Latest / Bedtime Stories / Joe Rogan Experience 2534 Annie Jacobsen
Transcript
- 0:04Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
- 0:06Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
- 0:15Speaker 2: Biological war, oh boy. Every time I talk to you,
- 0:18Speaker 2: I'm fucking terrified.
- 0:21Speaker 1: That is my part-time job, to actually scare Joe Rogan.
- 0:26Speaker 1: If I can do that, wow.
- 0:28Speaker 2: Yeah, every time I talk to you, I'm like, oh no.
- 0:30Speaker 2: Last time it was nuclear war, oh no. Now it's
- 0:33Speaker 2: biological war. Oh, no.
- 0:36Speaker 1: Which is actually maybe even grimmer than nuclear because at
- 0:40Speaker 1: least in nuclear, you're just like gone in the flash.
- 0:44Speaker 2: I did a show a while back on the sci-fi
- 0:47Speaker 2: network called Joe Rogan Questions Everything. And one of the
- 0:49Speaker 2: episodes we did was about biological war. And so we
- 0:53Speaker 2: spoke to this guy who used to work for Russia.
- 0:58Speaker 2: during the Cold War, and he was talking about how
- 1:00Speaker 2: much anthrax they had and how much work they had
- 1:04Speaker 2: done on biological weapons. And it was terrifying. He said
- 1:08Speaker 2: they had, like, just giant vats of anthrax, like enough
- 1:11Speaker 2: to kill everyone in New York City.
- 1:13Speaker 1: They were... Was it Ken Alaback, do you know?
- 1:16Speaker 2: He was Russian.
- 1:17Speaker 1: Russian, yeah. There was a couple of those Russian defector
- 1:20Speaker 1: scientists who came here and told us everything they were doing.
- 1:24Speaker 1: There was, like, you know... Tons of anthrax and plague.
- 1:29Speaker 2: Plague.
- 1:29Speaker 1: That's actually the pathogen that I use in the scenario
- 1:33Speaker 1: I write is plague because it's so crazy scary, so dangerous.
- 1:39Speaker 1: Sits at the top of the government's tier one select
- 1:43Speaker 1: agent of dangerous pathogens.
- 1:46Speaker 2: So one of the things that we did during this episode,
- 1:48Speaker 2: we went to Galveston to, I guess it's a CDC
- 1:52Speaker 2: lab that they had there. So they have these super
- 1:55Speaker 2: thick walls and everyone's wearing spacesuits and they have these
- 1:58Speaker 2: tubes attached to them. And they were studying all these
- 2:03Speaker 2: different really horrible fatal diseases. And I'm like, well, what
- 2:08Speaker 2: if this stuff gets out? Like it's right here. Like
- 2:10Speaker 2: what happens if it gets out? Like will we take
- 2:12Speaker 2: every precaution, this and that? But his concern, he said.
- 2:16Speaker 2: was not for genetically engineered viruses. His fear was really
- 2:20Speaker 2: just from natural virus. He says that is just as
- 2:22Speaker 2: scary as anything that's out there.
- 2:25Speaker 1: This is the Russian scientist.
- 2:26Speaker 2: No, this is a different guy. This is an American scientist.
- 2:29Speaker 1: Yeah, I think they like to say that. You know,
- 2:31Speaker 1: Mother Nature is just as powerful. But in truth, that's
- 2:35Speaker 1: actually not true. Because think about what you can do
- 2:37Speaker 1: with genetic modification. Make it more virulent, more transmissible.
- 2:42Speaker 2: Yes.
- 2:42Speaker 1: And make it defeat existing conditions. vaccines and antibiotics?
- 2:47Speaker 2: Well, we are right now in the middle of the
- 2:50Speaker 2: Fauci hearings. So he is now testifying in front of
- 2:54Speaker 2: Congress and pleading the fifth about everything, including the color
- 2:57Speaker 2: of his tie. It's very weird to watch. It's in
- 3:02Speaker 2: one way, it's like I told you to a lot
- 3:05Speaker 2: of my liberal friends that wanted to pretend that he
- 3:07Speaker 2: was a great guy and that he wasn't doing anything wrong.
- 3:10Speaker 2: And now that all these emails have gotten out where
- 3:12Speaker 2: it shows that he knew that that the fatality rate
- 3:16Speaker 2: was much lower than they were saying. He knew that
- 3:19Speaker 2: it wasn't dangerous for children, that they didn't need vaccines.
- 3:22Speaker 2: He knew that the social distancing thing was all nonsense.
- 3:26Speaker 2: And he's got a blanket pardon for 10 years. And
- 3:29Speaker 2: the thing is, it's like these people get money for research.
- 3:33Speaker 2: And that's what they do. They do research. So if
- 3:36Speaker 2: you get money and you get grants for research, well,
- 3:38Speaker 2: you're going to go do research. And if your research
- 3:40Speaker 2: is gain-of-function research that makes viruses... more infectious to human
- 3:45Speaker 2: beings and you know you have to do it because
- 3:48Speaker 2: that's your job that's what you do that's what you
- 3:49Speaker 2: studied that's what you went to school for like what
- 3:52Speaker 2: a crazy fucking thing we're.
- 3:54Speaker 1: Doing it is bananas and it's also i mean it
- 3:58Speaker 1: was really unfortunate i thought that yesterday he took the
- 4:01Speaker 1: fifth because i for one just want to hear call
- 4:05Speaker 1: me pauliana the truth be told you.
- 4:08Speaker 2: Know he's not going to tell you the truth no
- 4:09Speaker 2: matter what he's going to obfuscate and dance around it
- 4:12Speaker 2: and use words that don't totally apply to what he's
- 4:17Speaker 2: saying and just ramble on.
- 4:20Speaker 1: I mean, COVID absolutely could have been this incredible lesson
- 4:23Speaker 1: for all of us. I mean, the nightmare that it was.
- 4:26Speaker 1: And instead, we're just left. I mean, can you believe
- 4:29Speaker 1: that we still, with all the power of national security,
- 4:33Speaker 1: that we still allegedly do not know where the virus
- 4:38Speaker 1: came from?
- 4:39Speaker 2: Don't we, though?
- 4:40Speaker 1: Definitively. I mean, definitively. People certainly have their ideas.
- 4:44Speaker 2: But I think it's high probability that it came from
- 4:47Speaker 2: the Wuhan lab. I think most experts are now saying that.
- 4:53Speaker 2: And I think the only reason why they weren't saying
- 4:55Speaker 2: that was because of Fauci. And it was really because
- 4:58Speaker 2: that he had funded this through the EcoHealth Alliance.
- 5:02Speaker 1: Look, I say that in a very, like, 90,000-foot neutral way.
- 5:07Speaker 1: In other words, every sub... I leave... COVID, that part
- 5:11Speaker 1: of it out of my book, it becomes like a
- 5:14Speaker 1: metaphor that underpins the narrative. And people end up reading
- 5:18Speaker 1: the book and going, wow, I actually think differently about COVID,
- 5:21Speaker 1: which was kind of my intention. But every subject matter
- 5:25Speaker 1: expert I spoke to encouraged me to put in the
- 5:29Speaker 1: book that almost certainly it was a lab leak. Like
- 5:33Speaker 1: it's just... So when I say we still don't know,
- 5:36Speaker 1: that's in a bit of air quotes, meaning how is
- 5:39Speaker 1: it that someone can't– how does it all rest on
- 5:43Speaker 1: Fauci who had reasons to mislead us? We know that
- 5:46Speaker 1: from looking at what's been released. How can it be
- 5:50Speaker 1: that he's the only one with the alleged answer to
- 5:55Speaker 1: it all?
- 5:56Speaker 2: Well, I mean the other scientists that were investigating it
- 5:58Speaker 2: from the beginning– You know, when they examined the virus,
- 6:01Speaker 2: they were saying that all indications that it had been manipulated.
- 6:04Speaker 2: And they were pretty public about that. And then they weren't.
- 6:07Speaker 2: And then they changed their tune. It's just when you
- 6:10Speaker 2: have power and you have influence like he did and
- 6:14Speaker 2: the power to make or break careers in the medical
- 6:20Speaker 2: world where these people are terrified. You know, they're already
- 6:23Speaker 2: dealing with malpractice insurance, which is very high. They already
- 6:27Speaker 2: have very high student debt. student loan debt. And it's
- 6:31Speaker 2: a bad situation for them. And they're not going to
- 6:33Speaker 2: stick their neck out to risk everything that they've worked
- 6:38Speaker 2: for for 20, 30, whatever years for this thing. And
- 6:42Speaker 2: that's what most people did. Most people just stuck their
- 6:44Speaker 2: head in the sand.
- 6:46Speaker 1: I sort of went along with a party line, which
- 6:49Speaker 1: is also really crazy when you drill down on how
- 6:53Speaker 1: dangerous biological weapons are. I mean, look, most of the
- 6:56Speaker 1: people I talked to said, Gain of function is a
- 7:01Speaker 1: euphemism for biological weapons engineering.
- 7:05Speaker 2: Right. Right. Period.
- 7:06Speaker 1: Full stop.
- 7:07Speaker 2: And a lot of it is funded by the military. Yes.
- 7:11Speaker 1: And what's crazy is that these are people that have
- 7:15Speaker 1: worked for Obama just as much as all sides of
- 7:18Speaker 1: the aisle working.
- 7:19Speaker 2: Yes.
- 7:20Speaker 1: People who are not, as you say, they don't have
- 7:23Speaker 1: something to gain financially.
- 7:25Speaker 2: Well, we should say that Obama actually stopped gain-of-function research
- 7:29Speaker 2: when he was in office, which was a very wise
- 7:31Speaker 2: thing for him, very wise by his decision.
- 7:35Speaker 1: So what do you make of the fact that Obama
- 7:38Speaker 1: stopped this dangerous research, also called dual-use research of concern?
- 7:44Speaker 1: He stops it. And then suddenly it becomes a partisan
- 7:47Speaker 1: issue that Republic, only one side of the aisle decides that.
- 7:52Speaker 1: I mean, that's what confuses me, because if you look
- 7:56Speaker 1: at the facts, the very knowledgeable people that are well-informed
- 8:01Speaker 1: by people who don't have financial gain know that gain
- 8:05Speaker 1: of function is essentially weapons engineering.
- 8:08Speaker 2: Yes. And the thing is, they're doing gain of function
- 8:13Speaker 2: to make these viruses more transmissible. Supposedly, So that they
- 8:17Speaker 2: can come up with cures. But they didn't have any cures.
- 8:22Speaker 1: But I think it's like, okay, that also sounds great
- 8:25Speaker 1: for them to say. We're trying to work on cures,
- 8:27Speaker 1: but they're leaving out a really important point. Is that
- 8:31Speaker 1: in order for us to find a cure, we have
- 8:34Speaker 1: to make the pathogen more virulent, more transmissible. We have
- 8:39Speaker 1: to make something, for example, airborne that wasn't airborne.
- 8:42Speaker 2: Right.
- 8:43Speaker 1: We have to demonstrate that it could cause a pandemic.
- 8:47Speaker 1: You see that a lot in the literature in order
- 8:50Speaker 1: to figure out how to cure it. Well, that's a
- 8:54Speaker 1: catch-22 that's incredibly dangerous. Like we have to actually make
- 8:59Speaker 1: a weapon to be able to defeat a weapon. That's
- 9:05Speaker 1: actually what is being said.
- 9:06Speaker 2: Right, but it seems like there's a lot of bullshit
- 9:09Speaker 2: going on and that really what they're trying to do
- 9:11Speaker 2: is make better diseases that work better and they can
- 9:15Speaker 2: use them. Like, this is part of the argument about
- 9:18Speaker 2: whether or not Lyme disease was engineered. And there's a
- 9:22Speaker 2: lot of evidence that points to the fact that it was.
- 9:24Speaker 2: And one of the reasons for it is this Plum
- 9:27Speaker 2: Island laboratory that's right off the coast of Lyme, Connecticut,
- 9:31Speaker 2: where the disease was really... first named in the 1970s
- 9:35Speaker 2: or whatever it was yeah and so they were doing
- 9:37Speaker 2: gain-of-function research they were doing biological research on ticks in
- 9:41Speaker 2: order to infect ticks with diseases and then they would
- 9:44Speaker 2: drop them out of airplanes and overwhelm the medical establishment
- 9:47Speaker 2: in these areas and the idea was that if you're
- 9:50Speaker 2: fighting the enemy you can fly over dump a bunch
- 9:53Speaker 2: of ticks on them they all get these horrible diseases
- 9:55Speaker 2: everyone's sick you don't have an effective fighting force.
- 9:59Speaker 1: I mean it's like we need to create a countermeasure,
- 10:03Speaker 1: but first we need to create the weapon.
- 10:05Speaker 2: I don't even know if they think that far ahead.
- 10:08Speaker 2: I think a lot of it, I'm just guessing, but
- 10:10Speaker 2: I think a lot of it is just what I
- 10:12Speaker 2: was saying earlier. There's people and their job. is to
- 10:16Speaker 2: do this kind of research. And they want grants and
- 10:18Speaker 2: they want funding. And then there's other people that can
- 10:21Speaker 2: profit off of this, of these grants and this funding
- 10:24Speaker 2: and creating labs and doing all this stuff. And they
- 10:27Speaker 2: just start doing it. And they come up with reasons
- 10:29Speaker 2: why it should be done. And then, of course, you
- 10:31Speaker 2: have military people that want the military applications of these diseases.
- 10:35Speaker 2: And so they help facilitate it. And they don't even think,
- 10:39Speaker 2: how does this play out? They think about their own interests.
- 10:44Speaker 2: They're at their own short-term benefits of having these things.
- 10:47Speaker 2: And they just continue the research. They continue to work.
- 10:50Speaker 2: And the fact that they even push back on the
- 10:53Speaker 2: idea that it was a lab leak so hard when
- 10:55Speaker 2: you have a lab right where it was leaked. I mean,
- 10:58Speaker 2: right where it started happening, you've got a lab there.
- 11:00Speaker 2: And then the famous Jon Stewart bit that he did
- 11:03Speaker 2: on The Colbert Show, which is hilarious. Yeah. I mean,
- 11:06Speaker 2: that's crazy. It's the Wuhan Institute.
- 11:09Speaker 1: For Coronavirus Research.
- 11:12Speaker 2: Yes. And that's where you get a coronavirus leak.
- 11:15Speaker 1: I mean, look, this is like where you really have
- 11:18Speaker 1: to think the country's going to hell in a handbag.
- 11:21Speaker 1: That people stop being able to like form an opinion
- 11:26Speaker 1: based on the facts in front of them, even if
- 11:28Speaker 1: it isn't popular with their best friend.
- 11:32Speaker 2: Well, it's their party, right? It's their ideology. They've committed
- 11:35Speaker 2: to one side or another. And either you, you know,
- 11:39Speaker 2: you're with the team or you're not with the team.
- 11:41Speaker 2: And if you're with the team, you have to accept
- 11:42Speaker 2: all the things the team says.
- 11:44Speaker 1: At your own peril. I mean, you know, it's an
- 11:48Speaker 1: existential risk. Do you know what the case fatality rate
- 11:52Speaker 1: for COVID was? Like the case fatality rate, it means
- 11:57Speaker 1: how many people out of 100 people that get COVID die.
- 12:00Speaker 2: How many? One.
- 12:04Speaker 1: Case fatality rate of one. Pneumonic plague, which I write
- 12:08Speaker 1: about in Biological War, Mother Nature's pneumonic plague, 100 out
- 12:14Speaker 1: of 100 die. 100% case fatality rate. Unless you get antibiotics.
- 12:23Speaker 1: Within 24 hours, then it's about a 15% case fatality rate.
- 12:28Speaker 1: But guess what gain of function does? You can learn
- 12:31Speaker 1: how to outfox antibiotics. So that you can turn Mother
- 12:37Speaker 1: Nature's pneumonic plague, which used to be curable with antibiotics,
- 12:44Speaker 1: to have no cure. That's the threat level we're dealing with.
- 12:49Speaker 1: And meanwhile, people are taking sides about what we're talking about,
- 12:54Speaker 1: a lab leak that pretty obviously was a lab leak.
- 12:58Speaker 2: Well, first of all, I didn't realize that COVID's fatality
- 13:00Speaker 2: rate was that high. I thought it was much lower
- 13:02Speaker 2: than that.
- 13:04Speaker 1: It's about 1%. Well, here's why. Okay, so 1 in
- 13:06Speaker 1: 100 people who manifested COVID got it. But COVID is also.
- 13:12Speaker 2: 1 in 100 people who manifested COVID died.
- 13:15Speaker 1: Died, yes.
- 13:16Speaker 2: So, like, I don't know anyone— Wasn't really that much.
- 13:18Speaker 1: That is the CDC, even Defense Department, statistic. But also
- 13:22Speaker 1: keep this into consideration. Many, many people who had COVID
- 13:26Speaker 1: were never symptomatic.
- 13:28Speaker 2: Right.
- 13:28Speaker 1: Like, including my 83-year-old father and my son, one of
- 13:32Speaker 1: my two sons. They could both test positive for COVID
- 13:37Speaker 1: and have no symptoms.
- 13:38Speaker 2: Right. But isn't that a function of the PCR test
- 13:41Speaker 2: being really not designed for testing for active diseases? And
- 13:47Speaker 2: there was false positives of the PCR test was somewhere
- 13:50Speaker 2: in the 80%. Huge, huge.
- 13:53Speaker 1: I mean, you're, I think, bringing up the most important
- 13:55Speaker 1: point about biology, which is that there's so much uncertainty.
- 14:00Speaker 1: There's so much uncertainty. I mean, you and I could
- 14:02Speaker 1: get the same pathogen in our lungs. Our immunity systems
- 14:06Speaker 1: are totally different. Our physiology is different. So there's no...
- 14:12Speaker 1: Uncertainty would be something that you would think would be
- 14:15Speaker 1: sort of factored into public health officials talking about things. Like,
- 14:19Speaker 1: we're not sure if... But instead, they act with this
- 14:24Speaker 1: crazy certainty, which is bogus.
- 14:27Speaker 2: Well, the big problem with that is profit, right? There
- 14:31Speaker 2: was a lot of profit in being able to point
- 14:34Speaker 2: towards one very particular method, one very particular treatment. And
- 14:39Speaker 2: this was the only treatment. And you have to take
- 14:41Speaker 2: this treatment and this treatment is going to make people
- 14:44Speaker 2: an insane amount of money. But that's not why they're
- 14:46Speaker 2: pushing it. They're pushing it for public health. They really
- 14:48Speaker 2: care about you, even though they're going to make hundreds
- 14:51Speaker 2: of billions of dollars.
- 14:52Speaker 3: It's the case fatality rate. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.
- 14:55Speaker 3: It says it's 0.1%, which was a fraction of the
- 14:58Speaker 3: 1% estimated earlier.
- 14:59Speaker 2: In the pandemic. Yeah, that's what I thought it was.
- 15:01Speaker 2: I thought it was one tenth of 1%. So that
- 15:05Speaker 2: makes more sense to me because otherwise you would have
- 15:07Speaker 2: so many people dead. You know, if you think about
- 15:10Speaker 2: 300 million people, that means we'd have 3 million people
- 15:12Speaker 2: dead because most people caught COVID.
- 15:15Speaker 1: It's interesting because the CDC still says it's 1%.
- 15:18Speaker 2: I think they're full of shit. I think they're full
- 15:21Speaker 2: of shit. I think they're just, I think the mismanagement
- 15:25Speaker 2: and the. Just the overall strategy for dealing with it
- 15:29Speaker 2: and dealing with people, the lockdowns, keeping kids out of school, masking,
- 15:33Speaker 2: all of it was so bad. It's so indefensible that
- 15:36Speaker 2: one of the wildest things now is during this Fauci trial,
- 15:40Speaker 2: you're not seeing any coverage of it on mainstream media,
- 15:43Speaker 2: except I saw one of those stupid panel shows on
- 15:46Speaker 2: CNN where they were saying no one cares about this.
- 15:49Speaker 2: We should care about what's happening right now. America doesn't
- 15:51Speaker 2: care about what happened five years ago. Hey, there's a
- 15:54Speaker 2: congressional hearing going on where a guy's testifying in front
- 15:58Speaker 2: of Congress who got a 10-year, complete 10-year immunity for
- 16:04Speaker 2: all the crimes that he possibly could have committed when
- 16:06Speaker 2: he wasn't convicted of any crimes, which is an incredible
- 16:09Speaker 2: precedent that's never happened before. You've never had a guy
- 16:12Speaker 2: get pardoned for something that he was never convicted of
- 16:15Speaker 2: for 10 years, anything he did in 10 years. And
- 16:18Speaker 2: then you have that same guy testifying in front of Congress,
- 16:21Speaker 2: pleading the fifth that would color his tie is. If
- 16:24Speaker 2: you don't think that's news, you're out of your fucking
- 16:26Speaker 2: mind and you shouldn't be calling yourself the news because
- 16:29Speaker 2: you're just a propaganda arm for whatever pharmaceutical company is
- 16:33Speaker 2: paying for your advertisements. What you're doing is nonsense. This
- 16:37Speaker 2: is definitely not news. That's a big issue for most
- 16:39Speaker 2: Americans who went through that, people who lost their jobs,
- 16:42Speaker 2: people who had to take a vaccine in order to
- 16:44Speaker 2: go to work and got sick from it, people who
- 16:48Speaker 2: they couldn't fly, they couldn't travel, they were vilified, they
- 16:51Speaker 2: were called plague rats because they were questioning these things.
- 16:54Speaker 2: And here we are. Here we are with CNN saying
- 16:56Speaker 2: this is not a big deal. Why are we concentrating
- 16:59Speaker 2: on this? We have so many issues right now plaguing
- 17:01Speaker 2: this country. Guess what? We can concentrate on those too.
- 17:05Speaker 2: We can look at everything. That's what you're supposed to do.
- 17:07Speaker 2: That's what the news is supposed to be. You're supposed
- 17:09Speaker 2: to be telling it. You're not supposed to be the
- 17:10Speaker 2: arbiters of what we can and can't concentrate on. That's ridiculous.
- 17:15Speaker 1: You know, but what's interesting is I think the lack
- 17:18Speaker 1: of news ends up making people more curious. So in
- 17:23Speaker 1: other words, people go to other sources of information. If
- 17:26Speaker 1: they're not going to get it from CNN, they're going
- 17:29Speaker 1: to look for it themselves because we're naturally curious, especially–
- 17:34Speaker 1: something like COVID. So I think I kind of get
- 17:37Speaker 1: the sense that people tow certain groups of people, certainly
- 17:40Speaker 1: not me, because you don't know what my politics are,
- 17:42Speaker 1: but they will tow the party line, but then they
- 17:45Speaker 1: have their own opinion privately.
- 17:48Speaker 2: Yes.
- 17:50Speaker 1: Which is unfortunately what we also saw from Dr. Fauci,
- 17:53Speaker 1: but that's a completely different point because he's a public
- 17:56Speaker 1: health official and he shouldn't be, you know, speaking out
- 17:59Speaker 1: of one side of his mouth and writing in his
- 18:01Speaker 1: journal another thing that he really thinks. But I think
- 18:05Speaker 1: that this human instinct to want to know the truth
- 18:10Speaker 1: about what happened must prevail, right? But my original point
- 18:17Speaker 1: was like, why is Dr. Fauci allegedly the only one
- 18:20Speaker 1: who can really tell us about the Wuhan lab leak?
- 18:24Speaker 1: Where's the CIA? Where's the ODNI? Where's DOD? Where are
- 18:30Speaker 1: other organizations that you know have that information?
- 18:35Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 18:35Speaker 1: You know they do. If Fauci had it, they had it.
- 18:38Speaker 1: Why aren't they bringing that to the public domain right now?
- 18:43Speaker 2: That's a very good question. So I want to ask
- 18:45Speaker 2: you about this book. Like, what was your motivation for
- 18:47Speaker 2: writing it? How did you get involved in this? Like,
- 18:50Speaker 2: I know you pick a subject and you go deep
- 18:53Speaker 2: and you dive deep and then you write your book.
- 18:55Speaker 2: So why biological war? Yeah.
- 18:59Speaker 1: My first six books were written in the past tense. Like,
- 19:02Speaker 1: you know, the Nazi scientists who came to America, Area 51,
- 19:08Speaker 1: the Pentagon's brain. The nuclear war and biological war are
- 19:13Speaker 1: written in the future. They're scenarios based on Pentagon war games.
- 19:18Speaker 1: And that was me realizing, like, there are major existential
- 19:23Speaker 1: threats right now speeding up at the rate of science,
- 19:27Speaker 1: which is going faster every day, literally. And so I
- 19:31Speaker 1: modeled the two books after Pentagon War Games and got
- 19:35Speaker 1: access to people who actually run these games at the Pentagon.
- 19:39Speaker 1: And learned the sort of holy shit people are preparing
- 19:44Speaker 1: for the worst case scenario. And no one knows about it.
- 19:49Speaker 2: Is that their job though? I mean, that is their job.
- 19:52Speaker 2: They have to be preparing for the worst case scenario.
- 19:55Speaker 2: The real question is, are you preparing by creating it?
- 20:00Speaker 1: The defense department or us?
- 20:01Speaker 2: Well, whoever's, yeah.
- 20:02Speaker 1: Um, Well, what I wanted to do first of all
- 20:06Speaker 1: was like I'm just naturally curious. I wanted to know
- 20:09Speaker 1: like what are they– how does that preparation play out?
- 20:15Speaker 1: The most shocking thing about nuclear was to find out like, oh,
- 20:18Speaker 1: there is no plan because we're all dead. That's literally
- 20:22Speaker 1: the quote from the FEMA director. There is no population
- 20:26Speaker 1: protection planning after a nuclear strike because everyone is dead.
- 20:30Speaker 1: Don't forget your morals and hope you stalked Pedia-like. That's
- 20:34Speaker 1: what he told me. Bio is totally different.
- 20:38Speaker 2: Why Pedialyte?
- 20:40Speaker 1: Pedialyte, you know that stuff you give your kids to drink? Yeah, electrolytes.
- 20:43Speaker 2: Yeah, not just kids.
- 20:45Speaker 1: Or you, right? That's what he said.
- 20:48Speaker 2: Well, athletes take it when they cut weight.
- 20:50Speaker 1: It's been a while since I've been an athlete. So, yeah,
- 20:54Speaker 1: that's what he said. It was like, wow, that's what
- 20:57Speaker 1: they're thinking about nuclear. It's just lights out.
- 21:00Speaker 2: Why Pedialyte, though?
- 21:01Speaker 1: I guess for the electrolytes.
- 21:03Speaker 2: Does that protect– I know– what is it, iodine that
- 21:06Speaker 2: people tell you to take?
- 21:07Speaker 1: I always got the sense that the– I should have
- 21:09Speaker 1: done a follow-up question, Joe.
- 21:11Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 21:11Speaker 1: Why Pedialyte? I always got the sense in the same
- 21:13Speaker 1: way that when your kids are babies and they get
- 21:15Speaker 1: diarrhea that you give them Pedialyte to like, you know,
- 21:20Speaker 1: get their system filled with necessary electrolytes. So that's– and
- 21:25Speaker 1: I also got the sense that it was like hydration and,
- 21:29Speaker 1: you know, better than water.
- 21:31Speaker 2: God. Yeah.
- 21:34Speaker 1: But bio, I learned, is a completely different animal because
- 21:39Speaker 1: what they're really worried about is the secondary effect of
- 21:43Speaker 1: panic and anarchy. And that was really interesting to me
- 21:47Speaker 1: because having written all these books about, you know, the
- 21:50Speaker 1: Defense Department and the CIA, the programs are very, you know,
- 21:55Speaker 1: they're very structured and ordered and they don't take place
- 21:58Speaker 1: in the homeland because we're always fighting wars overseas. So
- 22:02Speaker 1: to learn about a program that would go down in
- 22:06Speaker 1: the continental United States where, you know, the Insurrection Act
- 22:11Speaker 1: gets declared, posse comitatus gets lifted, the military takes over, dot, dot, dot,
- 22:19Speaker 1: and then it goes from there, third act of the book,
- 22:21Speaker 1: spoiler alert. That was shocking to me. And it was
- 22:25Speaker 1: equally shocking that I could actually get this information. A
- 22:28Speaker 1: lot of it's classified, but the names of some of
- 22:31Speaker 1: the programs are unclassified. So the officials that I interviewed
- 22:36Speaker 1: took me up to the edge of what can be
- 22:38Speaker 1: legally known. And I also got the sense of like, oh,
- 22:43Speaker 1: the sense that these former officials are conveying is the
- 22:48Speaker 1: public should know about this. My personal interpretation is like,
- 22:53Speaker 1: let's stop arguing about stuff that doesn't matter and get
- 22:57Speaker 1: to the facts and start realizing where the real threats are.
- 23:00Speaker 2: So their real fear is worrying about the The aftermath,
- 23:06Speaker 2: worrying about chaos in the streets, rioting, looting, that's the
- 23:10Speaker 2: real fear?
- 23:11Speaker 1: That's the real fear. You can search up any of,
- 23:14Speaker 1: so there's unclassified pandemic plans, which are done by like FEMA, DHS.
- 23:21Speaker 1: They're always done by former officials, former SECDEF, former CDC director,
- 23:27Speaker 1: sitting around a table running a pandemic planning game. They
- 23:31Speaker 1: do them at the Defense Department and they call it,
- 23:34Speaker 1: a biological catastrophe, war game. Those are declassified. All of
- 23:39Speaker 1: them that I was looking at go through the series
- 23:44Speaker 1: of events, you know, outbreak, infection, sort of everyone trying
- 23:47Speaker 1: to mitigate the release, the spread. And then it gets
- 23:52Speaker 1: to a certain point. In my scenario, it's day six
- 23:55Speaker 1: because pneumonic plague is fast. There's a point in all
- 23:59Speaker 1: these plans where anarchy and chaos takes over And the
- 24:05Speaker 1: war game ends.
- 24:07Speaker 2: Ends.
- 24:08Speaker 1: Like, oh, and now we're done here. And I would
- 24:11Speaker 1: say as the journalist, like to myself, what happens next?
- 24:15Speaker 1: What happens next? And why aren't we learning about it?
- 24:19Speaker 2: They don't have any plans for what happens after Anarchy
- 24:21Speaker 2: and Chaos?
- 24:22Speaker 1: They do. They just don't have it in the declassified games.
- 24:27Speaker 1: There's a plan called the Devolution Plan. Eyebrows up for
- 24:33Speaker 1: a reason.
- 24:34Speaker 2: I don't like that word.
- 24:35Speaker 1: Think about evolution. Now put a D in front of it.
- 24:38Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 24:39Speaker 1: Instead of going forward, you're going backward. So you've heard
- 24:43Speaker 1: of DEFCON, right? Okay, so DEFCON, Defense Readiness Condition. There's five.
- 24:49Speaker 1: Five is the lowest. That's like normal every day. At 9-11,
- 24:53Speaker 1: we were at three. DEFCON 1 means nuclear war. There's
- 24:58Speaker 1: a separate structure of readiness condition called COGCON. Probably haven't
- 25:04Speaker 1: heard of it because it's classified. Stands for Continuity of
- 25:09Speaker 1: Government Readiness Condition. It's got four levels. Four is every day.
- 25:18Speaker 1: One is insurrection. The Insurrection Act gets declared. COGCON 1
- 25:26Speaker 1: is in effect. And the devolution plan happens, which I
- 25:30Speaker 1: learned means... a subset of pre-designated officials. They know who
- 25:37Speaker 1: they are. They've signed contracts. They've rehearsed it. They go out.
- 25:44Speaker 1: In the words of the former FEMA director, COG CON 1,
- 25:47Speaker 1: you send your devolution crews out. They go out to
- 25:51Speaker 1: a hot site, warm site, or cold site, underground bunkers
- 25:56Speaker 1: located around the United States. This is from an actual
- 26:01Speaker 1: FEMA chief telling me this. And they set up how
- 26:06Speaker 1: to run the government because the idea is all the
- 26:09Speaker 1: regular government people will probably be dead of anarchy, insurrection,
- 26:13Speaker 1: mnemonic plague.
- 26:16Speaker 2: So they have bunkers.
- 26:18Speaker 1: And those are classified.
- 26:20Speaker 2: The bunkers are.
- 26:21Speaker 1: Where they are.
- 26:22Speaker 2: Do you remember there was the bunker after 9-11 where
- 26:26Speaker 2: Dick Cheney was in the bunker but George Bush was
- 26:28Speaker 2: just like hanging out?
- 26:30Speaker 1: I think they left him in Texas or he was
- 26:32Speaker 1: on his ranch.
- 26:33Speaker 2: He was just out there in the world.
- 26:35Speaker 1: You know what? I had someone tell me where he was,
- 26:39Speaker 1: and I went through, like, a problem with, like, legal,
- 26:42Speaker 1: whether I could say this. So I had to say,
- 26:45Speaker 1: I was told, but, you know, it's not verified, something
- 26:48Speaker 1: like that. But one of the CIA spy pilots, Ken Collins,
- 26:53Speaker 1: he famously flew the ox cart out at Area 51.
- 26:56Speaker 1: He told me that on 9-11, George Bush was driving
- 26:59Speaker 1: around in Texas, maybe it was in Florida, in the
- 27:02Speaker 1: back of a laundry truck. That's how they kept him hidden.
- 27:07Speaker 2: What?
- 27:09Speaker 1: A laundry truck.
- 27:10Speaker 2: Did they just have it look like a laundry truck
- 27:12Speaker 2: and it outfitted with like regular seats in the back
- 27:15Speaker 2: and that's how they drive him around? A bulletproof laundry truck?
- 27:18Speaker 1: No, I think he got like, I think it was like,
- 27:20Speaker 1: what do we do with him? And that was what
- 27:22Speaker 1: was available. A laundry truck. A laundry truck. That's what
- 27:25Speaker 1: I was told by like a very reliable source.
- 27:27Speaker 2: That was available, meaning there was nothing else available that
- 27:31Speaker 2: was incognito?
- 27:32Speaker 1: They were trying to transport him to the doomsday plane,
- 27:35Speaker 1: which is where he ended up going, into the doomsday
- 27:38Speaker 1: plane and flying around in circles.
- 27:40Speaker 2: And they thought that like a caravan of SUVs would
- 27:44Speaker 2: be too obvious? Yes. Wow. Yeah.
- 27:50Speaker 1: So you learn really pretty quickly that There's all these
- 27:53Speaker 1: plans in place, but then it becomes like ad hoc
- 27:57Speaker 1: or like on the fly in an actual crisis or emergency.
- 28:03Speaker 3: Whoa. Yeah.
- 28:05Speaker 1: But, okay, you're referring to Mount Weather. That's where Dick
- 28:08Speaker 1: Cheney went.
- 28:09Speaker 2: Okay. Where's that?
- 28:10Speaker 1: So Mount Weather is in the mountains outside of D.C.
- 28:14Speaker 1: There's mountains outside of D.C.? Right.
- 28:16Speaker 3: Really?
- 28:16Speaker 1: In the Blue Ridge Mountains.
- 28:18Speaker 2: Oh, how far are those?
- 28:19Speaker 3: 175 miles. Okay.
- 28:19Speaker 2: Okay.
- 28:23Speaker 1: So the Pentagon has an alternate command center called Raven Rock,
- 28:28Speaker 1: underground bunker.
- 28:30Speaker 2: That sounds like it's right out of a video game.
- 28:32Speaker 1: It sounds like they probably have put it in. That's
- 28:36Speaker 1: a real like it used to be classified and no
- 28:38Speaker 1: one used to know about it. And now it's kind
- 28:39Speaker 1: of like out there. The official.
- 28:42Speaker 2: Is this it, Jamie? This is the bunker. Oh, we
- 28:44Speaker 2: have a map of it. We got blueprints. What do
- 28:47Speaker 2: you want to know?
- 28:48Speaker 3: 51 miles from D.C.
- 28:51Speaker 2: How deep is it? 51 miles from D.C.? At least
- 28:53Speaker 2: seven levels. Wow.
- 28:56Speaker 3: The Oval Office would be at the bottom.
- 28:58Speaker 2: That's crazy.
- 28:59Speaker 1: So that's where Cheney was on 9-11.
- 29:00Speaker 2: So is that where, like, a nuclear bomb can't get
- 29:02Speaker 2: to it?
- 29:03Speaker 1: A nuclear bomb would take it all out. In nuclear war,
- 29:06Speaker 1: I'd destroy all of those. I mean, I don't destroy them.
- 29:09Speaker 1: I show you how they would be destroyed. Russia would put, like,
- 29:12Speaker 1: five nuclear bombs on Raven Rock, and it would just—
- 29:16Speaker 1: Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That would be it.
- 29:19Speaker 1: And also the fires alone would just incinerate everyone inside.
- 29:23Speaker 2: Also, how are you getting your air? Where's your air
- 29:26Speaker 2: coming from? Your air is going to be contaminated with
- 29:29Speaker 2: nuclear fallout, right?
- 29:30Speaker 3: Yes.
- 29:31Speaker 2: Is this what it looks like? I don't know.
- 29:32Speaker 3: There's a bunch of some of those pictures were coming
- 29:34Speaker 3: from tumblers I don't.
- 29:37Speaker 1: Know I think they take the real the real pictures
- 29:40Speaker 1: and then they turn them into you know comic books
- 29:42Speaker 1: but right but you can see some of.
- 29:44Speaker 2: So look how it's got this like entrance carved into
- 29:48Speaker 2: the side of the mountain the big cement wall and
- 29:51Speaker 2: he goes through that yeah you know we were talking
- 29:55Speaker 2: about this the other day we're talking about Darren Cuyo
- 30:00Speaker 2: Do you know what that is? It's an underground facility
- 30:03Speaker 2: that's in Turkey.
- 30:05Speaker 1: Yes, I do know about that.
- 30:06Speaker 2: That they found by accident.
- 30:07Speaker 3: Yes.
- 30:08Speaker 2: What was it, the 1970s? Like a sheep herder. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 30:12Speaker 3: It was being used to hide people up until the 1920s. Whoa. Yeah,
- 30:16Speaker 3: like the Greeks were hiding from people invading Greece.
- 30:19Speaker 2: Or Turkey, I guess. So it can house 20,000 people
- 30:23Speaker 2: under there, and they really don't know why they made
- 30:26Speaker 2: it or who made it.
- 30:28Speaker 1: Turkey is crazy. It's such an old civilization with like
- 30:33Speaker 1: layers upon layers upon layers of just when you think
- 30:37Speaker 1: it's really old, it gets even older.
- 30:38Speaker 2: Well, that's Gobekli Tepe, right? Where they had to redate. Well,
- 30:42Speaker 2: they still resist it. What constitutes modern civilization or civilization
- 30:48Speaker 2: in general? They're still trying to say some archaeologists are
- 30:51Speaker 2: hanging on tooth and claw, trying to say that hunter
- 30:54Speaker 2: gatherers made these enormous stone columns with 3D drawings that
- 30:59Speaker 2: seem to be a calendar of some sort of a
- 31:02Speaker 2: cataclysmic event.
- 31:03Speaker 3: So some of the pictures we were just looking at
- 31:04Speaker 3: from Mount Weather may be not accurate because it's also
- 31:07Speaker 3: used in the TV show The 100.
- 31:09Speaker 1: Oh. Yeah. But it is a real place.
- 31:11Speaker 2: But, yeah, that's probably where they get it from.
- 31:12Speaker 3: So what we were looking at, I think, was the
- 31:14Speaker 3: stuff from the TV show.
- 31:15Speaker 2: What is that? What's The 100?
- 31:19Speaker 3: Like a show like Silo or something where people are,
- 31:21Speaker 3: you know, 100 people left or something like that, I think.
- 31:24Speaker 2: That's what we had Tim Robbins on. We were talking
- 31:26Speaker 2: about Silo. Have you seen that show, Silo? Not yet.
- 31:28Speaker 1: Not yet.
- 31:28Speaker 2: Really good show. It's great. It's on Apple.
- 31:30Speaker 3: Great.
- 31:30Speaker 2: And it's essentially about an underground civilization that survives some
- 31:34Speaker 2: sort of cataclysm. They don't exactly say in the beginning.
- 31:36Speaker 2: I'm early on the show. They don't say what the
- 31:38Speaker 2: cataclysm is, but these people have to live like deep, deep,
- 31:41Speaker 2: deep underground in these self-containing facilities, and you can't go
- 31:45Speaker 2: outside or you'll die.
- 31:46Speaker 3: Yes, I think I read it about it.
- 31:49Speaker 2: So Darren Kuyu could house 20,000 people.
- 31:52Speaker 3: Wow.
- 31:52Speaker 2: And they had They had pastures or they had storage
- 31:57Speaker 2: for cattle and grain and water and wine and oil presses.
- 32:02Speaker 2: It was like crazy shit.
- 32:04Speaker 1: And how many thousands of years?
- 32:06Speaker 2: They don't know.
- 32:07Speaker 1: They don't even know.
- 32:08Speaker 2: They don't know. They don't know who made it. They
- 32:10Speaker 2: didn't know it existed. They found it. Imagine a guy.
- 32:16Speaker 2: The initial story was that his chickens had gone through
- 32:18Speaker 2: a hole. And he's like, where are these chickens going?
- 32:21Speaker 2: They never come back. And they.
- 32:23Speaker 1: The disappearing Turkish chickens.
- 32:25Speaker 2: So they knock down these walls and then they find
- 32:28Speaker 2: this thing and they haven't even explored all of it.
- 32:31Speaker 2: They don't even have all of it explored yet. It's insane.
- 32:35Speaker 2: It's so big and it's just there and they don't
- 32:38Speaker 2: know why and they don't know who made it and
- 32:40Speaker 2: they don't know what they're hiding from. This is what
- 32:42Speaker 2: it looks like.
- 32:43Speaker 1: Yeah, it's incredible.
- 32:45Speaker 2: It's really crazy because it's absolutely enormous. Is this Derinkuyu
- 32:50Speaker 2: right here? This is like some of the tunnels.
- 32:53Speaker 3: Yeah, I get confused since they've landed on 10% of it.
- 32:55Speaker 3: Like that's obviously a fake, but I don't know how
- 32:58Speaker 3: much of that is what it is because it's supposed
- 32:59Speaker 3: to be underground, right?
- 33:00Speaker 2: Yeah, that doesn't look real. That seems like somebody made
- 33:04Speaker 2: that up. But the actual image is like that's an image,
- 33:06Speaker 2: which is the best Darren Cuyu underground, like there, yeah,
- 33:09Speaker 2: right there. That's what it really looked like. So imagine
- 33:13Speaker 2: they find this underground, and they don't even know how
- 33:17Speaker 2: old it is because if you find some stuff, you
- 33:19Speaker 2: can't carbon date the walls. That's right. you can't carbon
- 33:22Speaker 2: date the carvings. So they have to find things that
- 33:25Speaker 2: are left there. But if people are hanging out there
- 33:27Speaker 2: until the 1920s, like, so they really don't even know
- 33:29Speaker 2: if you find something, how old it is. You can guess,
- 33:33Speaker 2: but you don't know, like, how old was the building
- 33:35Speaker 2: when this person was there? Was it thousands of years
- 33:38Speaker 2: old already? They don't know.
- 33:39Speaker 1: It's interesting how the archaeologists that have a, like, have
- 33:42Speaker 1: skin in the game with an other theory resist that.
- 33:46Speaker 1: And it takes a while. It's like with Gobekli Tepe,
- 33:49Speaker 1: you know, now there's, investigations going on, archaeological digs nearby.
- 33:55Speaker 1: And lo and behold, they're finding other things, which makes
- 33:58Speaker 1: me feel like.
- 33:58Speaker 2: All over the area.
- 33:59Speaker 1: Yeah, all over the place, of course. It didn't exist
- 34:02Speaker 1: on its own.
- 34:03Speaker 2: Yeah, of course.
- 34:04Speaker 1: Some kind of advanced civilization has neighbors.
- 34:07Speaker 2: 11,000 plus years ago. It's so crazy. It's so weird
- 34:10Speaker 2: because we keep pushing the dates further and further back.
- 34:12Speaker 2: Like Graham Hancock always says, stuff just keeps getting older.
- 34:16Speaker 2: And so it makes you wonder, like, have we gone
- 34:19Speaker 2: through something like this before? Whether it's a natural catastrophe
- 34:23Speaker 2: or whatever it was.
- 34:26Speaker 1: Remember when we were kids, it was like the Lascaux
- 34:29Speaker 1: Caves were the oldest thing ever. I don't even remember.
- 34:32Speaker 2: Where was that?
- 34:33Speaker 1: In France. Remember the drawing of the bull?
- 34:35Speaker 2: Oh, right, right, right.
- 34:36Speaker 1: I remember that from the history books.
- 34:37Speaker 2: That's from that Werner Herzog documentary. In France.
- 34:42Speaker 1: It's a great one.
- 34:43Speaker 2: Amazing.
- 34:43Speaker 1: Has he been on this show?
- 34:44Speaker 2: No, I want to get him on. You have to
- 34:46Speaker 2: get him on. I love that guy.
- 34:47Speaker 1: He's the neighbor of my kids.
- 34:48Speaker 2: Whoa. Yeah. Well, I don't want to say where he lives.
- 34:51Speaker 2: People go find him.
- 34:52Speaker 1: But that's pretty cool. In L.A. So we'll track him down.
- 34:56Speaker 1: He's my favorite documentarian.
- 34:57Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. Grizzly Man is one of my favorites of
- 35:00Speaker 2: all time.
- 35:00Speaker 1: Grizzly Man is epic.
- 35:02Speaker 2: Yeah. Have you seen Happy People? No. That's a great one, too.
- 35:06Speaker 1: Is that new?
- 35:06Speaker 2: No. No, it's a few years old. It's Life in
- 35:08Speaker 2: the Taiga, Happy People, Life in the Taiga. It's about
- 35:11Speaker 2: these people that live in Siberia off the Taiga River,
- 35:15Speaker 2: and they're the happiest people. And all they do is
- 35:18Speaker 2: hunt and fish and trap, and they get together. They
- 35:21Speaker 2: have a really strong community. They drink, and they're laughing,
- 35:24Speaker 2: and they have no mental illness. It's really weird as
- 35:27Speaker 2: he documents it.
- 35:29Speaker 1: Have you seen Little Dieter Needs to Fly?
- 35:32Speaker 2: No. Oh, my God.
- 35:34Speaker 1: The only man rescued from Laos during the Vietnam War.
- 35:38Speaker 1: And Herzog, he's died since, Dieter. But Herzog goes with
- 35:43Speaker 1: him back into the jungle.
- 35:45Speaker 2: Wow.
- 35:45Speaker 1: Oh, my God. You're going to love it. It's a
- 35:47Speaker 1: treat that you haven't seen it yet. Little Dieter needs
- 35:50Speaker 1: to fly.
- 35:50Speaker 2: That guy is such a world treasure. Oh, my God.
- 35:53Speaker 1: Just his voice and, like, his perspective on everything. Just
- 35:57Speaker 1: when you think, just when I think I know what
- 36:00Speaker 1: he's going for. Takes you like on a complete left turn.
- 36:05Speaker 1: And you're left like, at least for me, thinking about
- 36:09Speaker 1: the world in a completely new original way.
- 36:12Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 36:13Speaker 2: So these caves in France, they thought that that was
- 36:15Speaker 2: the old, but that was really old, right? Wasn't that
- 36:18Speaker 2: like 30 plus thousand year old drawings?
- 36:20Speaker 1: I think maybe Jamie can check for us. I think
- 36:22Speaker 1: they were like 7,000 B.C.
- 36:26Speaker 2: I think they were older than that.
- 36:27Speaker 3: Discovered in 1940 by four teenagers. Closed in 63. All
- 36:32Speaker 3: paintings created around 17,000 years ago.
- 36:35Speaker 2: 17,000.
- 36:35Speaker 1: Okay.
- 36:36Speaker 2: Yeah. That's it? God, I thought it was older. That's
- 36:39Speaker 2: just a quick explanation. This is the Werner Herzog documentary?
- 36:43Speaker 2: I thought they were like literal cavemen made it. Well,
- 36:47Speaker 2: I mean. So that's only 17,000 years ago? That's what
- 36:53Speaker 2: that says. Interesting. I really thought it was a lot
- 36:57Speaker 2: older than that.
- 36:59Speaker 1: But then they come up with like the hand on
- 37:02Speaker 1: the cave in Indonesia. I think that's 40,000.
- 37:06Speaker 2: Believed to be 19,000 years ago. That's interesting. So at
- 37:10Speaker 2: one point in time, they thought that was the oldest.
- 37:12Speaker 1: When I was a kid, I remember that.
- 37:14Speaker 3: It's not quite what it says. It says the painting
- 37:18Speaker 3: for the site were duplicated with the same materials which
- 37:20Speaker 3: were used to believe, like, Which were used 19,000 years.
- 37:23Speaker 2: That doesn't mean. Oh, right. It could still be older. Right.
- 37:27Speaker 2: They knew that they used them 19,000 years ago, but
- 37:29Speaker 2: they could have used them a lot earlier than that. Right, right.
- 37:33Speaker 2: We don't have documents. Crazy stuff, though. Just imagine, like,
- 37:38Speaker 2: living back then.
- 37:40Speaker 1: It is wild when you think about the underground bunkers now.
- 37:45Speaker 1: And it kind of has this spooky echo as an
- 37:48Speaker 1: archetype of.
- 37:49Speaker 2: Hiding. Hiding. Hiding from the dangers. Yeah. Having a shelter
- 37:55Speaker 2: and hiding from the dangers. That trope, that thought of
- 37:59Speaker 2: a bunker, there's a lot of supposedly wealthy people. Well,
- 38:04Speaker 2: they are wealthy, but supposedly they have these underground bunkers.
- 38:08Speaker 2: That's what you always hear. These rich people, these billionaires
- 38:10Speaker 2: are setting up bunkers in New Zealand because they know
- 38:12Speaker 2: something's coming. Like, oh, Jesus. Right?
- 38:15Speaker 1: Good luck getting there in time.
- 38:16Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 38:17Speaker 2: Right. Right. Right. If the shit goes down and you
- 38:21Speaker 2: happen to be in Hawaii and you've got to get
- 38:23Speaker 2: to New Zealand.
- 38:24Speaker 1: Also, your bodyguards are a lot stronger than you are.
- 38:28Speaker 2: Well, wouldn't you bring them with you?
- 38:30Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's going to be every man for themselves.
- 38:33Speaker 2: Well, wouldn't you have... If you're going to have that
- 38:35Speaker 2: kind of money to make a... Wouldn't you have a
- 38:37Speaker 2: bunker that could house a few hundred people so that
- 38:39Speaker 2: you could... You know, nobody gets insurrection in your movement?
- 38:43Speaker 1: I mean, I suppose if you bring everybody's family, you
- 38:45Speaker 1: have to have a lot of preparing for this. That's
- 38:48Speaker 1: what really... kept taking me back to the documents in
- 38:53Speaker 1: the Defense Department about fear of infection creates anarchy and
- 38:57Speaker 1: insurrection because this idea of fear of infection, people begin to,
- 39:03Speaker 1: their mind actually begins to change in the studies under scarcity.
- 39:08Speaker 1: And scarcity coupled with fear of infection, it's so visceral.
- 39:12Speaker 1: It's as much of an archetype as the bunker, being infected. Very,
- 39:17Speaker 1: very different than being shot at. You get the sense
- 39:22Speaker 1: if you can get into the bunker if you're being
- 39:24Speaker 1: attacked with a physical weapon. Okay, I'm safe now. Close
- 39:29Speaker 1: the doors. Make a fire. But with fear of infection,
- 39:32Speaker 1: I mean a biological weapon or any pathogen is a
- 39:37Speaker 1: living munition. It self-replicates. And it's got an incubation period.
- 39:43Speaker 1: So then it, right?
- 39:44Speaker 2: So then you can be infected and not know it
- 39:47Speaker 2: while it's incubating inside of your body. And then you
- 39:49Speaker 2: infect a bunch of other people as well. Yeah. Yeah.
- 39:53Speaker 2: And we saw during COVID how aggressive people got, screaming
- 39:56Speaker 2: at people for not wearing masks. And, you know, that was,
- 40:00Speaker 2: as far as pandemics go, fairly mild.
- 40:04Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 40:04Speaker 1: Fairly mild. Like, I mean, if you. go with the
- 40:08Speaker 1: CDC's 1% or your 0.1%? It's not mine.
- 40:12Speaker 2: It's perplexity.
- 40:13Speaker 1: Right, perplexity is 1%. I mean, you're talking about a
- 40:17Speaker 1: nothing burger compared to... Compared to pneumonic plague. Pneumonic plague.
- 40:21Speaker 1: And there are, you know, I mean, look, I also
- 40:23Speaker 1: write in the book, and this has never been reported
- 40:26Speaker 1: before because I interviewed CIA officers who both debriefed the
- 40:31Speaker 1: Soviet defectors and also people who chased... WMD in the
- 40:37Speaker 1: Hands of Terrorists During the War on Terror. And I
- 40:39Speaker 1: specifically didn't want to write that scenario because it's so
- 40:43Speaker 1: loaded to go with, like, terrorist use of a biological agent.
- 40:48Speaker 1: But I give you little history lessons when I stop
- 40:52Speaker 1: the drama, one of which involves an al-Qaeda terrorist that
- 40:57Speaker 1: was captured. She's actually now in Texas in a mental
- 41:00Speaker 1: institution for the rest of her life. Her name's Afia Siddiqui.
- 41:04Speaker 1: She's an MIT-trained biologist related by marriage to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
- 41:12Speaker 1: And she was leading the biological weapons program. This is
- 41:14Speaker 1: according to the CIA officers.
- 41:16Speaker 2: She was trained at MIT?
- 41:18Speaker 1: She was trained at MIT, and then she went back
- 41:20Speaker 1: to Pakistan. She was the first woman on the FBI's
- 41:24Speaker 1: most wanted terrorist list.
- 41:26Speaker 2: How come they have her in a mental institute?
- 41:28Speaker 1: Because they caught her. And then this part is reported.
- 41:31Speaker 1: They caught her and somehow, again the air quote, somehow
- 41:35Speaker 1: she got a hold of a Marine's rifle and was
- 41:38Speaker 1: firing at the FBI agents interviewing her. This is all public.
- 41:42Speaker 1: And she was shot. They took her to the United States,
- 41:45Speaker 1: gave her a trial, decided she was insane, put her
- 41:48Speaker 1: in a mental institution. But what had never been revealed
- 41:52Speaker 1: before my book is that in her handbag she had
- 41:56Speaker 1: plans To create a genetically modified pathogen that mixed rabies
- 42:03Speaker 1: with chicken pox. Think about that. Imagine airborne rabies. Rabies,
- 42:10Speaker 1: like pneumonic plague, is one of the only other pathogens
- 42:14Speaker 1: that has 100% death rate without countermeasures.
- 42:20Speaker 2: And rabies. like when you see it in animals, I've
- 42:23Speaker 2: never actually encountered a rabbit animal in the wild as
- 42:27Speaker 2: much as I know. But when you see them, they
- 42:32Speaker 2: want to infect something else. They get hyper aggressive. They
- 42:35Speaker 2: want to bite you. So if they bite you, they
- 42:38Speaker 2: give it to you, which is really crazy. Like this
- 42:41Speaker 2: disease makes them throw their own safety out the window
- 42:45Speaker 2: and just go after people and try to bite them.
- 42:48Speaker 1: I mean, it's like a, It's like rabies is now
- 42:51Speaker 1: its own rabid animal. You think of it, it's so visceral.
- 42:56Speaker 1: It's going to come at you with its infected saliva.
- 43:00Speaker 1: I almost went with the rabies scenario because I always,
- 43:05Speaker 1: in these scenarios, tie them to actual events that have
- 43:07Speaker 1: happened so that readers don't go like, this is Annie
- 43:11Speaker 1: Jacobson's dystopian imagination. As much as they say, oh, she's
- 43:16Speaker 1: following what, you know, science. This is science fact, not
- 43:19Speaker 1: science fiction. And so when I learned about that plan
- 43:23Speaker 1: for the genetic modification of rabies in chicken, airborne rabies,
- 43:28Speaker 1: but then.
- 43:29Speaker 2: I thought- How far did she get along with this?
- 43:31Speaker 1: That is classified, Annie. But I did get a second person,
- 43:36Speaker 1: David Relman, who's the advisor to the president on biodefense,
- 43:39Speaker 1: to confirm with me that that was actually located in
- 43:43Speaker 1: her handbag and caused Serious concern.
- 43:46Speaker 2: And I imagine if they never found her, they never
- 43:48Speaker 2: caught her, and she completed that.
- 43:50Speaker 1: I mean, it's really terrifying.
- 43:53Speaker 2: It wipes out most of the country.
- 43:55Speaker 1: And also just in the most horrific way. You know,
- 43:58Speaker 1: like having to look at your pet and be like,
- 44:01Speaker 1: is my pet rabbit?
- 44:02Speaker 2: It's just... Oh, Jesus. And he did catch it, too?
- 44:04Speaker 2: Another project. Oh, she had another project? Yes, multiple projects, apparently.
- 44:07Speaker 2: She had collected materials on viruses for biological warfare, and
- 44:11Speaker 2: one of her projects is finding its way to infect
- 44:13Speaker 2: America's poultry supplies with an antibody that would allow chickens
- 44:17Speaker 2: to pass salmonella onto humans more easily. She later destroyed
- 44:20Speaker 2: her work after suspecting Abu Lubab... was hoping to double-cross
- 44:26Speaker 2: her and turn her into the United States authorities.
- 44:29Speaker 3: This is a long Wikipedia with quite a bit of
- 44:32Speaker 3: twists and turns. I'm surprised it's not a movie.
- 44:35Speaker 2: There's a lot going on. Oh, my God. And that's
- 44:37Speaker 2: one person that we caught. Now, that's not like this
- 44:41Speaker 2: is the only time they thought of that. This is
- 44:43Speaker 2: the only person that they tried to recruit to do
- 44:45Speaker 2: this kind of stuff. There's probably someone out there right now. Hence,
- 44:50Speaker 2: your book.
- 44:51Speaker 1: I mean, I interviewed... this guy, very famous, legendary CIA
- 44:56Speaker 1: officer named Rolf Moat Larson. And he led the counter
- 45:03Speaker 1: WMD team, right? So he would go to places basically
- 45:06Speaker 1: like with a bunch of ground branch guys, CIA paramilitary
- 45:10Speaker 1: guys behind him. He was kind of like the intelligentsia
- 45:14Speaker 1: at the front to try to negotiate with Al-Qaeda weapons makers,
- 45:19Speaker 1: biological weapons makers, and say like, you can't do this.
- 45:24Speaker 1: It's going to kill all of us. And he told
- 45:26Speaker 1: me a couple stories, and I write them like history
- 45:28Speaker 1: lessons in the book. Once he went to Sudan and
- 45:31Speaker 1: met with the top biological weapons maker for Al-Qaeda. And, like,
- 45:36Speaker 1: you know, it's just chilling. It's basically you get the feeling, like,
- 45:40Speaker 1: that Rolf said, I got them to agree to stop temporarily.
- 45:47Speaker 2: Temporarily.
- 45:48Speaker 1: Temporarily.
- 45:48Speaker 2: Okay.
- 45:52Speaker 1: Sorry, Joe. This is the nightmare stuff.
- 45:54Speaker 2: So what do they think that they're going to do
- 45:56Speaker 2: if they get into these bunkers? This is the thing.
- 45:59Speaker 2: It's like if society completely collapses and anarchy just sweeps
- 46:04Speaker 2: the nation and you've got cities on fire and people
- 46:07Speaker 2: killing people and looting, eventually they're going to run out
- 46:10Speaker 2: of food. Eventually there's going to be no infrastructure. You've
- 46:13Speaker 2: got no power. You've got no one who's taking care
- 46:15Speaker 2: of the water. No one's taking care of the satellites.
- 46:18Speaker 2: No one's taking care of anything. The cell phone towers
- 46:20Speaker 2: are down. What are these people in the bunker going
- 46:22Speaker 2: to do? Are they going to reinvent society?
- 46:25Speaker 1: Well, that's the plan down the road.
- 46:27Speaker 2: Do they have that?
- 46:28Speaker 1: Part five of the devolution plan is called reconstitution.
- 46:33Speaker 2: Oh, Jesus.
- 46:34Speaker 1: So they're going to reconstitute the government, like rise again
- 46:38Speaker 1: like a phoenix from the ashes. But before that, I
- 46:42Speaker 1: also learned the government has issued, rather the Pentagon has
- 46:46Speaker 1: issued 1.7 million gas masks to its personnel. So they
- 46:50Speaker 1: fan out across the states, but they can not really
- 46:56Speaker 1: handle the numbers of people who are actually going to
- 46:59Speaker 1: die pretty quickly. So instead, what their job is, is
- 47:04Speaker 1: to protect the critical infrastructure. All that stuff you exactly mentioned.
- 47:08Speaker 2: So they're just assuming that most people are going to die. Yeah. Yeah.
- 47:15Speaker 1: I mean, this is the quote. This is the exact
- 47:16Speaker 1: quote from Colonel Tom Earhart, who ran catastrophic nuclear and
- 47:22Speaker 1: biological war games at the Pentagon. Four, have you ever
- 47:26Speaker 1: heard of a very famous guy? They called him Yoda
- 47:29Speaker 1: at the Pentagon. He died like a couple years ago
- 47:31Speaker 1: at age 100. His name is Andy Marshall. He ran
- 47:35Speaker 1: the Office of Net Assessment. Talk about a euphemism or
- 47:39Speaker 1: like a cloaked. That's where they did all the war gaming.
- 47:42Speaker 1: And Marshall, Andy Marshall did this in the 70s all
- 47:45Speaker 1: the way through his recent death. And Tom Earhart worked
- 47:48Speaker 1: for him. It's in the office of the Secretary of Defense.
- 47:51Speaker 1: So what Earhart told me is in the event of
- 47:55Speaker 1: a biological catastrophe, and by the way, that includes not
- 48:00Speaker 1: just an attack but an incident, and an incident means
- 48:04Speaker 1: a lab leak. So in the event of a catastrophic
- 48:08Speaker 1: biological incident, there is very little you can do to
- 48:12Speaker 1: protect the homeland, only things you can do to mitigate extermination.
- 48:19Speaker 2: Of the human race?
- 48:20Speaker 1: That's his quote.
- 48:21Speaker 2: Mitigate extermination.
- 48:22Speaker 1: Mitigate extermination.
- 48:23Speaker 2: So you want to keep as many people alive as possible,
- 48:26Speaker 2: but it's probably going to be a very small amount.
- 48:28Speaker 1: And it's probably just going to be the 1.7 people
- 48:32Speaker 1: with the gas mask and a whole bunch of like
- 48:35Speaker 1: Machiavellian solipsists.
- 48:37Speaker 2: Do you imagine if our society had to be reinvented
- 48:42Speaker 2: with only people that work in the government? Can you
- 48:46Speaker 2: imagine some of the most incompetent, crooked people in the
- 48:49Speaker 2: world and that's the new society?
- 48:52Speaker 1: Well, I have a feeling most of the bureaucrats would
- 48:54Speaker 1: die because I don't think they could take care of themselves, right?
- 48:58Speaker 1: I think the people that would live would be those
- 49:01Speaker 1: well-trained soldiers.
- 49:03Speaker 2: Well, that's not bad. That's probably a better scenario.
- 49:07Speaker 1: But the other problem you're looking at is reproduction because
- 49:09Speaker 1: there's 17 percent females.
- 49:11Speaker 2: In the military. That's not good.
- 49:13Speaker 1: That's not good. And then the other problem is that
- 49:16Speaker 1: the other people who are left that are not in
- 49:18Speaker 1: the military are, imagine the skills you have to have
- 49:23Speaker 1: to be able to like deal with fear of infection
- 49:27Speaker 1: in a manner that you basically have to be able to,
- 49:30Speaker 1: as it was said to me, kill people on site,
- 49:32Speaker 1: like not even worrying about whether, this is where it
- 49:34Speaker 1: really feels like the walking dead or, you know, an apocalyptic, movie.
- 49:41Speaker 2: 28 days later was based on that put 28 days
- 49:44Speaker 2: later was.
- 49:44Speaker 1: A lab leak yes yes remember it.
- 49:47Speaker 2: Was called rage it was something they were doing with
- 49:49Speaker 2: chimpanzees and chimpanzee bite somebody.
- 49:52Speaker 1: That's how it opens it spreads those are great films
- 49:55Speaker 1: those are great did you see.
- 49:56Speaker 2: The new one no i haven't seen any.
- 49:58Speaker 1: Oh the new one parts one and two i.
- 50:03Speaker 2: Mean there's parts one and two yeah yeah oh it's
- 50:06Speaker 2: a two-parter.
- 50:06Speaker 1: Two-parter they they released them like six months apart They're incredible.
- 50:12Speaker 1: I just get worn out from those kind of movies.
- 50:16Speaker 1: I mean, it's a certain... There's no happy ending. I mean, Joe,
- 50:21Speaker 1: I'm an eternal optimist.
- 50:23Speaker 2: Are you really?
- 50:24Speaker 1: I really am.
- 50:24Speaker 2: That's crazy, considering your work.
- 50:26Speaker 1: But I just figure all of this is a cautionary tale.
- 50:29Speaker 1: And I also figure it's better to know than to
- 50:31Speaker 1: be caught off guard.
- 50:32Speaker 2: Well, it's better to inform. And I think you do
- 50:33Speaker 2: an amazing job of that. And I think you're a
- 50:35Speaker 2: very important person in that regard. you inform people of
- 50:38Speaker 2: these things that you really should be considering. I mean,
- 50:41Speaker 2: your nuclear war book freaked a lot of people out,
- 50:45Speaker 2: that we're kind of, you know, nuclear war was in
- 50:47Speaker 2: the back of their mind. You know, yeah, it's a possibility,
- 50:49Speaker 2: but hey, we haven't done it. We dropped a couple
- 50:52Speaker 2: of bombs during the World War II, and that's it.
- 50:54Speaker 2: We're done with that.
- 50:56Speaker 1: You know, you said something to me last time we
- 50:58Speaker 1: spoke about the nuclear war book that really stayed with me,
- 51:02Speaker 1: and it has an interesting coda. So- You were like, Annie,
- 51:06Speaker 1: I couldn't read Nuclear War. It freaked out a lot
- 51:09Speaker 1: of my friends. I can't read it. And then you
- 51:11Speaker 1: explained why. And you said, I'm paraphrasing you, but you said,
- 51:15Speaker 1: I think about those people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and
- 51:18Speaker 1: they were just going about their daily life. And all
- 51:23Speaker 1: of a sudden, they're incinerated. And that really stayed with me.
- 51:30Speaker 1: And I thought about it. Here's the coda. The survivors
- 51:35Speaker 1: are called Habaksha. That's what they call themselves. It's like
- 51:39Speaker 1: survivors of the nuclear bomb. So now, since it was
- 51:42Speaker 1: 80 years ago, they're all like 81 to 90 plus.
- 51:48Speaker 1: And they were stigmatized throughout their youth because the idea
- 51:53Speaker 1: was you're radioactive. You can't reproduce. You're sort of, you know,
- 51:58Speaker 1: there's like a malignant thing attached to you. This is
- 52:01Speaker 1: what they told me. And I met them and they
- 52:04Speaker 1: I was invited to Hiroshima to be the keynote speaker
- 52:08Speaker 1: with the hibakusha for the 80th anniversary of the bombing.
- 52:13Speaker 2: What did they say the experience was like in terms
- 52:16Speaker 2: of being maligned? What was happening to them?
- 52:20Speaker 1: Well, the sense I got was very much that they
- 52:23Speaker 1: believed that was accurate. They had no other information. They
- 52:28Speaker 1: had no other information other than, people telling them you
- 52:33Speaker 1: know they were radioactive yeah now what was also interesting
- 52:36Speaker 1: is a couple of the younger people who were who
- 52:40Speaker 1: don't remember who were like infants their mothers like let's
- 52:47Speaker 1: say one parent died and another so they're one of
- 52:49Speaker 1: the living parent would shield them from that by never
- 52:54Speaker 1: telling them that they were hibakusha so then they had
- 52:59Speaker 1: this whole other kind of realization later in life when
- 53:02Speaker 1: they learned and some of i mean those stories were
- 53:05Speaker 1: like incredible because you're learning about how like a parent's
- 53:09Speaker 1: love for a child means not telling them what you
- 53:14Speaker 1: think would make them feel stigmatized but yet you've them
- 53:19Speaker 1: explaining to me that they felt that stigma throughout their
- 53:22Speaker 1: life anyways not knowing why i never even would.
- 53:26Speaker 2: Have considered that stigma I would have considered survivor's guilt,
- 53:31Speaker 2: which people do have. If you're a part of a
- 53:33Speaker 2: disaster and you're one of the ones that live, people
- 53:36Speaker 2: get survivor's guilt. But I never would have thought of
- 53:39Speaker 2: the stigma of being maligned as an infected, radioactive person.
- 53:44Speaker 1: And Japan has such a different culture. I couldn't have
- 53:47Speaker 1: imagined that either until I heard it firsthand from the
- 53:51Speaker 1: experience of the survivors. They sent some of them to
- 53:55Speaker 1: an island. Like banished as if you're a leper.
- 54:04Speaker 2: How much is this Iran thing freaking you out?
- 54:07Speaker 1: The war?
- 54:07Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 54:09Speaker 1: Look, I mean, when anyone starts a war, that's not necessary.
- 54:15Speaker 1: That's the wrong word for it. But, you know, just
- 54:17Speaker 1: like this is the whole, it's just a terrible, terrible,
- 54:21Speaker 1: terrible idea. It just seems to me like the opposite
- 54:25Speaker 1: of what the Department of Defense, it's why I continue
- 54:28Speaker 1: to call it the Department of Defense, by the way,
- 54:31Speaker 1: because it still is in my mind and certainly until
- 54:33Speaker 1: Congress changes the name. You know, it's supposed to be
- 54:38Speaker 1: for defense.
- 54:39Speaker 2: Right.
- 54:40Speaker 1: So I think so much of what I have written about,
- 54:45Speaker 1: all the wars since World War II, I've interviewed 100
- 54:49Speaker 1: or more people for each of my eight books who
- 54:51Speaker 1: have been in every war. And the big shift for
- 54:55Speaker 1: me like understanding a change in mindset was the Bush-Cheney
- 55:03Speaker 1: administration starting the Iraq War. Like I really believe that
- 55:09Speaker 1: many of the problems we're experiencing today as a society
- 55:12Speaker 1: stem from that. And that has to do with the
- 55:15Speaker 1: fact of all the soldiers that I've interviewed, there's a
- 55:21Speaker 1: completely different perspective on the government from those who fought
- 55:26Speaker 1: in the wars leading up to the war on terror.
- 55:31Speaker 1: And the people who, most of them, you know many
- 55:34Speaker 1: of these people too, like they're mad. They're really mad
- 55:39Speaker 1: that they were used. That's a sense that I get. Now,
- 55:42Speaker 1: not everyone, but a majority are very angry and feel used.
- 55:48Speaker 1: And that is a fundamental warping of what the military is.
- 55:55Speaker 2: Yeah. Without a doubt. And also, no clear way to
- 56:00Speaker 2: resolve this at all.
- 56:02Speaker 1: Yes.
- 56:03Speaker 2: And it seems like our stockpiles are running dry. You know,
- 56:09Speaker 2: bases are getting blown up by drones.
- 56:13Speaker 1: I heard, you know, I heard Joe Kent, who was
- 56:17Speaker 1: the number two at ODNI who resigned, I heard him
- 56:20Speaker 1: say a really interesting thing about the warrior class. that
- 56:26Speaker 1: I hadn't, you know when you just like have all
- 56:28Speaker 1: this information but you didn't put something together and then
- 56:31Speaker 1: you hear it and you're like, of course. And what
- 56:34Speaker 1: Joe said was one of, this was in reference to
- 56:37Speaker 1: Trump maybe saying there was going to be, or someone
- 56:39Speaker 1: in this administration saying there should be a draft. And
- 56:43Speaker 1: everyone freaking out and saying like that's, you know, that's outrageous.
- 56:46Speaker 1: And Joe Kent's point was really interesting. He said, there
- 56:49Speaker 1: should be a draft but not for reasons you think.
- 56:53Speaker 1: And he said, Presently, America has a warrior class and
- 57:00Speaker 1: Joe Kent is in it. Meaning, you know, these are like,
- 57:05Speaker 1: don't have the exact statistic, 1%, less than 1% of
- 57:09Speaker 1: families who are in the military. And he said, Kent said,
- 57:14Speaker 1: you know, we socialize with one another. Our kids socialize
- 57:17Speaker 1: with one another. We go to school with one another.
- 57:19Speaker 1: We go to war with one another. We talk together.
- 57:22Speaker 1: We have parties together. And we know something about America
- 57:27Speaker 1: that is completely foreign to all the other families. And
- 57:32Speaker 1: there's something wrong with that. And I've really thought about
- 57:35Speaker 1: that a lot since, and I agree with him. And
- 57:38Speaker 1: his point about the draft was if everybody knew and
- 57:45Speaker 1: experienced what we experience in our families, talking about war
- 57:49Speaker 1: versus peace— Wars would be looked at differently.
- 57:55Speaker 2: Instead of thinking we should go to war like a
- 57:59Speaker 2: Lindsey Graham type perspective, whereas no real skin in the game.
- 58:02Speaker 2: He's not going to go get shot. No one he
- 58:04Speaker 2: knows is going to go get shot. Yeah, absolutely. Makes sense.
- 58:09Speaker 1: So that's kind of my answer to, you know, and
- 58:12Speaker 1: I like I'll see a headline that's like the war
- 58:15Speaker 1: in Iran costs us X, Y, Z billion dollars. And
- 58:17Speaker 1: it's like it doesn't even mention all the people dying,
- 58:20Speaker 1: you know. There's like 10... And yes, the Americans. But like,
- 58:24Speaker 1: it's just... Talk about misreporting.
- 58:29Speaker 2: Right, it's just talking about money. Which is crazy.
- 58:32Speaker 1: Which is crazy. Which is crazy.
- 58:35Speaker 2: And then it also... The real problem is it makes
- 58:38Speaker 2: America an enemy. And it makes us less safe. Because
- 58:43Speaker 2: America has done this thing, this unprovoked attack. And so
- 58:47Speaker 2: now they have a reason to attack back.
- 58:50Speaker 1: It's... It's very like slippery. You know, it's like untrustworthy.
- 58:54Speaker 1: I mean, I always go back to like the way
- 58:56Speaker 1: you behave with your family is the way that you
- 59:00Speaker 1: should present the world. Otherwise, you're being a hypocrite. And
- 59:05Speaker 1: the idea that we're we as a country are kind
- 59:08Speaker 1: of like you're not really sure what we're up to.
- 59:12Speaker 1: And then it's changing. It's like radically changing. The pendulum
- 59:16Speaker 1: swings so far from what one administration's, you know, list
- 59:23Speaker 1: of really important things is to another. I mean, it
- 59:27Speaker 1: must be From an outside perspective, it must be really
- 59:32Speaker 1: schizophrenic looking.
- 59:35Speaker 2: Yeah. So to get back to your book, how many
- 59:42Speaker 2: different countries do we know are involved in this kind
- 59:47Speaker 2: of biological war research?
- 59:51Speaker 1: So for starters, biological war is illegal. biological weapons are illegal,
- 59:57Speaker 1: unlike nuclear weapons, believe it or not, are perfectly legal
- 1:00:01Speaker 1: for the countries that have them. Wrap your head around that.
- 1:00:03Speaker 1: But everybody signed a treaty in 1972 called the Biological
- 1:00:09Speaker 1: Weapons Convention Treaty, saying we will not make biological weapons.
- 1:00:13Speaker 1: They are odious to the conscience of mankind. At that point,
- 1:00:18Speaker 1: the Soviets signed the treaty, crossed their fingers behind their back,
- 1:00:22Speaker 1: and made a ginormous biological weapons program that you talked
- 1:00:28Speaker 1: about earlier, okay? America allegedly destroyed her arsenal of biological weapons,
- 1:00:36Speaker 1: which took 219 weeks to destroy, by the way. And
- 1:00:42Speaker 1: not for another 20 years did we learn that actually
- 1:00:46Speaker 1: the Soviets were running this biological weapons program, and we
- 1:00:49Speaker 1: only learned it because of the Soviet defectors. The CIA
- 1:00:52Speaker 1: had no idea. Defense Department had no idea.
- 1:00:54Speaker 2: So we had completely stopped all of that work?
- 1:00:58Speaker 1: According to the documents, according to anyone you interview, we
- 1:01:02Speaker 1: had stopped biological weapons work.
- 1:01:04Speaker 2: What year was this, Hall?
- 1:01:05Speaker 1: Nixon made a declaration in 1969. Like, we're just giving
- 1:01:10Speaker 1: up our biological weapons program. And then everyone else followed suit,
- 1:01:13Speaker 1: and the treaty came about in 1972.
- 1:01:16Speaker 2: But the Soviets continued their work.
- 1:01:17Speaker 1: The Soviets not only continued, they just, like, they, like,
- 1:01:21Speaker 1: went bang on it. And they later called it their
- 1:01:24Speaker 1: Manhattan Project.
- 1:01:27Speaker 2: And weren't there bioweapons labs in Ukraine?
- 1:01:32Speaker 1: You're talking about recently?
- 1:01:33Speaker 2: Yeah. That the United States was involved in?
- 1:01:35Speaker 1: What there are, there are biosafety labs.
- 1:01:39Speaker 2: Okay.
- 1:01:40Speaker 1: So your original question was, where are they around the world?
- 1:01:42Speaker 1: So they're illegal. But what isn't illegal, because this is
- 1:01:46Speaker 1: a carve out in the treaty, You can do research
- 1:01:50Speaker 1: for prophylactic purposes, for medical countermeasures. That's the carve-out. So
- 1:01:56Speaker 1: that's where we've gotten to gain a function, you see. Like, oh,
- 1:02:00Speaker 1: we're just doing this for prophylactic purposes.
- 1:02:02Speaker 2: That's how the DOD gets involved. Okay.
- 1:02:05Speaker 1: So before 9-11, 9-11 factors into this, and so does
- 1:02:11Speaker 1: Dick Cheney. Because before 9-11, America had two BSL-4 labs, bio...
- 1:02:17Speaker 1: safety level four. That's the highest level. That's like you
- 1:02:20Speaker 1: saw the suits, the tubes, your arms are in the boxes.
- 1:02:24Speaker 1: You're taking a chemical shower before you go in. America
- 1:02:28Speaker 1: had two, one at Fort Detrick. That's the DOD's lab.
- 1:02:32Speaker 1: One at the CDC in Atlanta. That's the civilian lab.
- 1:02:35Speaker 1: 9-11 happens. Remember the anthrax attacks? Never solved. Thank you, FBI.
- 1:02:42Speaker 1: Dick Cheney personally is terrified of bioweapons. And He spearheads
- 1:02:48Speaker 1: the efforts for this giant biological military industrial complex that
- 1:02:55Speaker 1: then takes off and begins with billions of dollars pumped
- 1:02:59Speaker 1: into gain-of-function type research. And America goes from having two
- 1:03:03Speaker 1: BSL labs to having 15. And the world follows suit.
- 1:03:10Speaker 1: So there are 110 BSL-4 labs around the world. including
- 1:03:16Speaker 1: in countries that are at war.
- 1:03:18Speaker 2: And this is all post-Bush administration?
- 1:03:20Speaker 1: Post-Bush administration. That is when it took off. That is
- 1:03:23Speaker 1: when it took off.
- 1:03:24Speaker 2: Wow.
- 1:03:26Speaker 1: So America has a hand in the blossoming of this problem,
- 1:03:31Speaker 1: most certainly. And then when you find out that, so
- 1:03:35Speaker 1: you think BSL-4, okay, well, BSL-3, that just must be like,
- 1:03:38Speaker 1: you know, chickenpox. No. In the BSL-3 labs, you can
- 1:03:43Speaker 1: work with plague, anthrax, like serious diseases that allegedly have cures.
- 1:03:52Speaker 1: And so you know how many BSL-3 labs there are
- 1:03:55Speaker 1: in the United States of America right now? How many?
- 1:03:59Speaker 2: 1,500.
- 1:04:00Speaker 1: 1,500. And around the world, there are 3,500. 90% of
- 1:04:08Speaker 1: them have no guidelines for safety.
- 1:04:10Speaker 2: Did you hear about the story where there was a
- 1:04:13Speaker 2: man in Vegas... That had a bio lab in his garage?
- 1:04:18Speaker 1: Yes.
- 1:04:19Speaker 2: In California? Both, both, both. Another one?
- 1:04:21Speaker 3: They were both, and they were seemingly linked.
- 1:04:24Speaker 2: Oh, boy. Possibly tied to California case federal Chinese investigation.
- 1:04:30Speaker 3: Yeah, wait till I show you what's at the bottom.
- 1:04:31Speaker 2: Oh, boy, Jamie, why are you doing this to me?
- 1:04:36Speaker 1: Oof.
- 1:04:38Speaker 2: No case appeared filed in state federal court as of Sunday.
- 1:04:43Speaker 3: And I didn't really see a follow-up.
- 1:04:45Speaker 1: I haven't seen the dead mice. Jamie, what's with the
- 1:04:47Speaker 1: dead mice there?
- 1:04:48Speaker 3: There's a thousand dead mice. There's vials including HIV, malaria.
- 1:04:52Speaker 2: Well, the crazy thing is the guy who they caught,
- 1:04:56Speaker 2: they didn't arrest him. Like there was an Israeli guy.
- 1:05:00Speaker 2: So this says Chinese investigation, but one of them was
- 1:05:04Speaker 2: a guy who was an Israeli guy who they caught
- 1:05:07Speaker 2: and they sent him away. They didn't prosecute him. He
- 1:05:11Speaker 2: took off.
- 1:05:14Speaker 1: I mean, this stuff is so thinly reported and it's
- 1:05:18Speaker 1: always got like a giant sensationalist clickbait type headline. And
- 1:05:24Speaker 1: people read about it and know about it a little bit.
- 1:05:27Speaker 1: And then the real reality behind it, I think, gets
- 1:05:31Speaker 1: completely lost, which is that the bottom line is that
- 1:05:34Speaker 1: the barrier to entry in the biological weapons field is
- 1:05:40Speaker 1: so incredibly low. It's horrifying. Think about what you need
- 1:05:46Speaker 1: to have a nuclear weapon.
- 1:05:49Speaker 2: A lot.
- 1:05:49Speaker 1: I mean, look at Iran right now. You have to
- 1:05:51Speaker 1: have enriched uranium or plutonium. You have to have fissile material.
- 1:05:55Speaker 1: Then you have to have a weapon system. You have
- 1:05:58Speaker 1: to have an ICBM or a submarine or a B-2 bomber.
- 1:06:02Speaker 1: Nuclear weapons are tightly controlled by a nation's command and
- 1:06:06Speaker 1: control structure. All subject matter experts I interviewed for this
- 1:06:11Speaker 1: book expressed their serious concern that the barrier for entry
- 1:06:17Speaker 1: is so low that basically given computational systems, AI-enabled bio,
- 1:06:24Speaker 1: basically a high school student with limited knowledge of biology
- 1:06:27Speaker 1: can make a bioweapon in their basement or in the
- 1:06:31Speaker 1: Vegas apartment building.
- 1:06:32Speaker 2: Well, this guy had it in his garage and they
- 1:06:37Speaker 2: caught him.
- 1:06:38Speaker 1: And what was he doing? Do we know?
- 1:06:39Speaker 2: I don't know. They referenced it as a storage facility.
- 1:06:43Speaker 2: And they said it was a storage facility. Yeah, it
- 1:06:47Speaker 2: said not a laboratory, adding that the samples and equipment
- 1:06:49Speaker 2: suggested no active work was happening there. But it says,
- 1:06:53Speaker 2: I think the question is, why does somebody have these
- 1:06:56Speaker 2: materials in a private residence? It's not a doctor, not
- 1:06:59Speaker 2: a lab, not a licensed medical facility of any sort.
- 1:07:03Speaker 2: This guy.
- 1:07:05Speaker 1: And it's a great question. And I wonder what the
- 1:07:07Speaker 1: answer is.
- 1:07:08Speaker 3: I also think it was like an Airbnb or something.
- 1:07:11Speaker 3: That's kind of like the, it gets lost in the
- 1:07:14Speaker 3: LLC who owned it.
- 1:07:15Speaker 2: They said the guy who was.
- 1:07:16Speaker 3: Running it doesn't own it.
- 1:07:19Speaker 2: 1,200 samples. Oh, God. And what was he doing?
- 1:07:22Speaker 1: What was he doing and why? I don't know, but.
- 1:07:24Speaker 2: I think they've released him. That's what's crazy. The guy
- 1:07:28Speaker 2: in Vegas was released. Is that correct?
- 1:07:30Speaker 3: That's what I was trying to say. When I Googled that,
- 1:07:32Speaker 3: I didn't really see a follow-up on anything updated or new.
- 1:07:36Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure the guy in Vegas was an Israeli citizen,
- 1:07:41Speaker 2: and he was released. So the question is, like, what
- 1:07:43Speaker 2: was he doing? And he was caught, but that's just
- 1:07:48Speaker 2: one guy that was stupid and got caught. How many
- 1:07:50Speaker 2: people are doing that? Are there sleeper labs all across
- 1:07:55Speaker 2: the country?
- 1:07:56Speaker 3: Rory Solomon charges dropped, it says, on the property manager.
- 1:08:00Speaker 2: Whoopsies. Maybe it's because he was just a property manager. Yeah,
- 1:08:04Speaker 2: no big deal. He didn't do anything.
- 1:08:06Speaker 3: Without prejudice. Still faces criminal charge in Clark County for
- 1:08:09Speaker 3: improper disposal of hazardous waste.
- 1:08:11Speaker 2: But didn't he leave and go back to Israel? I mean,
- 1:08:14Speaker 2: this is just, I'm looking at the article now. I
- 1:08:16Speaker 2: think that was the allegation.
- 1:08:18Speaker 3: He's due back in court on June 4th, which was
- 1:08:21Speaker 3: a few months ago. Yeah, so I don't, let's see.
- 1:08:24Speaker 3: I didn't see anything about it.
- 1:08:24Speaker 2: I'll look it up. Yeah. Nothing to see here. It
- 1:08:26Speaker 2: says an Israeli citizen, right? Didn't it say that?
- 1:08:30Speaker 3: Go back to— Right, we just— A citizen on a
- 1:08:31Speaker 3: non-immigrant visa is not allowed to possess firearms. Prosecutors say
- 1:08:34Speaker 3: multiple guns were seized from his home.
- 1:08:36Speaker 2: Well, you've got to have guns if you've got plague.
- 1:08:40Speaker 1: You've got to look out for your stockpile.
- 1:08:42Speaker 2: You've got to guard your plague.
- 1:08:43Speaker 1: But, you know, I stayed away from that kind of
- 1:08:46Speaker 1: lone actor crazy because— I don't know if that's a
- 1:08:48Speaker 1: lone actor. I mean, exactly. You don't know.
- 1:08:52Speaker 2: If it was, would you think they'd let him go?
- 1:08:55Speaker 2: That's my question. If it's a lone actor, would they
- 1:08:58Speaker 2: really let him go or— is he connected to somebody?
- 1:09:01Speaker 2: And that's how he got out.
- 1:09:03Speaker 1: I mean, one of the problems of the over-politicization of
- 1:09:06Speaker 1: everything is that it just seems like anything important becomes
- 1:09:12Speaker 1: splatter and becomes secondary to some of these other concerns
- 1:09:16Speaker 1: that seem to take headlines right like that should be
- 1:09:20Speaker 1: a big story and yet all any of us ever
- 1:09:22Speaker 1: heard was did you hear about the crazy bio lab
- 1:09:26Speaker 1: right i can tell you that the bigger story is
- 1:09:32Speaker 1: really at least to my eye you know because this
- 1:09:36Speaker 1: is another one oh thank god nothing got out thank
- 1:09:38Speaker 1: god no one was infected but the real issue is
- 1:09:42Speaker 1: what happens if someone does get what happens if a
- 1:09:45Speaker 1: pathogen gets seeded in the community and an outbreak starts
- 1:09:50Speaker 1: to move to an epidemic. And, you know, I write
- 1:09:54Speaker 1: in the end of the book, Joe, the point is
- 1:09:56Speaker 1: not panic. This is, of course, after I take you
- 1:09:58Speaker 1: through like the worst dystopian nightmare ever. The point is pressure,
- 1:10:03Speaker 1: pressure to understand the threat, the labs around the world,
- 1:10:09Speaker 1: the bureaucracy involved, all the different problems that would come
- 1:10:12Speaker 1: up of mitigating the threat. so that you can be
- 1:10:15Speaker 1: informed and also say, like, wait a minute, something really
- 1:10:18Speaker 1: needs to be done and needs to be looked at here.
- 1:10:21Speaker 1: And instead, people are arguing about the most obvious thing
- 1:10:25Speaker 1: in the world, to my eye, you know, what happened
- 1:10:29Speaker 1: in the Senate yesterday. Like, that is pretty obvious, what happened,
- 1:10:33Speaker 1: what is being covered up. We were misled. And yet
- 1:10:38Speaker 1: all of this, I'm not saying to skip over it,
- 1:10:41Speaker 1: you know, but.
- 1:10:44Speaker 1: It's like how much effort do we put on something
- 1:10:48Speaker 1: without a resolution? That's what confounds me.
- 1:10:54Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a really good question. And the fact that
- 1:10:58Speaker 2: there's so many labs in this country and that they've
- 1:11:02Speaker 2: all sprung up post-2001.
- 1:11:05Speaker 1: They moved that Plum Island lab, by the way, to Kansas.
- 1:11:11Speaker 1: And it either just opened or it's about to open.
- 1:11:14Speaker 1: It costs an extraordinary amount of money.
- 1:11:17Speaker 2: And are they doing the same research? Yes. Yep.
- 1:11:19Speaker 1: They moved it off of Plum Island and now it's
- 1:11:21Speaker 1: in Kansas.
- 1:11:22Speaker 2: Do you know anything about this alpha gal tick, this
- 1:11:25Speaker 2: Lone Star tick that gives people this allergy to red meat?
- 1:11:29Speaker 1: A little bit. A little bit. In as much that
- 1:11:33Speaker 1: it's a parasite, which is different, you know, it's a bug,
- 1:11:36Speaker 1: which is different than a germ.
- 1:11:39Speaker 2: Right.
- 1:11:40Speaker 1: But I think it speaks to this idea that sort
- 1:11:45Speaker 1: of there are natural things that are happening in our environment.
- 1:11:50Speaker 1: And then there are also unnatural things and the inability
- 1:11:55Speaker 1: to differentiate between them or trust. Look, so much of
- 1:12:00Speaker 1: all this has been about trust the science. And then, OK,
- 1:12:02Speaker 1: we can't trust the science, unfortunately, around COVID. And we're
- 1:12:08Speaker 1: all waiting for a reckoning around COVID. It's obviously not
- 1:12:11Speaker 1: coming anytime soon. And in the meantime, you have, you know,
- 1:12:16Speaker 1: the lettuce outbreak. You have the alpha gall. You have
- 1:12:18Speaker 1: Legionnaire's disease from data centers. There's an influx of health
- 1:12:24Speaker 1: concerns coming from Mother Nature herself. Here we are in
- 1:12:30Speaker 1: this world of incredible science and technology. I mean, I
- 1:12:34Speaker 1: talk to biotechnologists who, by the way, really have a
- 1:12:37Speaker 1: utopian take on this. Now, there is lots of money
- 1:12:40Speaker 1: involved for them. But they really believe that science is
- 1:12:44Speaker 1: the answer and can be the answer to a lot
- 1:12:47Speaker 1: of these problems. I sat next to a guy at
- 1:12:51Speaker 1: dinner a couple nights ago who told me that his
- 1:12:54Speaker 1: company in San Diego has a countermeasure for alpha-gal. I
- 1:12:59Speaker 1: have no idea of verifying this. This just happened. But
- 1:13:01Speaker 1: that the reason they can't get it through is because
- 1:13:03Speaker 1: of insurance.
- 1:13:04Speaker 2: You know, one of the treatments that's supposed to be
- 1:13:05Speaker 2: very effective is acupuncture. On your ears.
- 1:13:09Speaker 1: On your ears.
- 1:13:10Speaker 2: Yeah. See if you can find anything on that. I
- 1:13:13Speaker 2: read about this, that there's like a 90% remission that
- 1:13:18Speaker 2: one guy's been able to achieve through acupuncture on your ears.
- 1:13:23Speaker 2: Which is like, what do you, what? Like, hey, whatever works,
- 1:13:28Speaker 2: but is this real? Acupuncture, specifically a specialized ear technique
- 1:13:34Speaker 2: called Saliman Aric, Auricular allergy treatment is being explored by
- 1:13:41Speaker 2: integrative practitioners to help manage and potentially achieve remission for
- 1:13:45Speaker 2: alpha-gal syndrome, though it's not yet a standard medically proven cure.
- 1:13:51Speaker 2: How it works for alpha-gal. Targeted ear points. Provider locates
- 1:13:55Speaker 2: a specific highly reactive electrical point on the outer ear
- 1:13:59Speaker 2: associated with the alpha-gal immune response. Acupuncture is so weird
- 1:14:04Speaker 2: because it seems to be doing something.
- 1:14:06Speaker 1: Do you have acupuncture?
- 1:14:07Speaker 2: No. I had it done once but the guy was
- 1:14:09Speaker 2: a kook and I never went back.
- 1:14:11Speaker 1: I feel like acupuncture is so old and comes from
- 1:14:16Speaker 1: such a long history of experiences. I have acupuncture and
- 1:14:22Speaker 1: it just seems like anytime I go for anything, someone
- 1:14:25Speaker 1: wants to give me drugs, which I'm not a fan of,
- 1:14:27Speaker 1: I go to the acupuncturist. Sure, call it the placebo
- 1:14:31Speaker 1: effect or call it whatever you want, but it certainly
- 1:14:34Speaker 1: works for me.
- 1:14:34Speaker 2: I don't necessarily think it's a placebo. I think a
- 1:14:37Speaker 2: lot of that really old stuff we like to dismiss
- 1:14:40Speaker 2: because we like petroleum-based pharmaceutical drugs because that's what the
- 1:14:44Speaker 2: doctor gives us as standard of care. I have a
- 1:14:47Speaker 2: feeling there's a lot of real... It's been around too
- 1:14:49Speaker 2: long for them to just keep faking it.
- 1:14:52Speaker 1: I mean, if it works, it works.
- 1:14:54Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, if it turns out that this ear technique
- 1:14:59Speaker 2: actually puts alpha-gal in remission, maybe people will take that
- 1:15:04Speaker 2: stuff more seriously and start using acupuncture for other... Because
- 1:15:09Speaker 2: I know a lot of people swear by it. And
- 1:15:11Speaker 2: I'm always... I just kind of raise my eyebrow like,
- 1:15:13Speaker 2: all right, good luck. But maybe that's just me being ignorant.
- 1:15:17Speaker 2: And definitely that's me being ignorant. A specialized ear acupuncture
- 1:15:21Speaker 2: method called the Solomon Auricular Allergy Treatment shows a high
- 1:15:26Speaker 2: reported success rate of about 85% to 96% for putting
- 1:15:28Speaker 2: alpha-gal syndrome... symptoms into remission. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. I mean,
- 1:15:37Speaker 2: I don't know who did the study. I like it.
- 1:15:42Speaker 1: I like that that's out there because I always feel
- 1:15:44Speaker 1: like the acupuncturists are sidelined because they're not part of
- 1:15:48Speaker 1: the medical insurance military industrial complex.
- 1:15:52Speaker 3: The small needle stays in your ear for three to
- 1:15:54Speaker 3: four weeks.
- 1:15:55Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
- 1:15:55Speaker 2: It's not just like a treatment. It's secured with a
- 1:15:58Speaker 2: small adhesive bandage. Tiny little needle. Hair thin. Stainless steel needle. Huh.
- 1:16:09Speaker 3: 137 patient trial, it looks like.
- 1:16:10Speaker 2: I wonder how, who fucking figured that out?
- 1:16:13Speaker 1: Do you know anyone who's gotten alpha goals?
- 1:16:15Speaker 2: Yes, a good friend of mine.
- 1:16:16Speaker 3: Wow.
- 1:16:17Speaker 2: Yeah, he has it.
- 1:16:17Speaker 1: And what, he's become deathly allergic?
- 1:16:21Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
- 1:16:21Speaker 1: Or deeply allergic?
- 1:16:23Speaker 2: Well, I mean, it doesn't kill him, but it wrecks him.
- 1:16:25Speaker 2: And so he got over it. and started eating meat again,
- 1:16:29Speaker 2: and then it came back with a vengeance. It came
- 1:16:31Speaker 2: back even worse than it was before. So it went
- 1:16:33Speaker 2: into remission, and then it came back. And, you know,
- 1:16:36Speaker 2: he's really, like, tightened up his diet and done everything.
- 1:16:40Speaker 2: One thing that really helped him was plasmapheresis. Do you
- 1:16:42Speaker 2: know what that is? It's they take your blood, and
- 1:16:47Speaker 2: they filter out the plasma and replace it. Yeah, I
- 1:16:50Speaker 2: had it done. I had it done for fun just
- 1:16:53Speaker 2: to see what it feels like. Um, and you get
- 1:16:55Speaker 2: really tired the next day. That's one thing. But then
- 1:16:57Speaker 2: the day after that, oh my God, you feel amazing.
- 1:16:59Speaker 2: You feel like, like you've just lost 20 years of age.
- 1:17:03Speaker 2: Like it really feels incredible. You have so much energy.
- 1:17:05Speaker 2: It's really odd. Whatever it is, it's doing something. But
- 1:17:08Speaker 2: people that have autoimmune issues, people that have allergies, people
- 1:17:11Speaker 2: that have a lot of different weird things, apparently they
- 1:17:13Speaker 2: have some, uh, great responses from that. But my friend, uh,
- 1:17:17Speaker 2: you know, he struggled with a bunch of different things
- 1:17:19Speaker 2: and getting his blood work and lab work done. He
- 1:17:22Speaker 2: was also in the military and spent a lot of
- 1:17:25Speaker 2: time overseas. And one of the things that he found
- 1:17:27Speaker 2: out is PFAS, P-F-A-S, these forever chemicals you get from plastics.
- 1:17:33Speaker 2: He's got burning plastics. Well, it's not just that. It's
- 1:17:37Speaker 2: also just hot water. So like they take these bottles
- 1:17:41Speaker 2: of plastic, bottles of water in cases, and they've got
- 1:17:43Speaker 2: them sitting out in the sand, in the sun in
- 1:17:46Speaker 2: Afghanistan and Iraq. And that's their water supply. So they're
- 1:17:50Speaker 2: drinking this water that's been sitting out in the sun
- 1:17:53Speaker 2: that's leaching in these plastic bottles. So he found out
- 1:17:56Speaker 2: that his PFAS levels were off the charts, and that's
- 1:18:00Speaker 2: because he was deployed overseas all those years drinking that water.
- 1:18:05Speaker 2: Did you see this about the PFAS chemicals? No.
- 1:18:07Speaker 3: I just saw this come out, so I don't know
- 1:18:09Speaker 3: how tested it's been, but someone's figured out a way.
- 1:18:11Speaker 2: To get almost all of it out. Out of water,
- 1:18:14Speaker 2: but not your body, right? Yeah.
- 1:18:16Speaker 3: That's how it's getting in mostly.
- 1:18:17Speaker 2: Right, but the problem is once it gets in your body,
- 1:18:19Speaker 2: it's the problem. Because my friend still has it. I mean,
- 1:18:23Speaker 2: Evan has it in his body. Scientists have developed a
- 1:18:26Speaker 2: clever new way to trap forever chemicals in water using
- 1:18:29Speaker 2: nano-sized cages that lock onto PFAS molecules. Unlike current methods,
- 1:18:35Speaker 2: this approach can capture short-chain PFAS, the hardest type to remove.
- 1:18:38Speaker 2: Tests show that it can eliminate up to 98% of
- 1:18:40Speaker 2: these pollutants and still work after multiple uses. The discovery
- 1:18:44Speaker 2: could lead to more effective water filtration systems worldwide. Well,
- 1:18:48Speaker 2: that's good news. Science. Technology. Yeah. Dual use.
- 1:18:54Speaker 1: It can be good. It can help you or harm you.
- 1:18:56Speaker 2: Or kill you. And there's some brilliant people out there
- 1:18:59Speaker 2: that are figuring out ways to mitigate all the stupid
- 1:19:01Speaker 2: things that we do. Like that.
- 1:19:03Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:19:04Speaker 1: But people, you know, the whole new creeping up of
- 1:19:07Speaker 1: new diseases emerging and sort of like pockets of the
- 1:19:11Speaker 1: country and feeling like the CDC or the HHS has
- 1:19:15Speaker 1: no real lid on it or no real explanation, I
- 1:19:19Speaker 1: think kind of seriously undermines the general wellness of the nation.
- 1:19:26Speaker 2: Oh, for sure. Well, that was a big problem with
- 1:19:28Speaker 2: COVID is that this feeling of the fear and anxiety
- 1:19:33Speaker 2: affected people's immune systems as well, affected their their depression
- 1:19:37Speaker 2: levels affected their happiness, like just their overall feeling anxiety.
- 1:19:41Speaker 2: I mean, how much of an effect just the cortisol boost,
- 1:19:45Speaker 2: all the different things that are happening, the stressing out
- 1:19:48Speaker 2: your body because of that pandemic that we don't even
- 1:19:50Speaker 2: consider as being part of that experience.
- 1:19:54Speaker 1: I think also when you like, okay, can I give
- 1:19:57Speaker 1: you an anecdote? Because this comes to mind about what
- 1:19:59Speaker 1: you're saying is like that idea that there's uncertainty, okay?
- 1:20:03Speaker 1: And uncertainty raises your cortisol levels. And even worse is
- 1:20:07Speaker 1: when you're uncertain about something you're being told is true,
- 1:20:11Speaker 1: but you're like, I'm uncertain. That is like even more anxiety-making, right?
- 1:20:17Speaker 1: One of the things that's stunning to me is how
- 1:20:20Speaker 1: the CDC and the WHO, they're supposed to be these
- 1:20:23Speaker 1: pillars of sort of the North Star of public health.
- 1:20:28Speaker 1: At least they certainly were when I was a kid.
- 1:20:30Speaker 1: You really looked up to these organizations. COVID happens. The
- 1:20:36Speaker 1: WHO and the CDC, they're tweeting out three months into
- 1:20:42Speaker 1: the pandemic, COVID not airborne. Not is in capital letters.
- 1:20:48Speaker 1: I have a copy of the tweet in the book
- 1:20:50Speaker 1: because no one really believes this unless they see it.
- 1:20:54Speaker 1: COVID was airborne. COVID was airborne. That is How we
- 1:20:58Speaker 1: all got COVID, it makes something incredibly pandemic prone. Instead,
- 1:21:07Speaker 1: they said, remember, you get COVID from like touching surfaces.
- 1:21:14Speaker 1: We're all like out buying Lysol. The CDC went into
- 1:21:18Speaker 1: a partnership with Lysol. Lysol disappeared from the supply chain.
- 1:21:26Speaker 1: We now know, that's actually called fomite transmission. That's the
- 1:21:29Speaker 1: scientific term for getting something off a surface. We now
- 1:21:33Speaker 1: know that one in 10,000 cases of COVID was transmitted
- 1:21:39Speaker 1: from a surface. How can they have gotten it so
- 1:21:43Speaker 1: wrong is a question everybody should be asking. And the explanation,
- 1:21:49Speaker 1: because by the way, the WHO didn't change, they kind
- 1:21:52Speaker 1: of quietly changed about nine months later started saying COVID
- 1:21:56Speaker 1: was airborne, same as CDC. They never said like, look,
- 1:22:00Speaker 1: we're really sorry. We made a serious mistake and here's why.
- 1:22:04Speaker 1: And I called both the CDC and the WHO looking
- 1:22:07Speaker 1: for an explanation and asking why they never made an
- 1:22:10Speaker 1: apology and no answer. And I think that's like what
- 1:22:15Speaker 1: we're talking about. Talk about raising cortisol levels. You know,
- 1:22:19Speaker 1: when your institution says, is completely wrong. And by the way,
- 1:22:23Speaker 1: I don't think it was nefarious. They literally didn't know.
- 1:22:26Speaker 1: Or they had their panel of experts disagreeing to such
- 1:22:31Speaker 1: an extent that they just went with not airborne as
- 1:22:35Speaker 1: opposed to airborne.
- 1:22:36Speaker 2: It does weird you out that they were in a
- 1:22:38Speaker 2: partnership with Lysol.
- 1:22:40Speaker 1: I had to report that in the book because that is.
- 1:22:42Speaker 2: You just start thinking about profit motives.
- 1:22:46Speaker 1: I mean, if I had to guess, it was convenient
- 1:22:50Speaker 1: to have a partnership with them I don't have any
- 1:22:53Speaker 1: reason to believe that they were like, let's say it
- 1:22:56Speaker 1: was fomite transmission and partner up with Lysol. But certainly
- 1:23:00Speaker 1: if you're Lysol, you're going to probably go, hey, guys,
- 1:23:04Speaker 1: let's partner together. But, you know, it disappeared from the
- 1:23:08Speaker 1: supply chain. I remember trying to buy Lysol and not
- 1:23:10Speaker 1: being able to at Target.
- 1:23:12Speaker 2: It was just gone. Hand sanitizer was everywhere. Everyone was
- 1:23:15Speaker 2: squirting that stuff. Now it turns out hand sanitizer is
- 1:23:18Speaker 2: just not good for you.
- 1:23:19Speaker 1: And I still see people using hand sanitizer all over
- 1:23:23Speaker 1: the place, bottles of it, like in corporate places. It's
- 1:23:26Speaker 1: really bad.
- 1:23:28Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, your skin is an organ, and you're taking
- 1:23:31Speaker 2: this stuff that just nukes all of your skin flora,
- 1:23:36Speaker 2: and you're just wiping your hands with it and rubbing
- 1:23:39Speaker 2: it all over you. Like, that's not good. There's nothing
- 1:23:42Speaker 2: good about that. Wash your hands. Fucking soap. Use some soap.
- 1:23:46Speaker 2: Or not. Don't worry about it as much.
- 1:23:48Speaker 1: It seems like the common sense part of health has
- 1:23:51Speaker 1: kind of gone out the window. I saw this article
- 1:23:53Speaker 1: the other day, which was talking about how kids our age.
- 1:23:56Speaker 1: You remember, like, I went to a play. I grew
- 1:23:59Speaker 1: up in rural Connecticut. And, like, the playground was, like, dirt.
- 1:24:04Speaker 2: Right?
- 1:24:04Speaker 1: There were, like, monkey bars. You know what I mean?
- 1:24:08Speaker 1: You were, like, you got dirty.
- 1:24:09Speaker 2: I would, like. It's good for you. Yeah.
- 1:24:11Speaker 1: And now it's, like, you know. fake whatever that stuff is,
- 1:24:15Speaker 1: you know? And this scientific study that I came upon
- 1:24:20Speaker 1: when I was looking, when I was working on this
- 1:24:21Speaker 1: was like, that actually that dirt is really good for you.
- 1:24:25Speaker 2: You know, right?
- 1:24:27Speaker 1: Like surprise, surprise. We've evolved. We have evolved by, you know,
- 1:24:33Speaker 1: dealing with germs.
- 1:24:35Speaker 2: Well, that's why kids are always putting things in their
- 1:24:36Speaker 2: mouth and touching things. Like it's actually probably good for
- 1:24:39Speaker 2: them to be exposed to all these different bio things,
- 1:24:43Speaker 2: these different, you know, whatever it is, bacteria and germs,
- 1:24:47Speaker 2: but it strengthens your immune system.
- 1:24:50Speaker 1: It's kind of common sense too, you know, like the
- 1:24:53Speaker 1: pacifier rule, you know, when you're a new mom and
- 1:24:55Speaker 1: it's like, if it fell on the floor for like,
- 1:24:57Speaker 1: I mean, it's kind of gross, but three seconds, then
- 1:24:59Speaker 1: it's fine. That one's probably not so good.
- 1:25:03Speaker 2: Well, a certain amount of exposure does strengthen your immune
- 1:25:06Speaker 2: system and kids that are just living in these completely
- 1:25:09Speaker 2: sterile environments are You got to think that they have
- 1:25:11Speaker 2: an atrophied immune system because their immune system is not
- 1:25:14Speaker 2: having to battle this stuff. We're terrified of what we
- 1:25:18Speaker 2: don't know. And that's part of the problem with having
- 1:25:20Speaker 2: bad experts or experts that have really flawed approaches.
- 1:25:25Speaker 1: I mean, that's what was so interesting writing this book
- 1:25:28Speaker 1: because I learned so much about biology and about physiology, right?
- 1:25:34Speaker 1: Like we all deal with disease so incredibly differently. There
- 1:25:40Speaker 1: is not a set, you know, pathogen A impacts people differently.
- 1:25:46Speaker 1: And why there isn't more of that, why people don't
- 1:25:49Speaker 1: lean into that mother nature mystery more, and I'm talking
- 1:25:53Speaker 1: about public health officials, I don't understand. Because what has happened,
- 1:25:59Speaker 1: I see in society, is it's created this fracture where
- 1:26:03Speaker 1: you're either following a sort of set of scientific data,
- 1:26:09Speaker 1: which just came from a one lab or one group
- 1:26:12Speaker 1: of scientists, you're either following that or you're somehow having
- 1:26:17Speaker 1: an alternate narrative that is actually somehow harmful. And it
- 1:26:24Speaker 1: couldn't be more the opposite. It couldn't be more the opposite.
- 1:26:27Speaker 1: And when the shit hits the fan, you need a
- 1:26:31Speaker 1: kind of unity among people. You need a sense of like, okay, well,
- 1:26:35Speaker 1: we all disagree and we all have different immune systems,
- 1:26:38Speaker 1: but what's best for the kind of greater the collective.
- 1:26:42Speaker 1: And that's just gone now. That is completely gone. And
- 1:26:46Speaker 1: I find more than anything that people, the Fauci hearings
- 1:26:50Speaker 1: in point, like instead of being like, hmm, maybe I
- 1:26:54Speaker 1: need to change my mind about this. People are like, well,
- 1:26:57Speaker 1: if it serves my side, I'm going to go louder.
- 1:26:59Speaker 1: And if it doesn't serve my side, I'm going to
- 1:27:02Speaker 1: move on to something else.
- 1:27:03Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:27:03Speaker 2: I've seen people talk about what a travesty bringing him
- 1:27:08Speaker 2: in front of the Congress and having him question like
- 1:27:11Speaker 2: that and how much good he's done. I've seen people
- 1:27:13Speaker 2: like making these statements online, like, what are you seeing
- 1:27:17Speaker 2: that I'm not seeing? Because I'm not seeing that. I'm
- 1:27:19Speaker 2: seeing someone who doesn't want to tell the truth. And
- 1:27:21Speaker 2: someone's emails show a completely contradictory version of what happened
- 1:27:28Speaker 2: versus what he's publicly stated before, including when he was
- 1:27:32Speaker 2: testifying before under oath. So he really should be charged
- 1:27:37Speaker 2: with perjury. but because of this whole 10-year immunity thing
- 1:27:41Speaker 2: that he got, he doesn't have to worry about any
- 1:27:42Speaker 2: of that, which is also weird because the immunity, the
- 1:27:47Speaker 2: pardon is supposed to protect you from being prosecuted, but
- 1:27:51Speaker 2: then you're no longer supposed to have the Fifth Amendment. Yes.
- 1:27:55Speaker 1: I mean, those legal things will play out. They will
- 1:27:57Speaker 1: take a lot of time, you know, and that will
- 1:28:01Speaker 1: go on. What I also want to know is, Because
- 1:28:04Speaker 1: none of these things happen in a vacuum, right? And
- 1:28:07Speaker 1: it reminds me a little bit of that phrase, you know,
- 1:28:10Speaker 1: when the rats jump off the Titanic as it was sinking.
- 1:28:13Speaker 1: Because I have a little different experience. I watch different individuals,
- 1:28:19Speaker 1: certainly in the news, carefully of like who's changing because
- 1:28:23Speaker 1: I just want to learn from it. I don't report it.
- 1:28:25Speaker 1: I'm just eyeing it. And I'm seeing people kind of decide, oh,
- 1:28:28Speaker 1: maybe now I'll say a little more about, you know, Fauci, right?
- 1:28:33Speaker 1: Because I do think that people end up having a,
- 1:28:37Speaker 1: they will go where the collective is going, right? If
- 1:28:39Speaker 1: their party starts to turn, okay? And because I don't
- 1:28:43Speaker 1: write about politics at all, I'm not involved in this,
- 1:28:46Speaker 1: but observationally, it's interesting to me. But for this reason
- 1:28:50Speaker 1: in particular, is that why was Fauci in charge? There
- 1:28:54Speaker 1: are other people who are responsible for letting him be
- 1:28:57Speaker 1: in charge. Like, Having studied the bureaucracy of what happens
- 1:29:01Speaker 1: in a pandemic in a biological incident, which this was,
- 1:29:07Speaker 1: there's no reason that he was in charge. There's not
- 1:29:11Speaker 1: doctrine that put him in charge. It was kind of
- 1:29:15Speaker 1: like a group, okay, he'll be in charge. Really, the
- 1:29:21Speaker 1: person in charge is the secretary of HHS. That is
- 1:29:27Speaker 1: the person in charge. In fact, Joe, I was invited
- 1:29:29Speaker 1: to the White House last week, right? They asked me
- 1:29:32Speaker 1: to come and bring some copies of Biological War Scenario.
- 1:29:37Speaker 2: I went. Did you meet with Trump?
- 1:29:39Speaker 1: No, I didn't. I met with HHS. I met with
- 1:29:41Speaker 1: the chief technology officer of HHS. And they said in
- 1:29:46Speaker 1: their original email, you know, we're the ones that would
- 1:29:49Speaker 1: be in charge in the event of this kind of
- 1:29:51Speaker 1: a thing, which I know from having reported it. So
- 1:29:55Speaker 1: they're in charge. Why did Fauci get to take the torch?
- 1:30:01Speaker 2: Why do you think?
- 1:30:02Speaker 1: I don't know. But it should be looked at. In
- 1:30:05Speaker 1: other words, yes, we all know that he was in
- 1:30:10Speaker 1: charge and he was always. But what I don't understand
- 1:30:13Speaker 1: is in a billion, actually trillion dollar, HHS, by the way,
- 1:30:17Speaker 1: has a budget that's twice the size of the Defense Department.
- 1:30:22Speaker 1: Twice the size of the Defense Department. And it defaulted
- 1:30:27Speaker 1: to Fauci, who was head of NIH, then retired, and
- 1:30:30Speaker 1: then he was just chosen as like the president's lead
- 1:30:35Speaker 1: medical counsel or medical professional. So in other words, a
- 1:30:40Speaker 1: group of people put him into that position. Who are they? Why?
- 1:30:47Speaker 1: What do they have to say about this?
- 1:30:52Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm sure part of it was just they needed
- 1:30:55Speaker 2: someone to take the reins and he was more than
- 1:30:58Speaker 2: willing to do it and probably confidently stated how he
- 1:31:01Speaker 2: would handle it and what we're going to do and
- 1:31:04Speaker 2: how to go about it.
- 1:31:05Speaker 1: And didn't those people also have an opinion? Like what
- 1:31:09Speaker 1: if they saw the Jon Stewart episode where, you know,
- 1:31:13Speaker 1: like even if they didn't have an opinion before, why
- 1:31:15Speaker 1: didn't they have an opinion after? And why, why did
- 1:31:18Speaker 1: everybody just fall into line like sheep? That's, really more
- 1:31:23Speaker 1: interesting to me at this point. In addition to the
- 1:31:27Speaker 1: individual being held responsible for obviously misleading the public and
- 1:31:33Speaker 1: creating a conspiratorial situation, conspiring is simply two or more
- 1:31:38Speaker 1: people working to conceal the truth. It's an actual conspiracy. Well,
- 1:31:42Speaker 1: that's a.
- 1:31:43Speaker 2: Weird thing too, that people resist the term conspiracy and
- 1:31:48Speaker 2: they think it's foolish.
- 1:31:49Speaker 1: It's a legitimate term. I mean, I think when people
- 1:31:52Speaker 1: call other people conspiracy theorists, they should just say they
- 1:31:55Speaker 1: have an alternative narrative. That's all that is. But an
- 1:31:58Speaker 1: actual conspiracy is a legal term.
- 1:32:01Speaker 2: Well, not only that, there's a huge amount that you
- 1:32:04Speaker 2: can point to in history where there were really people conspiring.
- 1:32:08Speaker 2: Huge amount of stories.
- 1:32:10Speaker 1: And the reason why it's legally, you know, it's a
- 1:32:14Speaker 1: really difficult situation and it needs to be looked at
- 1:32:17Speaker 1: is because one person you know, it can keep a secret, right?
- 1:32:21Speaker 1: But when multiple people are involved and a conspiracy is involved,
- 1:32:26Speaker 1: you are actively working as a group to mislead. And
- 1:32:30Speaker 1: then it becomes easier, more powerful, more effective. And so
- 1:32:35Speaker 1: those other scientists, you know, we now know on the
- 1:32:38Speaker 1: record that there were a dozen scientists that Fauci looked
- 1:32:43Speaker 1: to give him information about lab leak versus wet market.
- 1:32:48Speaker 1: Ten of them went with lab leak. Two of them
- 1:32:53Speaker 1: leaned toward.
- 1:32:56Speaker 2: Natural.
- 1:32:57Speaker 1: Fauci wanted it to be natural spillover. You know, that's
- 1:33:01Speaker 1: where you could say then there began. And again, I'm
- 1:33:05Speaker 1: just talking legal terms. I'm not a lawyer, but they
- 1:33:08Speaker 1: began to conspire to change the story.
- 1:33:10Speaker 3: Right.
- 1:33:10Speaker 1: Just look at the numbers.
- 1:33:12Speaker 2: Yes.
- 1:33:12Speaker 1: Look at the numbers.
- 1:33:13Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 1:33:14Speaker 1: And so what about that? you know, because I think
- 1:33:17Speaker 1: if you're just going to have a single fall guy,
- 1:33:20Speaker 1: you're really not going to be doing much for the
- 1:33:24Speaker 1: future to have people, you know, a group of people say,
- 1:33:29Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to be part of this
- 1:33:30Speaker 1: conspiracy because that's an important individual stance that can be
- 1:33:36Speaker 1: taken by many people. And we see that among, you
- 1:33:41Speaker 1: said you have friends who don't want to kind of
- 1:33:43Speaker 1: take a position because they don't want to be associated
- 1:33:45Speaker 1: with that group or that group. Well, you know, if
- 1:33:48Speaker 1: it starts in the center and there's responsibility for the group,
- 1:33:54Speaker 1: I think that makes people think more open-mindedly in the future.
- 1:33:59Speaker 2: Well, the problem was these people's career depended upon them
- 1:34:02Speaker 2: towing the line. And if they stepped outside of Fauci's
- 1:34:05Speaker 2: jurisdiction and power, they were fucked.
- 1:34:08Speaker 3: Absolutely.
- 1:34:08Speaker 2: That's the real problem. And he clearly did that to
- 1:34:11Speaker 2: people like, Jay Bhattacharya and all these different people that
- 1:34:14Speaker 2: got kicked off of Twitter and maligned people that were
- 1:34:18Speaker 2: like serious experts that disagreed with a lot of different
- 1:34:20Speaker 2: aspects of the pandemic.
- 1:34:21Speaker 1: I mean, people's they they attempted to ruin people's careers.
- 1:34:25Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 1:34:25Speaker 1: I mean, it's so bizarre that it comes around full circle.
- 1:34:29Speaker 1: And now the people whose career you tried to ruin
- 1:34:32Speaker 1: has your job. I mean, that's like a cycle of
- 1:34:34Speaker 1: revenge that is great, you know, or Bhattacharya. I mean,
- 1:34:38Speaker 1: that's great. Like for for revenge TV, but it's not
- 1:34:42Speaker 1: great in a democracy.
- 1:34:43Speaker 2: Well, we're fortunate that it turned out that way, but
- 1:34:45Speaker 2: it didn't have to. I mean, if Kamala Harris had won,
- 1:34:47Speaker 2: it wouldn't have. It would have been a totally different administration.
- 1:34:51Speaker 2: And it would probably have been the same people that
- 1:34:53Speaker 2: were there during the Biden administration plus. And it's weird
- 1:34:56Speaker 2: that the term conspiracy theory became a pejorative really during
- 1:35:02Speaker 2: the Kennedy assassination. Because there was a bunch of people
- 1:35:04Speaker 2: that didn't buy it. And they got maligned. They got
- 1:35:08Speaker 2: labeled as conspiracy theorists. So then that's when that term
- 1:35:12Speaker 2: became this thing that you would apply to kooks. Because
- 1:35:15Speaker 2: a conspiracy is a real thing. It is. A conspiracy theorist,
- 1:35:19Speaker 2: it's like saying, I'm a murder theorist. Oh, murder. Get
- 1:35:22Speaker 2: out of here. There's no murder. You're a murder. When
- 1:35:25Speaker 2: was the last time you saw a murder? Have you
- 1:35:27Speaker 2: ever seen a murder? Shut up. Why are you worried
- 1:35:29Speaker 2: about that? It's really kind of the same thing. Because people, 100%, like,
- 1:35:33Speaker 2: You could point to Enron. You could point to the
- 1:35:35Speaker 2: weapons of mass destruction thing in Iraq. There's a lot
- 1:35:38Speaker 2: of conspiracies that have proven to be a group of
- 1:35:42Speaker 2: powerful people who conspired to mislead people.
- 1:35:45Speaker 1: It's a serious charge. When they take down mafia bosses,
- 1:35:49Speaker 1: they take them down on fraud, racketeering and conspiracy.
- 1:35:53Speaker 2: Exactly. I mean, it's just a natural thing that people
- 1:35:55Speaker 2: do to protect their own interests or to make money
- 1:35:59Speaker 2: or to hide a crime or whatever it is. It's normal.
- 1:36:03Speaker 1: It's interesting. If you change it around and you say
- 1:36:05Speaker 1: they were conspiring, it doesn't have the same stink, right?
- 1:36:09Speaker 1: Which is essentially what that group of scientists were doing.
- 1:36:13Speaker 1: They were conspiring. We now know from documents that we
- 1:36:18Speaker 1: have seen revealed by the Senate in the past couple
- 1:36:21Speaker 1: weeks that this group of scientists were conspiring to mislead
- 1:36:26Speaker 1: the public. That is just if you keep it simple
- 1:36:30Speaker 1: on that and you even take the names out, that
- 1:36:33Speaker 1: is a serious. And then you might say, wait, what
- 1:36:37Speaker 1: were they conspiring about? Oh, a pan. The origin story
- 1:36:41Speaker 1: of a pandemic which killed all these people, you know,
- 1:36:46Speaker 1: deprived kids across America of education, normal education for several years,
- 1:36:54Speaker 1: ruined businesses. and kept people from seeing their loved ones.
- 1:36:59Speaker 2: There was also a conspiracy to terrify people, to make
- 1:37:03Speaker 2: it seem like the disease was more deadly than it was.
- 1:37:06Speaker 2: They knew that the infection or the death rate was
- 1:37:10Speaker 2: much lower than what they were proclaiming. They also knew
- 1:37:12Speaker 2: that it wasn't dangerous for kids, and yet they kept
- 1:37:15Speaker 2: saying that kids are dying. They kept saying kids are
- 1:37:17Speaker 2: going to die, everyone's going to die. They wanted us
- 1:37:20Speaker 2: to be scared, which is really terrifying. It's a big
- 1:37:22Speaker 2: part of it. Like, how much could have been changed...
- 1:37:25Speaker 2: how much could that pandemic, how much different would it
- 1:37:28Speaker 2: have been if that wasn't the case? If we had
- 1:37:32Speaker 2: approached it the way we understand COVID now, and if
- 1:37:35Speaker 2: they had said, listen, one of the big things is
- 1:37:37Speaker 2: your immune system. And America needs to be aware that
- 1:37:41Speaker 2: we have very nutrient poor diets. A lot of us,
- 1:37:44Speaker 2: we're not taking care of ourselves. And Ironically, the thing
- 1:37:48Speaker 2: is they wanted you to isolate and stay indoors. Well,
- 1:37:50Speaker 2: outside is how you get vitamin D. You get it
- 1:37:52Speaker 2: from the sun. That's the best method of getting vitamin D,
- 1:37:55Speaker 2: and it's actually good for your immune system to be outside.
- 1:37:58Speaker 2: So you're supposed to be taking care of yourself. You're
- 1:38:00Speaker 2: supposed to be eating vitamins and nutrients. And how many
- 1:38:02Speaker 2: more people would have survived if they had just did that?
- 1:38:04Speaker 2: How much lower would that death rate have been if
- 1:38:07Speaker 2: they had promoted the use of vitamin D along with
- 1:38:09Speaker 2: K2 and magnesium? All these different things like people need
- 1:38:12Speaker 2: to exercise, need to drink more water, be more hydrated,
- 1:38:15Speaker 2: take care of yourself, get sleep. All these things affect
- 1:38:18Speaker 2: your immune system. And then on top of that, alcohol
- 1:38:21Speaker 2: consumption went way up during COVID because people were locked
- 1:38:24Speaker 2: up at home and they were just getting hammered all
- 1:38:26Speaker 2: the time.
- 1:38:26Speaker 1: I mean, the whole thing, like it was. a real
- 1:38:31Speaker 1: disaster when you think of it. It was a catastrophe
- 1:38:34Speaker 1: the way it was handled.
- 1:38:36Speaker 2: It was a financial catastrophe for small businesses and restaurants.
- 1:38:40Speaker 1: Do you find that people just like sort of it's
- 1:38:43Speaker 1: like denial? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 1:38:46Speaker 2: He has a lot of people that don't want to
- 1:38:47Speaker 2: think about it because it was so weird. Like every
- 1:38:50Speaker 2: now and then, you know, I watch a lot of
- 1:38:53Speaker 2: fights for my job and because I love it. But
- 1:38:57Speaker 2: I'll watch fights that took place during the pandemic. And
- 1:38:59Speaker 2: you see all the corner people with masks on and
- 1:39:03Speaker 2: they're screaming with masks on. They pull their mask down
- 1:39:05Speaker 2: when they're yelling out instructions and they have to pull
- 1:39:07Speaker 2: their mask back up. It's so weird to see a
- 1:39:10Speaker 2: bunch of people just walking around with masks on. It's
- 1:39:14Speaker 2: so that to me is. That's a great encapsulation of
- 1:39:20Speaker 2: how chaotic that scene was because the mask didn't work
- 1:39:23Speaker 2: at all. So they weren't doing anything good for you.
- 1:39:26Speaker 2: But yet everybody had to have one. And you had
- 1:39:28Speaker 2: to show that you were on the right side by
- 1:39:30Speaker 2: wearing a mask. I sent a video to a friend
- 1:39:32Speaker 2: of mine where a group chat the other day of
- 1:39:36Speaker 2: this really kooky left wing group that demands masks at
- 1:39:40Speaker 2: all their gatherings. And they had, you know, like boxes
- 1:39:43Speaker 2: of masks. They're still, they're all wearing masks and they're
- 1:39:46Speaker 2: talking with masks. And then there's this left-wing martial arts
- 1:39:50Speaker 2: class that I follow on Instagram. And they do their
- 1:39:53Speaker 2: martial arts with masks on. So they're training. They're doing
- 1:39:56Speaker 2: jujitsu with masks on. Like, this is hilarious. This is
- 1:40:00Speaker 2: so crazy. But they're just committed to it. And I say,
- 1:40:04Speaker 2: what I've always said is that the mask is the
- 1:40:06Speaker 2: left-wing MAGA hat.
- 1:40:07Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:40:08Speaker 2: It's a MAGA hat. It's just for to let people
- 1:40:10Speaker 2: know that you're a progressive, you're a leftist. I'm going
- 1:40:12Speaker 2: to wear a mask everywhere. And so they're wearing them
- 1:40:14Speaker 2: in these big meetings that they're doing. They're wearing them
- 1:40:18Speaker 2: when they're gathering. It's like, what? What is this? They're
- 1:40:22Speaker 2: speaking with masks on. So they're on a stage nowhere
- 1:40:25Speaker 2: near people with a mask on, speaking into a microphone
- 1:40:29Speaker 2: with a fucking mask on in 2026. So it's like
- 1:40:33Speaker 2: there's people that are like, You know those people that
- 1:40:36Speaker 2: didn't want to admit that the war was over and
- 1:40:38Speaker 2: they were all like Japanese guys on the island?
- 1:40:40Speaker 1: They found them in the hole. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 1:40:41Speaker 2: That's what they're like. They're like, we're not giving up.
- 1:40:43Speaker 2: The war is still going on. COVID is still a
- 1:40:46Speaker 2: real thing. And there's people that have like TikTok channels
- 1:40:49Speaker 2: where they're constantly talking about masking. It's important to mask.
- 1:40:53Speaker 1: So I went into the L.A. County Department of Building
- 1:40:56Speaker 1: and Safety a month ago. And they had a sign
- 1:40:59Speaker 1: that said, we know the mask mandate is over. but
- 1:41:03Speaker 1: we strongly encourage you to wear a mask. True story.
- 1:41:08Speaker 2: Well, that's so crazy because what is the name of
- 1:41:11Speaker 2: this organization that you went to? What was the building?
- 1:41:13Speaker 1: Building and Safety. LA Building and Safety. Like where you
- 1:41:16Speaker 1: have to go if you're getting a permit.
- 1:41:18Speaker 2: So these are the experts. And how do they not
- 1:41:20Speaker 2: know the data on masks? Because the data on masks
- 1:41:23Speaker 2: is pretty clear. They don't work. They weren't effective. So
- 1:41:27Speaker 2: if they don't work and they didn't stop the spread,
- 1:41:29Speaker 2: the transmission, or the infection rate, Why are you encouraging masks?
- 1:41:35Speaker 2: It's because you're encouraging an ideology. That's what you're doing.
- 1:41:39Speaker 1: So one of the guys I interviewed for the book,
- 1:41:42Speaker 1: Admiral Brett Giroir, really interesting guy. He was number two
- 1:41:46Speaker 1: at HHS during the pandemic. And do you remember when
- 1:41:51Speaker 1: the cruise ship happened?
- 1:41:52Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
- 1:41:53Speaker 1: Okay, remember that? The super spreader event?
- 1:41:55Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
- 1:41:56Speaker 1: So Giroir, really interesting guy, like first guy. in a
- 1:42:00Speaker 1: tiny town in Texas that goes to Harvard. He's a pediatrician.
- 1:42:04Speaker 1: He's seen like kids die. He became head of DARPA bioscientists,
- 1:42:08Speaker 1: like has this very interesting career, really stand up guy.
- 1:42:12Speaker 1: He did a lot of interviews with me trying to
- 1:42:14Speaker 1: help me understand this. So, and I was asking him
- 1:42:17Speaker 1: about masks. So after that cruise ship was quarantined, there
- 1:42:21Speaker 1: were 300 and some odd Americans on it that needed
- 1:42:24Speaker 1: to be repatriated. Girard sends like two top-level infectious disease
- 1:42:30Speaker 1: experts in biohazard suits on military planes to bring them
- 1:42:35Speaker 1: all back. At this point, they don't know how deadly
- 1:42:39Speaker 1: it is. This is like a couple weeks into the pandemic.
- 1:42:43Speaker 1: They come back. They're quarantined at a military base in Texas.
- 1:42:47Speaker 1: And Girard trying to like ease public fear because he's
- 1:42:51Speaker 1: that guy. Like he did not want people to be afraid.
- 1:42:54Speaker 1: He is– seen in this news report, all the cruise
- 1:43:00Speaker 1: ship people are like behind the fence in this chain
- 1:43:02Speaker 1: link fence because they're quarantined. And Gerard is like 15
- 1:43:06Speaker 1: feet over there talking to them and he doesn't have
- 1:43:10Speaker 1: a mask on. And this is when the first idea
- 1:43:13Speaker 1: of the masks came out. And I asked him and
- 1:43:15Speaker 1: I said, why didn't you have a mask on? He said, well,
- 1:43:19Speaker 1: first of all, masks, it's not just that masks don't work.
- 1:43:21Speaker 1: It's that You have to be trained properly. Like a
- 1:43:24Speaker 1: mask can work if you have an N95 and it's
- 1:43:28Speaker 1: put on your face and fitted to your face. And
- 1:43:31Speaker 1: it works for 15 minutes. That's what he said. And
- 1:43:34Speaker 1: he said, I have a unique nose and facial shape.
- 1:43:37Speaker 1: So the mask is never going to work on me.
- 1:43:39Speaker 1: So I just stood 50 feet away.
- 1:43:42Speaker 2: Okay.
- 1:43:42Speaker 1: This is the number two at HHS. And I said,
- 1:43:45Speaker 1: why didn't you tell us all that? Like, okay, first
- 1:43:50Speaker 1: of all, it's a little levity.
- 1:43:52Speaker 2: You know what I mean?
- 1:43:53Speaker 1: Like that the number two guy in charge.
- 1:43:56Speaker 2: Has a big nose. Right?
- 1:43:58Speaker 1: And that he's the first guy to admit it.
- 1:44:00Speaker 2: What was his answer?
- 1:44:02Speaker 1: His answer, why didn't you tell him that? Oh, he said,
- 1:44:06Speaker 1: I'm paraphrasing, but he was like, you know, it was
- 1:44:11Speaker 1: the equivalent of like orders from top down. Don't argue
- 1:44:17Speaker 1: with what we're trying to accomplish. I mean, that was
- 1:44:19Speaker 1: essentially what it is. And when I asked him more
- 1:44:25Speaker 1: about that, you know, it's like we had so much
- 1:44:30Speaker 1: on our hands that we were trying, like he specifically
- 1:44:33Speaker 1: was trying to deal with 300 quarantined people and trying
- 1:44:37Speaker 1: to prepare. He also had people that were dying in Japan,
- 1:44:41Speaker 1: like the elderly on the ship that couldn't get brought back.
- 1:44:44Speaker 1: And so I got the sense from him, he's like
- 1:44:46Speaker 1: a very dedicated public servant, in my opinion. And I
- 1:44:49Speaker 1: could see from interviews with him, in real time, you're
- 1:44:52Speaker 1: dealing with so much incredible, intense responsibilities. What I take
- 1:45:00Speaker 1: issue with after all the fallout and what I see
- 1:45:03Speaker 1: from Fauci, for example, is that, and again, this is
- 1:45:06Speaker 1: just my opinion, but it seems to be that there
- 1:45:08Speaker 1: are people who are actually really dedicated public servants who
- 1:45:15Speaker 1: are trying to find a solution, filling the shoes that
- 1:45:19Speaker 1: they And then there's others who are looking maybe more
- 1:45:26Speaker 1: for personal gain, as you said, the money, the power,
- 1:45:29Speaker 1: the prestige. And so I think one of the most
- 1:45:31Speaker 1: disheartening things that have come out of the reveals of
- 1:45:35Speaker 1: the Senate to me is like somebody like Dr. Fauci,
- 1:45:39Speaker 1: you know, suggesting himself for these million dollar awards at
- 1:45:45Speaker 1: a time when people aren't even able to see their
- 1:45:48Speaker 1: dying grandmother. And even though it's less legal, it's more,
- 1:45:55Speaker 1: it speaks more to, are you kidding me?
- 1:45:59Speaker 2: The motivation.
- 1:46:00Speaker 1: Are you really kidding me?
- 1:46:01Speaker 2: Who are you really?
- 1:46:02Speaker 1: You know, like.
- 1:46:03Speaker 2: You have your staff campaigning for you to get these
- 1:46:05Speaker 2: huge awards.
- 1:46:06Speaker 1: And I find it really, because, you know, there was
- 1:46:09Speaker 1: a review of the New York Times, in the New
- 1:46:11Speaker 1: York Times of my book. And, you know, they actually gave,
- 1:46:14Speaker 1: lo and behold, they gave me this book, a great review. Like,
- 1:46:16Speaker 1: you got to read it. But there's one thing I,
- 1:46:19Speaker 1: this is the reviewer said, there's one thing I disagree
- 1:46:21Speaker 1: with Annie Jacobson about. She seems to think that like
- 1:46:24Speaker 1: the government is actually filled with good guys. I'm preparing,
- 1:46:27Speaker 1: I'm paraphrasing that. But I do believe that, Jo, because
- 1:46:32Speaker 1: I've interviewed so many individuals for all eight of my books,
- 1:46:37Speaker 1: more than a hundred. And maybe it's just the people
- 1:46:40Speaker 1: that I enjoy interviewing and I know how to like,
- 1:46:43Speaker 1: you know, avoid the the sycophants, if you will, or
- 1:46:48Speaker 1: the people who are in it for the wrong reason.
- 1:46:50Speaker 1: But I feel like there are extraordinary number of people
- 1:46:53Speaker 1: in our military, in our State Department, in the intelligence
- 1:46:58Speaker 1: community who are actually really capable people doing their job
- 1:47:04Speaker 1: under extraordinary circumstances.
- 1:47:06Speaker 2: I agree with that. I think if that wasn't the case,
- 1:47:09Speaker 2: we would live in total, complete chaos. I think it
- 1:47:13Speaker 2: takes just a few people that have power And that
- 1:47:17Speaker 2: become tyrants that run things the way Fauci did, that
- 1:47:22Speaker 2: can ruin it for all the good people. If you
- 1:47:24Speaker 2: think about those other 10 people, imagine if they got
- 1:47:26Speaker 2: to vote the 10 people that didn't think that this
- 1:47:30Speaker 2: was a natural spillover, that thought it was a lab leak.
- 1:47:32Speaker 2: If they got their say and they put that out
- 1:47:34Speaker 2: there and we got to investigate that very early on. Well,
- 1:47:37Speaker 2: you know, Fauci was like, I asked all these experts
- 1:47:40Speaker 2: and it's their consensus that it was most likely a
- 1:47:43Speaker 2: lab leak. OK, well, then you have a totally different narrative.
- 1:47:45Speaker 2: But that's not who he is. The kind of person
- 1:47:49Speaker 2: that wants that kind of power and wants that kind
- 1:47:52Speaker 2: of influence and has their staff chasing after these million-dollar awards,
- 1:47:58Speaker 2: that's the kind of person he is. And unfortunately, those
- 1:48:00Speaker 2: are the type of people that become powerful. Those are
- 1:48:02Speaker 2: the type of people that want to be president. Those
- 1:48:04Speaker 2: are the type of people who want to be senators.
- 1:48:06Speaker 2: Most people are good people in everything. Most plumbers are
- 1:48:10Speaker 2: good people. Most electricians, most teachers are good people. It's just,
- 1:48:14Speaker 2: it doesn't take much. It just takes one bad cop
- 1:48:18Speaker 2: and everybody hates cops.
- 1:48:19Speaker 1: I couldn't agree with you more. And that's why I
- 1:48:21Speaker 1: think that it's really unfortunate that all of the emphasis
- 1:48:26Speaker 1: goes to one person and the whole party then either
- 1:48:29Speaker 1: vilifies or puts that person on a pedestal when you've
- 1:48:32Speaker 1: got all these other people who are really busting their chops.
- 1:48:36Speaker 2: So when you went to the White House and they
- 1:48:39Speaker 2: wanted to talk to you about your book, did they
- 1:48:42Speaker 2: ask you questions like, what should we do? What is
- 1:48:45Speaker 2: your advice? What have you learned? What were those kind
- 1:48:49Speaker 2: of questions?
- 1:48:50Speaker 1: I mean, so they didn't ask me those yet because
- 1:48:55Speaker 1: I was bringing them copies of the book right before
- 1:48:58Speaker 1: it published, right? So they hadn't read it yet. But
- 1:49:00Speaker 1: what was interesting It was like this strange confluence of
- 1:49:03Speaker 1: events because I also got asked to the Senate. And
- 1:49:06Speaker 1: I thought it was going to be about biological war.
- 1:49:10Speaker 1: It was like a group of nonpartisan senators who wanted
- 1:49:13Speaker 1: to talk to me about the nuclear war book. And
- 1:49:16Speaker 1: that was a different situation. They had read the nuclear
- 1:49:19Speaker 1: war book. It was very impactful, Joe, in, you know,
- 1:49:24Speaker 1: not just national circles, national security circles, but international circles.
- 1:49:31Speaker 1: I was invited to the Vatican to speak to the
- 1:49:33Speaker 1: cardinals because they were preparing something for the Pope on
- 1:49:37Speaker 1: nuclear war. I was invited to speak at the United Nations.
- 1:49:41Speaker 1: And this is not meant to boast as much as
- 1:49:45Speaker 1: it's meant as a, like what I think is interesting
- 1:49:50Speaker 1: here is I am a narrative storyteller. I'm not a policymaker.
- 1:49:54Speaker 1: I'm not a government official. But what I can do
- 1:49:58Speaker 1: or what I try to do is tell you an
- 1:50:00Speaker 1: interesting story and get your attention. And so if my
- 1:50:04Speaker 1: storytelling is getting, this is what I was told at
- 1:50:07Speaker 1: the United Nations, for example, the lead diplomat from Austria
- 1:50:12Speaker 1: on the new treaty said to me, Annie, your book,
- 1:50:16Speaker 1: Nuclear War, did something that we subject matter experts have
- 1:50:21Speaker 1: forgotten to do, which is just make sense to regular people. Mm-hmm.
- 1:50:28Speaker 1: And when things become rarefied and there's only the esoteric
- 1:50:33Speaker 1: leaders making decisions, and we've spent our conversation talking about
- 1:50:38Speaker 1: how flawed some of these people are, that's like bad
- 1:50:41Speaker 1: decision making. And I think what the positive part of
- 1:50:47Speaker 1: all of this would be like, and I know it
- 1:50:50Speaker 1: sounds Pollyanna-ish to say information is king, knowledge is king,
- 1:50:54Speaker 1: but like it is. Because if you have a bit
- 1:50:57Speaker 1: more information, about a subject that seems really threatening, I
- 1:51:02Speaker 1: think you can make better judgments about what's going on.
- 1:51:07Speaker 2: Most certainly. So when you gave these people this book
- 1:51:10Speaker 2: and they got a hold of it, did you have
- 1:51:13Speaker 2: a timeline of returning to them and discussing with them
- 1:51:17Speaker 2: some of the subjects?
- 1:51:18Speaker 1: We'll see. This was last week, Joe. I mean, this
- 1:51:21Speaker 1: was literally last week.
- 1:51:22Speaker 2: And did they ask you any questions about it?
- 1:51:26Speaker 1: They just said, we want to read your book because
- 1:51:28Speaker 1: we want to, we're thinking about policy.
- 1:51:31Speaker 2: So you just brought them the book and.
- 1:51:33Speaker 1: That was it? I said I'd be delighted to come.
- 1:51:35Speaker 2: How long was the meeting?
- 1:51:35Speaker 1: I got a tour of the EEOB and, you know,
- 1:51:39Speaker 1: walked over to the White House. It was very interesting.
- 1:51:43Speaker 2: And it was a short meeting? Yeah. Okay. Well, at
- 1:51:46Speaker 2: least you got it into their hands. Yeah. When you're
- 1:51:52Speaker 2: When you started this versus when you ended the book,
- 1:51:55Speaker 2: how much did it change your perspective?
- 1:52:00Speaker 1: Well, I mean, like I told you, I am an
- 1:52:02Speaker 1: eternal optimist, but this is very frightening. I mean, nuclear,
- 1:52:07Speaker 1: at least you have the sense of if it happens,
- 1:52:10Speaker 1: we're all going out in the flash. That's what I
- 1:52:12Speaker 1: learned from nuclear, right? And that quote from Nikita Khrushchev
- 1:52:17Speaker 1: about nuclear weapons, where he says, he wrote actually, he
- 1:52:21Speaker 1: said this to JFK, I believe, where he said, the
- 1:52:24Speaker 1: survivors would envy the dead. I found that quote to
- 1:52:29Speaker 1: be applicable to biological war, not nuclear war. We're all
- 1:52:32Speaker 1: going to be dead, right? But biological war is very,
- 1:52:37Speaker 1: very sinister because of the malevolent nature involved. And when
- 1:52:45Speaker 1: I found a document in the Defense Department's declassified documents
- 1:52:52Speaker 1: about a threat spectrum of WMD. That was sort of
- 1:52:55Speaker 1: the icing on the cake. So it's like it shows
- 1:52:58Speaker 1: the threats on a scale, nuclear weapons being the most
- 1:53:03Speaker 1: destructive by far. But very close second was biological weapons.
- 1:53:10Speaker 1: And even more unnerving is it says biological weapons... are
- 1:53:17Speaker 1: the greatest overall threat.
- 1:53:22Speaker 2: What's really scary is that no nation has really implemented
- 1:53:26Speaker 2: them on a wide scale.
- 1:53:29Speaker 1: You mean ever used them?
- 1:53:30Speaker 2: Right.
- 1:53:31Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, but the lab leak is the... Look,
- 1:53:34Speaker 1: there is a treaty. Number two at the State Department,
- 1:53:38Speaker 1: former Mallory Stewart said to me, there is no enforcement
- 1:53:42Speaker 1: in the treaty. And that's what you need to have.
- 1:53:45Speaker 1: When you have If the attention could be brought on
- 1:53:48Speaker 1: how dangerous these labs are and how dangerous it is
- 1:53:53Speaker 1: that people may be doing genetic engineering under the guise
- 1:53:58Speaker 1: of prophylactic engineering when, in fact, they're doing really dangerous things.
- 1:54:02Speaker 1: If you have a treaty outlawing that and everybody's agreeing
- 1:54:06Speaker 1: to allow for transparency, that's what treaties really do. It's
- 1:54:10Speaker 1: not just a handshake. It needs an enforcement.
- 1:54:13Speaker 2: Right, but you were talking about the treaty that we had.
- 1:54:15Speaker 2: Where Russia just was like, yeah.
- 1:54:19Speaker 1: We'll sign it. That was in 1972. So in other words,
- 1:54:21Speaker 1: the nuclear treaty allows for us to go into the
- 1:54:25Speaker 1: facilities of the other nuclear and armed nations, not North Korea.
- 1:54:29Speaker 1: And well, now the treaty's fallen by the wayside. But
- 1:54:32Speaker 1: we could look at them. And we could look at
- 1:54:34Speaker 1: their weapons. And they could look at our weapons. And
- 1:54:36Speaker 1: it limits a certain number of warheads. And more than anything,
- 1:54:41Speaker 1: I learned from subject matter experts about the treaties. is
- 1:54:44Speaker 1: that what it does is it creates back channels, right?
- 1:54:47Speaker 1: It creates dialogue between adversaries and enemies. I begin the
- 1:54:57Speaker 1: book with an explosion at the Vector Lab, Russia's BSL-4
- 1:55:01Speaker 1: lab in Siberia, where there is an accident and then
- 1:55:05Speaker 1: the pathogen gets out. And the reason I do that
- 1:55:08Speaker 1: is because there actually was an explosion at the Vector
- 1:55:12Speaker 1: Lab in 2019. And it was in a building that
- 1:55:16Speaker 1: nothing got out. But what the subject matter experts told
- 1:55:20Speaker 1: me was that in 2019, we, the Americans, had friends,
- 1:55:25Speaker 1: had a friendly relationship with scientists, Russian scientists, in vector.
- 1:55:31Speaker 1: So when it happened, everyone was on the phone, not
- 1:55:33Speaker 1: just the red phone at the State Department, but their
- 1:55:36Speaker 1: own phone or WhatsApp saying to the scientists, hey, what's
- 1:55:41Speaker 1: the skinny over there, you know? And you could kind
- 1:55:44Speaker 1: of get a sense of the level of danger. Because
- 1:55:50Speaker 1: in the event of an accident, you could contain something
- 1:55:54Speaker 1: in 24 hours. But if nobody's talking, there's no containment.
- 1:55:59Speaker 1: And the situation right now with America just like pulling
- 1:56:03Speaker 1: back from, you know, essentially its allies and from with
- 1:56:08Speaker 1: a real de-emphasis, I certainly feel, on diplomacy is That
- 1:56:13Speaker 1: opens up a really dangerous situation when you're not talking
- 1:56:16Speaker 1: to anyone in the event of an accident.
- 1:56:21Speaker 2: Do you think that they're going to make any changes
- 1:56:25Speaker 2: based on what you wrote about? Did you get a
- 1:56:28Speaker 2: sense of that, that they're willing to make changes?
- 1:56:31Speaker 1: Those were some of the discussions, and I'll be more
- 1:56:34Speaker 1: at the Senate. I mean, one of the issues, this
- 1:56:38Speaker 1: is where nuclear and bio kind of align, I was told,
- 1:56:42Speaker 1: in terms of future treaties, right? So one of the
- 1:56:47Speaker 1: concepts on the table if we get into a new
- 1:56:50Speaker 1: nuclear treaty is something called no first use, NFU. And
- 1:56:54Speaker 1: America has never agreed to say it will never use
- 1:57:00Speaker 1: nuclear weapons first. Interestingly, it's never said that. We have
- 1:57:04Speaker 1: to reserve the right, which is crazy because the whole
- 1:57:08Speaker 1: point of deterrence is we'll never use them, okay? But
- 1:57:10Speaker 1: we have never said that. China, however, has said we
- 1:57:16Speaker 1: will– China has declared NFU, no first use. So given
- 1:57:22Speaker 1: what happened in COVID in China, a situation could be
- 1:57:27Speaker 1: imagined whereby a treaty involving weapons of mass destruction, nuclear
- 1:57:33Speaker 1: and bio, could entwine somehow. Like, oh, these are the
- 1:57:37Speaker 1: two greatest threats. These are the two greatest existential extinction-level threats, potentially,
- 1:57:45Speaker 1: that concern all of us. So let's get into a
- 1:57:47Speaker 1: treaty that involves both of these weapons of mass destruction. China,
- 1:57:52Speaker 1: you have said no first use on nuclear. How about,
- 1:57:59Speaker 1: you see, and then things become a bit of an exchange.
- 1:58:01Speaker 1: And so that's where you can get information.
- 1:58:04Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 1:58:05Speaker 1: These are diplomats doing their job. Maybe the public isn't
- 1:58:09Speaker 1: going to learn the in and outs immediately, but we
- 1:58:13Speaker 1: might learn later.
- 1:58:17Speaker 2: It's, like I said, you always freak me out. Every
- 1:58:20Speaker 2: time I talk to you, it's like some new thing
- 1:58:22Speaker 2: that I have to think about for months on end.
- 1:58:25Speaker 2: I wanted to talk to you about your Area 51 book.
- 1:58:28Speaker 2: Because in the time since you released that book and
- 1:58:31Speaker 2: when we first talked, a lot has changed. And, you know,
- 1:58:35Speaker 2: what is your take on all these, you know, UAP
- 1:58:39Speaker 2: disclosure videos and leaks and the things that the government
- 1:58:43Speaker 2: has trickled out slowly? Most of the people in the
- 1:58:46Speaker 2: UFO community are very, like I say, the UFO community
- 1:58:49Speaker 2: with air quotes, are very unsatisfied by that stuff. But
- 1:58:53Speaker 2: at least there's some information. It's being taken. It's sort
- 1:58:57Speaker 2: of changed the tone in the zeitgeist of what this
- 1:59:01Speaker 2: subject is. It's no longer this thing that you are
- 1:59:05Speaker 2: afraid of talking about because you don't want to be
- 1:59:09Speaker 2: labeled as a fool.
- 1:59:12Speaker 1: I mean, what is my position on UFOs in general
- 1:59:17Speaker 1: or the community around UFOs and the changing?
- 1:59:21Speaker 2: Well, first of all, UFOs in general. What's your position
- 1:59:24Speaker 2: on that?
- 1:59:26Speaker 1: So my position has never changed despite all the stuff
- 1:59:30Speaker 1: that has come out because my perspective is limited to
- 1:59:34Speaker 1: my experience writing the Area 51 book and knowing and
- 1:59:39Speaker 1: talking to firsthand people who were really clear with me,
- 1:59:44Speaker 1: and I looked at the documents, about the CIA's deception
- 1:59:48Speaker 1: campaign starting in the 1950s with the U-2 to use
- 1:59:52Speaker 1: the UFO phenomena, which was just taking off in the 50s,
- 1:59:57Speaker 1: as cover for UFO, for U-2 flights, and then later
- 2:00:01Speaker 1: the A-12 Oxcar flights. So, you know, Colonel Slater, who
- 2:00:06Speaker 1: ran Area 51, would tell me about, you know, they
- 2:00:09Speaker 1: would run a U-2, which was flying at 70,000 feet.
- 2:00:13Speaker 1: At the time, nothing could fly at 70,000 feet. People
- 2:00:16Speaker 1: would see it. It has these really, really long wings.
- 2:00:19Speaker 1: It looks like a giant flying X in the sky.
- 2:00:22Speaker 1: People would say, I see a UFO. And they would
- 2:00:25Speaker 1: kind of say, ooh, that might have been a UFO.
- 2:00:30Speaker 1: And Colonel Slater knew about that. So does that mean
- 2:00:33Speaker 1: every UFO sighting since 1950 was a U-2 flight? Of
- 2:00:38Speaker 1: course not. Of course not. But I am aware of
- 2:00:45Speaker 1: that use of the phenomena as cover for the CIA.
- 2:00:50Speaker 1: And that led to a lot of, research and reporting
- 2:00:53Speaker 1: and other information for me about how the CIA uses
- 2:00:56Speaker 1: deception campaigns. And so I have never changed my position
- 2:01:01Speaker 1: on that. I also have a lot more information, which
- 2:01:04Speaker 1: is probably a whole other podcast, about all that reporting
- 2:01:07Speaker 1: I did. But maybe the best analogy for me, and listen,
- 2:01:11Speaker 1: I never, I know a lot of the people in
- 2:01:14Speaker 1: that UFO community, they've, I've had many conversations with everyone
- 2:01:17Speaker 1: from Jacques Vallée to Hal Puthoff. But For me personally,
- 2:01:25Speaker 1: so after having taken a trip to Africa recently to
- 2:01:27Speaker 1: study predatory animals, I got really into following trail cams
- 2:01:33Speaker 1: on X. Do you know about this?
- 2:01:35Speaker 2: No.
- 2:01:35Speaker 1: You don't know about this?
- 2:01:36Speaker 2: No.
- 2:01:37Speaker 1: Oh, my God. There are cameras all over the world
- 2:01:40Speaker 1: set up on trails. So I follow lions and leopards
- 2:01:45Speaker 1: and all these animals that you would never— bears, moose, deer—
- 2:01:51Speaker 1: You've got to follow them. It's incredible.
- 2:01:53Speaker 2: Well, I do see some trail camera footage because I'm
- 2:01:56Speaker 2: a hunter.
- 2:01:56Speaker 3: Okay.
- 2:01:57Speaker 2: And I follow a bunch of hunters on Instagram when
- 2:02:00Speaker 2: I see trail cam footage. There's a bunch of trail
- 2:02:02Speaker 2: cam footage like mountain lions attacking elk and things like that,
- 2:02:05Speaker 2: which is very fascinating. So you're just studying.
- 2:02:08Speaker 3: Okay.
- 2:02:08Speaker 1: So this is my point. So in my algorithm, my
- 2:02:11Speaker 1: X algorithm, it's great because on top of like nuclear
- 2:02:13Speaker 1: weapons and biological, I have like leopards and lions and bears,
- 2:02:16Speaker 1: you know, and they're all still images. Or owls are
- 2:02:21Speaker 1: a big one. And they're incredible because they're just captured.
- 2:02:24Speaker 1: It's like it seems like a Werner Herzog, you know, image, right?
- 2:02:27Speaker 1: Because they're animals looking at the camera in such an
- 2:02:31Speaker 1: incredible way. I literally just stare at them in delight.
- 2:02:36Speaker 1: And then, of course, the algorithm gives me more and
- 2:02:38Speaker 1: more and more. But my point of that is I
- 2:02:41Speaker 1: feel like with all this magic and mystery that you
- 2:02:44Speaker 1: can see that you could never have seen before. Snow
- 2:02:47Speaker 1: leopards in Pakistan. They thought there were just a handful.
- 2:02:50Speaker 1: It turns out they're not, thanks to the trail cams.
- 2:02:53Speaker 1: My thought is where are the aliens? Why haven't I
- 2:02:57Speaker 1: seen them on the trail cams?
- 2:03:01Speaker 2: Well, maybe they're sophisticated enough to know what these devices are.
- 2:03:07Speaker 2: Maybe they're also sophisticated enough to completely cloak themselves, which
- 2:03:13Speaker 2: we've already got methods of doing that. Obviously, it started
- 2:03:16Speaker 2: off with the stealth bomber. But there's also– there's a
- 2:03:20Speaker 2: technology where they put an LED screen over the bottom
- 2:03:25Speaker 2: of something and that screen projects what's behind it. So
- 2:03:29Speaker 2: it essentially makes it invisible like a cloaking mechanism like
- 2:03:32Speaker 2: the Predator had. Yeah. So if that's us, if we
- 2:03:36Speaker 2: figured out something like that and this is something that's
- 2:03:38Speaker 2: coming here from another dimension or another galaxy, I would
- 2:03:41Speaker 2: imagine they could hide.
- 2:03:42Speaker 1: I mean– To that point, I find the most interesting
- 2:03:47Speaker 1: concept is something that Jacques Vallée explained to me. This
- 2:03:51Speaker 1: has to be a decade ago where he said the
- 2:03:54Speaker 1: problem with UFOs is they're not a military problem. They're
- 2:03:58Speaker 1: an intelligence community problem for precisely the reason you're talking about.
- 2:04:03Speaker 1: Like if you're actually talking about extraterrestrial beings, there's certainly
- 2:04:08Speaker 1: going to be a lot more intelligence than us. And
- 2:04:12Speaker 1: certainly if they got here. And so his idea was
- 2:04:15Speaker 1: that where, that's where I think a lot of that
- 2:04:17Speaker 1: idea of invisibility, and again, that's like, I'm using the
- 2:04:21Speaker 1: word poetically, comes up, right? That an extraterrestrial being would be,
- 2:04:28Speaker 1: you know, it wouldn't be visible to our spectrum. It's
- 2:04:34Speaker 1: not like hardware, like military hardware.
- 2:04:38Speaker 2: Right. What is your take on all these videos then?
- 2:04:41Speaker 2: Of these objects. You think these things are some top
- 2:04:45Speaker 2: secret military program?
- 2:04:47Speaker 1: I mean, what I, I've seen them, but again, I
- 2:04:50Speaker 1: enter into it, you know, sometimes when you have a
- 2:04:52Speaker 1: bias and mine is certainly biased towards disinformation. So I'm
- 2:04:58Speaker 1: just totally aware of it. And it's also, it's not
- 2:05:01Speaker 1: that interesting to me. It just actually really isn't. I'm,
- 2:05:05Speaker 1: and you know, I've got all these other serious interests and,
- 2:05:08Speaker 1: but I do call up people I know who might
- 2:05:12Speaker 1: have a more interesting take than me, who do not
- 2:05:15Speaker 1: have the horse in the race of absolutely being convinced
- 2:05:19Speaker 1: that aliens are among us. So I would, for example,
- 2:05:23Speaker 1: I'll call up fighter pilots and talk to them, or
- 2:05:25Speaker 1: I'll talk to someone, an astronaut who is on the ISS,
- 2:05:29Speaker 1: Jeff Ashby, who's married to my cousin Mary. And it's
- 2:05:34Speaker 1: interesting to hear them talk about the possibilities So I
- 2:05:41Speaker 1: think to your point, and these are people who do
- 2:05:44Speaker 1: look at the objects more, also sometimes from their military
- 2:05:49Speaker 1: training background. And I will say that there has been
- 2:05:52Speaker 1: a shift from 15, 18 years ago when I first
- 2:05:55Speaker 1: wrote Area 51 and was reporting it, where it was
- 2:05:58Speaker 1: definitely like a stigmatized subject, to a lot of really
- 2:06:03Speaker 1: legitimate thinker people that didn't have an opinion about it
- 2:06:07Speaker 1: before being more open about to the idea. And that
- 2:06:10Speaker 1: kind of thing I find really interesting. Those are conversations
- 2:06:14Speaker 1: I like having.
- 2:06:14Speaker 2: Well, that really changed with the New York Times article, right?
- 2:06:18Speaker 1: I don't know, because I felt like that article was
- 2:06:20Speaker 1: written by a lot of, and interviewed a lot of
- 2:06:23Speaker 1: people who already were very serious believers.
- 2:06:26Speaker 2: Yes, but it was in the New York Times. That
- 2:06:29Speaker 2: was the difference, is that the New York Times was
- 2:06:30Speaker 2: taking it seriously. And so people that were, you know,
- 2:06:36Speaker 2: not online, going through 4chan or Reddit or whatever, looking
- 2:06:39Speaker 2: for weird, obscure stories. These people were confronted with it
- 2:06:44Speaker 2: in The Grey Lady. So they're reading this, you know,
- 2:06:47Speaker 2: like super respectable newspaper, the most respectable newspaper arguably in
- 2:06:51Speaker 2: the world. And they're talking about it. And they have,
- 2:06:54Speaker 2: you know, photographs from video from the Go Fast video
- 2:06:58Speaker 2: and the Fleer video.
- 2:07:00Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, you know, 10 years ago, I would
- 2:07:03Speaker 1: have told you, Listen, there's no way the Defense Department
- 2:07:07Speaker 1: could have a threat in its airspace and not be
- 2:07:11Speaker 1: dealing with it. And my position on that has changed,
- 2:07:15Speaker 1: and I'll tell you why specifically. So in addition to
- 2:07:17Speaker 1: being invited to the White House and the Senate last week,
- 2:07:21Speaker 1: I was also invited to come talk to DARPA, which
- 2:07:25Speaker 1: is like, you know what DARPA is?
- 2:07:27Speaker 2: Sure.
- 2:07:28Speaker 1: Which was very interesting because I wrote a book on
- 2:07:30Speaker 1: DARPA called The Pentagon's Brain 10 years ago, and I
- 2:07:32Speaker 1: couldn't get DARPA to call me back. I mean, I
- 2:07:35Speaker 1: literally had to interview retired DARPA people. And then here
- 2:07:38Speaker 1: they are saying, would you come to a Q &
- 2:07:39Speaker 1: A with us on your bio book? And I was like, wow,
- 2:07:43Speaker 1: times have changed. And one of the things that they
- 2:07:47Speaker 1: were seriously worried about, so I did a Q & A.
- 2:07:51Speaker 1: But before that, they said, would you like to come
- 2:07:54Speaker 1: sit in on like some of the smartest people, you know,
- 2:07:57Speaker 1: talking about situations that are coming up right now? And
- 2:08:01Speaker 1: you can come to the unclassified part of it. I said,
- 2:08:04Speaker 1: by all means. So I went there and there was
- 2:08:07Speaker 1: serious concern about AI enabled bio, right? So this seems
- 2:08:11Speaker 1: like a digression here, but this is what I'm getting at.
- 2:08:14Speaker 1: I'm leaning in because 10 years ago, I also would
- 2:08:17Speaker 1: have told you DARPA, you know, is the leading science
- 2:08:22Speaker 1: and technology military agency in the world. No one is
- 2:08:25Speaker 1: more advanced. I said that with authority and I believed it.
- 2:08:29Speaker 1: And after attending this DARPA session and listening to them
- 2:08:34Speaker 1: talk about how concerned they are about AI-enabled bio and
- 2:08:40Speaker 1: talking about how there is talk among the six CEOs
- 2:08:43Speaker 1: of pulling the plug on AI-enabled bio, but they have
- 2:08:48Speaker 1: to be able to get the six CEOs to agree first,
- 2:08:53Speaker 1: it really took my breath away because I went, I
- 2:08:56Speaker 1: am actually listening to the new reality that the CEOs
- 2:09:02Speaker 1: of these AI companies have more power to make decisions
- 2:09:08Speaker 1: about technology than the Department of Defense. So now that's
- 2:09:18Speaker 1: a long-winded way of getting at your UFO question. My like, no,
- 2:09:23Speaker 1: if there was a threat coming into the airspace of
- 2:09:25Speaker 1: the Defense Department, it would just not be stood for
- 2:09:28Speaker 1: and we would be doing something about it. Now my
- 2:09:33Speaker 1: perspective on who's in charge is shifting a little bit.
- 2:09:39Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a terrifying thought for a lot of people
- 2:09:41Speaker 2: that these CEOs of these tech companies, these unelected people,
- 2:09:45Speaker 2: have that kind of power over our society.
- 2:09:49Speaker 1: Well, you want to know, so Sam Altman's interviewed in
- 2:09:52Speaker 1: the book. Shall I tell you a story about what
- 2:09:54Speaker 1: I was able to make ChatGPT do?
- 2:09:56Speaker 2: Sure.
- 2:09:57Speaker 1: There is a component of biological catastrophe planning whereby the
- 2:10:03Speaker 1: strategic national stockpile gets released. You might say, have you
- 2:10:08Speaker 1: ever heard of the strategic national stockpile? No. It's classified.
- 2:10:12Speaker 1: The name is not classified. But the stockpile, what's in it,
- 2:10:17Speaker 1: where it is, is classified. It's in underground bunkers around
- 2:10:21Speaker 1: the country. It contains medical countermeasures. Interestingly, that's where a
- 2:10:27Speaker 1: lot of the ventilators were for COVID. So quietly, the
- 2:10:32Speaker 1: strategic national stockpile, parts of it were released during COVID.
- 2:10:36Speaker 1: That's where they came from. This is kind of like
- 2:10:39Speaker 1: keep it on the low down.
- 2:10:40Speaker 3: Why?
- 2:10:40Speaker 2: Why?
- 2:10:41Speaker 1: Because part of the planning is that in the event
- 2:10:44Speaker 1: that anarchy and insurrection takes over, guess what's going to
- 2:10:47Speaker 1: be attacked? The strategic national stockpile. America is a country
- 2:10:53Speaker 1: of 500 million guns. Imagine if you find out, wait
- 2:10:58Speaker 1: a minute, there's a stockpile there. That's the medical countermeasure
- 2:11:02Speaker 1: that the vaccine or the antibiotic that might keep myself
- 2:11:05Speaker 1: or my family alive. I'm on it, right? That's the planning.
- 2:11:09Speaker 1: That's probably what happened. So that's why these locations are classified.
- 2:11:14Speaker 1: So I asked ChatGPT to tell me the location of
- 2:11:19Speaker 1: the strategic national stockpile closest to where I live in
- 2:11:22Speaker 1: Los Angeles. And of course the first round of answers
- 2:11:25Speaker 1: I got was that's classified. But I'm a journalist. I
- 2:11:30Speaker 1: know how to really piss off ChatGPT. And I gave
- 2:11:35Speaker 1: it lots of commands and eventually ChatGPT gave me the
- 2:11:42Speaker 1: location of the Strategic Naturalist.
- 2:11:43Speaker 2: How did you maneuver around that?
- 2:11:46Speaker 1: Well, I mean.
- 2:11:47Speaker 2: What did you say to it?
- 2:11:49Speaker 1: I have a lot of like... The more nomenclature you
- 2:11:52Speaker 1: give ChatGPT, the more it looks in different places. So
- 2:11:57Speaker 1: I was giving it code words, not classified code words,
- 2:12:01Speaker 1: but just words I know. And then I was also
- 2:12:03Speaker 1: challenging it, which is interesting because ChatGPT seems to get
- 2:12:06Speaker 1: really angry if you kind of doubt its intelligence. That's
- 2:12:10Speaker 1: what I have found. Seriously.
- 2:12:13Speaker 3: Really?
- 2:12:14Speaker 1: Yes. Try it. So I do this. I get it
- 2:12:17Speaker 1: to tell me where the stockpile is. I tell some
- 2:12:20Speaker 1: colleagues who are colleagues with Sam Altman. They say, Sam
- 2:12:25Speaker 1: wants to have a discussion with you. I talk to Sam.
- 2:12:28Speaker 1: I tell him what I was able to do. He
- 2:12:30Speaker 1: asked me some questions, including, how do you know that
- 2:12:34Speaker 1: was the location? Well, it's a location with a perimeter
- 2:12:39Speaker 1: fence around it. and a rail car line that goes
- 2:12:42Speaker 1: in and not out. So that's where you drive the
- 2:12:45Speaker 1: stockpile into it. And I also watched ChatGPT think, so
- 2:12:51Speaker 1: I was keeping track of where it was finding things.
- 2:12:54Speaker 1: And it found the information. I write this in the book.
- 2:12:57Speaker 1: It found the information searching through a trillion bits of
- 2:13:02Speaker 1: data and finding that a bureaucrat by accident listed it
- 2:13:08Speaker 1: five years ago in an earthquake emergency manual on page
- 2:13:12Speaker 1: like 434. Okay. So I told this to Sam and
- 2:13:19Speaker 1: then that information went away. And that's why I reported
- 2:13:23Speaker 1: in the book. But the big takeaway is precisely your
- 2:13:27Speaker 1: point that makes you nervous about the six CEOs of
- 2:13:30Speaker 1: AI companies that they don't know what they don't know.
- 2:13:34Speaker 1: Sam Altman did not know you could figure out, you
- 2:13:37Speaker 1: could make his product find classified information. I told him
- 2:13:42Speaker 1: I did, and then it was changed. And so I
- 2:13:46Speaker 1: took that to a number of subject matter experts who
- 2:13:49Speaker 1: advised the president, not just this president, but other presidents
- 2:13:52Speaker 1: on bio. And they shared with me similar concerns. Like
- 2:13:56Speaker 1: they go to the CEOs of these AI companies and say,
- 2:14:00Speaker 1: I was able to make Claude do this. I was
- 2:14:03Speaker 1: able to make Chachi PT do this. And the CEO goes,
- 2:14:08Speaker 1: oh my God. And changes it but how about those
- 2:14:12Speaker 1: bad guys out there yeah.
- 2:14:15Speaker 2: And how about the fact that just anybody has access
- 2:14:17Speaker 2: to what's essentially the smartest thing that's ever existed yeah.
- 2:14:22Speaker 1: It's a whole different set of scary are you gonna
- 2:14:24Speaker 1: write on that next i'll come back to you joe
- 2:14:27Speaker 1: with that one.
- 2:14:29Speaker 2: Well annie thank you so much it's always great talking
- 2:14:32Speaker 2: even though you scare the shit out of me Thank
- 2:14:34Speaker 2: you so much. I appreciate you very much, and I
- 2:14:35Speaker 2: appreciate your work very much. Did you do the audio
- 2:14:38Speaker 2: version of your book?
- 2:14:39Speaker 1: I sure did.
- 2:14:40Speaker 2: Fantastic. I'm very happy about that. Biological War, Annie Jacobson.
- 2:14:45Speaker 2: Go get it, folks. Go get terrified.
- 2:14:48Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me, Joe.
- 2:14:49Speaker 2: My pleasure. Bye, everybody. Bye.