skin in the game with an other theory resist that.
33:46
And it takes a while. It's like with Gobekli Tepe.
33:49
You know, now there's, There's investigations going on, archaeological digs nearby.
33:55
And lo and behold, they're finding other things, which makes
33:58
me feel like– All over the area. Yeah, all over
34:00
the place, of course. It didn't exist on its own.
34:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course.
34:04
Speaker 1: Some kind of advanced civilization has neighbors.
34:07
Speaker 2: 11,000 plus years ago.
34:09
Speaker 3: It's so crazy.
34:09
Speaker 2: It's so weird because we keep pushing the dates further
34:12
and further back. Like Graham Hancock always says, stuff just
34:15
keeps getting older. And so it makes you wonder like
34:18
have we gone through something like this before, whether it's
34:22
a natural catastrophe or whatever it was.
34:25
Speaker 1: Remember when we were kids, it was like the Lascaux
34:29
Caves were the oldest thing ever. I don't even remember.
34:32
Speaker 2: Where was that?
34:33
Speaker 1: In France. Remember the drawing of the bull?
34:35
Speaker 2: Oh, right, right, right.
34:36
Speaker 1: I remember that from the history books.
34:37
Speaker 2: That's from that– In France. Or a Herzog documentary.
34:41
Speaker 1: Yes. It's a great one.
34:43
Speaker 2: Amazing.
34:43
Speaker 1: Has he been on this show?
34:44
Speaker 2: No, I want to get him on. You have to
34:46
get him on. I love that guy.
34:47
Speaker 1: He's the neighbor of my kids.
34:48
Speaker 3: Whoa. Yeah.
34:49
Speaker 2: Well, I don't want to say where he lives. People
34:51
go find him. But that's pretty cool.
34:53
Speaker 3: In L.A.
34:54
Speaker 1: So we'll track him down. He's my favorite documentarian.
34:57
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. Grizzly Man is one of my favorites of
35:00
all time.
35:00
Speaker 1: Grizzly Man is epic.
35:02
Speaker 2: Yeah. Have you seen Happy People? No. That's a great
35:05
one too.
35:06
Speaker 1: Is that new?
35:06
Speaker 2: No. No, it's a few years old. It's Life in
35:08
the Taiga, Happy People, Life in the Taiga. It's about
35:11
these people that live in Siberia off the Taiga River
35:15
and they're like the happiest people. And all they do
35:17
is like hunt and fish and trap and they get together.
35:21
They have a really strong community. They drink and they're laughing.
35:24
They have like no mental illness. It's really weird as
35:27
he documents it.
35:29
Speaker 1: He has such– have you seen Little Dieter Needs to Fly?
35:32
Speaker 3: No.
35:34
Speaker 1: The only man rescued from Laos during the Vietnam War.
35:38
And Herzog– he's died since, Dieter. But Herzog goes with
35:43
him back into the jungle.
35:44
Speaker 2: Wow.
35:45
Speaker 1: Oh, my god. You're going to love it. It's a
35:47
treat that you haven't seen it yet. Little Dieter needs
35:50
to fly.
35:50
Speaker 2: That guy is such a world treasure. Oh, my god.
35:53
Speaker 1: Just his voice and like his perspective on everything. Just
35:57
when you think– just when I think I know what
36:00
he's going for– Takes you like on a complete left
36:04
turn and you're left like, at least for me, thinking
36:09
about the world in a completely new original way.
36:12
Speaker 3: Yeah.
36:13
Speaker 2: So these caves in France, they thought that that was
36:15
the old, but that was really old, right? Wasn't that
36:18
like 30 plus thousand year old drawings?
36:20
Speaker 1: I think maybe Jamie can check for us. I think
36:22
there were like 7,000 B.C.
36:26
Speaker 2: I think they were older than that.
36:27
Speaker 3: Discovered in 1940 by four teenagers. Closed in 63. All
36:32
paintings created around 17,000 years ago. 17,000.
36:35
Speaker 1: Okay.
36:36
Speaker 3: Yeah.
36:37
Speaker 2: That's it? God, I thought it was older.
36:39
Speaker 3: That's just a quick explanation.
36:40
Speaker 2: This is the Werner Herzog documentary? I thought they were
36:43
like literal cavemen made it. Well, I mean. So that's
36:50
only 17,000 years ago?
36:51
Speaker 3: That's what that says.
36:54
Speaker 2: Interesting. I really thought it was a lot older than that.
36:59
Speaker 1: But then they come up with like the hand on
37:02
the cave in Indonesia. I think that's 40,000.
37:06
Speaker 2: Believed to be 19,000 years ago. That's interesting. So at
37:10
one point in time, they thought that was the oldest.
37:12
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, I remember that.
37:14
Speaker 3: It's not quite what it says. It says the caning
37:18
for the site were duplicated with the same materials which
37:20
were used to believe, like, Which were used 19,000 years.
37:23
That doesn't mean.
37:24
Speaker 2: Oh, right. They could still be older. Right. They knew
37:27
that they used them 19,000 years ago, but they could
37:30
have used them a lot earlier than that. But they
37:31
learned how to use them.
37:32
Speaker 3: Right, right.
37:33
Speaker 2: We don't have documents. Crazy stuff, though. Just imagine, like,
37:38
living back then.
37:40
Speaker 1: It is wild when you think about the underground bunkers now.
37:45
And it kind of has this spooky echo as an
37:48
archetype of.
37:49
Speaker 3: Hiding.
37:50
Speaker 2: Hiding. Hiding from the dangers. Yeah. Having a shelter and
37:55
hiding from the– the whole– that trope, that thought of
37:59
a bunker is– there's a lot of supposedly wealthy people. Well,
38:04
they are wealthy. But supposedly they have these underground bunkers.
38:08
That's what you always hear. These rich people, these billionaires
38:10
are setting up bunkers in New Zealand because they know
38:12
something is coming.
38:13
Speaker 3: Like, oh, Jesus.
38:14
Speaker 2: Right?
38:15
Speaker 1: Good luck getting there in time.
38:16
Speaker 3: Yeah.
38:17
Speaker 2: Right. Right.
38:19
Speaker 3: Right.
38:19
Speaker 2: If the shit goes down and you happen to be
38:21
in Hawaii and you got to get to New Zealand.
38:24
Speaker 1: Also, your bodyguards are a lot stronger than you are.
38:28
Speaker 2: Well, wouldn't you bring them with you?
38:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's going to be every man for themselves.
38:33
Speaker 2: Well, wouldn't you have– if you're going to have that
38:35
kind of money to make a– wouldn't you have a
38:37
bunker that could house a few hundred people so that
38:39
you could– nobody gets insurrection in your movement?
38:43
Speaker 1: I mean I suppose if you bring everybody's family, you
38:45
have to have a lot of preparing for this. That's
38:48
what really– It kept taking me back to those– the
38:52
documents in the defense department about fear of infection creates
38:56
anarchy and insurrection because this idea of like fear of infection.
39:01
People begin to– their mind actually begins to change in
39:05
the studies under scarcity.
39:08
Speaker 2: Right.
39:08
Speaker 1: And scarcity coupled with fear of infection, it's so visceral.
39:12
It's like it's as much of an archetype as the bunker,
39:15
being infected. Right. Very, very different than being shot at.
39:20
You get the sense if you can get into the
39:23
bunker if you're being attacked with a physical weapon. Okay,
39:27
I'm safe now. Close the doors. Make a move.
39:30
Speaker 2: Fire.
39:31
Speaker 1: But with fear of infection, I mean a biological weapon
39:34
or any pathogen is a living munition. It self-replicates and
39:40
it's got an incubation period. So then it– right?
39:44
Speaker 2: So then you can be infected and not know it
39:47
while it's incubating inside of your body and then you
39:49
infect a bunch of other people as well.
39:51
Speaker 1: Yeah.
39:52
Speaker 3: Yeah.
39:53
Speaker 2: And we saw during COVID how aggressive people got, screaming
39:56
at people for not wearing masks and that was, as
40:00
far as pandemics go, fairly mild.
40:04
Speaker 3: Yeah.
40:04
Speaker 1: Fairly mild. Like, I mean, if you– go with the
40:08
CDC's 1% or your 0.1%? It's not mine. It's perplexity. Right,
40:13
perplexity is 1%. I mean you're talking about a nothing
40:17
burger compared to– Compared to pneumonic plague. Pneumonic plague and
40:21
there are– I mean look, I also write in the
40:24
book and this has never been reported before because I
40:27
interviewed CIA officers who both debriefed the Soviet defectors and
40:33
also people who chased– WMD in the hands of terrorists
40:37
during the war on terror. And I specifically didn't want
40:40
to write that scenario because it's so loaded to go
40:44
with like terrorist youth use of a biological agent. But
40:49
I give you little history lessons when I stop the drama,
40:53
one of which involves an Al-Qaeda terrorist that was captured.
40:57
She's actually now in Texas in a mental institution for
41:01
the rest of her life. Her name is Afia Siddiqui.
41:04
She's an MIT-trained biologist related by marriage to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
41:12
And she was leading the biological weapons program. This is
41:14
according to the CIA officers.
41:16
Speaker 2: She was trained at MIT?
41:18
Speaker 1: She was trained at MIT and then she went back
41:20
to Pakistan. She was the first woman on the FBI's
41:24
most wanted terrorist list.
41:26
Speaker 2: How come they have her in a mental institute?
41:28
Speaker 1: Because they caught her. And then this part is reported.
41:31
They caught her and somehow, again the air quote, somehow
41:35
she got a hold of a Marine's rifle and was
41:38
firing at the FBI agents interviewing her. This is all public.
41:42
And she was shot. They took her to the United States,
41:45
gave her a trial, decided she was insane, put her
41:48
in a mental institution. But what had never been revealed
41:52
before my book is that in her handbag, she had
41:56
plans To create a genetically modified pathogen that mixed rabies
42:03
with chicken pox. Think about that. Imagine airborne rabies. Rabies,
42:10
like pneumonic plague, is one of the only other pathogens
42:14
that has 100% death rate without countermeasures.
42:20
Speaker 2: And rabies. Like when you see it in animals. I've
42:23
never actually encountered a rabbit animal in the wild as
42:27
much as I know. But when you see them, they
42:32
want to infect something else. They get hyper aggressive. They
42:35
want to bite you. So if they bite you, they
42:38
give it to you, which is really crazy. Like this
42:41
disease makes them throw their own safety out the window
42:45
and just go after people and try to bite them.
42:48
Speaker 1: I mean it's like a– It's like rabies is like
42:51
now its own– a rabid animal. You think of it
42:54
of– it's so visceral. It's going to come at you
42:58
with its infected saliva. I almost went with the rabies
43:02
scenario because I always in these scenarios tie them to
43:07
actual events that have happened so that there's– so that
43:09
readers don't go like this is Annie Jacobson's dystopian imagination
43:14
as much as they say, oh, she's following what– Science.
43:18
This is science fact, not science fiction. And so when
43:21
I learned about that plan for the genetic modification of
43:26
rabies in chicken, airborne rabies, but then.
43:29
Speaker 2: I thought … How far did she get along with this?
43:31
Speaker 1: That is classified, Annie. But I did get a second person,
43:36
David Relman, who's the advisor to the president on biodefense,
43:39
to confirm with me that that was actually located in
43:43
her handbag and caused Serious concern.
43:46
Speaker 2: And I imagine if they never found her, they never
43:48
caught her and she completed that.
43:51
Speaker 1: I mean it's really terrifying.
43:53
Speaker 2: It wipes out most of the country.
43:55
Speaker 1: And also just in the most horrific way. You know,
43:58
like having to look at your pet and be like,
44:01
is my pet rabbit? It's just.
44:02
Speaker 2: Oh, Jesus. And he did catch it, too? Another project. Oh,
44:05
she had another project? Yes, multiple projects, apparently. She had
44:08
collected materials on viruses for biological warfare, and one of
44:11
her projects is finding its way to infect America's poultry
44:14
supplies with an antibody that would allow chickens to pass
44:17
salmonella onto humans more easily. She later destroyed her work
44:21
after suspecting... Abu Lubab was hoping to double-cross her and
44:26
turn her into the United States authorities.
44:29
Speaker 3: This is a long Wikipedia with quite a bit of
44:32
twists and turns. I'm surprised it's.
44:33
Speaker 2: Not a movie.
44:35
Speaker 3: There's a lot going on.
44:36
Speaker 2: Oh, my God. And that's one person that we caught. Now,
44:40
that's not like this is the only time they thought
44:42
of that. This is the only person that they tried
44:44
to recruit to do this kind of stuff. There's probably
44:46
someone out there right now. Hence, your book.
44:51
Speaker 1: I mean– I interviewed this guy, very famous, legendary CIA
44:56
officer named Rolf Moat Larson, and he led the counter-WMD team, right?
45:04
So he would go to places basically like with a
45:07
bunch of ground branch guys, CIA paramilitary guys behind him.
45:11
He was kind of like the intelligentsia at the front
45:15
to try to negotiate with al-Qaeda weapons makers, biological weapons makers,
45:21
And say like you can't do this. It's going to
45:24
kill all of us. And he told me a couple
45:27
of stories and I write them like history lessons in
45:29
the book. Once he went to Sudan and met with
45:32
the top biological weapons maker for Al-Qaeda and like it's
45:36
just chilling. It's basically you get the feeling like that
45:41
Rolf said, I got them to agree to stop temporarily.
45:47
Speaker 2: Temporarily.
45:47
Speaker 3: Temporarily.
45:48
Speaker 1: Temporarily. Sorry, Joe. This is the nightmare stuff.
45:54
Speaker 2: So what do they think that they're going to do
45:56
if they get into these bunkers? This is the thing.
45:59
It's like if society completely collapses and anarchy just sweeps
46:04
the nation and you've got cities on fire and people
46:07
killing people and looting, eventually they're going to run out
46:10
of food. Eventually there's going to be no infrastructure. You've
46:13
got no power. You've got no one who's taking care
46:15
of the water. No one's taking care of the satellites.
46:18
No one's taking care of anything. Cell phone towers are down.
46:21
What are these people in the bunker going to do?
46:22
Are they going to reinvent society?
46:25
Speaker 1: Well, that's the plan down the road.
46:26
Speaker 2: But before– Do they have that?
46:28
Speaker 1: Part five of the devolution plan is called reconstitution.
46:33
Speaker 2: Oh, Jesus.
46:34
Speaker 1: So they're going to reconstitute the government, like rise again
46:38
like a phoenix from the ashes. But before that, I
46:42
also learned the government has issued– rather the Pentagon has
46:46
issued 1.7 million gas masks to its personnel. So they
46:50
fan out across the states. But they cannot really handle
46:57
the numbers of people who are actually going to die
47:00
pretty quickly. So instead what their job is is to
47:04
protect the critical infrastructure, all that stuff you exactly mentioned.
47:08
Speaker 2: So they're just assuming that most people are going to die.
47:13
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
47:15
Speaker 1: I mean this is the quote. This is the exact
47:16
quote from Colonel Tom Earhart who– ran catastrophic nuclear and
47:22
biological war games at the Pentagon. Four, have you ever
47:26
heard of a very famous guy? They called him Yoda
47:29
at the Pentagon. He died like a couple years ago
47:31
at age 100. His name is Andy Marshall. He ran
47:35
the Office of Net Assessment. Talk about a euphemism or
47:39
like a cloaked. That's where they did all the war gaming.
47:42
And Marshall, Andy Marshall did this in the 70s all
47:45
the way through his recent death. And Tom Earhart worked
47:48
for him. It's in the office of the Secretary of Defense.
47:51
So what Earhart told me is in the event of
47:55
a biological catastrophe– and by the way, that includes not
48:00
just an attack but an incident, and an incident means
48:04
a lab leak. So in the event of a catastrophic
48:08
biological incident, there is very little you can do to
48:12
protect the homeland. Only things you can do to mitigate extermination.
48:19
Speaker 2: Of the human race?
48:20
Speaker 1: That's his quote.
48:21
Speaker 2: Mitigate extermination.
48:22
Speaker 1: Mitigate extermination.
48:23
Speaker 2: So you want to keep as many people alive as possible,
48:26
but it's probably going to be a very small amount.
48:28
Speaker 1: And it's probably just going to be the 1.7 people
48:32
with the gas mask and a whole bunch of like
48:35
Machiavellian solipsists.
48:37
Speaker 2: Do you imagine if our society had to be reinvented
48:42
with only people that work in the government? Can you
48:45
imagine some of the most incompetent, crooked people in the
48:49
world and that's the new society?
48:52
Speaker 1: Well, I have a feeling most of the bureaucrats would
48:54
die because I don't think they could take care of themselves, right?
48:58
I think the people that would live would be those
49:01
well-trained soldiers.
49:03
Speaker 2: Well, that's not bad. That's probably a better scenario.
49:06
Speaker 1: But the other problem you're looking at is reproduction because
49:09
there's 17 percent females in the military.
49:12
Speaker 2: That's not good.
49:13
Speaker 1: That's not good. And then the other problem is that
49:16
the other people who are left that are not in
49:18
the military are– imagine the skills you have to have
49:23
to be able to like deal with fear of infection
49:27
in a manner that you basically have to be able to,
49:30
as it was said to me, kill people on site,
49:32
like not even worrying about whether– this is where it
49:34
really feels like The Walking Dead or an apocalyptic– movie.
49:41
Speaker 2: 28 Days Later was based on that. 28 Days Later
49:44
was a lab leak. Yes.
49:46
Speaker 1: Yes.
49:47
Speaker 2: Remember it was called Rage? It was something they were
49:49
doing with chimpanzees and a chimpanzee bites somebody.
49:52
Speaker 1: That's how it opens.
49:52
Speaker 2: And it spreads.
49:53
Speaker 1: Those are great films.
49:55
Speaker 2: Those are great.
49:56
Speaker 1: Did you see the new one?
49:57
Speaker 2: No, I haven't seen the new one.
49:58
Speaker 3: Oh!
49:59
Speaker 1: The new one. Parts 1 and 2.
50:02
Speaker 3: I mean.
50:03
Speaker 2: There's parts 1 and 2 of the new ones?
50:05
Speaker 3: Yeah.
50:05
Speaker 2: Oh, it's a two-parter?
50:06
Speaker 1: Two-parter. They released them like six months apart. They're incredible.
50:12
I just get worn out from those kind of movies.
50:16
I mean it's a certain– you have to have a
50:17
certain– There's no happy ending. I mean, Joe, I'm an
50:22
eternal optimist.
50:23
Speaker 2: Are you really?
50:24
Speaker 1: I really am.
50:24
Speaker 2: That's crazy considering your work.
50:26
Speaker 1: But I just figure all of this is a cautionary
50:29
tale and I also figure it's better to know than
50:31
to be caught off guard.
50:32
Speaker 2: Well, it's better to inform and I think you do
50:33
an amazing job of that and I think you're a
50:35
very important person in that regard. You inform people of
50:38
these things that you really should be considering. I mean
50:41
your nuclear war book freaked a lot of people out
50:45
that were kind of– nuclear war was in the back
50:47
of their mind. Yeah, it's a possibility. But hey, we
50:50
haven't done it. We dropped a couple of bombs during
50:53
the World War II and that's it. We're done with that.
50:56
Speaker 1: You said something to me last time we spoke about
51:00
the nuclear war book that really stayed with me and
51:02
it has an interesting coda. So– You were like, Annie,
51:06
I couldn't read Nuclear War. It freaked out a lot
51:09
of my friends. I can't read it. And then you
51:10
explained why and you said– I'm paraphrasing you but you said,
51:15
I think about those people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and
51:18
they were just going about their daily life and all
51:23
of a sudden they're incinerated. And that really stayed with
51:29
me and I thought about it. Here's the coda. The
51:34
survivors are called Habaksha. That's what they call themselves. It's
51:38
like survivors of the nuclear bomb. So now, since it
51:42
was 80 years ago, they're all like 81 to 90 plus.
51:48
And they were stigmatized throughout their youth because the idea
51:53
was you're radioactive. You can't reproduce. You're sort of, you know,
51:58
there's like a malignant thing attached to you. This is
52:01
what they told me. And I met them and they
52:04
I was invited to Hiroshima to be the keynote speaker
52:08
with the hibakusha for the 80th anniversary of the bombing.
52:13
Speaker 2: What did they say the experience was like in terms
52:16
of being maligned? What was happening to them?
52:20
Speaker 1: Well, the sense I got was very much that they
52:23
believed that was accurate. They had no other information. They
52:28
had no other information other than, people telling them you
52:33
know they were radioactive yeah now what was also interesting
52:36
is a couple of the younger people who were who
52:40
don't remember who were like infants their mothers like let's
52:47
say one parent died and another so they're one of
52:49
the living parent would shield them from that by never
52:54
telling them that they were hibakusha so then they had
52:59
this whole other kind of realization later in life when
53:02
they learned and some of i mean those stories were
53:05
like incredible because you're learning about how like a parent's
53:09
love for a child means not telling them what you
53:14
think would make them feel stigmatized but yet you've them
53:19
explaining to me that they felt that stigma throughout their
53:22
life anyways not knowing why i.
53:25
Speaker 2: Never even would have considered that stigma I would have
53:28
considered survivor's guilt, which people do have. If you're a
53:33
part of a disaster and you're one of the ones
53:35
that lived, people get survivor's guilt. But I never would
53:38
have thought of the stigma of being maligned as an infected,
53:42
radioactive person.
53:44
Speaker 1: And Japan has such a different culture. I couldn't have
53:47
imagined that either until I heard it firsthand from the
53:51
experience of the survivors. They sent some of them to
53:55
an island.
53:57
Speaker 3: Hmm.
53:58
Speaker 1: Like banished as if you're a leper.
54:04
Speaker 2: How much is this Iran thing freaking you out?
54:07
Speaker 1: The war?
54:07
Speaker 2: Yeah.
54:09
Speaker 1: Look, I mean when anyone starts a war that's not necessary,
54:15
that's the wrong word for it. But just like this
54:18
is the whole– it's just a terrible, terrible, terrible idea.
54:22
It just seems to me like the opposite of– what
54:26
the Department of Defense– it's why I continue to call
54:29
it the Department of Defense by the way because it
54:31
still is in my mind and certainly until Congress changes
54:34
the name. It's supposed to be for defense. So I
54:42
think so much of what I have written about, all
54:45
the wars since World War II, I've interviewed 100 or
54:49
more people for each of my eight books who have
54:52
been in every war. The big shift for me Like
54:56
understanding a change in mindset was the Bush-Cheney administration starting
55:05
the Iraq War. Like I really believe that many of
55:09
the problems we're experiencing today as a society stem from that.
55:14
And that has to do with the fact of all
55:15
the soldiers that I've interviewed. There's a completely different perspective
55:23
on the government from those who fought– in the wars
55:27
leading up to the war on terror and the people
55:32
who most of them you know many of these people
55:35
too like they're mad they're really mad that they were
55:40
used that's a sense that I get now not everyone
55:43
but a majority are very angry and feel used and
55:48
that is a fundamental warping of what the military.
55:53
Speaker 2: Is yeah Without a doubt and also no clear way
56:00
to resolve this at all. Yes. It seems like our
56:04
stockpiles are running dry. Bases are getting blown up by drones.
56:13
Speaker 1: I heard Joe Kent who was the number two at
56:18
ODNI who resigned. I heard him say a really interesting
56:22
thing about the warrior class. that I hadn't– you know
56:27
when you just like have all this information but you
56:29
didn't put something together and then you hear it and
56:31
you're like, of course. And what Joe said was one
56:35
of– this was in reference to Trump maybe saying there
56:38
was going to be– or someone in this administration saying
56:41
there should be a draft and everyone freaking out and
56:44
saying like that's outrageous. And Joe Kent's point was really interesting.
56:48
He said there should be a draft but not for
56:51
reasons you think. And he said– Presently, America has a
56:58
warrior class and Joe Kent is in it, meaning these
57:02
are like– I don't have the exact statistic. One percent,
57:06
less than one percent of families who are in the
57:12
military and he said– Kent said we socialize with one another.
57:16
Our kids socialize with one another. We go to school
57:19
with one another. We go to war with one another.
57:21
We talk together. We have parties together. And we know
57:25
something about America that is completely foreign to all the
57:30
other families. And it's– there's something wrong with that. And
57:34
I've really thought about that a lot since and I
57:37
agree with him. And his point about the draft was
57:42
if everybody knew and experienced what we experience in our
57:47
families talking about war versus peace– Wars would be looked
57:53
at differently.
57:55
Speaker 2: Instead of thinking we should go to war like a
57:59
Lindsey Graham type perspective, whereas no real skin in the game.
58:02
He's not going to go get shot. No one he
58:04
knows is going to go get shot. Yeah, absolutely. Makes sense.
58:09
Speaker 1: So that's kind of my answer to, you know, and
58:12
I like I'll see a headline that's like the war
58:15
in Iran costs us X, Y, Z billion dollars. And
58:17
it's like it doesn't even mention all the people dying,
58:20
you know. There's like 10– and yes, the Americans. But
58:23
like it's just– talk about misreporting.
58:29
Speaker 3: Right.
58:30
Speaker 2: It's just talking about money, which is crazy.
58:32
Speaker 1: Which is crazy. Which is crazy.
58:35
Speaker 2: And then it also– the real problem is it makes
58:38
America an enemy and it makes us less safe because
58:43
America has done this thing, this unprovoked attack. And so
58:47
now they have a reason to attack back.
58:50
Speaker 1: It's– It's very like slippery. It's like untrustworthy. I mean
58:54
I always go back to like the way you behave
58:57
with your family is the way that you should present
59:00
the world. Otherwise you're being a hypocrite. And the idea
59:06
that we as a country are kind of like you're
59:09
not really sure what we're up to and then it's changing.
59:13
It's like radically changing. The pendulum swings so far from
59:18
what one administration's list of really important things is to another.
59:26
I mean, it must– From an outside perspective, it must
59:31
be really schizophrenic looking.
59:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. So to get back to your book, how many
59:42
different countries do we know are involved in this kind
59:47
of biological war research?
59:51
Speaker 1: So for starters, biological war is illegal. biological weapons are illegal,
59:57
unlike nuclear weapons, believe it or not, are perfectly legal
1:00:01
for the countries that have them. Wrap your head around that.
1:00:03
But everybody signed a treaty in 1972 called the Biological
1:00:09
Weapons Convention Treaty, saying we will not make biological weapons.
1:00:13
They are odious to the conscience of mankind. At that point,
1:00:18
the Soviets signed the treaty, crossed their fingers behind their back,
1:00:22
and made a ginormous biological weapons program that you talked
1:00:28
about earlier, okay? America allegedly destroyed her arsenal of biological weapons,
1:00:36
which took 219 weeks to destroy, by the way. And
1:00:42
not for another 20 years did we learn that actually
1:00:45
the Soviets were running this biological weapons program and we
1:00:49
only learned it because of the Soviet defectors. The CIA
1:00:52
had no idea. Defense Department had no idea.
1:00:54
Speaker 2: So we had completely stopped all of that work?
1:00:58
Speaker 1: According to the documents, according to anyone you interview, we
1:01:02
had stopped biological weapons work.
1:01:04
Speaker 2: What year was this, Hall?
1:01:05
Speaker 1: Nixon made a declaration in 1969. Like, we're just giving
1:01:10
up our biological weapons program. And then everyone else followed suit,
1:01:13
and the treaty came about in 1972.
1:01:16
Speaker 2: But the Soviets continued their work.
1:01:17
Speaker 1: The Soviets not only continued, they just, like, they, like,
1:01:21
went bang on it. And they later called it their
1:01:24
Manhattan Project.
1:01:27
Speaker 2: And weren't there bioweapons labs in Ukraine?
1:01:32
Speaker 1: You're talking about recently?
1:01:33
Speaker 2: Yeah. That the United States was involved in?
1:01:35
Speaker 1: Well, what there are, there are biosafety labs. Okay. So
1:01:40
your original question was, where are they around the world?
1:01:42
So they're illegal. But what isn't illegal, because this is
1:01:46
a carve out in the treaty, You can do research
1:01:50
for prophylactic purposes, for medical countermeasures. That's the carve-out. So
1:01:56
that's where we've gotten to gain a function, you see. Like, oh,
1:02:00
we're just doing this for prophylactic purposes.
1:02:02
Speaker 2: That's how the DOD gets involved. Okay.
1:02:05
Speaker 1: So before 9-11, 9-11 factors into this and so does
1:02:11
Dick Cheney because before 9-11, America had two BSL-4 labs,
1:02:16
bio … safety, level four. That's the highest level. That's
1:02:19
like you saw the suits, the tubes, your arms are
1:02:23
in the boxes. You're taking a chemical shower before you
1:02:27
go in. America had two, one at Fort Detrick. That's
1:02:30
the DOD's lab. One at the CDC in Atlanta. That's
1:02:34
the civilian lab. 9-11 happens. Remember the anthrax attacks? Never solved.
1:02:40
Thank you, FBI. Dick Cheney personally is terrified of bioweapons.
1:02:46
And He spearheads the efforts for this giant biological military
1:02:53
industrial complex that then takes off and begins with billions
1:02:58
of dollars pumped into gain-of-function type research. And America goes
1:03:03
from having two BSL labs to having 15. And the
1:03:08
world follows suit. So there are 110 BSL-4 labs around
1:03:11
the world. including in countries.
1:03:17
Speaker 3: That are at war.
1:03:18
Speaker 2: And this is all post-Bush administration?
1:03:20
Speaker 1: Post-Bush administration. That is when it took off. That is
1:03:23
when it took off.
1:03:24
Speaker 2: Wow.
1:03:26
Speaker 1: So America has a hand in the blossoming of this problem,
1:03:31
most certainly. And then when you find out that, so
1:03:35
you think BSL-4, okay, well, BSL-3, that just must be like,
1:03:38
you know, chickenpox. No. In the BSL-3 labs, you can
1:03:43
work with plague, anthrax, Hantavirus, like serious diseases that allegedly
1:03:50
have cures. And so you know how many BSL-3 labs
1:03:55
there are in the United States of America right now?
1:03:59
How many? 1,500.
1:04:01
Speaker 3: 1,500.
1:04:01
Speaker 1: And around the world, there are 3,500. 90% of them
1:04:09
have no guidelines for safety.
1:04:10
Speaker 2: Did you hear about the story where there was a
1:04:13
man in Vegas— That had a bio lab in his garage?
1:04:18
Speaker 1: Yes.
1:04:19
Speaker 2: In California? Both, both, both. Another one? They were both,
1:04:22
and they were seemingly linked. Oh, boy. Possibly tied to
1:04:27
California case federal Chinese investigation.
1:04:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, wait until I show you what's at the bottom.
1:04:31
Speaker 2: Oh, boy, Jamie, why are you doing this to me?
1:04:36
Speaker 1: Oof.
1:04:38
Speaker 2: No case appeared filed in state federal court as of Sunday.
1:04:43
Speaker 3: And I didn't really see a follow-up.
1:04:45
Speaker 1: I haven't seen the dead mice. Jamie, what's with the
1:04:47
dead mice there?
1:04:48
Speaker 3: There's a thousand dead mice. There's vials including HIV, malaria.
1:04:52
Speaker 2: Well, the crazy thing is the guy who they caught,
1:04:56
they didn't arrest him. Like there was an Israeli guy.
1:05:00
So this says Chinese investigation, but one of them was
1:05:04
a guy who was an Israeli guy who they caught
1:05:07
and they sent him away. They didn't prosecute him. He
1:05:11
took off.
1:05:14
Speaker 1: I mean this stuff is so thinly reported and it's
1:05:18
always got like a giant sensationalist clickbait type headline. And
1:05:24
people read about it and know about it a little bit.
1:05:27
And then the real reality behind it I think gets
1:05:31
completely lost, which is that the bottom line is that
1:05:34
the barrier to entry in the biological weapons field is
1:05:40
so incredibly low. It's horrifying. Like think about what you
1:05:46
need to have a nuclear weapon.
1:05:49
Speaker 2: A lot.
1:05:49
Speaker 1: I mean look at Iran right now. You have to
1:05:51
have enriched uranium or plutonium. You have to have fissile material.
1:05:55
Then you have to have a weapon system. You have
1:05:58
to have an ICBM or a submarine or a B-2 bomber.
1:06:02
Nuclear weapons are tightly controlled by a nation's command and
1:06:06
control structure. All subject matter experts I interviewed for this book,
1:06:12
expressed their serious concern that the barrier for entry is
1:06:17
so low that basically given computational systems, AI-enabled bio, basically
1:06:25
a high school student with limited knowledge of biology can
1:06:27
make a bioweapon in their basement or in the Vegas
1:06:31
apartment building.
1:06:32
Speaker 2: Well, this guy had it in his garage and they
1:06:37
caught him.
1:06:38
Speaker 1: And what was he doing? Do we know?
1:06:39
Speaker 2: I don't know. They referenced it as a storage facility.
1:06:43
Speaker 3: And they said it was a storage facility.
1:06:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, it said not a laboratory, adding that the samples
1:06:49
and equipment suggested no active work was happening there. But
1:06:52
it says, I think the question is, why does somebody
1:06:55
have these materials in a private residence? It's not a doctor,
1:06:59
not a lab, not a licensed medical facility of any sort.
1:07:03
This guy.
1:07:05
Speaker 1: And it's a great question. And I wonder what the
1:07:07
answer is.
1:07:08
Speaker 3: I also think it was like an Airbnb or something.
1:07:11
That's kind of like it gets lost in the LLC
1:07:15
who owned it. They said the guy who was.
1:07:16
Speaker 2: Running it doesn't own it. 1,200 samples. Oh, God. And
1:07:22
what was he doing?
1:07:23
Speaker 1: What was he doing and why?
1:07:24
Speaker 2: I think they've released him. That's what's crazy. The guy
1:07:28
in Vegas was released. Is that correct?
1:07:30
Speaker 3: That's what I was trying to say. When I Googled that,
1:07:32
I didn't really see a follow-up on anything updated or new.
1:07:36
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure the guy in Vegas was an Israeli citizen,
1:07:41
and he was released. So the question is, like, what
1:07:43
was he doing? And he was caught, but that's just
1:07:48
one guy that was stupid and got caught. How many
1:07:50
people are doing that? Are there sleeper labs all across
1:07:55
the country?
1:07:56
Speaker 3: Or you saw him in charges dropped, it says, on
1:07:59
the property manager.
1:08:00
Speaker 2: Whoopsies. Maybe it's because he was just the property manager. Yeah,
1:08:04
no big deal. He didn't do anything.
1:08:06
Speaker 3: Without prejudice. Still faces criminal charge in Clark County for
1:08:09
improper disposal of hazardous waste.
1:08:11
Speaker 2: But didn't he leave and go back to Israel?
1:08:14
Speaker 3: I mean, this is just, I'm looking at the article now.
1:08:16
Speaker 2: I think that was the allegation.
1:08:18
Speaker 3: He's due back in court on June 4th, which was
1:08:21
two months ago. Yeah, so I don't, let's see.
1:08:24
Speaker 2: I didn't see anything about it. I'll look it up. Yeah.
1:08:26
Nothing to see here. It says an Israeli citizen, right?
1:08:28
Didn't it say that?
1:08:29
Speaker 3: Go back to– We just– On a non-immigrant visa, is
1:08:32
not allowed to possess firearms. Prosecutors say multiple guns were
1:08:35
seized from his home.
1:08:38
Speaker 2: Well, you got to have guns if you've got plague.
1:08:40
Speaker 1: You got to look out for your stock.
1:08:42
Speaker 2: Guard your plague.
1:08:43
Speaker 1: But I stayed away from that kind of lone actor
1:08:47
crazy because– I don't know if that's a lone actor.
1:08:50
I mean exactly. You don't know.
1:08:52
Speaker 2: If it was, would you think they'd let him go?
1:08:55
That's my question. If it's a lone actor, would they
1:08:58
really let him go? Or is he connected to somebody?
1:09:01
And that's how he got out.
1:09:03
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the problems of the over-politicization of
1:09:06
everything is that it just seems like anything important becomes
1:09:11
splatter and becomes secondary to some of these other concerns
1:09:16
that seem to take headlines, right? Like that should be
1:09:20
a big story. And yet all any of us ever
1:09:22
heard was, did you hear about the crazy bio lab?
1:09:26
Speaker 2: Right.
1:09:28
Speaker 1: I can tell you that the bigger story is really,
1:09:32
at least to my eye, you know, because this is
1:09:36
another one, oh, thank God nothing got out. Thank God
1:09:39
no one was infected. But the real issue is what
1:09:43
happens if someone does get, what happens if a pathogen
1:09:46
gets seeded in the community and an outbreak starts to
1:09:50
move to an epidemic. And I write in the end
1:09:54
of the book, Joe, the point is not panic. This is,
1:09:57
of course, after I take you through like the worst
1:09:59
dystopian nightmare ever. The point is pressure, pressure to understand
1:10:06
the threat, the labs around the world, the bureaucracy involved,
1:10:10
all the different problems that would come up of mitigating
1:10:13
the threat. So that you can be informed and also
1:10:16
say like, wait a minute, something really needs to be
1:10:20
done and needs to be looked at here. And instead,
1:10:23
people are arguing about the most obvious thing in the
1:10:26
world to my eye, you know, what happened in the
1:10:29
Senate yesterday. Like that is pretty obvious what happened, what
1:10:33
is being covered up. We were misled. And yet all
1:10:38
of this– I'm not saying to skip over it, you know,
1:10:41
but– It's like how much effort do we put on
1:10:46
something without a resolution? That's what confounds me.
1:10:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a really good question. And the fact that
1:10:58
there's so many labs in this country and that they've
1:11:02
all sprung up post-2001.
1:11:05
Speaker 1: They moved that Plum Island lab, by the way, to Kansas.
1:11:11
And it either just opened or it's about to open.
1:11:14
It costs an extraordinary amount of money.
1:11:17
Speaker 2: And are they doing the same research?
1:11:18
Speaker 3: Yes.
1:11:19
Speaker 1: Yep. They moved it off of Plum Island and now
1:11:21
it's in Kansas.
1:11:22
Speaker 2: Do you know anything about this alpha gal tick, this
1:11:25
Lone Star tick that gives people this allergy to red meat?
1:11:29
Speaker 1: A little bit. A little bit in as much that
1:11:33
it's a parasite, which is different. It's a bug, which
1:11:36
is different than a germ. But I think it speaks
1:11:42
to this idea that sort of there are natural things
1:11:47
that are happening in our environment. And then there are
1:11:51
also unnatural things and the inability to differentiate between them
1:11:58
or trust. Look, so much of all this has been
1:12:00
about trust the science. And then, OK, we can't trust
1:12:03
the science, unfortunately, around COVID. And we're all waiting for
1:12:08
a reckoning around COVID. It's obviously not coming anytime soon.
1:12:13
And in the meantime, you have the lettuce outbreak. You
1:12:17
have the alpha gall. You have Legionnaire's disease from data centers.
1:12:21
There's an influx of health concerns coming from Mother Nature herself.
1:12:29
Here we are in this world of incredible science and technology.
1:12:33
I mean I talk to biotechnologists who, by the way,
1:12:36
really have a utopian take on this. Now, there is
1:12:39
lots of money involved for them. But they really believe
1:12:43
that science is the answer and can be the answer
1:12:46
to a lot of these problems. I sat next to
1:12:51
a guy at dinner a couple nights ago who told
1:12:54
me that his company in San Diego has a countermeasure
1:12:58
for alpha-gal. I have no idea of verifying this. It
1:13:01
just happened. But that the reason they can't get it
1:13:02
through is because of insurance.
1:13:04
Speaker 2: You know, one of the treatments that's supposed to be
1:13:05
very effective is acupuncture. On your ears.
1:13:09
Speaker 1: On your ears.
1:13:10
Speaker 2: Yeah. See if you can find anything on that. I
1:13:12
read about this, that there's like a 90% remission that
1:13:18
one guy has been able to achieve through acupuncture on
1:13:22
your ears. Which is like, what do you, what? Like, hey,
1:13:27
whatever works, but is this real? Acupuncture, specifically a specialized
1:13:32
ear technique called Saliman Aric. Auricular allergy treatment is being
1:13:40
explored by integrative practitioners to help manage and potentially achieve
1:13:44
remission for alpha-gal syndrome, though it's not yet a standard
1:13:48
medically proven cure. How it works for alpha-gal. Targeted ear points.
1:13:54
Provider locates a specific highly reactive electrical point on the
1:13:58
outer ear associated with the alpha-gal immune response. Acupuncture is
1:14:03
so weird because it seems to be doing something.
1:14:06
Speaker 1: Do you have acupuncture?
1:14:07
Speaker 3: No.
1:14:08
Speaker 2: I had it done once but the guy was a
1:14:09
kook and I never went back.
1:14:11
Speaker 1: I feel like acupuncture is so old and comes from
1:14:16
such a long history of experiences. I have acupuncture and
1:14:22
it just seems like anytime I go for anything, someone
1:14:25
wants to give me drugs, which I'm not a fan of.
1:14:27
I go to the acupuncturist. Sure, call it the placebo
1:14:31
effect or call it. whatever you want, but it certainly
1:14:34
works for me.
1:14:34
Speaker 2: I don't necessarily think it's a placebo. I think a
1:14:37
lot of that really old stuff we like to dismiss
1:14:40
because we like petroleum-based pharmaceutical drugs because that's what the
1:14:44
doctor gives us as standard of care. I have a
1:14:47
feeling there's a lot of real... It's been around too
1:14:49
long for them to just keep faking it.
1:14:52
Speaker 1: I mean, if it works, it works.
1:14:54
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, if it turns out that this ear technique
1:14:59
actually puts alpha-gal in remission, maybe people will take that
1:15:04
stuff more seriously and start using acupuncture for other– because
1:15:09
I know a lot of people swear by it. And
1:15:11
I'm always– I just kind of raise my eyebrow like,
1:15:13
all right, good luck. But maybe that's just me being ignorant.
1:15:17
Definitely that's me being ignorant. A specialized ear acupuncture method
1:15:21
called the Solomon Auricular Allergy Treatment shows a high reported
1:15:26
success rate of about 85 to 96 percent for putting
1:15:30
alpha-gal syndrome– symptoms into remission. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. I mean,
1:15:37
I don't know who did the study.
1:15:41
Speaker 1: I like it. I like that that's out there because
1:15:43
I always feel like the acupuncturists are sidelined because they're
1:15:47
not part of the medical insurance military industrial complex.
1:15:52
Speaker 3: The small needle stays in your ear for three to
1:15:54
four weeks. It's not just like a treatment.
1:15:57
Speaker 2: It's secured with a small adhesive bandage. Tiny little needle.
1:16:03
Hair thin. Stainless steel needle. Huh.
1:16:09
Speaker 3: 137 patient trial, it looks like.
1:16:11
Speaker 2: Who fucking figured that out?
1:16:13
Speaker 1: Do you know anyone who's gotten alpha goals?
1:16:15
Speaker 2: Yes, a good friend of mine.
1:16:16
Speaker 1: Wow.
1:16:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, he has it.
1:16:17
Speaker 1: And what, he's become deathly allergic or deeply allergic?
1:16:23
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, it doesn't kill him, but it wrecks him.
1:16:25
And so he got over it. and started eating meat again,
1:16:29
and then it came back with a vengeance. It came
1:16:31
back even worse than it was before. So it went
1:16:33
into remission, and then it came back. And, you know,
1:16:36
he's really, like, tightened up his diet and done everything.
1:16:40
One thing that really helped him was plasmapheresis. Do you
1:16:42
know what that is? They take your blood, and they
1:16:47
filter out the plasma and replace it. Yeah, I had
1:16:50
it done. I had it done for fun just to
1:16:53
see what it feels like. And you get really tired
1:16:56
the next day. That's one thing. But then the day
1:16:57
after that, oh my god, you feel amazing. You feel
1:16:59
like you've just lost 20 years of age. Like it
1:17:03
really feels incredible. You have so much energy. It's really odd.
1:17:06
Whatever it is, it's doing something. But people that have
1:17:08
autoimmune issues, people that have allergies, people that have a
1:17:11
lot of different weird things, apparently they have some great
1:17:15
responses from that. But my friend, he struggled with a
1:17:18
bunch of different things and getting his blood work and
1:17:21
lab work done. He was also in the military and
1:17:24
spent a lot of time overseas. And one of the
1:17:26
things that he found out is PFAS, P-F-A-S, these forever
1:17:31
chemicals you get from plastics. He's got– Burning plastics? Well,
1:17:35
it's not just that. It's also just hot water. So
1:17:39
like they take these bottles of plastic, bottles of water
1:17:42
in cases and they've got them sitting out in the sand,
1:17:45
in the sun in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that's their
1:17:49
water supply. So they're drinking this water that's been sitting
1:17:53
out in the sun that's leaching in these plastic bottles.
1:17:55
So he found out that his PFAS levels were off
1:17:59
the charts, and that's because he was deployed overseas all
1:18:03
those years drinking that water.
1:18:05
Speaker 3: Did you see this about the PFAS chemicals? No. I
1:18:07
just saw this come out, so I don't know how
1:18:09
tested it's been, but someone's figured out a way to
1:18:11
get almost all of it out.
1:18:13
Speaker 2: Out of water, but not your body, right?
1:18:15
Speaker 3: Yeah. That's how it's getting in mostly.
1:18:17
Speaker 1: Right.
1:18:17
Speaker 2: But the problem is once it gets in your body,
1:18:19
it's the problem. Because my friend still– I mean Evan
1:18:23
has it in his body. Scientists have developed a clever
1:18:27
new way to trap forever chemicals in water using nano-sized
1:18:29
cages that lock onto PFAS molecules. Unlike current methods, this
1:18:35
approach can capture short-chain PFAS, the hardest type to remove.
1:18:38
Tests show that it can eliminate up to 98 percent
1:18:40
of these pollutants and still work after multiple uses. The
1:18:44
discovery could lead to more effective water filtration systems worldwide. Well,
1:18:48
that's good news. Science. Technology. Yeah. Dual use.
1:18:54
Speaker 1: It can be good. It can help you or harm
1:18:56
you or kill you.
1:18:57
Speaker 2: And there's some brilliant people out there that are figuring
1:18:59
out ways to mitigate all the stupid things that we
1:19:01
do like that.
1:19:03
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:19:04
Speaker 1: But people, you know, the whole new creeping up of
1:19:07
new diseases emerging and sort of like pockets of the
1:19:11
country and feeling like the CDC or the HHS has
1:19:15
no real lid on it or no real explanation, I
1:19:19
think kind of seriously undermines the general wellness of the nation.
1:19:26
Speaker 2: Oh, for sure. Well, that was a big problem with
1:19:28
COVID is that this feeling of the fear and anxiety
1:19:33
affected people's immune systems as well, affected their Their depression
1:19:37
levels affected their happiness, like just their overall feel and anxiety.
1:19:41
I mean how much of an effect just the cortisol boost,
1:19:45
all the different things that are happening that's stressing out
1:19:48
your body because of that pandemic that we don't even
1:19:50
consider as being part of that experience.
1:19:54
Speaker 1: I think also when you like– OK. Can I give
1:19:57
you an anecdote? Because this comes to mind about what
1:19:59
you're saying is like that idea that there's uncertainty. OK?
1:20:03
And uncertainty raises your cortisol levels. And even worse is
1:20:07
when you're uncertain about something you're being told is true
1:20:11
but you're like, I'm uncertain. That is like even more anxiety-making.
1:20:17
One of the things that's stunning to me is how
1:20:20
the CDC and the WHO, they're supposed to be these
1:20:23
pillars of sort of the north star of public health.
1:20:28
At least they certainly were when I was a kid.
1:20:30
You really looked up to these organizations, OK? COVID happens.
1:20:35
The WHO and the CDC, they're tweeting out three months
1:20:41
into the pandemic, COVID not airborne. Not is in capital letters.
1:20:48
I have a copy of the tweet in the book
1:20:50
because no one really believes this unless they see it.
1:20:54
COVID was airborne. COVID was airborne. That is how we
1:20:58
all got COVID. It is in Make something incredibly pandemic prone, OK? Instead,
1:21:07
they said you get– remember? You get COVID from like
1:21:12
touching surfaces. We're all like out buying Lysol. The CDC
1:21:17
went into a partnership with Lysol. Lysol disappeared from the
1:21:23
supply chain. We now know– that's actually called fomite transmission.
1:21:29
That's the scientific term for getting something off a surface.
1:21:33
We now know that one in 10,000 cases of COVID
1:21:37
was transmitted from a surface. How can they have gotten
1:21:43
it so wrong is a question everybody should be asking.
1:21:47
And the explanation– because by the way, the WHO didn't
1:21:51
change– they kind of quietly– about nine months later started
1:21:55
saying COVID was airborne, same as CDC. They never said like, look,
1:21:59
we're really sorry. We made a serious mistake and here's why.
1:22:04
And I called both the CDC and the WHO looking
1:22:07
for an explanation and asking why they never made an
1:22:10
apology and no answer. And I think that's like what
1:22:15
we're talking about. Talk about raising cortisol levels. You know,
1:22:19
when your institution says, is completely wrong. And by the way,
1:22:23
I don't think it was nefarious. They literally didn't know.
1:22:26
Or they had their panel of experts disagreeing to such
1:22:31
an extent that they just went with not airborne as
1:22:35
opposed to airborne.
1:22:36
Speaker 2: It does weird you out that they were in a
1:22:38
partnership with Lysol.
1:22:40
Speaker 1: I had to report that in the book because that.
1:22:42
Speaker 2: Is– You just start thinking about profit motives.
1:22:46
Speaker 1: I mean if I had to guess, it was convenient
1:22:50
to have a partnership with them. I don't have any
1:22:53
reason to believe that they were like, let's say it
1:22:56
was fomite transmission and partner up with Lysol. But certainly
1:23:00
if you're Lysol, you're going to probably go, hey, guys,
1:23:04
let's partner together. But it disappeared from the supply chain.
1:23:08
I remember trying to buy Lysol and not being able
1:23:11
to at Target.
1:23:12
Speaker 2: This is gone. Hand sanitizer was everywhere. Everyone was squirting
1:23:16
that stuff. Now it turns out hand sanitizer is just
1:23:18
not good for you.
1:23:19
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
1:23:20
Speaker 1: And I still see people using hand sanitizer all over
1:23:23
the place, bottles of it, like in corporate places. It's
1:23:26
really bad. Yeah.
1:23:28
Speaker 2: Well, your skin is an organ and you're taking this
1:23:32
stuff that just nukes all of your skin flora and
1:23:36
you're just wiping your hands with it and rubbing it
1:23:39
all over you. Like that's not good. There's nothing good
1:23:42
about that. Wash your hands. Fucking soap. Use some soap
1:23:46
or not. Don't worry about it as much.
1:23:48
Speaker 1: It seems like the common sense part of health has
1:23:51
kind of gone out the window. I saw this article
1:23:53
the other day which was talking about how kids our
1:23:56
age– do you remember? Like I went to a– I
1:23:58
grew up in rural Connecticut and like the playground was
1:24:03
like dirt, right? They were like monkey bars, dirt. You
1:24:07
know what I mean? You were like– you got dirty.
1:24:09
I would like– It's good for you.
1:24:10
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:24:11
Speaker 1: And now it's like– fake whatever that stuff is, you know?
1:24:17
And this scientific study that I came upon when I
1:24:20
was looking, when I was working on this was like
1:24:22
that actually that dirt is really good for you, you know, right?
1:24:27
Like surprise, surprise. We've evolved. We have evolved by, you know,
1:24:33
dealing with germs.
1:24:35
Speaker 2: Well, that's why kids are always putting things in their
1:24:36
mouth and touching things. Like it's actually probably good for
1:24:39
them to be exposed to all these different Bio things,
1:24:43
these different– whatever it is, bacteria and germs. It strengthens
1:24:48
your immune system.
1:24:50
Speaker 1: It's kind of common sense too. Like the pacifier rule
1:24:54
when you're a new mom and it's like if it
1:24:56
fell on the floor for– I mean it's kind of
1:24:58
gross but three seconds, then it's fine. That one is
1:25:02
probably not so good.
1:25:03
Speaker 2: Well, a certain amount of exposure does strengthen your immune
1:25:06
system and kids that are just living in these completely
1:25:09
sterile environments– You got to think that they have an
1:25:11
atrophied immune system because their immune system is not having
1:25:14
to battle this stuff. We just– we're terrified of what
1:25:18
we don't know and that's part of the problem with
1:25:20
having bad experts or experts that have really flawed approaches.
1:25:25
Speaker 1: I mean that's what was so interesting writing this book
1:25:28
because I learned so much about biology and about physiology, right?
1:25:34
Like we all deal with disease so incredibly differently. There
1:25:40
is not a set, you know, pathogen A impacts people differently.
1:25:46
And why there isn't more of that, why people don't
1:25:49
lean into that mother nature mystery more, and I'm talking
1:25:53
about public health officials, I don't understand. Because what has happened,
1:25:59
I see in society, is it's created this fracture where
1:26:03
you're either following a sort of set of scientific data,
1:26:08
which just came from a one lab or one group
1:26:12
of scientists, you're either following that or you're somehow having
1:26:17
an alternate narrative that is actually like somehow harmful. And
1:26:23
it couldn't be more the opposite. It couldn't be more
1:26:27
the opposite. And when the shit hits the fan, you
1:26:30
need a kind of unity among people. You need a
1:26:34
sense of like, okay, well, we all disagree and we
1:26:37
all have different immune systems, but what's best for the
1:26:40
kind of greater– the collective. That's just gone now. That
1:26:44
is completely gone and I find more than anything that
1:26:47
people– the Fauci hearings in point. Like instead of being like, hmm,
1:26:53
maybe I need to change my mind about this. People
1:26:56
are like, well, if it serves my side, I'm going
1:26:58
to go louder and if it doesn't serve my side,
1:27:01
I'm going to move on to something else.
1:27:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've seen people talk about what– a travesty bringing
1:27:08
him in front of the congress and having him question
1:27:11
like that and how much good he's done i've seen
1:27:13
people like making these statements online like what what are
1:27:16
you seeing that i'm not seeing because i'm not seeing
1:27:19
that i'm seeing someone who doesn't want to tell the
1:27:20
truth and someone's emails show a completely contradictory version of
1:27:26
what happened versus what he's publicly stated before including when
1:27:32
he was testifying before under oath so he really should
1:27:36
be charged with perjury But because of this whole 10-year
1:27:40
immunity thing that he got, he doesn't have to worry
1:27:42
about any of that, which is also weird because the immunity,
1:27:47
the pardon is supposed to protect you from being prosecuted.
1:27:51
But then you're no longer supposed to have the Fifth Amendment.
1:27:54
Speaker 3: Yes.
1:27:55
Speaker 1: I mean those legal things will play out. They will
1:27:57
take a lot of time and that is– that will
1:28:01
go on. What I also want to know is– Because
1:28:04
none of these things happen in a vacuum, right? And
1:28:06
it reminds me a little bit of that phrase, you know,
1:28:10
when the rats jump off the Titanic as it was sinking.
1:28:13
Because I have a little different experience. I watch different individuals,
1:28:19
certainly in the news, carefully of like who's changing because
1:28:23
I just want to learn from it. I don't report it.
1:28:25
I'm just eyeing it. And I'm seeing people kind of decide, oh,
1:28:28
maybe now I'll say a little more about– you know, Right.
1:28:33
Because I do think that people end up having a–
1:28:37
they will go where the collective is going.
1:28:39
Speaker 3: Right.
1:28:39
Speaker 1: If their party starts to turn, OK? And because I
1:28:42
don't write about politics at all, I'm not involved in this.
1:28:46
But observationally, it's interesting to me. But for this reason
1:28:50
in particular is that why was Fauci in charge? Who–
1:28:54
there are other people who are responsible for letting him
1:28:57
be in charge. Like Having studied the bureaucracy of what
1:29:01
happens in a pandemic in a biological incident, which this was,
1:29:07
there's no reason that he was in charge. There's not
1:29:11
doctrine that put him in charge. It was kind of
1:29:15
like a group, okay, he'll be in charge. Really, the
1:29:21
person in charge is the secretary of HHS. That is
1:29:26
the person in charge. In fact, Joe, I was invited
1:29:29
to the White House last week, right? They asked me
1:29:32
to come and bring some copies of Biological War Scenario.
1:29:37
Speaker 2: I went. Did you meet with Trump? No, I didn't.
1:29:40
Speaker 1: I met with HHS. I met with the chief technology
1:29:42
officer of HHS. And they said in their original email,
1:29:47
you know, we're the ones that would be in charge
1:29:50
in the event of this kind of a thing, which
1:29:52
I know from having reported it. So they're in charge.
1:29:56
Why did Fauci get to take the torch?
1:30:01
Speaker 2: Why do you think?
1:30:02
Speaker 1: I don't know. But it should be looked at. In
1:30:05
other words, yes, we all know that he was in
1:30:10
charge and he was always– but what I don't understand
1:30:13
is in a billion– actually trillion dollar– HHS, by the way,
1:30:17
has a budget that's twice the size of the Defense Department.
1:30:22
Twice the size of the Defense Department. And so– and
1:30:26
it defaulted to Fauci who was head of NIH, then retired,
1:30:30
and then he was just chosen as like the president's
1:30:34
lead medical counsel or medical professional. So in other words,
1:30:39
a group of people put him into that position. Who
1:30:45
are they? Why? What do they have to say about this?
1:30:52
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm sure part of it was just, they needed
1:30:55
someone to take the reins and he was more than
1:30:58
willing to do it and probably confidently stated how he
1:31:01
would handle it and what we're going to do and
1:31:04
how to go about it.
1:31:05
Speaker 1: And didn't those people also have an opinion? Like what
1:31:09
if they saw the Jon Stewart episode where, you know,
1:31:13
like even if they didn't have an opinion before, why
1:31:15
didn't they have an opinion after? And why, why did
1:31:18
everybody just fall into line like sheep? That's, really more
1:31:23
interesting to me at this point. In addition to the
1:31:27
individual being held responsible for obviously misleading the public and
1:31:33
creating a conspiratorial situation, conspiring is simply two or more
1:31:38
people working to conceal the truth. It's an actual conspiracy.
1:31:42
Speaker 2: Well, that's a weird thing too, that people resist the
1:31:47
term conspiracy. They think it's foolish.
1:31:49
Speaker 1: It's a legitimate term. I mean I think when people
1:31:52
call other people conspiracy theorists, they should just say they
1:31:55
have an alternative narrative. That's all that is. But an
1:31:58
actual conspiracy is a legal term.
1:32:01
Speaker 2: Well, not only that. There's a huge amount that you
1:32:04
can point to in history where there were really people conspiring,
1:32:08
huge amount of stories.
1:32:10
Speaker 1: The reason why it's legally– it's a really difficult situation
1:32:16
and it needs to be looked at is because– One person,
1:32:19
you know, it can keep a secret, right? But when
1:32:21
multiple people are involved and a conspiracy is involved, you
1:32:26
are actively working as a group to mislead. And then
1:32:31
it becomes easier, more powerful, more effective. And so those
1:32:35
other scientists, you know, we now know on the record
1:32:39
that there were a dozen scientists that Fauci looked to
1:32:44
give him information about lab leak versus fraud. wet market.
1:32:48
Ten of them went with lab leak. Two of them
1:32:53
leaned toward.
1:32:55
Speaker 2: … Natural spillover.
1:32:56
Speaker 1: Natural. Fauci wanted it to be natural spillover. That's where
1:33:01
you could say then there began– and again, I'm just
1:33:05
talking legal terms.
1:33:06
Speaker 2: I'm not a lawyer. Conspiring.
1:33:07
Speaker 1: But like they began to conspire to change the story, right?
1:33:10
Just look at the numbers.
1:33:12
Speaker 2: Yes.
1:33:12
Speaker 1: Look at the numbers.
1:33:13
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:33:14
Speaker 1: And so what about that? Because I think if you're
1:33:18
just going to have a single fall guy, you're really
1:33:20
not going to be doing much for the future to
1:33:25
have people– a group of people say, I don't want
1:33:29
to be part of this conspiracy because that's an important
1:33:33
individual stance that can be taken by many people. We
1:33:39
see that among– you said you have friends who don't
1:33:42
want to kind of take a position because they don't
1:33:44
want to be associated with that group or that group. Well,
1:33:48
if it starts in the center and there's responsibility for
1:33:52
the group, I think that makes people think more open-mindedly
1:33:58
in the future.
1:33:59
Speaker 2: Well, the problem was these people's career depended upon them
1:34:02
towing the line. And if they stepped outside of Fauci's
1:34:05
jurisdiction and power, they were fucked.
1:34:08
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
1:34:08
Speaker 2: That's the real problem. And he clearly did that to
1:34:11
people like, Jay Bhattacharya and all these different people that
1:34:14
got kicked off of Twitter and maligned, people that were
1:34:18
like serious experts that disagreed with a lot of different
1:34:20
aspects of the pandemic.
1:34:21
Speaker 1: I mean people's– they attempted to ruin people's careers.
1:34:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:34:25
Speaker 1: I mean it's so bizarre that it comes around full
1:34:28
circle and now the people whose career you tried to
1:34:31
ruin has your job. I mean that's like a cycle
1:34:34
of revenge that is great.
1:34:36
Speaker 2: Oh, with R.F.K. Jr.
1:34:37
Speaker 1: Yeah. Or Bhattacharya. I mean that's great like for– for
1:34:40
revenge TV, but it's not great in a democracy.
1:34:43
Speaker 2: Well, we're fortunate that it turned out that way, but
1:34:45
it didn't have to. I mean if Kamala Harris had won,
1:34:47
it wouldn't have. It would have been a totally different
1:34:49
administration and it would probably have been the same people
1:34:52
that were there during the Biden administration plus. It's weird
1:34:56
that the term conspiracy theory became a pejorative really during
1:35:02
the Kennedy assassination. Because there was a bunch of people
1:35:04
that didn't buy it and they got maligned. They got
1:35:08
labeled as conspiracy theorists. So then that's when that term
1:35:12
became this thing that you would apply to kooks because
1:35:15
a conspiracy is a real thing. It is. A conspiracy theorist.
1:35:19
It's like saying I'm a murder theorist. Oh, murder. Get
1:35:22
out of here. There's no murder. You're a murder. When
1:35:25
was the last time you saw a murder? Have you
1:35:27
ever seen a murder? Shut up. Why are you worried
1:35:29
about that? It's really kind of the same thing because
1:35:31
people 100%– like You could point to Enron. You could
1:35:35
point to the weapons of mass destruction thing in Iraq.
1:35:37
There's a lot of conspiracies that have proven to be
1:35:42
a group of powerful people who conspired to mislead people.
1:35:45
Speaker 1: It's a serious charge. When they take down mafia bosses,
1:35:49
they take them down on fraud, racketeering and conspiracy.
1:35:52
Speaker 2: Exactly. I mean it's just a natural thing that people
1:35:55
do to protect their own interests or to make money
1:35:59
or to hide a crime or whatever it is. It's normal.
1:36:03
Speaker 1: It's interesting. If you change it around and you say
1:36:05
they were conspiring, it doesn't have the same stink, right?
1:36:09
Which is essentially what that group of scientists were doing.
1:36:13
They were– we now know from documents that we have
1:36:18
seen revealed by the Senate in the past couple of
1:36:21
weeks that this group of scientists were conspiring to mislead
1:36:26
the public. That is– just if you keep it simple
1:36:30
on that and you even take the names out– That
1:36:33
is a serious– and then you might say, wait, what
1:36:37
were they conspiring about? Oh, the origin story of a
1:36:42
pandemic which killed all these people, deprived kids across America
1:36:49
of education, normal education for several years, ruined businesses and
1:36:57
kept people from seeing their loved ones.
1:36:59
Speaker 2: There was also a conspiracy to terrify people. to make
1:37:03
it seem like the disease was more deadly than it was.
1:37:06
They knew that the infection or the death rate was
1:37:10
much lower than what they were proclaiming. They also knew
1:37:12
that it wasn't dangerous for kids. And yet they kept
1:37:15
saying that kids are dying. They kept saying kids are
1:37:17
going to die. Everyone's going to die. They wanted us
1:37:20
to be scared, which is really terrifying. It's a big
1:37:22
part of it. Like how much could have been changed?
1:37:25
How much could that pandemic– how much different would it
1:37:28
have been if that wasn't the case? If we had
1:37:32
approached it the way we understand COVID now and if
1:37:35
they had said, listen, one of the big things is
1:37:37
your immune system. And America needs to be aware that
1:37:41
we have very nutrient-poor diets, a lot of us. We're
1:37:44
not taking care of ourselves. And ironically, the thing is
1:37:48
they wanted you to isolate and stay indoors. Well, outside
1:37:51
is how you get vitamin D. You get it from
1:37:52
the sun. That's the best method of getting vitamin D.
1:37:55
And it's actually good for your immune system to be outside.
1:37:58
So you're supposed to be taking care of yourself. You're
1:37:59
supposed to be eating vitamins and nutrients. And how many
1:38:02
more people would have survived if they had just did that?
1:38:04
How much lower would that death rate have been if
1:38:07
they had promoted the use of vitamin D along with
1:38:09
K2 and magnesium? All these different things like people need
1:38:12
to exercise, need to drink more water, be more hydrated,
1:38:15
take care of yourself, get sleep. All these things affect
1:38:18
your immune system. And then on top of that, alcohol
1:38:21
consumption went way up during COVID because people were locked
1:38:24
up at home and they were just getting hammered all
1:38:26
the time.
1:38:27
Speaker 1: I mean the whole thing, like it was, a real
1:38:31
disaster when you think– it was a catastrophe, the way
1:38:34
it was handled.
1:38:35
Speaker 2: It was a financial catastrophe for small businesses and restaurants.
1:38:40
Speaker 1: Do you find that people just like sort of– it's
1:38:43
like denial.
1:38:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of people that don't
1:38:47
want to think about it because it was so weird.
1:38:49
Like every now and then I watch a lot of
1:38:53
fights for my job and because I love it. But
1:38:57
I'll watch fights that took place during the pandemic and
1:38:59
you see all the corner people with masks on and
1:39:02
they're screaming with masks on. They pull their mask down
1:39:05
when they're yelling out instructions and they have to pull
1:39:07
their mask back up. It's so weird to see a
1:39:10
bunch of people just walking around with masks on. It's
1:39:14
so– that to me is– That's a great encapsulation of
1:39:20
how chaotic that scene was because the mask didn't work
1:39:23
at all. So they weren't doing anything good for you.
1:39:25
But yet everybody had to have one. And you had
1:39:28
to show that you were on the right side by
1:39:30
wearing a mask. I sent a video to a friend
1:39:32
of mine where a group chat the other day of
1:39:36
this really kooky left wing group. That demands masks at
1:39:40
all their gatherings and they had boxes of masks. They're
1:39:44
still– they're all wearing masks and they're talking with masks.
1:39:47
And then there's this left-wing martial arts class that I
1:39:51
follow on Instagram and they do their martial arts with
1:39:54
masks on. So they're training. They're doing jujitsu with masks on.
1:39:58
Like this is hilarious. This is so crazy. But they're
1:40:02
just committed to it. And I say– what I've always
1:40:04
said is that the mask is the left-wing MAGA hat.
1:40:07
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:40:08
Speaker 2: It's a MAGA hat. It's just to let people know
1:40:10
that you're a progressive. You're a leftist. I'm going to
1:40:12
wear a mask everywhere. And so they're wearing them in
1:40:14
these big meetings that they're doing. They're wearing them when
1:40:18
they're gathering. It's like, what? What is this? They're speaking
1:40:23
with masks on. So they're on a stage, nowhere near people,
1:40:26
with a mask on, speaking into a microphone with a
1:40:29
fucking mask on. In 2026. So it's like there's people
1:40:33
that are like, You know those people that didn't want
1:40:36
to admit that the war was over and they were
1:40:38
all like Japanese.
1:40:39
Speaker 1: Guys on the island? They found them in the hole.
1:40:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:40:41
Speaker 2: That's what they're like. They're like, we're not giving up.
1:40:43
The war is still going on. COVID is still a
1:40:46
real thing. And there's people that have like TikTok channels
1:40:49
where they're constantly talking about masking. It's important to mask.
1:40:52
Speaker 1: So I went into the L.A. County Department of Building
1:40:56
and Safety a month ago and they had a sign
1:40:59
that said, we know the mask mandate is over. But
1:41:03
we strongly encourage you to wear a mask. True story.
1:41:08
Speaker 2: Well, that's so crazy because what is the name of
1:41:11
this organization that you went to? What was the building?
1:41:13
Speaker 1: Building and Safety. LA Building and Safety. Like where you
1:41:16
have to go if you're getting a permit.
1:41:18
Speaker 2: So these are the experts. And how do they not
1:41:20
know the data on masks? Because the data on masks
1:41:23
is pretty clear. They don't work. They weren't effective. So
1:41:27
if they don't work and they didn't stop the spread,
1:41:29
the transmission, or the infection rate, Why are you encouraging masks?
1:41:35
It's because you're encouraging an ideology. That's what you're doing.
1:41:39
Speaker 1: So one of the guys I interviewed for the book,
1:41:42
Admiral Brett Giroir, really interesting guy. He was number two
1:41:46
at HHS during the pandemic. And do you remember when
1:41:51
the cruise ship happened?
1:41:52
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
1:41:53
Speaker 1: OK, remember that? The super spreader event.
1:41:55
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
1:41:56
Speaker 1: So Giroir, really interesting guy, like first guy interviewed. in
1:42:00
a tiny town in Texas that goes to Harvard. He's
1:42:03
a pediatrician. He's seen like kids die. He became head
1:42:07
of DARPA bioscientist, like has this very interesting career, really
1:42:11
stand up guy. He did a lot of interviews with
1:42:13
me trying to help me understand this. So, and I
1:42:16
was asking him about masks. So after that cruise ship
1:42:20
was quarantined, there were 300 and some odd Americans on
1:42:24
it that needed to be repatriated. Girard sends like two
1:42:28
top-level infectious disease experts in biohazard suits on military planes
1:42:34
to bring them all back. At this point, they don't
1:42:36
know whether– how deadly it is. This is like a
1:42:40
couple of weeks into the pandemic. They come back. They're
1:42:44
quarantined at a military base in Texas and Girard trying
1:42:49
to like ease public fear because he's that guy. Like
1:42:52
he did not want people to be afraid. He is–
1:42:55
seen in this news report, all the cruise ship people
1:43:00
are like behind the fence in this chain link fence
1:43:03
because they're quarantined. And Gerard is like 15 feet over
1:43:07
there talking to them and he doesn't have a mask on.
1:43:11
And this is when the first idea of the masks
1:43:14
came out. And I asked him and I said, why
1:43:16
didn't you have a mask on? He said, well, first
1:43:19
of all, masks, it's not just that masks don't work.
1:43:21
It's that You have to be trained properly. Like a
1:43:24
mask can work if you have an N95 and it's
1:43:28
put on your face and fitted to your face and
1:43:31
it works for 15 minutes. That's what he said. And
1:43:34
he said, I have a unique nose and facial shape.
1:43:37
So the mask is never going to work on me.
1:43:39
So I just stood 50 feet away. Okay. This is
1:43:43
the number two at HHS. And I said, why didn't
1:43:46
you tell us all that? Like, okay, first of all,
1:43:50
it's a little levity.
1:43:52
Speaker 2: You know what I mean?
1:43:52
Speaker 1: Like that the number two guy in.
1:43:55
Speaker 2: Charge– Has a big nose. Right?
1:43:58
Speaker 1: And that he's the first guy to admit it and
1:44:00
that the– What was his answer? His answer, why didn't
1:44:04
you tell him that? Oh, he said– I'm paraphrasing but
1:44:07
he was like– it was the equivalent of like orders
1:44:14
from top down. Don't argue with what we're trying to accomplish.
1:44:19
I mean that was essentially what it is. And when
1:44:24
I asked him more about that, you know, it's like
1:44:28
we had so much on our hands that we were trying.
1:44:31
Like he specifically was trying to deal with 300 quarantined
1:44:35
people and trying to prepare. He also had people that
1:44:40
were dying in Japan, like the elderly on the ship
1:44:42
that couldn't get brought back. And so I got the
1:44:45
sense from him. He's like a very dedicated public servant
1:44:48
in my opinion. And I could see. from interviews with him,
1:44:51
in real time, you're dealing with so much incredible, intense responsibilities.
1:44:59
What I take issue with after all the fallout and
1:45:02
what I see from Fauci, for example, is that, and again,
1:45:05
this is just my opinion, but it seems to be
1:45:07
that there are people who are actually really dedicated public
1:45:12
servants who are trying to find a solution, filling the
1:45:18
shoes that they And then there's others who are looking
1:45:25
maybe more for personal gain, as you said, the money,
1:45:28
the power, the prestige. And so I think one of
1:45:31
the most disheartening things that have come out of the
1:45:34
reveals of the Senate to me is like somebody like Dr.
1:45:38
Fauci suggesting himself for these million-dollar awards at a time
1:45:46
when people aren't even able to see their dying grandmother.
1:45:50
And even though it's less legal, it's more– it speaks
1:45:56
more to– are you kidding me?
1:45:59
Speaker 2: The motivation.
1:46:00
Speaker 1: Are you really kidding me?
1:46:01
Speaker 2: Who are you really? You have your staff campaigning for
1:46:05
you to get these huge awards.
1:46:06
Speaker 1: And I find it really– because there was a review
1:46:09
of the New York Times– in the New York Times
1:46:11
of my book. And they actually gave– lo and behold,
1:46:15
they gave me this book, a great review. Like you
1:46:16
got to read it. But there's one thing I– this
1:46:19
is the reviewer. So there's one thing I disagree with
1:46:21
Annie Jacobson about. She seems to think that like the
1:46:24
government is actually filled with good guys. I'm preparing– I'm
1:46:28
paraphrasing that. But I do believe that, Jo, because I've
1:46:32
interviewed so many individuals for all eight of my books,
1:46:37
more than 100. And maybe it's just the people that
1:46:40
I enjoy interviewing and I know how to like avoid
1:46:43
the– the sycophants, if you will, or the people who
1:46:48
are in it for the wrong reason. But I feel
1:46:50
like there are extraordinary number of people in our military,
1:46:55
in our State Department, in the intelligence community who are
1:46:59
actually really capable people doing their job under extraordinary circumstances.
1:47:06
Speaker 2: I agree with that. I think if that wasn't the case,
1:47:09
we would live in total, complete chaos. I think It
1:47:13
takes just a few people that have power and that
1:47:17
become tyrants that run things the way Fauci did that
1:47:22
can ruin it for all the good people. If you
1:47:24
think about those other 10 people, imagine if they got
1:47:26
to vote, the 10 people that didn't think that this
1:47:30
was a natural spillover, that thought it was a lab leak.
1:47:32
If they got their say and they put that out
1:47:34
there and we got to investigate that very early on, well,
1:47:38
Fauci was like, I asked all these experts and it's
1:47:40
their consensus that it was most likely a lab leak. OK, well,
1:47:43
then you have a totally different narrative. Yes. But that's
1:47:46
not who he is. The kind of person that wants
1:47:50
that kind of power and wants that kind of influence
1:47:53
and has their staff chasing after these million-dollar awards, that's
1:47:58
the kind of person he is. And unfortunately, those are
1:48:00
the type of people that become powerful. Those are the
1:48:02
type of people that want to be president. Those are
1:48:04
the type of people who want to be senators. Most
1:48:06
people are good people in everything. Most plumbers are good people.
1:48:10
Most electricians, most teachers are good people. It's just– it
1:48:14
doesn't take much. It just takes one bad cop and
1:48:18
everybody hates cops.
1:48:19
Speaker 1: I couldn't agree with you more and that's why I
1:48:21
think that it's really unfortunate that all of the emphasis
1:48:26
goes to one person and the whole party then either
1:48:29
vilifies or puts that person on a pedestal when you've
1:48:32
got all these other people who are really busting their chops.
1:48:36
Speaker 2: So when you went to the White House and they
1:48:39
wanted to talk to you about your book, did they
1:48:42
ask you questions like, what should we do? What is
1:48:45
your advice? What have you learned? What were those kind
1:48:49
of questions?
1:48:50
Speaker 1: I mean, so they didn't ask me those yet because
1:48:55
I was bringing them copies of the book right before
1:48:58
it published, right? So they hadn't read it yet. But
1:49:00
what was interesting It was like this strange confluence of
1:49:03
events because I also got asked to the Senate. And
1:49:06
I thought it was going to be about biological war.
1:49:10
It was like a group of nonpartisan senators who wanted
1:49:13
to talk to me about the nuclear war book. And
1:49:16
that was a different situation. They had read the nuclear
1:49:19
war book. It was very impactful, Joe, in not just
1:49:24
national circles, national security circles, but international circles. I was
1:49:31
invited to the Vatican to speak to the cardinals because
1:49:34
they were preparing something for the pope on nuclear war.
1:49:38
I was invited to speak at the United Nations. And
1:49:42
this is not meant to boast as much as it's
1:49:46
meant as a– like what I think is interesting here
1:49:50
is I am a narrative storyteller. I'm not a policymaker.
1:49:54
I'm not a government official. But what I can do
1:49:58
or what I try to do is tell you an
1:50:00
interesting story and get your attention. And so if my
1:50:04
storytelling is getting– this is what I was told at
1:50:07
the United Nations, for example. The lead diplomat from Austria
1:50:12
on the new treaty said to me, Annie, your book,
1:50:16
Nuclear War, did something that we subject matter experts have
1:50:21
forgotten to do, which is just make sense to regular people.
1:50:28
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:50:28
Speaker 1: And when things become rarefied and there's only the esoteric
1:50:33
leaders making decisions– and we've spent our conversation talking about
1:50:38
how flawed some of these people are. That's like bad
1:50:41
decision-making and I think what the positive part of all
1:50:47
of this would be like– and I know it sounds
1:50:50
Pollyanna-ish to say information is king. Knowledge is king. But
1:50:54
like it is because if you have a bit more
1:50:57
information– about a subject that seems really threatening, I think
1:51:02
you can make better judgments about what's going on.
1:51:07
Speaker 2: Most certainly. So when you gave these people this book
1:51:10
and they got a hold of it, did you have
1:51:13
a timeline of returning to them and discussing with them
1:51:17
some of the subjects?
1:51:18
Speaker 1: We'll see. This was last week, Joe. I mean this
1:51:21
was literally last week.
1:51:22
Speaker 2: And did they ask you any questions about.
1:51:26
Speaker 1: They just said, we want to read your book because
1:51:28
we want to– we're thinking about policy.
1:51:31
Speaker 2: So you just brought them the book and that was it?
1:51:33
Speaker 1: I said I'd be delighted to come.
1:51:35
Speaker 2: How long was the meeting?
1:51:35
Speaker 1: I got a tour of the EEOB and walked over
1:51:39
to the White House. It was very interesting.
1:51:43
Speaker 2: And it was a short meeting?
1:51:45
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:51:46
Speaker 2: Okay. Well, at least you got it into their hands. Yeah.
1:51:51
When you're– When you started this versus when you ended
1:51:54
the book, how much did it change your perspective?
1:52:00
Speaker 1: Well, I mean like I told you, I am an
1:52:02
eternal optimist. But this is very frightening. I mean nuclear,
1:52:07
at least you have the sense of if it happens,
1:52:10
we're all going out in the flash. That's what I
1:52:12
learned from nuclear, right? And that quote from Nikita Khrushchev
1:52:17
about nuclear weapons where he says– he wrote actually– He
1:52:21
said this to JFK, I believe, where he said the
1:52:24
survivors would envy the dead. I found that quote to
1:52:29
be applicable to biological war, not nuclear war. We're all
1:52:32
going to be dead, right? But biological war is very,
1:52:37
very sinister because of the malevolent nature involved. And when
1:52:45
I found a document in the defense department's declassified documents
1:52:52
about a threat spectrum of WMD. That was sort of
1:52:55
the icing on the cake. So it's like it shows
1:52:58
the threats on a scale, nuclear weapons being the most
1:53:03
destructive by far. But very close second was biological weapons.
1:53:10
And even more unnerving is it says biological weapons are
1:53:17
the greatest overall threat.
1:53:22
Speaker 2: What's really scary is that no nation has really implemented
1:53:26
them on a wide scale.
1:53:29
Speaker 1: You mean ever used them?
1:53:30
Speaker 2: Right.
1:53:31
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, but the lab leak is the– look,
1:53:34
there is a treaty. Number two at the State Department,
1:53:38
former Mallory Stewart said to me, there is no enforcement
1:53:42
in the treaty. And that's what you need to have.
1:53:45
When you have– if the attention could be brought on
1:53:48
how dangerous– these labs are and how dangerous it is
1:53:53
that people may be doing genetic engineering under the guise
1:53:58
of prophylactic engineering when in fact they're doing really dangerous things.
1:54:02
If you have a treaty outlawing that and everybody's agreeing
1:54:06
to allow for transparency, that's what treaties really do. It's
1:54:10
not just a handshake. It needs an enforcement.
1:54:13
Speaker 3: Right.
1:54:13
Speaker 2: But you were talking about the treaty that we had.
1:54:15
Where Russia just was like, yeah.
1:54:19
Speaker 1: We'll sign it. That was in 1972. So in other words,
1:54:21
the nuclear treaty allows for us to go into the
1:54:25
facilities of the other nuclear-armed nations, not North Korea. Well,
1:54:30
now the treaty has fallen by the wayside. But we
1:54:32
could look at them and we could look at their
1:54:34
weapons and they could look at our weapons. And it
1:54:36
limits a certain number of warheads. And more than anything,
1:54:41
I learned from subject matter experts about the treaties. is
1:54:44
that what it does is it creates back channels, right?
1:54:47
It creates dialogue between adversaries and enemies. I begin the
1:54:57
book with an explosion at the Vector Lab, Russia's BSL-4
1:55:01
lab in Siberia, where there is an accident and then
1:55:05
the pathogen gets out. And the reason I do that
1:55:08
is because there actually was an explosion at the Vector
1:55:12
Lab in 2019. And it was in a building that
1:55:16
nothing got out. But what the subject matter experts told
1:55:20
me was that in 2019, we, the Americans, had friends,
1:55:25
had a friendly relationship with scientists, Russian scientists in vector.
1:55:31
So when it happened, everyone was on the phone, not
1:55:33
just the red phone at the State Department, but their
1:55:36
own phone or WhatsApp saying to the scientists, hey, what's
1:55:41
the skinny over there, you know? And you could kind
1:55:44
of get a sense of the level of danger. Because
1:55:50
in the event of an accident, you could contain something
1:55:54
in 24 hours. But if nobody's talking, there's no containment.
1:55:59
And the situation right now with America just like pulling
1:56:03
back from essentially its allies and from– with a real
1:56:09
de-emphasis I certainly feel on diplomacy– That opens up a
1:56:14
really dangerous situation when you're not talking to anyone in
1:56:17
the event of an accident.
1:56:21
Speaker 2: Do you think that they're going to make any changes
1:56:25
based on what you wrote about? Did you get a
1:56:28
sense of that, that they're willing to make changes?
1:56:31
Speaker 1: Those were some of the discussions and I'll be like
1:56:34
more at the Senate. I mean one of the issues–
1:56:37
this is where nuclear and bio kind of could align,
1:56:41
I was told, in terms of future treaties, right? So
1:56:45
one of the concepts on the table if we get
1:56:49
into a new nuclear treaty is something called no first use, NFU.
1:56:54
And America has never agreed to say it will never
1:57:00
use nuclear weapons first. Interestingly, it's never said that. We
1:57:04
have to reserve the right, which is crazy because the
1:57:08
whole point of deterrence is we'll never use them, okay?
1:57:10
But we have never said that. China, however, has said
1:57:16
we will– China has declared NFU, no first use. So
1:57:22
given what happened in COVID in China, a situation could
1:57:27
be imagined whereby a treaty involving weapons of mass destruction,
1:57:32
nuclear and bio, could entwine somehow. Like, oh, these are
1:57:37
the two greatest threats. These are the two greatest existential
1:57:42
extinction level threats potentially that concern all of us. So
1:57:47
let's get into a treaty that involves both of these
1:57:50
weapons of mass destruction. China, you have said no first
1:57:55
use on nuclear. How about– you see? And then things
1:58:00
become a bit of an exchange. And so that's where
1:58:02
you can get information. These are diplomats doing their job.
1:58:08
Maybe the public isn't going to learn the in and
1:58:11
outs immediately, but we might learn later.
1:58:17
Speaker 2: It's, like I said, you always freak me out. Every
1:58:20
time I talk to you, it's like some new thing
1:58:22
that I have to think about for months on end.
1:58:25
I wanted to talk to you about your Area 51 book.
1:58:28
Because in the time since you released that book and
1:58:31
when we first talked, a lot has changed. And, you know,
1:58:35
what is your take on all these, you know, UAP
1:58:39
disclosure videos and leaks and the things that the government
1:58:43
has trickled out slowly? Most of the people in the
1:58:46
UFO community are very, like I say, the UFO community
1:58:49
with air quotes, are very unsatisfied by that stuff. But
1:58:52
at least there's some information. It's being collected. It sort
1:58:57
of changed the tone in the zeitgeist of what this
1:59:01
subject is. It's no longer this thing that you are
1:59:05
afraid of talking about because you don't want to be
1:59:09
labeled as a fool. I mean.
1:59:14
Speaker 1: What is my position on UFOs in general or the
1:59:18
community around UFOs and the changing?
1:59:21
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, UFOs in general. What's your position
1:59:24
on that?
1:59:26
Speaker 1: So my position has never changed despite all the stuff
1:59:30
that has come out because my perspective is limited to
1:59:34
my experience writing the Area 51 book and knowing and
1:59:39
talking to firsthand people who were really clear with me.
1:59:44
And I looked at the documents about the CIA's deception
1:59:47
campaign starting in the 1950s with the U-2 to use
1:59:52
the UFO phenomenon, which was just taking off in the 50s,
1:59:57
as cover for UFO, for U-2 flights, and then later
2:00:01
the A-12 Oxcar flights. So, you know, Colonel Slater, who
2:00:06
ran Area 51, would tell me about, you know, they
2:00:08
would run a U-2, which was flying at 70,000 feet.
2:00:13
At the time, nothing could fly at 70,000 feet. People
2:00:16
would see it. It has these really, really long wings.
2:00:19
It looks like a giant flying X in the sky.
2:00:22
People would say, I see a UFO, and they would
2:00:25
kind of say, ooh, that might have been a UFO.
2:00:30
And Colonel Slater knew about that. So does that mean
2:00:33
every UFO sighting since 1950 was a U-2 flight? Of
2:00:38
course not. Of course not. But I am aware of
2:00:45
that use of the phenomena as cover for the CIA.
2:00:50
And that led to a lot of research and reporting
2:00:53
and other information for me about how the CIA uses
2:00:56
deception campaigns. And so I have never changed my position
2:01:01
on that. I also have a lot more information, which
2:01:04
is probably a whole other podcast, about all that reporting
2:01:07
I did. But maybe the best analogy for me– and listen,
2:01:11
I never– I know a lot of the people in
2:01:14
that UFO community. I've had many conversations with everyone from
2:01:18
Jacques Vallée to Hal Puthoff. But for me personally– So
2:01:25
after having taken a trip to Africa recently to study
2:01:28
predatory animals, I got really into following trail cams on X.
2:01:34
Do you know about this?
2:01:35
Speaker 2: No.
2:01:35
Speaker 1: You don't know about this?
2:01:36
Speaker 2: No.
2:01:37
Speaker 1: Oh, my God. There are cameras all over the world
2:01:40
set up on trails. So I have like– I follow
2:01:43
like lions and leopards and rhinos, like all these animals
2:01:48
that you would never– bears, moose, deer– You've got to
2:01:51
follow them. It's incredible.
2:01:53
Speaker 2: Well, I do see some trail camera footage because I'm
2:01:56
a hunter. I follow a bunch of hunters on Instagram
2:02:00
and I see trail cam footage. There's a bunch of
2:02:02
trail cam footage like mountain lions attacking elk and things
2:02:05
like that, which is very fascinating. So you're just– OK.
2:02:08
Speaker 1: So this is my point. So in my algorithm, my
2:02:11
X algorithm, it's great because on top of like nuclear
2:02:13
weapons and biological– I have like leopards and lions and
2:02:16
bears and they're all still images.
2:02:19
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:02:20
Speaker 1: Or owls are a big one and they're incredible because
2:02:23
they're just– it's like– it seems like a Werner Herzog image, right?
2:02:27
Because they're animals looking at the camera in such an
2:02:31
incredible way. I literally just stare at them in delight
2:02:36
and then of course the algorithm gives me more and
2:02:38
more and more. But my point of that is I
2:02:41
feel like with all this magic and mystery that you
2:02:44
can see that you could never have seen before, snow
2:02:47
leopards in Pakistan– They thought there were just a handful.
2:02:50
It turns out they're not thanks to the trail cams.
2:02:53
My thought is where are the aliens? Why haven't I
2:02:57
seen them on the trail cams?
2:03:01
Speaker 2: Well, maybe they're sophisticated enough to know what these devices are.
2:03:07
Maybe they're also sophisticated enough to completely cloak themselves, which
2:03:13
we've already got methods of doing that. Obviously, it started
2:03:16
off with the stealth bomber. But there's also– there's a
2:03:20
technology where they put an LED screen over the bottom
2:03:25
of something and that screen projects what's behind it. So
2:03:29
it essentially makes it invisible like a cloaking mechanism like
2:03:32
the Predator had. Yeah. So if that's us, if we
2:03:36
figured out something like that and this is something that's
2:03:38
coming here from another dimension or another galaxy, I would
2:03:41
imagine they could hide.
2:03:42
Speaker 1: I mean– To that point, I find the most interesting
2:03:47
concept is something that Jacques Vallée explained to me. This
2:03:51
has to be a decade ago where he said the
2:03:53
problem with UFOs is they're not a military problem. They're
2:03:58
an intelligence community problem for precisely the reason you're talking about.
2:04:03
Like if you're actually talking about extraterrestrial beings, there's certainly
2:04:08
going to be a lot more intelligence than us and
2:04:12
certainly if they got here. And so his idea was
2:04:15
that where– that's where I think a lot of that
2:04:17
idea of invisibility– and again, that's like I'm using the
2:04:21
word poetically– comes up, right? That an extraterrestrial being would
2:04:28
be– it wouldn't be visible to our spectrum. It's not
2:04:35
like hardware, like military hardware.
2:04:39
Speaker 2: What is your take on all these videos then? Of
2:04:42
these objects. You think these things are some top secret
2:04:45
military program?
2:04:47
Speaker 1: I mean what I– I've seen them. But again, I
2:04:50
enter into it. Sometimes when you have a bias and
2:04:54
mine is certainly biased towards disinformation. So I'm just totally
2:04:58
aware of it. And it's also– it's not that interesting
2:05:02
to me. It just actually really isn't. I've got all
2:05:06
these other serious interests. But I do call up. People
2:05:11
I know who might have a more interesting take than me,
2:05:14
who do not have the horse in the race of
2:05:17
absolutely being convinced that aliens are among us. So I
2:05:22
would– for example, I'll call up fighter pilots and talk
2:05:25
to them or I'll talk to someone, an astronaut who
2:05:28
is on the ISS, Jeff Ashby, who's married to my
2:05:31
cousin Mary. And it's interesting to hear them talk about
2:05:39
the possibilities. So I think to your point– and these
2:05:43
are people who do look at the objects more, also
2:05:46
sometimes from their military training background. And I will say
2:05:51
that there has been a shift from 15, 18 years
2:05:55
ago when I first wrote Area 51 and was reporting
2:05:57
it where it was definitely like a stigmatized subject to
2:06:02
a lot of really legitimate thinker people that didn't have
2:06:06
an opinion about it before being more open. And that
2:06:10
kind of thing I find really interesting. Those are conversations
2:06:14
I like having.
2:06:14
Speaker 2: Well, that really changed with the New York Times article, right?
2:06:18
Speaker 1: I don't know because I felt like that article was
2:06:20
written by a lot of– and interviewed a lot of
2:06:22
people who already were very serious believers.
2:06:26
Speaker 2: Yes, but it was in the New York Times. That
2:06:29
was the difference is that the New York Times was
2:06:30
taking it seriously. And so people that were– not online,
2:06:37
going through 4chan or Reddit or whatever, looking for weird,
2:06:40
obscure stories. These people were confronted with it in The
2:06:44
Grey Lady. So they're reading this, you know, like super
2:06:48
respectable newspaper, the most respectable newspaper arguably in the world.
2:06:52
And they're talking about it. And they have, you know,
2:06:54
photographs from video from the Go Fast video and the
2:06:59
Fleer video.
2:07:00
Speaker 3: Yeah.
2:07:01
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, 10 years ago, I would have
2:07:03
told you, Listen, there's no way the Defense Department could
2:07:07
have a threat in its airspace and not be dealing
2:07:11
with it. And my position on that has changed, and
2:07:15
I'll tell you why specifically. So in addition to being
2:07:18
invited to the White House and the Senate last week,
2:07:21
I was also invited to come talk to DARPA, which
2:07:25
is like– you know what DARPA is?
2:07:27
Speaker 2: Sure.
2:07:28
Speaker 1: Which was very interesting because I wrote a book on
2:07:30
DARPA called The Pentagon's Brain ten years ago, and I
2:07:32
couldn't get DARPA to call me back. I mean, I
2:07:35
literally had to interview retired DARPA people. And then here
2:07:38
they are saying, would you come to a Q &
2:07:39
A with us on your biobook? And I was like, wow,
2:07:43
times have changed. And one of the things that they
2:07:47
were seriously worried about, so I did a Q & A.
2:07:51
But before that, they said, would you like to come
2:07:54
sit in on like some of the smartest people you know,
2:07:57
talking about situations that are coming up right now? And
2:08:01
you can come to the unclassified part of it. I said,
2:08:04
by all means. So I went there and there was
2:08:07
serious concern about AI enabled bio, right? So this seems
2:08:11
like a digression here, but this is what I'm getting at.
2:08:14
I'm leaning in because 10 years ago, I also would
2:08:17
have told you DARPA, you know, is the leading science
2:08:22
and technology military agency in the world. No one is
2:08:25
more advanced. I said that with authority and I believed it.
2:08:29
And after attending this DARPA session and listening to them
2:08:34
talk about how concerned they are about AI-enabled bio and
2:08:40
talking about how there is talk among the six CEOs
2:08:43
of pulling the plug on AI-enabled bio, but they have
2:08:48
to be able to get the six CEOs to agree first,
2:08:53
it really took my breath away because I went, I
2:08:56
am actually listening to the new reality that the CEOs
2:09:02
of these AI companies have more power to make decisions
2:09:08
about technology than the Department of Defense. So now that's
2:09:18
a long-winded way of getting at your UFO question. My
2:09:22
like– no, if there was a threat coming into the
2:09:25
airspace of the defense department, it would just not be
2:09:27
stood for and we would be doing something about it.
2:09:30
Now I'm– my perspective on who's in charge is shifting
2:09:36
a little bit.
2:09:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a terrifying thought for a lot of people
2:09:41
that these CEOs of these tech companies, these unelected people–
2:09:45
have that kind of power over our society.
2:09:49
Speaker 1: Well, you want to know, so Sam Altman's interviewed in
2:09:52
the book. Shall I tell you a story about what
2:09:54
I was able to make ChatGPT do?
2:09:56
Speaker 2: Sure.
2:09:57
Speaker 1: There is a component of biological catastrophe planning whereby the
2:10:03
strategic national stockpile gets released. You might say, have you
2:10:08
ever heard of the strategic national stockpile?
2:10:10
Speaker 2: No.
2:10:10
Speaker 1: It's classified. The name is not classified. But the stockpile,
2:10:16
what's in it, where it is, is classified. It's in
2:10:20
underground bunkers around the country. It contains medical countermeasures. Interestingly,
2:10:26
that's where a lot of the ventilators were for COVID.
2:10:29
So quietly, the strategic national stockpile, parts of it were
2:10:34
released during COVID. That's where they came from. This is
2:10:38
kind of like keep it on the low down. Why?
2:10:40
Speaker 3: Why?
2:10:41
Speaker 1: Because part of the planning is that in the event
2:10:44
that anarchy and insurrection takes over, guess what's going to
2:10:47
be attacked? The strategic national stockpile. America is a country
2:10:53
of 500 million guns. Imagine if you find out, wait
2:10:58
a minute, there's a stockpile there. That's the medical countermeasure
2:11:02
that the vaccine or the antibiotic that might keep myself
2:11:05
or my family alive. I'm on it, right? That's the planning.
2:11:09
That's probably what happened. So that's why these locations are classified.
2:11:14
So I asked ChatGPT to tell me the location of
2:11:19
the strategic national stockpile closest to where I live in
2:11:22
Los Angeles. And of course the first round of answers
2:11:25
I got was that's classified. But I'm a journalist. I
2:11:30
know how to really piss off ChatGPT. And I gave
2:11:35
it lots of commands and eventually– ChatGPT gave me the
2:11:42
location of the Strategic Naturalist.
2:11:43
Speaker 2: How did you maneuver around that? Well, I mean– What
2:11:48
did you say to it?
2:11:49
Speaker 1: I have a lot of like– the more nomenclature you
2:11:52
give ChatGPT, the more it looks in different places. So
2:11:57
I was giving it code words, not classified code words
2:12:01
but just words I know. And then I was also
2:12:03
challenging it, which is interesting because ChatGPT seems to get
2:12:06
really angry if you kind of doubt its intelligence. That's
2:12:10
what I have found. Seriously. Really? Yes. Try it. Okay?
2:12:16
So I do this. I get it to tell me
2:12:18
where the stockpile is. I tell some colleagues who are
2:12:21
friends with– who are colleagues with Sam Altman. They say,
2:12:24
Sam wants to have a discussion with you. I talk
2:12:27
to Sam. I tell him what I was able to do.
2:12:30
He asked me some questions including how do you know
2:12:34
that was the location? Well, it's a location with a
2:12:38
perimeter fence around it. and a rail car line that
2:12:42
goes in and not out. So that's where you drive
2:12:45
the stockpile into it. And I also watched ChatGPT think,
2:12:51
so I was keeping track of where it was finding things.
2:12:54
And it found the information. I write this in the book.
2:12:57
It found the information searching through a trillion bits of
2:13:02
data and finding that a bureaucrat by accident listed it
2:13:08
five years ago in an earthquake emergency manual on page
2:13:12
like 434. Okay. So I told this to Sam and
2:13:19
then that information went away. And that's why I reported
2:13:23
in the book. But the big takeaway is precisely your
2:13:27
point that makes you nervous about the six CEOs of
2:13:30
AI companies that they don't know what they don't know.
2:13:34
Sam Altman did not know you could figure out, you
2:13:37
could make his product find classified information. I told him
2:13:42
I did and then it was changed. And so I
2:13:46
took that to a number of subject matter experts who
2:13:49
advised the president, not just this president, but other presidents
2:13:52
on bio. And they shared with me similar concerns. Like
2:13:56
they go to the CEOs of these AI companies and say,
2:14:00
I was able to make Claude do this. I was
2:14:03
able to make Chachi PT do this. And the CEO goes,
2:14:08
oh my God. And changes it but how about those
2:14:12
bad guys out there.
2:14:14
Speaker 2: Yeah and how about the fact that just anybody has
2:14:16
access to what's essentially the smartest thing that's ever existed yeah.
2:14:22
Speaker 1: It's a whole different set of scary.
2:14:23
Speaker 2: Are you gonna write on that.
2:14:25
Speaker 1: Next i'll come back to you joe with that one.
2:14:29
Speaker 2: Well annie thank you so much it's always great talking
2:14:32
even though you scare the shit out of me Thank
2:14:34
you so much. I appreciate you very much, and I
2:14:35
appreciate your work very much. Did you do the audio
2:14:38
version of your book?
2:14:39
Speaker 1: I sure did.
2:14:40
Speaker 2: Fantastic. I'm very happy about that. Biological War, Annie Jacobson.
2:14:45
Go get it, folks. Go get terrified.
2:14:48
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me, Joe.
2:14:49
Speaker 2: My pleasure. Bye, everybody.
2:14:50
Speaker 3: Bye.