#417 - The Pentagon Is Preparing for A Doomsday Plague Event | Annie Jacobsen

Olen Shannon Maldonado, käsintehtyjä artesaanitua teitä myyvän jaujilahjakaupan perustaja. Valitsin Shopify, koska alustoja testatessani totesin sen ehdottomasti yhdeksi helpokäyttöisimmistä alustoista. Minulla oli tärkeää pohtia kehittymistämme tulevaisuudessa. Kaikki myyntiin tarvittavat työkalut, kuten varaston suunnittelu ovat kätevästi dashboardissa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu Shopify piste komsi vustolla. <i>Oi</i> <i>Kokeilu</i> Kolemme nyt, Annie Jacobsen. Thanks so much for having me back. Of course, I'm super excited to have you and talk to you about this new book. First of all, how did you decide to write about biological war? Especially after you did the nuclear war book. Did you figure that was like the next best or the next most logical thing to write about? Or were you, was there some sort of weird connection between those two books? The next best horror show. You know, many of my sources in, for the nuclear war, a scenario book, work in what is called counter-proliferation. It's basically a fancy phrase for stopping bad guys, stopping nations using WMD weapons of mass destruction. And so many of the people who work in nuclear counter-proliferation also work in biological warfare, counter-proliferation, which is much trickier because it's illegal to have biological weapons. But when I was reporting that book, a number of those individuals would say to me, "Annie, next, you have to look at bio." And this kind of shark in the water feeling. And of course, nuclear is so horrific and overwhelming. I was completely focused on that, but immediately began looking at bio once I was done reporting nuclear. They're very different, equally terrifying. So biological weapons are illegal? Biological weapons are illegal. And everyone is doing them. This is where we talk about the fine points here, because it's very interesting. I mean, you know, it's crazy to think that nuclear weapons are legal, but they are legal at the United Nations to the five nations that legally have them, except for there are nine nuclear armed nations. So you see, right, so the people that won't really acknowledge that they have them or will not be part of the treaties. But either way, nuclear weapons are technically legal. Biological weapons were banned. They became illegal in 1972 with the signing of the biological weapons convention treaty by all these signatories, including America, including America. Yes, it is. Absolutely. And before that, people should be, you know, shocked if they don't already know, that biological weapons were legal, and we had a massive arsenal of biological weapons as did all the other superpowers. So in this scenario that you play out in the book, it's terrifying. It's scared the living day lies out of me. How there were these Soviet defectors, I believe, that came to the US and basically explained how there was these programs buried deep inside Siberia to create these hybrid chimera bacteria beasts. Where they're basically taking the plague virus, not the bubonic plague, but the respiratory plague. Newmonic plague. Like pneumonia. Nomonia, pneumonia plague. And they're essentially fusing the DNA of that with some other kind of disease. So that when the person catches it, there's no way to determine what the person has, because the symptoms are just so much more broad. Is that correct? That's absolutely right. And that is the sort of, so you hit upon an important point for me in my reporting, which is that in writing the scenario, I want to be able to convey the deep sense of science and of nonfiction reporting that I do and that I have written all of my books about. And so all things are tied to what is scientifically possible, what the US government knows about, the programs that exist within the various elements of the US government to combat these kind of situations were they to happen, and how many different agencies are involved in all the different contingencies, and things are generally based on war game scenarios that are done at the Pentagon. And so that's really a kind of lead in the narrative of the defense department has gained through this before, and of course they have many different scenarios. But I think one of the most terrifying scenarios, and it was certainly conveyed to me by all of the defense officials that I that I discuss this with as well as FEMA, those are the federal emergency management officials, who would have to deal with this, the public health officials with HHS, the US Office of Health. Office of Health and Human Services is that the ability to create recombined genetic viruses, this is genetically engineered genetically modified viruses and bacteria has opened up this extraordinary new threat level that is off the charts that no one is talking about. And if there's anything I want to say about biological war scenario is the point is not panic, the point is pressure, people need to or will benefit from being informed about what is possible and what the government knows is possible. So that God forbid something like this happens, people behave in a manner that maybe there's a solution as opposed to complete, you know, the book ends in anarchy and insurrection, that's the spoiler alert, because the out of control nature of genetic engineering is just beyond the worst possible imagination. What is the origin of this recombinant DNA stuff? So this is interesting because it all ties into the origin of PCR and the PCR testing stuff, and I'm familiar with the dude Carrie Mollis, I read his book a while ago, and he won a Nobel Prize for developing the PCR method with the DNA and all that. But so recombinant DNA is that essentially the same thing is the chimera weapon recombinant DNA is like just like like recombining a pathogens DNA. Okay, so a pathogen for starters, like there's viruses, we all know about the COVID virus, but there's also bacteria, which is can be equally deadly. A pathogen is a is a dangerous or deadly organism or virus or a virus or bacteria. So you have viruses and you know, but then germs like germs are a different germs can also be perfectly good. We all have germs and our guts that are like necessary. So that's germ is kind of can be okay pathogen dangerous virus and bacteria within that for decades since the invention of antibiotics right around World War 2. Most antibiotics will kill bacteria. So if you have a strap throat, you go to the doctor and the doctor prescribes antibiotics and your strap throat goes away. But not all strap throats are bacterial summer viral infections. I mean, sorry, all strap throats are bacteria, but not all sore throats. You can go and the doctor says, oh, that's actually not strap and you're like, but my throat hurts and they say drink lots of tea and you know, talk to us in a week, right. So now to answer your question about genetic engineering. In 1972, that is the origin story of this idea of recombinant DNA. A professor named Paul Berg in a laboratory in Stanford in California at the university figures out a way to combine the DNA of two organisms. Hence the word chimera. Did you win a Nobel Prize? You did win a Nobel Prize. And this was in 1972. And I write a little bit about the book in the kind of how we got here where I set the reader up to understand and kind of a very general 90,000 foot view way. Here's what here's what happened and here's where we are now. And that's a really important moment in science because it was basically like the discovery of the of the atom. Meaning you could absolutely create a new pathway in terms of weapons. And of course, the scientists were not thinking about weapons at the time. They were thinking about medical countermeasures. They were thinking about antidotes. They were thinking about how to use science for good. But that's not what happened in a certain lane. Right. And you also talk about SV 40, semi-invirus 40, the monkey virus, which I've learned a lot about on this show in the past couple of years, especially when it came to like the early developments of the polio vaccine. With Alton Oshner in I forget what year that would have been. But yeah, like there was a whole vaccine push for the polio vaccine. And Alton Oshner, who was the one behind it pushing it out, was doing like a test on a presentation in front of an auditorium of students. in New Orleans. And he injected his grandchild, his two grandchildren, his granddaughter and his grandson with this vaccine. And I think it killed his grandson and it gave his granddaughter polio. And she ended up surviving. And what there was this lady named Bernice Eddie. And I can't remember exactly what her like title would have been, but she was in charge of like reviewing and doing the safety tests on these vaccines. And it was like a day before he did that presentation, she tested a bunch of them on monkeys. And a bunch of the monkeys were dropping dead because it had this active SV 40 in there, the SV, the semi-invirus 40 in there. And that's what was killing them because that is a like a cancer causing virus that like exasperates cancer. And you know, I also had a gentleman in here. The crazy part about this is this guy worked for the human genome project at MIT. And he was on this podcast. And he was explaining to me all of the stuff about SV 40. He found traces of this in contaminated vials of the Pfizer vaccine for the COVID. And that episode got blasted off you like taking off of YouTube because of that. Still on Spotify. But like this was scary stuff. Like this guy's no, he's no cook. Like this guy was a legitimate biologist DNA expert who worked at MIT at the human genome project who found this stuff. So like it's not gone away. The SV 40 is still here. Anyways, that's the long-winded wave. You know, I'm just really curious about like what specifically they would have been doing with SV 40. Well, you have brought up a really interesting point that's fundamental to any of these conversations about whether it's biological war, you know, a lab leak, which is called an incident or an accident in that same lane that could cause panic, anarchy, insurrection, and mass death. And medical countermeasures. So vaccines, antibiotics, other medical countermeasures, things that will counter a dangerous pathogen. And I think the principle that we're really talking about here that's most important for people to think about and kind of digest and be open-minded about is the idea of uncertainty. So that's what I hear you talking about. And I don't know about the SV 40 vaccine trials you were talking about. And I specifically stay away from the vaccine debate. Only because I do not want to be part of the division of sort of people having a horse in the race about uncertainty, because-- Yes, for the most divisive things in American history. I mean, if we learned anything from COVID, it fractured trust in American officials. This is so profoundly dangerous. And it's actually an old Soviet play, which is super dangerous. We can talk about that. And that's what happens in the scenario I write. But uncertainty, biology is not a bomb. I mean, it's interesting because one of the reasons I think, and this is me sort of pontificating, biological weapons were made illegal by the Nixon administration in 1969. We had this massive arsenal. It took 219 weeks to destroy. That's how big it was, okay? Living organisms that were going to be put into bomblets and dropped, you know, fired and missiles and things. And it's remained mystery why it was that Nixon decided to do that. And there are all different kinds of theory. My theory is this. Is that-- And this comes from having reported eight books now on the Pentagon and the CIA is that biology is profoundly difficult to control. The uncertainty factor is extraordinary. You can drop a nuclear bomb or a conventional bomb and know, in advance, the kill ratios. You can know that they have been measurable. They are measurable effects. Well, von Neumann did, right? That is exactly what he did. And think about trying to measure biology. There are so many different factors. You and I could be in the same room with the same pathogen. And you could have, you could be asymptomatic and never-- I mean, we can go on and on and we can get into any of this, but it is impossible to control and therefore it is not a good weapon for the US Defense Department. It also makes it a very terrible and viable weapon for someone who wants to cause unbridled chaos. And that and also the important distinctions, I think, is why in the Cold War biological weapons were seen as viable and that has to do with geography. The Soviet Union was a closed-off space. So their plan was like what's called biological warfare 101. Creative vaccine, vaccinate all your soldiers. They were going to do this with plague. Bubonic plague in the lungs becomes pneumonic plague. It's incredibly contagious. They were going to vaccinate their soldiers and then use plague on the battlefield, kill all the enemy soldiers. But that doesn't work anymore because proximity, because of intercontinental warfare, and primarily because of airborne pathogens. And how genetically-- genetic engineering has advanced to the degree where you can make something that wasn't airborne, airborne, which is the number one requirement for a pandemic. Can we talk about the most underrated part of the body? It's the liver. Your liver is doing over 500 functions a day from helping with energy, fat metabolism, digestion, and even vitamin storage. Basically processing everything you put into your body. And if it's overworked, you feel it. That's why I've been using dose for your liver. It's a clinically backed liver health supplement. But what I like is it's not just another pill or powder. 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Yeah, imagine if you could and you may have laid the sound in the book and I don't remember exactly, but if you could make something like SV-40 or a cancer-causing virus airborne and make that transmissible, you're essentially making cancer contagious. That's terrifying. Absolutely. And this sounds like science fiction. And all of the presidential advisors on biodefense that I have spoken to will shake their head grimly. Letting us all know this is no longer science fiction. I'll give you an example. I report this in the book and it's an interesting detail that has never been reported before and has not yet been picked up on. But I interviewed two of the CIA's top counter-proliferation experts. And one of you interviewed, Matt Dog Lawler called Matt Dog because he got bit by a rabid dog in Paris. And Ralph Mowatt-Larson. And they were in charge of different lanes of the of the CIA's, you know, going after bad guys trying to get WMD. Lawler was kind of like really looking with long-term missions, really working on sort of developing assets to understand the science programs, to go after them from the inside out, which is super interesting in its own right. And then Mowatt-Larson was like literally with ground branch guys going after the bad guys, you know, take meeting with al-Qaeda weapons makers in Sudan and saying it's going to be this or that, okay? That kind of thing. But digressing here, going back to Matt Dog, James Lawler from the CIA told me that Afasadiki, Afisadiki. She was captured in Afghanistan. She was the first woman on the most wanted terrorist list for the FBI. This is during the height of the war on terror. She was an MIT trained microbiologist who was linked to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And this FBI was after her, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. FBI was after her. They heard she was developing bio weapons. They couldn't find her. They finally found her. This part is all reported. They finally found her, you know, acting strange outside of police station in Afghanistan. There was a big sort of kerfuffle. She grabbed a gun. Someone was shot. I mean, it's all the millions of conspiracies have been developed around this. She's now in a state facility in Texas for 80 years, in a penitentiary, in a mental institution. This is the unreported fact that Lawler told me. It was confirmed by a second person, which is shocking to your point about making something airborne. In her bag and her handbag, she had plans to create a chimera weapon that mixed rabies case, which has a 100% lethality rate if you do not get anti-rabies medication immediately, 100% you will die. To make rabies airborne. And that was confirmed by Lawler and a second presidential advisor named David Rellman. And that has never been reported and I believe that the reason it has never been reported is because it's too horrifying to even consider. That would be even worse than airborne plague. Well, they are the two killers that have a 100% death rate if you don't have a countermeasure. So rabies is a virus. There's anti, you know, there's shots in the stomach when you get rabies if you know you're bitten and then plague, once upon a time, you could take antibiotics for plague. And immediately it has to be within the 24 hours and then it would kill the pneumonic plague to a certain degree. It's not like I'm talking about it. And this is like nature's natural plague. Natural mother nature's plague. Which happens in the U.S. every year. Yes. Which is interesting. There are three different kinds of plague which is interesting, bubonic plague has so much narrative load to it because we think of the black death. We think of what happened. Yes. And you know, in the 14th century, bubonic plague killed between one third and one half of Europe. I mean, that's the bring out your dead. You know, that's the like, there's nowhere to bury people. Didn't they also use that as like weapons? They would take dead bodies and festive of plague and like how to pull them into like enemy territory? This is old biological warfare ideas and you can see where it comes from. And so bubonic plague has that like real scary sense and it literally is transmitted by a flea that is infected with the bacteria, which is called Yersinia pastus. So the flea bites, the infected flea bites Danny, Danny gets a lump on his lymph nodes, which are also called buboes, hence, bubo, and then it becomes, you know, it takes over the body and that's a bubonic plague and the death rate from that is anywhere, it's like around 30%. Let's say this is again, this is like sort of uncertainty. If the bubonic plague explodes in the body and enters the bloodstream, it's called systemic plague. And that, think about it, you get sepsis, your dead. If it infiltrates the lungs, it's pneumonic plague, 100% death rate. And that's why the bubonic plague was killing so many people because it started out with fleas and then it sort of became pneumonic and then you had all kinds of people giving it to one another, you know, through contact and also when something becomes airborne, literally aerosolized in the air. This particular version of the pneumonic plague that you write about, and I know you go back and forth between fiction and reality in the book, right? Hypothetical scenario. Like a pentagon war game. Exactly. And you go, you go back and forth between that and like actual real interviews with folks. This pneumonic plague that is completely not treatable with any kind of antibiotics or drugs or any kind of known treatments, and you call it a novel, a novel plague. So completely unknown to anyone who's ever done any research on this stuff. So like, if that, is that real? COVID was a novel virus. That means it's new. So mother nature, and whatever you think about lab leak versus natural origin, we can get into that later. But either way, mother nature create, you know, viruses mutate, bacteria mutate so that is why something can be novel, which is a different word for new. Let me give you three basic concepts that I think are really helpful to consider when you're talking about any deadly pathogen, three requirements to be really afraid of, right? One, transmissibility. We've talked about that. If it's airborne, that is the number one threat, because it's going to linger in the air after you and I leave this room. If I have Ebola, and I'm standing way over there and you're over by that door, as terrifying as Ebola is with it's up to 90% death rate, you're not going to get Ebola if you're way over there. It has to be surface contact. And so that's why your first responders, your doctors, your nurses, your loved ones carrying something. Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever. You bleed out of your eyeballs. So anyone touching you is going to get it. But Danny's across the room, not so that is not so transmissibility is the number one. It's virulence, how deadly is it, okay, rabies and plague, 100% case fatality rate, COVID, Ebola, we just talked about. Maybe it's 60, 80, 90 again, there's some uncertainty with various trends. Guess what COVID was? I think it was less than a percent, right? It was around 1%. And there were many asymptomatic people, meaning people who didn't even know had COVID. So 1% now, you know, something like Honda virus. And also very depending on age, right, and come on, there were so many factors. There were so many factors. But the case fatality rate is usually done after the fact once you have a certain amount of people that die of the disease per 100, then you can get it. So it's transmissibility, number one, to be considered, virulence, how deadly is it? And then number three, how do we stop it? Do we have any medical countermeasures? In the old days, plague antibiotics, rabies, give them the shots in the gut. Ebola, no medical countermeasures, okay? So- Wait, now we have no- Now, the strain from 2014, a medical countermeasure was developed called Z-Map by some scientists in San Diego, and now the new strain in Africa right now is a different strain. It's a mutated strain. No reason to think it's a lab leak. No medical countermeasures yet, okay? So number three, can we stop it? Now if you just consider those three factors that we had to go through all these different scenarios, imagine the uncertainty involved. I mean, and yet when CDC officials or WHO officials are confronted with any new pathogen, the Haunt-of-Ira scare with the cruise ship recently that happened in May, if you remember. You know, now there's a Legionnaires outbreak in New York City. Officials, what I notice from our reporting is they immediately try to act like they know exactly what's going on, which is ridiculous. Just given the three factors we spoke about, and so why is there this need to pretend because that is what it is, that they have the situation under control when it is not under control. Uncertainty leads in any outbreak, whether it's natural or engineered. Right. Well, they want to keep the general population subdued for as long as possible, right? And make them feel comfortable and not panic. Which brings me to my most important point of the entire book, Biological War scenario, which is what the Defense Department says in all of its doctrine, which is that in the event of an outbreak, chaos and panic is almost certain to happen because of fear of infection. So what you just said is absolutely true and what I just said is absolutely true. And those two concepts clash right up against one another, hence stay informed. If you know what to be afraid of, if you know what to fear, if you know what to be cautious about versus another, you know, and that's where we got all the fractured trust because we were just getting bad information during COVID. I used to feel exhausted during the day, but then have trouble shutting my brain down when I'm ready to go to bed. I was feeling more irritable, less motivated, and it was taking me a lot longer to recover from hard workouts. Even though I've been doing the same exact routine I've always done. And to no surprise, this was all connected to cortisol, which is the body's stress hormone. It's supposed to rise under pressure and then come back down, but work, screens, finances and modern life can keep the body stuck in stress mode, which can interfere with a healthy testosterone production. And that's what led me to Marsmen. Marsmen is designed to support healthy testosterone while also helping your body manage cortisol without weird stimulants or synthetic hormones. I've noticed steadier energy, quicker recovery, a more elevated mood during the day, and I have a way easier time winding down at night. It doesn't feel like caffeine, just a more consistent drive throughout the day. It's made in the USA, third party tested, and it's backed by a 90 day money back guarantee. For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off for life, plus free shipping, and three free gifts at mengo2mars.com. That's M-E-N-G-O-T-O-M-A-R-S dot com for 50% off in three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they're going to ask where you're heard about them, and please support our show by letting them know we sent you. One of the things. that really stood out to me about the book. I think there was like a whole, there was a whole part of the book titled like when democracy starts to fail or collapse or something like that. But what you really realize towards the end of the book is that democracy never was. It's just the veil. It's just the fake pretend veil of democracy starts to erode because you realize that all these people have all these special protections that underground bunkers and safe stocks of vaccines for their families so that when the people that paid for everything die, they can still survive and get off the planet or whatever they want to do. So it's fake, it's all fake. - Well, that is a very, very, very interesting reality that underpins biological war or a biological incident. And that is what makes it so different than nuclear. And when you frame it that way, I mean, I was thinking of the term egalitarian and I think what you're saying, democracy is perhaps even a little bit more frightening and maybe requires some modification in my own brain because maybe egalitarian is being too generous because you are absolutely right. And one of the most surprising things reporting this book was to learn about a very secret program called Devolution. Some people pronounce it devolution according to the man who wrote the directive on it, Craig Fugate, Obama's FEMA director. Devolution is exactly like it sounds evolution in reverse. And it's what you refer to which is when the shit hits the fan. When anarchy and outbreak and insurrection overtakes the government, the state's individual state's ability to contain what is happening in a city. Washington DC makes a decision. The White House makes a decision. FEMA helps the White House make the decision. The National Security Advisor acting in his dual-hatted manner as the National Security Coordinator, not something many people know, makes the call devolution. And Devolution is precisely as you describe it, which is how the scenario ends, which is where a select group of people disappears into these bunkers. Now what's interesting is it's kind of assumed that many of the high-ranking officials in the government will die. And so it's an even more skewed perspective on democracy if you take your point because this group has been pre-chosen and they know who they are because they rehearse it. And you and I don't know who they are and we will never know who they are. - Right. Yeah, it's terrifying. It's crazy to think that that's real. And on top of all that, this is only what they were, they told you, Annie, like imagine what they didn't tell you. - I mean, absolutely, that is like I get the very tip of the iceberg and then there's the iceberg and then there's the iceberg beneath the sea. - Exactly, yes, that's a great way. That's a great analogy for it because like with all of the stuff we've been exposed to in the last couple of years or the last year alone, just the fake declassifications that we've seen, like with the UFO stuff, with the Epstein stuff, with everything else, like it is. That tiny tip of the iceberg they're gonna say, they're gonna create this big dog and pony show to make everyone feel like it's transparent government. But in reality, you know, there's billions of files that have been burned and destroyed or that are never gonna see the light of day. And you know, when it comes to somebody who is like you, who's a journalist going out there knocking on doors of the government, former CIA folks and former military folks, like they're only gonna tell you what they're allowed to say. So, which is terrifying in itself, it's a nightmare. It's a total nightmare. And just to know that that's probably just, you know, 5% of the truth is unimaginable. - It's interesting, I love your point that you're making here, which is that, like, so I'll make the science analogy. We have science and technology moving so fast, so incredibly fast. I write about military and intelligence community science and technology, right? So, the speed at which it's accelerating is astonishing. And the sort of law enforcement, courts, correction, Congress, they are just a zillion years behind the curve, nevermind that half the Congress is like, doesn't even know how to use an iPad, okay? And then you're talking about this idea of declassification and transparency. And what's the opposite word of cynicism? Like optimism? - No, I'm thinking more like, in other words, what your point, what you were saying was, okay, so they're fake, it's like a big fake declass, it's like, oh, we're going to declassify this, and then it's a nothing burger. - Right. - So it's, people are, people are savvier to the reality of, oh, I should just simply buy what the government is telling me. And that, I think, is actually an interesting and hopeful situation. And, by the way, has an extraordinary amount of historical precedent, always coinciding with science and technology. So it's not a bad thing. It's just the where we are right now. I mean, do you want an example? Like, and think of, yeah. - Okay, so printing press. And also, by the way, science and technology grows out of war. A lot of, you know, look at World War Two, that's where all of the WMD sort of really exploded, although it existed in World War One. Okay, so, bubonic plague, we're talking about that earlier, the Black Death, 1340-ish, right around about five or six years in that time period, 90 years late, you know, half of your updies, 90 years later comes the invention of the printing press. That is a moment in technology, in democracy, in transparency, in sort of the public getting more information, regularly, the printing press. So suddenly, you could print out a whole bunch of, you know, pieces of paper, and people could go around and pin them up with like an iron nail onto the walls of the city, and people could read them, and people became literate. And so that caused the first kind of near fall of the Catholic church, of the popes. Because until then, and this is the analogy I kind of see with like, in the 50s and 60s in America, everybody just believed the government was like, oh, the government is, they have our backs, and they're so, that was kind of the American jingoistic sentiment. And so, with the Catholic church, once you had, you know, the reform, once you had people saying printing information and saying, no, no, no, this is, this is like corruption, it's always the same thing. Sort of corruption, they're looking out for themselves, not us, then you had, I mean, that was the whole Protestant reformation. You have a revolt, right? So this is back in, you know, the 1500s. But I see an analogy to today, where it will go, I don't know. But, people being able to look up on the internet, using chat GPT, information immediately, finding information out from multiple sources, and not believing, as you call it, the fake declassified document dump, to my eye has a little bit of an analogy of what happened right after the printing press. - Yeah, and also the chat GPT's and the search algorithms are also cooked, you know, that's another problem. - Tell me more about your idea about that, 'cause I think this is very interesting. - Well, I mean, there's been tons of people who have done studies on this and actually reported on this during multiple election cycles, how Google, which is the biggest website in the world, curates search results based on certain things that they want to put, certain narratives that they want to push. And we saw this very much during COVID, we saw this very much measurably during the last two presidential elections. And, you know, you can see it today, depending on what the topic is that you're searching for. So when you have the, the AIs like chat GPT, who are, you know, huge government contractors as well, are basically, it's one large trough, right, a condensed search from Google, essentially, from all these different sites that are all curated through Google. So Google's gonna essentially pick what rises to the top and then those AIs are going to serve whatever they suggest. So, you know, if Google, which was, you know, quite literally incubated by the NSA and DARPA and the CIA is feeding the AIs, I mean, and those are the primary agencies who are, by their very nature designed to be deceptive. What are the chances we're gonna get the truth from, from Google or from chat GPT or from any of those AIs, you know, you almost need just like a rogue AI. You know, that's what led to all of the emerging alternative search engines that have been popping up over the years that were designed, people were going to, specifically, because they wanted to get uncurated information. And, They didn't want what Google was going to filter to them. They wanted like old school, you know, the good stuff rises to the top. We don't want any sort of filter on this stuff. So yeah, I guess that's just a long way to the way of saying that like you're not going to get the truth from, I think Google is entwined with the government, 100%. I don't think that's a speculative thing to say. I think that's pretty obvious. - I love this thinking because I think this is like, I mean, what's the, what is the log line of your show that I love so much about Danny's quest to get smarter, right? And the journalist, Annie Jacobson's quest, is like to learn and inform. So they're very similar. I have a little bit of a different take on this, but of course, neither of us really knows, and this is why this conversation is important. And I think it's super important to be like, well, I don't exactly know, but here's what I'm thinking. So, first of all, I see Google and ChatGPT as very, very, very different because they have different owners. And if you look at the owners, and then you start to look at things like politics, which is the only thing that's interesting to me to look at politics in terms of ownership, not tribe, not how we vote, but who those people are, right? So they have very, I believe they're totally different. It's almost as different as Wikipedia and X, okay? And also, once more gets revealed, there's pushback, and then things become transparent, and then there's a debate about that. But I do think it's in one thing that's fascinating to me about ChatGPT. And I am just working with ChatGPT right now. I'm waiting for the Claude and to work on other AIs. And when I say working on it, I mean, asking it questions, because I'm trying to kind of learn the personality right now. And so, but I did hear an interesting thing, which is whereas the algorithms of the social media apps are most certainly geared toward agitation. - Yeah. - Okay. So I'll do different tasks like on my X-feed, I got back from a trip to Africa where I was studying predators and predator behavior. So then all-- - Out of predators. - Lions, leopards, really interesting. Okay, different story. - Okay. - So then I would just look at X accounts like trail cams. - Okay. - Okay, so if you start to watch trail cams and you hit like before you know it, your entire feed is filled with images of animals, okay? And then you can really watch how that algorithm tracks. Like, I will, if I start liking predators, I will only get predators. If I start liking like deer and owls, now I'm getting more deer and owls, okay? So that is like a large language model that has been fine tuned to a trillionth degree to be able to do that. It's just remarkable. If I start to like some guy carping or yelling about such and such a thing or woman, now suddenly my feed's going that way. So the algorithm within that social media is jury rigged as far as I'm concerned. 100% everyone knows it. I'm not saying anything new. Chatchy PT is very interesting. Chatchy PT, and I have had a conversation with Sam Altman about Chatchy PT, not about this, but about bio weapons. We can come back to that later. But Chatchy PT is, in my opinion, it's engineered, 'cause remember, it's a large language model. So it has been given all this information. And for some reason, there's something in that system that skews positive, okay? So if I'm saying like, God, I'm trying to get my, like talking basic stuff with Chatchy PT, let's say my workout routine, 'cause I want to become, I want to stay really strong, 'cause I love to ski. Miss Laulam skier in the winter, and I want to stay strong in the summer. So I'll chill Chatchy PT about my workout routine and like ask, you know, tweaks and things. And it's always good job, Annie. You're really on top of this, right? There's a kind of positive nature to it that is remarkable to me, that I haven't figured out what that is, because the negative, the X is all about negative. It would rather have me stirred up about politics than watching owls on Chatchy PT. - Well, that's interesting, because Chatchy PT is, communicating directly to you, where X is not. You're just exposed to other people screaming into the void. - Yes, yes. - You know, and Chatchy PT is also gonna miss people to kill themselves, which is crazy. The same positive feedback, yes, this probably would be an ideal thing for you to do. I don't know how many people have committed suicide because of Chatchy PT. Like, I know it's literally convinced people, there's been lots of reports on this, or maybe not convinced them, but maybe like, you know, pushed them or nudged them in that direction because they felt that they felt super suicidal and it did nothing to stop it, it more likely encouraged it. But I think the algorithms with like X, they see with X in YouTube and Instagram, it's all designed on an engagement, right? So it's like, if you like more of this stuff, or you pause on these tweets and spend more time reading these tweets, it's gonna give you that more of that stuff because the longer you stay on the platform, the more money they're gonna make. - It looks like seven claimants. - Wow, that's interesting. Google says there's no confirmed exact figure. - When you, there's a great website I recommend to you, it's called Wiki Spooks. So it's the Wikipedia, it's like the mirror, the inverted Wikipedia, right? So everything that Wikipedia likes to hide and curate, which we've seen that with Bill Clinton and the Epstein stuff, how conveniently all the Epstein stuff was deleted off his Wikipedia. Wiki Spooks will show you all of the crazy real stuff, which is, you need a good balance there. - Yeah. And I think that's exactly the point. And the more balance you're after, you know, Danny's quest to become smarter, which should be all of our, right? Then you can have a little bit of objectivity and be able to, 'cause I think the worst feeling for most of us, or at least certainly for me, probably for you, it's different, depends how you're built, is like self-righteous indignation, you know? When you become so convinced that what you are seeing is correct and everyone else is wrong, that's certainly where the danger lies with any of this. But that's an inside job, you know? I'm not trying to find out how to kill myself on JGPT. I can't imagine such a, you know, but then again, who am I to say that here? I am writing about, you know, the end of the world from the point of view of the release of a biological weapon. - Yeah, but you're doing a service 'cause you're informing people about something that's true and that's real, right? That's not, there's another layer to this AI stuff that's actually communicating with people personally, they're developing like real connections to it emotionally, and making them more disconnected from reality because now more than ever, I mean, people are lonely. People are disconnected from communities now more than ever, and that's why you have these suicide stories and even stories of guys proposing men proposing to their chat GPT or their AI model and like, literally having weddings with it, so crazy. - I suspect that we always had those corners of society of kind of weirdo subsists. They just weren't as, you know, you couldn't read about them on the internet. I don't know that I think human nature has changed that radically. What I do think is-- - Maybe not, yeah. - Very interesting about AI is it's a technology that has been created that's creating itself. And so that is a, in my understanding of science and technology, certainly from a Warren weapons point of view that is a first. Although you could argue that biological weapons are kind of in that same space because a biological weapon is a living munition that is such a bizarre concept to think about. That a cell divides and grows. A virus replicates. You know, a bullet is sitting on this table is never gonna be anything other than a bullet. It's not gonna be two bullets and it's certainly not gonna be 10 million bullets. And yet that is the reality of a living munition, a biological weapon, a virus or a back then. - Yeah, you're weaponizing another species, a living species, almost like alien species, right? Except for their native to earth, but they're just like, they're invisible and you're making that, turning that into something that can kill it, it is. It is a very bizarre thing. - There's another interesting spooky detail. When we were talking about the three components of biological weapons, right? So there's transmissibility. There's virulence and there's how can we stop it? Another interesting fact and also uncertainty is that like, so for example, like a low dose killer is plague. 40,000 plague bacteria fit on the head of a pin. You need as little as 1,000 or maybe even 100 plague bacteria to get in your lungs to develop pneumonic plague. Think about it. that. Now, here's another fascinating fact, and I much of my information comes from Dr. Henry Hein, who is one of the world's experts in plague, in bubonic plague, studied at U-Sam Red and was part of the team that investigated the anthrax attacks after 9/11. And what Dr. Hein told me, which is just really crazy to think about, basic facts, to this day, epidemiologists cannot agree on how much COVID was required for you to get COVID. How much of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is what it's called, to get COVID. So, think about that uncertainty idea. People don't even know how much dosage you need. Yeah, it is, it's crazy because that, you know, the, it's interesting that nobody knew. I mean, it's revelatory that nobody knew because the official government narrative change or the CDC, what the CDC said, CDC said, was a fact changed multiple times. They moved to the goalpost so many times. You know, and I think fear is a huge, was a huge driving factor there for them, you know, to get people to comply and to like, weaponize empathy. And, you know, it's just like the psychological toll that it had on people was, it was devastating. One of the things I find extremely unhelpful is that post COVID with trust fractured, certainly in America, with, you know, division, this, like, people want a hill to die on. What their position is about vaccines or about lab, and yet the basic facts, the CDC and the WHO has not answered, which is, I'll give you the most important distinction when you're studying how something could become anarchy, insurrection, and devolution as the book really is asking. Okay. How would that happen? Airborne, an airborne pathogen. Here is the most astonishing, simple fact of all of COVID to me is that COVID was airborne. It was transmissible down between you and me. The CDC in, on March 28th of 2020, so three months into the pandemic, shut downs across America. The CDC and the WHO tweeted, I have copies in the book, COVID not airborne, NOT big gap, not airborne. It took almost a year for them to acknowledge it. Here's another one. Remember all that crazy nonsense about lysol? Remember the crazy nonsense about wearing gloves and not touching something? If a pathogen is transmissible from a surface, it's called thomite transmission. Okay. It's just like a fancy term. The CDC was claiming that you could get COVID from touching something. Remember people were having their Amazon packages delivered from a distance and spraying lysol. The CDC went into a partnership with lysol. Lysol, it was like it messed up the supply chain. Completely, you know what the chances of getting COVID, SARS COVID to from a foe might from touching something, one in 10,000. And no one has ever, you know, people arguing about vaccines and good have arguments, have healthy arguments, but please ask the CDC why they haven't either apologized or acknowledged that kind of incredible screw up. That is insane. You know, they also did a tweet. I believe it was the CDC where they got sued and they lost because they posted a tweet about and again, I'm not an expert on this. I don't know if it's effective or not, but they posted a tweet about Ivermectin saying, come on people, you're not, you're not cattle. Don't take this stuff when they're legally not allowed to recommend or not recommend treatments for anything. And that, yeah, they got sued for that in a huge class action lawsuit and they lost. I mean, and somebody like myself who's a journalist who works to write books about this, of course, I'm going to be doing the deep dive and reading papers and reading scientific. You can't expect people to just know all this, but that is a basic example of that is really going to so mistrust and fear going down the road as it has. And with everything being on social media, and the fact that social media was in lockstep with all of these things that would come out of the CDC, right? So if you're on social media and you're not in line with the CDC, you say something that's not in line with that, you can lose your social media, lose your freedom of speech, right? And especially if you have your livelihood that's devastating. And when that changes every week or every month or every year, like, how does that work, right? You're literally like banning people off the internet for this stuff when you learn yourself and when the government is wrong about it all along the way, it's crazy. It was the FDA, not CDC. Oh, it was the FDA. Okay. Yeah. The FDA said nothing. I remember. Have you ever opened up your fridge, stared blankly into it for five minutes, and suddenly came to the conclusion that there's nothing to eat? That hasn't happened to me since I started using butcher box. But your box delivers 100% grass-fed beef, organic chicken, wild-caught seafood, and more. All source to standards they can actually tell you about. They've already done the research and made the sourcing decisions, so all you have to do is decide what's for dinner. 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But what's interesting on a sort of nomenclature government department organization is FDA and CDC are all under the banner of HHS. And most people like what HHS? And I'm not saying you have to have a degree in government, you know, policy and organizations, but it is helpful to know that the US Department of Health and Human Services, of which right now RFK is the secretary. It has something like 37 agencies below it, of which is the FDA, the CDC, the NIH. So all of this, Asperr, which is in charge of strategic, you know, pandemic preparedness, Barda, which is in charge of the biomedical vaccines. And it's all stemming down from HHS. And HHS has a budget, an annual budget that is twice that of the defense department. And yet most people are like, wait, what, right? HHS is twice out of the business. It is like $1.8 trillion. And DOD is like 900 million. Yet we have like, we're like one of the last countries in health outcomes in the world. And you know, it is in charge of a lot of things. And what's even more astonishing is that HHS is in charge of a pandemic when it happens, not the DOD. So if it's a biological attack, if it's suspected a biological attack by a terrorist organization, I do not go there in my scenario because there's just so much baggage about that. So no need to go there. But in that case, then the FBI would open an investigation. Well, we all know how that's going to go, okay? Not to be cynical about the FBI, but to be cynical about the FBI. They never even solved the anthrax attacks. Never solved the anthrax attacks. Well, there was a story about how it was shipped from an FBI office, right? Have you seen I've heard that story? I mean, this is a, this is like a big rabbit hole. I have sources in the book. Yeah. Dr. Hein work with Dr. Bruce Ivans, who's the FBI accused of being responsible for the anthrax attacks and then committed suicide before, before a trial. I, and I have sources in the CIA who say Ivans was guilty. And I have sources that I really both sides of the aisle, there is a huge disagreement about it. But whatever you believe, the FBI never solved that. And I believe it was the largest single largest most expensive investigation in FBI history. That reminds me, Steve, go to, go to X and go to Sam Tripoli's X. He just posted something yesterday where he listed all of the investigations that the FBI has done in the sense to Kennedy. Yeah. And this is fascinating. So the FBI has lost a lot of credibility amongst most people. But okay, so going back to HHS is in charge of a pandemic. And so you have this giant bureaucracy that's twice as big as the defense department in charge. One of the most interesting things I learned in writing biological war scenario was that the defense department in my opinion is probably the only organization which could actually impact change that could actually handle and prevent devolution from happening. Were there an outbreak? So in the scenario I write I take you know I take the reader from outbreak to anarchy in insurrection in six days and then dev six days That's about how it goes. Well, it wasn't even a full day until the guy landed from Frankfurt and tell there was literally thousands and thousands of people on Skid Row like convulsing industries and those were from two different transmission chains that I take the reader through right because that's what that's what happens It's like you have multiple people on multiple flights going to multiple cities, but you know, HHS I mean one of the things that I found also incredibly interesting in this book There is something called the strategic national stockpile and it is a classified stash of medical countermeasures What's in it? We don't know the name and its existence is not classified So you can Google it and it will tell you what it is, but where it is and what's in it classified? It's part of what's called an SAP program special access program same as devolution So when I was interviewing Craig fugate who really took me up to the razor's edge of what can be known about devolution because he signed off on the on the a very important monograph on devolution in 2016 and it's the program is classified But the name has been declassified because it leaked to the public Right same with something called cog con which is the that the FEMA's version of DEF con And so I was able to learn about how these different programs work based on knowing certain sort of words and key words and then reading directives and piecing together the big pieces of the puzzle and what I was shocked to learn is that the defense department like HHS is in charge of the strategic national stockpile But how are they going to get it out to the people they need the defense department they need Transportation command right so I think what was super interesting for me to realize was like there is there are so many moving pieces in the God forsaken event of a of the release of a genetically modified pathogen into American society Either by accident or on purpose that you would need everybody informed and willing to cooperate and That may sound like really idealistic, but the alternative is hundreds of millions of people dead right Now when it comes to that that strategic stockpile isn't there a certain I mean is this what we talked about earlier with that specific stockpile like 12 million only for certain people That get like the go-bags That are that are elected to survive in the continuity of government situation You I believe you're referring to the dark winter war game. Yes, that's it. Yes Excuse me in this book like in nuclear war. I'm giving you this narrative this ticking clock narrative of the shit hitting the fan Interrupted by little history lessons. Yes, which explain You know sort of give the reader a contact and hopefully allow them to just pause for a minute and then get some contacts and in biological war scenario That includes a couple war games that have either been decled that were classified that have been declassified Or were never classified to begin with because they just involve retired public health officials and The dark winter war game was done at Andrews Air Force Base right before 9/11 and involved smallpox It involved and this is various the spooky partners You know spawned a million conspiracy theories because right before Elkida attacked like as in three months before These officials gathered at Andrews Air Force Base to discuss what would happen if Elkida Were to get their hands on a biological weapon out of vector the precise BSL-4 lab In Siberia that I use based my scenario on because it's a real lab and has real pathogens there If Elkida got a hold of that if they got a Russian scientist to Sell them a biological weapon and then they deployed it they released it in three cities in America and it was in the dark winter So that like freak people out like wait a minute. Why are you running this scenario right before 9/11? That is spooky you could call it a coincidence. You could call it something else. I'm staying out of that to do it But that is where we learned That there you go. This is the fun fact of all the investigations that the FBI allegedly lied about JFK anthrax attacks russian gate finders of the biggest shooting January 6th wake up all of which you know Maybe coincidence maybe not but FBI informants were Interestingly involved and how interesting is it that now we have this Internet of ideas yeah people can post these Ideas about and we can look at them and we can judge for ourselves or decide for ourselves subject to change yeah But let me finish the one point about the strategic national Yeah, I think it pertains is that yeah, the dark winter in dark winter the scenario that they used was a smallpox bio weapon Smallpox is a virus. It has a case fatality rate of about 30% and it is transmissible through the air and One of the things that happened in the dark winter scenario is The public learns That and it wasn't called the strategic national stockpile then it was just a a stash of vaccines that had been secreted away somewhere and was made available to defense department officials and Their families and others that were considered important for the continuity of government That's called cog continuity of government and in the dark winter scenario That's all that just like sets off even more anarchy more chaos more panic because people are furious The irony out of that is after the 9/11 attacks and that followed by the anthrax attacks You had this massive push From the Bush administration to create what is called a bio defense industry the system and that is where the true today's strategic national stockpile Was planned and developed and and now exists mm-hmm. Yeah, you also touched on this. I mean, there was a multiple Agendas being pushed right after 9/11 I mean you talked about this in your DARPA book about the total information awareness thing with the NSA and the CIA and all this I mean I wrote the DARPA book 10 years ago about all this cutting-edge science that was on the table and now it's Absolutely right in front of us. Imagine what DARPA is doing today. Right. Yeah, I can't imagine I actually had a DARPA guy in here a couple months back maybe six months ago. He was a what was that guy? Remember that guy he would no, no, no, no He was a DARPA. He was a psychologist who was contracted by DARPA and did a bunch of work for DARPA And he was explaining to me, which I'm sure you're probably aware of That they have this thing they can do where they can take a surgeon in Washington put this mesh on his head and take some random soldier in Afghanistan Wear another mesh and they link up and he can basically take over the guy's body and perform surgery on somebody across the world like through their brain I mean that I don't know about at all. Yeah, I mean it sounds like that sounds like you would be effecting physical matter from a distance which doesn't sound plausible to me That's like psychokinesis on steroids. Oh, yeah, but you know, I mean in other words Spooky action at a distance in a different Relative term, but I mean certainly you can do You can have a robot performing surgery with a surgeon on another continent. I mean, this was specifically brain to brain. Yeah, I mean I can imagine that there are trials going on to try and Impact someone's brain, but it would have to be impacting the your immune system. I mean, I don't I would imagine too I don't know how works there. Yeah, I don't know who knows how real it is But so back to the biological worst of the one of the craziest things to me I think what was in the beginning of the book was you explained that because biological weapons work is totally illegal That nearly all of the biological weapons laboratories around the world are disguised as Vaccine laboratories Yes It's It's incredible to think biological weapons are illegal what a hot you know assistant secretary of defense Malorie Stewart told me is in essence this means that there is there are no protocols for Transparency so unlike nuclear weapons and although these protocols have fallen off the map right now We used to be able to go into nuclear facilities and check You know warheads number of missiles and that that that's called counter proliferation not only are you Keeping things from expanding, but you're ideally shrinking the arsenals down right because of transparency because you kind of Have an agreement. This is what we're looking at it involves trust. Yes It involves and then you start to develop relationships with people that you're working with This is always people who work in counter-politics. This is the positive way that has to go. The other is suspicion and paranoia and mistrust. But with biological weapons, or as Andy Weber, one of the world's sort of most knowledgeable individuals on the Soviet biological program, one of Obama's advisors on and on and on his creds are incredible. He's a major source for me in the book. As he explained it to me, it's really the most dangerous part about biological weapons, unlike deterrence, which is this idea in nuclear, that nuclear war won't happen, because everybody has their arsenals pointed at each other, those that have nuclear weapons and say, don't be crazy because we would kill all of you. But because biological weapons are said not to exist, there is no threat, which is we'll get you with our biological weapons if you get us with yours, because technically they're illegal. And this brings for a lot of paranoia, it brings, and it also breeds a lot of disguised science. So you have scientists in places like Russia, according to the State Department now, as of like 2024, released in its statement on the biological weapons convention that it believes that the Russians have an active biological weapons program. It's no longer believing that they are simply conducting defensive research, which is the one little hooky-do or caveat for why you would have smallpox in your lab and be working with it. And this gets us into the whole gain of function debate, which is a term, a phrase that almost no one knew about until COVID when it became revealed as such a hot button issue. And such a dangerous scientific practice, certainly according to the people I interviewed. So the conventional idea that basically Fouchy was arguing the gain of function was? What was his argument? He was trying to make it sound good, right? Like it was a good thing. Yes, so gain of function, again, a very complex term, which is actually exactly like it sounds. You are trying to gain the function of a dangerous pathogen, okay? So more deadly. We talked about the three components, transmission, how it spreads, virulence, how much of a killer it is, and is there a medical countermeasure. So the gain of function debate, gain of function is just genetic modification, but it's specific to make it gain the function of transmissibility, virulence, and then defeat countermeasures. So you have a bunch of scientists in labs. This is starting after 9/11, when the bio-defense industry took off, you've now got billions, if not trillions of dollars being pumped into the system. It's very secret. It's behind the veil. Dick Cheney personally was terrified of biological weapons. He was a big proponent of this kind of funding for this. And you have scientists and labs going, well, wait a minute. The best way for us to defeat biological weapon with smallpox is to know the worst case scenario it could be. And then we'll figure out how to create a vaccine or a countermeasure against it, usually they can't. So how do we do that? Well, we're going to, in a lab, in a BSL-4 biosafety level four, that's the highest, or BSL-3, that's the next lab, we're going to do gain of function research. We're going to make it even more transmissible. We're going to turn it from transmissibility in spit to transmissibility as an aerosol. Or we're going to make it more virulent. We're going to add a component to it so that instead of a case fatality rate of 30, we're going to tweak it up and make it a case fatality rate of 60. That is gain of function research. The people I interviewed, people who run Pentagon Wargames, Colonel Thomas Earhart, who ran Pentagon Wargames on BioWare for the Office of Native Assessment, this very famous legendary old guy named Andy Marshall, since he died. Earhart ran those Pentagon Wargames. He said to me, "Annie, gain of function is evil." So that is one school of thought. At Andy Weber said, "Gain of function is another word for biological weapons engineering." You do have Dr. Fauci on the record. I quote him directly from his paper in the book, just a reference, where he states that the benefits of gain of function outweigh the risks. And that has created a division between people who believe that are essentially opposite sides of the aisle. Yeah, it's a crazy how something like that could be politicized and be driven to divide people. How could people fight about something like that? It's just so silly. And part of the reason why they fought about it was, again, going back to, you have a CDC COVID-19 airborne. A WHO COVID-19 airborne. There was a study I found where they did nine million predictive COVID studies were done. Or looked at, nine million studies. So obviously, nine million were done. More than nine million were done. And then we're looked at. And the success rate for those predictions was around 50%. That's a coin toss. In other words, you can't predict. And so if the CDC did not know if it was airborne, despite like real obvious suggestions that it was airborne, why didn't they simply say we don't know instead of making those kind of statements? And of course, the same thing happened with Dr. Fauci, with gain of function, with this idea that America was doing research in Wuhan with the whole implausibility or plausibility of a lab leak. And that is a great travesty. All the money that could spend on the defense department and the HHS and all this, we've had this idea in our heads that America is this unpenetrable, just incredible force for technology, for innovation, for just the ultimate superpower. But what we've seen, with COVID, is we don't know, or the government has no clue. Like they're completely unprepared for something as as low as a less than 1% fatality rate as COVID. And even with the C-RON war, it's crazy that it doesn't seem like America can beat Iran in a little war like this, which is like, it's really pulled back the veil. And it's revealed like the emperor has no clothes. It's pretty, it's been an astonishing thing to witness the last couple of years. - I couldn't agree with you more. I have spent decades writing books that pull back the veil on specific operations. Showing, okay, this is what we were told and this is what happened. And it's not meant to make a mockery of American democracy whatsoever. It's just meant to, my work has been, you know, it's meant to inform that often how situations are reported are not what happens. And essentially, many of the individuals I interview who participated in those activities, those operations classified, since declassified, I'm interviewing guys who are in their 80s and 90s. And they have a little bit of perspective with a love of America saying, this is what we did wrong and this is what we did right. And that has kind of been sort of my north star of my reporting. Maybe I didn't even intend it to be that way, but that has what has happened. And so I'm interviewing people who, in my opinion, have a very healthy relationship toward what you're talking about, which is what we said happened and what happened. But what has happened now, I think, is in a new kind of landscape, it's kind of, it's a very dangerous ground because situations have gotten so tribal in terms, I don't write about politics, I write about POTUS, the president of the United States. And because of that, I have readers on both side of the aisle. And so I believe that people read my books and sometimes go, oh, wow, maybe I was wrong about that. Or in fact, I have, all the time I have people at the CIA ringing me up who I meet and say, you know, I didn't know that about my own agency. And I'm glad you revealed that to me. So this is interesting and important. That's democracy, that's being egalitarian. That's Danny wants to get smarter, you know? But where we have now is a lot of self-righteous indignation. We have a lot of mockery. That's the social media algorithm. That is what I find most dangerous. That is what I try to-- - Mockery. - Well, people, you know, mockery, like, and I think what, you know, if you mock someone, it's like finger wagging. I'm right. See, you know, that from like SNL or whatever that was. That idea that grownups are doing that. And I'm not saying, you know, we don't all have a desire to do that, but tell your spouse that, you know? Don't publicize it because it all becomes a game of iron. I'm right, you're wrong, and it switches. - Yeah, and I think it's a slippery slope with people on the internet, especially X, because I've seen it happen. I've seen people devolve into this, where it's like, at first, you have this gut reaction to like, oh my God, why would I act like this, you know, publicly, but then they do it once, and they say, oh my God, I got 100,000 impressions on that tweet. Now all of a sudden, they wanna have an opinion on everything, and a super inflammatory opinion on everything. And I think that's like a natural process when they start to see more engagement, more followers start to happen. And then before you know it, these people just become like fake characters, right? Where they're just like, they're playing up to whatever gets the most attention. Like you see with a lot of like newscasters and sportscasters every time. - And I think you also lose your own perspective. - Yeah, I mean, hopefully you have a good spouse or partner, and you have a good tribe, your actual tribe. - Yeah, you become the prostitute to the algorithm. - You don't want to do that, you want to. And I think you've got little kids. I've got grown up kids now, and young men. And it's like the divide, you know, the sort of, you wanna lead by example of like, look, you can privately have these opinions about them, but stay away from sharing them publicly because you could very easily be wrong. - Yeah, and I think though by and large, there's been a general good effect to this though, because it has made people more aware that, you know, like I said, the emperor has no clothes. Like it says, maybe democracy isn't everything we thought it was. Maybe this is all some sort of Plato's cave thing, you know? And I think, like you said, you brought up Tim Dylan in your book, which is funny, because I think he is more tapped into this than anybody. I listen to his podcast every single week. And what he said recently, really wrong truth. I mean, I've said this on like three podcasts so far, but he's basically said, America used to be the quarterback in high school, right? Who all the girls loved him? He shoved the bullies in the locker. He was tough. Now America is the weird quiet kid in the corner who may have a gun. And he's so right about him. - And he's so right about him. I mean, he, you know, talk about really being able to use humor to get at the heart of the matter. - Oh yeah. - And I, I listened to him as well, because he says the unspoken, you know? But he says it with a degree of humor. That's, and also he's also very non-partisan, I believe. You don't really know what his politics is. - Totally. - And that is some equality I always admire in a person. But one of the first, the podcast I reference in the book, I have in a hypothetical scenario, you know, Los Angeles is one, is the first source of the outbreak of biological war, and it happens inside a homeless camp. And I did this with a lot of thought behind it, because my discussions with the world's leading experts, they're called virus hunters. These are people who get sent into the hot zone in a spacesuit to try and help the situation. With, you know, assessing what pathogen is involved and what medical countermeasures might be necessary. And then also to help rescue people who need to be rescued. And there's a couple of them in the book specifically that I follow, but these individuals, and they run also the special pathogen suites in America, which we can get into, they're only 100 beds that can really deal with this kind of virulent pathogen when there's 340 million Americans. But these individuals, you know, the subject of homeless individuals came up, because there's absolutely no component of health surveillance. Health surveillance is a real concept in the United States of America. Like it or not, thousands of hospitals, emergency rooms, urgent care facilities, they are all tied in in near real time reporting to the CDC. So in a different world, this would have maybe scared people like, that's crazy. I don't want them to know what's wrong with me. Well, in the event of a pandemic or an outbreak, that idea is helpful because it could prevent an outbreak from becoming an epidemic, from becoming a pandemic. If you could send in the forces to mitigate the problem. The homeless population of America, which is now around 800,000, 70,000 of whom are in my home state of California, 4,000 of whom live on Skid Row in a small 50 block radius, 4,000 people. They are an absolutely not part of any of this health surveillance system. They are completely left out, a fact confirmed with me by HHS. And that is where transmissibility is a super spreader event over and over and over again, according to the world's leading epidemiologists. And I've heard Tim Dylan talk about that in a manner that was really insightful to me. And he was just one of the few people that kind of addressed it spot on. And so I have a nurse in the scenario who works down at Skid Row in a facility doing pro bono work for homeless individuals. Talk about Tim Dylan and listening to him. Really? And being furious about how hypocritical our elected leaders are, are mayor, are governor. - Oh yeah. - From their ivory towers. - Oh yeah. - Pretending that they are of the people, they are not. And I say that on the record. - When the vice president and the head of the FBI and all these people get into meetings about like what they're gonna tell the public, I have to imagine they consider how Tim Dylan's gonna react to it. (laughing) You know, he's a huge influence. And you're right, he does. He has a very, he has a gift for combining humor with like the unspoken truth about what's going on and he thinks about it. Like the way he's able to like think through stuff and communicate it in a way that's hilarious is pretty amazing. What's I gonna say? Oh, on the part of like tracking health, it's interesting because I don't know if you saw but there's these, there was this report that came out where the company Palantir and my Peter Tio did some sort of partnership with Aura Ring. And Aura Ring is this health fitness device that you wear on your finger and it tracks your heart rate, your respiratory rate, everything, HRV, all kinds of crazy stuff. So now Palantir who's a huge defense contractor and CIA contractor is essentially monitoring the health of all the individuals who own these rings. So like health devices. I would say the situation is far bigger than that. So during COVID Palantir had a received a contract with the HHS, right? So all of the COVID tests, all of the DNA on all of the COVID tests is now accessible to the US government. And I have written about systems of systems that track people in all of my books. This is espionage at its core. - Yeah. - Palantir will tell you, and I've interviewed many people at Palantir, including its owners. - Really? - That is, they are data ag-- - You need a carpe. - I'm not gonna name names. I'm not gonna name names then, okay. But Palantir is a data aggregator. So data gets aggregated, it gets put together. Who is then the recipient of that information? That is the question. So one, I mean, I really think it's valuable to think about this. And I have not reached a conclusion yet. And I have been writing about Palantir for a decade. - Right. - So what does it mean to be the person collecting the data? And what does it mean to be the person receiving the data? - Yeah. - And where are the firewalls within that system? And I think that what is most interesting about the large language models, like the chat GPTs of the world, that no one is really addressing right now, which is far more important to me than if they're biased, is where is this data coming from? You hear a lot of times people talk about scraping the internet. - Yes. - That is the wizard of Oz reality that I haven't gotten that answer yet. - Well, it does give sources for things, right? For answers. - Yeah, but giving sources and telling the truth are different things, right? - So no one's answered that question. And part of the reason why I don't name names is 'cause I want to know that answer. And I continue to ask that question. And I don't know if I will get it. And I also have learned something in 20 years, is that a lot of times people, I used to think that people didn't give me the answer 'cause they were withholding. You know, they didn't want me to know. And now I realize a lot of times people don't give me the answer 'cause they don't know. And there is a that is a really important distinction. Mm-hmm. And they don't want to say they don't know They want to sound cool like they have some sort of super information super classified information. Or it's frightening that they don't know It's frightening that they don't know right That's true. And there's many examples of that I mean in the military late like dealing with CIA operators as I have done a lot and interviewing a lot of them It's really fascinating that they don't know about the program now. I'm speaking in a general way here Yeah, but I am speaking with authority of having interviewed a lot of people Many of the invo they do not know the program that they are involved in. They're just going after the target They might find out later and they might even find out in my book. Mm-hmm. It's like super stove piped We're there to some one little piece of the puzzle and they don't see the full picture Exactly, and I'm not saying that some kind of big sinister nefarious plan It's the way the system works, and so I think that and also I am very interested in scapegoating When everyone just decide like they you kind of hear all that's One of the things I like about Tim Dylan is he makes his own opinions about things I hear opinions from him that I have not heard elsewhere, and I say I often ask people Where's that idea from and they said, you know, oh, I actually read the same thing in newsweek So I just wanted to see and you know, I'm not being a smart ass, but maybe I am That's where they read it or the New York Times, right when someone comes to their own conclusion about something. It is 10 times more interesting to me. Yeah, and that's what Danny Jones wants to be smarter That's where we get really interesting, and that's where I think we can actually add to the conversation in a way that is Unique and necessary and it's very rare, you know, it's very rare for even for me like You know people have busy lives, right? We're working. We're taking care of family. We're trying to feed ourselves trying to do all this stuff Like when do we have time? That's what I love about to know like how do you have time or how many people have the time to sit down in a quiet room with a Pen and paper and actually like work through what they really think and come up with an original opinion if that exists, right? Everything is just regurgitating things you've already heard maybe putting a spin on it or whatever and and It's very rare to hear something, you know like a unique take on something The talent the Palantir part is super interesting to me because I was writing about Palantir 10 years ago when Operators in Afghanistan were using Palantir's information and this was still secrets What kind of came at me and like sort of like bits, but they were there was a program that the Defense Department was running to kill people That was called find fix and finish finish is to kill you, okay? And so there were persistent surveillance balloons in the air tethered by a steel cable look like a giant blimp above certain areas and They so you had multiple surveillance platforms. You had predators with one lens. You had the Reaper with 63 lenses You had the Reaper are outfitted with something called argus is which had you know, I can't remember the exact number But a lot more lenses multiple targets. So you have the different layers of surveillance happening from above Then you have the kids on the ground doing the most god-awful job and you know getting blown up aid by IEDs because they're doing Land surveillance and what the goal of the Defense Department is to find fix and finish certain terrorists to kill them Based on biometric information that's being aggregated Palantir is sitting at the center of it I have stories and because Palantir has gotten the name of the twirling mustash bad guy in all of society I'm interested in finding out if that's an actual actual actual depiction And I don't know Well, it's not comforting when you have the head of the company going around talking about how obsessed he is with the devil Well, that's That has to do with mockery and that has to do with culture wars and everything else But I'm just talking about the science of it right so to finish the thought on afghan in afghanistan on the ground is that A lot of the soldiers were killing the wrong people and I write and the systems that the defense department had to aggregate the debt the data We're far inferior to Palantir systems maybe Right, so I have stories of operators who are doing the fine fix and finishing like I found the guy kill him And then they find out that you know, they're looking at the wrong guy and Palantir the argument that many of these Operators made and I'm talking about people sitting in an office in washington dc Watching the war theater from thousands of miles away that are making the call to kill the person saying Palantir's information was more accurate. I don't know if that's true, but that does not square up with The evil bad god now, so you know, I'm much more concerned about hhs having everybody's dna Right that to me is disconcerting right and then with the doge stuff, you know With what Elon was doing getting all of that hhs data all the irs data All of the other stuff and then you know simultaneously working on Digital currency and then he had a partnership with palantir ai So if he's combining all of that information of all the american citizens into this ai Where they have a full 360 picture of every single citizen inside the united states and then Suddenly you put push digital currency on everyone you can see how that would be a very frightening scenario as well Which to your point when you referenced my DARPA book of You know more than 10 years ago total information awareness that was the original chainy Bush plan and it's just like it sounds total information awareness. We want to know everything about everyone at all times So I'm fascinated when you know the the Large language models the ai systems are taking all the heat for data centers, which they may be But what I'm really wondering is because the reason why you can't have total information awareness on everybody on all the time has to do with data storage Where do you store all that data? And that is a very big problem and how much does it cost? so who's really funding The Need for these big data storage systems my suspicion is hhs DoD and that the individual players the private citizen groups the open ai the anthropics the palantirs They're servicing that contract so I'm just super interested when Also on the cultural level I and I should say I'm suspicious when I see Somebody appear instantly as the good guy and somebody else is the bad guy. Right. I'm wondering what the real truth behind the veil is on that So you think it could be possible that these ai companies are just like a front facing bogeyman for who's really funding them Which would be hhs and the doD which is why I'd really enjoy talking to the people who own the companies. Yeah Right because and I'm in no rush to report any of this because I don't know Right and sometimes I wonder what do they know But that I think is natural egalitarian democratic Inquiry the journalist job the journalist true job the way I was raised old school journalism Just the facts ma'am and also right to the level of the high school senior because we're we're all just people here The whole like part is an idea So many of the news organizations now reverse engineer and this is my opinion But they reverse engineer their stories based on an outcome they want yeah, you know If you want to make someone the bad guy you can gather evidence and tell that story I mean, I'm very clear about this. I write narrative for a living Right But what if it's different what if you're really actually trying to find out what the true story is or rather What one of the true stories is? Right Yeah, there's a lot of stuff you have to string together to try to weave together some set up some sort of a coherent picture from all these people And it's like, you know, how do you know who to trust? You know, how do you know what sources to trust? You know one of the crazy things about the the whole UFO narrative right now is that There's a lot of people who are like popping on to the UFO scene if you want to call it that it's crazy That's become this like cultural thing, but that are making films or movies and all of their sources are people like James Clapper and There's this huge you know, everyone online who pays any attention to this stuff they know or they they at least have The the reason to see like Okay, if you're someone who's reporting on this stuff and you're getting all of your all of your sources are deeply embedded government people Who are known for lying to Congress or covering things up like we're not going to trust you You know, it's almost it's become so polarized Where it's like you can't have any tie to any sort of officials or former officials in the government if you're going to be trusted And on top of that They're constantly labeling anyone who says anything they don't agree with as being a fed You know, they're being like paid for by one government or another so You know, that's always a weird thing for me to navigate to like having people on the podcast who are former CIA or former military people or involved wherever involved in any sort of like intelligence activities at all It was also like you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt and kind of have to like Push push them on certain things and like kind of hold their feet to the fire on certain things like for example we just had TD barns in here and We were talking about area 51 and I was asking them lots of questions and you know He was throwing his hands up saying oh no, that's got to be absolute bullshit You know, and I would say to him. I was like Says the guy who walked into wearing a CIA hat and a CIA pin on his jacket, you know It's like is that information worthless because of that? No, absolutely not but you have to get as much information as you can and You know, you also have to be very very wary of the stories that those people tell you Shopeyfai was the most popular place in the world, and it was the most popular place in the world. It was the most popular place in the world. Annie, can I go off the record with you? Annie, and I go off the record with you? I'm a guy in that claim that he made to you. That you reported on. That people think like he lied to you. He tried to deceive you. They got one over on you or whatever. And, you know, I don't know. That's just one of the things that really stuck with me is like, you know, if I were you, how that would torture me. Oh my God. Someone who has no idea what they're talking about, having an opinion about my source. I don't mean the opinions of people. You mean, what alto? I mean, I would just think about, I would constantly, I feel like I'd be going back and forth in my own mind. Was he true? Was he lying to me? Not even a question. Shall we talk about that a little bit? Yeah, because it is interesting because it doesn't form all of my reporting. It informs all of my books. It informs me as a journalist. My experience with Al O'Donnell. It also informs what I really have to think and say about other people who have opinions about them. You know, they're just opinions and they're entitled to them. I find someone's credentials incredibly fascinating. That doesn't mean that somebody's experience isn't just as important. Like, for example, Al's really good friend was Richard Mingus. And Richard Mingus was the security guard at Area 51. And so Al had this incredible creds. He was called the Trigger Man. He armed, wired, and fired 186 nuclear weapons. If you look up an article in the Las Vegas Review Journal from January 2011, Al O'Donnell is on the front page of it. Of course he is. He's a totally legitimate person with serious creds. He read the hardcover book about the hundred most important people in Las Vegas at its kind of origin story. Al O'Donnell is one of those people. So I always knew this about him. I spent hundreds of hours talking to him. He is an anonymous source in Area 51 because it felt like it was the right thing to do. He and I talked about that at length. He gave me his permission to tell his story once he died. He wanted it to be known. He wanted people to know not to do what he did. And his entire family did not know he was the source of those last 12 pages of the book where I write that he participated in this horrific experiment. His family didn't know it. And in fact, after the book published, I was called to Las Vegas. I walked into Al O'Donnell's house. There was his wife of 60 years. His kids and one of his grandkids. And they said, "Al, tell us what you told Annie isn't true." And he said, "It's true." So you see, this fellow named TD Barnes or some other engineer who happened to be out there for a tiny period of time, it doesn't matter what they think. They can think what they want. What matters to me is the family, that kind of family dynamic, where you realize I am inside of a deeply human experience. That's the privilege of the journalist. That's going after information that's point of view. Was O'Donnell correct? We don't know. Did he believe that he was correct? Absolutely. And that's what's important to me. And that's how I reported the story. Everything in Cindi area that people didn't like in that book, the last 12 pages of very everyone, is in quotes, because he said it to me. Exactly. And you can decide. Exactly. Yeah, that's true. It's up for the people to decide. And by the way, I just kept him hidden because actually a lot of it had to do for me personally with it. I met his grandkids. And they were kind of like these young people, and I was just like, I mean, the fact that he went on the record with me, and essentially, he was considered a hero in his family, and that he kind of rewrote his narrative to admit to having participated in what was essentially a human experiment with people dying and the chap, not our good thing to end your life story on. And so, you know, I was like, let's hold this until the kids are older. That was one of my thoughts, discussed with husbands, spouse, privilege. But another really important thought to me was that on balance, the reason he said this was because he wanted people to learn from his experience. Nothing's more important than that, you know? And he also said, if the Department of Justice comes after me, so be it, then it, then more will be revealed in a, you know, in essence, in a trial, right, or the declassification things. That never happened. Because all the euphologists who want to believe that they're UFOs, right, it wasn't some Stalin, you know, black operation to kind of emulate the war of the world hoax. The euphologists were all like, she's crazy. So I didn't have the Department of Justice coming after me. It is perplexing to think why, you know, obviously you've talked to so many people and interview so many people, and you spent 100 hours plus with this guy, like, I'm sure you can judge his personality and whether he's being sarcastic or joking or whether he's being serious. Like, I don't, I don't question your ability to do that, right? So like if he actually did say that to you, why would he do that? You know, like, why would he say something like that? If it, why would he lie? What would be the purpose? Like if he wasn't like doing this for the, for the government or like, sewing disinformation with you, like, why would he just want to purposely stain his own government, his own career and his own life story? I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why, and I've not said this before. So for starters, let's let, let's tell listeners what we're talking about. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Let's, that's a good point. We should lay that out. So once upon a time before there were intercontinental ballistic missiles, there were bombers. And so we're talking now, and Roswell happened in 1947. And this is in the 50s, the missile, the intercontinental ballistic missile did not yet exist. And so the way that you would attack America with nuclear weapons, once you had them, if you were Russia, they didn't have them until 1949, was by sending bomber planes into the United States. It's why our nuclear facilities are in the middle of the country, not on the eastern, right, not on the coast. And so radar was key to all of this. And the idea of the war of the World Hoax, which was studied by the Defense Department, then called the Department of War, declassified documents, I source in the book, also obsessed Joseph Stalin, the totalitarian dictator of the Soviet Union at the time. And so the idea that O'Donnell was told was that Stalin had a plan to conduct a War of the World type hoax against America to send a craft over the, into the United States, and have these sort of alien-looking individuals come out of it. And just like the War of the Worlds, which overwhelmed the telephone system, America's radar defense system would be overwhelmed and it would allow the Soviet attack. It's a pretty good narrative when you think about it, whether or not it's true, it's impossible to know. But that's the narrative. Does that part make sense? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So if this thing slipped through our defenses, it would overwhelm the public. It would create like crazy public panic, that's the idea. And the systems would jam, you know? I mean, tiny analogy to biological war, remember when the president declared, okay, I'm closing all the borders, this is back in COVID, and it was in, I think it was in March 5th, 2020. And President Trump said, I'm closing the borders with Europe in 24 hours, so everybody had to get back to the United States, right? I actually had a child, my son, college age, someone was in Greece at the time. We like rushed out to my office, my husband and I picked up the phone and we're like, because we had to get him home immediately. And we got, we could not make a phone call, all phone lines were jammed to the airlines. We went onto the internet and bought he and his friend plane tickets directly home from the Athens airport the next day. But the phones were jammed, you couldn't get through. That was in COVID. That was okay. So imagine a fake alien attack, system overwhelm, no one can communicate. When the system goes down, the United States is vulnerable, that was the idea, okay, so that was the idea. So that was the idea. And so what, what O'Donnell tells me is that he was one of the five EG&G engineers, EG&G had the contract to wire, arm wire and fire the nuclear bombs, they did it for the Manhattan project, they did it for all of the subsequent nuclear tests. He was one of five, that's like a tiny unit of people. And that he, we had these, the craft and the alleged beings in formaldehyde, he was very vague on these details. And that he was told out at Area 51, he drew a map for me, I have the map of where it is, that they were supposed to work on this and create a program to figure out how on Earth the Soviets had made these small people look like aliens, surgically made them, very vague on the details, would always start crying, okay. And so this is the roundabout way of where you said, but why would he ever say that, why would you ruin your legacy? How did he say what, did he say exactly what the craft was or how it operated, how it was for help? He drew a picture for me, he, I'm not going to get involved, I've never spoken about that stuff because of course it gets picked apart by every single UFO person that exists and it doesn't matter, I'm interested in the narrative of what he told me. Which by the way. But he did explain that stuff to you. In very sparse details, okay. That's all classified. I mean, you know, so, okay, train of thought, what you asked me, why he would, why he would sort of confess to me that he was involved in this program in the first place, something that he had kept hidden for so long. You know, I'm by the way, he told George Napp the same story except for he reversed it that they were aliens, okay. It was this before after he talked to you. I'll come to the George Napp thing in the end because, okay, so I say, I'm constantly trying to get more information from him and I'm also really interested in nuclear weapons because he was the trigger man and he wired all of these, right? So at the same time, you're thinking, wait a minute, this guy has a cue clearance, he has a top secret clearance, he's one of five engineers who has the knowledge to wire, arm, and fire nuclear bombs. He's never left the country of the United States after World War II because he'd be kidnapped because he has the knowledge, okay. He had an FBI of mind or following him around who I met, okay. So this guy is serious creds, why, and so if you think he's crazy, then that brings up a whole other problem, which is why is a crazy person? Why was a crazy person allowed to arm wire and fire America's nuclear bombs? We're talking about real nuclear explosions that happened in the '50s, up to 1963. You can see them on YouTube. They happened in the Marshall Islands and they happened in Nevada, okay. That was him doing that. Why did he tell me this? I asked him that question and through tears he explained to me that his one of his children, wife, gave birth to a child with birth defects. And he loved that child so incredibly much and yes, he told me this through tears. And he said, I loved him just long enough for him to then be taken from us, right? Because I think the child lived for five or six years. And he said, in that moment, I could finally face the facts that what I did was horrible because the experiments, the human experiments were done on people who were handicapped according to him in the Soviet Union, in America at Area 51. After EG&G, the five EG&G engineers, that is the program he was involved in. And he said, I realized when my grandchild was born that I was being punished by God for what I had done. And I said, why are you telling me this and not a priest? And he said, because you won't judge me. And that's all, actually, exactly. So imagine me, people slinging arrows at me, what does that really matter? I mean, that's the journalist privilege. And by the way, he told me I could reveal that story one day when I thought it was appropriate. And I didn't tell Lex the part about the grandson, because it didn't come up. But you know, I do think to answer your other question, I think about him, off my kids met him, you know, my husband met him. I didn't spend 100 hours with him. I spent 100 days with him, you know. There are lots of other stories that he has, lots of other stories. I'm maybe one day I'll write the book, you know. What's Jesus? I've made contact. You know, here's a final interesting story. And I told Lex this part. At the time, Chris Carter created the ex files was writing the television show of Area 51. And I took Chris Carter out to Las Vegas to meet Al O'Donnell. He wanted to meet him. And Chris is like a great secret keeper, you know, like he never told anyone. I'm a great seeker. Yeah. Give me somewhere, bring me there if you want. So we went there, I mean, I went with Al to the Nevada Test site and he's like, that's, you know, with Al and Mingus. It was, okay, I'm digressing. But anyways, I take Chris Carter, creator of the ex files out to meet Al. And now I lost my train of, oh, so I wondered if Al would tell Chris some more things, you know. Al had never watched the ex files according to him. Of course he lived it, right? But after that, and the book had published, and time had passed, and I would reach out to him. He was always writing emails. I have lots of emails from him. And I got a message from his FBI handler that said, you must cease and desist. All communication, period without. And I knew from my CIA people, asking them if, you know, because I had little kids at the time. I was like, I'm Jet and Finley's mom, and I'm just not interested in pushing something into the dark area. Yeah, yeah. And so I just knew that was the right move. Wow. And he called me once. He called me once and left me a voicemail message. And it was really spooky. I'm not going to say what it says. The FBI guy or Al? No, Al. He called me once after that, to ask why I never called him. And it broke my heart because I couldn't call him back. And then when he died, I know, I know. And then when he died, I got a call from the FBI Minder. And they said, Al wanted you to know, Al has died. And he wanted you to know. He had left a list of, I think it was either five or ten people to call. And they said, you are number two. And I said, can I come to the funeral? And they said, absolutely not. And they hung up. What? Wow. That's an insane story. It is an insane story. It's a mystery of mysteries. So when he talked to George Nap, was that after you spoke with him last? He had talked to George Nap before he spoke to me. Okay. George Nap kind of got wind that he knew something. George Nap will talk. George Nap was a real gentleman. When Area 51 published, I was out, I mean, obviously, you know, it just created, I thought people were going to be like super interested in the CIA spy plans that I wrote about for the first time. All of this science and technology behind that and the engineer. And it was like the whole world wanted to know about the last 12 pages of the book where I give you the reveal. And I talk about it as if it's a narrative. I don't know. I don't know how true it is. Certainly, he seems truer than, you know, flying saucers with little people walking out of them to my eye. But anyways, I was doing an interview in Las Vegas. I can't remember, and George Nap took me, like, I think I was doing interview with him in local news because he's kind of owns the space, broke the stories. A mob was R. Yes. And he's like a legendary reporter in that regard. But he took me and we kind of went and back where no one was listening and he said, "Listen, I know your source is Al O'Donnell and I'm going to keep it secret with you." And I was like, "You are a real gentleman, thank you." So we had, we both knew. Right. And it's just that he told, Al O'Donnell told George Nap the reverse story. What do you mean reverse? Well, he told them that they were actually aliens. But he didn't tell them any of the other familial details. He just told him, "Yes, I was involved in it and yes, they were aliens." And it was, he told me the reason was to keep, to get George Nap off his back. Oh, so he explained to you why he said that to George Nap? Yeah. Yeah. We had many talks about, about that. Oh my God. But again, I mean. Right. It's a rabbit hole of, this is disinformation, misinformation. And you know, after the book published, at least once or twice, Al O'Donnell said to me, "Now I'm so confused, I don't even know what's true." You know, he worried that he had been used and that he had been told a story that was at least partially not true. Maybe that, I mean, listen, there's a thousand, there's a thousand, you know, strings to pull on that spider web of a story. Hmm. Absolutely. You know, and with people like him, it reminds me of that recent story with those missing scientists, like with that General McCaslin guy. I don't know how much attention you paid to that. But it was, I think it was starting in December. All of a sudden, all of these scientists, high-level scientists from different military contractors and science plays like, I think one of them was Los Alamos started to go missing. And you know, one of the biggest stories was this McCaslin guy who was a general who was allegedly connected to Wright Patterson Air Force Base and some of the most secret compartmentalized projects at Wright Patterson. And you know, he was getting old and he was getting dementia and he was going to see a doctor about his dementia. And one of the theories that was positive to me, which was interesting, is that a guy I know who did contract for the CIA who I had on the podcast, or not the CIA, the NSA, who was on the podcast, he said that when you start to work for these places like the NSA and you get access to secret stuff, you have to assign this incredible NDA. And in the NDA, allegedly, he said that you have to basically sign away and give the government right to take any sanction necessary to get rid of you if they think that the information locked inside your brain is at risk. You know, if your brain is this hard drive that stores all of this top secret national security information, like they want to, they have the right, you're signing away their right to make sure that this stays there. So if you are going through some sort of a psychological issue or you're seeing a shrink or whatever, they have the right to, I guess, either kill you or you have to agree to walk away from your public life completely. And it was interesting that the story of the scientist was like, it looks like they took stuff with them and they went somewhere voluntarily like this guy. So now you're touching upon my deep interest in narrative and POV and the fact that I touched upon before that you can, if you already have a conclusion about something, you can reverse engineer the facts to that and we're all guilty of that. But when I hear all of those scientists to me, the missing scientists to me were, I mean, it's tragic individually what happened to those people. But it's also, to my eye, it was just like super easy to connect them all. I mean, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of scientists. There is a million personnel working for the defense department right now and a classified number of people working for the CIA. The CIA is one of 17 or 18 intelligence agencies. So go figure the amount of people. There are also an extraordinary amount of people who are like contracted and had one toe in for five minutes. I'm not passing judgment on any of these individuals I haven't looked into them. But what I do know is all of my sources. I have to double down and make sure they are absolutely placed where they were, said they were and that they had serious clearances and serious responsibilities. Interestingly, Richard Mingus is the analogy. He was the security guard at Area 51, but he had an extraordinary responsibilities. All fact checkable. So I also know people who were contractors for five minutes and their POV can be very different about the reality of a program. I also know that really high-ranking people in the CIA in particular, many of whom I have interviewed, when they are on their deathbed, they have an actual minder. with them. Oh really? I have run into these people and have experienced this like Annie, you can't talk to Dr. Wheelan anymore. That's crazy. That's crazy. This idea that you can kill me if I get dementia, I'm not buying it for four seconds. I'm not even buying it for one second. No, no, no. That's just me. I could be wrong. At least with the have this stuff, they have a babysitter, they have an FBI babysitter, especially when they're about to die to make sure they confess that confession. And it's not even necessarily deathbed confession. We all know what happens to us. Any of us who have had surgery and you're on some loopy opiate to, you know, nullify the pain of the surgery. Well, you might also start to make shit up. You might see things that aren't there. So that, you know, but again, point of view and kind of looping it around to the AI, the thing that's most interesting to me, and you have a lot of guests about consciousness, right? And this idea of like seeing things that are phenomenal. I really am interested in the subject, the jury's out in terms of my mind about what it is, consciousness about will AI ever be sentient. But what I do know is that I often think about what's the difference between consciousness and machine, right? And which kind of loops a bit around to this idea that you're talking about, which is point of view. In other words, machines technically don't have a point of view. If you ask Google something, it doesn't give you a point of view. That's machine learning. That's a search engine. Where chat GPT becomes super interesting to me, interesting in a spooky way is that it does have an opinion. What does that mean? What does that mean? Because before I ever used a large language model, I would have told you that only humans have a point of view. And now I can make chat GPT give me its opinion, give me its opinion, which is right at the edge of consciousness. And when you're getting into point of view, that's where that's interesting to me both by the scientist, like the scientist's wife has a point of view about what happened to him. You falligists are going to have another point of view, his handler over it, right? So what are the pieces of that puzzle? And the only narrative we really heard from the, as far as I'm concerned, my take on it from those missing scientists a couple months ago was like one theory being pushed that they were all part of some secret UFO program, and they were all being disappeared. There was no alternative narrative. Right. Exactly. Well, there was a lot of the scientists. There was people that were trying to say that there was like 11 or 12 of them, but then like you could pick a lot of them out and be like, look, there's no connection with this guy. This guy was doing something else. There was one girl, A.M.E.S. Grinch, who died years ago. She was never a part of any serious government program, and they were trying to connect her to it. There was really like maybe three that were mysteriously killed that were like high level like murdered, like there was one guy who was like stalked and hunted down and murdered on his front porch. Well, the other really big problem with this, it speaks to what you said earlier about people on social media, loving 1000 clicks or hearts or I like. And that, you know, and I really empathize with contemporary journalists who are stuck doing those kind of dreadful news stories, because I can't imagine being in that position back when I was reporting for the LA Times, there was still some zeblents, and I wrote magazine pieces. There was a semblance that you could have sort of objectivity here as my story, but that's all gone now, and it's really just what sells. And so you have these journalists whose job it is to report the story and give it to the people and let them decide essentially kind of being stuck pushing this kind of weird narrative, because it's getting a lot more eyeballs than not. And that's unfortunate, and I think that's where you like personally have to take a position on it. And then like we were talking about where before we started is you have, you know, people in the government, like in Congress that are trying to become influencers and, you know, trying to latch on to certain narratives, like the UFO stuff or the MK Ultra stuff or whatever it is just trying to gain popularity and just play Kate to who's ever above them or, you know, depending on whatever ladder they like to climb. Well, it's also interesting. I mean, there is a degree of narcissism and narcissism is a great, you know, Greek myth. I often look toward because I love narrative, and I'm interested in it and how if humans changed and you look back at the myth of narcissists, do you know about it? Yeah. Right. Okay. So it's like falling in love with yourself. Well, you see it's wonderful, like a wonderful use of X is like when somebody shows differences of individuals in the public domain and the public sphere who have changed the way they look over time. It's so narcissistic, you know, the next thing you know, they're having like they're appearing on camera with all this makeup and a certain hairstyle, maybe even plastic surgery, and it's just like, oh my God, this is a, this is a complete aberration of what a Congress person in my idea, I'm older than you, you know, once upon a time was. Yeah, totally. It's just the way the world is going. It is a popularity contest, you know, and the fact that that's those are the people that are in charge is very frightening, very unsettling. I mean, or are they? How much do they know about this is what is the plagues? Well, but what is, and to, to loop it all about what is shifting is, you know, in the nomenclin, in the sort of zeitgeist right now people talk about oligarchs and people in power, but this should not be. This should be taken more seriously because in many regards, that kind of power is more powerful. The narrative, the power of narrative, my business. This has become more powerful than some of these very institutions, and that is remarkable. It reminds me of the world right after the printing press was invented, where you will see upheaval. You know, who, excuse me, who is controlling the narrative on all of this? Yeah. It becomes really interesting. Yeah, and then, you know, I, this is something I rack my brain about, I rack my brain on all the time as well, you know, and you illustrate this in your book towards the end when the shit starts to hit the fan. They tell the president, we need to shut down the internet. Well, if they have the ability to shut down the internet, and I'm sure they, at the very least, have the ability to control the narratives or control speech to some level, to at least pull the levers on speech on all these social media platforms. If they have that ability, what is going on behind the scenes right now that we don't know? Is it really just a free for all? Like, how do we know? And who dictates that? You know, like, who controls that? Well, people in these extraordinary positions of power, they still have to sleep a certain amount of time a day. I mean, there's only so much you can do in a day, which is why I think a lot of it has to do with what, what garners someone's attention. When I wrote nuclear war scenario, one of the most shocking things to myself, and ultimately to readers, was that we learned I learned from sex deaths, from White House chiefs of staff, from national security advisors that most presidents are completely uninformed about nuclear war. Right. They don't know, they don't want to know, they don't know what they will be asked to do in a tiny six minute window if they have to launch a counter attack if we're being attacked. They don't know. That was shocking to people. The absolute same is true with biology. And so you're really stuck saying, wow, the system is huge. All these different agencies, HHS, we talked about defense department, FEMA, DHS, national security council, but there's one president. And when it comes to weapons of mass destruction, when it comes to making decisions in the event of a biological incident or attack, fascinating that in defense department, nomenclature, the word incident is also there. It's not just in a biological attack. It can be an incident, which means lab leak. It should get everybody's attention to make you want to know more. Ultimately, the decisions have to be run by and made by the president. And you're talking about someone who is consumed with a zillion other problems. Oh, yeah. Yeah, especially this president. Any president. Any president. And okay, so now that we circled all the way back here to the biological war stuff. So it seems like so in your situation or in your scenario, Soviet Union or Russia was the main like ground zero for this attack. And they they had that huge biological lab that was disguised as something else, right? It wasn't actually known for being a biological lab. And they had this crazy genetically altered double mutated plague virus that's completely untreatable and new. So is that fit, does that actually exist somewhere in a lab right now? So in the 1980s, in the late 80s and early 90s, a Soviet scientist defected from Russia to the UK. I interviewed the British intelligence officer who first interviewed him. And this guy named Posseshnek revealed that the Soviets, despite pretending they didn't, despite signing the biological weapons treaty, had a very advanced, enormous biological weapons program. Among the biological weapons that were the most dangerous was what was called a super plague weapon, which is very much like you describe, which was genetically modified to cause death on a massive scale, and to evade medical countermeasures we've talked about. So it was going to defy the antibiotics. And when the West learned about this, the British shared it with the CIA, President Clinton was learned about it. It's just like the whole world changed. The wall came down. The Cold War was essentially over, bio weapons were the new threat behind the scenes. So hold that thought that you presented to get to my scenario. Decades have passed. Genetic modification has advanced to the point where so the dream of the Soviets was to create this chimera weapon. They had worked to make bubonic plague into a super weapon. Their plan was, and this is a quote, to launch it America, kill all the people and leave the infrastructure intact. Shannon Maldonado, the director of the Artesan Institute of Technology, Jaui Lahia-Kaupan-Perusta. We were able to create a new world for the Soviets. All the experts were able to create a new world for the Soviets, and to create a new world for the Soviets. So spooky, nuclear weapons destroy everything, leave radioactive wasteland, biological weapons, kill everybody, take over all their stuff, so sinister, so dark. Those are quotes from the actual scientists on that program. Now if they created this demonic chimera super plague weapon, did they also have an antidote for it? Great question. So at the same time, they allege to have vaccines, and they do today, by the way. The Russians claimed to have a plague vaccine. America does not. Dr. Henry Heine from the USAMRA doctor was working on it, but we don't have it anymore. Most people don't even realize that. Russia does. But what was happening in the '90s was no one was ever able to prove that they created this chimera weapon. We didn't have access to the labs, and if they had it, they destroyed it, maybe hit it. We don't know. But it was spoken about by the scientists who actually defected to the United States. But that was, you know, 30, 40 years ago. So now move, think about where science has taken us today. Oh, yeah. It's the exponential growth of science. And so that is why the State Department is so concerned. Russia has a biological weapons program. North Korea has a biological weapons program, according to the US State Department. Really? Yes, they do. I source them in the book. They have said it publicly. And they believe China and Iran have questionable programs, which is kind of like a euphemism for they probably do too. Of course they do. Okay. So in the scenario I write, we are working from the theoretical supposition of this plague super-weapon and this dastardly idea that gets revealed by Seregaipopov, one of the Russian scientists who actually came here and is presently still in the United States, who explained that the reason Russia wanted to create this weapon with a back door, meaning when Americans would take an antibiotic, believing that it would cure them of plague, it would instead trigger a second, even more insanely painful in sephalitis of the brain, causing people to die in an equally or more horrific manner. And the purpose of that was to erode trust in medicine and government. Those are exact quotes from the Russian scientist working on the program 40 years ago. Because nothing would work. And it would create absolute insane mayhem in the United States. And that is the scenario, spoiler alert. I hope you read the book, is what I describe in the book because it is what defense department officials are most afraid of. Now there was a deliberate Soviet siop to make this happen is what you're saying. So this was all part of it, the fact that all the antibiotics would make this thing more deadly and enhance the effects of it, that was on purpose because they knew that that would also so misinformation and distrust of the American government and revolt. It was kind of like the most sinister, nefarious, dark-hearted revenge that you could so upon your enemy, which is have everybody die hating their government at the same time. And so when I, knowing this narrative that I do from interviewing the players that were actually involved in it, then and now, it's why I put so much emphasis on the stay informed part of the book. So the book is not meant, as I said earlier, to so panic, it's meant to be proactive. It is meant for people to understand that information is king, knowing basic things that you learn in the book. Like, I have to know about transmissibility, about virulence, about medical countermeasures. Before I act in a certain way, God forbid there's the release of a genetically modified pathogen. But also to have an accountability from government officials, realizing that they must be able to work with uncertainty. They cannot pretend that they know what is going on when they don't. It is only going to make people more mistrustful. So what is your, I know the CIA did a whole thing on this. They said that if they think this COVID was a lab leak, it seems like that's the most likely scenario that COVID, the Wuhan birologist was working on these same things. It was a biological weapons program, right? The jury officially is still out. What is officially, I mean, I think everybody needs to weigh the evidence themselves. I mean, the lab in Wuhan was working with corona bat viruses, specifically. The outbreak occurred in Wuhan. There were cases. This is John Stuart's funny montage. I'm not allowed to talk about Hershey, Pennsylvania. The chocolatey outburst, the flood of chocolate that came out of Hershey, Pennsylvania. We don't know where it came from. I mean, it's stunning to me that you cannot draw the conclusion that I would draw, which I'm going to refrain from saying, right? But here's the thing. It also speaks to if you're tribal, if you have a horse in the race, if you're insistent, if you mock somebody, then it's very difficult to back off of that. And there were these articles that came out that literally called the Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theories. And so, first of all, I want to say on the record, I think conspiracy theories should become. It's an embarrassing, ineligant, unthoughtful thing to say, in my opinion. You should say speculative narrative. You could even say wildly speculative narrative. I would call. Speculative narrative. I would call the idea that aliens are among us, a wildly speculative narrative. If I say conspiracy theory, it just sounds like I'm trying to be holier than thou. It sounds like I'm trying to mock someone. Yeah, it's a pejorative, for sure. And so, and the fact that, you know, the Wuhan lab leak, which is really much more of the scientifically prevailing theory than a natural origin. And by the way, I think the most convincing evidence for it is if you look at the original paper that was written and you look at the original group that wanted to shut down the idea that it was a lab leak theory, you will see a direct line from that position, anti-lab leak, shut it down. You will see money, you will see power, and you will see prestige. Meaning all of those people were offered that. and have been granted that period, that's just you can just identify that in a chart. And so there was only something for individuals to gain and there was nothing for them to lose of that core group that shut that down. And it's just so unfortunate because in the event of the release of a genetically modified pathogen as I show in nuclear war, I mean, sorry, as I show in biological war scenario, you need unity, you need clear direction and you need uncertainty as an okay idea. You need health officials to be really clear about what they know and what they don't know. Because a biological event is considered in the nomenclature of the defense department of FEMA of HHS as potentially a near extinction level event. And I'll end with this because on the threat spectrum of weapons of mass destruction in the defense department and I have an unclassified chart of this in the book on the threat spectrum of all the threats. Nuclear weapons are considered the most dangerous, biological weapons, biological incident is considered the most likely to happen really. And therefore it is the most dangerous. Well, nuclear weapons certainly kill people the fastest in the impact zone, right? But the biological weapons have the potential to spread and get more people and even though it kills them slowly, it still kills them in a horrific way. One of the most chilling quotes from an official that I interviewed, Tom Dashel, former Senate majority leader, he himself, his office was the subject of the anthrax attack right after 9/11 and he's dedicated his life to looking at biological weapons and biological threats. When I asked him what would happen in an event, in a catastrophic biological event, he said it would be death physically, it would be death governmentally, it would be death of everything you know. But then he said this, people will do inhuman things to other people just to survive. Oh yeah, of course, but the people that will survive are the people that are in this underground tunnels. Those people that have that little go back and get that special call during the devolution plan. And then you have a world of like solipsists, people who live alone and psychopaths, people who are willing to kill people from a distance, right, Machiavellian sort of world. And by the way, it would be mostly male, you know, the defense department, by the way, has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its servicemen. So that's how you survive. You have that mask on and you never take it off. And the military has only something like 17% females. We're talking about a really lopsided world that gets left behind. These are grim thoughts. A bottleneck in the human genome is going to happen if that really, if that, wow. Somebody was telling me recently that in an event like this, like a nuclear war or something catastrophic where the government falls that people will target the, what was the religious group again? Wow. What are they called? No, not the Muslims. What is the religion where they're all, like they're kind of omnis, but they're not, they're super armed, why is this escaping me right now? It's a group. It's a religious group where they kind of live off the land and they're self-sustaining and they're kind of like, they're kind of like preppers. You know who I'm talking about. I don't know. God damn it, dude. What is that? We were just talking about the other day. No, it's like a sect of Christianity, but they're, they're not Christians, they're, they're not Jesuits, they're, I don't know why, I don't know why I'm having this brain far right now. Well, certainly they're a heavily armed group of people who are prepared for this kind of thing. Yeah, but anyways, the point, the point, the point I was trying to make is this, this religious faction, Mormons, no, anyways, maybe it's Mormons. I don't remember. Anyway, the point that this person was making is that people are going to target them and try to go to them because they're going to be self-sustaining, they're going to have a lot of self-sustaining resources, which is why they are armed to the teeth with all kinds of weapons. People live in Mexico and they're basically like, they're like cartels because they know people are going to come after them in this kind of event. I'd put my money on the defense department because they are, they outarm everybody. Yeah. And they also have a very organized plan in place. I think that's what readers will really find pretty shocking when you see when devolution begins to happen and the defense department moves into the Insurrection Act, which repeals Posse Comatotes and allows the defense department to arms soldiers to try and enforce the law. I take readers through what happens and I think it's super interesting and you just begin to go, wow, they have, this is all based on plans that exist and you realize the ultimate idea of cog-con continuity of government plan is to make sure that a tiny spine, a tiny architecture of the U.S. government survives so that it can reconstitute. And in fact, the final phase of devolution is called reconstitution, which is this sort of utopic idea that one day the government will re-emerge like a phoenix from the ashes. It's so anti-constitutional, like it's so anti-declaration of independence in the book and how it's so counterintuitive to this idea of how just the top, top level of people that's all they care about is their own survival. But again, I really believe that biological weapons are a man-made problem, same as nuclear war, nuclear weapons, man-made problem, therefore there's a man-made solution. Kind of looping to my other point, it's like if everybody's so busy talking about UFOs, you're not really talking about the real problem. I do not foresee the UFO invasion, an alien invasion anytime soon. But I do for, look, we had a pandemic. The case fatality rate of COVID was 1%, imagine if it had been 30%, like Hauntivirus, now make it 100%. Make everyone-- Hauntivirus was 30%. Hauntivirus is 30%, but it's not airborne. It was the big myth in May when there was the outbreak of Hauntivirus. What's happened with that? Is that gone? It is over because it is transmissible through spit essentially. Have you ever been really close to anybody at a party talking to them and then you kind of have to do this? They've bi-- you know, don't do that. You wipe your-- that, and then you wipe your eyes or your nose or your mouth, you know? Just leave it sitting there. You don't even speak that close to people, right? Right, right. Stay away from the spitters. Right. It's, you know, that's called droplet transmission. Yes. So it's a form of human to human. That's what we thought COVID was at one point. Yes. Very different. Human to human transmission through droplets is different than airborne, airborne means it's aerosolized. It lingers in the air. So that is a huge-- people need to know the distinction. And Hauntivirus was not that. It was not. Fear because of the unknowns about the Andes strain of the Hauntivirus. That it was maybe airborne. And to my eye, when I was watching that unfold, I don't think anyone acted out of, you know, I think people were behaving very conservatively and appropriately, health officials. But again, you know, people, there was sort of-- everyone leapt on the current administration for quarantining people. Well, I take the reader in the book very quickly through what quarantine really means and the presidential authority to do so. And you will think twice before you have like a quick opinion about that. And again, concept behind all of it, stay informed, stay informed. And you know, like also the part about the military quite literally opening fire on migrants that are going to start storming this place, storming this country and probably other countries too, if this thing, if something like leaks in and people get into another country or Caribbean Island or something like that, like all the immigrants that are going to be coming in, like that's a conundrum, you know, like what do you do if there's like this demonic demon plague that's killing people in 24 hours and they're bleeding from every orifice of their body. Are you just going to, out of the goodness of your heart, let all these people escape from these islands and come to Florida or are you going to mow them down? I mean, you brought up a great and very controversial point in the book and thank you for bringing that up because, you know, that sounds so crazy. Like, what, wait, what, the coast, the U.S. coast guards can start shooting migrants that are trying to come here? Well yes, and that is not from Annie Jacobson's imagination. That is a play out of an unclassified biological weapons attack war game done by U.S. officials who had recently retired. That is a major fear and it has to do with, you know, every kind of worst fear that any of us can think about because of, imagine the kind of mayhem that would ensue. And do we have these things here? Do we have these super plague weapons in like the continental United States, deepened within a lab somewhere, do you think? Look, that would, we, those are illegal. It is illegal to have a biological weapon. So what are in the freezers at U.S. amrad? Maybe I'll, maybe I'll, you know, close out with this, which is kind of these BSL labs, right? Safety level four lab is, that's where you're in what looks like a space suit. You have, you know, you're hooked up to a breathing tube. You're working with your arms in an autoclave, you know, everything is disinfected. Once upon a time before 9/11, there were two in the United States at U.S. amrad, which is at Fort Dietrich and at the CDC in Atlanta, two. Now there are around 15 or 17, it's hard to pin down. There is no organization responsible for making this information public. This is from scientists who work on this, yes. There are 110 BSL four labs in something like 34 countries around the world. Okay. So think about, and no oversight and some of these, you know, Japan has one in the center of a Tokyo with 37 million people around it. Look at Wuhan. So then there's also the idea of the BSL three lab, which is just right below BSL four. BSL four has Ebola and others that there is absolutely no medical countermeasure for. BSL three labs have pathogens in them that there are allegedly countermeasures for. But what if they are defeated? Okay. So like plague, you work on plague in a BSL three lab. I visited a BSL three lab when I was reporting the book, Hunter virus is there, anthrax, rabies, all of this in BSL three, are you ready for this? There are now 3,500 BSL three labs around the world. There are places where there are wars going on. Something like between 50 and again, these statistics are fungible. Something like between 50 and 80 or 90% of those 3,500 BSL three labs have no safety standards. So it's kind of like, as is in the country. And again, these are tracked by scientists and academics. And then you can't, if one of them leaks out or say like a cartel gets their hands, like similar to what you talked about in the nuclear war book, you know, if a cartel gets their hands on one of these things and tries to use it, it's how do you, where do you attribute the origin? Like you don't know. It's just, wow, the genies out of the bottle. The genie could very easily be out of the bottle. Yes. That's terrifying. Thank you. I'm going to sleep well tonight. Thank you for doing this, Annie. What is going to be your next book? Close hold. But I'll be back to talk to you about it. Not on UFOs. Not on UFOs. Not on UFOs. Lot more serious threats. Yeah. Well, I look forward to it. Thank you for doing this. Your book is assuming that this podcast is going to be dropping probably right when your book's dropping. So it will link all that stuff below. And anything else we should tell folks for you to part? Stay informed. All right. Thanks again. Thank you so much, Dan. Sleep tight, everyone. I'm Shannon Maldonado, the professor of Art and Technology at Jaui Lajakaoban Perusta. I was very busy with shopping because I was able to find out the results of the event. I was able to find out the results of the event because I was able to find out the results of the event.