The Joe Rogan Experience - May 16, 2019


Joe Rogan Experience #1299 - Annie Jacobsen

Topics
psychic program and disinformation human experiments star-crossed lovers and psychic tricks psychics and their abilities psychic ESP experiments Argentina Nazis Operation Paperclip Auschwitz survivor tattoo Operation Paperclip and Nazi reparations CIA paramilitary program propaganda assassination drone strikes morality question drone strikes casualties rate autonomous robots killing
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Annie Jacobsen
Mentioned
Ed Mitchell Annie Jacobson Kurt Blum Stalin Jamie Hunting Hitler Billy Wah Che Guevara Billy Waugh Osama Bin Laden Jesus Christ Donald Trump Walter Schreiber Orson Welles Fritz Haber John Ruiz Linda Hunt Elon Musk Eisenhower Paperclip and 53 more
Joe Rogan Experience #1297 - Phil Demers Joe Rogan Experience #1300 - Michael Malice

Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 37 minutes

Words per minute

162.5

Word count

25,548

Sentence count

2,560

Harmful content

Misogyny

27

sentences flagged

Toxicity

172

sentences flagged

Hate speech

69

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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??

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Now, we're live.
00:00:01.000 3, 2, 1, boom.
00:00:03.000 Hello, Annie.
00:00:04.000 Hello, Joe.
00:00:05.000 Very nice to meet you.
00:00:05.000 I'm excited to talk to you.
00:00:06.000 I'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.
00:00:17.000 I'm super excited about this.
00:00:19.000 I heard through the grapevine you were a fan.
00:00:21.000 I'm a freak when it comes to this stuff.
00:00:23.000 What do you think is going on up there?
00:00:25.000 I 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?
00:00:37.000 Yeah.
00:00:38.000 Do you think there's any alien stuff up there?
00:00:40.000 I write in the book all about that.
00:00:42.000 Yeah?
00:00:42.000 Yeah.
00:00:43.000 Well, tell me.
00:00:43.000 Last 12 pages.
00:00:44.000 You want me to go to the last 12 pages?
00:00:47.000 What do you think?
00:00:49.000 So Area 51 was this secret test base where the CIA was running spy plane programs, right?
00:00:58.000 So interestingly, my new book is about ground branch, guys on the ground.
00:01:03.000 That's about air branch, what we were doing in the air.
00:01:06.000 And it was this idea that we should spy on the enemy, okay?
00:01:11.000 But if you go back in time, why Area 51 really started...
00:01:16.000 I think?
00:01:38.000 Little men who looked like aliens would get out of an aircraft and the government would go crazy about it. 0.99
00:01:45.000 And then Stalin would say, look, not only do we have technology better than you, but we have a better propaganda department than you.
00:01:55.000 Really?
00:01:56.000 Joe, you've got to read the whole book.
00:01:57.000 This is a tough opening.
00:02:00.000 You got me on the spot.
00:02:00.000 It is a tough opening, but it's a good spot.
00:02:02.000 Right?
00:02:02.000 It's a good spot.
00:02:03.000 So, Stalin just hired short people?
00:02:07.000 What did he do?
00:02:08.000 Alright, I'm going to make you save that.
00:02:10.000 I'm going to make you earn that.
00:02:11.000 Save it?
00:02:11.000 Yeah.
00:02:12.000 How's that?
00:02:12.000 I mean, you want me to talk about that right now, right off the bat.
00:02:14.000 Why is it?
00:02:15.000 I'm sweating.
00:02:17.000 We're going to get to Surprise, Kill, Vanish as well.
00:02:21.000 Why does it make you sweat?
00:02:23.000 Oh my god, it's such an incendiary topic.
00:02:26.000 I mean people want to believe they're aliens, right?
00:02:30.000 I 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.
00:02:50.000 So this topic is always coming up because a lot of people want to believe that there were aliens in that craft.
00:02:59.000 And my source, who I write about in the book, told me otherwise, that they were genetically...
00:03:07.000 Let 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?
00:03:16.000 Yes.
00:03:17.000 But that was never supposedly taken to Area 51. It was supposed to be taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
00:03:22.000 The legend has it that Truman flew there to meet them, right?
00:03:25.000 Yes.
00:03:26.000 That's one legend.
00:03:27.000 So, 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,
00:03:51.000 surgically altered to look like aliens.
00:03:54.000 In a plan for Stalin to sort of twist Truman's arm because at that time we had the atomic bomb.
00:04:05.000 When Roswell happened, we had the atomic bomb and the Soviets did not. 0.82
00:04:09.000 Can I stop you there?
00:04:10.000 When you say humans that were surgically altered to look like aliens, do you mean...
00:04:16.000 So this is 1951. So you're talking about four years after the supposed crash.
00:04:21.000 Yes.
00:04:22.000 So what was left?
00:04:24.000 They had the bodies.
00:04:24.000 They kept the bodies.
00:04:25.000 They kept the bodies.
00:04:26.000 In what?
00:04:27.000 Formaldehyde?
00:04:27.000 Yes.
00:04:28.000 And also because the idea was...
00:04:30.000 And remember...
00:04:31.000 Or I can't say remember because you haven't read the book yet.
00:04:33.000 Right.
00:04:33.000 And I wrote this book eight years ago.
00:04:57.000 Mm-hmm.
00:05:04.000 But how reliable is this source?
00:05:06.000 This is a very incendiary idea to rely upon one individual's recollection of it.
00:05:13.000 Which is why the book went through the roof in terms of people being upset about it.
00:05:18.000 Were they?
00:05:18.000 Oh my god, I interviewed 79 CIA guys, Air Force guys, spy pilots, engineers.
00:05:25.000 Who's mad at you? 0.89
00:05:27.000 The conspiracy theorists were mad at me because they said, this woman is bananas. 1.00
00:05:32.000 They were aliens.
00:05:34.000 Well, even if they weren't aliens, right, there's also, there's accounts that it was some sort of a test.
00:05:55.000 I think?
00:06:03.000 No one even knew about Area 51. Well, people knew.
00:06:06.000 It 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.
00:06:23.000 At least modern piloted aircrafts are not totally capable of.
00:06:26.000 I 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?
00:06:36.000 And we have a whole department for that reason called DARPA, which looks at weapons systems 25 years out.
00:06:42.000 So 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.
00:06:56.000 And they're developing weapon systems.
00:06:57.000 The great weapon systems of the future, that's what they call them.
00:07:00.000 Right, like how they developed the stealth bomber.
00:07:02.000 And that was all out in Area 51 and Groom Lake.
00:07:06.000 Yes.
00:07:07.000 What do you think of Bob Lazar's story?
00:07:09.000 Because Bob Lazar's story, really, there's some fascinating aspects to it. 0.95
00:07:13.000 But one of the most fascinating is some of the things that he's said, that people said was horseshit.
00:07:18.000 Has been proven to be true.
00:07:19.000 Like 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.
00:07:28.000 And people are like, what are you talking about?
00:07:30.000 And then they actually found out that this was something they really did have.
00:07:33.000 And they have photos of this thing now.
00:07:35.000 This is something he talked about and they claimed it was science fiction.
00:07:39.000 Yeah.
00:07:39.000 I mean, it's fascinating when someone touches upon a subject that the government does not want known about for any reason.
00:07:48.000 And there is a campaign to discredit that person.
00:07:51.000 And there's no doubt that that happened to him.
00:07:53.000 I mean, it was remarkable.
00:07:54.000 And 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.
00:08:02.000 And the reason that I trust the source is because, Joe, he told me that he also worked on the program.
00:08:08.000 So he had like a burden to unload, right?
00:08:13.000 And 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.
00:08:23.000 Yes, those were the surgically modified humans that the government was doing experiments on.
00:08:30.000 I 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. 0.87
00:08:55.000 Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the guy who gave you that information did work there, but is also feeding you horseshit?
00:09:05.000 Well, the source was a major player in the Manhattan Project.
00:09:10.000 He went on and worked in the Atomic Energy Commission.
00:09:14.000 I mean, there's a wing of a museum named after him.
00:09:18.000 His accolades, his awards were so extraordinary.
00:09:22.000 What's his name?
00:09:23.000 I've never said his name, although, you know, I will say this.
00:09:25.000 Well, you're giving it away.
00:09:26.000 You're giving away a lot of the stuff.
00:09:28.000 He recently died, and he did give me permission to tell his full story after he died.
00:09:33.000 And I'm circling around that.
00:09:35.000 I'm circling around that.
00:09:36.000 But he was absolutely – with a Q clearance, that's what you have when you have access to nuclear secrets. 0.98
00:09:46.000 So if someone has a Q clearance for decades – And they're full of garbage.
00:09:52.000 You really have to ask, my God, should this guy have a cue clearance? 0.65
00:09:56.000 I mean, that's reverse engineering his credibility.
00:09:58.000 But 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...
00:10:09.000 You 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.
00:10:20.000 I don't believe he was lying whatsoever.
00:10:21.000 He's feeding you disinformation.
00:10:22.000 No, I don't believe.
00:10:23.000 I don't believe— So you think that Stalin, that the Russian government definitely did surgically alter people to make them look like aliens?
00:10:31.000 I believe— Were there images of these things?
00:10:33.000 I believe what he told me.
00:10:34.000 Did you see photos?
00:10:35.000 No, I did not see photos.
00:10:36.000 But here's the rub.
00:10:37.000 Ready?
00:10:38.000 Okay.
00:10:39.000 When I was writing another book called Phenomena, which dealt with the CIA and the Pentagon's use of psychics, okay, over decades.
00:10:48.000 I mean, this goes back – everything I write about pretty much goes back to post-World War.
00:10:52.000 All that remote viewing stuff.
00:10:54.000 Yes, yes.
00:10:55.000 And it's all about government – U.S. government takes pole position after World War II, and we now need to always be ahead of the curve.
00:11:02.000 We must lead.
00:11:04.000 We can never get beaten by the Russians. 1.00
00:11:06.000 Now it's China, okay? 0.70
00:11:07.000 So the psychic program had a lot of people who really believe in aliens or You know, intelligence from other worlds.
00:11:17.000 And 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.
00:11:28.000 They knew the source, and they believed that he was fed misinformation.
00:11:33.000 So these are two sides of the coin, which are super interesting, I think, if you can look at them.
00:11:39.000 With your own bias turned off and not have a desired outcome.
00:11:46.000 I want to believe this.
00:11:48.000 I don't want to believe this.
00:11:51.000 Speaking of I want to believe, I was working on a project with Chris Carter, who is the Really?
00:12:13.000 Yeah.
00:12:16.000 See, I don't have a desired outcome.
00:12:19.000 I mean, I would love it if aliens were real.
00:12:20.000 Okay.
00:12:21.000 But when someone starts talking about disinformation and propaganda campaigns, but they want you to believe them.
00:12:29.000 Right.
00:12:29.000 But don't, listen, I'm here telling you the truth.
00:12:33.000 I'm here telling you the truth.
00:12:34.000 I'm not saying I'm telling you the truth at all.
00:12:36.000 No, not you.
00:12:47.000 Well, I mean, maybe you are neutral.
00:12:49.000 I don't know.
00:12:50.000 I know I'm neutral.
00:12:52.000 Yeah, well, listen, I absolutely want aliens to be real.
00:12:56.000 100%.
00:12:56.000 Wouldn't it be interesting?
00:12:57.000 I'm not neutral, but I am neutral in my perceptions.
00:13:01.000 And when I look at things, I go, hmm, I don't know about that.
00:13:05.000 Me too.
00:13:05.000 I want to see a picture.
00:13:07.000 Like, what do these guys look like?
00:13:09.000 I mean, what did they do to them?
00:13:10.000 Did he describe what kind of surgical alterations?
00:13:12.000 I stayed with the source, I mean, after the book published.
00:13:17.000 I would go and visit him.
00:13:19.000 We'd sit in a Chinese restaurant and eat and talk, and I would try to get a droplet of information out of him.
00:13:25.000 What was he doing?
00:13:26.000 Avoiding it?
00:13:47.000 It's the truth.
00:13:49.000 I mean, that's a triangular version of getting at the truth.
00:13:52.000 But again, to reiterate, I believe he believes what he told me was the truth.
00:13:58.000 That was the truth he was told. 0.98
00:14:00.000 I think there's certain agents that think it's fun to fuck with reporters and journalists and make things up. 0.99
00:14:06.000 I really do. 0.98
00:14:06.000 And 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. 0.98
00:14:19.000 I'm going to tell you everything.
00:14:20.000 That's not how we met.
00:14:21.000 Well, I mean, however you met.
00:14:23.000 Well, 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.
00:14:43.000 And they gave me his name.
00:14:45.000 And we talked for days and hours about nuclear weapons.
00:14:48.000 And then...
00:14:50.000 In one conversation, he began to cry and told me this story that I was like, what?
00:14:57.000 What?
00:14:58.000 Why was he crying?
00:14:59.000 He was crying because he participated in our version of the human experiments.
00:15:05.000 Because what the Russians do, we do.
00:15:09.000 Look, I've written five books about this.
00:15:11.000 We altered people to make them look like aliens?
00:15:13.000 According 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. 0.96
00:15:22.000 So what did they do?
00:15:23.000 Take prisoners or something?
00:15:25.000 Who did they alter?
00:15:26.000 He said they were handicapped children.
00:15:29.000 Oh, Jesus.
00:15:31.000 And he told me that he participated in this.
00:15:33.000 So again, I mean, unless you have someone that lost their mind at age 90 and was willing to tell their wife of 65 years, I lost my mind.
00:15:40.000 So he's saying that he participated in something that altered handicapped children.
00:15:47.000 When you say handicapped, you mean like Down syndrome or something like that.
00:15:50.000 And they... 0.95
00:15:52.000 Made them look like aliens and then killed them?
00:15:55.000 What did they do with this?
00:15:58.000 This is where we get into drops of information coming in.
00:16:01.000 But what I can say is he had a grandchild that was born that way.
00:16:05.000 And the grandchild did not live long.
00:16:08.000 The grandchild died.
00:16:09.000 And it made him feel so guilty about what he had done that he felt compelled to confess, if you will.
00:16:17.000 And I remember saying to him, why are you telling me this?
00:16:19.000 Why don't you tell a priest?
00:16:20.000 And he said...
00:16:21.000 A priest would judge me and I can tell you won't.
00:16:25.000 Why wouldn't you judge him?
00:16:26.000 I'd judge him.
00:16:27.000 Well, I guess that's why I'm a born journalist, Joe, because I really try not to judge people.
00:16:33.000 I mean, my new book, Surprise, Kill, Vanish, it's about assassins.
00:16:37.000 It's about people who work for the CIA who do what needs to be done on the ground in the name of national security.
00:16:45.000 I don't judge them.
00:16:46.000 This is why, you know, what's really at issue here is morality, right?
00:16:50.000 Yeah.
00:16:50.000 I mean, can I tell you how I got the idea for this book?
00:16:54.000 Sure, but let me, before we go any further, so...
00:16:57.000 You want to talk about the aliens.
00:16:59.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:16:59.000 Was he saying that there have never been any encounters with alien spacecraft?
00:17:05.000 He was totally neutral about aliens.
00:17:07.000 He had nothing to do with aliens.
00:17:08.000 He could have cared less.
00:17:09.000 He didn't watch the X-Files.
00:17:11.000 What was his take on Bob Lazar?
00:17:13.000 His take on Bob Lazar was that he probably saw something that the government had an extension of the program.
00:17:20.000 I mean, he didn't know.
00:17:21.000 That was speculative.
00:17:22.000 We didn't talk about that.
00:17:23.000 I mean, you know, other than inference.
00:17:25.000 He was very limited in the information that he would get out.
00:17:30.000 But, I mean, I used 79 sources in that book that all went on the record in name.
00:17:35.000 And he was the one anonymous source.
00:17:38.000 Because...
00:17:39.000 But like I said, you know, he told me after he died that I could tell the whole story.
00:17:44.000 Are you going to?
00:17:44.000 I might.
00:17:45.000 I might come back.
00:17:46.000 You want to write another book?
00:17:47.000 Well, if you give me a break and back off the subject, I might come back and tell you and your audience his name.
00:17:52.000 What are you saying?
00:17:52.000 Back off the subject?
00:17:53.000 This is your book.
00:17:54.000 I want to promote your book.
00:17:55.000 I know you want to promote your new book, but I want to promote this book as well.
00:17:58.000 I mean, I'm teasing you.
00:17:59.000 I know you are.
00:18:00.000 But it's like...
00:18:03.000 It's an astonishing story.
00:18:06.000 And I think the best line of all is that people that read about that in the very end of what we did, they go, I wish they were aliens.
00:18:14.000 So, Stalin created some sort of a craft that mimicked...
00:18:18.000 You're going to read it.
00:18:19.000 That's what you're going to do the rest of the afternoon.
00:18:21.000 Nope.
00:18:22.000 I'm going to come back on your show.
00:18:23.000 This is a podcast, and we're talking.
00:18:25.000 I think we should probably get into this a little bit.
00:18:27.000 Okay.
00:18:27.000 Come on with the questions.
00:18:28.000 I'm used to asking the questions.
00:18:30.000 Are you?
00:18:31.000 Oh, right.
00:18:31.000 As a journalist, yeah.
00:18:32.000 Now, Stalin and the Russians created something that mimicked a UFO, something that looked like it would be from another planet. 0.80
00:18:40.000 Is that what they did?
00:18:41.000 Mothership.
00:18:41.000 Mm-hmm.
00:18:42.000 In those days, drones were...
00:18:44.000 There was a mothership and a drone was attached to it and it was jettisoned off.
00:18:48.000 Okay?
00:18:50.000 In those days?
00:18:51.000 Well, in 1947, 48, right?
00:18:54.000 What do you mean by...
00:18:56.000 Well, they didn't.
00:18:56.000 I mean, that was drone technology then.
00:18:58.000 So there's a mother craft, like an aircraft, and then the drone is like a small aircraft under it, and it gets jettisoned off.
00:19:08.000 And that was what the craft was.
00:19:10.000 It was jettisoned off.
00:19:11.000 So Stalin actually, according to the source, invaded our airspace, which was the deep embarrassment to Truman.
00:19:17.000 So we invaded our airspace and then let this drone crash land on the ground with these things that turned out to be human.
00:19:27.000 They looked like aliens, but they turned out to be humans that were manipulated surgically to look like aliens.
00:19:32.000 Yes, 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.
00:20:01.000 How did they pilot them?
00:20:02.000 Was it wirelessly, like we do now?
00:20:05.000 No, no.
00:20:05.000 Then it was like there was a pilot in the mothership and they kind of let it go.
00:20:09.000 And it flew off.
00:20:11.000 I mean, there's incredible stories of what the CIA was able to do out there at Area 51 with their air branch.
00:20:19.000 The technology, they're always ahead of technology.
00:20:22.000 That's what's remarkable.
00:20:23.000 Well, 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?
00:20:34.000 Yeah.
00:20:34.000 In 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.
00:20:42.000 You see how science evolves bit by bit.
00:20:47.000 And then there's these great breakthroughs because what the government is always looking for is called a revolution in military affairs.
00:20:55.000 And that's certainly what drone technology did later on as drones became developed after the Vietnam War.
00:21:02.000 So 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?
00:21:14.000 Sure.
00:21:14.000 So they probably had something like that back then.
00:21:17.000 When 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,
00:21:33.000 to develop that stealth technology.
00:21:37.000 And what was amazing, talk about keeping secrets.
00:21:40.000 They had something like 10,000 people working on that.
00:21:44.000 No one knew about it.
00:21:46.000 That story was never broken by the press, not by anyone.
00:21:49.000 It just suddenly appeared in the Gulf War and took out Saddam Hussein's facilities.
00:21:56.000 That's a revolution in military affairs.
00:21:58.000 What becomes interesting is then it becomes obsolete.
00:22:01.000 Because now everybody knows about it and everybody's going to mimic that.
00:22:04.000 And now you have to have a new weapon system and that's the military-industrial complex.
00:22:09.000 So 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?
00:22:19.000 The latter, right?
00:22:20.000 And remember, that information I am very limited to.
00:22:24.000 That's why it's 12 pages.
00:22:25.000 It's like the source gave me these little bits of information which I felt was important to include because it speaks to the big issue.
00:22:35.000 Why is Area 51 classified?
00:22:39.000 I mean, now it's not.
00:22:40.000 President Obama was the first president to actually say Area 51 publicly.
00:22:44.000 Some people say because of my book, right?
00:22:47.000 Meaning it was out.
00:22:48.000 The secret was out.
00:22:48.000 But before that, I went through 10,000 pages of documents from the National Archives.
00:22:54.000 And every place you see, the word Area 51 was actually redacted, right?
00:22:59.000 Why would you keep that so secret?
00:23:01.000 I mean, all the guys that I was interviewing say they could call it You know, Groom Lake.
00:23:05.000 They could call it the test facility.
00:23:07.000 They could call it Paradise Ranch.
00:23:08.000 But they couldn't say Area 51. Why?
00:23:12.000 And the source said, well, because we did this horrible program out there.
00:23:17.000 And the government doesn't want anyone to know about that ever.
00:23:20.000 I mean, there are stories of, like, somebody asking Bill Clinton, you know...
00:23:25.000 About Area 51, him going white. 0.90
00:23:27.000 I mean, human experiments?
00:23:29.000 Who wants to be part of that?
00:23:30.000 It's horrible.
00:23:31.000 But 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?
00:23:40.000 Well, my goodness.
00:23:40.000 I mean, you read now the declassified documents tell us how many different human experiments were going on around nuclear weapons, okay?
00:23:51.000 Horrible experiments where they were subjecting people to radiation.
00:23:55.000 Because they wanted to know.
00:23:56.000 They felt, well, it's more important to know what happens to people than to not know.
00:24:01.000 And so they would take groups of people that, say, had cancer or something and test them.
00:24:05.000 So there's no doubt that the government has experimented on humans.
00:24:09.000 It's just, is that something that is wise to make public?
00:24:13.000 And, you know, there's two sides of the coin on that.
00:24:15.000 I 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.
00:24:24.000 Partially with good reason and partially it's like bad for national security.
00:24:29.000 So I think that's the justification on the part of the Defense Department to keep things secret.
00:24:34.000 That makes sense. 0.98
00:24:35.000 Wow, 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. 0.99
00:24:46.000 Hey man, you got a problem? 0.99
00:24:48.000 Zalians, they're coming. 1.00
00:24:49.000 And 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?
00:25:02.000 And radio, which was where people got all their information from.
00:25:06.000 I mean, was there two channels?
00:25:07.000 How many channels were there in 1947?
00:25:09.000 Maybe three?
00:25:11.000 Maybe.
00:25:11.000 Maybe three.
00:25:12.000 I mean, it was radio in World War II, right?
00:25:14.000 Most people had radio.
00:25:15.000 Yeah, mostly radio and newspapers, and that's where people were getting their information.
00:25:19.000 And 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.
00:25:40.000 Or that H.G. Wells, excuse me.
00:25:43.000 Right?
00:25:43.000 It was H.G. Wells' book and Orson Welles read it.
00:25:46.000 And when they were talking about this on the radio, a lot of people missed that part, right?
00:25:52.000 And so as the radio went on, as the broadcast went on and people were tuning in later in the day, it erupted in mass hysteria.
00:26:00.000 People were freaking out.
00:26:01.000 Hundreds of thousands of people really did think that it was.
00:26:04.000 And it was also something that was recreated in other countries.
00:26:09.000 I don't know if you know that.
00:26:10.000 They did that in other countries in different languages when they saw how cute it worked in America.
00:26:15.000 Well, so you see.
00:26:16.000 You can see the logic. 0.94
00:26:17.000 I mean, at first it sounds absurd and it sounds ridiculous. 0.69
00:26:20.000 It does, yeah.
00:26:20.000 And that's why I was sweating because it's like, right?
00:26:23.000 I know, right.
00:26:23.000 But 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.
00:26:35.000 And you begin to see how people's perception and how they're easily manipulated factors into national security, just like you just described.
00:26:44.000 Stalin knew about that.
00:26:46.000 He was a master.
00:26:48.000 He was the master of propaganda.
00:26:49.000 He invented it.
00:26:50.000 I mean, he didn't invent it, but he invented it on the political stage to be used to mess with another country's perception of things.
00:27:01.000 Think of what he did with brainwashing, right?
00:27:03.000 Okay.
00:27:04.000 So like in the 50s, and this is journalists, you know, said, so there was a journalist who was putting out stories about brainwashing.
00:27:11.000 And there was this idea, which is well taken, that totalitarian governments brainwash people.
00:27:16.000 And this became a big code word.
00:27:17.000 It was introduced into the American lexicon.
00:27:21.000 Well, then we're in the Korean War.
00:27:23.000 Our pilots start getting shot down.
00:27:25.000 They're put on TV by the communists saying terrible things about America, the American pilots.
00:27:32.000 And suddenly it was like they've been brainwashed.
00:27:35.000 It was very convenient to have that story.
00:27:37.000 So 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?
00:27:49.000 In the pole position.
00:27:51.000 That's the goal of the U.S. government.
00:27:54.000 So the propaganda that we did that sort of copied Stalin's – we're kind of playing catch-up in that sense.
00:28:01.000 I mean, we're playing catch-up, then we're ahead, then we're behind.
00:28:04.000 It's always a...
00:28:05.000 It's a game.
00:28:06.000 I mean, you're a competitor.
00:28:08.000 You know this.
00:28:09.000 But 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.
00:28:18.000 Did he say specifically what kind of modification they made to people that made them look like aliens?
00:28:23.000 I got drips.
00:28:25.000 Drips.
00:28:25.000 And you'll read it in those 12 pages.
00:28:26.000 Come on with this 12 pages...
00:28:28.000 I'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.
00:28:35.000 We sat there and talked about everything.
00:28:37.000 And I would try to squeeze out just like you're trying to squeeze out of me.
00:28:41.000 And that's why I'm saying read it because I literally tell you everything that there is.
00:28:46.000 I 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.
00:28:57.000 Right?
00:28:58.000 Why he did what he did.
00:28:59.000 How he wound up in the Manhattan Project.
00:29:02.000 Sounds like he was probably Jewish from Germany.
00:29:05.000 No?
00:29:06.000 No.
00:29:06.000 I'm trying.
00:29:08.000 Okay.
00:29:09.000 Trying to get you.
00:29:11.000 Morality.
00:29:12.000 Talk to me.
00:29:12.000 I want to talk about morality.
00:29:13.000 I want to talk about why we can't talk about certain things.
00:29:16.000 Well, what you were saying before about being a competitor.
00:29:20.000 The United States is competitive, obviously.
00:29:23.000 And when you're playing the ultimate game, which is war, you have to be very careful about what you reveal and what you don't reveal.
00:29:32.000 Yeah.
00:29:53.000 And why?
00:29:55.000 Why are we not supposed to know about that?
00:29:57.000 Should we know about that?
00:29:57.000 The way the story started for me, I'm at my house in 2009. A source calls me up.
00:30:03.000 He says, I'm on my way back from the Middle East.
00:30:05.000 I'm going to pop by the house and say hi.
00:30:08.000 He brings me a challenge coin that says, Kabul, Afghanistan, State Department.
00:30:12.000 I'm thinking, okay, he is not a diplomat.
00:30:15.000 I mean, he's weapons trained.
00:30:17.000 Yeah.
00:30:36.000 So 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.
00:30:49.000 And I thought, okay, so now I know what he was doing in Kabul, Afghanistan.
00:30:53.000 He's taking out Al-Qaeda with this.
00:30:57.000 There's another case on the ground that he never opens.
00:31:00.000 And when the boys go off, I say to him, what's in that?
00:31:03.000 And he opens it up, and inside there's a knife, and it's serrated.
00:31:09.000 And I said, what's that for?
00:31:10.000 Immediately realizing, you know, my naivete.
00:31:14.000 And he says to me, sometimes a job requires quiet.
00:31:19.000 So why that became interesting to me was because of my own thoughts and perceptions about what he had told me.
00:31:26.000 In other words, I could deal with him with a sniper rifle.
00:31:30.000 I could be like, okay, that's what he does.
00:31:32.000 But the knife gave me pause.
00:31:33.000 I was like...
00:31:34.000 Is he slitting someone's throat?
00:31:36.000 Is it in the ribs?
00:31:37.000 And 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.
00:31:52.000 And that led me to Surprise, Kill, Vanish.
00:31:59.000 I think? 0.99
00:32:13.000 With a, you know, a knife to the throat. 0.96
00:32:16.000 And I thought, okay, that's considered okay, because they were Nazis, right? 0.96
00:32:20.000 But we can't, we're not supposed to do that anymore.
00:32:23.000 In this world we live in, why?
00:32:26.000 And 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?
00:32:40.000 Yeah, and who are they willing to do that to?
00:32:44.000 Where do they draw that line?
00:32:46.000 Like, 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,
00:33:03.000 and it's an international...
00:33:09.000 Well, it's a huge incident, right?
00:33:11.000 This supposedly was ordered by, who was it supposedly ordered by?
00:33:16.000 The head of Saudi Arabia?
00:33:18.000 Yeah, MBS, Mohammed bin Salman.
00:33:20.000 I 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.
00:33:27.000 Because he was saying some things.
00:33:28.000 Yeah.
00:33:30.000 And that they, this is how they did it.
00:33:32.000 Yeah.
00:33:32.000 I 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?
00:33:39.000 Right.
00:33:39.000 Why, you know, because...
00:33:40.000 Because he's a journalist and he's on our side.
00:33:42.000 He's delivering information to people.
00:33:44.000 But the government of Saudi Arabia disagreed.
00:33:48.000 They're like, that information is our information.
00:33:50.000 He's a threat by releasing it.
00:33:52.000 Yes.
00:33:53.000 He's a threat to our livelihood.
00:33:55.000 Yes.
00:33:56.000 Yeah.
00:33:57.000 And who decides who's a threat?
00:33:58.000 I mean, a lot of this book is about who's on the kill list and why.
00:34:01.000 I mean, there is an actual kill list.
00:34:03.000 There always has been.
00:34:03.000 And the euphemisms involved.
00:34:05.000 I mean, I write history, as I said.
00:34:08.000 So Eisenhower called his assassination program health alteration.
00:34:13.000 I mean, literally in the declassified documents.
00:34:16.000 That's hilarious.
00:34:17.000 Health alteration.
00:34:18.000 He had a health alteration committee.
00:34:20.000 Whoa.
00:34:21.000 Kennedy had an executive action committee, right?
00:34:25.000 That sounds cleaner.
00:34:26.000 Right?
00:34:26.000 Guess what Reagan's was called?
00:34:29.000 Super Wonder Boy Power Up.
00:34:31.000 I don't know.
00:34:32.000 Close.
00:34:33.000 Pre-emptive neutralization.
00:34:36.000 Pre-emptive neutralization.
00:34:38.000 Wow.
00:34:38.000 Why do they keep switching the names for it?
00:34:40.000 They're burying the information, right?
00:34:43.000 Oh, the data.
00:34:43.000 Right, right, right.
00:34:44.000 And they keep switching around the...
00:34:46.000 They switch around who has authority to...
00:34:51.000 You know, say, yes, let's go ahead and put this guy on the kill list.
00:34:54.000 I mean, that was fascinating.
00:34:55.000 I mean, I interviewed a guy named John Rizzo, who's a decades long CIA attorney.
00:35:00.000 I was stunned that he was willing to talk to me.
00:35:04.000 And 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.
00:35:19.000 That 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,
00:35:38.000 and they can't, their rules of engagement are totally different.
00:35:40.000 So the misnomer is like, oh, the SEALs killed bin Laden.
00:35:44.000 Well, they were SEALs trained, but that was a CIA mission.
00:35:49.000 Because Pakistan is a sovereign nation, and the military can't kill people in countries we're not at war with.
00:35:59.000 So those guys all became...
00:36:02.000 Essentially CIA operators for the night.
00:36:06.000 And if you look at photographs, as I have seen, you'll notice that they have no markings on their outfits.
00:36:16.000 So that if the job went south, it'd be like, I don't know who these guys are.
00:36:20.000 And if you look back at Vietnam photos of the MACV SOG teams, which I also write about...
00:36:26.000 In Surprise, Kill, Vanish, because that's the precursor of that.
00:36:29.000 You see no markings, right?
00:36:31.000 That way you can go into, you can go behind enemy lines.
00:36:35.000 You can go into Laos, you know, in the Vietnam War.
00:36:38.000 You can go, now you can go into Pakistan.
00:36:40.000 What I learned reporting this book is we're in 134 countries doing Title 50 operations.
00:36:48.000 Think about that.
00:36:50.000 Government wants that to be kept secret.
00:36:52.000 So in all those countries, they're doing things that don't fall under the normal letter of the law.
00:37:00.000 Yes, not under the rules of engagement of the military.
00:37:03.000 But the CIA works at the president's behest.
00:37:07.000 That was one thing that really blew my mind, to report, to research, to understand.
00:37:12.000 I talked to 42 guys who have direct access to this, who are in this world.
00:37:17.000 You 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.
00:37:31.000 And again, to your question, well, why does someone get to know that?
00:37:37.000 And why does the government want, why do they allow that information out is super interesting.
00:37:42.000 And I believe that has to do with a certain climate we're in right now about military might, right?
00:37:49.000 In other words, what the CIA does is called tertia optio.
00:37:53.000 It's the third option.
00:37:54.000 You've got the first option is diplomacy.
00:37:57.000 Second option is war.
00:37:59.000 So if diplomacy is not working, and war is unwise, you go to the third option, which is the CIA's paramilitary.
00:38:09.000 And they're in a hundred and how many countries?
00:38:11.000 A hundred and thirty-four. 1.00
00:38:13.000 Damn. 0.99
00:38:14.000 Well, if you wonder why the military budget's so big, that's what it is, folks. 0.99
00:38:17.000 You've got to feed those folks. 0.98
00:38:18.000 A lot of work.
00:38:19.000 A lot happening.
00:38:20.000 And you as a competitor would be fascinated by the kind of training they do and what they do.
00:38:25.000 I mean, so many of these infiltration techniques are mind-boggling.
00:38:29.000 They've got halo jumping, which you know about, right?
00:38:32.000 High altitude, low opening.
00:38:34.000 So 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.
00:38:44.000 Then they also have hey-ho, which is high altitude, high opening.
00:38:49.000 And that way you can fly over airspace where we're allowed and float into, let's say, a country like Iran and land.
00:39:01.000 Gather your team and do what you have to do.
00:39:03.000 But 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.
00:39:14.000 You're a journalist, so you're trying not to judge.
00:39:18.000 Mm-hmm.
00:39:20.000 But is it your belief that this is a good thing for America?
00:39:26.000 Meaning the president having a third option?
00:39:30.000 Well, I mean, I write in the book that that's in the prologue after I tell that story about the source with the knife.
00:39:37.000 I say, I wanted to know.
00:39:41.000 And that exact question, like, is this a good thing?
00:39:44.000 And 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,
00:40:03.000 right?
00:40:06.000 Also, after talk—do I think it's a good thing?
00:40:08.000 After 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,
00:40:25.000 right, for the Pentagon, that's the second option, war.
00:40:31.000 The 42 guys that I interviewed, you know, they're like, send me.
00:40:36.000 They are professional.
00:40:37.000 They are tier one operators.
00:40:39.000 They're Green Berets. 0.98
00:40:40.000 They're SEALs.
00:40:40.000 They're Delta.
00:40:41.000 They retire.
00:40:42.000 They join the CIA. So they're like professionals at what they do.
00:40:46.000 And they're saying, someone has to do this job.
00:40:49.000 We've been doing this since the end of World War II. I want to do it.
00:40:53.000 So do I think it's better?
00:40:56.000 I mean, I think that...
00:41:00.000 That concept speaks to choice, right?
00:41:07.000 Because 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.
00:41:14.000 So, 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.
00:41:26.000 Right?
00:41:27.000 I 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,
00:41:43.000 even, right, where the outcome is not necessarily great.
00:41:46.000 But they talk about the romanticization of War and of camaraderie and of brotherhood that comes from that.
00:41:56.000 And then they have their experience and some of that does give them that sense, but not always.
00:42:02.000 Whereas the operators are much more about, you know, getting the job done.
00:42:08.000 That's what I was fascinated by.
00:42:09.000 I mean, these guys are really clear.
00:42:12.000 They're competitors.
00:42:13.000 They're like top tier competitors.
00:42:15.000 They have a job, they do it, they get it done, and they ask for the next job.
00:42:20.000 So, is the oversight, when it comes to choosing whether or not this operation takes place or not, do they have moral guidelines?
00:42:32.000 Do they have ethical or moral guidelines where they say, like, this is...
00:42:35.000 the president is...
00:42:38.000 Requesting that this person get taken out, the Chiefs of Staff, whoever it is.
00:42:43.000 Do they have to make an ethical distinction? 0.99
00:42:46.000 You mean, are they like, kill him nicely? 0.94
00:42:48.000 Like, don't make it hurt? 0.99
00:42:49.000 No, no, no.
00:42:49.000 Do they decide, like, does this make sense?
00:42:52.000 Or, like, what if the President is like, Rosie O'Donnell, she's been talking shit, take her out. 1.00
00:42:56.000 You know what I'm saying? 1.00
00:42:57.000 Well, I mean, that's a big issue.
00:43:00.000 But...
00:43:01.000 What I try to report in Surprise, Kill, Vanish is the idea that the people we take out maybe are bad guys, right?
00:43:11.000 One guy I write about is Che Guevara, okay?
00:43:13.000 Because Che is often...
00:43:21.000 I don't know if you know, but he was he was killed by the Bolivian Rangers, but it was a CIA operation.
00:43:30.000 And I interview the man in charge of that operation in Surprise Kill Vanish.
00:43:34.000 His name was Felix Rodriguez.
00:43:36.000 Okay, long serving CIA paramilitary officer.
00:43:39.000 So, but I also report Why the president, to your question, wanted Che Guevara dead?
00:43:48.000 You know, he was really advocating for nuclear war.
00:43:53.000 And I show that.
00:43:54.000 Che Guevara was.
00:43:55.000 Yes.
00:43:56.000 I 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.
00:44:05.000 I mean, Che was also, Che killed anyone who betrayed him, he killed.
00:44:10.000 He writes about it in his diaries, as I write in the book, right?
00:44:13.000 So, but on the morality question, who decides?
00:44:16.000 I don't have that answer, but I will tell you what I did.
00:44:18.000 I went with my main source, Billy Waugh, who he's a 89 now.
00:44:22.000 And he's been with the CIA for 60 years, okay?
00:44:28.000 And he and I went to Cuba for him to do a halo jump with Che Guevara's son.
00:44:36.000 So we were a guest of the man...
00:44:41.000 Whose 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. 0.59
00:44:57.000 And that's what I try to give readers a sense of, the long lens of history, how time changes all things.
00:45:07.000 And 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?
00:45:16.000 Because really what you might ask is, is it necessary?
00:45:21.000 Right?
00:45:22.000 I mean, I could moralize right, wrong, but it would just be my opinion.
00:45:26.000 But 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.
00:45:40.000 And 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.
00:45:48.000 So 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?
00:45:58.000 And my conclusion of that, again, is not is it right or wrong, but is it necessary?
00:46:05.000 I mean, we have these wars.
00:46:07.000 We keep having these wars.
00:46:10.000 Is it necessary?
00:46:12.000 Yeah.
00:46:13.000 What do you think?
00:46:15.000 Well, 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.
00:46:28.000 And so you create what some at the Pentagon call a self-licking ice cream cone, or the military-industrial complex.
00:46:36.000 And there's a lot built into that, and there's a lot to be said about that.
00:46:40.000 And there's also probably some concern about other countries getting ahead of us.
00:46:45.000 So you have to do what you have to do.
00:46:47.000 If 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.
00:47:04.000 Absolutely.
00:47:05.000 I 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?
00:47:13.000 Whoa.
00:47:13.000 Right?
00:47:14.000 Really?
00:47:14.000 Yeah.
00:47:15.000 What are they doing?
00:47:15.000 Oh, my God.
00:47:16.000 They have these little salamanders.
00:47:17.000 I mean, they're showing that salamanders can regenerate their limbs.
00:47:21.000 And so human, their idea, they're down at UC Irvine.
00:47:25.000 They have this incredible lab, and they're funded by DARPA because that's where the money comes from, right?
00:47:30.000 Yeah.
00:47:30.000 And their idea is that humans should be able to regenerate their limbs and, you know, 50 years out we'll be doing that.
00:47:37.000 And they're working on the science for that.
00:47:40.000 Well, that's the same science that allows for cloning. 0.78
00:47:43.000 And so in our discussions, because that's how I try to report, is like really ask people, What they think about future consequences.
00:47:52.000 And 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? 0.84
00:48:04.000 You know, the American people are going to freak out and go, where the hell was DARPA? Why aren't we ahead of the curve?
00:48:09.000 So it's that there's a chicken and the egg problem with that of like, well, we have to stay ahead.
00:48:16.000 We're We're on top.
00:48:17.000 We wanna be on top.
00:48:20.000 It's kind of terrifying.
00:48:21.000 I mean, everything I write about is terrifying.
00:48:24.000 How do you sleep?
00:48:25.000 Do you sleep well?
00:48:26.000 Do you have to take Ambien?
00:48:27.000 I'm more worried about...
00:48:28.000 No.
00:48:28.000 God, no.
00:48:29.000 I'm more worried about coming on your show and being asked tough questions than I am about...
00:48:33.000 No, teasing you.
00:48:34.000 But then I am about...
00:48:35.000 I mean, this stuff is informative.
00:48:37.000 It's informative and it's a longer conversation.
00:48:39.000 It's why I think what you do with your podcast is awesome because people can really get into...
00:48:48.000 The thinking about things, right?
00:48:50.000 And they can move away from their own preconceptions, their own biases they're bringing into it.
00:48:56.000 And they're stopping for a minute and they're going, what do I really think about that?
00:49:01.000 And to really think about something you need information.
00:49:03.000 Yeah.
00:49:04.000 And information can be boring unless it's interestingly presented through conversation, through, you know, uncomfortable conversation.
00:49:13.000 Well, 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.
00:49:21.000 I mean, that's impossible.
00:49:22.000 Well, it's so difficult.
00:49:23.000 I see people have these conversations about books or something that are trying to – a complex, very nuanced subject that they're trying to discuss.
00:49:31.000 And there's another person on the other side that's like, that's not true!
00:49:34.000 And they're shouting over each other.
00:49:35.000 I'm like, boy, just the pressure.
00:49:37.000 People have to understand that – People do understand, but you have to reiterate it, and it has to be kind of drilled into your head.
00:49:46.000 When 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.
00:49:55.000 You should have the best version.
00:49:58.000 If I'm going to have a disagreement with someone...
00:50:01.000 I want the best version of their point.
00:50:04.000 And I want them to get it out with no pressure.
00:50:07.000 I want to help them get it out.
00:50:09.000 I'd like to reiterate it with them.
00:50:10.000 I'd like to give them plenty of time.
00:50:12.000 I want to know how you think.
00:50:14.000 I want to know what you're thinking about.
00:50:16.000 I would love to talk to these guys.
00:50:19.000 I would love to.
00:50:20.000 But the thing is, they can't tell you a lot of this.
00:50:24.000 I mean, for national security reasons, there's a lot of reasons.
00:50:28.000 I'm sure. 0.99
00:50:29.000 If they want to keep their job and stay alive, they have to shut the fuck up. 0.99
00:50:33.000 They 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. 0.99
00:50:42.000 Yeah.
00:50:44.000 But that's the reporter's job, or at least my job.
00:50:47.000 So in other words, okay, so I go to visit Billy Wah at his home, and I knew, I heard stories about he's this legendary operator, right?
00:50:54.000 And he's also what's called a singleton, so he works alone.
00:50:57.000 And when I was at...
00:50:58.000 That's what they call him, a singleton?
00:50:59.000 A singleton, right?
00:51:00.000 Oh.
00:51:00.000 Which is like he's got one guy giving him orders.
00:51:03.000 Whoa.
00:51:03.000 Right?
00:51:04.000 And he's out there lonely?
00:51:04.000 Oh, my God.
00:51:05.000 I mean, Billy Wah is, right?
00:51:07.000 I mean, back...
00:51:08.000 Can we back up for a second?
00:51:09.000 Yeah.
00:51:09.000 I'm not going to give you the story of him.
00:51:10.000 Okay, so here's this guy.
00:51:12.000 He's in...
00:51:13.000 He's in Vietnam, and he's part of what was called MACV SOG, right?
00:51:17.000 And they're doing cross-border missions into Laos, and it's so dangerous.
00:51:21.000 It's a CIA program that SOG stands for Studies and Observations Group.
00:51:28.000 I mean, it's supposed to sound like a bunch of guys in an Ivy League tower with bow ties, right?
00:51:33.000 But the guys on the ground called it suicide on the ground.
00:51:36.000 That's how dangerous it was.
00:51:38.000 Jesus.
00:51:38.000 A hundred percent.
00:51:40.000 Of the people had casualties, right?
00:51:43.000 Billy Waugh has nine Purple Hearts from the work he did.
00:51:46.000 Nine, okay?
00:51:47.000 I 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.
00:51:57.000 The war ends.
00:51:58.000 Everybody's furious with the government, with the military.
00:52:05.000 There's no room for special operators.
00:52:07.000 I mean, everything, it's called the time of troubles by them.
00:52:10.000 Billy Wah is working in the post office.
00:52:13.000 And he gets this knock, you know, and it's like, he's back in the CIA now, in 1977. So he was out for a while?
00:52:21.000 He was out.
00:52:22.000 It was over.
00:52:22.000 I mean, he was, you know, it was over.
00:52:25.000 That was it.
00:52:25.000 And he was working in the post office?
00:52:26.000 He was working in the post office.
00:52:27.000 It seems like a Stallone movie.
00:52:28.000 We need you.
00:52:30.000 Right?
00:52:31.000 The team needs you.
00:52:33.000 I 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.
00:52:42.000 Whoa.
00:52:43.000 Because he was getting back into it.
00:52:45.000 Probably had like recycled his mind and put himself in a place, I'm just a civilian now.
00:52:50.000 And he said, I'm going to wind up being one of those old guys drinking beer at the end of the bar talking about the war.
00:52:56.000 Right?
00:52:56.000 And 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.
00:53:11.000 I mean, that's the beginning of his career.
00:53:13.000 And it goes on all the way until we were in Cuba, I think was actually some kind of a mission.
00:53:18.000 Because it was like, what are we doing here in Cuba doing infiltration and exfiltration techniques, allegedly with Che Guevara's son?
00:53:26.000 But 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.
00:53:36.000 But there's one framed Item that I'm looking at, and it's a knife.
00:53:43.000 And there's a seal from the CIA. And it says, in appreciation to the assassin.
00:53:53.000 And I said, Billy, tell me about that.
00:53:56.000 And he said, you know, I can't talk about that.
00:53:58.000 So I, you know, stayed with him for two years.
00:54:01.000 I mean, stayed, we conversed, we traveled, I interviewed him, you know, hundreds of hours.
00:54:08.000 And I kept asking him about that award.
00:54:12.000 And he kept saying, you know, I can't talk about that.
00:54:14.000 But as I write in the book, he couldn't talk about it, but others did.
00:54:19.000 So that's how a reporter works.
00:54:21.000 You get introduced to enough of his friends, enough of the others who are involved.
00:54:26.000 You make sure they're a legitimate source and you begin to find out what he can't talk about.
00:54:33.000 And that's what I report in the book.
00:54:34.000 And that is very explosive because President Bush, right after 9-11, created what was called a stalker team.
00:54:42.000 And 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.
00:54:53.000 And that, what I learned, had never happened until right after 11 with the stalker team.
00:54:57.000 12 men and actually one or two women, the femme fatale, and they would go after bad guys. 1.00
00:55:05.000 And they adopted the term from the Reagan era.
00:55:10.000 So it was called preemptive neutralization.
00:55:13.000 Who are the women? 1.00
00:55:15.000 There's always one woman on the team, that's what I was told, by the guy who was in charge of the soccer team. 0.51
00:55:20.000 Why is that?
00:55:21.000 Well, I mean, he gave me this great example.
00:55:25.000 I don't report it in the book, but I'll tell you, right?
00:55:27.000 He said, so, women have a different presentation. 1.00
00:55:33.000 And this, like, he told me the story of a woman sitting on a bench and You know, embracing a man, right?
00:55:43.000 And no one thought anything of it.
00:55:45.000 And it allowed her to spy on someone in a manner that a man would have drawn attention.
00:55:54.000 And then the stalker team could go.
00:55:56.000 So what their job would be is to conduct surveillance of a target.
00:56:01.000 And they call it making book.
00:56:03.000 They have to make book on that individual so they know exactly where the guy is.
00:56:07.000 And they're waiting on the president's orders whether or not they should take action.
00:56:14.000 And, you know, that's where the information stops, right?
00:56:18.000 Right.
00:56:18.000 I say, well, then what happens?
00:56:19.000 Well, that's all we can say, Annie.
00:56:21.000 That must be so exciting.
00:56:23.000 Like, to live like that, like all cloak and dagger, it's got to be so exciting.
00:56:29.000 Like, I would take that over a cubicle every day of the week.
00:56:32.000 I really would. 0.99
00:56:34.000 Well, you might get killed. 1.00
00:56:35.000 I might die in that damn cubicle, too. 1.00
00:56:37.000 Right. 1.00
00:56:38.000 I think it's why so many of these operators stay in it long term, right?
00:56:43.000 Did you ever see the television show, the Showtime show?
00:56:45.000 What the hell is it called? 0.99
00:56:47.000 What the fuck is that show called? 0.99
00:56:49.000 The Homeland. 1.00
00:56:51.000 You ever watch that?
00:56:52.000 Yes.
00:56:53.000 That's the whole premise.
00:56:55.000 She's completely addicted to being in that world.
00:56:59.000 Adrenaline.
00:57:00.000 I mean, that's what that is.
00:57:01.000 Imagine jumping out of an aircraft, landing behind enemy lines, and then your work begins.
00:57:09.000 And then you have to get out.
00:57:11.000 That's why surprise, kill, vanish. 0.99
00:57:13.000 I mean, you've got to surprise your way in, kill them, and then get out. 0.99
00:57:17.000 And if you do a good job, they frame your knife and give you a plaque. 0.99
00:57:22.000 Jamie, I'm going to get you a knife.
00:57:24.000 It's an appreciation of the assassin. 1.00
00:57:25.000 You're a killer. 1.00
00:57:28.000 It's just such a crazy way to live your life. 1.00
00:57:30.000 But, you know, I'll take that over a boring life.
00:57:34.000 I would take that over a boring life every day of the week.
00:57:37.000 Well, it's like the Pink Floyd line, you know, living life of quiet desperation.
00:57:41.000 I mean, that just terrifies me.
00:57:42.000 Well, that's Thoreau's quote, that most men live lives of quiet desperation.
00:57:46.000 It's one of my favorite quotes ever because it's true.
00:57:49.000 And I've been that guy.
00:57:51.000 You're just in this world where you just can't wait to just run away.
00:57:57.000 And how do people get stuck there?
00:57:58.000 How do you think they get stuck there?
00:58:00.000 Bills.
00:58:01.000 Bills?
00:58:02.000 Like financial bills?
00:58:03.000 Yeah.
00:58:04.000 Bills and commitment.
00:58:05.000 You have an apartment you have to pay for.
00:58:07.000 You have a car you leased.
00:58:08.000 You have a wife that you have to feed. 0.99
00:58:10.000 You have a child you have to raise.
00:58:12.000 You have your mortgage.
00:58:13.000 You have your this.
00:58:14.000 You have your that.
00:58:15.000 And that's where it all comes from.
00:58:16.000 Where do you think opportunity plays into that?
00:58:19.000 Well, the opportunity takes place usually when you're young and you don't have any responsibility.
00:58:24.000 That's when you have your options.
00:58:26.000 Your options are severely limited the more you gather responsibilities.
00:58:32.000 Like, if I had to...
00:58:36.000 Yeah.
00:58:50.000 But 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.
00:58:59.000 That's the only way you ever get where you want to go.
00:59:04.000 You have to take a path that's dangerous.
00:59:07.000 And most people want to take the safe path.
00:59:09.000 And the safe path leaves you stuck in quiet desperation almost every time.
00:59:15.000 It's hell.
00:59:17.000 It's hell. 1.00
00:59:17.000 You're selling insurance or some other shit that you care zero about. 1.00
00:59:23.000 But can people just make that change? 0.99
00:59:25.000 Yes, you can.
00:59:26.000 I believe they can.
00:59:27.000 But you have to plan it out.
00:59:28.000 The way you can change is you have to put aside enough money to give yourself a window.
00:59:32.000 And then you have to have a plan. 0.99
00:59:34.000 And you have to spend all your waking hours outside of whatever shit job you do planning your escape. 1.00
00:59:39.000 And you have to come to the realization very clearly that you fucked up and you got yourself stuck. 1.00
00:59:44.000 So whatever you're doing, you have to... 0.99
00:59:48.000 Do it like your life depends on it.
00:59:51.000 And whether it is you're trying to be an author and you're going to...
00:59:54.000 If 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.
01:00:07.000 You're trying to save your life.
01:00:08.000 You don't want to drown. 0.99
01:00:09.000 That one and a half hours a day that you have to write, god damn, you better be caffeinated and motivated. 0.99
01:00:14.000 You got to go. 0.99
01:00:15.000 You got to get after it.
01:00:17.000 And you've got to have discipline.
01:00:18.000 Most people don't have those things.
01:00:20.000 Most people don't understand what it's like to really go for something and to know that the consequences of not doing that are horrific.
01:00:30.000 Then you're desperate and you're quiet.
01:00:32.000 But I do think there is something to be said for fate and circumstance.
01:00:37.000 Sure.
01:00:38.000 And 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?
01:00:52.000 But when your life is on the line, right, a lot of times they have these experiences where they're like, I must change.
01:01:01.000 And that's what I find really interesting in people.
01:01:05.000 Sure.
01:01:05.000 Desperation.
01:01:06.000 Right.
01:01:06.000 Yeah, I think fate and circumstance are giant.
01:01:10.000 Fortune is giant.
01:01:11.000 There's no question about it.
01:01:12.000 Some children get shot in drive-bys.
01:01:14.000 You know, that's just horrible, horrible luck and unfortunate circumstance.
01:01:18.000 A lot of it is fortune and fate.
01:01:21.000 How about people getting lost, right?
01:01:24.000 Lost, how so?
01:01:25.000 So, the book that I told you I wrote on the psychics, Phenomenon.
01:01:29.000 What do you believe about that?
01:01:31.000 Again, I'm neutral, right?
01:01:33.000 I'm not.
01:01:34.000 You're not?
01:01:34.000 Tell me.
01:01:34.000 I want to hear what you believe.
01:01:35.000 I think there's a lot of people that are full of shit. 1.00
01:01:37.000 Absolutely. 1.00
01:01:38.000 My God. 1.00
01:01:39.000 I think it's almost all people that are talking about being psychic are full of shit. 0.99
01:01:42.000 But I do think that there is a strange connection that we have with each other. 0.99
01:01:48.000 That's intangible.
01:01:49.000 And I think that some people have better connections than others.
01:01:53.000 Just like some people are more intelligent.
01:01:55.000 Like we were talking before the podcast about Elon Musk. 0.99
01:01:57.000 And it's painfully aware when you talk to him what a chimp you are. 1.00
01:02:01.000 He's so fucking smart. 1.00
01:02:03.000 And his brain is built different. 1.00
01:02:06.000 Just like some people have defective hearts.
01:02:08.000 Some people have a heart like Lance Armstrong.
01:02:10.000 It's incredible.
01:02:11.000 Huge.
01:02:12.000 An anomaly.
01:02:13.000 Some people have giant hands.
01:02:15.000 He has a big heart?
01:02:16.000 Literally?
01:02:17.000 Yes, literally.
01:02:18.000 And they don't know whether or not that's from training or steroids and EPO or whether or not it's something he was born with.
01:02:25.000 They really don't know.
01:02:26.000 But yeah, he has an unusually sized heart.
01:02:30.000 It's usually large.
01:02:31.000 But what was my point?
01:02:34.000 Fate, circumstance, getting lost.
01:02:36.000 Oh, psychics.
01:02:37.000 Psychics.
01:02:38.000 That's what it is. 1.00
01:02:38.000 I think that most of the people that can tell you the future are full of shit. 1.00
01:02:44.000 I think people get feelings. 1.00
01:02:45.000 I think sometimes you think about someone they call you, and I don't know what that is.
01:02:49.000 I don't know if that's just complete fortune.
01:02:52.000 Like, how many times are you thinking about a person when they don't call you?
01:02:55.000 That's the argument against it.
01:02:56.000 But how many times are you thinking about that person they don't call you, but they're thinking about you as well?
01:03:02.000 How often is that?
01:03:04.000 With 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.
01:03:11.000 And 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.
01:03:22.000 It's possible.
01:03:23.000 It's possible. 1.00
01:03:24.000 But the problem is you have these mediums and psychics and those people are just assholes. 0.99
01:03:28.000 And I have a friend, his name is Banachek, and he runs a Las Vegas mentalist show where he shows you how he does these tricks. 0.99
01:03:37.000 But he'll tell you absolutely these are tricks.
01:03:39.000 He's been on the podcast.
01:03:40.000 He's a brilliant, brilliant man.
01:03:42.000 But he'll tell you these are tricks.
01:03:44.000 I'm showing you how I do this.
01:03:46.000 I mean, I'm going to tell you this trick.
01:03:48.000 I'm not going to give you how I do it, but I'm going to tell you while I'm doing it, this is a trick.
01:03:54.000 But he's pulling all this information out of people about their past, their childhood.
01:03:58.000 He's guessing people's ages.
01:04:00.000 He's guessing where they grew up. 0.99
01:04:02.000 I mean, and it's all little sneaky shit. 0.99
01:04:05.000 You know, it's the way they do it. 0.99
01:04:07.000 It's a skill as much as anything.
01:04:10.000 And so when you see these people...
01:04:12.000 That are channelers or, you know, psychics that are telling you about someone in your past that's trying to contact you.
01:04:18.000 They're con artists, almost exclusively.
01:04:21.000 I 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. 1.00
01:04:30.000 But 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. 0.99
01:04:41.000 They had weird ego problems that were glaring that they didn't notice. 0.99
01:04:46.000 You know, like I could see it that this is a gross way to behave and they don't see it.
01:04:51.000 Their interpersonal relationships, the way they communicate with people was like an agent, like a fake Hollywood person or something. 0.81
01:04:57.000 There was something bullshitty about them.
01:04:59.000 And people who lie a lot, I think if you lie a lot, it's very difficult for you to tell what a lie is.
01:05:06.000 Oh, that's interesting.
01:05:07.000 Yeah, I think you lose your connection. 1.00
01:05:09.000 I think when you bullshit, I think you also bullshit yourself. 0.99
01:05:13.000 I mean, I don't think these psychics are 100% honest, even with themselves. 1.00
01:05:18.000 I don't think this is like, I'm going to fuck this lady over. 1.00
01:05:20.000 She thinks she's going to talk to her husband. 1.00
01:05:22.000 Tell her some nonsense. 0.95
01:05:24.000 Take her money. 1.00
01:05:24.000 I think some of them actually believe they're getting information. 1.00
01:05:28.000 My grandmother used to believe that.
01:05:30.000 My grandmother was a very eccentric lady. 0.89
01:05:34.000 An 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, 0.85
01:05:59.000 that 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.
01:06:06.000 It always did.
01:06:07.000 If you were really psychic, you would have better instincts.
01:06:11.000 This is just this inclination that people have that there's something special about their perceptions, and that they're psychic.
01:06:17.000 And it's always these really wacky people that believe they're psychics, in my experience.
01:06:24.000 I think you're talking also about what some scientists would call the self-fulfilling prophecy.
01:06:29.000 That if you believe this, things happen, manifest themselves, and you can convince yourself that you believe this.
01:06:36.000 But for me, I'm super interested in...
01:06:41.000 People who really believe in psychics, right?
01:06:44.000 And the military, for example.
01:06:47.000 Do you ever talk to Ed Daines?
01:06:49.000 Do you ever talk to those guys, the remote viewing guys?
01:06:51.000 I 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?
01:07:01.000 And he was so...
01:07:03.000 So 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.
01:07:18.000 It's this extraordinary image because you're like, wait a minute, he's on the moon and he's reading a document.
01:07:22.000 What is that document?
01:07:24.000 I found out the document was a map of the moon.
01:07:27.000 Okay?
01:07:28.000 Mitchell got lost on the moon and literally pulled a map out of like, okay, he was trying to get to a certain crater.
01:07:35.000 And they had a very limited amount of time.
01:07:37.000 There it is right there.
01:07:38.000 Right?
01:07:38.000 Okay, there he is.
01:07:40.000 Wow.
01:07:40.000 I mean, think about it.
01:07:41.000 It's like the most advanced technology of the time.
01:07:45.000 Why doesn't the guy with the camera tell him where to go?
01:07:50.000 Guy's taking a picture of him.
01:07:52.000 He'll be like, hey bro, this way.
01:07:53.000 Move left. 0.59
01:07:54.000 Let's just follow our footprints.
01:07:55.000 We're the only ones walking. 1.00
01:07:57.000 What are you, stupid? 1.00
01:07:58.000 Turn around, look at the ground. 1.00
01:07:59.000 See those things?
01:08:00.000 That's where you walked.
01:08:01.000 Let's go that way.
01:08:02.000 Jesus Christ.
01:08:03.000 I'd be so mad at him.
01:08:04.000 I'd be like, bro, you're pulling out a map?
01:08:06.000 Who wrote that map?
01:08:08.000 No one's even been here.
01:08:09.000 Come on, man.
01:08:10.000 They had little maps folded up in their pockets in case they got lost.
01:08:14.000 They 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.
01:08:23.000 They had all this pressure.
01:08:24.000 They couldn't find it.
01:08:26.000 The heart rate's up.
01:08:26.000 The guys at Houston are like, you've got to turn back.
01:08:28.000 Your heart rate's going crazy.
01:08:30.000 And think about it.
01:08:31.000 Mitchell tells me, I went to interview him at his house.
01:08:33.000 I think it was his last interview before he died.
01:08:35.000 And he said there we had gotten 240,000 miles to get lost.
01:08:42.000 They missed the crater by like, you know, 900 feet or something.
01:08:45.000 Really?
01:08:46.000 Yeah.
01:08:46.000 So he never got to the crater?
01:08:47.000 Never got to it.
01:08:47.000 He was devastated.
01:08:48.000 And on the way back from the moon, he has this, what he told me was a psychic change, right?
01:08:55.000 His consciousness flipped.
01:08:58.000 And he became convinced that psychic powers were real.
01:09:03.000 And that is really the beginning of his foray.
01:09:06.000 I 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.
01:09:17.000 And he dedicated the rest of his life to it.
01:09:19.000 And he was ridiculed.
01:09:21.000 He had some wacky beliefs.
01:09:23.000 He had some wacky beliefs about aliens as well.
01:09:26.000 He thought that we were definitely in contact with aliens.
01:09:29.000 And 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?
01:09:43.000 He 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.
01:09:54.000 And Shepard said to him, like, look at this nonsense.
01:09:57.000 The newspapers will do anything to make a buck.
01:10:00.000 And Mitchell said, I did that.
01:10:02.000 I actually did that.
01:10:03.000 Well, what experiments?
01:10:04.000 So he was doing ESP experiments on the way back from the moon.
01:10:08.000 He had a psychic in Chicago, a Swedish psychic, that he was sending messages to.
01:10:14.000 Was she hot? 1.00
01:10:15.000 It was an old Swedish man, right? 0.51
01:10:18.000 Named Olaf, right?
01:10:20.000 But I hear Swedish psychic.
01:10:21.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:10:21.000 I gotta get to my psychic.
01:10:23.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:10:23.000 Can't wait to take my clothes off.
01:10:26.000 I'll introduce you to Olaf.
01:10:28.000 I saw the movie Frozen.
01:10:30.000 I didn't see that one.
01:10:31.000 Olaf's the little snowman.
01:10:33.000 Oh, you've got younger kids.
01:10:36.000 I missed that one.
01:10:37.000 Mine are older.
01:10:39.000 Anyway, sorry.
01:10:40.000 So Ed Mitchell was talking to this hot chick.
01:10:42.000 The hot old man.
01:10:44.000 And the story broke because the Swedish psychic could not resist leaking to the press that he had done these experiments.
01:10:53.000 What experiments were they?
01:10:55.000 Well, psychics train on these little cards called zener cards, right?
01:10:59.000 So, like, you have different symbols on them, and, you know, one person, that's how they decide whether or not they're being psychic.
01:11:07.000 Like, there would be a veil between us, and I would say, what are you seeing, right?
01:11:12.000 And you would call it out.
01:11:13.000 So it's like a control system.
01:11:15.000 And Mitchell had these items with him.
01:11:26.000 Did it work?
01:11:30.000 Well, no.
01:11:31.000 And he took notes.
01:11:32.000 He showed me the notes.
01:11:33.000 It was so wild to be at his house in Florida.
01:11:35.000 And he pulls out this old spiral notebook with like water stains on it that actually went to the moon.
01:11:41.000 I was like, wow, this is really something else.
01:11:46.000 I mean, it was one of those moments in time where you're just like, I don't know, there was a feeling of sadness around all of it.
01:11:55.000 With Ed Mitchell sitting there in his...
01:11:59.000 You know, his chair and talking to me about what it was like to be an Apollo astronaut on the walls.
01:12:06.000 I'm with a lot of these sources with like incredible amounts of awards on the walls.
01:12:11.000 But what does that mean after time passes, right?
01:12:13.000 So his experiments didn't work, but he still believed in psychic powers.
01:12:17.000 Yes.
01:12:18.000 I mean, and that's, and he, okay, so what we were saying, he was ridiculed, you know, and he had such a tough time with it.
01:12:24.000 And so the people who propped him up and the people who gave him a lot of encouragement, Who were these people?
01:12:36.000 You know, conspiracy theorists who really kind of used him because he was an Apollo astronaut.
01:12:41.000 And so he was so much more famous than any of them would ever be.
01:12:46.000 And they really took advantage of him, I think.
01:12:49.000 So you think they manipulated him with information and tried to get him more and more enthusiastic about their obsessions?
01:12:55.000 I mean, it's speculation on my part, but you kind of go where the love is, right?
01:12:58.000 He was an older guy, too.
01:12:59.000 I'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.
01:13:10.000 And people take advantage of that.
01:13:12.000 Yeah, he was really obsessed with extraterrestrial life.
01:13:16.000 It was really interesting because didn't he claim that he had seen something while he was up in space?
01:13:23.000 I think people helped him make that claim.
01:13:27.000 That was my understanding of it, of reporting it.
01:13:29.000 I 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?
01:13:43.000 Because so much of this is, it's like, who's funding this stuff and why?
01:13:47.000 Yeah.
01:13:49.000 Yeah.
01:14:04.000 Who's in charge, right?
01:14:07.000 Right.
01:14:07.000 And 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.
01:14:17.000 Oh, I'm sure.
01:14:18.000 Did you find anything about Ed Mitchell?
01:14:19.000 Did he say anything about – see if he said anything about seeing a UFO or seeing extraterrestrial life.
01:14:27.000 But 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.
01:14:36.000 The other thing is, as these guys get older, that becomes their career.
01:14:41.000 Their career becomes discussing their experiences.
01:14:44.000 And the more outrageous those experiences are, the better their career is.
01:14:49.000 It's absolutely true.
01:14:50.000 They changed their stories.
01:14:51.000 Michael Collins changed his story.
01:14:54.000 His story when he just got back from the moon, his story was that they couldn't see any stars.
01:15:00.000 But 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.
01:15:12.000 But there's a press conference when he came back from the moon, right after the Apollo 11 moon launch.
01:15:18.000 He was talking about he couldn't see any stars.
01:15:21.000 So everybody's like, well, what is it?
01:15:23.000 You know, they get lost, right?
01:15:27.000 They're older.
01:15:28.000 It's been so many years since whatever they did when they were working with NASA. And really, it becomes...
01:15:35.000 That's their focal point of attention.
01:15:37.000 Where they get their attention from and where they make their career is from their attention.
01:15:42.000 And so they start telling these inconsistent stories.
01:15:46.000 I mean, one of the great perils of, you know, living on your laurels is exactly that.
01:15:52.000 And 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, 0.96
01:16:08.000 right?
01:16:09.000 So his cover later became Just Another Old Man.
01:16:14.000 Which is like super interesting.
01:16:16.000 Like 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.
01:16:27.000 And 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.
01:16:44.000 What did he do?
01:16:45.000 Like, wear golf shirts and wander around?
01:16:47.000 No, I have a photograph of him.
01:16:48.000 He wore, like, you know those socks that go all the way up to your mid-shin? 0.99
01:16:52.000 Oh, he dressed like a dork. 0.92
01:16:54.000 Yes, and little shorts and a sweatband over his head. 0.98
01:16:57.000 And he said, my cover was that I was an old man on a fitness craze.
01:17:12.000 Wow.
01:17:19.000 Jesus.
01:17:21.000 I 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.
01:17:36.000 Dun-dun-dun.
01:17:38.000 I mean, that's an easy narrative, right?
01:17:40.000 Sure.
01:17:40.000 Yeah, sure.
01:17:42.000 Yeah, and, I mean, how much do they tell Ed Mitchell?
01:17:45.000 They say, hey, thanks for going to the moon.
01:17:47.000 Well, 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.
01:18:00.000 How much do you think Trump knows?
01:18:02.000 Do you think they keep stuff from him?
01:18:03.000 Because I would say, like, he's kind of a loose cannon.
01:18:05.000 I wouldn't tell him about the aliens.
01:18:07.000 I mean, I often wonder that.
01:18:11.000 Like, can the president be like, I demand to know about this?
01:18:15.000 And then can they say, no, sir.
01:18:17.000 Or they say, as I write in one of my other books, it's like, you don't want to know about that.
01:18:21.000 Because you don't want to have to lie.
01:18:23.000 Well, that's nonsense.
01:18:23.000 I definitely want to know.
01:18:24.000 I would want to know.
01:18:25.000 And that would be the only reason to become president, right?
01:18:27.000 You'd have to figure out why you have to lie.
01:18:29.000 Like, whether or not, if you have to lie, make sense to you, right?
01:18:32.000 Like, there's some things... 1.00
01:18:34.000 That you know that we're done, like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, where you go, what the fuck are you doing? 0.99
01:18:42.000 Like, no, you can't do that. 0.99
01:18:44.000 But then there's some things you go, oh, I see why you had to do that.
01:18:48.000 Yes.
01:18:48.000 You know, so it would have to be like, which one of those things is it?
01:18:52.000 Is 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?
01:19:00.000 Or...
01:19:00.000 Is it some nefarious plot to turn Down Syndrome children into surgically constructed fake aliens and crash them into the earth?
01:19:10.000 And the curiosity factor would be outrageous.
01:19:13.000 I mean, can you imagine being the president and saying, I want to know about JFK? And they're like, sir, you don't want to know.
01:19:20.000 Then you would go, well, of course I want to know.
01:19:22.000 Now I really want to know.
01:19:23.000 I mean, that happens to me as a reporter all the time.
01:19:25.000 I can't talk about that.
01:19:27.000 That just becomes the obsession.
01:19:28.000 It's like, I want to know.
01:19:32.000 Yeah.
01:19:32.000 That's the first thing I'd want to know.
01:19:33.000 I'd almost run for president to learn about aliens.
01:19:36.000 I'm like, come on, bro. 1.00
01:19:37.000 But then if I found out there were nothing, I'd be like, well, fuck this job. 1.00
01:19:40.000 I quit. 0.99
01:19:41.000 I don't want to run the world.
01:19:43.000 I just want to find out about the aliens.
01:19:45.000 And then there's all these things that you find out.
01:19:47.000 Jamie and I were talking about that before.
01:19:48.000 It's like, you know...
01:19:50.000 Jamie's obsessed.
01:19:52.000 He's obsessed with Chicago.
01:19:54.000 I know.
01:19:54.000 Ohio, rather.
01:19:55.000 Columbus.
01:19:56.000 Well, we were talking about Nazis, right? 0.89
01:19:58.000 I mean, I wrote a book about Operation Paperclip.
01:20:01.000 And my God, talk about a rabbit's hole.
01:20:04.000 That's a rabbit hole.
01:20:05.000 It's a rabbit hole.
01:20:05.000 Let's explain to people that don't know what we're talking about.
01:20:08.000 Operation 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.
01:20:21.000 They had Wernher von Braun run NASA. He was a Nazi, like 100% Nazi. 0.88
01:20:26.000 Good friends with Hitler type Nazi. 0.98
01:20:27.000 Yes. 0.92
01:20:28.000 He ran a Berlin rocket factory where they hung the five slowest Jews. 1.00
01:20:34.000 They would hang them out front so everybody would know, like, this is what happens when you work slow. 0.99
01:20:39.000 We'll hang you. 0.86
01:20:40.000 I mean, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said that if Wernher von Barm was alive today, they would prosecute him for crimes against humanity. 0.99
01:20:47.000 Yes, they would.
01:20:48.000 And that was the head of NASA. That was the head of NASA. That was the guy who got us to the moon.
01:20:51.000 That was the big cheese guy.
01:20:53.000 Yeah.
01:20:54.000 So 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. 0.93
01:21:03.000 And they got a few of them as well.
01:21:04.000 But we got how many?
01:21:06.000 More than a thousand, right?
01:21:08.000 Allegedly 1,400, but I would not be surprised if, you know...
01:21:13.000 The story changes and there were more, right?
01:21:15.000 But that goes back to our discussion earlier about being in pole position.
01:21:19.000 I mean, that's why we grabbed those Nazis. 0.95
01:21:22.000 We were like, if we don't get them, the Russians will. 1.00
01:21:24.000 I get it.
01:21:24.000 I get it.
01:21:25.000 And, you know, and I'm sure the Nazis could say, I didn't want to do it.
01:21:28.000 They made me.
01:21:29.000 I'm a nice person.
01:21:30.000 I love Jews.
01:21:32.000 Well, that was part of the mythology.
01:21:34.000 It was like, we got the good Germans.
01:21:36.000 Well, no, we didn't.
01:21:36.000 We got the top Germans.
01:21:39.000 And who do you think the top Germans were?
01:21:40.000 They were coveted by Hitler, Himmler, Goring, you know?
01:21:44.000 I 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?
01:21:55.000 Yeah.
01:21:56.000 Well, if you're smart, you're an asset, right?
01:21:58.000 I mean, that's what Genghis Khan used to do.
01:21:59.000 He'd take warlords from the other side and capture them and go, listen...
01:22:03.000 Just come over here, bro.
01:22:05.000 Come on.
01:22:05.000 Work for me.
01:22:06.000 I'm the man.
01:22:07.000 I mean, you know, ideology aside, I'm super smart and I want that to be known.
01:22:13.000 That's the competitor, right?
01:22:16.000 Sure, sure.
01:22:16.000 I mean, you cannot be the best rocket designer in the world and not want those talents, you know, demonstrated.
01:22:25.000 That's Warner Von Brown's story.
01:22:26.000 That's the story of all of them.
01:22:27.000 And that was so shocking writing that book because it's a...
01:22:31.000 It's like, wow, you know, huge amounts of talent, but how far will the competitor go to see their baby come to fruition?
01:22:40.000 What are they willing to put aside?
01:22:43.000 Yeah.
01:22:44.000 Did you pay any attention to the other places where Nazis went when they escaped Germany?
01:22:50.000 Like Argentina in particular?
01:22:52.000 Have you ever seen any of that stuff?
01:22:54.000 Where they have entire German towns down in Argentina?
01:22:56.000 Right?
01:22:57.000 They do Oktoberfest down there.
01:22:59.000 They wear Lederhosen.
01:23:00.000 They drink out of Steins.
01:23:03.000 It's crazy.
01:23:03.000 They speak German.
01:23:04.000 And you're like, what the fuck is this? 0.99
01:23:06.000 Like, my friend Tim Kennedy went down there. 0.99
01:23:09.000 And 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...
01:23:20.000 Like, you're the descendant of escaped Nazis, and they put together a town down there.
01:23:26.000 I mean, the way the Nazis were able to flee is—I can't read enough of that.
01:23:33.000 I mean, that's what Jamie and I were talking about.
01:23:34.000 It's dark.
01:23:35.000 Oh, my God.
01:23:36.000 And it's endless.
01:23:38.000 I mean, there's so—you know, the ones that we—there was a famous guy that we got.
01:23:43.000 He was the Surgeon General of the Third Reich, right?
01:23:47.000 I mean, think about that, okay?
01:23:49.000 Dr. Walter Schreiber.
01:23:50.000 I mean, he was such a bad dude.
01:23:52.000 He was in charge of the vaccine program.
01:23:55.000 I mean, you just put those words together and your mind goes really dark, right?
01:23:59.000 But we wanted him because he was an expert in vaccines and we brought him to the United States.
01:24:05.000 He was the only Nazi I found of the ones, the paperclip scientists who came here. 1.00
01:24:10.000 That was actually outed, right?
01:24:13.000 He was outed as a Nazi, and that's because one of the investigators at the Nuremberg trials recognized him.
01:24:22.000 And he's the only one we got out of here.
01:24:26.000 And guess where he went?
01:24:27.000 Argentina.
01:24:28.000 And lived out the rest of his life there.
01:24:32.000 The show was called Finding Hitler.
01:24:34.000 They were trying to find evidence that Hitler somehow escaped. 0.99
01:24:36.000 It was really a bullshit premise of the show. 0.94
01:24:38.000 But what was interesting is that there were thousands and thousands of Nazis that made it to Argentina and set up shop throughout South America. 0.98
01:24:48.000 There's a lot of Germans down there.
01:24:49.000 It's kind of weird.
01:24:51.000 If you can imagine me on book tour of the kind of questions I get, because we're talking, right?
01:24:56.000 Having written books about Area 51, Nazis, assassins. 0.82
01:25:00.000 How are you still alive?
01:25:01.000 I mean, just last night I was at a book signing, and people were like, is Hitler really dead?
01:25:08.000 Oh, God.
01:25:09.000 Well, if he was alive, he'd be the oldest man alive.
01:25:11.000 Right?
01:25:12.000 Imagine, he was probably like, how old was he during World War II? He had to be in his 40s, right?
01:25:17.000 He'd be hundreds.
01:25:19.000 Or they say, he cloned himself.
01:25:21.000 He'd be 160 years old.
01:25:23.000 He'd be 120 now.
01:25:24.000 That's what he'd be?
01:25:25.000 Oh, Jesus.
01:25:26.000 Jamie knows.
01:25:26.000 That's an old man.
01:25:27.000 I mean, there's been 120-year-old people, but it's fucking pretty rare.
01:25:32.000 Yeah, so Operation Paperclip was not even publicly acknowledged until, what was it, like the 90s?
01:25:41.000 Like, when did it become public?
01:25:44.000 I think it was through the Freedom of Information Act, was it?
01:25:46.000 Yeah, it was this very intrepid journalist named Linda Hunt.
01:25:50.000 Shout out to Linda. 0.99
01:25:51.000 Yeah.
01:25:52.000 I mean, she broke the story.
01:25:54.000 That's what's amazing.
01:25:55.000 I mean, as a journalist, you're always writing on the shoulders of those before you, right?
01:25:59.000 And she had it really hard because she did a Freedom of Information Act request, got all these documents that no one had ever seen.
01:26:08.000 And then the government sent her a bill for $125,000.
01:26:15.000 And she had to spend a lot of time.
01:26:16.000 This is what I understand.
01:26:17.000 I never interviewed her, but for Xeroxing fees.
01:26:22.000 What?
01:26:22.000 Yeah.
01:26:23.000 I just love that detail because it's like, it's such a covert way of getting someone to stop.
01:26:27.000 It's like, okay, here's the information we had to give it to you, but now here's your bill.
01:26:31.000 Imagine if the government's coming down on you for $125,000.
01:26:35.000 Yeah, see, that would make me want to call a bunch of rich people and go, hey, let's all just donate $1,000 to this lady. 1.00
01:26:41.000 Yeah.
01:26:41.000 And it's a different world now.
01:26:42.000 You could do that.
01:26:43.000 You could do a GoFundMe campaign.
01:26:45.000 A hundred percent.
01:26:45.000 But my God, in the 80s and the 90s, you were just like out on a limb.
01:26:49.000 Yeah, they would crush you financially.
01:26:50.000 We actually had this very same discussion yesterday with my friend Phil Demers, who's being sued by Marineland.
01:26:56.000 And because of, he was a walrus trainer and trained orcas and he's showing how horrific.
01:27:03.000 It wasn't blackfish, that's SeaWorld, but it's SeaWorld is actually, the way he says it's a day in the park compared to Marineland.
01:27:09.000 Marineland's a horrific place in Canada.
01:27:12.000 And anyway, they have been trying to squash him with legal fees by dragging out his case.
01:27:20.000 But we set up GoFundMes.
01:27:23.000 And all his legal bills get paid for from people that want him to win the good fight.
01:27:29.000 And this is an option today that wasn't available to Linda when she was exposing this.
01:27:35.000 Exposing Nazis.
01:27:36.000 $125,000. 1.00
01:27:38.000 You assholes. 1.00
01:27:39.000 She should sue them for misappropriation of funds. 1.00
01:27:44.000 Does it cost you really $125,000 to print those things out?
01:27:48.000 If it does, you guys should be in jail.
01:27:50.000 That's like with those $10,000 hammers that they have in the Pentagon.
01:27:54.000 Yeah.
01:27:55.000 Yeah.
01:27:56.000 So she gets all this information, and does the government immediately acknowledge that they imported these Nazis?
01:28:03.000 No.
01:28:04.000 I mean, she wrote the first book, and it was just stunning.
01:28:07.000 What year was this?
01:28:09.000 Late 80s, early 90s.
01:28:11.000 Okay.
01:28:14.000 Then more gets revealed, because they gave her a certain amount.
01:28:17.000 I mean, I filed a bunch of FOIAs.
01:28:19.000 There was releases.
01:28:20.000 I went to Germany.
01:28:22.000 FOIA meaning Freedom of Information Act.
01:28:23.000 Freedom of Information Act, yes.
01:28:24.000 Then 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.
01:28:36.000 I interviewed a lot of grandchildren of Nazis.
01:28:39.000 Wow.
01:28:40.000 And children of Nazis. 0.90
01:28:42.000 And, you know, I mean, this one extraordinary, oh my God, there's a guy, I told you about Schreiber, right?
01:28:49.000 On the narrative level, humans acting, I'm so interested in rivalry and competition, right?
01:28:55.000 As a concept, because this is what America does to be the best.
01:29:00.000 And also as humans, right?
01:29:02.000 Because people are like that.
01:29:03.000 They're built like that.
01:29:04.000 So, the Nazis had rivals amongst themselves.
01:29:07.000 And Schreiber's rival was Dr. Blum, who was in charge of the biological weapons program for Hitler.
01:29:13.000 Okay?
01:29:14.000 And Blum had a son.
01:29:16.000 And Blum was prosecuted at Nuremberg.
01:29:19.000 You can see a picture of him with a big dueling scar.
01:29:22.000 You know, he was a bad dude.
01:29:24.000 He had a dueling scar?
01:29:25.000 A dueling scar.
01:29:26.000 Duel like a sword duel?
01:29:27.000 Sword fighting.
01:29:28.000 It was like, among the Nazis, they would... 0.92
01:29:41.000 Really?
01:29:46.000 Jamie, pull up...
01:29:49.000 I got a couple.
01:29:50.000 What's his name?
01:29:51.000 Well, you can pull up Dr. Blum.
01:29:52.000 B-O-L-M-E. But also...
01:29:55.000 Look at that big-ass scar on his face.
01:29:57.000 And also, if you pull up Kurt Debus, who was the director of our JFK Center.
01:30:02.000 He was NASA's...
01:30:04.000 Von Braun's number two.
01:30:07.000 He had a huge dueling scar.
01:30:08.000 And yet, when you...
01:30:09.000 Look, there he is right there.
01:30:10.000 Knowing what we know now, it's like, come on.
01:30:13.000 You're trying to tell me that guy's not a hardcore Nazi?
01:30:15.000 So those guys had dueling scars on their faces.
01:30:18.000 Yeah, you see him?
01:30:19.000 How often did they duel?
01:30:22.000 Well, when they were in college...
01:30:23.000 Did they duel it to the death?
01:30:24.000 No, no, no, no, no.
01:30:24.000 It was like, on guard, you know?
01:30:26.000 Oh, like fencing?
01:30:27.000 Fencing, fencing.
01:30:28.000 Oh, this guy had it too.
01:30:30.000 Yeah.
01:30:30.000 How did they not get poked in the eyes?
01:30:32.000 Oh, I guess that was the gentleman's rules. 1.00
01:30:35.000 How do you fuck? 1.00
01:30:35.000 Listen, you go in for the cheek, you hit the eye. 1.00
01:30:37.000 Like, that happens all the time.
01:30:39.000 I mean, they must have cut a lot of eyeballs out. 0.90
01:30:41.000 I haven't seen any photographs of missing eyeballs, but there's a lot right on the cheek, so maybe that was the whole point.
01:30:46.000 It was actually just a bit for show.
01:30:49.000 Oh.
01:30:49.000 Right?
01:30:50.000 How weird.
01:30:51.000 But it was a badge of honor.
01:30:52.000 It was a badge of honor, yeah.
01:30:54.000 There's more.
01:30:56.000 Wow, so they all had it on their face.
01:30:58.000 It's all in the same spot, dueling scars.
01:31:00.000 Yeah.
01:31:02.000 So imagine like...
01:31:03.000 So they wanted to have these scars.
01:31:05.000 That was a...
01:31:06.000 Jesus Christ!
01:31:08.000 Oh, they had goggles on.
01:31:09.000 Oh, there you go.
01:31:10.000 That's how they didn't take out the eyeballs. 0.98
01:31:11.000 Academic fencing, it says.
01:31:13.000 Academic fencing.
01:31:15.000 So what they were essentially doing, they were having fencing matches with real swords, not with ones with tips.
01:31:22.000 Okay.
01:31:22.000 Wow.
01:31:23.000 And cutting their faces up. 1.00
01:31:24.000 Fuck, man. 1.00
01:31:26.000 Oh, Jesus, look at this guy's face. 1.00
01:31:28.000 Yikes! 1.00
01:31:31.000 Wow, dueling cults.
01:31:34.000 That is crazy.
01:31:36.000 So 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.
01:31:47.000 I mean, now you really have to say to yourself, come on, guys.
01:31:50.000 They were all Nazis. 0.90
01:31:51.000 Right? 1.00
01:31:51.000 Big-ass fucking scars on their face. 1.00
01:31:53.000 Absolutely. 1.00
01:31:54.000 Oof.
01:31:56.000 That's dark, man.
01:31:57.000 OG Fight Club.
01:31:58.000 Yeah, right.
01:31:59.000 OG. Don't talk about Fight Club.
01:32:00.000 Super OG. Yeah.
01:32:03.000 God, that's crazy.
01:32:05.000 Wow.
01:32:06.000 So I go to interview...
01:32:07.000 Sometimes, as a journalist, you can get amazing information from...
01:32:12.000 Look at these guys.
01:32:14.000 Oh, my God.
01:32:15.000 They're sliced up.
01:32:18.000 Badger of Honor.
01:32:20.000 Yeah.
01:32:22.000 Well, I mean, that is a martial art.
01:32:24.000 I mean, it's an art of war.
01:32:26.000 It really is.
01:32:26.000 Sword fighting is a martial art.
01:32:28.000 I mean, many martial arts have weapons.
01:32:33.000 Sorry.
01:32:33.000 So you go to interviews people?
01:32:35.000 So, to piece together the story, right?
01:32:38.000 I can't tell you others can, right?
01:32:41.000 To 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.
01:32:53.000 And one of them was Dr. Blum.
01:32:55.000 His son, I tracked down, I found him.
01:32:57.000 And he said, yes, you may come visit me.
01:32:59.000 And it was such a remarkable journey.
01:33:01.000 It was like he lived in the Black Forest.
01:33:03.000 I 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.
01:33:13.000 So he was the junior to his father, who was this horrific Nazi. 0.61
01:33:17.000 I mean, a top Nazi had favor of the Fuhrer, wore what was called the Golden Party Badge, right? 0.76
01:33:24.000 Right.
01:33:24.000 Hitler gave out these little buttons.
01:33:27.000 Blum's was, I believe, number six.
01:33:29.000 So that's how favored he was.
01:33:31.000 And 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?
01:33:43.000 The son had been a medical doctor but had left the profession to cure people with flowers.
01:33:49.000 It's called Bach flower therapy.
01:33:52.000 So he was this very interesting individual who had never given an interview before.
01:33:58.000 And he agreed to let me come to him.
01:34:00.000 So I go on that journey.
01:34:01.000 I go to his house.
01:34:03.000 And he was remarkable.
01:34:04.000 I mean, he was so interesting.
01:34:06.000 Talk about the sins of the father, you know?
01:34:09.000 I mean, my God, what he had as a burden, right?
01:34:13.000 And I asked him to tell me everything he could about his father, and he did.
01:34:17.000 And then he asked me to tell me what I knew about his father.
01:34:20.000 I had information from the German archives about his father that he did not have.
01:34:25.000 Like what kind of stuff?
01:34:26.000 Like that his father had given something.
01:34:28.000 I'd just come from this archive and found these documents.
01:34:31.000 Dr. Blum ordered that 6,000 tubercular Jews be given Sonderbehandling. 0.98
01:34:38.000 That's the German word.
01:34:39.000 What does that mean?
01:34:40.000 Special treatment.
01:34:42.000 There's a euphemism for you. 1.00
01:34:44.000 That was kill those 6,000 tubercular Jews. 1.00
01:34:48.000 When you say tubercular, is that people with tuberculosis? 0.99
01:34:50.000 Yes, they were suffering from tuberculosis. 0.82
01:34:52.000 And Dr. Blum worked closely with Himmler, and they just decided to kill them.
01:34:59.000 Sitting there talking to this man, telling him about his father at his request was remarkable.
01:35:04.000 And then he's telling me what he knows.
01:35:06.000 And then as I'm getting ready to leave, he says to me...
01:35:10.000 I'd like you to have these.
01:35:12.000 And he takes down from his incredible bookshelf, he himself had written eight books, right?
01:35:19.000 And he takes down these books and he hands them to me.
01:35:22.000 And they're in these wrappers.
01:35:24.000 And I can see that they have Nuremberg nomenclature on them.
01:35:29.000 And what they are is they're his father's documents from his Nuremberg trial.
01:35:34.000 Wow.
01:35:35.000 And I'm like, I can't take these.
01:35:38.000 I 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.
01:35:43.000 And he said, no, no, no, I want you to have them.
01:35:46.000 And I was like, I can't have them.
01:35:49.000 And he said, I don't want them, and you should have them.
01:35:53.000 Oh, wow.
01:36:10.000 In Germany, that is Dr. Blums, the Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich, documents from Nuremberg covered with swastikas.
01:36:19.000 I mean, he was acquitted at Nuremberg based on all these documents, okay?
01:36:24.000 And, by the way, based on human experiments.
01:36:28.000 And I'm at the airport and I realize suddenly, oh my god, swastikas, like this is illegal!
01:36:36.000 If they go through my bag, I'm going to be arrested.
01:36:38.000 I'm carrying...
01:36:39.000 I mean, I'm carrying these incendiary...
01:36:41.000 Right.
01:36:41.000 Do you have any copies of your book on you?
01:36:43.000 I haven't written it yet.
01:36:43.000 So you can say, I'm a journalist, but other books.
01:36:45.000 No, no, no.
01:36:47.000 I was just like holding my breath.
01:36:48.000 Oh my God, you've got to have at least one.
01:36:49.000 Joe, I was sweating almost as hard as I was sweating at the beginning of this interview.
01:36:52.000 Right?
01:36:53.000 I think you're sweating harder.
01:36:54.000 I was.
01:36:56.000 I went through.
01:36:57.000 Because, you know, I was like, wow.
01:36:58.000 I went through.
01:36:59.000 No problem.
01:37:00.000 Got home.
01:37:00.000 I have them in my office.
01:37:01.000 So they didn't check anything.
01:37:02.000 Nope.
01:37:03.000 I didn't say boo.
01:37:04.000 Lucky you didn't go through Israel. 0.99
01:37:07.000 Well, you know what?
01:37:08.000 The swastika is not outlawed there, but it is in Germany.
01:37:11.000 You may not have any Nazi paraphernalia whatsoever.
01:37:14.000 In fact, my paperclip book, which has a swastika on it, had to be redesigned, the cover, for the German publication.
01:37:21.000 And it just has, like, broken up images of the Nazis, because you cannot reproduce that image in Germany.
01:37:29.000 I 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.
01:37:46.000 This swastika predates World War II, it predates the Nazis, it predates their sort of reclaiming of it. 0.82
01:37:54.000 And 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.
01:38:03.000 I know they have it at a different angle, right?
01:38:06.000 But I mean, talk about branding, right?
01:38:08.000 I mean, my God, that was...
01:38:10.000 And the Nazis were, you know, kings of that. 0.99
01:38:13.000 I mean, they were all...
01:38:14.000 Not only that, the mustache.
01:38:16.000 That guy killed that mustache.
01:38:18.000 There's not another thing like that.
01:38:20.000 But he didn't kill the dueling scar.
01:38:22.000 Right?
01:38:23.000 That could come back.
01:38:24.000 Do you think?
01:38:24.000 No.
01:38:25.000 Not after your show.
01:38:26.000 What do you have, four million viewers?
01:38:28.000 Probably.
01:38:29.000 But people don't think about it that way.
01:38:31.000 They don't think about the dueling scar as being a Nazi thing.
01:38:34.000 No!
01:38:34.000 No, that's what I find remarkable.
01:38:36.000 They really don't.
01:38:38.000 But the Nazis did. 0.96
01:38:38.000 The Nazis did. 0.96
01:38:40.000 There's an amazing photograph of JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Kurt Debus, Sitting at, you know, for a launch, a moon launch.
01:38:50.000 And there's Davis with his huge dueling scar.
01:38:53.000 And I'm like, and their position was, oh, he's one of the good Germans.
01:38:57.000 Well, that culture was a culture of ruthlessness.
01:39:01.000 I mean, it was even the good ones.
01:39:04.000 There he is.
01:39:05.000 Yes.
01:39:06.000 Good job, Jamie.
01:39:07.000 Look at that.
01:39:07.000 Can you believe that?
01:39:08.000 He had a scar on his face.
01:39:21.000 We're good to go.
01:39:33.000 Well, they will now.
01:39:39.000 When you really stop and think about the horrific nature of what the Nazis did, I mean, how inhuman it was, how crazy it was.
01:39:51.000 That had to permeate the entire culture.
01:39:54.000 There's no good Nazis.
01:39:56.000 There was not one. 1.00
01:39:57.000 Even one of them that was looped into that had to be responsible for some awful, awful shit. 0.99
01:40:03.000 I mean, Einstein said it the best when he said, you know, you could have left. 0.99
01:40:08.000 Like, people who could have left should have left, right?
01:40:11.000 Well, you know the story of Fritz Haber, right?
01:40:14.000 Yes.
01:40:14.000 I mean, he wound up having to flee, and he's the guy who created Zyklon gas.
01:40:21.000 He created Zyklon A, which had smell.
01:40:27.000 built 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. 0.81
01:40:44.000 I 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.
01:40:51.000 Yeah.
01:40:51.000 Well, once World War II came around.
01:40:53.000 See, he was a part of World War I when they first started using gas.
01:40:56.000 And he was...
01:40:57.000 There's a great Radiolab podcast about it.
01:41:00.000 I think it's called The Bad Show.
01:41:03.000 But 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,
01:41:19.000 which to this day they say 50% of the nitrogen in human bodies was created by the Haber method.
01:41:25.000 So 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. 0.85
01:41:43.000 It's a dark, his story is a dark story.
01:41:47.000 I mean, he died looking for medical treatment because he had to flee Germany.
01:41:50.000 And he's had a bad heart.
01:41:52.000 He died on the road trying to get to Switzerland.
01:41:54.000 I think it was Switzerland.
01:41:56.000 I mean, Nazi Germany is like the pole position taken way too far, right? 0.51
01:42:02.000 And that's what's remarkable that the Pentagon was like, okay, but we can learn from this.
01:42:07.000 And there are elements that are dark in that.
01:42:10.000 Well, it also comes out of the devastation of World War I, right?
01:42:14.000 The economic devastation, the defeat.
01:42:17.000 The Germans are in this terrible state overall in terms of their morale. 0.97
01:42:21.000 And then along comes this charismatic psychopath That is just really good at screaming. 0.93
01:42:27.000 To 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.
01:42:34.000 Like 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...
01:42:46.000 We're very fortunate there's not something like that right now.
01:42:49.000 And 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?
01:42:57.000 Because that was a literal evil empire straight out of Star Wars.
01:43:01.000 I mean, that was like the Sith Lord.
01:43:03.000 They really were. 0.99
01:43:05.000 They were human beings who were doing some of the most evil shit, almost demonic, if you really stopped and thought about it. 0.99
01:43:13.000 If there were demons pretending to be people, they would do the same thing. 0.98
01:43:16.000 I mean, that's why I think it's a rabbit hole, because it's so hard to comprehend that a culture of educated individuals...
01:43:29.000 In that moment in time that you talked about between World War I and World War II could completely become malevolent.
01:43:37.000 Yeah, 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. 0.85
01:43:46.000 Brilliant engineers and scientists that were also evil.
01:43:51.000 Right.
01:43:52.000 Those two things are very uncomfortable for us.
01:43:55.000 We 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.
01:44:03.000 Not the Nazis.
01:44:05.000 They were trying to figure out how to kill people better. 1.00
01:44:06.000 They were trying to figure out how to use rockets to shoot them at Europe and blow people up. 0.99
01:44:11.000 It's one of the more telling And horrific times in our history.
01:44:19.000 Because it's one of the more horrific ones that we have footage of.
01:44:24.000 Because we don't have footage of Genghis Khan.
01:44:26.000 We don't have footage of Alexander the Great.
01:44:28.000 We have stories and tales of Napoleon and some photographs and drawings of dictators.
01:44:35.000 But we have...
01:44:37.000 We have a lot of footage from Vietnam.
01:44:39.000 We have a lot of footage from World War II. We have a lot of footage from modern wars.
01:44:43.000 And 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,
01:45:02.000 or they...
01:45:04.000 Were able to convince themselves that they were the good Germans, that they were part of it. 0.96
01:45:08.000 Because I never saw a single bit of remorse ever.
01:45:11.000 Like no one ever acknowledged what they had done.
01:45:14.000 So it made me wonder.
01:45:16.000 I guess results vary, right?
01:45:18.000 I 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.
01:45:27.000 I don't know.
01:45:28.000 It's a good question.
01:45:29.000 It would be interesting to interview them.
01:45:31.000 The ones who've been caught I think we're good to go.
01:46:06.000 It's...
01:46:06.000 One of the...
01:46:07.000 You know, you write a book about that, or you think about it, and you kind of have...
01:46:12.000 You go down the rabbit hole, and then you have to ask yourself, what does this mean?
01:46:16.000 Or you kind of...
01:46:17.000 It's too dark, right?
01:46:18.000 And so I asked that question to an Auschwitz survivor...
01:46:23.000 I think?
01:46:29.000 I think?
01:47:00.000 I think we're good to go.
01:47:09.000 And he lived.
01:47:10.000 And I did an interview with him because I was asking him, you know, the flip side of all of that.
01:47:16.000 And his whole family was killed at Auschwitz.
01:47:17.000 And I said to him, what is any of...
01:47:19.000 You know, we went through all these questions to try to get some closure to this or some meaning.
01:47:23.000 And I said...
01:47:24.000 And then we landed and I said, you know, we couldn't answer, what does this mean, right?
01:47:30.000 What does it mean for today?
01:47:31.000 Couldn't answer.
01:47:32.000 So when I asked him...
01:47:34.000 What matters about all this?
01:47:37.000 He went like this.
01:47:38.000 He lifted up his sleeve, and he showed me his tattoo.
01:47:43.000 And he said, that matters.
01:47:47.000 And I have that image seared in my mind.
01:47:50.000 I had never seen a tattoo from Auschwitz before, and I have not since.
01:47:54.000 And it also made me think, because I thought, he's going to die soon, and he has died since.
01:47:59.000 And then that tattoo's gone.
01:48:03.000 So all you have is the exchange of information and people talking about it.
01:48:09.000 The eyewitnesses die.
01:48:13.000 How did they get that guy out of Nuremberg?
01:48:16.000 How did they get them to release him?
01:48:19.000 Well, okay, so he was convicted at Nuremberg, then he went to prison.
01:48:22.000 He went to the prison where we had all the...
01:48:25.000 They didn't execute him?
01:48:26.000 No, no.
01:48:27.000 They executed like the top Nazis, and then a lot of these guys went to prison.
01:48:31.000 So there was a bunch of trials.
01:48:32.000 And so I went to the prison.
01:48:33.000 I saw his cell.
01:48:34.000 I mean, in Germany.
01:48:36.000 Intense, Landsberg Prison.
01:48:38.000 And then we, because we were sort of policing Nazi Germany after the war was over.
01:48:45.000 We were policing Germany. 0.64
01:48:46.000 And then a guy named McCoy was in charge.
01:48:51.000 He was kind of like the governor general of Germany.
01:48:54.000 And the Germans wanted Germany back.
01:48:57.000 And they were like, we're tired of you guys policing us.
01:49:03.000 I think?
01:49:29.000 And 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.
01:49:42.000 And I called up the son to interview him.
01:49:45.000 He was not as forthright as Dr. Blum's son.
01:49:48.000 And he hung up on me and said, If you ever contact me again, they have very serious privacy laws in Germany.
01:49:55.000 I thought about going and knocking on his front door.
01:49:57.000 My lawyer was like, Annie, do not do that.
01:50:00.000 They have very different laws in Germany.
01:50:02.000 For privacy.
01:50:02.000 Yes.
01:50:03.000 Even if you're the son of a Nazi. 0.99
01:50:05.000 Yes, absolutely.
01:50:09.000 If he didn't do anything, he shouldn't be responsible for what his father did.
01:50:13.000 No, but he has the villa.
01:50:15.000 That was the point.
01:50:15.000 Right.
01:50:15.000 He had all the money.
01:50:16.000 Right.
01:50:17.000 And he got that money from his father who got that money from stealing it from people.
01:50:21.000 Yes.
01:50:22.000 During World War II. Yes.
01:50:23.000 Yeah, like what happens there?
01:50:24.000 Yes.
01:50:26.000 But if you go back to that, like...
01:50:28.000 We should really find out who had the plantations in America and who benefited from that.
01:50:34.000 Like, go several generations from there.
01:50:36.000 I mean, you could get weird with war.
01:50:39.000 Reparations are big.
01:50:40.000 With evil deeds where people profited.
01:50:42.000 Yeah.
01:50:43.000 I 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.
01:50:50.000 I mean, they open up a whole can of worms about reparations.
01:50:54.000 Sure.
01:50:54.000 You know.
01:50:55.000 Yeah.
01:50:56.000 Wow.
01:50:57.000 Was Operation Paperclip, writing that book, was that one of the most disturbing ones?
01:51:01.000 That was dark.
01:51:02.000 That was so dark.
01:51:27.000 So my husband, having a Norwegian mom, was like, when I was writing paperclip, it would be so dark sometimes.
01:51:32.000 I would be like, down in my office, like, I can't, you know, honey, I can't, you know, ah!
01:51:38.000 And he'd be down there with a sandwich or coffee and he'd say, but are you throwing another Nazi under the bus? 0.81
01:51:43.000 And I would say, yes.
01:51:44.000 And he'd say, keep typing, right?
01:51:47.000 And then I realized, well, wait a minute.
01:51:48.000 The neutral journalist has to really make sure that she's not just throwing Nazis under the bus without really good reason.
01:51:56.000 And so when I was in Germany at the archives, I went to Dachau.
01:51:59.000 The concentration camp and I asked the lead archivist if I could come and see the worst possible photographs that no one wants to see.
01:52:08.000 And he said, absolutely.
01:52:10.000 And I didn't write about them in the book because I didn't want to subject people to that kind of horror.
01:52:15.000 But 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.
01:52:25.000 And these are in human experiments.
01:52:27.000 You know, to see whether or not pilots could survive height or, you know, they simulated different things in chambers at high altitude or speed.
01:52:37.000 And I saw photographs of, you know, freezing people to death, right?
01:52:42.000 Because they were trying to develop programs where they wanted to see at what temperature humans actually died, right?
01:52:49.000 And so they experimented on Jews. 0.91
01:52:51.000 These are some of the doctors that came on our programs.
01:52:54.000 And I looked at that evidence and that blew me away. 0.98
01:52:57.000 And then I knew when I left there, okay, I can throw these Nazis under the bus.
01:53:02.000 It's such a crazy time in history where you really stop and think about all the different experiments that they did do.
01:53:08.000 It's almost like they just opened up the vault of evil and said, listen, we have an opportunity.
01:53:13.000 These people aren't people.
01:53:14.000 Let's do whatever we want.
01:53:15.000 It's like they're fake people.
01:53:17.000 It's like they were an invention.
01:53:20.000 I mean the perception really played into it. 0.82
01:53:24.000 It's so gross.
01:53:26.000 It's so scary to think about that humans just, you know, A generation or two away, we're capable of doing that.
01:53:35.000 Yes, 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?
01:53:45.000 I mean, we talked about that earlier when you brought up Khashoggi, right?
01:53:50.000 I mean, you know, people often say to me, and these are sources, they're like, Annie, Saudi Arabia is the root of all evil.
01:53:58.000 I mean, I hear that constantly.
01:54:00.000 And why are they our ally?
01:54:03.000 Why are we protecting them, you know?
01:54:06.000 Oil.
01:54:06.000 Right, yes.
01:54:07.000 Pretty simple.
01:54:08.000 Money and influence in the Middle East and to have an ally over there.
01:54:12.000 And it's why I think people – the benefit of, you know, people often say to me, why do you write these 500-page books?
01:54:19.000 Well, because, I mean, hopefully they're interesting.
01:54:22.000 And I do know they're interesting because I got this great email, Joe, the other day from a reader.
01:54:28.000 And he said, Annie, I'm a truck driver. 0.99
01:54:32.000 And my whole life, people have tried to tell me I'm stupid. 0.98
01:54:37.000 But I drive around in my truck and I listen to your books. 0.98
01:54:39.000 I read the audio on my books.
01:54:41.000 And he said, now I know I'm really smart. 1.00
01:54:44.000 Okay, he's stupid. 1.00
01:54:45.000 That guy's ridiculous. 1.00
01:54:47.000 Your whole life, everyone's telling you you're stupid and then you read some books and go, now I know I'm smart. 1.00
01:54:52.000 Oh, come on. 1.00
01:54:54.000 Give him some space, right?
01:54:56.000 Anybody who says they're smart doesn't get any space.
01:54:59.000 I think he was making a point that he has the ability to listen, right?
01:55:04.000 Maybe he's not the world's greatest reader.
01:55:06.000 That's how I took it.
01:55:07.000 Are your books available in audio form?
01:55:15.000 Yeah, I read all my books.
01:55:16.000 Oh, that's great.
01:55:17.000 I love that.
01:55:17.000 I get bummed out when someone reads a book.
01:55:21.000 But my friend Graham Hancock had a really good point.
01:55:23.000 He's like, not my fiction books, because he writes fiction books as well.
01:55:27.000 He's like, my fact-based books I read myself, but fiction, I hire an actor.
01:55:33.000 I'm like, that's a good move.
01:55:34.000 Nice.
01:55:34.000 Because then you've got to do voices and inflection and all that other stuff.
01:55:38.000 No, it's amazing to read them.
01:55:39.000 I mean, because you really also feel like later on down the road you connect with people.
01:55:45.000 Sure, yeah.
01:55:46.000 And then people that are hearing you right now, they'll have that same voice when they get your audio book.
01:55:51.000 And because I write things that are so at the edge of conspiratorial thinking, right?
01:55:58.000 There's a certain sense of, oh, there's a real human there, right?
01:56:01.000 This is not government propaganda.
01:56:03.000 And 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.
01:56:17.000 When 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?
01:56:30.000 Like, was it the most altering of the different subjects that you covered?
01:56:35.000 I mean, each book changed.
01:56:37.000 It has a huge impact for different reasons.
01:56:40.000 But when I think of Paperclip, I think of this one saying that was over the gates at Buchenwald.
01:56:46.000 And it said, Yadam das Zaina.
01:56:50.000 And what that means is, everyone gets what they deserve.
01:56:55.000 And that was horrible.
01:56:58.000 And I still think about that, because it's such a piece of Nazi propaganda. 0.77
01:57:01.000 It was like saying to the Jews, you guys deserve this. 1.00
01:57:04.000 And so I know much of my reporting and my general just way of being as a human is, there's no such thing as what you deserve, right?
01:57:13.000 There's what happens, there's what you do, there's what you're responsible for, and there's what you can change.
01:57:21.000 But that idea is reprehensible.
01:57:24.000 For some reason, that really stuck with me as just the worst possible thing that I could think of.
01:57:31.000 Jesus.
01:57:32.000 Because it's the psychology behind why they did what they did.
01:57:35.000 Yes.
01:57:35.000 The dehumanizing.
01:57:37.000 But the weird thing is that that was less than 100 years ago.
01:57:41.000 That seems like that should have been something that took place.
01:57:43.000 If you hear about the Inquisition, you go, okay, well, that makes people didn't know any better back then.
01:57:47.000 But 1945 is not that long ago.
01:57:50.000 It's just not.
01:57:53.000 Oof.
01:57:55.000 I mean, people just read and read and read about World War II for good reason, you know?
01:58:01.000 And everything I write starts, it all goes back to the Nazis. 0.66
01:58:05.000 And 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, 0.89
01:58:23.000 and they almost took over the world because of it, right?
01:58:26.000 And that is the premise of all of this.
01:58:28.000 I mean, in Surprise, Kill, Vanish, it's like, these are the guys on the ground.
01:58:32.000 In the Pentagon's brain, it's, this is the technology in the sky.
01:58:36.000 But 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. 0.91
01:58:48.000 And that's really something to think about.
01:58:51.000 Is that alarmist?
01:58:53.000 I don't think it is.
01:58:54.000 History repeats itself.
01:58:55.000 I mean, if we went and stopped and looked at all the instances throughout history of people being evil dictators, there's quite a few.
01:59:02.000 And there's, you know, we could look at North Korea right now, and that guy assassinated his own uncle, right?
01:59:08.000 With a, what was that, with a missile coming out of a helicopter, I think.
01:59:13.000 Put him in a field.
01:59:14.000 Yeah.
01:59:15.000 Yeah.
01:59:17.000 I mean, that's straight-up messaging.
01:59:21.000 Right?
01:59:21.000 Which is another thing I think is interesting about the CIA's paramilitary program.
01:59:27.000 It's all meant to remain plausibly deniable.
01:59:31.000 It's supposed to be secret.
01:59:33.000 Like, we're not supposed to be giving out the message that we have these teams, you know, that go after high-value targets.
01:59:40.000 They're just supposed to disappear.
01:59:41.000 That's the vanish part of the...
01:59:43.000 And that, as someone who is really...
01:59:47.000 Interested in transparency and people being educated and having information.
01:59:51.000 That always puts me in conflict with, you know, the government in essence, because I'm like, we should know.
01:59:58.000 But 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.
02:00:05.000 What has to be this distinction that they have the ability to break the rules because it's how they protect us.
02:00:11.000 And that's the rub, right?
02:00:14.000 And the stories we hear are often the failures because those are the ones that get reported in the press.
02:00:21.000 There 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.
02:00:36.000 Right.
02:00:37.000 Yeah, there's got to be a ton of them that went through that you don't hear nothing about.
02:00:41.000 Your kids will hear about them.
02:00:43.000 Maybe.
02:00:44.000 Maybe.
02:00:44.000 When you think about protecting us from something like another Nazi Germany, that's when people are willing to give up some of their freedoms.
02:00:54.000 They're willing to give up surveillance, they're willing to give up, and this is where things get real slippery, right?
02:01:00.000 I 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? 0.72
02:01:15.000 Then the Russians go away and now they're back, you know? 1.00
02:01:18.000 The Russians are the master assassins and they do it through poisoning. 1.00
02:01:22.000 I mean, look at Skirpal, right? 0.72
02:01:24.000 I 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.
02:01:36.000 It's It's fascinating to look at those documents and realize, like, this is how it works.
02:01:41.000 This is how it worked, you know, 60 years ago.
02:01:44.000 And then you kind of see echoes of that, of how it's working today.
02:01:48.000 And you can only imagine the defectors or those who come over from the other side who we learn from, and they just disappear.
02:01:58.000 I mean, they disappear as sort of the CIA's version of witness protection.
02:02:04.000 Wow.
02:02:05.000 Do you, because of the subject matter that you choose to write about, does this affect you as a human?
02:02:12.000 Like, are you suspicious of everything now?
02:02:14.000 Do you look at everything in terms of, like, things that are happening in the news?
02:02:19.000 Do you try to look at the hidden mechanisms behind the scenes?
02:02:23.000 I think the opposite.
02:02:25.000 I really believe that information gives you a certain understanding of, like, the long view, right?
02:02:33.000 It does not make me paranoid at all.
02:02:34.000 In fact, the opposite.
02:02:35.000 People often say, like, my God, the world's about to end.
02:02:38.000 And I say, well, wow, you should really read about what it was like in 1980. I think?
02:03:05.000 In the modern era of what has always been there, which is rivals seeking supremacy over one another, people trying to outfox the bad guys.
02:03:20.000 What 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.
02:03:33.000 We used to want a peaceful world.
02:03:36.000 I mean, war was outlawed in 1928, right?
02:03:40.000 And 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.
02:03:57.000 And that's troubling because those 18-year-old kids are the ones who get sent into the line of fire.
02:04:05.000 What, 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,
02:04:21.000 and that this would be the future?
02:04:24.000 Huge amount for the book that I wrote called The Pentagon's Brain.
02:04:29.000 Really 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?
02:04:57.000 I'm interested in who's doing that, who's creating that science, and why.
02:05:04.000 And he said to me, This is like where artificial intelligence is right now with scientists who are really looking into this.
02:05:12.000 It's like Magellan.
02:05:14.000 Who will discover the new world?
02:05:18.000 But on the idea of frightening artificial intelligence, I think we're good to go.
02:05:46.000 And he said, my daughter can recognize me from across a baseball field, you know, if I have a hat on, just by the way I walk, right?
02:05:56.000 And he said, if she couldn't, there would be something really wrong with her.
02:06:00.000 In other words, her human recognition abilities are truly intelligent.
02:06:08.000 And that is a system of systems, a biological system of systems that no scientist has...
02:06:14.000 You know, the algorithm for which no one has ever been able to figure out yet.
02:06:19.000 And he believes that we're far away from that.
02:06:21.000 But the Defense Department, on the other hand, is moving us in that direction and absolutely wants autonomous weapons to be fighting wars.
02:06:29.000 Look, there was a program that said, I quote this in the book, it says, the battle place is no place for humans.
02:06:38.000 Whoa.
02:06:41.000 So, drones are the way of the future.
02:06:44.000 Right, but they're used to kill people. 1.00
02:06:47.000 Which also means that the enemy is creating drone systems, and pretty soon that's going to be a big issue.
02:06:54.000 Yeah, that's the big fear.
02:06:56.000 The big fear is that they're going to be the first ones to implement it.
02:06:58.000 I mean, what scares you about AI? Everything.
02:07:01.000 DARPA thinks AI could help troops telepathically control machines.
02:07:05.000 Of course they do.
02:07:06.000 And they probably can.
02:07:07.000 I mean, they've already got cursors that people can move around that are paraplegic.
02:07:11.000 They can move them around with their mind and their eyes.
02:07:13.000 Yeah, I think there's going to be quite a few of those things.
02:07:17.000 They've already made this thing.
02:07:18.000 This is called the Synapse.
02:07:21.000 I'll read this thing.
02:07:24.000 DARPA-funded program to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels.
02:07:31.000 More simply stated, it is an attempt to build a new kind of computer with similar form and function to the mammalian brain.
02:07:40.000 Such artificial brains would be used to build robots whose intelligence matches that of mice and cats.
02:07:46.000 Jesus Christ.
02:07:48.000 Robot cats.
02:07:49.000 Robot cats coming to get us.
02:07:52.000 Well, they created something called the RoboRat.
02:07:56.000 That was the first biohybrid, right? 0.93
02:07:59.000 So a biohybrid is when you mix an animal and a machine.
02:08:03.000 And DARPA was doing that right before 9-11.
02:08:07.000 And people freaked out.
02:08:09.000 They were like, you cannot put brain chips in rats and make them move through a maze by a remote control, which is what they were doing.
02:08:18.000 And I interviewed the guys who were all working on this program before 9-11.
02:08:22.000 And so the morality of the citizenry was like, no.
02:08:28.000 Then 9-11 happened.
02:08:30.000 And suddenly, all this money Got pumped into DARPA to do anything they wanted.
02:08:38.000 The morality issue went out the window, and they started creating all kinds of biohybrids, as I write in the Pentagon's brain. 0.93
02:08:45.000 So they now have pigeons that are mixed animal and machine.
02:08:53.000 What?
02:08:54.000 They created something called, there's a moth.
02:08:57.000 So there's a mandica sexta moth.
02:08:58.000 That's what it's called.
02:08:59.000 It's a large moth.
02:09:00.000 And DARPA scientists put brain chips into the larva, okay, so that when it cocooned and became a flying moth, it had the...
02:09:14.000 The chip built into its system, making it easier to integrate, and they could fly the moth around the lab.
02:09:22.000 And that was a huge step, and this is now four years ago that I was interviewing these scientists.
02:09:28.000 Did you see any of this stuff?
02:09:30.000 I didn't see the moth, but I told you I saw that the limb regeneration lab was a trip.
02:09:35.000 And this is all...
02:09:36.000 What was going on there?
02:09:37.000 Well, they were just cutting limbs off of salamanders and watching the limbs grow back, right?
02:09:41.000 And examining that and saying, well, if a salamander can do this, so can we one day.
02:09:46.000 And I said to them, but wait, that's impossible, you know?
02:09:49.000 And they said, well, it's not, actually, because humans...
02:09:53.000 I love scientists who break it down into terms I can understand.
02:09:57.000 It's like what Elon Musk did.
02:09:59.000 And they said to me, you were once a single cell in your mother's womb, and then you were two, and then you were, right?
02:10:10.000 So you can regenerate.
02:10:13.000 And that's their premise.
02:10:14.000 I mean, these are the world's top scientists in regeneration.
02:10:18.000 What is this, Jamie?
02:10:19.000 It's the moth being stimulated by electrocurrents in its abdomen.
02:10:23.000 So the stimulation of the electrocurrents, they can cause it to go left or right?
02:10:28.000 Is that it?
02:10:29.000 Yeah, I was just looking up these bio-hybrid moths.
02:10:31.000 What was the thing that you threw your hands in your head like you were freaking out?
02:10:34.000 Macaulay Culkin and Home Alone.
02:10:36.000 He was reading something and he went, uh...
02:10:38.000 Yeah, I started typing in bio-hybrid stuff and this is the first thing that popped up was this...
02:10:42.000 Shrimp?
02:10:43.000 ...article.
02:10:43.000 Yeah, it says they're going to test them through Olympic-themed events.
02:10:47.000 Oh my god, look at this.
02:10:49.000 DARPA MTO seeks innovative proposals for the development of micro-to-milli insect-scale robotic technology.
02:10:56.000 SHRIMP will develop...
02:10:58.000 Okay, so SHRIMP is the...
02:11:01.000 An acronym, probably.
02:11:02.000 They love acronyms.
02:11:05.000 We'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,
02:11:21.000 maneuverability, and dexterity.
02:11:23.000 To achieve this goal, SHRIMP will also provide foundational research in the area of microactuality, Thank you.
02:11:49.000 Applications including search and rescue.
02:11:52.000 Yeah, right.
02:11:52.000 Search and rescue.
02:11:53.000 Disaster relief.
02:11:54.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:11:54.000 We're going to help people.
02:11:55.000 Hazardous environment inspection or killing motherfuckers with an evil nuclear bee. 1.00
02:12:03.000 That's all you need is a nutrient bee that goes in your mouth and blows up. 1.00
02:12:08.000 Fuck. 1.00
02:12:08.000 That's crazy. 1.00
02:12:10.000 I mean, they do all kinds of planning for the future.
02:12:14.000 But the search and rescue thing, it's a great sort of way in which to present DARPA as doing all this great stuff.
02:12:22.000 I interviewed...
02:12:24.000 Darpa scientists who said, look, Annie, we're able to send robots into Fukushima to twist the... 0.56
02:12:31.000 Cores.
02:12:31.000 Right?
02:12:32.000 And yes, that is great, but that's far from the only thing it's being used for. 0.98
02:12:36.000 Yeah, they're trying to kill people.
02:12:37.000 But here's a trip.
02:12:39.000 You want to hear?
02:12:39.000 Sure.
02:12:44.000 I sourced all these documents and also interviewed generals at the Pentagon who were like, we don't like AI. We want this.
02:12:52.000 We want our guys on the ground.
02:12:55.000 They believe in the human, the warrior, that concept.
02:12:59.000 And so the generals were very opposed to it.
02:13:01.000 DARPA took a vote and it was like, no AI, we want humans in the mix.
02:13:05.000 And so what did DARPA start doing?
02:13:08.000 The generals, they said, why can't we go more autonomous?
02:13:13.000 And the answer was, we don't trust the machines, okay?
02:13:18.000 So right around that same time, what did DARPA start doing?
02:13:21.000 It started looking into and hiring scientists who were working...
02:13:25.000 With how trust works in the brain, specifically with what is called the moral molecule.
02:13:32.000 And it's this molecule in the brain that mothers emit when they're breastfeeding. 0.98
02:13:37.000 Okay?
02:13:37.000 Like oxytocin?
02:13:38.000 Yes!
02:13:39.000 So think about that.
02:13:40.000 I mean, that's like the ultimate going way back biology.
02:13:43.000 Like 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. 0.95
02:13:52.000 I'm stopping to do this.
02:13:53.000 I'm going to die.
02:13:54.000 Right?
02:13:55.000 So 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.
02:14:11.000 And 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.
02:14:22.000 Wow.
02:14:24.000 The 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.
02:14:39.000 Absolutely.
02:14:39.000 So I, as the journalist, said to myself, well, wait a minute.
02:14:43.000 If the general's at the Pentagon, and that's a euphemism, meaning the guys that are in charge here don't want that, who does want this?
02:14:53.000 And where my research took me to was the group that wants that is what's called the Defense Science Board.
02:14:59.000 And those are the individuals who are...
02:15:02.000 Counseling the Pentagon in the manner in which they should proceed.
02:15:05.000 And now those individuals are all sitting on the boards of the defense contractors.
02:15:12.000 So you can really see how money drives the rubric.
02:15:17.000 The generals don't want it.
02:15:18.000 The humans don't want it.
02:15:19.000 But guess who does?
02:15:20.000 The people who stand to make the money creating the autonomous systems.
02:15:25.000 And that's exactly what Eisenhower warned us of in his farewell speech, you know, the military industrial complex.
02:15:32.000 And 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.
02:15:46.000 It's why I write my books.
02:15:48.000 Because an alert and knowledgeable citizenry has the ability to kind of push back and go, but we don't want that.
02:15:54.000 I 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?
02:16:03.000 What if the Chinese open it? 0.98
02:16:05.000 And obviously their technology is super, super advanced.
02:16:09.000 I mean, their electronic technology in particular, their cell phones are cutting edge.
02:16:13.000 I mean, Apple and all these other companies are struggling to try to keep up with Huawei and these One FC or One... 0.99
02:16:20.000 What is the fucking... 0.98
02:16:22.000 One ST? What is that One... 1.00
02:16:24.000 What is that big company that they just released some...
02:16:30.000 They just hired Robert Downey Jr. to give him millions of dollars to...
02:16:34.000 OnePlus?
02:16:35.000 OnePlus, yeah.
02:16:36.000 OnePlus 7. They have this new phone that doesn't have a front-facing camera.
02:16:41.000 You press a button, it slides out of the top.
02:16:43.000 They figured out a way to make the entire phone all screen.
02:16:46.000 And they're incredibly advanced in terms of their electronics.
02:16:49.000 We...
02:16:50.000 We're good to go.
02:17:14.000 And what they need for that is the world's fastest supercomputer, right?
02:17:18.000 And 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.
02:17:28.000 And 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?
02:17:37.000 So go back in time to then, listen to this about, this really freaked me out in terms of progress.
02:17:43.000 Right 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.
02:17:51.000 I mean, they existed, but he built the first computer that could actually do calculations, okay?
02:17:56.000 Before that, calculations were done by calculators.
02:18:00.000 Computers were humans.
02:18:01.000 But 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.
02:18:09.000 And he, because he was a brilliant polymath, he could add faster than anyone around him.
02:18:15.000 He's also the guy who calculated at what level the atomic bomb should explode over Hiroshima for the most blast.
02:18:22.000 Because it didn't hit the ground, it wouldn't kill as many people.
02:18:25.000 So this is how his mind worked.
02:18:26.000 So he's faster than the computer.
02:18:28.000 He has a pen and paper in front of him, and he can outperform the world's fastest computer with his own brain.
02:18:33.000 Two and a half years into it, in like 1949, the computer beats him.
02:18:40.000 And he made a statement then that said, one day, artificially intelligent machines will be the ruin of man.
02:18:49.000 I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but that was his prediction.
02:18:51.000 But that was in 1949. Yeah.
02:18:53.000 In the 50s, Marshall McLuhan said that we are the sex organs of the machine world.
02:18:59.000 I'm going to have to really think about that.
02:19:01.000 That's a deep one.
02:19:02.000 That is very deep.
02:19:03.000 Yeah.
02:19:03.000 That we are the propagators.
02:19:06.000 We're the ones who are...
02:19:07.000 We're the progenitors.
02:19:09.000 Yeah, that's it.
02:19:09.000 That's our baby.
02:19:10.000 We're going to make that baby, and then we're going to die.
02:19:13.000 Most likely, that's going to be the new living thing.
02:19:16.000 Who said that?
02:19:17.000 Marshall McLuhan.
02:19:18.000 Okay.
02:19:20.000 Yeah.
02:19:22.000 Pfft.
02:19:23.000 Just stop and think about that, figuring that out in the 50s.
02:19:27.000 Just looking around and going, oh, we're giving birth to these things.
02:19:32.000 But I have a question for you then on that morality issue, right?
02:19:36.000 Which is, if man has always been a warring animal, right?
02:19:43.000 Right.
02:19:44.000 Why do we look so down upon the knife to the throat, and why do we as a society accept drone strikes?
02:19:56.000 Because 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.
02:20:05.000 Well, one of them is very personal.
02:20:08.000 The other one is like a video game. 0.99
02:20:11.000 You know, to stab someone, to look them in the eye and shove a knife through their ribs.
02:20:16.000 It takes a different kind of person and we don't think we want that person around us. 0.99
02:20:20.000 Interesting.
02:20:21.000 You think it's a proximity issue?
02:20:23.000 It's...
02:20:25.000 It's just different.
02:20:26.000 You know, one of them is throwing a rock at someone that's nowhere near you.
02:20:31.000 The other one is beating a guy to death when he's right in front of you.
02:20:35.000 It's very personal.
02:20:36.000 You see someone struggling, and we don't like to think that someone can put that aside and still twist that blade.
02:20:43.000 We don't want that.
02:20:44.000 We don't want that on our side.
02:20:45.000 We don't want our people to be noble and just.
02:20:49.000 But meanwhile, When it comes to civilian casualties, drones are one of the worst inventions ever in human history.
02:20:57.000 If 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, 0.98
02:21:17.000 like that That's some shit that people have done. 0.94
02:21:20.000 I mean, that has been done. 0.99
02:21:22.000 And the casualty rate for civilians when it comes to drone strikes, for innocent civilians, is stunning.
02:21:29.000 I think it's in the high 80%.
02:21:31.000 I think that's...
02:21:34.000 We've done this before, right?
02:21:35.000 Haven't we?
02:21:36.000 I think it's a disturbing...
02:21:39.000 I might be conservative by saying it's in the 80s.
02:21:42.000 It might be in the 90s.
02:21:43.000 It's a disturbingly high number of people who died who were not the intended target.
02:21:48.000 Right.
02:21:49.000 Which would be an argument...
02:21:52.000 For the blade.
02:21:52.000 For the blade.
02:21:53.000 Yeah, the blade is you know who you're stabbing.
02:21:55.000 And that that warrior is going in there aware that he too might die.
02:22:00.000 What do you got, Jamie?
02:22:02.000 What's that face?
02:22:03.000 3%?
02:22:04.000 3% what?
02:22:06.000 That's what this says. 0.99
02:22:07.000 That's horseshit. 0.98
02:22:08.000 I know. 0.99
02:22:08.000 Who released that? 0.99
02:22:09.000 Maybe 3% accuracy.
02:22:11.000 No.
02:22:11.000 I know there's been some serious discussions among scholars about this.
02:22:17.000 That's not true.
02:22:18.000 Whatever you're reading, that can't be right.
02:22:20.000 Maybe it's one operation was 3%.
02:22:23.000 Just to throw this out there, because there is that big debate.
02:22:26.000 I mean, CIA, paramilitary, army, tiny.
02:22:29.000 Defense Department, huge.
02:22:31.000 CIA using either ground operators or drones.
02:22:35.000 Defense Department, I read the statistic the other day, 7,200 and change bombs dropped on Afghanistan last year.
02:22:46.000 I mean, people don't even realize we're still 7,000!
02:22:51.000 Are they just practicing?
02:22:54.000 Here it goes.
02:22:55.000 President 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. 0.98
02:23:04.000 Oh, so we're going to get shit information now. 0.82
02:23:06.000 But pull up 2017. I don't know. 0.98
02:23:11.000 You have to really look hard to get that statistic.
02:23:14.000 There's an inspector general who covers Afghanistan, right, for the government.
02:23:19.000 He looks at all the statistics.
02:23:20.000 And by the way, this administration just canceled his job.
02:23:24.000 So we will no longer have that information.
02:23:26.000 But he's the one that is in charge of reporting that because it's called the reconstruction effort, right?
02:23:32.000 But 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.
02:23:43.000 And 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?
02:23:49.000 People prefer to believe that we're just safe and sound here and not at risk.
02:23:56.000 And I mean, that's the endless question of are these threats real and must they be dealt with?
02:24:02.000 Well, it's very hard for people to be 100% aware of something they're not experiencing, right?
02:24:10.000 And 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.
02:24:20.000 And I think that right now we're not experiencing sentient robots running through streets murdering people.
02:24:27.000 But that could happen.
02:24:30.000 We're not experiencing Nazi Germany anymore.
02:24:32.000 We got past that.
02:24:33.000 We'd like to assume that that's in the past.
02:24:35.000 But 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.
02:24:47.000 It seems it's a part of what people do. 0.98
02:24:49.000 And 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. 0.97
02:25:00.000 And who are you most afraid of? 0.98
02:25:01.000 China? 0.73
02:25:02.000 China, 100%. 0.83
02:25:03.000 They keep outperforming us in that supercomputer, which is frightening.
02:25:07.000 They also have a total integration of their government and their industry.
02:25:11.000 Everything is connected.
02:25:13.000 It's not like us.
02:25:16.000 They'll play the long game.
02:25:18.000 They're strategic in their ability to plan for things and not have them be currently profitable.
02:25:27.000 They don't have to operate on a bottom line like someone who's beholden to stock owners.
02:25:34.000 And they don't have an informed public.
02:25:37.000 Yes, at all.
02:25:38.000 I mean, they have Google censorship.
02:25:40.000 I mean, they convince Google to go over there.
02:25:43.000 I 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...
02:25:52.000 What they want to do anyway.
02:25:53.000 They're going to copy all of our information and just redo Google.
02:25:58.000 We think at least this way we will protect our interest by being over there.
02:26:03.000 I'm like, do you know how crazy that sounds?
02:26:04.000 You're going to let the Chinese government help?
02:26:07.000 You're going to help them censor people?
02:26:10.000 On an interesting note of that, in the mirror, all my books are published in China.
02:26:16.000 Like the DARPA book, they were right on that.
02:26:18.000 They had that translated into Chinese.
02:26:21.000 I have a copy of it.
02:26:22.000 It's spooky.
02:26:22.000 It's like you see the Pentagon, all this Chinese writing.
02:26:25.000 I don't understand a word of it, except for my own name.
02:26:28.000 Right?
02:26:29.000 But it's like, wow, they're reading us.
02:26:34.000 Of course.
02:26:35.000 Especially anything that makes us look bad.
02:26:38.000 There'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.
02:26:54.000 To 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.
02:27:01.000 What are you about to pull up, Jamie?
02:27:02.000 I found a couple of better information.
02:27:05.000 I might have misread that.
02:27:06.000 It said, something I just found showed something like, only 2% are the high target, or the targets.
02:27:14.000 Yes, that's what I meant.
02:27:15.000 And the rest would be children, civilians, but other combatants too.
02:27:18.000 They might be other soldiers, but...
02:27:21.000 I've got to get rid of that, sorry.
02:27:23.000 Part 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.
02:27:33.000 Well, I think Trump basically told the military, you know what you're doing, just go do it.
02:27:37.000 I mean, he basically let them just run the military instead of having the same sort of oversight that other presidents insisted upon.
02:27:45.000 And the military people like him for that.
02:27:47.000 And people aren't focused or interested in drone strikes anymore.
02:27:50.000 They're more interested in watching the battle and the conflict and the name-calling and the shouting.
02:27:57.000 It's like throwing rocks without warfare. 0.97
02:27:59.000 Meanwhile, China's making robots to kill us. 0.99
02:28:02.000 Absolutely. 0.99
02:28:03.000 No!
02:28:04.000 Chinese people, please be nice.
02:28:05.000 This was the thing I found.
02:28:06.000 What does this say?
02:28:07.000 Okay.
02:28:08.000 U.S. drone strikes fighting ISIS and Iraq and Syria have killed at least 1,257 civilians, according to the Pentagon.
02:28:16.000 Air Wars estimate the number to be as great as 7,500.
02:28:19.000 Just this year only.
02:28:20.000 Yeah, just this year.
02:28:21.000 As of January.
02:28:22.000 Yeah, they're doing a weird thing.
02:28:25.000 They are shooting people from a remote location with a robot.
02:28:31.000 That all came to be, by the way, right after 9-11.
02:28:35.000 I mean, whenever we get attacked, it's like Pearl Harbor, suddenly there is a massive swing of what civilians, what the citizenry will tolerate.
02:28:45.000 And 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.
02:29:05.000 And Congress wrote off on that.
02:29:07.000 In fact, what Rizzo told me is the gang of eight that are in charge of the intelligence committees in Congress said, Is this enough?
02:29:38.000 We're good to go.
02:30:04.000 Whereas 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. 0.66
02:30:11.000 That person is willing to stab somebody.
02:30:13.000 And what are the unintended consequences of that?
02:30:16.000 And we never even know.
02:30:17.000 I'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?
02:30:27.000 And it doesn't mean we do it.
02:30:28.000 It's just that those plans get sent up the chain of command, and then it comes back.
02:30:32.000 So he said, he showed me these drawings.
02:30:36.000 They were going to go kill Chavez, right?
02:30:38.000 This is when Bush was in power.
02:30:39.000 And You know, he was like teaming up with Ahmadinejad and he was a really bad guy, you know, a threat to us.
02:30:46.000 And so the plan was to halo in, take the team down, go kill Chavez and vanish.
02:30:53.000 And the plans got rejected.
02:30:55.000 They were like, no way, we are not doing this, according to Billy Wah.
02:30:58.000 Well, Billy Wah said to me recently, I mean, thank God we didn't do that.
02:31:02.000 Can you imagine if we had?
02:31:04.000 We would be blamed right now for everything that is going on in Venezuela.
02:31:10.000 It's a really interesting point.
02:31:12.000 I mean, who has to make that decision?
02:31:14.000 I'm glad it's not me.
02:31:15.000 Can you imagine?
02:31:16.000 No, I can't. 1.00
02:31:17.000 Yes, kill this guy, but don't kill that guy. 1.00
02:31:19.000 That's a good idea. 0.99
02:31:20.000 Yeah.
02:31:23.000 It's intense.
02:31:25.000 And 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.
02:31:34.000 But I think it's super interesting because it also comes back to your own humanness, right?
02:31:39.000 What are you making judgments about?
02:31:41.000 What are you for or against?
02:31:44.000 And why?
02:31:45.000 Do you want that opinion?
02:31:49.000 I mean, I think that's so interesting and important.
02:31:51.000 And discuss it with your children, you know?
02:31:54.000 And let people have...
02:31:56.000 My favorite expression is, just as long as you don't make me do it.
02:32:00.000 I'm pretty tolerant of other people's opinions about things.
02:32:04.000 Don't force me into it.
02:32:05.000 But this stuff impacts all of us.
02:32:07.000 It really does.
02:32:08.000 It really does.
02:32:09.000 Are the robots going to be taking over your show, Joe?
02:32:13.000 No.
02:32:14.000 No.
02:32:14.000 Well, they probably could to a certain extent.
02:32:20.000 I don't think robots are currently capable of spontaneous humor.
02:32:24.000 Huh.
02:32:25.000 Right?
02:32:25.000 That's the only thing saving a person like me.
02:32:29.000 There's nothing funny about a drone.
02:32:32.000 No, not yet.
02:32:33.000 But what is the difference between wetware and hardware and silicon-based interactions?
02:32:39.000 Like, 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.
02:32:48.000 People just get destroyed by these computers now.
02:32:51.000 Like, what makes us think that creativity is so unique and special?
02:32:56.000 I 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.
02:33:11.000 That's our intuition, trust, you know?
02:33:14.000 Should I trust?
02:33:15.000 Should I not?
02:33:15.000 And you take that out of the equation, really bad things could happen.
02:33:19.000 Yeah.
02:33:21.000 I worry.
02:33:22.000 I worry that we're creating a thing that's going to surpass us.
02:33:25.000 But I think that that's inevitable. 0.69
02:33:27.000 I mean, if I was a chimp and I was worried about becoming a person, I should probably, you know, seem silly. 0.90
02:33:32.000 It's inevitable.
02:33:33.000 You want to hear the scariest AI story I know?
02:33:36.000 It's old, right?
02:33:37.000 Should we dim the lights?
02:33:38.000 Turn the candle on?
02:33:39.000 No.
02:33:40.000 But it's from like the early days, gather round children.
02:33:43.000 This is like early days of DARPA, okay?
02:33:47.000 And 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?
02:33:57.000 So DARPA sets up this station at the top of the world.
02:34:02.000 To monitor the Soviet launch.
02:34:06.000 Because it only takes 24 minutes for an ICBM to get from the launch pad in Russia to hit New York or Washington.
02:34:16.000 So we set up this station up there to monitor this so we would have some kind of a jump on this.
02:34:23.000 Okay, like we'd learn it about eight minutes.
02:34:25.000 My God, the, you know, it was a radar station.
02:34:27.000 That 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?
02:34:36.000 Okay.
02:34:37.000 And it's like the first week of business.
02:34:40.000 And 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.
02:34:51.000 Number five is endgame, okay?
02:34:53.000 So 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.
02:35:07.000 Actual story, okay?
02:35:08.000 The guy panics, but he trusts.
02:35:10.000 He says, wait a minute, you know, because he's supposed to now give the launch code.
02:35:13.000 Let's try and get the generals on the phone.
02:35:15.000 They can't get the Pentagon general in charge of NORAD. They get a Canadian guy named General Sleeman.
02:35:20.000 And Sleeman, you know, my God, should we launch?
02:35:24.000 Should we launch?
02:35:25.000 Sleeman's like, wait a minute.
02:35:26.000 Human thought.
02:35:27.000 He remembered that the night before, he thought he saw Khrushchev on TV at the UN. You know, he's famously banging his shoe.
02:35:36.000 And he says, where's Khrushchev right now?
02:35:38.000 They check.
02:35:39.000 He's in New York City.
02:35:40.000 Why would the Soviets send a thousand nuclear weapons our way while their own leader is in New York? 0.64
02:35:47.000 They said, I don't know, sir, but the radar returns are reporting this.
02:35:51.000 So someone had the idea at that BMU site to go outside, and lo and behold, what was there?
02:35:59.000 A big, full moon.
02:36:02.000 The system was reading the moon moving and misinterpreted it as a thousand nuclear, thermonuclear ICBMs coming.
02:36:14.000 Jesus Christ.
02:36:15.000 And they didn't launch.
02:36:16.000 So we came that close to the end of the world.
02:36:19.000 I mean, and it's an astonishing story.
02:36:21.000 The documents are now declassified.
02:36:23.000 But 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.
02:36:37.000 Because the machine said with 99.9% certainty, this is happening.
02:36:43.000 We must launch in retaliation.
02:36:46.000 True story.
02:36:47.000 Whew.
02:36:48.000 Annie, you freak me out.
02:36:49.000 Thank you.
02:36:50.000 Thank you for everything.
02:36:51.000 Thank you for the books.
02:36:52.000 Thank you for your talk here with us.
02:36:54.000 Your new book, which is Surprise, Kill, Vanish, Area 51, which I will read.
02:37:00.000 I promise you, I will read it.
02:37:01.000 And if people want to get a hold of you on social media, what is your...
02:37:05.000 Annie Jacobson.
02:37:06.000 Is it as well on Instagram, Twitter?
02:37:09.000 All right.
02:37:10.000 Thank you, Annie.
02:37:10.000 I really appreciate it.
02:37:11.000 Thank you so much for having me.
02:37:12.000 It was fun.
02:37:13.000 Thank you.