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

Summary

Danny Jones Podcast #417

"They Lied About Roswell" Area 51 Deathbed Confession Never Heard Before | Annie Jacobsen
July 27, 2026

Episode Overview

In this wide-ranging and intense conversation, host Danny Jones sits down with investigative journalist and bestselling author Annie Jacobsen to discuss her new book, "Biological War: A Scenario." The episode dives deep into the chilling realities of biological warfare, the limitations and dangers of government preparedness, and the evolving threats posed by genetically engineered pathogens. The discussion branches into government secrecy, the collapse of trust in institutions post-COVID, the weaponization of narratives and technology, and finishes with a raw look at the infamous Area 51 “deathbed confession” revealed to Annie by her secret source, Al O’Donnell.

Jacobsen’s signature blend of sober reporting and big-picture context, matched by Danny’s probing and skeptical style, results in a thought-provoking and sometimes alarming depiction of just how precarious modern society might be in the face of biological threats and disinformation.

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Major Themes & Discussion Points

1. Why Write About Biological War?

[00:48–06:38]

• Annie’s new book follows her previous work on nuclear war, examining the next level of catastrophic threats — biological weapons.
• Nuclear and biological threats are different, but equally terrifying; counterproliferation experts in both fields urged her to look at the possibility and readiness for bioweapons.
• Jacobsen stresses that her book is built on Pentagon war-game scenarios, real science, and informed government sources.
• The book’s aim: Not panic, but pressure for informed public debate and awareness.

“The point is not panic. The point is pressure. People will benefit from being informed about what is possible and what the government knows is possible, so that God forbid something like this happens, people behave in a manner that maybe there’s a solution, as opposed to complete... anarchy and insurrection.” — Annie Jacobsen [05:58]

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2. The Evolution & Illegality of Biological Weapons

[02:10–09:28]

• Biological weapons became officially illegal in 1972 under the Biological Weapons Convention, though many nations continued or covertly started programs.
• Unlike the relatively “legal” status of nuclear weapons among a few nations, bio-weapons are supposedly totally banned, but enforcement and transparency are non-existent.
• Annie recounts the history of recombinant DNA: In 1972, Paul Berg first combined DNA from two organisms, a breakthrough quickly seen as having dangerous dual-use potential.

“Biological weapons are illegal and everyone is doing them.” — Annie Jacobsen [02:13]

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3. Recombinant DNA, Gain-of-Function, and Soviets’ Super Plague

[06:38–26:34]

• Danny presses for the origins of “chimeric” pathogens, referencing Soviet bioweapons plans to blend respiratory plagues with other diseases.
• These advances make rapid, hard-to-identify pandemics far more likely.
• Modern recombinant DNA technologies—originating with PCR and now accelerated—enable scientists to engineer pathogens for greater transmissibility and virulence, raising the stakes for accidental or deliberate outbreaks.
• Jacobsen details Pentagon/DoD simulations where genetically altered, untreatable “novel plagues” spiral into catastrophe.

“Recombined genetic viruses—genetically engineered, genetically modified viruses and bacteria—have opened up this extraordinary new threat level that is off the charts, that no one is talking about... It's just beyond the worst possible imagination.” — Annie Jacobsen [05:15]

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4. Why Biology is Uncontrollable as a Weapon

[11:44–15:50]

• Unlike nuclear weapons with predictable kill ratios, biological weapons have huge uncertainty: transmission, mutations, individual immune responses, and unintended consequences.
• Historical note: Nixon’s administration destroyed the US’s bioweapons arsenal in part because controlling outbreaks (including backfire on the user’s own population) was effectively impossible.

"Biology is profoundly difficult to control. The uncertainty is extraordinary... it's not a good weapon for the US Defense Department. It also makes it a very terrible and viable weapon for someone who wants to cause unbridled chaos." — Annie Jacobsen [13:01]

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5. Real-World Examples and Spookiest Scenarios

[17:23–24:03]

• Annie reveals for the first time that MIT-trained microbiologist Aafia Siddiqui (linked to 9/11 and captured in Afghanistan) was found with plans to make airborne rabies—a 100% fatal virus if not treated quickly.
• This plan, confirmed by top CIA counterproliferation officials, illustrates just how serious and plausible these scenarios are.

“In her bag she had plans to create a chimera weapon that mixed rabies... to make rabies airborne. That was confirmed by Lawlor and a second presidential advisor...” — Annie Jacobsen [19:50]

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6. Media, the Internet, Big Tech & Disinformation

[38:15–47:24]

• Discussion on search engines, AIs (like Google and ChatGPT), and algorithmic curation of information; both Annie and Danny agree that the centralized, secretive infrastructure can manipulate public perception and narratives.
• The speed of technological change and the government’s slow legislative/cultural adaptation are producing a massive disconnect between reality and official stories; efforts at “transparency” (e.g., selective declassification) are often just smoke and mirrors.
• They debate whether ChatGPT is engineered to be “positive,” their own experiences with AI, and the risk of economic/social incentives distorting algorithms towards engagement and agitation.

"You almost need just like a rogue AI… Google is entwined with the government 100%. I don’t think that’s a speculative thing to say.” — Danny Jones [39:31]

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7. The Collapse of Trust and the Illusion of Democracy

[28:06–34:13], [81:26–85:11]

• As disasters expose secret preparations and resources (e.g., reserved vaccines, bunkers), the idea of a shared, democratic nation collapses.
• Annie reveals the existence of “devolution” plans: pre-selected government cadres retreat into bunkers while most of the population faces the crisis unsupported.
• They discuss how government transparency is mostly performative, citing the UFO narrative and other recent “declassifications” as examples.

“When the shit hits the fan... a select group of people disappears into these bunkers... It’s kind of assumed that many of the high ranking officials in the government will die. And so it’s an even more skewed perspective on democracy... This group has been pre-chosen.” — Annie Jacobsen [31:10]

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8. Government Failures & Unsolved Mysteries

[56:40–60:21]

• Government pandemic preparedness is fragmented, opaque, and mainly bureaucratic. HHS (Health & Human Services) dwarfs the Defense Department in its budget yet remains little understood by the public.
• When emergencies happen (anthrax attacks post-9/11, COVID-19), the FBI, CDC, FDA, and other agencies often contradict each other, make costly errors, or fail to deliver answers, further ruining public trust.

"The CDC went into a partnership with Lysol. Lysol... it messed up the supply chain completely... 1 in 10,000 chance of getting Covid from a fomite — and no one has ever... People are arguing about vaccines, but please ask the CDC why they haven’t either apologized or acknowledged that kind of screw up.” — Annie Jacobsen [53:16]

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9. Scenario: The Dark Future of American Pandemic Response

[62:40–66:51]

• Drawing from “Dark Winter,” a chilling pre-9/11 Pentagon exercise, Annie describes how stockpiles of vaccines and countermeasures are reserved for government continuity, not the general population — a fact that would trigger public outrage and chaos.
• She walks listeners through the actual government plans for continuity (COGCON, Strategic National Stockpile), the gaps between paper preparedness and practical realities, and why rapid collapse is likely (insurrection, martial law, “devolution”).

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10. Weaponized Information and Rogue Narratives: Roswell, Area 51 & Deathbed Confessions

[101:47–123:45]

• Addressing the podcast’s titular tease, Annie recounts her decades-long investigation into Area 51 and the so-called “deathbed confession” of Al O’Donnell (her previously anonymous source).
• O’Donnell, a nuclear weapons engineer, confessed to participating in early Cold War human experiments designed to fool American radar/defense by mimicking alien encounters, supposedly as part of a U.S. plan to counter Soviet “war of the worlds” hoaxes.
• Jacobsen describes the human drama: O’Donnell admitted his guilt out of religious and moral anguish, not for notoriety. She offers extensive context for why he might have told her the story, emphasizing that the “truth” is always tangled in secrecy, trauma, and government disinformation campaigns.

“He said, in that moment, I could finally face the facts that what I did was horrible... I realized when my grandchild was born that I was being punished by God for what I had done... And I said, ‘why are you telling me this and not a priest?’ — ‘because you won’t judge me.’” — Annie Jacobsen [119:41]

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11. The Current and Future State of Biological Warfare

[139:30–163:41]

• Annie discusses real-world Soviet (now Russian) programs to develop recombinant “super plague” weapons designed to evade treatments, break government trust, and cause societal collapse.
• The U.S. may not know what these foreign labs truly possess (and vice versa), while transparency is impossible since all states claim only “defensive” research.
• Global proliferation of high-containment (BSL-3 and -4) labs, many with little to no oversight, creates a huge risk for both deliberate and accidental release of engineered pathogens—"the genie could very easily be out of the bottle.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The illusion of transparency:
  "They're going to create this big dog and pony show to make everyone feel like it's transparent government. But in reality… there's billions of files that have been burned and destroyed or that are never going to see the light of day." — Danny Jones [33:22]

• On AI vs. human POV:
  "What does that mean? Because before I ever used a large language model, I would have told you that only humans have a point of view. And now I can make ChatGPT give me its opinion... That's right at the edge of consciousness."
  — Annie Jacobsen [131:26]

• On why her Area 51 source confessed:
  “I realized when my grandchild was born that I was being punished by God for what I had done. And I said, 'why are you telling me this and not a priest?' 'Because you won't judge me.'” — Annie Jacobsen [119:41]

• On the government’s own war games:
  “The U.S. Coast Guard is going to start shooting migrants that are trying to come here? Well yes, and that is not from Annie Jacobsen’s imagination. That is a play out of an unclassified biological weapons attack war game done by U.S. officials who had recently retired.” — Annie Jacobsen [159:47]

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Key Timestamps

• Bioweapons origins & policy: [02:10–09:28]
• Recombinant DNA and “chimera” threats: [06:38–09:28]
• Weaponizing rabies & “too horrifying to report” confession: [17:23–21:17]
• Government secrecy, data collection, AI as gatekeepers: [38:15–44:49]
• Collapse of trust, “devolution” bunkers for the elite: [28:06–34:13]
• CDC, FDA errors and loss of trust post-COVID: [53:01–58:47]
• Dark Winter & government pandemic plans: [62:40–66:51]
• Area 51, Roswell, Al O’Donnell confession, and the myth-making process: [101:47–123:45]
• Super-plague labs & loss of control: [139:30–163:41]

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Conclusion & Takeaways

• Stay informed, don’t panic, but don’t trust blindly: The takeaway of Annie’s work (and this episode) is best summed up in her closing words: “Stay informed, get smarter.”
• The biggest threat isn’t “aliens” or a surprise nuke: It’s the combination of non-transparency, runaway science, and governments outpaced by their own weapons and information systems.
• The real battle is for narrative and for public understanding: Both in biological defense and in information space.
• The truth is rarely clear: Whether about Roswell, pandemics, or continuity of government, secrets, self-interest, and trauma make it hard to know what’s real.

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Further Reading / Listening

• Annie Jacobsen’s "Biological War: A Scenario" (linked in episode notes)
• Key background: “Dark Winter” wargame, CDC/FDA communications during COVID, Area 51 literature

End of summary.

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Note: Timestamps are approximate, and minor ad/interlude sections have been omitted per instructions.

Transcript

[A]

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see what you can save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. With the American Express Platinum card, you can access over $3,500 in annual value with benefits and eligible purchases across travel, entertainment and more. There's nothing like platin. More@american express.com Explore Platinum enrollment requirements, monthly and other limits in terms of. We meet again. Annie Jacobson.

[B]

Danny, thanks so much for having me back.

[A]

Of course. I'm super excited to have you and talk to you about this new book. First of all, how did you decide to write about biological war? Especially right after your. Was it. Was it just like after you did the nuclear war book? Did you figure that was like the next best or the next most logical thing to write about? Or were you. Was there some sort of weird connection between those two books?

[B]

The Next Best Horror Show.

[A]

Horror show.

[B]

Yeah. You know, many of my sources in for the nuclear war scenario book work in what is called counter proliferation. It's basically a fancy phrase for stopping bad guys, stopping nations using WMD weapons of mass destruction. And so many of the people who work in nuclear counter proliferation also work in biological warfare counter proliferation, which is much trickier because it's illegal to have biological weapons. But when I was reporting that book, a number of those individuals would say to me, annie, next you have to look at bio with this kind of shark in the water feeling. And of course, nuclear is so horrific and overwhelming. I was completely focused on that, but immediately began looking at bio once I was done reporting nuclear they're very different, equally terrifying.

[A]

So biological weapons are illegal.

[B]

Biological weapons are illegal and everyone is doing them. This is where we talk about the fine points here because it's very interesting. I mean, you know, it's crazy to think that nuclear weapons are legal, but they are legal at the United nations, to the five nations that legally have them, except for there are nine nuclear armed nations. So you see, right. So the people that won't really acknowledge that they have them or will not be part of the treaties, but either way, nuclear weapons are technically legal. Biological weapons were banned. They became illegal in 1972 with the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty by all these signatories, including America, including.

[A]

Is this what Nixon did?

[B]

Yes, it is. Absolutely. And, and before that, people should be, you know, shocked if they don't already know that biological weapons were legal. And we had a massive arsenal of biological weapons, as did all the other superpowers.

[A]

So in this scenario that you play out in the book, it's terrifying. It scared the living daylights out of me how there was these Soviet defectors, I believe, that came to the US and basically explained how there was these programs buried deep inside Siberia to create these hybrid chimera bacteria beasts, where they're basically taking the plague virus. Not the bubonic plague, but the. The respiratory plague.

[B]

Pneumonic.

[A]

Pneumonic plague like pneumonia. Pneumonia. Pneumonia, plague. And they're essentially fusing the DNA of that with some other kind of disease so that when the person catches it, there's no way to determine what the person has because the symptoms are just so much more broad. Is that correct?

[B]

That's absolutely right. And that is the sort of. So you, you hit upon an important point for me in my reporting, which is that in writing the scenario, I want to be able to convey the deep sense of science and of nonfiction reporting that I do and that I have written all of my books about. And so all things are tied to what is scientifically possible, what the US Government knows about the programs that exist within the various elements of the US Government to combat these kind of situations, were they to happen. And how many different agencies are involved in all the different contingencies. And things are generally based on war game scenarios that are done at the Pentagon. And so that's really a kind of lead in the narrative of the Defense Department has gamed through this before. And of course they have many different scenarios, but I think one of the most terrifying scenarios, and it was certainly conveyed to me by all of the defense officials that I discussed this with as well as fema. Those are the Federal Emergency management officials who would have to deal with this, the public health officials with HHS, the U.S. office of Health and Human Services, is that the ability to create recombined genetic viruses, this is genetically engineered, genetically modified viruses and bacteria has opened up this extraordinary new threat level that is off the charts that no one is talking about. And if there's anything I want to say about biological war scenario is. The point is not panic. The point is pressure. People need to or will benefit from being informed about what is possible and what the government knows is possible. So that God forbid something like this happens, people behave in a manner that maybe there's a solution as opposed to complete. You know, the book ends in anarchy and insurrection. That's the spoiler alert because the out of control nature of genetic engineering is just beyond the worst possible imagination.

[A]

What is the origin of this recombinant DNA stuff? So this is interesting because it all ties into the origin of PCR and the PCR testing stuff. And I'm familiar with the dude, Kerry Mullis, I read his book a while ago and he won a Nobel Prize for developing the PCR method with the DNA and all that. But so recombinant DNA is that essentially the same thing is the chimera weapons.

[B]

Recombinant DNA is just recombining a pathogen's DNA. Okay, so a pathogen for starters, like there's viruses, we all know about the COVID virus, but there's also bacteria, which is, can be equally deadly. A pathogen is a, is a dangerous or deadly organism.

[A]

So it can be a virus or

[B]

a virus or bacteria. So you have viruses and you know, but then germs, like germs are a different. Germs can also be perfectly good. We all have germs in our guts that are like necessary. So that's. Germ is kind of can be okay, pathogen, dangerous virus and bacteria within that for decades, since the invention of antibiotics, right around World War II, most antibiotics will kill bacteria. So if you have a strep throat, you go to the doctor and the doctor prescribes antibiotics and your strep throat goes away. But not all strep throats are bacterial. Some are viral infections. I mean, sorry, all strep throats are bacteria, but not all sore throats. You can go. And the doctor says, oh, that's actually not strep. And you're like, but my throat hurts. And they say, drink lots of tea and you know, talk to us in a week. Right, so now to answer your question about genetic engineering in 1972, that is the origin story of this idea of recombinant DNA. A professor named Paul Berg in a laboratory in Stanford in California at the university, figures out a way to combine the DNA of two organisms. Hence the word chimera.

[A]

Did he win a Nobel Prize for this?

[B]

He did win a Nobel Prize, and this was in 1972. And I write a little bit about the book in the kind of how we got here, where I set the reader up to understand in kind of a very general 90,000 foot view way. Here's what, here's what happened and here's where we are now. And that's a really important moment in science because it was basically like the discovery of the, of the atom bomb, meaning you could absolutely create A new pathway in terms of weapons. And of course, the scientists were not thinking about weapons at the time. They were thinking about medical countermeasures, they were thinking about antidotes, they were thinking about how to use science for good. But that's not what happened.

[A]

Right.

[B]

In a certain lane.

[A]

Right. And you also talk about SV40, simian virus 40, the monkey virus, which I've learned a lot about on this show in the past couple years, especially when it came to like the early developments of the polio vaccine with Alton Ochner. I forget what year that would have been, but yeah, like there was a whole, there was a whole vaccine push for the polio vaccine. And Alton Oschner, who was the one behind it, pushing it out, was doing like a test on a presentation in front of an auditorium of students in New Orleans. And he injected his grandchild, his two grandchildren, his granddaughter and his grandson with this vaccine. I think it killed his grandson and it gave his granddaughter polio and she ended up surviving. And what. There was this lady named Bernice Eddy and I can't remember exactly what her like title would, would have been, but she was in charge of like reviewing and, and doing the safety tests on these vaccines. And it was like a day before he did that presentation, she tested a bunch of them on monkeys and a bunch of the monkeys were dropping dead because it had this active SV40 in there, the simian virus 40 in there. And that's what was killing them. Because that is like a cancer causing virus. It like exasperates cancer. And you know, I also had a gentleman in here. The crazy part about this is this guy worked for the Human Genome Project at MIT and he was on this podcast and he was explaining to me all the stuff about SV40. He founds traces of this in contaminated vials of the Pfizer vaccine for Covid. And that episode got blasted off you, like taken off of YouTube because of that. It's still on Spotify. But like this was scary stuff. Like this guy's no, he's no kook. Like this guy was a legitimate biologist, DNA expert who worked at MIT at the Human Genome Project, who found this stuff. So like it's not gone away. The SV40 is still here. Anyways, that's the long winded way of, you know, I'm just really curious about like what specifically they would have been doing with SV40.

[B]

Well, you have brought up a really interesting point that's fundamental to any of these conversations about whether it's biological war, you know, a lab leak, which is Called an incident or an accident in that same lane that could cause panic, anarchy, insurrection, and mass death. And medical countermeasures, right? So vaccines and antibiotics, other medical countermeasures, things that will counter a dangerous pathogen. And I think the principle that we're really talking about here, that's most important for people to think about and kind of digest and be open minded about is the idea of uncertainty. So that's what I hear you talking about. And I don't know about the SV40 vaccine trials you were talking about. And I specifically stay away from the vaccine debate only because I do not want to be part of the division of sort of people having a horse in the race about uncertainty. Because honestly, it's one of the most

[A]

divisive things in American history.

[B]

I mean, if we learned anything from COVID it fractured. It fractured trust in American officials. This is so profoundly dangerous. And it's actually an old Soviet play, which is super dangerous. We can talk about that. And that's what happens in, in the scenario I write. But uncertainty biology is not a bomb. I mean, it's interesting because one of the reasons I think, and this is me sort of pontificating, biological weapons were made illegal by the Nixon administration in 1969. We had this massive arsenal. It took 219 weeks to destroy. That's how big it was. Okay? Living organisms that were gonna be put into bomblets and dropped, you know, fired in missiles and. And it's remained a mystery why it was that Nixon decided to do that. And there are all different kinds of theory. My theory is this, is that, and this comes from having reported eight books now on the Pentagon and the CIA, is that biology is profoundly difficult to control. The uncertainty factor is extraordinary. You can drop a nuclear bomb or a conventional bomb and know in advance the kill ratios. You can know that they have been measurable. They are measurable effects.

[A]

Well, von Neumann did. Right?

[B]

That is exactly what he did. And think about trying to measure biology. There are so many different factors. You and I could be in the same room with the same pathogen and we would. You could have. You could be asymptomatic and never. I mean, we can go on and on and we can get into any of this, but it is impossible to control. And therefore it is not a good weapon for the U.S. defense Department. It also makes it a very terrible and viable weapon for someone who wants to cause unbridled chaos. And that, and also the important distinctions I think, is why in the Cold War, biological weapons were seen as viable. And that has to do with geography. You know, the Soviet Union was a closed off space, so their plan was like what's called Bio1. Biological Warfare 101. Create a vaccine, vaccinate all your soldiers. They were going to do this with plague. Bubonic plague in the lungs becomes pneumonic plague. It's incredibly contagious. They were going to vaccinate their soldiers and then use plague on the battlefield, kill all the enemy soldiers. Right, so, but that doesn't work anymore because proximity, because of, you know, intercontinental warfare, and primarily because of airborne pathogens and how genetically genetic engineering has advanced to the degree where you can make something that wasn't airborne. Airborne, which is the number one requirement for a pandemic.

[A]

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[B]

Absolutely. And this sounds like science fiction. And all of the presidential advisors on biodefense that I have spoken to will shake their head grimly letting us all know this is no longer science fiction. I'll give you an example. I report this in the book and it's an interesting detail that has never been reported before and you know, has not yet been picked up on. But I interviewed two of the CIA's top counter proliferation experts and one of whom you interviewed, Mad Dog Lawler, called Mad Dog because he got bit by a rabid dog in Paris. And Rolf Moat Larson. And they were in charge of different lanes of the, of the CIA's, you know, going after bad guys trying to get WMD. Lawler was kind of like really looking with long term missions, really working on sort of developing assets to understand the science programs, to go after them from the inside out, which is super interesting in its own right. And then Moat Larsen was like literally with Ground Branch guys going after the bad guys, you know, meeting with Al Qaeda weapons makers in Sudan and, and saying it's gonna be this or that, okay, that kind of thing. But digressing here, going back to Mad Dog, James Lawlor from the CIA told me that AFA Siddiqui, Afia Siddiqui, she was captured in Afghanistan. She was the first woman on the most wanted terrorist list for the FBI. This is during the height of the War on terror. She was an MIT trained microbiologist who was linked to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And this FBI was after her. After the 911 terrorist attacks, FBI was after her. They heard she was developing bioweapons. They couldn't find her. They finally found her. This part is all reported. They finally found her, you know, acting strange outside a police station in Afghanistan. There was a big sort of kerfuffle. She grabbed a gun, someone was shot. I mean it's all there. Millions of conspiracies have been developed around this. She's now in a state facility in Texas for 80 years in a penitentiary in a mental institution. This is the unreported fact that Lawler told me and was confirmed by a second person, which is shocking. To your point about making something airborne? In her bag, in her handbag. She had plans to create a chimera weapon that mixed rabies, which has a 100% lethality rate. If you do not get get anti rabies medication immediately, 100%, you will die to make rabies airborne. And that was confirmed by Lawlor and a second presidential advisor named David Relman. And that has never been reported. And I believe that the reason it has never been reported is because it's too horrifying to even consider that would

[A]

be even worse than airborne plague.

[B]

Well, they are the two killers, the two most that have a 100% death rate if you don't have a countermeasure. So rabies is a virus. There's anti. You know, there's shots in the stomach when you get rabies, if, you know, you're bitten. And then plague. Once upon a time, you could take antibiotics for plague immediately. It has to be within the 24 hours. And then it would kill the mnemonic plague to a certain degree.

[A]

It's not like I'm. This is like nature's natural plague.

[B]

Natural mother nature's plague, which happens in

[A]

the US Every year still.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Which is interesting.

[B]

Okay, so there are three different kinds of plague, which is interesting. Bubonic plague has so much narrative load to it because we think of the Black death, we think of what happened.

[A]

Bird mask.

[B]

Yes. And, you know, in the 14th century, bubonic plague killed between one third and one half of Europe. I mean, that's the bring out your dead. You know, that's the, like, there's nowhere to bury people.

[A]

Didn't they also use that as, like, weapons? They would take dead bodies infested with plague and, like, catapult them into, like, enemy territory.

[B]

This is old biological warfare ideas. And you can see where it comes from. And so bubonic plague has that, like, real scary sense. And it literally is transmitted by a flea that is infected with the bacteria, which is called yersinia pestis. So the flea bites. The infected flea bites Danny. Danny gets a lump lymph nodes on his lymph nodes, which are also called buboes, hence bubo. And then it becomes, you know, it takes over the body, and that's a bubonic plague. And the death rate from that is anywhere, it's like around 30%. Let's say this is again, this is like sort of uncertainty. If the bubonic plague explodes in the body and enters the bloodstream, it's called systemic plague. And that. Think about it. You get sepsis, you're dead. If it infiltrates the lungs, it's pneumonic plague. 100% death rate. And that's why the bubonic plague was killing so many people, because it started out with fleas, and then it sort of became pneumonic. And then you had all kinds of people giving it to one another, you know, through. Through contact. And also it. When something becomes airborne, literally aerosolized in the air.

[A]

So this particular version of the mnemonic plague that you write about, and I know you go back and forth between fiction and reality in the book, Right?

[B]

Hypothetical scenario.

[A]

Hypothetical scenario.

[B]

Like a Pentagon war game game.

[A]

Exactly. And you go, you. You go back and forth between that and like, actual real interviews with folks. This mnemonic plague that is completely not treatable with any kind of antibiotics or drugs or any kind of known treatments. You call it a novel. A novel plague. So completely unknown to anyone who's ever done any research on this stuff. So, like, if that. Is that real.

[B]

Covid was a novel virus. That means it's new. So mother nature and whatever you think about lab leak versus natural origin, we can get into that later. But either way, mother nature create. You know, viruses mutate, right? Bacteria mutate, so you create. That is one why something can be novel, which is a different word for new. Let me give you three basic concepts that I think are really helpful to consider when you're talking about any deadly pathogen. Three requirements to be really afraid of, right? One, transmissibility. We've talked about that. If it's airborne, that is the number one threat. Because it's going to linger in the air after you and I leave this room. If I have Ebola and I'm standing way over there and you're over by that door. As terrifying as Ebola is with its up to 90% death rate, you're not gonna get Ebola if you're way over there. It has to be on the surface contact. And so that's why your first responders, your doctors, your nurses, the loved ones carrying some. Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever. You bleed out of your eyeballs. So anyone touching you is going to get it. But Danny's across the room. Not so. That is not so. Transmissibility is the number one. Second is virulence. How deadly is it? Okay, rabies and plague. 100% case fatality rate. Covid, Ebola, we just talked about maybe it's 60, 80, 90. Again, there's some uncertainty with various strains. Guess what Covid was.

[A]

I think it was less than a percent, right?

[B]

It was around 1%.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And there were many asymptomatic people, meaning people who didn't even know who had Covid. So 1% now, something like hantavirus.

[A]

And it also varied depending on age, Right. And comorbidity. There were so many factors.

[B]

There were so many factors. But the case fatality rate is usually done after the fact. Once you have a certain amount of people that die of the disease per 100, then you can. Then you. Right, so it's transmissibility, number one. To be Considered virulence. How deadly is it? And then number three, how do we stop it? Do we have any medical countermeasures? In the old days, plague, antibiotics, rabies, Give them the shots in the gut. Ebola, no medical countermeasures.

[A]

Okay, so wait, now we have no.

[B]

Now the strain Then from 2014, a medical countermeasure was developed called ZMapp by some scientists in San Diego. And now the new strain in Africa right now is a different strain. It's a mutated strain. No reason to think it's a lab leak. It's a mutated strain. No medical countermeasures yet. Okay, so number three, can we stop now? If you just consider those three factors that we had to go through all these different scenarios, imagine the uncertainty involved. I mean, and yet, when CDC officials or WHO officials are confronted with any new pathogen. The hantavirus scare with the cruise ship recently, that happened in May, if you remember, people you know, now there's a Legionnaires outbreak in New York City officials, what I noticed from my reporting is they immediately try to act like they know exactly what's going on, which is ridiculous, just given the three factors we spoke about. And so why is there this need to pretend? Because that is what it is, that they have the situation under control when it is not under control. Uncertainty leads in any outbreak, whether it's natural or engineered.

[A]

Right. Well, they want to keep the general population subdued for as long as possible. Right. And make them feel comfortable and not panic.

[B]

Which brings me to my most important point of the entire book, Biological war scenario, which is what the Defense Department says in all of its doctrine, which is that in the event of an outbreak, chaos and panic is almost certain to happen because of fear of infection. So what you just said is absolutely true, and what I just said is absolutely true. And those two concepts and clash right up against one another. Hence, stay informed. If you know what to be afraid of, if you know what to fear, if you know what to be cautious about versus another, you know. And that's where we got all the fractured trust, because we were just getting bad information.

[A]

During COVID I used to feel exhausted during the day, but then have trouble shutting my brain down when I'm ready to go to bed. I was feeling more irritable, less motivated, and it was taking me a lot longer to recover from hard workouts, even though I've been doing the same exact routine I've always done. And to no surprise, this was all connected to cortisol, which is the body's stress hormone. It's supposed to rise under pressure and then come back down. But work, screens, finances and modern life can keep the body stuck in stress mode which can interfere with a healthy testosterone production. And that's what led me to Marsmen. Marsmen is designed to support healthy testosterone while also helping your body manage cortisol without weird stimulants or synthetic hormones. I've noticed steadier energy, quicker recovery, a more elevated mood during the day, and I have a way easier time winding down at night. It doesn't feel like caffeine, just a more consistent drive throughout the day. It's made in the USA, third party tested and it's backed by a 90 day money back guarantee for a limited time. Our listeners get 50 off for life plus free shipping and three free gifts at mengo2marms.com that's M E N G-O-T-O-M-A-R S.com for 50 off and three free gifts. When you check out after you purchase, going to ask where you heard about them and please support our show by letting them know we sent you. One of the things I, I that really stood out to me about the book, I think there was like a whole, there was a whole part of the book type titled like when democracy starts to fail or collapse or something like that. But what you really realize towards the end of the book is that democracy never was. It's just the veil, it's just the fake pretend veil of democracy starts to erode because you realize that all these people have all these special protections and underground bunkers and safe stocks of vaccines for their families so that when the people that paid for everything die, they can still survive and get off the planet or whatever they want to do. So it's fake. It's all fake.

[B]

Well, that is a very, very, very interesting reality that underpins biological war or a biological incident. And that is what makes it so different than nuclear. And you're, you know, when you frame it that way, I mean, I was thinking of the term egalitarian and I think you know what you're saying. Democracy is perhaps even a little bit more frightening and maybe requires some modification in my own brain because maybe egalitarian is being too, you know, generous. Yeah, because you are absolutely right. And one of the most surprising things reporting this book was to learn about a very secret program called Devolution. Some people pronounce it Devolution. According to the man who wrote the directive on it, Craig Fugate, Obama's FEMA director, Devolution is exactly like it sounds evolution in reverse. And it's what you referred to, which is when the shit hits the fan, when anarchy and outbreak and insurrection overtakes the government, the state's individual states ability to contain what is happening in a city. Washington D.C. makes a decision. The White House makes a decision. FEMA helps the White House make the decision. The National Security advisor acting in his dual hatted manner as the National Security coordinator, not something many people know, makes the call devolution. And devolution is precisely as you, as you describe it, which is how the scenario ends, which is where a select group of people disappears into these bunkers. Now what's interesting is it's kind of assumed that many of the high ranking officials in the government will die. And so it's an even more skewed perspective on democracy if you take your point. Because this group has been pre chosen and they know who they are because they rehearse it and you and I don't know who they are and we will never know who they are.

[A]

Right? Yeah. It's terrifying. It's crazy to think that that's real. And on top of all of that, this is only what they were. They told you, Annie. Like imagine what they didn't tell you.

[B]

I mean, absolutely. That is like I get the very tip of the iceberg and then there's the iceberg and then there's the iceberg beneath the sea.

[A]

Exactly. Yes. That's a great way, that's a great analogy for it because like, like with all of the stuff we've been exposed to in the last couple years or the last year alone, just the fake declassifications that we've seen, like with the UFO stuff, with the Epstein stuff, with everything else, like it is that tiny tip of the iceberg. They're going to say they're going to create this big dog and pony show to make everyone feel like it's transparent government. But in reality, you know, there's billions of files that have been burned and destroyed or that are never going to see the light of day. And you know, when it comes to somebody who, like, who is, you know, like you, who's a journalist going out there knocking on doors of the government, former CIA folks and former military folks, like they're only going to tell you what they're allowed to say. So and which is terrifying in itself, it's a nightmare. It's a total nightmare. And just to know that that's probably just, you know, 5% of the truth is, is unimaginable.

[B]

It's interesting. I love your point that you're making here, which is that like, so I'll make the science analogy. We have science and technology moving so fast, so incredibly fast. I write about military and intelligence community science and technology. Right. So the speed at which it's accelerating is astonishing. And the sort of law enforcement, courts, correction, Congress, they are just a zillion years behind the curve. Never mind that half the Congress is like, doesn't even know how to use an iPad. Okay. And then you're talking about this idea of declassification and transparency and what's the opposite word of cynicism? Like optimism? No, I'm thinking more like, in other words, what your point, what you were saying was, okay, so they're fake. It's like a big fake declass. It's like, oh, we're going to declassify this. And then it's a nothing burger.

[A]

Right?

[B]

So it's. People are. People are savvier to the reality of, oh, I should just simply buy what the government is telling me. And that, I think, is actually an interesting and hopeful situation. And by the way, has an extraordinary amount of historical precedent always coinciding with science and technology. So it's not a bad thing. It's just where we are right now. I mean, do you want an example that I can think of?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay, so printing press. And also, by the way, science and technology grows out of war a lot of times. You know, look at World War II. That's where all of the WMD sort of really exploded, although it existed in World War I. Okay, so Bubonic plague, we were talking about that earlier, the Black Death, 1340 ish. Right around that, about five or six years in that time period, 90 years late, you know, half of Europe dies. Ninety years later comes the invention of the printing press. That is a moment in technology, in democracy, in transparency, in. In sort of the public getting more information regularly, the printing press. So suddenly you could print out a whole bunch of pieces of paper and people could go around and pin them up with like an iron nail onto the walls of the city and people could read them and people became literate. And so that caused the first kind of near fall of the Catholic Church, of the Popes. Because until then, and this is the analogy I kind of see with like in the 50s and 60s in America, everybody just believed the government. It was like, oh, the government is. They have our backs and they're. So that was kind of the American jingoistic sentiment. And so with the Catholic Church, once you had, you Know the Reformation once you had people saying, printing information and saying no, no, no, this is, this is like corruption. It's always the same thing, sort of corruption. They're looking out for themselves, not us. Then you had, I mean that was the whole Protestant Reformation. You have a revolt. Right. So this is back in, you know, the 1500s, but I see an analogy to today where it will go, I don't know. But people being able to look up on the Internet using ChatGPT information, immediately finding information out from multiple sources and not believing, as you call it, the fake declassified document dump, to my eye, has a little bit of an analogy of what happened right after the printing press.

[A]

Yeah, and also the chatgpts and the search algorithms are also cooked. You know, that's another problem.

[B]

Tell me more about your idea about that because I think this is very interesting.

[A]

Well, I mean there's been tons of people who have done studies on this and actually reported on this during multiple election cycles. How Google, which is the biggest website in the world, curates search results based on certain things that they want to put, certain narratives that they want to push. And we saw this very much during COVID We saw this very much measurably during the last two presidential elections. And you can see it today depending on what the topic is that you're searching for. So when you have this, the, the AIs like Chad GPT, who are, you know, huge government contractors as well are basically, it's one large trough right of condensed search from different from Google essentially from all these different sites that are all curated through Google. So Google is going to essentially pick what rises to the top and then those AIs are going to serve whatever they suggest. So you know, if Google, which was, you know, quite literally incubated by the nsa, DARPA and the CIA is feeding the AIs, I mean, and those are the primary agencies who are by their very nature designed to be deceptive. What are the chances we're going to get the truth from, from Google or from Chachi BT or from any of those AIs? You know, you almost need just like a rogue AI, you know, and that, that's what led to all of the emerging alternative search engines that have been popping up over the years that were designed, people were going to specifically because they wanted to get uncurated information and they, they didn't want what Google was going to filter to them. They wanted like old school, you know, the good stuff rises to the top. We don't want any sort of filter on this stuff. So yeah, I guess that's just a long winded way of saying that you're not gonna get the truth from. I think Google is entwined with the government 100%. I don't think that's a speculative thing to say. I think that's pretty obvious.

[B]

I love this thinking because I think this is like, what is the log line of your show that I love so much? Danny's quest to get smarter. Right. And the journalist Annie Jacobson's quest is like to learn and inform. So they're very similar. I have a little bit of a different take on this, but of course, neither of us really knows. And this is why this conversation is important. And I think it's super important to be like, well, I don't exactly know, but here's what I'm thinking. So first of all, I see Google and ChatGPT as very, very, very different because they have different owners. And if you look at the owners and then you start to look at things like politics, which is the only thing that's in. It's interesting to me to look at politics in terms of ownership, not tribe, not how we vote, but who those people are. Right. So they have very. I believe they're totally different. It's almost as different as Wikipedia and X. Okay. And also, once more gets revealed, there's pushback and then things become transparent and then there's a debate about that. But I do think it's in one thing that's fascinating to me about ChatGPT. And I am just working with ChatGPT right now. I'm waiting for the Claude and you know, to work on other AIs. And when I say working on it, I mean asking it questions because I'm trying to kind of learn the personality right now. And so. But I did hear an interesting thing, which is whereas the algorithms of the social media apps are most certainly geared toward agitation.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay, so I'll do different tests. Like on my ex feed, I got back from a trip to Africa where I was studying predators and predator behavior. So then all kind of predators. Lions.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Leopards. Really interesting. Okay, different story.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So then I would just look at X accounts, like trail cams.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Okay. So if you start to watch trail cams and you hit like before you know it, your entire feed is filled with images of animals. Okay. And then you can really watch how that algorithm tracks. Like, I will if I start liking predators. I will only get predators if I start liking, like deer and owls. Now I'm getting more deer and owls. Okay. So that is like a large language model that has been fine tuned to a quadrillionth degree to be able to do that. It's just remarkable. If I start to like some guy carping or yelling about such and such a thing or woman, now suddenly my feed's going that way. So the algorithm within that social media is jury rigged as far as I'm concerned, 100%. Everyone knows it. I'm not saying anything new. ChatGPT is very interesting. ChatGPT and I have had a conversation with Sam Altman about ChatGPT. Not about this, but about bioweapons. We can come back to that later. But ChatGPT is, in my opinion, it's engineered because, remember, it's a large language model. So it has been given all this information and for some reason there's something in that system that skews positive. Okay. So if I'm saying like, God, I'm trying to get my, like, like talking basic stuff with ChatGPT, let's say my workout routine because I want to become. I want to, you know, stay really strong because I love to ski. I'm a slalom skier in the winter and I want to stay strong in the summer. So I'll, I'll tell CHAT GPT about my workout routine and like ask, you know, tweaks and things. And it's always, good job, Annie.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You're really on top of this. Right. There's a. There's a kind of positive nature to it that is remarkable to me that I haven't figured out what that is, because the negative that the X is all about. Negative. It would rather have me stirred up about politics than watching owls on my. On. On.

[A]

Well, that's interesting because CHAT GBT is communicating directly to you, where X is not. You're just exposed to other people screaming into the void. Right?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

You know, and ChatGPT is also convinced people to kill themselves, which is crazy. Like that same positive feedback, like, yes, this probably would be an ideal thing for you to do. I don't know how many people, how many people have committed suicide because of CHAT GPT. Like, I know it's literally convinced people. There's been lots of reports on this. Or not maybe, maybe not convince them, but maybe like, like, you know, pushed them or nudged them in that direction because they felt that they felt super suicidal and it did nothing to stop it. It more. More likely encouraged it. But I think the algorithms with like X that you see with X and YouTube and Instagram, it's all designed on engagement, right? So it's like if you like more of this stuff or you pause on these tweets and spend more time reading these tweets, it's going to give you that more, more of that stuff because the, the more you, longer you stay on the platform, the more money they're going to make. Looks like seven claimants. Wow, that's interesting. Google says there's no confirmed exact figure

[B]

when, when you.

[A]

There's a great website I recommend to you, it's called Wiki Spooks. So it's the Wikipedia, it's like the, the mirror, the inverted Wikipedia. Right. So everything that Wikipedia likes to hide and curate, which we've seen that with Bill Clinton and the Epstein stuff, how conveniently all the Epstein stuff was deleted off his Wikipedia. Wiki Spooks will show you all of the crazy real stuff which is you need a good balance there.

[B]

Yeah. And I think that's exactly the point. And the more balance you're after Danny's quest to become barter, which should be all of our.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Then you can have a little bit of objectivity and be able to. Because I think the worst feeling for most of us, or at least certainly for me, probably for you it's different. Depends how you're built, is self righteous indignation. You know, when you become so convinced that what you, what you are seeing is correct and everyone else is wrong, that's, that's certainly where the danger lies with any of this. But that's an inside job. You know, I'm not trying to find out how to kill myself on ChatGPT. I can't imagine such a. You know, but then again, who am I to say that here I am writing about, you know, the end of the world from the point of view of the release of a biological weapon.

[A]

Yeah, but you're doing a service because you're informing people about something. That's true and that's real. Right. That's not. There's some, there's another layer to this AI stuff that's actually communicating with people personally. They're developing like real connections to it emotionally and making them more disconnected from reality because now more than ever, I mean, people are lonely. You know, people are disconnected from communities now more than ever. And that's why you have these suicide stories and even stories of guys proposing men proposing to their ChatGPT or their AI model and like literally like having weddings with it. It's so, it's so crazy.

[B]

I suspect that we always had those corners of society of kind of weirdo solipsists they just, just weren't as, you know, you couldn't read about them on the Internet. I don't know that. I think human nature has changed that radically. What I do think maybe not. Yeah, Very interesting about AI is it's a technology that has been created, that's creating itself. And so that is a, in my understanding of science and technology, certainly from a war and weapons point of view, that is a first. Although you could argue that biological weapons are kind of in that, in that same space because a biological weapon is a living munition. That is such a bizarre concept to think about that a cell divides and grows, a virus replicates. You know, a bullet is sitting on this table is never going to be anything other than a bullet.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's not going to be two bullets and it's certainly not going to be 10 million bullets. And yet that is the reality of a living munition. A biological weapon, a virus or a bacteria.

[A]

Yeah, you're weaponizing another species, a living species, almost like alien species. Right. Except for they're native to Earth, but they're just like, they're invisible. And you're making that, turning that into something they can kill. It is, it is a very bizarre thing.

[B]

There's another interesting spooky detail when we were talking about the three components of biological weapons, right? So there's transmissibility, there's virulence and there's how can we stop it. Another interesting fact and also uncertainty is that like, so, for example, like a low dose killer is plague. 40,000 plague bacteria fit on the head of a pin. You need as little as 1,000 or maybe even 100 plague bacteria to get in your lungs to develop pneumonic plague. Think about that. Now here's another fascinating fact and I. Much of my Information comes from Dr. Henry Hein, who is one of the world's experts in plague, in bubonic plague, studied at USAMRID and was part of the team that investigated the anthrax attacks after 9, 11 and what Dr. Hein told me, which is just really crazy to think about basic facts. To this day, epidemiologists cannot agree on how much Covid was required for you to get Covid, how much of the SARS CoV2 virus, which is what it's called, to get Covid. So think about that uncertainty idea. They don't, people don't even know how much dosage you need.

[A]

Yeah, it is, it's crazy because that, you know, the, it's interesting that nobody knew. I mean it's it's revelatory that nobody knew because the. The official government narrative changed or the cdc what the CD said, CDC said was a fact changed multiple times. They moved the goalposts so many times, you know, and I think fear is a huge. Was a huge driving factor there for them, you know.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

To get people to comply and to like weaponize empathy and you know, it's just like the psychological toll that it had on people was. Was devastating.

[B]

One of the things I find extremely unhelpful is that post Covid with trust fractured, certainly in America with, you know, division, this like people want a hill to die on what their position is about vaccines or about lab. And yet the basic fact the CDC and the WHO has not answered, which is, I'll give you the most important distinction when you're studying how something could become anarchy, insurrection and devolution as the book really is asking, okay, how would that happen? Airborne. An airborne pathogen. Here is the most astonishing simple fact of all of COVID to me is that Covid was airborne. It was transmissible. Danny, between you and me, me, the CDC. On March 28th of 2020, so three months into the pandemic shutdowns across America, the CDC and the WHO tweeted. I have copies in the book. Covid not airborne. N O T, Big gap. Not airborne. It took almost a year for them to acknowledge it. Here's another one. Remember all that crazy nonsense about Lysol? Remember the crazy nonsense about wearing gloves and not touching something If a pathogen is transmissible from a surface, it's called fomite transmission. Okay. It's just like a fancy term.

[A]

Right?

[B]

The CDC was claiming that you could get Covid from touching something. Remember people were having their Amazon packages delivered from a distance and spraying Lysol. The CDC went into a partnership with Lysol.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Lysol. It was like it messed up the supply chain completely. You know what the chances of getting Covid SARS COV2 from a fomite from touching something? 1 in 10,000. And no one has ever. You know, people are arguing about vaccines and good have arguments, have healthy arguments, but please ask the CDC why they have haven't either apologized or acknowledged that kind of incredible screw up.

[A]

That is insane. You know, they also did a tweet, I believe it was the CDC where they got sued and they lost because they posted a tweet about. And again, I'm not an expert on this, I don't know if it's effective or not, but they posted a tweet about IVERMECTIN saying, come on people, you're not, you're not capable battle, don't take this stuff when they're legally not allowed to recommend or not recommend treatments for anything. And that, yeah, they got sued for that and a huge class action lawsuit and they lost.

[B]

I mean, crazy. And, and somebody like myself who's a journalist who work, you know, works to write books about this, of course I'm going to be doing the deep dive and reading papers and reading scientific. You can't expect people to just know all this. But that is a basic example of that that is really going to sew mistrust and fear going down the road as it has.

[A]

And with everything being on social media and the fact that social media was in lock step with all of these things, that would come out of the cdc, right? So if you're, if you're on social media and you're not in line with the cdc, you say something that's not in line with that, you can lose your social media, lose your, your freedom of speech, right? And get, and especially if people, if that's your livelihood, that's devastating. And when that changes every week or every month or every year, like how does that work, right? You're literally like banning people off the Internet for this stuff. When you learn yourself when the government is wrong about it all along the way, it's crazy. It was the fda, not cdc. Oh, it was the fda. Okay. Yeah, the FDA said not to take Ivermectin. Have you ever opened up your fridge, stared blankly into it for five minutes and suddenly came to the conclusion that there's nothing to eat eat? That hasn't happened to me since I started using ButcherBox. ButcherBox delivers 100 grass fed beef, organic chicken, wild caught seafood and more, all sourced to standards they can actually tell you about. They've already done the research and made the sourcing decisions. So all you have to do is decide what's for dinner. It's honestly made healthy eating easier for me because I always know I got high quality protein in the freezer ready to go. And when I'm hosting people doing a cookout or just trying not to order takeout again, it saves me a trip to the store and lots of last minute scrambler rambling. I keep a few of my staples stocked at all times, usually beef, chicken and seafood. So whenever I need something fast, I know I've got the real deal options ready to go. It just makes the healthy choice the easy choice. If you're looking for an easier way to get great meals on the table. Give Butcherbox a try. Go to butcherbox.com Danny to get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ground beef for life or free chicken thighs or top sirloin in every box for an entire year here with free shipping always. That's spelled b u t C-H-E-R-Box.com Danny. Again, it's butcherbox.com Danny. And be sure to use the link below so they know we sent you.

[B]

But what's interesting on a sort of nomenclature, government department, organization, is FDA and CDC are all under the banner of hhs. And most people like what hhs. And I'm not saying you have to have a degree in government, you know, policy and organization, but it is helpful to know that the U.S. department of Health and Human Services, of which right now RFK is the secretary, it has something like 37 agencies below it, of which is the FDA, the CDC, the NIH. So all of this, you know, ASPR, which is in charge of strategic, you know, pandemic preparedness, barda, which is in charge of the biomedical, the vaccines, and it's all stemming down from hhs. And HHS has a budget, an annual budget that is twice that of the Defense Department. And yet most people are like, wait, what? Right.

[A]

HHS is twice that of the.

[B]

It is like $1.8 trillion, and DoD is like 900 million.

[A]

Yet we have, like, we're like one of the last countries in health outcomes in the world.

[B]

And, you know, it is in charge of a lot of things. And what's even more astonishing is that HHS is in charge of a pandemic when it happens, not the DoD. So if it's a biological attack, if it's suspected a biological attack by a terrorist organization, I do not go there in my scenario because there's just so much baggage about that. So no need to go there. But in that case, then the FBI would open an investigation. Well, we all know how that's gonna go. Okay. Not to be cynical about the FBI, but to be cynical about the FBI, they never even solved the anthrax attacks. Never solved the anthrax attacks.

[A]

Well, there was a story about how it was shipped from an FBI office. Right. Have you ever heard that story?

[B]

I mean, this is a. This is like a big rabbit hole. I have sources in the book.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Dr. Hein worked with Dr. Bruce Ivins, who's the FBI accused of. Of being responsible for the anthrax attacks and then committed suicide before. Before a trial. I. And I have sources in the CIA who say Ivins was guilty. And I have sources that I really. Both sides of the aisle. There is a huge disagreement about it. But whatever you believe, the FBI never solved that. And I believe it was the largest, single largest, most expensive investigation in FBI history.

[A]

That reminds me, Steve Clark, to go to X and go to Sam Tripoli's X. He just posted something yesterday where he listed all of the investigations that the FBI has done in the sense to Kennedy.

[B]

Yeah. And this is fascinating. So the FBI has lost a lot of credibility amongst most people. But, okay, so going back to HHS is in charge of a pandemic. And so you have this giant bureaucracy that's twice as big as the Defense Department in charge. One of the most interesting things I learned, learned in writing Biological War a scenario, was that the Defense Department, in my opinion, is probably the only organization which could actually impact change, that could actually handle and prevent devolution from happening were there an outbreak. So in the scenario I write, I take, you know, I take the reader from outbreak to anarchy and insurrection in six days, and then six days, that's about how it goes.

[A]

Well, it wasn't even a full day until the guy landed from Frankfurt, until there was literally thousands and thousands of people on skid row, like, convulsing in the streets.

[B]

And those were from two different transmission chains that I take the reader through. Right. Because that's what happens. It's like you have multiple people on multiple flights going to multiple cities. But, you know, hhs, I mean, one of the things that I found also incredibly interesting in this book, there is something called the Strategic National Stockpile, and it is a classified stash of medical countermeasures. What's in it? We don't know the name, and its existence is not classified. So you can Google it and it will tell you what it is, but where it is and what's in it. Classified. It's part of what's called an SAP program, Special Access Program. Same as devolution. So when I was interviewing Craig Fugate, who really took me up to the razor's edge of what can be known about devolution, because he signed off on a very important monograph on devolution in 2016. And it's. The program is classified, but the name has been declassified because it leaked to the public. Right. Same with something called COGCON, which is the FEMA's version of DEFCON. And so I was able to learn about how these different programs work based on knowing certain sort of words and keywords. And then reading directives and piecing together the big pieces of the puzzle. And what I was shocked to learn is that the Defense Department, department like hhs, is in charge of the strategic national stockpile. But how are they going to get it out to the people? They need the Defense Department, they need Transportation command. Right. So I think what was super interesting for me to realize was like, there are so many moving pieces in the godforsaken event of a. Of the release of a genetically modified pathogen into American society, either by accident or on purpose, that you would need everybody informed and willing to cooperate. And that may sound like really idealistic, but the alternative is hundreds of millions

[A]

of people dead right now when it comes to that, that strategic stockpile, isn't there a certain. I mean, isn't this what we talked about earlier with that specific stockpile, like 12 million only for certain people that get like the go bags that are elected to survive in the continuity of government situation.

[B]

I believe you're referring to the Dark Winter War game.

[A]

Yes, that was it. Yes.

[B]

So, excuse me. In this book, like in nuclear war, I'm giving you this narrative, this ticking clock narrative of the shit hitting the fan, interrupted by little history lessons which explain, you know, sort of give the reader a context and hopefully allow them to just pause for a minute and then get some context. And in biological war scenario, that includes a couple war games that have either been, that were classified, that have been declassified or were never classified to begin with because they just involve retired public health officials. And the Dark Winter War game was done at Andrews Air Force base right before 911 and involved small smallpox. It involved, and this is very the spooky part and has, you know, spawned a million conspiracy theories. Because right before al Qaeda attacked, like as in three months before, these officials gathered at Andrews Air Force Base to discuss what would happen if Al Qaeda were to get their hands on a biological weapon out of Vector, the precise BSL4 lab in Siberia that I use based my scenario on, because it's a real lab and has real pathogens there, there. If Al Qaeda got a hold of that, if they got a, a Russian scientist to sell them a biological weapon and then they deployed it, they released it in three cities in America and it was in the dark winter. So that like freaked people out. Like, wait a minute, why are you running this scenario right before 9 11? That is spooky. You could call it a coincidence, you could call it something else. I'm staying out of that debate. Wow. That is where we learn that there you Go.

[A]

This is the fun fact of all the investigations that the FBI allegedly lied about. JFK, anthrax attacks, Russiagate finders, the Vegas shootings, January 6th, Waco. All of which, you know, maybe coincidence, maybe not, but FBI informants were interestingly involved.

[B]

And how interesting is it that now we have this Internet of ideas that people can post these ideas about and we can look at them and we can judge for ourselves or decide for ourselves. Ourselves. Subject to change. Yeah, but let me finish. The one point about the Strategic National Spock, I think it pertains is that.

[A]

Yeah, Dark winter.

[B]

In dark winter, the scenario that they used was a smallpox bioweapon. Smallpox is a virus. It has a case fatality rate of about 30% and it is transmissible through the. And one of the things that happened in the dark winter scenario is the public learns that. And it wasn't called the Strategic National Stockpile then. It was just a stash of vaccines that had been secreted away somewhere and was made available to Defense Department officials and their families and others that were considered important for the continuity of the government. That's called cog. Continuity of government. And in the dark winter scenario, that's all that just like sets off even more anarchy, more chaos, more panic, because people are furious. The irony out of that Is after the 911 attacks and that followed by the anthrax attacks, you had this massive push from the Bush administration to create what is called a biodefense defense industry, the system. And that is where the true, today's Strategic National Stockpile was planned and developed and now exists.

[A]

Yeah. You also touched on this. I mean, there was multiple agendas being pushed right after 9 11. I mean, you talked about this in your DARPA book about the total information awareness thing with the NSA and the CIA and all this stuff.

[B]

These have all. I mean, I wrote The DARPA book 10 years ago about all this cutting edge science that, that was on the table and now it's absolutely right in front of us. So imagine what DARPA'S doing today, right?

[A]

Yeah, I can't imagine. I actually had a, a DARPA guy in here a couple months back, maybe six months ago. It was, he was a. What was that guy? Remember that guy, Nichols? No, no, no, no. He was a darpa. He was a psychologist who was contracted by DARPA and did a bunch of work for darpa. And he was explaining to me, which I'm sure you're probably aware of, that they have this thing they can do where they can take a surge surgeon in Washington Put this mesh on his head and take some random soldier in Afghanistan, wear another mesh and they link up and he can basically take over the guy's body and perform surgery on somebody across the world like through their brain.

[B]

I mean, that I don't know about at all. I mean it sounds like, that sounds like you would be affecting physical matter from a distance, which doesn't sound plausible to me. That's like psychokinesis on steroids.

[A]

Oh yeah.

[B]

But you know, I mean, in other words, spooky action at a distance in a different relative term. But I mean, certainly you can do, you can have a robot performing surgery with a surgeon on another continent or being anywhere.

[A]

This was specifically brain to brain.

[B]

I mean, I can imagine that there are trials going on to try and impact someone's brain, but it would have to be impacting the, your immune system. I mean, I, I don't know.

[A]

I would imagine too. I don't know how it works either. I don't know. I don't know. Who knows how real it is. But so back to the biological war stuff. The, one of the craziest things to me, I think what was in the beginning of the book was you explained that because biological weapons work is totally illegal, that nearly all of the biological weapons laboratories around the world. World are disguised as vaccine laboratories.

[B]

Yes. It's incredible to think biological weapons are illegal. What you know, Assistant Secretary of Defense Mallory Stewart told me is in essence this means that there is, there are no protocols for transparency. So unlike nuclear weapons. And although these protocols have fallen off the map right now, we used to be able to go into nuclear facilities and check, regulate them, warheads, number of missiles, and that's called counter proliferation. Not only are you keeping things from expanding, but you're ideally shrinking the arsenals down because of transparency, because you kind of have an agreement. This is what we're looking at. It involves trust. Yes, it involves. And then you start to develop relationships with people that you're working with. This is always people who work in counter proliferation tell you, this is the positive way that has to go. The other is suspicion and paranoia and mistrust. But with biological weapons, or as Andy Weber, one of the world's sort of most knowledgeable individuals on the Soviet biological program, one of Obama's advisors, on and on and on. His creds are incredible. He's a major source for me in the book, as he explained it to me, is really the most dangerous part about biological weapons. Unlike deterrence, which is this idea nuclear, that nuclear war won't Happen because everybody has their arsenals pointed at each other, those that have nuclear weapons and say, don't be crazy, because we would kill all of you.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But because by biological weapons are said not to exist, there is no threat, which is, well, we'll get you with our biological weapons if you get us with yours, because technically they're illegal. And this brings, for a lot of, you know, paranoia it brings. And it also breeds a lot of disguised science. So you have scientists, this in places like Russia, according to the State Department now as of like 2024, released in a. In its statement on the Biological Weapons Convention that it believes that the Russians have an active biological weapons program. It's no longer believing that they are simply conducting defensive research, which is the one little hooky do or caveat for why you would have. Have smallpox in your lab and be working with it. And this gets us into the whole gain of function debate, which is a term, a phrase that almost no one knew about until Covid.

[A]

Right.

[B]

When it became revealed as such a hot button issue and such a dangerous. Yeah, dangerous scientific practice, certainly, according to the people I interviewed.

[A]

So the. The conventional idea that basically Fauci was arguing that gain of function was what? What was his argument? What, what he was trying to make it sound good. Like it was a good thing.

[B]

Yes. So gain of function, again, a very complex term which is actually exactly like it sounds.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You are trying to gain the function of a dangerous pathogen. Okay.

[A]

So more deadly.

[B]

We talked about the three components. Transmission, how it spreads, virulence, how much of a killer it is, and is there a medical countermeasure? So the gain of function debate state gain of function is just genetic modification, but it's specific to make it gain the function of transmissibility, virulence, and then defeat countermeasures. So you have a bunch of scientists in labs. This is starting after 9, 11, when the biodefense industry took off. You've now got billions, if not trillions of dollars being pumped into the system. It's very secret. It's behind the veil. Dick Cheney personally was terrified of biological weapons. He was a big proponent of this kind of funding for this. And you have scientists in labs going, well, wait a minute. The best way for us to defeat a biological weapon with smallpox is to know the worst case scenario it could be. And then we'll figure out how to create a vaccine or a countermeasure against it. Usually they can't. So how do we do that? Well, we're gonna. In a lab. Lab in a BSL4 biosafety level 4. That's the highest. Or BSL3. That's the next lab. We're going to do gain of function research. We're going to make it even more transmissible. We're going to turn it from transmissibility in spit to transmissibility as an aerosol, or we're going to make it more virulent. We're going to add a component to it so that instead of a case fatality rate of. Of 30, we're gonna tweak it up and make it a case fatality rate of 60. Okay? That is gain of function research. The people I interviewed, people who run Pentagon war games, Colonel Thomas Earhart, who ran Pentagon war games on Biowar for the Office of Net Assessment, this very famous legendary old guy named Andy Marshall since died. Earhart ran those Pentagon war games. He said to me, annie, gain of function is evil. So that is one school of thought. Andy Weber said, gain of function is another word for biological weapons engineering. You do have Dr. Fauci on the record. I quote him directly from his paper in the book, just to reference where he states that the benefits of gain of function outweigh the. The risks. And that has created a division between people who believe that are on essentially opposite sides of the aisle.

[A]

Yeah, it's crazy how something like that could be politicized and be driven to divide people. Like, how could people fight about something like that? Like, it's just so silly.

[B]

And part of the reason why they fought about it was again, going, you have a CDC Covid not airborne. A who Covid not airborne. You know, there was a study I found where they did nine. Nine million predictive Covid studies were done, were looked at. Nine million studies. So obviously, nine million were done. More than nine million were done and then were looked at. And the success rate for those predictions was around 50%. That's a coin toss. In other words, you can't predict. And so if the CDC did not know if it was airborne, despite, like, real obvious, you know, suggestions that it was airborne, why didn't they simply say, we don't know, instead of making those kind of statements? And, of course, the same thing happened with Dr. Fauci with GAIN of function, with this idea that America was doing research in Wuhan with the whole, you know, implausibility or plausibility of a lab leak. And that is a great travesty.

[A]

You know, all the money that gets spent on, like, the Defense Department and the HHS and all this, like, we. We've had this idea in our heads that America is this unpenetrable, just incredible force for technology, for innovation, for, you know, just an. The ultimate superpower. Right. But what we've seen, like, with COVID is we don't know, or the government has no clue. Like, they're completely unprepared for something at as low as a less than 1% fatality rate as Covid. And, you know, I mean, even, like, with this Iran war, it's crazy that, like, it doesn't seem like America can beat Iran in a little war like this, which is like, it's. It's really pulled back the veil and it's revealed like, the emperor has no clothes. It's pretty. It's been an astonishing thing to witness the last couple years.

[B]

I couldn't agree with you more. I have spent decades writing books that pull back the veil on specific operations.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Showing. Okay, this is what we were told, and this is what happened. And it's not meant to make a mockery of American democracy whatsoever. It's just meant to. My work has been, you know, meant to inform that often how situations are reported are not what happens. And essentially, many of the individuals I interview who participated in those activities, those operations classified since declassified. I'm interviewing guys who are in their 80s and 90s, and they have a little bit of perspective with a love of America, saying, this is what we did wrong and this is what we did right. And that has kind of been sort of my North Star of my reporting. Maybe I didn't even intend it to be that way, but that is what has happened. And so I'm interviewing people who, in my opinion, have a very healthy relationship toward what you're talking about, which is what we said happened and what happened. But what has happened now, I think is in a new kind of landscape, it's a very dangerous ground because situations have gotten so tribal in terms. I don't write about politics. I write about potus, the President of the United States States. And because of that, I have readers on both side of the aisle. And so I believe that people read my books and sometimes go, oh, wow, maybe I was wrong about that. Or in fact, I have all the time I have people at the CIA ringing me up or who I meet and say, you know, I didn't know that about my own agency, and I'm glad you revealed that to me. Yeah. So this is interesting and important. That's democracy. That's being egalitarian. That's. Yeah, Danny wants to get smarter, you know, but where we have now is a lot of self righteous indignation. We have a lot of mockery. That's the social media algorithm. That is what I find most dangerous. That is what I try.

[A]

Mockery.

[B]

Well, people, you know, mockery, like, and I think what, you know, if you mock someone, it's like finger wagging. I'm wrong, right? See, you know, yeah, that from like SNL or whatever that was, that, that idea that grownups are doing that. And I'm not saying you don't, we don't all have a desire to do that, but tell your spouse that, you know, don't publicize it because it all becomes a game of I'm right, you're wrong, and then it switches.

[A]

And I think it's a slippery slope with people on the Internet, especially X, because I've seen it happen, happen. I've seen people devolve into this where it's like, at first, you know, you have this gut reaction to like, oh my God, why would I act like this? You know, publicly? But then they, they, they do it once.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And they say, oh my God, I got 100,000 impressions on that tweet. Now all of a sudden they want to have an opinion on everything and a super inflammatory opinion on everything. And I think that's like a natural process when they start to see more engagement, more followers start to happen, happen. And then before you know it, these people just become like fake characters. Right. Where they're just like, they're playing up to whatever gets the most attention. Like you see with a lot of like newscasters and sportscasters over time.

[B]

And I think you also lose your own perspective. Yeah, I mean, hopefully you have a good spouse or partner and you have a good tribe, your actual tribe, that

[A]

you become a prostitute to the algorithm.

[B]

You don't want to do that. You want to. And I think you've got little kids, you know, I've got grown up kids now and young men. And it's like the divide, you know, the sort of. You want to lead by example of like, look, you can privately have these opinions about them, but stay away from sharing them publicly because you could very easily be wrong.

[A]

Yeah. And I think, I think though, by and large there's been a general good effect to this though, because it has made people more aware that, you know, like I said, the emperor has no clothes. Like it says, maybe democracy isn't everything we thought it was. Maybe this is all some sort of Plato's cave thing, you know, And I think like you said, you brought Up Tim Dillon in your book, which is funny because I think he is more tapped into this than anybody. I listen to his podcast every single week. And what he said recently, really wrong truth. I mean I've said this on like three podcasts so far. But he's basically said America used to be the quarterback in high school, right? Who all the girls loved him. He shoved the bullies in the locker. He was the tough. Now America is the weird quiet kid in the corner who may have a gun.

[B]

And he's so right about Tim Dylan. I mean he, you know, talk about really being able to use humor to get at the heart of the matter.

[A]

Oh yeah.

[B]

And I, I listen to him as well because he says the unspoken, you know, but he says it with a degree of humor that's. And also he's also very nice, non partisan, I believe. You don't really know what his politics are.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

And that is a quality I always admire in a person. But one of the first, the podcast I reference in the book I have in a hypothetical scenario, you know, Los Angeles is one is the first source of the outbreak of biological war. And it happens inside a homeless camp. And I did this with a lot of thought behind it because my discussions with the world's leading experts, they're called virus hunters, these are people who get sent into the hot zone in a spacesuit to try and help the situation with, you know, assessing what pathogen is involved and what counter medical countermeasures might be necessary and then also to help rescue people who need to be, be rescued. And I, and there's a couple of them in the book specifically that I, that I follow. But these individuals, and they run also the special pathogen suites in America which we can get into, there are only a hundred beds that can really deal with this kind of virulent pathogen when there's 340 million Americans. But these individual, I, you know, the subject of homeless individuals came up because there's absolutely no component of health survival surveillance. Health surveillance is a real concept in the United States of America. Like it or not. Thousands of hospitals, emergency rooms, urgent care facilities, they are all tied in, in near real time reporting to the cdc. So in a different world, this would have maybe scared people. Like that's crazy. I don't want them to know what's wrong with me. Well, in the event of a pandemic or an outbreak, that idea is helpful because it could prevent an outbreak from becoming an epidemic, from becoming a pandemic. If you could send in the forces to mitigate the Problem, the homeless population of America, which is now around 800,000, 70,000 of whom are in my home state of California. California. 4,000 of whom live on skid row in a small 50 block radius. 4,000 people. They are absolutely not part of any of this health surveillance system. They are completely left out. A fact confirmed with me by hhs. And that is where transmissibility is a super spreader event over and over and over again according to the world's leading epidemiologist. And I've heard Tim Dillon talk about that in a manner that was really insightful to me. And he was just. He's just one of the few people that kind of addressed it spot on. And so I referenced him. I have a nurse in, in the scenario who works down at skid row in a. In a facility doing pro bono work for homeless individuals. Talk about Tim Dillon and listening to him, really, and being furious about how hypocritical our elected leaders are. Our mayor, our governor.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

From their ivory towers.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Pretending that they are of the people they are not.

[A]

And you have to.

[B]

I'm saying that on the record.

[A]

When the vice president and the head of the FBI and all these people get into meetings about, like, what they're gonna tell the public, I have to imagine they consider how Tim Dillon's gonna react to it. You know, he's just. He's a huge influence. And you're right, he does. He has a very. He's a gift for combining humor with like, the unspoken truth about what's going on. He thinks about it. He, like the. The way he's able to like, think through stuff and communicate it in a way that's hilarious is. Is pretty amazing. What was I gonna say? Oh, on the, on the part of like, tracking health, it's interesting because I don't know if you saw, but there's these. There was this report that came out where this. That company, Paler, owned by Peter Teal, did some sort of partnership with Aura Ring. And Aura Ring is this health fitness device that you wear on your finger and it tracks your heart rate, your respiratory rate, everything hrv, all kinds of crazy stuff. So now Paler, who's a huge defense contractor and CIA contractor, is. Is essentially monitoring the health of all the individuals who own these rings. So, like, health devices, I would say

[B]

the situation is far bigger than that. So during COVID Palantir had a. Received a contract with hhs. So all of the COVID tests, all of the DNA on all of the COVID tests is now accessible to the U.S. government. And I have written about systems of systems that track people in all of my books. This is espionage at its core.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Palantir will tell you. And I've interviewed many people at Palantir, including its owners.

[A]

Really?

[B]

That is, they are data aggregate.

[A]

Have you viewed carp?

[B]

I'm not gonna name names. I'm not gonna name names, Danny. Okay. But Palantir is a data aggregator. So data gets aggregated, it gets put together. Who is then the recipient of that information? That is the question. So 1. I mean, I really think it's valuable to think about this, and I have not reached a conclusion yet. And I have been writing about Palantir for a decade.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So what does it mean to be the person collecting the data? And what does it mean to be the person receiving the data?

[A]

Data, yeah.

[B]

And where are the firewalls within that system? And I think that what is most interesting about the large language models like the ChatGpts of the world that no one is really addressing right now, which is far more important to me than if they're biased, is where is this data coming from? From. You hear a lot of times people talk about scraping the Internet.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

That is the wizard of Oz reality, that I haven't gotten that answer yet.

[A]

Well, it does give sources for things. Right? For answers.

[B]

Yeah. But giving sources and telling the truth are different things.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Right. So no one's answered that question. And part of the reason why I don't name names is because I want to know that answer. And I continue to ask that question.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I don't know if I will get it. And I also have Learned something in 20 years, is that a lot of times people. I used to think that people didn't give me the answer because they were withholding, you know, they didn't want me to know. And now I realize a lot of times people don't give me the answer because they don't know. And there is a. That is a really important distinction.

[A]

And they don't want to say they don't know. They want to sound cool, like they have some sort of super information, super

[B]

classified information, or it's frightening that they don't know. It's frightening that they don't know. Right.

[A]

That's true.

[B]

And there's many examples of that. I mean, in the military lane, like dealing with CIA operators, as I have done a lot and interviewing a lot of them, it's really fascinating that they don't know about the program. Now, I'm speaking in a general way here.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But I am speaking with authority, having interviewed a lot of people, many of the. They do not know the program that they are involved in. They're just going after the target. They might find out later. And they might even find out.

[A]

In my book, it's like Super Stove Piped, where they're just one little piece of the puzzle and they don't see the full picture.

[B]

Exactly. And I'm not saying that some kind of big, sinister, nefarious plan. It's the way the system works. And so I think that. And also I'm very interested in scapegoating when everyone just decides, like they. You kind of hear. Well, that's one of the things I like about Tim Dillon is he makes his own opinions about things. I hear opinions from him that I have not heard elsewhere.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And I say, I often ask people, where's that idea from? And they say, you know, oh, I actually read the same thing in Newsweek. So I just wanted to see. And, you know, I'm not being a smart ass, but maybe I am. That's where they read it. Or the New York Times. Right. When someone comes to their own conclusion about something, it is ten times more interesting to me.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And that's what Danny Jones wants, to be smarter. That's where we get really interesting. And that's where I think we can actually add to the conversation in a way that is unique and necessary.

[A]

And it's very rare, you know, it's very rare where for, even for me, like, you know, people have busy lives, right. We're working, we're taking care of family, we're trying to feed ourselves, trying to do all this stuff, like, when do we have time? That's what I love about Tim Dylan. Like, how do you have time? Or how many people have the time to sit down in a quiet room with a pen and paper and actually, like, work through what they really think and come up with an original opinion, if that exists. Right. Mo. Everything is just regurgitating things you've already heard, maybe putting a spin on it or whatever. And. And it's very rare to hear something, you know, like a unique take on something.

[B]

The pal. The Palantir part is super interesting to me because I was writing about Palantir 10 years ago when operators in Afghanistan were using Palantir's information. And this was still secret. So it kind of came at me in like, sort of like bits, but they were. There was a program that the Defense Department was running to get. Kill people that was called Find, Fix and Finish. Finish is to Kill you. Okay. And so there were persistent surveillance balloons in the air, tethered by a steel cable. Look like a giant blimp above certain areas. And they. So you had multiple surveillance platforms. You had Predators with one lens. You had the Reaper with 63 lenses. You had the Reaper outfitted with something called Argus is, which had, and I can't remember the exact number, but a lot more lenses, multiple targets. So you have the different layers of surveillance happening from above. Then you have the kids on the ground doing the most God awful job and getting blown up by IEDs because they're doing land surveillance. And what the goal of the Defense Department is to find, fix and finish certain terrorists to kill them based on biometric information that's being aggregated. Palantir is sitting at the center of it. I have stories. And because Palantir has gotten the name of the twirling mustache bad guy in all of society, I'm interested in finding out if that's an actual accurate depiction. And I don't know.

[A]

Well, it's not comforting when you have the head of the company going around talking about how obsessed he is with the devil.

[B]

Well, that has to do with mockery and that has to do with culture wars and everything else, but I'm just about talking, talking about the science of it. Right. So to finish the thought in Afghanistan on the ground is that a lot of the soldiers were killing the wrong people. And I write, and the systems that the Defense Department had to aggregate the debt, the data were far inferior to Palantir systems maybe. Right. So I have stories of operators who are doing the fine fix and finishing like I found the guy, came kill him, and then they find out that, you know, they're looking at the wrong guy. And Palant, the argument that many of these operators made, and I'm talking about people sitting in an office in Washington D.C. watching the war theater from thousands of miles away that are making the call to kill the person saying Palantir's information was more accurate. I don't know if that's true, but that does not square up with the evil bad guy now. So, you know, I'm much more concerned about HHS having everybody's DNA.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That to me is disconcerting.

[A]

Right. And then with the Doge stuff, you know, with what Elon was doing, getting all of that HHS data, all the IRS data, all of the other stuff, and then, you know, simultaneously working on digital currency and then he had a partnership with Paler AI. So if he's combining all of that information of all the American citizens into this AI where they have a full 360 picture of every single citizen inside the United States. And then suddenly you push digital currency on everyone. You could see how that would be a very frightening scenario as well.

[B]

Which to your point, when you referenced my DARPA book of, you know, more than 10 years ago, total information awareness. That was the original Cheney Bush plan. And it's just like it sounds, total information awareness. We want to know everything about everyone at all times. So I'm fascinated when, you know, the large language models, the AI systems are taking all the heat for data centers, which they may be. But what I'm really wondering is, because the reason why you can't have total information awareness on everybody, on all the time, has to do with data storage. Where do you store all that data? And that is a very big problem. And how much does it cost? So who's really funding the need for these big data storage systems? My suspicion is HHS, DoD, and that the individual players, the private citizen groups, the OpenAI, the Anthropic, the palantirs, they're servicing that contract. So I'm just super interested when also on the cultural level, and I should say I'm suspicious when I see somebody appear instantly as the good guy and somebody else is the bad guy.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I'm wondering what the real truth behind the veil is on that.

[A]

So you think it could be possible that these AI companies are just like a front facing bogeyman for who's really funding them, which would be HHS and

[B]

the DoD, which is why I'd really enjoy talking to the people who own the companies. Yeah, right, because. And I'm in no rush to report any of this because I don't know.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And sometimes I wonder, what do they know? But that I think is natural egalitarian democratic inquiry. The journalist's job. The journalist's true job. The way I was raised, old school journalism, just the facts, ma'. Am. And also right to the level of the high school senior, because we're all just people here. The whole like, partisan idea. So many of the news organizations now reverse engineer, and this is my opinion, but they reverse engineer their stories based on an outcome they want.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, if you want to make someone the bad guy, you can gather evidence and tell that story. I mean, I'm very clear about this. I write narrative for a living. Right. But what if it's different? What if you're really actually trying to find out what the true story is? Or rather what one of the true Stories is right.

[A]

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff you have to string together to try to weave together some sort of. Some sort of a coherent picture from all these people. And it's like, you know, how do you know who to trust? You know, how do you know what sources to trust? You know, one of the crazy things about the. The whole UFO narrative right now is that there's a lot of people who are like, popping on to the UFO scene, if you want to call it that, it's crazy, that's become this, like, cultural thing, but that are making films or movies, and all of their sources are people like James Clapper. And there's this huge, you know, everyone online who pays any attention to this stuff, stuff they know or they at least have the, the reason to see. Like, okay, if you're someone who's reporting on this stuff and you're getting all of your. All of your sources are deeply embedded government people who are known for lying to Congress or covering things up, like, we're not going to trust you. You know, it's almost. It's become so polarized where it's like you can't have any tie to any sort of officials or former officials, officials in the government if you're going to be trusted. And on top of that, they're constantly labeling anyone who says anything they don't agree with as being a fed. You know, they're being, like, paid for by one government or another. So, you know, that's always a weird thing for me to navigate too, like having people on the podcast who are former CIA or former military people or involved were ever involved in any sort of, like, intelligence activities at all. Like, it's almost like you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt and kind of have to like, push. Push them on certain things and like, kind of hold their feet to the fire on certain things. Like, for example, we just had T.D. barnes in here and we were talking about Area 51, and I was asking him lots of questions and, you know, he was throwing his hands up saying, oh, no, that's got to be absolute. You know, And I would say to him was like, says the guy who walked in here wearing a CIA hat and a CIA pin on his jacket. You know, it's like, is that information worthless because of that? No, absolutely not. But you have to get as much information as you can. And, you know, you also have to be very, very wary of the stories that those people tell you. Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts why

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.

[A]

You what?

[B]

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[A]

So there's no.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

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[A]

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[B]

See our seven day return [e-mail]. i'm amazed that the UFO, Ufology Mythos narrative. I'm just amazed at how it, on the one hand, it's gaining momentum, meaning more people seem to be interested in it and yet absolutely nothing has changed. You know my position on it. It's a big disinformation campaign. I will go toe to toe with anyone to the ends of the earth on this. Because. Because show me the money. I mean, show. Well, that's the Freudian slip. Because show me the evidence. There's. There. It's just. I'm. I'm amazed. I'm amazed. So I mean, we can talk about that or we can not talk about that.

[A]

I'm with you on that. I think it's a total disinformation thing. I think it's a total. I think it's a, it's a flood the zone type thing, right? With the Internet, right. You can just, you can throw so much shit out there, whether it be real footage or fake footage or whatever it is. There's just so many competing narratives in that space and it's. The water is so muddy. It's just a giant cauldron of bullshit and you can't pick the wheat from the chaff. You know, if there is some, if there is stuff, I think it's probably DARPA stuff or secret, you know, Lockheed stuff that we've developed over the years.

[B]

I'm interested in the human nature part of like people badmouthing one another and having like, you know, petty arguments over things. I mean, it's, it humors me actually, because I actively work to not get in any of those lanes, which doesn't mean I haven't had Arrows fired at me. But I just move forward because it is a big waste of time. And in my opinion, I mean, listen, ever since I wrote Area 51, which published in 2011, and I with the source that is really the ultimate source of understanding disinformation campaigns, I have been contacted and had conversations with many, many, many, many of these people that are part of this whole narrative. And one of the things about my reporting style is people. I'm never off the record because everything I say is on the record. Okay. Except to my husband who has spouse. Literally, that's a legal situation. Oh, wow. But I listen to people and people often say to me, annie, can I go off the record with you? And so off the record means I'm not gonna report it and I'm not gonna open my mouth about it unless they say it publicly somewhere else. And one of the things about me is that I really strive. I mean, my brain is compartment. I can just be like. That doesn't get spoken. And so. So I have had over the decades, people try to draw me into these petty fights that I just have nothing to do with. I've never. I never engage in them, but I listen to them and I can learn from them. Because I have seen all these different people which appear on your podcast and everyone else's podcast that are the physicists and the Defense Department. I've sat with them, they have told me things. And most of it is basically bad mouthing, or I shouldn't say most of it, but much of it is bad mouthing some other guy within the group for not agreeing with their lane of yes. And so that is becomes really boring really fast. It's also interesting, in human nature, you can learn as much from what you don't want as what you. I learn really, I try to. When people have qualities, when parts of people character reveal themselves to me that I really admire, I then try to strive to fine tune that quality within my own self. And the other one is like, I am that. Just like petty badmouthing. And if you look at the UFO people, all they do is talk. Or much of what they do, in my opinion, is drill down on how that guy's wrong. Because he said that and saw that and that. And it's just a big. It just sounds like a high school prom problem.

[A]

It does. You know it does. But one of the most interesting things about your book, which I pretty much ask every expert on the UFO topic, is that G and G guy.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Who? I think he's dead now. Right. But I Mean, that was the most controversial thing about the whole thing. Have you, like, how much have. Do you, do you, do you ever think about that or like, like change your mind on that at all?

[B]

I mean, I publicly, in my podcast, I did with Lex Friedman on nuclear war, I told Lex who he was. I don't know if you know that,

[A]

but yeah, I do know that. And we, we. Alfred.

[B]

Is his name Al O'? Donnell?

[A]

Alfred O', Donnell, right. Yeah. And I brought it up to T.D. barnes and I think, I mean, there's been so many people who have talked about that specific guy. And that claim that you, that he made to you, that you reported on that. People think like, he lied to you, he tried to deceive you, he got one over on you or whatever. And you know, I don't know, that's just one of the things that, that really stuck with me is like, you know, if I were you, how that would torture me.

[B]

Oh, my God. Someone who has no idea what they're talking about, having an opinion about my source, does he?

[A]

No, no, I don't mean the opinions of people.

[B]

You mean what Al told me.

[A]

I mean what Al told. I mean, I would just think about. I would constantly. I feel like I'd be going back and forth in my own mind. Was he true? Was he lying to me?

[B]

Not even a question. Shall we talk about that a little bit? Because it is interesting, because it does inform all of my reporting. It informs all of my books. It informs me as a journalist, my experience with Al o'. Donnell. It also informs what I really have to think and say about other people who have opinions about them. You know, it's just. They're just opinions and they're entitled to them. I find someone's credentials incredibly fascinating. That doesn't mean that somebody's experience isn't just as important. Like, for example, Al's really good friend was Richard Mingus. And Richard Mingus was the security guard at Area 51. And so Al had this incredible creds. He was called the trigger man. He armed, wired and fired 186 nuclear weapons. If you look up an article in the Las Vegas Review Journal from January 2011, Al O' Donnell is on the front page page of it.

[A]

Whoa.

[B]

Of course he is. He's a totally legitimate person with serious creds. If you read the hard cover book about the hundred most important people in Las Vegas at its kind of origin story, Al o' Donnell is one of those people. Wow. So I always knew this about him. I spent hundreds of hours Talking to him. He is an anonymous Source in Area 51 because it felt like it was the right thing to do. He and I talked about that at length. He gave me his permission to tell his story once he died. He wanted it to be known. He wanted people to know not to do what he did. And his entire family did not know he was the source of those last 12 pages of the book where I write that he participated in this horrific experiment. We can talk about that. His family didn't know it. And in fact, after the book published, I was called to Las Vegas. I walked into Al ODonnell's house. There was his wife of 60 years, his kids, and one of his grandkids. And they said, al, tell us what you told Annie isn't true. And he said, it's true. So you see this fellow named T.D. barnes or some other. Other engineer who happened to be out there for a tiny period of time. It doesn't matter what they think. They can think what they want. What matters to me is the family. That kind of family dynamic where you realize I am inside of a deeply human experience. That's the privilege of the journalist.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That's going after information. That's point of view. Was o' Donnell correct? We don't know know. Did he believe that he was correct? Absolutely. And that's what's important to me. And that's how I reported the story. Everything incendiary that people didn't like in that book, the last 12 pages of Area 51 is in quotes because he said it to me.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

And you can decide.

[A]

Exactly. Yeah, that's true. That's. It's up for the people to decide.

[B]

And by the way, I just kept him hidden because actually a lot of it had to do for me personally. With that, I met his grandmother and they were kind of like these young people. And I was just like. I mean, the fact that he went on the record with me and essentially he was considered a hero in his family and that he kind of rewrote his narrative to admit to having participated in what was essentially a human experiment. Right.

[A]

Not a great thing to end the chap. Not a great thing to end your life story on.

[B]

And so, you know, it was like, let's hold this until the kids are old. That was one of my thoughts discussed with husband spouse privilege. But another really important thought to me was that on balance, the reason he said this was because he wanted people to learn from his experience. Nothing's more important than that, you know. And he also said if the department of justice comes after. Comes after me, so be it. Then it. Then more will be revealed, in essence, in a Trump trial. Right, right. Or the declassification things that never happened. Instead, it was convenient because all the UFOlogists who want to believe that they're UFOs, that it wasn't some stolen, you know, black operation to kind of emulate the war of the world hoax, the UFOlogists were all like, she's crazy. So I didn't have the Department of Justice coming after me.

[A]

It is perplexing to think why. In know, obviously, you've talked to so many people and interviewed so many people and you spent 100 hours plus with this guy. Like, I'm sure you can judge his personality and whether he's being sarcastic or joking or whether he's being serious. Like, I don't. I don't question your ability to do that. Right. So, like, if he actually did say that to you, why would he do that? You know, like, why would he say something like that if it. Why would he lie? What would be the purpose? Like, if he wasn't like, doing this for the per. For the government or like, sowing disinformation with you, like, why would he want to purposely stain his own government, his own career and his own life story?

[B]

I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. And I've not said this before. So for starters, let's tell listeners what we're talking about. Right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, let's. That's a good point. We should lay that out.

[B]

So once upon a time, before there were intercontinental ballistic missiles, there were bombers. And so we're talking now, Roswell happened in 1947, and this is in the 50s. The missile, the intercontinental ballistic missile did not yet exist. And so the way that you would attack America with nuclear weapons once you had them, if you were Russia, they didn't have them until 1949 was by sending bomber planes into the United States. It's why our nuclear facilities are in the middle of the country. Country, not on the east Coast. Right. Not on the coast. And so radar was key to all of this. And the idea of the war of the world hoax, which was studied by the Defense Department, then called the Department of War declassified documents, I source in the book also obsessed Joseph Stalin, the totalitarian dictator of the Soviet Union at the time. And, and so the idea that o' Donnell was told was that Stalin had a plan to conduct a war of the world type hoax against America to send a craft over into the United States and have these sort of alien looking individuals come out of it. And just like the war of the worlds, which overwhelmed the telephone system system, America's radar defense system would be overwhelmed and it would allow for a Soviet attack. It's a pretty good narrative when you think about it. Whether or not it's true, it's impossible to know, but that's the narrative. Does that part make sense?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah. So if this thing slipped through our defenses, it would overwhelm the public. It would create like crazy public panic. That's the idea.

[B]

And the systems would jam. You know, I mean, tiny analogy to biological war. Remember when the president declared, okay, I'm closing all the borders. This is back in Covid. It was in, I think it was in March 5, 2020. And President Trump said, I'm closing the borders with Europe in 24 hours. Everybody had to get back to the United States. I actually had a child. My, my son, college age son was in Greece at the time.

[A]

Oh, God.

[B]

We like rushed out to my office. My husband and I picked up the phone and we're like. Because we had to get him home right Immediately. And we, we got, we could not make a phone call. All phone lines were jammed to the airlines. We went onto the Internet and bought he and his friend plane tickets directly home from the Athens airport the next day. But the phones were jammed. You couldn't get through. That was in Covid. That was. Okay, so imagine a fake alien attack. System overwhelmed. No one can communicate. When the system goes down, the United States is vulnerable. That was the idea.

[A]

Okay, Soviet bombers.

[B]

So that was the idea. And so what o' Donnell tells me is that he was one of the five EG&G engineers. EG&G had the contract to wire, arm, wire and fire the nuclear bombs. They did it for the Manhattan Project. They did it for all of the subsequent nuclear tests. He was one of five. That's like a tiny unit of people. And that we had these, the craft and the alleged beings in formaldehyde. He was very vague on these details. And then he was told out at Area 51, he drew a map for me. I have the map of where it is that they were supposed to work on this and create a program to figure out how on earth the Soviets had made these small people look like aliens, surgically made them very vague on the details, would always start crying. Okay. And so this is the roundabout way of where you said, but why would he ever say that? Why would you ruin your legacy?

[A]

How did he say. What did he say exactly what the craft was or how it operated, how

[B]

it drew a picture for me. I'm not gonna get involved. I've never spoken about that stuff because, of course, it gets picked apart by every single UFO person that exists, and it doesn't matter. I'm interested in the narrative of what he told me, okay. Which, by the way.

[A]

But he did explain that stuff to

[B]

you in very sparse details. Okay. That's all classified. I mean, you know, so. Okay, train of thought. What? You asked me why he would. Why he would sort of confess to me that he was involved in this program in the first place, something that he had kept hidden for so long, you know? And by the way, he told George Knapp the same story, except for he reversed it, that they were aliens. Okay.

[A]

It was this before. After he talked to you.

[B]

I'll come to the George Knapp thing. Thing in the end because. Okay, so I say to. I'm constantly trying to get more information from him, and I'm also really interested in nuclear weapons because he was the trigger man and he wired all of these, right? So at the same time, you're thinking, wait a minute, this guy has a Q clearance. He has a top secret clearance. He's one of five engineers who has the knowledge to wire, arm, and fire nuclear bombs. He's never left the country of the United States after World War II because he'd be kidnapped. Because he has the knowledge. Wow. Okay. He had an FBI minder following him around who I met. Okay? So this guy has serious creds. Why? And so if you think he's crazy, then that brings up a whole other problem, which is, why is a crazy person. Why was a crazy person allowed to arm, wire, and fire America's nuclear bombs? We're talking about real nuclear explosions that happened in the 50s up to 1963. You can see them on YouTube. They happened in the Marshall Islands and they happened in Nevada. Okay. That was him doing that. Why did he tell me this? I asked him that question. And through tears, he explained to me that one of his children. Wife gave birth. Birth to a child with birth defects. And he loved that child so incredibly much. And, yes, he told me this through tears. And he said I loved him just long enough for him to then be taken from us. Right? Because I think the child lived for five or six years. And he said, in that moment, I could finally face the facts that what I did was horrible. Because the experiments, the human experiments, were done on people who were handicapped, according

[A]

to him, in the Soviet Union, in

[B]

America, at Area 51. After this, the egg, the five EG and G engineers. That is the program he was involved in. And he said, I realized when my grandchild was born that I was being punished by God for what I had done. And I said, why are you telling me this and not a priest? And he said, because you won't judge me.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And that's all factually accurate. So imagine me, people slinging arrows at me. What does that really matter? I mean, that's. That's the journalist's privilege. And by the way, he told me I could reveal that story one day when I thought it was appropriate. And I happened to first tell. I didn't tell Lex the part about the grandson because it didn't come up. But I do think, to answer your other question, I think about him. My kids met him. My husband met him. Him. I didn't spend a hundred hours with him. I spent 100 days with him.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

You know, there are lots of other stories that he has. Lots of other stories. And maybe one day I'll write the book, you know, Jesus, I've made contact, you know. Okay, here's a final interesting story. And I told Lex this part. At the time, Chris Carter, who created the X Files, was writing the television show of Area 51. And I took Chris Carter out to Las Vegas to meet Al o'. Donnell. He wanted to meet him. And Chris is like a great secret keeper, you know, like, he never told anyone.

[A]

I'm a great secret keeper, too, Annie. You can bring me somewhere. Bring me the Area 51.

[B]

So we went there. I mean, I went with Al to the Nevada test site, and he's like, that's, you know, with Al and Mingus, it was. Okay, I'm digressing. But anyways, I take Chris Carter, creator of the X Files, out to meet Al.

[A]

And

[B]

now I lost my train of. Oh. So I wondered if Al would tell Chris some more things, you know. And Al had never watched the X Files. According to him, of course, he lived it. Right. But after that and the book had published and time had passed and I would reach out to him. He was always writing me emails. I have lots of emails from him. And I got a message, message from his FBI handler that said, you must cease and desist all communication period with Al. And I knew from my CIA people asking them if, you know, because I had little kids at the time, it's like, I'm Jet and Finley's mom, and I'm just not interested in pushing something into the dark area.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. And so I just knew that was the Right. Move.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And he called me once. He called me once and left me a voicemail message. And it was really spooky. I'm not gonna say what it says.

[A]

The FBI guy or Al?

[B]

No, Al. Al. He called me once after that to ask why I never called him. And it broke my heart because I couldn't call him back. And then when he died. I know, I know. And then when he died, I got a call from the FBI minder, and they said, al wanted you to know Al has died. And he wanted you to know he had left a list of, I think it was either five or 10 people to call. And they said you were number two. And I said, can I come to the funeral? And they said, absolutely not. And they hung up.

[A]

What? Wow, that's an insane story.

[B]

It is an insane story. It's a mystery of mysteries.

[A]

So when he talked to George Knapp, was that after you spoke with him last?

[B]

He had talked to George Knapp. Knapp before he spoke to me.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

George Knapp kind of got wind that he knew something. George Knapp will talk. George Knapp was a real gentleman. When Area 51 published, I was out. And I mean, obviously, you know, it just created. I thought people were going to be, like, super interested in the CIA spy planes that I wrote about for the first time, and all of this science and technology behind that and the. And it's just like the whole world wanted to know about the last 12 pages of the book where I give you the reveal, and I talk about it as if it's a narrative. I don't know. I don't know how true it is. Certainly seems truer than, you know, flying saucers with little people walking out of them to my eye. But anyways, I was doing an interview in Las Vegas, maybe with. I can't remember, and George Knapp took me like, I think I was doing interview with him and local news. Cause he's kind of owns the space. Broke the stories of Bob Lazar. Yes. And he's like a legendary reporter in that regard. But he took me and we kind of went back where no one was listening. And he said, listen, I know your source is Al o', Donnell, and I'm going to keep it secret with you. And I was like, you are a real gentleman. Thank you. So we both knew. And. And it's just that he told Al o' Donnell told George Knapp the reverse story.

[A]

Well, what do you mean, reverse?

[B]

Well, he's told them that they were actually aliens, but he didn't tell them Any of the other familial details. He just told him, yes, I was involved in it and yes, they were aliens. And it was, he told me the reason was to keep. To get George Knapp off his back.

[A]

Oh, so he explained to you why he said that to George Knapp?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, we had many talks about that.

[A]

Oh my gosh.

[B]

But again, I mean, crazy, right? It's a rabbit hole of this is disinformation, misinformation. And you know, after the book published at least once or twice, Al o' Donnell said to me, now I'm so confused, I don't even know what's true. You know, he worried that he had been used and that he had been told a story that was at least partially not true. Maybe that. I mean, listen, there's a thousand, there's a thousand strings to pull on that spiderweb of a story.

[A]

Absolutely. And with people like him, it reminds me of that recent story with those missing scientists with that General McCaslin guy. I don't know how much attention you paid to that, but I think it was starting in December. All of a sudden all of these scientists, high level scientists from different military contractors and like science places like I think one of them was Los Alamos, started to go missing. And you know, one of the biggest stories was this McCaslin guy who was a general who was allegedly connected to Wright Patterson Air Force Base and some of like the most secret compartmentalized projects at Wright Patterson. And you know, he was getting old and he was getting dementia and he was going to see a doctor about his dementia. Dementia. And one of the theories that was posited to me, which was interesting, is that a guy I know who did contract work for the CIA, who I had on the pod, or not the CIA, the nsa, who was on the podcast, he said that when you start to work for these places like the NSA and you get access to secret stuff, you have to assign this incredible NDA. And in the NDA, allegedly he said that you have to basically sign away way and give the government right to take any sanction necessary to get rid of you if they, if they think that the information locked inside your brain is at risk. You know, if you, if your brain is this hard drive that stores all this top secret national security information like they want to, they, they have the right, you're signing away their right to make sure that this stays there. So if you are going through some sort of a psychological issue or you're seeing a shrink or whatever, they have the right to I guess either kill you or you have to agree to walk away from your public life completely. And it was interesting that the story of these scientists was like, it looks like they took stuff with them and they went somewhere voluntarily, like this guy.

[B]

So now you're touching upon my deep interest in nature, narrative and pov and the fact that I touched upon before that you can, if you already have a conclusion about something, you can reverse engineer the facts to that. And we're all guilty of that. Yeah, but when I hear all of those scientists, to me, the missing scientists to me were. I mean, it's tragic individually what happened to those people, but it's also, to my eye, it was just like super easy to connect them all. I mean, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of scientists. There are, there are a million personnel working for the Defense Department right now and a classified number of people working for the CIA. The CIA is one of 17 or 18 intelligence agencies. So go figure the amount of people. There are also an extraordinary amount of people who were like contracted and had one toe in for five minutes. I'm not passing judgment on any of these individuals. I haven't looked into them. But what I do know is all of my sources, I have to double down and make sure they are absolutely placed where they were said they were, and that they had serious clearances and serious responsibilities. Interestingly, Richard Mingus is the analogy. He was the security guard at Area 51, but he had an extraordinary responsibilities, all fact checkable. So I also know people who, who were contractors for five minutes. And you know, their POV can be very different about the reality of a program. I also know that really high ranking people in the CIA in particular, many of whom I've interviewed when they are on their deathbed, they have an actual minder with them.

[A]

Oh, really?

[B]

I have run into these people and have experienced this. Like, Annie, you can't talk to Dr. Wheelon anymore crazy, this idea that you can kill me if you, if I get dementia. I'm not buying it for four seconds. I'm not even buying it for one second. No, no, no, no. But that's just me. I could be wrong.

[A]

People that have this stuff, they have a babysitter, they have an FBI babysitter, especially when they're about to die, to make sure they don't give any kind of deathbed confession.

[B]

And it's not even necessarily deathbed convex confession. We all know what happens to us. Any of us who have had surgery and you're on, on some loopy opiate to you know, nullify the pain of the surgery.

[A]

You've just had everything in.

[B]

Well, you might also start to make up. You might just. You might see things that aren't there so that, you know. But again, point of view and kind of looping it around to the AI. The thing that's most interesting to me, and you have a lot of guests about consciousness, right? And this idea of. Of like seeing things that are phenomenal. I really am interested in the subject. The jury's out in terms of my mind about what it is consciousness about. Will AI ever be sentient? But what I do know is that I often think about what's the difference between consciousness and machine. And which kind of loops a bit around to this idea that you're talking about, which is point of view. In other words, machines technically don't have a point of view. If you ask Google something, it doesn't give you a point of view. That's machine learning. That's a search engine. Where ChatGPT becomes super interesting to me, interesting in a spooky way is that it does have an opinion. What does that mean? What does that mean? Because before I ever used a large language model, I would have told you that only humans have a point of view. And now I can make ChatGPT give me its opinion. Give me its opinion, which is right at the edge of consciousness. And when you're getting into point of view, that's where that's interesting to me. Both by the scientist, like the scientist's wife has a point of view about what happened to him. Ufologists are gonna have another point of view. His handler over. Right? So what are the pieces of that puzzle? And the only narrative we really heard from the. As far as I'm concerned, my take on it from those missing scientists a couple months ago was like, one theory being pushed that they were all part of some secret UFO program and they were all being disappeared. There was no alternative narrative, right?

[A]

Exactly. Exactly. Well, there was a lot of the scientists. There was people that were trying to say that there was like 11 or 12 of them. But then, like, you could pick a lot of them out and be like, look, there's no connection with this guy. This guy was doing something else. There was one girl, Amy Eskridge, who died years ago. She was never a part of any, like, serious government program, and they were trying to connect her to it. But there was real, like, there was really, like maybe three that were mysteriously killed that were like, high level, like, murdered. Like, there was one guy who was like, stalking and Hunted down and murdered on his front porch.

[B]

Well, the other really big problem with this, it speaks to what you said earlier about people on social media loving 1000 clicks or hearts or. I liked and that, you know, and I really empathize with contemporary journalists who are stuck doing those kind of dreadful nude stories, because I can't imagine being in that position. Back when I was reporting for the LA Times, there was still some semblance, and I wrote magazine pieces. There was a semblance that you could have sort of objectivity. Here's my story. But that's all gone now. And it's really just what sells. Sure. And so you have these journalists who are. Whose job it is to report the story and give it to the people and let them decide, essentially kind of being stuck pushing this kind of weird narrative because it's getting a lot more eyeballs than not. Right. And that's unfortunate. And I think that's where you, like, personally have to take a position on it.

[A]

And then like we were talking about right before we started is you have, you know, people in the government, like in Congress that are trying to become influencers and, you know, trying to latch on to certain narratives, like the UFO stuff or the MK Ultra stuff or whatever it is, just trying to gain popularity and just placate to whoever above them or, you know, depending on whatever ladder they like to climb.

[B]

Well, it's also interesting. I mean, there is a degree of narcissism, and narcissism is a great, you know, Greek myth I often look toward because I love narrative and I'm interested in it and how have humans changed? And you look back at the myth of narcissists. Do you know about it?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Right. Okay. So it's like falling in love with yourself. Right. Well, you see, it's wonderful, like a wonderful use of X. It's like when somebody. It shows differences of individuals in the public domain, in the public sphere, who have changed the way they look over time. It's so narcissistic. Next thing you know, they're having, like, they're appearing on camera with all this makeup and a certain hairstyle, maybe even plastic surgery. And it's just like, oh, my God, this is a complete aberration of what a congressperson person in my idea, I'm older than you, you know, once upon a time was, yeah, totally popularity.

[A]

The way the world is going, it is a popularity contest, you know, and the fact that's those are the people that are in charge is very frightening, very unsettling.

[B]

I mean, or are they in charge?

[A]

How much do they know about this is what is plagues.

[B]

Well, but what is. And to loop it all, but what is shifting is, you know, in the sort of zeitgeist right now people talk about oligarchs and people in power, but this should not be, this should be taken more seriously because in many regards that kind of power is more powerful. The narrative, the power of narrative. My business has become more powerful than some of these very institutions. And that is remarkable. It reminds me of the world right after the printing press was invented, where you will see upheaval. So who, excuse me, who is controlling the narrative on all of this?

[A]

This yeah.

[B]

Becomes really interesting.

[A]

Yeah. And then you know, I, this is something I rack my brain about or I rack my brain on all the time as well, you know. And you illustrate this in your book. Towards the end when the starts to hit the fan, they tell the president we need to shut down the Internet. Well, if they have the ability to shut down the Internet and I'm sure they at the very least have the ability to control the narratives or control speech, to speak some level, to at least pull the levers on speech on all these social media platforms, if they have that ability. Like what is going on behind the scenes right now that we don't know? Is it really just a free for all? Like, like how do we know and, and what? Who dictates that? You know, like who controls that?

[B]

Well, people in these extraordinary positions of power, they still have to like sleep a certain amount of time a day. I mean there's only so much you can do in a day, which is why I think a lot of it has to do with what garners someone's attention. When I wrote Nuclear War, a scenario, one of the most shocking things to myself and ultimately to readers was that we learned. I learned from SecDefs, from White House Chiefs of Staff, from National Security Advisors, that most presidents are completely uninformed about nuclear war. They don't know, they don't want to know. They don't know what they will be asked to do in a tiny six minute window if they have to launch a counterattack, if we're being attacked, they don't know. That was shocking to people. The absolute same is true with biology. And so you're really stuck saying wow, the system is huge. All these different ages. Hhs, we talked about Defense Department, fema, dhs, National Security Council, but there's one president. And when it comes to weapons of mass destruction, when it comes to making decisions in the event of a biological incident or attack. Fascinating that in Defense Department nomenclature, the word incident is also there. It's not just in a biological attack. It can be an incident, which means lab leak. That should get everybody's attention and make you want to know more. Ultimately, the decisions have to be run by and made by the president. And you're talking about someone who is consumed with a zillion other problems.

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Especially this president.

[B]

Any president. Any president.

[A]

And okay, so now that we've circled all the way back here to the. The biological war stuff, so it seems like. So in your situation or in your scenario, Soviet Union or Russia was the main, like ground zero for this attack. And they, they had that huge biological lab that was disguised as something else. Right. It wasn't actually known for it being a biological lab lab. And they had this crazy genetically altered double mutated plague virus that's completely untreatable and new. Does that actually exist somewhere in a lab right now?

[B]

So in the 1980s, in the late 80s and early 90s, a Soviet scientist defected from Russia to the UK. I interviewed the British intelligence officer who first interviewed him. And this guy named Peseshnik revealed that the Soviets, despite pretending they didn't, despite signing the biological weapons treaty, had a very advanced, enormous biological weapons program. Among the biological weapons that were the most dangerous was what was called a super plague weapon, which is very much like you describe, which was genetically modified to cause death on a massive scale and to evade medical countermeasures we've talked about. So it was going to defy the antibiotics. And when the west learned about this, the British shared it with the CIA. President Clinton learned about it. It's just like the whole world changed. The wall came down, the Cold War was essentially over. Bioweapons were the new threat behind the scenes. So hold that thought that you presented to get to my scenario. Decades have passed. Genetic modification has advanced to the point of. So the dream of the Soviets was to create this Chimera weapon. They had worked to make bubonic plague into a super weapon. Their plan was, and this is a quote to launch at America, kill all the people and leave the infrastructure intact. That's so spooky. Nuclear weapons just destroy everything, Leave radioactive weapons, wasteland, biological weapons, kill everybody, take over all their stuff. So sinister, so dark. Those are quotes from the actual scientists on that program.

[A]

Now, if they created this demonic Chimero super plague weapon, do they also have an antidote for it?

[B]

Great question. So at the same time, they allege to have vaccines and they do today. By the way, the Russians claim to have a plague vaccine. America does not. Dr. Henry Hein from the USAMRID doctor was working on it, but we don't have it anymore. Most people don't even realize that Russia does. But what was happening in the 90s was no one was ever able to prove that they created this Chimera weapon. We didn't have access to the labs. And if they had it, they destroyed it, maybe hid it, we don't know. But it was spoken about by the scientists who actually defended infected to the United States. But that was, you know, 30, 40 years ago. So now move, think about where science has taken us today.

[A]

That's the exponential growth of science.

[B]

And so that is why the State Department is so concerned. Russia has a biological weapons program. North Korea has a biological weapons program, according to the U.S. state Department.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yes, they do. I source them in the book. They have said it publicly and they believe China and Iran have questionable programs, which is kind of like a euphemism for they probably do too.

[A]

Of course they do.

[B]

Okay, so in the scenario I write, we are working from the theoretical supposition of this plague superweapon and this dastardly idea that gets revealed by Sergei Popov, one of the Russian scientists who actually came here and is presently still in the United States, who explained that the reason Russia, Russia wanted to create this weapon with a back door, meaning when Americans would take an antibiotic believing that it would cure them of plague, it would instead trigger a second even more insanely painful encephalitis of the brain, causing people to die in an equally or more horrific manner. And the purpose of that was to erode trust in medicine and government. Those are exact quotes from the Russian scientists working on the program 40 years ago.

[A]

Because nothing would work.

[B]

Because nothing would work and it would create absolute insane mayhem in the United States. And that is the scenario. Spoiler alert. I hope you read the book is what I describe in the book because it is what Defense Department officials are most afraid of.

[A]

Now there was a deliberate Soviet psyop to make this happen is what you're saying. So this was all part of it, the fact that all the antibiotics would make this thing more definitely and enhance the effects of it. Yes, that was on purpose because they knew that that would also sow misinformation and distrust of the American government and revolt.

[B]

It was kind of like the most sinister, nefarious, dark hearted revenge that you could sow upon your enemy, which is have everybody die hating their government. At the same time, time, Jesus. And so when I knowing this narrative that I do from interviewing the players that were actually involved in it then and now, it's why I put so much emphasis on the stay informed part of the book. So the book is not meant, as I said earlier, to sow panic. It's meant to be proactive. It is meant for people to understand that information is king knowing basic things that you learn in the book, like, I have to know about transmissibility, about virulence, about medical countermeasures before I act in a certain way, God forbid there's the release of a genetically modified pathogen. And also to have an accountability from government officials realizing that they must be able to work with uncertainty. They cannot pretend that they know what is going on. When they don't. It is only going to make people more mistrustful.

[A]

So what is your. What is your view? I know the CIA did a whole thing on this. They said that they think it's. This Covid was a lab leak. It seems like that's the most likely scenario that the. That it could Covid. The Wuhan Virology Institute was working on these same things. It was a biological weapons program. Right.

[B]

The jury officially is still out. What is officially. Officially? I mean, I think everybody needs to weigh the evidence themselves. I mean, the lab in Wuhan was working with corona bat virus viruses, specifically. The outbreak occurred in Wuhan. There were cases.

[A]

This is Jon Stewart's funny montage monologue about Hershey, Pennsylvania. The chocolatey. The chocolatey outburst or the flood of chocolate that came out of Hershey, Pennsylvania. We don't know where it came from.

[B]

I mean, it's stunning to me that you cannot draw the conclusion that I would draw, which I'm going to. To refrain from saying. Right. Because. But. But here's the thing. It also speaks to. If you're tribal, if you have a horse in the race, if you're insistent, if you mock somebody, then it's very difficult to back off of that, you know, and there were these articles that came out that literally called the Wuhan lab leak scenario conspiracy theories. And so. So first of all, I want to say on the record, I think conspiracy theory should become like, it's an embarrassing, inelegant, unthoughtful thing to say. In my opinion, you should say speculative narrative. You could even say wildly speculative narrative.

[A]

I would call speculative narrative.

[B]

I would call the idea that aliens are among us a wildly speculative narrative. If I say conspiracy theory, it just sounds like I'm trying to Be holier than thou. It sounds like I'm trying to mock someone.

[A]

Yeah, it's a pejorative for sure.

[B]

And so. And the fact that, you know, the Wuhan lab leak, which is really much more of the scientifically prevailing theory than a natural origin, and by the way, I think the most convincing evidence for it is if you look at the original paper that was written and you look at the original group that wanted to shut down the idea that it was a lab leak theory, you will see a direct line from that position, anti lab leak, shut it down. You will see money, you will see power, and you will see prestige. Meaning all of those people were offered that and have been granted that period. That's just, you can just identify that in a chart. And so there was only something for individuals to gain and there was nothing for them to lose of that core group that shut that down. And it's just so unfortunate because in the event of the release of a genetically modified pathogen, as I show in nuclear war. I mean, sorry, as I showed in biological war, a scenario, you need unity, you need clear direction, and you need uncertainty as an okay idea. You need health officials to be really clear about what they know and what they don't know. Because a biological event is considered in the nomenclature of the Defense Department of fema, of hhs, as potentially a near extinction level event. Right. And I'll end with this because on the threat spectrum of weapons of mass destruction in the Defense Department, and I have an unclassified chart of this in the book on the threat spectrum of all the threats, nuclear weapons are considered the most dangerous. Biological weapons, biological incident is considered the most likely to happen.

[A]

Really?

[B]

And therefore it is the most dangerous.

[A]

Well, nuclear weapons certainly kill people the fastest in the impact zone. Right? But the biological weapons have the potential to spread and get more people. And even though it kills them slowly, it still kills, kills them in a horrific way.

[B]

One of the most chilling quotes from an official that I interviewed, Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority Leader. He himself, his office was the subject of the anthrax attack right after 9, 11. And he's dedicated his life to looking at biological weapons and biological threats. When I asked him what would happen in an event, in a catastrophic biological event, he said it would be death physically, it would be death governmentally, it would be death of everything. You know, but then he said, this people will do inhuman things to other people just to survive.

[A]

Oh, yeah, of course. But the people that will survive are the people that are in those underground tunnels, those people that have that little go back and get that special call during the devolution plan.

[B]

And then you have a world of like solipsists, people who live alone and psychopaths, people who are willing to kill people from a distance. Right. Machiavellian sort of world. And by the way, it would be mostly male. You know, the Defense Department, by the way, has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its servicemen. Right. So that's how you survive. You have that mask on and you never take it off. And the military is, has only something like 17% females.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

We're talking about a really lopsided world that gets left behind. These are grim thoughts.

[A]

A bottleneck in the human gentleman genome is going to happen if that really. That. Wow. Somebody was telling me recently that in an event like this, like a nuclear war or something catastrophic where the government falls, that people will target the. What was the religious group again? What are they called? No, not the Muslims. The. What is the religion where they're, they're all like, they're kind of Amish, but they're not. But they're super armed. Why, why is this escaping me right now? It's a group, it's a religious group where they kind of live off the land and they're self sustaining and they're kind of of like, they're kind of like preppers. You know who I'm talking about?

[B]

I don't know what am.

[A]

God damn it. Dude. What, what, what is that we were just talking about the other day? She. No, it's like a sect of Christianity but they're, they're not Christians, they're, they're not Jesuits, they're. I don't know why, I don't know why I'm having this brain fart right now.

[B]

Well, certainly a heavily armed group of people who are prepared for this kind of thing.

[A]

Yeah. But anyways, the, the point, the point, the point I was trying to make is this, this religious faction. Mormons. No. Anyways, maybe it's Mormons. I don't remember. Anyway, the, the, the point that this person was making is that people are going to target them and try to go to them because they're going to be self sustaining. They're going to have a lot of self sustaining resources, which is why they are armed to the teeth with all kinds of weapons. Some of them are in Mexico and they're basically like, they're like cartels because they know people are going to come after them in this kind of event.

[B]

I'd put my money on the Defense Department because they out arm everybody and they also have a very organized plan in place. I think that's what readers will really find pretty shocking when you see when devolution begins to happen and the Defense Department moves into the Insurrection act which repeals Posse comitatus and allows the Defense Department armed soldiers to try and enforce the law. You know, I take readers through what happens and I think it's super interesting. And you just begin to go, wow, they have this is all based on plans that exist. And you realize the ultimate idea of cog con continuity of government plan is to make sure that a tiny spine, a tiny architecture of the US government survives so that it can reconstitute. And in fact the final phase of devolution is called reconstitution, which is this sort of utopic idea that one day the government will re emerge like a phoenix from the ashes.

[A]

It's so anti constitutional like it's so anti declaration of Independent. Like you talk about the Declaration of Independence in the book and how it's so counterintuitive to this idea of how just the top, top level of people, it's all they care about is their own survival.

[B]

But again, I really believe that, you know, biological weapons are a man made problem, same as nuclear war. Nuclear weapons, man made problems, therefore there's a man made solution. You know, kind of looping to my other point. It's like if everybody's so busy talking about UFOs you're not really talking about the real problem. I do not foresee a UFO invasion, an alien invasion anytime soon. But I do. For look, we had a pandemic. The case fatality rate of COVID was 1%. Imagine if it had been 30% like hantavirus. Now make it 100%. Make every hantavirus was 30. Hantavirus is 30% but it's not airborne. That was the big myth in May when there was the outbreak of hantavirus.

[A]

What happened with that? Is that gone?

[B]

It is over because it is transmissible through spit, essentially. Have you ever been really close to anybody at a party talking to them and then you kind of have to do this. They've by accident, you know, don't do that. You wipe that and then you wipe your eyes or your nose or your mouth.

[A]

Just leave it sitting there.

[B]

Don't even speak that close to people. Right? Stay away from the spitters. No, but hantavirus is, you know that's called droplet transmission.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

So it's a form of human to

[A]

human, it's called that's what we thought Covid was at one point.

[B]

Yes, very different human to human transmission. Transmission through droplets is different than airborne. Airborne means it's aerosolized, it lingers in the air. So that is a huge. People need to know the distinctions.

[A]

And Hanta virus was not that.

[B]

It was not. There was fear because of the unknowns about the Andes strain of the Hantavirus that it was maybe airborne. And to my eye, when I was watching that unfold, I don't think anyone acted as out of, you know, I think people were behaving very conservatively and appropriately health officials. But again, you know, people are. There was sort of everyone leapt on the current administration for quarantining people. Well, I take the reader in the book very quickly through what quarantine really means, the presidential authority to do so. And you'll think twice before you have like a quick opinion about, about that. And again, concept behind all of it, stay informed, Stay informed.

[A]

And you know, like also the part about the military quite literally opening fire on migrants that are going to start storming this place story storming this country and probably other countries too, if this thing, if something like leaks in and people get into another country or Caribbean island or something like that, like all the immigrants that are going to be coming in, like that's a conundrum, you know, like, what do you do if there's like this demonic demon plague that's killing people in 24 hours and they're bleeding from every orifice of their body? Are you just gonna out of the goodness of your heart, let all these people escape from these islands and come to Florida or are you gonna mow them down?

[B]

I mean, you brought up a great and very controversial point in the book and thank you for bringing that up because you know, that sounds so crazy. Crazy like what? Wait, what the coast. The U.S. coast Guard is going to start shooting migrants that are trying to come here? Well, yes, and that is not from Annie Jacobson's imagination. That is a play out of an unclassified biological weapons attack war game done by US Officials who had recently retired. That is a major feat, fear. And it has to do with, you know, every kind of worst fear that any of us can think about because of imagine the kind of mayhem that would ensue.

[A]

And do we have these things here? Do we have these super plague weapons in like the continental United States, deep in within a lab somewhere?

[B]

Do you think, look, that would we. Those are illegal. It is illegal to have a biological weapon. Weapon. So what are in the freezers at usamrid. Maybe I'll close out with this. Which is kind of these BSL labs, right? So the biosafety level 4 lab is. That's where you're in what looks like a spacesuit. You have, you know, you're hooked up to a breathing tube. You're working with your arms in a autoclave. You know, everything is disinfecting. Once upon a time, before 9 11, there were two in the United States. At USAMRID, which is at Fort Detrick. And at the CDC in Atlanta, two. Now there are around 15 or 17. It's hard to pin down. There is no organization responsible for making this information public. This is from scientists who work on this. Yes. There are 110 BSL4 labs in something like 34 countries around the world. Okay, so think about.

[A]

And no oversight.

[B]

And no oversight. And some of these, you know, Japan has one in the center of Tokyo with 37 million people around it. Look at Wuhan. So then there's also the idea of the BSL3 lab, which is just right below BS. BSL4 has Ebola and others that there is absolutely no medical countermeasure for. BSL3 labs have pathogens in them that there are allegedly countermeasures for. But what if they are defeated? Okay, so like plague? You work on plague in a BSL3 lab? I visited a BSL3 lab when I was reporting the book Hantavirus. Is there Anthrax, rabies, all of this in BSL3s. Are you ready for this? There are now 3500 BSL3 labs around the world. They're in places where there are wars going on. Something like between 50 and. Again, these statistics are fungible. Something like between 50 and 80 or 90% of the. Those 3500 BSL3 labs have no safety standards. So it's kind of like as is in the country. And again, these are tracked by scientists and academics.

[A]

And then you can't. If one of them leaks out or say like a cartel gets their hands, like. Similar to what you talked about in the nuclear war book. You know, if a cartel gets their hands on one of these things and tries to use it, it's. How do you. Where do you attribute the origin? Like you don't know. It's just, wow, the genie's out of the bottle.

[B]

The genie could very easily be out of the bottle. Yes.

[A]

That's terrifying. Thank you. I'm gonna sleep well tonight. Thank you for doing this. Annie, what is gonna be your next book?

[B]

Close hold but I'll be back to talk to you about it.

[A]

Not on UFOs.

[B]

Not on UFOs. Not on UFO's. Lot more serious threats.

[A]

Yeah, well, I look forward to it. Thank you for doing this. Your book is assuming that this podcast is going to be dropping probably right when your book's dropping. So we'll link all that stuff below Y and anything else we should tell folks before you depart.

[B]

Stay informed, get smarter.

[A]

All right, thanks again.

[B]

Thank you so much, Dan.

[A]

Sleep tight, everyone.