In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, host Alex Blumberg sits down with author Joe Pesci to discuss Area 51 and the conspiracy theories surrounding it. Area 51 is a history of the CIA's top-secret base in the desert, where the CIA ran a secret spy program. The base was built in the late 1950s, and is said to be one of the most highly classified places in the United States. But what exactly is going on at Area 51? Is it a place where the government is keeping secrets from the public? Or is it something else entirely? Or is Area 51 just another secret base run by the CIA? Or are they hiding something even more classified than they're letting on? Alex and Joe discuss all of this and much more in Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Basebook by Joseph Pesci, author of Area 51, an incredible new book about Area 51. And, of course, there's a little bit of truth at the end of the book! Thanks to Joe for being a freak when it comes to conspiracy theories, and for being willing to take the time to share his expertise on Area 51 with the world. It was a pleasure to have the chance to talk about Area51 and all of the theories he s come up with. . Thank you, Joe. You're a freak, but you're not alone. Joe. Thanks, Joe! And thanks, Annie. You're not the only if you re a freak if you're into this stuff, you know what's up there's more than you want to know the truth about it, right? Thanks, Annie, you're cool with it, too! - Alex - Thank you for listening to this episode, Joe, too, and thanks for listening, and you're listening to the truth. - Your support is so much more important than you know it's important to know that it's not just for you to know it, and it's more important to you than you'll ever know it! -- it's gonna make it so you'll get a chance to be a part of the story, too? - and you'll have to listen to it, you'll be the first to find out what's out there, too. -- Thank you to Joe and Annie, Joe is a freak for letting us know that's right up to the rest of the truth, right??
00:00:06.000I'm super excited to talk to you about several subjects, but this one, thank you very much for this first edition copy of your Area 51, An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Basebook.
00:00:19.000I heard through the grapevine you were a fan.
00:00:21.000I'm a freak when it comes to this stuff.
00:00:23.000What do you think is going on up there?
00:00:25.000I mean, same thing that's going on all over the place when it comes to military secrets, which is stuff that you want to know about, very few people know about, and every now and then a journalist gets a hint at it, right?
00:02:23.000Oh my god, it's such an incendiary topic.
00:02:26.000I mean people want to believe they're aliens, right?
00:02:30.000I mean I've spent five books dealing with the mythology of Area 51, which is phenomenal in its own way because it speaks so much to – To power, to morality, to information, to people's desire to know what's going on and the government's desire to keep things hidden.
00:02:50.000So this topic is always coming up because a lot of people want to believe that there were aliens in that craft.
00:02:59.000And my source, who I write about in the book, told me otherwise, that they were genetically...
00:03:07.000Let me stop you right there, because when you say that craft, what you mean is the supposed UFO wreckage that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. That's what you mean, right?
00:03:27.000So, in my book, I interview a man who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, who tells a different story, tells the story of receiving that craft at Area 51 in 1951, which is why the base is called Area 51. And that inside the craft were humans who had been altered,
00:03:51.000surgically altered to look like aliens.
00:03:54.000In a plan for Stalin to sort of twist Truman's arm because at that time we had the atomic bomb.
00:04:05.000When Roswell happened, we had the atomic bomb and the Soviets did not.
00:06:03.000No one even knew about Area 51. Well, people knew.
00:06:06.000It was common folklore, but there was no definitive proof that there was something going on over there other than some weird VHS footage of things flying around in the desert that seemed to be behaving in a way that modern aircrafts are not totally capable of.
00:06:23.000At least modern piloted aircrafts are not totally capable of.
00:06:26.000I mean, which brings me to another book I wrote called The Pentagon's Brain, which sort of off this idea was like, wait a minute, what kind of technology is the government capable of?
00:06:36.000And we have a whole department for that reason called DARPA, which looks at weapons systems 25 years out.
00:06:42.000So the idea that you and I don't know what the military is capable of in the air, underwater, wherever it may be, Is because we're not thinking 25 years out, and they are.
00:07:19.000Like one of the things, the biometric reader that measured the length of the bones in your hand and that they are unique, as unique as a fingerprint.
00:07:28.000And people are like, what are you talking about?
00:07:30.000And then they actually found out that this was something they really did have.
00:07:33.000And they have photos of this thing now.
00:07:35.000This is something he talked about and they claimed it was science fiction.
00:07:54.000And I write about him in the book because if you follow the logic that my source told me that these were, you know, modified human beings as part of a hoax.
00:08:02.000And the reason that I trust the source is because, Joe, he told me that he also worked on the program.
00:08:08.000So he had like a burden to unload, right?
00:08:13.000And so if you follow that logic through, then the Bob Lazar story is that when Bob Lazar said, I saw an alien, it looked like this, it was small, it had big eyes.
00:08:23.000Yes, those were the surgically modified humans that the government was doing experiments on.
00:08:30.000I think Bob Lazar's exact quote was he walked by a window and he looked in and he saw two agents that were looking down at something that was very small and looked humanoid but he didn't know if it was a dummy or anything and he wasn't even supposed to be looking in there and it was a brief like one second Look that he has bounced around in his head back and forth.
00:08:55.000Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the guy who gave you that information did work there, but is also feeding you horseshit?
00:09:05.000Well, the source was a major player in the Manhattan Project.
00:09:10.000He went on and worked in the Atomic Energy Commission.
00:09:14.000I mean, there's a wing of a museum named after him.
00:09:18.000His accolades, his awards were so extraordinary.
00:09:36.000But he was absolutely – with a Q clearance, that's what you have when you have access to nuclear secrets.
00:09:46.000So if someone has a Q clearance for decades – And they're full of garbage.
00:09:52.000You really have to ask, my God, should this guy have a cue clearance?
00:09:56.000I mean, that's reverse engineering his credibility.
00:09:58.000But I think you should read the whole book because, you know, it's shocking what he says, but it does make sense if you can get through 400 pages of...
00:10:09.000You know, the CIA's idea about information, disinformation, why we need to cover things up, why— That's why I'm asking if you think that he might have been lying to you.
00:10:20.000I don't believe he was lying whatsoever.
00:10:23.000I don't believe— So you think that Stalin, that the Russian government definitely did surgically alter people to make them look like aliens?
00:10:31.000I believe— Were there images of these things?
00:11:07.000So the psychic program had a lot of people who really believe in aliens or You know, intelligence from other worlds.
00:11:17.000And when I was writing the Phenomena book, I learned a whole bunch of new information about how upset they were with my story because they – and they all knew the source, by the way.
00:11:28.000They knew the source, and they believed that he was fed misinformation.
00:11:33.000So these are two sides of the coin, which are super interesting, I think, if you can look at them.
00:11:39.000With your own bias turned off and not have a desired outcome.
00:14:06.000And I think especially when they're talking about secret information that they were sworn to protect, and then all of a sudden they want to talk to someone that they don't even know, on the sneak tip, let's meet at a diner.
00:14:23.000Well, we met because I was interviewing nuclear weapons engineers who were setting off nuclear bombs in Area 51. I mean, in the Nevada test site, Area 12 of Area 23. And they all said to me, you've got to talk to the top engineer of all this weaponry.
00:15:09.000Look, I've written five books about this.
00:15:11.000We altered people to make them look like aliens?
00:15:13.000According to him, we had a small program in 1951 where we wanted to see how the Russians did what they did, how they made human beings look like this.
00:19:11.000So Stalin actually, according to the source, invaded our airspace, which was the deep embarrassment to Truman.
00:19:17.000So we invaded our airspace and then let this drone crash land on the ground with these things that turned out to be human.
00:19:27.000They looked like aliens, but they turned out to be humans that were manipulated surgically to look like aliens.
00:19:32.000Yes, as a way to, and remember, I mean, not remember, but where this was, was, you know, very close to a nuclear weapons base, to our Right.
00:20:23.000Well, what Bob Lazar did film that was really shocking was the filming of these drones flying around and performing these really crazy – you've seen those videos, I'm sure, right?
00:20:34.000In the 80s, it gets really crazy with what they're able to do and what they're – But I mean, why I like looking at history is because you can see the progression.
00:20:42.000You see how science evolves bit by bit.
00:20:47.000And then there's these great breakthroughs because what the government is always looking for is called a revolution in military affairs.
00:20:55.000And that's certainly what drone technology did later on as drones became developed after the Vietnam War.
00:21:02.000So in the 1980s when Bob Lazar was filming all this stuff, you think this was similar to the technology that we see publicly described today in terms of what drones are capable of?
00:21:14.000So they probably had something like that back then.
00:21:17.000When the F-117 was revealed during the first Gulf War, that aircraft was being developed for 20, 25 years out at Area 51. Actually, at Area 52 was where they had it set up,
00:21:46.000That story was never broken by the press, not by anyone.
00:21:49.000It just suddenly appeared in the Gulf War and took out Saddam Hussein's facilities.
00:21:56.000That's a revolution in military affairs.
00:21:58.000What becomes interesting is then it becomes obsolete.
00:22:01.000Because now everybody knows about it and everybody's going to mimic that.
00:22:04.000And now you have to have a new weapon system and that's the military-industrial complex.
00:22:09.000So was this drone aircraft that was released from the mother ship, was this capable of autonomous flight or was it just they just threw it out there and let it crash?
00:23:31.000But the human experiments, were they limited to this mimicry of the Russian experiments where they were trying to get people to look like aliens, or were there something else going on?
00:23:56.000They felt, well, it's more important to know what happens to people than to not know.
00:24:01.000And so they would take groups of people that, say, had cancer or something and test them.
00:24:05.000So there's no doubt that the government has experimented on humans.
00:24:09.000It's just, is that something that is wise to make public?
00:24:13.000And, you know, there's two sides of the coin on that.
00:24:15.000I mean, when you reveal these kind of things, when you write about them, I mean, people get really upset and, you know, vilify the government.
00:24:24.000Partially with good reason and partially it's like bad for national security.
00:24:29.000So I think that's the justification on the part of the Defense Department to keep things secret.
00:24:35.000Wow, that's an interesting take that I never thought of before, but if I was Stalin and I was trying to, air quotes, fuck with the Americans, that's maybe the way I would do it.
00:24:49.000And there was, if people, it's hard for people that live in 2019, especially if you're young, to really imagine a world, not only without the internet, but with two television channels, right?
00:25:02.000And radio, which was where people got all their information from.
00:25:15.000Yeah, mostly radio and newspapers, and that's where people were getting their information.
00:25:19.000And there was a mass hysteria where people were absolutely terrified that we were going to be invaded, which is why when Orson Welles' War of Worlds, which When they released it, when they did it on the air, they were very clear that this is going to be a reading of Orson Welles' War of Worlds book.
00:26:23.000But when you think it through, and I challenge you to read the whole book because you start piecing together these various ideas and disinformation becomes less vague and more specific and you go, ah, that's how it works.
00:26:35.000And you begin to see how people's perception and how they're easily manipulated factors into national security, just like you just described.
00:27:25.000They're put on TV by the communists saying terrible things about America, the American pilots.
00:27:32.000And suddenly it was like they've been brainwashed.
00:27:35.000It was very convenient to have that story.
00:27:37.000So these things work part and parcel, and you've got all kinds of smart people behind the scenes knowing this, looking at it, examining it, and using it to their advantage to stay where?
00:28:09.000But that's a crazy thing to do, to make a fake spaceship and just let it slam into the ground with a bunch of people that you cut up to look like aliens.
00:28:18.000Did he say specifically what kind of modification they made to people that made them look like aliens?
00:28:28.000I'm telling you that because you're asking me these questions that as if I spent, I mean, look, I did spend literally hundreds of hours with this source.
00:28:35.000We sat there and talked about everything.
00:28:37.000And I would try to squeeze out just like you're trying to squeeze out of me.
00:28:41.000And that's why I'm saying read it because I literally tell you everything that there is.
00:28:46.000I think what's most interesting about the source and why I might come back and talk to you about it and tell you who he is on your show is because of his back story.
00:30:36.000So he sets up this sniper rifle in the living room and I live up in the hills and you can look across the canyon through this scope he set up and I can see the veins on a leaf across the canyon.
00:30:49.000And I thought, okay, so now I know what he was doing in Kabul, Afghanistan.
00:31:37.000And I thought, why is it that I am willing to accept sort of the clinical nature of a sniper rifle, but I can't – I'm uncomfortable with that close-up, hand-to-hand killing.
00:31:52.000And that led me to Surprise, Kill, Vanish.
00:32:26.000And I spent the whole, this whole book researching and reporting is about that sort of conundrum, if you will, that moral puzzle, you know, why do we, why do we differentiate?
00:32:40.000Yeah, and who are they willing to do that to?
00:32:46.000Like, I'm sure you're aware of the story of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist, who was assassinated by someone, some group of people, and he entered into the Turkish embassy, and they whacked him and chopped him up and carried him out in boxes,
00:33:20.000I mean, that's the idea, is that their head of state wanted him killed because he was a threat, because he was a reporter, because he was writing.
00:33:32.000I mean, and there's, that's a great question because what you're saying is like, okay, so, but we all think of that as reprehensible, right?
00:34:55.000I mean, I interviewed a guy named John Rizzo, who's a decades long CIA attorney.
00:35:00.000I was stunned that he was willing to talk to me.
00:35:04.000And he explained to me how a presidential finding, also called a memorandum of notification works, that gives the president the authority to To put an individual on the kill list.
00:35:19.000That job is then given to the CIA's paramilitary army, an operator or their assassins, because the CIA works under a code called Title 50. So it makes it legal, whereas the Defense Department works under what's called Title 10. So in other words,
00:35:38.000and they can't, their rules of engagement are totally different.
00:35:40.000So the misnomer is like, oh, the SEALs killed bin Laden.
00:35:44.000Well, they were SEALs trained, but that was a CIA mission.
00:35:49.000Because Pakistan is a sovereign nation, and the military can't kill people in countries we're not at war with.
00:36:50.000Government wants that to be kept secret.
00:36:52.000So in all those countries, they're doing things that don't fall under the normal letter of the law.
00:37:00.000Yes, not under the rules of engagement of the military.
00:37:03.000But the CIA works at the president's behest.
00:37:07.000That was one thing that really blew my mind, to report, to research, to understand.
00:37:12.000I talked to 42 guys who have direct access to this, who are in this world.
00:37:17.000You know, from the knuckle-draggers on the ground, as they call themselves, to the lawyer at CIA, senior intelligence staff, that's the equivalent of a general at the CIA. Those guys explaining to me, Annie, this is how it works, you know.
00:37:31.000And again, to your question, well, why does someone get to know that?
00:37:37.000And why does the government want, why do they allow that information out is super interesting.
00:37:42.000And I believe that has to do with a certain climate we're in right now about military might, right?
00:37:49.000In other words, what the CIA does is called tertia optio.
00:38:34.000So they jump out, free fall down, terminal velocity, pull the ripcord really low so they're not detected by radar, and then they meet up with a team on the ground and go do what they do.
00:38:44.000Then they also have hey-ho, which is high altitude, high opening.
00:38:49.000And that way you can fly over airspace where we're allowed and float into, let's say, a country like Iran and land.
00:39:01.000Gather your team and do what you have to do.
00:39:03.000But like so much of what I report, I get information like that and then I ask a million questions like you've asking me and it's like, can't talk about that, that's classified.
00:39:14.000You're a journalist, so you're trying not to judge.
00:39:41.000And that exact question, like, is this a good thing?
00:39:44.000And my answer at the end, after it's complex, not to be vague, but it is really complex, is also that, well, if you're gonna take that pole position, you must accept rivalry,
00:40:06.000Also, after talk—do I think it's a good thing?
00:40:08.000After talking to a lot of 20-year-old soldiers who come back from the war theater missing a limb or with intense PTSD and who essentially serve as cannon fodder, I would say, my opinion,
00:40:25.000right, for the Pentagon, that's the second option, war.
00:40:31.000The 42 guys that I interviewed, you know, they're like, send me.
00:41:07.000Because I'm not so sure that the 20-year-olds know what they're in for and the 40-year-olds know what they're in for and are willing to do it.
00:41:14.000So, well, also the difference between a specialized, trained individual with a very specific task versus someone who is sort of following orders and at the front of the line, you know.
00:41:27.000I mean, and also has a, you know, a lot of times I talk to these young kids who go to war, and they tell me, one fascinating detail is that they talk about movies that they see, and whether it's Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down,
00:41:43.000even, right, where the outcome is not necessarily great.
00:41:46.000But they talk about the romanticization of War and of camaraderie and of brotherhood that comes from that.
00:41:56.000And then they have their experience and some of that does give them that sense, but not always.
00:42:02.000Whereas the operators are much more about, you know, getting the job done.
00:43:56.000I mean, he spoke publicly about, you know, if we have to have an atomic war, the Cuban, paraphrasing, the Cuban people will be happy to have sacrificed themselves for that.
00:44:05.000I mean, Che was also, Che killed anyone who betrayed him, he killed.
00:44:10.000He writes about it in his diaries, as I write in the book, right?
00:44:13.000So, but on the morality question, who decides?
00:44:16.000I don't have that answer, but I will tell you what I did.
00:44:18.000I went with my main source, Billy Waugh, who he's a 89 now.
00:44:22.000And he's been with the CIA for 60 years, okay?
00:44:28.000And he and I went to Cuba for him to do a halo jump with Che Guevara's son.
00:44:41.000Whose father was killed by the CIA. And we had this really interesting discussion in the Cigar Club where Che and Castro, you know, smoked cigars and plotted the downfall of the United States.
00:44:57.000And that's what I try to give readers a sense of, the long lens of history, how time changes all things.
00:45:07.000And Maybe leave them with this idea which they can come to their own conclusions about what you asked me of, is it right or is it wrong?
00:45:16.000Because really what you might ask is, is it necessary?
00:45:22.000I mean, I could moralize right, wrong, but it would just be my opinion.
00:45:26.000But when you see – Billy Wah and I also traveled to Vietnam because he was supposed to kill – he was tasked to kill the top commander of the North Vietnamese Army, a guy named General Xop.
00:45:40.000And Hua didn't kill Jop, and we had this incredibly, this terrible mission that went awry that I write about in the book in the Vietnam War.
00:45:48.000So 50 years later, Hua and I go to visit the son of General Jop, are sitting there in Jop's home, talking about these same issues, right?
00:45:58.000And my conclusion of that, again, is not is it right or wrong, but is it necessary?
00:46:15.000Well, I mean, my opinion is that the Defense Department is far too concerned with vast weapon systems of the future, which is its mission statement of its science department.
00:46:28.000And so you create what some at the Pentagon call a self-licking ice cream cone, or the military-industrial complex.
00:46:36.000And there's a lot built into that, and there's a lot to be said about that.
00:46:40.000And there's also probably some concern about other countries getting ahead of us.
00:46:45.000So you have to do what you have to do.
00:46:47.000If your job is to protect the American people and to keep the military strong, you just have to operate with that premise that there's a bunch of other people out there that are doing the same thing for their country and trying to take down the United States and we got to stay ahead of the curve and make human eating robots that can shoot missiles.
00:47:05.000I mean, when I was reporting the Pentagon's brain, which is about DARPA, and I was sitting there with scientists who were working on limb regeneration, right?
00:47:30.000And their idea is that humans should be able to regenerate their limbs and, you know, 50 years out we'll be doing that.
00:47:37.000And they're working on the science for that.
00:47:40.000Well, that's the same science that allows for cloning.
00:47:43.000And so in our discussions, because that's how I try to report, is like really ask people, What they think about future consequences.
00:47:52.000And they said to me your exact question, which is, well, Annie, what if one day we wake up and we find out that China has cloned the first human or a dark horse like Saudi Arabia?
00:48:04.000You know, the American people are going to freak out and go, where the hell was DARPA? Why aren't we ahead of the curve?
00:48:09.000So it's that there's a chicken and the egg problem with that of like, well, we have to stay ahead.
00:49:04.000And information can be boring unless it's interestingly presented through conversation, through, you know, uncomfortable conversation.
00:49:13.000Well, also uncompromised conversation where you don't have a certain time period that you have to smush something into, like a four-minute segment on CNN or something.
00:49:23.000I see people have these conversations about books or something that are trying to – a complex, very nuanced subject that they're trying to discuss.
00:49:31.000And there's another person on the other side that's like, that's not true!
00:49:37.000People have to understand that – People do understand, but you have to reiterate it, and it has to be kind of drilled into your head.
00:49:46.000When you're pressuring someone and you're yelling back and forth, you're not even going to get a good version of whatever this person's argument is.
00:50:29.000If they want to keep their job and stay alive, they have to shut the fuck up.
00:50:33.000They can't just talk about what they do and how they do it and decisions that maybe they made that were uncomfortable where they killed somebody they didn't think maybe needed to die.
00:51:47.000I mean, they get shot, they bandage themselves up there, you know, they're up in an aircraft because they're limping instead of on the ground, you know, viewing the missions.
00:52:33.000I mean, but he said the most incredible thing to me because he said, and he doesn't ever talk about fear, and he said, there was only one time in my whole life I've ever been afraid, and that was in the post office.
00:52:56.000And instead, he gets called up by the CIA and they send him to Libya in 1977. And his cover is that he's training Gaddafi's paramilitary guys in paramilitary tactics.
00:53:11.000I mean, that's the beginning of his career.
00:53:13.000And it goes on all the way until we were in Cuba, I think was actually some kind of a mission.
00:53:18.000Because it was like, what are we doing here in Cuba doing infiltration and exfiltration techniques, allegedly with Che Guevara's son?
00:53:26.000But in any event, you know, when I went to visit Billy Waugh the first time, he's got this, you know, he's got certificates and awards and medals all over the walls of his home.
00:53:36.000But there's one framed Item that I'm looking at, and it's a knife.
00:53:43.000And there's a seal from the CIA. And it says, in appreciation to the assassin.
00:53:53.000And I said, Billy, tell me about that.
00:53:56.000And he said, you know, I can't talk about that.
00:53:58.000So I, you know, stayed with him for two years.
00:54:01.000I mean, stayed, we conversed, we traveled, I interviewed him, you know, hundreds of hours.
00:54:08.000And I kept asking him about that award.
00:54:12.000And he kept saying, you know, I can't talk about that.
00:54:14.000But as I write in the book, he couldn't talk about it, but others did.
00:54:34.000And that is very explosive because President Bush, right after 9-11, created what was called a stalker team.
00:54:42.000And ironically, you know, people have this idea that we've been, you know, sending a team of assassins around the world in NATO partner countries.
00:54:53.000And that, what I learned, had never happened until right after 11 with the stalker team.
00:54:57.00012 men and actually one or two women, the femme fatale, and they would go after bad guys.
00:55:05.000And they adopted the term from the Reagan era.
00:55:10.000So it was called preemptive neutralization.
00:58:50.000But the only way I could be this person now is if I took that chance when I was 21, when I was dead broke and had my cars repossessed and all that stuff.
00:58:59.000That's the only way you ever get where you want to go.
00:59:04.000You have to take a path that's dangerous.
00:59:07.000And most people want to take the safe path.
00:59:09.000And the safe path leaves you stuck in quiet desperation almost every time.
00:59:51.000And whether it is you're trying to be an author and you're going to...
00:59:54.000If you're going to try to be an author and you're working eight hours a day, plus commuting, plus family responsibilities or whatever else you have, whatever time that you have, you have to attack like you're trying to save the world.
01:00:38.000And I always write – I mean, people in these military environments that I write about and in these intelligence world environments – Fate and circumstance plays a big part because they too can even get complacent, you know?
01:00:52.000But when your life is on the line, right, a lot of times they have these experiences where they're like, I must change.
01:01:01.000And that's what I find really interesting in people.
01:03:04.000With star-crossed lovers, they find each other years later, and they tell each other they've been thinking about each other all the time, and they can't believe it.
01:03:11.000And when you get that text from someone, maybe that's just someone prone to action, but maybe there is some sort of a connection, some sort of quantum entanglement between you and someone you spent time with or shared energy with.
01:04:12.000That are channelers or, you know, psychics that are telling you about someone in your past that's trying to contact you.
01:04:18.000They're con artists, almost exclusively.
01:04:21.000I mean, maybe there's like one lady in Tibet that has a broken gene and she can tune into the next dimension and pull some, extract some information from it.
01:04:30.000But in my experience, the vast majority of those people that I've talked to that claim to have psychic ability were also At least partially full of shit.
01:04:41.000They had weird ego problems that were glaring that they didn't notice.
01:04:46.000You know, like I could see it that this is a gross way to behave and they don't see it.
01:04:51.000Their interpersonal relationships, the way they communicate with people was like an agent, like a fake Hollywood person or something.
01:04:57.000There was something bullshitty about them.
01:04:59.000And people who lie a lot, I think if you lie a lot, it's very difficult for you to tell what a lie is.
01:05:30.000My grandmother was a very eccentric lady.
01:05:34.000An old Sicilian lady and she would tell you about the like old Italian ladies all like want to play the lottery they all have numbers there and she was playing the numbers wasn't even the lottery it was like the organized crime numbers racket and she would always I was gonna pick this number and I just add up the last minute I changed the number wouldn't you know what the first one came in and she was so mad and But it was always that,
01:05:59.000that I had a dream of this, and I had a vision of that, and it was all visions and dreams and psychics, but everything worked out horribly for her.
01:06:49.000Do you ever talk to those guys, the remote viewing guys?
01:06:51.000I talked to a lot of the scientists who taught the remote viewing, and I talked to a number of remote viewers for the book, but the most interesting of all was the astronaut Ed Mitchell, right?
01:07:03.000So I'm interested in the psychology behind what are you looking for in that, and I saw that I was doing some research in an archive and I came across a photo of what turned out to be Ed Mitchell on the moon reading a piece of paper.
01:07:18.000It's this extraordinary image because you're like, wait a minute, he's on the moon and he's reading a document.
01:08:10.000They had little maps folded up in their pockets in case they got lost.
01:08:14.000They were on the way to this crater, and in that crater they were going to find, allegedly, rocks that were going to solve the mystery of the moon's creation, the origin story.
01:08:58.000And he became convinced that psychic powers were real.
01:09:03.000And that is really the beginning of his foray.
01:09:06.000I mean, Mitchell became a huge proponent of psychic warfare, of, you know, the idea behind what you're talking about that we spoke of as being sort of charlatanism.
01:09:17.000And he dedicated the rest of his life to it.
01:09:23.000He had some wacky beliefs about aliens as well.
01:09:26.000He thought that we were definitely in contact with aliens.
01:09:29.000And that comes from like, he was so vilified by the scientists and by the astronauts and by the kind of military men, because this was just, he told me the story of when they were in quarantine after they came back from the moon, right?
01:09:43.000He and Shepard were sitting there, you know, eating breakfast, waiting, and Shepard, the story, a story broke that Mitchell had done some ESP experiments on the way back from the moon.
01:09:54.000And Shepard said to him, like, look at this nonsense.
01:09:57.000The newspapers will do anything to make a buck.
01:12:59.000I'd seen some interviews with him as he was getting older and older, and he seemed to be having some difficulties thinking about things, clearly.
01:13:12.000Yeah, he was really obsessed with extraterrestrial life.
01:13:16.000It was really interesting because didn't he claim that he had seen something while he was up in space?
01:13:23.000I think people helped him make that claim.
01:13:27.000That was my understanding of it, of reporting it.
01:13:29.000I mean, I stayed away from some of the crazier speculative things about him because what I was really interested in when I was writing that book was how his authority and power allowed the program to get funding, right?
01:13:43.000Because so much of this is, it's like, who's funding this stuff and why?
01:14:07.000And in all of this, what I learned more than anything is that the office of the president has a lot more power than I think any of us are aware.
01:14:18.000Did you find anything about Ed Mitchell?
01:14:19.000Did he say anything about – see if he said anything about seeing a UFO or seeing extraterrestrial life.
01:14:27.000But the problem is, if he believes that, boy, you know, if he was talked into saying that, you gotta wonder about a lot of the other things that he said as well.
01:14:36.000The other thing is, as these guys get older, that becomes their career.
01:14:41.000Their career becomes discussing their experiences.
01:14:44.000And the more outrageous those experiences are, the better their career is.
01:14:54.000His story when he just got back from the moon, his story was that they couldn't see any stars.
01:15:00.000But then as he got older, he wrote in depth in his book, I think it was in the 90s, You know, decades later, how vivid the stars were and how incredible it was out there with no atmosphere.
01:15:12.000But there's a press conference when he came back from the moon, right after the Apollo 11 moon launch.
01:15:18.000He was talking about he couldn't see any stars.
01:15:21.000So everybody's like, well, what is it?
01:15:28.000It's been so many years since whatever they did when they were working with NASA. And really, it becomes...
01:15:35.000That's their focal point of attention.
01:15:37.000Where they get their attention from and where they make their career is from their attention.
01:15:42.000And so they start telling these inconsistent stories.
01:15:46.000I mean, one of the great perils of, you know, living on your laurels is exactly that.
01:15:52.000And it's why, I mean, like, a guy like Billy Wah, I was so intrigued by that he was constantly reinventing his own role within the CIA, as he talked to me about at length, because he never wanted to just become one of those has-beens,
01:16:16.000Like he was in Sudan in the 90s and he actually took the first reconnaissance photographs of Osama bin Laden before bin Laden was on anybody's radar except for the CIA's.
01:16:27.000And his, I mean, how do you run, he said to me, how do you run around Sudan, which is a country made up of like really tall black Dinka tribesmen, if you're a five foot eight old white guy who's 72, you know, supposed to get reconnaissance photographs of bin Laden.
01:17:21.000I can't find any evidence that he says that he saw aliens, but I'm seeing different reports that, based off of his conversations with lots of different people, he believes that aliens at some point visited Earth and that it's being covered up.
01:17:42.000Yeah, and, I mean, how much do they tell Ed Mitchell?
01:17:45.000They say, hey, thanks for going to the moon.
01:17:47.000Well, look, one of the most interesting things about reporting this is that you find out these people that you think have access to all the information only know they're a piece of the pie.
01:18:48.000You know, so it would have to be like, which one of those things is it?
01:18:52.000Is it one of those things where it makes sense, where you had to go and assassinate someone who was plotting some sort of a nuclear attack on Chicago?
01:20:05.000Let's explain to people that don't know what we're talking about.
01:20:08.000Operation Paperclip was when, after World War II, the United States gathered up a ton of scientists from Nazi Germany, brought them over to America, and even Wernher von Braun.
01:20:21.000They had Wernher von Braun run NASA. He was a Nazi, like 100% Nazi.
01:20:54.000So we were willing to put a lot of really dark things aside in order to gather up the best scientists so that the Soviet Union couldn't get them all.
01:21:39.000And who do you think the top Germans were?
01:21:40.000They were coveted by Hitler, Himmler, Goring, you know?
01:21:44.000I mean, these guys were – I mean, there were guys that we grabbed out of the docks at Nuremberg literally to come be part of our program, you know?
01:23:04.000And you're like, what the fuck is this?
01:23:06.000Like, my friend Tim Kennedy went down there.
01:23:09.000And he said he was literally talking to people, interviewing people, and they had photos of SS soldiers on their wall, and they would talk about how grandfather was a hero, and they're like...
01:23:20.000Like, you're the descendant of escaped Nazis, and they put together a town down there.
01:23:26.000I mean, the way the Nazis were able to flee is—I can't read enough of that.
01:23:33.000I mean, that's what Jamie and I were talking about.
01:24:34.000They were trying to find evidence that Hitler somehow escaped.
01:24:36.000It was really a bullshit premise of the show.
01:24:38.000But what was interesting is that there were thousands and thousands of Nazis that made it to Argentina and set up shop throughout South America.
01:28:24.000Then I went to Germany and looked in their archives with a fellow, a German PhD, who had real access to stuff and was able to translate for me while we were there looking at this stuff.
01:28:36.000I interviewed a lot of grandchildren of Nazis.
01:31:36.000So when you consider, like, that people did not know about that, and then you've got these Germans walking around America as part of our space program and our science programs, and, oh, these are the good Germans.
01:31:47.000I mean, now you really have to say to yourself, come on, guys.
01:32:41.000To find out more about the Nazis, I went to Germany and sought out some children of these top, top Nazis to see if maybe they didn't have journals or anything they might share with me.
01:33:01.000It was like he lived in the Black Forest.
01:33:03.000I had to take like a taxi through the mountains, up over the hill, down through the valley, you know, into a courtyard behind a church to Dr. Blum's house.
01:33:13.000So he was the junior to his father, who was this horrific Nazi.
01:33:17.000I mean, a top Nazi had favor of the Fuhrer, wore what was called the Golden Party Badge, right?
01:33:31.000And his son, Dr. Kurt Blum, whereas the father was in charge of the biological weapons program, so his plan was to, you know, murder people with biological weapons from nature, right?
01:33:43.000The son had been a medical doctor but had left the profession to cure people with flowers.
01:35:38.000I thought he meant take them back to my hotel room, look at them, and then bring them back the next morning when we were doing the next interview.
01:35:43.000And he said, no, no, no, I want you to have them.
01:37:08.000The swastika is not outlawed there, but it is in Germany.
01:37:11.000You may not have any Nazi paraphernalia whatsoever.
01:37:14.000In fact, my paperclip book, which has a swastika on it, had to be redesigned, the cover, for the German publication.
01:37:21.000And it just has, like, broken up images of the Nazis, because you cannot reproduce that image in Germany.
01:37:29.000I mean, I'm not pro-swastika, but it's so strange that we've given so much power to this There's a temple out here, I believe it's a Hindu temple, and it was a part of Hinduism.
01:37:46.000This swastika predates World War II, it predates the Nazis, it predates their sort of reclaiming of it.
01:37:54.000And this building that was built out here, I think it was built in the 1920s, has swastikas on it, and there's a big plaque explaining why there's swastikas on it.
01:38:03.000I know they have it at a different angle, right?
01:38:06.000But I mean, talk about branding, right?
01:40:27.000built into it so that it would warn you when you were using this pesticide and then the Nazis turned it into Zyklon B where they removed that element that added the smell and just this odorless horrific poisonous gas that they used to gas the Jews And he was a Jew.
01:40:44.000I mean, you know, then when you think about it, he was no longer useful to them because when they figured out he really was a Jew.
01:41:03.000But anyway, what essentially it says is that he was winning, he was up for the Nobel Prize at the same time he was wanted for Crimes Against Humanity, because he was up for the Nobel Prize for creating the Haber method of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere, which was used for fertilizer,
01:41:19.000which to this day they say 50% of the nitrogen in human bodies was created by the Haber method.
01:41:25.000So what you get from food, from vegetables, like that nitrogen, 50% of it at least, It's coming from this guy's method, who was a scientist, who was a Jew, who was working in Germany before it became Nazi Germany, and then was the guy who figured out how to use gas on people.
01:41:43.000It's a dark, his story is a dark story.
01:41:47.000I mean, he died looking for medical treatment because he had to flee Germany.
01:42:17.000The Germans are in this terrible state overall in terms of their morale.
01:42:21.000And then along comes this charismatic psychopath That is just really good at screaming.
01:42:27.000To this day, I don't speak German, but to this day, when you watch that guy scream and yell at all those people and see them respond, it gives you chills.
01:42:34.000Like that kind of charisma, that kind of influence that someone has where they can do that in front of thousands and thousands of people and everyone's goose-stepping and...
01:42:46.000We're very fortunate there's not something like that right now.
01:42:49.000And our forefathers and our grandparents and whoever fought in World War II, if it wasn't for them, who knows where this world would be right now?
01:42:57.000Because that was a literal evil empire straight out of Star Wars.
01:43:05.000They were human beings who were doing some of the most evil shit, almost demonic, if you really stopped and thought about it.
01:43:13.000If there were demons pretending to be people, they would do the same thing.
01:43:16.000I mean, that's why I think it's a rabbit hole, because it's so hard to comprehend that a culture of educated individuals...
01:43:29.000In that moment in time that you talked about between World War I and World War II could completely become malevolent.
01:43:37.000Yeah, that's one of the more disturbing things about the Nazis was that there were so many of these people that they did extract through Operation Paperclip.
01:43:46.000Brilliant engineers and scientists that were also evil.
01:43:52.000Those two things are very uncomfortable for us.
01:43:55.000We like to think of our scientists as being the people that are out there trying to solve the mysteries of the universe and provide us with the technology to make our life better here on Earth.
01:44:37.000We have a lot of footage from Vietnam.
01:44:39.000We have a lot of footage from World War II. We have a lot of footage from modern wars.
01:44:43.000And out of all of them, the one that scares me the most is World War II. Do you think those scientists, when they came here, because I could not figure this out even after writing that whole book, do you think they came here and actually thought about what they had done,
01:45:18.000I mean, I think there's probably two people that go through the same thing and one person has no problem with it and the other person literally can't sleep.
01:49:29.000And the family still has this villa in Switzerland, I believe, or maybe it's the Bavarian Alps, that had been in the family, which is money from Nazi Germany.
01:49:42.000And I called up the son to interview him.
01:49:45.000He was not as forthright as Dr. Blum's son.
01:49:48.000And he hung up on me and said, If you ever contact me again, they have very serious privacy laws in Germany.
01:49:55.000I thought about going and knocking on his front door.
01:49:57.000My lawyer was like, Annie, do not do that.
01:50:00.000They have very different laws in Germany.
01:50:43.000I mean, which is sometimes a reason why I realize in looking at these and reporting these books, which is why certain things are kept secret.
01:50:50.000I mean, they open up a whole can of worms about reparations.
01:52:10.000And I didn't write about them in the book because I didn't want to subject people to that kind of horror.
01:52:15.000But I looked at them and I watched, I saw with my own eyes, people moments before they were killed, you know, and then the bodies afterwards.
01:52:27.000You know, to see whether or not pilots could survive height or, you know, they simulated different things in chambers at high altitude or speed.
01:52:37.000And I saw photographs of, you know, freezing people to death, right?
01:52:42.000Because they were trying to develop programs where they wanted to see at what temperature humans actually died, right?
01:53:26.000It's so scary to think about that humans just, you know, A generation or two away, we're capable of doing that.
01:53:35.000Yes, and so I think when it all comes around full circles, all these government programs I write about, is that idea of an evil enemy, right?
01:53:45.000I mean, we talked about that earlier when you brought up Khashoggi, right?
01:53:50.000I mean, you know, people often say to me, and these are sources, they're like, Annie, Saudi Arabia is the root of all evil.
01:56:03.000And I can relate to this and I can hopefully, I don't want to say trust, but I can recognize an authenticity of working with sources.
01:56:17.000When you were done with the paperclip book and you published it and you have to live with all the information that you had to gather and run through your mind, did that book, was that the book, did that change you, that book?
01:56:30.000Like, was it the most altering of the different subjects that you covered?
01:57:55.000I mean, people just read and read and read about World War II for good reason, you know?
01:58:01.000And everything I write starts, it all goes back to the Nazis.
01:58:05.000And every book, the trail, the paper trail at the National Archives or individual university libraries and people's papers where I go, they all refer back to that because It was so remarkable that the Nazis led in weapons technology,
01:58:23.000and they almost took over the world because of it, right?
01:58:26.000And that is the premise of all of this.
01:58:28.000I mean, in Surprise, Kill, Vanish, it's like, these are the guys on the ground.
01:58:32.000In the Pentagon's brain, it's, this is the technology in the sky.
01:58:36.000But we must, we, the government's position, whether it's Pentagon, CIA, is always, we have to stay ahead because the next Nazi Germany is right around the corner.
01:58:48.000And that's really something to think about.
01:59:47.000Interested in transparency and people being educated and having information.
01:59:51.000That always puts me in conflict with, you know, the government in essence, because I'm like, we should know.
01:59:58.000But then you think about it, well, the whole thing is you're not supposed to know because it's supposed to be just the hidden hand, the president's hidden hand, they call it.
02:00:05.000What has to be this distinction that they have the ability to break the rules because it's how they protect us.
02:00:14.000And the stories we hear are often the failures because those are the ones that get reported in the press.
02:00:21.000There is a sense undergirding this narrative, which I really like and am interested in and intrigued by, is that the successful operations you don't hear about because they are plausibly denied.
02:00:44.000When you think about protecting us from something like another Nazi Germany, that's when people are willing to give up some of their freedoms.
02:00:54.000They're willing to give up surveillance, they're willing to give up, and this is where things get real slippery, right?
02:01:00.000I mean, also, when you think about Russia, because all of this Cold War Science, technology, operations, all of that was to beat back the Russians, okay?
02:01:15.000Then the Russians go away and now they're back, you know?
02:01:18.000The Russians are the master assassins and they do it through poisoning.
02:01:24.000I write in the book about a defector who came over in the 50s and said, I was an assassin for the KGB and gave us all kinds of information.
02:01:36.000It's It's fascinating to look at those documents and realize, like, this is how it works.
02:01:41.000This is how it worked, you know, 60 years ago.
02:01:44.000And then you kind of see echoes of that, of how it's working today.
02:01:48.000And you can only imagine the defectors or those who come over from the other side who we learn from, and they just disappear.
02:01:58.000I mean, they disappear as sort of the CIA's version of witness protection.
02:02:35.000People often say, like, my God, the world's about to end.
02:02:38.000And I say, well, wow, you should really read about what it was like in 1980. I think?
02:03:05.000In the modern era of what has always been there, which is rivals seeking supremacy over one another, people trying to outfox the bad guys.
02:03:20.000What I think has changed is that the desire to prevent war has shifted, and that makes me That makes me upset because we used to sue for peace.
02:03:36.000I mean, war was outlawed in 1928, right?
02:03:40.000And now we just – the military-industrial complex is such that it's really a lot better for the Defense Department to be in a state of constant war because then you're in a state of constant weapons production and you can always be creating those vast weapon systems of the future for the next war that comes along.
02:03:57.000And that's troubling because those 18-year-old kids are the ones who get sent into the line of fire.
02:04:05.000What, if any, research have you done on artificial intelligence and robotics and autonomous weapons and the future of warfare, which a lot of people think is going to be like what we're seeing now in Yemen with drones, that we're going to be seeing that with robots on the ground,
02:04:24.000Huge amount for the book that I wrote called The Pentagon's Brain.
02:04:29.000Really impactful moment was going to Los Alamos when I went there to meet a DARPA scientist who was working on an artificial brain for DARPA. I mean, this stuff is way… Artificial brain?
02:04:57.000I'm interested in who's doing that, who's creating that science, and why.
02:05:04.000And he said to me, This is like where artificial intelligence is right now with scientists who are really looking into this.
02:11:05.000We'll develop and demonstrate through a series of Olympic-themed events, multifunctional MM to CM scale robotic platforms, so I guess that's millimeter to centimeter scale, robotic platforms with a focus on untethered mobility,
02:13:40.000I mean, that's like the ultimate going way back biology.
02:13:43.000Like you have to have a mother, a trusting mother, to breastfeed in, you know, prehistory or otherwise you'd be eaten by, you'd be like, this is a bad idea.
02:13:55.000So they examined that molecule, the brain's moral molecule, and they began a program to work with that, to be able to give that to soldiers so that they trusted AI machines.
02:14:11.000And that's where I think you're getting into really spooky, dark, multi-levels of manipulation about what humans want versus what the Pentagon wants.
02:14:24.000The worry about trusting the machine scares the shit out of me, because that's what everyone's worried about when it comes to AI. That's what Elon Musk keeps warning people about, that these things are going to have superhuman capabilities, and they're going to be sentient, and it's a matter of when.
02:15:20.000The people who stand to make the money creating the autonomous systems.
02:15:25.000And that's exactly what Eisenhower warned us of in his farewell speech, you know, the military industrial complex.
02:15:32.000And the other part of that speech, which people don't know as well, is that what he said, his antidote, Eisenhower said this, the antidote to the military industrial complex, Is an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.
02:15:48.000Because an alert and knowledgeable citizenry has the ability to kind of push back and go, but we don't want that.
02:15:54.000I think what we're worried about is Pandora's box when it comes to AI. And we're worried that, first of all, if we're not the ones to open it, what if they open it?
02:17:14.000And what they need for that is the world's fastest supercomputer, right?
02:17:18.000And what's interesting is that we, America, just overtook the Chinese in having, again, having the world's fastest supercomputer, but they had it for a couple years.
02:17:28.000And think about this, okay, because you were saying, hard to believe the Nazis were only, you know, not even, like, just in our grandfather's age, right?
02:17:37.000So go back in time to then, listen to this about, this really freaked me out in terms of progress.
02:17:43.000Right after the war, a guy called John von Neumann got a grant from the Atomic Energy Commission to essentially build the world's first computer.
02:17:51.000I mean, they existed, but he built the first computer that could actually do calculations, okay?
02:17:56.000Before that, calculations were done by calculators.
02:18:01.000But there's this amazing story of von Neumann in the Basement of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study where he built this computer with government funds.
02:18:09.000And he, because he was a brilliant polymath, he could add faster than anyone around him.
02:18:15.000He's also the guy who calculated at what level the atomic bomb should explode over Hiroshima for the most blast.
02:18:22.000Because it didn't hit the ground, it wouldn't kill as many people.
02:19:44.000Why do we look so down upon the knife to the throat, and why do we as a society accept drone strikes?
02:19:56.000Because that's the whole question I ask in Surprise, Kill, Vanish, and I'm not sure I answered it to my own satisfaction because it's such a complicated question.
02:20:45.000We don't want our people to be noble and just.
02:20:49.000But meanwhile, When it comes to civilian casualties, drones are one of the worst inventions ever in human history.
02:20:57.000If we really want to examine ourselves in terms of efficacy and the moral high ground in terms of engagement, like launching missiles at apartment buildings because you found metadata in there that indicates that most likely an Al-Qaeda operative has a cell phone in that building,
02:21:17.000like that That's some shit that people have done.
02:22:55.000President Donald Trump revoked a requirement that U.S. intelligence officials publicly report the number of civilian kills in drone strikes and other attacks on terrorist targets outside of war zones.
02:23:04.000Oh, so we're going to get shit information now.
02:23:20.000And by the way, this administration just canceled his job.
02:23:24.000So we will no longer have that information.
02:23:26.000But he's the one that is in charge of reporting that because it's called the reconstruction effort, right?
02:23:32.000But that number of bombs really makes you think long and hard, or at least me, about You know, the big footprint versus the small operation.
02:23:43.000And again, I think this is why most people don't want to talk about this, because it's a dark rabbit hole to go down, you know?
02:23:49.000People prefer to believe that we're just safe and sound here and not at risk.
02:23:56.000And I mean, that's the endless question of are these threats real and must they be dealt with?
02:24:02.000Well, it's very hard for people to be 100% aware of something they're not experiencing, right?
02:24:10.000And right now we're not experiencing a war currently in our neighborhoods, but yet it is happening overseas and the United States technically is involved in these wars.
02:24:20.000And I think that right now we're not experiencing sentient robots running through streets murdering people.
02:24:33.000We'd like to assume that that's in the past.
02:24:35.000But if you just looked at the vast amount of history that's dedicated to atrocities that are committed by armies against their enemies, it seems like that's just what people do.
02:24:47.000It seems it's a part of what people do.
02:24:49.000And if there is a real technological race in order to develop autonomous, sentient robots that are capable of killing people, we should be fucking horrified.
02:25:40.000I mean, they convince Google to go over there.
02:25:43.000I was talking to an executive at Google, and they were saying, essentially, we're willing to let them censor because we know they're going to do...
02:26:35.000Especially anything that makes us look bad.
02:26:38.000There's an interesting story about the Freedom of Information Act and Iran, which came to mind with this new activity in Iran, which is that they filed a FOIA to get all the information that we had on Iran, and the government went very high up in the judicial system.
02:26:54.000To say, we're not going to release this information to them, even though they had the right to have it, because it would benefit them.
02:27:23.000Part of the reason on why the strikes, things have changed is because the Trump administration has carried out way more than the Obama administration ever did over eight years.
02:27:33.000Well, I think Trump basically told the military, you know what you're doing, just go do it.
02:27:37.000I mean, he basically let them just run the military instead of having the same sort of oversight that other presidents insisted upon.
02:27:45.000And the military people like him for that.
02:27:47.000And people aren't focused or interested in drone strikes anymore.
02:27:50.000They're more interested in watching the battle and the conflict and the name-calling and the shouting.
02:27:57.000It's like throwing rocks without warfare.
02:27:59.000Meanwhile, China's making robots to kill us.
02:28:25.000They are shooting people from a remote location with a robot.
02:28:31.000That all came to be, by the way, right after 9-11.
02:28:35.000I mean, whenever we get attacked, it's like Pearl Harbor, suddenly there is a massive swing of what civilians, what the citizenry will tolerate.
02:28:45.000And for Surprise Kill Vanish, I interviewed, I told you, lawyer John Rizzo, who wrote what was called the September 17th Memorandum of Notification, and And it gave presidential powers to the degree which had not been seen since the worst part of the Cold War.
02:30:04.000Whereas if you sent someone over there to assassinate these guys with a knife, you would think of that, I don't want that person in my neighborhood.
02:30:11.000That person is willing to stab somebody.
02:30:13.000And what are the unintended consequences of that?
02:30:17.000I'll tell you an interesting story that's not in the book, which is that Billy Waugh showed me a number of plans that he had presented, because sometimes the operators are asked, like, what do you think we should do?
02:31:25.000And it's the world we live in that we don't discuss and we don't think about because it doesn't affect our daily lives in terms of like it's not something that's unavoidable.
02:31:34.000But I think it's super interesting because it also comes back to your own humanness, right?
02:32:33.000But what is the difference between wetware and hardware and silicon-based interactions?
02:32:39.000Like, if there's a computer that can beat the greatest chess masters, and they have it, and then the greatest Go master now, too, which they thought was even more complex.
02:32:48.000People just get destroyed by these computers now.
02:32:51.000Like, what makes us think that creativity is so unique and special?
02:32:56.000I think what separates us really is our biological instincts, and that these are things that are programmed into our DNA over thousands of years of survival, that these are the things you have to worry about, this is the information we have, and act on that.
02:33:11.000That's our intuition, trust, you know?
02:33:40.000But it's from like the early days, gather round children.
02:33:43.000This is like early days of DARPA, okay?
02:33:47.000And this is when we were really seriously afraid that the Russians were going to send, you know, a hundred thermonuclear warheads at Washington and take out the whole country, okay?
02:33:57.000So DARPA sets up this station at the top of the world.
02:34:06.000Because it only takes 24 minutes for an ICBM to get from the launch pad in Russia to hit New York or Washington.
02:34:16.000So we set up this station up there to monitor this so we would have some kind of a jump on this.
02:34:23.000Okay, like we'd learn it about eight minutes.
02:34:25.000My God, the, you know, it was a radar station.
02:34:27.000That station called the BMU site or J site is connected to the NORAD station in Cheyenne Mountain, you know, the one from the movies, right?
02:34:37.000And it's like the first week of business.
02:34:40.000And the guys that are sitting there in the station are Looking for the alert are sitting there and they've been trained like the alerts never go off and all of a sudden the alerts go from one, two, three, four.
02:34:53.000So the information that the technicians are getting is now 1,000 Soviet thermonuclear missiles are on their way to Washington, D.C. with 99.9% certainty.
02:36:23.000But it is an actual indication of why that element of human intervention, why trust, why other information like, oh, I think I saw Khrushchev on the TV last night, is so important.
02:36:37.000Because the machine said with 99.9% certainty, this is happening.