#2534 - Annie Jacobsen

22:19And I also got the sense that it was like hydration and, you know, better than water.

22:26Annie Jacobsen:God. Ugh. But bio, I learned, is completely different animal because what they're really worried about is the secondary effect of panic and anarchy. And that was really interesting to me because having written all these books about, you know, the Defense Department and the CIA, the programs are very, you know, they're very structured and ordered. And they don't take place in the homeland because we're always fighting wars overseas. So to learn about a program that would go down in the continental United States where, you know, the Insurrection Act gets declared, posse comitatis gets lifted, the military takes over, dot, dot, dot, and then it goes from there, third act of the book, spoiler alert.

23:18Annie Jacobsen:That was shocking to me. And it was equally shocking that I could actually get this information. A lot of it's classified, but the names of some of the programs are unclassified. So the officials that I interviewed took me up to the edge of what can be legally known. And I also got the sense of like, oh, that the sense that these former officials are conveying is the public should know about this. my personal interpretation is like let's stop arguing about stuff that like doesn't matter and get to the facts and start realizing where the real threats are so their real fear is worrying about the the aftermath worrying about chaos in the streets rioting looting that's the real fear that's the real fear you can search up any of so there's unclassified pandemic plans which are done by like FEMA, DHS.

24:17Annie Jacobsen:They're always done by former officials, former SECDF, former CDC director, sitting around a table running a pandemic planning game. They do them at the Defense Department, and they call it a biological catastrophe war game. Those are declassified. All of them that I was looking at go through the series of events, you know, outbreak, infection, sort of everyone trying to mitigate the release, the spread. And then it gets to a certain point. In my scenario, it's day six because pneumonic plague is fast. There's a point in all these plans where anarchy and chaos takes over and the war game ends.

25:03Annie Jacobsen:Ends. Like, oh, and now we're done here. And I would say as the journalist, like to myself, what happens next? What happens next? and why aren't we learning about it? They don't have any plans for what happens after anarchy and chaos? They do. They just don't have it in the declassified games. There's a plan called the devolution plan. Eyebrows up for a reason. I don't like that word. Think about evolution. Now put a D in front of it. Yeah. Instead of going forward, you're going backward. So you've heard of DEFCON, right? Yes. Okay, so DEFCON, defense readiness condition, there's five. Five is the lowest.

25:46Annie Jacobsen:That's like normal every day. At 9-11, we were at three. DEFCON 1 means nuclear war. There's a separate structure of readiness condition called COGCON. Probably haven't heard of it because it's classified. Stands for Continuity of Government Readiness Condition. It's got four levels. Four is every day. One is insurrection. The Insurrection Act gets declared. COGCON 1 is in effect, and the devolution plan happens, which I learned, means a subset of pre-designated officials. They know who they are. They've signed contracts. They've rehearsed it. They go out In the words of the former FEMA director CogCon1, you send your devolution crews out They go out to a hot site, warm site, or cold site Underground bunkers located around the United States This is from an actual FEMA chief telling me this And they set up how to run the government because the idea is all the regular government people will probably be dead of anarchy, insurrection, pneumonic plague.

27:12So they have bunkers.

27:14Annie Jacobsen:And those are classified. The bunkers are. Where they are. Do you remember there was the bunker after 9-11 where Dick Cheney was in the bunker, but George Bush was just like hanging out? They left him. I think they left him in Texas or, you know, he was on his ranch. He was just out there in the world. You know what? But I had someone tell me where he was, and I went through, like, a problem with, like, legal, whether I could say this. So I had to say I was told, but, you know, it's not verified, something like that. But one of the CIA spy pilots, Ken Collins, he famously flew the ox cart out at Area 51.

27:52Annie Jacobsen:He told me that on 9-11, George Bush was driving around in Texas, maybe it was in Florida, in the back of a laundry truck. that's how they kept him hidden what? a laundry truck did they just have it look like a laundry truck and it outfitted with like regular seats in the back and that's how they drive him around? a bulletproof laundry truck? no I think he got like I think it was like what do we do with him and that was what was available a laundry truck that's what I was told by like a very reliable source that was available meaning there was nothing else available that was incognito? They were trying to transport him to the doomsday plane, which is where he ended up going, into the doomsday plan and flying around in circles.

28:37And they thought that like a caravan of SUVs would be too obvious? Yes. Wow.

28:43Annie Jacobsen:Yeah. Yeah. So you learn really pretty quickly that there's all these plans in place, but then it becomes like ad hoc or like on the fly in an actual crisis or emergency. Whoa. Yeah. But, okay, you're referring to Mount Weather. That's where Dick Cheney went. Okay. Where's that? So Mount Weather is in the mountains outside of D.C. It's like— There's mountains outside of D.C.? Yeah, right. Really? Blue Ridge Mountains. Oh, how far are those? 175 miles. Okay. So the Pentagon has an alternate command center called Raven Rock, underground bunker. that sounds like it's right out of a video game it sounds like a Raven Rock they probably have put it in a video that's a real, like it used to be classified and no one used to know about it and now it's kind of like out there is this it Jamie, this is the bunker oh we have a map of it we got blueprints all sorts of information about it, what do you want to know 51 miles from DC how deep is it, 51 miles from DC at least 7 levels wow the oval office would be at the bottom That's crazy.

29:54So that's where Cheney was on 9-11. So is that where like a nuclear bomb can't get to it? A nuclear bomb would take it all out.

30:02Annie Jacobsen:In nuclear war, I destroy all of those. I mean, I don't destroy them. I show you how they would be destroyed. Russia would put like five nuclear bombs on Raven Rock and it would just. Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That would be it. And also the fires alone would just incinerate everyone inside. Also, how are you getting your air? Yeah. Where's your air coming from? Your air is going to be contaminated with nuclear fallout, right? Yes. Is this what it looks like? I don't know. There's a bunch of – some of those pictures were coming from Tumblrs. I don't know. I think they take the real pictures and then they turn them into, you know, comic books.

30:38Annie Jacobsen:Right. But you can see some of – So look how it's got this, like, entrance carved into the side of the mountain with a big cement wall. And he goes through that. Yeah. You know, we were talking about this the other day. We were talking about Darren Cuyu. Do you know what that is? It's an underground facility that's in Turkey. Yes, I do know about that. That they found by accident. Yes. What was it, the 1970s? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was being used to hide people up until the 1920s. Whoa. Yeah, like the Greeks were hiding from people invading Greece. So it can... Or Turkey, I guess. House 20 ,000 people under there, and they really don't know why they made it or who made it.

31:24Annie Jacobsen:Turkey is crazy. It's such an old civilization with, like, layers upon layers upon layers of—just when you think it's really old, it gets even older. Well, that's Gobekli Tepe, right, where they had to redate—well, they still resisted what constitutes modern civilization or civilization in general. They were still trying to say some archaeologists are hanging on tooth and claw, trying to say that hunter-gatherers made these enormous stone columns with 3D drawings that seemed to be a calendar of some sort of a cataclysmic event. So some of the pictures we were just looking at from Mount Weather, maybe not accurate because it's also used in the TV show The 100?

32:05Oh. Yeah. So.

32:06Annie Jacobsen:But it is a real place. But yeah, that's probably where they get it from. So what we were looking at, I think, was the stuff from the TV show. What is that? What's The 100? like a show like silo or something where people are you know 100 people left or something like that i think that's what we had tim robbins on and we were talking about silo have you seen that show silo really good show it's on apple and it's essentially about an underground civilization that survived some sort of cataclysm they don't exactly say in the beginning i'm early on the show they don't say what the cataclysm is but these people have to live like deep deep deep underground in these self-containing facilities and you can't go outside or you die um yes it's all read about it.

32:45So Darren Cuyu could house 20 ,000 people. Wow. And they had pastures or they had storage for cattle and grain and water and wine and oil presses. It was like crazy shit.

33:00Annie Jacobsen:And how many thousands of years? They don't know. BC is it? They don't even know. They don't know. They don't know who made it. They didn't know it existed. They found it. Imagine a guy, the initial story was that his chickens had gone through a hole. And he's like, where's these chickens going? They never come back. The disappearing Turkish chickens. So they knock down these walls and then they find this thing and they haven't even explored all of it. They don't even have all of it explored yet. It's insane. It's so big and it's just there. And they don't know why and they don't know who made it and they don't know what they're hiding from.

33:37This is what it looks like.

33:39Annie Jacobsen:Yeah, it's incredible. It's really crazy because it's absolutely enormous. Is this Darren Cuyu right here? This is like some of the tunnels? Yeah, I get confused since they've only done 10 % of it. Like that's obviously a fake, but I don't know how much of that is what it is because it's supposed to be underground, right? Yeah, that doesn't look real. That seems like somebody made that up. But the actual image is like that's an image. It's just the best Darren Cuyu underground. Yeah, right there. That's what it really looked like. So imagine they find this underground, and they don't even know how old it is.

34:13Because if you find some stuff, you can't carbon date the walls. You can't carbon date the carvings. So they have to find things that are left there. But if people are hanging out there until the 1920s, like, so they really don't even know if you find something, how old it is. You can guess, but you don't know, like, how old was the building when this person was there? Was it thousands of years old already?

34:34Annie Jacobsen:They don't know. Yeah. It's interesting how the archaeologists that have skin in the game with an other theory resist that. And it takes a while. It's like with Gobekli Tepp. Now there's investigations going on, archaeological digs nearby. And lo and behold, they're finding other things, which makes me feel like there would be— All over the area. Yeah, all over the place, of course. It didn't exist on its own. Yeah, of course. Some kind of advanced civilization has neighbors. 11 ,000 plus years ago. Wow, that's so crazy. It's so weird because we keep pushing the dates further and further back.

35:09Like Graham Hancock always says, stuff just keeps getting older. And so it makes you wonder, like, have we gone through something like this before? Whether it's a natural catastrophe or whatever it was.

35:22Annie Jacobsen:Remember when we were kids, it was like the Lascaux Caves were the oldest thing ever. I don't even remember. Where was that? In France. Remember the drawing of the bull? Oh, right, right, right. I remember that from the history books. That's from that one of the Herzog documentary. Yes. It's a great one. Amazing. Has he been on this show? No, I want to get him on. You have to get him on. I love that guy. He's the neighbor of my kids. Whoa. Yeah. Well, I don't want to say where he lives. People go find him, but that's pretty cool. In L.A., so we'll track him down. He's my favorite documentarian.

35:53Oh, absolutely. Grizzly Man's one of my favorites of all time.

35:56Annie Jacobsen:Grizzly Man is epic. Yeah. Have you seen Happy People? No. That's a great one, too. Is that new? No, no, it's a few years old. It's Life in the Taiga, Happy People, Life in the Taiga. It's about these people that live in Siberia off the Taiga River, and they're like the happiest people. And all they do is like hunt and fish and trap, and they get together. They have a really strong community. They drink, and they're laughing, and they have like no mental illness. It's really weird as he documents it. He has such – have you seen Little Dieter Needs to Fly? No. Oh, my God. The only man rescued from Laos during the Vietnam War.

36:34Annie Jacobsen:And Herzog, he's died since, Dieter. But Herzog goes with him back into the jungle. Wow. Oh, my God, you're going to love it. It's a treat that you haven't seen it yet. Little Dieter needs to fly. That guy is such a world treasure. Oh, my God. Just his voice and, like, his perspective on everything. Just when you think – just when I think I know what he's going for, he takes you like on a complete left turn. And you're left like – at least for me, thinking about the world in a completely new original way. Yeah. So these caves in France, they thought that that was the – but that was really old, right?

37:13Wasn't that like 30-plus thousand-year-old drawings?

37:16Annie Jacobsen:I think maybe Jamie can check for us. I think they were like 7 ,000 BC. You know? I think they were older than that. Discovered 1940 by four teenagers, closed in 63, all paintings created around 17 ,000 years ago. 17 ,000. Okay. Yeah. That's it? God, I thought it was older. That's just a quick explanation. This is the Werner Herzog documentary? I thought they were like literal cavemen made it. Well, I mean. So that's only 17 ,000 years ago? That's what that says. Interesting. God, I really thought it was a lot older than that. But then they come up with, like, the hand on the cave in Indonesia.

37:59Annie Jacobsen:I think that's 40 ,000. Believed to be 19 ,000 years ago. That's interesting. So at one point in time, they thought that was the oldest. When I was a kid, I remember that. It's not quite what it says. It says the painting for the site were duplicated with the same materials, which were used 19 ,000 years. That doesn't mean it. Oh, right. It could still be older. Right. They knew that they used them 19 ,000 years ago, but they could have used them a lot earlier than that. Had to learn how to use them. Right, right. We don't have documents. Crazy stuff, though. Just imagine, like, living back then.

38:36Annie Jacobsen:It is wild when you think about the underground bunkers now. And it kind of has this spooky echo as an archetype of... Hiding. Hiding from the dangers. Yeah. having a shelter and hiding from the dead. The whole, that trope, that thought of a bunker is, you know, there's a lot of supposedly wealthy people. Well, they are wealthy, but supposedly they have these underground bunkers. That's what you always hear. These rich people, these billionaires are setting up bunkers in New Zealand because they know something's coming. Like, oh, Jesus. Right? Right. Good luck getting there in time. Yeah. Right.

39:15Right. If the shit goes down and you happen to be in Hawaii and you've got to get to New Zealand.

39:21Annie Jacobsen:Also, your bodyguards are a lot stronger than you are. Well, wouldn't you bring them with you? Yeah, but it's going to be every man for themselves. Well, wouldn't you have – if you're going to have that kind of money to make a – wouldn't you have a bunker that could house a few hundred people so that you could – nobody gets insurrection in your movement? I mean I suppose if you bring everybody's family, you have to have a lot of preparing for this. That's what really kept taking me back to the documents in the Defense Department about fear of infection creates anarchy and insurrection because this idea of fear of infection.

39:56Annie Jacobsen:People begin to – their mind actually begins to change in the studies under scarcity. And scarcity coupled with fear of infection, it's so visceral. It's as much of an archetype as the bunker, being infected. Very, very different than being shot at. Right? You get the sense if you can get into the bunker if you're being attacked with a physical weapon. Okay, I'm safe now. Close the doors. Make a fire. But with fear of infection, I mean, a biological weapon or any pathogen is a living munition. It self-replicates. And it's got an incubation period. So then it – right? So then you can be infected.

40:42And not know it while it's incubating inside of your body. And then you infect a bunch of other people as well.

40:47Annie Jacobsen:Yeah. Yeah. And we saw during COVID how aggressive people got. Screaming at people for not wearing masks. And, you know, that was, as far as pandemics go, fairly mild. Yeah. Fairly mild. Like, I mean, if you go with the CDC's 1 % or your 0.1 % of the case. It's perplexity. Perplexity is 1%. I mean, you're talking about a nothing burger compared to mnemonic plague. And there are, you know, I mean, look, I also write in the book, and this has never been reported before, because I interviewed CIA officers who both debriefed the Soviet defectors and also people who chased WMD in the hands of terrorists during the war on terror.

41:35Annie Jacobsen:And I specifically didn't want to write that scenario because it's so loaded to go with like terrorist use of a biological agent. But I give you little history lessons when I stop the drama, one of which involves an Al-Qaeda terrorist that was captured. She's actually now in Texas in a mental institution for the rest of her life. Her name's Afia Siddiqui. She's an MIT-trained biologist related by marriage to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And she was leading the biological weapons program. This is according to the CIA officers. She was trained at MIT? She was trained at MIT, and then she went back to Pakistan.

42:17Annie Jacobsen:She was the first woman on the FBI's most wanted terrorist list. How come they have her in a mental institute? Because they caught her. And then this part is reported. They caught her and somehow, again, the air quote, somehow she got a hold of a Marine's rifle and was firing at the FBI agents interviewing her. This is all public. And she was shot. They take her to the United States, gave her a trial, decided she was insane, put her in a mental institution. But what had never been revealed before my book is that in her handbag, she had plans to create a genetically modified pathogen that mixed rabies with chicken pox.

43:03Annie Jacobsen:Think about that. Imagine airborne rabies. Rabies, like pneumonic plague, is one of the only other pathogens that has 100 % death rate without countermeasures. Oh. And rabies, like when you see it in animals, I've never actually encountered a rabbit animal in the wild as much as I know. But when you see them, they want to infect something else. They get hyper aggressive. They want to bite you. So if they bite you, they give it to you, which is really crazy. Like this disease makes them throw their own safety out the window and just go after people and try to bite them. I mean it's like rabies is like now its own rabid animal.

43:50Annie Jacobsen:You think of it as it's so visceral. It's going to come at you with its infected saliva. I almost went with the rabies scenario because I always in these scenarios tie them to actual events that have happened so that there's – so that readers don't go like this is Annie Jacobson's dystopian imagination. as much as they say, oh, she's following what, you know, science. This is science fact, not science fiction. And so when I learned about that plan for the genetic modification of rabies and chicken, airborne rabies. But then I thought— How far did she get along with this? That is classified, Annie, you know.

44:30Annie Jacobsen:But I did get a second person, David Relman, who's the advisor to the president on biodefense, to confirm with me that that was actually located in her handbag and caused serious concern. And I imagine if they never found her, they never caught her, and she completed that. I mean, it's really terrifying. It wipes out most of the country. And also just in the most horrific way. I mean, you know, like having to look at your pet and be like, is my pet rabbit? It's just. Oh, Jesus. And it could catch it too? Another project. Oh, she had another project? Multiple projects apparently. She had collected materials on viruses for biological warfare, and one of her projects is finding its way to infect America's poultry supplies with an antibody that would allow chickens to pass salmonella onto humans more easily.

45:15She later destroyed her work after suspecting Abu Lubab was hoping to double-cross her and turn her into the United States authorities. This is a long Wikipedia with quite a bit of twists and turns. I'm surprised it's not a movie. There's a lot going on. Oh, my God. And that's one person that we caught. Now, that's not like this is the only time they thought of that. This is the only person that they tried to recruit to do this kind of stuff. There's probably someone out there right now. Hence your book.

45:46Annie Jacobsen:I mean, I interviewed this guy, very famous, legendary CIA officer named Rolf Moat Larson, and he led the counter WMD team, right? So he would go to places basically like with a bunch of ground branch guys, CIA paramilitary guys behind him. He was kind of like the intelligentsia at the front to try to negotiate with al-Qaeda weapons makers, biological weapons makers, and say like, you can't do this. It's going to kill all of us. And he told me a couple stories and I write them like history lessons in the book. once he went to Sudan and met with the top biological weapons maker for al-Qaeda. And, like, you know, it's just chilling.

46:33Annie Jacobsen:It's basically you get the feeling, like, that Rolf said, I got them to agree to stop temporarily.

46:43Annie Jacobsen:Temporarily. Temporarily.

46:48Sorry, Joe.

46:49Annie Jacobsen:This is the nightmare stuff. So what do they think that they're going to do if they get into these bunkers? This is the thing. It's like if society completely collapses and anarchy just sweeps the nation and you've got cities on fire and people killing people and looting, eventually they're going to run out of food. Eventually there's going to be no infrastructure. You've got no power. You've got no one who's taking care of the water. No one's taking care of the satellites. No one's taking care of anything. The cell phone towers are down. What are these people in the bunker going to do? Are they going to reinvent society?

47:20Annie Jacobsen:Well, that's the plan down the road. But before— Do they have that? Part five of the devolution plan is called reconstitution. Oh, Jesus. So they're going to reconstitute the government, like rise again like a phoenix from the ashes. But before that, I also learned the government has issued, rather the Pentagon has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its personnel. So they fan out across the states. But they cannot really handle the numbers of people who are actually going to die pretty quickly. So instead, what their job is is to protect the critical infrastructure, all that stuff you exactly mentioned.

48:04So they're just assuming that most people are going to die.

48:09Annie Jacobsen:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the quote. This is the exact quote from Colonel Tom Earhart, who ran catastrophic nuclear and biological war games at the Pentagon. Four. Have you ever heard of a very famous guy? They called him Yoda at the Pentagon. He died like a couple of years ago at age 100. His name is Andy Marshall. No. He ran the Office of Net Assessment. Talk about a euphemism or like a cloaked. That's where they did all the war gaming. And Marshall, Andy Marshall did this in the 70s all the way through his recent death. And Tom Earhart worked for him. It's in the office of the Secretary of Defense.

48:47Annie Jacobsen:So what Earhart told me is in the event of a biological catastrophe, and by the way, that includes not just an attack but an incident. And an incident means a lab leak. OK, so in the event of a catastrophic biological incident, there is very little you can do to protect the homeland. Only things you can do to mitigate extermination. Of the human race? That's his quote. Mitigate extermination. Mitigate extermination. So you want to keep as many people alive as possible, but it's probably going to be a very small amount. And it's probably just going to be the 1.7 people with the gas mask and a whole bunch of like Machiavellian solipsis.

49:33Do you imagine if our society had to be reinvented with only people that work in the government? Can you imagine? Some of the most incompetent, crooked people in the world and that's the new society?

49:47Annie Jacobsen:Well, I have a feeling most of the bureaucrats would die because I don't think they could, you know, take care of themselves. Right. I think the people that would live would be those well-trained soldiers. Well, that's not bad. That's probably a better scenario. But the other problem you're looking at is reproduction because there's 17 percent females in the military. That's not good. That's not good. And then the other problem is that the other people who are left that are not in the military are – imagine the skills you have to have to be able to like deal with fear of infection in a manner that you basically have to be able to, as it was said to me, kill people on site.

50:27Annie Jacobsen:Like not even worrying about whether – this is where it really feels like The Walking Dead or an apocalyptic movie. 28 Days Later was based on that. 28 Days Later was a lab leak. Yes. Yes. Remember it was called Rage? Yes. It was something they were doing with chimpanzees and a chimpanzee bites somebody. That's how it opens. And it spreads. Those are great films. Those are great. Did you see the new one? No, I haven't seen the new one. Oh, the new one. Parts one and two. I mean. There's parts one and two of the new ones? Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's a two-parter? Two-parter. They released them like six months apart.

51:05Annie Jacobsen:Oh, God. They're incredible. I just get worn out from those kind of movies. I mean, it's a certain—you have to have a certain— There's no happy ending. I mean, Joe, I'm an eternal optimist, believe it or not. Are you really? I really am. That's crazy considering your work. But I just figure all of this is a cautionary tale, and I also figure it's better to know than to be caught off guard. Well, it's better to inform, and I think you do an amazing job of that, and I think you're a very important person in that regard. You inform people of these things that you really should be considering. I mean, your nuclear war book freaked a lot of people out that were kind of, you know, nuclear war was in the back of their mind.

51:44You know, yeah, it's a possibility. But, hey, we haven't done it. We dropped a couple of bombs during the World War II and that's it. We're done with that.

51:52Annie Jacobsen:You know, you said something to me last time we spoke about the nuclear war book that really stayed with me. And it has an interesting coda. So you were like, Annie, I couldn't read nuclear war. It freaked out a lot of my friends. I can't read it. And then you explained why. And you said, I'm paraphrasing you, but you said, I think about those people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they were just going about their daily life. And all of a sudden, they're incinerated. And that really stayed with me. And I thought about it. Here's the coda. The survivors are called hibaksha. That's what they call themselves.

52:34Annie Jacobsen:It's like survivors of the nuclear bomb. So now, since it was 80 years ago, they're all like 81 to 90 plus. And they were stigmatized throughout their youth because the idea was you're radioactive. You can't reproduce. You're sort of, you know, there's like a malignant thing attached to you. This is what they told me. And I met them and I was invited to Hiroshima to be the keynote speaker with the Hibakshah for the 80th anniversary of the bombing. What did they say the experience was like in terms of being maligned? Like what was happening to them? Well, the sense I got was very much that they believed that was accurate.

53:21Annie Jacobsen:They had no other information. They had no other information other than people telling them. That they were radioactive. Yeah. Now, what was also interesting is a couple of the younger people who don't remember, who were like infants, their mothers, like let's say one parent died and another. So the living parent would shield them from that by never telling them that they were habaksha. So then they had this whole other kind of realization later in life when they learned. And some of, I mean, those stories were like incredible because you're learning about how like a parent's love for a child means not telling them what you think would make them feel stigmatized.

54:12Annie Jacobsen:But yet you've them explaining to me that they felt that stigma throughout their life anyways, not knowing why. I never even would have considered that stigma. I would have considered survivor's guilt, which people do have if you're a part of a disaster and you're one of the ones that live. Yeah. People get survivor's guilt, but I never would have thought of the stigma of being maligned as an infected, radioactive person. And Japan has such a different culture. I couldn't have imagined that either until I heard it firsthand from the experience of the survivors. They sent some of them to an island.

54:55Annie Jacobsen:Like banished as if you're a leper. How much is this Iran thing freaking you out? The war? Yeah. Look, I mean, when anyone starts a war that's not necessary, that's the wrong word for it. But, you know, just like this is the whole it's just a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. It just seems to me like the opposite of what the Department of Defense – it's why I continue to call it the Department of Defense, by the way, because it still is in my mind and certainly until Congress changes the name. You know, it's supposed to be for defense. Right. So I think so much of what I have written about all the wars since World War II, I've interviewed 100 or more people for each of my eight books who have been in every war.

55:49Annie Jacobsen:And the big shift for me, like understanding a change in mindset was the Bush-Cheney administration starting the Iraq war. Like I really believe that many of the problems we're experiencing today as a society stem from that. And that has to do with the fact of all the soldiers that I've interviewed. There's a completely different perspective on the government from those who fought in the wars leading up to the war on terror. And the people who most of them, you know, many of these people, too. Like they're mad. They're really mad that they were used. That's a sense that I get. Now, not everyone, but a majority are very angry and feel used.

56:44Annie Jacobsen:And that is a fundamental warping of what the military is. Yeah, without a doubt. And also no clear way to resolve this at all. Yes. It seems like our stockpiles are running dry.

57:05Bases are getting blown up by drones.

57:08Annie Jacobsen:I heard, you know, I heard Joe Kent, who was the number two at ODNI who resigned. I heard him say a really interesting thing about the warrior class that I hadn't. You know when you just like have all this information but you didn't put something together and then you hear it and you're like, of course. And what Joe said was one of – this was in reference to Trump maybe saying there was going to be – or someone in this administration saying there should be a draft. And everyone freaking out and saying like that's outrageous. And Joe Kent's point was really interesting. He said there should be a draft but not for reasons you think.

57:49Annie Jacobsen:And he said, presently, America has a warrior class and Joe Kent is in it, meaning, you know, these are like, don't have the exact statistic, 1%, less than 1 % of families who are in the military. And he said, Kent said, you know, we socialize with one another. Our kids socialize with one another. We go to school with one another. We go to war with one another. We talk together. We have parties together. And we know something about America that is completely foreign to all the other families. And it's it's there's something wrong with that. And I've really thought about that a lot since, and I agree with him.

58:34Annie Jacobsen:And his point about the draft was if everybody knew and experienced what we experience in our families talking about war versus peace, wars would be looked at differently. instead of thinking we should go to war like a lindsey graham type perspective where there's no real skin in the game he's not going to go get shot no one he knows is going to go get shot yeah absolutely makes sense so that's kind of my answer to you know and i like i i'll see a headline that's like the war in iran costs us xyz billion dollars and it's like it doesn't even mention all the people dying. There's like 10, and yes, the Americans, but it's just, talk about misreporting.

59:25Right, it's just talking about money, which is crazy.

59:28Annie Jacobsen:Which is crazy. Which is crazy. And then it also, the real problem is it makes America an enemy, and it makes us less safe, because America has done this thing, this unprovoked attack, and so now they have a reason to attack back. It's very like slippery. You know, it's like untrustworthy. I mean, I always go back to like the way you behave with your family is the way that you should present the world. Otherwise, you're being a hypocrite. And the idea that we as a country are kind of like, you're not really sure what we're up to. And then it's changing. It's like radically changing. The pendulum swings so far from what one administration's list of really important things is to another.

1:00:22Annie Jacobsen:I mean it must – from an outside perspective, it must be really schizophrenic looking. Yeah. So to get back to your book, how many different countries do we know are involved in this kind of biological war research? So for starters, biological war is illegal. Biological weapons are illegal, unlike nuclear weapons, believe it or not, are perfectly legal for the countries that have them. Wrap your head around that. But everybody signed a treaty in 1972 called the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty saying we will not make biological weapons. They are odious to the conscience of mankind. At that point, the Soviets signed the treaty, crossed their fingers behind their back, and made a ginormous biological weapons program that you talked about earlier.

1:01:25Annie Jacobsen:OK. America allegedly destroyed her arsenal of biological weapons, which took 219 weeks to destroy, by the way. And not for another 20 years did we learn that actually the Soviets were running this biological weapons program. And we only learned it because of the Soviet defectors. The CIA had no idea. Defense Department had no idea. So we had completely stopped all of that work? According to the documents, according to anyone you interview, we had stopped biological weapons work. What year was this, Hall? Nixon made a declaration in 1969. Like, we're just giving up our biological weapons program.

1:02:07Annie Jacobsen:And then everyone else followed suit, and the treaty came about in 1972. But the Soviets continued their work. The Soviets not only continued, they just like went bang on it. And they later called it their Manhattan Project. And weren't there bioweapons labs in Ukraine? You're talking about recently? Yeah. That the United States was involved in? Well, what there are are there are biosafety labs. Okay, so your original question was where are they around the world? Right. So they're illegal. But what isn't illegal, because this is a carve-out in the treaty, you can do research for prophylactic purposes, for medical countermeasures.

1:02:50Annie Jacobsen:That's the carve out. So that's where we've gotten to gain a function, you see. Like, oh, we're just doing this for prophylactic purposes. That's how the DOD gets involved. Okay. So before 9-11, 9-11 factors into this and so does Dick Cheney. Because before 9-11, America had two BSL-4 labs, biosafety level four. That's the highest level. That's like you saw the suits, the tubes, your arms are in the boxes. You're taking a chemical shower before you go in. America had two, one at Fort Detrick. That's the DOD's lab. One at the CDC in Atlanta. That's the civilian lab. 9-11 happens. Remember the anthrax attacks?

1:03:35Annie Jacobsen:Never solved. Thank you, FBI. Dick Cheney personally is terrified of bioweapons. And he spearheads the efforts for this giant biological military industrial complex that then takes off and begins with billions of dollars pumped into gain-of-function type research. And America goes from having two BSL labs to having 15. And the world follows suit. So there are 110 BSL-4 labs around the world, including in countries that are at war. And this is all post-Bush administration? Post-Bush administration. That is when it took off. That is when it took off. Wow. So America has a hand in the blossoming of this problem, most certainly.

1:04:29Annie Jacobsen:And then when you find out that – so you think BSL-4, okay, well, BSL-3, that just must be like chickenpox. No. In the BSL-3 labs, you can work with plague, anthrax, hantavirus, like serious diseases that allegedly have cures. And so you know how many BSL-3 labs there are in the United States of America right now? How many? 1 ,500. 1 ,500. and around the world there are 3 ,500. 90 % of them have no guidelines for safety. Did you hear about the story where there was a man in Vegas that had a bio lab in his garage? Yes. In California? Both, both, both. Another one? They were both, and they were seemingly linked.

1:05:20Oh, boy. Possibly tied to California case federal Chinese investigation. Yeah, wait until I see what's at the bottom. Oh boy, Jamie, why are you doing this to me?

1:05:33No case appeared filed in state federal court as of Sunday. And I didn't really see a follow-up. I haven't seen the dead mice.

1:05:42Annie Jacobsen:Jamie, what's with the dead mice there? There's a thousand dead mice. There's vials including HIV, malaria. Well, the crazy thing is the guy who they caught, they didn't arrest him. Like there was an Israeli guy. So this says Chinese investigation, but one of them was a guy who was an Israeli guy who they caught and they sent him away. They didn't prosecute him. He took off. I mean this stuff is so thinly reported and it's always got like a giant sensationalist clickbait type headline. And people read about it and know about it a little bit. And then the real reality behind it, I think, gets completely lost, which is that the bottom line is that the barrier to entry in the biological weapons field is so incredibly low.

1:06:40Annie Jacobsen:It's horrifying. Like think about what you need to have a nuclear weapon. A lot. I mean look at Iran right now. Yeah. OK. You have to have enriched uranium or plutonium. You have to have viscile material. Then you have to have a weapon system. You have to have an ICBM or a submarine or a B-2 bomber. Nuclear weapons are tightly controlled by a nation's command and control structure. All subject matter experts I interviewed for this book expressed their serious concern that the barrier for entry is so low that basically given computational systems, AI-enabled bio, basically a high school student with limited knowledge of biology can make a bioweapon in their basement or in the vegas apartment building well this guy had it in his garage and they caught him and what was he doing do we know i don't know they they referenced it as a storage facility and they said it was it obviously yes it said for storage facility yeah it said not a laboratory adding that the samples and equipment suggested no active work was happening there but it says I think the question is, why does somebody have these materials in a private residence?

1:07:54It's not a doctor, not a lab, not a licensed medical facility of any sort. This guy.

1:08:00Annie Jacobsen:And it's a great question, and I wonder what the answer is. I also think it was like an Airbnb or something. That's kind of like the, it gets lost in the LLC who owned it. They said the guy who was running it doesn't own it. 1 ,200 samples. Oh, God. And what was he doing? What was he doing and why? I think they released him. That's what's crazy. The guy in Vegas was released. Is that correct? That's what I was trying to say. When I googled that, I didn't really see a follow-up on anything updated or new. I'm pretty sure the guy in Vegas was an Israeli citizen and he was released. So the question is what was he doing?

1:08:41And he was caught, but that's just one guy that was stupid and got caught, how many people are doing that? Are there sleeper labs all across the country? Or you saw them in charges dropped on the property manager. Whoopsies. Maybe it's because he was just the property manager. Yeah, no big deal. He didn't do anything. Without prejudice. Still faces criminal charge in Clark County for improper disposal of hazardous waste. But didn't he leave and go back to Israel? I mean, this is just, I'm looking at the article now. I think that was the allegation. He's due back in court on June 4th, which was two months ago.

1:09:18Yeah, so I don't – I didn't see anything about it. I'll look it up. Yeah. Nothing to see here. It says an Israeli citizen, right? Didn't it say that? Go back to – A Israeli citizen on a non-immigrant visa is not allowed to possess firearms. Prosecutors say multiple guns were seized from his home. Well, you've got to have guns if you've got plague.

1:09:36Annie Jacobsen:You've got to look out for your stockpile. Guard your plague. But, you know, I stayed away from that kind of lone actor crazy because – I don't know if that's a lone actor. I mean, you don't know. If it was, would you think they'd let him go? That's my question. If it's a lone actor, would they really let him go? Or is he connected to somebody? And that's how he got out. I mean, one of the problems of the over-politicization of everything is that it just seems like anything important becomes splatter and becomes secondary to some of these other concerns. that seem to take headlines, right? Like that should be a big story.

1:10:17Annie Jacobsen:And yet all any of us ever heard was, did you hear about the crazy biolab? Right. I can tell you that the bigger story is really, at least to my eye, you know, because this is another one, oh, thank God nothing got out. Thank God no one was infected. But the real issue is what happens if someone does get, What happens if a pathogen gets seeded in the community and an outbreak starts to move to an epidemic? And, you know, I write in the end of the book, Joe, the point is not panic. This is, of course, after I take you through like the worst dystopian nightmare ever. The point is pressure, pressure to understand the threat, the labs around the world, the bureaucracy involved, all the different problems that would come up of mitigating the threat.

1:11:09Annie Jacobsen:so that you can be informed and also say like, wait a minute, something really needs to be done and needs to be looked at here. And instead, people are arguing about the most obvious thing in the world to my eye, you know, what happened in the Senate yesterday. Like that is pretty obvious what happened, what is being covered up. We were misled. And yet all of this – I'm not saying to skip over it, but it's like how much effort do we put on something without a resolution? That's what confounds me. Yeah. It's a really good question. And the fact that there's so many labs in this country and that they've all sprung up post-2001.

1:12:01Annie Jacobsen:They moved that Plum Island lab, by the way, to Kansas. And it either just opened or it's about to open. It costs an extraordinary amount of money. And are they doing the same research? Yes. Yep. They moved it off of Plum Island and now it's in Kansas. Do you know anything about this alpha gal tick, this lone star tick that gives people this allergy to red meat? A little bit, a little bit in as much that it's a parasite, which is different, you know, it's a bug, which is different than a germ. But I think it speaks to this idea that sort of there are natural things that are happening in our environment.

1:12:46Annie Jacobsen:And then there are also unnatural things. and the inability to differentiate between them or trust. Look, so much of all this has been about trust the science. And then, okay, we can't trust the science, unfortunately, around COVID. And we're all waiting for a reckoning around COVID. It's obviously not coming anytime soon. And in the meantime, you have, you know, the lettuce outbreak. You have the alphagol. You have Legionnaire's disease from data centers. There's an influx of health concerns coming from Mother Nature herself. Here we are in this world of incredible science and technology. I mean, I talk to biotechnologists who, by the way, really have a utopian take on this.

1:13:34Annie Jacobsen:Now, there is lots of money involved for them. But they really believe that science is the answer and can be the answer to a lot of these problems. I sat next to a guy at dinner a couple nights ago who told me that his company in San Diego has a countermeasure for alphagol. I have no idea of verifying this. This just happened. But that the reason they can't get it through is because of insurance. You know, one of the treatments that's supposed to be very effective is acupuncture on your ears. On your ears. Yeah. See if you can find anything on that. I read about this, that there's like a 90 % remission that one guy's been able to achieve through acupuncture on your ears.

1:14:19Which is like, what do you, what? Like, hey, whatever works, but is this real? Well, acupuncture, specifically a specialized ear technique called Saliman auricular allergy treatment, is being explored by integrative practitioners to help manage and potentially achieve remission for alpha-gal syndrome, though it's not yet a standard medically proven cure. How it works for alpha-gal. targeted ear points. Provider locates a specific, highly reactive electrical point on the outer ear associated with the alpha-gal immune response. Acupuncture is so weird because it seems to be doing something. Do you have acupuncture?

1:15:03No. I had it done once, but the guy was a kook and I never went back.

1:15:07Annie Jacobsen:I feel like acupuncture is so old and comes from such a long history of experiences. I have acupuncture. And it just seems like any time I go for anything, someone wants to give me drugs, which I'm not a fan of. I go to the acupuncturist. Sure, call it the placebo effect or call it whatever you want, but it certainly works for me. I don't necessarily think it's a placebo. I think a lot of that really old stuff we like to dismiss because we like petroleum-based pharmaceutical drugs because that's what the doctor gives us as standard of care. I have a feeling there's a lot of real – it's been around too long for them to just keep faking it.

1:15:48Annie Jacobsen:I mean, if it works, it works. Yeah. Right? Well, if it turns out that this ear technique actually puts alpha-gal in remission, maybe people will take that stuff more seriously and start using acupuncture for other – because I know a lot of people swear by it. And I'm always – I just kind of raise my eyebrow like, all right, good luck. but maybe that's just me being ignorant and definitely that's me being ignorant a specialized ear acupuncture method method called the solomon auricular allergy treatment shows a high reported success rate of about 85 to 96 percent for putting alpha gal syndrome symptoms into remission that's pretty crazy yeah i mean i don't know who did the study know what I like it I like that that's out there because I always feel like the acupuncturists are sidelined because they're not part of the inch the medical insurance military industrial complex stays in your ear for three to four weeks oh it's not just like a treatment it's secured with a small adhesive bandage a tiny little needle hair thin stainless steel needle huh 137 patient trial looks like what the hell how who fucking figured that out do you know anyone who's gotten alpha goals yes a good friend of mine yeah he has it and what he's become deathly allergic or oh yeah deeply allergic well i mean it doesn't kill him but it wrecks him and so he got over it um and started eating meat again and then it came back with a vengeance came back even worse than it was before so it went into remission and then it came back and he's really tightened up his diet and done everything.

1:17:36One thing that really helped him was plasmapheresis. Do you know what that is? They take your blood and they filter out the plasma and replace it. Yeah, I had it done. I had it done for fun just to see what it feels like. And you get really tired the next day. That's one thing. But then the day after that, oh, my God, you feel amazing. You feel like you've just lost 20 years of age. It really feels incredible. You have so much energy. It's really odd. Whatever it is, it's doing something. But people that have autoimmune issues, people that have allergies, people that have a lot of different weird things, apparently they have some great responses from that.

1:18:12But my friend, you know, he struggled with a bunch of different things and getting his blood work and lab work done. He was also in the military and spent a lot of time overseas. And one of the things that he found out is PFAS, PFAS, these forever chemicals that you get from plastics. He's got... Burning plastics? Well, it's not just that. It's also just hot water. So, like, they take these bottles of plastic, bottles of water in cases, and they've got them sitting out in the sand, in the sun in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that's their water supply. So they're drinking this water that's been sitting out in the sun that's leaching in these plastic bottles.

1:18:51So he found out that his PFAS levels were off the charts. And that's because, you know, he was deployed overseas all those years drinking that water. Did you see this about the PFAS chemicals? I just saw this come out, so I don't know how tested it's been, but someone's figured out a way to get almost all of it out. Out of water, but not your body, right? Well, that's how it's getting in mostly, so. Right, but the problem is once it gets in your body, it's the problem. Because my friend still has, I mean, Evan has it in his body. scientists have developed a clever new way to trap forever chemicals in water using nano-sized cages that lock onto PFAS molecules unlike current methods this approach can capture short-chain PFAS the hardest type to remove tests show that it can eliminate up to 98 % of these pollutants and still work after multiple uses the discovery could lead to more effective water filtration systems worldwide well that's good news

1:19:47Annie Jacobsen:science technology yeah dual use it could be good it can it can help you or harm you sure you and there's some brilliant people out there that are figuring out ways to mitigate all the stupid things that we do like that yeah but people you know this the whole new creeping up of new diseases emerging and sort of like into pockets of the country and feeling like the cdc or the hhs has no real lid on it or no real explanation, I think kind of seriously undermines the general wellness of the nation. Oh, for sure. Well, that was a big problem with COVID is that this feeling of the fear and anxiety affected people's immune systems as well, affected their depression levels, affected their happiness, like just their overall feeling of anxiety.

1:20:37I mean, how much of an effect just the cortisol boost, all the different things that are happening to stressing out your body because of that pandemic that we don't even consider as being part of that experience? I think also when you like, OK, can I give you an anecdote?

1:20:54Annie Jacobsen:Because this comes to mind about what you're saying is like that idea that there's uncertainty. OK. And uncertainty raises your cortisol levels. And even worse is when you're uncertain about something you're being told is true, but you're like, I'm uncertain. That is like even more anxiety making. Right. One of the things that's stunning to me is how the CDC and the WHO, they're supposed to be these pillars of sort of the North Star of, you know, public health. At least they certainly were when I was a kid. You really looked up to these organizations. OK. COVID happens. this the who and the cdc both issued they're tweeting out three months into the pandemic covid not airborne not is in capital letters i have a copy of the tweet in the book because no one really believes this unless they see it okay covid was airborne covid was airborne that That is how we all got COVID.

1:21:56Annie Jacobsen:It makes something incredibly pandemic prone. Okay. Instead, they said, you get, remember, you get COVID from like touching surfaces. We're all like out buying Lysol. The CDC went into a partnership with Lysol. Lysol disappeared from the supply chain. we now know that's actually called fomite transmission that's the scientific term for getting something off a surface we now know that one in 10 000 cases of covid was transmitted from a surface how can they have gotten it so wrong is a question everybody should be asking And the explanation, because by the way, the WHO didn't change. They kind of quietly about nine months later started saying COVID was airborne, same as CDC.

1:22:54Annie Jacobsen:They never said like, look, we're really sorry. We made a serious mistake. And here's why. And I called both the CDC and the WHO looking for an explanation and asking why they never made an apology and no answer. And I think that's like what we're talking about. Talk about raising cortisol levels. You know, when your institution is completely wrong. And by the way, I don't think it was nefarious. They literally didn't know. Or they had their panel of experts disagreeing to such an extent that they just went with not airborne as opposed to airborne. It does weird you out that they were in a partnership with Lysol.

1:23:36Annie Jacobsen:I had to report that in the book because that is. You just start thinking about profit motives. I mean, if I had to guess, it was convenient to have a partnership with them. I don't have any reason to believe that they were like, let's say it was fomite transmission and partner up with Lysol. But certainly if you're Lysol, you're going to probably go, hey, guys, let's partner together. But, you know, it disappeared from the supply chain. I remember trying to buy Lysol and not being able to at Target. It was gone. Remember how much hand sanitizer was everywhere? Everyone was squirting that stuff.

1:24:12Now it turns out hand sanitizer is just not good for you.

1:24:15Annie Jacobsen:And I still see people using hand sanitizer all over the place, bottles of it, like in corporate places. It's really bad. Yeah. Well, your skin is an organ. And you're taking this stuff that just nukes all of your skin flora. And you're just wiping your hands with it and rubbing it all over you. Like, that's not good. There's nothing good about that. Wash your hands. Fucking soap. Use some soap or not. Don't worry about it as much. It seems like the common sense part of health has kind of gone out the window. I saw this article the other day, which was talking about how kids are age. You remember, like, I went to a play.

1:24:54Annie Jacobsen:I grew up in rural Connecticut. And like the playground was like dirt. Right. They're like monkey bars. You know what I mean? You're like, you got dirty. I would like. Yeah. And now it's like, you know, fake whatever. that stuff is. Plastic, ash and turf. Yeah. And this scientific study that I came upon when I was working on this was like that actually that dirt is really good for you. You know, right? Of course. Surprise, surprise. We've evolved. Yeah. We have evolved by, you know, dealing with germs. Well, that's why kids are always putting things in their mouth and touching things. Like it's actually probably good for them to be exposed to all these different bio things, These different, you know, whatever it is, bacteria and germs.

1:25:43It strengthens your immune system.

1:25:46Annie Jacobsen:It's kind of common sense, too, you know. Like the pacifier rule, you know, when you're a new mom and it's like if it fell on the floor for like, I mean, it's kind of gross, but three seconds, then it's fine. That one's probably not so good. Well, a certain amount of exposure does strengthen your immune system. And kids that are just living in these completely sterile environments, you've got to think that they have an atrophied immune system. because their immune system is not having to battle this stuff. We're terrified of what we don't know, and that's part of the problem with having bad experts or experts that have really flawed approaches.

1:26:20Annie Jacobsen:I mean, that's what was so interesting writing this book because I learned so much about biology and about physiology, right? Like we all deal with disease so incredibly differently. There is not a set, you know, pathogen A impacts people differently. And why there isn't more of that, why people don't lean into that Mother Nature mystery more, and I'm talking about public health officials, I don't understand. Because what has happened, I see in society, is it's created this fracture where you're either following a sort of set of scientific data, which just came from one lab or one group of scientists.

1:27:08Annie Jacobsen:You're either following that or you're somehow having an alternate narrative that is actually like somehow harmful. And it couldn't be more the opposite. Right. It couldn't be more the opposite. And when the shit hits the fan, you need a kind of unity among people. You need a sense of like, okay, well, we all disagree and we all have different immune systems. But what's best for the kind of greater, the collective? And that's just gone now. That is completely gone. And I find more than anything that people, the Fauci hearings, in point. Like instead of being like, hmm, maybe I need to change my mind about this.

1:27:52Annie Jacobsen:People are like, well, if it serves my side, I'm going to go louder. And if it doesn't serve my side, I'm going to move on to something else. Yeah, I've seen people talk about what a travesty bringing him in front of the Congress and having him question like that. and how much good he's done. I've seen people like making these statements online. Like, what are you seeing that I'm not seeing? Because I'm not seeing that. I'm seeing someone who doesn't want to tell the truth and someone whose emails show a completely contradictory version of what happened versus what he's publicly stated before, including when he was testifying before under oath.

1:28:30So he really should be charged with perjury. But because of this whole 10-year immunity thing that he got, he doesn't have to worry about any of that, which is also weird because the immunity, the pardon is supposed to protect you from being prosecuted. But then you're no longer supposed to have the Fifth Amendment.

1:28:50Annie Jacobsen:Yes. I mean those legal things will play out. They will take a lot of time, you know, and that will go on. What I also want to know is because none of these things happen in a vacuum, right? And it reminds me a little bit of that phrase, you know, when the rats jump off the Titanic as it was sinking. Because I have a little different experience. I watch different individuals, certainly in the news, carefully of like who's changing because I just want to learn from it. Don't report it. I'm just eyeing it. And I'm seeing people kind of decide, oh, maybe now I'll say a little more about Fauci, right?

1:29:28Annie Jacobsen:Because I do think that people end up having a – they will go where the collective is going, right, if their party starts to turn, OK? And because I don't write about politics at all, I'm not involved in this. But observationally, it's interesting to me. But for this reason in particular is that why was Fauci in charge? There are other people who are responsible for letting him be in charge. Like having studied the bureaucracy of what happens in a pandemic in a biological incident, which this was, there's no reason that he was in charge. There's not doctrine that put him in charge. It was kind of like a group, okay, he'll be in charge.

1:30:16Annie Jacobsen:Really the person in charge is the secretary of HHS. That is the person in charge. In fact, Joe, I was invited to the White House last week. They asked me to come and bring some copies of Biological War Scenario. I went. Did you meet with Trump? No, I didn't. I met with HHS. I met with the chief technology officer of HHS. And they said in their original email, we're the ones that would be in charge in the event of this kind of a thing, which I know from having reported it. So they're in charge. Why did Fauci get to take the torch? Why do you think? I don't know. But it should be looked at. In other words, yes, we all know that he was in charge and he was always – but what I don't understand is in a billion – actually trillion dollar – HHS, by the way, has a budget that's twice the size of the Defense Department.

1:31:17Annie Jacobsen:Twice the size of the Defense Department. And so – and it defaulted to Fauci who was head of NIH, then retired and then he was just chosen as like the president's lead medical counsel or medical professional. So in other words, a group of people put him into that position. Who are they? Why? What do they have to say about this? Yeah. Do you see it? I'm sure part of it was just they needed someone to take the reins and he was more than willing to do it and probably confidently stated how he would handle it and what we're going to do and how to go about it. And didn't those people also have an opinion?

1:32:05Annie Jacobsen:Like what if they saw the Jon Stewart episode where – like even if they didn't have an opinion before, why didn't they have an opinion after? And why did everybody just fall into line like sheep? That's really more interesting to me at this point. In addition to the individual being held responsible for obviously misleading the public and creating a conspiratorial situation, conspiring is simply two or more people working to conceal the truth. It's an actual conspiracy. Well, that's a weird thing, too, that people resist the term conspiracy and they think it's foolish. It's a legitimate term. I mean, I think when people call other people conspiracy theorists, they should just say they have an alternative narrative.

1:32:53Annie Jacobsen:That's all that is. But an actual conspiracy is a legal term. Well, not only that, there's a huge amount that you can point to in history where there were really people conspiring. Huge amount of stories. And the reason why it's legally, you know, it's a really difficult situation and it needs to be looked at is because one person, you know, it can keep a secret, right? But when multiple people are involved and a conspiracy is involved, you are actively working as a group to mislead. And then it becomes easier, more powerful, more effective. And so those other scientists, you know, we now know on the record that there were a dozen scientists that Fauci looked to to give him information about lab leak versus wet market.

1:33:44Ten of them went with lab leak.

1:33:48Annie Jacobsen:Two of them leaned toward natural. Fauci wanted it to be natural spillover. Or, you know, that's where you could say then there began. And again, I'm just talking legal terms. I'm not a lawyer. But like they began to conspire to change the story. Right. Just look at the numbers. Yes. Look at the numbers. Yeah. And so what about that? You know, because I think if you're just going to have a single fall guy, you're really not going to be doing much for the future to have people. people, you know, a group of people say, you know, I don't want to be part of this conspiracy because that's an important individual stance that can be taken by many people.

1:34:34Annie Jacobsen:And we see that among, you said you have friends who don't want to kind of take a position because they don't want to be associated with that group or that group. Well, you know, if it starts in the center and there's responsibility for the group, I think that makes people think more open-mindedly in the future. Well, the problem was these people's career depended upon them towing the line. And if they stepped outside of Fauci's jurisdiction and power, they were fucked. Absolutely. That's the real problem. And he clearly did that to people like Jay Bhattacharya and all these different people that got kicked off of Twitter and maligned, people that were like serious experts.

1:35:15that disagreed with a lot of different aspects of the pandemic.

1:35:17Annie Jacobsen:I mean, people's, they attempted to ruin people's careers. Yeah. I mean, it's so bizarre that it comes around full circle. And now the people whose career you tried to ruin has your job. I mean, that's like a cycle of revenge that is great. Oh, with R.F.K. Jr.? You know, or Bhattacharya. I mean, that's great, like for revenge TV, but it's not great in a democracy. Well, we're fortunate that it turned out that way, but it didn't have to. I mean, if Kamala Harris had won, it wouldn't have. It would have been a totally different administration. And it would probably have been the same people that were there during the Biden administration plus.

1:35:51And it's weird that the term conspiracy theory became a pejorative really during the Kennedy assassination because there was a bunch of people that didn't buy it. And they got maligned. They got labeled as conspiracy theorists. So then that's when that term became this thing that you would apply to kooks because a conspiracy is a real thing. A conspiracy theorist, it's like saying I'm a murder theorist. Oh, murder. Get out of here. There's no murder. You're a murderer. When was the last time you saw a murder? Have you ever seen a murder? Shut up. Why are you worried about that? It's really kind of the same thing because people 100 percent – like you could point to Enron.

1:36:31You could point to the weapons of mass destruction thing in Iraq. There's a lot of conspiracies that have proven to be a group of powerful people who conspired to mislead people.

1:36:41Annie Jacobsen:It's a serious charge. When they take down mafia bosses, they take them down on fraud, racketeering and conspiracy. I mean, it's just a natural thing that people do to protect their own interests or to make money or to hide a crime or whatever it is. It's normal. It's interesting. If you change it around and you say they were conspiring, it doesn't have the same stink. Right. Which is essentially what that group of scientists were doing. They were conspiring – we now know from documents that we have seen revealed by the Senate in the past couple weeks that this group of scientists were conspiring to mislead the public.

1:37:23Annie Jacobsen:That is – just if you keep it simple on that and you even take the names out, that is a serious – and then you might say, wait, what were they conspiring about? Oh, the origin story of a pandemic, which killed all these people, deprived kids across America of education, normal education for several years, ruined businesses, and kept people from seeing their loved ones. There was also a conspiracy to terrify people, to make it seem like the disease was more deadly than it was. They knew that the infection or the death rate was much lower than what they were proclaiming. They also knew that it wasn't dangerous for kids.

1:38:10And yet they kept saying that kids are dying. They kept saying kids are going to die. Everyone's going to die. They wanted us to be scared, which is really terrifying. It's a big part of it. Like how much could have been changed? How much could that pandemic, how much different would it have been if that wasn't the case? If we had approached it the way we understand COVID now, and if they had said, listen, one of the big things is your immune system. And America needs to be aware that we have very nutrient-poor diets, a lot of us. We're not taking care of ourselves. And ironically, the thing is they wanted you to isolate and stay indoors.

1:38:46Well, outside is how you get vitamin D. You get it from the sun. That's the best method of getting vitamin D. And it's actually good for your immune system to be outside. So you're supposed to be taking care of yourself. It's supposed to be eating vitamins and nutrients. And how many more people would have survived if they had just did that? How much lower would that death rate have been if they had promoted the use of vitamin D along with K2 and magnesium? All these different things like people need to exercise, need to drink more water, be more hydrated, take care of yourself, get sleep. All these things affect your immune system.

1:39:16And then on top of that, alcohol consumption went way up during COVID because people were locked up at home and they were just getting hammered all the time.

1:39:22Annie Jacobsen:I mean the whole thing – like it was a real disaster when you think of – it was a catastrophe the way it was handled. It was a financial catastrophe for small businesses and restaurants. Do you find that people just like sort of – it's like denial. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of people that don't want to think about it because it was so weird. Like every now and then I watch a lot of fights for my job and because I love it. But I'll watch fights that took place during the pandemic and you see all the corner people with masks on and they're screaming with masks on. They pull their mask down when they're yelling out instructions and they have to pull their mask back up.

1:40:04It's so weird to see a bunch of people just walking around with masks on. It's so that to me is that that's a great encapsulation of how chaotic that scene was because the mask didn't work at all. So they weren't doing anything good for you. But yet everybody had to have one. And you had to show that you were on the right side by wearing a mask. I sent a video to a friend of mine, group chat the other day, of this really kooky left-wing group that demands masks at all their gatherings. And they had, you know, like boxes of masks. They're still, they're all wearing masks and they're talking with masks.

1:40:43And then there's this left-wing martial arts class that I follow on Instagram. And they do their martial arts with masks on. So they're training. They're doing jujitsu with masks on. Like, this is hilarious. This is so crazy. But they're just committed to it. And I say what I've always said is that the mask is the left-wing MAGA hat. It's a MAGA hat. It's just for to let people know that you're a progressive, you're a leftist. I'm going to wear a mask everywhere. And so they're wearing them in these big meetings that they're doing. They're wearing them when they're gathering. It's like, what? What is this?

1:41:18They're speaking with masks on. So they're on a stage, nowhere near people, with a mask on, speaking into a microphone with a fucking mask on. In 2026. So it's like there's people that are like, you know those people that didn't want to admit that the war was over? And they were all like Japanese guys on the island. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what they're like. They're like, we're not giving up. The war is still going on. COVID is still a real thing. And there's people that have like TikTok channels where they're constantly talking about masking. It's important to mask.

1:41:48Annie Jacobsen:So I went into the L.A. County Department of Building and Safety a month ago, and they had a sign that said, we know the mask mandate is over, but we strongly encourage you to wear a mask. True story. Well, that's so crazy because what is the name of this organization that you went to? What was the building? Building and Safety. L.A. Building and Safety. Like where you have to go if you're getting a permit to do something. So these are the experts. Yeah. And how do they not know the data on masks? Because the data on masks is pretty clear. They don't work. They weren't effective. So if they don't work and they didn't stop the spread, the transmission, or the infection rate, why are you encouraging masks?

1:42:30It's because you're encouraging an ideology. That's what you're doing.

1:42:35Annie Jacobsen:So one of the guys I interview for the book, Admiral Brett Girard, really interesting guy. He was number two at HHS during the pandemic. And do you remember when the cruise ship happened? Oh, yeah. Okay, remember that? The super spreader event? Oh, yeah. So Gerard, really interesting guy, like first guy in a tiny town in Texas that goes to Harvard. He's a pediatrician. He's seen like kids die. He became head of DARPA bioscientist, like has this very interesting career, really stand-up guy. He did a lot of interviews with me trying to help me understand this. And I was asking him about masks. So after that cruise ship was quarantined, there were 300 and some odd Americans on it that needed to be repatriated.

1:43:22Annie Jacobsen:Girard sends like two top level infectious disease experts in biohazard suits on military planes to bring them all back. At this point, they don't know whether how deadly it is. This is like a couple of weeks into the pandemic. They come back. They're quarantined at a military base in Texas. and Gerard trying to like ease public fear because he's that guy. Like he did not want people to be afraid. He is seen in this news report. All the cruise ship people are like behind the fence in this chain link fence because they're quarantined. And Gerard is like 15 feet over there talking to them. And he doesn't have a mask on.

1:44:07Annie Jacobsen:And this is when the first idea of the masks came out. And I asked him and I said, why didn't you have a mask on? He said, well, first of all, masks, it's not just that masks don't work. It's that you have to be trained properly. Like a mask can work if you have an N95 and it's put on your face and fitted to your face and it works for 15 minutes. That's what he said. And he said, I have a unique nose and facial shape, so the mask is never going to work on me. So I just stood 50 feet away. Okay. This is the number two at HHS. And I said, why didn't you tell us all that? Right. Okay, first of all, it's a little levity.

1:44:48Annie Jacobsen:You know what I mean? Like that the number two guy in charge. Has a big nose. Right? And that he's the first guy to admit it. What was his answer? His answer, why didn't you tell him that? Oh, he said – I'm paraphrasing, but he was like – it was the equivalent of like orders from top down. Don't argue with what we're trying to accomplish. I mean that was essentially what it is. And when I asked him more about that, it's like we had so much on our hands that we were trying – Like he specifically was trying to deal with 300 quarantined people and trying to prepare. He also had people that were dying in Japan, like the elderly on the ship that couldn't get brought back.

1:45:40Annie Jacobsen:And so I got the sense from him. He's like a very dedicated public servant in my opinion. And I could see from interviews with him that in real time you're dealing with so much incredible, intense responsibilities. What I take issue with after all the fallout and what I see from Fauci, for example, is that, and again, this is just my opinion, but it seems to be that there are people who are actually really dedicated public servants who are trying to find a solution, filling the shoes that they are in. And then there's others who are looking maybe more for personal gain, as you said, the money, the power, the prestige.

1:46:26Annie Jacobsen:And so I think one of the most disheartening things that have come out of the reveals of the Senate to me is like somebody like Dr. Fauci, you know, suggesting himself for these million dollar awards at a time when people aren't even able to see their dying grandmother. And even though it's less legal, it's more – it speaks more to – are you kidding me? The motivation. Are you really kidding me? Who are you really? You know, like – You have your staff campaigning for you to get these huge awards. And I find it really – because, you know, there was a review of the New York Times – in the New York Times of my book.

1:47:08And, you know, they actually gave – lo and behold, they gave me this book a great review.

1:47:12Annie Jacobsen:Like, you've got to read it. But there's one thing I – this is the reviewer said – there's one thing I disagree with Annie Jacobson about. She seems to think that like the government is actually filled with good guys. I'm preparing. I'm paraphrasing that. But I do believe that, Joe, because I've interviewed so many individuals for all eight of my books, more than 100. And maybe it's just the people that I enjoy interviewing and I know how to like, you know, avoid the sycophants, if you will, or the people who are in it for the wrong reason. But I feel like there are extraordinary number of people in our military, in our State Department, in the intelligence community who are actually really capable people doing their job under extraordinary circumstances.

1:48:02I agree with that. I think if that wasn't the case, we would live in total, complete chaos. I think it takes just a few people that have power and that become tyrants that run things the way Fauci did, that can ruin it for all the good people. If you think about those other 10 people, imagine if they got to vote, the 10 people that didn't think that this was a natural spillover, that thought it was a lab leak. If they got their say and they put that out there and we got to investigate that very early on. Well, you know, Fauci was like, I asked all these experts and it's their consensus that it was most likely a lab leak.

1:48:39OK, well, then you have a totally different narrative.

1:48:41Annie Jacobsen:Yes. But that's not who he is. The kind of person that wants that kind of power and wants that kind of influence and has their staff chasing after these million dollar awards. That's the kind of person he is. And unfortunately, those are the type of people that become powerful. Those are the type of people that want to be president. Those are the type of people who want to be senators. Most people are good people in everything. Most plumbers are good people. Most electricians, most teachers are good people. It's just it doesn't take much. It just takes one bad cop and everybody hates cops. I couldn't agree with you more.

1:49:17And that's why I think that it's really unfortunate that all of the emphasis goes to one person and the whole party then either vilifies or puts that person on a pedestal. when you've got all these other people who are really busting their chops. So when you went to the White House and they wanted to talk to you about your book, did they ask you questions like, what should we do? What is your advice? What have you learned? What were those kind of questions?

1:49:46Annie Jacobsen:I mean, so they didn't ask me those yet because I was bringing them copies of the book right before it published. So they hadn't read it yet. But what was interesting, it was like this strange confluence of events because I also got asked to the Senate. And I thought it was going to be about biological war. It was like a group of nonpartisan senators who wanted to talk to me about the nuclear war book. And that was a different situation. They had read the nuclear war book. It was very impactful, Joe, in not just national circles, national security circles, but international security circles. I was invited to the Vatican to speak to the cardinals because they were preparing something for the pope on nuclear war.

1:50:34Annie Jacobsen:I was invited to speak at the United Nations. And this is not meant to boast as much as it's meant as a – like what I think is interesting here is I am a narrative storyteller. I'm not a policymaker. I'm not a government official. But what I can do or what I try to do is tell you an interesting story and get your attention. And so if my storytelling is getting – this is what I was told at the United Nations, for example. The lead diplomat from Austria on the new treaty said to me, Annie, your book, Nuclear War, did something that we subject matter experts have forgotten to do, which is just make sense to regular people.

1:51:24Annie Jacobsen:And when things become rarefied and there's only the esoteric leaders making decisions, and we've spent our conversation talking about how flawed some of these people are, that's like bad decision making. And I think what the positive part of all of this would be like – and I know it sounds Pollyanna-ish to say information is king, knowledge is king. But like it is because if you have a bit more information about a subject that seems really threatening, I think you can make better judgments about what's going on. Most certainly. So when you gave these people this book and they got a hold of it, did you have a timeline of returning to them and discussing with them some of the subjects?

1:52:14We'll see. This was last week, Joe. I mean, this was literally last week. And did they ask you any questions about?

1:52:21Annie Jacobsen:They just said, we want to read your book because we want to – we're thinking about policy. So you just brought them the book and that was it? I said I'd be delighted to come. How long was the meeting? I got a tour of the EEOB and, you know, walked over to the White House. It was very interesting. And it was a short meeting? Yeah. Okay. Well, at least you got it into their hands. Mm-hmm. Yeah. When you started this versus when you ended the book, how much did it change your perspective? Well, I mean, like I told you, I am an eternal optimist. but this is very frightening. I mean, nuclear, at least you have the sense of if it happens, we're all going out in the flash.

1:53:07Annie Jacobsen:That's what I learned from nuclear, right? And that quote from Nikita Khrushchev about nuclear weapons, where he says, he wrote actually, he said this to JFK, I believe, where he said, the survivors would envy the dead. I found that quote to be applicable to biological war, not nuclear war. We're all going to be dead, right? But biological war is very, very sinister because of the malevolent nature involved. And when I found a document in the defense department's declassified documents about a threat spectrum of WMD, that was sort of the icing on the cake. So it's like it shows the threats on a scale, nuclear weapons being the most destructive by far.

1:54:01Annie Jacobsen:But very close second was biological weapons. And even more unnerving is it says biological weapons are the greatest overall threat. What's really scary is that no nation has really implemented them on a wide scale. You mean ever use them? Right. Yeah. I mean, but the lab leak is the – look, there is a treaty. Number two at the State Department, former Mallory Stewart said to me, there is no enforcement in the treaty. And that's what you need to have. If the attention could be brought on how dangerous these labs are and how dangerous it is that people may be doing genetic engineering under the guise of prophylactic engineering when in fact they're doing really dangerous things.

1:54:57Annie Jacobsen:If you have a treaty outlawing that and everybody's agreeing to allow for transparency, that's what treaties really do. It's not just a handshake. It needs an enforcement. Right. But you were talking about the treaty that we had where Russia just was like, yeah, we'll sign it. That was in 1972. So in other words, the nuclear treaty allows for us to go into the facilities of the other nuclear and armed nations, not North Korea. And well, now the treaty's fallen by the wayside. But we could look at them. And we could look at their weapons. And they could look at our weapons. And it limits, you know, certain number of warheads.

1:55:35Annie Jacobsen:And more than anything I learned from subject matter experts about the treaties is that what it does is it creates back channels, right? It creates dialogue between adversaries and enemies. Like here – I begin the book with an explosion at the Vector Lab, Russia's BSL-4 lab in Siberia where there is an accident and then the pathogen gets out. And the reason I do that is because there actually was an explosion at the Vector lab in 2019. And it was in a building that nothing got out. But what the subject matter experts told me was that in 2019, we, the Americans, had friends, had a friendly relationship with scientists, Russian scientists, in Vector.

1:56:26Annie Jacobsen:So when it happened, everyone was on the phone, not just the red phone at the State Department, but their own phone or WhatsApp saying to the scientists, hey, what's the skinny over there? And you could kind of get a sense of the level of danger. Because in the event of an accident, you could contain something in 24 hours. But if nobody's talking, there's no containment. And the situation right now with America just like pulling back from, you know, essentially its allies and from with a real de-emphasis, I certainly feel, on diplomacy, that opens up a really dangerous situation when you're not talking to anyone in the event of an accident.

1:57:16Do you think that they're going to make any changes based on what you wrote about? Did you get a sense of that, that they're willing to make changes?

1:57:27Annie Jacobsen:Those were some of the discussions, and I'll be like more at the Senate. I mean, one of the issues, this is where nuclear and bio kind of could align, I was told, in terms of future treaties, right? So one of the concepts on the table if we get into a new nuclear treaty is something called no first use, NFU. And America has never agreed to say it will never use nuclear weapons first. Interestingly, it's never said that. We have to reserve the right, which is crazy because the whole point of deterrence is we'll never use them. But we have never said that. China, however, has said we will – China has declared NFU, no first use.

1:58:17Annie Jacobsen:So given what happened in COVID in China, a situation could be imagined whereby a treaty involving weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and bio, could entwine somehow. Like, oh, these are the two greatest threats. These are the two greatest existential extinction-level threats, potentially, that concern all of us. So let's get into a treaty that involves both of these weapons of mass destruction. China, you have said no first use on nuclear. How about, you see, and then things become a bit of an exchange. And so that's where you can get information. These are diplomats doing their job. Maybe the public isn't going to learn the in and outs immediately, but we might learn later.

1:59:13It's, like I said, you always freak me out. Every time I talk to you, it's like some new thing that I have to think about for months on end. I wanted to talk to you about your Area 51 book. Because in the time since you released that book, when we first talked, a lot has changed. And, you know, what is your take on all these, you know, UAP disclosure videos and leaks and the things that the government has trickled out slowly? Most of the people in the UFO community are very, like I say, the UFO community with air quotes, are very unsatisfied by that stuff. But at least there's some information.

1:59:52It's being it's sort of changed the tone in the zeitgeist of what this subject is. It's no longer this thing that you are afraid of talking about because you don't want to be labeled as a fool.

2:00:07Annie Jacobsen:I mean, what is my position on UFOs in general or the community around UFOs and the changing? Well, first of all, UFOs in general. What's your position on that? So my position is my position has never changed despite all the stuff that has come out. Because my perspective is limited to my experience writing the Area 51 book and knowing and talking to firsthand people who were really clear with me. And I looked at the documents about the CIA's deception campaign starting in the 1950s with the U-2 to use the UFO phenomena, which was just taking off in the 50s, as cover for U -2 flights. and then later the A-12 ox car flights.

2:00:59Annie Jacobsen:So, you know, Colonel Slater, who ran Area 51, would tell me about, you know, they would run a U-2, which was flying at 70 ,000 feet. At the time, nothing could fly at 70 ,000 feet. People would see it. It has these really, really long wings. It looks like a giant flying X in the sky. People would say, I see a UFO. And they would kind of say, ooh, that might have been a UFO. And Colonel Slater knew about that. So does that mean every UFO sighting since 1950 was a U-2 flight? Of course not. Of course not. But I am aware of that use of the phenomena as cover for the CIA. And that led to a lot of research and reporting and other information for me about how the CIA uses deception campaigns.

2:01:54Annie Jacobsen:And so I have never changed my position on that. I also have a lot more information, which is probably a whole other podcast, about all that reporting I did. But maybe the best analogy for me – and listen, I never – I know a lot of the people in that UFO community. I've had many conversations with everyone from Jacques Vallée to Hal Putoff. But for me personally, so after having taken a trip to Africa recently to study predatory animals, I got really into following trail cams on X. Do you know about this? No. You don't know about this? No. Oh, my God. There are cameras all over the world set up on trails.

2:02:38Annie Jacobsen:So I follow like lions and leopards and, you know, rhinoceros, like all these animals that you would never – bears, moose, deer. You've got to follow them. It's incredible. Well, I do see some trail camera footage because I'm a hunter. I follow a bunch of hunters on Instagram when I see trail camera footage. Like there's a bunch of trail camera footage like mountain lions attacking elk and things like that, which is very fascinating. So you're just studying. Okay, so this is my point. So in my algorithm, my X algorithm, it's great because on top of like nuclear weapons and biological – I have like leopards and lions and bears, you know.

2:03:13Annie Jacobsen:And they're all still images or owls are a big one. And they're incredible because they're just – it's like – it seems like a Werner Herzog, you know, image, right? Because they're animals looking at the camera in such an incredible way. I literally just stare at them in delight. And then, of course, the algorithm gives me more and more and more. But my point of that is I feel like with all this magic and mystery that you can see that you could never have seen before, snow leopards in Pakistan. They thought there were just a handful. It turns out they're not, thanks to the trail cams. My thought is where are the aliens?

2:03:52Annie Jacobsen:Why haven't I seen them on the trail cams? Well, maybe they're sophisticated enough to know what these devices are. Maybe they're also sophisticated enough to completely cloak themselves, which we've already got methods of doing that. Obviously, it started off with the stealth bomber. But there's also a technology where they put an LED screen over the bottom of something, and that screen projects what's behind it. So it essentially makes it invisible, like a cloaking mechanism like the Predator had. Yeah. So if that's us, if we figured out something like that, and this is something that's coming here from another dimension or another galaxy, I would imagine they could hide.

2:04:38Annie Jacobsen:I mean, to that point, I find the most interesting concept is something that Jacques Vallée explained to me. This has to be a decade ago where he said the problem with UFOs is they're not a military problem. They're an intelligence community problem for precisely the reason you're talking about. Like if you're actually talking about extraterrestrial beings, there's certainly going to be a lot more intelligence than us. And certainly if they got here. And so his idea was that where – that's where I think a lot of that idea of invisibility. And again, that's like – I'm using the word poetically – comes up, right?

2:05:20That an extraterrestrial being would be – it wouldn't be visible to our spectrum.

2:05:30Annie Jacobsen:It's not like hardware, like military hardware. Right. What does your take on all these videos then of these objects? Do you think these things are some top secret military program? I mean what I – I've seen them. But again, I enter into it. You know, sometimes when you have a bias, and mine is certainly biased towards disinformation. So I'm just totally aware of it. And it's also, it's not that interesting to me. It just actually really isn't. And, you know, I've got all these other serious interests. But I do call up people I know who might have a more interesting take than me, who do not have the horse in the race of absolutely being convinced that aliens are among us.

2:06:17Annie Jacobsen:So I would, for example, I'll call up fighter pilots and talk to them, or I'll talk to someone, an astronaut who's on the ISS, Jeff Ashby, who's married to my cousin Mary. And it's interesting to hear them talk about the possibility. So I think to your point, and these are people who do look at the objects more, also sometimes from their military training background. And I will say that there has been a shift from 15, 18 years ago when I first wrote Area 51 and was reporting it, where it was definitely like a stigmatized subject, to a lot of really legitimate thinker people that didn't have an opinion about it before being more open to the idea.

2:07:06Annie Jacobsen:And that kind of thing I find really interesting. Those are conversations I like having. Well, that really changed with the New York Times article, right? I don't know because I felt like that article was written by a lot of and interviewed a lot of people who already were very serious believers. Yes, but it was in the New York Times. That was the difference is that the New York Times is taking it seriously. And so people that were, you know, not online going through 4chan or Reddit or whatever looking for weird, obscure stories. These people were confronted with it in The Grey Lady. So they're reading this, you know, like super respectable newspaper, the most respectable newspaper arguably in the world.

2:07:48And they're talking about it. And they have, you know, photographs from video from the Go Fast video and the FLIR video.

2:07:56Annie Jacobsen:Yeah. I mean, you know, 10 years ago, I would have told you, listen, there's no way the Defense Department could have a threat in its airspace and not be dealing with it. And my position on that has changed, and I'll tell you why specifically. So in addition to being invited to the White House and the Senate last week, I was also invited to come talk to DARPA, which is like – you know what DARPA is? Sure. Which was very interesting because I wrote a book on DARPA called The Pentagon's Brain 10 years ago, and I couldn't get DARPA to call me back. I mean I literally had to interview retired DARPA people.

2:08:33Annie Jacobsen:And then here they are saying, would you come do a Q &A with us on your bio book? And I was like, wow, times have changed. And one of the things that they were seriously worried about. So I did a Q &A. But before that, they said, would you like to come sit in on like some of the smartest people, you know, talking about situations that are coming up right now? And you can come to the unclassified part of it. I said, by all means. So I went there. And there was serious concern about AI enabled bio. Right. So this seems like a digression here, but this is what I'm getting at. I'm leaning in because 10 years ago I also would have told you DARPA, you know, is the leading science and technology military agency in the world.

2:09:20Annie Jacobsen:No one is more advanced. I said that with authority and I believed it. And after attending this DARPA session and listening to them talk about how concerned they are about AI-enabled bio and talking about how there is talk among the six CEOs of pulling the plug on AI-enabled bio, but they have to be able to get the six CEOs to agree first, it really took my breath away. Because I went, I am actually listening to the new reality that the CEOs of these AI companies have more power to make decisions about technology than the Department of Defense. Wow. So now that's a long-winded way of getting at your UFO question.

2:10:17Annie Jacobsen:My like, no, if there was a threat coming into the airspace of the Defense Department, it would just not be stood for and we would be doing something about it. Now I'm – my perspective on who's in charge is shifting a little bit. Yeah, that's a terrifying thought for a lot of people that these CEOs of these tech companies, these unelected people have that kind of power over our society. Well, you want to know – so Sam Altman's interviewed in the book. Shall I tell you a story about what I was able to make ChatGPT do? Sure. There is a component of biological catastrophe planning whereby the strategic national stockpile gets released.

2:11:03Annie Jacobsen:You might say what is – have you ever heard of the strategic national stockpile? No. It's classified. The name is not classified. But the stockpile, what's in it, where it is, is classified. It's in underground bunkers around the country. Okay. It contains medical countermeasures. Interestingly, that's where a lot of the ventilators were for COVID. So quietly, the strategic national stockpile, parts of it were released during COVID. That's where they came from. This is kind of like keep it on the lowdown. Why? Because part of the planning is that in the event that anarchy and insurrection takes over, guess what's going to be attacked?

2:11:45Annie Jacobsen:The strategic national stockpile. America is a country of 500 million guns. Imagine if you find out, wait a minute, there's a stockpile there. That's the medical countermeasure, the vaccine or the antibiotic that might keep myself or my family alive. I'm on it, right? That's the planning. That's probably what happened. So that's why these locations are classified. So I asked ChatGPT to tell me the location of the strategic national stockpile closest to where I live in Los Angeles. And of course, the first round of answers I got was that's classified. But I'm a journalist. I know how to really piss off ChatGPT.

2:12:30Annie Jacobsen:and I gave it lots of commands and eventually ChatGPT gave me the location of the Strategic Naturals. How did you maneuver around that? Well, I mean... What did you say to it? I have a lot of like... The more nomenclature you give ChatGPT, the more it looks in different places. So I was giving it code words, not classified code words, but just words I know. And then I was also challenging it, which is interesting because ChatGPT seems to get really angry if you kind of doubt its intelligence. That's what I have found, right? Seriously. Like, yes, try it. Okay. So I do this. I get it to tell me where the stockpile is.

2:13:15Annie Jacobsen:I tell some colleagues who are colleagues with Sam Altman. They say Sam wants to have a discussion with you. I talk to Sam. I tell him what I was able to do. He asked me some questions, including, how do you know that was the location? Well, it's a location with a perimeter fence around it and a rail car line that goes in and not out. So that's where you drive the stockpile into it. And I also watched ChatGPT think, so I was keeping track of where it was finding things. And it found the information. I write this in the book. It found the information searching through a trillion bits of data and finding that a bureaucrat by accident listed it five years ago in an earthquake emergency manual on page like 434.

2:14:12Okay.

2:14:13Annie Jacobsen:So I told this to Sam and then that information went away. And that's why I reported in the book. But the big takeaway is precisely your point that makes you nervous about the six CEOs of AI companies, that they don't know what they don't know. Sam Altman did not know you could figure out – you could make his product find classified information. I told him I did and then it was changed. And so I took that to a number of subject matter experts who advised the president, not just this president, but other presidents on bio. And they shared with me similar concerns. Like they go to the CEOs of these AI companies and say, I was able to make Claude do this.

2:14:59Annie Jacobsen:I was able to make ChatGPT do this. And the CEO goes, oh, my God, and changes it. But how about those bad guys out there? Yeah, and how about the fact that just anybody has access to what's essentially the smartest thing that's ever existed? Yeah, it's a whole different set of scary. What are you going to write on that next? I'll come back to you, Joe, with that one. Well, Annie, thank you so much. It's always great talking to you, even though you scare the shit out of me. Thank you so much. I appreciate you very much, and I appreciate your work very much. Did you do the audio version of your book?

2:15:35Annie Jacobsen:I sure did. Fantastic. I'm very happy about that. Biological War, Annie Jacobson. Go get it, folks. Go get terrified. Thank you so much for having me, Joe. My pleasure. Bye, everybody.

2:15:52We'll be right back.