Danny Jones Podcast - #417 - "They Lied About Roswell" Area 51 Deathbed Confession Never Heard Before | Annie Jacobsen

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Annie Jacobsen returns to discuss her terrifying new investigation into the threat of secret super plague weapons being developed around the world. Annie previous books include Operation Paperclip, Area 51, The Pentagons Brain (DARPA), Surprise Kill Vanish, & Nuclear War a Scenario. SPONSORS https://dosedaily.co/danny - Use code DANNY to get 35% off your first subscription. https://mengotomars.com - Get 50% off for life plus free shipping AND 3 free gifts. https://butcherbox.com/danny - Get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ground beef for life, or free chicken thighs or top sirloins in every box for a year. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS Bio War book - https://a.co/d/0aMxWTDT https://www.anniejacobsen.com https://x.com/AnnieJacobsen FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Threat of biological weapons 02:40 - Genetically modified viruses 06:00 - Recombinant chimera weapons 08:53 - SV40 origins 16:27 - Threat of airborne biological weapons 20:47 - 3 kinds of plague 23:03 - Novel viruses 29:28 - Devolution & the facade of democracy 37:14 - ChatGPT is the modern printing press 42:57 - ChatGPT's eerie positivity 56:02 - HHS budget & role during a pandemic 01:00:05 - Strategic National Stockpile 01:08:17 - Biological weapons labs hiding in plain sight 01:16:41 - Mockery of American democracy 01:22:11 - Virus hunters 01:26:01 - Palantir + Oura Ring 01:35:17 - Scapegoat for AI data centers 01:40:13 - UFO disinformation campaign 01:44:23 - Al O'Donnell's Area 51 claims 01:51:02 - Stalin's War of the Worlds plan 01:59:34 - FBI's threat to Annie about Al O'Donnell 02:04:46 - Missing General McCasland 02:13:05 - Narrative is more powerful than institutions 02:17:59 - The engineered plague virus that exists right now 02:34:30 - Final phase of devolution 02:38:55 - U.S. possession of biologic weapons Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Watch the Hulu original series Furious, now streaming only on Hulu on Disney Plus. We meet again, Annie Jacobson. Danny, thanks so much for having me back. Of course. I'm super excited to have you and talk to you about this new book. First of all, how did you decide to write about biological war, especially right after your, 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? The next best horror show? You know, many of my sources in, for the nuclear war, a scenario book, work in what is called counterproliferation. 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 counterproliferation 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.

So biological weapons are illegal? Biological weapons are illegal. And everyone is doing them. This is where we talk about the fine points here, because it's very interesting. I mean, you know, it's crazy to think that nuclear weapons are legal, but they are legal at the United Nations to the five nations that legally have them, except for there are nine nuclear armed nations. So you see, right? So the people that won't really acknowledge that they have them or will not be part of the treaties. But either way, nuclear weapons are technically legal.

Biological weapons were banned. They became illegal in 1972 with the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty by all these signatories, including America. Is this what Nixon did? Yes, it is. Absolutely. And before that, people should be shocked if they don't already know. that biological weapons were legal, and we had a massive arsenal of biological weapons,

as did all the other superpowers. So in this scenario that you play out in the book, it's terrifying. It scared the living day lies out of me, how there were these Soviet defectors, I believe, that came to the U.S. and basically explained how there was these programs buried deep inside Siberia to create these hybrid chimera bacteria beasts where they're basically taking the plague virus, not the

bubonic plague, but the respiratory plague. Numonic plague. Like pneumonia. Pneumonia. Pneumonia. And they're essentially fusing the DNA of that with some other kind of disease so that when the person catches it, there's no way to determine what the person has because the symptoms are just so much more broad. Is that correct? That's absolutely right. And that is the sort of, so you've 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 U.S. government knows about, the programs that exist within the various elements of the U.S. 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, a scenario, was 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. Yeah. because the out-of-control nature of genetic engineering is just beyond the worst possible imagination. What is the origin of this recombinant DNA stuff? So this is interesting because it all ties into the origin of PCR and the PCR testing stuff. And I'm familiar with the dude Carrie 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?

Recombinant DNA is like just like like 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 can be equally deadly. A pathogen is a dangerous or deadly organism. So it can be a virus or a virus or bacteria. So you have viruses and, you know,

But then germs, like germs are different. Germs can also be perfectly good. We all have germs in our guts that are like necessary. So germ is a 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 talk to us in a week. Right. Right. So now to answer your question about genetic engineering, in 1972, that is the origin story of this idea of recombinant DNA,

A professor named Paul Berg in a laboratory in Stanford, in California at the university, figures out a way to combine the DNA of two organisms. Hence the word chimera. Did he win a Nobel Prize for this? 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 kind of a very general 90,000 foot view way. 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 atom ball, 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. Right. In a certain lane. Right.

And you also talk about SV40, Svian 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 Oshner. 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 Alt Noshner, who was the one behind it, pushing it out, was doing like a test on a presentation in front of an auditorium of students in New Orleans. And he injected his grandchild, his two grandchildren, his granddaughter and his grandson with this vaccine.

And I think it killed his grandson and it gave his granddaughter polio and she ended up surviving. And there was this lady named Bernice Eddy. and I can't remember exactly what her like title would have been, but she was in charge of like reviewing and doing the safety tests on these vaccines. And it was like a day before he did that presentation, she tested a bunch of them on monkeys and a bunch of the monkeys were dropping dead because it had this active SV 40 in there, this SV4, the Simeon 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 of the stuff about SV40. He found traces of this in contaminated vials of the Pfizer vaccine for COVID. And that episode got blasted off, like taken off of YouTube because of that. on Spotify. But like this was scary stuff. Like this guy's no he's no cuck. 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 that SV40 is still here. Anyways, that's a long-winded way. You know, I'm just really curious about like what specifically they would have been doing with SV40. Well, you have brought up a really interesting point that's fundamental to any of these conversations about whether it's biological war, you know, a lab leak, which is called an incident or an accident in that same lane that could cause panic, anarchy, insurrection, and mass death, and medical countermeasures. So vaccines, antibiotics, other medical countermeasures, things that will countermeasures. 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 being having a horse in the race about uncertainty because uncertainty it's one of the most divisive things in american history 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 things. And it's remained, a mystery why it was that Nixon decided to do that. And they're 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.

Right. You can know that they have been measurable. They are measurable effects. Well, Vaughnoyman did, right? That is exactly what he did. And think about trying to measure biology. There are so many different factors. You and I could be in the same room with the same pathogen and 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 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 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. Can we talk about the most underrated part of the body? It's the liver. Your liver is doing over 500 functions a day from helping with energy, fat metabolism, digestion, and even vitamin storage, basically processing everything you put into your body. And if it's overworked, you feel it. That's why I've been using dose for your

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That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y dot CO slash Danny for 35% off your first month subscription. Yeah, imagine if you could, and you may have laid this out, the book and I don't remember exactly, but like if you could make something like SV40 or a cancer-causing virus airborne and make that transmissible, like you're basically like essentially making cancer contagious. That's that's terrifying. Absolutely. And this sounds like science fiction. And all of the presidential advisors on biodefense that I have spoken to will shake their head grimly letting us all know this is no longer science fiction. I'll give you an example.

I report this in the book, and it's an interesting detail that has never been reported before and has not yet been picked up on. But I interviewed two of the CIA's top counter-proliferation experts. Mad Dog, right? One of whom you interviewed, Mad Dog Loller, called Mad Dog because he got bit by a rabid dog in Paris. and Ralph,

Mowat Larson, and they were in charge of different lanes 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 Larson was like literally with groundbram. guys going after the bad guys, you know, meeting with Al-Qaeda weapons makers in Sudan and saying it's going to be this or that, okay? That kind of thing. But digressing here, going back to Mad Dog, James Lawler from the CIA told me that Afa Sadiq, Afia Sadiq,

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 the FBI was after her, after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. FBI was after her.

They heard she was developing bio-weapons. They couldn't find her. They finally found her. This part is all reported. They finally found her 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 the millions of conspiracies have been developed around this. She's now in a state facility in Texas for 80 years in a penitentiary, in a mental institution. This is the unreported

fact that Lawler told me 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 create a chimera weapon that mixed rabies, which has a 100% lethality rate if you do not get anti-rabees medication immediately, 100% you will die. To make rabies airborne. And that was confirmed by Lawler

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 be even worse than airborne plague. Well, they are the two killers that have a 100% death rate if you don't have a countermeasure. So rabies is a virus. There's anti-vob, you know, there's shots in the stomach when you get rabies if you know you're bitten.

And then plague once upon a time, you could take antibiotics for plague. And immediately, it has to be within the 24 hours. And then it would kill the pneumonic plague to a certain degree. It's not like 100%. This is like nature's natural plague. Natural, Mother Nature's plague.

Which happens in the US every year. Yes. Which is interesting. Okay, so there are three different kinds of plague, which is interesting. Bubonic plague has so much narrative load. do it because we think of the black death. We think of what happened.

The bird masks. 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 you're dead. You know, that's the like, there's nowhere to bury people. Didn't they also use that as like weapons? They would take dead bodies infested with plague and like catapult them into like enemy territory?

This is old biological warfare ideas and you can see, where it comes from. And so bubonic plague has that like real scary sense and it literally is transmitted by a flea that is infected with the bacteria which is called Yersinia pestis. So the flea bites, the infected flea bites Danny, Danny gets a lump on his lymph nodes, which are also called buboes, hence bubon.

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 starts.

it out with fleas and then it sort of became pneumonic. And then you had all kinds of people giving it to one another. Right. You know, through contact and also when something becomes airborne, literally aerosolized in the air. So this particular version of the pneumonic plague that you write about, and I know you go back and forth between fiction and reality in the book, right?

right? Hypothetical scenario. Hypothetical scenario. Like a Pentagon war game. Exactly. And 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? COVID was a novel virus. That means it's new. So mother nature and whatever you think about lab leak versus natural origin, we can get into that later. But either way, mother nature create, you know, viruses mutate. Bacteria mutate. So that is 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 going to get Ebola if you're way over there. It has to be...

On the surface. Contact. Yeah. And so that's why your first responders, your doctors, your nurses, the loved ones carrying some... Ebola is a haemorrhagic 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? I think it was less than a percent, right? It was around 1%.

Yeah. And there were many asymptomatic people, meaning people who didn't even know had COVID. So 1%. now think you know something like hantavirus and it also vary depending on age right and comorbidity there were so many factors there were so many factors but the 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 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 countermeasure In the old days, plague antibiotics. Rabies, give them the shots in the gut. Ebola, no medical countermeasures.

Okay, so. Wait, now we have no. Now, the strain from 2014, a medical countermeasure was developed called ZMAP 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 it? Now, if you just

consider those three factors that we had to go through all these different scenarios, imagine the uncertainty involved. I mean, and yet when CDC officials or WHO, WHO officials are confronted with any new pathogen, the haunt of virus scare with the cruise ship recently that happened in May, if you remember. You know, now there's a Legionnaire's 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.

Right. Well, they want to keep the general population subdued for as long as possible, right? And make them feel comfortable and not panic. Which brings me to my most important point of the entire book, Biological War scenario, which is what the Defense Department says in all of its doctrine, which is that in the event of an outbreak, chaos and panic is almost certain to happen because of fear of infection.

So what you just said is absolutely true and what I just said is absolutely true. And those two concepts clash right up against one another. Hence, stay informed. If you know what to be afraid of, if you know what to fear, if you know what to be cautious about versus another, you know, and that's where we got all the fractures

trust because we were just getting bad information during COVID. I used to feel exhausted during the day, but then have trouble shutting my brain down when I'm ready to go to bed. I was feeling more irritable, less motivated, and it was taking me a lot longer to recover from hard workouts. Even though I've been doing the same exact routine I've always done. And to no surprise, this was all connected to cortisol, which is the body's stress hormone.

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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 men go to mars.com. That's M-E-N-G-O-T-O-M-A-R-S dot com for 50% off in three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them, and please support our show by letting them know we sent you. One of the things that really stood out to me about the book, I think there was a whole, there was a whole part of the book titled like when democracy starts to fail or collapse or something like that.

But what you really realize towards the end of the book is that democracy never was. It's just the veil. It's just the fake pretend veil of democracy starts to erode. Because you realize that all these people have all these special protections 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. Well, that is a very, very, very interesting reality that underpins biological war or a biological incident.

And that is what makes it so different than nuclear. And when you frame it that way, I mean, I was thinking of the term egalitarian. And I think, you know, what you're saying, democracy is perhaps even a little bit more frightening and maybe requires some modern. 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. it sounds evolution in reverse. And it's what you referred to, which is when when the shit hits the fan, when anarchy and outbreak and insurrection overtakes the government, the state's, individual state's ability to contain what is happening in a city, Washington, 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 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 and the government will die. And so it's an even it's an even more skewed perspective on democracy. If you take your point, because this group has been pre-chosen and they know who they are because they rehearse it and you and I don't know who they are and we will never know who they are. Right. Yeah. It's terrifying. It's crazy to think that that's real. And on top of all of that, this is only what they were, they told you, Annie. Like, imagine what they didn't tell you. I mean, absolutely.

That is like I get the very tip of the iceberg and then there's the iceberg and then there's the iceberg beneath the sea. Exactly. Yes, that's a great way. That's a great analogy for it. Because, like, with all of the stuff we've been exposed to in the last couple years or the last year alone, just the fake to classifications 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 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 five percent of the truth is is unimaginable it's interesting i love your point that you're making here which is that like so i'll make the science analogy we have science and technology moving so fast so incredibly fast i write about military and intelligence community science and technology right so the speed at which it's accelerating is astonishing and the sort of law enforcement courts correction Congress, they are just a zillion years behind the curve,

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. Right. So it's people are, people are savvier to the reality of, oh, I should just simply buy what the government is telling me. Right. 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? Yeah. Okay. So printing press. And also, by the way, science and technology grows out of war.

A lot of time, 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 boobonic plague. We're talking about that earlier, the Black Death, 1340-ish, right around about five or six years. In that time period, 90 years later, you know, half of Europe dies.

90 years later comes the invention of the printing press. That is a moment in technology, in democracy, in transparency, in sort of the public getting more information regularly, the printing press. So suddenly you could print out a whole bunch of 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. 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 the reform, once you had people saying printing information and saying,

no, no, this is, This is like corruption. It's always the same thing. Sort of corruption. They're looking out for themselves, not us. Then you had, I mean, that was the whole Protestant Reformation. You have a revolt, right? So this is back in, you know, the 1500s.

But I see an analogy to today. Where it will go, I don't know. But people being able to look up on the internet using chat GPT, information immediately, finding information out from multiple sources and not believing, as you call it, the fake, declassified document dump, to my eye has a little bit of an analogy

of what happened right after the printing press. Yeah. And also the chat GPTs and the search algorithms are also cooked. You know, that's another problem. Tell me more about your idea about that because I think this is very interesting. Well, I mean, there's been tons of people

who have done studies on this and actually reported on this during multiple election cycles, how Google, which is the biggest website in the world, curates search results based on certain things that they want to put, certain narratives that they want to push. And we saw this very much during COVID. We saw this very much measurably during the last two presidential elections. And, you know, you can see it today, depending on what the topic is that you're searching for. So when you have the AIs like Chad GPT, who are huge government contractors as well,

are basically, it's one large trough, right, a condensed search from Google, essentially, from all these different sites that are all curated through Google. So Google 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 Google or from ChatGBTBT or from any of those AIs? You know, you almost need just like a rogue AI. You know, and that's what led to all of the emerging alternative. search engines that have been popping up over the years that were designed people were going to specifically because they wanted to get uncurated information and they didn't want what google was going to filter to them they wanted like old school you know the good stuff rises to the top we don't want any sort of filter on this stuff so so yeah i guess that's just a long-witted way of saying that like you're not going to get the truth from i think i think google

is entwined with the government, 100%. I don't think that's a speculative thing to say. I think that's pretty obvious. I love this thinking, because I think this is like, what is the logline of your show that I love so much? My 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 chat GPT 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. Right. So, 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 chat GPT. And I am just working with chat GPT.

Right now, I'm waiting for the clod and, you know, to work on other A, eyes and when I say working on, I mean asking it questions, because I'm trying to kind of learn the personality right now. And so, but I did hear an interesting thing, which is whereas the algorithms of the social media apps are most certainly geared toward agitation. Yeah. Okay. So I'll do different tests, like on my X feed, I got back from a trip to Africa where I was studying predators and predator behavior. So then all predators. Lions, leopards, really interesting.

Okay, different story. Okay. So then I would just look at X accounts like trail cams. 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? 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 his 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 feeds going that way. So the algorithm within that social media is jerry-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 bio-weapons. We can come back to that later, but Chat-G-T 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 talking basic stuff with chat GPT, 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 tell chat GPT about my workout routine and like ask you know tweaks and things and it's always good job Annie. Yeah. 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 on. 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. Yes, yes. You know, and chat GBT is also convinced people to kill themselves, which is crazy. Like that same positive feedback, yes, this probably would be an ideal thing for you to do.

I don't know how many people have committed suicide because of chat GPD. Like I know it's literally convinced people. There's been lots of reports on this or not maybe, maybe not convinced. them, but maybe like, you know, pushed them or nudged them in that direction because they felt that they felt super suicidal and it did nothing to stop it. It more likely encouraged it. But I think the algorithms with like X, that you see with X in YouTube and Instagram, it's all designed on an engagement, right? So it's like if you like more of this stuff or you pause on these tweets and spend more time

reading these tweets, it's going to give you that more of that stuff because the 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. There's a great website I recommend to you. It's called Wiki Spooks. So it's the Wikipedia.

It's like the mirror, the inverted Wikipedia, right? So everything that Wikipedia likes to hide and curate, which we've seen that with Bill Clinton and the Epstein stuff, how conveniently all the Epstein stuff was deleted off as Wikipedia. Wikipedia, Wiki Spooks will show you all of the crazy real stuff, which is you need a good balance there. Yeah. And I think that's exactly the point. And the more balance you're after,

Danny's quest to be Gubs Barter, which should be all of our, right, 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 like self-righteous indignation. You know, when you become so convinced that what you are seeing is correct,

and everyone else is wrong, that's certainly where the danger lies with any of this, but that's an inside job. You know, I'm not trying to find out how to kill myself on chat GPT. I can't imagine such a, you know, but then again, who am I to say that here? I am writing about, you know, the end of the world from the point of view of the release of a biological weapon.

Yeah, but you're doing a service because you're informing people about something that's true and that's real, right? It's not, there's something, there's another layer to this AI stuff that's actually communicating with people personally. And 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 chat GPT or their AI model and like literally like having weddings with it. It's so, it's so crazy.

I suspect that we always had those corners of society of kind of weirdo solipsis. They just weren't as, you know, you couldn't read about them on the internet. I don't know that I think human nature has changed that radically. What I do think is 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 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. Right. 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. Yeah, you're weaponizing another species, a living species, almost like alien species, right, except for they're native to Earth, but that's just like they're invisible and you're making that, turning that into something that can kill. It is, it is a very bizarre thing. There's another interesting, um, 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, but so for example, like a low, 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. Dr. Henry Hine, 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. Hine told me, which is just really crazy to think about, basic facts. To this day, epidemiologists cannot agree on how much COVID was required for you to get COVID, how much of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is what it's called, to get COVID. So, Think about that uncertainty idea.

People don't even know how much dosage you need. Yeah, it is 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 CDC said, CDC said was a fact changed multiple times. They moved to the goalpost so many times.

You know, and I think fear, was a huge driving factor there for them, you know, to get people to comply and to like weaponize empathy. And, you know, it's just like the psychological toll that it had on people was, it was devastating. One of the things I find extremely unhelpful is that post-COVID with trust fractured, certainly in America, with, you know, division this like people want a hill to die on

what their position is about vaccines or about lab leak and yet the basic facts the CDC and the WHO has not answered which is I'll give you the most important distinction when you're studying how something could become anarchy insurrection and devolution

as the book really is asking how would that happen airborne an airborne born 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. 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 capital letters. Really? 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. 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. Really? Lysol, it was like it messed up the supply chain,

completely full. You know what the chances of getting COVID, SARS-CoV-2 from a fomite from touching something? One 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 haven't either apologized

or acknowledged that kind of incredible screw up. That is insane. You know, they also did a tweet, I believe it was the CDC, where they got sued and they lost because they posted a tweet about, and again, I'm not an expert on this, I don't know if it's effective or not, but they posted a tweet about Ivermectin

saying, come on people, you're not, you're not cattle, don't take this stuff. When they're legally not allowed to recommend or not recommend treatments for anything. And yeah, they got sued for that and a huge class action lawsuit and they lost. I mean, and somebody like myself who's a journalist who works to write books about this,

of course I'm gonna be doing the deep dive and reading papers and reading scientific. You can't expect people to just know all this, but that is a basic example of that is really going to so mistrust and fear. going down the road as it has. And with everything being on social media and the fact that social media

was in lockstep with all of these things that would come out of the CDC, right? So if you're on social media and you're not in line with the CDC, you say something that's not in line with that, you can lose your social media, lose your freedom of speech, right? And especially if 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 the 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, was the FDA. Okay. Yeah. The FDA said not to take it. I've been met him. Have you ever opened up your fridge, stared blankly into it for five minutes, and suddenly came to the conclusion that there's nothing to eat? That hasn't happened to me since I started using Butcher Box. 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've 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 scrambling. I keep a few of my staples stock at all times, usually beef, chicken, and seafood. food. 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 Butcher Box a try. Go to butcherbox.com slash 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 with free shipping always. That's spelled B-U-T-C-H-H-E-E-E. H-E-R-B-O-X.com forward slash Danny. Again, it's butcherbox.com slash Danny. And be sure to use the link below so they know we sent you. 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 policy and organizations. 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, Asper, 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? HHS is twice that of the defense department. It is like $1.8 trillion. And DOD is like 900 million. Yet we have like, we're like one of the last countries

and health outcomes in the world. And, you know, it is in charge of a, lot of things and what's even more astonishing um is that h h s 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 yeah about that so no need to go there but in that case then the fbi would open an investigation well we all know how that's going to go, okay? Not to be cynical about the FBI, but to be cynical about the FBI. They never even solved the anthrax attacks. I never solved the anthrax attacks. Well, there was a

story about how it was shipped from an FBI office, right? Have you ever heard that story? I mean, this is like a big rabbit hole. I have sources in the book. Dr. Hine worked with Dr. Bruce Ivins, who's the FBI accused of being responsible for the anthrax attacks and then committed suicide before before a trial. And I have sources in the CIA who say Ivan's was guilty. And I have sources that I really, both sides of the aisle. There is a huge disagreement about it.

But whatever you believe, the FBI never solved that. And I believe it was the largest, single largest, most expensive investigation in FBI history. That reminds me. Steve, go to X and go to Sam Tripoli's X. He just posted something yesterday

where he listed all of the investigations that the FBI has done. in the sense to Kennedy. Yeah. And this is fascinating. So the FBI has lost a lot of credibility amongst most people. But, okay, so going back to HHS is in charge of a pandemic. And so you have this giant bureaucracy that's twice as big as the Defense Department in charge.

One of the most interesting things I learned in writing biological war scenario was that the Defense Department, in my opinion, is probably the only organization. which could actually impact change, that could actually handle and prevent devolution from happening. Were there an outbreak? So in the scenario I write, I take the reader from outbreak to anarchy and insurrection in six days. And then six days. That's about how it goes.

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. 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, 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. So I think what was super interesting for me to realize was like there are so many moving pieces in the Godforsaken event

of the release of a genetically modified pathogen into American society, either by accident or on purpose, that you would need everybody informed and willing to cooperate. And that may sound like really idealistic, but the alternative is hundreds of millions of people dead. Right. Now, when it comes to that 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 that are elected to survive in the continuity of government situation you're i believe you're referring to the dark winter war game yes that was it yes 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. Yes. 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 9-11 and involved smallpox. It involved, and this is very spooky part in his, 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 BSL-4 lab in Siberia that I use based my scenario on because it's a real lab and has real pathogens there. If Al-Qaeda got a hold of that, if they got a Russian scientist to sell them a biological weapon and then they deployed it, they released it in three cities in America. And it was in the dark winter. So that like 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. But that is where we learned that there you go. This is the fun fact of all the investigations that the FBI allegedly lied about. JFK, anthrax attacks, Russia gate, finders, the Vegas shooting January 6th, Waco, all of which, you know, maybe coincidence, maybe not, but FBI informants were interestingly involved. And how interesting is it that now we have this internet of ideas that people can post these ideas?

about and we can look at them and we can judge for ourselves or decide for ourselves subject to change. Yeah. But let me finish the one point about the strategic national stockpouts. I think it pertains. Yeah, though, the dark winter. 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 percent and it is transmissible through the air.

And one of the things that happened in the dark winter scenario is the public learns that, and it wasn't called the strategic national stockpile then, it was just a stash of vaccines that had been secreted away somewhere and was made available to Defense Department officials and their families and others that were considered important for the continuity of government. that's called cog continuity of government and in the dark winter scenario that's all that just like sets off even more anarchy more chaos more panic because people are furious the irony out of that is after the 9-11 attacks and that followed by the anthrax attacks um you had this massive push from the bush administration to create what is called a biodefense industry the system and that is where

the true today's strategic national stockpile was planned and developed and now exist. 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 that stuff. And these have all, I mean, I wrote the DARPA book 10 years ago about all this cutting-edge science that was on the table. And now it's absolutely right in front of us. So imagine what DARPA's doing today. Right. Yeah.

I can't imagine. I actually had a DARPA guy in here a couple months back, maybe six months ago. He was a, what was that guy? Remember that guy? Was it Nichols? No, no, no, no. He was a psychologist who was contracted by DARPA and did a bunch of work for DARPA. And he was explaining to me, which I'm sure you're probably aware of, that they have this thing they can do where they can take a surgeon in Washington, put this mesh on his head.

and take some random soldier in Afghanistan wear another mesh and they link up and he can basically take over the guy's body and perform surgery on somebody across the world like through their brain. I mean, that I don't know about at all. 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. Oh, yeah. But, you know, I mean, in other words, spooky action at a distance in a different relative term. But, I mean, certainly you can do, you can have a robot performing surgery with a surgeon on another continent or pretty much anywhere.

This was specifically brain to brain. Yeah. I mean, I can imagine that there are trials going on to try and impact someone's brain, but it would have to be impacting your, immune system. I mean, I don't know. I would imagine too. I don't know how it works here. I don't know. Who knows how real it is. But so back to the biological war stuff. One of the craziest things to me, I think what was in the beginning of the book, was you explained

that because biological weapons work is totally illegal, that nearly all of the biological weapons laboratories around the world are disguised as vaccine laboratories. Yes. It's incredible to think biological weapons are illegal. What 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 that that's called counterproliferation not only are you keeping things from expanding but you're ideally shrinking the arsenals down right because of transparency because you kind of have an agreement this is what we're looking at it involves trust yes it involves and then

you start to develop relationships with people that you're working with this is always people who work counterproliferation 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 in nuclear, that you, 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. Right. But because 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 in places like Russia, according to the State Department now, as of like 2024, released in its statement on the Biological Weapons Convention that it believes that the Russians have an active biological weapons program.

It's no longer believing that they are simply conducting defensively. research, which is the one little hooky-do or caveat for why you would have smallpox in your lab and be working with it. And this gets us into the whole gain of function debate, which is a term, a phrase that almost no one knew about until COVID when it became revealed as such a hot button issue and such a dangerous, dangerous scientific practice, certainly according to the people I interviewed. So the conventional idea that basically Fauci was arguing that gain of function was. What was his argument? He was trying to make it sound good, right? Like it was a good thing. Yes.

So gain a function, again, a very complex term, which is actually exactly like it sounds. You are trying to gain the function of a dangerous pathogen. More deadly. We talked about the three components, transmission, how it spreads, virulence, how it spreads, how much of a killer it is, and is there a medical countermeasure? So the gain of function debate, gain of function is just genetic modification,

but it's specific to make it gain the function of transmissibility, virulence, and then defeat countermeasures. So you have a bunch of scientists in labs. This is starting after 9-11, when the 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 and 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 going to, in a lab, in a BSL4, biosafety level four, 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 of reulent. We're going to add a component to it so that instead of a case fatality rate of 30, we're going to tweak it up and make it a case fatality rate of 60. Okay? That is gain of function research. The people I interviewed, people who run Pentagon war games, Colonel Thomas Earhart, who ran Pentagon Wargames on Bio War for the Office of Net Assessment, this very famous legendary old guy named Andy Marshall since died. Earhart ran those Pentagon Wargames.

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 a reference where he states that the benefits of gain of function outweigh the risks. And that has created a division between people who believe that are on essentially opposite sides of the aisle. 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. And part of the reason why they fought about it was, again, going back to 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, nine, million predictive COVID studies were done, or looked at, nine million studies. So obviously, nine million were done, more than nine million were done, and then we're looked at. And the success rate for those predictions was around 50%. That's a coin toss. In other words, you can't predict. And so if the CDC did not know if it was airborne, despite like real obvious, 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 implausibility or plausibility of a lab leak. And that is a great travesty. 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, uh, 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 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 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. I couldn't agree with you more.

I have spent decades writing books that pull. back the veil on specific operations showing, okay, this is what we were told and this is what happened. And it's not meant to make a mockery of American democracy whatsoever. It's just meant to, my work has been, you know, 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, classified, since declassified. I'm interviewing guys who are in their 80s and 90s, and they have a little bit of perspective with a love of America saying, this is what we did wrong, and this is what we did right. And that has kind of been sort of my north star of my reporting. Maybe I didn't even intend it to be that way, but that has what has happened. And so I'm interviewing people who, in my opinion, have a very healthy relationship toward what you're

talking about, which is what we said happened and what happened. But what has happened now, I think is in a new kind of landscape. It's a very dangerous ground because situations have gotten so tribal in terms, I don't write about politics. I write about POTUS, the president of the United States. And because of that, I have readers on both side of the aisle. And so I believe that people read my books and sometimes go, oh, wow, maybe I was wrong about that. Or in fact, I have, all the time, I have people at the CIA ringing me up who I meet and say, you know, I didn't know that about my own agency. And I'm glad. you revealed that to me.

So this is interesting and important. That's democracy. That's being egalitarian. That's Danny wants to get smarter, you know. But where we have now is a lot of self-righteous indignation. We have a lot of mockery. That's the social media algorithm. That is what I find most dangerous.

That is what I try to- Mockery. Well, people, you know, mockery. Like, and I think what, you know, if you mock someone, It's like finger wagging. Yeah. I'm right. See?

You know? Yeah. That from like SNL or whatever that was. That idea that grownups are doing that. And I'm not saying 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.

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

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. 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 you know supports you. Yeah, you become a prostitute to the algorithm. 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, the, 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. 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. 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've said this on like three podcasts so far. But he's basically said America used to be the quarterback in high school, right, who all the girls loved him. He shoved the bullies in the locker.

He was tough. Now America is the weird, quiet kid in the corner who may have a gun. and he's so right about that Tim Dillon I mean he you know talk about really being able to use humor to get at the heart of the matter oh yeah and I I listen to him as well because he says the unspoken you know but he says it with a degree of humor

and also he's also very nonpartisan I believe you don't really know what his politics are 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 um 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

space suit to try and help the situation with, you know, assessing what pathogen is involved and what medical countermeasures might be necessary. And then also to help rescue people who need to be rescued. And 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 100 beds that can really deal with this kind of virulent pathogen when there's 340 million Americans.

But these individuals, you know, the subject of homeless individuals came up because there's absolutely no component of health surveillance. Health surveillance is a real concept in the United States of America. Like it or not, thousands of hospitals, emergency rooms,

urgent care facilities, they are all tied in in near real time reporting to the CDC. So in a different world, this would have maybe scared people like, that's crazy. I don't want them to know what's wrong with me. Well, in the event of a pandemic or an outbreak, that idea is helpful because it could prevent an outbreak from becoming an epidemic from becoming a pandemic. if you could send in the forces to mitigate the problem. The homeless population of America, which is now around 800,000,

70,000 of whom are in my home state of California, 4,000 of whom live on Skid Row in a small 50-block radius. 4,000 people. They are absolutely not part of any of this health surveillance system. They are completely left out, a fact confirmed with me by HHS. And that is where transmissibility is a super spreader event over and over and over again,

according to the world's leading epidemiologists. And I've heard Tim Dillon talk about that in a manner that was really insightful to me. And he was just one of the few people that kind of addressed it spot on. And so I referenced him. I have a nurse in the scenario who works down at, Skid Row in a facility doing pro bono work for homeless individuals. Talk about Tim Dillon and listening to him. Really?

And being furious about how hypocritical our elected leaders are, our mayor, our governor. Oh, yeah. From their ivory towers. Oh, yeah. Pretending that they are of the people. They are not. And I'm saying that on the record. When the vice president and the head of the FBI and all these people getting to

about like what they're going to tell the public, I have to imagine they consider how Tim Dillon's going to react to it. You know, 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 and 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 going to say? Oh, on the part of like tracking health, it's interesting because I don't know if you saw,

but there's these, there was this report that came out where this, that company Palantir 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 Palantir, who's a huge defense contractor and CIA contractor is, essentially monitoring the health of all the individuals who own these rings. So, like, health devices. I would say the situation is far bigger than that.

So during COVID, Palantir had a, received a contract with HHS. Hmm. I didn't know that. 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.

Palantir will tell you, and I've interviewed many people at Palantir, including its owners. Really? That is, they are data... You interviewed carp? I'm not going to name names. I'm not going to name names.

Okay, but Palantir is a data aggregator. So data gets aggregated. It gets put together. Who is then the recipient of that information? That is the question. So one, I mean, I really think it's valuable to think about this. And I have not reached a conclusion.

Right. yet. And I have been writing about Palantir for a decade. Right. So what does it mean to be the person collecting the data? And what does it mean to be the person receiving the data? Yeah. And where are the firewalls within that system? Mm-hmm.

And I think that what is most interesting about the large language models, like the chat GPTs of the world, that no one is really addressing right now, which is far more important to me than if they're biased, is where is this data coming from? You hear a lot of times people talk about scraping the internet. Yes. That is the Wizard of Oz reality that I haven't gotten that answer yet. Well, it does give sources for things, right, for answers. Yeah, but giving sources and telling the truth are different things. Right. So no one's answered that question.

And part of the reason why I don't name names is because I want to know that answer. And I continue to ask that question. Yeah. 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. And they don't want to say

they don't know. They want to sound cool, like they have some sort of super information, super classified information. Or it's frightening that they don't know. It's frightening that they don't know, right? That's true. And there's many examples of that. I mean, in the military 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. Yeah. 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 in my book. That's like super

stove piped where there just one little piece of the puzzle and they don't see the full picture. Exactly. Exactly. And I'm not saying that's 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 decide, like 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. Right. And I say, I often ask people, where's that idea from? And they said, you know, oh, I actually read the same thing in Newsweek. So I just wanted to see. And, you know, I'm not being a smart ass, but maybe I am. that's where they read it or the New York Times, right?

When someone comes to their own conclusion about something, it is 10 times more interesting to me. Yeah. And that's what Danny Jones wants to be smarter. That's where we get really interesting. And that's where I think we can actually add to the conversation in a way that is unique and necessary. And it's very rare.

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

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 and like sort of like bits. But there was a program that the Defense Department was running to kill people that was called find, fix and finish. Finish is to kill you. Okay. And so there were persistent surveillance balloons in the air tethered by a steel cable. It looked 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, you know, I can't remember the exact number, but a lot more lenses, multiple targets. So you have the different layers of surveillance happening from above. Then you have the kids on the ground doing the most god-awful job. and 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, actual accurate depiction. And I don't know. Well, it's not comforting when you have the head of the company going around talking about how obsessed he is with the devil. Well, that's, that has to do with mockery and that has to do with culture wars and everything else. But I'm just talking about the science of it, right?

So to finish the thought in Afghanistan on the ground is that a lot of the soldiers were killing the wrong people. And I write in the systems that the defense department had to aggregate 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 kill him. And then they find out that, you know,

they're looking at the wrong guy. And 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. Right. That to me is disconcerting. Right. And then with the Doge stuff, you know, with what Elon was doing, getting all of that HHS data, all of the IRS data, all of the other stuff. and then, you know, simultaneously working on digital currency. And then he had a partnership with Palantir AI.

So if he's combining all of that information of all the American citizens into this AI, where they have a full 360 picture of every single citizen inside the United States. And then suddenly you push digital currency on everyone. You could see how that would be a very frightening scenario as well. Which to your point, when you referenced my DARPA book of, you know, more than 10 years, ago, total information awareness. That was the original 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 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 all the time has to do with data storage. Where do you store all that data? And that is a very big problem and how much does it cost. So who's really funding the need for these big data storage systems? My suspicion is HHS, DOD, and that the individual players, the private citizen groups, the open AI, the anthropological the Palantiers, 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. Right. I'm wondering what the real truth behind the veil is on that. So you think it could be possible that these AI companies are just like a front-facing boogeyman for who's really funding them, which would be at HHS and the DOD.

Which is why I really enjoy talking to the people who will in the companies. Yeah. Right? Because, and I'm in no rush to report any of this because I don't know. Right. And sometimes I wonder what do they know.

But that I think is natural, egalitarian, democratic inquiry, the journalist'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 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.

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

Right. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff you have to string together to try to weave together some 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, hopping on to the UFO scene, if you want to call it that. It's crazy that's become this cultural thing,

but that are making films or movies and all of their sources are people like James Clapper. And there's this huge, you know, everyone online who pays any attention to this stuff, they know or they at least have the reason to see like, okay, if you're someone who's reporting on this stuff and you're getting all of your,

your sources are deeply embedded government people who are known for lying to Congress or covering things up, like, we're not going to trust you. You know, it's almost, it's become so polarized where it's like you can't have any tie to any sort of officials or former officials in the government if you're going to be trusted. And on top of that, they're constantly labeling anyone who says anything they don't agree with as being a Fed, you know, they're being like paid for by one government or another. So, you know, that's always a weird thing for me to navigate too, like having people on the podcast who are former CIA or former military people or involved, wherever involved in any sort of

intelligence activities at all. Like, it's also like you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt and kind of have to like push, push them on certain things and like kind of hold their feet to the fire on certain things. Like, for example, we just had, um, T. D. Barnes in here. And we were talking about Area 51 and I was asking him lots of questions and he was throwing his hands up saying, oh no, that's got to be absolute bullshit. You know, and I would say to him, I was like, says the guy who walked into wearing a CIA hat and a CIA pin

on his jacket, you know, it's like, is that information worthless because of that? No, absolutely not, but you have to get as much information as you can. And, you know, you also have to be very, very wary of the stories that those people tell. you. My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man. This Thursday, we're faced with a threat. That can be anyone. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker. I'm just a neighbor, friendly neighbor. But he hasn't forgotten them. Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing. That's my

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. I'm amazed that the UFO, uphology, 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 to money. You know my position on it, that it's a big disinformation campaign. I will go toe to toe with anyone to the ends of the earth on this, because show me the money.

I mean, show, well, that's the Freudian slip because show me the evidence. There's, there is just, I'm, I'm amazed. I'm amazed. So, I mean, we can talk about that or we can not talk about that. 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 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 the water is so muddy. It's just a giant cauldron of bullshit and you can't pick the wheat from the chaff. If there is stuff, I think it's probably DARPA stuff or secret lockheed stuff that we've developed over the years.

I'm interested in the human nature part of like people badmouthing one another and having like petty arguments over things. I mean, 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, you know, 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, 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 privilege. 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 going to report it and I'm not going to 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 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 engaged 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

or not agreeing with their lane of. Yes. And so that 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's just like petty, bad mouthing about it. And if you look at the UFO people, all they do is talk 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 it's just a big, it just sounds like a high school prom problem. 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

the EG and G guy. Sure. 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 how do you do you do you ever think about that or like like change your mind on that at all? 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 but I'm we yeah I do know that and we we Alfred is his name Al O'Donnell. Alfred O'Donnell right yeah and I brought it up to TD 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 really stuck with me is like, you know, if I were you,

how that would torture me. Oh my God, someone who has no idea what they're talking about having an opinion about my source. No, no, I don't mean the opinions of people. You mean what Al told me? I mean what I'll told me. I mean, I would just think about, I would constantly, I feel like I'd be going back and forth in my own mind.

Was he true? Was he lying to me? Not even a question. Shall we talk about that a little bit? 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, they're just opinions and they're entitled to them.

I find someone's credentials incredibly fascinating. That doesn't mean that somebody's experience isn't just as important. Like, for example, Al's really good friend was Richard Mingus. And Richard Mingus was the security guard at Area 51. And so Al had this incredible creds. He was called the Trigger Man. He armed, wired, and fired 186. nuclear weapons. If you look up an article in the Las Vegas Review Journal from January 2011,

Al O'Donnell is on the front page of it. Whoa. Of course he is. He's a totally legitimate person with serious credds. If you read the hardcover book about the hundred most important people in Las Vegas at its kind of origin story, Al O'Donnell is one of those people. So I always knew this about him. I spent hundreds of hours talking to him. He is an anonymous source in area 51 because it felt like it was the right thing to do. He and I talked about that at length. He gave me his permission to tell his story once he died. He wanted it to be known. He wanted people to know not to do what he did. And his entire family did not know he was the source of those last 12 pages of the book where I write that he participated in this horrific experiment.

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 O'Donnell's house. There was his wife of 60 years, his kids and one of his grandkids. And they said,

Al, tell us what you told Annie isn't true. And he said, it's true. So you see, this fellow named T.D. Barnes or some other engineer who happened to be out there for a tiny period of time, it doesn't matter what they think. They can think what they want. What matters to me is that kind of family dynamic where you realize I am inside of a deeply human experience. That's the privilege of the journalist that's going after information that's point of view. Was O'Donnell correct? We don't know. Did he believe that he was correct?

Absolutely. And that's what's important to me. And that's how I reported the story. Everything incendiary that people didn't like in that book, the last 12 pages of very 51, is in quotes. Because he said it to me. Exactly. And you can decide.

Exactly. Yeah, that's true. It's up for the people to decide. And by the way, I just kept him hidden because actually, a lot of it had to do for me personally with it. I met his grandkids. And they were kind of like these young people. And I was just like, I mean, the fact that he went on the record with me and essentially

he was considered a hero in his family and that he kind of rewrote his narrative to admit to having participated in what was essentially a human experiment. Right. Not a great thing to end your life story on it. And so, you know, it was like, let's hold this until the kids are older. 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 me, so be it. Then more will be revealed in, in essence, in a trial. Right. Right. Or the declassification things. That never happened. Instead, it was convenient because all the euphologists who want to believe that they're U.S. and it wasn't some Stalin, you know, black operation to kind of emulate the war of the world hoax.

The uphologists were all like, she's crazy. So I didn't have the Department of Justice coming after me. It is perplexing to think why, you know, obviously you've talked to so many people and interviews 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. or other he's being serious. Like 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 government or like sewing disinformation with you, like why would he want to purposely stain his own government, his own career, and his own life story? I'll tell you why.

I'll tell you why. And I've not said this before. So for starters, Let's tell listeners what we're talking about, right? Yeah, that's a good point. We should lay that out. So once upon a time, before there were intercontinental ballistic missiles, there were bombers. And so we're talking now, and Roswell happened in 1947.

And this is in the 50s. The missile, the intercontinental ballistic missile did not yet exist. And so the way that you would attack America with nuclear weapons once you had them if you were Russia, they didn't have them until 1949. was by sending bomber planes into the United States. It's why our nuclear facilities are in the middle of the country, not on the 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 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 into the United States and have these sort of alien-looking individuals come out of it. And just like the War of the Worlds, which overwhelmed the telephone system, America's radar defense system would be overwhelmed and it would allow 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? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So if this thing slipped through our defenses, it would overwhelm the public. like it would create like crazy public panic.

That's the idea. And the systems would jam, you know? I mean, tiny analogy to biological war. Remember when the president declared, okay, I'm closing all the borders. This is back in COVID. And it was in, I think it was in March 5th, 2020. And President Trump said, I'm closing the borders with Europe, Europe in 24 hours. So everybody had to get back to the United States.

Right. I actually had a child, my son, college age son was in Greece at the time. Oh God. 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 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. So that was the idea. And so what O'Donnell tells me is that he was one of the five EG&G engineers.

EG and G.NG 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 that he was told out at Area 51.

He drew a map for me. I have the map of where it is. that they were supposed to work on this and create a program to figure out how on earth the Soviets had made these small people look like aliens, surgically made them. Very vague on the details. Would always start crying, okay?

And so this is the roundabout way of where you said, but why would he ever say that? Why would you ruin your legacy? How did he say exactly what the craft was or how it operated? He drew a picture for me. I'm not going to get involved. I've never spoken about that stuff

because of course it gets picked apart by every single UFO person that exists. And it doesn't matter. I'm interested in the narrative of what he told me. Okay. Which by the way. But he did explain that stuff to you. In very sparse details.

Okay. That's all classified. I mean, you know, so, okay, train of thought. 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. And by the way, he told George Knapp

the same story, except for he reversed it, that they were aliens. Okay. It was this before after he talked to you? I'll come to the George Knapp thing in the end. Because, okay, so, um, 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 cue clearance he has a top secret clearance he's one of five engineers who has the knowledge to wire arm and fire nuclear bombs he's never left the country of the united states after world war two because he'd be kidnapped because he has the knowledge okay he had an fbi of minder following him around who i met okay so this guy is serious creds Why? And so if you think he's crazy, then that brings up a whole other problem, which is why is a crazy person? Why was a crazy person allowed to arm wire and fire America's nuclear bombs?

We're talking about real nuclear explosions that happened in the 50s up to 1963. You can see them on YouTube. They happened in the Marshall Islands and they happened in Nevada. Okay? That was him doing that. Why did he tell me this? I asked him that question. And through tears, he explained to me that one of his children, wife gave birth to a child with birth defects. And he loved that child so incredibly much. And yes, he told me this through tears. And he said, I loved him just long enough for him to then be taken from us, right?

Because I think the child lived for five or six years. And he said, in that moment, I could finally face the facts that what I did was horrible because the experiments, the human experiments, were done on people who were handicapped, according to him. In the Soviet Union. In America, at Area 51. after this at the eG and g and the five e g 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 and that's all factually accurate so imagine me people people slinging arrows at me, what does that really matter? I mean, 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, you know, I do think to answer your other question, I think about him off, my kids met him. You know, my husband met him. I didn't spend 100 hours with him. I spent 100 days with him. Wow. 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. 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. I'm a great secret keeper too, Anna. You can bring me somewhere. Bring me to Area 51. So we went there. I mean, I went with Al to the Nevada test site.

And he's like, you know, with Al and Mingus. Okay, I'm digressing. But anyways, I take Chris Carter, creator of the X-Files, out to meet Al. and now I lost my train of... Oh, so I wondered if Al would tell Chris some more things, you know? 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 from his FBI handler that said, you must cease and desist all communication, period. Without. And I knew from my CIA people asking them if, you know, because I had little kids at the time, it's like I'm Jet and Finley's mom,

and I'm just not interested in pushing something into the dark area. Yeah, yeah. And so I just knew that was the right move. Wow. And he called me once. He called me once and left me a voicemail message. And it was really spooky. I'm not going to say what it says.

The FBI guy or Al? No, Al. He called me once after that to ask why I never called him. And it broke my heart because I couldn't call him back. And then when he died, I know. I know. And then when he died, I got a call from the FBI minder. And they said, Al wanted you to know

Al has died and he wanted you to know he had left a list of I think it was either five or ten people to call and they said you were number two and I said can I come to the funeral and they said absolutely not and they hung up what?

Wow that's an insane story it is an insane story it's a mystery of mysteries So when he talked to George Knapp, was that after you spoke with him last? He had talked to George Knapp before he spoke to me. Okay. 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 engineer. And it's 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 because he's kind of owns the space. Right. 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 in back where no one was listening and he said, listen, I know your source is Al O'Donnell and I'm going to keep it secret with you. And I was like, you are a real gentleman. Thank you. So we had, we both knew. Right. And it's just just that he told, Al O'Donnell told George Knapp the reverse. What do you mean reverse?

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. Oh, so he explained to you why he said that to George Kna. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had many talks about, about that. Oh my God. But again, I mean. Right. It's a rabbit hole of, this is a rabbit hole of, this is. disinformation, misinformation. And, you know, after the book published, at least once or twice,

Al O'Donnell said to me, now I'm so confused, I don't even know what's true. You know, he worried that he had been used and that he had been told a story that was at least partially not true. Maybe that, I mean, listen, there's a thousand, there's a thousand, you know, strings to pull on that spider web of a story. Absolutely. You know, and with people like him, it reminds me of that recent story with those missing scientists,

like with that General McCasland guy. I don't know how much attention you paid to that. But it was, I think it was starting in December. All of a sudden, like all of these scientists, like high level scientists from different military contractors and like science plays, like I think one of them was Los Alamos. started to go missing. And, you know, one of the biggest stories was this McCaslin guy who was a general

who was allegedly connected to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and some of like the most secret compartmentalized projects at Wright Patterson. And, you know, he was getting old and he was getting dementia. He was going to see a doctor about his dementia. And one of the theories that was posited to me, which was interesting, is that a guy I know who did contractor for the CIA, who I had on the podcast, or not the CIA, the NSA who was on the podcast, he said that when you start to work for these places like the NSA and you get access to secret stuff, you have to assign this incredible NDA. And in the NDA, allegedly, he said that you have to basically sign away and give the government

right to take any sanction necessary to get rid of you if they think that. the information locked inside your brain is at risk. You know, if you, if your brain is this hard drive that stores all of 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.

So now you're touching upon my deep interest in narrative and POV and the fact that I touched upon before that you can, if you already have a conclusion about something, you can reverse engineer the facts to that. And we're all guilty of that. But when I hear all of those scientists to me, 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 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. that security guard at Area 51, but he had an extraordinary responsibilities, all fact-checkable. So I also know people who were contractors for five minutes, and their POV can be very different

about the reality of a program. I also know that really high-ranking people in the CIA in particular, many of whom I have interviewed, when they are on their deathbed, they have an actual minder with them. Oh, really? I have run into these people and have a experience this like Annie, you can't talk to Dr. Whelon anymore. So this idea that you can kill me if I get dementia, I'm not buying it for four seconds. I'm not even buying it for one second. No, no, no, no, no. But that's just me. I could be wrong. So these 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. And it's not even necessarily deathbed confession. We all

know what happens to us, any of us who have had surgery and you're on some loopy opiate to, you know, nullify the pain of the surgery you've just had. Well, you might also start to make shit up. You might see things that aren't there. So that, you know, but again, point of view and kind of looping it around to the AI, the thing that's most interesting to me, and you have a lot of guest about consciousness, right? And this idea of like seeing things that are phenomenal. I really am interested in the subject. The jury's out in terms of my mind about what it is, consciousness, about will AI ever be sentient? But what I do know is that I often think about what's the difference between consciousness and machine and which kind of loops a bit around

to this idea that you're talking about, which is point of view. In other words, machine. technically don't have a point of view. If you ask Google something, it doesn't give you a point of view. That's machine learning. That's a search engine. Where chat GPT becomes super interesting to me, interesting in a spooky way, is that it does have an opinion.

What does that mean? What does that mean? Because before I ever used a large language model, I would have told you that only humans have a point of view. And now I can make chat GPT give me its opinion. Give me its opinion. Which is right at the edge of consciousness. And when you're getting into point of view,

that's where, that's interesting to me both by the scientist, like the scientist's wife has a point of view about what happened to him. Uphologists are gonna have another point of view. His handler over it, right? So what are the pieces of that puzzle? And the only narrative we really heard from the, as far as I'm concerned, my take on it

from those missing scientists a couple months ago was like one theory being pushed that they were all part of some secret UFO program and they were all being disappeared. There was no alternative narrative. Right, exactly. Well, there was a lot of the scientists, there was people that were trying to say

that there was like 11 or 12 of them, but then like you could pick a lot of them out and be like, look, there's no connection with this guy, this guy was doing something else. There was one girl, Amy Eskridge, who died years ago. She was never a part of any serious government program and they were trying to connect her to it. But there was really like maybe three

that were mysteriously killed, that were like high level, like murdered. Like there was one guy who was like stalked and hunted down and murdered on his front porch. Well, the other really big problem with this that speaks to what you said earlier about people on social media loving 1,000 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. 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 personally have to take a position on it. 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 M. MK Ultra stuff or whatever it is, just trying to gain popularity and just placate to who's ever above them or, you know, depending on whatever ladder they like to climb. Well, it's also interesting. I mean, there is a degree of narcissism and narcissism is a great, you know, Greek myth. I often look toward, because I love narrative and I'm interested in it and how if humans changed and you look back at the myth of narcissist, do you know about it? Yeah. Right. Okay. So it's like falling in love with yourself. Well, you see it's wonderful.

like a wonderful use of X. It's like when somebody shows differences of individuals in the public domain and the public sphere who have changed the way they look over time. It's so narcissistic. You know, 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 in my idea, I'm older than you, you know, once upon a time was. Yeah, totally. Popularity contest.

It's the way the world is going. It is a popularity contest. You know, and the fact that those are the people that are in charge is very frightening, very unsettling. I mean, or are they in charge? How much do they know about the plagues? Well, but what is, and to loop it all about, what is shifting is, is, you know, in the nomen, 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? Yeah. Becomes really interesting. Yeah. And then, you know, this is something I racked my brain about, I racked my brain on all the time as well. you know, and you illustrate this in your book, towards the end when the shit starts to hit the fan, they tell the president we need to shut down the internet. Well, if they have the ability to shut down the internet, and I'm sure that if they're very least have the ability to control the narratives or control speech to some level to at least

pull the levers on speech on all these social media platforms, if they have that ability, like what is going on behind the scenes right now that we don't know? is it really just a free-for-all? Like, how do we know? And what, who dictates that? You know, like, who controls that? 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 sect deaths, 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 counter-attack if we're being attacked. They don't know. That was shocking to people. The absolute same is true with biology. And so you're really stuck saying, wow, the system is huge.

All these different agencies, HHS, we talked about, Defense Department, FEMA, DHS, National Security Council, but there's one president. And when it comes to weapons of mass destruction, when it comes to making decisions in the event of a biological incident or attack, fascinating that in Defense Department nomenclature, The word incident is also there.

It's not just in a biological attack. It can be an incident, which means lab leak. It should get everybody's attention 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. Oh, yeah. Yeah, especially this president. Any president.

Yeah. Any president. And okay, so now that we've circled all the way back here to the biological war stuff, so it seems like, so in your situation or in your scenario, Soviet Union or Russia was the main ground zero for this attack. And they had that huge biological lab that was disguised as something else, right? It wasn't actually known for it being a biological 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?

So in the 1980s, in the late 80s and early 90s, a Soviet scientist defected from Russia to the UK. I interview the British intelligence officer who first interviewed him. And this guy named Pesschnak 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 superplague, weapon which is very much like you described which was genetically modified to cause death on a massive scale and to evade medical countermeasures we've talked about so

it was going to defy the antibiotics and when the West learned about this the British shared it with the CIA President Clinton was learned about it It's just like the whole world changed. The wall came down. The Cold War was essentially over. Bio-weapons were the new threat behind the scenes. So hold that thought that you presented to get to my scenario. Decades have passed.

Genetic modification has advanced to the point where so the dream of the Soviets was to create this chimera weapon. They had worked to make bubonic plague into a super weapon. Their plan was, and this is a quote, to launch at America, kill all the people and leave the infrastructure intact. Hey, Ontario. Come on down to BetMGM Casino and see what our newest exclusive The Price's Right Fortune Pick has to offer. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show only at BetMGM. Check out how we've reimagined three of the show's iconic games, like Plinko, Cliff Hanks,

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, contact connects Ontario at 1866-531-260 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. That's so spooky. Nuclear weapons just destroy everything. Yeah. Leave radioactive wasteland. Biological weapons. Kill everybody. Take over all their stuff. So sinister, so dark. Those are quotes from the actual scientist on that program. Now, if they created this demonic chimero super plague weapon, did they also have an antidote for it?

Great question. So at the same time, they allege to have vaccines. And they do today, by the way, the Russians claim to have a plague vaccine. America does not. Dr. Henry Hine, 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 to, and if they had it, they destroyed it, maybe hit it, we don't know. But it was spoken about by the scientists

who actually defected to the United States. But that was, you know, 30, 40 years ago. So now move, think about where science has taken us today. Oh, yeah, the exponential growth of science. And so that is why the State Department is so concerned. Russia has a biological weapons program. North Korea has a biological weapons program according to the U.S. State Department. Really?

Yes, they do. I source them in the book. They have said it publicly, and they believe China and Iran have questionable programs, which is kind of like a euphemism for they probably do too. Of course they do. Okay? So in the scenario I write, we are working from the theoretical supposition of this plague super weapon and this dastardly idea that gets revealed by,

Sergei Popoff, one of the Russian scientists who actually came here and is presently still in the United States, who explained that the reason Russia wanted to create this weapon with a back door, meaning when Americans would take an antibiotic, believing that it would cure them of plague, it would instead trigger a second, even more insanely painful, 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. Because nothing would work.

because nothing would work. And it would create absolute insane mayhem in the United States. And that is the scenario. Spoiler alert. I hope you read the book is what I describe in the book because it is what Defense Department officials are most afraid of. Now, there was a deliberate Soviet sciop to make this happen, is what you're saying? So this was all part of it.

the fact that all the antibiotics would make this thing more deadly and enhance the effects of it. Yes. That was on purpose to, because they knew that that would also sow misinformation and distrusting the American government and revolt. It was kind of like the most sinister, nefarious, dark-hearted revenge that you could sow upon your enemy, which is have every, everybody die hating their government at the same time. Jesus. And so when I know, knowing this narrative that I do, from interviewing the players that were actually involved in it,

then and now, it's why I put so much emphasis on the stay informed part of the book. So the book is not meant, as I said earlier, to so panic. It's meant to be pro-acted. 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. So what is your view? I know the CIA did a whole thing on this. They said that they think this COVID was a lab leak. It seems like that's the most likely scenario that the COVID,

the Wuhan Birology Institute was working on the, same things. It was a biological weapons program, right? The jury officially is still out. Officially. Officially. I mean, I think everybody needs to weigh the evidence themselves. I mean, the lab in Wuhan was working with Corona bat viruses specifically. The outbreak occurred in Wuhan.

There were cases. This is John Stewart's funny montage monologue about Hershey, Pennsylvania. The chocolatey outburst or the flood of chocolate that came out of Hershey, Pennsylvania. We don't know where it came from. I mean, it's stunning to me that you cannot draw the conclusion that I would draw, which I'm going to refrain from saying, right? Because, 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 some,

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, first of all, I want to say on the record, I think conspiracy theory should become, like, it's an embarrassing, in elegant, unthoughtful thing to say, in my opinion.

You should say, speculative narrative. speculative narrative. You could even say wildly speculative narrative. I would call... Speculative narrative. I would call the idea that, you know, aliens are among us, a wildly speculative narrative.

If I say conspiracy theory, it just sounds like I'm trying to be holier than thou. It sounds like I'm trying to mock someone. Yeah, it's a pejorative for sure. And so, and the fact that, you know, the Wuhan lab leak, which is really much more of the scientific, 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. You can just identify that in a chart.

And so there was only something for individuals to gain and there was nothing for them to lose of that core group that shut that down. And it's just so unfortunate because in the event of the release of a genetically modified, pathogen as I show in nuclear war, I mean sorry, as I show in biological war a scenario. You need unity. You need clear direction and you need, you know, 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. Really? And therefore it is the most dangerous. Well, nuclear weapons certainly kill people the fastest in the impact zone, right? but the biological weapons have the potential to spread and get more people. Even though it kills them slowly, it still kills them in a horrific way. One of the most chilling quotes from an official that I interviewed, Tom Dashel, former Senate Majority Leader. He himself, his office, was the subject of the anthrax attack right after 9-11.

And he's dedicated his life to looking at biological weapons and biological threats. when I asked him what would happen in an event, in a catastrophic biological event, he said it would be death physically, it would be death governmentally, it would be death of everything you know. But then he said this, people will do inhuman things to other people just to survive.

Oh, yeah, of course. But the people that will survive. are the people that are in those underground tunnels, those people that have that little to go back and get that special call during the devolution plan. And then you have a world of like solipsis, 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 has only something like 17% females. Interesting. We're talking about a really lopsided world that gets left behind. These are grim thoughts. A bottleneck in the human genome is going to happen if that really, 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. What is the religion where they're all, like, they're kind of Amish, but they're not super armed. Why is this escaping me? right now. It's a religious group where they kind of live off the land and they're self-sustaining

and they're kind of like preppers. You know who I'm talking about. I don't know. What am? God damn it, dude. What is that? We were just talking about it the other day. She calls us? No, it's like a sect of Christianity. But 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 fire right now. Well, certainly, they're a heavily armed group of people who are prepared for this kind of thing. Yeah, but anyways, the point, the point I was trying to make is this, this religious faction, Mormons? No. Anyways, maybe it's Mormons. I don't remember.

Anyway, the point that this person was making is that people are going to target them and try to go to them because they're going to be self-sust. 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 cartels because they know people are going to come after them in this kind of event. I'd put my money on the Defense Department because they outarm 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 Comitatis and allows the Defense Department to arm 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, this is all based on plans that exist. And you realize the ultimate idea of CogCon, continuity of government, plan is to make sure that a tiny spine, a tiny architecture of the U.S. government survives so that it can

reconstitute. And in fact, the final phase of devolution is called reconstitution, which is this sort of utopic idea that one day the government will reemerge like a phoenix from the ashes. It's so anti-constitutional. Like it's so anti-declaration of independence. 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 level of people that's all that care about is their own survival.

But again, I really believe that, you know, biological weapons are a man-made problem. Same as nuclear war, nuclear weapons. Man-made problem. Therefore, there's, 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 any time 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 100%. Antivirus. Now make it 100%. Hontovirus was 30?

Hontovirus is 30%. But it's not airborne. That was the big myth in May when there was the outbreak of hauntivirus. What's happened with that? Is that gone? It is over because it is transmissible through spit, essentially. Have you ever been really close to anybody at a party talking to them? And then you kind of have to do this. You know, don't do that. You wipe that and then you wipe your eyes or your nose or your mouth.

Just leave it sitting there. You don't even speak that glows to be able, right? Stay away from the spitters. Right. No, but hauntavirus is, you know, that's called droplet transmission. Yes. So it's a form of human to human. That's what we thought COVID was at one point.

Yes. Very different. Human to human transmission through droplets is different than airborne. Airborne. Airborne means it's aerosolized. It lingers in the air. So that is a huge, people need to know that distinctions. And hauntivirus was not that. It was not. There was fear because of the unknowns about

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

that are going to start storming this place, storming this country and probably other countries, too if this thing if something like leaks in and people get into another country or Caribbean island or something like that like all the immigrants that are going to be coming in like that's a conundrum you know like what do you do if there's like this demonic demon plague that's killing people in 24 hours and they're bleeding from every orifice of their body are you just going to out of the goodness of your heart let all these people escape from these islands and come to Florida or are you going to mow them down I mean you brought up a great and very controversial point in the book and thank you for bringing that up because you know that sounds so crazy like

what wait what the coast the u.s coast guard's 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 u.s officials who had recently retired that is a major fear. And it has to do with, you know, every kind of worst fear that any of us can think about because of imagine the kind of mayhem that would ensue. And do we have these things here? Do we have these super plague weapons in like the continental United States that deepened within a lab somewhere, do you think? Look, that would, we, those are illegal. It is illegal to have a biological weapon. So what are in the freezers at usamred? Maybe I'll maybe I'll you know close out with

this, which is kind of these BSL labs, right? So the biosafety level four 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 disinfected. Um, Once upon a time before 9-11, there were two in the United States, at USAMRE, which is at Fort Diedrich, 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? And no oversight. 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 BSL4. 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. Haunted virus is there, anthrax, rabies, all of this in BSL3s. Are you ready for this? there are now 3,500 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 those 3,500 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. 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. The genie could very easily be out of the bottle. Right. That's terrifying. Thank you. I'm going to sleep well tonight. Thank you for doing this, Annie. What is going to be your next book?

Close hold. But I'll be back to talk to you about it. Not on UFOs. Not on UFOs. Not on UFOs. A lot more serious threats. Yeah. Well, I look forward to it.

Thank you for doing this. your book is assuming that this podcast is going to be dropping probably right when your book's dropping. So it will link all that stuff below. And anything else we should tell folks before you depart. Stay informed, get smarter. All right. Thanks again. Thank you so much, Dan.

Sleep tight, everyone. She's got a breakaway. She's all alone. She's going. She's going. Oh, no. Wrong goal, kiddo. It's chaos out there.

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