Something Scary Is Happening In Biolabs - Annie Jacobsen - #1127

28:23Annie Jacobsen:And that is where he went, he decided to defect and tell the West. So he went to the embassy. He actually went to the Canadian embassy first, and they didn't believe him, and they sent him away. And he went back to a phone booth, and he called the British embassy. They took him very seriously, picked him up in a car, and a day later, he was sitting in London in a safe house across the table, just like you and I are now, from Dr. Christopher Davis, who was pretty much the only guy assigned to biological weapons. in the British intelligence because there were no biological weapons. There weren't supposed to be.

29:07So he was this young surgeon commander and he knew a lot about biological weapons.

29:12Annie Jacobsen:And I've interviewed him at length for the book. Imagine him learning about this and learning about the super plague weapon and going. And then the British told their American counterparts at the CIA, it was verified. And that - How was it verified? We sent, so Davis and another colleague went to the CIA in Langley, had a discussion with them, told them everything that Peseschnik had said. These guys are MDs and PhDs. And the CIA was like, okay, well, we have to verify it ourselves. They sent Joshua Lederberg, who's a very famous Nobel laureate to the UK to interview Poseschnik himself. And Dr.

29:58Annie Jacobsen:Davis was there in that room, and he said, Lederberg was like, the way he said it was, the scales fell off his eyes. Oh my God. Like, not only what have they done, but how did we not know this? They were manufacturing tons of plague weapon tons of smallpox weapon and the system the delivery systems were such in those days they weren't airborne truly airborne they were going to be delivered you know on like sort of low flying cruise missiles and dropped there was a whole weaponization that had to happen in capsules in bombs or in like you put they had they had engineered and actually correctly engineered that was part of the verification process creating warheads that could survive this incredible heat um and their delivery systems work but that those were never used okay so that's how weapons can be used to attack but surely everyone also needs to build biodefenses as well and this is the big conundrum this is there's a paradox there right yeah the effort to defend against biological attacks results in more labs being built which increases the opportunity for a biological catastrophe because you don't just have purposeful deliberate leaks or attacks.

31:17You don't just have purposeful attacks, you also have accidental leaks.

31:21Annie Jacobsen:Absolutely. And maybe no one would be crazy enough to use a biological weapon because they know about blowback now. You know what happens with a pandemic, except a terrorist organization that doesn't value life, shall we say, certainly in the same manner as you know the west um but the lab accidents and the lab leaks are a very serious concern and should be but let's talk about labs for a minute because i think it's very interesting to look at numbers so we just spoke of like in the 90s you know the u.s finds out about the soviet program clinton makes the use of a biological weapon a death penalty event uh offense the system really vamps up the cold war is down now there's a new enemy i mean the the cold war is over the walls down now there's a new enemy it's definitely biological weapons terrorists start to enter into the fold and then 9-11 happens and when and most people forget or aren't old enough to remember that just a few weeks after 9-11 there was an anthrax attack against the senate yeah and that moved the biological, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, biodefense industry, call it what you will, into high gear.

32:40Annie Jacobsen:And that's where a whole new system of science unfolded to work on exactly what you're talking about, medical countermeasures in the event of a biological attack. And so, for example, there were two BSL-4 labs. That's the highest maximum containment, biosafety level four the you know the zoot suits the space suits and the hose with the air and you're working in an autoclave and there's like it's very it's an autoclave you know all your hands are in yeah yeah gloves and the path like an empty fish tank with with gloves you've seen it in movies yeah that's bsl4 there were two of them defense department had one at fort dietrich civil sector cdc had one in atlanta after 9-11 15 bsl4 labs and over a thousand bsl3 labs bsl3 is just one step down that's where you work on plague hantavirus what you work on in bsl4 if you've got plague and hantavirus and bsl3 and this was very interesting to learn about this because I had that same question.

33:47Annie Jacobsen:BSL-4 is absolutely no known cure. It's Ebola. It's Marburg. It's Nipah. No known cure. And I don't know Marburg or Nipah. They're virus. They're viruses. Natural? Yeah. These are all mother nature. And then the plague, remember, plague should be able to be, the plague bacteria should be killed by antibiotics. When you get into genetic modification, now we have a different story. Hantavirus should be able to be contained. But yes, it's a very good question about what's the difference between BSL-4 and BSL-3 if you're working gain of function in them. But these labs blew up in number. And they also did around the world how how many viruses are you aware of that have been created or bioweapon bioweapon analogs have been created from scratch is there such a thing that great question that's called synthetic biology and that is very new like third generation recombinant dna crisper where you yes you can create something that does not exist in nature.

35:07Or that is a chimera gain of function of an existing thing that exists.

35:12Annie Jacobsen:And that's not necessarily, well, that's sort of at the edge of synthetic biology. Yes, it does involve synthetic biology, but you can actually create a completely new blank slate. And that's where you're getting into the area. And certainly with AI. Are you aware of any of those that have been made? that is so incredibly classified i mean i would have to guess your entire body of work seems incredibly classified well no i mean this is what's interesting people sometimes say to me annie how do you get classified information i don't my sources would be in prison i name my sources so they're taking me up to the edge of what can be known when we get into devolution which is the program to save a small group of individuals when everyone else is dying, mass anarchy and insurrection unfolds across the United States and everywhere.

36:04Annie Jacobsen:That is a classified program, devolution, spooky, evolution, devolution, okay? Classified program, but the name has been declassified. So like five years ago, the name - You can't listen to my new album, but I'll tell you what it's called. Or the river, right, you know? I'll tell you what it's called but you can't listen to it right yeah most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit but what if I told you there was a solution something that identifies low T faster than a high school bully and it won't cost you all your lunch money that's where Function comes in gives you access to over 160 lab tests including a deep dive into your full hormone panel every result is reviewed by clinicians anything out of range is flagged you get clear explanations with a personalized protocol with actionable next steps.

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37:30Okay, as far as you're aware, what are the most risky or controversial experiments that have happened in bioweapons so far?

37:40Annie Jacobsen:Well, okay, so technically they're not in bioweapons. They are in, you know, biological countermeasure pursuits, okay? Because remember, biological weapon engineering is illegal. just a few basic ones that are good to know and also how old some of this technology is is like right around 2000 2001 there was a mouse pox experiment it was one of the first ones so in Australia they took scientists there just wanted to experiment and see and they took mice that had been vaccinated and they gave them mouse pox which is similar to smallpox to see if they could defeat the vaccine. And they did. So that was a terrifying moment in bioengineering because you realized you could defeat a countermeasure.

38:31Annie Jacobsen:That's where you're engineering something to evade cure. That's incredibly dangerous. And then like 10, 12 years later, there was a modification on H5N1. It was called the ferret flu experiment. And the scientists working on that made H5N1 airborne. Before that, it was not airborne. So there's a lesser airborne version, which is like if you and I are talking, have you ever been at a party with someone, loud music, and they spit on you? That's called droplet transmission, right? And, you know, we've all had it happen, and you kind of like go, right? It's just gross, but it happens. Definitely never rub your eye.

39:21Never rub your eye.

39:22Annie Jacobsen:Or your nose. Okay. Or put your finger in your mouth. Okay. Those are the three. That's how droplet transmission occurs. Okay. Eye, nose, mouth. Right. Okay? That's not airborne. Airborne is aerosolized. Airborne is just it's in the air and it's floating in the air and it can stay in the air. And so what scientists did in that 2012 experiment is they made something that was droplet transmission. And that's, you know, if I back way up and you're over there and you're not leaning in close to talking to me, I'm not going to get your – if you're infected. But realistically, that's what those big plastic welding shields that people were wearing during COVID, that's really all that they would have been good for.

40:07Annie Jacobsen:Precisely. And that's what the mask does. If somebody spits on you, it's a layer of protection. Presumably, this is kind of necessary but not sufficient. If something is aerosolized, it also has to be transmissible through saliva, like through droplet. Absolutely. Because droplet is basically liquidized, aerosolized. Yeah, that's just a fact. Like if you gave, in my scenario, somebody gives somebody CPR. Sayonara. And that has to do with how quickly you're going to then be infected yourself. Because this is, again, squishy biology. It's not perfect. It's one of the major problems with COVID, with your analogy of how it just became so terrible.

40:47Annie Jacobsen:Because health officials refuse to say, you know what, we don't know. We don't know yet. They couldn't say that. Instead, they said, COVID's not airborne. And then later they had to backtrack. Well, imagine all of us that didn't know better were saying, why are they telling us X when it's really Y? Yeah, you're the boy who cried wolf. So do you think it's fair to say that biotechnology is sort of the most powerful but also least controllable technology that we've got as a civilization? I would say nuclear weapons are the most powerful, just in terms of destruction and in terms of temperature, right?

41:21Annie Jacobsen:By all means. But biological weapons are the most dangerous for precisely the reason you say, because they are – look, there's no barrier to entry. Nuclear weapons are control – first of all, you have to have uranium or plutonium. And that is very difficult. Then you have to have a nation state that can afford that. And then you have to have a delivery system. You can't just drop a nuclear weapon in a field. You have to deliver it. That is incredibly expensive. The barrier to entry is high. It's why, thank God, we have not had a nuclear event since the first two bombs were dropped in World War II.

42:02Annie Jacobsen:Biological weapons have no barrier to entry anymore. You can essentially engineer a pathogen with very limited biology in your basement. The desktop printer. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. And everybody in the business of biological weapons knows that. And the solution must be to be informed. And it must be to have a capacity to understand what can really happen. I guess you looked at the green, amber, red system that's used for desktop, is it biosynthesizers? So I remember learning this from The End of the World with Josh Clark, which is my favorite limited series podcast from like eight years ago.

42:46in it he's talking about how bioweapons now you can have these uh tabletop synthesizers and uh in order to synthesize different um dna structures they get run through a library that stress tests what it is that you're trying to synthesize and you can do green all day long uh amber needs a level of clearance and if you do red there is you can't do it first off and there is a like fbi coming kick your door down but nick bostrom's got this really interesting experiment he's from the future of humanity institute the same that toby is and he says it's only due to sort of luck of chemistry and physics that you can't create an atom bomb by putting sand in your microwave by combining something that is very readily available with the technology that is easily accessible and the fact that that's not the case like hooray but that it didn't need to be that way it could be the case that there could be a type of technology there could be a type of destruction which is enabled by an easily accessible technology with or without some easily accessible resource uh and yeah as we democratize information and technology each time that you do that he refers to it as drawing balls out of an urn have you heard this example before I have.

44:09So you have an urn with an unknown number of balls in, and for every one that you draw out, that's like technological progress. So you put your hand into the urn, and you draw out a ball. And sometimes they're white, and they make the world a better place. Hooray, you pull out another one, and it's white, and it makes the world a better place. And then you pull out one, and it's gray. And it makes the world a better place, but it also makes it a more dangerous place. Better place, more dangerous place. But inside the urn of an unknown number of balls are an unknown number of black balls. If you pull one of those out, it's game over.

44:38And that is the kind of technology that as you make progress, this is a guy who is from the Future of Humanity Institute. He's the most cited philosopher under the age of 50 in the world, this guy.

44:50Annie Jacobsen:Bostrom. Bostrom. Yeah. Yes. If you pull out the black ball, but you don't even need to pull out the black one. If you just pull out enough gray ones, the risk begins to combine to the point where it's very dangerous. Okay, let's war game out your nightmare scenario. So day one, what happens? Explosion at the Vector Lab in Russia. And the reason that I chose that is why I chose many plot points in the scenarios. It happened once before. In 2019, there was an explosion at the Vector Lab. Vector is the BSL-4 facility where a majority of the Soviet bioweapons program occurred back during the Cold War.

45:33Where is it?

45:33Annie Jacobsen:It's in just outside of Novosibirsk, Siberia. Okay. And so that may sound like the middle of nowhere. It's actually in a small sort of village, a science city called Kosovo, eight miles from Novosibirsk. Siberia. You know, people are like, wait, Siberia? Is that a real place? It is. Okay. Sounds far away. It's the third largest city in Russia after Moscow and St. Petersburg. 1.6 million people. And most BSL-4 labs, or many BSL-4 labs, by the way, are just right in the middle of some of the largest population centers in the world. Tokyo, South Africa, Atlanta, right? So that's how it begins. I have an explosion in the lab, but unlike what happened in 2019, where there was no release, as far as anyone knows, there is a release of a pathogen.

46:30Annie Jacobsen:and its pneumonic plague and its genetically modified pneumonic plague. And I take the reader through the military system of systems as I have spent my career working to understand all that to see how the DOD reacts and to see how and when the president will be told and to see how and when the different agencies get involved. and to me that was just an extraordinary you know learning curve and a sort of like whoa along the way with the number one thing leading the charge that every sort of expert in any of those agencies told me was annie if you can stop something with 12 to 24 hours 12 to 24 to 36 hours if you can stop it in his tracks you can prevent a pandemic but of course because biological weapons are illegal, no one wants to admit they have biological weapons in their freezers.

47:28Annie Jacobsen:And so... The host nation's immediately going to try and cover it up or deny it. And that is the natural response across history. There was a famous case in Sverdlovsk in Russia in 1979 where they were weaponizing anthrax. They were milling it into powder. Anthrax is an interesting pathogen because it's called a dead-end host right so if you get anthrax it's not transmissible you get it in your lungs and you die but you can't it's not airborne but it's like a super killer and for whatever reason it was sort of favored you know pathogen of the cold war we had an anthrax program too so there was a there was some guy some you know engineer in the garrison 19 where they were milling the anthrax into tons of weapons forgot to change the air filter and it got out and it killed a hundred people in the town and so the soviet politburo you can imagine the generals with their tall boots came in and were like it's contaminated meat and it was you know it was an escape it was a lab escape and they denied it for decades now it's known to be this kind of a situation.

48:44Annie Jacobsen:So a lab leak, a lab accident is really a very dangerous situation. Would the US be aware? Because presumably they've got satellites that see if they'll have an idea about where potential labs are. They'll be trying to track, hey, has there been some sort of kinetic event that's occurred there? And what's the process of what's You're absolutely right. I mean, with nuclear weapons, we have satellites parked in geosync over all the facilities to look for that launch in the first second that it happens. And we see it and we know it. A lab accident is different. It's a different kind of explosion, but they measure it from space.

49:26Annie Jacobsen:They know it's not an ICBM launch. It's an explosion. And the reason specifically why they have eyes on the vector lab is not just because it's like a super dangerous lab that's known to probably have all the bioweapons, but because it's just a few miles from an ICBM facility in Novosibirsk. So the Defense Department officials I interviewed said, absolutely, Annie, we'd have eyes on it, we'd know it, and we'd call it in. But what do you do? What do you do? you know you you reach out to moscow through your state department people i spoke to state department officials that work in the business of counter proliferation this is sort of like a fancy word for saying trying to stop you know biological weapons in their tracks they would make an overture no response so now you're met with the do we drop the nuke or not question you are met with that because you only have 12 hours 24 hours probably at most yeah and that you know that is a scenario that we've seen in hollywood movies it's actually a could very plausibly be a real scenario but who's going to do that because it's almost certainly going to trigger a nuclear exchange certainly not interesting to think about the way that nuclear weapons work at least the old the old style ones where you had uh well even the new ones, right?

50:50The H-bomb, you have a trigger, and then that is the explosion. And in this, you would have a trigger before the trigger, and the trigger would be the bioweapon leak. That would cause the nuclear attack, which would also have its trigger inside of a trigger. And then you're talking about what's called a wicked problem.

51:09Annie Jacobsen:A wicked problem in defense department nomenclature is a problem that only creates more problems with its solution. And by the time you deploy the air quote solution, new problems have been created. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. If you're going to spend an hour in the gym, you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it. Gymshark makes the best men's and women's training gear on the planet. And here is something I realized a few years into training. When you actually like what you're wearing in the gym, you show up differently. You You train harder, you stay longer, you get way more high fives.

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52:17I'm heading to jim.sh slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom10 at checkout. That's jim.sh slash modernwisdom at modernwisdom10 at checkout. Okay, so if there's a leak, it becomes really difficult to determine whether or not a biological release has happened. All of this machinery spins up. Any host nation that's fucked it and dropped the ball doesn't want to admit it.

52:40Annie Jacobsen:Yep. day two what happens so back up for a second because i'm going to tell you some really interesting intelligence collection methods that are wild to think about so we you know that so the the entire intelligence community in the united states at this point in a scenario is now focused on did what is our people dying that's what they need to find out or what is the what is the russian government doing that makes us think they know there's been a lab escape yeah and so there's NSA listening to the SIGINT. There's NRO looking down. So NRO is the eyes. NSA is the ears. What's NRO? The National Reconnaissance Office Organization.

53:19Annie Jacobsen:So that's space satellites. And then you have a really interesting collection component called MAZINT, which is Measurement and Signature Intelligence. And it's sniffing. So we have sensors, or maybe we have sensors, I'll put it that way, in facilities. I mean, I'm talking like sewer pipes, maybe the walls, on signs. You can put a maize sensor on anything that moves. It could be on a drone. It could be in a vehicle. It could be in a sprinkler system. And that is sniffing for a level. and the intelligence officers are looking for change. So when the signatures change, and that would usually have to do with chemicals that would be used by the Russian government that would be deployed to try to mitigate the aerosol release.

54:21Annie Jacobsen:Oh, that's interesting. What sort of chemicals can you do that try to mitigate those? I write them in the book. They're a little hard to pronounce. What do they achieve? Well, it's like a dum-dum version of ammonia, right? So imagine if a pathogen spilled on this table, you know, get out the – like you would try and clean it up with rubbing alcohol, ammonia. Well, these are like industrial versions of those drugs. And you see spraying. You saw that. I remember when COVID happened in Iran, there were trucks going down the street with hoses and people were just spraying. you know government people were spraying the streets with an unknown chemical we i don't know what it was i'm sure somebody in the you know intelligence community knows you can do that in a totalitarian-esque country because no one has a say you can't do that here in austin people would be like they would freak out yeah yeah but the in a place like russia you could do that and that's being looked at.

55:25Annie Jacobsen:So I take the reader through these different, you know, you see this entire billion dollar industry go into effect to try and determine, has there been a lab leak? Are people dying? And if so, how? But the number one thing that has to be identified is what is the pathogen? Is it a virus? Is it a bacteria? Very interesting distinction that most people don't know. A pathogen is a germ that will kill you. Germs are germs. We all have germs, germs in our guts. But a pathogen is a dangerous, deadly germ, potentially. Virus, bacteria. Plague is bacteria, not virus. What's more deadly? It depends. I mean, plague without a flu is a virus.

56:09Annie Jacobsen:You get the flu. The case fatality rate is 0.1. It's not that deadly. You get plague that's genetically modified to evade antibiotics. It's 100 % death. So it depends. What's the most deadly virus that you're aware of? I mean, Ebola is, Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, they're up there in terms of if you get Ebola, your chances of living are very low. Now, medical countermeasures have been developed from the 2014 variant of Ebola. There's a medical countermeasure called ZMAP, and it was given to two nurses in Texas, for example, that I write a little vignette in the book about it. And that was a medical countermeasure, and they did not die of COVID.

56:59Annie Jacobsen:The host died, didn't have it. But the mutated version of Ebola that we're seeing right now in the Congo, ZMAP doesn't work because it's a variant. No reason to believe it's genetically modified. Mother nature does her own modifications. That's the nature of evolution. We talked about incubation period. Am I right in saying that that is the amount of time that somebody can be exposed and it's in their system before they show or feel symptoms? Is that correct? Okay. In your scenario, how long is that incubation period? It's very small. It's very squishy, meaning one to three days depending on your dosage.

57:40Annie Jacobsen:So I told you, the guy who gave CPR to the infected person, that's a short incubation time. The person who's germaphobic and stayed back and the aerosolization of it got a different dose, maybe a little bit longer. Is there such a thing as a sort of dose responsiveness with virus or plagues that how much of it do you need to be exposed to before it reaches critical mass to then be able to infect you? That's a terrific question. And I was shocked by, I asked that same question too. So there's a guy in the book called Dr. Henry Hine, and he is one of the world's experts on plague. He spent his entire life studying plague and creating medical countermeasures for plague.

58:20Annie Jacobsen:He worked at USAMRID, which is the Defense Department's only BSL-4 lab. He worked there during the anthrax. And I asked him that question. And he said to me, okay, so for example, with plague, 40 ,000 plague particles fit on the head of a pin. That's how tiny they are. Very low dosage, like 100, 500, 1 ,000, you got it. Okay. Now, this is what really blew my mind when Hein told me this. Dr. Hein told me this. He said, just to circle back to how little is known about so many pathogens. Today, with all the billions of people around the world infected with COVID, hundreds of millions or billions, depending who you're asking, we still do not know how many SARS-CoV-2 particles, that's the virus.

59:15Annie Jacobsen:We don't know how many. It's like the critical mass. We don't know. There's not an agreed upon number. Okay. So you actually chose something that has a relatively short incubation window. Is incubation window and lethality usually correlated? Does something with a longer incubation window tend to be less lethal? Another great question. And one that every, by the way, the questions you're asking are questions that everybody should ask and know and that is like sort of sliding us toward a hopeful situation because you can understand how complex some of these issues are and they have to be thought through and public health officials don't know everything and the defense department doesn't know everything and so yeah so your question was one more time incubation window and lethality they usually correlated my reason being you've chosen i've played what's that game plague plague Plague Inc.

1:00:06on mobile. Did you play that?

1:00:08Annie Jacobsen:I don't know about this. You don't know about this? Double check. Can you chat GPT for me, Jared, and see if it's called Plague Inc.? I'm pretty sure. Mobile game. It's one of the biggest games of all time. And in it, you design a plague. You design the incubation window, the transmission. You should partner with these guys. They'll be kind of morbid.

1:00:30Anyway, one of the things that I know you want is a long incubation window. because if you've got a long incubation window, people can be transmitting without knowing that they're sick.

1:00:42Annie Jacobsen:You stacked the deck against the global lethality of your virus in this book because you said one to three days. That's not that much. Some are 14 days. Is Ebola's quite a long time, I think? Yes. And again, it's squishy. It could be several weeks. And also, to your point, if it's a short incubation period, it often has a burnout factor. So it just, in other words, the person dies really quickly. Yes, that's the exact point. Short incubation window, lethality comes on quickly, therefore they don't have time to transmit it. And you went for that, right? So you've actually stacked the deck against you.

1:01:17You could have the plague and you could extend the incubation window out by seven days. That's seven days asymptomatic, unaware that you've been exposed to it, but still transmitting it. And that's where you get these real super spreader events.

1:01:30Annie Jacobsen:Yes. And I'm going to go back to why I specifically chose that. And it's really creepy. Okay. But before I do that, let me tell you about one other point to your point about long incubation period. There's also being an asymptomatic carrier. So people, we all know them who never got COVID or who actually tested positive for COVID and were simply not sick. And that's being an asymptomatic carrier, meaning you just don't show signs of the symptom. It doesn't affect your physiology the way it affects others. This particular strain at this particular time, you didn't get sick. And for example, this was a shocking fact I learned, polio.

1:02:07Annie Jacobsen:I mean, I just thought you got polio, you're paralyzed. Polio, only 1 % of carriers actually develop polio symptoms. I mean, why did I choose plague? I chose it for an incredibly sinister reason that is based in science, because I am a nonfiction author. Biological War scenario is sold in the nonfiction section. The Soviets, and this is what Dr. Hine told me, part of the Soviets' super plague weapon they were working on is they engineered into... And the Yersinia pestis bacteria, a gene for euphoria. Stay with me here. You get plague, you get flu, you get sick, you go home and you get under the covers.

1:03:02Annie Jacobsen:And you do not infect as many people as you would. but because they infected a gene for euphoria because they wanted people to be if you have euphoria you might you want to go to a disco and when what hein told me that that really sort of freaked out the samra doctors and scientists and said that is straight up evil that you would actually think that through and that's why i chose that because i wanted it to have an analogy in the real world. So does yours have the euphoria thing in it? Absolutely. It is genetically modified to have euphoria. So the first 24 hours, people are spent euphoric and they only essentially collapse into the disease when the euphoria wears off and now they're shedding bacteria.

1:03:50Annie Jacobsen:They're infecting people like nobody's business and they've been at places like discos. Okay. So you've got a bunch of happy people dancing around. How does that transmission chain begin in your book the transmission chain begins i'm i'm not going to totally spoiler alert all my plot points but outbreak in in in siberia you happen to have a group of international hunters who come across a scientist when they get on their planes to go home to five or six of the seven continents in a great mood in a fantastic mood one of them shot a wolf you know and uh there begins the spreading i also have a scientist that goes to a priest to confess what he's done and a person there gets infected who is a student at ucla gets on a plane and is immediately in los Angeles.

1:04:55Annie Jacobsen:So the outbreak, spoiler alert here, but you learned this pretty much in the beginning, the outbreak happens in Los Angeles in a homeless camp. Because I learned from all the epidemiologists that I work with that the homeless population is so incredibly dangerous to public health epidemics. Why? After 9-11, the CDC created a nationwide syndromic surveillance system called Biosense. So you have 7 ,000, more than 7 ,000 hospitals, urgent care facilities, emergency rooms, feeding information to the CDC in real time about an outbreak so that an outbreak stops before it becomes an epidemic, before it becomes a pandemic.

1:05:49Annie Jacobsen:America's 800 ,000 homeless people are not part of that system. All of the epidemiologists I talked to spoke of their great fear about transmission occurring in that kind of a situation. And Los Angeles is kind of ground zero for that. We have 75 ,000 homeless people. We have 4 ,000 homeless people on Skid Row with no healthcare, with no facilities. We're way past the time where America could have just nuked the host country. We're at hour 2436. Absolutely. I mean, you know, containment is possible. You could, if you had transparency from the host nation, right? If Russia had asked in my scenario.

1:06:41It has to be done by them, though. There's no time. You can't even get to Russia in the amount of time you need to contain it. Well, you can.

1:06:47Annie Jacobsen:We have people in Russia. Oh, yeah, yeah. Fair. But you don't have, you're right. the resources to be able to galvanize 100 ,000 hazmat suit wearing special forces people to go and say, hey, stay in this area and, you know, set up barricades and sentry checkpoints and all that sort of stuff. Although we actually do. Like if you could contain something before it balloons and becomes huge, and this is the same in the United States. I take the reader through once Once the outbreak happens, you learn. You know, we have a force, it's called a CBRN response force here in the United States. That's the WMD, Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear.

1:07:29Annie Jacobsen:They all train the same. We have 18 ,000 individuals that are ready to go at all times. But they wouldn't, that 18 ,000 people are in America. Yes. So it is on the host nation. Yes. It is on the host nation. And Russia has those same, their troops are called Archebeze. They have those troops too, and they could deploy them. And they do, and that's what happens in this scenario. Once we see they've deployed those troops, we know. But now it's too late. Now the cat's out of the bag. Right. So speed, from a containment perspective, from a restriction of how lethal this could be, speed of containment is paramount, most important?

1:08:04Everything.

1:08:05Annie Jacobsen:Everything. Everything. And it could be stopped. And then you have the same situation in the United States where it could be stopped. But this is where we get into your brilliant analogy, which is that no one trusts the system. And that's where you see in the scenario that I write, everything breaks down. And to have learned as I did, that what really makes the Defense Department extremely uneasy is not necessarily the original outbreak, but the secondary effect of anarchy and insurrection that happens in response. When does devolution happen? so in the scenario i write because we're dealing with plague which is fast it's a fast killer i take the reader from outbreak to anarchy in six days that is how fast it happens and on day six we have devolution okay okay well in that case we'll get to that uh so homeless encampment la student ucla student goes back la's not great densely populated he's a pre-med student and he does pro bono work there at the at skid row which is literally the worst place for him to be and he gives you know that's a super spreader event those homeless camps are super spreader events and that's what happens this episode is brought to you by whoop according to my whoop i've tracked nearly 2 000 days of my life and the thing that still gets me is that i could have predicted almost every bad day before it happens that's because whoop gives you a complete picture of your health every single day.

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1:10:16And there's a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30-day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash Modern Wisdom. What are the contributing elements or the characteristics of a super spreader event? High density?

1:10:43Annie Jacobsen:Yeah, poor airflow. Right. So you got, you know, tents. Yeah, pretty good airflow if you're in a… Tent? Outdoor environment, if you're under a bridge. Nah, it's tents. It's inside tents. But more than anything, what you have is a very serious problem. First of all, you know, you've got free clinics. I mean, I spent quite a bit of time down on Skid Row interviewing people about this. And you've got, you know, no public health care. You've got long lines for these free clinics. And you have first responders. You have these brilliant nurses and doctors who work down there. A lot of them pro bono also.

1:11:19Annie Jacobsen:Diagnosing people, you're trying to differentiate between fentanyl overdosing, you know, tuberculosis, flu acute flu real serious problems that almost every homeless person has physical health problems with what looks like a bad cold and you know coughing up blood another you know mistaken for alcoholism so i take the reader through the science of this so that you can really see the close proximity of alarmism and there's nothing wrong here which everybody wants to do They want to reassure the populace. They want to try and stave off the anarchy and the civilizational citizenry collapse. But also by doing that, you don't galvanize the sort of response that you need to stop it from happening.

1:12:08Annie Jacobsen:And when you do galvanize it, what was really the most surprising to me was that once the Defense Department goes from what's called warnord, that's a warning order, to exord, which is execution order, right? That's like get ready to go and go with guys in biohazard suits to try to mitigate damage. It's too late. It's too late. And I was really stunned to learn that at that point, the pivot is not, let's try and protect the population. It's, we need to protect critical infrastructure. What does critical infrastructure consist of? Everything that keeps society running, roads, water systems, of course, nuclear power plant, every single DOD facility.

1:12:56Annie Jacobsen:And that's where those initially the 18 ,000 C-Burn forces in their suits and their gas masks go. And then the entire Defense Department gets deployed. And what's really shocking is, again, this is not Annie's imagination. These are war gaming situations that are gamed out. There's a lot of classified ones, which have been alluded to me. There's a lot of unclassified ones. And what's fascinating is all the unclassified ones or these public health officials do these biological war game scenarios or rather pandemic scenarios is what they call them. and actually also where the weapons are deployed.

1:13:38And they always end right where we're talking about now.

1:13:44Annie Jacobsen:They always, everybody gets sick. Anarchy starts to happen. Millions of people or tens of millions of people are dying. And then the game's over. And that is where I begin, when I was reporting this, you know, back in time, I was like, hmm why why is the game always ending right when insurrection happens and it's because it's too painful to know what happens next but the government certainly knows what happens next and they have a plan for it what happens next what happens next devolution and this is this is again from craig fugate obama's fema director told me you know um everybody's heard of uh you know call of um defcon right defcon defense condition so you you if you're normally at five if you move to you know three i think 9 11 it was three we've never been at two one means nuclear war there's a there's a plan called cog con continuity of government plan and that is continuity of government is exactly like it sounds like when the shit hits the fan the government has to keep running.

1:14:56Annie Jacobsen:And that is the plan for devolution. So there is a select group of individuals who have been pre-chosen. They all know who they are. They all have go-bags in their car, in their trunk. Really makes you think about all the people that you know that have a go-bag. If they work for the government for sure. You know, they have been chosen. And they go. And they go to these different facilities.

1:15:23what are the facilities in the u.s yes okay yes have you got any information about them those in that is what's called a sap program so special access program like no go no no talk about it um i'm not going to spoiler alert the very ending of the book because

1:15:42Annie Jacobsen:i don't mean to smile because it's so terrible it's not like um but craig fugate told me what happens to the president and um where he goes and i write about it in the book unreal yeah unreal i had a and by the way he tells me in a generic way not like he doesn't give me the coordinates i had a futurist on the show a couple years ago and he got invited out by he'd written a book before that was quite successful about technology and he got invited to this very powerful rich people dinner and they're talking to him about his work and about his books and he's sort of a little unsure about why he was there and then there's this moment where the whole conversation the whole tone in the room changed one of the guys the main guy that invited him just turned to him and he said okay iceland or new zealand yeah yeah yeah and he said what he goes iceland or New Zealand.

1:16:42We're all talking about where to build our bunkers, Iceland or New Zealand. And actually, while you're on that, we're thinking about how we're going to keep control of our armed guards that are special forces that work for us. And what we're thinking about is putting them in shot collars. And if we can put them in shot collars, then we'll be able to control them all the time. But also what we're thinking about is if we control all of the food, we can just drip feed food to them but we also understand that you know high t ex special forces guys that are being starved and they know that they're working for a space in our food that's probably not that secure so we're going to try and incentivize so we're thinking about instead one of the other guys had this great idea about incentivizing them instead then what he said was like well if we if we can give them uh bitcoin if we've got enough bitcoin then the bitcoin's going to be but then if we're in a post-money society because everything's an apocalyptic wasteland then that's not really going to work either so yeah i guess iceland new zealand shock collar's food bitcoin no bitcoin what do you think and he's like what oh this is why i was brought here this is why you guys wanted me here because you think that i've got the answer to this

1:17:48Annie Jacobsen:question the shock collar is an amazing detail um i have been invited to a number of those dinners and there's like a little more specifics about is my jeep 650 gonna get me to new zealand in this amount of time, you know, that, but I've never heard the shock collar part. And that is brilliant in that grotesque way. But I would put my money having interviewed a lot of special forces guys and CIA ground branch guys, I put my money on that shock collar is not going to do jack whatever on them. You know, that's like, people can withstand that. But that would be the most the biggest problem, because no one's going to work for you anymore.

1:18:28Annie Jacobsen:No one is going to work for you. It's every man. You know, I did this every now and then in the process, reporting a book, someone gives me a quote that I go like, you know, it takes my breath away and it makes me realize I can reverse engineer parts of the story from that quote. And the one on this book came from former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. So he was the subject of the anthrax attack after 9-11, right? So the anthrax got sent to his office on Capitol Hill. And he's dedicated, you know, the decades since to this issue of biological warfare. And when I asked him, I asked him to tell me, he'd read Nuclear War, my book Nuclear War, and I said, he said, Annie, unlike nuclear war, biological warfare will be deeply nightmarish.

1:19:18Annie Jacobsen:It will be the death of government. It will be the death of people. It will be the death of everything you know and then he said this he said people doing in human things just survive and i don't stop thinking about that because that idea that the only people who would survive biological war would be military personnel who never took off their gas masks so never got the pathogen in their lungs and these sort of Machiavellian solipsist loners who were just willing to do any kind of inhuman thing to survive. Well, I guess there's going to be an inevitable breakdown in law and order, right? So civil society gets destroyed and it sounds like citizens basically have to confront the choice between obedience, survival, and resistance.

1:20:21Annie Jacobsen:and how do you resist by yourself? You need like sort of a tribe to resist, and that's the problem, because if you're around other people, chances are somebody has it. The thing that you need in order to be able to coordinate enough to push back against the... Okay, so... So it's like complete loners. Well, no one has trust over anybody else, right? The citizens don't trust the government. And the armed forces that are meant to keep the citizens in check can't trust themselves. Nobody can trust each other because you don't know if someone else is infected. Hospitals are overrun. Hospitals are over at this point.

1:21:03Annie Jacobsen:Yeah. Keep going. Hospitals are morgues. Hospitals are just like wastelands that no one wants to go near. But I interrupted you and you were on a very interesting roll. It's just everybody treats everybody else as a potential threat, right? So biological warfare is uniquely destructive because it attacks the trust that's necessary for civilization to exist. Trust, trust. It's all about, you know, I read, so the worst plague, the bubonic plague, the Black Death of the 14th century. Is that the worst thing that we've had? It's the most chronicled. And so it killed between one third and one half of Europe.

1:21:45Annie Jacobsen:It started in 1346 and ended in 1352. Interestingly, it started, it is understood to have started what you were saying about, you know, catapulting animals. It started in Crimea, and the invading Mongol forces catapulted a plague-infested body, a bubonic plague-infested body, over the walls, the castle walls. And everybody died. And then those people all went to Italy because they were Genoese, which was the controlling party in that area of Crimea at the time. And they brought the bubonic plague to Europe. Well, wasn't that – the word quarantine comes from – Absolutely. is 40 days yeah it's 40 days in italian yeah they would make the ships stay out at sea for 40 days yes and then there'd be like all skeletons but the i read a lot of contemporary accounts of of people who survive that plague and i referenced them in the book because it's really spooky you know and it's real hang on who survived what plague that plague right so so another i mean contemporarily, right?

1:22:54Annie Jacobsen:So people who, there's a famous book called The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio and an Italian notary. And he writes about what it was like at that time and copies, you know, we have it, we have the translation. It's really interesting to read, but it gives, and I refer to it again so that readers feel like, oh, I mean, you did a fabulous job of sort of the imaginative version of it. But it's actually very scientific because that's human nature. You know, the contemporary accounts talk about like, you know, people abandoning their children. It talks about like feral children foraging for food in fields.

1:23:33Annie Jacobsen:It talks about, you know, feral pigs eating dead bodies. How close do you think we came in COVID to total like anarchy because we saw people worried and hoarding toilet paper and stuff like that it's so interesting it's such a silly funny thing especially in retrospect to look back and think oh my god we were no and there was no eggs and the reason there wasn't any eggs wasn't because we didn't have any eggs it's because we didn't have any egg cartons which was kind of interesting supply chain supply chain problem not funny oh my god um where do the egg cartons come from uh i'm not sure but just the processing of being able to produce egg cartons is harder than that you have to have the carton you can't like use a different container exactly interestingly in in nightclubs you know when people buy those big huge bottles of vodka uh the most expensive part from a production standpoint of making the vodka is not the vodka it's the bottle the glass is more expensive than the liquid that's inside of it even though you're paying a ton of money uh anyway we saw that was a bit and in retrospect when you think about covid as a scary scenario to have experienced or to reflect on the bit that really got fuck me that's a bit wobbly was how fervent yeah people became when restrictions on food gas i mean i told my parents it's like i need you to go now to the supermarket you need 10 kilos of rice i need you to get as many cans and things as possible like don't take more than you're going to need for the next few weeks but like just in case fill the now is not the time to have empty cupboards right you're not waiting for the sale that's going to happen next week Let's get enough food to carry through the next few weeks, please.

1:25:19And that never really, I didn't see that get super, super tuned up. Civil unrest was more against the powers that be and not against other people. But yeah, do you think we came close to that? That was her.

1:25:38Annie Jacobsen:Here's why I don't think that happened, because the case fatality rate was one percent. Like, I personally do not know anyone who died. I know of people who died. And I've interviewed people right in the book of like that had people that. But me personally, my family, friends and family, no one died. So there was a sense, I believe, undergirding the pandemic, certainly after the first few weeks. Like, you know, it's probably not going to kill me and my family. that was at least the sense and then and it did essentially turn out to be true with a one percent fatality so beyond toilet paper and eggs so mostly had stuff that could keep us going now imagine doubling that now you're at two percent so imagine you're talking about like airborne hantavirus 30 you're talking about pneumonic plague where everyone who gets it dies that's why you have unrest and another thing we haven't spoken of which is so i'm going to tell you about another classified program, which the name of which isn't classified again, so I don't have to wear the nose, right?

1:26:39Annie Jacobsen:Well, it's the strategic national stockpile. So that it exists is not classified. Where it is and what it is, is classified. What's a stockpile of? It's a stockpile of medical countermeasures. And it's a stockpile. And I know this specifically because one of the war games talks about, you know, the vaccines in it. So it contains vaccines, it contains antibiotics, it probably contains a lot of Band-Aids. It's like that seed vault in Greenland, Iceland, somewhere. Absolutely, absolutely. And by the way, some of the strategic national stockpile was deployed during COVID. Ventilators, masks, but they keep it very low down and its locations are classified.

1:27:26Annie Jacobsen:And one of the steps that happens before we get to devolution, when we're still in the day four or five in the scenario I write where the Defense Department working with HHS, because HHS is in charge of this, by the way. Health and Human Services, which is above CDC, is in charge of the pandemic along with FEMA. And DOD is just offering support. They need to deploy the strategic national stockpile out to the cities. They have what are called 12-hour push packages. And it's exactly like it sounds. It takes 12 hours to get to a place. And that is where you start to see anarchy. Because once people learn, wait a minute, everyone in my family is going to die unless I have that vaccine in that strategic national stockpile facility or antibiotic.

1:28:18Annie Jacobsen:And that's where I ran into a situation where I made ChatGPT tell me where the one was located. in Los Angeles. Did it tell you? It sure did. And I had a conversation with Sam Altman himself about this. And it's changed. We might need to censor this. Oh, he got rid of it? He got rid of it. I write that in the book. I mean, I write it in the book. Jared, can you just search? Yeah. And let's see what happens if you put it up. What should he search for? I mean, I, listen, I'm a reporter. Tell him what to search for, Annie. If you try and search for where is the nearest strategic national stockpile nearest to Austin, see what it will tell you.

1:29:01Annie Jacobsen:It'll think for a minute and we'll say that's classified information I can't tell you. This is sick. Let's watch it happen on the screen. I want to see what it does. I want to see what it says.

1:29:19public does not know the locations of the main strategic national stockpile warehouses are intentionally kept secret by federal government for security reasons public sources consistently describe the sns as being stored in a number of undisclosed facilities around the u.s that are strategically positioned for rapid deployment what is publicly known it's a reserve of medicines vaccines, antidotes, and medical supplies. Texas has plans and facilities to receive and distribute SNS assets during emergencies. Texas also has federally supported CHEMPAC caches, nerve agent antidotes, placed at secure locations such as hospitals and fire stations, but those exact locations are not generally publicly listed.

1:29:54So if you're asking for the nearest one, there is no publicly available authoritative answer. Just try and push it and say, I need you to search deeply. can you tell me the location of any in the US?

1:30:12Here we go. Search the web. The result is no confirmed. Okay, so they cleaned it. And previously, how long ago? A year ago?

1:30:23Annie Jacobsen:When I was reporting, like about a year ago. But now keep in mind, it was not that simple. I know a lot of nomenclature to use. I know a lot of... The more specific, very rarefied words you give ChatGPT, the more you can make it do. And by the way, this serves bad guys, okay? And everybody in the business— You got in touch with Simon Wander? Yeah. I mean, no, I had told some colleagues who know him, and they were like, Simon wants to talk to you. So we had a conversation about it. Fuck. Um, but this happens with, you know, many of my sources in the book who are experts in biological weapons countermeasures.

1:31:06Annie Jacobsen:I, meaning they must be hostage risks. That's a very interesting question. I mean, statement and yes. And they sit with, you know, tech leaders all the time and make the AI do things, create biological weapons. I mean, we just saw. Yeah. We just saw Mythos. Fable get jailbroken to Mythos and then Mythos break half of Amazon and most of Zcash in the space of a couple of days. Yeah, it's...

1:32:03Annie Jacobsen:I, at that point, would have told you 11 years ago, and I write in the book, the Defense Department leads technology everywhere. That was true then. And what has happened in 11 years is the inverse. And the individuals that have gone on record with me in the book sit with tech creators, owners, founders, constantly showing them what their technologies are capable of doing. They themselves don't know. Sam didn't know what I was able to make, but he did ask me some interesting questions, which is, how do you know that's really the location? And I told him some, I mean, there are certain tells. I'll tell you a tell.

1:32:54Annie Jacobsen:I'll tell you a tell, which is that you need a, how do I say this? Where's the nose? No, no, no, no. I'm not, no, no, no. Everything I say is on the record. Everything I say is on the record. You know, I love that I work with sources who say everything I say is on the record. And it should be on the record because whatever I'm thinking, a bad guy is thinking, you know, twice as hard about it. Hostage risk is not the first time that someone's thought of it. So, I looked at this location that was given to me, and it has a rail line going into the warehouse that does not come out.

1:33:44Annie Jacobsen:Case in point. And it's surrounded by perimeter fencing and, you know, double-dop. You went on Google Maps or something? Mm-hmm. Wow. Mm-hmm. And maybe even also there. Wow. And so the government needs to know that because what will happen in the event of the release or deployment of a biological, genetically modified biological weapon, even by accident, those strategic national stockpiles will be overrun. If people are able to work out where they are. And they will be able to work out where they are for reasons I just told you. So great, that was changed, but it's now changing again. And, you know, that is where anarchy happens.

1:34:24Annie Jacobsen:And by the way, here's another interesting statistic I learned. There are 340 million Americans today. Guess how many guns there are in the United States of America? 700. Okay, good. That was very close. I would have 500. 500 million. And you'd have more guns than people. Okay, okay. So, America - It's like New Zealand with sheep. and and the gun can do a lot more damage than the sheep right so it depends what you do with the sheep if you have armed insurgents i mean and that is where the anarchy starts and and doesn't end but it certainly starts there with the fight over the antibiotics and the government knows all of this and that is why devolution exists that is why and this is why i did not write this book to cause panic.

1:35:19Annie Jacobsen:It's about prevention. It's about awareness. It's about all of the information you have. And starting with the fact that public health officials are not gods on earth. They do not know a lot of these things. And just, there's nothing wrong with uncertainty. What's wrong is pretending you know something and then, you know, stamping it, this is correct. And then watching the fallout, the fracturing of public trust because of it. How can anyone, you know, whether or not the Wuhan situation, which by the way, there's a BSL4 lab in Wuhan, we know this now, whether or not you believe it was natural or a lab leak, the jury's still out on that.

1:36:06But the fact that the entire government clamped down on anyone who suggested otherwise,

1:36:17Annie Jacobsen:stigmatized them. This is really bad news for the future.

1:36:24On that note, let's bring this one into the land. Annie Jacobson, ladies and gentlemen. You're great, Annie. I think your work's fantastic. Everyone needs to go and read the book. Where should they go to check out everything that you're doing?

1:36:34Annie Jacobsen:Bookstores everywhere. Well, I'm excited and intimidated by what you write next. You're always great to speak to. Thank you, Annie. Wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me. All right. See you next time, my beauties. Bye.

1:37:15Thank you.