#323 Annie Jacobsen - Is America Ready for Biological War?

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Because sometimes I write for everybody, just give it to me so I can understand it. That's the questions I ask, the smartest people in the room, and it's what I try to convey. Because if you're too knowledgeable on a subject, sometimes you lose your audience. And we all live through the COVID pandemic. So whenever you're talking about a biological incident, three things, how might I get it? That's transmissibility. How might I get it? How deadly is it? Okay. COVID, 1% death rate, one out of 100 people died, flew 0.1%. Okay. Third thing is, is there something I can take that will heal me? That's called medical countermeasure, three basic components. And so through all of modern history and defense department planning against biological war, has been like looking at those three and creating lists of fears around them. And so when people don't know any of that, the fear, like for example, your tick situation, a tick is called a vector-born disease, so it has to bite you for you to be infected. Okay. The most deadly threat is an airborne pathogen, and that's what COVID was. So something that can be breathed in the, something that can linger in the room, that's a real problem. And that's the scenario I take readers through, an airborne pathogen because that is what all of government fears, it's unstoppable. The weapon essentially becomes the human law. The weapon's delivery system becomes the human lungs. And you know, another really interesting thing to me learning about all this was that the uncertainty idea is so huge in public health. Remember when COVID happened, or maybe people don't remember this because it's kind of like easier to forget. For the first three months, the CDC who is in charge and the WHO who's kind of in charge internationally, we're sending out tweets that said COVID not airborne. N-O-T in big letters. I reprint one of their tweets in the book. Nice. COVID not airborne, it was airborne, it was airborne. And instead of admitting they were wrong or even out of the gate saying, look, we don't know because they didn't know. To insist that then creates this kind of spiraling mistrust, hence your opening question about trust, you know. He's going through, you know, the outline and so I've brought a lot of stuff to mind. I mean, we'll get into the book here just a second, but if you if you looked at ancestry.com or like any of these, you know, these, my mind's going blank here, biometrics, you know, companies. I mean, in who owns them and I mean, they could they could take your DNA that you paid to have tested and create a bio weapon specifically designed to assassinate you. Absolutely. I mean, individual targets are a whole other dirty game and historically that that has been going on for a very long time. The Soviets had huge assassination programs specifically, you know, creating like biopoisons. Poisoning is like one of the oldest assassination ruses in the world. I mean, you can think of like a poison arrow or like somebody, there was a there was an El Qaeda guy that got assassinated. I want to say one of the like before the war on terror, he was in Kosovo, I believe. And he, Katab was his last name and he like opened up a letter or and somehow licked it or just closed the letter and that there was poison on it and he died. So they're these very specific assassinations that way. But what I think is the really big threat is this what what the defense department calls what FEMA calls what HHS or health and human services call because bio is a multi multi agency event, which is even more complex and threatening because now you're talking about multiple agencies and stove piping. But you have, you know, you have airborne pathogens that can be, or rather you have pathogens that can be genetically modified to your point to become airborne, right? So genetic modification of of path, let's start, let me, let me say one thing is the pathogen thing can kind of be like what the hell is that? Viruses and bacteria are both pathogens germs are everywhere. We have germs in our stomachs germs are not necessarily bad. When you call it a pathogen, that means it can be deadly virus and bacteria, COVID was a virus plague, which I use as the pathogen in my book that scenario plague is a bacteria. Plague was a bio weapon of yesterday because and then a medical countermeasure was invented to fight plague because it's a bacteria. So antibiotics kill the plague. Now with genetic modification, you can tweak the plague pathogen, which is called your synopestus, so that it is immune to the antibiotics. That's where we're into some very sinister genetic modifications that most people don't know about, don't want to know about, but probably should know a little bit about because it helps you know what you're up against. Most gear looks good until you actually start using it. Then you find out pretty quickly what holds up and what doesn't. That's why I keep coming back to roka. These aren't just lifestyle sunglasses pretending to be performance gear. I've worn mine training on the rains, traveling and outdoors for long days and they stay locked in place the entire time. 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You know, from what I understand, it's a lot, a lot cheaper to produce a bio weapon, a lot easier to sneak it in the country, a lot easier to get it released. I don't, I'm not a scientist or anything, but you know, you see, you know, all the things that are being created right now, the dire wolf, the woolly mammoth, supposedly, is coming back. We had Charles Hoskinson on who's one of the scientists. Did you heard about the plants that they're developing? They're making bioluminescent plants that can glow whatever color they want, which is amazing, you know, some of the use. And he was saying, you know, you could put these things around, put these plants around a nuclear power plan or whatever. And if there's any radiation leaking, then the plants will glow red. And he showed me pictures of what these things look like. We couldn't put it on the episode because it was so early on. But I mean, it's, it's like something you would see in that movie, The Avatar. It's like science fiction, except for its science facts. Yes. Real. And this is, you know, when you're talking about these kind of modifications to mother nature, it brings up this idea, which I think is super important. And it's kind of at the heart of all of this debate, discussion, science moving forward, which is dual use. So yes. if you're able to create plants that can detect radiation leakage, that's another form of an intelligence vehicle like what's called MAZIN. Like we have Sniffer technology. We have, you know, we can test sewer water. We can, same as we can see, you know, explosions from space. That's a signals intelligence. So measurement and signature intelligence called MAZIN would be the plants, and that would be terrific for us because it's a way of, you know, understanding what an adversary is up to. In the biomedical world, the reason you have genetic modification, the reason this all began, and by the way, it was kind of discovered, invented in 1971 in a lab in California. It's Stanford, genetic modification. So the idea of those scientists, they certainly weren't weapons engineers. They were like, we're going to be able to create incredible medical countermeasures. In the same way that penicillin itself was a medical countermeasure and stopped infection. You know, so many soldiers died in World War II because of wound infection. Penicillin comes along, fantastic. You've taken, you've knocked out all of so many bacteria deaths. So that's the idea if you're, you know, a doctor, if you're trying to do good in the world or trying to kind of keep the world in balance. But the other side of dual use is weaponizing something. And one of the original sort of components I saw after I wrote nuclear war, and I was like, am I really going to touch bio? And I had had many sources saying to me, Annie, you've got to write about it because it's more threatening. There's a threat spectrum diagram that I found an unclassified version of it in looking through the defense department documents. And it shows all the weapons of mass destruction on a scale. And of course, nuclear weapons are at the worst end because they are the most destructive. But bio weapons are considered by the defense department the greatest overall threat. - Really? - Greatest overall threat. That is shocking, that needs to be discussed. - Yeah. - And it's because the bar for entry is so low. You know, think about what, think about we've had nuclear technology for 80 years now, weapons technology. There's an incredibly low bar for, I mean, high bar for entry. You can't just make a nuclear bomb in your basement. Bio weapons, people will now tell you that like a high school student with limited biology can essentially do some genetic tweaks to create this kind of thing. So the accident, absolutely. That is, that sounds alarmist, it's true. That is like worthy of a discussion in and of itself. - That's basically everybody. - Everybody. Yeah, high school students compete in sort of science courses doing genetic tweaks. - I had no idea. High school has come along. - I have worked since I was a. I was dissecting frogs, you know? We were not doing genetic modifications. - Wow, wow. So where do we start today? Where do you want to start? - Where do you want to start? - What was your inspiration? - For this book? - For this book. - Oh God, what a funny word, right? I mean, inspiration for writing a book about the end of the world, you know? The fact that biological war is considered a near-extinct, potentially, a near-extinction level event. That's the nomenclature, a near-e-le. And I think, you know, inspiration, I am a storyteller. I am really interested in telling a dramatic narrative. I want people to read what I write. And it's not necessarily meant to terrify them, but maybe to put pressure on, you know, government people. But the most shocking part about it for me was that there are plans in place, like nuclear war. There are plans in place for this kind of a near-extinction level event, which I, you know, spoiler alert on the end of this book, where I take the readers through, you know, outbreak to anarchy in six days. What happens after anarchy is an actual government plan called devolution, devolution, pronounced two different ways, depending on who's saying it. Evolution with the D in front of it. It's exactly like you would think, wait, what evolution moving forward? Devolution is going back. So it's a government plan. The name devolution is unclassified. The program is classified. I had the man who signed off on the last version of it. Take me right up, Obama's FEMA director. Craig Fugic, take me, you readers, right up to the edge of what can legally be known. That this program exists so that after anarchy and insurrection happens, which will, we can get into why a essentially secret government disappears off into a bunch of bunkers, called hot sites, warm sites, and cold sites, to hunker down so that they can rebuild the government once everybody dies. Real program. - I saw that. So who, a lot of questions. So who determines who this is? - It is a pre-chosen, pre-designated list of people. Now, that list is classified. Who is on that list is classified? How that list is determined is classified. But I'm glad we're talking about this because let's speculate, because that's all we can do here. I would guess it certainly changes by administration. In other words, the current president is not gonna have a bunch of former president, Biden's, designates, go off and run the government. So then you really think about it like, wow, imagine being in that room, deciding, okay, who are, essentially, there's kind of like a mirror image person of every high-ranking official, because you have to assume, okay, POTUS could get the airborne bacteria in his lungs and die. So who's gonna be the devolution, POTUS, the national security advisor, the SEC staff, right? So all of these individuals, and by the way, it's not just defense department, it's health officials, it's Supreme Court justices, it's the government has to run. So then, I mean, you have the eyebrow-raising side that I had, which is, wow, that's a lot of, if there's that much planning that goes into catastrophe, why don't we have more public awareness about how to not have this happen? - We'll get into that discussion. It's called the devolution. - Devolution. - Devolution. - And we don't know how often, I mean, is there, there's a lot of conspiracies on who really runs the government, they're running wild right now, they ran wild in the last administration as well. I mean, on probably every administration that comes, there'll be this question, you think there's a possibility that maybe they don't get picked, maybe they're the ones that are running everything? - You mean the actual devolution is already at effect of taking care of things? That I don't know, it's certainly an interesting thought experiment, you know? I mean, I also think conspiracy theory is such a bad term. I think it should be changed to speculative narrative. - I love that. - Because, I mean, for example, when COVID happened on top of the WHO and the CDC saying COVID not airborne when it was airborne, so they got the most basic, most important, most critical fact wrong. And by the way, they've never admitted it. They've just quietly changed the idea that COVID was airborne about a year later. So, and there's that. And then there was the lab leak component of things, which separate from what you think about that, is a real possibility, okay? And yet, when that was first reported, it was actually called a conspiracy theory by major news outlets. And we know it wasn't a conspiracy theory. So, why not change that verbiage to speculative narrative? It just takes everybody way down off the ledge. You can even say, you know, if you're talking about, you can say it's a wildly speculative narrative. But to call something a conspiracy theory, I think is such self-righteous indignation and so potentially dangerous. Because once you say that, you have a really tough time walking it back and admitting you're wrong. And that's my- - I mean, the CIA created that term, correct? Conspiracy theory I didn't I don't I don't know that I have heard many different things I think I would or is that a speculative narrative Good look at that change the no change the change the thinking and the way people talk right here And now on the Sean Ryan show podcast But you know what I mean? It gives room for being wrong. There's something really Really character building about being able to keep yourself open to I might be wrong about this And I don't know why it has disappeared from the government. I just really don't know I mean, there's a famous JFK quote after the Bay of pigs, which is a failure Okay, and JFK said something like you know, I'm paraphrasing like Success has a thousand fathers Failure is an orphan And he was admitting His mistake in the Bay of pigs the CIA paramilitary attempt at invading Cuba that failed You know drastically. Mm-hmm. He was admitting Defeat he was admitting being wrong and I think that's Profoundly important. It's part of all of our personal lives Certainly minds are I mean right you got to be able to with your kids. I do it all the time publicly. I've had to do it two or three times this year unfortunately, but you know, I think you think You know, it's it's it's that's why we're in the big distrust era of the government and all of our institutions and pretty much everything right now is because Nobody has been able to admit wrong and you know, the funny thing is is you know it it it Instantaneously reestablishes your credibility and even lifts it more because people realize oh this person actually has a moral compass This person actually lives by a set of values Yes, and isn't can't say for anybody in government because they never do they're they're too proud There's too much pride pride go with before the fall. I mean I just think about pride is ego Which or the unhealthy part of ego. Maybe the healthy part of ego is uncertainty, you know Being able to say like you know, I don't know, but I think it's this I still cannot I could not get a straight I mean I'm always trying to get a straight answer from government officials on these Certain questions like that like asking that CDC. Why have you never admitted you are wrong about You know COVID-nought airborne and they won't they won't go there Um So people mistrust you've asked them. I always ask what do they say? I mean usually you get ignored on those questions, right? They I mean it's why I spend so much of my time interviewing former Sector, you know former Stratcom commander former FEMA chief Because once they are out of government They're really out of the cat bird seat which is kind of fair that when you are in a government position You have to tow the party line. You can't really answer a straight question without going to 10 press officers and finding out what you're supposed to say and Maybe that you know is understandable on some component, but it also should change because People I think are advancing way beyond that in their own personal lives, you know, just the ability to get information on your fingertips is just so much Faster now than it ever was that the government needs to adapt to that, you know We'll get back to you and answer on that and then six weeks later. They're giving you the answer and the question has already changed What about what else about this deal? Devolution I mean it was which it was out of surprise to you. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I've heard that term referenced, but it's always it's it's referenced without any Information attached to it because it's the only thing that's declassment. I was really kind of staunt that Craig Vuegate was able to really share with me what he did because he signed off on the 2016 version of it the last day of the Obama administration and that is the set of protocols From which all updates are made so the system hasn't changed the names on the list might But you know, there are other really really interesting details. I learned like okay, again spoiler alert, right? The president gets moved in the event of a major biological catastrophe where people are there is a pathogen That has a case fatality rate of 100% I told you COVID had 1% Plague not bubonic plague, but pneumonic plague, which is Neumonic pneumonia so in the lungs when plague goes into the lungs Not bubonic plague if you get bitten by a tick you get bubonic plague Your lymph nodes swell up and it you know It sort of takes over parts of the body your lymph system pneumonic plague in the lungs 100% Case fatality rate 100% 100% You get it you die unless you take antibiotics You have to take antibiotics within 24 hours with in 24 hours by the way I have one of my major sources on the book is one of the world's experts on bubonic plague pneumonic plague Dr. Henry Hein he was at you Sam red, which is at Fort Detrick Studying this for a very long time until he left now he works privately so all of this information is like fully sourced But the big fear I'm going looping back to the president here Big fear of defense department CDC HHS all of these organizations would be involved in a bio event Something a pathogen is released either a lab leak or an attack. It's airborne And it has a case fatality rate of 100% Okay, then I said the medical countermeasures. How are we going to stop it? Well, what if it has been genetically modified to defeat antibiotics Again, sounds like Annie's talking science fiction There are plans in place because this is what is feared I'm sure there aren't in this event the president I learned This is like You know sometimes you get information and you go I got a reverse engineer my book from that because this is Just too dramatic the president Does not get moved to a big bunker like Ravenrock or Mountweather Any of these command centers we can talk about if you want more details He gets moved to like what's called a cold site like really far away By himself It's such a crazy visual To think about the president of the United States with a gas mask By himself in a room His military aid with the nuclear football out the door outside the door And a couple secret service agents Watching the building For how long I mean that to me Sounds like science fiction To realize it's science fact Is like I got to know about this and that's how I work as a reporter like okay, so how how does that happen? I Maybe who you are there, you know That's the end of democracy. Yeah, I'd like to go back a little bit and talk about maybe the biological Arms race before we get to yes, but we don't rise I mean who do they think they're gonna even govern you know, I mean The trillionaires that are building the billionaires and and trillionaires that are building bunkers and Hawaii What are they gonna do come out of your bunker and do what's like We're gonna govern Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. I don't think so. They're not being governed right now And you gotta think of the skills you have to have survive in that kind of a world. Okay, so biological arms race. Here's an interesting fact Biological war is illegal Biological weapons are illegal nuclear weapons are not illegal Crazy thought. Okay. Okay, there's only a certain amount of countries that have them and They're making sure no one else gets them hence around But nuclear weapons are not illegal to those who hold them Biological weapons all biological weapons are illegal. They were made illegal by a treaty called the biological weapons convention The BWC it's the treaty in 1972 Before that the United States had a massive arsenal of nuclear of biological weapons Which is just crazy to think about that's cold war paranoia for you We had them rush. I had them China was building them north Korea all right, so they became illegal president Nixon decided They're repugnant to the conscience of mankind. That's what he said Okay, and Makes them illegal illegal. Everyone suck. We destroyed our biological weapons. It took 200 and 19 weeks to destroy them, by the way. So everybody says we're gonna destroy our weapons, biological weapons, everybody signs the treaty, not for another 20 years with the United States' learn from Soviet defector scientists. That the Russians went like this. Oh yeah, we signed that treaty, and then they began to build a colossal biological weapons program. And they called it their Manhattan Project. And the idea, which is so spooky, is that they wanted to kill all the people in America and the West and leave the infrastructure intact, those were their words. Interesting, smart and interesting and evil. I mean, you know, we were talking about ancestry.com, 23 and me, who knows what else is out there that people are using, but I mean, would you say an arsenal of biological? I mean, how many, how many different types of biological weapons do you need? Is, can they, I mean, I'm sure they can. I mean, can they, can they engine, you know, by sucking that DNA out or lab core, you know, the biggest blood diagnostics company in the world. I mean, can they get that information, hack that information or just sell it? I mean, I think 23 and me and ancestry and probably all the other ones have sold all the data most multiple times, allegedly. But is it possible to create a biological weapon that would only target American DNA, Canadian DNA, North American DNA, Latino DNA, black DNA, any race? There is. And that, by the way, this is not something I get into in the book. It was a little too speculative narrative for me to really go down, okay? But let me tell you who to, that was confirmed. I asked that exact question to Admiral Brett Draugh. And he was the assistant secretary of health and human services at the White House during COVID. Okay, he's also a medical doctor. He ran DARPAs by a science office. He's an incredible human being. He's like a, he's a character in the book for sure. I mean, he's really a remarkable person, you know, grew up in a small town in Texas. First guy in his town to go to Harvard, you know, fully dedicated to services whole life. He, I asked him that question and he said to me after a bit of a pause, yes. And there are suspicions that China is doing that. So the suspicions part of it is where I make a distinction for Annie as a journalist. I'm going to work my scenario from what is known, what is on the record and what has been confirmed by people on the other side. Because then I can never be accused of like fear monk. Like if I were to go down that lane, perhaps people would say, well, you're fear-mongering because it's speculative because you don't know for sure. Right? Now, when you have someone like Admiral Jarar saying it's speculative, the subtext in that, you and I can infer what that means. So I don't think someone like that is going to say something like that to me off the cuff. Without a little more fear, shall we say, then speculation. So there's speculative rumors that China is creating this or has. Yes. Yes. And there has also been so happy to have Asian blood. Yes. Really? How is that? You got to tell me that. How is that? Because I'm a Japanese. Wow. I'm good. I never knew that. Mom or dad? Dad. Dad. Interesting. Okay. So you got the DNA immunity, perhaps. Yeah, hopefully. If that's the case. There's a very interesting paper for anyone who's interested in reading on this. So Dr. Robert Cadleck sourced in the book. He was in he was he is now the current administration, essentially, the bio defense chief. He was dedicated to bio defense starting in the Bush administration has had huge, powerful jobs across every administration. He actually ran operation warp speed during COVID, which was the vaccine program. He's an Air Force colonel and a medical doctor. And he's now the current president's bio defense chief. So he, you know, we had conversation before. And then when you go back into the administration, you can't really talk to a journalist like me. But right before going back into the administration, he wrote a paper on Chinese on China's biological program. So the State Department speculates China has a bio weapons program. The State Department confirms that Russia has a bio weapons program. North Korea has a bio weapons program. According to the US State Department, China may be around maybe. That's what they say. Maybe they say maybe I mean, I'm sorry. What was the Wuhan lab? So here's maybe. And again, we're talking about language. What about Ukraine? We're talking about language. Those are our bio labs. Those were some of ours. So the position of the State Department is that the Russian biological program I told you about that. The very evil program in the 70s and 80s was absorbed, not dismantled. And so that is why they take the position. Russia still has a program. And China. So let me, this, this is how a diplomat would clarify. Maybe that couldn't the treaty I told you about the BWC, which everybody is supposed to adhere to all the signatories and not have bio weapons. There's a tiny go around, which is that you can do genetic engineering for defensive purposes, for prophylactic purposes. And so that's where you get the Wuhan excuse, which is that we were modifying the coronavirus so that we would know how to defend against it. You see? So that's the kind of catch 22 in plain language I call it a hokey-do, which allows these BSL-4 labs, bio safety level four. That's the highest level, guys and spaces, to manipulate viruses and pathogens in really dangerous ways. So that in case somebody else uses it, we know how to defend against it. And that has its own longer conversation and it's extremely dangerous. It's called gain of function. It's just like it sounds. You are trying to make a pathogen gain new function. Mentioned before virulence, transmissibility, how do we catch it? Virulence, is it going to kill me and how fast? And is there a medical countermeasure? Those three components, gain a function, tweaks those. Okay. So let's make it more airborne. Let's make it from droplet transmission, which would be me coughing at you. And you know, sorry for my spit hitting you. That's droplet transmission. Versus us talking, airborne lingering in the air. Somebody else could walk in here after we leave. Airborne, it's still here. That's the number one threat. You can, with gain of function, genetic engineering, you can make a pathogen airborne. Whoa. What are the different kinds? Do you know of pathogens of biouppens? Well, yeah, there's a, I mean, great question. And again, stuff we should know about, right? Because then we can, we the public can react appropriately as opposed to starting creating speculative narratives about what could happen. Ebola, for example, you know, the haunt of virus, right? So the CDC keeps a list of what are called tier one, common term, select agents. Those are the pathogens that they're most afraid will be weaponized. Subtext have been weaponized in the past. They probably have speculative intelligence are being weaponized. Plague is one of them. Why? 100% death rate if you don't have antibiotics. Anthrax is another. Ebola is another because it's got fear factor. Ebola is not airborne. So, but what if you could tweak Ebola to be airborne? What is, what does Ebola do to you? Ebola is called a hemorrhagic fever virus, right? So think of what hemorrhaging is. He's just bleeding. It's bleeding. Okay. Ebola causes the body, the entire body to hemorrhage. You're bleeding out your eyes, your ears, your nose. I mean, it is a horrific, terrifying disease. It's also not airborne. You get Ebola from close contract. If there's somebody over there in that corner bleeding out, you know, if you're a first responder, you may go help them. That's why doctors, first responders. If you're the patient's mother, that's why the loved ones die from Ebola. But the The guy walking down the street is not going to get Ebola because he's going to keep his distance. So that's again, takes us back to transmissibility. It takes us to virulence. Ebola is a 85, 90% rate killer. So it's super deadly. Is there a medical countermeasure against it? Third question to ask. Well, after the 2014 Ebola epidemic, doctors got at it. Those same kind of doctors that Dr. Cadillac worked with warp speed. Doctors got at it. They created in San Diego a medical countermeasure called ZMAP. So when one Ebola patient arrived in Texas in 2014 and gave his two nurses Ebola, he died because he was further along. Those two nurses in this heroics that is completely unknown, but involves Dr. Admiral Gerard, which is why I know the story. He knew about the ZMAP medical countermeasure being developed in San Diego. The CDC in Texas wouldn't help him. It hadn't been authorized. He got a friend who was a pilot and had a plane to fly to San Diego. Get the ZMAP, brought it back, gave it to the nurses. They lived. Wow. Now this new form of Ebola in Africa has mutated and the ZMAP doesn't work. Will doctors, will scientists be able to create a medical countermeasure fast enough before that epidemic that is going on in Africa become, you know, grows and becomes bigger? Who knows? Will that epidemic be able to be contained and put out? I've always liked gear that feels simple, well made and built with some character. That's what Tacovus does well. A good pair of boots changes how you carry yourself. You put them on with jeans and you're good. Dinner, travel, a wedding, a barbecue, a long weekend, whatever it is, they fit the situation without trying too hard. Tacovus crafts quality western boots for everyone. 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I've been thinking about it the entire conversation I would do now. Tell me. Have you thought about it? Well, I, I think about that, it's a fascinating question. I think about that from the dramatic narrative point of view, working from what is scientifically possible. That's why I chose pneumonic plague. And even more so, the reason why I chose pneumonic plague is for very specific reason that when, when the Soviet defectors came finally revealed to the West what the Russians had been doing. And mind you, this is 30, 40 years ago when genetic engineering was not possible. They had created a super plague weapon, airborne, to with plans to be genetically modified. This is early genetic engineering, like almost like imagine using scissors to cut film and taping it back together as opposed to digital editing today. That would be the analogy of where things were. They, the Russian, the Soviet scientists by their own admittance created as a plague weapon that they had built in, they had genetically modified it to defeat antibiotics. And even worse to actually trigger a new disease in sephalitis in the brain. Once you take the antibiotic and by the Russian scientist's own admittance, the reason they did that was because they hated America so much in the Cold War. Not only did they want to kill all the people and take the infrastructure, march in and just take everything, the buildings would be there, unlike in nuclear. But they wanted people to die with the last thought in their brain that the government had failed them. Because the antibiotics that the American medical establishment and the government told Americans to take to defeat the plague weapon would kill them in an even more horrific way. This was their plan. This is on the books, this is documented. So to answer your question, I couldn't come up with anything more sinister than that myself. And I wanted to stick to science fact. And so that's the very specific pathogen that gets unleashed in biological war scenario my book. And by the way, it's not a nefarious act, it's a lab leak. Now, I don't, you know, I think what I would do is, I would have stages. Maybe you do something that is an attention grabber, like COVID, maybe you make a pathogen that targets the reproductive system and then you get the news cycle going and it's all we can't, you know what I mean, nobody in North America can reproduce anymore. And what you have the antidote, you let the headlines percolate. This is why you're not reproducing because I've created this. And if you want the antidote, then your government is going to do X, Y and Z. Maybe it's something even quicker, you know, maybe it's maybe it is something like COVID. If you want to get better, this is what you're going to do. If you try to duke us, you won't get the antidote. So this is what's going to happen. If you don't listen, then we're going to go to the next step and we're going to prove to you that it's real. And this is what's going to happen to your body. Then that happens, then everybody's, they know, you know, and then it just keeps escalating. If you want to save human life or give them the option to save themselves, that's how I would do it. And that's a very sort of red teaming mind scenario, which is what war games at the Pentagon from my understanding are entirely based on, like getting people to think through those incredibly sinister ideas to try and have a plan in place to prevent that from happening. And so in my experience and learning about of all this, what is what's interesting about this is that is all very valuable and that sort of historical red teaming and war gaming. But what has been left out of the discussion are two major components, which is one, how fast science and technology are moving. So you can't possibly keep up with it. Although yours did a, the three stage thing is like really sinister and, you know, very scientific. Well, it also gives them the option to save themselves. Explain to me that a little bit more on the third part of it. On my plan? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My plan is you get the attention. Okay. Everybody knows something's up. Then you take credit for what's happening. Okay. This is the bad guy. Yeah. This is the bad guy. Or the good guy. Okay. Maybe there is genocide going on somewhere in the world, like we see all over right now, right? And then the country that's committing genocide gets a pathogen that makes their people sick. They're not dying. Maybe some dying. You know what I mean? But it grabs that nation's headlines and then you make the statement. If you don't want this to continue, you stop the genocide right now. If the genocide continues, then we'll move to stage two. Stage two is you bleed out of every orifice in your body. Would you like that to happen? Yes or no? You have two hours. And this is- Two hours goes by. They don't do it. The next pathogen is released. It's already staged. It stops. They get the antidote. That gets released. These are some of the hallmarks of early biological warfare thinking with another component mixed in, which is that you would need to inoculate, give a vaccine essentially to your own people that would be anywhere near that area to make sure they didn't- Well, that's dependent. If you target a certain race of people that will all share a comment. and strand of DNA. - Yes, and this is exactly what that cold war mentality was, by the way, right? It was really, it's almost like hot mental, you know, hostage taking, essentially, on a grand scale. And then the conclusion by pretty much everyone involved was the blowback idea, was that you couldn't, you couldn't contain it, because the pathogen would have to be contagious to be, you know, really effective. And then you, you would have these co-centric circles of people getting sick. So that's where a kind of biological warfare became obsolete in terms of thinking. And that's why they made it illegal. But people still think about that. And now, with scientific advancements with genetic engineering, being able to target individual people is becoming much more of a reality. And by the way, that's what I meant to say. In Dr. Cadillac's paper, he's the current biodefense chief. There's a public paper you can read that he wrote on China's, what he believes is China's, or rather what's on the record about China's biological program. And the Chinese officials in their defense department have essentially said they are not against, they are actually, you know, programs in place for precisely the kind of warfare that you're talking about. I mean, it's that it's been, this is what God did to the Egyptians in the Old Testament, correct? It is a narrative that has existed. And it's like, you know, where does it go? The argument not to have that is it's too evil. And it's, it has the consequences are too great. Hence the idea that is, you know, odious to the nature of mankind. So the bigger idea that I think we're getting to is like, so what is the solution? If all of this is possible, what is the solution? And right now we're kind of, I think, stuck in this idea of like, well, the debate is really only on the gain of function, right? The debate is like, we need, the bad guys are making those kind of weapons, maybe even targeting a certain genetic population. And so we have to create medical countermeasures because of it. And if that can, you know, if you think that's utopian or dystopian, that's a worthy debate, I think, because I've heard arguments on both sides of the aisle. Like you cannot prevent the bad guys, the adversary, whoever they may be, terrorist organizations, some crazy college kid or a high school student in his basement. You can't prevent them. You can't prevent all evil. The thresholds too low. So the biotechnology industry must prevail, must be allowed to work on these medical countermeasures that involve tweaking the virulence, the transmissibility, and the medical countermeasures of different pathogens. Either way, I think it's very important that people know about this. So that in the God forsaken event, something does happen. There's not an immediate wildly speculative narrative, right? So does the government have any countermeasures for the citizens of this country, or is it just for themselves? Well, the countermeasure question, the reason why I use that Soviet sort of evil concept, it's called a chimerah weapon, bio-weapon. The chimerah is this ancient Greek monster. You've seen images of it. Like, think of a head of a lion and the tail of a serpent with a goat coming out of it. A chimerah just means like a multi-specied monster. And that is essentially what genetic engineering is. You're taking the DNA of one viral species, and you're mixing it with another. And so the chimerah weapon, the original chimerah weapon, was this plague superweapon that would-- you take the antidote and it turns into a booby trap and it kills you. So that idea becomes what the Defense Department calls a wicked problem, because there is no solution to it. Because how do you know whether or not the antibiotic is going to kill you unless you have evidence? And that's where the devolution plan happens pretty much really fast because the chances can't be taken because the threat's so high. And so on the public health side of things, you have a lot of people instead of saying, well, you can't just go down the evil rabbit hole of the military industrial complex of it. You have to have public health awareness. And that's why there are a lot of people I interviewed in the book where it's all about diagnostics, diagnostics, fancy word for testing. I mean, remember in COVID, by the end of COVID year two, whatever it was, I live in Los Angeles. You could buy a COVID test at the 7-11. Remember, did you have that access kind of year? You could literally-- We may have, I don't know. The test didn't work. I never wanted to get tested anyways, because there was the speculative narratives that they were calling you after you got tested to make sure that you know whatever. And-- but my wife was pregnant at the time. Nobody really knew what the hell was going on. And so I did get tested. And I took two tests. And one was positive. And one was negative. And the speculative narratives were correct. I did get calls. And-- Wow. You just met like a urgent care? Yeah, I took it at an urgent care. And so I never took another-- and that was before-- so yeah, I guess that was-- if I could have done something undocumented, then I would have done something undocumented, because I don't want my information in the government's hands, but not that it isn't already. But-- so no, we didn't have the-- over-the-counter tests, with that particular point in time, which would have been around 2021. So in big cities, they were-- you could suddenly literally buy a dip-- they were called dipstick test. And you could sit in your car and test yourself. And then you were supposed to-- because there were asymptomatic people in COVID, meaning people who carried COVID, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it's called it visually, and didn't have any symptoms like my son. So then you were supposed to work on the honor system of not being around anybody, because you were a carrier. It's called a silent carrier. You could get everybody else sick, but you weren't sick. But I think your point about not wanting the government to know is so incredibly important, that the government has to learn from these errors. They have to work with the public. People do not want the sense that the government is lurking over them, and looming over them particularly with their health. It's the bio-- it's like the biotechnology surveillance military industrial complex. And it's very real. But I found an interesting loophole in it that I drill on into the book, which I'm sure will raise-- raise some eyebrows from some groups of people, and I don't care, which is that-- so there's a-- after 9/11, Dick Cheney himself was personally terrified of bio-weapons. And he was part and parcel to this extreme elevation, escalation, I mean, of gain a function of medical countermeasures, of opening up more biosecurity level four labs, of all of this biotech billions of dollars went into this industry, this brand new industry. Remember there was 9/11, people forget, then there were the anthrax attacks. Anthrax was mailed through the mail to some news outlets and a couple senators on Capitol Hill never been solved. Thank you, FBI. OK, literally-- I mean, that's a given. OK, so it created an entire industry about bio-defense. And one of the results of that was there is-- many people don't know about this. There is something called the National Syndromic-- syndrome-- surveillance system that monitors that collects information in real time from more than 7,000 emergency rooms, urgent care facilities, yours included, all of these facilities across America, 7,000 of them in the 50 states. That is a lot. All the information goes in near real time to the CDC, where it is kept. and monitored. Okay? So it's a very real system that is monitoring people. The goal of which was to create, stop a pandemic if it happens. Well, how did that work out in COVID? Not well. But a little loophole I found in it, which is, you know, when you know this from your work in the military, that a hole is exactly what an adversary targets. And a fascinating hole to me is that, and this I learned from working with the worlds or America's most senior epidemiologists, people who are trying to prevent like outbreaks from taking over. And one of the holes in the system that they pointed out to me was the homeless population. There are 800,000 homeless people in America. None of their information goes into that important CDC, national syndromics are a fact confirmed with me by HHS, by the way. So if you have that kind of a gaping hole, where are you going to target? Where are the super spreader events? Where is there no healthcare? Where are these people living on top of one another? Where are their symptoms of disease going to be mistaken for a zillion other things if they even have any access to a medical doctor? And so that is where I have the outbreak in America, because I was told by epidemiologists, that is a very serious warning. But the last two books you've written, I cannot believe you're still living in Los Angeles. You got to get out to the woods, Eddie. I mean, driving around here, it's very beautiful. We get a little walking around around her about her. But the idea of insurrection and anarchy at the end of all of this, which is what happens, which is what the defense department is preparing for. Sure, the big cities are just like, get me out of here really fast. But there are components of all of this. I did in every book. There's always a couple interviews, a couple things that people say to you, that just is haunting. One of them was from former Senate Majority Leader Tom Dashel. So I just mentioned the anthrax attacks after 9/11. Dashel's office received an envelope of weaponized anthrax. They all got an immediate dose of sipro, which is an antibiotic assumed to kill anthrax. And it did. But Dashel, Senator Tom Dashel has spent decades since working on biodefence. He obviously is seriously concerned about this issue. And in my interview with him, he said to me, we were talking about nuclear war versus bio war. And he said to me, unlike nuclear war, biological war will be perhaps more terrifying. And then he said, yes, it will be death physically, death governmentally, death of everything we know in America. But most horrifying is it will be, this is his quote, people doing inhuman things to other people just to survive. And that's that desperation. Desperation. This happens in any pretty much any event. I mean, eventually people get to hunger, thirst, disease. Absolutely. Financial collapse. And so out in the country, in the city, you know, pick your battle literally. And again, the point of me working on these kind of scenarios is not to create panic. It's to create pressure. It's to create conversation. You know, if nuclear war was about we need to have this conversation while we can still have it, bio is about stay informed. You know, because there is, there are actions that people have to take in the event that this kind of a situation happens. Period full stop. I mean, we, you could look, COVID could have been this brilliant situation from which to learn errors. Notice I said could have been. Instead, it's like either total denial about what happened or, you know, tribal anger about, you know, the wrongs that were done and there were many. And so that I think is worth re-examining. I think it's really would be really wise to look at the problems that happen in COVID and not make those same mistakes. Well, I mean, there's a lot of speculative narratives that say that maybe that was, that was an experiment to see how the population would react. I have not heard that one. The speculative narrative on that is that it's internal, domestic or external. I don't know. It could be both, you know, it would be none, but, but I mean, a lot of those narratives running around, I mean, they wanted to see how the people reacted. And if they, if they, basically, if they listen to the government or if they do not listen to the government, and, you know, I don't know, I mean, they definitely learned a lot, whoever, if it was an experiment, even if it wasn't an experiment, they learned a lot about how we're going to react. Are we going to take the vaccines? Are we going to do the, you, they learned that, are we going to stay in our homes? How long are we going to stay in our homes? How long are we going to buy this bullshit? You know, they've collected a lot of information there. A lot of information, and I'm going to really tap into your fear about the National Syndromeic Surveillance System here. Again, it's a fact that think about, and I'm amazed that people don't ask this question, where did all the DNA data go from those COVID tests because it was collected? And so, my eye as the journalist is like, why isn't, I mean, I certainly have asked a zillion people. What I do know is that HHS, so again, an organization most people have never heard of, maybe they heard of it during COVID, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Current Secretary, RFK Junior, okay? An organization that most people have never heard of, that has a budget, an annual budget twice that of the defense department. Really? Twice that? Twice. $1.7 or $8 trillion is HHS. Defense Department is about $900 million. And yet, no, people don't even know it. The CDC answers to HHS. The NIH, the National Institute answers to HHS. The FDA answers to HHS. Another situation I'm always fond of is like bringing to the discussion, oh, there are some really interesting organizations that you might want to know about. And again, speculative narrative versus science fiction, science fact. HHS is the organization in charge in the event of a biological incident or attack, crazy that a, and a biological incident is a lab leak, okay? HHS is in charge, which is stunning to think about because what I learned also writing this whole narrative is like, I actually wish DOD was in charge. Really? Why is that? I mean, there's a line I write in the book, I kind of at the midpoint where I'm like where I, you know, and again, I take you through what happens, I take you, you know, the defense department trying to figure out what's going on, what's, what's happened. I have, I start the, the inciting incident in the book is an explosion at a BSL 4 lab in Russia in Siberia. It's called Vector. It's where a lot of the work took place during the Cold War. It's a real lab. There was actually a real explosion there in 2019. An explosion at a BSL 4 lab is profoundly dangerous. In a place like Russia where they're going to immediately not be transparent, it's even more dangerous. Or maybe you could say that about every, every nation. But in the, you know, the cover up begins and I, I've got, I show you, I show readers how the defense department will be immediately eyes on trying to figure out what's going on. They will work with the State Department to try and get information. Information is King denial is dangerous in the Wuhan lab leak or natural, whatever you want to call it. When Wuhan happened, the Chinese government immediately shut down access to information. incredibly dangerous. I spoke to epidemiologists. who actually believe that pandemic could have been stopped, had the Chinese government been transparent about what happened. So that's a real plug for transparency. And the more people that know about something, the more they're going to demand transparency. Do you think they wanted to shut that down? Go with it? The big, you mean the giant-- You think they wanted to contain it? Did they want to contain it? That I don't know, but what I do know is because biological weapons are illegal. If any nation has bio weapons in their lab, they are certainly not going to be transparent about what happened. Well, we already know, and we already discussed the loopholes. You know, we already discussed the loopholes. So, I mean, it's an easy excuse. I mean, I think China learned a lot about that. I mean, they also have them monopoly, probably along with India, for all the PPE equipment and antibiotics, especially the ones that work. I've remapped it. You know, they could have shut that down immediately because anything that Patin is up on, we don't produce it. We don't care about actual people. We just care about money here. And so, they produce all that stuff. And I think Americans learned a little bit about that during COVID. We learned about the supply chain. Most people were shocked to find out exactly what you just mentioned. And yet, very little has been done about that. Although there are some manufacturing changes-- Even when COVID happened, you know, there's the big mask narrative. Well, the masks are going to stop this shit. Who makes all the masks? You get a virus that comes from China and then China supplies us with the fucking masks that are supposed to protect us. And we're just putting this shit on hook line and sinker, but he's like, oh, yeah, cool. They're the ones that release the thing that leaked the virus. And now they're going to give us masks. I mean, you can't even make our own fucking masks. We cannot make our own masks. And you can't even have a grown-up in the room explained to people how a mask works. So instead, you had sort of people going, you know, when I was reporting the book at the very tail end of COVID, I went to a BSL 3 lab to, you know, see what it was like. And these are former USAMRA doctors. USAMRA is the US Army Medical Research of Infection. It's where the BSL 4 lab is at Fort Dietrich in Maryland. And with regards to the masks, they were telling me that if you are working in pathogens, it's just basic common knowledge that an N95 mask, you have to wear it properly outfitted to your face. You get an actual lesson in how to wear it. It's just that it is only going to work for 15 minutes. And that's an N95 mask. Those were gone in about two days. So the other kind of masks are essentially almost useless. And I think that kind of. We were wearing two of them. People wearing dirty masks, you know? And sometimes you still see people walking around Los Angeles. That's a great look at FaceDyper you get on there. But that nobody spoke of this. And when I say nobody, I mean like sort of a public official in a position of authority. And meanwhile I'm learning that all the scientists in America are like shaking their head and going, but afraid to speak out because they're going to be called, you know. Be ostracized. So this was just, again, a dangerous situation which extraordinary lessons could have been learned and were not. Let's take a break. We'll come back. We'll get into the panic. We talk a lot on this show about performance, recovery, and trying to stay ahead of all the stuff in the modern world. And the reality is we're constantly surrounded by things our biology was never really designed for. EMFs, artificial light, processed foods, microplastics, stress, you name it, the list goes on. That's one of the reasons I started using armor a colostrum. What interested me is it works at the cellular level to support your body from within. And this isn't just another supplement. 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Did you talk to people on what that kind of desperation, that panic, what would it do to society, how fast would it happen? It happens so fast so I like to try and look at specifics again. So to keep the narrative on actual documentation. So we spoke a little bit earlier how an outbreak of this pathogen I talk about it starts with a lab leak in Siberia. It winds up in Los Angeles in a homeless camp. And so I looked and because I live in Los Angeles and I am very familiar with the public health system. I lived there for 30 years, the public health system, you know law enforcement. I can see a lot of the problems that have to my eye that have happened over the decades. It wasn't always like this. It certainly is just an absolute mess right now with very little trust and real serious problems. So I looked at for example what would happen in a biological attack in Los Angeles because unbeknownst to many people big cities practice these things. And they happen at the federal level. I learned and they also happen at the state level. And so Los Angeles state and county, California state and Los Angeles County officials get like a bismally failing remarks in these efforts. And this just goes completely unnoticed like for example we put in a whole new 911 system recently like in the past few years and it completely failed upon its original test. Like a system overrun. You know there are stories of people calling all the time people are posting on X like 911 from Los Angeles and then you can see how many minutes they've been on hold like 13 minutes on hold just to have your call answered. So this is a real serious problem day to day imagine if there was a biological incident where timing is everything timing is everything you have to get the information out to the people. So instead I learned really interesting details like okay so Los Angeles has a 100,000 bottle of sipro siprofloxacin which is antibiotic stash. 100,000. A hundred thousand bottles. How many people does that treat for the city officials. And I break it down of who it goes to and so you've got like 16,000 bottles going to first responders. Obviously they need it and then like a bunch of them going to like the zoo officials you know in the cultural affairs affairs. I mean, I'm not kidding. I give you the numbers. So it seems to be really poorly thought out. And really what I wanted to know is what happens to law enforcement, what happens to first responders. I did an interview with a fire commissioner named Jimmy Harrah, who unfortunately like died tragically last month in the car accident. Oh, man. I know. And he was an incredible person, completely dedicated. I mean, he served as a doctor in Vietnam. And he's been dedicated to LA public health and fire safety ever since. And he told me just flat out, Los Angeles is completely unprepared for a pneumonic plague attack, period full stop. And then he took me through some of the details of what would happen. So I like, in mixing these documents with interviews like fire commissioner Harrah, I could begin to see that it's just complete ignorance. It's like being an ostrich with your head in the sand. And the hundred bottles of Cipro, I also learned have this wacky program attached to it. And I was going somewhere in this, which is where you're asking, where is the whole for insurrection and anarchy that the defense department and their documents is so worried about? How does that happen? That's what I wanted to really drill down on so that I could explain it to readers. And the hundred thousand bottles of just perfect example that would repeat around the country. So this, this hundred bottle supply gets dispersed by volunteers. How does that work? How do you have, imagine if you had a biological incident where you've got pneumonic plague with a hundred percent death rate, no known cure, airborne, killing homeless people, you know, which is being mistaken for something else, a mass overdose, for example, because that's happening all over the country. That's what epidemiologists are worried about. You've got law enforcement unprotected rushing in to help. And then you've got this kind of wild chaos at City Hall, rather than the emergency department of the city planners, and they like get the Cipro out to everybody. And they make an announcement on Facebook, which then goes viral. And so now you have everybody in Los Angeles trying to access what they believe is the medical countermeasure, which will save their lives in the lives of their family members and America is a nation of guns, 500 million guns in America, according to a Gallup poll, that's, so you can see that's where insurrection and anarchy happens. That's the dashal quote, people doing inhuman things just to survive. And by the way, not for Manny Jacobson's imagination, looking at declassified or unclassified war games that that gave this out show that is exactly what people begin to kill one another over perceived medical countermeasures. It's a grim, it's a grim story. I mean, I think it's pretty all, I mean, I don't think people think about it, but I mean, of course, what measure are you going to take to save your husband and your kids? And I think, you know, it's going to be like that until the playing field is level. And it looks like Yemen, Afghanistan, you know, where there is not really much social hierarchy, everybody's on the same playing field, you know what I mean, and so that it just, it will continue until that happens, until all the resources have been ransacked. It's done. There's nothing left to ransack and then you have to learn to survive off what's left. The devolution component of that that was stunning to me was that what the Defense Department prepares for. So what's interesting is, I mentioned before that HHS is in charge of this when it happens, but very quickly, HHS realizes in its plant, you know, wargaming that they need the military as help. This is page one, because for example, they can't get supplies out to the states. And you're talking about, when you're talking about a pathogen that's killing people in like 48 hours, speed is everything. And so they're trying to get medical countermeasures out to states. And they need the military's help, they need transportation command. And so I had this moment in working on this book where I realized that I mentioned earlier, my god, like not since World War II, will Americans be so happy to see the military show up in their town or their city to try and, you know, regain control to try and bring back order in sort of the insurrection that will be unfolding as people begin to panic. I mean, maybe they would be happy. Well, I think a lot of people would be happy because not everybody's criminally minded, okay? And are going to be thinking, help is on the way. Well, how was the military going to treat the infected? And that's where it gets especially if they don't have an antidote. So the military I learned, and you probably know this, has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its personnel. So you have, imagine, so the military are protected. And now you have another situation which is the mask becomes a coveted item. So now you have president declaring an insurrection act so that Posse Comotatus can be overridden. Posse Comotatus, the act after the Civil War that prohibits the military from carrying out law enforcement measures in the United States, that gets repealed with insurrection act. It's the only act that can do that. The president has the authority to declare it whenever he chooses, okay? So the insurrection act gets laid down and now military can act with those orders, same as in a war theater. So there's like a moment in time it seemed to my eye writing this where order could be restored. But then I learned that there's only so many military and there are 340 million Americans. So you do the math. And then you realize that with shoot to kill orders and the fact that the devolution plan calls for there's a component of American infrastructure called critical infrastructure. You don't even really think about it until you hopefully read about it in my book and go, of course, like the roadways, everything from the system, the communication systems, the banking systems, the roads, the nuclear power plants, the electrical grid, the electrical grid, the plants, water treatment, waste, this is critical infrastructure and that needs to be guarded and that's what the military begins to guard. And the military must also guard the hot sites, the cold sites I told you about earlier where the devolution crews are going to. And so this kind of really spooky, almost science fiction, but again, it's science fact kicks in in my reporting and as I write in the book, where you begin to see what unfolds and how it is sort of almost inevitable the outcome of devolution because the center can't hold because the people cannot, the people do not know what is happening to them and have no way of understanding what lies ahead. I mean, if you want a small, like a small window, like a very small window of what that looks like you can go, you can go to Florida during hurricane season and you see how fast everything is gone, how people treat each other, that's one of the reasons I moved out of there. What was that experience like for you with hurricane? I mean, it was, was there kind of like some anarchy going on? I mean, I would not say anarchy at all, but I mean, there are, there are, and I'd like, I've always, you know what I used to do, so I'm pretty prepared and I always have been. But you're looking at gas lines that are hours and hours long, you're looking at, you know, in people hoard. So you got a guy show up with a trailer and he fills up his car and he fills up his boat and then he fills up all his gas cans, you know what I mean? And you're wondering, does there going to be any gas left for me? All the bottled water is gone, all the food is gone, all the plywood is gone, all the generators are gone within 24 hours and then you're waiting, you're waiting for ex updates to see which home depot has been resupplied with plywood so that you can go board your windows up or which Walmart has some extra generator, she's got a new shipment of generators. In the last hurricane that went there, this was like, I'm out of here, now this is for me. There was a traffic jam from Miami. Florida all the way to Atlantic, Georgia. The entire everybody trying to get everybody trying to get out of the dog. Everybody's trying to funnel out, you know, in a couple of highways and it's stop and go traffic. People are, they run out of gas. They're pulled over on the side of the road. Everybody's hoarding. I mean, the grocery store is legitimate. They're, they're empty in 24 hours. Were people behaving like were they following traffic laws? Where people are, I mean, it's, it's bottled out. There are no traffic laws. I mean, you can't get anywhere. It's gridlocked. You know, I mean, a gas line, I mean, we'll go all the way down the interstate. So let me ask you, FEMA, that's a hurricane. Yes, that's, that's a hurricane. And that hurricane didn't even, it was like a joke. So it was hurricane Matthew. I mean, then they have all these beams everywhere that mass panic. Hurricane doesn't even hit. And I think it was Matthew. It could be mistaken. And then you see all these memes like the days after a show like a, a lawn chair flipped upside down. We would, we will rebuild the threat of hurricane was even as compulsive as a hurricane itself. Yeah, just the threat. I mean, I, I, what were we calling it speculative narratives? You know, I, I mean, I've had speculative narrative that, I mean, maybe these corporations are, are paying the news cycles to overhype this because the amount of revenue that happens instantaneously from everything, booze cigarettes, gas generators, everything, plywood, water, bullets, guns, bullets. People get worried that, you know, that they're just going to last forever and they go stock up on bullets. They go buy, they go buy their first AR 15. Did, was there any site of FEMA, the federal emergency management agency? No, no, no, because FEMA, what do you think about FEMA? Well, I don't really know much about it. I don't think they come in until afterwards, right? But, I mean, I've never had any experience with FEMA. But FEMA is another one of those really interesting organizations that's almost not known about. And by the way, are the ones in charge of the devolution program. So consider that. I mean, those FEMA's all, it's not volunteers, but I know a lot of a lot of people after the hurricanes or after a natural disaster, they'll, they'll do a mass hire and they pay, yes, supposedly pretty well. Yes. So, you got a bunch of people that are, you know, got hired yesterday that are running shit. Which, and again, the military is so interesting to me always has been how they function, how it's a system of systems, flaws, weaknesses, strengths, but the military has professional individuals who have a lot of experience doing what they're doing. And to your point, when you have an organization that's like, has like attention on it very sporadically, you really have an organization of bureaucrats, you know, sort of pencil pushers, like very sort of straight-minded individuals who are not gifted, shall we say, with flexibility as a as a leading care. They're really about organization. And then suddenly, there's a crisis. That's a really a mismatch of professionalism, which I think FEMA really drastically suffers from. And yet it's in the event of these sort of mass catastrophe, they're called complex catastrophes. The FEMA director calls it a maximum of maximums event. That's really what they're planning for behind the scenes. And yet so few of their people are actually equipped like military personnel, and again, this is just my opinion, having studied all of this, seems like that needs a big reconfiguring. The question is, of course, as we move into the future with science moving so fast, are these threats, weapons of mass destruction that sort of hinge upon science, whether it's nuclear bio drones, are they making us move faster into toward a catastrophe, maybe, they could also be working faster toward solution. And if so, what is the government doing to kind of stay on top of that? And what I think is happening is not much. Governments consumed with, you know, all kinds of inside baseball problems, political tribalism. And the public's consumed with what should be called speculative narratives, and are instead being called conspiracy theories. It's just creating this extraordinary fracture, a furdler fracturing from solution toward more chaos. Which is, you know, again, I write these books because I really believe that being informed, it gives you, it gives you lift, it gives you a little bit of height on being able to assess the situation about what's best for you and your family. And it also, it, it takes away in a big component, I think, at least for me of like doom and gloom inevitable, because I don't want to just think America is doomed and we're just going downhill. I just, I'm, I'm too, I'm too much of a happy American to take that path. Good. Am I alone? I have hope. There's a lot of us. But I'm also prepared. Because I've seen too many things go sour in my previous life. I did get you a present. I can't remember. I've been talking. I can't remember. You can't remember what? Did I get a present? I got you a present. You did get me a present. Oh, okay. Should I give it to you now? Sure. I thought you said, did I give you a present? No, no, no, it's, yeah. You got me Joe Kance long rifle. Part two. I would love to get Joe Kance long rifle. I have to, you know, I have two young men who are like, mom, I hope you get the, I hope you get the long rifle from sick. Unfortunately, the state you live in, uh, wow, this is not for that. So here we go. This is, you are kidding me. You are kidding me. Sean, this is amazing. I am now prepared for bio. There we go. Biological war is an area. Well, I don't know about that. We might need to get some gas masks and some other things. Maybe some water filtration. But, uh, but you're, you're prepared for mass panic to defend your home now. This is pretty incredible. I'm really amazed. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Sick. So I got a friend over there. His name's Jason. He's VP of marketing and he heard you were coming on and he loved the nuclear war scenario interview. So he wanted me to give that to you. It's got the SIG flashlight on there. So, so you're not ever in the dark and, uh, the new SIG Romeo optic red dot. So, so you can fix a lot of, you can, you can skip right through a lot of fundamentals of shooting and just point and pull the trigger with that thing, put that red dot on there. Well, I'm going to be sure to get a lot of lessons. And I do also know and this is going to be like a subject of envy, the good kind of envy from a number of people I know. So thank you so much. You're welcome. That is pretty incredible, Sean. We'll do a little, uh, lesson after this hopefully. That would be, that'd be in a honor. Um, literally my kids were, that was like a joke about the, the joke can't long gun. And that's not far away. So I'm, I'm flustered. I'm amazed. Thank you. Really? You're welcome to flustered me. So, right? Is that your first firearm? I do have two firearms. Oh, nice. Right. But not that one. Right on. Um, yeah. Well, I hope you enjoy it. When, thank you so much. You know, I mean, California is an interesting state in terms of all of that. But speaking of the pandemic, when the pandemic happened, like every ammo shop ran out of ammo. I remember seeing the lines and of, of people in California that were, that were arming themselves. And I remember being disgusted, but the second amendment community because they were making fun of it. And they were like, these people shouldn't even have firearms or all. They're basically Democrats getting firearms. And I was just, I'm, I'm thinking like, yeah, what the hell is wrong with you, man? Like, I mean, here we are complaining about second amendment rights and gun rights non-stop all day and all night. And now you have the other side of the aisle that is trying to arm themselves and everybody's on the, on the same page. And, and you're going to bastardize them for it. That's incredible. I mean, that's a great point, right? That's like that gets into the sort of one people start. having self-righteous indignation about when they shouldn't. They should be like, congratulations, you know. I had an interesting story with a firearm. Okay, I'm gonna, I've got to think if I can tell this. Okay, so I get jury duty in Los Angeles. Being a good citizen, I go to do my jury duty. This was several years ago. This was before COVID so before. - Oh, that everyone was like, "Oh, you should, Annie, Jacob, since I'm jury duty with me." - No, no one, you know, I'm like in a room full of people or all like, "Why am I here?" Okay? But so before COVID, I didn't own any firearms or thought, but I did own a firearm because my grandfather was a captain in the army who was behind enemy lines in what was then called Czechoslovakia, who became like the guy in charge when the war ended and took a luger off a Nazi and brought it home. - Wow. - Okay. So this was in the possession of my mother and then it was given to me to give to my son, one of my two sons. And it's a really incredible artifact because it actually like, they're all identifiable to certain Nazis. And at the end, it comes with a certificate from the war department so it's war booty, but you were allowed to actually have it. So it's officially my grandfather's. And now, okay, so it's in our house. - Wow. - Yeah, it's incredible, right? Just as a piece of, you know, I have his purple heart and his luger. - Man, that is right. - What a great heirloom. - So there I am doing jury duty and it's a police brutality trial. And one of the questions that they're asking is they're trying to select jurors is who has a firearm, right? So I'm down here. I'm like, okay, being a good citizen, I'm under oath, you know? Of course I raise my hand because I do. I am, and by the way, this is before jury selection. So there's 50 people in this room, in this courthouse, all of whom under oath are the variation of that, okay? I'm the only one who raises my hand of having a firearm. - Wow. - And I was like looking, like what? How is this even possible? And when I was home that night at dinner, I had this discussion with my kids and my husband. And they're like, mom, everyone in LA has illegal guns. And they don't want to admit it. Now, I have no idea if that's true, but it's a very interesting observation. And what is true is that no one else raised their hand. - Man. Maybe it's a little, maybe it's a little sort of perception versus reality, right? No one wanted to admit they had a firearm. I have no idea. - I could see it either way. When I'm traveling in the summer, the routine is always the first thing to slip. Different schedule, different bed, late nights, early mornings, and you're usually not eating the same way you would at home. And that's why I rely on AG1. It takes 30 seconds, one scoop, eight ounces of water, and I know I'm getting a daily health drink with a multivitamin, pre-improbiotics, superfoods, and antioxidants. In the next gen formula, deliver 75 plus ingredients that are clinically shown to support gut health, fill common nutrient gaps, and improve key nutrient levels within three months. 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What, you know, I mean, obviously, if you want to spread, I mean, if it was me and I wanted to spread one globally, then I would definitely obviously hit the airports, right? You would release it in the airports because people are constantly coming and going. And it would be impossible for-- Yes. --to be able to trace it at that point. And it would spread like, I mean, with all the-- if you wanted to hit it more locally and try to keep it contained, I guess, what would you had? You would have had probably, unfortunately, schools, grocery stores. Well, a lot of early wargaming planning was predicated on precisely those kinds of scenarios. Like, what would happen? How would the targets disperse? In the past 20 years or so, with the advent, or rather the advancement of genetic engineering, all of that no longer pretty much matters. And we saw this in COVID. It was an airborne pathogen, right? So there used to only be a very few truly airborne pathogens that a medical countermeasure didn't exist for. And so you would have to kind of do exactly what you're talking about, like, have multiple targets. This was the terrorist threat. But now that an airborne pathogen can be modified with ease, we saw in COVID that it just begins to spread naturally on its own. And if you shorten the window of contagion to death, you have one kind of effect if you lengthen it, right? So COVID had a lot of sort of what were silent carriers for a long time. Now it's spreading in a different manner. And so as a result, most of the war games have begun to focus on two things, which is, like, first and foremost-- and this is probably upsetting to a lot of people-- is how to keep infected people out of the United States of America. There was one war game that I write about in particular. So I take the reader through the scenario and then I kind of stop for, like, little history lessons about different war games. And one of them that was conducted in 2018 describes boats of migrants. There's an outbreak in South America. So you've got all these panicked people leaving Venezuela in boats headed to Puerto Rico-- hundreds of miles away, OK? This is actually wargamed out. You can read it online. And they have the CDC officials deciding what to do. Like, do we actually let them come on land? And the answer is no. And then the subtext is rules of engagement, right? Now that is-- and then, of course, you have another debate within this war game about how to deal with the press. Like, if we start shooting at migrants and boats, we're going to have a real problem. That's going to be all over the news. And that kind of candor in planning for a biological incident was shocking to me. Because it really gets at the heart of the matter of the kind of sort of ruthless sort of fortressing that homeland security will immediately try to do if the pathogen is outside trying to come in. But what you learn from the war gaming is that the pathogen is almost always certainly already here. I mean, remember when President Trump's first administration, COVID happens, he closes the border with Europe. He's restricted any flights from China. The pathogen is already here, people have it in New York City, people have it in Seattle. I did an interview with the Deformer Defense official in Italy, the Defense Minister. And he was telling, because there was a huge outbreak in Italy. I remember that. Remember that? And you know why? It was because in Milan, which is a fashion capital of the world, had Chinese individuals working in manufacturing, Milan to China. They had brought it to China. But another interesting fact I learned from the FEMA chief is that all most of the initial cases of COVID in New York City were from Italy, not from Wuhan. And they can tell this through genetic testing later to determine the variance. Did it start in New York? Did it start in Washington? In the United States, the first cases were in Washington. But the real panic, the real sort of like, oh my god, it's here, moments, was once New York City was infected. Because then people realized there's no way to stop this, because of movement. You know, I looked at bubonic plague, the black death, the plague of the black death, because bubonic plague becomes pneumonic plague in the lungs. And I wanted to show readers historically what has happened and what is possible. And what was interesting is, you know, I learned this very unique fact that, of course, pathogens travel at the rate at which humans move. So in the time of the black death, in the 14, 1300s, in the 14th century, people moved by caravan, people moved by ship. So it was like slow, right? Now people moved by airplane. You know, you can get from one side of the earth to the other in 15 hours. That's how fast things happen. But they're still going to attempt to isolate it. And I show that in the beginning of the book, because this is where you have the epidemiologist. This is where you have public health officials. This is where you have, by the way, I mean, by no means do I mean to make everybody in government sound like, you know, some kind of incompetent bureaucrat. That is simply not the case. The individuals that I interview and I list them all in the front of the book, like COVID, I mean, like the nuclear war book, so that people can see, wow, you know, she's talking to the top subject matter experts in public health, in defense, in federal emergency management, extraordinarily competent people, desperately trying, literally to, you know, bring these different factions of the government together to pay attention to this threat, to actually take actions so that America is prepared for such a thing. And I show their stories that they tell me of like how the good part of that, of like how they have made progress and then also where they are so failing. And the failures are always political. What measures would they go through to isolate an incident? So one of the more, it's this super important question, quarantine does exist. But before that, it's all about diagnostics. We were talking about that a little bit earlier, like you went and had a COVID test, right? Now that has spiraled into a, it's, it's whole set of rabbit hole problems. But the diagnostics, the testing is important because very few people realize that the doctor doesn't know what he's looking at. The doctor doesn't know, you can walk in with a sneeze in a cough. And the doctor doesn't know. That's why the doctor will say, I think you have, okay, want me to give you an example that's kind of easier wrap your head around. Okay. Strap throat. Have you had strap throat? Yeah. Recently. No. Okay. Strap throat, you know, you go in like doctor my, my throat hurts. They take, they give you a strap test. Strap is a bacteria. Bacteria are killed by antibiotics. You go into the doctor. You say I have, I have a strap, they give you a strap test because strap is ubiquitous. The test often happens in the back of the doctor's office takes five minutes for a strap test. When I was growing up in the 70s, a strap test took two or three days. That's science. When you were growing up, it probably took ten minutes, okay. Now it's down to a couple minutes. The minute the doctor knows you have strap throat, bacteria, you are prescribed antibiotics. You usually drive to the local pharmacy on the way home from the doctor's office. Certainly if your kids have strap, you want to get that antibiotic in them right away. Okay, now they're fighting the pathogen. They're not going to get more sick. They're on the path to wellness. You go in there for a strap and the doctor gives you the strap test and it comes back negative because you have a virus, not strap, antibiotics do nothing for a virus. That's why the doctor sometimes says go home and drink tea, you know, take some Advil. Call me tomorrow. So that's diagnostics, if you know what someone has, now you can begin to treat it. So so much of bio war is predicated on testing, it's predicated on testing people need, which is that dual edge sword because no one wants to like give all their information to the government. So again, that would be another situation where people realize, no, if there is an outbreak of something testing actually helps you and your family. What is the, what lengths is the government willing to go to contain, you know, I mean, we saw just in COVID, I mean, entering a department store entering it, they get the thermometer gone. Yeah, taking your head temperature, you know what I mean, everywhere you go. And that was, I mean, at the time, you know, everything, if you were in a car wreck and you up and have COVID, you died of COVID. So they overinflated the numbers and it made it sound worse. And I think I took a couple months for everybody to catch on and I think the majority of people caught on relatively quickly and, you know, least around here that shit didn't last very long. You know, look in New York and you got people eating and bubbles like inflatable bubbles in restaurants and everything shut down and California, if we've all heard the stories there. Our governor closed our parks. Yeah, we couldn't go to the beach, get arrested for surfing, which is the place to go by the way, like fresh air, but keep going, yeah. But, you know, so in, so anyways, what I'm getting at is that was, I mean, that was overreaction to a virus that did, that did minimal damage. What is the government willing to do for something like Ebola? Are they going to surround a city with, with the military? Are they, are they going to have rules of engagement? Are they going to have an escalation of force? Are they going to kill people? What are they going to do? Yes to every one of those questions, right? So, and by the way, COVID was, you know, essentially a, I mean, a lot of people died and to them it was a lot, obviously, to their family members. But in the scope of things, a pathogen with a 1% case fatality rate is nothing. And so if you have a select, a tier one select agent where you have a case fatality rate of 30%, 40%, 50% or 100%, the extreme measures that the government will go to, there's no such thing as to extreme. Their quarantine is, the president can, there are legally quarantined diseases and the president will absolutely declare quarantine. So then the issue becomes, well, how do you enforce a quarantine, which is why the military comes in and the military has, can only come in if they have, they have two lanes. The military can function under what is called defense support of civil authorities. And it's just like it sounds. The defense department is supporting the state, the law enforcement. That's when you see the National Guard come in. They do not have rules of engagement like the normal military. Because they're in support of the governor, when the insurrection act is declared and it will be in a catastrophic biological event, the military has rules of engagement, essentially America is a war theater and America's what a war theater, you know? And I did this really. It's not going to work. You just said, there's 500 million guns in the country. Good luck. And so this is the kind of blood bath. This is that quote from Tom Daschle, people doing inhuman things just to survive. And there are contingency plans in place. And what I learned is of course the tip of the iceberg. But it is enough that I describe in the scenario, so I think really get people thinking like, just like nuclear war, this is a catastrophic situation that we don't even want to get even close to. And so what are the solutions? What are the solutions, you know? And I believe those are always there. When you read the worst case possible scenario, you begin to be able to think in terms of solution because you're aware of what can happen. I mean, nobody's going to listen even if you do surround, even if you, if you were to surround Nashville with military and the ROEs were to shoot anybody that's living and you have something like Ebola, break out. How would you rather die? Bleeding out from every orifice in your body or being shot and slides out immediately. I know which way I want to go. I mean, this is, you know, this, this kind of maximum of maximum events is something that used to be very far afield in planning, I believe. You know, it was kind of in the Cold War, there was a real effort to push for what was called civil defense. You know, it was this idea that you could save the population from itself, essentially, that everybody would sort of go along to get along. And that those days are completely over. And what is left is essentially what's called continuity of government. Cog, that's the acronym. And it's exactly like it sounds. The government must continue. You know, there's another interesting detail I learned. So you know about DEFCOM, defense readiness condition. And you know, five is where DEF, where we normally are. And then at 9/11, it went to three. At nuclear war, it's going to go to one. That means nuclear war. Two is like nuclear war. We don't know because it's classified whether DEF, we've ever gone to DEFCOM2, but DEFCOM3 was 9/11. There is a similar defense, similar civilian readiness condition that exists that FEMA is in charge of. The agency, many people have never heard of or aren't sure what it does. The agency in charge of devolution. And it's called CogCon. Again, completely classified program. The term itself has been declassified, which is why former FEMA director Craig Fugae could discuss it with me. And they're four levels. And when CogCon1 gets declared, that's the triggering point for devolution. So the situation you're talking about is going to go in concert with DEFCOM, you know, as the situation ratchets up. And then once you hit CogCon1, devolution protocols. And then everybody leaves Washington, DC. It's called the national capital regional. I love that there are all this weird nomenclature that like keeps the rest of us out. And I think, you know, why is that? But it's not called Washington, DC. It's called the national capital region. And everybody departs and goes to their bunkers. And the military moves into the states. Not a great scenario. Let's switch gears here real quick. We've got a hot question for you. 100% July 25th, 1946, bikini atoll. There are only seven atomic bombs on the entire planet. And the U.S. is about to spend one blowing up its own ships underwater to see what happens. That bomb was called Baker. And it became the first time humanity really understood what fallout was. The ships that survived the blast were so radioactive they had to abandon the cleanup because it was killing the sailors doing it bikini still uninhabitable today 80 years later. Can you walk us through Baker because this is the moment we learned at Nuke doesn't just destroy it poisons everything for generations. Yeah, it's a fascinating moment, moment in time that's being discussed there. And journal as detail just because I have spent my life interviewing people who have actually been there. Really? It's what gives me a little bit of an authority. And I mean, that like as an author, you know, I wasn't there like you were in the war theater. I never have been, but I interviewed. So the man who wired that bomb, who wired the Baker bomb, he armed, wired, and fired it. His name is Alfred O'Donnell. He's now dead. But I interviewed him for my book Area 51, which was sort of my first foray into nuclear weapons. And O'Donnell was with a small team of engineers called EG and G. And so even more interesting is that O'Donnell walked me through how do you like I said to him, how do you why how do you arm? What wire wire arm and fire a nuclear weapon to which he said, well, that's really classified, but I can give you the layman's version of it. Okay, because that by the way is what prohibits most rogue groups from being able to acquire a nuclear weapon. They don't have the arming and firing device. That's what's so jellously guarded. It's incredibly complex. O'Donnell never left the country. He never left the country because he would be kidnapped. And he had a minder until he died, like an FBI minder keeping eyes on him, kind of always watching us whenever I was interviewing him, having lunch with him at the Chinese restaurant. He had a lot of secrets. He wired 186 nuclear weapons for the government in the martial islands and in Nevada. And what I learned about that Baker bomb is that in those days, we've been talking about how science and technology have advanced. There was no remote wiring system the way there is now. I mean, it did exist, but it wasn't ubiquitous, right? So now you do this and you blow something up at a distance or you do this and you blow. So they had cables. If you've ever seen that photograph of that, you can, it's like ships in the atoll and you see this mushroom cloud and coming up out of the water. I have an accident. Oh, it's an incredible photo. We'll put it up on some incredible photo. And O'Donnell took me through how they had to lay cable from the arming facility to the actual bomb. Wow. So they, how far were they? They were, they were not far away. This is like in those days where, you know, they, they would, they would set the situation up. They had some remote control, right? So they would go out on a ship, ship further out from the atoll, maybe 25 miles away, but and they would do some remote firing. But the, the actual device had to be attached to its armed system, on shore, which is just kind of an unfathomable detail in today's world. How was he psychologically? How many sailors died? Well, that was the first atomic test after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I mean, you know, that was a really pivotal moment in history because there was a kind of decision of like maybe we're going to sort of not go nuclear. And you know, there was lots of debate in the international community, whether it should be monitored. And the Navy stepped in and was like, you know, we're in business here. And then the nuclear arms race took off with that Baker bomb. And there were more than a hundred atmospheric nuclear tests that happened after that. And the size of that test, by the way, was tiny compared to what would come later because that was an atomic weapon. There was only atomic weaponry in those days. It would be, it wouldn't be until the very early 1950s that the thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, would be invented. And the hydrogen bombs are what are megatons. The atomic weapons were still in the kiloton range. So while that bomb looks huge, you'll see in the photo, it's not, you know, Castle Bravo or Ivy Mike, the megaton weapons that we're going off later. So psychologically, how was O'Donnell? I mean, you know, it, it took a toll on those individuals, but they also were so conditioned, some might say, programmed to believe. And no, I'm going to say condition because Russia was such a threat, you know, I mean, totalitarian communism was just a looming threat. And everyone that worked within the military industrial complex in those days knew it was conditioned to be extremely fearful of it and was determined to beat it. And you know, people have their opinions now, but having interviewed a lot of Cold War warriors, I completely reserve judgment on that and just go with what they, what they talk about about. how serious that threat was. >> Wow. >> Last question. >> Yeah. >> Is America prepared for a biological war? >> I mean, absolutely not. Absolutely not. And biological work can never happen. You know, it can never happen. This is what I would talk about with nuclear war, where I would say, you know, nuclear war is insane. And every person I ever interviewed told me that. And these are people in nuclear command and control that retired. You can never have a nuclear war. Civilization, it's the end game. And biological war is the same situation. It is an end game. We cannot have one. COVID needs to be reexamined as a lesson. What can we learn from this? And what can we never do again with those mistakes? The same mistakes. And how do we educate people so that they can have conversations like we're having, you know, airing a little bit on the like, oh my god, this is a disaster. So that you realize how do I participate in the dialogue so that it can never happen. And that can be a specific, different lane for all kinds of us. Each one of us, like some people will really take issue with gain of function. We'll say that must be shut down. The current president has shut down gain of function research. You know, others will, I mean, I didn't even mention how many biosafety labs there are right now. Like I did, we did speak about how during, you know, before 9/11, there were two in America. There was one in Atlanta at CDC and one at Fort Dietrich, two. Now there are 17 in America. There are 17. There are 110 around the world in countries where there are wars going on. You create. The BSL three labs, which are just one degree below, which by the way you can work with anthrax, plague, haunt, a virus in BSL three. There are 3,500 of them around the world. 90% of them have no safety protocols. They're just working, working away without kind of, and no organization tracks this, no government organization. Academics and scientists track this. So you pick your lane once you know about this stuff. Hmm, what do I want to pay attention to and kind of keep eyes on that would be a good, well, keeping track of what labs are doing. What is a great starting place? Wow. Well, my conclusion would be the governments prepared for themselves for it, but they have a done shit to prepare the rest of us. And they probably never will. Or it's a considered such a rarified problem. You know, it's the old, it's a bit like the nuclear issue, like that's never going to happen. But I do think that the COVID pandemic really has the potential in a good way to flip the switch on that ostrich in the sand thinking. Before that, people could say, oh, come on, there hasn't been a pandemic since the Spanish flu. You know, the influenza pandemic of 1918. That's that's of the past. And COVID really was a wake up call that you can just be caught completely off guard. You don't want to be caught unaware. Well, Annie, those are fascinating discussion. Always a pleasure. Likewise. Thank you. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.