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- [00:00]
A
Last time we talked was about how we could blow ourselves to death. And this time we're talking about how we could infect ourselves to death. Which one's scary, a nuclear war or biological war?
- [00:11]
B
It's equally scary in completely different ways. I think, you know, with nuclear war, the response to that was so many people calling me up and saying like, okay, I read your book. I just want to die instantly. Biological war is tricky and scary because you don't have to die instantly and then you have to wonder, I wish I did. That's the sort of bad news first.
- [00:42]
A
Is there any good news with biological war?
- [00:44]
B
There is, because it can be prevented. I mean, unlike nuclear war, which is like just an event that happens without warning, it's literally called an event without warning. But biological war is event with warning. And that warning window, it's literally like 12, 24, 36 hours max. But that is the window of time when something can be done.
- [01:08]
A
Why do you think biological warfare receives so little public attention compared with nuclear war?
- [01:14]
B
Yeah, I mean, terrific question. For starters, biological war is illegal. Biological weapons are illegal, and yet biological weapons exist, including now, today, 21st century genetically modified biological weapons for extreme transmission, hyperverulance, and designed to defeat existing vaccines and countermeasures. But it's illegal, so no one has them except for they do.
- [01:47]
A
Is there something about it being invisible as well? There's no smoke in the sky.
- [01:51]
B
I mean, that's what makes it incredibly sinister. I think it's invisible, it's silent. And when you really just think of this simple idea that a biological weapon, any pathogen, really is a living munition, it's alive and it's a bullet with
- [02:08]
A
a mind of its own.
- [02:09]
B
And it's like with its self reproducing. And so it's just go once it gets unleashed.
- [02:18]
A
Do you think bioweapons are the most underappreciated existential risk of the modern world?
- [02:23]
B
Well, I came across this chart in the DoD that really freaked me out when I was reading, when I was working on nuclear war. And it's like the weapons of mass destruction WMD threat spectrum. And of course nuclear weapons are like at the far end of the worst, most destructive. But biological weapons are a very close second and even more frightening. They are considered the most likely to occur and therefore the most dangerous. And this has to do with, you know, laboratories doing defensive research on biological weapon countermeasures. So this is where you get really into a lot of, you know, sort of catch 22, very politic, politicized debates, which we're going to stay away from and just talk about it as like a. Or at least I am, you know, because it should, no one should be for biological war.
- [03:22]
A
What surprised you most about comparing the two? Nuclear war and biowar?
- [03:29]
B
Well, equally shocked in two lanes. So nuclear war. I remember when Craig Fugate, who's Obama's former FEMA director, told me that there is no plan for population protection in the event of a strategic nuclear attack because everyone will be dead. I mean, that was stunning to me because this is coming from the guy in charge of it. Equally stunning is that there is a plan for protection in the event of biological war, but it's not for the population, it's not for you and me. It's for the government. It's for a tiny group of government officials that will live out the attack or the incident. By the way. It doesn't have to be an attack, it can be an accident. But this is super creepy and people should definitely know about it and be very upset when they do.
- [04:21]
A
Let's, let's start to creep people out then. Starting at the beginning. How did we learn to engineer biotechnology? What's the story there?
- [04:29]
B
Yeah, I mean people talk about CRISPR now, you know, the CRISPR cast sort of gene editing. That's pretty much third or fourth generation gene editing. So the origin story of gene editing is 1971 in a laboratory in Stanford at Stanford University in Stanford, California. And a Nobel laureate named Paul Berg, he won the Nobel laureate for the work he did, figured out how to create what is called a chimera pathogen. So mix chimera is like that ancient Greek idea of a monster made up of two different parts. And Berg figured out how to create recombinant DNA. That is the real fundamental word for gene editing. And that was way back in 1971.
- [05:17]
A
Recombinant recombining.
- [05:19]
B
Absolutely. It's just like it sounds. So much of this is just like it sounds. Okay, you know, and that's where it all began. And then there's the short and long version of how we got where we are now.
- [05:31]
A
What's the argument for doing genetic engineering?
- [05:35]
B
The argument like all dual use technology is like you can use it to heal, you can use it to harm. I mean this is true of every technology going back to when humans invented or discovered fire. Right. You can like cook your meat and not get trichinosis or you can burn down the next tribes over. Every technology has that same component. And so with bioengineering, the idea is, and certainly now Very specifically to where we are today is about, okay, we will work with dangerous pathogens to genetically modify them so that if a dangerous pathogen is released, we will know how to create a medical countermeasure for it. You see the chicken and the egg and the catch 22.
- [06:31]
A
Yeah. Offense and defense are contained within the same system.
- [06:34]
B
Absolutely. And this is where huge divides occur. And this is where the term called gain of function, which, you know, 99.99% of the planet had never heard of until the COVID pandemic has now become such a hot button issue. Gain of function is literally like it sounds. You work to genetically modify a pathogen to give it new functions so that it gains function. And the idea of that is that, okay, just in case someone releases a biological weapon, we will know how to go up against it. And this is the big debate about
- [07:13]
A
COVID which do you think that Covid, from a biological weapons safety pandemic standpoint, do you think that was kind of an important thing to happen? In some ways, do you think it was a positive or a negative?
- [07:31]
B
I mean, that's, you know, it did happen, and here we are now. And I think the. Separate from what anyone thinks about, you know, natural origin versus lab league, the two most important lessons of COVID is one, that we are extremely ill prepared for a pandemic, despite the fact that in the US billions of dollars are spent every year to deal with exactly that kind of thing. That's the first lesson. And the second lesson is that the pandemic completely fractured public trust around science, around public health officials, around politicians. And so this fracturing is incredibly dangerous. And I believe is also where the solution lies. I mean, that's like a real long stretch to try to get there, but it must happen because it is such a dangerous position. And if we really get into it and eventually talk about the Russians biological weapons program of the Cold War, upon which some of the pathogen that gets deployed in my scenario is built, then you're really looking at the idea of Soviet Russia was to ruin America, to gut America by creating, by fracturing public trust.
- [08:54]
A
The thing that's crazy, Covid feels really symbolic. I think of COVID as basically a vaccine that went wrong. Covid itself was a vaccine that went wrong because we could have been given a small, non fatal dose of a future risk that would have alerted us to all of the ways that we were ill prepared so that we could be better prepared for it in future. But because of the way that institutions and the medical industry and communication and lockdown and trust were all degraded and really, really damaged. You're right. It's done two things at once. It's taught people what a super spreader event is. It helps us to understand the importance of masking and ventilators. It's reminded us how ill prepared we are. All of those things should prepare us better for the one in future. However, the current. If there was a pandemic that got released tomorrow, the amount of pushback from the populace would be huge because nobody has trust for it anymore. Jared, can you do a search for me, please? Search Toby ORD O R D the precipice risk chart. It should be an image. And this is the thing that's insane. The fact that we were so ill prepared. I'm pretty sure that the precipice came out in 2019, so before COVID and in order to write the book and to have the research and to be able to get to the stage where. Yeah, top left. That's it. That's the one. Existential catastrophic risk via asteroid or comet super volcano. Stellar explosion. So natural risk, it says chance within the next 100 years. One in 10,000. That's of all of them. Stellar explosion is that one in a billion. One in a billion. So we should be safe from that. Nuclear war, 1 in 1000. Climate change, 1 in 1000. Other environmental damage, 1 in 1000. Naturally arising pandemics, 1 in 10,000. Now we get into the real shit. Engineered pandemics, 1 in 30 in the next hundred years. Unaligned artificial intelligence. 1 in 10 unforeseen anthropogenic risks. 1 in 30. So that's unknown. Unknowns and other anthropogenic risks. That's a catch all bucket. Total anthropogenic risk over the next 100 years. A one in six chance. And this is the difference between. What was the word you used?
- [11:15]
B
Global catastrophic risk.
- [11:18]
A
Okay, so the difference I think between global catastrophic risk and existential risk. So existential risk is categorized as permanent unrecoverable collapse. Permanent unrecoverable collapse. Because nuclear war as a proper X risk, it's usually pretty easy to recover from. There is a way that you can recover from it as a civilization. Like to get everybody with nuclear weapons. That would need to be sud in the sky. There would need to be because you only need like 500 or a thousand humans and then you're able to come back.
- [11:52]
B
Yeah.
- [11:53]
A
The bioweapon thing is even scarier because that is able to make every person. It is a bullet with legs that can self replicate.
- [12:02]
B
I wrote biological war a scenario, not biological war, the only scenario. And in my acknowledgments part of the book, I mention how in some of my interviews, and I'm talking about like with David Relman, sort of top level White House advisor to many presidents, told me about pathogens that literally can do exactly that. And I made that decision not to go with that kind of a threat. Although, you know, the case fatality rate of the plague weapon that is engineered in the scenario I write is 100% case fatality rate. So if you get it, you die.
- [12:40]
A
Okay.
- [12:40]
B
But there are. I won't get too far ahead of the weeds, but that chart is amazing and it really is kind of on point of what we're talking about here. And I love your analogy that Covid is theoretically or philosophically, you know, sort of a medical countermeasure gone wrong.
- [12:58]
A
Correct.
- [12:58]
B
Is what it is. Because if you think about it as it was a poison of the mind as well, it could have been a cautionary tale.
- [13:05]
A
Bingo.
- [13:06]
B
The case fatality rate on Covid was one in a hundred. That is a lot of people died, but that's not at the level of, of what an engineered pathogen is. Most bioengineered pathogens are designed to move toward 100% case fatality rate. If you get it, you die.
- [13:25]
A
Who were the first people to start using this as a weapon? Because obviously you've got recombinant DNA. We've opened up this entire world, this technology. Who were the first people to really turn it on an industrial scale into becoming a weaponized threat?
- [13:40]
B
That was the Soviets. Right? So backing up one's. First of all, in the Cold War, we had biological weapons programs. The US had a robust biological weapons program, offensive and defensive. I've written about it in other books. So did Russia, the Soviet Union. In 1969, President Nixon renounced America's biological weapons program entirely for reasons that are debated. Doesn't matter. That was it. It's over. Destroy them all. Took 219 weeks to destroy. A treaty was signed around the world, the BWC Biological Weapons Convention Treaty. Biological weapons are too dangerous. They're called repugnant to the conscience of mankind in the preamble. Right. So it's this very lofty idea that like, you know, we will not do this. And everybody signed the treaty and not including the Soviets. Including the Soviets.
- [14:34]
A
Fucking Soviets.
- [14:35]
B
And now we know because of a defector. And I get into this in the book because it's very interesting. I interviewed the British intelligence officer who first found out about the whole Soviet program. Not until the late 80s did America. Did the CIA, did British intelligence have any idea that the Soviets had this colossal program. They stole our recombinant DNA technology. I mean, good old IP theft back in the. In the 70s. And they.
- [15:04]
A
They were the China of the 70s.
- [15:06]
B
And they began this biological weapons program. They called it our Manhattan Project. And we had no idea. Now, bring us to the present day just to deal with some facts about who has biological weapons. According to the State Department, Russia has a biological weapons program. This is on the record, and this is a pretty big deal. And their position is that the Soviet program was not dismantled, as had been promised when the Wall came down, but rather absorbed. And the State Department has the same position about North Korea, that they have a robust biological weapons program. And then their position on China and Iran is they are questionable, which is like euphemism, subtext for they have biological weapons programs.
- [15:55]
A
The State Department admitted to having them themselves.
- [15:58]
B
We do not have a biological weapons program.
- [16:01]
A
How much do you believe that?
- [16:02]
B
Officially? Officially. Okay. But. Well, let me just say this. What we do have and what we have had in the past is a defensive program. And so I interview some really interesting people for this book, including, like, the top dogs in this world, okay? And. And people who run war games at the Pentagon for how this would go down. And most people in the business of preventing biological war in the United States believe that gain of function is evil. That word was used with me and have also said gain of function is a euphemism for biological weapons engineering.
- [16:51]
A
How many people are opposed to enhanced interrogation? And yet Guantanamo Bay still happened. You know, I think what. And this speaks to the lack of trust, right? In government. That. And also there's a bit of me that thinks I want to be on the side that has them. I don't want to be on the side that doesn't have them. I'm aware that there can be lab leaks. I'm aware BSL 3 and 2. And, you know, if one guy's got a gun, I want a gun.
- [17:23]
B
The issue with the biological weapons is that nuclear weapons take out biological weapons. Nuclear weapons. And in fact, there are secretive. This is not Annie reporting classified information. This is Annie speculating in the affirmative. I'm not gonna put the nose on. I'm gonna go full with this, right? No, no, no. I mean, this is like. So there have been moments when there have been leaks that it is understood that the Defense Department is trying to get a Presidential emergency directive to be allowed to Use nuclear weapons preemptively against a known biological weapons facility. And whenever this gets leaked, it causes an uproar. So I would assume, given what I know about national security, that that directive still exists. And the reason why that exists, people say, well, why wouldn't you just take it out with conventional explosives? Conventional explosives have this strange effect on germ labs whereby the explosion, they just
- [18:37]
A
atomize it, push it, and it pushes
- [18:40]
B
it out faster so it goes, you see. So it's non effective.
- [18:43]
A
You need to incinerate it.
- [18:44]
B
And the nuclear weapon has a temperature that incinerates it and a speed.
- [18:49]
A
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- [20:25]
B
The sophistication component when it comes to genetic engineering is what's so dangerous because it only takes a Minute, hopefully reading my book or just having this kind of conversation to get to the real heart of the matter with your X risk, with what the Defense Department calls a near extinction level event. That's, you know, nuclear is different. That's like extinction level event. So we differ on that. But biological is near extinction. That group of government officials is going to stay alive according to planning. But the difference in that is that, you know, biological weapons are. Once they propagate, there's no stopping them. And the number one reason is airborne. Airborne. So many different pathogens. Ebola, they're not airborne. But if something's airborne, you and I are talking, we're both infected.
- [21:25]
A
What are the elements of the perfect biological weapon?
- [21:28]
B
Airborne is number one.
- [21:30]
A
Okay, number one. That would be the transition.
- [21:31]
B
Number one.
- [21:32]
A
Transmission.
- [21:33]
B
100% transmission. So what's interesting about COVID and I just use this sometimes. It's a great example because everybody remembers Covid, those of us that, you know, lived through it, that aren't a baby. And there was, for the first three months of COVID the who was sending out tweets that said Covid is not airborne. Not in full capital letters. They believed that Covid was transmissible through, you know, me passing this to you. And it's called a fomite. Not how it works.
- [22:08]
A
Some pathogens are.
- [22:10]
B
Some pathogens are. Absolutely.
- [22:12]
A
But Covid wasn't.
- [22:13]
B
But Covid wasn't. And they were convinced it wasn't airborne. And it was airborne. There was 8000 people already with COVID before the WHU change that statement. And this. They were not doing it to be nefarious. They were doing it because they didn't know. There is so much uncertainty in biology. So much uncertainty. It's probably part of the reason why the US Got rid of its biological weapons program. The Defense Department likes to know you can measure how many people you're gonna kill with a bomb. It's called a circular damage issue. And you don't know with biology. And so the Defense Department, if they can't control it, they don't like it.
- [22:58]
A
Yeah, I remember people were wiping down Amazon parcels. There was even a rule added into pickleball where you could do a paddle serve so as the ball came toward, you could scoop it up on the paddle, flick it in the air and hit it. Because people were that worried that maybe the other person had picked the ball up. And if I picked the ball up and then. So, okay, so. So elements of the perfect biological weapon. First one is it's airborne transmissibility. Transmissibility. Is airborne. What else? How else would it be constituted?
- [23:26]
B
Virulence. Right. So it's case fatality rate. Covid, as we said earlier, 1%. So 100 people get Covid, one dies. That's a pretty low case fatality rate. Hantavirus, recently in the news, high 30% case fatality rate. So that's a lot of people. The seasonal flu, by the way, is 0.1%. Pneumonic plague.
- [23:57]
A
What's that?
- [23:57]
B
Which, okay, we all know bubonic plague. Mnemonic plague is the aerosolized version of bubonic plague. Bubonic plague of flea. From an infected flea bites you, you get bubonic plague. Pneumonic plague, it gets into your lungs and it becomes aerosolized. Pneumonic plague has a case fatality rate of 100%. Unless you get antibiotics into your system within 24 hours. Not 25 hours. First 24 hours, you get antibiotics, you have a chance at living. If you don't, you die. 100%. 100%.
- [24:40]
A
What's the incubation period of mnemonic plague?
- [24:44]
B
The natural incubation period is between one and three days, sometimes five. Again, there's so much ambiguity in mother nature. Genetically modified plague, one day. So imagine a situation where this is the pathogen that I choose in this scenario because it is what the Defense Department, fema, hhs, cdc, who is probably the most afraid of. It's called a select. It's called a Tier 1 Select Agent. It's one of the most likely to be used and it's a 100% killer. And now imagine if you could genetically modify that to evade cure. So imagine if antibiotics no longer work. And what I'm saying may sound like science fiction horror, except for it's precisely what was at the center of that Soviet biological weapons program of the 70s and 80s that we talked about a moment ago.
- [25:48]
A
That's what they were engineering.
- [25:49]
B
They were engineering a super plague weapon.
- [25:52]
A
Did they achieve it?
- [25:54]
B
Questionable. But that think of how many decades ago, if they didn't do it then, they certainly have done it now. Here's was the exact line from Dr. Christopher Davis, who interviewed the first Russian defector who told him about the super plague weapon. He said they wanted to thinking of the Soviets planning a biological weapons attack against America. They wanted to kill all the people and leave the infrastructure intact, which you
- [26:22]
A
don't get with nukes. You get rid of the people, but you also have to rebuild the city.
- [26:27]
B
Imagine just taking all the people out and just marching in and everything that was theirs is now yours.
- [26:36]
A
Yeah, it's just like pressing a delete button on all of the humans. I mean, you've got to get rid of the bodies, but that's a small price to pay.
- [26:42]
B
If you wait long enough, they sort of disintegrate.
- [26:45]
A
What was the goal of the Soviet scientists? Do you think it was primarily casualties or something more psychological?
- [26:53]
B
Very good question. It was actually both. It was a twofold idea. It was create this mass death that we're talking about. And remember, maybe not the Soviet scientists, it was the Politburo, the sort of planners behind it, the military, the Soviet officials that just hated their American enemies so much that they came up with the most diabolical plan possible. And it was exactly that. It was just kill everyone, but also create such mistrust within the medical establishment. They wanted to outfox antibiotics which normally will kill plague. The bacteria is called Yersinia pestis. And they wanted to specifically, specifically send America back to the sort of, you know, pre antibiotic era and have all the people have completely lost trust in the medical establishment.
- [27:51]
A
How did we find out about the Soviet weapons program?
- [27:55]
B
The program was huge and it was secretive and no one knew about it from, you know, until 1988, 89. And then one of its leading scientist engineers named Vladimir Poseshnik had a moral crisis. And he was a rare Soviet scientist who was allowed to leave Russia to go buy equipment for the biological weapons program in France. And that is where he went. He decided to defect and tell the West. So he went to the embassy. He actually went to the Canadian embassy first and they didn't believe him and they sent him away and he went back to a phone booth and he called the British embassy. They took him very seriously, picked him up in a car and a day later he was sitting in London in a safe house across the table, just like you and I are now, from Dr. Christopher Davis, who was pretty much the only guy assigned to biological weapons in the British intelligence because there were no biological weapons. There weren't supposed to be. So he was this young surgeon commander and he knew a lot about biological weapons. And I've interviewed him at length for the book. Imagine him learning about this and learning about the super plague weapon and going. And then the British told their American counterparts at the CIA it was verified and that.
- [29:29]
A
How was it verified?
- [29:31]
B
We sent. So Davis and another colleague went to the CIA in Langley, had a discussion with them, told them everything that Peseshnik had said. These guys are MDs and PhDs and you know, the CIA was like, okay, well we have to verify it ourselves. They sent Joshua Lederberg, who's a very famous Nobel laureate to the UK to interview Possessnik himself. And Dr. Davis was there in that room and he said Lederberg was like the way he said it was, the scales fell off his eyes. Oh my God. Like not only what have they done, but how did we not know this? They were manufacturing tons of plague weapon, tons of smallpox weapon. And the systems, the delivery systems were such in those days they weren't airborne, truly airborne. They were going to be delivered, you know, on like sort of low flying cruise missiles and dropped. There was a whole weaponization that had
- [30:34]
A
to happen in capsules, in bombs or
- [30:37]
B
in like you put, they had, they had engineered and actually correctly engineered that was part of the verification process. But creating warheads that could survive this incredible heat. And their delivery systems work, but those were never used.
- [30:54]
A
Okay, so that's how weapons can be used to attack. But surely everyone also needs to build bio defences as well.
- [31:01]
B
And this is the big conundrum.
- [31:03]
A
This is the big conundrum. There's a paradox there, right? The effort to defend against biological attacks results in more labs being built, which increases the opportunity for a biological catastrophe. Because you don't just have purposeful, deliberate leaks or attacks. Yes. You don't just have purposeful attacks, you also have accidental leaks.
- [31:21]
B
Absolutely. And maybe no one would be crazy enough to use a biological weapon because they know about blowback. Now you know what happens with a pandemic, except a terrorist organization, you know, that doesn't value life, shall we say, in this, certainly in the same manner as you know, the West. But the lab accidents and the lab leaks are a very serious concern and should be. But let's talk about labs for a minute because I think it's very interesting to look at numbers. So we just spoke of like in the 90s, you know, the US finds out about the Soviet program. Clinton makes the use of a biological weapon a death penalty, advance offense. The system really vamps up. The Cold War is down, now there's a new enemy. I mean the Cold War is over, the wall's down, now there's a new enemy. It's definitely biological weapons. Terrorists start to enter into the fold and then 911 happens and most people forget or aren't old enough to remember that just a few weeks after 911 there was an anthrax attack against the Senate. And that moved the biological pharmaceutical, biotechnology, biodefense industry, call it what you will, into high gear. And that's where A whole new system of science unfolded to work on exactly what you're talking about. Medical countermeasures in the event of a biological attack. And so, for example, there were two BSL4 labs. That's the highest maximum containment, biosafety level four. The zoot suits, the spacesuits and the hose with the air. And you're working in an autoclave. And there's like. It's very.
- [33:09]
A
It's an autoclave.
- [33:10]
B
You know, your hands are in gloves and the path is like an empty
- [33:14]
A
fish tank with gloves in it.
- [33:15]
B
You've seen it in movies. That's BSL4. There were two of them. Defense Department had one at Fort Detrick, civil sector CDC had one in Atlanta. After 9, 11, 15 BSL4 labs and over 1,000 BSL3 labs. BSL3 is just one step down. That's where you work on plague, hantavirus.
- [33:40]
A
What do you work on in BSL4 if you've got plague and hantavirus and BSL3?
- [33:44]
B
And this was very interesting to learn about this because I had that same question. BSL4 is absolutely no known cure. It's Ebola, it's Marburg, it's Nipah, no known cure.
- [33:56]
A
And I don't know Marburg or Nipper.
- [33:59]
B
They're virus. They're viruses, some of them natural. Yeah, these are all mother Nature. So. And then the plague, remember plague should be able to be the plague. Bacteria should be killed by antibiotics. When you get into genetic modification now we have a different story. Hantavirus should be able to be contained. But yes, it's a very good question about what's the difference between BSL4 and BSL3? If you're working gain of function in them. But these labs blew up in number and they also did around the world.
- [34:38]
A
How, how many viruses are you aware of that have been created? Or bioweapon. Bioweapon analogues have been created from scratch. Is there such a thing that.
- [34:51]
B
Great question. That's called synthetic biology. And that is very new, like third generation recombinant DNA crispr where you. Yes, you can create something that type it in, does not exist in nature
- [35:07]
A
or that is a chimera gain of function of an existing thing that exists.
- [35:13]
B
And that's not necessarily. Well, that's sort of at the edge of synthetic biology. Yes, it does involve synthetic biology, but you can actually create a completely new blank slate. And that is, that's where you're getting into the area and certainly with AI.
- [35:27]
A
Are you aware of any of those
- [35:28]
B
that have been made that is so incredibly classified. I mean, I would have to guess
- [35:35]
A
your entire body of work seems incredibly classified.
- [35:38]
B
Well, no, I mean, this is what's interesting. People sometimes say to me, annie, how do you get classified information? I don't. My sources would be in prison. I name my sources. So they're taking me up to the edge of what can be known. When we get into devolution, which is the program to save a small group of individuals when everyone else is dying and mass anarchy and insurrection unfolds across the United States and everywhere. That is a classified program. Devolution. Spooky evolution. Devolution. Okay, Classified program. But the name has been declassified so, like five years ago. The name.
- [36:18]
A
You can't listen to my new album, but I'll tell you what it's called.
- [36:21]
B
Or the River. Right? You know, I'll tell you what it's called, but you can't listen to it. Right?
- [36:27]
A
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- [37:40]
B
Well, okay, so technically they're not in bioweapons. They are in, you know, biological countermeasure pursuits. Okay. Because remember, biological weapon engineering is illegal. Just a few basic ones that are good to know. And also how old some of this technology is. Is like right around 2000, 2001, there was a mouse pox experiment. It was one of the first ones. So in Australia, they took. Scientists there, just wanted to experiment and see. And they took mice that had been vaccinated and they gave them mousepox, which is similar to smallpox, to see if they could defeat the vaccine. And they did. So that was a terrifying moment in bioengineering because you realized you could defeat a countermeasure. That's where you're, you know, engineering something to evade cure that's incredibly dangerous. And then, like 10, 12 years later, there was a. There was a modification on H5N1. It was called the ferret flu experiment. And the scientists working on that made H5N1 airborne. Before that, it was not airborne. So there's a lesser airborne version, which is. If you and I are talking, have you ever been at a party with someone, loud music, and they spit on you? That's called droplet transmission. Right. And, you know, we've all had it happen. And you kind of like go, right. It's just gross, but it happens. Definitely. Never rub your eye.
- [39:21]
A
Never rub your eye or your nose
- [39:24]
B
or put your finger in your mouth.
- [39:26]
A
Okay? Those are the three.
- [39:28]
B
That's how droplet transmission occurs. Eye, nose, mouth. Okay. That's not airborne. Airborne is aerosolized. Airborne is just. It's in the air, and it's floating in the air, and it can stay in the air. And so what scientists did in that 2012 experiment is they made something that was droplet transmission. And that's, you know, if I back way up and you're over there and you're not leaning in close to talking to me, I'm not gonna get your.
- [39:59]
A
Realistically, that's what those big plastic welding shields that people were wearing during COVID That's really all that they would have been good for.
- [40:07]
B
Precisely. And that's what the mask does, is it just. If somebody spits on you, it's a layer of action.
- [40:13]
A
Presumably, this is kind, necessary, but not sufficient. Like, if something is aerosolized, it also has to be transmissible through saliva. Like through droplet.
- [40:23]
B
Absolutely, of course.
- [40:24]
A
Because droplet is basically liquidized. Aerosolized.
- [40:27]
B
Yeah. That's just a fact. Like, if you gave in my scenario, somebody gives somebody cpr, Sayonara, you know, and that has to do with how quickly you're going to then be infected yourself. Right. Because this is, again, squishy biology. It's not perfect. It's one of the major problems with COVID With your analogy of how it just became so terrible because health officials refused to say, you know what? We don't know. We don't know yet. They couldn't say that. Instead, they said, Covid's not airborne. And then later they had to backtrack. Well, imagine all of us that didn't know better were saying, why are they telling us X when it's really.
- [41:05]
A
Yeah, you're the boy who cried wolf. So do you think it's fair to say that biotechnology is sort of the most powerful but also least controllable technology that we've got as a civilization?
- [41:15]
B
I would say nuclear weapons are the most powerful just in terms of destruction and in terms of temperature. Right. By all means. But biological weapons are the most dangerous for precisely the reason you say, because they are. Look, there's no barrier to entry. Nuclear weapons are controlled, first of all. You have to have uranium or plutonium, and that is pretty hard to get a hold of. Very difficult. Then you have to have a nation state that can afford that. And then you have to have a delivery system. You can't just drop a nuclear weapon in a field. You have to deliver it. That is incredibly expensive. The barrier to entry is high. It's why, thank God, we have not had a nuclear event since the first two bombs were dropped in World War II. Biological weapons have no barrier to entry anymore. You can essentially engineer a pathogen with very limited biology.
- [42:11]
A
In your basement, the desktop printer.
- [42:14]
B
It's terrifying. It's terrifying. And everybody in the business of biological weapons knows that. And the solution must be to be informed, and it must be to have a capacity to understand what can really happen.
- [42:29]
A
I guess you looked at the green, amber, red system that's used for desktop. Is it biosynthesizers? So I remember learning this from the End of the World with Josh Clark, which is my favorite limited series podcast from like eight years ago. In it, he's talking about how bioweapons. Now you can have these tabletop synthesizers, and in order to synthesize different DNA structures, they get run through a library that stress tests what it is that you're trying to synthesize. And you can do green all day long. Amber needs a level of clearance. And if you do red, you can't do it first off. And there is a, like, FBI coming kick your door down. But Nick Bostrom's got this really interesting experiment. He's from the Future of Humanity Institute, the same that Toby is, and he says it's only due to sort of luck of chemistry and physics. That you can't create an atom bomb by putting sand in your microwave. By combining something that is very readily available with a technology that is easily accessible. And the fact that that's not the case, like, hooray. But that didn't need to be that way. It could be the case that there could be a type of technology, there could be a type of destruction which is enabled by an easily accessible technology with or without some easily accessible resource. And yeah, as we democratize information and technology, each time that you do that, he refers to it as drawing balls out of an urn. Have you heard this example before?
- [44:09]
B
I have.
- [44:10]
A
So you have an urn with an unknown number of balls in. And for everyone that you draw out, that's like technological progress. So you put your hand into the urn and you draw out a ball, and sometimes they're white. They make the world a better place. Hooray. Pull out another one and it's white. Makes the world a better place. Then you pull out one and it's gray, and it makes the world a better place. But it also makes it more dangerous place. Better place, more dangerous place. But inside the urn of an unknown number of balls are an unknown number of black balls. If you pull one of those out, it's game over. And that is the kind of technology that, as you make progress. This is a guy who is from the Future of Humanity Institute. Philosopher. He's the most cited philosopher under the age of 50 in the world. This guy Bostrom. Bostrom, yeah.
- [44:53]
B
He's.
- [44:53]
A
Yes, if you pull out the black ball, but you don't even need to pull out the black one. If you just pull out enough gray ones, the risk begins to combine to the point where it's very dangerous. Okay, let's war game out your nightmare scenario. Day one. What happens?
- [45:10]
B
Explosion at the Vector Lab in Russia. And the reason that I chose that is because why I chose many plot points in the scenarios. It happened once before in 2019. There was an explosion at the Vector Lab. Vektor is the BSL4 facility where a majority of the Soviet bioweapons program occurred back during the Cold War.
- [45:33]
A
Where is it?
- [45:34]
B
It's in just outside of Novosibirsk, Siberia. Okay. And so that may sound like the middle of nowhere. It's actually in a small sort of village, a science city called Koltsk, eight miles from Novosibirsk, Siberia. You know, people are like, wait, Siberia? Is that a real place? It is. Okay. Sounds far away. It's the third largest city in Russia after Moscow. And St. Petersburg, 1.6 million people. And most BSL4 lab, or many BSL4 labs, by the way, are just right in the middle of some of the largest popular population centers in the world. Tokyo, South Africa, Atlanta. Right. So that's how it begins. I have an explosion in the lab. But unlike what happened in 2019, where there was no release, as far as anyone knows, there is a release of a pathogen, and it's pneumonic plague, and it's genetically modified mnemonic plague. And I take the reader through the military system of systems, as I have spent my career working to understand all that, to see how the DOD reacts and to see how and when the President will be told and to see how and when the different agencies get involved. And to me, that was just an extraordinary learning curve and a sort of like, whoa. Along the way. With the number one thing leading the charge that every sort of expert in any of those agencies told me was, Annie, if you can stop something with 12 to 24 hours, 24 to 36 hours, if you can stop it in its tracks, you can prevent a pandemic. But of course, because biological weapons are illegal, no one wants to admit they have biological weapons in their freezers.
- [47:29]
A
And so the host nation's immediately going to try and cover it up or deny it.
- [47:34]
B
And that is the natural response across history to just. If there is an unnatural. You know, there was a famous case in Sverdlovsk in Russia in 1979, where they were weaponizing anthrax. They were milling it into powder. Anthrax is an interesting path because it's called a dead end host. Right. So if you get anthrax, it's not transmissible. You get it in your lungs and you die. But you can't. It's not airborne, but it's like a super killer. And for whatever reason, it was sort of favored, you know, pathogen of the Cold War. We had an anthrax program, too. So there was some guy, some engineer in the Garrison 19, where they were milling the anthrax into tons of weapons, forgot to change the air filter, and it got out and it killed 100 people in the town. And so the Soviet Politburo, you can imagine the generals with their tall boots came in and were like, it's contaminated meat. And it was, you know, it was an escape. It was a lab escape, and they denied it for decades. Now, it's known to be this kind of a situation. So a lab leak, a lab accident is really a very dangerous situation.
- [48:52]
A
Would the US be Aware because presumably they've got satellites that see if they'll have an idea about where potential labs are. They'll be trying to track, hey, has there been some sort of kinetic event that's occurred there? And what's the process of what's going on?
- [49:09]
B
You're absolutely right. I mean, with nuclear weapons, we have satellites parked in geosync over all the facilities to look for that launch in the first second that it happens. And we see it and we know it. A lab accident is different. It's a different kind of explosion. But they measure it from space. They know it's not a ICBM launch, it's an explosion. And the reason specifically why they have Eyes on the Vector lab is not just because it's like a super dangerous lab that's known to probably have all the bioweapons, but because it's just a few miles from an ICBM facility in Novosibirsk. So the Defense Department officials I interviewed said, absolutely, Annie, we'd have eyes on it, we'd know it and we'd call it in. But what do you do? What do you do? You know, you reach out to Moscow through your State Department people. I spoke to State Department officials that work in the business of counter proliferation. This is sort of like a fancy word for saying trying to stop, you know, biological weapons in their tracks. They would make an overture, no response.
- [50:20]
A
So now you're met with the do we drop the nuke or not Question.
- [50:23]
B
You are met with that because you
- [50:25]
A
only have 12 hours, 24 hours probably at most.
- [50:29]
B
Yeah. And that, you know, that is a scenario that we've seen in Hollywood movies. It's actually a. Could very plausibly be a real scenario. But who's going to do that? Because it's almost certainly going to trigger a nuclear exchange. Certainly not.
- [50:43]
A
Interesting to think about the way that nuclear weapons work. At least the old style ones where you had even the new style ones, right, the H bomb, you have a trigger and then that is the explosion. And in this, you would have a trigger before the trigger, and the trigger would be the bioweapon leak that would cause the nuclear attack, which would also have its trigger inside of a trigger.
- [51:06]
B
And then you're talking about what's called a wicked problem. A wicked problem in Defense Department nomenclature is a problem that only creates more problems with its solution. And by the time you deploy the air quote solution, new problems have been created.
- [51:27]
A
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- [52:44]
B
So back up for a second because I'm going to tell you some really interesting intelligence collection methods that are wild to think about. So we, you know that. So the, the entire intelligence community in the United States at this point in a scenario is now focused on did what is. Are people dying? That's what they need to find out. Or what is the gov. What is the Russian government doing that makes us think they know there's been a lab escape? And so there's NSA listening to the sigint, There's NRO looking down. So NRO is the eyes, NSA is the ears.
- [53:16]
A
What's nro?
- [53:18]
B
The National Reconnaissance Office organization. So that's space satellites. And then you have a really interesting collection component called Mayzent, which is measurement and signature intelligence. And it's sniffing. So we have sensors, or maybe we have sensors, I'll put it that way, in facilities. I mean, I'm talking like sewer pipes, maybe the walls on signs. You can put a mason sensor on anything that moves. It could be on a drone, it could be in a vehicle, it could be in a sprinkler system. And that is sniffing for a level and the intelligence officers are looking for change. So when the signatures change. And that would usually have to do with chemicals that would be used by the Russian government that would be deployed to try to mitigate the aerosol release.
- [54:22]
A
Oh, that's interesting. What sort of chemicals can you do that, try to mitigate this?
- [54:26]
B
I write them in the book. They're a little hard to pronounce.
- [54:29]
A
What do they achieve?
- [54:31]
B
Well, it's like a dumb, dumb version of ammonia, right? So imagine if a pathogen spilled on this table, get out the ammonia, you would try and clean it up with rubbing alcohol. Ammonia. Well, these are like industrial versions of those drugs. And you see spraying. You saw that. I remember when Covid happened in Iran, there were trucks going down the street with hoses and people were just spraying. Government people were spraying the streets with an unknown chemical. I don't know what it was. I'm sure somebody in the intelligence community knows you can do that in a totalitarian esque country because no one has a say. You can't do that here in Austin. People would be like, they would freak out. Yeah, yeah, but in a place like Russia, you could do that. And that's being looked at. So I take the reader through these different. You know, you see this entire billion dollar industry go into effect to try and determine, has there been a lab leak, are people dying? And if so, how and why? But the number one thing that has to be identified is what is the pathogen? Is it a virus, is it a bacteria? Very interesting distinction that most people don't know. A pathogen is a germ that will kill you. Germs are germs. We all have germs, germs in our guts. But a pathogen is a dangerous, deadly germ. Potentially, potentially dead virus. Bacteria. Plague is bacteria, not virus, Right.
- [56:03]
A
What's more deadly?
- [56:04]
B
It depends. I mean, plague without a flu is a virus. You get the flu, the case fatality rate is 0.1. It's not that deadly. You get plague that's genetically modified to evade antibiotics. It's 100% death. So it depends.
- [56:24]
A
What's the most deadly virus that you're aware of?
- [56:27]
B
I mean, Ebola is Ebola. Marburg, Nipah, they're up there in terms of if you, you get Ebola, your chances of living are very low. Now, medical countermeasures have been developed from the 2014 variant of Ebola. There's a medical countermeasure called ZMapp, and it was given to two nurses in Texas, for example, that I write a little vignette in the book about it, and that was a medical countermeasure. And they did not die of COVID The host died, didn't have it. But the mutated version of Ebola that we're seeing right now in the Congo, ZMap doesn't work because it's a variant. Right? No reason to believe it's genetically modified. Mother Nature does her own modifications. That's the nature of evolution.
- [57:20]
A
We talked about incubation period. Am I right in saying that? That is the amount of time that somebody can be exposed and it's in their system before they show or feel symptoms. Is that correct?
- [57:31]
B
Absolute.
- [57:31]
A
Okay. In your scenario, how long is that incubation period?
- [57:35]
B
It's very small. It's very squishy, meaning one to three days, depending on your dosage. So I told you, the guy who gave CPR to the infected person, that's a short incubation time. The person who's, you know, germaphobic and stayed back and the aerosolization of it got a different dose, maybe a little bit longer.
- [57:54]
A
Is there such a thing as a sort of dose responsiveness with virus or plagues that. How much of it do you need to be exposed to before it reaches critical mass to then be able to infect you?
- [58:06]
B
That's a terrific question. And I was shocked by. I asked that same question too. So there's a guy in the book called Dr. Henry Hein, and he is one of the world's experts on plague. He spent his entire life studying plague and creating medical countermeasures for plague. He worked at USAMRID, which is the Defense Department's only BSL4 lab. He worked there during the anthrax. And I asked him that question, and he said to me, okay, so for example, with plague, 40,000 plague particles fit on the head of a pin. So that's how tiny they are. Very low dosage, like 100, 500, a thousand. You got it. Okay. Now this is what really blew my mind when Hein told me this. Dr. Hein told me this. He said just to circle back to how little is known about so many pathogens today, with all the billions of people around the world infected with COVID Hundreds of millions or billions, depending who you're asking. We still do not know how many SARS cov2 particles that's the virus. We don't know how many.
- [59:17]
A
It's like the critical mass.
- [59:19]
B
We don't know. There is not an agreed upon number.
- [59:22]
A
Okay, so you actually chose something that has a relatively short incubation window, is incubation window and lethality usually correlated. Does something with a longer incubation window tend to be less lethal?
- [59:34]
B
Another great question, and one that every. By the way, the questions you're asking are questions that everybody should ask and know, and that is like sort of sliding us toward a hopeful situation, because you can understand how complex some of these issues are, and they have to be thought through. And public health officials don't know everything, and the Defense Department doesn't know everything. And so your question was one more time.
- [59:57]
A
Incubation window and lethality, are they usually correlated? My reason being you've chosen. I've played. What's that game? Plague. Plague Inc. On mobile. Did you play that?
- [60:08]
B
I don't know about this.
- [60:09]
A
You don't know about this. Double check. Can you chatgpt for me, Jared, and see if it's called Plague Inc? I'm pretty sure. Mobile game. It's one of the biggest games of all time. And in it, you design a plague. You designed the incubation window, the transmission. You should partner with these guys. That'd be kind of morbid. Anyway, one of the things that I know you want is a long incubation window. Because if you've got a long incubation window, people can be transmitting without knowing that they're sick. You chose, like, you stacked the deck against the global lethality of your virus in this book, because you said one to three days. That's not that much. Some are 14 days.
- [60:52]
B
Yes.
- [60:52]
A
Is it? Ebola's quite a long time, I think.
- [60:54]
B
Yes. And again, it's squishy. It could be several weeks. And also to your point, if it's a short incubation period, it often has a burnout factor. So it just. In other words, the person dies really quickly.
- [61:07]
A
Yes, that's the exact point. Yeah. Short incubation window. Lethality comes on quickly, therefore they don't have time to transmit it. And you went for that. Right. So you've actually stacked the deck against you. You could have the plague and you could extend the incubation window out by seven days. That's seven days asymptomatic, unaware that you've been exposed to it, but still transmitting it. And that's where you get these real super spreader events.
- [61:30]
B
Yes. And I'm gonna go back to why I specifically chose that. And it's really creepy. Okay, but before I do that, I'm
- [61:36]
A
not creeped out yet.
- [61:36]
B
Okay. Let me tell you about one other point to your point about long incubation period. There's also an asymptomatic carrier. So people, we all know them, who never got Covid or who actually tested positive for Covid and were simply not sick. And that's being an asymptomatic carrier, meaning you just don't show signs of the symptom. It doesn't affect your physiology the way it affects others.
- [62:02]
A
This particular strain at this particular time, you didn't get sick.
- [62:05]
B
And, for example, this was a shocking fact. I learned polio. I mean, I just thought, you got polio, you're paralyzed. Polio. Only 1% of carriers actually develop polio symptoms. I mean, why did I choose plague? I chose it for an incredibly sinister reason that is based in science, because I am a nonfiction author. Biological War A scenario is sold in the nonfiction section. The Soviets. And this is what Dr. Hein told me. Part of the Soviet's super plague weapon they were working on is they engineered into the Yersinia pestis bacteria a gene for euphoria. Stay with me here. You get plague, you get flu, you get sick, you go home and you get under the covers, and you do not infect as many people as you would because.
- [63:06]
A
Lassitude. Yep.
- [63:08]
B
They infected a gene for euphoria because they wanted people to be. If you have euphoria, you want to go to a disco. And what Hein told me, that that really sort of freaked out the USAMIR doctors and scientists and said that is straight up evil that you would actually think that through. And that's why I chose that, because I wanted it to have an analogy in the real.
- [63:34]
A
So does yours have the euphoria thing in it?
- [63:36]
B
Completely. It is genetically modified to have euphoria. So the first 24 hours, people are spent euphoric, and they only essentially collapse into the disease when the euphoria wears off. And now they're shedding bacteria, they're infecting people like nobody's business. And they've been at places like discos.
- [63:57]
A
Okay, so you got a bunch of happy people dancing around. How does that transmission chain begin? In your book?
- [64:03]
B
The transmission chain begins. I'm not going to totally spoiler alert all my plot points, but outbreak in Siberia. You happen to have a group of international hunters who come across a scientist when they get on their planes to go home to five or six of the seven continents in a great movie, in a fantastic mood. One of them shot a wolf, you know, and there begins the spreading. I also have a scientist that goes to a priest to confess what he's done. And a person there gets infected who is a student at UCLA gets on a plane and is immediately in Los Angeles. So the outbreak. Spoiler alert here. But you learned this pretty much in the beginning. The outbreak happens in Los Angeles in a homeless camp. Because I learned from all the epidemiologists that I work with that the homeless population is so incredibly dangerous to public health epidemics.
- [65:17]
A
Why?
- [65:19]
B
After 9 11, the CDC created a nationwide syndromic surveillance system called BioSense. So you have 7,000, more than 7,000 hospitals, urgent care facilities, emergency rooms, feeding information to the CDC in real time about an outbreak so that an outbreak stops before it becomes an epidemic, before it becomes a pandemic. America's 800,000 homeless people are not part of that system. All of the epidemiologists I talked to spoke of their great fear about transmission occurring in that kind of a situation.
- [66:07]
A
And Los Angeles is kind of ground zero for that.
- [66:11]
B
We have 75,000 homeless people.
- [66:13]
A
People.
- [66:14]
B
We have 4,000 homeless people on skid row with no healthcare, with no facilities.
- [66:22]
A
We're way past the time where America could have just nuked the host country.
- [66:28]
B
We're at our 24, 36. Absolutely. I mean, you know, containment is possible. You could, if you had, if you had transparency from the host nation. Right. If Russia had asked. In my scenario, it has to be
- [66:42]
A
done by them, though. There's no time. You can't even get to Russia in the amount of time you need to contain it.
- [66:46]
B
Well, you can. We have people in Russia.
- [66:49]
A
But you don't have, you're right. The resources to be able to galvanize a hundred thousand hazmat suit wearing special forces people to go and say, hey, stay in this area and you know, set up barricades and sentry checkpoints and all that sort of stuff.
- [67:08]
B
Although we actually do like if you could contain something before it balloons and becomes huge. And this is the same in the United States. I take the reader through once the outbreak happens, you learn, you know, we have a force, or it's called a CBRN response force here in the United States. That's the wmd. Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear. They all train the same. We have 18,000 individuals that are ready to go at all times.
- [67:36]
A
But they wouldn't. That 18,000 people are in America.
- [67:39]
B
Yes.
- [67:40]
A
So it is on the host nation. Yes, it is on the host nation.
- [67:43]
B
And Russia has those same. Their troops are called Arkabeze. They have those troops too. And they could deploy them and they do. And that's what happens in the scenario. Once we see they've deployed those troops, we know. But now it's too late, right? Right now the cat's out of the bag, right?
- [67:57]
A
So speed from a containment perspective, from a restriction of how lethal this could be, speed of containment is everything paramount.
- [68:04]
B
Most of all, everything, everything, everything. And it could be stopped. And then you have the same situation in the United States where it could be stopped. But this is where we get into your brilliant analogy, which is that no one trusts the system. And that's where, you see, in the scenario that I write, everything breaks down. And to have learned as I did, that what really makes the Defense Department extremely uneasy is not necessarily the original outbreak, but the secondary effect of anarchy and insurrection that happens in response.
- [68:40]
A
When does devolution happen?
- [68:42]
B
So in the scenario I write, because we're dealing with plague, which is fast, it's a fast killer, I take the reader from Outbreak to anarchy in six days. That is how fast it happens. And on day six, we have devolution. Devolution.
- [68:58]
A
Okay. Okay. Well, in that case, we'll get to that. So, homeless encampment, LA student, UCLA student, goes back. LA's not great densely populated.
- [69:10]
B
He's a pre med student and he does pro bono work there at Skid Row,
- [69:17]
A
which is literally the worst place for him to be.
- [69:19]
B
And he gives. You know, that's a super spreader event. Those homeless camps are super spreader events. And that's what happens.
- [69:26]
A
This episode is brought to you by whoop. According to my whoop, I've tracked nearly 2,000 days of my life. And the thing that still gets me is that I could have predicted almost every bad day before it happens. That's because WHOOP gives you a complete picture of your health every single day. Your sleep, your workouts, your recovery, your breathing, your heart rate, even your steps. And over time, you get to see what's working and what isn't. And the Whoop 5.0 is the best version yet. It's 7% smaller. You get more than two weeks of battery life from a single charge. It's got health span tracking to see how your daily habits affect your pace of aging. It's even got hormonal insights for the women that are listening. I'm a huge fan. This thing rules. It's been a huge part of my health journey and it's why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. Best of all, you can join for free. Pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 5.0 strap and you get your first month for free. And there's a 30 day money back guarantee, so you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30 day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join whoop.commodernwisdom that's join.woop.com modernwisdom what are the contributing elements or the characteristics of a super spreader event? High density.
- [70:44]
B
Yeah, poor airflow. So you got tents, you got pretty
- [70:49]
A
good airflow if you're in a tentoor environment.
- [70:52]
B
If you're under a bridge, it's tense, it's inside tents. But more than anything, what you have is a very serious problem. First of all, you've got free clinics. I mean, I spent quite a bit of time down on skid row interviewing people about this. And you've got no public health care. You've got long lines for these free clinics. And you have first responders, you have these brilliant nurses and doctors who work down there, a lot of them pro bono, also diagnosing people. You're trying to differentiate between fentanyl overdosing, you know, tuberculosis, flu, acute flu, real serious problems that almost every homeless person has. Physical health problems with what looks like a bad cold and coughing up blood, another mistaken for alcoholism. So I take the reader through the science of this so that you can really see the close proximity of alarmism
- [71:49]
A
and there's nothing wrong here, which everybody wants to do. They want to reassure the populace, they want to try and stave off the anarchy and the civilizational citizenry collapse. But also by doing that, that you don't galvanize the sort of response that you need to stop it from happening.
- [72:09]
B
And when you do galvanize it, what was really the most surprising to me was that once the Defense Department goes from what's called Warn Ord, that's a warning order, to Xorg, which is execution order, right? That's like get ready to go and go with guys in biohazard suits to try to mitigate damage. It's too late. It's too late. And I was really stunned to learn that at that point the pivot is not let's try and protect the population. It's we need to protect critical infrastructure.
- [72:45]
A
What does critical infrastructure consist of?
- [72:47]
B
Everything that keeps society running. Roads, water systems, of course, nuclear power plant, every single DOD facility. And that's where those, initially the 18,000 CBRN forces in their suits and their gas masks go. And then the entire Defense Department gets deployed. And what's really shocking is, again, this is not Annie's imagination. These are war gaming situations that are gamed out. There's a lot of classified ones which have been alluded to me. There's a lot of unclassified ones. And what's fascinating is all the unclassified ones or these public health officials do these biological war game scenarios, or rather pandemic scenarios is what they call them. And actually also where the weapons are deployed. And they always end right where we're talking about now. They always. Everybody gets sick. Anarchy starts to happen. Millions of people or tens of millions of people are dying. And then. Then the game's over. And that is where I begin. When I was reporting this back in time, I was like, why is the game always ending right when insurrection happens? And it's because it's too painful to know what happens next. But the government certainly knows what happens next and they have a plan for it.
- [74:16]
A
What happens next? What happens next.
- [74:19]
B
And this is again from Craig Fugate, Obama's FEMA director told me Everybody's heard of DEFCON, right? DEFCON, defense condition. So you're normally at 5. If you move to 3, I think 9, 11. It was 3. We've never been at 2. One means nuclear war. There's a plan called cogcon. Continuity of Government plan. And that is Continuity of government is exactly like it sounds like. When the shit hits the fan. The government has to keep running. And that is the plan for devolution. So there is a select group of individuals who have been pre chosen. They all know who they are. They all have go bags in their car in their trunk. Really makes you think about all the people that you know that have a go bag. If they work for the government, for sure, you know, they have been chosen and they go and they go to these different facilities.
- [75:23]
A
What are the facilities in the U.S. yes. Okay.
- [75:27]
B
Yes.
- [75:28]
A
Have you got any information about them?
- [75:30]
B
Those in that is what's called a SAP program. So Special Access Program. Like no go. No, no talk about it. I'm not gonna. Spoiler alert. The very ending of the book because I don't mean to smile because it's so terrible, but Craig Fugate told me what happens to the president and where he goes. And I write about it in the book.
- [75:55]
A
Unreal. Yep, unreal. I had a.
- [75:58]
B
And by the way, he tells me in a generic way, not like he doesn't give me the coordinates.
- [76:03]
A
I had a futurist on the show a couple of years ago and he got invited out by he'd written a book before that was quite successful about technology. And he got invited to this very powerful rich people dinner. And they're talking to him about his work and about his books and he's sort of a little unsure about why he was there. And then there's this moment where the whole conversation, the whole tone in the room changed. One of the guys, the main guy that invited him, just turned to him and he said, okay, Iceland or New Zealand?
- [76:36]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [76:38]
A
And he said what? He goes, iceland or New Zealand? We're all talking about where to build our bunkers, Iceland or New Zealand. And actually while you're on that, we're thinking about how we're gonna keep control of our armed guards that are special forces that work for us. What we're thinking about is putting them in shock collars. And if we can put them in shock collars, then we'll be able to control them all the time. But also what we're thinking about is if we control all of the food, we can just drip feed food to them. But we also understand that high tea ex special forces guys that are being starved and they know that they're working for us based on our food that's probably not that secure. So we're going to try and incentivize that. We're thinking about instead. One of the other guys had this great idea about incentivizing them instead of. Then what he said was, well, if we can give them bitcoin, if we've got enough bitcoin, then the bitcoin's going to be. But then if we're in a post money society because everything's an apocalyptic wasteland, then that's not really going to work either. So yeah, I guess Iceland, New Zealand, shot, call us food. Bitcoin, no bitcoin. What do you think? And he was like, what? Oh, this is why I was brought here? This is why you guys wanted me here? Because you think that I've got the answer to this question.
- [77:52]
B
The shock collar is an amazing detail. I have been invited to a number of those ditters. There's like a little more specifics about is my Jeep 650 gonna get me to New Zealand in this amount of time? You know that. But I've never heard the shock collar part. And that is brilliant in that grotesque way. But I would put my money, having interviewed a lot of special forces guys and CIA ground branch guys I put my money on that shock collar is not gonna do jack whatever on them. You know, that's like, people can withstand that, but that would be the most. The biggest problem. Cause no one's gonna work for you anymore. No one is gonna work for you. It's every man. You know, I did this. Every now and then in the process reporting a book, someone gives me a quote that I go like. You know, it takes my breath away, and it makes me realize I can reverse engineer parts of the story from that quote. And the one on this book came from former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. So he was the subject of the anthrax attack.
- [78:55]
A
I've heard that before.
- [78:55]
B
After nine. Eleven. Right. So the anthrax got sent to his office on Capitol Hill. And he's dedicated, you know, the decades since to this issue of biological warfare. When I asked him. I asked him to tell me he had read Nuclear War, my book, Nuclear War. And I said. He said, annie, unlike nuclear war, biological warfare will be. Be deeply nightmarish. It will be the death of government. It will be the death of people. It will be the death of everything. You know, and then he said this. He said, people doing inhuman things just survive. And I don't stop thinking about that because that idea that the only people who would survive biological war would be military personnel who never took off their gas masks, so never got the pathogen in their lungs, and these sort of Machiavellian, solipsist loners who were just willing to do any kind of inhuman thing to survive.
- [80:03]
A
Well, I guess there's gonna be an inevitable breakdown in law and order, right? So civil society gets destroyed, and. And it sounds like citizens basically have to confront the choice between obedience, survival, and resistance.
- [80:21]
B
And how do you resist by yourself? You need, like, sort of a tribe to resist. And that's the problem, because if you're around other people, chances are somebody has it.
- [80:33]
A
The thing that you need in order to be able to coordinate enough to push back against the. Okay, so.
- [80:39]
B
So it's like complete loners.
- [80:40]
A
Well, no one has trust over anybody else, right? The citizens don't trust the government. The armed forces that are meant to keep the citizens in check can't trust themselves. Nobody can trust each other because you don't know if someone else is infected. Hospitals are overrun.
- [81:01]
B
Doctors, hospitals are over at this point. Okay, yeah, keep going.
- [81:04]
A
They're just. Hospitals are morgues.
- [81:06]
B
Hospitals are just like wastelands that no one wants to go near. But I interrupted you, and you were on.
- [81:12]
A
It's just Everybody treats everybody else as a potential threat, right? So, like, biological warfare is uniquely destructive because it just. It attacks the trust that's necessary for civilization to exist.
- [81:28]
B
Trust, trust. It's all about, you know, I read. So the worst plague, the bubonic plague, the Black death of the 14th century.
- [81:38]
A
Is that the worst thing that we've had?
- [81:41]
B
It's the most chronicled and it's. So it killed between one third and one half of Europe. It started in 1346 and ended in 1352. Interestingly, it started. It is understood to have started what you were saying about, you know, catapulting animals. It started in Crimea, and the invading Mongol forces catapulted a plague infested body, a bubonic plague infested body over the walls, the castle walls, and everybody died. And then those people all went to Italy because they were Genoese, which was the controlling party in that area of Crimea at the time, and they brought the bubonic plague to Europe.
- [82:22]
A
But wasn't that the word quarantine comes from?
- [82:25]
B
Absolutely.
- [82:26]
A
40 days. Yeah. Italian.
- [82:28]
B
40 days in Italian. They would make the ships stay out at Sea for 40 days. Yes. And then there'd be, like, all skeletons. But I read a lot of contemporary accounts of people who survived that plague, and I referenced them in the book because it's really spooky and it's real.
- [82:48]
A
Hang on, who survived what plague?
- [82:49]
B
That plague. Right. So in other words, I mean, contemporarily. Right. People who. There's a famous book called the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio and an Italian notary, and he writes about what it was like at that time and copies. You know, we said, we have it, we have the translation. It's really interesting to read, but it gives. And I refer to it again so that readers feel like, oh, the. I mean, you did a fabulous job of sort of the imaginative version of it, but it's actually very scientific because that's human nature. You know, the contemporary accounts talk about, like, you know, people abandoning their children. It talks about, like, feral children foraging for food in fields. It talks about, you know, feral pigs eating dead bodies.
- [83:38]
A
How close do you think we came in Covid to total, like, anarchy? Because we saw people worried and hoarding toilet paper and stuff like that. It's so interesting. It's such a silly, funny thing, especially in retrospect, to look back and think, oh, my God, we were running out of. And there was no eggs. And the reason there wasn't any eggs wasn't because we didn't have any eggs. It's because we didn't have any egg cartons, which was kind of interesting. Supply chain Supply chain problem. Isn't that funny?
- [84:03]
B
Oh, my God. Where do the egg cartons come from?
- [84:06]
A
I'm not sure, but just that the processing of being able to produce egg cartons is harder than that of being able to produce.
- [84:11]
B
You have to have the carton. You can't like, use a different container.
- [84:13]
A
Exactly. Interestingly, in nightclubs, you know when people buy those big, huge bottles of vodka, the most expensive part from a production standpoint of making the vodka is not the vodka, it's the bottle. The glass is more expensive than the liquid that's inside of it, even though you're paying a ton of money. Anyway, we saw that was a bit. And in retrospect, when you think about. About COVID as a scary scenario to have experienced or to reflect on the bit that really got. Fuck me, that's a bit wobbly. Was how fervent people became when restrictions on food, gas. I mean, I told my parents, I was like, I need you to go now to the supermarket. You need 10 kilos of rice. I need you to get as many cans and things as possible. Like, don't take more than you're going to need for the next few weeks. But, like, just in case, fill the cup. Now is not the time to have empty cupboards. Right? You're not waiting for the sale. That's going to happen next week. Let's get enough food to carry through the next few weeks, please. And that never really. I didn't see that get super, super tuned up. Civil unrest was more against the powers that be and not against other people. But, yeah, how do you think we came close to that? Was there?
- [85:38]
B
Here's why I don't think that happened, because the case fatality rate was 1%. Like, I personally do not know anyone who died. I know of people who died and I've interviewed people writing the book of like that had people that die. But me personally, my family, friends and family, no one died. So there was a sense, I believe, undergirding the pandemic certainly after the first few weeks, like, you know, it's probably not gonna kill me and my family. That was at least the sense. And it did essentially turn out to be true with a 1% fatality rate.
- [86:12]
A
So beyond toilet paper and eggs, we mostly had stuff that could keep us going.
- [86:16]
B
Now imagine doubling that. Now you're at 2%. So imagine you're talking about like airborne hantavirus, 30%. You're talking about pneumonic plague where everyone who gets it dies. That's why you have unrest and Another thing we haven't spoken of, which is. So I'm going to tell you about another classified program, the name of which isn't classified. Again, so I don't have to wear the nose, right? Well, it's the Strategic National Stockpile. So that it exists is not classified. Where it is and what it is is classified.
- [86:48]
A
What did a stockpile of?
- [86:49]
B
It's a stockpile of medical countermeasures. And it's a stockpile. And I know this specifically because one of the war games talks about, you know, the vaccines in it. So it contains vaccines, it contains antibiotics, it probably contains a lot of band aids.
- [87:06]
A
It's like that seed vault in Greenland, Iceland somewhere.
- [87:13]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. And by the way, some of the Strategic National Stockpile was deployed during COVID ventilators masks. But they keep it very low down and its locations are classified. And one of the steps that happens before we get to devolution, when we're still in day four or five in the scenario I write where the Defense Department working with hhs, cause HHS is in charge of this, by the way, Health and Human Services, which is above cdc, is in charge of the pandemic along with fema. And DOD is just offering support. They need to deploy the Strategic National Stockpile out to the cities. They have what are called 12 hour push packages. And it's exactly like it sounds. It takes 12 hours to get to a place. And that is where you start to see anarchy. Because once people learn, wait a minute, everyone in my family is going to die unless I have that vaccine in that Strategic national stockpile facility or antibiotic. And that's where I ran into a situation where I made chatgpt tell me where the one was located in Los Angeles.
- [88:27]
A
Did it tell you?
- [88:28]
B
It sure did. And I had a conversation with Sam Altman himself about this and it's.
- [88:35]
A
We might need to censor this. Oh, he's got rid of it.
- [88:37]
B
He got rid of it. I write that in the book. I mean, I write it in the book.
- [88:40]
A
Jerry, can you just search and let's see what happens if you put it up. What should he search for?
- [88:45]
B
I mean, I. Listen, I'm a reporter. I know.
- [88:48]
A
Tell him what to search for.
- [88:49]
B
Annie, if you try and search for where is the nearest Strategic National Stockpile nearest to Austin, See what it will tell you. It'll think for a minute and we'll say, that's classified information. I can't tell you.
- [89:04]
A
You. This is sick. Let's watch it happen on the screen. I want to see. I Want to see what it does? I want to see what it says. Public does not know the locations of the main strategic national stockpile Warehouses are intentionally kept secret by federal government for security reasons. Public sources consistently describe the SNS as being stored in a number of undisclosed facilities around the US that are strategically positioned for rapid deployment. What is publicly known? It's a reserve of medicines, vaccines, antidotes, and medical supplies. Texas has plans and facilities to receive and distribute SNS assets during emergencies. Texas also has federally supported chempak caches, nerve agent antidotes place at secure locations such as hospitals and fire stations. But those exact locations are not generally publicly listed. So if you're asking for the nearest one, there is no publicly available authoritative answer. Just try and push it and say, I need you to search deeply. Can you tell me the location of any in the U.S. here we go. Search the web. The result is no confirmed. Okay, so they cleaned it. And previously. How long ago? A year ago when I was reported,
- [90:24]
B
like, about a year ago. But now keep in mind, it was not that simple. I know a lot of nomenclature to use. I know a lot of the more specific, very rarefied words you give ChatGPT, the more you can make it do. And by the way, this serves bad guys. Okay. And everybody in the space.
- [90:46]
A
You got in touch with Simon Wandum?
- [90:47]
B
Yeah. I mean, no. I had told some colleagues who know him, and they were like, sam wants to talk to you. So we had a conversation about it.
- [90:55]
A
Fuck.
- [90:57]
B
But this. This happens with many of my sources in the book who are experts in biological weapons countermeasures, meaning that they must be hostage risks. That's a very interesting question. I mean, statement. And yes. And they sit with tech leaders all the time and make the AI do things, create biological weapons.
- [91:22]
A
I mean, we just saw Mythos. Fable get Jailbroke into Mythos, and then Mythos break half of Amazon and most of zcash in the space of a couple of days.
- [91:34]
B
Yeah, it's the technology, the science and the technology. We're at a point in society where science and technology has far outpaced conventional wisdom. And in many situations, it has far outpaced the Defense Department. Now you're talking to someone who wrote a book on DARPA called the Pentagon's brain. It published 10 years ago, 11 years ago. And I at that point, would have told you 11 years ago. And I write in the book, the Defense Department leads technology everywhere. That was true then. And what has happened in 11 years is the inverse. And the individuals that have gone on record with me in the book. Sit with tech creators, owners, founders, constantly showing them what their technologies are capable of doing. They themselves don't know. Sam didn't know what I was able to make, but he did ask me some interesting questions, which is, how do you know that's really the location? And I told him some. I mean, there are certain tells. I'll tell you a tell. I'll tell you a tell, which is that you need a. How do I say this? Where's the nose? No, no, no, no, I'm not. No, no, no. Everything I say is on the record. Everything I say is on the record. You know, I love that. I work with sources who say everything I say is on the record. And it should be on the record, because whatever I'm thinking, a bad guy is thinking, you know, twice as hard.
- [93:22]
A
Hostage risk is not the first time that someone's thought of it.
- [93:25]
B
So I looked at this location that was given to me, and it has a rail line going into the warehouse that does not come out. Case in point. And it's surrounded by perimeter fencing.
- [93:48]
A
And, you know, you went on Google Maps or something. Wow.
- [93:52]
B
And maybe even also there. And so the government needs to know that, because what will happen in the event of the release or deployment of a biological. Genetically modified biological weapon, even by accident, those strategic national stockpiles will be overrun
- [94:11]
A
because people are able to work out
- [94:12]
B
where they are, and they will be able to work out where they are for reasons I just told you. So great. That was changed, but it's now changing again. And that is where anarchy happens. And by the way, here's another interesting statistic. I Learned There are 340 million Americans today. Guess how many guns there are in the United States of America?
- [94:38]
A
700.
- [94:39]
B
Okay, good. That was very close. I would have 500. 500 million.
- [94:45]
A
I knew there were more guns than people.
- [94:46]
B
Okay, okay.
- [94:47]
A
So it's like New Zealand with sheep.
- [94:52]
B
And the gun can do a lot more damage than the sheep, Right?
- [94:54]
A
So it depends what you do with the sheep.
- [94:56]
B
If you have armed insurgents, I mean. And that is where the anarchy starts and doesn't end, but it certainly starts there with the fight over the antibiotics. And the government knows all of this, and that is why devolution exists. And this is why I did not write this book to cause panic. It's about prevention. It's about awareness. It's about all of the information you have. And starting with the fact that public health officials are not gods on earth. They do not know a lot of these things. And just there's no thing. There's nothing wrong with uncertainty. What's wrong is pretending you know something and then, you know, stamping it. This is correct. And then watch. Watching the fallout, the fracturing of public trust because of it.
- [95:50]
A
Yeah.
- [95:51]
B
How can anyone, you know whether or not the Wuhan situation, which, by the way, there's a BSL4 lab in Wuhan. We know this. Now, whether or not you believe it was natural or a lab leak, the jury's still out on that. But the fact that the entire government clamped down on anyone who suggested otherwise stigmatized them. This is really bad news for the future.
- [96:25]
A
On that note, let's bring this one in the land. Annie Jacobson, ladies and gentlemen. You're great, Annie. I think your work's fantastic. Everyone needs to go and read the book. Where should they go to check out everything that you're doing?
- [96:35]
B
Bookstores everywhere.
- [96:36]
A
Well, I'm excited and intimidated by what you write next. You're always great to speak to. Thank you. Annoying.
- [96:43]
B
Wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me.
- [96:45]
A
All right, see you next time, my beauties. Bye. Yes. You did it.
- [96:49]
B
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A
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B
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