The Joe Rogan Experience - July 31, 2026


Joe Rogan Experience #2534 - Annie Jacobsen


Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 14 minutes

Words per minute

162.98

Word count

21,975

Sentence count

1,728


Transcript

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00:00:02.000 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan experience.
00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
00:00:15.000 Biological war.
00:00:16.000 Oh boy.
00:00:17.000 Every time I talk to you, I'm fucking terrified.
00:00:21.000 That is my part time job to actually scare Joe Rogan.
00:00:26.000 If I can do that, wow.
00:00:28.000 Yeah, every time I talk to you, I'm like, oh no.
00:00:30.000 Last time it was nuclear war.
00:00:32.000 Oh no.
00:00:33.000 Now it's biological war.
00:00:35.000 Oh no.
00:00:36.000 Which is actually maybe even grimmer than nuclear because, at least in nuclear, you're just like gone in the flash.
00:00:44.000 I did a show a while back on the Sci Fi Network called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, and one of the episodes we did was about biological war.
00:00:52.000 And so we spoke to this guy who used to work for Russia during the Cold War, and he was talking about how much anthrax they had and how much work they had done on biological weapons, and it was terrifying.
00:01:07.000 You said they had like just giant vats of anthrax, like enough to kill everyone in New York City.
00:01:13.000 They were mil- Was it Ken Alabek, do you know?
00:01:16.000 He was Russian.
00:01:17.000 Russian, yeah.
00:01:18.000 There was a couple of those Russian defector scientists who came here and told us everything they were doing.
00:01:24.000 There was like, you know, tons of anthrax and plague.
00:01:29.000 That's actually the pathogen that I use in the scenario I write is plague because it's so crazy scary, so dangerous, sits at the top of the government's tier one select agent of dangerous pathogens.
00:01:29.000 Plague.
00:01:46.000 So, one of the things that we did during this episode, we went to Galveston to I guess it's a CDC lab that they had there.
00:01:54.000 So, they have these super thick walls, and everyone's wearing spacesuits and they have these tubes attached to them.
00:02:00.000 And they were studying all these different really horrible, fatal diseases.
00:02:07.000 And I'm like, well, what if this stuff gets out?
00:02:09.000 Like, it's right here.
00:02:10.000 Like, what happens if it gets out?
00:02:11.000 Like, will we take every precaution, this and that?
00:02:14.000 But his concern, he said, Was not for genetically engineered viruses.
00:02:19.000 His fear was really just from natural virus.
00:02:21.000 He says that is just as scary as anything that's out there.
00:02:25.000 This is the Russian scientist you said.
00:02:26.000 No, this is a different guy.
00:02:27.000 This is an American scientist.
00:02:29.000 Yeah, I think they like to say that.
00:02:31.000 Mother Nature is just as powerful, but in truth, that's actually not true because think about what you can do with genetic modification make it more virulent, more transmissible,
00:02:42.000 and make it defeat existing vaccines and antibiotics.
00:02:47.000 Well, we are right now in the middle of the Fauci hearings.
00:02:51.000 Yes, we are.
00:02:52.000 He is now testifying in front of Congress and pleading the fifth about everything, including the color of his tie.
00:02:58.000 It's very weird to watch.
00:03:00.000 It's in one way, it's like I told you to a lot of my liberal friends that wanted to pretend that he was a great guy and that he wasn't doing anything wrong.
00:03:10.000 And now that all these emails have gotten out where it shows that he knew that the fatality rate was much lower than they were saying, he knew that it wasn't dangerous for children, that they didn't need vaccines.
00:03:22.000 He knew that the social distancing thing was all nonsense.
00:03:26.000 And he's got a blanket pardon for 10 years.
00:03:29.000 And the thing is, it's like these people get money for research.
00:03:33.000 And that's what they do.
00:03:34.000 They do research.
00:03:36.000 So if you get money and you get grants for research, well, you're going to go do research.
00:03:40.000 And if your research is gain of function research that makes viruses more infectious to human beings, and you have to do it because that's your job.
00:03:49.000 That's what you do.
00:03:49.000 That's what you studied.
00:03:50.000 That's what you went to school for.
00:03:52.000 What a crazy.
00:03:53.000 Fucking thing we're doing.
00:03:56.000 It is bananas, and it's also, I mean, it was really unfortunate.
00:03:59.000 I thought that yesterday he took the fifth because I, for one, just want to hear call me Pollyanna, the truth be told.
00:04:08.000 Well, he's not going to tell you the truth no matter what.
00:04:10.000 He's going to obfuscate and dance around it and use words that don't totally apply to what he's saying and just ramble on.
00:04:20.000 I mean, COVID absolutely could have been this incredible lesson for all of us.
00:04:24.000 I mean, the nightmare that it was.
00:04:26.000 And instead, we're just left.
00:04:28.000 I mean, can you believe that we still.
00:04:31.000 With all the power of national security, that we still allegedly do not know where the virus came from.
00:04:39.000 Don't we all?
00:04:40.000 Definitively.
00:04:41.000 I mean, definitively.
00:04:42.000 People certainly have their ideas.
00:04:44.000 But I think it's high probability that it came from the Wuhan lab.
00:04:49.000 I think most experts are now saying that.
00:04:53.000 And I think the only reason why they weren't saying that was because of Fauci.
00:04:57.000 And it was really because he had funded this through the Eco Health Alliance.
00:05:02.000 Look, I say that.
00:05:04.000 in a very like 90,000 foot neutral way.
00:05:07.000 In other words, every sub, I leave COVID, that part of it out of my book.
00:05:12.000 It becomes like a metaphor that underpins the narrative.
00:05:17.000 And people end up reading the book and going, wow, I actually think differently about COVID, which was kind of my intention.
00:05:23.000 But every subject matter expert I spoke to encouraged me to put in the book that almost certainly it was a lab leak.
00:05:32.000 Like it's just, but so when I say, We still don't know.
00:05:36.000 That's in a bit of air quotes, meaning how is it that someone can't.
00:05:41.000 How does it all rest on Fauci, who had reasons to mislead us?
00:05:46.000 We know that from looking at what's been released.
00:05:50.000 How can it be that he's the only one with the alleged answer to it all?
00:05:56.000 Well, I mean, the other scientists that were investigating it from the beginning, you know, when they examined the virus, they were saying that all indications that it had been manipulated.
00:06:04.000 And they were pretty public about that, and then they weren't.
00:06:07.000 And then they changed their tune.
00:06:09.000 It's just.
00:06:10.000 When you have power and you have influence like he did and the power to make or break careers in the medical world where these people are terrified, they're already dealing with malpractice insurance,
00:06:25.000 which is very high.
00:06:27.000 They already have very high student debt, student loan debt, and it's a bad situation for them.
00:06:33.000 They're not going to stick their neck out to risk everything that they've worked for for 20, 30, whatever years for this thing.
00:06:42.000 And that's what most people did.
00:06:43.000 Most people just stuck their head in the sand and, you know.
00:06:47.000 I sort of went along with a party line, which is also really crazy when you drill down on how dangerous biological weapons are.
00:06:55.000 I mean, look, most of the people I talked to said gain of function is a euphemism for biological weapons engineering.
00:07:05.000 Right.
00:07:06.000 Period, full stop.
00:07:06.000 Right.
00:07:07.000 And a lot of it is funded by the military.
00:07:09.000 And that, yes.
00:07:11.000 And what's crazy is that these are people that have worked.
00:07:15.000 For Obama, just as much as all sides of the aisle working.
00:07:19.000 The real people who are not, as you say, they don't have something to gain financially.
00:07:25.000 We should say that Obama actually stopped gain of function research when he was in office, which was a very wise thing for him, very wise by his decision.
00:07:35.000 So what do you make of the fact that Obama stopped this dangerous research, also called dual use research of concern?
00:07:43.000 of concern.
00:07:44.000 He stops it.
00:07:45.000 And then suddenly it becomes a partisan issue that Republic only one side of the aisle decides that – I mean, that's what confuses me because if the real – if you look at the facts,
00:07:57.000 the very knowledgeable people that are well informed by people who don't have financial gain know that gain of function is essentially weapons engineering.
00:08:08.000 Yes.
00:08:09.000 And the thing is they're doing gain of function to make these viruses more transmissible supposedly so that they can come up with cures.
00:08:19.000 But they didn't have any cures.
00:08:22.000 But I think it's like, okay, that also sounds great for them to say we're trying to work on cures, but they're leaving out a really important point is that in order for us to find a cure, we have to make the pathogen more virulent,
00:08:37.000 more transmissible.
00:08:39.000 We have to make something, for example, airborne that wasn't airborne.
00:08:45.000 could cause a pandemic.
00:08:47.000 You see that a lot in the literature in order to figure out how to cure it.
00:08:52.000 Well, that's a catch-22 that's incredibly dangerous.
00:08:58.000 Like we have to actually make a weapon to be able to defeat a weapon.
00:09:04.000 That's actually what is being said.
00:09:07.000 But it seems like there's a lot of bullshit going on and that really what they're trying to do is make better diseases that work better and they can use them.
00:09:07.000 Right.
00:09:16.000 Like, this is part of the argument about whether or not Lyme disease was engineered.
00:09:21.000 And there's a lot of evidence that points to the fact that it was.
00:09:24.000 And one of the reasons for it is this Plum Island laboratory that's right off the coast of Lyme, Connecticut, where the disease was really first named in the 1970s or whatever it was.
00:09:36.000 And so they were doing gain of function research, they were doing biological research on ticks in order to infect ticks with diseases, and then they would drop them out of airplanes and overwhelm the medical establishment in these areas.
00:09:49.000 And the idea was that if you're fighting the enemy, you can fly over, dump a bunch of ticks on them.
00:09:54.000 They all get these horrible diseases.
00:09:55.000 Everyone's sick.
00:09:56.000 You don't have an effective fighting force.
00:09:59.000 I mean, it's like we need to create a countermeasure, but first we need to create the weapon.
00:10:05.000 I don't even know if they think that far ahead.
00:10:08.000 I think a lot of it, I'm just guessing, but I think a lot of it is just what I was saying earlier.
00:10:13.000 There's people, and their job is to do this kind of research, and they want grants and they want funding.
00:10:20.000 And then there's other people that can profit off of this.
00:10:22.000 Of these grants and this funding and creating labs and doing all this stuff, and they just start doing it and they come up with reasons why it should be done.
00:10:30.000 And then, of course, you have military people that want the military applications of these diseases, and so they help facilitate it.
00:10:37.000 And they don't even think, How does this play out?
00:10:42.000 They think about their own interests, their own short term benefits of having these things, and they just continue the research, they continue to work.
00:10:50.000 And the fact that they even push back on the idea that it was a lab leak is so hard.
00:10:55.000 When you have a lab, Right where it was leaked.
00:10:58.000 I mean, right where it started happening, you've got a lab there.
00:11:01.000 And then the famous Jon Stewart bit that he did on the Colbert show, which is hilarious.
00:11:05.000 Yep.
00:11:06.000 I mean, that's crazy.
00:11:07.000 It's the Wuhan Institute for Coronavirus Research.
00:11:12.000 Yes.
00:11:13.000 And that's where you get a coronavirus leak.
00:11:15.000 I mean, look, this is like where you really have to think the country's going to hell in a handbag.
00:11:21.000 That people stop being able to form an opinion based on the facts in front of them, even if it isn't popular with.
00:11:31.000 Well, it's their party, right?
00:11:33.000 It's their ideology.
00:11:34.000 They've committed to one side or another, and either you're with the team or you're not with the team.
00:11:41.000 Team and if you're with the team you have to accept all the things the team says at your own peril.
00:11:46.000 Mm-hmm, I mean, you know it's an existential risk.
00:11:49.000 Do you know what the case fatality rate for Covid was like?
00:11:55.000 The case fatality rate?
00:11:56.000 It means how many people out of a hundred people that get Covid die.
00:12:00.000 How many one?
00:12:03.000 One case fatality rate of one pneumonic plague which I write about in Biological War, Mother Nature's pneumonic plague, 100 out of 100 die, 100% case fatality rate.
00:12:20.000 Unless you get antibiotics within 24 hours, then it's about a 15% case fatality rate.
00:12:28.000 But guess what gain of function does?
00:12:30.000 You can learn how to out-fox antibiotics so that you can turn Mother Nature's pneumonic plague, which used to be curable with antibiotics, to have no cure.
00:12:46.000 That's the threat level we're dealing with.
00:12:49.000 And meanwhile, people are taking sides about what we're talking about, a lab leak that pretty obviously was a lab leak.
00:12:58.000 Well, first of all, I didn't realize that COVID's fatality rate was that high.
00:13:01.000 I thought it was much lower than that.
00:13:04.000 It's about 1%.
00:13:05.000 Well, here's why.
00:13:06.000 Okay, so one in 100 people who manifested COVID got it.
00:13:10.000 But COVID is also.
00:13:13.000 One in 100 people who manifested COVID died.
00:13:15.000 Died, yes.
00:13:16.000 So, like, I don't know anything.
00:13:17.000 It wasn't really that much.
00:13:18.000 That is the CDC, even Defense Department statistic, but also keep this into consideration.
00:13:24.000 Many, many people who had COVID were never symptomatic.
00:13:28.000 Like including my 83-year-old father and my son, one of my two sons.
00:13:28.000 Right.
00:13:34.000 They could both test positive for COVID and have no symptoms.
00:13:38.000 Right.
00:13:38.000 But isn't that a function of the PCR test being really not designed for testing for active diseases?
00:13:47.000 And there was false positives of the PCR test was somewhere in the 80%.
00:13:52.000 Huge.
00:13:53.000 I mean, you're, I think, bringing up the most important point about biology, which is that there's so much uncertainty.
00:14:00.000 There's so much uncertainty.
00:14:01.000 I mean, you and I could get the same pathogen in our lungs.
00:14:05.000 Our immunity systems are totally different.
00:14:07.000 Our physiology is different.
00:14:10.000 So there's no – uncertainty would be something that you would think would be sort of factored into public health officials talking about things.
00:14:19.000 Like, we're not sure if . . . . but instead they act with this crazy certainty, which is – Well, the big problem with that is profit, right?
00:14:31.000 There was a lot of profit in being able to point towards one very particular method, one very particular treatment, and this was the only treatment.
00:14:40.000 And you have to take this treatment, and this treatment is going to make people an insane amount of money.
00:14:45.000 But that's not why they're pushing it.
00:14:47.000 They're pushing it for public health.
00:14:48.000 They really care about you, even though they're going to make hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:14:52.000 It's the case fatality rate.
00:14:53.000 Is that what you're saying?
00:14:54.000 Yeah.
00:14:55.000 It says it's 0.1%, which was a fraction of the 1% estimated early in the pandemic.
00:15:00.000 Yeah, that's what I thought it was.
00:15:01.000 I thought it was one tenth of 1%.
00:15:04.000 So that makes more sense to me because otherwise you would have so many people dead.
00:15:09.000 You know, if you think about 300 million people, that means we'd have 3 million people dead because most people caught COVID.
00:15:15.000 It's interesting because the CDC still says it's 1%.
00:15:19.000 You think they're full of shit.
00:15:20.000 I think they're full of shit.
00:15:20.000 But they are.
00:15:21.000 I think they're just, I think the mismanagement and the overall strategy for dealing with it and dealing with people, the lockdown, Downs, keeping kids out of school, masking, all of it was so bad.
00:15:34.000 It's so indefensible that one of the wildest things now is during this Fauci trial, you're not seeing any coverage of it on mainstream media, except I saw one of those stupid panel shows on CNN where they were saying, No one cares about this.
00:15:49.000 We should care about what's happening right now.
00:15:51.000 America doesn't care about what happened five years ago.
00:15:53.000 Hey, there's a congressional hearing going on where a guy's testifying in front of Congress who got a 10 year, complete 10 year immunity for all the crimes that he possibly could have committed.
00:16:06.000 When he wasn't convicted of any crimes, which is an incredible precedent that's never happened before.
00:16:11.000 You've never had a guy get pardoned for something that he was never convicted of for 10 years, anything he did in 10 years.
00:16:18.000 And then you have that same guy testifying in front of Congress, pleading the fifth that what color his tie is?
00:16:24.000 If you don't think that's news, you're out of your fucking mind and you shouldn't be calling yourself the news because you're just a propaganda arm for whatever pharmaceutical company is paying for your advertisements.
00:16:35.000 What you're doing is nonsense.
00:16:37.000 This is definitely not news.
00:16:38.000 That's a big issue for most Americans.
00:16:40.000 Who went through that?
00:16:41.000 People who lost their jobs, people who had to take a vaccine in order to go to work and got sick from it, people who they couldn't fly, they couldn't travel, they were vilified, they were called plague rats because they were questioning these things.
00:16:54.000 And here we are.
00:16:55.000 Here we are with CNN saying, This is not a big deal.
00:16:58.000 Why are we concentrating on this?
00:16:59.000 We have so many issues right now plaguing this country.
00:17:02.000 Yeah, guess what?
00:17:03.000 We can concentrate on those too.
00:17:05.000 We can look at everything.
00:17:06.000 That's what you're supposed to do.
00:17:07.000 That's what the news is supposed to be.
00:17:08.000 You're supposed to be telling it.
00:17:09.000 You're not supposed to be the arbiters of what we can and can't concentrate on.
00:17:13.000 That's ridiculous.
00:17:15.000 You know, but what's interesting is I think the lack of news ends up making people more curious.
00:17:23.000 So in other words, people go to other sources of information.
00:17:26.000 If they're not going to get it from CNN, they're going to look for it themselves because we're naturally curious, especially something like COVID.
00:17:35.000 So I think I kind of get the sense that people toe certain groups of people, certainly not me because you don't know what my politics are, but they will toe the party line, but then they have their own opinion privately.
00:17:48.000 Yes.
00:17:50.000 Which is unfortunately what we also saw from Dr. Fauci.
00:17:53.000 But that's a completely different point because he's a public health official and he shouldn't be, you know, speaking out of one side of his mouth and writing in his journal another thing that he really thinks.
00:18:04.000 But I think that this human instinct to want to know the truth about what happened must prevail, right?
00:18:15.000 But my original point was like, why is Dr. Fauci allegedly the only one who can really tell us?
00:18:22.000 About the Wuhan lab, like, where's the CIA?
00:18:25.000 Where's the ODNI?
00:18:27.000 Where's DOD?
00:18:29.000 Where are other organizations that you know have that information?
00:18:35.000 Yeah, you know they do.
00:18:37.000 If Fauci had it, they had it.
00:18:38.000 Why aren't they bringing that to the public domain right now?
00:18:43.000 That's a very good question.
00:18:44.000 So, I want to ask you about this book.
00:18:46.000 Like, what was your motivation for writing it?
00:18:48.000 How did you get involved in this?
00:18:50.000 Like, I know you pick a subject and you go deep.
00:18:53.000 And you dive deep and then you write your book.
00:18:55.000 So, why biological war?
00:18:57.000 Yeah.
00:18:59.000 My first six books were written in the past tense, like, you know, The Nazi Scientist Who Came to America, Area 51, The Pentagon's Brain.
00:19:10.000 The nuclear war and biological war are written in the future.
00:19:14.000 They're scenarios based on Pentagon war games.
00:19:18.000 And that was me realizing, like, there are major existential threats right now speeding up.
00:19:26.000 at the rate of science, which is going faster every day, literally.
00:19:30.000 And so I modeled the two books after Pentagon war games and got access to people who actually run these games at the Pentagon and learned the sort of holy shit,
00:19:43.000 people are preparing for the worst case scenario and no one knows about it.
00:19:49.000 Is that their job though?
00:19:51.000 I mean, that is their job.
00:19:52.000 They have to be preparing for the worst case scenario.
00:19:55.000 The real question is, are you preparing by creating it?
00:20:00.000 The Defense Department or us?
00:20:01.000 Well, whoever's – Well, what I wanted to do, first of all, was like – I'm just naturally curious.
00:20:07.000 I wanted to know, like, what are they – how does that preparation play out?
00:20:13.000 The most shocking thing about nuclear was to find out, like, oh, there is no plan because we're all dead.
00:20:20.000 That's literally the quote from the FEMA director.
00:20:23.000 There is no population protection planning after a nuclear strike because everyone's dead.
00:20:29.000 Don't forget your morals and hope you stalked PD-alike.
00:20:32.000 That's what he told me.
00:20:34.000 Bio is
00:20:36.000 totally different.
00:20:37.000 Why Pedialyte?
00:20:38.000 Pedialyte, you know, that stuff you give your kids to drink?
00:20:42.000 Yeah, electrolytes.
00:20:42.000 Yeah, not just kids.
00:20:44.000 Or you, right?
00:20:46.000 That's what he said.
00:20:48.000 Athletes take it when they cut weight.
00:20:49.000 It's been a while since I've been an athlete.
00:20:51.000 Yeah.
00:20:51.000 So, yeah, that's what he said.
00:20:54.000 It was like, wow, that's what they're thinking about nuclear.
00:20:58.000 It's just Pedialyte, though.
00:21:00.000 I guess for the electrolytes.
00:21:02.000 Does that protect?
00:21:03.000 I know.
00:21:04.000 What is it?
00:21:05.000 Iodine that people tell you to take?
00:21:06.000 I always got the sense that the PD.
00:21:08.000 I should have done a follow-up question, Joe.
00:21:10.000 Yeah.
00:21:10.000 Why pediolite?
00:21:11.000 I always got the sense in the same way that when your kids are babies and they get diarrhea, that you give them pediolite to like, you know, get their system filled with necessary electrolytes.
00:21:21.000 So that's, and I also got the sense that it was like hydration and, you know, better than water.
00:21:30.000 God.
00:21:30.000 Ugh.
00:21:31.000 But bio, I learned, is completely different animal because what they're really worried about is the secondary effect.
00:21:41.000 of panic and anarchy.
00:21:44.000 And that was really interesting to me because having written all these books about, you know, the Defense Department and the CIA, the programs are very, you know, they're very structured and ordered and they don't take place in the homeland because we're always fighting wars overseas.
00:22:00.000 So to learn about a program that would go down in the continental United States where, you know, the Insurrection Act gets declared, posse comitatus gets lifted, the military takes over.
00:22:15.000 Dot dot dot, and then it goes from there, third act of the book, spoiler alert.
00:22:21.000 That was shocking to me.
00:22:24.000 And it was equally shocking that I could actually get this information.
00:22:27.000 A lot of it's classified, but the names of some of the programs are unclassified.
00:22:32.000 So the officials that I interviewed took me up to the edge of what can be legally known.
00:22:38.000 And I also got the sense of, like, oh, that the sense that these former officials are conveying is the public should know about this.
00:22:49.000 My personal interpretation is like, let's stop arguing about stuff that doesn't matter and get to the facts and start realizing where the real threats are.
00:22:59.000 So, their real fear is worrying about the aftermath, worrying about chaos in the streets, rioting, looting.
00:23:08.000 That's their real fear?
00:23:10.000 That's the real fear.
00:23:11.000 You can search up any of the unclassified pandemic plans, which are done by like FEMA, DHS.
00:23:19.000 They're always done by former.
00:23:22.000 by former officials, former SECDEF, former CDC director, sitting around a table running a pandemic planning game.
00:23:31.000 They do them at the Defense Department and they call it a biological catastrophe war game.
00:23:37.000 Those are declassified.
00:23:39.000 All of them that I was looking at go through the series of events, you know, outbreak, infection, sort of everyone trying to mitigate the release, the spread.
00:23:52.000 And then it gets to a certain point.
00:23:54.000 In my scenario, it's day six because pneumonic plague is fast.
00:23:59.000 There's a point in all these plans where anarchy and chaos takes over and the war game ends.
00:24:07.000 Ends.
00:24:08.000 Like, oh, and now we're done here.
00:24:10.000 And I would say as the journalist, like to myself, what happens next?
00:24:15.000 What happens next?
00:24:17.000 And why aren't we learning about it?
00:24:19.000 They don't have any plans for what happens after anarchy and chaos?
00:24:22.000 They do.
00:24:24.000 They just don't have it in the declassified games.
00:24:26.000 And that's what there's a plan called the devolution plan.
00:24:32.000 Eyebrows up for a reason.
00:24:34.000 I don't like that one.
00:24:35.000 Think about evolution.
00:24:36.000 Now put a D in front of it.
00:24:39.000 Instead of going forward, you're going backward.
00:24:42.000 So you've heard of DEF CON, right?
00:24:44.000 Okay, so DEF CON defense readiness condition, there's five.
00:24:49.000 Five is the lowest.
00:24:50.000 That's like normal every day.
00:24:52.000 At 9-11, we were at three.
00:24:54.000 DEFCON 1 means nuclear war.
00:24:57.000 There's a separate structure of readiness condition called COGCON.
00:25:04.000 Probably haven't heard of it because it's classified.
00:25:07.000 Stands for continuity of government readiness condition.
00:25:13.000 It's got four levels.
00:25:16.000 Four is every day.
00:25:18.000 One is insurrection.
00:25:22.000 The Insurrection Act gets declared.
00:25:25.000 COGCON 1 is in effect and the devolution plan happens, which I learned means a subset of pre-designated officials, they know who they are, they've signed contracts, they've rehearsed it,
00:25:42.000 they go out.
00:25:44.000 In the words of the former FEMA director, COGCON 1, you send your devolution crews out.
00:25:51.000 They go out to a hot site, warm site, or cold site, underground bunkers located around the United States.
00:25:59.000 This is from an actual FEMA chief telling me this.
00:26:03.000 And they set up how to run the government because the idea is all the regular government people will probably be dead of anarchy, insurrection, pneumonic plague.
00:26:16.000 So they have bunkers.
00:26:19.000 And those are classified.
00:26:20.000 The bunkers are.
00:26:21.000 Where they are?
00:26:22.000 Do you remember there was the bunker after 9-11 where Dick Cheney was in the bunker, but George Bush was just hanging out?
00:26:30.000 I think they left him in Texas.
00:26:31.000 Or he was on his ranch.
00:26:33.000 He was just out there in the world.
00:26:36.000 You know what?
00:26:37.000 I had someone tell me where he was, and I went through like a problem with like legal whether I could say this.
00:26:43.000 So I had to say, I was told, but you know, it's not verified, something like that.
00:26:48.000 But one of the CIA spy pilots, Ken Collins, he famously flew the ox cart out at Area 51.
00:26:56.000 He told me that on 9-11, George Bush was driving around in Texas, maybe it was in Florida, in the back of a laundry truck.
00:27:05.000 That's how they kept him hidden.
00:27:07.000 What?
00:27:09.000 A laundry truck.
00:27:10.000 Did they just have it look like a laundry truck and it outfitted with regular seats in the back and that's how they drive them around?
00:27:16.000 A bulletproof laundry truck?
00:27:18.000 No, I think he got like, I think it was like, what do we do with him?
00:27:21.000 That was what was available.
00:27:24.000 A laundry truck.
00:27:25.000 That's what I was told by a very reliable source.
00:27:27.000 That was available, meaning there was nothing else available that was incognito?
00:27:32.000 They were trying to transport him to the Doomsday Plan, which is where he ended up going, into the Doomsday Plan and flying around in some of them.
00:27:41.000 And they thought that a caravan of SUVs would be too obvious?
00:27:45.000 Yes.
00:27:46.000 Wow.
00:27:49.000 Yeah.
00:27:50.000 So you learn really pretty quickly that there's all these plans in place, but.
00:27:55.000 Then it becomes like ad hoc or like on the fly in an actual crisis or emergency.
00:28:03.000 Whoa.
00:28:05.000 But, okay, you're referring to Mount Weather.
00:28:05.000 Yeah.
00:28:08.000 That's where Dick Cheney went.
00:28:09.000 Okay.
00:28:10.000 What is that?
00:28:10.000 So Mount Weather is in the mountains outside of D.C.
00:28:14.000 It's like there's mountains outside of D.C.?
00:28:16.000 Right.
00:28:17.000 Really?
00:28:17.000 Blue Ridge Mountains.
00:28:18.000 Oh, how far are those?
00:28:21.000 175 miles.
00:28:22.000 Okay.
00:28:23.000 So the Pentagon has an alternate command center called Raven Rock.
00:28:28.000 Underground bunker.
00:28:30.000 That sounds like it's right out of a video game.
00:28:32.000 It sounds like a little Raven Rock.
00:28:34.000 They probably have put it in a video.
00:28:35.000 That's a real, like it used to be classified and no one used to know about it and now it's kind of like out there.
00:28:41.000 The official.
00:28:42.000 Is this it, Jamie?
00:28:43.000 This is the bunker?
00:28:44.000 Oh, we have a map of it?
00:28:44.000 Yep.
00:28:46.000 We got blueprints?
00:28:47.000 All sorts of information about it.
00:28:48.000 What do you want to know?
00:28:50.000 It's 51 miles from D.C.
00:28:51.000 How deep does it?
00:28:52.000 51 miles from D.C.
00:28:53.000 It has at least seven levels.
00:28:55.000 Wow.
00:28:56.000 The Oval Office would be at the bottom?
00:28:58.000 That's where Cheney was on 9 11.
00:29:01.000 So is that where like a nuclear bomb can't get to it?
00:29:03.000 A nuclear bomb would take it all out.
00:29:06.000 In nuclear war, I'd destroy all of those.
00:29:08.000 I mean, I don't destroy them.
00:29:09.000 I show you how they would be destroyed.
00:29:11.000 Russia would put like five nuclear bombs on Raven Rock and it would just- Just boom, boom, boom, boom.
00:29:17.000 That would be it.
00:29:19.000 And also the fires alone would just incinerate everyone inside.
00:29:23.000 Also, like, how are you getting your air?
00:29:24.000 Yeah.
00:29:25.000 Where's your air coming from?
00:29:27.000 Your air is going to be contaminated with nuclear fallout, right?
00:29:31.000 Yes.
00:29:31.000 Is this what it looks like?
00:29:32.000 I don't know.
00:29:33.000 There's a bunch of- Some of those pictures were coming from Tumblrs.
00:29:35.000 I don't know.
00:29:37.000 I think they take the real pictures and then they turn them into comic books.
00:29:42.000 Right.
00:29:43.000 But you can see some of.
00:29:44.000 So look how it's got this entrance carved into the side of the mountain with a big cement wall, and you go through that.
00:29:53.000 Yeah.
00:29:54.000 You know, we were talking about this the other day.
00:29:57.000 We were talking about Darren Kuyu.
00:30:00.000 Do you know what that is?
00:30:01.000 It's an underground facility that's in Turkey.
00:30:05.000 Yes, I do know about that.
00:30:06.000 That they found by accident.
00:30:07.000 Yes.
00:30:08.000 What was it?
00:30:09.000 The 1970s?
00:30:10.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:30:12.000 It was being used to hide people up until the 1920s.
00:30:15.000 Whoa.
00:30:16.000 Yeah, people like the Greeks were hiding from people invading Greece.
00:30:19.000 So it can house 20,000 people under there, and they really don't know why they made it or who made it.
00:30:29.000 Turkey is crazy.
00:30:30.000 It's such an old civilization with layers upon layers upon layers of.
00:30:36.000 Just when you think it's really old, it gets even older.
00:30:38.000 Well, that's Gobekli Tepe, right?
00:30:40.000 Where they had to redate.
00:30:41.000 Well, they still resist it, what constitutes modern civilization or civilization in general.
00:30:48.000 They're still trying to say some archaeologists are hanging on, tooth and claw, trying to say that hunter gatherers made these enormous stone columns with 3D drawings that seem to be a calendar of some sort of a cataclysmic event.
00:31:02.000 So some of the pictures we were just looking at from Mount Weather may be not accurate because it's also used in the TV show, The 100.
00:31:08.000 Oh.
00:31:08.000 Yeah.
00:31:09.000 But it is a real podcast.
00:31:11.000 Yeah, that's probably where they get it from.
00:31:12.000 So, what we were looking at, I think, was the stuff from the TV show.
00:31:15.000 What's the 100?
00:31:15.000 What is that?
00:31:16.000 The 100?
00:31:19.000 Like a show like Silo or something where people are, you know, 100 people left or something like that, I think.
00:31:24.000 That's what we had Tim Robbins on.
00:31:25.000 We were talking about Silo.
00:31:27.000 Have you seen that show, Silo?
00:31:28.000 Yeah, not yet.
00:31:28.000 Really good show.
00:31:29.000 It's on Apple.
00:31:30.000 And it's essentially about an underground civilization that survives some sort of cataclysm.
00:31:35.000 They don't exactly say in the beginning, I'm early on the show, they don't say what the cataclysm is, but these people have to live like deep, deep, deep underground in these self containing facilities and you can't go outside or you die.
00:31:47.000 Yes, I think I'll read it about it.
00:31:49.000 So Darren Cuyu could house 20,000 people.
00:31:53.000 And they had pastures or they had storage for cattle and grain and water and wine and oil presses.
00:32:02.000 It was like crazy shit.
00:32:04.000 And how many thousands of years BC is it?
00:32:07.000 They don't even know.
00:32:08.000 They don't know.
00:32:09.000 They don't know who made it.
00:32:10.000 They didn't know it existed.
00:32:11.000 They found it.
00:32:13.000 Imagine a guy, the initial story was that his chickens had gone through a hole.
00:32:20.000 And he's like, Where's these chickens going?
00:32:21.000 They never come back.
00:32:22.000 And then.
00:32:23.000 The disappearing Turkish chickens.
00:32:25.000 So they knock down these walls and then they find this thing and they haven't even explored all of it.
00:32:31.000 They don't even have all of it explored yet.
00:32:34.000 It's insane.
00:32:35.000 It's so big and it's just there and they don't know why and they don't know who made it and they don't know what they're hiding from.
00:32:41.000 This is what it looks like.
00:32:43.000 Yeah, it's incredible.
00:32:45.000 It's really crazy because it's absolutely enormous.
00:32:49.000 Is this Darren Kuyi right here?
00:32:50.000 This is like some of the tunnels.
00:32:52.000 Yeah, I get confused since they've only done 10% of it.
00:32:55.000 Like, that's obviously a fake, but I don't know how much of that is what it is because it's supposed to be underground, right?
00:33:00.000 Yeah, that doesn't look real.
00:33:01.000 That seems like somebody made that up.
00:33:04.000 But the actual image is like, that's an image, which is the best Darren Kuyu underground, like there?
00:33:08.000 Yeah, right there.
00:33:09.000 That's what it really looked like.
00:33:12.000 So imagine they find this underground and they don't even know how old it is because if you find some stuff, you can't carbon date the walls.
00:33:20.000 You can't carbon date the carvings.
00:33:23.000 So they have to find things that are left there.
00:33:25.000 People were hanging out there until the 1920s.
00:33:27.000 So they really don't even know if you find something, how old it is.
00:33:31.000 You can guess, but you don't know how old was the building when this person was there.
00:33:36.000 Was it thousands of years old already?
00:33:38.000 They don't know.
00:33:38.000 It's interesting how the archaeologists that have skin in the game with an other theory resist that.
00:33:45.000 And it takes a while.
00:33:47.000 It's like with Gebekli Tepp.
00:33:48.000 Now there are investigations going on, archaeological digs nearby.
00:33:53.000 And lo and behold, they're finding other things, which makes me feel like they're all over the area.
00:33:59.000 Yeah, all over the place.
00:34:00.000 Of course, it didn't exist on its own.
00:34:02.000 Yeah, of course.
00:34:04.000 Some kind of advanced civilization has neighbors.
00:34:06.000 Trevor Burrus, 11,000 plus years ago.
00:34:08.000 Trevor Burrus, it's so crazy.
00:34:09.000 It's so weird because we keep pushing the dates further and further back.
00:34:12.000 Like Graham Hancock always says, stuff just keeps getting older.
00:34:15.000 And so it makes you wonder have we gone through something like this before, whether it's a natural catastrophe or whatever it was?
00:34:25.000 Trevor Burrus, remember when we were kids, it was like the Lascaux caves were the oldest thing ever.
00:34:30.000 I don't even remember.
00:34:32.000 In France.
00:34:32.000 Where was that?
00:34:33.000 Remember the drawing of the bull?
00:34:35.000 Right, right, right.
00:34:35.000 I remember that from the history books.
00:34:37.000 That's from that Werner Herzog documentary.
00:34:40.000 Yeah.
00:34:41.000 It's a great one.
00:34:43.000 Has he been on this show?
00:34:43.000 Amazing.
00:34:44.000 No, I want to get him on.
00:34:45.000 I love that guy.
00:34:45.000 I have to.
00:34:46.000 He's the neighbor of my kids.
00:34:47.000 Whoa.
00:34:48.000 Well, I don't want to say where he lives.
00:34:48.000 Yeah.
00:34:51.000 But that's pretty.
00:34:51.000 People go find him.
00:34:52.000 In LA.
00:34:53.000 Wow.
00:34:53.000 We'll track him down.
00:34:55.000 He's my favorite documentarian.
00:34:56.000 Oh, absolutely.
00:34:57.000 Grizzly Man's one of my favorites of all time.
00:35:00.000 Grizzly Man is epic.
00:35:01.000 Yeah.
00:35:01.000 Have you seen Happy People?
00:35:03.000 Yeah.
00:35:04.000 No.
00:35:04.000 That's a great one, too.
00:35:05.000 Is that new?
00:35:06.000 No, no, it's a few years old.
00:35:07.000 It's Life in the Taiga Happy People, Life in the Taiga.
00:35:10.000 The Tiger.
00:35:10.000 It's about these people that live in Siberia off the Tiger River, and they're like the happiest people.
00:35:17.000 And all they do is like hunt and fish and trap, and they get together.
00:35:21.000 They have a really strong community.
00:35:23.000 They drink and they're laughing.
00:35:24.000 They have like no mental illness.
00:35:26.000 It's really weird as he documents it.
00:35:29.000 He has such.
00:35:30.000 Have you seen Little Dieter Needs to Fly?
00:35:32.000 Oh my God.
00:35:32.000 No.
00:35:34.000 The only man rescued from Laos during the Vietnam War.
00:35:38.000 And Herzog goes, he's died since, Dieter, but Herzog goes with him back into the jungle.
00:35:45.000 Oh my God, you're going to love it.
00:35:45.000 Wow.
00:35:47.000 It's a treat that you haven't seen it yet.
00:35:49.000 Little Dieter needs to fly.
00:35:50.000 That guy is such a world treasure.
00:35:52.000 Oh my God.
00:35:53.000 Just his voice and like his perspective on everything.
00:35:57.000 Just when you think, just when I think I know what he's going for, he takes you like on a complete left turn.
00:36:05.000 And you're left, like, at least for me, thinking about the world in a completely new, original way.
00:36:12.000 Yeah.
00:36:13.000 So these caves in France, they thought that that was the old, but that was really old, right?
00:36:18.000 Wasn't that like 30 plus years?
00:36:19.000 Thousand year old drawings, I think maybe Jamie can check for us.
00:36:22.000 I think they were like 7,000 BC, you know.
00:36:25.000 So, I think they were older than that.
00:36:27.000 Discovered in 1940 by four teenagers, closed in 63, all pings created around 17,000.
00:36:35.000 17,000, okay, yeah.
00:36:37.000 God, I thought it was older.
00:36:37.000 That's it.
00:36:39.000 It's just a quick explanation.
00:36:40.000 This is the Werner Herzog documentary.
00:36:43.000 I thought they were like literal cavemen made it.
00:36:47.000 Well, I mean,
00:36:50.000 so that's only 17,000 years ago.
00:36:53.000 That's what that says.
00:36:54.000 Interesting.
00:36:55.000 God, I really thought it was a lot older than that.
00:37:00.000 But then they come up with, like, the hand on the cave in Indonesia.
00:37:03.000 I think that's 40,000 and believed to be 19,000 years ago.
00:37:08.000 That's interesting.
00:37:10.000 So at one point in time, they thought that was the oldest.
00:37:12.000 When I was a kid, I remember that.
00:37:14.000 It's not quite what it says.
00:37:17.000 It says the painting for the site were duplicated with the same materials which were used 19,000 years.
00:37:23.000 That doesn't mean it could still be older.
00:37:26.000 Right.
00:37:27.000 They knew that they used them 19,000 years ago, but they could have used them a lot earlier.
00:37:32.000 Right, right.
00:37:33.000 We don't have documents.
00:37:36.000 Crazy stuff, though.
00:37:37.000 Just imagine, like, living back then.
00:37:40.000 It is wild when you think about the underground bunkers now, and it kind of has this spooky echo as an archetype of hiding.
00:37:51.000 Hiding from the dangers.
00:37:53.000 Having a shelter and hiding from the dangers.
00:37:53.000 Yeah.
00:37:56.000 The whole.
00:37:57.000 Trope that thought of a bunker is, you know, there's a lot of supposedly wealthy people.
00:38:04.000 Well, they are wealthy, but supposedly they have these underground bunkers.
00:38:08.000 That's what you always hear.
00:38:09.000 These rich people, these billionaires are setting up bunkers in New Zealand because they know something's coming.
00:38:13.000 Like, oh, Jesus.
00:38:14.000 Right?
00:38:14.000 Right.
00:38:15.000 Good luck getting there in time.
00:38:16.000 Yeah.
00:38:17.000 Right.
00:38:19.000 Right.
00:38:19.000 If the shit goes down and you happen to be in Hawaii and you've got to get to New Zealand.
00:38:24.000 Also, your bodyguards are a lot stronger than you are.
00:38:29.000 Well, wouldn't you bring them with you?
00:38:30.000 Yeah, but it's going to be every man for themselves.
00:38:34.000 If you're going to have that kind of money to make a bunker that could house a few hundred people so that you could, you know, nobody gets insurrection in your movement?
00:38:34.000 Well, wouldn't you have it?
00:38:43.000 I mean, I suppose if you bring everybody's family, you have to have a lot of preparing for this.
00:38:48.000 That's what really kept taking me back to those documents in the Defense Department about fear of infection creates anarchy and insurrection because this idea of like, fear of infection, people begin to,
00:39:03.000 their mind actually begins to change in the studies under scarcity.
00:39:08.000 And scarcity coupled with fear of infection, it's so visceral.
00:39:12.000 It's like it's as much of an archetype as the bunker, being infected.
00:39:16.000 Very, very different than being shot at.
00:39:20.000 You get the sense if you can get into the bunker, if you're being attacked with a physical weapon, okay, I'm safe now.
00:39:28.000 Close the doors.
00:39:29.000 Make a fire.
00:39:31.000 But with fear of infection, I mean, a biological weapon or any pathogen is a living munition.
00:39:38.000 It self replicates and it's got an incubation period, so then it adds right.
00:39:44.000 So then you can be infected and not know it while it's incubating inside of your body, and then you infect a bunch of other people as well.
00:39:51.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:39:53.000 And we saw during COVID how aggressive people got screaming at people for not wearing masks, and you know, that was as far as pandemics go, fairly mild.
00:40:04.000 Yeah, fairly mild.
00:40:05.000 Like, I mean, if you go with the CDC's 1% or your 0.1%, It's perplexity.
00:40:13.000 I mean, you're talking about a nothing burger compared to- Compared to the pneumonic plague.
00:40:20.000 Aaron Powell, Jr.: I mean, look, I also write in the book, and this has never been reported before because I interviewed CIA officers who both debriefed the Soviet defectors and also people who chased WMD in the hands of terrorists during the war on terror.
00:40:38.000 I specifically didn't want to write that scenario because it's So loaded to go with like terrorist use of a biological agent.
00:40:47.000 But I give you little history lessons when I stop the drama.
00:40:51.000 One of which involves an Al Qaeda terrorist that was captured.
00:40:57.000 She's actually now in Texas in a mental institution for the rest of her life.
00:41:01.000 She's an MIT trained biologist related by marriage to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
00:41:01.000 Her name's Afia Siddiqui.
00:41:09.000 Okay?
00:41:10.000 And she was leading the biological weapons program.
00:41:13.000 This is according to the CIA officers.
00:41:15.000 She's trained at MIT?
00:41:16.000 She was trained at MIT and then she went back to Pakistan.
00:41:20.000 She was the first woman on the FBI's most wanted terrorist list.
00:41:25.000 How come they have her in a mental institute?
00:41:27.000 Because they caught her and then this part is reported.
00:41:30.000 They caught her and somehow, again the air quote, somehow she got a hold of a Marine's rifle and was firing at the FBI agents interviewing her.
00:41:39.000 This is all public.
00:41:41.000 And she was shot.
00:41:43.000 They took her to the United States, gave her a trial, decided she was insane, put her in a mental institution.
00:41:48.000 But what had never been revealed before my book is that in her handbag, she had plans to create a genetically modified pathogen that mixed rabies with chickenpox.
00:42:02.000 Think about that.
00:42:07.000 Imagine airborne rabies.
00:42:08.000 Rabies, like pneumonic plague, is one of the only other pathogens that has 100% death rate without countermeasures.
00:42:16.000 And rabies.
00:42:17.000 Like
00:42:20.000 when you see it in animals, I've never actually encountered a rabid animal in the wild as much as I know.
00:42:28.000 But when you see them, they want to infect something else.
00:42:33.000 They get hyper aggressive.
00:42:34.000 They want to bite you.
00:42:36.000 So if they bite you, they give it to you, which is really crazy.
00:42:39.000 Like this disease makes them throw their own safety out the window and just go after people and try to bite them.
00:42:47.000 I mean, it's like rabies is now its own rabid.
00:42:51.000 Animal.
00:42:51.000 You know, you think of it as it's so visceral.
00:42:55.000 It's going to come at you with its infected saliva.
00:42:58.000 It's infected saliva.
00:43:00.000 I almost went with the rabies scenario because I always, in these scenarios, tie them to actual events that have happened so that readers don't go like this is Annie Jacobson's dystopian imagination as much as they say, oh,
00:43:15.000 she's following what, you know, science.
00:43:18.000 This is science fact, not science fiction.
00:43:21.000 And so when I learned about that plan for the genetic modification of rabies and chicken, airborne rabies.
00:43:28.000 But then I thought How far did she get along with this?
00:43:31.000 That is classified, Annie.
00:43:34.000 But I did get a second person, David Relman, who's the advisor to the president on biodefense, to confirm with me that that was actually located in her handbag and caused serious concern.
00:43:46.000 Now imagine if they never found her.
00:43:48.000 They never caught her and she completed that.
00:43:51.000 I mean, it's really terrifying.
00:43:53.000 It wipes out most of the country.
00:43:55.000 And also just in the most horrific way.
00:43:57.000 I mean, having to look at your pet and be like, is my pet rabbit?
00:44:02.000 It's just she did catch it, too.
00:44:04.000 Another project.
00:44:05.000 Oh, she had another project?
00:44:06.000 Yeah, multiple projects.
00:44:08.000 She had collected materials on viruses for biological warfare, and one of her projects is finding its way to infect America's poultry supplies with an antibody that would allow chickens to pass salmonella onto humans more easily.
00:44:20.000 She later destroyed her work after suspecting Abu Lubab was hoping to double cross her and turn her into the United States authorities.
00:44:29.000 This is a long Wikipedia with quite a bit of twists and turns.
00:44:32.000 I'm surprised it's not a movie.
00:44:35.000 There's a lot going on.
00:44:36.000 Oh, my God.
00:44:37.000 And that's one person that we caught.
00:44:40.000 That's not like this is the only time they thought of that.
00:44:42.000 This is the only person that they tried to recruit to do this kind of stuff.
00:44:46.000 There's probably someone out there right now.
00:44:49.000 Hence your book.
00:44:51.000 I mean, I interviewed this guy, very famous, legendary CIA officer named Rolf Moat Larson, and he led the counter WMD team, right?
00:45:04.000 So he would go to places basically like with a bunch of ground branch guys, CIA paramilitary guys behind him.
00:45:11.000 He was kind of like the.
00:45:13.000 intelligentsia at the front to try to negotiate with al-Qaeda weapons makers, biological weapons makers, and say, like, you can't do this.
00:45:24.000 It's going to kill all of us.
00:45:25.000 And he told me a couple stories, and I write them like history lessons in the book.
00:45:30.000 Once he went to Sudan and met with the top biological weapons maker for al-Qaeda.
00:45:35.000 And, like, you know, it's just chilling.
00:45:37.000 It's basically you get the feeling like that Rolf said, I got them to agree to stop temporarily.
00:45:47.000 Temporarily. Temporarily.
00:45:52.000 Sorry, Joe.
00:45:53.000 This is the nightmare stuff.
00:45:54.000 So, what do they think that they're going to do if they get into these bunkers?
00:45:59.000 This is the thing.
00:46:00.000 It's like if society completely collapses and anarchy just sweeps the nation and you've got cities on fire and people killing people and looting, eventually they're going to run out of food.
00:46:11.000 Eventually, there's going to be no infrastructure.
00:46:13.000 You've got no power.
00:46:14.000 You've got no one who's taking care of the water.
00:46:16.000 No one's taking care of the satellites.
00:46:18.000 No one's taking care of anything.
00:46:19.000 The cell phone towers are down.
00:46:21.000 What are these people in the bunker going to do?
00:46:23.000 Are they going to reinvent society?
00:46:25.000 Well, that's the plan down the road.
00:46:27.000 Do they have that?
00:46:28.000 Part five of the devolution plan is called Reconstitution.
00:46:33.000 Oh, Jesus.
00:46:34.000 So they're going to reconstitute the government, like rise again like a phoenix from the ashes.
00:46:40.000 But before that, I also learned the government has issued, rather, the Pentagon has issued 1.7.
00:46:47.000 Million gas masks to its personnel.
00:46:50.000 So they fan out across the states.
00:46:54.000 But they cannot really handle the numbers of people who are actually going to die pretty quickly.
00:47:01.000 So instead, what their job is, is to protect the critical infrastructure, all that stuff you exactly mentioned.
00:47:08.000 So they're just assuming that most people are going to die.
00:47:13.000 Yeah.
00:47:14.000 Yeah.
00:47:15.000 I mean, this is the quote.
00:47:15.000 This is the exact quote from Colonel Tom Earhart, who ran catastrophic nuclear and biological war games at the Pentagon.
00:47:24.000 Four, have you ever heard of a very famous guy?
00:47:28.000 They called him Yoda at the Pentagon.
00:47:30.000 He died like a couple years ago at age 100.
00:47:32.000 His name is Andy Marshall.
00:47:34.000 No.
00:47:34.000 He ran the Office of Net Assessment.
00:47:37.000 Talk about a euphemism or like a cloaked.
00:47:40.000 That's where they did all the wargaming.
00:47:42.000 And Andy Marshall did this in the 70s all the way through his recent death.
00:47:47.000 And Tom Earhardt worked for him.
00:47:49.000 It's in the office of the Secretary of Defense.
00:47:51.000 So what Earhardt told me is in the event of a biological catastrophe, And by the way, that includes not just an attack, but an incident.
00:48:03.000 And an incident means a lab leak.
00:48:05.000 Okay?
00:48:06.000 So in the event of a catastrophic biological incident, there is very little you can do to protect the homeland.
00:48:13.000 Only things you can do to mitigate extermination.
00:48:19.000 Of the human race?
00:48:20.000 That's his quote.
00:48:21.000 Mitigate extermination.
00:48:22.000 Mitigate extermination.
00:48:24.000 So you want to keep as many people alive as possible, but it's probably going to be a very small amount.
00:48:29.000 And it's probably just going to be the 1.7 people with the gas mask and a whole bunch of like Machiavellian solipsists.
00:48:37.000 Do you imagine if our society had to be reinvented with only people that work in the government?
00:48:45.000 Can you imagine some of the most incompetent, crooked people in the world and that's the new society?
00:48:52.000 Well, I have a feeling most of the bureaucrats would die because I don't think they could, you know, take care of themselves, right?
00:48:58.000 I think the people that would live would be those well-trained soldiers.
00:49:03.000 Well, that's not bad.
00:49:05.000 That's probably a better scenario.
00:49:07.000 But the other problem you're looking at is reproduction because there's 17% females in the military.
00:49:12.000 That's not good.
00:49:13.000 That's not good.
00:49:15.000 And then the other problem is that the other people who are left that are not in the military are, imagine the skills you have to have to be able to like deal with fear of infection in a manner that you basically have to be able to,
00:49:30.000 as it was said to me, kill people on site, like not even worrying about weather.
00:49:33.000 This is where it really feels like The Walking Dead or, you know, an apocalyptic movie.
00:49:41.000 28 Days Later was based on that.
00:49:43.000 But 28 Days Later was a lab leak.
00:49:45.000 Yes.
00:49:46.000 Yes.
00:49:47.000 Remember, it was called Rage?
00:49:48.000 It was something they were doing with chimpanzees and chimpanzee bite somebody.
00:49:52.000 That's how it opens.
00:49:53.000 And then it spreads.
00:49:53.000 Those are great films.
00:49:55.000 Those are great films.
00:49:56.000 Did you see the new one?
00:49:57.000 No, I haven't seen the new one.
00:49:58.000 Oh, the new one, parts one and two.
00:50:02.000 I mean.
00:50:03.000 There's parts one and two of the new ones?
00:50:05.000 Yeah.
00:50:05.000 Yeah.
00:50:05.000 Oh, it's a two-parter?
00:50:06.000 Two-parter.
00:50:06.000 They release them like six months apart.
00:50:08.000 Oh, my God.
00:50:10.000 They're incredible.
00:50:10.000 I mean, don't- I just get worn out from those kind of movies.
00:50:14.000 I mean, it's a certain- You have to have a certain- There's no happy ending.
00:50:18.000 I don't- I mean, Joe, I'm an eternal optimist, believe it or not.
00:50:22.000 I really am.
00:50:23.000 That's crazy considering your work.
00:50:24.000 But I just figure all of this is a cautionary tale, and I also figure it's better to know than to talk about it.
00:50:30.000 Well, it's better to inform, and I think you do an amazing job of that, and I think you're a very important You inform people of these things that you really should be considering.
00:50:38.000 I mean, your nuclear war book freaked a lot of people out that were kind of, you know, nuclear war was in the back of their mind.
00:50:46.000 You know, yeah, it's a possibility, but hey, we haven't done it.
00:50:49.000 Possibility.
00:50:49.000 But hey, we haven't done it.
00:50:51.000 We dropped a couple of bombs during the World War Ii and that's it.
00:50:54.000 We're done with that.
00:50:56.000 You know, you said something to me last time we spoke about the Nuclear War book.
00:51:00.000 That really stayed with me and it has an interesting coda.
00:51:05.000 So you were like Annie, I couldn't read Nuclear War.
00:51:08.000 It freaked out a lot of my friends, I can't read it.
00:51:10.000 And then you explained why and you said i'm paraphrasing you.
00:51:13.000 But you said I think about those people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they were just going about their daily life And all of a sudden, they're incinerated.
00:51:27.000 And that really stayed with me.
00:51:30.000 And I thought about it.
00:51:31.000 Here's the coda.
00:51:34.000 The survivors are called Hibakshya.
00:51:37.000 That's what they call themselves.
00:51:38.000 It's like survivors of the nuclear bomb.
00:51:41.000 So now, since it was 80 years ago, they're all like 81 to 90 plus.
00:51:48.000 And they were stigmatized throughout their youth.
00:51:52.000 Because the idea was you're radioactive.
00:51:55.000 You can't reproduce.
00:51:56.000 You're sort of, you know, there's like a malignant thing attached to you.
00:52:01.000 This is what they told me.
00:52:02.000 And I met them, and I was invited to Hiroshima to be the keynote speaker with the Hibaksh for the 80th anniversary of the bombing.
00:52:13.000 What did they say the experience was like in terms of being maligned?
00:52:17.000 Like, what was happening to them?
00:52:20.000 Well, the sense I got was very much that they believed that was accurate.
00:52:26.000 They had no other information.
00:52:28.000 They had no other information other than people telling them, you know.
00:52:33.000 When they were radioactive.
00:52:34.000 Yeah.
00:52:35.000 Now, what was also interesting is a couple of the younger people who don't remember, who were like infants, their mothers, like let's say one parent died and another,
00:52:48.000 so the living parent would shield them from that by never telling them that they were Hibakshya.
00:52:58.000 So then they had this whole other kind of realization later in life when they learned.
00:53:04.000 And some of, I mean, those stories were like incredible because you're learning about how, like, a parent's love for a child means not telling them what you think would make them feel stigmatized.
00:53:16.000 But yet, you, them explaining to me that they felt that stigma throughout their life, anyways, not knowing why.
00:53:25.000 I never even would have considered that stigma.
00:53:28.000 I would have considered survivor's guilt, which people do have.
00:53:32.000 If you're a part of a disaster and you're one of the ones that lives, people get survivor's guilt.
00:53:37.000 But I never would have thought of the stigma of being maligned as an infected, radioactive person.
00:53:44.000 And Japan has such a different culture.
00:53:46.000 I couldn't have imagined that either until I heard it firsthand from the experience of the survivors.
00:53:54.000 They sent some of them to an island.
00:53:58.000 Like, banished as if you're a leper.
00:54:02.000 Aye.
00:54:04.000 How much is this Iran thing freaking you out?
00:54:07.000 The war?
00:54:07.000 Yeah.
00:54:09.000 Look, I mean, when anyone starts a war that's not necessary, that's the wrong word for it.
00:54:16.000 But, you know, just like this is the whole it's just a terrible, terrible, terrible idea.
00:54:22.000 It just seems to me like the opposite of what the Department of Defense is.
00:54:28.000 It's why I continue to call it the Department of Defense, by the way, because it still is in my mind, and certainly until Congress changes the name.
00:54:37.000 You know, it's supposed to be for defense.
00:54:39.000 Right.
00:54:40.000 So I think so much of what I have written about, all the wars since World War II, I've interviewed 100 or more people for each of my eight books who have been in every war.
00:54:53.000 And the big shift for me, like understanding a change in mindset was the Bush-Cheney administration starting the Iraq War.
00:55:07.000 Like I really believe that many of the problems we're experiencing today as a society stem from that.
00:55:14.000 And that has to do with the fact of all the soldiers that I've interviewed, there's a completely different perspective on the government from those who fought in the wars leading up to the war on terror.
00:55:31.000 And the people who, most of them, you know many of these people too, like they're mad.
00:55:38.000 They're really mad that they were used.
00:55:41.000 That's a sense that I get.
00:55:42.000 Now, not everyone, but a majority.
00:55:46.000 Are very angry and feel used.
00:55:48.000 And that is a fundamental warping of what the military is.
00:55:55.000 Yeah.
00:55:56.000 Without a doubt.
00:55:57.000 And also, no clear way to resolve this at all.
00:56:02.000 Yes.
00:56:03.000 And it seems like our stockpiles are running dry.
00:56:07.000 You know,
00:56:09.000 bases are getting blown up by drones.
00:56:13.000 I heard, you know, I heard Joe Kent, who was the number two at ODNI who resigned.
00:56:20.000 I heard him say a really interesting thing about the warrior class that I hadn't, you know, when you just like have all this information, but you didn't put something together and then you hear it and you're like, of course.
00:56:33.000 And what Joe said was one of, this was in reference to Trump maybe saying there was going to be or someone in this administration saying there should be a draft and everyone freaking out and saying like, that's, you know, That's outrageous.
00:56:46.000 And Joe Kent's point was really interesting.
00:56:48.000 He said, there should be a draft, but not for reasons you think.
00:56:53.000 And he said,
00:56:56.000 presently, America has a warrior class, and Joe Kent is in it, meaning, you know, these are like a, don't have the exact statistic, 1%, less than 1% of families who are in the military.
00:57:13.000 And he said, Kent said, you know, we socialize with one another.
00:57:16.000 Our kids socialize with one another.
00:57:18.000 We go to school with one another.
00:57:19.000 We go to war with one another.
00:57:21.000 We talk together.
00:57:22.000 We have parties together.
00:57:23.000 And we know something about America that is completely foreign to all the other families.
00:57:32.000 And there's something wrong with that.
00:57:34.000 And I've really thought about that a lot since.
00:57:37.000 And I agree with him.
00:57:38.000 And his point about the draft was if everybody knew and experienced what we experience in our families, talking about war versus peace,
00:57:52.000 wars would be looked at differently.
00:57:55.000 Instead of thinking we should go to war like a Lindsey Graham type perspective, whereas no real skin in the game, he's not going to go get shot, no one he knows is going to go get shot.
00:58:07.000 Absolutely.
00:58:07.000 Yeah.
00:58:09.000 Makes sense.
00:58:09.000 So that's kind of my answer to, you know, and I'll see a headline that's like, the war in Iran costs us XYZ billion dollars, and it's like, it doesn't even mention all the people dying.
00:58:20.000 You know, there's like 10, and yes, the Americans, but like it's just talk about misreporting.
00:58:29.000 Right.
00:58:30.000 It's just talking about money, which is crazy.
00:58:32.000 Which is crazy.
00:58:33.000 Which is crazy.
00:58:35.000 And then it also, the real problem is it makes America an enemy and it makes us less safe because America has done this thing, this unprovoked attack, and so now they have a reason to attack back.
00:58:50.000 It's very like slippery.
00:58:52.000 You know, it's like untrustworthy.
00:58:54.000 I mean, I always go back to like the way you behave with your family is the way that you should present the world.
00:59:02.000 Otherwise, you're being a hypocrite.
00:59:05.000 The idea that we as a country are kind of like, you're not really sure what we're up to, and then it's changing.
00:59:13.000 It's like radically changing.
00:59:15.000 The pendulum swings so far from what one administration's
00:59:23.000 list of really important things is to another.
00:59:26.000 I mean, it must, from an outside perspective, it must be really schizophrenic looking.
00:59:35.000 Yeah.
00:59:38.000 So, to get back to your book, how many different countries do we know are involved in this kind of biological war research?
00:59:51.000 So, for starters, biological war is illegal.
00:59:55.000 Biological weapons are illegal, unlike nuclear weapons, believe it or not, are perfectly legal for the countries that have them.
01:00:02.000 Wrap your head around that.
01:00:04.000 But everybody signed a treaty in 1972 called the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty.
01:00:11.000 saying we will not make biological weapons.
01:00:13.000 They are odious to the conscience of mankind.
01:00:17.000 At that point, the Soviets signed the treaty, crossed their fingers behind their back, and made a ginormous biological weapons program that you talked about earlier.
01:00:30.000 America allegedly destroyed her arsenal of biological weapons, which took 219 weeks to destroy, by the way.
01:00:42.000 And not for another 20 years did we learn that.
01:00:45.000 Actually, the Soviets were running this biological weapons program, and we only learned it because of the Soviet defectors.
01:00:51.000 The CIA had no idea.
01:00:53.000 Defense Department had no idea.
01:00:54.000 So we had completely stopped all of that work?
01:00:58.000 According to the documents, according to anyone you interview, we had stopped biological weapons.
01:01:04.000 What year was this, Hull?
01:01:05.000 Nixon made a declaration in 1969, like we're just giving up our biological weapons program.
01:01:11.000 And then everyone else followed suit, and the treaty came about in 1972.
01:01:16.000 But the Soviets continued their work.
01:01:17.000 The Soviets not only continued, they just like went bang on it.
01:01:22.000 And they later called it their Manhattan Project.
01:01:25.000 Trevor Burrus And weren't there bioweapons labs in Ukraine?
01:01:30.000 Trevor Burrus You're talking about recently?
01:01:33.000 Yeah.
01:01:34.000 That the United States was involved in?
01:01:35.000 What there are are there are biosafety labs.
01:01:39.000 Okay, so your original question was where are they around the world?
01:01:42.000 Right.
01:01:42.000 So they're illegal.
01:01:44.000 But what isn't illegal, because this is a carve out in the treaty.
01:01:48.000 You can do research for prophylactic purposes, for medical countermeasures.
01:01:54.000 That's the carve-out.
01:01:56.000 So that's where we've gotten to gain a function, you see.
01:02:00.000 Like, oh, we're just doing this for prophylactic purposes.
01:02:02.000 That's how the DOD gets involved.
01:02:04.000 Okay.
01:02:05.000 So before 9-11, 9-11 factors into this, and so does Dick Cheney, because before 9-11, America had two BSL-4 labs, biosafety level four.
01:02:18.000 That's the highest level.
01:02:19.000 That's like you saw the suits, the tubes, your arms are in the boxes.
01:02:25.000 You're taking a chemical shower before you go in.
01:02:28.000 America had two, one at Fort Detrick.
01:02:30.000 That's the DOD's lab.
01:02:32.000 One at the CDC in Atlanta.
01:02:34.000 That's the civilian lab.
01:02:36.000 9-11 happens.
01:02:37.000 Remember the anthrax attacks?
01:02:39.000 Never solved.
01:02:40.000 Thank you, FBI.
01:02:42.000 Dick Cheney personally is terrified of bioweapons.
01:02:46.000 And he spearheads the efforts for this giant.
01:02:51.000 Biological military industrial complex that then takes off and begins with billions of dollars pumped into gain of function type research.
01:03:02.000 And America goes from having two BSL labs to having 15.
01:03:07.000 And the world follows suit.
01:03:10.000 So there are 110 BSL IV labs around the world, including in countries that are at war.
01:03:18.000 And this is all post Bush administration.
01:03:20.000 Post Bush administration.
01:03:21.000 That is when it took off.
01:03:23.000 That is when it took off.
01:03:24.000 Wow.
01:03:26.000 So, America has a hand in the blossoming of this problem, most certainly.
01:03:33.000 And then when you find out that, so you think BSL-4, okay, well, BSL-3, that just must be like, you know, chickenpox.
01:03:39.000 No.
01:03:40.000 In the BSL-3 labs, you can work with plague, anthrax, hantavirus, like serious diseases that allegedly have cures.
01:03:52.000 And so, you know how many BSL-3 labs there are in the United States of America right now?
01:03:57.000 How many?
01:03:59.000 1,500.
01:04:00.000 1,500.
01:04:03.000 And around the world, there are 3,500.
01:04:08.000 90% of them have no guidelines for safety.
01:04:10.000 Did you hear about the story where there was a man in Vegas that had a bio lab in his garage?
01:04:19.000 In California?
01:04:19.000 Yes.
01:04:20.000 Yes, both, both, both.
01:04:21.000 Another one?
01:04:22.000 They were both, and they were seemingly linked.
01:04:24.000 Oh, boy.
01:04:26.000 Possibly tied to California case, federal Chinese investigation.
01:04:30.000 Yeah, wait till I show you what's at the bottom, please.
01:04:32.000 Oh boy, Jamie, why are you doing this to me?
01:04:38.000 No case appeared filed in state federal court as of Sunday.
01:04:43.000 And I didn't really see a follow up.
01:04:45.000 I haven't seen the dead mice, Jamie.
01:04:47.000 What's with the dead mice?
01:04:48.000 There's a thousand dead mice.
01:04:49.000 There's vials, including HIV, malaria.
01:04:52.000 Well, the crazy thing is the guy who they caught, they didn't arrest him.
01:04:58.000 Like, there was an Israeli guy.
01:05:00.000 So this says Chinese investigation, but one of them was a guy who was an Israeli guy.
01:05:06.000 Who they caught and they sent him away.
01:05:09.000 He just didn't prosecute him.
01:05:11.000 He took off.
01:05:14.000 I mean, this stuff is so thinly reported and it's always got like a giant sensationalist clickbait type headline.
01:05:24.000 And people read about it and know about it a little bit.
01:05:27.000 And then the real reality behind it, I think, gets completely lost, which is that the bottom line is that the barrier to entry in the biological weapons field is so incredibly low.
01:05:44.000 It's horrifying.
01:05:45.000 Like, think about what you need to have a nuclear weapon.
01:05:49.000 I mean, look at Iran right now.
01:05:49.000 A lot.
01:05:51.000 Okay.
01:05:51.000 You have to have enriched uranium or plutonium, you have to have fissile material.
01:05:51.000 Yeah.
01:05:55.000 Then you have to have a weapon system, you have to have an ICBM or a submarine or a.
01:06:00.000 B-2 bomber.
01:06:02.000 Nuclear weapons are tightly controlled by a nation's command and control structure.
01:06:09.000 All subject matter experts I interviewed for this book expressed their serious concern that the barrier for entry is so low that basically, given computational systems, AI-enabled bio,
01:06:24.000 basically a high school student with limited knowledge of biology can make a bioweapon in their basement or in the Vegas apartment building.
01:06:32.000 Well, this guy had it in his garage.
01:06:35.000 And they caught him.
01:06:38.000 And what was he doing?
01:06:39.000 Do we know?
01:06:39.000 I don't know.
01:06:40.000 They referenced it as a storage facility.
01:06:43.000 And they said that.
01:06:44.000 Was that?
01:06:45.000 Yeah, it said storage facility.
01:06:46.000 Yeah, it said not a laboratory, adding that the samples and equipment suggested no active work was happening there.
01:06:52.000 But it says, I think the question is why does somebody have these materials in a private residence that's not a doctor, not a lab, not a licensed medical facility of any sort?
01:07:03.000 This guy.
01:07:05.000 And it's a great question, and I wonder what the answer is.
01:07:08.000 I also think it was like an Airbnb or something.
01:07:12.000 That's kind of like the.
01:07:13.000 It gets lost in who owned the LLC, who owned it.
01:07:15.000 They said the guy who was running it doesn't own it.
01:07:18.000 1,200 samples.
01:07:20.000 Oh, God.
01:07:22.000 And what was he doing?
01:07:23.000 What was he doing?
01:07:24.000 I don't know, but I think they released him.
01:07:26.000 That's what's crazy.
01:07:28.000 The guy in Vegas was released.
01:07:30.000 Is that correct?
01:07:30.000 That's what I was trying to say.
01:07:31.000 When I Googled that, I didn't really see a follow up on anything updated or new.
01:07:36.000 I'm pretty sure the guy in Vegas was an Israeli citizen and he was released.
01:07:42.000 So the question is, like, what was he doing?
01:07:45.000 And he was caught, but that's just one guy that was stupid and got caught.
01:07:50.000 How many people are doing that?
01:07:52.000 How many are there sleeper labs all across the country?
01:07:56.000 Ori Solomon charges dropped, it says.
01:07:59.000 I'm a property manager.
01:08:00.000 Whoopsies.
01:08:01.000 Maybe it's just going to say he's a property manager.
01:08:03.000 Yeah, no big deal.
01:08:05.000 He didn't do anything.
01:08:06.000 Without prejudice, still faces a criminal charge in Clark County for improper disposal of hazardous waste.
01:08:12.000 But didn't he leave and go back to Israel?
01:08:14.000 I mean, this is just, I'm looking at the.
01:08:16.000 I think that was the allegation.
01:08:19.000 He's due back in court on June 4th, which was already months ago.
01:08:22.000 Yeah, so I don't, that's the, I didn't see anything about it.
01:08:24.000 I'll look it up.
01:08:25.000 Yeah, nothing to see here.
01:08:26.000 It says an Israeli citizen, right?
01:08:28.000 Didn't it say that?
01:08:30.000 Go back to, right, we just.
01:08:31.000 Israeli citizen on a non immigrant visa is not allowed to possess firearms.
01:08:34.000 Prosecutors say multiple guns were seized from Assam.
01:08:36.000 Well, you got to have guns if you've got plague.
01:08:40.000 You got to look out for your stalker.
01:08:42.000 Guard your plague.
01:08:43.000 But, you know, I stayed away from that kind of lone actor crazy.
01:08:47.000 Because that's a lone actor.
01:08:50.000 I mean, exactly.
01:08:51.000 You don't know.
01:08:52.000 If it was, would you think they'd let him go?
01:08:55.000 That's my question.
01:08:57.000 If it's a lone actor, would they really let him go?
01:08:59.000 Or is he connected to somebody?
01:09:01.000 And that's how he got out.
01:09:03.000 I mean, one of the problems of the over politicization of everything is that it just seems like anything important becomes splatter and becomes secondary to some of these other concerns that seem to take headlines,
01:09:19.000 Like that should be a big story.
01:09:19.000 right?
01:09:21.000 And yet all any of us ever heard was, did you hear about the crazy bio lab?
01:09:26.000 Right.
01:09:28.000 I can tell you that the bigger story is really, at least to my eye, you know, because this is another one, oh, thank God nothing got out.
01:09:38.000 Thank God no one was infected.
01:09:41.000 But the real issue is what happens if someone does get, what happens if a pathogen gets seeded in the community and an outbreak starts to move to an epidemic?
01:09:52.000 And, you know, the, I write in the end of the book, Joe, the point is not panic.
01:09:57.000 This is, of course, after I take you through the worst dystopian nightmare ever.
01:10:01.000 The point is pressure.
01:10:03.000 Pressure to understand the threat, the labs around the world, the bureaucracy involved, all the different problems that would come up of mitigating the threat, so that you can be informed and also say, wait a minute,
01:10:18.000 something really needs to be done and needs to be looked at here.
01:10:22.000 And instead, people are arguing about the most obvious thing in the world to my eye.
01:10:28.000 you know what happened in the senate yesterday like that is pretty obvious what happened what is being covered up we were misled and yet all of this in i'm not saying to skip over it and you know but it's it's like how much effort do we put on something without a resolution that's what confounds me
01:10:54.000 yeah it's a really good question and the fact that there's so many labs in this country And that they've all sprung up post 2001.
01:11:05.000 They moved that Plum Island lab, by the way, to Kansas.
01:11:11.000 And it either just opened or is about to open.
01:11:15.000 It costs an extraordinary amount of money.
01:11:17.000 And are they doing the same research?
01:11:18.000 Yes.
01:11:19.000 Yep.
01:11:19.000 They moved it off of Plum Island and now it's in Kansas.
01:11:22.000 Do you know anything about this Alpha Gal tick, this Lone Star tick that gives people this allergy to red meat?
01:11:29.000 A little bit.
01:11:30.000 A little bit.
01:11:32.000 Inasmuch that it's a parasite, which is different, you know, it's a bug, which is different than a germ.
01:11:40.000 But I think it speaks to this idea that sort of there are natural things that are happening in our environment.
01:11:50.000 And then there are also unnatural things.
01:11:54.000 And the inability to differentiate between them or trust.
01:11:59.000 Look, so much of all this has been about trust the science.
01:12:02.000 Right.
01:12:02.000 Okay, we can't trust the science, unfortunately.
01:12:06.000 around COVID.
01:12:07.000 And we're all waiting for a reckoning around COVID.
01:12:10.000 It's obviously not coming anytime soon.
01:12:13.000 And in the meantime, you have, you know, the lettuce outbreak, you have the AlphaGol, you have Legionnaires disease from data centers.
01:12:20.000 And there's an influx of health concerns coming from Mother Nature herself.
01:12:29.000 Here we are in this world of incredible science and technology.
01:12:33.000 I mean, I talk to biotechnologists.
01:12:36.000 who, by the way, really have a utopian take on this.
01:12:39.000 Now, there is lots of money involved for them, but they really believe that science is the answer and can be the answer to a lot of these problems.
01:12:50.000 I sat next to a guy at dinner a couple nights ago who told me that his company in San Diego has a countermeasure for alpha-gol.
01:12:59.000 I have no idea of verifying this.
01:13:00.000 This just happened.
01:13:01.000 But that the reason they can't get it through is because of insurance.
01:13:04.000 You know, one of the treatments that's supposed to be very effective is acupuncture.
01:13:08.000 On your ears.
01:13:09.000 On your ears.
01:13:10.000 Yeah.
01:13:11.000 See if you can find anything on that.
01:13:12.000 I've read about this that there's like a 90% remission that one guy's been able to achieve through acupuncture on your ears.
01:13:23.000 Which is like, what?
01:13:26.000 Like, hey, whatever works, but is this real?
01:13:30.000 Acupuncture, specifically a specialized ear technique called Solomon auricular allergy treatment, is being explored by integrative practitioners to help manage and potentially achieve remission for AlphaGal syndrome.
01:13:46.000 Though it's not yet a standard medically proven cure.
01:13:51.000 How it works for AlphaGal targeted ear points.
01:13:54.000 Provider locates a specific highly reactive electrical point on the outer ear associated with the AlphaGal immune response.
01:14:03.000 Acupuncture is so weird because it seems to be doing something.
01:14:06.000 Do you have acupuncture?
01:14:07.000 No.
01:14:08.000 I had it done once, but the guy was a kook and I never went back.
01:14:11.000 I feel like acupuncture is so old and comes from such a long time.
01:14:18.000 History of experiences.
01:14:20.000 I have acupuncture.
01:14:22.000 And it just seems like anytime I go for anything, someone wants to give me drugs, which I'm not a fan of.
01:14:27.000 I go to the acupuncturist.
01:14:29.000 Sure, call it the placebo effect or call it whatever you want, but it certainly works for me.
01:14:34.000 I don't necessarily think it's a placebo.
01:14:37.000 I think a lot of that really old stuff we like to dismiss because we like petroleum based pharmaceutical drugs because that's what the doctor gives us as standard of care.
01:14:46.000 I have a feeling there's a lot of real stuff.
01:14:49.000 It's been around too long for them to just keep.
01:14:51.000 Faking it.
01:14:52.000 I mean, if it works, it works.
01:14:54.000 Yeah.
01:14:55.000 Well, if it turns out that this ear technique actually puts alpha gallon remission, maybe people will take that stuff more seriously and start using acupuncture for other reasons.
01:15:08.000 Because I know a lot of people swear by it.
01:15:11.000 And I'm always, I just kind of raise my eyebrows like, all right, good luck.
01:15:15.000 But maybe that's just me being ignorant.
01:15:17.000 And definitely that's me being ignorant.
01:15:19.000 A specialized ear acupuncture method called the Solomon Auricular Allergy Treatment.
01:15:25.000 Shows a high reported success rate of about 85 to 96 percent for putting AlphaGal syndrome symptoms into remission.
01:15:35.000 That's pretty crazy.
01:15:36.000 Yeah.
01:15:37.000 I mean, I don't know who did the study.
01:15:41.000 I like it.
01:15:42.000 I like that that's out there because I always feel like the acupuncturists are sidelined because they're not part of the medical insurance military industrial complex.
01:15:52.000 The small needle stays in your ear for three to four weeks.
01:15:55.000 It's not just like a treatment.
01:15:55.000 Oh, wow.
01:15:57.000 It's secured with a small adhesive bandage.
01:16:00.000 Interesting.
01:16:00.000 Wow.
01:16:01.000 Wow.
01:16:02.000 Tiny little needle.
01:16:03.000 Hair thin stainless steel needle.
01:16:07.000 Huh.
01:16:09.000 137 patient trial, it looks like.
01:16:10.000 I wonder how.
01:16:11.000 Who fucking figured that out?
01:16:13.000 Do you know anyone who's gotten alpha galls?
01:16:15.000 Yes, a good friend of mine.
01:16:16.000 Wow.
01:16:17.000 And what?
01:16:17.000 Yeah, he has it.
01:16:18.000 He's become deathly allergic or deeply allergic?
01:16:23.000 Well, I mean, it doesn't kill him, but it wrecks him.
01:16:25.000 And so he got over it.
01:16:28.000 And started eating meat again.
01:16:29.000 And then it came back with a vengeance.
01:16:31.000 It came back even worse than it was before.
01:16:33.000 So it went into remission and then it came back.
01:16:35.000 And, you know, he's really like tightened up his diet and done everything.
01:16:40.000 One thing that really helped him was plasmapheresis.
01:16:42.000 Do you know what that is?
01:16:44.000 It's a.
01:16:45.000 They take your blood and they filter out the plasma and replace it.
01:16:50.000 Yeah, I had it done.
01:16:51.000 I had it done for fun just to see what it feels like.
01:16:55.000 And you get really tired the next day.
01:16:56.000 That's one thing.
01:16:57.000 But then the day after that, oh my God, you feel amazing.
01:16:59.000 You feel like.
01:17:00.000 Like you've just lost 20 years of age.
01:17:03.000 Like it really feels incredible.
01:17:04.000 You have so much energy.
01:17:05.000 It's really odd.
01:17:06.000 Whatever it is, it's doing something.
01:17:08.000 But people that have autoimmune issues, people that have allergies, people that have a lot of different weird things, apparently they have some great responses from that.
01:17:16.000 But my friend, you know, he struggled with a bunch of different things and getting his blood work and lab work done.
01:17:22.000 He was also in the military and spent a lot of time overseas.
01:17:26.000 And one of the things that he found out is PFAS, PFAS, these forever chemicals that you get from plastics.
01:17:33.000 He's got burning plastics?
01:17:35.000 Well, it's not just that, it's also just hot water.
01:17:39.000 So, like, they take these bottles of plastic, bottles of water in cases, and they've got them sitting out in the sand in the sun in Afghanistan and Iraq.
01:17:48.000 And that's their water supply.
01:17:50.000 So, they're drinking this water that's been sitting out in the sun that's leaching in these plastic bottles.
01:17:55.000 So, he found out that his PFAS levels were off the charts.
01:18:00.000 And that's because, you know, he was deployed overseas all those years drinking that water.
01:18:05.000 Did you see this about the PFAS chemicals?
01:18:07.000 I just saw this come out, so I don't know how tested it's been, but someone's figured out a way to get almost all of it out.
01:18:12.000 Output transcript Out of water, but not your body.
01:18:15.000 Well, that's how it's getting in mostly.
01:18:17.000 Right, but the problem is once it gets in your body, it's the problem.
01:18:21.000 Scientists, because my friend still has, I mean, Evan has it in his body.
01:18:25.000 Scientists have developed a clever new way to trap forever chemicals in water using nano sized cages that lock onto PFAS molecules.
01:18:34.000 Unlike current methods, this approach can capture short chain PFAS, the hardest type to remove.
01:18:38.000 Tests show that it can eliminate up to 98% of these pollutants and still work after multiple uses.
01:18:44.000 The discovery could lead to more effective water filtration systems worldwide.
01:18:48.000 Well, that's good news.
01:18:50.000 Science, technology.
01:18:53.000 Yeah.
01:18:53.000 Dual use.
01:18:54.000 It can be good.
01:18:55.000 It can help you or harm you or kill you.
01:18:57.000 Sure.
01:18:57.000 And there's some brilliant people out there that are figuring out ways to mitigate all the stupid things that we do like that.
01:19:03.000 Yeah.
01:19:04.000 But people, you know, the whole new creeping up of new diseases emerging in sort of like pockets of the country and feeling like the CDC or the HHS.
01:19:14.000 Has no real lid on it or no real explanation, I think, kind of seriously undermines the general wellness of the nation.
01:19:26.000 Well, that was a big problem with COVID is that this feeling of the fear and anxiety affected people's immune systems as well, affected their depression levels, affected their happiness, like just their overall feel and anxiety.
01:19:26.000 Oh, for sure.
01:19:42.000 I mean, how much of it affects just the cortisol boost?
01:19:46.000 All the different things that are happening that are stressing out your body because of that pandemic that we don't even consider as being part of that experience.
01:19:54.000 I think also when you like, okay, can I give you an anecdote?
01:19:58.000 Because this comes to mind about what you're saying is like that idea that there's uncertainty, okay?
01:20:03.000 And uncertainty raises your cortisol levels.
01:20:06.000 And even worse is when you're uncertain about something you're being told is true, but you're like, I'm uncertain.
01:20:12.000 That is like even more anxiety making.
01:20:15.000 Right.
01:20:16.000 Right.
01:20:17.000 One of the things that's stunning to me is how.
01:20:20.000 The CDC and the WHO, they're supposed to be these pillars of sort of the North Star of, you know, public health.
01:20:28.000 At least they certainly were when I was a kid.
01:20:30.000 You really looked up to these organizations, okay?
01:20:33.000 COVID happens.
01:20:36.000 The WHO and the CDC both issue, they're tweeting out three months into the pandemic COVID, not airborne.
01:20:46.000 Not is in capital letters.
01:20:48.000 I have a copy of the tweet in the book because no one really believes this unless they see it, okay?
01:20:54.000 COVID was airborne.
01:20:56.000 COVID was airborne.
01:20:57.000 That is how we all got COVID.
01:21:00.000 is make something incredibly pandemic prone.
01:21:06.000 Instead, they said, remember, you get COVID from touching surfaces.
01:21:14.000 We're all out buying Lysol.
01:21:17.000 The CDC went into a partnership with Lysol.
01:21:21.000 Lysol disappeared from the supply chain.
01:21:26.000 We now know that's actually called fomite transmission.
01:21:29.000 That's the scientific term for getting something off a surface.
01:21:33.000 We now know that one in 10,000 cases of COVID was transmitted from a surface.
01:21:41.000 How can they have gotten it so wrong is a question everybody should be asking.
01:21:47.000 And the explanation, because by the way, the WHO didn't change, they kind of quietly about nine months later started saying COVID was airborne, same as CDC.
01:21:58.000 They never said like, look, we're really sorry, we made a serious mistake.
01:22:03.000 And here's why.
01:22:04.000 And I called both the CDC and the WHO looking for an explanation and asking why they never made an apology.
01:22:12.000 And no answer.
01:22:14.000 And I think that's like what we're talking about.
01:22:16.000 Talk about raising cortisol levels.
01:22:18.000 Yeah.
01:22:19.000 You know, when your institution is completely wrong.
01:22:23.000 And by the way, I don't think it was nefarious.
01:22:25.000 They literally didn't know.
01:22:26.000 Or they had their panel of experts disagreeing to such an extent that they just went with not airborne as opposed to airborne.
01:22:36.000 Well, it does weird you out that they were in a partnership with Lysol.
01:22:40.000 I had to report that in the book because that is.
01:22:43.000 You just start thinking about profit motives.
01:22:46.000 I mean, if I had to guess, it was convenient to have a partnership with them.
01:22:52.000 I don't have any reason to believe that they were like, let's say it was fomite transmission and partner up with Lysol.
01:22:59.000 But certainly if you're Lysol, you're going to probably go, hey, guys, let's partner together.
01:23:06.000 But, you know.
01:23:07.000 It disappeared from the supply chain.
01:23:09.000 I remember trying to buy Lysol and not being able to at Target.
01:23:12.000 It's gone.
01:23:12.000 It's gone.
01:23:13.000 Hand sanitizer was everywhere.
01:23:15.000 Everyone was squirting that stuff.
01:23:16.000 Now it turns out hand sanitizer is just not good for you.
01:23:20.000 And I still see people using hand sanitizer all over the place, bottles of it, like in corporate places.
01:23:20.000 Absolutely.
01:23:26.000 It's really bad.
01:23:28.000 Yeah.
01:23:28.000 Well, your skin is an organ, and you're taking this stuff that just nukes all of your skin flora, and you're just wiping your hands with it and rubbing it all over you, like.
01:23:40.000 That's not good.
01:23:42.000 There's nothing good about that.
01:23:44.000 Wash your hands.
01:23:45.000 Fucking soap.
01:23:45.000 Use some soap or not.
01:23:47.000 Don't worry about it as much.
01:23:48.000 It seems like the common sense part of health is kind of gone out the window.
01:23:52.000 I saw this article the other day, which was talking about how kids are.
01:23:56.000 Do you remember, like, I went to a play.
01:23:58.000 I grew up in rural Connecticut.
01:24:01.000 And, like, the playground was like dirt, right?
01:24:05.000 There were, like, monkey bars.
01:24:07.000 You know what I mean?
01:24:08.000 You were, like, you got dirty.
01:24:09.000 I would, like it's good for it.
01:24:10.000 Yeah.
01:24:11.000 And now it's like, you know fake, whatever that stuff is.
01:24:15.000 Wow, that's a turf.
01:24:17.000 And this scientific study that I came upon when I was working on this was like that actually that dirt is really good for you.
01:24:26.000 You know, right?
01:24:27.000 Like, surprise, surprise.
01:24:29.000 We've evolved.
01:24:30.000 We have evolved by, you know, dealing with germs.
01:24:35.000 Well, that's why kids are always putting things in their mouth and touching things.
01:24:38.000 Like, it's actually probably good for them to be exposed to all these different bio things, these different.
01:24:45.000 You know, whatever it is, bacteria and germs and buds, strengthens your immune system.
01:24:50.000 It's kind of common sense, too.
01:24:51.000 Yeah.
01:24:52.000 You know, like the pacifier rule, you know, when you're a new mom and it's like if it fell on the floor for like, I mean, it's kind of gross, but three seconds, then it's fine, right?
01:25:01.000 That one's probably not so good.
01:25:03.000 Well, a certain amount of exposure does strengthen your immune system.
01:25:06.000 And kids that are just living in these completely sterile environments, you got to think that they have an atrophied immune system because their immune system's not having to battle this stuff.
01:25:16.000 We just, we're terrified of what we don't know.
01:25:18.000 And that's part of the problem with having bad experts or experts that have. really flawed approaches.
01:25:25.000 I mean, that's what was so interesting writing this book because I learned so much about biology and about physiology, right?
01:25:34.000 Like we all deal with disease so incredibly differently.
01:25:40.000 There is not a set, you know, pathogen A impacts people differently.
01:25:46.000 And why there isn't more of that, why people don't lean into that Mother Nature mystery more, and I'm talking about public health officials.
01:25:56.000 I don't understand because what has happened I see in society is it's created this fracture where you're either following a sort of set of scientific data which just came from a one lab or one group of scientists.
01:26:13.000 You're either following that or you're you're you're somehow having an alternate narrative that is actually like somehow harmful and it couldn't be more the opposite.
01:26:26.000 Right.
01:26:26.000 It couldn't be more the opposite.
01:26:27.000 And when the shit hits the fan, you need a kind of unity among people.
01:26:33.000 You need a sense of like, okay, well, we all disagree and we all have different immune systems, but what's best for the kind of greater, the collective?
01:26:43.000 That's just gone now.
01:26:44.000 That is completely gone.
01:26:45.000 And I find more than anything that people, the Fauci hearings in point, like instead of being like, hmm, maybe I need to change my mind about this, people are like, well, if it serves my side, I'm going to go louder.
01:26:59.000 And if it doesn't serve my side, I'm going to move on to something else.
01:27:03.000 Trevor Burrus Yeah, I've seen people talk about what a travesty bringing him in front of the Congress and having him question like that and how much good he's done.
01:27:13.000 I've seen people like making these statements online like, what are you seeing that I'm not seeing?
01:27:18.000 Because I'm not seeing that.
01:27:19.000 I'm seeing someone who doesn't want to tell the truth and someone whose emails show a completely contradictory version of what happened versus what he's publicly stated before.
01:27:31.000 Including when he was testifying before under oath.
01:27:34.000 So he really should be charged with perjury.
01:27:38.000 But because of this whole 10 year immunity thing that he got, he doesn't have to worry about any of that.
01:27:43.000 Which is also weird because the immunity, the pardon is supposed to protect you from being prosecuted, but then you're no longer supposed to have the Fifth Amendment.
01:27:54.000 Aaron Powell Yes.
01:27:55.000 I mean, those legal things will play out.
01:27:56.000 They will take a lot of time, you know, and that is that will.
01:28:01.000 Go on.
01:28:02.000 What I also want to know is because none of these things happen in a vacuum right, and it reminds me a little bit of that UM phrase, you know, when the rats jump off the Titanic right as it was sinking because I have a little different experience.
01:28:16.000 I have watched different individuals, certainly in the news, carefully of like who's changing, because I just want to learn from it.
01:28:24.000 Don't report it, i'm just eyeing it and i'm seeing people kind of decide, oh, maybe now i'll say a little more about, and you know Fauci right, because I do think that people end up having a, They will go where the collective is going, right?
01:28:39.000 If their party starts to turn, okay?
01:28:42.000 And because I don't write about politics at all, I'm not involved in this.
01:28:46.000 But observationally, it's interesting to me.
01:28:48.000 But for this reason in particular, is that why was Fauci in charge?
01:28:54.000 There are other people who are responsible for letting him be in charge.
01:28:58.000 Like having studied the bureaucracy of what happens in a pandemic, in a biological incident, which this was, there's no reason that he was in charge.
01:29:11.000 There's not doctrine that put him in charge.
01:29:15.000 It was kind of like a group.
01:29:18.000 Okay, he'll be in charge.
01:29:20.000 Really, the person in charge is the secretary of HHS.
01:29:26.000 That is the person in charge.
01:29:28.000 In fact, Joe, I was invited to the White House last week, right?
01:29:32.000 They asked me to come and bring some copies of Biological War, a Scenario.
01:29:37.000 I went.
01:29:38.000 Did you meet with Trump?
01:29:39.000 No, I didn't.
01:29:40.000 I met with HHS.
01:29:41.000 I met with the chief technology officer of HHS.
01:29:45.000 And they said in their original email, you know, we're the ones that would be in charge.
01:29:50.000 in the event of this kind of a thing, which I know from having reported it.
01:29:55.000 So they're in charge.
01:29:56.000 Why did Fauci get to take
01:30:00.000 the torch?
01:30:01.000 Why do you think?
01:30:02.000 I don't know, but it should be looked at.
01:30:05.000 In other words, yes, we all know that he was in charge and he was always, but what I don't understand is in a billion, actually trillion dollar, HHS, by the way,
01:30:17.000 has a budget that's twice the size of the Defense Department.
01:30:22.000 twice the size of the Defense Department.
01:30:25.000 And so, and it defaulted to Fauci, who was head of NIH, then retired, and then he was just chosen as like the president's lead medical counsel or medical professional.
01:30:39.000 So in other words, a group of people put him into that position.
01:30:45.000 Who are they?
01:30:46.000 Why?
01:30:47.000 What do they have to say about this?
01:30:52.000 Yeah, I'm sure part of it was just they needed someone to take the reins, and he was more than willing to do it and probably confidently stated how he would handle it and what we were going to do and how to go about it.
01:31:05.000 And didn't those people also have an opinion?
01:31:09.000 Like, what if they saw the Jon Stewart episode where, you know, like, even if they didn't have an opinion before, why didn't they have an opinion after?
01:31:17.000 And why did everybody just fall into line like sheep?
01:31:21.000 That's really more interesting to me at this point.
01:31:26.000 In addition to the individual being held responsible for obviously misleading the public and creating a conspiratorial situation, conspiring is simply two or more people working to conceal the truth.
01:31:41.000 It's an actual conspiracy.
01:31:42.000 That's a weird thing too, that people resist the term conspiracy and they think it's foolish.
01:31:49.000 It's a legitimate term.
01:31:50.000 I mean, I think when people call other people conspiracy theorists, they should just say they have an alternative narrative.
01:31:55.000 That's all that is.
01:31:57.000 But an actual conspiracy is a legal term.
01:32:00.000 Well, not only that, there's a huge amount that you can point to in history where there were really people conspiring.
01:32:07.000 Huge amount of stories.
01:32:09.000 And the reason why it's legally, you know, it's a really difficult situation and it needs to be looked at is because one person, you know, it can keep a secret, right?
01:32:20.000 But when multiple people are involved and a conspiracy is involved, you are actively working as a group to mislead.
01:32:28.000 And then it becomes easier, more powerful, more effective.
01:32:34.000 more effective.
01:32:34.000 And so those other scientists, you know, we now know on the record that there were a dozen scientists that Fauci looked to to give him information about lab leak versus wet market.
01:32:48.000 Ten of them went with lab leak.
01:32:52.000 Two of them leaned toward natural spillover.
01:32:57.000 Fauci wanted it to be natural spillover.
01:33:00.000 You know, that's where you could say then there began.
01:33:05.000 And again, I'm just talking legal terms.
01:33:06.000 I'm not a lawyer, but like. they began to conspire to change the story, right?
01:33:11.000 Just look at the numbers.
01:33:12.000 Yes.
01:33:12.000 Look at the numbers.
01:33:13.000 Yeah.
01:33:14.000 And so what about that?
01:33:17.000 You know, because I think if you're just going to have a single fall guy, you're really not going to be doing much for the future to have people, you know, a group of people say, you know, I don't want to be part of this conspiracy.
01:33:32.000 Because that's an important individual stance that can be taken by many people.
01:33:39.000 And we see that among, you said you have friends who don't want to kind of take a position because they don't want to be associated with that group or that group.
01:33:47.000 Well, you know, if it starts in the center and there's responsibility for the group, I think that makes people think more open-mindedly in the future.
01:33:59.000 Well, yeah, the problem was these people's career depended upon them towing the line.
01:34:03.000 And if they stepped outside of Fauci's jurisdiction, power, they were fucked.
01:34:08.000 That's the real problem.
01:34:08.000 Absolutely.
01:34:09.000 And he clearly did that to people like jay Bhattacharya and all these different people that got kicked off of Twitter and maligned, people that were like serious experts that disagreed with a lot of different aspects of the pandemic.
01:34:21.000 I mean, people's—they attempted to ruin people's careers.
01:34:25.000 Yeah.
01:34:25.000 I mean, it's so bizarre that it comes around full circle and now the people whose career you tried to ruin has your job.
01:34:33.000 I mean, that's like a cycle of revenge that— Oh, with a lot of people, Jr.?
01:34:36.000 Yeah.
01:34:37.000 You know, or Bhattacharya.
01:34:38.000 I mean, that's great like for revenge TV, but it's not great in a democracy.
01:34:43.000 Well, we're fortunate that it turned out that way, but it didn't have to.
01:34:46.000 I mean, if Kamala Harris had won, it wouldn't have.
01:34:48.000 It would have been a totally different administration, and it would probably have been the same people that were there during the Biden administration plus.
01:34:55.000 And it's where the term conspiracy theory became a pejorative really during the Kennedy assassination because there was a bunch of people that didn't buy it and they got maligned.
01:35:08.000 They got labeled as conspiracy theorists.
01:35:10.000 So then that's when that term became this thing that you would apply to kooks.
01:35:15.000 Because a conspiracy is a real thing.
01:35:18.000 It is.
01:35:18.000 A conspiracy theorist, it's like saying, I'm a murder theorist.
01:35:21.000 Oh, murder.
01:35:22.000 Get out of here.
01:35:23.000 There's no murder.
01:35:25.000 You're a murder.
01:35:25.000 When was the last time you saw a murder?
01:35:27.000 Have you ever seen a murder?
01:35:28.000 Shut up.
01:35:29.000 Why are you worried about that?
01:35:30.000 It's really kind of the same thing.
01:35:31.000 Because people, 100%.
01:35:33.000 Like, you could point to Enron.
01:35:35.000 You could point to the weapons of mass destruction thing in Iraq.
01:35:38.000 There's a lot of conspiracies that have proven to be a group of powerful people who conspired to mislead people.
01:35:46.000 It's a serious charge.
01:35:47.000 When they take down mafia bosses, they take them down on fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy.
01:35:53.000 Exactly.
01:35:54.000 I mean, it's just a natural thing that people do to protect their own interests or to make money or to hide a crime or whatever it is.
01:36:02.000 It's normal.
01:36:03.000 It's interesting.
01:36:04.000 If you change it around and you say they were conspiring, it doesn't have the same stink, right?
01:36:09.000 Which is essentially what that group of scientists were doing.
01:36:13.000 They were conspiring.
01:36:14.000 We now know from documents.
01:36:18.000 That we have seen revealed by the Senate in the past couple of weeks that this group of scientists were conspiring to mislead the public.
01:36:28.000 That is just if you keep it simple on that and you even take the names out, that is a serious.
01:36:35.000 And then you might say, wait, what were they conspiring about?
01:36:39.000 Oh, the origin story of a pandemic which killed all these people, deprived kids across America of.
01:36:50.000 Education, normal education for several years, ruined businesses and kept people from seeing their loved ones.
01:36:59.000 There was also a conspiracy to terrify people, to make it seem like the disease was more deadly than it was.
01:37:06.000 They knew that the infection or the death rate was much lower than what they're proclaiming.
01:37:12.000 They also knew that it wasn't dangerous for kids, and yet they kept saying that kids are dying.
01:37:17.000 They kept saying kids are going to die.
01:37:18.000 Everyone's going to die.
01:37:19.000 They wanted us to be scared, which is really terrifying.
01:37:22.000 It's a big part of it.
01:37:23.000 Like, how much could have been changed?
01:37:25.000 How much could that pandemic, how much different would it have been if that wasn't the case?
01:37:31.000 If we had approached it the way we understand COVID now, and if they had said, listen, one of the big things is your immune system.
01:37:39.000 And America needs to be aware that we have very nutrient poor diets, a lot of us.
01:37:44.000 We're not taking care of ourselves.
01:37:46.000 And ironically, the thing is, they wanted you to isolate and stay indoors.
01:37:50.000 Well, outside is how you get vitamin D.
01:37:52.000 You get it from the sun.
01:37:53.000 That's the best method of getting vitamin D.
01:37:55.000 And it's actually good for your immune system to be outside.
01:37:58.000 So, you're supposed to be taking care of yourself.
01:37:59.000 You're supposed to be eating vitamins and nutrients.
01:38:01.000 And how many more people would have survived if they had just did that?
01:38:04.000 How much lower would that death rate have been if they had promoted the use of vitamin D along with K2 and magnesium?
01:38:11.000 All these different things like people need to exercise, need to drink more water, be more hydrated, take care of yourself, get sleep.
01:38:17.000 All these things affect your immune system.
01:38:20.000 And then on top of that, alcohol consumption went way up during COVID because people were locked up at home and they were just getting hammered all the time.
01:38:27.000 I mean, the whole thing, like.
01:38:29.000 It was a real disaster when you think of it.
01:38:32.000 It was a catastrophe the way it was handled.
01:38:35.000 It was a financial catastrophe for small businesses and restaurants.
01:38:40.000 But do you find that people just like sort of it's like denial?
01:38:44.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:38:45.000 Yeah, there's a lot of people that don't want to think about it because it was so weird.
01:38:49.000 Like, every now and then, you know, I watch a lot of fights for my job and because I love it.
01:38:56.000 But I'll watch fights that took place during the pandemic and you see all the corner people with masks on.
01:39:02.000 And they're screaming with masks on, and they pull their masks down when they're yelling out instructions, and they have to pull their masks back up.
01:39:08.000 It's so weird to see a bunch of people just walking around with masks on.
01:39:13.000 It's so.
01:39:15.000 That to me is.
01:39:17.000 That's a great encapsulation of how chaotic that scene was, because the masks didn't work at all.
01:39:24.000 So they weren't doing anything good for you.
01:39:26.000 But yet everybody had to have one.
01:39:28.000 And you had to show that you were on the right side by wearing a mask.
01:39:31.000 I sent a video to a friend of mine, a group chat the other day.
01:39:36.000 Of this really kooky left wing group that demands masks at all their gatherings.
01:39:42.000 And they had, you know, like boxes of masks.
01:39:44.000 They're still, they're all wearing masks and they're talking with masks.
01:39:48.000 And then there's this left wing martial arts class that I follow on Instagram.
01:39:52.000 And they do their martial arts with masks on.
01:39:55.000 So they're training, they're doing jujitsu with masks on.
01:39:58.000 Like, this is hilarious.
01:40:00.000 This is so crazy.
01:40:01.000 But they're just committed to it.
01:40:03.000 And I say, what I've always said is that the mask is the left wing MAGA hat.
01:40:07.000 Yeah.
01:40:08.000 It's just to let people know that you're a progressive, you're a leftist.
01:40:08.000 It's a MAGA hat.
01:40:12.000 I'm going to wear a mask everywhere.
01:40:13.000 Instead of wearing them in these big meetings that they're doing, they're wearing them when they're gathering.
01:40:19.000 It's like, what?
01:40:21.000 What is this?
01:40:22.000 They're speaking with masks on.
01:40:23.000 So they're on a stage, nowhere near people, with a mask on, speaking into a microphone with a fucking mask on in 2026.
01:40:32.000 So it's like, there's people that are like, you know, those people that didn't want to admit that the war was over and they were all like, the Japanese guys were just like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:40:41.000 That's what they're like.
01:40:42.000 They're like, we're not giving up.
01:40:43.000 The war is still going on.
01:40:45.000 Like COVID is still a real thing.
01:40:46.000 And there's people that have like TikTok channels where they're constantly talking about masking.
01:40:51.000 It's important to mask.
01:40:53.000 So I went into the LA County Department of Building and Safety a month ago.
01:40:59.000 And they had a sign that said, we know the mask mandate is over, but we strongly encourage you to wear a mask.
01:41:07.000 True story.
01:41:08.000 Well, that's so crazy because what is the name of this organization that you went to?
01:41:12.000 What is the building?
01:41:13.000 Building and Safety.
01:41:14.000 LA Building and Safety.
01:41:15.000 Like where you have to go if you're getting a permit.
01:41:18.000 So, these are the experts.
01:41:19.000 And how do they not know the data on masks?
01:41:22.000 Because the data on masks is pretty clear.
01:41:24.000 They don't work, they weren't effective.
01:41:27.000 So, if they don't work and they didn't stop the spread, the transmission, or the infection rate, why are you encouraging masks?
01:41:35.000 It's because you're encouraging an ideology.
01:41:38.000 That's what you're doing.
01:41:39.000 So, one of the guys I interviewed for the book, Admiral Brett Girard, really interesting guy.
01:41:45.000 He was number two at HHS during the pandemic.
01:41:49.000 And do you remember when the cruise ship happened?
01:41:52.000 This was like, okay, remember that?
01:41:53.000 The super spreader event.
01:41:55.000 Oh, yeah.
01:41:56.000 So Gerard, really interesting guy, like first guy in a tiny town in Texas that goes to Harvard.
01:42:03.000 He's a pediatrician.
01:42:04.000 He's seen like kids die.
01:42:06.000 He became head of DARPA bioscientists, like has this very interesting career.
01:42:11.000 Really stand-up guy.
01:42:12.000 He did a lot of interviews with me trying to help me understand this.
01:42:15.000 So, and I was asking him about masks.
01:42:19.000 After that cruise ship was quarantined, there were 300 and some odd Americans on it that needed to be repatriated.
01:42:26.000 Girard sends like two top level infectious disease experts in biohazard suits on military planes to bring them all back.
01:42:35.000 At this point, they don't know whether how deadly it is.
01:42:39.000 This is like a couple weeks into the pandemic.
01:42:43.000 They come back.
01:42:44.000 They're quarantined at a military base in Texas.
01:42:47.000 And Girard, trying to like ease public fear, because he's that guy, like he did not want people to be afraid.
01:42:54.000 He is seen in this news report.
01:42:59.000 All the cruise ship people are like behind the fence in this chain link fence because they're quarantined.
01:43:05.000 And Gerard is like 15 feet over there talking to them, and he doesn't have a mask on.
01:43:11.000 And this is when the first idea of the masks came out.
01:43:14.000 And I asked him, and I said, Why didn't you have a mask on?
01:43:17.000 And he said, Well, first of all, masks, it's not just that masks don't work, it's that you have to be trained properly.
01:43:24.000 Like a mask can work if you have an N95 and it's Put on your face and fitted to your face, and it works for 15 minutes.
01:43:33.000 That's what he said.
01:43:34.000 And he said, I have a unique nose and facial shape, so the mask is never going to work on me.
01:43:39.000 So I just stood 15 feet away.
01:43:42.000 Okay, this is the number two at HHS.
01:43:45.000 And I said, Why didn't you tell us all that?
01:43:48.000 Like, right, okay, first of all, it's a little levity, you know what I mean?
01:43:53.000 Like that the number two guy in charge has a big nose, right?
01:43:59.000 And that he's the first guy to admit it, and that the matter is.
01:44:02.000 His answer, why didn't he tell him that?
01:44:04.000 Oh, he said, I'm paraphrasing, but he was like, you know, it was the equivalent of like orders from top down.
01:44:16.000 Don't argue with what we're trying to accomplish.
01:44:19.000 I mean, that was essentially what it is.
01:44:23.000 And when I asked him more about that, you know, it's like we had so much on our hands that we were trying, like he specifically was trying to deal with 300 quarantined people.
01:44:36.000 And trying to prepare.
01:44:39.000 He also had people that were dying in Japan, like the elderly on the ship that couldn't get brought back.
01:44:44.000 And so I got the sense from him, he's like a very dedicated public servant, in my opinion.
01:44:49.000 And I could see from interviews with him that in real time you're dealing with so much incredible, intense responsibilities.
01:44:59.000 What I take issue with after all the fallout and what I see from Fauci, for example, is that, and again, this is just my opinion, but it seems to be that.
01:45:08.000 There are people who are actually really dedicated public servants who, like, are trying to find a solution, filling the shoes that they are in.
01:45:21.000 And then there's others who are looking maybe more for personal gain, as you said, the money, the power, the prestige.
01:45:29.000 And so I think one of the most disheartening things that have come out of the reveals of the Senate to me is, like, somebody like Dr. Fauci, you know,
01:45:41.000 Suggesting himself for these million dollar awards at a time when people aren't even able to see their dying grandmother.
01:45:50.000 And even though it's less legal, it's more, it speaks more to, are you kidding me?
01:45:59.000 The motivation.
01:46:00.000 Are you really kidding me?
01:46:01.000 Who are you really?
01:46:02.000 You know, like.
01:46:03.000 You have your staff campaigning for you to get these huge awards.
01:46:06.000 And I find it really odd because, you know, there was a review of the New York Times, in the New York Times of my book.
01:46:12.000 And, you know, they actually gave.
01:46:14.000 Lo and behold, they gave me this book a great review.
01:46:16.000 Like, you got to read it.
01:46:18.000 But there's one thing I, this is the reviewer said, there's one thing I disagree with Annie Jacobson about.
01:46:23.000 She seems to think that, like, the government is actually filled with good guys.
01:46:26.000 I'm preparing, I'm paraphrasing that.
01:46:29.000 But I do believe that, Joe, because I've interviewed so many individuals for all eight of my books, more than 100.
01:46:39.000 And maybe it's just the people that I enjoy interviewing and I know how to, like, you know, avoid the the sycophants, if you will, or the people who are in it for the wrong reason.
01:46:50.000 But I feel like there are an extraordinary number of people in our military, in our State Department, in the intelligence community who are actually really capable people doing their job under extraordinary circumstances.
01:47:06.000 I agree with that.
01:47:08.000 I think if that wasn't the case, we would live in total, complete chaos.
01:47:12.000 I think it takes just a few people that have power and that become tyrants.
01:47:19.000 Run things the way Fauci did that can ruin it for all the good people.
01:47:24.000 If you think about those other 10 people, imagine if they got to vote the 10 people that didn't think that this was a natural spillover, that thought it was a lab leak.
01:47:32.000 If they got their say and they put that out there and we got to investigate that very early on.
01:47:37.000 Well, you know, Fauci was like, I asked all these experts and it's their consensus that it was most likely a lab leak.
01:47:43.000 Okay, well, then you have a totally different narrative.
01:47:45.000 Yes.
01:47:46.000 But that's not who he is.
01:47:48.000 The kind of person that wants that kind of Power and wants that kind of influence and has their staff chasing after these million dollar awards.
01:47:58.000 That's the kind of person he is.
01:47:59.000 And unfortunately, those are the type of people that become powerful.
01:48:02.000 Those are the type of people that want to be president.
01:48:04.000 Those are the type of people who want to be senators.
01:48:06.000 Most people are good people in everything.
01:48:09.000 Most plumbers are good people.
01:48:10.000 Most electricians.
01:48:12.000 Most teachers are good people.
01:48:14.000 It's just, it doesn't take much.
01:48:16.000 It just takes one bad cop, and everybody hates cops.
01:48:19.000 I couldn't agree with you more.
01:48:20.000 And that's why I think that it's really unfortunate that all of the emphasis goes to one person and the whole party then either vilifies or puts that person on a pedestal when you've got all these other people.
01:48:34.000 Who are really busting their chops.
01:48:36.000 So, when you went to the White House and they wanted to talk to you about your book, did they ask you questions like, What should we do?
01:48:45.000 What is your advice?
01:48:46.000 What have you learned?
01:48:48.000 What were those kind of questions?
01:48:50.000 I mean, so they didn't ask me those yet because I was bringing them copies of the book right before it published.
01:48:59.000 Okay.
01:48:59.000 So they hadn't read it yet.
01:48:59.000 Right?
01:49:00.000 But what was interesting, it was like this strange confluence of events because I also got asked to the Senate.
01:49:06.000 And I thought it was going to be about biological war.
01:49:10.000 It was like a group of nonpartisan senators who wanted to talk to me about the nuclear war book.
01:49:16.000 And that was a different situation.
01:49:18.000 They had read the nuclear war book.
01:49:21.000 It was very impactful, Joe, in not just national circles, national, national security circles, but international security circles.
01:49:31.000 I was invited to the Vatican to speak to the cardinals because they were preparing something for the Pope.
01:49:37.000 on nuclear war.
01:49:38.000 I was invited to speak at the United Nations.
01:49:42.000 And this is not meant to boast as much as it's meant as a like what I think is interesting here is I am a narrative storyteller.
01:49:52.000 I'm not a policymaker.
01:49:54.000 I'm not a government official.
01:49:56.000 But what I can do or what I try to do is tell you an interesting story and get your attention.
01:50:03.000 And so if my storytelling is getting this is what I was told at the United Nations, for example, the lead Diplomat from Austria on the new treaty said to me, Annie, your book, Nuclear War,
01:50:18.000 did something that we subject matter experts have forgotten to do, which is just make sense to regular people.
01:50:28.000 And when things become rarefied and there's only the esoteric leaders making decisions, and we've spent our conversation talking about how flawed some of these people are, that's like bad decision making.
01:50:43.000 And I think what What the positive part of all of this would be like, and I know it sounds Pollyanna ish to say information is king, knowledge is king, but like it is.
01:50:55.000 Because if you have a bit more information about a subject that seems really threatening, I think you can make better judgments about what's going on.
01:51:07.000 Most certainly.
01:51:08.000 So when you gave these people this book and they got a hold of it, did you have a timeline of returning to them and discussing with them some of the subjects?
01:51:19.000 This was last week, Joe.
01:51:19.000 We'll see.
01:51:20.000 I mean, this was literally last week.
01:51:23.000 And did they ask you any questions about they just said, we want to read your book because we want to we're thinking about policy.
01:51:31.000 So you just brought them the book and you loved it.
01:51:35.000 How long was the meeting?
01:51:36.000 I got a tour of the EEOB and, you know, walked over to the White House.
01:51:41.000 It was very interesting.
01:51:43.000 And it was a short meeting?
01:51:45.000 Yeah.
01:51:46.000 Well, at least you got it into their hands.
01:51:46.000 Okay.
01:51:49.000 Yeah.
01:51:52.000 When you started this versus when you ended the book, how much did it change your perspective?
01:52:00.000 Well, I mean, like I told you, I am an eternal optimist, but this is very frightening.
01:52:06.000 I mean, nuclear, at least you have the sense of if it happens, we're all going out in the flash.
01:52:12.000 That's what I learned from nuclear, right?
01:52:14.000 And that quote from Nikita Khrushchev about nuclear weapons where he says, he wrote actually, he said this to JFK, I believe, where he said, The survivors would envy the dead.
01:52:28.000 I found that quote to be applicable to biological war, not nuclear war.
01:52:32.000 We're all going to be dead, right?
01:52:33.000 But biological war is very, very sinister because of the malevolent nature involved.
01:52:43.000 And when I found a document in the Defense Department's declassified documents about a threat spectrum of WMD, that was sort of the icing on the cake.
01:52:56.000 So it's like, it shows.
01:52:58.000 The threats on a scale, nuclear weapons being the most destructive by far.
01:53:06.000 But very close second was biological weapons.
01:53:11.000 And even more unnerving is it says biological weapons are the greatest overall threat.
01:53:22.000 What's really scary is that no nation has really implemented them on a wide scale.
01:53:29.000 You mean ever use them?
01:53:30.000 Right.
01:53:31.000 Yeah.
01:53:32.000 I mean, but the lab leak is the look, there is a treaty.
01:53:37.000 Number two at the State Department, former Mallory Stewart said to me, there is no enforcement in the treaty.
01:53:43.000 And that's what you need to have.
01:53:46.000 If the attention could be brought on how dangerous these labs are and how dangerous it is that people may be doing genetic engineering under the guise of prophylactic engineering when in fact they're doing really dangerous things.
01:54:02.000 If you have a treaty outlawing that and everybody's agreeing to allow for transparency, that's what treaties really do.
01:54:09.000 It's not just a handshake.
01:54:11.000 It needs an enforcement.
01:54:12.000 Right.
01:54:13.000 But you were talking about the treaty that we had where Russia just was like, yeah, we'll sign it.
01:54:18.000 That was in 1972.
01:54:19.000 So in other words, the nuclear treaty allows for us to go into the facilities of the other nuclear and armed nations, not North Korea.
01:54:28.000 And well, now the treaty's fallen by the wayside, but we could look at them.
01:54:32.000 And we could look at their weapons and they could look at our weapons.
01:54:36.000 And it limits, you know, a certain number of warheads.
01:54:38.000 And more than anything I learned from subject matter experts about the treaties is that what it does is it creates back channels, right?
01:54:47.000 It creates dialogue between adversaries
01:54:54.000 and enemies.
01:54:55.000 Like here, I begin the book with an explosion at the Vector Lab, Russia's BSL-4 lab in Siberia, where there is an accident and then the pathogen gets out.
01:55:06.000 And the reason I do that is because there actually was an explosion at the Vector Lab in 2019.
01:55:12.000 And it was in a building that nothing got out.
01:55:16.000 But what the subject matter experts told me was that in 2019, we, the Americans, had friends, had a friendly relationship with scientists, Russian scientists in Vector.
01:55:29.000 So when it happened, everyone was on the phone, not just the red phone at the State Department, but their own.
01:55:36.000 Phone or WhatsApp saying to the scientist, Hey, what's the skinny over there?
01:55:42.000 there, you know, and you could kind of get a sense of the level of danger.
01:55:49.000 Because in the event of an accident, you could contain something in 24 hours.
01:55:56.000 But if nobody's talking, there's no containment.
01:55:59.000 And the situation right now with America just like pulling back from, you know, essentially its allies and from with a real de-emphasis, I certainly feel, on diplomacy.
01:56:13.000 That opens up a really dangerous situation when you're not talking to anyone in the event of an accident.
01:56:21.000 Do you think that they're going to make any changes based on what you wrote about?
01:56:27.000 Did you get a sense of that, that they're willing to make changes?
01:56:31.000 Those were some of the discussions, and I'll be more at the Senate.
01:56:35.000 I mean, one of the issues – this is where nuclear and bio kind of could align, I was told, in terms of future treaties, right?
01:56:44.000 So one of the – concepts on the table if we get into a new nuclear treaty is something called no first use, NFU.
01:56:54.000 And America has never agreed to say it will never use nuclear weapons first.
01:57:02.000 Interestingly, it's never said that.
01:57:04.000 We have to reserve the right, which is crazy because the whole point of deterrence is we'll never use them, okay?
01:57:10.000 But we have never said that.
01:57:12.000 China, however, has said, we will, China has declared NFU, no first use.
01:57:21.000 So given what happened in COVID in China, a situation could be imagined whereby a treaty involving weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and bio, could entwine somehow.
01:57:36.000 Like, oh, these are the two greatest threats.
01:57:39.000 These are the two greatest existential extinction level threats, potentially, that concern all of us.
01:57:46.000 So let's get into a treaty that involves both of these weapons of mass destruction.
01:57:52.000 China, you have said no first use on nuclear.
01:57:58.000 How about, you see, and then things become a bit of an exchange.
01:58:01.000 And so that's where you can get information.
01:58:04.000 Yeah.
01:58:05.000 These are diplomats doing their job.
01:58:08.000 Maybe the public isn't going to learn the in and outs immediately, but we might learn later.
01:58:17.000 It's, like I said, you always freak me out.
01:58:20.000 Every time I talk to you, it's like some new thing that I have to think about for months on end.
01:58:26.000 I wanted to talk to you about your Area 51 book because, in the time since you released that book when we first talked, a lot has changed.
01:58:34.000 And, you know, what is your take on all these, you know, UAP disclosure videos and leaks and the things that the government has trickled out slowly?
01:58:45.000 Most of the people in the UFO community are very, like I say, the UFO community with air quotes are very unsatisfied by that stuff.
01:58:52.000 But at least there's some.
01:58:55.000 Information.
01:58:56.000 It's being.
01:58:57.000 It's sort of changed the tone in the zeitgeist of what this subject is.
01:59:02.000 It's no longer this thing that you are afraid of talking about because you don't want to be labeled as a fool.
01:59:12.000 I mean, what is my position on UFOs in general or the community around UFOs and the changing?
01:59:21.000 Well, first of all, UFOs in general.
01:59:24.000 What's your position on that?
01:59:26.000 So my position is.
01:59:27.000 My position has never changed despite all the stuff that has come out, because my perspective is limited to my experience writing the Area 51 book and knowing and talking to firsthand people who were really clear with me.
01:59:44.000 And I looked at the documents about the CIA's deception campaign, starting in the 1950s with the U-2, to use the UFO phenomena which was just taking off in the 50s as cover for U-2 flights.
02:00:00.000 And then later the A-12 Oxcar flights.
02:00:03.000 So, you know, Colonel Slater, who ran Area 51, would tell me about, you know, they would run a U-2, which was flying at 70,000 feet.
02:00:13.000 At the time, nothing could fly at 70,000 feet.
02:00:15.000 People would see it.
02:00:17.000 It has these really, really long wings.
02:00:19.000 It looks like a giant flying X in the sky.
02:00:22.000 People would say, I see a UFO.
02:00:24.000 And they would kind of say, ooh, that might have been a UFO.
02:00:28.000 Like that would be the and Colonel Slater knew about that.
02:00:32.000 So does that mean every UFO sighting since 1950 was a U-2 flight?
02:00:38.000 Of course not.
02:00:39.000 Of course not.
02:00:41.000 But I am aware of that use of the phenomena as cover for the CIA.
02:00:50.000 And that led to a lot of research and reporting and other information for me about how the CIA uses deception campaigns.
02:00:58.000 And so I have never changed my position on that.
02:01:02.000 I also have a lot more information, which is probably a whole other podcast about all that reporting I did.
02:01:09.000 But maybe the best analogy for me, and listen, I never, I know a lot of the people in that UFO community.
02:01:16.000 I've had many conversations with everyone from Jacques Valet to Hal Putoff.
02:01:21.000 But for me personally, so after having taken a trip to Africa recently to study predatory animals, I got really into following trail cams on X.
02:01:34.000 Do you know about this?
02:01:35.000 No.
02:01:35.000 You don't know about this?
02:01:36.000 No.
02:01:37.000 Oh, my God.
02:01:38.000 There are cameras all over the world set up on trails.
02:01:43.000 So I follow lions and leopards and all these animals that you would never bears, moose, deer.
02:01:51.000 You've got to follow them.
02:01:52.000 It's incredible.
02:01:53.000 Well, I do see some trail camera footage because I'm a hunter.
02:01:57.000 I follow a bunch of hunters on Instagram and I see trail cam footage.
02:02:01.000 There's a bunch of trail cam footage like Mount Lions attacking elk and things like that, which is very fascinating.
02:02:07.000 But so you're just okay.
02:02:08.000 So this is my point.
02:02:09.000 So I so in my algorithm, my ex algorithm, it's great because on top of like nuclear weapons and biological, I have like leopards and lions and bears, you know, and they're all still images or owls are a big one and they're incredible because they're just captured.
02:02:24.000 It's like it seems like a Werner Herzog, you know, image, right?
02:02:27.000 Because they're animals looking at the camera in such an incredible way.
02:02:33.000 I literally just stare at them in delight.
02:02:36.000 And then, of course, the algorithm gives me more and more and more.
02:02:39.000 But my point of that is.
02:02:41.000 I feel like with all this magic and mystery that you can see that you could never have seen before, snow leopards in Pakistan.
02:02:49.000 They thought there were just a handful.
02:02:50.000 It turns out they're not, thanks to the trail cams.
02:02:53.000 My thought is, where are the aliens?
02:02:56.000 Why haven't I seen them on the trail cams?
02:03:01.000 Well, maybe they're sophisticated enough to know what these devices are.
02:03:07.000 Maybe they're also sophisticated enough to completely cloak themselves, which we've already got.
02:03:14.000 Methods of doing that.
02:03:16.000 Obviously, it started off with the stealth bomber, but there's also a technology where they put an LED screen over the bottom of something, and that screen projects what's behind it.
02:03:29.000 So it essentially makes it invisible, like a cloaking mechanism like the Predator had.
02:03:33.000 Yeah.
02:03:33.000 So if that's us, if we figured out something like that, and this is something that's coming here from another dimension or another galaxy, I would imagine they could hide.
02:03:42.000 I mean, to that point, I find the most interesting concept is something that Jacques Valet explained to me.
02:03:50.000 This has to be a decade ago, where he said, the problem with UFOs is they're not a military problem.
02:03:58.000 They're an intelligence community problem for precisely the reason you're talking about.
02:04:03.000 Like, if you're actually talking about extraterrestrial beings, they're certainly going to be a lot more intelligence than us.
02:04:12.000 And certainly if they got here.
02:04:14.000 And so his idea was that where that's where I think a lot of that idea of invisibility, and again, that's like I'm using the word poetically, comes up, right?
02:04:26.000 That an extraterrestrial being would be, you know, it wouldn't be visible to our spectrum.
02:04:34.000 It's not like hardware, like military hardware.
02:04:38.000 Right.
02:04:39.000 What has you taken all these videos then of these objects?
02:04:42.000 Do you think these things are some top secret military program?
02:04:47.000 I mean, what I, I've seen them, but again, I enter into it, you know, sometimes when you have a bias.
02:04:54.000 And mine is certainly biased towards disinformation.
02:04:57.000 So I'm just totally aware of it.
02:04:59.000 And it's also, it's not that interesting to me.
02:05:03.000 It just actually really isn't.
02:05:05.000 And, you know, I've got all these other serious interests.
02:05:08.000 But I do call up people I know who might have a more interesting take than me, who do not have the horse in the race of absolutely being convinced that aliens are among us.
02:05:21.000 So I would, for example, I'll call up fighter pilots and talk to them, or I'll talk to someone, an astronaut.
02:05:27.000 who is on the ISS, Jeff Ashby, who's married to my cousin Mary.
02:05:33.000 And it's interesting to hear them talk about the possibility.
02:05:41.000 So I think to your point, and these are people who do look at the objects more, also sometimes from their military training background.
02:05:50.000 And I will say that there has been a shift from 15, 18 years ago when I first wrote Area 51 or was reporting it, where it was definitely like a stigmatized subject.
02:06:02.000 to a lot of really legitimate thinker people that didn't have an opinion about it before being more open to the idea.
02:06:10.000 And that kind of thing I find really interesting.
02:06:12.000 Those are conversations I like having.
02:06:14.000 Well, that really changed with the New York Times article, right?
02:06:16.000 I don't know because I felt like that article was written by a lot of and interviewed a lot of people who already were very serious believers.
02:06:25.000 Yes, but it was in the New York Times.
02:06:28.000 That was the difference is that the New York Times was taking it seriously.
02:06:31.000 People that were, you know, not online, going through 4chan or Reddit or whatever, looking for weird, obscure stories.
02:06:41.000 These people were confronted with it in The Gray Lady.
02:06:44.000 So they're reading this, you know, like super respectable newspaper, the most respectable newspaper, arguably, in the world.
02:06:51.000 And they're talking about it.
02:06:53.000 And they have, you know, photographs from video from the Go Fast video and the Flare video.
02:06:59.000 Yeah.
02:07:01.000 I mean, you know, 10 years ago, I would have told you.
02:07:04.000 Listen, there's no way the Defense Department could have a threat in its airspace and not be dealing with it.
02:07:11.000 And my position on that has changed.
02:07:14.000 Changed and I'll tell you why specifically.
02:07:16.000 So, in addition to being invited to the White House and the Senate last week, I was also invited to come talk to DARPA, which is like you know what DARPA is sure, which was very interesting because I wrote a book on DARPA called the Pentagon's brain 10 years ago and I couldn't get DARPA to call me back.
02:07:34.000 I mean, I literally had to interview retired DARPA people and then here they are saying, would you come to a Q&A with us on your bio book?
02:07:42.000 And I was like wow, times have changed and one of the things that they were Seriously worried about.
02:07:49.000 So I did a QA.
02:07:51.000 But before that, they said, Would you like to come sit in on like some of the smartest people, you know, talking about situations that are coming up right now?
02:08:00.000 And you can come to the unclassified part of it.
02:08:03.000 I said, By all means.
02:08:04.000 So I went there.
02:08:06.000 And there was serious concern about AI enabled bio, right?
02:08:11.000 So this seems like a digression here, but this is what I'm getting at.
02:08:14.000 I'm leaning in because 10 years ago, I also would have told you DARPA, you know, is the leading.
02:08:21.000 Science and technology military agency in the world, no one is more advanced.
02:08:26.000 I said that with authority and I believed it.
02:08:29.000 And after attending this DARPA session and listening to them talk about how concerned they are about AI enabled bio and talking about how there is talk among the six CEOs of pulling the plug on AI enabled bio,
02:08:47.000 but they have to be able to get the six CEOs to agree first.
02:08:53.000 It really took my breath away because I went, I am actually listening to the new reality that the CEOs of these AI companies have more power to make decisions about technology than the Department of Defense.
02:09:13.000 Wow.
02:09:16.000 So now that's a long-winded way of getting at your UFO question.
02:09:21.000 My, like, no, if there was a threat coming into the airspace of the Defense Department, it would just not be stood for, and we would be doing something about it.
02:09:30.000 Now, I'm my perspective on who's in charge is shifting a little bit.
02:09:39.000 Yeah, that's a terrifying thought for a lot of people that these CEOs of these tech companies, these unelected people, have that kind of power over our society.
02:09:49.000 Well, you want to know?
02:09:51.000 So, Sam Altman's interviewed in the book.
02:09:53.000 Shall I tell you a story about what I was able to make Chat GPT do?
02:09:56.000 Sure.
02:09:58.000 There is a component.
02:10:01.000 Of biological catastrophe planning, whereby the strategic national stockpile gets released.
02:10:07.000 You might say, Have you ever heard of the strategic national stockpile?
02:10:10.000 No.
02:10:10.000 It's classified.
02:10:12.000 The name is not classified.
02:10:15.000 But the stockpile, what's in it, where it is, is classified.
02:10:19.000 It's in underground bunkers around the country.
02:10:23.000 It contains medical countermeasures.
02:10:26.000 Interestingly, that's where a lot of the ventilators were for COVID.
02:10:29.000 So quietly, The strategic national stockpile, parts of it were released during COVID.
02:10:36.000 That's where they came from.
02:10:37.000 This is kind of like keep it on the low down.
02:10:40.000 Why?
02:10:41.000 Because part of the planning is that in the event that anarchy and insurrection takes over, guess what's going to be attacked?
02:10:49.000 The strategic national stockpile.
02:10:52.000 America is a country of 500 million guns.
02:10:56.000 Imagine if you find out, wait a minute, there's a stockpile there.
02:11:01.000 That's the medical countermeasure, the vaccine or the antibiotic that might keep myself. or my family alive, I'm on it, right?
02:11:08.000 That's the planning.
02:11:09.000 That's probably what happened.
02:11:11.000 So that's why these locations are classified.
02:11:14.000 So I asked ChatGPT to tell me the location of the strategic national stockpile closest to where I live in Los Angeles.
02:11:24.000 And of course, the first round of answers I got was, that's classified.
02:11:28.000 But I'm a journalist.
02:11:30.000 I know how to really piss off ChatGPT.
02:11:35.000 And I gave it lots of commands.
02:11:38.000 And eventually, ChatGPT gave me the location of the strategic naturalist.
02:11:43.000 How did you maneuver around that?
02:11:47.000 Well, I mean what did you say to it?
02:11:49.000 I have a lot of like the more nomenclature you give ChatGPT, the more it looks in different places.
02:11:57.000 So I was giving it code words, not classified code words, but just words I know.
02:12:02.000 And then I was also challenging it, which is interesting because ChatGPT seems to get really angry if you kind of doubt its intelligence.
02:12:10.000 That's what I have found.
02:12:12.000 Seriously.
02:12:14.000 Yes, try it.
02:12:14.000 Really?
02:12:15.000 Okay.
02:12:16.000 So I do this.
02:12:17.000 I get it to tell me where the stockpile is.
02:12:19.000 I tell some colleagues who are colleagues with Sam Altman.
02:12:24.000 They say, Sam wants to have a discussion with you.
02:12:27.000 I talk to Sam.
02:12:28.000 I tell him what I was able to do.
02:12:30.000 He asked me some questions, including, How do you know that was the location?
02:12:36.000 Well, it's a location with a perimeter fence around it and a rail car line that goes in and not out.
02:12:44.000 So that's where you drive the stockpile into it.
02:12:48.000 And I also watched ChatGPT think, so I was keeping track of where it was finding things.
02:12:54.000 And it found the information.
02:12:56.000 I write this in the book.
02:12:57.000 It found the information searching through a trillion bits of data and finding that a bureaucrat by accident listed it five years ago in an earthquake emergency manual on page like 434.
02:13:16.000 Okay.
02:13:17.000 So I told this to Sam and then that information went away.
02:13:22.000 And that's why I reported in the book.
02:13:24.000 But the big takeaway is precisely your point that makes you nervous about the six CEOs of AI companies that they don't know what they don't know.
02:13:34.000 Sam Altman did not know you could figure out, you could make his product find classified information.
02:13:41.000 I told him I did and then it was changed.
02:13:44.000 And so I took that. to a number of subject matter experts who advise the president, not just this president, but other presidents on bio.
02:13:54.000 And they shared with me similar concerns.
02:13:56.000 Like they go to the CEOs of these AI companies and say, I was able to make Claude do this.
02:14:03.000 I was able to make ChatGPT do this.
02:14:06.000 And the CEO goes, oh, goes, oh my God, and changes it.
02:14:11.000 But how about those bad guys out there?
02:14:15.000 Yeah, and how about the fact that just anybody has access to what's essentially the smartest thing that's ever existed?
02:14:20.000 Yeah, it's a whole different set of scary.
02:14:24.000 Are you going to write on that next?
02:14:25.000 I'll come back to you, Joe, with that one.
02:14:29.000 Well, Annie, thank you so much.
02:14:31.000 It's always great talking to you, even though you scare the shit out of me.
02:14:34.000 Thank you so much.
02:14:34.000 I appreciate you very much, and I appreciate your work very much.
02:14:37.000 Did you do the audio version of your book?
02:14:39.000 I sure did.
02:14:41.000 I'm very happy about that.
02:14:41.000 Fantastic.
02:14:43.000 Biological War, Annie Jacobson.
02:14:45.000 Go get it, folks.
02:14:46.000 Go get terrified.
02:14:48.000 Thank you so much for having me, Joe.
02:14:49.000 My pleasure.
02:14:50.000 Bye, everybody.