Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #0229_ Annie Jacobsen — The Government’s Classified Plans for Biological Warfare: Secret Programs, National Security & Hidden Threats

Transcript

#0229_ Annie Jacobsen — The Government’s Classified Plans for Biological Warfare: Secret Programs, National Security & Hidden Threats · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: I just love doing podcasts so much. It just gives
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: somebody like me an opportunity to have a conversation. I mean,
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: in the old days, you had to go on, like,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: a news program and talk for four minutes in between
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: a commercial break.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: They gave you four minutes?
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: That's generous. Yeah, yeah.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Podcasts have reach. Okay, good story, Sean Ryan story. I'm in, uh...
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: about podcasts having reach.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: I'm in.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: I'm an avid skier. I'm in the Italian Alps in February,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: a few months ago.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Okay?
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: Skiing. Little hut, like a hotel that you ski in,
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: ski out. Couldn't be more in the middle of nowhere
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: in the Dolomite Mountains. There with the whole family. Go
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: to settle the bill with the night manager at the
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: end of the thing, and he says to me, I
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: have to say, I really enjoyed seeing you on the
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: Sean Ryan Show podcast.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: In the Italian Alps?
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: As God is my witness and my husband, who was
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: standing there, right? And I said, you're kidding. And he said, no.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: And he said, I'm a fan of the show and
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: now I read your books.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: That's awesome. That's awesome.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: In the middle of the Italian Dolomite Mountains.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: I bet it's beautiful up there.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: It's gorgeous. But that's reach for you. And it's incredible
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: to think about how much we are alike. I mean,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: what really would you think the night manager at a
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: small hotel in the mountains in Italy would necessarily have
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: in common with you or I? And then you have
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: that desire to communicate, desire for information, listening to a
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: good podcast. So congratulations to you.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: I appreciate that. Well, it's good to have you back, Annie.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Thank you. It's great to be here.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: Awesome to have you back. I love talking to you.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Oh, I love talking to you.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: So let me give you an introduction here for anybody
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: that missed the first episode. Annie Jacobson, you're a Pulitzer
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: Prize finalist, investigative journalist, and New York Times bestselling author
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: who spent your career uncovering some of the most secretive
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: aspects of the U.S. government. You've written bestselling books including
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: Area 51, Operation Paperclip, The Pentagon's Brain, Surprise Kill, Vanish,
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: Nuclear War, a scenario in your newest release, Biological Warfare,
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: a scenario. Everyone loved your last appearance on the show,
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: so we'd love to have you back. And I gotta say, Annie,
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: I think your timelines are a little reversed here with
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: the previous book, Nuclear War, and the new one, Biological Warfare.
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: But what do you think about all this stuff going on?
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: You know, I mean, in Iran, the nuclear, I mean,
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: I don't think anything's gonna happen.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: You mean, is the war in Iran ratcheting up the
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: threat of nuclear war, per se? I mean, you know,
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: it's such a rabbit hole of a topic, that war.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: Um.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: I don't... Because Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon, and
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: because the alleged premise of that war is to keep
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: Iran from having a nuclear weapon, It exists in a
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: little bit of a different lane than I am really
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: interested in reporting on, which is what if a nuclear
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: war happens? Because, you know, Iran has almost had a
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: bomb for a very long time. So it does seem
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: to me like an easy... I don't want to use
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: the word excuse, but I'm going to use the word excuse.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: You know? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, there is
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: something that I wanted to.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: Relate to here? I mean, are you aware of the
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: tick thing?
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: Which tick thing?
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: Which tick thing? The alpha gall. I mean, we've got
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: people trying to force us to eat fake meat, artificial meat,
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: buying up all our farmland, then genetically altering insects, ticks.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: Now we have this alpha gall. going on right now.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: I don't know how many people have it, but what
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: do you think of that?
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: I think that anything talking about bio is like circling
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: around what could eventually be the drain unless something isn't done.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: So in a bizarre way, bringing from where I sit,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: who just loves information, loves sharing information, loves having conversations
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: about not right, not wrong, uncertainty being a huge principle.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: I think whether it's the Legionnaire's disease that just broke
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: out in New York City right now, or the ticks
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: you're talking about.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: What is that one? I don't even heard of that.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: It just happened yesterday.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: The Legionnaire's disease?
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: What is that? You know, these are all pathogens that
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: suddenly make their way into a small population that is
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: called an outbreak. And then the real question is, is
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: it gonna become an epidemic? you know, local, and then
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: the real question is, is it gonna become a pandemic? Um,
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: so I think that any of these subjects that bring
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: it to people's attention, there's an Ebola epidemic going on
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: right now in Africa. There was a hantavirus scare on
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: that cruise ship in May. These things surface, people talk
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: about them, they learn a little bit. To my eye,
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: it's just so much more helpful to kind of learn
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: basics about bio and what a bio a genetically modified
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: pathogen is, then kind of either be terrified by it
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: or politicize it because everybody is going to lose if
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: there's a biological incident. And interestingly, because of course I
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: write about war and weapons, you know, biological war is
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: one of the only threats in the Defense Department of
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: sort of nomenclature and monographs and protocols that doesn't have
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: to be an attack. It can also be an incident.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: So a lab leak is.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: Sounds familiar.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: A very, very high threat level situation for everybody. So again,
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: it's like information, not panic. Pressure. Pressure to learn more.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, they just... What would you rather go through?
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: a nuclear war scenario or a biological pathogen that... Because
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: that could be a long, slow, painful death. I mean,
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: so I guess so could nuclear war if you weren't
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: in the blast zone, but.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: I mean, one of the biggest takeaways that readers came
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: back at me with after reading nuclear war scenario was,
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: I just want to die in the immediate blast. Because,
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: you know, it's like that Nikita... Khrushchev quote, the survivors
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: would envy the dead. In many ways, bio has that
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: same component, probably because of what you said, that you
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: just think of having this like long, slow, painful death.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: But the reality I learned when researching and reporting this
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: book is actually a little bit more frightening, which is that,
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: so in Nuclear War, I take readers from nuclear launch
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: to nuclear winter in 72 minutes, 72 minutes. Not days, minutes.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: That's how fast it could happen, according to Stratcom. In
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Biological War, I take the readers from outbreak to anarchy
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: in six days. Because anarchy and insurrection is the real threat.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: And that was shocking to learn, again, from the Defense Department.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: And you're talking about in the homeland. Anarchy, insurrection. A
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: common phrase I came across when looking at declassified documents was,
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: fear of infection will send America spiraling into anarchy and insurrection.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Fear of infection. There's just something so visceral about this
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: idea of being infected.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Do you prepare for this kind of stuff? I mean,
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: you know, what does your house look like?
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: What is my house?
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: I mean... You got a bunker?
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: No, I just have a house, you know? I mean,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: you know, call me naive, but I just really think
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: man-made problems, man-made solution. And that's the optimist in me.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: But it is really helpful to know what you're up against.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: It's very helpful to know. I mean, want me to
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: give you, like, the three basic things ideas of bio
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: to understand.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Because, like, sometimes the... I write for, like, everybody. Like,
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: just give it to me so I can understand it.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: That's the questions I ask the smartest people in the room,
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: and it's what I try to convey. Because if you're, like,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: too knowledgeable on a subject, sometimes you lose your audience. So...
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: And we all lived through the COVID pandemic. So whenever
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: you're talking about a bio, biological incident three things How
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: might I get it? That's transmissibility. How might I get it?
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: How deadly is it? Okay kovat 1% death rate 1
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: out of 100 people died flu. 1 percent.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: Okay?
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: Third thing is, is there something I can take that
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: will heal me? That's called medical countermeasure. Three basic components.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: And so through all of modern history and Defense Department
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: planning against biological war has been like looking at those
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: three and creating of fears around them. And so, when
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: people don't know any of that, the fear... Like, for example,
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: your tick situation. A tick is called a vector-borne disease,
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: so it has to bite you for you to be infected.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: Okay?
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: The most deadly threat is an airborne pathogen. And that's
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: what COVID was. So, something that can be breathed through
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: something that can linger in the room, that's a real problem.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: And that's the scenario I take readers through, an airborne pathogen,
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: because that is what all of government fears. It's unstoppable.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: The weapon essentially becomes the human lung. The weapons delivery
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: system becomes the human lungs. And, you know, another really
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: interesting thing to me learning about all this was that
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: The uncertainty idea is so huge in public health. Remember
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: when COVID happened? Or maybe people don't remember this, because
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: it's kind of like easier to forget. For the first
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: three months, the CDC, who is in charge, and the WHO,
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: who's kind of in charge internationally, were sending out tweets
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: that said, COVID not airborne. N-O-T in big letters. I
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: reprint that. one of their tweets in the book. Nice.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: COVID not airborne. It was airborne. It was airborne. And
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: instead of admitting they were wrong or even out of
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: the gate saying, look, we don't know, because they didn't know,
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: to insist that then creates this kind of spiraling mistrust,
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: hence your opening question about trust, you know?
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: Just going through, you know, the outline and stuff, it
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: brought a lot of stuff to mind. I mean, we'll
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: get into the book here in just a second, but
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: if you looked at ancestry.com or like any of these,
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: you know, these, my mind's going blank here, biometrics, you know, companies,
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: I mean, and who owns them? I mean, they could
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: take your DNA that you paid to have tested.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: And create a bioweapon specifically designed to assassinate you?
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. I mean, individual targets are a whole other dirty game.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: And historically, that has been going on for a very
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: long time. The Soviets had huge assassination programs specifically, you know, creating, like, bio-poisons.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: Poisoning is, like, one of the oldest assassination ruses in
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: the world. I mean, you can think of, like, a
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: poison arrow. Or, like, somebody... There was an Al-Qaeda guy
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: that got assassinated. I want to say one of the... Like,
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: before the war on terror, he was in Kosovo, I believe.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: And he... Khattab was his last name. And he, like,
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: opened up a letter or... And somehow licked it or
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: closed the letter and there was poison on it and
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: he died. So there are these very... specific assassinations that way.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: But what I think is the really big threat is this,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: what the Defense Department calls, what FEMA calls, what HHS,
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: or Health and Human Services, call, because BIO is a
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: multi-agency event, which is even more complex and threatening because
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: now you're talking about multiple agencies and stovepiping. But you have,
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: you know, you have airborne that can be, or rather
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: you have pathogens that can be genetically modified, to your point,
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: to become airborne, right? So genetic modification of.
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: Path.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: Let's start, let me say one thing, because the pathogen
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: thing can kind of be like, what the hell is that?
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Viruses and bacteria are both pathogens, right? Germs are everywhere.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: We have germs in our stomachs. Germs are not necessarily bad.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: When you call it a pathogen, that means it can
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: be deadly. Virus and bacteria. COVID was a virus. Plague,
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: which I use as the pathogen in my book, that scenario,
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: plague is a bacteria. Plague was a bioweapon of yesteryear because,
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: and then a medical countermeasure, was invented to fight plague
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: because it's a bacteria. So, antibiotics kill the plague. Now,
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: with genetic modification, you can tweak the plague pathogen, which
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: is called Yersinia pestis, so that it is immune to
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: the antibiotics. That's where we're into some very sinister genetic
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: modifications that most people don't know about, don't want to
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: know about, but probably should know a little bit about
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: because it helps you know what you're up against.
• 15:52
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• 16:13
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  Speaker 2: code SRS. I mean, it's scary, you know, from what
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: I understand, it's a lot, a lot cheaper, uh, to
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: produce a bioweapon. A lot easier to sneak it in
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: the country, a lot easier to get it released. I'm
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: not a scientist or anything, but you see all the
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: things that are being created right now. The dire wolf,
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: the woolly mammoth supposedly is coming back. We had Charles
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: Hoskinson on who's one of the scientists. Have you heard
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: about the plants that they're developing? They're making bioluminescent plants
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: that can glow whatever color they want, which is amazing.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: You know, some of the use, I mean, he was saying,
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: you know, you could put these things around, put these
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: plants around a nuclear power plant or, or, or whatever.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: And if there's, if there's any radiation leaking, then the
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: plants will, will glow red. And he showed me pictures
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: of what these things look like. We couldn't put it
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: on the, on the episode because it was so early on,
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: but I mean, it's, it, It's like something you would
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: see in that movie, The Avatar.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: It's like science fiction, except for it's science fact.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's real.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: And this is, you know, when you're talking about these
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: kind of modifications to Mother Nature, it brings up this idea,
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: which I think is super important and is kind of
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: at the heart of all of this debate, discussion, science
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: moving forward, which is dual use. So, yes, if you're
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: able to create that can detect radiation leakage. That's another
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: form of an intelligence vehicle, like what's called Mazin. You know,
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: like we have sniffer technology. We have, you know, we
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: can test sewer water. We can, same as we can see,
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: you know, explosions from space. That's signals intelligence. So measurement
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: and signature intelligence called Mazin would be the plants. And
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: that would be terrific. because it's a way of, you know,
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: understanding what an adversary is up to. In the biomedical world,
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: the reason you have genetic modification, the reason this all began,
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: and by the way, it was kind of discovered, invented
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: in 1971, in a lab in California at Stanford, genetic modification.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: So the idea of those scientists, they certainly weren't weapons engineers,
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: they were like, we're going to be able to create
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: incredible medical countermeasures in the same way that penicillin itself
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: was a medical countermeasure and stopped infection. You know, so
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: many soldiers died in World War II because of wound infection.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: Penicillin comes along, fantastic. You've taken, you've knocked out all
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: of so many bacteria deaths. So that's the idea if you're,
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: you know, a doctor, if you're trying to do good
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: in the world or trying to kind of keep the
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: world in balance. But the other side of dual use
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: is weaponizing something. And one of the original sort of
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: components I saw after I wrote Nuclear War, and I
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: was like, am I really going to touch bio? And
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: I had had many sources saying to me, Annie, you've
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: got to write about it because it's more threatening. There's
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: a threat spectrum diagram that I found, an unclassified version
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: of it, in looking through the Defense Department documents. And
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: it shows all the weapons of mass destruction on a scale.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: And of course, nuclear weapons are at The worst end,
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: because they are the most destructive. But bioweapons are considered
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: by the Defense Department the greatest overall threat.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: Greatest overall threat. That is shocking. That needs to be discussed.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: And it's because the bar for entry is so low.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: You know, think about what... Think about we've had nuclear technology...
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: For 80 years now, weapons technology, there's an incredibly low
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: bar for, I mean, high bar for entry. You can't
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: just make a nuclear bomb in your basement. Bioweapons, people
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: will now tell you that, like, a high school student
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: with limited biology can essentially do some genetic tweaks to
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: create this kind of thing. Are you serious? Absolutely. That is,
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: that sounds alarmist. It's true. That is, like, worthy of
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: a discussion in and of itself.
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: That's basically everybody.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: Everybody.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: High school students compete in sort of science courses doing
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: genetic tweaks.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: I had no idea high school's come a long way
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: since I was there.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: I was dissecting frogs, you know.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: Same here.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: We were not doing genetic modifications.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: Wow. Wow. So where do we start today? Where do
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: you want to start?
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: Where do you want to start?
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: What was your inspiration? Your original inspiration? Yeah.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: Oh God, what a funny word, right? I mean, inspiration
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: for writing a book about the end of the world,
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: you know? The fact that biological war is considered a
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: near extinct, potentially, a near extinction level event. That's the nomenclature,
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: a near ELE. But I think, you know, inspiration, I
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: am a storyteller. I am really interested in telling a
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: dramatic narrative. I want people to read what I write.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: And it's not necessarily meant to terrify them, but maybe
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: to put pressure on, you know, government people. But the
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: most shocking part about it for me was that there
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: are plans in place, like nuclear war. There are plans
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: in place for this kind of a near-extinction level event.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: Which I, you know, spoiler alert on the end of
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: this book, where I take the readers through, you know,
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: outbreak to anarchy in six days. What happens after anarchy
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: is an actual government plan called devolution. Devolution. Pronounced two
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: different ways, depending on who's saying it. Evolution with a
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: D in front of it. It's exactly like you would think. Wait, what?
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: Evolution moving forward? Devolution... is going back. So it's a
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: government plan. The name devolution is unclassified. The program is classified.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: I had the man who signed off on the last
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: version of it take me right up Obama's FEMA director,
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: Craig Fugate, take me, you readers, right up to the
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: edge of what can legally be known, that this program exists.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: so that after anarchy and insurrection happens, which will, we
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: can get into why, a essentially secret government disappears off
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: into a bunch of bunkers called hot sites, warm sites,
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: and cold sites to hunker down so that they can
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: rebuild the government once everybody dies. Real program.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: I saw that. So who... So, who determines who this is?
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: It is a pre-chosen, pre-designated list of people. Now, that
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: list is classified. Who is on that list is classified.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: How that list is determined is classified. But I'm glad
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: we're talking about this, because let's speculate, because that's all
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: we can do here. I would guess that, it certainly
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: changes by administration.
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: In other words, the current president is not gonna have
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: a bunch of former president Bidens designates go off and
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: run the government. So, then you really think about it like, wow,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: imagine being in that room, um, deciding, okay, who are going... Essentially,
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: there's kind of like a mirror image person of every
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: high-ranking official because you have to assume, okay, POTUS could
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: get the airborne bacteria in his lungs and die. So
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: who's going to be the devolution POTUS, the national security advisor,
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: the SecDef, right? So all of these individuals. And by
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: the way, it's not just Defense Department. It's health officials. It's,
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: you know, Supreme Court justices. The government has to run.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: So then, I mean, you have the eyebrow-raising side that
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: I had, which is, wow, that's a lot of plan—
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: if there's that much planning that goes into catastrophe, why
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: don't we have more public awareness about how to not
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: have this happen?
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: We'll get into that discussion. It's called de-evolution. Devolution. Devolution. Devolution.
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: And we don't know how often, I mean, there's a
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: lot of conspiracies on who really runs the government. They're
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: running wild right now. They ran wild on the last
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: administration as well. I mean, on probably every administration that comes,
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: there'll be this question. You think there's a possibility that
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: maybe they don't get picked? Maybe they're the ones that
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: are running everything.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: You mean the actual devolution is already in effect and
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: taking care of things? That I don't know. It's certainly
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: an interesting thought experiment, you know? Um... I mean, I
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: also think conspiracy theory is such a bad term. I
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: think it should be changed to speculative narrative.
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: I love that.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: Because, I mean, for example, when COVID happened, on top
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: of the WHO and the CDC saying COVID not airborne
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: when it was airborne. So they got the most basic,
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: most important, most critical fact wrong. And by the way,
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: they've never admitted it. They've just, they just quietly changed
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: the idea that COVID was airborne about a year later. So,
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: and there's that. And then there was the lab leak
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: component of things, which separate from what you think about that, um,
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: is a real possibility. And yet, when that was first reported,
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: it was actually called a conspiracy theory by major news outlets.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: And we know it wasn't a conspiracy theory. So why
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: not change that verbiage to speculative narrative? It just takes
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: everybody way down off the ledge. You can even say,
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: you know, if you're talking about... You can say it's
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: a wildly speculative narrative. But to call something a conspiracy theory,
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: I think, is such... self-righteous indignation, and so potentially dangerous.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: Because once you say that, you have a really tough
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: time walking it back and admitting you're wrong.
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. I mean, the CIA created that term, correct?
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: Conspiracy theory?
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: Didn't they?
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: I don't know that. I have heard many different things.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: I think I would.
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: Or is that a speculative narrative? Good.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: Look at that. Change the thinking and the way people
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: talk right here and now. on the Sean Ryan Show podcast.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: But do you know what I mean? It gives room
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: for being wrong. There's something really, really character building about
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: being able to keep yourself open to, I might be
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: wrong about this. And I don't know why it has
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: disappeared from the government. I just really don't know. I mean,
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: there's a famous JFK quote after the Bay of Pigs,
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: which is a failure, okay? And JFK said something like,
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: you know, I'm paraphrasing, like, success has a thousand fathers,
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: failure is an orphan. And he was admitting his mistake
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: in the Bay of Pigs. the CIA paramilitary attempt at
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: invading Cuba that failed, you know, drastically. He was admitting defeat.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: He was admitting being wrong. And I think that's profoundly important.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: It's part of all of our personal lives, certainly mine,
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: I mean, right? You gotta be able to with your kids.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: I do it all the time publicly. I've had to
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: do it two or three times this year, unfortunately, but...
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: You know, I think that's why we're in the big
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: distrust era of the government and all of our institutions
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: and pretty much everything right now is because nobody has
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: been able to admit wrong. And you know, the funny
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: thing is, is, you know, it instantaneously reestablishes your credibility
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: and even lifts it more because people realize, oh, this
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: person actually has a moral compass. This person actually lives
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: by a set of values.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: And isn't... Which we can't say for anybody in government.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: Because they never do. They're too proud. There's too much pride.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: Pride goeth before the fall. I mean, I just think
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: about pride as ego. Um, which... Or the unhealthy part
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: of ego. Maybe the healthy part of ego is uncertainty.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: You know? Being able to say, like, you know, I
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: don't know, but I think it's this.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: Um.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: I still cannot, I could not get a straight, I'm
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: always trying to get a straight answer from government officials
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: on these certain questions like that. Like asking the CDC,
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: why have you never admitted you were wrong about, you know,
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: COVID not airborne? And they won't, they won't go there.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: So people mistrust.
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: You've asked them.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: I always ask.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: What do they say?
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: I mean, usually you get ignored on those questions, right?
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's why I spend so much of my
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: time interviewing former SECDEF, you know, former STRATCOM commander, former
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: FEMA chief. Because once they are out of government, they're
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: really out of the catbird seat, which is kind of
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: fair that when you are in a government position, you
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: have to toe the party line. You can't really answer
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: a straight question without going to ten press officers and
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: finding out what you're supposed to say. And maybe that,
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: you know, is understandable on some component, but it also
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: should change because people, I think, are advancing way beyond
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: that in their own personal lives. You know, just the
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: ability to get information on your fingertips is just so
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: much faster now than it ever was that the government
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: needs to adapt to that, you know? We'll get back
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: to you and answer on that. And then six weeks later,
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: they're giving you the answer and the question has already changed.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: What else about this devolution?
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: I mean, it was.
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: Was that a surprise to you?
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've heard that term referenced, but
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: it's always... It's referenced without any... attached to it, because
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: it's the only thing that's declassified. I was really kind
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: of stunned that Craig Fugate was able to really share
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: with me what he did, because he signed off on
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: the 2016 version of it, the last day of the
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: Obama administration. And that is the set of protocols from
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: which all updates are made. So, the system hasn't changed.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: The names on the list might. Um, but you know,
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: there are other really, really interesting details I learned, like, okay, again,
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: spoiler alert, right? Um, the president gets moved in the
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: event of a major biological catastrophe where people are, there
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: is a pathogen that has a case fatality rate of 100%.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: I told you COVID had 1%. Plague, not bubonic plague.
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: but pneumonic plague, which is pneumonic pneumonia, so in the lungs.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: When plague goes into the lungs, not bubonic plague, if
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: you get bitten by a tick, you get bubonic plague.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: Your lymph nodes swell up, and it sort of takes
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: over parts of the body, your lymph system. Pneumonic plague
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: in the lungs, 100% case fatality rate.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: 100%.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: 100%. You get it, you die. Unless you take antibiotics.
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: You have to take antibiotics within 24 hours. Within 24 hours.
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: By the way, I have one of my major sources
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: on the book is one of the world's experts on
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, Dr. Henry Hine. He was at USAMRED,
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: which is at Fort Detrick, studying this for a very
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: long time until he left. Now he works privately. So
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: all of this information is like fully sourced. But the
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: big fear, I'm going looping back to the president here,
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: big fear of Defense Department, CDC, HHS, all of these
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: organizations would be involved in a bio event. Something, a
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: pathogen is released, either a lab leak or an attack.
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: It's airborne.
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: And it has a case fatality rate of 100%. Okay.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: Then I said the medical countermeasures, how are we going
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: to stop it? Well, what if it has been genetically
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: modified to defeat antibiotics?
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: Again, sounds like Annie's talking science fiction. There are plans
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: in place because this is what is feared.
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: I'm sure there are.
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: In this event, the president, I learned, this is like,
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: you know, sometimes you get information and you go, I
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: got to reverse engineer my book from that because this
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: is just too dramatic. The president does not get moved
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: to a big bunker like Raven Rock or Mount Weather.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: any of these command centers we can talk about if
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: you want more details, he gets moved to like what's
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: called a cold site, like really far away by himself.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: It's such a crazy visual to think about the President
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: of the United States with a gas mask by himself
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: in a room, his military aid with the nuclear football
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: outside the door, and a couple secret service agents watching
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: the building. For how long? I mean, that to me
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: sounds like science fiction. To realize it's science fact is like,
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: I gotta know about this. And that's how I work
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: as a reporter. Like, okay, so how does that happen?
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: I mean, who... Are there, you know....
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: That's the end of democracy.
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd like to go back a little bit and
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: talk about maybe the biological arms race before we get
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: to this. But who do they think they're going to
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: even govern? You know, I mean, the trillionaires that are building,
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: the billionaires and trillionaires that are building bunkers in Hawaii.
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: What are they going to do? Come out of your
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: bunker and do what? Sleep. What, are you gonna govern
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? I don't think so. They're
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: not being governed right now.
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: And you gotta think of the skills you have to
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: have to survive in that kind of a world. Okay,
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: so biological arms rights. Here's an interesting fact. Biological war
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: is illegal. Biological weapons are illegal. Nuclear weapons are not illegal.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: Crazy thought, okay? Okay, there's only a certain amount of
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: countries that have them. they're making sure no one else
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: gets them, hence Iran. But nuclear weapons are not illegal
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: to those who hold them. Biological weapons, all biological weapons
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: are illegal. They were made illegal by a treaty called
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: the Biological Weapons Convention, the BWC, it's the treaty, in 1972.
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: Before that, the United States had a massive arsenal of
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: biological weapons, which is just crazy to think about. That's
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: Cold War paranoia for you. We had them. Russia had them.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: China was building them. North Korea. So, they became illegal.
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: President Nixon decided they're repugnant to the conscience of mankind.
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: That's what he said.
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: Okay?
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: And makes them illegal. Everyone's... We destroyed our biological weapons.
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: It took 219 weeks to destroy them, by the way. So,
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: everybody says we're gonna destroy our weapons. biological weapons, everybody
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: signs the treaty. Not for another 20 years would the
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: United States learn from Soviet defector scientists that the Russians
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: went like this. Oh, yeah, here, we signed that treaty.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: And then they began to build a colossal biological weapons program.
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: They called it their Manhattan Project. And the idea, which
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: is so spooky, is that they wanted to kill all
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: the people in America and the West and leave the
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: infrastructure intact. Those were their words.
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: Interesting. Smart and interesting and evil. I mean, you know,
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: You know, we were talking about ancestry.com, 23andMe, who knows
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: what else is out there that people are using, but
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: I mean, would you say an arsenal of biological, how
• 39:59
  Speaker 2: many different types of biological weapons do you need? Can they,
• 40:05
  Speaker 2: and I'm sure they can, I mean, can they injure,
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: you know, by sucking that DNA out? Or LabCorp, you know,
• 40:12
  Speaker 2: the biggest blood diagnostics company in the world, I mean,
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: Can they get that information, hack that information, or just
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: sell it? I mean, I think 23andMe and Ancestry and
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: probably all the other ones have sold all the data
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: most multiple times, allegedly. But is it possible to create
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: a biological weapon that would only target American DNA, Canadian DNA,
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: North American DNA, Latino DNA, Black DNA? Any race.
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: There is. And that, by the way, this is not
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: something I get into in the book. It was a
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: little too speculative narrative for me to really go down, okay?
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: But let me tell you who to... That was confirmed.
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: I asked that exact question to Admiral Brett Giroir. And
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: he was the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: at the White House during COVID. He's also a medical doctor.
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: He ran DARPA's bioscience office. He's an incredible human being.
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: He's a character in the book, for sure. I mean,
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: he's really a remarkable person. You know, grew up in
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: a small town in Texas. First guy in his town
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: to go to Harvard. You know, fully dedicated to service
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: his whole life. I asked him that question and he
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: said to me after a bit of a pause, yes.
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: And there are suspicions that China is doing that. So,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: the suspicions part of it is where I make a
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: distinction for Annie as a journalist. I'm going to work
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: my scenario from what is known, what is on the record,
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: and what has been confirmed by people on the other side.
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: Because then, I can never be accused of, like, fear-mongering. Like,
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: if I were to go down that lane, perhaps people
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: would say, well, you're fear-mongering because it's speculative because you
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: don't know for sure. Now, when you have someone like
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: Admiral Giroir saying, it's speculative, the subtext in that, you
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: and I can infer what that means. I don't think
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: someone like that is going to say something like that
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: to me off the cuff without a little more fear,
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: shall we say, than speculation.
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: So there's speculative rumors that China is creating this, or
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: has created it.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: Yes, and there is also.
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: I've never been so happy to have Asian blood.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: Right. Yes.
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: How is that? You got to tell me that. How
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: is that?
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: Because I'm part Japanese. Wow. I'm good.
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: I never knew that. Mom or dad?
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: Dad.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: Dad. Interesting. Okay, so you got the DNA immunity, perhaps,
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: if that's the case.
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: Hopefully.
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: There's a very interesting paper for anyone who's interested in
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: reading on this. So Dr. Robert Kadlec, source in the book,
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: He is now the current administration, essentially the biodefense chief.
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: He was dedicated to biodefense starting in the Bush administration,
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: has had huge, powerful jobs across every administration. He actually
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: ran Operation Warp Speed during COVID, which was the vaccine program.
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: He's an Air Force colonel and a medical doctor, and
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: he's now the current president's biodefense chief. So he You know,
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: we had conversation before, and then when you go back
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: into the administration, you can't really talk to a journalist
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: like me. But right before going back into the administration,
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: he wrote a paper on China's biological program. So the
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: State Department speculates China has a bioweapons program. The State
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: Department confirms that Russia has a bioweapons program. North Korea
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: has a bioweapons program, according to the U.S.
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: State Department.
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: China, maybe. Iran, maybe. That's what they say.
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: Maybe?
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: They say maybe.
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: I'm sorry. What was the Wuhan lab?
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: So here's... Maybe? And again, we're talking about language.
• 44:40
  Speaker 2: What about Ukraine?
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: We're talking about language.
• 44:42
  Speaker 2: Those are our biolabs.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: Those were some of ours.
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: So....
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: The position of the State Department is that the Russian
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: biological program I told you about, that very evil program
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: in the 70s and 80s, was absorbed, not dismantled. And
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: so that is why they take the position Russia still
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: has a program. And China... So let me... This is
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: how a diplomat would clarify, maybe, that the treaty I
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: told you about, the BWC, which everybody is supposed to
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: adhere to, all the signatories... and not have bioweapons. There's
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: a tiny go-around, which is that you can do genetic
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: engineering for defensive purposes, for prophylactic purposes. And so that's
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: where you get the Wuhan excuse, which is that we
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: were modifying the coronavirus so that we would know how
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: to defend against it. You see? So that's the kind
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: of catch-22, In plain language, I call it a hooky-do,
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: which allows these BSL-4 labs, biosafety level four, that's the
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: highest level, guys in spacesuits, to manipulate viruses and pathogens
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: in really dangerous ways so that in case somebody else
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: uses it, we know how to defend against it. And
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: that has its own longer conversation, and it's extremely dangerous.
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: It's called gain of function. It's just like it sounds.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: You are trying to make a pathogen Gain new function.
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: Mentioned before, virulence, transmissibility, how do we catch it? Virulence,
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: is it going to kill me and how fast? And
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: is there a medical countermeasure? Those three components. Gain of
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: function tweaks those. Okay, so let's make it more airborne.
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: Let's make it from droplet transmission, which would be me
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: coughing at you and, you know, sorry for my spit
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: hitting you, that's droplet transmission, versus us talking. Airborne, lingering
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: in the air. Somebody else could walk in here after
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: we leave. Airborne, it's still here. That's the number one threat.
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: You can, with gain-of-function genetic engineering, you can make a
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: pathogen airborne.
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: Whoa. What are the different kinds? Do you know?
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: Of pathogens?
• 47:08
  Speaker 2: Of bioweapons. Pathogens, bioweapons.
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, great question. And again, stuff we should
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: know about, right? Because... then we can, we, the public,
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: can react appropriately as opposed to starting creating speculative narratives
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: about what could happen. Ebola, for example, you know, the hantavirus, right?
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: So the CDC keeps a list of what are called
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: Tier 1, common term, select agents. Those are the pathogens
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: that they're most afraid will be weaponized. Subtext have been
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: weaponized in the past. They probably have speculative intelligence are
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: being weaponized. Plague is one of them.
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: 100% death rate if you don't have antibiotics. Anthrax is another.
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: Ebola is another because it's got fear factor. Ebola is
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: not airborne. But what if you could tweak Ebola to
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: be airborne?
• 48:06
  Speaker 2: What does Ebola do to you?
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: Ebola is called a hemorrhagic fever virus. Right? So think
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: of what hemorrhaging is. You're just bleeding.
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: Just bleeding.
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: Okay? Ebola causes the body, the entire body, to hemorrhage.
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: You're bleeding out your eyes, your ears, your nose. I mean,
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: it is a horrific, terrifying disease. It's also not airborne.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: You get Ebola from close contact. If there's somebody over
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: there in that corner bleeding out, you know, if you're
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: a first responder, you may go help them. That's why doctors,
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: first responders. If you're the patient's mother, that's why the
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: loved ones die from Ebola. But the guy walking down
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: the street is not gonna get Ebola because he's gonna
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: keep his distance. So that's, again, takes us back to transmissibility.
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: It takes us to virulence. Ebola is a... 85, 90%
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: rate killer. So it's super deadly. Is there a medical counter?
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: against it? Third question to ask. Well, after the 2014
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: Ebola epidemic, doctors got at it. Those same kind of
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: doctors that Dr. Kadlec worked with with Warp Speed. Doctors
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: got at it. They created in San Diego a medical
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: countermeasure called ZMAP. So when one Ebola patient arrived in
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: Texas in 2014 and gave his two nurses Ebola, he
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: died because he was further along. Those two nurses in
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: this heroics that is completely unknown but involves Dr. Admiral Girard,
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: which is why I know the story, he knew about
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: the ZMAP medical countermeasure being developed in San Diego. The
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: CDC in Texas wouldn't help him. It hadn't been authorized.
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: He got a friend who was a pilot and had
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: a plane to fly to San Diego, get the Z-map,
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: brought it back, gave it to the nurses. They lived.
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: Now this new form of Ebola in Africa has mutated
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: and the Z-map doesn't work. Will doctors, will scientists be
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: able to create a medical countermeasure fast enough before that
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: epidemic that is going on in Africa becomes, you know,
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: grows and becomes bigger. Who knows? Will that epidemic be
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: able to be contained and put out?
• 50:51
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• 52:10
  Speaker 2: When you're writing and doing this research, I mean, do you...
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: Have you thought about, if you were to create a bioweapon,
• 52:19
  Speaker 2: what it would look like?
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: Me?
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: I mean.
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: This is what I do.
• 52:23
  Speaker 2: Well... I've been thinking about it the entire conversation. I
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: already know what I would do now. Tell me. Have
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: you thought about it?
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: Well, I think about that. It's a fascinating question. I
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: think about that from the dramatic narrative point of view,
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: working from what is scientifically possible. So that's why I
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: chose pneumonic plague. And even more so, the reason why
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: I chose pneumonic plague is for a very specific reason,
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: that when the Soviet defectors came finally revealed to the West,
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: what the Russians had been doing. And mind you, this
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: is 30, 40 years ago when genetic engineering was not possible.
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: They had created a super plague weapon, airborne, with plans
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: to be genetically modified. This is early genetic engineering, almost
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: like imagine using scissors to cut film and taping it
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: back together, as opposed to digital editing today. That would
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: be the analogy of where things were. The Russian, the
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: Soviet scientists, by their own admittance, created a plague weapon
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: that they had built in, they had genetically modified it
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: to defeat antibiotics. And even worse, to actually trigger a
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: new disease, encephalitis in the brain, once you take the antibiotic.
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: And by the Russian scientists' own admittance. The reason they
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: did that was because they hated America so much in
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: the Cold War. Not only did they want to kill
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: all the people and take the infrastructure, march in and
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: just take everything, the buildings would be there, unlike in nuclear,
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: but they wanted people to die with the last thought
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: in their brain that the government had failed them. Because
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: the antibiotics that the American medical establishment and the government
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: told Americans to take to defeat the plague weapon would
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: kill them in an even more horrific way. This was
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: their plan. This is on the books. This is documented. So,
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: to answer your question, I couldn't come up with anything
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: more sinister than that myself. And I wanted to stick
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: to science fact, and so that's the very specific pathogen
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: that gets unleashed in Biological War Scenario, my book. And
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: by the way, it's not A nefarious act, it's a
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: lab leak.
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: Wow. I don't, you know... I think what I would
• 55:03
  Speaker 2: do is... I would have stages. Maybe you do something
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: that is an attention grabber, like COVID. Maybe you make
• 55:15
  Speaker 2: a pathogen that targets the reproductive system And then you
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: get the news cycle going and it's, oh, we can't.
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean? Nobody in North America can
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: reproduce anymore. But you have the antidote. You let the
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: headlines percolate. This is why you're not reproducing because I've
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: created this. And if you want the antidote, then your
• 55:36
  Speaker 2: government is going to do X, Y, and Z. Maybe
• 55:39
  Speaker 2: it's something even quicker. Maybe it is something like COVID.
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: If you want to get better, this is what you're
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: going to do. If you try to nuke us, you
• 55:51
  Speaker 2: won't get the antidote. So this is what's going to happen.
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: If you don't listen, then we're going to go to
• 55:57
  Speaker 2: the next step and we're going to prove to you
• 55:59
  Speaker 2: that it's real. And this is what's going to happen
• 56:01
  Speaker 2: to your body. Then that happens. Then everybody's, they know,
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: you know, and then it just keeps escalating. If you
• 56:11
  Speaker 2: want to save human life. Or give them the option
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: to save themselves. That's how I would do it.
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: And that's a very sort of red-teaming mind scenario, which
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: is what war games at the Pentagon, from my understanding,
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: are entirely based on. Like, getting people to think through
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: those incredibly sinister ideas to try and have a plan
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: in place to prevent that from happening. And so, in
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: my experience and learning about of all this, what is...
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: What's interesting about this is that is all very valuable.
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: And that's sort of historical red teaming and war gaming.
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: But what has been left out of the discussion are
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: two major components, which is one, how fast science and
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: technology are moving. So you can't possibly keep up with it,
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: although yours did a gr- the three stage thing is
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: like really sinister and, you know, very scientific.
• 57:16
  Speaker 2: Well, it also gives them the option to save themselves.
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: Explain to me that a little bit more on the
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: third part of it.
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: On my plan?
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 57:25
  Speaker 2: My plan is you get the attention.
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 57:28
  Speaker 2: Everybody knows something's up. Then you take credit for what's happening.
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: Okay, it's the bad guy.
• 57:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the bad guy. Or the good guy. Okay.
• 57:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, maybe there is genocide going on somewhere in
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: the world.
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 57:43
  Speaker 2: Like we see all over right now, right? And then
• 57:46
  Speaker 2: the country that's committing genocide gets a pathogen that makes
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: their people sick. They're not dying. Maybe some die. You
• 57:53
  Speaker 2: know what I mean? But it grabs that nation's headlines.
• 57:57
  Speaker 2: And then you make the statement, if you don't want
• 58:00
  Speaker 2: this to continue, you stop the genocide right now. If
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: the genocide continues, then we'll move to stage two. Stage
• 58:10
  Speaker 2: two is you bleed out of every orifice in your body.
• 58:14
  Speaker 2: Would you like that to happen? Yes or no. You
• 58:17
  Speaker 2: have two hours.
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. And this is.
• 58:21
  Speaker 2: Two hours goes by. They don't do it. The next
• 58:24
  Speaker 2: pathogen is released. It's already staged. It stops. They get
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: the antidote. That gets released.
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. These are some of the hallmarks of early biological
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: warfare thinking with another component mixed in, which is that
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: you would need to inoculate, give a vaccine, essentially, to
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: your own people that would be anywhere near that area
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: to make sure they didn't.
• 58:53
  Speaker 2: Well, that's dependent if you, you know, if you target
• 58:56
  Speaker 2: a certain race of people that all share a common
• 59:00
  Speaker 2: strand of DNA.
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: Yes, and this is exactly what that Cold War mentality was,
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: by the way, right? It was really... uh, it's almost
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: like mental, you know, hostage-taking, essentially, on a grand scale.
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: And then, the conclusion by pretty much everyone involved was
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: the blowback idea. Was that you couldn't, you couldn't contain it.
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: Because the pathogen would have to be contagious to be,
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: you know, really effective. And then you would have these
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: co-centric circles of people getting sick. So, that's where kind
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: of biological warfare became obsolete in terms of thinking. And
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: that's why they made it illegal. But people still think
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: about that. And now, with scientific advancements, with genetic engineering,
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: being able to target individual people is becoming much more
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: of a reality. And by the way, that's what I
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: meant to say. In Dr. Kadlec's paper, he's the current
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: biodefense chief, there's a public paper you can read that
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: he wrote on China's, what he believes is China's, or
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: rather what's on the record about China's biological program. And
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: the Chinese officials in their defense department have essentially said
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: They are not against. They are actually, you know, programs
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: in place for precisely the kind of warfare that you're
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: talking about.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's been, this is what God did to
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 2: the Egyptians in the Old Testament, correct?
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: It is a narrative that has existed. And it's like,
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: you know, where does it go? The argument not to
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: have that is it's too evil. And it's, it has,
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: the consequences are too great. Hence the idea that it is,
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: you know, odious to the nature of mankind. So the
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: bigger idea that I think we're getting to is like,
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: so what is the solution? If all of this is possible,
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: what is the solution? And right now, we're kind of,
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: I think, stuck in this idea of like, well, the
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: debate is really only on the gain of function, right?
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: The debate is like, we need, the bad guys are
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: making those kind of weapons, maybe even targeting a certain
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: genetic population. And so we have to create medical countermeasures
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: because of it. And if you think that's utopian or dystopian,
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: that's a worthy debate, I think, because I've heard arguments
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: on both sides of the aisle. Like, you cannot prevent
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: the bad guys, the adversary, whoever they may be, terrorist organizations.
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: some crazy college kid or high school student in his basement.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: You can't prevent them. You can't prevent all evil. The
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: threshold's too low, so the biotechnology industry must prevail, must
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: be allowed to work on these medical countermeasures that involve
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: tweaking the virulence, the transmissibility, and the medical countermeasures of
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: different pathogens. Either way, I think it's very important that
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: people know about this so that in the godforsaken event,
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: something does happen, there's not an immediate, wildly speculative narrative, right?
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: So does the government have any countermeasures for the citizens
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 2: of this country, or is it just for themselves?
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: Well, the countermeasure question, the reason why I use that
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: Soviet sort of It's called a chimera weapon, bioweapon. The
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: chimera is this ancient Greek... monster. You've seen images of it. Like,
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: think of a... the head of a lion and the
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: tail of a serpent. Or with a goat coming out
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: of it. A chimera just means, like, a multi-species monster.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: And that is essentially what genetic engineering is. You're taking
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: the DNA of one animal, viral species and you're mixing
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: it with another. And so the Chimera weapon, the original
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: Chimera weapon was this plague super weapon that would, you
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: take the antidote and it turns into a booby trap
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: and it kills you. So, you know, that idea becomes
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: what the Defense Department calls a wicked problem. Because there
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: is no solution to it. Because how do you know
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: whether or not the antibiotic is going to kill you
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: unless you.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: Have evidence. And that's where the devolution plan happens pretty
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: much really fast because the chances can't be taken because
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: the threat's so high. And so on the public health
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: side of things, you have a lot of people instead
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: of saying, well, this is, you can't just go down
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: the evil rabbit hole of the military, you know, industrial
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: complex of it. You have to have public health awareness.
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: And that's why there are a lot of people I
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: interviewed in the book who were like, it's all about diagnostics. Diagnostics,
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: fancy word for testing. You know? I mean, remembering COVID,
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: by the end of COVID, year two, whatever it was,
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: I live in Los Angeles, you could buy a COVID
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: test at the 7-Eleven.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 2: Remember?
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: Did you have that access kind of year? You could literally.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 2: We may have, I don't know. The test didn't work.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 2: I got, I never wanted to get tested anyways. because
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 2: there was the speculative narratives that they were calling you
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 2: after you got tested to make sure that you know whatever.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 2: But my wife was pregnant at the time. Nobody really
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: knew what the hell was going on. And so I
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 2: did get tested and I took two tests and one
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 2: was positive and one was negative. the speculative narratives were correct.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 2: I did get calls. Wow.
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: You took them at like an urgent care?
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I took it at an urgent care. Wow. Yeah. And,
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 2: you know, so, so I never took another, and that
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 2: was before, so yeah, I guess that was, if I
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 2: could have done something undocumented, then I would have done
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: something undocumented.
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 2: Because I don't, I don't want my information in the
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 2: government's hands, but. Not that it isn't already. But... So, no,
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: we didn't have the over-the-counter tests at that particular point
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 2: in time, which would have been around 2021.
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: So in big cities, you could suddenly literally buy a dipstick...
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: They were called dipstick tests. And you could sit in
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: your car and test yourself. And then you were supposed to...
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: Because there were asymptomatic people in COVID, meaning people who
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: carried COVID... the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it's called officially, and didn't
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: have any symptoms, like my son. So then, you were
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: supposed to work on the honor system of, like, not
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: being around anybody because you were a carrier. It's called
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: a silent carrier. You could get everybody else sick, but
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: you weren't sick. But I think your point about not
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: wanting the government to know is so incredibly important. That
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: the government has to learn from these errors. They have
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: to work with the public. People do not want the
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: sense that the government is lurking over them and looming
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: over them, particularly with their health. It's the bio... It's
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: like the biotechnology surveillance military industrial complex. And it's very real.
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: But I found an interesting loophole in it that I
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: drill on into the book, which I'm sure will raise
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: some eyebrows from some groups of people, and I don't care.
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: Which is that So there's a, after 9-11, Dick Cheney
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: himself was like personally terrified of bioweapons. And he was
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: part and parcel to this extreme elevation, escalation, I mean, of,
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: you know, gain of function, of medical countermeasures, of opening
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: up more biosecurity level four labs, of all of this
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: sort of biotech industry. Billions of dollars went into this industry,
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: this brand new industry. Remember, there was 9-11. Then there
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: were the anthrax attacks. Anthrax was mailed through the mail
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: to some news outlets and a couple senators on Capitol Hill.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: Never been solved. Thank you, FBI. Um, okay. Um, literally.
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 2: That's a given.
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: Okay. So, um.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: It created an entire industry about biodefense. And one of the...
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: One of the results of that was there is, many
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: people don't know about this, there is something called the
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: National Syndrome Surveillance System that monitors, that collects information in
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: real time from more than 7,000 emergency rooms, urgent care facilities,
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: yours included, All of these facilities across America, 7,000 of
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: them in the 50 states, that is a lot. All
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: the information goes in near real time to the CDC,
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: where it is kept, and monitored okay so it's a
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: very real system that is monitoring people the goal of
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: which was to create stop a pandemic if it happens
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: well how did that work out in covet not well
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: But a little loophole I found in it, which is,
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: you know, when you know this from your work in
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: the military, that a hole is exactly what an adversary targets.
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: And a fascinating hole to me is that, and this
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: I learned from working with the world's, or America's, most
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: senior epidemiologists, people who are trying to prevent, like, outbreaks
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: from taking over. And one of the holes in the
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: system that they pointed out to me was the homeless population.
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: There are 800,000 homeless people in America. None of their
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: information goes into that important CDC national syndromic syndrome. A
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: fact confirmed with me by HHS, by the way. So
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: if you have that kind of a gaping hole, where
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: are you going to target? Where are the super spreader events?
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: Where is there no health care? Where are these people
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: living on top of one another? Where are their symptoms
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: of disease going to be mistaken for a zillion other
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: things if they even have any access to a medical doctor.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: And so that is where I have the outbreak in
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: America because I was told by epidemiologists that is a
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: very serious warning.
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 2: With the last two books you've written, I cannot believe
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 2: you're still living in Los Angeles. You got to get
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 2: out to the woods, Annie.
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: I mean, driving around here, it's very beautiful, I have
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: to say.
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 2: We get a little walking around room out here.
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: But, you know, the idea of insurrection and anarchy at
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: the end of all of this, which is what happens,
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: which is what the Defense Department is preparing for. Sure,
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: the big cities are just like, get me out of
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: here really fast. But, There are components of all of this.
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 2: Um.
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: You know, I did... In every book, there's always a
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: couple interviews, a couple things that people say to you
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: that just is haunting. And one of them was from
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. So, I just mentioned
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: the anthrax attacks after 9-11. Daschle's office received an envelope
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: of weaponized anthrax. They all got an immediate dose of Cipro,
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: which is an antibiotic assumed to kill anthrax, and it did. Um,
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: but Daschle, Senator Tom Daschle has spent decades since working
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: on biodefense. He obviously is seriously concerned about this issue.
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: And in my interview with him, he said to me,
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: we were talking about nuclear war versus biowar. And he
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: said to me, unlike nuclear war, biological war will be
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: perhaps more terrifying because, and then he said, yes, it
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: will be death physically, death governmentally, death of everything we
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: know in America. But most horrifying is it will be,
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: this is his quote, people doing inhuman things to other
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: people just to survive. And that's that kind of.
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 2: Desperation.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: Desperation.
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 2: This happens in pretty much any event. I mean, eventually
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 2: people get to hunger, thirst, disease.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 2: Financial collapse.
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: And so out in the country, in the city, you know,
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: pick your battle, literally. And again, the point of me
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: working on these kind of scenarios is not to create panic.
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: It's to create pressure. It's to create conversation. You know,
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: if nuclear war was about, we need to have this
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: conversation while we can still have it, bio is about
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: stay informed. You know, because there is, there are actions
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: that people have to take in the event that this
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: kind of a situation happens. Period. Full stop. I mean, we,
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: you could look, COVID could have been this brilliant situation
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: from which to learn errors. Notice I said could have been. Instead,
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: it's like either total denial about what happened or, you know,
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: tribal anger about, you know, the wrongs that were done,
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: and there were many. And so that, I think, is...
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: worth reexamining. I think it would be really wise to
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: look at the problems that happened in COVID and not
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: make those same mistakes.
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, there's a lot of speculative narratives that
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 2: say that maybe that was an experiment to see how
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 2: the population would react.
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: I have not heard that one, the speculative narrative on that.
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: is that it's internal, domestic, or external?
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 2: I don't know. It could be both, you know. It
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 2: could be none. But, I mean, a lot of those
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 2: narratives running around, I mean, they wanted to see how
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 2: the people reacted. And if they, basically, if they listen
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 2: to the government or if they do not listen to
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 2: the government. And, you know, I don't know. I mean,
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 2: they definitely learned a lot. whoever, if it was an experiment.
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 2: Even if it wasn't an experiment, they learned a lot
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 2: about how we're going to react. Are we going to
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 2: take the vaccines? Are we going to do the... They learned,
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 2: are we going to stay in our homes? How long
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 2: are we going to stay in our homes? How long
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 2: are we going to buy this bullshit? You know, they
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 2: collected a lot of information there.
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: A lot of information, and I'm gonna really tap into
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: your fear about the National Syndromic Surveillance System here. Again,
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: it's a fact that... think about, and I'm amazed that
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: people don't ask this question, where did all the DNA
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: data go from those COVID tests? Because it was collected.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: And so.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: My eye as the journalist is like, why isn't... I mean,
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: I certainly have asked a zillion people. Um... What I
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: do know is that HHS, so again, an organization most
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: people have never heard of, maybe they heard of it
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: during COVID, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, current secretary,
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: RFK Jr., okay? An organization that most people have never
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: heard of that has a budget, an annual budget, twice
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: that of the Defense Department.
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: Really.
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 2: Twice that?
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: Twice. $ 1. 7 or $ 8 trillion is HHS. Defense Department is
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: about $ 900 million. And yet people don't even know what...
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: The CDC answers to HHS. The NIH, the National Institute
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: of Health, answers to HHS. The FDA answers to HHS.
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: Another situation I'm always fond of is like bringing to
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: the discussion, oh, there are some really interesting organizations that
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: you might want to know about. And again, speculative narrative
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: versus science fiction, science fact. HHS is the organization in
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: charge in the event of a biological incident or attack.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: that a biological incident is a lab leak. Okay? HHS
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: is in charge. Which is stunning to think about. Because
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: what I learned also writing this whole narrative is, like,
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: I actually wish DOD was in charge.
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 2: Really? Why is that?
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's a line I write in the book, like,
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: kind of at the midpoint where I'm like, where I,
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: you know, and again, I take you through what happens,
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: I take you tru... You know, the Defense Department trying
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: to figure out what's going on, what's happened. I have,
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: I start the, the inciting incident in the book is
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: an explosion at a BSL-4 lab in Russia, in Siberia.
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: It's called Vector. It's where a lot of the work
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: took place during the Cold War. It's a real lab.
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: There was actually a real explosion there in 2019. An
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: explosion at a BSL-4 lab is profoundly dangerous. At a
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: place like Russia where they're going to immediately not be transparent.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: it's even more dangerous. Or maybe you could say that
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: about every nation. But in the, you know, the cover-up begins.
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: And I've got, I show you, I show readers how
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: the Defense Department will be immediately eyes on trying to
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: figure out what's going on. They will work with the
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: State Department to try and get information. Information is king.
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: Denial is dangerous. In the Wuhan lab leak or natural,
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it, when Wuhan happened, the
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: Chinese government immediately shut down access to information. Incredibly dangerous.
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: I spoke to epidemiologists who actually believe that pandemic could
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: have been stopped. Had the Chinese government been transparent about
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: what happened. So that's a real plug for transparency. And
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: the more people that know about something, the more they're
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: going to demand transparency.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 2: Do you think they wanted to shut that down? COVID?
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: The big... You mean the China.
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 2: You think they wanted to contain it?
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: Did they want to contain it? That I don't know,
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: but what I do know is because biological weapons are illegal.
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: If any nation has bioweapons in their lab, they are certainly...
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: not going to be transparent about what happened.
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 2: Well, we already know. I mean, we already discussed the loopholes,
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 2: you know? We already discussed the loopholes. So, I mean,
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 2: it's an easy excuse. I mean, I think China learned
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 2: a lot about that. I mean, they also have the monopoly,
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 2: probably along with India, for all the PPE equipment and antibiotics, especially,
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 2: you know, the ones that, Ivermectin, you know, they could
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 2: have shut that down immediately because anything that, you know,
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 2: Patton is up on, we don't produce it. We don't
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 2: care about actual people. We just care about money here.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 2: And so they produce all that stuff.
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: And I think Americans learned a little bit about that
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: during COVID. We learned about the supply chain. Most people
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: were shocked to find out exactly what you just mentioned.
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: And yet very little has been done about that. Although
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: there are some, you know, manufacturing changes going on.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 2: Even when COVID happened, you know, there was the big
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 2: mask narrative. Oh, the masks are going to stop this shit.
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 2: Who makes all the masks? You get a virus that
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 2: comes from China, and then China supplies us with the
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 2: fucking masks that are supposed to protect us. And we're just...
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 2: Putting this shit on hook, line, and sinker, buddy. Like, oh, yeah, cool.
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 2: They're the ones that released the thing that leaked the virus.
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 2: And now they're gonna give us masks. We can't even
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: make our own fucking masks.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: We cannot make our own masks. And you can't even
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: have a grown-up in the room explain to people how
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: a mask works. So instead, you had sort of people going,
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: you know... When I was reporting the book at the
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: very tail end of COVID, I went to a BSL-3 lab. to,
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: you know, see what it was like. And these are
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: former USAMRID doctors. USAMRID is the U.S. Army Medical Research
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: of Infection... You know, it's where the BSL-4 lab is
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: And....
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: With regards to the masks, they were telling me that
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: if you are working in pathogens, it's just basic common
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: knowledge that an N95 mask you have to wear it
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: properly outfitted to your face. You get an actual lesson
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: in how to wear it, and it's suggested that you...
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: that it is only going to work for 15 minutes.
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: And that's an N95 mask.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 2: Those were gone in about two days.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: So the other kind of masks are essentially almost useless.
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: And I think that kind of.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 2: That's why we were wearing two of them.
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: I mean, people were wearing dirty masks, you know? And
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: sometimes you still see people walking around Los Angeles.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 2: That's a great looking face diaper you got on there.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: But that nobody spoke of this. And when I say nobody,
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: I mean like sort of a public official in a
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: position of authority. And meanwhile, I'm learning that all the
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: scientists in America are like shaking their head and going,
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: but afraid to speak out because they're going to be called,
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: you know.
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 2: Be ostracized.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: So this was just, again, a dangerous situation from which
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: extraordinary lessons could have been learned and were not.
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 2: Let's take a break. When we come back, we'll get
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 2: into the panic. We talk a lot on this show
• 1:23:21
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• 1:23:24
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• 1:23:27
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• 1:23:31
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• 1:25:59
  Speaker 2: get back to biological warfare. And so what does the
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 2: panic look like? Did you talk to people on what
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 2: that was? What that kind of desperation, that panic, what
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 2: would it do to society? How fast would it happen?
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: It happened so fast. So I like to try and
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: look at specifics again, to keep the narrative on actual documentation.
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: So we spoke a little bit earlier how an outbreak
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: of this pathogen I talk about, it starts with a
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: lab leak in Siberia, it winds up in Los Angeles
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: in a homeless camp. And so I looked And because
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: I live in Los Angeles and I am very familiar
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: with the public health system, I've lived there for 30 years,
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: the public health system, you know, law enforcement, I can
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: see a lot of the problems that have, to my eye,
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: that have happened over the decades. It wasn't always like this.
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: It certainly is just an absolute mess right now with
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: very little trust and real serious problems. So I looked at,
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: for example, what would happen in a biological attack in
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: Los Angeles, because unbeknownst to many people, big cities practice
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: these things. And they happen at the federal level, I learned,
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: and they also happen at the state level. And so,
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: Los Angeles state and county... California state and Los Angeles
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: county officials get, like, abysmally failing remarks in these efforts.
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: And this just goes completely unnoticed. Like, for example, we
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: put in a whole new 911 system recently, like in
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: the past few years, and it completely failed upon its
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: original test. Like a system overrun. You know, there are
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: stories of people calling all the time people are posting
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: on X, like 911 from Los Angeles, and then you
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: can see how many minutes they've been on hold, like
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: 13 minutes on hold, just to have your call answered.
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: So this is a real serious problem day to day.
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: Imagine if there was a biological incident where timing is everything.
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: Timing is everything you have to get the information out
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: to the people. And instead I learned really interesting details like, okay,
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: so Los Angeles has a 100,000 bottle of Cipro. ciprofloxacin,
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: which is antibiotic stash.
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 2: 100,000?
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: 100,000 bottles.
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 2: How many people does that treat?
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: For the city officials. And I break it down of
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: who it goes to. And so you've got like 16,000
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: bottles going to first responders. Obviously they need it. And
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: then like a bunch of them going to like the
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: zoo officials. and the cultural affairs officials. I mean, I'm
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: not kidding. I gave you the numbers. So it seems
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: to be really poorly thought out. And really, what I
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: wanted to know is what happens to law enforcement? What
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: happens to first responders? I did an interview with a
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: fire commissioner named Jimmy Hara, who unfortunately, like, died tragically
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: last month in a car accident.
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, man.
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: I know. And he was an incredible person. Completely dedicated.
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, he served as a doctor in Vietnam. and
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: he's been dedicated to L.A. public health and fire safety
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: ever since. And he told me just flat out, um,
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: Los Angeles is completely unprepared for a pneumonic plague attack. Period.
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 2: Full stop.
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: And then he took me through some of the details
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: of what would happen. So I, like, in mixing these
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: documents with interviews like, um, Fire Commissioner Hara, I could
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: begin to see that it's just complete ignorance. It's like
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: being an ostrich with your head in the sand. And
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: the 100 bottles of Cipro, I also learned, have this, like,
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: wacky program attached to it. And I was going somewhere
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: in this, which is where you're asking, where is the
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: hole for insurrection and anarchy that the Defense Department and
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: their documents is so worried about? Like, how does that happen?
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: That's what I wanted to really drill down on so
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: that I could explain it to readers. And the 100,000
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: bottles are just a perfect example that would repeat around
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: the country. this 100-bottle supply gets dispersed by volunteers. How
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: does that work? How do you have... Imagine if you
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: had a biological incident where you've got pneumonic plague with
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: 100% death rate, no known cure, airborne, killing homeless people,
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: you know, which is being mistaken for something else, a
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: mass overdose, for example, because that's happening all over the country.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: That's what epidemiologists are worried about. You've got law enforcement, unprotected,
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: rushing in to help. And then you've got this kind
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: of wild chaos at City Hall, rather in the emergency
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: department of the city planners, and they're like, get the
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: Cipro out to everybody. And they make an announcement on Facebook,
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: which then goes viral. And so now you have everybody
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: in Los Angeles trying to access what they believe is
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: the medical countermeasure which will save their lives and the
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: lives of their family members. And America is a nation
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: of guns. 500 million guns in America, according to a
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: Gallup poll. That's, so you can see, that's where insurrection
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: and anarchy happens. That's the Daschle quote. People doing inhuman
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: things just to survive. And, by the way, not from
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: Annie Jacobson's imagination, looking at declassified or unclassified War games
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: that game this out show that is exactly what happened.
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: People begin to kill one another over perceived medical countermeasures.
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: It's a grim story.
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think it's pretty obvious. I don't think
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 2: people think about it, but I mean, of course. What
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 2: measure are you gonna take to save your husband and
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 2: your kids? And it's going to be like that until
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 2: the playing field is level and it looks like Yemen, Afghanistan,
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 2: where there is not really much social hierarchy. Everybody's on
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 2: the same playing field. You know what I mean? Yeah.
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 2: And so it will continue until that happens, until all
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 2: the resources have been ransacked. It's done. There's nothing left
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 2: to ransack. And then you have to learn to survive
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 2: off it.
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: The devolution component of that that was stunning to me
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: was that what the Defense Department prepares for. So what's
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: interesting is, I mentioned before that HHS is in charge
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: of this when it happens. But very quickly, HHS realizes
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: in its wargaming that they need the military's help. This
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: is page one. Because, for example, they can't get supplies
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: out to the states. And you're talking about, when you're
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: talking about a pathogen that's killing people in like 48 hours,
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: speed is everything. And so they're trying to get medical
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: countermeasures out to states. And they need the military's help.
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: They need transportation command. And so I had this moment
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: in working on this book where I realized that I
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, my God, like, not since World War II
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: will Americans be so happy to see the military show
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: up in their town or their city to try and,
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: you know, regain control, to try and bring back order
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: in sort of the insurrection that will be unfolding as
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: people begin to panic.
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 2: I mean, maybe they would be happy.
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: Well, I think a lot of people would be happy
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: because not everybody's criminally minded, okay? And are gonna be thinking,
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: Help is on the way.
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, how is the military gonna treat the infected?
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: And that's where it gets.
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 2: Especially if they don't have an antidote.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: So the military, I learned, and you probably know this,
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 1: has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its personnel. So
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: you have, imagine, so the military are protected. And now
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: you have another situation, which is, the mask becomes a
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: coveted item. So now you have president declaring an Insurrection
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: Act so that posse comitatus can be overridden. Posse comitatus,
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: the act after the Civil War that prohibits the military
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: from carrying out law enforcement measures in the United States,
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: that gets repealed with Insurrection Act. It's the only act
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: that can do that. The president has the authority to
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: declare it whenever he chooses, okay? So the Insurrection Act
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: gets laid down, and now military can act with those orders,
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: same as in a war theater. So there's like a
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: moment in time, it seemed to my eye writing this,
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: where order could be restored. But then I learned that
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: there's only so many military, and there are 340 million Americans.
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: So you do the math. And then you realize that
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: with shoot-to-kill orders and the fact that the devolution plan
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: calls for the crit... There's a component of American infrastructure
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: called critical infrastructure. You don't even really think about it
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: until you hopefully read about it in my book and go,
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: of course, like, the roadways, everything from the communication systems,
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: the banking systems, the roads, the nuclear power plants.
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 2: The electrical grid.
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 1: The electrical grid.
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 2: Water treatment plants.
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: Water treatment. Waste water. This is critical infrastructure, and that
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: needs to be guarded. And that's what the military begins
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: to guard. And the military must also guard the hot sites,
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: the cold sites I told you about earlier, where the
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: devolution crews are going to. And so, this kind of
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: really spooky, almost science fiction, but again, it's science fact,
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: kicks in in my reporting and as I write in
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: the book, where you begin to see what unfolds and
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: how it is sort of almost inevitable, the outcome of devolution.
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: Because the center can't hold because the people cannot, the
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: people do not know what is happening to them and
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: have no way of understanding what lies ahead.
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 2: I mean, if you want a small, like a small window,
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 2: like a very small window of what that looks like,
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 2: you can go to Florida during hurricane season and you
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 2: see how fast everything is gone, how people treat each other.
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 2: That's one of the reasons I moved out of there.
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: What was that experience like for you with the hurricane?
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 2: I mean, it was....
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: Was there kind of like some anarchy going on?
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 2: I mean, I would not say anarchy at all. But
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 2: I mean, there are... And I've always... You know what
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 2: I used to do, so I'm pretty prepared. And I
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 2: always have been. But you're looking at gas lines that
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 2: are hours and hours long. You're looking at, you know,
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 2: and people hoard. So you got a guy show up
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 2: with a trailer and he fills up his car and
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 2: he fills up his boat and then he fills up
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 2: all his gas cans. You know what I mean? And
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 2: you're wondering, is there going to be any gas left
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 2: for me? All the bottled water is gone. All the
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 2: food is gone. All the plywood is gone. All the
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 2: generators are gone. within 24 hours. And then you're waiting
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 2: for X updates to see which Home Depot has been
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 2: resupplied with plywood so that you can go board your
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 2: windows up or which Walmart has some extra generators. And
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 2: the last hurricane that went there, this was like, I'm
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 2: out of here. This isn't for me. There was a
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 2: traffic jam from Miami, Florida, all the way to Atlantic, Georgia.
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 2: The entire route.
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: Everybody trying to get out. Everybody trying to get out
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: of Dodge.
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 2: Everybody's trying to funnel out on a couple of highways,
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 2: and it's stop-and-go traffic. People are, they run out of gas.
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 2: They're pulled over on the side of the road. Everybody's hoarding.
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 2: I mean, the grocery store is legitimate. They're empty in
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 2: 24 hours.
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: Were people behaving, like, were they following traffic laws? Were
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: people driving on the grass?
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's bottlenecked.
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: It's bottlenecked.
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 2: There are no traffic laws. I mean, you can't get anywhere.
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 2: It's gridlocked. Wow. You know, I mean, a gas line,
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 2: I mean, will go all the way down the interstate.
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 2: So let me ask you, That's a hurricane. That's a hurricane.
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 2: And that hurricane didn't even mess... It was like a joke.
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 2: I think it was Hurricane Matthew. I mean, then you
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 2: have all these memes everywhere, the mass panic. Hurricane doesn't
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 2: even hit. And I think it was Matthew. I could
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 2: be mistaken. And then you see all these memes, like
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 2: the days after a show, like a lawn chair flipped
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 2: upside down. We will rebuild.
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: The threat of hurricane was... even as compulsive as a
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: hurricane itself.
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, just the threat. I mean, I... What were we
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 2: calling it? Speculative narratives. You know, I mean, I've had
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 2: speculative narrative that, I mean, maybe these corporations are paying
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 2: the news cycles to overhype this because the amount of
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 2: revenue that happens instantaneously for everything, booze, Cigarettes, gas, generators, everything. Plywood, water, bullets, guns. Bullets.
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 2: People get worried that they're just going to last forever,
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 2: and they go stock up on bullets. They go buy
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 2: their first AR-15.
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: Was there any site of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency?
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 2: No.
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: No. Because FEMA, what do you think about FEMA?
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 2: Well, I don't really know much about it. I don't
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 2: think they come in until afterwards, right? But I've never
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 2: had any experience with FEMA.
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: But FEMA is another one of those really interesting organizations
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: that's almost not known about. And by the way, they're
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: the ones in charge of the devolution program, so consider that.
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 2: I mean, those FEMA's all, it's not volunteers, but I
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 2: know a lot of people after the hurricanes or after
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 2: a natural disaster, they'll do a mass hire and they
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 2: pay supposedly pretty well. So, you got a bunch of
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 2: people that are, you know, got hired yesterday that are
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 2: running shit.
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: Which, and again, like, the military is so interesting to
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: me always has been how they function, how it's a
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: system of systems, flaws, weaknesses, strengths. But the military has
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: professional individuals who have a lot of experience doing what
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: they're doing. And to your point, when you have an
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: organization that's like, has like attention on it very sporadically,
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: you really have an organization of bureaucrats, you know, sort
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: of pencil pushers, like very sort of straight-minded individuals who
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: are not gifted, shall we say, with flexibility as a
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 1: leading character. They're really about organization. And then suddenly there's
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: a crisis that's a really a mismatch of professionalism, which
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: I think FEMA really drastically suffers from. And yet it's
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: in the event of these sort of mass catastrophes. They're
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 1: called complex catastrophes. The FEMA director calls it a maximum
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: of maximums event. That's really what they're planning for behind
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: the scenes. And yet so few of their people are
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: actually equipped like military personnel. And again, this is just
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: my opinion, having studied all of this. Seems like that
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: needs a big reconfiguring. The question is, of course, as
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: we move into the future with science moving so fast,
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: are these threats, weapons of mass destruction that sort of
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 1: hinge upon science, whether it's nuclear, bio, drones. Are they
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: making us move faster into toward a catastrophe? Maybe. They
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: could also be working faster toward solution. And if so,
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: what is the government doing to kind of stay on
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: top of that? And what I think is happening is
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: not much. Government's consumed with, you know, all kinds of
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 1: inside baseball problems, political tribalism.
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 2: And.
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: the public's consumed with what should be called speculative narratives
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: and instead being called conspiracy theories. So it's just creating
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: this extraordinary fracture, a further fracturing from solution toward more chaos.
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: Which is, you know, again, I write these books because
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: I really believe that being informed, it gives you, it
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: gives you lift, it gives you a little bit of
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: height being able to assess the situation about what's best
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: for you and your family. And it also, it takes
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: away in a big component, I think at least for me,
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: of like doom and gloom inevitable. Because I don't want
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: to just think America is doomed and we're just going downhill.
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: I just, I'm too much of a happy American to
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: take that path.
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 2: Good.
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: Am I alone?
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 2: I have hope. There's a lot of us. But I'm
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 2: also prepared. Mm-hmm. Because I've seen too many things go
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 2: sour in my previous life. I did get you a present.
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: I can't remember. I've been talking. I can't remember.
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 2: You can't remember what?
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: Did I get a present?
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 2: I got you a present.
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: You did get me a present.
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh, okay. Should I give it to you now? Sure.
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: I thought you said, did I give you a present?
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 2: No, no, no. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: You got me Joe Kent's long rifle, part two?
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 2: I would love to get you Joe Kent's long rifle.
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: I have two young men who are like, Mom, I
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: hope you get the long rifle from Sig.
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 2: Unfortunately, the state you live in can't do that. Are
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 2: you kidding me? Here we go.
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: You are kidding me. You are kidding me. Sean, this
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: is amazing. I am now prepared for bio- There we go.
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: Biological war scenario.
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 2: Well, I don't know about that. We might need to
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 2: get some gas masks and some other things, maybe some
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 2: water filtration. But you're prepared for mass panic to defend
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 2: your home now.
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: This is pretty incredible. I'm really amazed. Thank you so much.
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 2: You're welcome. Sig. Sig. So I got a friend over there.
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 2: His name's Jason. He's VP of marketing. And he heard
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 2: you were coming on and he loved the nuclear war
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 2: scenario interview. So he wanted me to give that to you.
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 2: It's got the SIG flashlight on there. So, so you're
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 2: not ever in the dark and the new SIG Romeo
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 2: optic red dot. So, so you can fix a lot of,
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 2: you can, you can skip right through a lot of
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 2: fundamentals of shooting and just point and pull the trigger
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 2: with that thing, put that red dot on there.
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm going to be sure to get a lot
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: of lessons. And I do also know in, This is
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: going to be like a subject of envy, the good
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: kind of envy from a number of people I know.
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: So thank you so much.
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 2: You're welcome.
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: That is pretty incredible, Sean.
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 2: We'll do a little lesson after this, hopefully.
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: Yes, that would be an honor. Literally, my kids were,
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: that was like a joke about the Joe Kent long gun,
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: and that's not far away. So I'm flustered. I'm amazed.
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: Thank you, really.
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 2: You're welcome.
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: It takes a lot to fluster me, so... Right?
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 2: Is that your first firearm?
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 1: I do have two firearms.
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 2: Oh, nice.
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: Right? But not that one.
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 2: Right on. Yeah. Well, I hope you enjoy it.
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much. You know, I mean, California is
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: an interesting state in terms of all of that. But
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: speaking of the pandemic, when the pandemic happened, like, every
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: ammo shop ran out of ammo.
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 2: I remember seeing the lines of... of people in California
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 2: that were arming themselves. And I remember being disgusted with
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 2: the Second Amendment community because they were making fun of it.
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 2: And they were like, these people shouldn't even have firearms.
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 2: They're basically Democrats getting firearms. And I was just, I'm
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 2: thinking like, what the hell is wrong with you, man? Like,
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 2: here you are complaining about Second Amendment rights and gun
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 2: rights nonstop. all day and all night. And now you
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 2: have the other side of the aisle that is trying
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 2: to arm themselves, and everybody's on the same page. And
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 2: you're gonna bastardize them for it.
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: That's incredible. I mean, that's a great point, right? That's like,
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: that gets into the sort of when people start having
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: self-righteous indignation about when they shouldn't. They should be like, congratulations,
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: you know. Um, I had an interesting story with a firearm. Okay,
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna... I've got to think if I can tell this. Okay,
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: so I get jury duty in Los Angeles. Being a
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: good citizen, I go to do my jury duty. This
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: was several years ago. This was before COVID.
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 2: I bet everyone was like, holy shit, Andy Jacobson's on
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 2: jury duty with me.
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: No, no. I'm like in a room full of people
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: who are all like, why am I here?
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 2: Okay. But....
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: So before COVID, I didn't own any firearms, but I
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: did own a firearm because my grandfather was a captain
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: in the army who was behind enemy lines in what
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: was then called Czechoslovakia, who became like the guy in
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: charge when the war ended and took a Luger off
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: a Nazi and brought it home.
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: Okay?
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 2: So.
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: this was in the possession of my mother. And when...
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: Then it was given to me to give to my son.
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: One of my two sons. And it's a really incredible artifact,
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 1: because it actually, like, they're all identifiable to certain Nazis.
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: And in... At the end, there's... It comes with a
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: certificate from the War Department. So it's war booty, but
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: you were allowed to actually have it. So it's officially...
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: My grandfather's. And now, okay, so it's in our house.
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's incredible, right? Just as a piece of, you know,
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 1: I have his Purple Heart and his Luger.
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 2: Man, that is.
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 2: What a great heirloom.
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: So there I am doing jury duty, and it's a
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: police brutality trial. And, um... one of the questions that
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: they're asking as they're trying to select jurors is who
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 1: has a firearm, right? So I'm down here, I'm like, okay,
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: being a good citizen, I'm under oath, you know? Of
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: course I raise my hand because I do. I am,
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: and by the way, this is before jury selection, so
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: there's 50 people in this room, in this courthouse, all
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 1: of whom under oath or the variation of that, okay?
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 1: I'm the only one who raises my hand of having
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: a firearm.
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: And I was like, Like, what? How is this even possible?
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: And when I was home that night at dinner, I
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: had this discussion with my kids and my husband, and
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: they're like, Mom, everyone in LA has illegal guns. And
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: they don't want to admit it. Now, I have no
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: idea if that's true, but it's a very interesting observation.
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: And what is true is that no one else raised
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: their hand. Man. Maybe it's a little sort of perception
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: versus reality, right? No one wanted to admit they had
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 1: a firearm. I have no idea.
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 2: I could see it either way. When I'm traveling in
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 2: the summer, the routine is always the first thing to slip.
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 2: Different schedule, different bed, late nights, early mornings, and you're
• 1:52:22
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  Speaker 2: When you talk to these people, I mean, what are
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 2: the different scenarios? Do they have scenarios where it's certain
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 2: parts of the country? Do they have scenarios where they
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 2: use the country to spread it globally? Where are the targets? What, what,
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 2: you know, I mean, obviously if you want to spread,
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 2: I mean, if it was me and I wanted to
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 2: spread one globally, then I would definitely obviously hit the airports, right?
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 2: You would release it in the airports because people are
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 2: constantly coming and going and it would be impossible for,
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 2: to be able to trace, trace it at that point.
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 2: And it would spread like, I mean, with all, if
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 2: you wanted to hit it more locally and can try
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 2: to keep it contained, I guess, what would you head?
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 2: You would hit probably, unfortunately, schools, grocery stores?
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 1: Well, a lot of early wargaming planning was predicated on
• 1:55:54
  Speaker 1: precisely those kinds of scenarios, like what would happen, how
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: would the targets disperse. In the past 20 years or so,
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: with the advent, or rather the advancement of genetic engineering,
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 1: all of that no longer pretty much matters. And we
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: saw this in COVID. It wants an airborne pathogen, right?
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: So there used to only be a very few truly
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: airborne pathogens that a medical countermeasure didn't exist for. And
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: so you would have to kind of do exactly what
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: you're talking about, like have multiple targets. This was the
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 1: terrorist threat. But now that an airborne pathogen can be
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 1: modified with ease, we saw in COVID that it just
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: begins to spread naturally on its own. And if you
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: shorten the window of, you know, contagion to death, you
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: have one kind of effect. If you lengthen it, right? So,
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: COVID had a lot of sort of what were silent
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: carriers for a long time. Now it's spreading in a
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: different manner. And so, as a result, most of the
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: war games have begun to focus on two things, which
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 1: is like, first and foremost, and this is probably upsetting
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: to a lot of people, is how to keep infected
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 1: people out of the United States of America. There was one, um,
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: war game that I write about in particular. So, I
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: take the reader through the scenario and then I kind
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 1: of stop for, like, little history lessons about different war games.
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: And one of them that was conducted in 2018, uh,
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: describes boats of migrants. There's an outbreak in, uh, South America. So,
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: you've got all these panicked, leaving Venezuela in boats headed
• 1:57:45
  Speaker 1: to Puerto Rico, hundreds of miles away, okay? This is
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 1: actually war-gamed out. You can read it online. And they
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: have the CDC officials deciding what to do. Like, do
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: we actually let them come on land? And the answer
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 1: is no. And then the subtext is.
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: Rules of engagement. Right? Now, that is something And then,
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: of course, you have another debate within this war game
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: about how to deal with the press. Like, if we
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 1: start shooting at migrants in boats, we're gonna have a
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 1: real problem that's gonna be all over, you know, the news.
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 1: And that kind of candor in planning for a biological
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: incident was shocking to me. Because... it really gets at
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: the heart of the matter of the kind of sort
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 1: of ruthless sort of, you know, fortressing that Homeland Security
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: will immediately try to do if the pathogen is outside
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 1: trying to come in. But what you learn from the
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: war gaming is that the pathogen is almost always certainly
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: already here. I mean, remember when President Trump's first administration,
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 1: COVID happens, he closes the border with Europe. He's, you know,
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 1: restricted any flights from China The pathogen is already here.
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: People have it in New York City. People have it
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: in Seattle. Um, I did an interview with the former
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 1: defense official in Italy, the defense minister. And he was telling,
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 1: because there was a huge outbreak in Italy.
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 2: I remember.
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 1: Remember that? And you know why? It was because in Milan,
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 1: which is a fashion capital of the world, had Chinese,
• 1:59:23
  Speaker 1: you know, individuals working in manufacturing Milan to China. They
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 1: had brought it to China. Another interesting fact I learned
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: from the FEMA chief is that most of the initial
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: cases of COVID in New York City were from Italy,
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 1: not from Wuhan. And they can tell this through genetic
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: testing later to determine the variants.
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 2: Did it start in New York or did it start
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 2: in Washington?
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 1: In the United States, the first cases were in Washington.
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: But the real panic, the real sort of like, oh,
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: my God, it's here moments, was once New York City
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 1: was infected. Because then people realized there's no way to
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: stop this because of movement, you know. I looked at
• 2:00:05
  Speaker 1: bubonic plague, the Black Death, the plague of the Black Death,
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: because bubonic plague becomes pneumonic plague in the lungs. And
• 2:00:13
  Speaker 1: I wanted to show readers historically what has happened and
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 1: what is possible. And what was interesting is, you know,
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 1: I learned this very unique fact that, of course, pathogens
• 2:00:25
  Speaker 1: travel at the rate at which humans move. So in
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: the time of the Black Death, in the 1400s, in
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: the 14th century, people moved by caravan. People moved by ship.
• 2:00:38
  Speaker 1: So it was like slow, right? Now people move by airplane.
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 1: You know, you can get from one side of the
• 2:00:45
  Speaker 1: Earth to the other in 15 hours. That's how fast
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: things happen.
• 2:00:51
  Speaker 2: But they're still gonna attempt to.
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: And I show that in the beginning of the book,
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 1: because this is where you have the epidemiologists. This is
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 1: where you have public health officials. This is where you have...
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 1: By the way, I mean, by no means do I
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: mean to make everybody in government sound like, you know,
• 2:01:10
  Speaker 1: some kind of incompetent bureaucrat. That is simply not the case.
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 1: The individuals that I interview, and I list them all
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 1: in the front of the book, like COVID, I mean,
• 2:01:19
  Speaker 1: like the nuclear war book, so that people can see, wow,
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: You know, she's talking to the top subject matter experts
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: in public health, in defense, in federal emergency management. Extraordinarily
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: competent people, desperately trying, literally, to, you know, bring these
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: different factions of the government together to pay attention to
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: this threat. To actually take actions so that America is
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 1: prepared for such a thing. And I show... their stories
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: that they tell me of, like, how the good part
• 2:01:58
  Speaker 1: of that, of, like, how they have made progress, and
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: then also where they are so failing. And the failures
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: are always political.
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 2: What measures would they go to through to isolate an incident?
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 1: So one of the first... It's this super important question.
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 1: Quarantine does exist, but before that, it's all about diagnostics.
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 1: We were talking about that a little bit earlier, like,
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: You went and had a COVID test, right? Now that
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 1: has spiraled into its whole set of rabbit hole problems.
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 1: But the diagnostics, the testings are important because very few
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 1: people realize that the doctor doesn't know what he's looking at.
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: The doctor doesn't know. You can walk in with a
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: sneeze and a cough and the doctor doesn't know. That's
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: why the doctor will say, I think you have....
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 1: Want me to give you an example that's kind of
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 1: easy to wrap your head around?
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 2: Uh-huh. Okay.
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: Strep throat. Have you had strep throat?
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: Recently?
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 2: No. Okay.
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 1: So, strep throat, you know, you go in like, doctor,
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: my throat hurts. They give you a strep test. Strep
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 1: is a bacteria. Bacteria are killed by antibiotics. You go
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 1: into the doctor. You say, I have a strep. They
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: give you a strep test. Because strep is ubiquitous, the
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: test often happens in the back of the doctor's office.
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: It takes five minutes for a strep test. When I
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 1: was growing up in the 70s, a strep test took
• 2:03:34
  Speaker 1: two or three days. That's science. When you were growing up,
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 1: it probably took 10 minutes, okay? Now it's down to
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 1: a couple minutes. The minute the doctor knows you have
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: strep throat bacteria, You are prescribed antibiotics. You usually drive
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: to the local pharmacy on the way home from the
• 2:03:53
  Speaker 1: doctor's office, certainly if your kids have strep. You want
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: to get that antibiotic in them right away. Okay, now
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 1: they're fighting the pathogen. They're not going to get more sick.
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 1: They're on the path to wellness. You go in there
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: for strep and the doctor gives you the strep test
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: and it comes back negative because you have a virus,
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 1: not strep. Antibiotics do nothing for a virus. That's why
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: the doctor sometimes says, go home and drink tea. You know,
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: take some Advil. Call me tomorrow. So that's diagnostics. If
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 1: you know what someone has, now you can begin to
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 1: treat it. So, so much of biowar is predicated on testing.
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 1: It's predicated on testing. People need, which is that dual-edged
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: sword because no one wants to like give all their
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 1: information to the government. So, Again, that would be another
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 1: situation where people realize, no, if there is an outbreak
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 1: of something, testing actually helps you and your family.
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 2: What is the... What lengths is the government willing to
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 2: go to contain? You know, I mean, we saw just
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 2: in COVID, I mean, entering a department store, entering it,
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 2: they get the thermometer gun where they're... taking your head temperature,
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 2: you know what I mean, everywhere you go. And that was,
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 2: I mean, at the time, you know, if you were
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 2: in a car wreck and you happen to have COVID,
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 2: you died of COVID. So they overinflated the numbers and
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 2: it made it sound worse. And I think it took
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 2: a couple months for everybody to catch on. And I
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 2: think the majority of people caught on relatively quickly. And,
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 2: you know, at least around here, that shit didn't last
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 2: very long. Yeah, look at New York, and you got
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 2: people eating in bubbles, like inflatable bubbles in restaurants, and
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 2: everything's shut down. And California, we've all heard the stories there.
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 1: Our governor closed our parks.
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we couldn't go to the beach, get arrested for surfing.
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: Which is the place to go, by the way, like
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 1: fresh air, but keep going, yeah.
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 2: But, you know, so anyways, what I'm getting at is
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 2: that was, I mean, that was... overreaction to a virus
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 2: that did minimal damage. What is the government willing to
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 2: do for something like Ebola? Are they gonna surround the
• 2:06:23
  Speaker 2: city with the military? Are they gonna have rules of engagement?
• 2:06:29
  Speaker 2: Are they gonna have an escalation of force? Are they
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 2: gonna kill people? What are they gonna do?
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: Yes to every one of those questions, right? And by
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 1: the way, COVID was, you know, essentially a, I mean,
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: a lot of people died. And to them, it was
• 2:06:47
  Speaker 1: a lot, obviously, to their family members. But in the
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 1: scope of things, a pathogen with a 1% case fatality
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 1: rate is nothing. And so if you have a select,
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 1: a tier one select agent, where you have a case
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: fatality rate of 30%, 50%, or 100%, The extreme measures
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 1: that the government will go to, there's no such thing
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: as too extreme. Quarantine is, the president can, there are
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 1: legally quarantinable diseases, and the president will absolutely declare a quarantine.
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 1: So then the issue becomes, well, how do you enforce
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 1: a quarantine, which is why the military comes in, and
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: the military can only come in if they have two lanes.
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: The military can function under what is called defense support
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 1: of civil authorities. And it's just like it sounds. The
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: Defense Department is supporting the states, the law enforcement. That's
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 1: when you see the National Guard come in. They do
• 2:07:59
  Speaker 1: not have rules of engagement like the normal military because
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 1: they're in support of the governor. When the Insurrection Act
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 1: is declared, and it will be in a catastrophic biological event,
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: the military has rules of engagement. essentially America is a
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 1: war theater.
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 2: America is what?
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 1: A war theater.
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 1: You know? And I did this really interesting.
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 2: It's not going to work. You just said there's 500
• 2:08:29
  Speaker 2: million guns in the country. Good luck.
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 1: And so this is the kind of bloodbath. This is
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 1: that quote from Tom Daschle, people doing inhuman things just
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 1: to survive. And there are contingency plans in place. And
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 1: what I learned is, of course, the tip of the iceberg.
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 1: But it is enough that I describe in the scenario to,
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 1: I think, really get people thinking, like, just like nuclear war,
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 1: this is a catastrophic situation that we don't even want
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: to get even close to. And so what are the solutions?
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 1: What are the solutions, you know? And I believe those
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 1: are always there. When you read the worst case possible scenario,
• 2:09:09
  Speaker 1: you begin to be able to think in terms of
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: solution because you're aware of what can happen.
• 2:09:18
  Speaker 2: I mean, nobody's going to listen even if you do surround.
• 2:09:21
  Speaker 2: Even if you were to surround Nashville with military and
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 2: the ROEs were to shoot anybody that's leaving and you
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 2: have something like Ebola break out, how would you rather die?
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 2: Bleeding out from every orifice in your body or being
• 2:09:41
  Speaker 2: shot and slides out immediately? I know which way I
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 2: want to go.
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is, you know, This kind of maximum
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 1: of maximum events is something that used to be very
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 1: far afield in planning, I believe. You know, it was
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 1: kind of in the Cold War, there was a real
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 1: effort to push for what was called civil defense. You know,
• 2:10:10
  Speaker 1: it was this idea that you could save the population
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 1: from itself. that everybody would sort of go along to
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 1: get along. And those days are completely over. And what
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 1: is left is essentially what's called continuity of government. COG.
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: That's the acronym. And it's exactly like it sounds. The
• 2:10:34
  Speaker 1: government must continue. You know, there's another interesting detail I learned. So,
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 1: you know about DEFCON, Defense Readiness Condition. And, you know,
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 1: five is where we normally are. And then at 9-11,
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 1: it went to three. At nuclear war, it's going to
• 2:10:53
  Speaker 1: go to one. That means nuclear war. Two is like
• 2:10:55
  Speaker 1: nuclear war. We don't know because it's classified whether we've
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 1: ever gone to DEFCON 2, but DEFCON 3 was 9-11.
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 1: There is a similar civilian readiness condition that exists that
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 1: FEMA is in charge of. the agency many people have
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 1: never heard of or aren't sure what it does, the
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: agency in charge of devolution. And it's called COGCON. Again,
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 1: completely classified program. The term itself has been declassified, which
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 1: is why former FEMA director Craig Fugate could discuss it
• 2:11:34
  Speaker 1: with me. And there are four levels. And when COGCON1
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 1: gets declared, that's the triggering point for devolution. So the
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 1: situation you're talking about is going to go in concert
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 1: with DEFCON, you know, as the situation ratchets up. And
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 1: then once you hit COGCON1, devolution protocols, and then everybody
• 2:11:59
  Speaker 1: leaves Washington, D.C. It's called the National Capital Regional. I
• 2:12:03
  Speaker 1: love that there's all this weird nomenclature that, like, keeps
• 2:12:06
  Speaker 1: the rest of us out. And I think, you know,
• 2:12:09
  Speaker 1: why is that? But it's not called Washington, D.C. It's
• 2:12:11
  Speaker 1: called the National Capital Region. And everybody departs and goes
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 1: to their bunkers and the military moves into the States.
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 2: Not a great scenario. Let's switch gears here real quick.
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 2: We got a hot question for you.
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 1: 100%.
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 2: July 25th, 1946, Bikini Atoll. Wow. There are only seven
• 2:12:40
  Speaker 2: atomic bombs on the entire planet. And the U.S. is
• 2:12:43
  Speaker 2: about to spend one blowing up its own ships underwater
• 2:12:47
  Speaker 2: to see what happens. That bomb was called Baker. And
• 2:12:50
  Speaker 2: it became the first time humanity really understood what fallout was.
• 2:12:55
  Speaker 2: The ships that survived the blast were so radioactive they
• 2:12:59
  Speaker 2: had to abandon the cleanup because it was killing the
• 2:13:01
  Speaker 2: sailors doing it. Bikini is still uninhabitable today, 80 years later.
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 2: Can you walk us through Baker? Because this is the
• 2:13:10
  Speaker 2: moment we learned a nuke doesn't just destroy, it poisons
• 2:13:14
  Speaker 2: everything for generations.
• 2:13:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a fascinating moment in time that's being discussed there.
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 1: And journalist detail, just because I have spent my life
• 2:13:28
  Speaker 1: interviewing people who have actually been there.
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 2:13:32
  Speaker 1: It's what gives me a little bit of an authority.
• 2:13:35
  Speaker 1: And I mean that, like, as an author. You know,
• 2:13:38
  Speaker 1: I wasn't there like you were in the war theater.
• 2:13:41
  Speaker 1: I never have been, but I interviewed him. So the
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 1: man who wired that bomb, who wired the Baker bomb,
• 2:13:48
  Speaker 1: he armed, wired, and fired it. His name is Alfred O'Donnell.
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 1: He's now dead. But I interviewed him for my book
• 2:13:56
  Speaker 1: Area 51, which was sort of my first foray into
• 2:14:00
  Speaker 1: nuclear weapons. And O'Donnell was with a small team of
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 1: engineers called EG & G. And so even more interesting
• 2:14:09
  Speaker 1: is that O'Donnell walked me through how do you, like
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 1: I said to him, how do you wire, how do
• 2:14:15
  Speaker 1: you arm, wire, wire, arm and fire a nuclear weapon?
• 2:14:22
  Speaker 1: To which he said, well, that's really classified, but I
• 2:14:24
  Speaker 1: can give you the layman's version of it, okay? Because that,
• 2:14:28
  Speaker 1: by the way, is what prohibits most rogue groups from
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 1: being able to acquire a nuclear weapon. They don't have
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 1: the arming and firing device. That's what's so jealously guarded.
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 1: It's incredibly complex. Al O'Donnell never left the country. He
• 2:14:49
  Speaker 1: never left the country because he would be kidnapped. And
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 1: he had a minder until he died. Like an FBI
• 2:14:56
  Speaker 1: minder keeping eyes on him. Kind of always watching us
• 2:14:59
  Speaker 1: whenever I was interviewing him. Having lunch with him. at
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 1: the Chinese restaurant, he had a lot of secrets. He
• 2:15:05
  Speaker 1: wired 186 nuclear weapons for the government in the Marshall
• 2:15:11
  Speaker 1: Islands and in Nevada. And what I learned about that
• 2:15:15
  Speaker 1: Baker bomb is that in those days, we've been talking
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 1: about how science and technology have advanced, there was no
• 2:15:24
  Speaker 1: remote wiring system the way there is now. I mean,
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 1: it did exist, but it wasn't ubiquitous, right? So now
• 2:15:32
  Speaker 1: you do this and you blow something up at a distance.
• 2:15:36
  Speaker 1: Or you do this and you blow... So they had cables.
• 2:15:40
  Speaker 1: Have you ever seen that photograph of that? It's like
• 2:15:43
  Speaker 1: ships in the atoll and you see this mushroom cloud
• 2:15:46
  Speaker 1: and coming up out of the water.
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 2: I have an actual.
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's an incredible photo.
• 2:15:51
  Speaker 2: We'll put it up on screen.
• 2:15:52
  Speaker 1: Incredible photo. And O'Donnell took me through how they had
• 2:15:57
  Speaker 1: to lay cables from the arming facility to the actual bomb.
• 2:16:06
  Speaker 2: Wow. So, like, how far were they?
• 2:16:10
  Speaker 1: They were not far away. This is like in those
• 2:16:12
  Speaker 1: days where, um, you know, they would set the situation up.
• 2:16:17
  Speaker 1: They had some remote control, right? So they would go
• 2:16:19
  Speaker 1: out on a ship further out from the atoll, maybe
• 2:16:24
  Speaker 1: 25 miles away. But, um, and they would do some
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 1: remote control. but the actual device had to be attached
• 2:16:32
  Speaker 1: to its armed system on shore. Which is just kind
• 2:16:37
  Speaker 1: of an unfathomable detail in today's world.
• 2:16:41
  Speaker 2: How was he psychologically? How many sailors died?
• 2:16:46
  Speaker 1: Well, that was the first atomic test after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• 2:16:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, that was a really pivotal moment
• 2:16:55
  Speaker 1: in history because... there was a kind of decision of like,
• 2:16:59
  Speaker 1: maybe we're gonna sort of not go nuclear. And, you know,
• 2:17:04
  Speaker 1: there was lots of debate in the international community whether
• 2:17:07
  Speaker 1: it should be monitored. And the Navy stepped in and
• 2:17:12
  Speaker 1: was like, you know, we're in business here. And then
• 2:17:18
  Speaker 1: the nuclear arms race took off with that Baker bomb.
• 2:17:23
  Speaker 1: And there were... more than 100 atmospheric nuclear tests that
• 2:17:29
  Speaker 1: happened after that. And the size of that test, by
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 1: the way, was tiny compared to what would come later
• 2:17:37
  Speaker 1: because that was an atomic weapon. There was only atomic
• 2:17:41
  Speaker 1: weaponry in those days. It wouldn't be until the very
• 2:17:45
  Speaker 1: early 1950s that the thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, would
• 2:17:50
  Speaker 1: be invented. And the hydrogen bombs are what are megatons.
• 2:17:55
  Speaker 1: The atomic weapons were still in the kiloton range. So
• 2:17:59
  Speaker 1: while that bomb looks huge, you'll see in the photo,
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 1: it's not, you know, Castle Bravo or Ivy Mike, the
• 2:18:06
  Speaker 1: megaton weapons that were going off later. So psychologically, how
• 2:18:10
  Speaker 1: was O'Donnell? I mean, you know, it... it took a
• 2:18:14
  Speaker 1: toll on those individuals, but they also were so conditioned,
• 2:18:18
  Speaker 1: some might say programmed, to believe... And no, I'm gonna
• 2:18:23
  Speaker 1: say conditioned, because Russia was such a threat, you know?
• 2:18:26
  Speaker 1: I mean, totalitarian communism was just a looming threat. And
• 2:18:35
  Speaker 1: everyone that worked within the military-industrial complex in those days
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 1: knew it, was conditioned to be extremely fearful of it,
• 2:18:45
  Speaker 1: and was determined to beat it. And, you know, people
• 2:18:49
  Speaker 1: have their opinions now, but having interviewed a lot of
• 2:18:52
  Speaker 1: Cold War warriors, I completely reserve judgment on that and
• 2:18:56
  Speaker 1: just go with what they talk about, about how serious
• 2:19:00
  Speaker 1: that threat was. Wow.
• 2:19:05
  Speaker 2: Last question. Yeah. is America prepared for a biological war?
• 2:19:12
  Speaker 1: I mean, absolutely not. Absolutely not. And biological war can
• 2:19:16
  Speaker 1: never happen. You know, it can never happen. This is
• 2:19:18
  Speaker 1: what I would talk about with nuclear war, where I
• 2:19:21
  Speaker 1: would say, you know, nuclear war is insane. And every
• 2:19:24
  Speaker 1: person I ever interviewed told me that. And these are
• 2:19:27
  Speaker 1: people in nuclear command and control that retired. You can
• 2:19:31
  Speaker 1: never have a nuclear war. Civilization, it's the end game.
• 2:19:37
  Speaker 1: And biological war is the same situation. It is an endgame.
• 2:19:42
  Speaker 1: We cannot have one. COVID needs to be reexamined as
• 2:19:48
  Speaker 1: a lesson. What can we learn from this? And what
• 2:19:51
  Speaker 1: can we never do again with those same mistakes? And
• 2:19:54
  Speaker 1: how do we educate people so that they can have
• 2:19:57
  Speaker 1: conversations like we're having? You know, erring a little bit
• 2:20:02
  Speaker 1: on the like, oh my God, this is a disaster.
• 2:20:05
  Speaker 1: so that you realize, how do I participate in the
• 2:20:08
  Speaker 1: dialogue so that it can never happen? You know, it
• 2:20:11
  Speaker 1: can never happen. And that can be a specific, different
• 2:20:15
  Speaker 1: lane for all kinds of us. Each one of us. Like,
• 2:20:19
  Speaker 1: some people will really take issue with gain-of-function. Will say,
• 2:20:23
  Speaker 1: that must be shut down. The current president has shut
• 2:20:25
  Speaker 1: down gain-of-function research. You know? Others will... I mean, I
• 2:20:31
  Speaker 1: didn't even mention how many biosafety labs there are right now. Like,
• 2:20:36
  Speaker 1: I did, we did speak about how during, you know,
• 2:20:39
  Speaker 1: before 9-11, there were two in America. There was one
• 2:20:43
  Speaker 1: in Atlanta at CDC and one at Fort Detrick. Two.
• 2:20:48
  Speaker 1: Now there are 17 in America. There's 17?
• 2:20:54
  Speaker 2: 17.
• 2:20:54
  Speaker 1: There are 110 around the world in countries where there
• 2:21:00
  Speaker 1: are wars going on.
• 2:21:02
  Speaker 2: Ukraine.
• 2:21:04
  Speaker 1: The BSL-3 labs, which are just one degree below, which,
• 2:21:07
  Speaker 1: by the way, you can work with anthrax, plague, hantavirus
• 2:21:11
  Speaker 1: in BSL-3. There are 3,500 of them around the world.
• 2:21:20
  Speaker 1: 90% of them have no safety protocols. They're just working,
• 2:21:26
  Speaker 1: working away without... And no organization tracks this, no government organization.
• 2:21:33
  Speaker 1: Academics and scientists track this. So you pick your lane
• 2:21:36
  Speaker 1: once you know about this stuff. Hmm, what do I
• 2:21:39
  Speaker 1: want to pay attention to and kind of keep eyes
• 2:21:42
  Speaker 1: on that would be a good... Well, keeping track of
• 2:21:45
  Speaker 1: what labs are doing what is a great starting place.
• 2:21:48
  Speaker 2: Wow. Well, my conclusion would be the government's prepared themselves
• 2:21:58
  Speaker 2: for it, but they haven't done shit to prepare the
• 2:22:00
  Speaker 2: rest of us. and they probably never will.
• 2:22:07
  Speaker 1: Or it's considered such a rarefied problem. You know, it's
• 2:22:12
  Speaker 1: the old, it's a bit like the nuclear issue, like
• 2:22:14
  Speaker 1: that's never going to happen. But I do think that
• 2:22:18
  Speaker 1: the COVID pandemic really has the potential and a good
• 2:22:24
  Speaker 1: way to flip the switch on that ostrich in the
• 2:22:26
  Speaker 1: sand thinking. Before that, people could say, oh, come on,
• 2:22:29
  Speaker 1: there hasn't been a pandemic since the Spanish flu. You know,
• 2:22:32
  Speaker 1: the influenza pandemic of 1918. That's of the past. And
• 2:22:38
  Speaker 1: COVID really was a wake-up call that, whoosh, you can
• 2:22:43
  Speaker 1: just be caught completely off guard. You don't want to
• 2:22:46
  Speaker 1: be caught unaware.
• 2:22:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, Annie, that was a fascinating discussion.
• 2:22:54
  Speaker 1: Always a pleasure.
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 2: Likewise. Thank you. No matter where you're watching The Sean
• 2:23:13
  Speaker 2: Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this
• 2:23:16
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• 2:23:24
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• 2:23:29
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• 2:23:33
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