The Joe Rogan Experience - #1299 - Annie Jacobsen

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

Annie Jacobsen is an American investigative journalist, author and 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist in history. Her latest book "Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins" is available now.

Now, we're live. 3, 2, 1, boom. Hello, Annie. Hello, Joe. Very nice to meet you. I'm excited to talk to you. I'm super excited to talk to you about several subjects, but this one, thank you very much for this first edition copy of your Area 51, an uncensored history of America's top secret military base book. I'm super excited about this. I heard through the grapevine you were a fan. I'm a freak when it comes to this stuff. What do you think is going on up there? grapevine you're a fan i'm a freak when it comes to this stuff do what do you think is going on up there i mean same thing that's going on all over the place when it comes to military secrets which

is stuff that you want to know about very few people know about and every now and then a journalist gets a hint right yeah do you think there's any alien stuff up there i write in the book all about that yeah yeah well tell me last 12 pages you want me to let me go to the last 12 pages um what do you think so area 51 was this secret test base where the cia was running uh spy plane programs right so interestingly my new book is about ground branch guys on the ground that's about air, what we were doing in the air. And it was this idea that we should spy on the enemy. Okay. But if you go back in time, why Area 51 really started, you learn that it was a base, hidden inside of a base, nuclear weapons.

And it was all about beating Stalin at his black propaganda campaign, as I write in the book, to hoax Americans in a war of the worlds type scenario, whereby little men who looked like aliens would get out of an aircraft, and the government would go crazy about it. And then Stalin would say, look, we have – not only do we have technology better than you, but we have a better propaganda department than you. Really? Joe, you've got to read the whole book.

I mean this is like a – this is a tough opening. You got me on the spot. It is a tough opening, but it's a good spot. Right? It's a good spot. So Stalin just hired short people? What did he do? All right, I'm going to make you save that.

I'm going to make you earn that. Save it? Yeah. How's that? I mean, you want me to talk about that right now, right off the bat? Why is that? I'm sweating. We're going to get to surprise kill vanish as well.

But I want to just, yeah. Why does it make you sweat? Oh, my God. It's such an incendiary topic. I mean, people want to believe they're aliens. Right. Right? Okay.

I mean, I've spent five books dealing with the mythology of Area 51, which is phenomenal in its own way. Because it speaks so much to power, to morality, to information, to people's desire to know what's going on and and the government's desire to keep things hidden so this topic is always coming up because a lot of people want to believe that there were aliens in that craft and my source who i write about in the book uh told me otherwise that they were were genetically, you know, that they were... Let me stop you right there, because when you say that craft, what you mean is the supposed UFO wreckage that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. That's what you mean, right?

Yes. But that was never supposedly taken to Area 51. It was supposed to be taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The legend has it that Truman flew there to meet them, right? That's one legend. Yeah. So in my book, I interview a man who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission who tells a different story,

tells the story of receiving that craft at Area 51 in 1951, which is why the base is called Area 51, Area 51 in 1951, which is why the base is called Area 51. And that inside the craft were humans who had been altered, surgically altered to look like aliens in a plan for Stalin to sort of twist Truman's arm. Because at that time, we had the atomic bomb. When Roswell happened, we had the atomic bomb, and the Soviets did not. Can I stop you there? Yeah. When you say humans that were surgically altered to look like aliens, do you mean, so this is 1951.

So you're talking about four years after the supposed crash. Yes. So what was left? They had the bodies. They kept the bodies. They kept the bodies. In what? Formaldehy crash. Yes. So what was left? They had the bodies. They kept the bodies. They kept the bodies. In what? Formaldehyde?

Yes. And also because the idea was, and remember, or I can't say remember because you haven't read the book yet. Right. And I wrote this book eight years ago. But it did really impact a lot of my thinking and working on government secrecy projects because it makes you really consider what a hoax means and what it means to a population of people and how the government

begins to work with disinformation versus cover stories and all of that. But going back to answer your question, that is what I was told by the source that but how reliable is this source this is a very incendiary idea to rely upon one individual's recollection of it which is why the book went through the roof in terms of people being upset about it i mean were they oh my god i interviewed 79 cia guys air force guys, spy pilots, engineers. I mean, true. Who's mad at you? The conspiracy theorists were mad at me because they said, this woman is bananas. They were aliens.

Well, even if they weren't aliens, right? There's also, there's accounts that it was some sort of a test vehicle and that there were actually just dummies inside there crash test dummies that they used there's been a bunch of different versions of it but the most compelling version of the area 51 alien myth to me is bob lazar did you get into that yeah he plays a huge role in area 51 i mean before bob lazar went public no one even knew about Area 51. Well, people knew. It was common folklore.

But there was no definitive proof that there was something going on over there other than some weird VHS footage of things flying around in the desert that seemed to be behaving in a way that modern aircrafts are not totally capable of. At least modern piloted aircrafts are not totally capable of, at least modern piloted aircrafts are not totally capable of. I mean, which brings me to another book I wrote called The Pentagon's Brain, which, you know, sort of off this idea was like, wait a minute, what kind of technology is the government capable of? And we have a whole department for that reason called DARPA, which looks at weapons systems 25 years out. So the idea that you and I don't know

what the military is capable of in the air, underwater, wherever it may be, is because we're not thinking 25 years out, and they are, and they're developing weapon systems, the great weapon systems of the future. That's what they call them. Right, like how they developed the stealth bomber, and that was all out in Area 51 and Groom Lake. um what do you think of bob lazar's story because bob lazar's

story what's it really there's some fascinating aspects to it but one of the most fascinating is some of the things that he's said that people said was horseshit is told has been proven to be true like one of the things the the biometric reader that measured the length of the bones in your hand and that they are unique, as unique as a fingerprint. And people are like, what are you talking about? And then they actually found out that this was something they really did have. And they have photos of this thing now. This is something that he talked about and they claimed it was science fiction. I mean, it's fascinating when someone touches upon a subject that the government does not want known about for any reason.

And there is a campaign to discredit that person. And there's no doubt that that happened to him. I mean, it was remarkable. And I write about him in the book because if you follow the logic that my source told me, that these were modified human beings as part of a hoax. And the reason that I trust the source is because Joe, he told me that he also worked on the program. So he had like a burden to unload, right? And so if you follow that logic through,

then the Bob Lazar story is that when Bob Lazar said, I saw an alien, it looked like this, it was small, it had big eyes. It's, yes, those were the genetically, I mean, those were the surgically modified humans that the government was doing experiments on. I think Bob Lazar's exact quote was he walked by a window and he looked in and he saw two agents that were – they were looking down at something that was very small and looked humanoid. But he didn't know if it was a dummy or anything and he wasn't even supposed to be looking in there and it was a brief like one second look that he has bounced around in his head back and forth has it ever occurred to you that maybe the guy who gave you that information did work there but is also feeding you horseshit.

Well, the source was a major player in the Manhattan Project. He went on and worked in the Atomic Energy Commission. I mean, there's a wing of a museum named after him. His accolades, his awards were so extraordinary. What's his name? I've never said his name. Although, you know, I will say this. Well, you're giving it away. Like you're giving away a lot of the stuff.

He recently died and he did give me permission to tell his full story after he died. And I'm circling around that. Circling around that. But he was absolutely, you know, with a Q clearance. That's what you have when you have access to nuclear secrets. So if someone has a queue clearance for decades and they're full of garbage, you really have to ask, my God, should this guy have a queue clearance? I mean, that's shocking what he says, but it does make sense if you can get through 400 pages of, you know, the CIA's idea about information, disinformation, why we need to cover things up. That's why I'm asking if you think that he might have been lying to you.

I don't believe he was lying whatsoever. And he's feeding you disinformation. No, I don't believe. I don't believe he's feeding you disinformation no i don't believe i don't believe so you think that the stalin that the russian government definitely did surgically alter people to make them look like aliens i believe were there images of these i believe what he told me did you see photos no i did not see photos but here's the rope ready okay when i was writing another book called phenomena which dealt with the CIA and the Pentagon's use of psychics, okay, over decades. I mean, this goes back, everything I write about pretty much goes back to post-World

War when we- All that remote viewing stuff. Yes, yes. And it's all about government, US government takes pole position after World War II, and we now need to always be ahead of the curve. We must lead. We can never get beaten by the Russians. Now it's China, okay? So the psychic program had a lot of people who really believe in aliens or, you know, intelligence from other worlds. And when I was writing the Phenomena book, I learned a whole bunch of new information about how upset they were with my story because they – and they all knew the source, by the way. They knew the source, and they believed that he was fed misinformation.

So these are two sides of the coin, which are super interesting, I think, if you can look at them with your own bias turned off and not have a desired outcome i want to believe this i don't want to believe this you know um speaking of i want to believe you know i was working on a project with chris carter the who is the x files creator and the one person i took the source um that i wanted to meet the source was chris carter and i we went out there together and sat with him and met him. And it was wild because the source had never even heard of the X-Files. And it was like, oh, I know. They talked about baseball, you know. Really?

Yeah. See, I don't have a desired outcome. I mean, I would love it if aliens were real. Okay. But when someone starts talking about disinformation and propaganda campaigns but they want you to believe them right but don't listen i'm here telling you the truth i'm here telling you the truth i'm not saying i'm telling you the truth at all that's why i was like joe let's wait for hour three because it's too explosive people have such a horse in the race already.

With aliens, you think? Well, I mean, maybe you are neutral. I don't know. I know I'm neutral. Yeah, well, listen, I absolutely want aliens to be real. 100%. Wouldn't it be interesting? I'm not neutral, but I am neutral in my perceptions.

And when I look at things, I go, hmm, I don't know about that. Me too. I want to see a picture. Like, what do these guys look like? I mean, what did they do to them? Did he describe what kind of surgical alterations? I stayed with the source. I mean, after the book published, I would go and visit him.

We'd sit in a Chinese restaurant and eat and talk, and I would try to get a droplet of information out of him what was he doing oh my god he avoided i mean look here's another thing when the book came out his wife of 65 years knew it was him okay and i went out to las vegas and sat there in a room with the source and his wife and she said tell me this isn't true tell me you made this all up to her husband and he said it's the truth i mean that's a triangular version of getting at the truth but again to reiterate i believe he believes what he told me was the truth that was the truth he was told i think there's certain agents that think it's fun to fuck with reporters and journalists and make things up. I really do.

And I think especially when they're talking about secret information that they were sworn to protect. And then all of a sudden they want to talk to someone that they don't even know on the sneak tip. Let's meet at a diner. I'm going to tell you everything. That's not how we met. Well, I mean, however you met. Yeah. Well, we met because I was interviewing nuclear weapons engineers who were setting off nuclear bombs in Area 51. I mean, in the Nevada test site, Area 12, Area 23.

And they all said to me, you've got to talk to the top engineer of all this weaponry. And they gave me his name. And we talked for days and hours about nuclear weapons. And then in one conversation, he began to cry and told me this story that I was like, what? What? Why was he crying? He was crying because he participated in our version of the human experiments. Because what the Russians do, we do. Look, I've written five books about this.

We altered people to make them look like aliens? According to him, we had a small program in 1951 where we wanted to see how the Russians did what they did. How they made human beings look like this. So what did they do? Take prisoners or something? Who did they alter? He said they were handicapped children oh jesus and he told me that he participated in this so again i mean unless you have someone that lost their mind at age 90 and was willing to tell their wife of 65 years i lost my mind so he's saying that he participated in something that altered handicapped children

when you say handicapped you mean like down syndrome or something like that and they made them look like aliens and then killed them like what did how did they what did they do with this this is where we get into drops of information coming in but what i can say is he had a grandchild that was born that way. And the grandchild did not live long. The grandchild died. And it made him feel so guilty about what he had done that he felt compelled to confess, if you will. And I remember saying to him, why are you telling me this? Why don't you tell a priest? And he said, a priest would judge me, and I can tell you won't why wouldn't you judge him i'd judge him well i guess that's why i'm a born journalist joe because i really try not to judge

people i mean my new book surprise kill vanish it's about assassins it's about people who work for the cia who do what needs to be done on the ground in the name of national security. I don't judge them. This is why, you know, what's really at issue here is morality, right? I mean, can I tell you how I got the idea for this book? Sure, but let me, before we go any further, so... You want to talk about the aliens. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Was he saying that there have never been any encounters with alien spacecrafts? He was totally neutral about aliens. He had nothing to do with aliens. He could have cared less. He didn't watch the X-Files. What was his take on Bob Lazar? His take on Bob Lazar was that he probably saw something that the government had an extension of the program. I mean, he didn't know.

That was speculative. We didn't talk about that. I mean, you know, other than inference. He was very limited in the information that he would get out. But, I mean, I used 79 sources in that book

that all went on the record in name. And he was the one anonymous source. Because, but like I said, you know, he told me after he died that I could tell the whole story. Are you going to? I might. I might come back. Write another book? Well, if you give me a break and back off of this subject, said you know he told me after he died that i could tell the whole story are you going to i might i might come back another book well if you give me a break and back off of this subject i

might come back and tell you and your audience his name this is your book i want to promote your book i know you want to promote your new book but i want to promote this book as well i mean i'm teasing you right but it's it's like it's an astonishing story. And I think the best line of all is that people that read about that in the very end of what we did, they go, I wish they were aliens. So Stalin created some sort of a craft that mimicked? You're going to read it. That's what you're going to do the rest of the afternoon. Nope.

I'm going to come back on your show after you read it. Well, this is a podcast and we're talking. I think we should probably get into this a little bit. Okay. Come on with the questions. Okay. I'm used to asking the questions. Are you?

Oh, right. As a journalist, yeah. Now, Stalin and the Russians created something that mimicked a UFO, something that looked like it would be from another planet. Is that what they did? Mothership. Mothership. In those days, drones were, there was a mothership and a

drone was attached to it and it was jettisoned off okay so according to in those days well in 1947 48 what do you mean by well they didn't i mean that was drone technology then okay right so there's a mother a mother craft like an aircraft and then the drone is like a small aircraft under it, and it gets jettisoned off. And that was what the craft was. It was jettisoned off. So Stalin actually, according to the source, invaded our airspace, which was the deep embarrassment to Truman.

So he invaded our airspace and then let this drone crash land on the ground with these things that turned out to be human. They looked like aliens, but they turned out to be humans that were manipulated surgically to look like aliens. Yes, as a way to, and remember, I mean, not remember, but where this was, was, you know, very close to a nuclear weapons base, to our White Sands military base. I mean, this is like not a place you want the Russians to be able to get near. I mean, what was interesting is at Area 51, we then went out and mimicked all of those. One of our early drones was a mimicry of that.

There was an M-21, which was the mothership, and a D-21, which was the daughtership. How did they pilot them? Was it wirelessly like we do now? No, no. Then it was like there was a pilot in the mother ship and they kind of let it go. Right. And it flew off.

I mean, there's incredible stories of what the CIA was able to do out there at Area 51 with their air branch, you know. The technology, they're always ahead of technology. That's what's remarkable. Well, what Bob Lazar did film that was really shocking was the filming of these drones flying around and performing these really crazy – you've seen those videos, I'm sure, right? In the 80s, it gets really crazy with what they're able to do. But, I mean, why I like looking at history is because you can see the progression. You see how science evolves, you know,

bit by bit. And then there's these great breakthroughs, because what the government is always looking for is called a revolution in military affairs, right? And that's certainly what drone technology did later on as drones became developed after the Vietnam War. So in the 1980s, when Bob Lazar was filming all this stuff, you think this was similar to the technology that we see publicly described today in terms of like what drones are capable of? Sure. I mean, that's probably had something like that back then.

You know, when the F-117 was revealed during the first Gulf War. That aircraft was being developed for 20, 25 years out at Area 51. Actually, at Area 52 was where they had it set up to develop that stealth technology. Think about, and what was amazing, talk about keeping secrets. They had something like 10,000 people working on that. No one knew about it that story was never broken by the press not by anyone it just suddenly appeared in the gulf war and took out saddam hussein's you know facilities that's a revolution in military affairs what becomes interesting is then it becomes obsolete because now everybody knows about it and everybody's

going to mimic that and now you have to have a new weapon system and that's the military industrial complex. So was this drone aircraft that was released from the mothership, was this capable of autonomous flight or was it just, they just threw it out there and let it crash? The latter, right? And remember that information I am very limited to. That's why it's 12 pages. It's like the source gave me these little bits of information, which I felt was important to include because it speaks to the big issue. Why is Area 51 classified? I mean, now it's not. President Obama was the first president to actually say Area 51 publicly.

Some people say because of my book, meaning it was out, the secret was out. But before that, I went through 10,000 pages of documents from the National Archives. And every place you see, the word Area 51 was actually redacted. Why would you keep that so secret? I mean, all the guys that I was interviewing say they could call it, you know, Groom Lake. They could call it the test facility. They could call it Paradise Ranch. But they couldn't say Area 51.

Why? And the source said, well, because we did this horrible program out there, and the government doesn't want anyone to know about that ever. I mean, there are stories of, like, somebody asking Bill Clinton, you know, about Area 51, him going white. I mean, human experiments, who wants to be part of that? It's horrible. But the human experiments were, were they limited to this mimicry of the Russian experiments where they were trying toassified documents tell us how many different human experiments were going on around nuclear weapons. OK. Horrible experiments where they were subjecting people to radiation because they wanted to know. They felt, well, it's more important to know what happens to people than to not know. And so they would take groups of people that, say, had cancer or something and test them. So there's no doubt that the government has experimented on humans. It's just, is that something that is wise to make public? And, you know, there's two sides of the coin on that. I

mean, when you reveal these kinds of things, when you write about them, I mean, people get really upset and, you know, vilify the government, partially with good reason and partially it's like bad for national security. So I think that's the justification on the part of the Defense Department to keep things secret. That makes sense. Wow. That's an interesting take that I never thought of before. But if I was Stalin and I was trying to, air quotes, fuck with the Americans. That's maybe where I would do it. Hey, man, you got a problem.

Zalians, they're coming. And there was if people it's hard for people that live in 2019, especially if you're young, to really imagine a world not only without the Internet, but with two television channels. Right. And radio, which was where people got all their information from. I mean, was there two channels? How many channels were there in 1947? Maybe three? Maybe.

Maybe. Maybe three. I mean, it was radio in World War II, right? Most people had radio. Yeah, mostly radio and newspapers. And that's where people were getting their information. And there was a mass hysteria where people were absolutely terrified that we were going to be invaded, which is why when Orson Welles' War of Worlds, which when they released it, when they did it on the air,

they were very clear that this is going to be a reading of Orson Welles' War of Worlds book. Or that H.G. Welles, excuse me, War of Worlds, right? It was H.G. Welles wells book and orson wells read it yes and when they were talking about this on the radio a lot of people missed that part right and so as the radio went on as the broadcast went on and people were tuning in later in the day it erupted in mass hysteria people were freaking out hundreds of thousands of people really did think that it was and it was also something that was recreated in other countries. I don't know if you know that.

They did that in other countries in different languages when they saw how cute it worked in America. Well, so you see. You can see the logic. I mean, at first it sounds absurd. It does. And it sounds ridiculous. And that's why I was sweating. Because it's like, right?

I know. Right. But when you think it through, and I challenge you to read the whole book because you start piecing together these various ideas and disinformation becomes less vague and more specific. And you go, that's how it works. And you begin to see how people's perception and how they're easily manipulated factors into national security, just like you just described. Stalin knew about that. He was a master. He was the master of propaganda.

He invented it. I mean, he didn't invent it, but he invented it on the political stage to be used to mess with another country's perception of things. Think of what he did with brainwashing, right? So like in the 50s, and this is journalists, you know, said, so there was a journalist who was putting out stories about brainwashing. And there was this idea, which is well taken that totalitarian governments brainwash people. And this became a big code word. It was introduced into the American lexicon in 1950.

Well, then we're in the Korean War, our pilots start getting shot down. They're put on TV by the communists saying terrible things about America, the American pilots. And suddenly it was like, they've been brainwashed. It was very convenient to have that story. So these things work part and parcel. And you've got all kinds of smart people behind the scenes, knowing this, And you've got all kinds of smart people behind the scenes knowing this, looking at it, examining it, and using it to their advantage to stay where? In the poll position. That's the goal of the U.S. government. So the propaganda that we did that sort of copied Stalin's – we're kind of playing catch-up in that sense.

I mean we're playing catch-up, then we're ahead, then we're behind. It's always a – it's a game. i mean you're a competitor you know this that's a crazy thing to do to make a fake spaceship and just let it slam into the ground with a bunch of people that you cut up to look like aliens did he say specifically what kind of modification they made to people that made them look like aliens? I got drips. Drips. And you'll read it in those 12 pages. Come on with this 12 pages. I'm telling you that because you're asking me these questions as if I spent, I mean, look, I did spend literally hundreds of hours with this source.

We sat there and talked about everything. And I would try to squeeze out, just like you're trying to squeeze out of me. And that's why I'm saying read it, because i literally tell you everything that there is i think what's most interesting about the source and why i might come back and talk to you about it and tell you who he is on your show is because because of his backstory right why he did what he did how he wound up in the Manhattan Project. Sounds like he was probably Jewish from Germany. No? No. I'm trying.

Okay. I'm trying to get you. Morality. Talk to me. I want to talk about morality. I want to talk about why we can't talk about certain things. Well, what you were saying before about being a competitor. The United States is competitive, obviously. And when you're playing the ultimate

game which is war you have to be very careful about what you reveal what you don't reveal and this is where the conversation about surprise kill vanish comes in because the cia using these covert operations to assassinate people and whether or not that should be allowed or not allowed whether it's good or bad whether it's necessary whether it's like if you want people to be safe over here there's certain people you got to take out and sometimes you just can't follow the rules and why why are we not supposed to know about that should we know about that the way the story started for me i'm at my house in 2009 a source is you know calls me up he, I'm on my way back from the Middle East. I'm going to pop by the house and say hi. He brings me a challenge coin that says Kabul, Afghanistan State Department.

I'm thinking, OK, he is not a diplomat. I mean, he's weapons trained. At the time, my boys were young. There were lots of GI Joes in the garden. And they had little weapons, right? And the source is showing them about the weapons. And they're like so into it because they know he's military trained. And then he says, if it's okay with your mom and dad, I'll show you some weapons. The boys are like, please. So he sets up this sniper rifle in the living room. And I live up in the hills. And you can look across the canyon through this scope he set up, and I can see the veins on a leaf across the canyon. And I thought, okay, so now I know what he was doing in Kabul, Afghanistan.

He's taking out al-Qaeda with this. There's another case on the ground that he never opens. And when the boys go off, I say to him, what's in that? And he opens it up, and inside there's a knife, and it's serrated. And I said, what's that for? Immediately realizing my naivete. And he says to me, sometimes a job requires quiet. So why that became interesting to me was because of my own thoughts and perceptions about what he had told

me. In other words, I could deal with him with a sniper rifle. I could be like, okay, that's what he does. But the knife gave me pause. I was like, is he slitting someone's throat? Is it in the ribs? And I thought, why is it that I am willing to accept sort of the clinical nature of a sniper rifle. But I can't, I'm uncomfortable with that close up hand to hand killing. And that led me to Surprise Kill Vanish, because that was the motto of the precursor agency of the CIA. It was called the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. Their motto was surprise, kill, vanish, because they would jump out of aircraft, land, work with their French partners, and kill Nazis with a knife to the throat. And I thought, okay, that's considered okay,

because they were Nazis, right? But we can't, we're not supposed to do that anymore in this world we live in. Why? And I spent this whole book researching and reporting is about that sort of conundrum, if you will, that moral puzzle. Why do we differentiate? Yeah, and who are they willing to do that to? Where do they draw that line like i'm sure you're aware of the story of jamal kashogi the journalist who was assassinated by someone yeah some group of people and that they he entered into the turkish embassy and um they they whacked him and chopped him up and carried him out in boxes. And it's an international, well, it's a huge incident, right?

Yes. This supposedly was ordered by, who was it supposedly ordered by? The head of Saudi Arabia? Yeah, MBS, Mohammed bin Salman. I mean, that's the idea is that their head of state wanted him killed because he was a threat, because he was a reporter, because he was writing. Because he was saying some things. Yeah. Yeah. And that they, this is how they did it.

Yeah. I mean, and there's, that's a great question because what you're saying is like, okay, so, but we all think of that as reprehensible. Right. Right. Right. Why, you know, because. Because he's a journalist and he's on our side. He's delivering information to people. But the government of Saudi Arabia disagreed. They're like, that information is our information.

He's a threat by releasing it. He's a threat to our livelihood. Yes. Yeah. And who decides who's a threat? I mean, a lot of this book is about who's on the kill list and why. I mean, there is an actual kill list. There always has been.

And the euphemisms involved. I mean, there is an actual kill list. There always has been. And the euphemisms involved. I mean, I write history, as I said. So Eisenhower called his assassination program health alteration. I mean, literally in the declassified documents. That's hilarious. Health alteration. He had a health alteration committee.

Whoa. Kennedy had an executive action committee. Right? That sounds cleaner. Right? Guess executive action committee, right? That sounds cleaner. Right? Guess what Reagan's was called? Super Wonder Boy Power Up. I don't know.

Close. Preemptive neutralization. Preemptive neutralization. Wow. Why do they keep switching the names for it? They're burying the information, right? Oh, the data. Right, right, right. for it they're burying the information right and they keep switching around the they switch around who has authority to you know say yes let's go ahead and put this guy on the kill list i mean

that was fascinating i mean i interviewed a guy named john rizzo who's a decades-long cia attorney i was stunned that he was willing to talk to me. And he explained to me how a presidential finding, also called a memorandum of notification works, that gives the president the authority to put an individual on the kill list. That job is then given to the CIA's paramilitary army, an operator or their assassins, because the CIA works under a code called Title 50. So it makes it legal, whereas the Defense Department works under what's called Title 10. So in other words, and they can't, their rules of engagement are totally different. So the misnomer is like, oh, the SEALs killed bin Laden. Well, they were SEALs trained, but that was a CIA mission because Pakistan is a sovereign nation and the military can't kill people in countries we're not at war with. So those guys all became essentially CIA operators for the night.

Whoa. Right? And if you look at photographs, as I have seen, you'll notice that they have no markings on their outfits. So that if the job went south, it'd be like, I don't know who these guys are. And if you look back at Vietnam photos of the MACV SOG teams, which I also write about in Surprise Kill Vanish, because that's the precursor of that, you see no markings, right? That way you can go into, you can go behind enemy lines. You can go into Laos, you know, in the Vietnam War. You can go, now you can go into Pakistan. What I learned reporting this book is we're in 134 countries doing Title 50 operations.

Think about that. Government wants that to be kept secret. So in all those countries, they're doing things that don't fall under the normal letter of the law. Yes, not under the rules of engagement of the military, but the CIA works at the president's behest. That was one thing that really blew my mind, to report, to research, to understand. I talked to 42 guys who have direct access to this, who are in this world, from the knuckle draggers on the ground, as they call themselves, to the lawyer at CIA, senior intelligence staff, that's the equivalent of a general at the CIA at CIA, senior intelligence staff, that's the equivalent of a general at the CIA. Those guys explaining to me, Annie, this is how it works,

you know. And again, to your question, well, why does someone get to know that? And why does the government want, why do they allow that information out is super interesting. And I believe that has to do with a certain climate we're in right now about military might, right? In other words, what the CIA does is called tertia optio. It's the third option. You've got the first option is diplomacy. Second option is war. So if diplomacy is not working, and war is unwise, you go to the third option, which is the CIA's paramilitary. And they're in 100 and how many countries? 134. Damn.

Well, if you wonder why the military budget is so big, that's what it is, folks. You've got to feed those folks. A lot of work. I mean. A lot happening. And you as a competitor would be fascinated by the kind of training they do and what they do i mean so many of these infiltration techniques are mind-boggling you know they've got halo jumping which you know about right where they high altitude low opening so they jump out they you know free fall down terminal velocity pull the ripcord really low so they're not

detected by radar and then they meet up with a team on the ground and go do what they do. Then they also have HAYHO, which is high altitude, high opening. And that way you can fly over airspace where we're allowed and float into, let's say, a country like Iran and land, gather your team and do what you have to do. But like so much of what I report i get information like that and then i ask a million questions like you've asking me and it's like can't talk about that that's classified you don't you you're a journalist so you're trying not to judge but is it your belief that this is a good thing for America? Meaning the president having a third option?

Well, I mean, I write in the book that that's in the prologue after I tell that story about the source with the knife. I say, I wanted to know. And that exact question, like, is this a good thing? And my answer at the end, after it's complex, not to be vague, but it is really complex, is also that, well, if you're going to take that pole position, you must accept rivalry, right? And also after talk, do I think it's a good thing?

After talking to a lot of 20-year-old soldiers who come back from the war theater missing a limb or with intense PTSD and who essentially serve as cannon fodder, I would say, my opinion, right, for the Pentagon. That's the second option, war. The 42 guys that I interviewed, you know, they're like, send me. They are professional.

They are tier one operators. They're Green Berets, they're SEALs, they're Delta. They retire, they join the CIA. So they're like professionals at what they do. And they're saying, someone has to do this job. We've been doing this since the end of World War II. I want to do it. So do I think it's better?

I mean, I think that that concept speaks to choice, right? Because I'm not so sure that the 20-year-olds know what they're in for, and the 40-year-olds know what they're in for and are willing to do it. Well, also the difference between a specialized, trained individual with a very specific task versus someone who is sort of following orders and at the front of the line you know right i mean and also has a you know a lot of times i talk to these young kids who go to war and they tell me one of the fascinating detail is that they talk about movies that they see and

whether it's saving private ryan or um black haw even, right, where the outcome is not necessarily great. But they talk about the romanticization of war and of camaraderie and of brotherhood that comes from that. And then they have their experience and some of that does give them that sense, but not always. Whereas the operators are much more about, you know getting the job done that's what i was fascinated by i mean these guys are really clear they're they're competitors they're like top tier competitors they have a job they do it they get it done and they ask for the next job so is the oversight when it comes to choosing whether or not this operation takes place or not is it do they have moral guidelines do they have ethical or moral guidelines where they say like

this is this the president is requesting that this person get taken out the chiefs of staff whoever it is is that i mean do they have to make a an ethical distinction you mean are they like kill him nicely like don't make it hurt do they decide like does this make sense or like what if the president is like rosie o'donnell she's been talking shit take her out like you know what i'm saying well i mean that's you know that's a big issue but what i try to write in what i try to report in surprise kill vanish is the idea that the people we take out maybe are bad guys right one one guy i write about is che guevara okay because che is often portrayed in the press as you know this amazing hero and that he

and we you know i don't know if you know but he, he was killed by the Bolivian Rangers, but it was a CIA operation. And I interviewed the man in charge of that operation in Surprise Kilvanish. His name was Felix Rodriguez, okay, long serving CIA paramilitary officer. But I also report why the president, to your question, wanted Che Guevara dead. You know, he was really advocating for nuclear war. And I show that. Che Guevara was. Yes. I mean, he spoke publicly about, you know, if we have to have an atomic war, the Cuban, I'm paraphrasing, the Cuban people will be happy to have sacrificed themselves for that. I mean, Che was also, Che killed anyone who betrayed him, he killed. He writes about it in his diaries, as I write in the book, right? So, but on the morality question, who decides? I don't have

that answer, but I will tell you what I did. I went with my main source, Billy Waugh, who he's 89 now, and he's been with the CIA for 60 years. And he and I went to Cuba for him to do a halo jump with Che Guevara's son. So we were a guest of the man whose father was killed by the CIA. whose father was killed by the CIA. Whoa. Okay? And we had this really interesting discussion in the cigar club where Che and Castro, you know,

smoked cigars and plotted the downfall of the United States. And that's what I try to give readers a sense of, the long lens of history, how time changes all things, and maybe leave them with this idea, which they can come to their own conclusions about what you asked me of, is it right or is it wrong? Because really what you might ask is, is it necessary? Right? I mean, I could moralize right, wrong, but it would just be my opinion. But when you see, I went, Billy Waugh and I also traveled to Vietnam, because he was supposed to

kill, he was tasked to kill the top commander of the North Vietnamese Army, a guy named General Jopp. And Waugh didn't kill Jopp. And we had this incredibly, this terrible mission that went awry that I write about in the book in the Vietnam War. So 50 years later, Hoa and I go to visit the son of General Jop, are sitting there in Jop's home, talking about these same issues, right? And my conclusion of that, again, is not is it right or wrong, but is it necessary? I mean, we have these wars. We keep having these wars. Is it necessary? Yeah. What do you think? Well, I mean, my opinion is that the Defense Department is far too concerned with vast weapon systems of the future,

which is its mission statement of its science department. And so you create what some at the Pentagon call a self-licking ice cream cone, or the military-industrial complex. And there's a lot built into that, and there's a lot to be said about that. And there's also probably some concern about other countries getting ahead of us.

So you have to do what you have to do. If your job is to protect the American people and to keep the military strong, you just have to operate with that premise that there's a bunch of other people out there that are doing the same thing for their country and trying to take down the United States. And we've got to stay ahead of the curve and make human-eating robots that can shoot missiles. Absolutely. I mean, when I was reporting The Pentagon's Brain, which is about DARPA, and I was sitting there with scientists who were working on limb regeneration, right? Whoa. Right?

Really? Yeah. What are they doing? Oh, my God. They have these little salamanders. I mean, they're showing that salamanders can regenerate their limbs. And so human, their idea, they're down at UC Irvine, they have this incredible lab, and they're funded by DARPA, because that's where the money comes from, right?

And their idea is that humans should be able to regenerate their limbs. And, you know, 50 years out, we'll be doing that. And they're working on the science for that. Well, that's the same science that allows for cloning. And so in our discussions, because that's how I try to report is like really ask people what they think about future consequences. And they said to me, your exact question, which is, well, Annie, what if one day we wake up and we find out that China has cloned the first human, or a dark horse like Saudi Arabia, you know, the american people are going to freak out and go where the hell was darpa why aren't we ahead of the curve so it's that there's a chicken

and the egg problem with that of like well we have to stay ahead we're we're on top we want to be on top it's kind of terrifying i mean everything I write about is terrifying. How do you sleep? Do you sleep well? Do you have to take Ambien? I'm more worried about – no, God, no. I'm more worried about coming on your show and being asked tough questions than I am about – No, teasing you. But than I am about – I mean, this stuff is informative.

It's informative and it's why I think what you do with your podcast is awesome because people can really get into the thinking about things, right? They can really – and they can move away from their own preconceptions, their own biases they're bringing into it. And they're stopping for a minute and they're going, what do I really think about that? And to really think about something, you need information. Yeah. And information can be boring unless it's interestingly presented through conversation, through, you know, uncomfortable conversation. Well, also uncompromised conversation where you don't have a certain time period

that you have to smush something into, like a four-minute segment on CNN or something. I mean, that's impossible. Well, it's so difficult. I see people have these conversations about books or something that are trying to, a complex, very nuanced subject that they're trying to discuss. And there's another person on the other side

that's like, that's not true! And they're shouting over each other. I'm like, boy, just the pressure. People have to understand that, people do understand, but you have to reiterate it and it has to be kind of drilled into your head. When you're pressuring someone and you're yelling back and forth, you're not even going to get a good version of whatever this person's argument is.

Like, you should have the best version. I want, like, if I'm going to have a disagreement with someone, I want the best version of their point. And I want them to get it out with no pressure i want to help them get it out i'd like to reiterate it with them i like to give them plenty of time i want to know how you think i want to know what you're thinking about i would love to talk to these guys i would love to love to but the thing is like they can't tell you a lot of this. I mean, for national security reasons, there's a lot of reasons. I'm sure. If they want to keep their job and stay alive, they have to shut the fuck up.

They can't just talk about what they do and how they do it and decisions that maybe they made that were uncomfortable. Well, they killed somebody they didn't think maybe needed to die. But that's the reporter's job or at least my job so in other words okay so i go to visit billy wad his home and i knew i heard stories about he's this legendary operator right and he's also what's called a singleton so he works alone and when i was at they call them a singleton right which is like he's got one guy giving him orders whoa right and he's out there. Oh, my God. I mean, Billy Wall is right. I mean, back. Can we back up for a second?

I'm going to give you the story of him. OK, so here's this guy. He's in he's in Vietnam and he's part of what was called MACV SOG. Right. And they're doing cross-border missions into Laos. And it's so dangerous. It's like it's it's a CIA program that SOG stands for Studies and Observations Group. I mean, it's supposed to sound like a bunch of guys in an Ivy League tower with bow ties, right?

But the guys on the ground called it suicide on the ground. That's how dangerous it was. Jesus. A hundred percent of the people had casualties, right? Billy Waugh has nine Purple Hearts from the work he did. Nine,

okay? I mean, they get shot, they bandage themselves up there. You know, they're up in an aircraft because they're limping instead of on the ground, you know, viewing the missions. The war ends. Everybody's furious with the government, with the military. There's no room for special operators. I mean, everything, it's called the time of troubles by them. Billy Wah is working in the post office. And he gets this knock, you know, and it's like he's back in the CIA now in 1977. So he was out for a while?

He was out. It was over in Vietnam. I mean, he was, you know, it was over. That was it. And he was working in the post office? He was working in the post office. It seems like a Stallone movie. He was working in the post office.

We need you. Right? The team needs you. I mean, but he said the most incredible thing to me because he said, and he doesn't ever talk about fear, and he said, there was only one time in my whole life I've ever been afraid, and that was in the post office. Whoa. Because he was getting back into it. Probably had, like, recycled his mind and put himself in a place i'm just a civilian now

and he said i'm gonna wind up being one of those old guys drinking beer at the end of the bar talking about the war right and instead he gets called up by the cia and they send him to libya in 1977 and his cover is that he he's training Gaddafi's paramilitary guys in paramilitary tactics. I mean, that's the beginning of his career. And it goes on all the way until we were in Cuba, I think was actually some kind of a mission, because it was like, what are we doing here in Cuba doing infiltration and exfiltration techniques, allegedly with Che Guevara's son. But in any event, when I went to visit Billy Wall the first time,

he's got certificates and awards and medals all over the walls of his home, but there's one framed item that I'm looking at, and it's a knife. And there's a seal from the CIA and it says in appreciation to the assassin and I said Billy tell me about that and he said you know I can't talk about that so I you know stayed with him for two years I mean mean, stayed, we conversed, we traveled, I interviewed him, you know, hundreds of hours. And I kept asking him about that award. And he kept saying, you know, I can't talk about that. But as I write in the book, he couldn't talk about it, but others did.

So that's how a reporter works. You get introduced to enough of his friends, enough of the others who are involved. You make sure they're a legitimate source and you begin to find out what he can't talk about. And that's what I report in the book. And that is very explosive because President Bush, right after 9-11, created what was called a stalker team. And ironically, you know, people have this idea that we've been, you know, sending a team of assassins around the world in NATO partner countries. And that, what I learned, had never happened until right after 11 with the stalker team. Twelve men and actually one or two women, the femme fatale, and they would go after bad guys.

And they adopted the term from the Reagan era. So it was called preemptive neutralization. Who were the women? There's always one woman on the team. That's what I was told by the guy who was in charge of the soccer team. Why is that? Well, I mean, he gave me this great great example i don't report it in the book but i'll tell you right he said so women have a different presentation and this like he told me

a story of a woman sitting on a bench you know in embracing a man right and no one thought anything of it and it allowed her to spy on someone in a manner that would a man would it would have drawn attention and then the stalker team could go so what their job would be to is to conduct surveillance of a target and they call it making book they have to make book on that individual so they know exactly where the guy is and they're waiting on the president's orders whether or not they should take action and you know that's where the that's where the information stops right i say well then what happens well that's all we can say ann Annie. That must be so exciting. Like, to live like that, like all cloak and dagger. It's got to be so exciting.

Like, I would take that over a cubicle every day of the week. I really would. Well, you might get killed. I might die in that damn cubicle, too. I think it's why so many of these operators stay in it long term. Oh, yeah. Right? Did you ever see the television show the showtime show

what the hell is it called with um the fuck's that show called that the the homeland yes yes well that's like the whole premise like she's completely addicted to being in that world adrenaline i mean that's what that is imagine Imagine jumping out of an aircraft, landing behind enemy lines, and then your work begins. And then you have to get out. That's why surprise, kill, vanish. I mean, you've got to surprise your way in, kill them, and then get out. And if you do a good job, they frame your knife and give you a plaque. Jamie, I'm going to get you a knife.

It's an appreciation of the assassin. You're a plaque. Jamie, I'm going to get you a knife. It's an appreciation of the assassin. You're a killer. It's just such a crazy way to live your life. But, you know, I'll take that over a boring life. I would take that over a boring life every day of the week. Well, it's like the Pink Floyd line, you know, living life of quiet desperation. I mean, that just terrifies me.

Well, that's Thoreau's quote, that most men live lives of quiet desperation. It's one of just terrifies me. Well, that's Thoreau's quote, that most men live lives of quiet desperation. It's one of my favorite quotes ever because it's true. And I've been that guy. Oh, my God. You're just in this world where you just can't wait to just run away. And how do people get stuck there?

How do you think they get stuck there? Bills. Bills, like financial bills? Yeah, bills and commitment. You have an apartment you have to pay for you have a car you leased you have a wife that you have to feed you have a child you have to raise you have to you have your mortgage you have your this you have your that and that's where it all comes from where do you think opportunity plays into that well the opportunity takes place usually when you're young and you don't have any responsibility. That's when you have your options.

Well, your options are severely limited the more you gather responsibilities. Like if I had, as a 51-year-old father of three, married man, pays taxes, has a house and a mortgage and a business and all that jazz. If I had to quit everything now and struggle the way i struggled as a stand-up comedian it would never work but the only way i could be this person now is if i took that chance when i was 21 when i was dead broke and had my cars repossessed and all that stuff that's the only way you you ever get where you want to go you have to you have to take a path that's dangerous. And most people want to take the safe path.

And the safe path leaves you stuck in quiet desperation almost every time. It's hell. It's hell. You're selling insurance or some other shit that you care zero about. But can people just make that change? mean i believe that you have to plan it out the way you can change is you have to put aside enough money to give yourself a window and then you have to have a plan and you have to spend all your waking hours outside of whatever shit job you do planning your escape and you have to come to the realization very clearly that you fucked up and you got yourself stuck so whatever you're doing you have to do it like your life depends on it and whether it is you're

trying to be an author and you're gonna you're gonna if you're gonna try to be an author and you're working eight hours a day plus commuting plus family responsibilities or whatever else you have whatever time that you have you have to attack like you're trying to save the world you're trying to save your life you don't want to drown that one and a half hours a day that you have to write god damn you better be caffeinated and motivated you got to go you got to get after it and you got to have discipline that's most people don't have those things most people don't understand what it's like to to really go for something and to know that the consequences of not doing that are horrific then you're desperate and you're quiet but i do think there is something to be said for fate and circumstance sure and i always write

i mean people in these military environments that I write about and in these intelligence world environments, fate and circumstance plays a big part because they too can even get complacent. But when your life is on the line, a lot of times they have these experiences where they're like, I must change. And that's what I find really interesting in people. Sure. Desper people. Sure. Desperation. Yeah. I think fate and circumstance are giant. Fortune is giant.

There's no question about it. Some children get shot in drive-bys. That's just horrible, horrible luck and unfortunate circumstance. A lot of it is fortune and fate. How about people getting lost, right? Lost household. Okay. So the book that i told you i wrote on the psychics phenomenon what do you believe about that again i'm neutral right

i'm not you're not tell me i want to hear what you believe i think there's a lot of people that are full of shit absolutely my god all people that are talking about being psychic are full of shit but i do think that there is a strange connection that we have with each other that's intangible and i think that some people have better connections than others just like some people are more intelligent like we were talking before the podcast about elon musk and it's painfully aware when you talk to him what a chimp you are that he's so fucking smart. And his brain is, it just, it's built different.

Just like some people have defective hearts. Some people have a heart like Lance Armstrong. It's incredible, huge, an anomaly. Some people have giant hands.

He has a big heart? Literally? Yes, yes, he has literally a, and they don't know whether or not that's from training

or steroids and EPO or whether or not it's something he was born with. They really don't know. But yeah, he has an unusually sized heart. Unusually large.

But what was my point? Fate, circumstance, getting lost. Oh, psychics. Psychics. That's what it is. I think that most of the people that can tell you the future are full of shit. Most of the people that are...

I think people get feelings. I think sometimes you think about someone they call you and i don't know what that is i don't know if that's just complete fortune like how many times you're thinking about a person when they don't call you that's the argument against it but how many times you're thinking about that person they don't call you but they're thinking about you as well how many i mean how how often is that with star-crossed lovers they find each other years later and they tell each other they've been thinking about each other all the time they can't believe it that's that's and when you get that text from someone maybe that's just someone prone to action but maybe there is some sort of a connection some sort of quantum

entanglement between you and someone you spent time with or shared energy with it's possible it's possible but the problem is you have these mediums and psychics and those people are just assholes and i i have a friend his name is banachek and he runs a las vegas mentalist show where he shows you how he does these tricks but he'll tell you absolutely these are he's been on the podcast he's a brilliant brilliant man but he'll tell you these are tricks i'm showing you how i do this this i mean i'm gonna tell you that's a trick i'm not gonna give you the how i do it but i'm gonna tell you while i'm doing it this is a trick but he's pulling all this information out of people about their past their childhood he's guessing people's ages he's guessing where

they grew up i mean and it's it's all a little sneaky shit. You know, it's the way they do it. It's a skill as much as anything. And so when you see these people that are channelers or, you know, psychics that are telling you about someone in your past that's trying to contact you, they're con artists almost exclusively. almost exclusively i mean maybe there's like one lady in tibet that has a broken gene and she could tune into the next dimension and pull some extract some information from it but in my experience the vast majority of those people that i've talked to that claim to have psychic ability were also at least partially full of shit they had weird ego problems that were glaring that they didn't notice you know like i could see it that this is a gross way to behave and they don't see it their

interpersonal relationships the way they communicate with people was like an agent like a fake hollywood person or something there's something bullshitty about them yeah and people who lie a lot i think if you lie a lot it's very difficult for you to tell what a lie is. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I think you lose your connection. I think when you bullshit, I think you also bullshit yourself. I mean, I don't think these psychics are 100% honest even with themselves. I don't think they're like, I'm going to fuck this lady over.

She thinks she's going to talk to her husband. I'm going to tell her some nonsense, take her money. I think some of them actually believe they're getting information you know my grandmother used to believe that my grandmother was uh she was a very eccentric lady and old sicilian lady and she would tell you about the like old italian ladies all like want to play the lottery they all have numbers there and she was playing the numbers wasn't even the lottery it was like the organized crime numbers racket and she would always say I was gonna pick this number and I just at the last minute I changed the number and wouldn't you know what the first one came in and she was so mad but it was always that that I had a dream of this and I had a vision of that and it was all visions and dreams and psychics but

everything worked out horribly for her it always did like if like you were really psychic you would this and i had a vision of that and it was all visions and dreams and psychics but everything worked out horribly for her it always did like if like you were really psychic you would have better instincts like this is just this inclination that people have that there's something special about their perceptions and that they're psychic and it's always these really wacky people that believe they're psychics in my my experience which i mean it's you're i think you're talking also about what some scientists would call the self-fulfilling prophecy you know that if you believe this things happen manifest themselves and you can convince yourself that you believe this but for me i'm super interested in people who really believe in psychics, right? Like that's what, and the military, for example.

And, you know, the most interesting- Do you ever talk to Ed Daines? Do you ever talk to those guys, the remote viewing guys? I talk to a lot of the scientists who taught the remote viewing, and I talk to a number of remote viewers for the book. But the most interesting of all was the astronaut Ed Mitchell, right? And he was so- So I'm interested in like the psychology psychology behind what are you looking for in that

and i saw that i was doing some research in an archive and i came across a photo of what turned out to be ed mitchell on the moon reading a piece of paper okay it's this extraordinary image because you're like wait a minute he's on the moon and he's reading a document. What is that document? I found out the document was a map of the moon. Okay? Mitchell got lost on the moon and literally pulled a map out of like, okay, he was trying to get to a certain crater. And they had a very limited amount of time. There it is right there. Right?

Okay, there he is. Wow. I mean, think about that. He's lost. It's like the most advanced technology of the time. Why doesn't the guy with the camera tell him where to go? Different story. The guy's taking a picture of him.

He'll be like, hey, bro, this way. Move left. Let's just follow our footprints. We're the only ones walking. What are you, stupid? Turn around. Look at the ground. See those things?

That's where you walked. Let's go that way. Jesus Christ. I'd be so mad at him. I'd be like, at him i'm like bro you're pulling out a map who wrote that map who's who's no one's even been here come on man they had little maps folded up in their in their pockets in case they got lost they were on the way to this crater and in that crater they were going to find allegedly rocks that were going to solve the

mystery of the moon's creation the origin story right so they had So they had like all this pressure. They couldn't find it. The heart rate's up. The guys at Houston are like, you got to turn back. Your heart rate's going crazy. And think about it. Mitchell tells me, I went to interview him at his house. I think it was his last interview before he died. And he said there we had gotten 240,000 miles to get lost.

They missed the crater by like 900 feet or something. Really? Yeah. So he never got to the crater? Never got to it. He was devastated. And on the way back from the moon, he has this, what he told me,

was a psychic change, right? His consciousness flipped, and he became convinced that psychic powers were real. And that is really the beginning of his foray. I mean, Mitchell became a huge proponent of psychic warfare, of the idea behind what you're talking about

that we spoke of as being sort of charlatanism. And he dedicated the rest of his life to it. And he was ridiculed. He was ridiculed. But he had some wacky beliefs. He had some wacky beliefs about aliens as well.. But he had some wacky beliefs. Yes. He had some wacky beliefs about aliens as well. And I think that comes. He thought that we were definitely in contact with aliens.

And that comes from like, he was so vilified by the scientists and by the astronauts and by the kind of military men. Because this was just, he told me the story of when they were in quarantine after they came back from the moon, right? He and Shepard were sitting there, you know, eating breakfast, waiting. And Shepard, a story broke that Mitchell had done some ESP experiments on the way back from the moon. And Shepard said to him, like, look at this nonsense. The newspapers will do anything to make a buck. And Mitchell said, I did that. I actually did that.

What experiments? So he was doing ESP experiments On the way back from the moon He had a psychic in Chicago A Swedish psychic That he was sending messages to Was she hot? It was an old Swedish man

Right? Named Olaf Right? But I hear Swedish psychic Yeah, yeah, yeah I gotta get to my psychic Can't wait to take my clothes off. No, I'll introduce you to Olaf.

Okay, okay. I saw the movie Frozen. I didn't see that one. Olaf's the little snowman. Oh, you got younger kids. Yeah. I missed that one. Mine are older.

Anyway, sorry. So Ed Mitchell was talking to this hot chick. The hot old man in, and the story broke because the Swedish psychic could not resist telling, you know, leaking to the press that he had done these experiments. What experiments were they? Well, psychics train on these little cards called zener cards, right? So, like, you have different symbols on them and, you know, one person, that's how they decide whether or not they're being psychic.

Like there would be a veil between us and I would say, what are you seeing? And you would call it out. So it's like a control system. And Mitchell had these items with him on the way to the moon and did these experiments to try to see whether you could have a psychic connection with someone back on earth i mean he that was you know did it work well no and he took notes he showed me the notes it was so wild to be at his house in florida and he pulls out this old spiral notebook with like water stains on it that actually went to the moon i was like wow this is really something else i mean it was one of those moments in time where you're just like i don't know there was a feel there was a feeling of

sadness around all of it with ed mitchell sitting there in his um you know his chair and uh talking to me about what it was like to be an apollo astronaut on the walls i'm with a lot of these sources with like incredible amounts of awards on the walls but what does that mean after time passes right so his experiments didn't work but he still believed in psychic powers yes i mean and that's and he okay so what we're saying he was ridiculed you know and he had such a tough time with it and so the people who propped him up and the people who gave him a lot of encouragement had sort of more radical ideas as he grew older. Who were these people? Conspiracy theorists who really kind of used him because he was an Apollo astronaut.

And so he was so much more famous than any of them would ever be. And they really took advantage of him, I think. So you think they manipulated him with information and tried to get him more and more enthusiastic about their obsessions? I mean, it's speculation on my part, but you kind of go where the love is, right? He was an older guy, too. And I'd seen some interviews with him as he was getting older and older, and he seemed to be having some difficulties thinking about things clearly. And people take advantage of that. Yeah, he was really obsessed with extraterrestrial life.

It was really interesting because didn't he claim that he had seen something while he was up in space? I think people helped him make that claim. That was my understanding of it, of reporting it. I mean, I stayed away from some of the crazier speculative things about him because what I was really interested in when I was writing that book was how his authority and power allowed the program to get funding, right? Because so much of this is, it's like, who's funding this stuff and why? And it really does come down to authority,

which is always a narrative that I find fascinating, right? How do people get the authority to say, go on these programs? Or, you know, we should do that. I mean, the question you asked of like, who's in charge, right? Right. And in all of this, what I learned more than anything is that the office of the president has a lot more power than I think any of us are aware. Oh, I'm sure. Did you find anything about Ed Mitchell?

Did he say anything about, see if he said anything about seeing a ufo or seeing extraterrestrial life but the problem is if he believes that boy you know if if he was talked into saying that you got to wonder about a lot of the other things that he said as well the other thing is as these guys get older that becomes their career their career becomes discussing their experiences and the more outrageous those experiences are the better the career is it's it's absolutely changed their stories you know michael collins changed his story his story when he just got back from the moon excuse me when he just got back from the moon his story was that they couldn't see any stars but then as he got older he wrote in depth in his book and i think it was in the 90s you know

decades later how vivid the stars were and how incredible it was out there with no atmosphere but there's a press conference when he came back from the moon right after the apollo 11 moon launch he was talking about he couldn't see any stars so everybody's like well what what is it did you know they there's they get lost right they're older it's been so many years since whatever they did when they were working with nasa and really it becomes that's their focal point of attention like where they get their attention from and where they make their career is from their attention. And so they start telling these inconsistent stories. I mean, one of the great perils of, you know, living on your laurels is exactly that. And it's why, I mean, like a guy like Billy Wah, I was so intrigued by that he was constantly reinventing his own role within the CIA as he talked to me about at length because he never wanted to just

become one of those has-beens, right? So his cover later became Just Another Old Man, which is like super interesting. Like he was in Sudan in the 90s and he actually took the first reconnaissance photographs of Osama bin Laden before bin Laden was on anybody's radar except for the CIA's and his I mean how do you run he said to me how do you run around Sudan which is a country made up of like really tall black dinka tribesmen if you're a five foot eight old white guy who's 72 you know supposed to get reconnaissance photographs of Bin Laden, right? What did he do? Like wear golf shirts? No, I have a photograph of him.

He wore like, you know, those socks like that go all the way up to your mid-shin. Oh, he dressed like a dork. Yes, and little shorts and a sweatband over his head. And he said, my cover was that I was an old man on a fitness craze.

And there he is running around Sudan. I mean, there's no sidewalks right and he's just jogging away and he said bin laden's dogs used to come after him and so he would have to run with a lead pipe and he would whack the dogs on the nose and he said they stopped coming after me wow jesus i can't find any evidence that he says that he saw aliens but there's I'm seeing different reports that based off of his conversations with lots of different people he believes that aliens at some point visited earth and that it's being covered up I mean that's an easy narrative sure yeah sure yeah and I mean how much they tell Ed Mitchell.

They say, hey, thanks for going to the moon. Well, look, one of the most interesting things about reporting this is that you find out these people that you think have access to all the information. Right. Only know they're a piece of the pie. How much do you think Trump knows? Do you think they keep stuff from him? Because I would say, like, he's kind of a loose cannon. wouldn't tell him about the alien i mean i tell everybody i i often

wonder that like can the president be like i demand to know about this yeah and then can they say no sir or they say as i write in one of my other books it's like you don't want to know about that because you don't want to have to lie well that's nonsense i definitely want to know i would want to know that would be the only reason want to have to lie. Well, that's nonsense. I definitely want to know. I would want to know. That would be the only reason to become president, right? You'd have to figure out why you have to lie. Like whether or not if you have to lie makes sense to you, right? Like there's some things that you know that were done like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment where you go, what the fuck are you doing?

Like, no, you can't do that. But then there's some things you go, oh, I see why you had to do that. Yes. So it would have to be like, which one of those things is it? Is it one of those things where it makes sense, where you had to go and assassinate someone who was plotting some sort of a nuclear attack on Chicago? Or is it some nefarious plot to turn Down syndrome children into surgically constructed fake aliens and crash them into the earth?

And the curiosity factor would be outrageous. I mean, can you imagine being the president and saying, I want to know about JFK? And they're like, sir, you don't want to know. Then you would go, well, of course I want to know. Now I really want to know. I mean, that happens to me as a reporter all the time. I can't talk about that. That just becomes the obsession.

It's like, I want to know about that. Yeah. That's the first thing I'd want to know. I'd almost run for president to learn about aliens. I'm like, come on, bro. But then if I found out there were nothing, I'd be like, well, fuck this job. I quit. I don't want to run the world.

I just want to find out about the aliens. And then there's all these things that you find out jamie and i were talking about that before it's like you know jamie was obsessed well he's obsessed with uh chicago all right i know ohio rather columbus and we were well we were talking about nazis right yes i mean i wrote a book about operation paperclip and my god talk about a rabbit's hole. That's a rabbit hole. It's a rabbit hole. Let's explain to people that don't know what we're talking about. Operation Paperclip was when, after World War II, the United States gathered up a ton of scientists from Nazi Germany, brought them over to America, and even Wernher von Braun.

They had Wernher von Braun run NASA. He was a Nazi, like 100% Nazi. Good friends with Hitler type Nazi. Yes. He ran a Berlin rocket factory where they hung the five slowest Jews. They would hang them out front so everybody would know, like, this is what happens when you work slow. We'll hang you. I mean, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said that if warner von braun was alive today they would

prosecute him for crimes against humanity yes they would and that was the head of nasa that was the head of nasa that was the guy who got us to the moon that was the big cheese guy yeah so we were willing to put a lot of really dark things aside in order to gather up the best scientists so the soviet union couldn't get them all and they got a few of them as well. But we got how many? More than 1,000, right? Allegedly 1,400, but I would not be surprised if, you know, the story changes and there were more, right? Yeah.

But that goes back to our discussion earlier about being in pole position. I mean, that's why we grabbed those Nazis. We were like, if we don't get them, the Russians will. I get it. I get it. And, you know, and I'm sure the Nazis could say, I didn't want grabbed those Nazis. We were like, if we don't get them, the Russians will. I get it. I get it. And, you know, and I'm sure the Nazis could say, I didn't want to do it. They made me. I'm a nice person.

I love Jews. Well, that was part of the mythology. It was like, we got the good Germans. Well, no, we didn't. We got the top Germans. And who do you think the top Germans were? They were coveted by Hitler, Himmler, Goering, you know. Germans were. They were coveted by Hitler, Himmler, Goering. I mean, these guys were...

I mean, there were guys that we grabbed out of the docks at Nuremberg literally to come be part of our program. One of these guys- Darrell Bock Well, if you're smart, you're an asset, right? I mean, that's what Genghis Khan used to do. He'd take warlords from the other side and capture them and go listen just come over here bro come out work for me i'm the man i mean what you know ideology aside i'm super smart and i want that to be known that's kind of that's that's the competitor right i mean you can't you cannot be the best rocket designer in the world and not want those talents demonstrated. That's a Warner on Brown story. That's the story of all of them.

And that was so shocking writing that book because it's like, wow, huge amounts of talent, but how far will the competitor go to see their baby come to fruition? What are they willing to put aside? Yeah. Did you pay any attention to the other places where nazis went when they escaped germany like uh argentina in particular have you ever seen

any of that stuff they have entire german towns down in argentina right they do oktoberfest down there they wear lederhosen they they drink out of steins it's crazy they speak german and you're like what the fuck is this like my friend tim kennedy went down there and he said he was literally talking to people interviewing people and they had photos of ss soldiers on their wall and they would talk about how grandfather was a hero and like like you are you're the descendants of escaped Nazis and they put together a town down there. I mean, the way the Nazis were able to flee is, I can't read enough of that. I mean, that's what Jamie and I were talking about. It's dark.

Oh my God. And it's endless. I mean, there's so, you know, the ones that we, there was a famous guy that we got. He was the Surgeon General of the Third Reich. I mean, think about that, okay? Dr. Walter Schreiber. I mean, he was such a bad dude. He was in charge of the vaccine program.

I mean, you just put those words together and your mind goes really dark, right? But we wanted him because he was an expert in vaccines. And we brought him to the United States. He was the only Nazi I found of the ones, the paperclip scientists who came here, that was actually outed. Right? He was outed as a Nazi. And that's because one of the investigators at the Nuremberg trials recognized him. Oh, Jesus.

And he's the only one we got out of here and guess where he went argentina and lived out the rest of his life there the the show was called finding hitler they were trying to find evidence that hitler somehow escaped it's really a bullshit premise of the show but what was interesting is that there were thousands and thousands of Nazis that made it to Argentina and set up shop throughout South America. There's a lot of Germans down there. It's kind of weird. If you can imagine me on book tour of like the kind of questions I get because we're talking, right? Having written books about Area 51, Nazis, assassins. How are you still alive?

People, I mean, just last night I was at a book Giving a signing And people were like, is Hitler really dead? Oh God If he was alive, he'd be the oldest man alive Imagine, he was probably like How old was he during World War II? He had to be in his 40s He'd be hundreds

He cloned himself He'd be 160 years old He'd be 120 now That's an old man There's been 120 year old people they say he cloned himself 160 years old 120 now that's what it'd be oh jesus jamie knows that's an old man i mean there's been 120 year old people but it's fucking pretty rare yeah um so operation paperclip was um not even publicly acknowledged until what was it like the 90s like when did they when did it become public i think it was through the freedom of information act yeah it was this very intrepid journalist named linda hunt who shout

out to linda yeah i mean she but you know she broke the story that's what's amazing i mean as a journalist you're always writing on the shoulders of those before you right and she had it really hard because she did a freedom of information Act request, got all these documents that no one had ever seen. And then the government sent her a bill for $125,000. And she had to spend a lot of time. This is what I understand. I never interviewed her. But for Xeroxing fees.

What? Yeah. I just love that detail because it's like it's such a covert way of getting someone to stop it's like okay here's the information we had to give it to you but now here's your bill imagine if the government's coming down on you for 125 grand yeah see that would make me want to call a bunch of rich people and go hey let's all just donate a thousand dollars to this lady and it's a different world now you could do that you could do a go fund me campaign you know but my god in the 80s and the 90s you were just like out on a limb yeah they

would crush you financially we actually had this very same discussion yesterday with my friend phil demers who's being sued by marine land and because of he was a walrus trainer and trained orcas and he's showing how horrific it wasn't black blackfish. That's SeaWorld. Okay. SeaWorld is actually the way he says it's a day in the park compared to Marineland. Marineland's a horrific place in Canada. And anyway, they have been trying to squash him with legal fees by dragging out his case. But we set up GoFundMes, and all his legal bills get paid for from people that want him to win the good fight and this is a this is an option today that wasn't available to linda when

she was exposing this exposing nazis twenty five thousand dollars do you assholes like you she should sue them for misappropriation of funds like Like, does it cost you really $125,000 to print those things out? If it does, you guys should be in jail. Like, that's like with those $10,000 hammers that they have in the Pentagon. Yeah. Yeah. So she gets all this information, and does the government immediately acknowledge that they imported these Nazis? No.

No. I mean, she wrote the first book, and it was just stunning. What year was this? Late 80s, early 90s. Okay. And, you know, then more gets revealed because they gave her a certain amount. I mean, I filed a bunch of FOIAs. There was releases.

I went to Germany. FOIA meaning Freedom of Information Act. Yes. releases. I went to Germany. FOIA, meaning Freedom of Information Act. Yes. Then I went to Germany and looked in their archives with a fellow German PhD who had

real access to stuff and was able to translate for me while we were there looking at this stuff. I interviewed a lot of grandchildren of Nazis and children of Nazis. And, you know, I mean, this one extraordinary, oh my God, there's a guy i told you about schreiber right i'm on the narrative level humans acting i'm so interested in rivalry

and competition right as a concept because this is what america does to be the best and also as humans right because people are like that they're built like that. So the Nazis had rivals amongst themselves. And Schreiber's rival was Dr. Blum, who was in charge of the biological weapons program for Hitler. Okay? And Blum had a son. And Blum was prosecuted at Nuremberg. You can see a picture of him with a big dueling scar.

You know, he was a bad dude. He had a dueling scar? A dueling scar you know he was a bad dude he was a dueling scar dueling scar duel like a sword sword fighting it was like among the nazis they would they would duel with one another when they were younger students and then they would pack the wound with horse hair to make it even more pronounced because it looked ferocious really pull up jamie pull up uh i got a couple what's his what's his name well you can pull up dr blum b-o-l-m-e but also look at that big ass scar on his face right and also you can pull if you pull up kurt dabus who was the director of our jfk center he was NASA's, Von Braun's number two.

He had a huge dueling scar. And yet, when you, look it, there he is right there. Knowing what we know now, it's like, come on. You're trying to tell me that guy's not a hardcore Nazi? So those guys had dueling scars on their faces. Yeah, you see him? How often did they duel? Well, when they were in college.

Did they do it to the death? No, no, no, no, no. It was like, oh, God. Oh, It was like, on guard, you know. Oh, like fencing? Fencing, fencing. Oh, this guy had it too. Yeah. How did they not get poked in the eyes?

Oh, I guess that was the gentleman's rules. How do you fuck? Listen, you go in for the cheek, you hit the eye. Like, that happens all the time. I mean, they must have cut a lot of eyeballs out. I haven't seen any photographs of missing eyeballs, but there's a lot right on the cheek so maybe that was the whole point it was actually just a bit for show oh right how weird but but it was a badge of honor it was a badge of honor yeah there's more and and but wow so they all had on their face yeah it's on the same spot dueling scars yeah

wow so imagine like wanted to have these scars that was a jesus christ oh they had goggles on oh there you go that's how they didn't take out academic fencing it says academic fencing so what they were essentially doing they were having fencing matches with real swords not with ones with tips okay wow and cutting their faces up fuck man oh jesus look at this guy's face yikes wow dueling cults cults that is crazy so when you consider like that people people did not know about that and then you've got these germans walking around america as part of our space program and our science programs and oh these are the good germans i mean now you really have to say to yourself come on guys i mean nazis right big ass fucking scars in their face absolutely

that's crazy. Wow. So I go to interview. Doc, sometimes you, as a journalist, you can get amazing information from. Look at these guys. Oh, my God. They're sliced up. History of European martial arts.

Yeah. What the fuck? Well, I mean, that is a martial art. I mean, it's an art of war. It really I mean, that is a martial art. I mean, it's an art of war. It really is. Sword fighting is a martial art. I mean, many martial arts have weapons. Ugh.

Sorry. So you've got to interview these people. So to piece together the story, right? I can't tell you others can, right? To find out more about the Nazis, I went to Germany and sought out some children of these top, top Nazis to see if maybe they didn't have journals or anything they might share with me. And one of them was Dr. Blum. His son, I tracked down, I found him. And he said, yes, you may come visit me. And it was such a remarkable journey. It was like he lived in the

Black Forest. I had to take like a taxi through the mountains, up over the hill, down through the valley, you know, into a courtyard behind a church to Dr. Blum's house. So he was the junior to his father, who was this horrific Nazi. I mean, a top Nazi had favor of the Fuhrer, wore what was called the Golden Party Badge, right? Hitler gave out these little buttons. Blum's was, I believe, number six. So that's how favored he was. And his son, Dr. Kurt Blum, whereas the father was in charge of the biological weapons program. So his plan was to, you know, murder people with biological weapons from nature, right? The son had been a medical doctor,

but had left the profession to cure people with flowers. It's called Bach flower therapy. So he was this very interesting individual who had never given an interview before, and he agreed to let me come to him. So I go on that journey, I go to his house. And he was remarkable. I mean, he was so interesting. Talk about the sins of the father. I mean, my God, what he had is a burden. And I asked him to tell me everything he could about his father, and he did. And then he asked me to tell me what I knew about his father.

I had information from the German archives about his father that he did not have. Like what kind of stuff? Like that his father had given something. I had just come from this archive and found these documents. Dr. Blum ordered that 6,000 tubercular Jews be given Sonderbehandlung. That's the German word.

What does that mean? Special treatment. There's a euphemism for you. That was kill those 6 000 tubercular jews when you say tubercular is that people with tuberculosis they were suffering from tuberculosis and he dr blum worked closely with himmler um and they just decided to kill them and you know sitting there talking to this man telling him about his father at his request was remarkable and then he's

telling me what he knows. And then as I'm getting ready to leave, he says to me, I'd like you to have these. And he takes down from his incredible bookshelf, he himself had written eight books, right? And he takes down these books, and he hands them to me. And they're in these wrappers. And I can see that they have Nuremberg nomenclature on them. And what they are is they're his father's documents from his Nuremberg trial. And I'm like, I can't take these. I thought he meant take them back to my hotel room, look at them, and then bring them back the next morning when we were doing the next interview. And he said, no, no, no, I want you to have them.

And I was like, I can't have them. And he said, I don't want them, and you should have them. And he gave them to me. So I had this stack. So I was like, on my trip home, it was so perplexing because I threw out all of my clothes. I was like, screw the clothes. I mean, I just carry, I travel with a carry-on bag, right? So in my carry-on bag, all I have is this Nazi paraphernalia.

Oh, Jesus Christ. In Germany, that is Dr. Blum's. Oh, my God. The Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich's documents from Nuremberg covered with swastikas. Oh, my God. He was acquitted at Nuremberg based on all these documents, okay? And, by the way, based on human experiments. And I'm at the airport, and I realize suddenly, oh, my God, swastikas.

Like, this is illegal. If they go through my bag, I'm going to be arrested. I'm carrying these incendiary. Do you have any copies of your book on you? I haven't written it yet. So you can say, I'm a journalist, but other books. No, no, no. I was just like holding my breath. You gotta have at least one.

Joe, I was sweating almost as hard as I was sweating at the beginning of this interview. Right? I think you're sweating harder. I was. I went through, because you know, I was like, wow. I went through, no problem. Got home, I hopped in my office. So they didn't check anything. Nope. They didn't say boo.

Lucky you didn't go through Israel. Oh, my God. Well, you know what? The swastika is not outlawed there, but it is in Germany. You may not have any Nazi paraphernalia whatsoever. In fact, my paperclip book, which has a swastika on it, had to be redesigned, the cover, for the German publication. And it just has, like, broken up images of the nazis because you cannot reproduce that image in germany it's i mean i'm not pro swastika but it's so strange that we've given

so much power to this design that you can't even see it it used to be there's a um there's a temple out here that i think is i believe it's a hindu temple and it was a part of hinduism that this swastika predates world war ii it predates the nazis it predates their their sort of reclaiming of it and the this building that was built out here in the 19 i think it was built in the 1920s has swastikas on there's a big plaque explaining why there's swastika is on it i know they have it at a different angle right but i mean talk about branding right i mean my god that was and the nazis were you know kings of that i mean they were only that the mustache that guy killed that mustache there's not another thing like that but he didn't kill the dueling scar right that could come back do you think no not

not after your show what do you have four million viewers probably right but people don't think about it that way they don't think about the dueling scars being a nazi thing no no that's what i find remarkable right they really don't but the nazis did the nazis did and then you look there's an amazing photograph of jfk lyndon, Kurt Davis, sitting at, you know, for a launch, a moon launch. And there's Davis with his huge dueling scar. And I'm like, and their position was, oh, he's one of the good Germans. Well, that culture was a culture of ruthlessness. I mean, it was even the good ones.

There he is. Yes. Good job, Jamie. Look at that. Can look at that can you believe that scar on his face they still give out an award by the way that's called the kurt dabus award and i rang them up and said like why are you guys giving out this award he was a hardcore nazi what do they say they were like they've hemmed and hawed. And I finally said, well, at least tell me what you say to people who ask that question. You know what they said? What? No one's ever asked us that question before, Annie. Well, they will now.

Jesus. When you really stop and think about the horrific nature of what the nazis did i mean how inhuman it was how how crazy it was like that had to permeate the entire culture there is no good nazis there was not one even one of them that was looped into that had to be responsible for some awful awful shit i mean einstein said it the best when he said, you know, you could have left. Like, people who could have left should have left, right? Well, do you know the story of Fritz Haber, right?

The guy who... Yes. I mean, he wound up having to flee. And he's the guy who created Zyklon gas. And he's, you know, he created Zyklon A, which had smell built into it so that would warn you when you were using this pesticide and then the nazis turned it into zyklon b where they removed that element that added the smell and just this odorless horrific poisonous gas that they used to

gas the jews and he was a jew i mean i you know then when you think about he became he was no longer useful to them because when they figured out he really was a jew yeah well once world war ii came around so he was a part of world war one when they first started using gas and he was there's a great radio lab podcast about it i think it's called the bad show but anyway what essentially says that he was winning he was up for the nobel prize at the same time he was wanted for crimes against humanity because he was up for the nobel prize for creating the hobber method of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere which was used for fertilizer which to this day they say 50 of the nitrogen in human bodies was created by the Haber method.

So what you get from food, from vegetables, like that nitrogen, 50% of it at least, is coming from this guy's method who was a scientist, who was a Jew, who was working in Germany before it became Nazi Germany, and then was the guy who figured out how to use gas on people. It's a dark, his story is a dark story. I mean, he died looking for medical treatment because he had to flee Germany. And he's had a bad heart. He died on the road trying to get to Switzerland. I think it was Switzerland. Yeah. Yeah, it's...

I mean, Nazi Germany is like the pole position taken way too far, right? And that's what's remarkable that the pentagon was like okay but we can learn from this and there there are elements that are dark in that well it also comes out of the devastation of world war one right the economic devastation the defeat the germans are in this terrible state overall in terms of their morale and then along comes this charismatic psychopath that is just really good at screaming to this day i don't speak german but to this day when you watch that guy scream and yell at all those people and see them respond it gives you chills like that kind of charisma

that kind of influence that someone has where they can do that in front of thousands and thousands of people and everyone's goose stepping and it's like to see we're very fortunate there's not something like that right now and our forefathers and our grandparents and whoever fought in world war ii if it wasn't for them who knows where this world would be right now because that was a literal evil empire straight out of star wars i mean that was like the sith lord Lord. They really were. They were human beings who were doing some of the most evil shit

that you could, almost demonic, if you really stopped and thought about it. If there were demons pretending to be people, they would do the same thing. I mean, that's why I think it's a rabbit hole because it's so hard to comprehend that a culture of educated individuals in that moment in time that

you talked about between world war ii world war one and world war ii could could completely become malevolent yeah that's one of the more disturbing things about the nazis was that there were so many of these people that they did extract through operation paperclip brilliant engineers and scientists that were also evil right like those two things are very uncomfortable for us we like to think of our scientists as being the people that are out there trying to solve the mysteries of the universe and provide us with the technology to make our life better here on earth not the nazis they were trying to figure out how to kill people better they were trying to figure out how to use rockets to shoot them at europe and blow people up and it is a it's one of the more telling

and horrific times in our history when you because it's it's one of the one of the more horrific ones that we have footage of because we don't have footage of have footage of. Because we don't have footage of Genghis Khan. We don't have footage of Alexander the Great. We have stories and tales of Napoleon and some photographs and drawings of dictators, past and present. But we have a lot of footage from Vietnam. We have a lot of footage from World War II. We have a lot of footage from modern wars. And out of all of them

the one that scares us the most scares me the most is world war ii do you think those scientists when they came here because this is a this is i could not figure this out even after writing that whole book is do you think they came here and actually thought about what they had done or they were able to convince themselves that they were the good germans that they were part of it because i never saw a single bit of remorse ever like no one ever acknowledged what they had done so it made me wonder i guess results vary right i mean i think there's probably two people that go through the same thing and one person has no problem with it and the other person literally can't sleep.

I don't know. It's a good question. It would be interesting to interview them. The ones who've been caught, who've been prosecuted and have been chased down, they've got one fairly recently. They caught a Nazi just a few months ago. It was one of the last ones. He was in his 90s, I believe.

like just a few months ago. It was one of the last ones. He was in his 90s, I believe. The ones who survived, they all tell different stories. And some of them say they just were following orders. And some of them say that they didn't do it. They're being framed.

They all have different stories.'s it's one of them you know you write a book about that and or you think about it and you kind of have you go down the rabbit hole and then you have to you have to ask yourself what does this mean or you kind of it's too dark right and so i asked that question to a auschwitz survivor, okay, who I wrote about in the book. His name was Gerhard Moschowski. And the reason he survived Auschwitz was because he was taken over to the labor camp, which was called Buna. So it was a rubber factory. And it was led by this truly evil man named Otto Ambrose, who became part of Operation Paperclip, okay?

man named Otto Ambrose, who became part of Operation Paperclip. After being tried at Nuremberg and being convicted of mass murder and genocide, we got him out and he worked for us. You've got to read the story. It's just astonishing. Otto Ambrose. He was a chemist. Gerhard was at Buna, this factory, this rubber factory. And he lived. And I did an interview with him because I was asking him, you know, the flip side of all of that.

And his whole family was killed at Auschwitz. And I said to him, what is any of, you know, we went through all these questions to try to get some closure to this or some meaning. And I said, and then we landed on, I said, you know, we couldn't, we couldn't answer what does this mean, right? What does it mean for today? Couldn't answer. So when I asked him, what matters about all this? He went like this. He lifted up his sleeve and he showed me his tattoo and he said that matters and i have that image seared in my mind i had never seen a tattoo from auschwitz before and i have not since and it also made me think because i thought he's gonna die soon and he has died since and then that tattoo is gone. So all you have is the exchange of information and people talking about it.

Yeah. The eyewitnesses die. How did they get that guy out of Nuremberg? How did they get them to release him? Well, okay, so he was convicted in Nuremberg. Then he went to prison. He went to the prison where we had all the... They didn't execute him?

No, no. I mean, obviously. They executed like the top Nazis, and then a lot of these guys went to prison. So there was a bunch of trials. And so I went to the prison. I saw his cell. I mean, in Germany. It was intense, Landsberg prison.

And then we, because we were sort of policing Nazi Germany after it was not, you know, after the war was over. We were policing Germany. Because we were sort of policing Nazi Germany after the war was over. We were policing Germany. And then a guy named McCoy was in charge. He was kind of like the governor general of Germany. And the Germans wanted Germany back. And they were like, we're tired of you guys policing us. The threat from the Russians was very real.

And so deals were made. I mean mean I write about all this in paperclip you know based on the documents and one of the provisions was we want our guys out of prison we want them back in society and that was arranged and again you don't even know these things you know they're like

but that was and then Otto Ambrose and they you know they're like but that was and then Otto Ambrose and they even gave him his money back that was astonishing and the family still has this villa um in Switzerland I believe or maybe it's the Bavarian Alps um that had been in the family which is money from you know from from Nazi Germany and I I called up the son to interview him. He was not as forthright as Dr. Blum's son. And he hung up on me and said, if you ever contact me again,

they have very serious privacy laws in Germany. I thought about going and knocking on his front door. My lawyer was like, Annie, do not do that. They have very different laws in Germany. For privacy? Yes. Even if you're the son of a Nazi. Yes, absolutely.

Well, I would imagine, look, if he didn't do anything, he shouldn't be responsible for what his father did. No, but he has the villa. That was the point. Right. He had all the money. Right. And he got that money from his father who got that money from stealing it from people. Yes.

During World War II. Yes. Yeah, like what happens there. Yes. from stealing it from people during World War II. Yes. Yeah, like what happens there. Yes.

But if you go back to that, we should really find out who had the plantations in America and who benefited from that. Go several generations from there. I mean, you could get weird with war. Reparations are big. With evil deeds where people profited. Yeah. I mean, which is sometimes a reason why I realize in looking at these, in reporting these books, which is why certain things are kept secret.

I mean, they open up a whole can of worms about reparations. Sure. You know. Yeah. Wow. Was Operation Paperclip, writing that book, was that one of the most disturbing ones for you? That was dark. I mean, that was so dark.

My husband is amazing. He's Norwegian, right? And Norway was occupied by the Nazis for five years. People kind of forget that. But he grew up there, and his mom was a grade schooler and was really impacted, like didn't go to school for five years while the Nazis were there. They were going to breed with the Norwegians

because they were such lovely Aryan people, right? So my husband, having a Norwegian mom, was like, when I was writing paperclip, it would be so dark sometimes. I would be like, down in my office, like, I can't, you know, honey, I can't, you know, ah, and he'd be down there with a sandwich or coffee and he'd say, but are you throwing another Nazi under the bus? And I would say, yes. And he'd say, keep typing, right? And then I realized, well, wait a minute. The neutral journalist has to really make sure that she's not just throwing Nazis under the bus without really good reason. And so when I was in Germany at the archives, I went to Dachau, the concentration camp, and I

asked the lead archivist if I could come and see the worst possible photographs that no one wants to see. And he said, absolutely. And I didn't write about them in the book because I didn't want to subject people to that kind of horror. But I looked at them and I watched, I saw with my own eyes, people moments before they were killed, you know, and then the bodies afterwards. And these are in human experiments to, you know, and then the bodies afterwards. And these are in human experiments to, you know, to see whether or not pilots could survive height or, you know, they simulated different things in chambers at high altitude or speed. And I saw, I saw photographs of, you know, freezing people to death, right? Because they were trying to develop programs

where they would, they wanted to see at what temperature humans actually death, right? Because they were trying to develop programs where they would, they wanted to see at what temperature humans actually died, right? And so they experimented on Jews. These are some of the doctors that came on our programs. And I looked at that evidence, and that blew me away. And then I knew when I left there, okay, I can throw these Nazis under the bus. It's such a crazy time in history where you really stop and think about all the different experiments that they did do. It's almost like they just opened up the vault of evil that said, listen, we have an opportunity.

These people aren't people. Let's do whatever we want. It's like they're fake people. It's like they were an invention. I mean, the perception really played into it. It's so gross. It's so scary to think about that humans just, you know, a generation or two away are capable of doing that. Yes.

And so I think when it all comes around full circle to all these government programs I write about, is that idea of an evil enemy, right? I mean, we talked about that earlier when you brought up Khashoggi, right? I mean, you know, people often say to me, and these are sources, they're like, Annie, Saudi Arabia is the root of all evil. I mean, I hear that constantly. And why are they our ally? Why are we protecting them? Oil.

Right, yes. Pretty simple. Money and influence in the Middle East and to have an ally over there. And it's why I think the benefit of, you know, people often say to me, why do you write these 500-page books? Well, because, I mean, hopefully they're interesting, and I do know they're interesting because I got this great email, Joe, the other day from a reader.

And he said, Annie, I'm a truck driver. And my whole life, people have tried to tell me I'm stupid. But I drive around in my truck and I listen to your books. I read the audio on my books. And he said, now I know I'm really smart.

Okay, he's stupid. That guy's ridiculous. Your whole life, everyone's telling you you're stupid, and then you read some books and go, now I know I'm smart. Well, he, oh, come on. Give him some space, right? Anybody who says they're smart doesn't get any space. I think he was making a point that he has the ability to listen, right?

Maybe he's not the world's greatest reader. That's how I took it. Are your books available? I'm just joking about this guy, obviously. But are your jokes available in audio form? Yeah, I read all my books. Oh, that's great. I love that.

I get bummed out when someone reads a book. But my friend Graham Hancock had a really good point. He's like, not my fiction books, because he writes fiction books as well. He's like, my fact-based books, I read myself, but fiction, I hire an actor. I'm like, that's a good move. Nice. Because then you've got to do voices and inflection and all that other stuff. No, it's amazing to read them.

I mean, because you really also feel like later on down the road you connect with people. Sure, yeah. And then people that are hearing you right now, they'll hear that same voice when they get your audio book. And because I write things that are so at the edge of conspiratorial thinking, right? Right. There's a certain sense of, oh, there's a real human there, right? This is not government propaganda. Right, right.

in there right this is not government propaganda right um and i can relate to this and i can hopefully i don't want to say trust but i can recognize an authenticity right yes of working with sources when you were done with the paperclip book and you know you you published it and you have to live with all the information that you had to gather and run through your mind. Did that book, was that the book, did that change you, that book? Like, was it the most altering of the different subjects that you covered? I mean, each book has a huge impact for different reasons. But when I think of paperclip, I think of this one saying that was over the gates at Buchenwald. And it said, Yadam das Zeina.

And what that means is everyone gets what they deserve. And that was horrible. And I still think about that because it's such a piece of Nazi propaganda. It was like saying to the Jews, you guys deserve this. It's such a piece of Nazi propaganda. It was like saying to the Jews, you guys deserve this. And so I know much of my reporting and my generalist way of being as a human is there's no such thing as what you deserve, right? There's what happens. There's what you do.

There's what you're responsible for. And there's what you can change. But that idea is reprehensible. and there's what you can change but there's that idea is reprehensible for some reason that really stuck with me as the as just the worst possible thing that i could think of jesus because it's the psychology behind why they did what they did yes this is the dehumanizing but the weird thing is that that was less than 100 years ago that seems like that should have been something that took place if you hear about the inquisition you go okay well that makes people didn't know any better back then but 1945 is not that long ago it's just not

i mean people people just read and read and read about world war ii for good reason you know and everything i write starts it all goes back to the nazis and every book i the the trail the paper trail at the national archives or individual university libraries and people's papers where i go they all refer back to that because it was so remarkable that the nazis led in weapons technology and they almost took over the world because of it, right? And that is the premise of all of this. I mean, in Surprise, Kill, Vanish, it's like these are the guys on the ground. In the Pentagon's brain, it's this is the technology in the sky.

But we must, we, the government's position, whether it's Pentagon, CIA, is always we have to stay ahead because the next Nazi Germany is right around the corner. And that's really something to think about. Is that alarmist? I don't think it is. History repeats itself. I mean, if we went and stopped and looked at all the instances throughout history of people being evil dictators, there's quite a few.

And there's, you know, we could look at North Korea right now. And that guy assassinated his own uncle, right? With a, what was that? With a missile coming out of a helicopter, I think. Put him in a field. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's straight up messaging.

Yeah. Right? Which is another thing I think is interesting about the CIA's paramilitary program. It's all meant to remain plausibly deniable. It's supposed to be secret. Like we're not supposed to be giving out the message that we of the so that and that as someone who is really interested in transparency and people being educated and having information that always puts me in conflict with, you know, the government in essence, because I'm I'm like, we should know. But then you think about it. Well, the whole thing is you are not supposed to know because it's supposed to be just the hidden hand the president's hidden hand they call it what has to be this distinction that they have the ability to break the rules because it's how they protect us and that that's that's the rub right and the stories we hear are often the failures because those are the ones that get reported in the press there is a sense undergirding this narrative which i really like and i'm interested in and intrigued by is that the the successful operations you don't hear about because they are plausibly denied right yeah there's got to be a ton of them that went through

that you don't hear nothing about and your kids will hear about well we maybe when you think about protecting us from something like another nazi germany that's when people are willing to give up some of their freedoms they're willing to give up surveillance they're willing to give up and this is this is where things get real slippery right i mean also when you think about Russia, because all of this Cold War science, technology, operations, all of that was to beat back the Russians. Then the Russians go away and now they're back. The Russians are the master assassins and they do it through poisoning. I mean, look at Skirpal, right? I write in the book about a defector who came over in the 50s and said, I was an assassin for the KGB, and gave us

all kinds of information. It's fascinating to look at those documents and realize like, this is how it works. This is how it worked, you know, 60 years ago. And then you kind of see echoes of that of how it's working today. And you can only imagine the defectors or those who come over from the other side who we learn from and they just disappear into, I mean, they disappear as sort of the CIA's version of witness protection. the CIA's version of witness protection. Wow. Do you, because of the subject matter that you choose to write about, does this affect you as a human? Like, are you suspicious of everything now? Do you look at everything in terms of things that are happening in the news?

Do you try to look at the hidden mechanisms behind the scenes? I think the opposite. I really believe that information gives you a certain understanding of, like, the long view, right? It does not make me paranoid at all. In fact, the opposite. People often say, like, my God, the world's about to end. And I say, well, wow, you should really read about what it was like in 1959 or 1962 when we were really almost at war with the Russians. Thermonuclear war, right? That is essentially at bay for now, right? So I don't

know, maybe it's my personality, but I actually take comfort in the fact that what is happening now is sort of, as you just said, it's a bit of a rebranding in the modern era of what has always been there, which is rivals seeking supremacy over one another. You know, people trying to outfox the bad guys. What I think has changed is that the desire to prevent war has shifted. And that makes me upset because we used to sue for peace. We used to want a peaceful world. I mean, war was outlawed in 1928, right? And now we just, the military industrial complex is such that it's really a lot better for the Defense Department to be in a state of constant war because then you're in a state of constant weapons production.

And you can always be creating those vast weapon systems of the future for the next war that comes along. And that's troubling because those 18-year-old kids are the ones who get sent into the line of fire. What, if any, research have you done on artificial intelligence and robotics and autonomous weapons and the future of warfare, which a lot of people think is going to be like what we're seeing now in Yemen with drones, that we're going to be seeing that with robots on the ground, and that this will be the future? Huge amount for the book that i wrote called the pentagon's brain really impactful moment was going to los alamos when i went there to meet a darpa scientist who was working on an artificial brain

for darpa i mean this stuff is way artificial brain trying to create a system you know a free thinking system and what his name was garrett kenyon what he told me was just utterly fascinating because again that human thing i'm always after it's like what are you doing i mean leave the science you've had lots of guys on here i'll talk to you about the high technology elements but i'm interested in who's doing that who's creating that science and why and And he said to me, this is like where artificial intelligence is right now with scientists who are really looking into this. It's like Magellan, you know, like who will discover the new world? But on the idea of frightening artificial intelligence, he told me an interesting story about his daughter. And he said, people seem to think like,

you know, facial recognition software is like telling us that we're one step away from AI, true AI. And he said, he showed me on his iPhone, this was a couple of years ago, and how much trouble the iPhone had recognizing him, like if he put a hat on or if he made a funny face. And he said, my daughter can recognize me from across a baseball field, you know, if I have a

hat on, just by the way I walk, right? And he said, if she couldn't, there would be something really wrong with her. In other words, her human recognition abilities are truly intelligent. And that is a system of systems, a biological system of systems that no scientist has, you know, the algorithm for which no one has ever been able to figure out yet. And he believes that we're far away from that. But the Defense Department, on on the other hand is moving us in that direction and absolutely wants autonomous weapons to be fighting wars look there was a program that said um i quote this in the book it says the um the battle place is no place for humans whoa so drones are the way of the future. Right, but they're used to kill people. Which also means that the enemy is creating drone systems.

And pretty soon that's going to be a big issue. Yeah, that's the big fear. The big fear is that they're going to be the first ones to implement it. I mean, what scares you about AI? Everything. DARPA thinks AI could help troops telepathically control machines. Of course they do. Right.

And they probably can. I mean, they've already got cursors that people can move around that are paraplegic. They can move them around with their mind and their eyes. Yeah, I think there's going to be quite a few of those things. What is this, Jamie? They've already made this thing. This is called the Synapse. This is a – I'll read this thing.

It's the – This is a... I'll read this thing that's... DARPA-funded program to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels. More simply stated, it is an attempt to build a new kind of computer with similar form and function to the mammalian brain. Such artificial brains would be used to build robots whose intelligence matches that of mice and cats. Jesus Christ. Robot cats.

Robot cats coming to get us. Well, they created something called the RoboRat. That was the first biohybrid, right? So a biohybrid is when you mix an animal and a machine. And DARPA was doing that right before 9-11. And people freaked out. They were like, you cannot put brain chips in rats and make them move through a maze by a remote control,

which is what they were doing. And I interviewed the guys who were all working on this program before 9-11. And so the morality of the citizenry was like, no. Then 9-11 happened. And suddenly, all this money got pumped into DARPA to do anything they wanted. The morality issue went out the window, and they started creating all kinds of biohybrids as i write in the pentagon's brain so they put um they now have pigeons that are mixed you know animal and machine they created something called there's a moth so there's a mandica sexta moth that's what it's

called it's a large moth and science darpa scientists put brain chips into the larva, okay, so that when it cocooned and became a flying moth, it had the chip built into its system, making it easier to integrate, and they could fly the moth around the lab. And that was a huge step. And this is now four years ago that i was interviewing these scientists did you see any of this stuff i didn't see the moth but i i told you i saw that the the limb regeneration lab was a trip and this is all what was going on there well they were just cutting limbs off of salamanders and watching the limbs grow back right and examining that and saying well if a salamander can do this, so can we one day. And I said to them, but wait, that's impossible.

And they said, well, it's not actually because humans have, they broke, I love scientists who break it down into terms I can understand. It's like what Elon Musk did, you know? Right, because, and they said to me, you were once a single cell in your mother's womb and and then you were two, and then you were, right? So you can regenerate.

And that's their premise. I mean, these are the world's top scientists in regeneration. What is this, Jamie? It's the moth being stimulated by electrocurrents in its abdomen. So the stimulation of the electrocurrents they can cause it to go left or right is that it yeah i was looking up these biohybrid moths what was the thing that you threw your hands in your head like you were freaking out macaulay culkin and home alone this he was reading something he went oh yeah i typed in i started typing

biohybrid stuff and this is the first thing that popped up was this uh shrimp article yeah it says through they're going to test them through Olympic-themed events. Oh, my God. Look at this. DARPA MTO seeks innovative proposals for the development of micro-to-milli insect-scale robotic technology. Shrimp will develop and demonstrate through a series of Olympic-themed events, An acronym, probably. They love an acronyms. We'll develop and demonstrate through a series of Olympic-themed events, multifunctional MM to CM scale robotic platforms. So I guess that's millimeter to centimeter scale.

Robotic platforms with a focus on untethered mobility, maneuverability, and dexterity. To achieve this goal, shrimp will also provide foundational research in the area of microactuator materials and energy-efficient power systems for extremely swap, capital letter S, capital letter W, lowercase a, capital P, constrained microbiotic systems. It is expected such advances will be enabling for applications including search and rescue.

Yeah, right. Search and rescue. Disaster relief. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to help people. Hazardous environment inspection or killing motherfuckers with an evil nuclear bee. That's all you need is a nuclear bee that goes in your mouth it's always a search and rescue that goes in your mouth and blows up fuck that's crazy i mean they do all kinds of planning for the future

but the search and rescue thing is a it's a great sort of you know way in which to present darpa as doing all this great stuff. I interviewed DARPA scientists who said, look, Annie, we're able to send robots into Fukushima to twist the... Cores. Right? And yes, that is great, but that's far from the only thing it's being used for.

Yeah, they're trying to kill people. Yeah. But here's a trip. You want to hear? I mean, it gets... There are rabbit holes there because I've sourced all these documents and also interviewed generals at the Pentagon who were like, we don't like AI. We want this.

We want our guys on the ground. They believe in the human, the warrior, that concept. And so the generals were very opposed to it. DARPA took a vote and it was like, no AI. We want humans in the mix. And so what. DARPA took a vote, and it was like, no AI, we want humans in the mix. And so what did DARPA start doing? And the generals, they said, why don't you, why can't we go more autonomous? And the answer was, we don't trust the machines, okay? So right around that same time, what did DARPA start doing? It started looking into and hiring scientists who were working with how trust works in the brain, specifically with what is called the moral molecule. And it's this molecule in the ultimate going way back biology. Like you have to have a mother, a trusting mother to breastfeed in prehistory or otherwise you'd be eaten by, you'd be like, this is a bad idea.

I'm stopping to do this. I'm going to die. Right. And they began a program to work with that, to be able to give that to soldiers so that they trusted AI machines. And that's where I think you're getting into really spooky, dark, multi-levels of manipulation about what humans want versus what the Pentagon wants. Wow. want versus what the pentagon wants wow the worry about trusting the machine scares the shit out of me because that's what everyone's worried about when it comes to ai like that's what elon musk keeps warning people about that these things are going to have superhuman capabilities and they're going to be sentient and it's a matter of when absolutely so i i as the journalist said to myself well wait a minute if the the generals at the Pentagon, and that's a euphemism, meaning the actual guys that are in charge here don't want that, who does want this?

And where my research took me to was the group that wants that is what's called the Defense Science Board. And those are the individuals who are counseling the Pentagon in the manner in which they should proceed. And now those individuals are all sitting on the boards of the defense contractors. So you can really see how money drives the rubric. The generals don't want it. The humans don't want it. But guess who does? The people who stand to make the money creating the autonomous systems.

And that's exactly what Eisenhower warned us of in his farewell speech, you know, the military-industrial complex. And the other part of that speech, which people don't know as well, is that what he said, his antidote, Eisenhower said this, the antidote to the military industrial complex is an alert and knowledgeable citizenry. It's why I write my books. Because an alert and knowledgeable citizenry has the ability to kind of push back and go, but we don't want that. I think what we're worried about is Pandora's box, right, when it comes to AI. And we're worried that, first of all, if we're not the ones to open it, what if they open it? What if the Chinese open it? And obviously their technology is super super advanced i mean their electronic technology particularly their cell phones are cutting edge i mean apple and all these other

companies are struggling to try to keep up with huawei and these one fc or uh one um what is the One ST What is that one What is that big company That They just released some They just hired Robert Downey Jr. To give him millions of dollars OnePlus OnePlus 7 They have this new phone that doesn't have a front facing camera

You press a button and it slides out of the top They figured out a way to make the entire phone All screen and they're incredibly advanced in terms of their electronics we we deeply are concerned that they're going to be the ones that implement military autonomous sentient robotics before we do because then you can essentially you can launch them with no physical human cost on your side and i mean they they they're literally weapons of mass destruction if you have robots that can go over there and just kill people and and what they need for that is the world's fastest supercomputer right and what's interesting is that we just we america just overtook the chinese in having again having the world's

fastest supercomputer but they had it for a couple years and think about this okay because you were saying hard to believe the nazis were only you know not even like just in just in our grandfather's age right so go back in time to then listen to this about this really freaked me out in terms of progress right after the war a guy called john von Neumann got a grant from the Atomic Energy Commission to essentially build the world's first computer. I mean, they existed, but he built the first computer that could actually do calculations. Before that, calculations were done by calculators. Computers were humans. But there's this amazing story of von Neumann in the basement of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study where he built this computer with government funds.

And he, because he was a brilliant polymath, he could add faster than anyone around him. He's also the guy who calculated at what level the atomic bomb should explode over Hiroshima for the most blast. Because it didn't hit the ground, it wouldn't kill as many people. So this is how his mind worked. So he's faster than the computer. He has a pen and paper in front of him, and he can outperform the world's fastest computer with his own brain. Two and a half years into it, in like 1949, the computer beats him. And he made a statement then that said, one day, artificially intelligent machines will be the ruin of man. I mean, I'm paraphrasing. Yeah.

That was his prediction. But that was in 1949. In the 50s, Marshall McLuhan said that we are the sex organs of the machine world. I'm going to have to really think about that. That's a deep one. That is very deep. Yeah. That we are the propagators. We're the ones who are- We're the progenitors. Yeah that that's a deep one that is very deep yeah that we are the propagators

we're the ones who are your progenitors yeah that's it that's our baby we're gonna make that baby and then we're gonna die most likely that's gonna be the new living thing who said that marshall mccluhan okay yeah just stop and think about that. Figuring that out in the 50s. Just looking around and going, oh, we're giving birth to these things. But I have a question for you then on that morality issue, right? Which is, if man has always been a warring animal, right?

Van has always been a warring animal, right? Why do we look so down upon the throat, you know, the knife to the throat? And why do we as a society accept drone strikes? Because that's the whole question I ask in Surprise Kill Vanish. And I'm not sure I answered it to my own satisfaction because it's such a complicated question. Well, one of them is very personal. The other one is like a video game. You know, to stab someone, to look them in the eye and shove a knife through their ribs, that's a, it takes a different kind of person and we don't think we want that person around us.

Interesting. You think it's a proximity issue? Oh, it's, it's just different you know one of them is throwing a rock at someone that's nowhere near you the other one is beating a guy to death when he's right in front of you they're one it's very personal when you see someone struggling and we don't like to think that someone can put that aside and still twist that blade we don't want that we don't want that on our side we don't want our people to be noble and just and but meanwhile when it comes to

civilian casualties drones are one of the worst invention ever in human history if we really want to examine ourselves in terms of efficacy and the moral moral high ground in terms of engagement like launching missiles at apartment buildings because you found metadata in there that indicates that most likely an al-qaeda operative has a cell phone in that building like that that's some shit that people have done i mean that has been done and the casualty rate for civilians when it comes to drone strikes for innocent civilians is stunning i think it's in the high 80 percent i think that's we've done this before right haven't we i think it's some it's it's a disturbing i might be conservative by saying it's in the 80s it might be in thes. It's a disturbingly high number of people who died who were not the intended target.

Right. Which would be an argument that- For the blade. For the blade. Yeah, the blade is you know who you're stabbing. And that that warrior is going in there aware that he too might die. What do you got, Jamie? What's that face?

3%? 3% what? That's what this says. That's horseshit. I know. Who released that? Maybe 3% accuracy. No, I know there's been some serious discussions among scholars about this.

That's not true. Whatever you're reading, that can't be right. Maybe it's one operation was 3%. Just to throw this out there, because there is that big debate. I mean, CIA paramilitary army, tiny. Defense department, huge. CIA using either ground operators or drones. Defense department, I read the statistic the other day, 7,200 and change bombs dropped on Afghanistan last year.

I mean, people don't even realize we're still 7,000. Are they just practicing? Here it goes. President Donald Trump revoked a requirement that U.S. intelligent officials publicly report the number of civilian kills in drone strikes and other attacks on terrorist targets outside of war zones. Oh, so we're going to get shit information now. kills in drone strikes and other attacks on terrorist targets outside of war zones oh so we're going to get shit information now but pull up 2017 i don't know that it might be gone you

have to find well you got to really look hard to get that statistic there's an inspector general who covers afghanistan right for the government he looks at all the statistics and by the way this administration just canceled his job so we will no longer have that information but he's the one that is in charge of reporting that because it's called the reconstruction effort right but that number of bombs really makes you think long and hard or at least me about you know the big footprint versus the small um operation um and i again i think this is why most people don't want to talk about this because it's a dark rabbit hole to go down you know it really is people prefer to believe that we're just safe and sound here and not not at risk and i mean that's that's the endless question of

are these are these threats real and must they be dealt with? Well, it's very hard for people to be 100% aware of something they're not experiencing, right? And right now, we're not experiencing a war currently in our neighborhoods, but yet it is happening overseas, and the United States technically is involved in these wars. And I think that right now we're not experiencing sentient robots running through streets murdering people but that could happen we're not experiencing Nazi Germany anymore we we've got past that we'd like to assume that that's in the past but if you just looked at the vast amount of history that's dedicated to atrocities that are committed by armies against their enemies, it seems like that's just what people do.

It seems it's a part of what people do. And if there is a real technological race in order to develop autonomous, sentient robots that are capable of killing people, we should be fucking horrified. And who are you most afraid of? China? China, 100%. They keep outperforming us in that supercomputer, which is frightening. They also have a total integration of their government and their industry.

Everything is connected. It's not like us. They'll play the long game. They're strategic in their ability to plan for things and not have them be currently profitable. They don't have to operate on a bottom line like someone who's beholden to stock owners. And they don't have an informed public. Yes, at all. I mean, they have Google censorship.

I mean, they convinced Google to go over there. I was talking to an executive at Google and they were saying essentially we're willing to let them censor because we know we're gonna they're gonna just they're gonna do what they want to do anyway they're gonna copy all of our information and just redo Google in like we think at least this way we will protect our interest by being over there I'm like do you know how crazy that sounds you're gonna let the chinese government help you're gonna help them censor people on an interesting note of that in the mirror all my books are published in china whoa like the darpa book they were right on that they had that translated into chinese i have a copy of it it's spooky it's like you see the pentagon all this chinese writing i don't understand a word of it except for my own name right wow but it's like wow they

are reading they're reading us of course you know anything i mean there's nothing that makes us look bad there's an interesting story about the freedom of information act and iran which came to mind with this new activity in iran which is that they filed a foia to get all the information that that we had on iran and the government went to went very high up in the judicial system to say we're not going to release this information to them even though they had the right to have it because it would benefit them well you've got to pull up jim i found a couple of better information. I might have misread that. It said something I just found

showed something like only 2% are the high target strike, or the targets. That's what I meant. And the rest would be children, civilians, but other combatants too. They might be other soldiers. Part of the reason I've got to get rid of that, sorry. Part of the

reason on why the strikes, things have changed Is because the Trump administration Has carried out way more than the Obama administration Ever did over eight years Well, I think Trump basically told the military You know what you're doing, just go do it I mean, he basically let them just Run the military

Instead of having the same sort of oversight That other presidents insisted upon And the military people like him for that and people aren't focused or interested in drone strikes anymore they're more interested in the wall in watching the the battle and the yeah the conflict and the name calling and the shouting it's like it's like throwing rocks without warfare you know while china's making robots to kill us. Absolutely. No. Right? No. Chinese people, please be nice. This was the thing I found. What does this say?

Okay. U.S. drone strikes fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria have killed at least 1,257 civilians. According to the Pentagon, air wars estimate the number to be as great as 7,500. Just this year only. Yeah, just this year. As of January. Yeah, they're doing a weird thing they are shooting people from a remote location with a robot that all came to be by the way right after

9-11 i mean when whenever we get attacked it's like pearl harbor you know suddenly there is a massive swing of what civilians what the citizenry will tolerate. And for Surprise Kill Vanish, I interviewed, I told your lawyer, John Rizzo, who wrote what was called the September 17th Memorandum of Notification. And it gave presidential powers to the degree which had not been seen since, you know, the worst part of the Cold War. And Congress rode off on that. In fact, what Rizzo told me is the gang of eight that are in charge of, you know, the intelligence committees in Congress said, is this enough?

And that's where the drones became such a big issue because the idea of preemptive neutralization, the idea we're going to take out bad guys, you know, we should have taken out bin Laden and we didn't. We're going to now do that preemptive neutralization, the idea, we're going to take out bad guys, you know, we should have taken out bin Laden, and we didn't. We're going to now do that preemptively. And it set off, it set us on this entirely different course, which continues to this day, although it's fallen out of the news, which is, let's strike someone before they strike us. And it's such an interesting chicken or the egg, because, you know, yes, you have civilians dying. And yes, you have more terrorists being created.

On the other hand, do you really want the Pentagon dropping 7,400, 300, 200 bombs on Afghanistan in any given year? And it seems so detached. Whereas if you sent someone over there to assassinate these guys with a knife you would think of that i don't want that person in my neighborhood that person is willing to stab somebody and what are the unintended consequences of that and we never even know you know i'll tell you an interesting story that's not in the book which is that billy waugh showed me a number of plans that he had presented because because sometimes the operators are asked, like, what do you think we should do? And it doesn't mean we do it.

It's just that those plans get sent up the chain of command, and then it comes back. So he said, he showed me these drawings. They were going to go kill Chavez, right? This is when Bush was in power. And, you know, he was, like, teaming up with Ahmadinejad, and he was a really bad guy, you know, he was like teaming up with Ahmadinejad and he was really bad guy, you know, a threat to us. And so the plan was to halo in, take the team down, go kill Chavez and vanish. And the plans got rejected.

They were like, no way, we are not doing this, according to Billy Wah. Well, Billy Wah said to me recently, I mean, thank God we didn't do that. Can you imagine if we had? We would be blamed right now for everything that is going on in venezuela it's a really interesting point i mean who has to make that decision i'm glad it's not me can you imagine no yes kill this guy but don't kill that guy that's a good idea yeah it's intense and it's the world we live in that we don't discuss and we don't think about because it doesn't affect our daily lives in terms of like it's not something that's unavoidable. What are you making judgments about? What are you for or against? And why? Are you really, are you really, do you want that opinion? I mean, I think that's so interesting and important.

And discuss it with your children, you know. And let people have, my favorite expression is, just as long as you don't make me do it. You know, I'm pretty tolerant of other people's opinions about things. Don't force me into it yeah but this stuff impacts all of us it really does it really does are the robots going to be taking over your show joe no no well they probably could to a certain extent i don't think robots are currently capable of spontaneous humor. Right?

That's the only thing saving a person like me. There's nothing funny about a drone. No, not yet. But what is the difference between wetware and hardware and silicon-based interactions? Like if there's a computer that can beat the greatest chess masters and they have it, and then the greatest Go master now, too, which they thought was even more complex, people just get destroyed by these computers now. Like what makes us think that creativity is so unique and special? I think what separates us really is our biological instincts and that these are things that are programmed into our DNA over thousands of years of survival. That these are the things you have to worry about.

This is the information we have. And act on that. That's our intuition. Trust. You know, should I trust? Should I not? And you take that out of the equation, really bad things could happen. I worry. I worry that we're creating a thing that's going to surpass us.

But I think that that's inevitable. I mean, if I was a chimp and I was worried about becoming a person, I should probably, you know, seem silly. It's inevitable. You want to hear the scariest AI story I know? Oh. It's old, right? Should we dim the lights?

No. Turn the candle on? But it's from like the early days. Gather around children. This is like early days of DARPA. Okay. And this is when we were really seriously afraid that the Russians were going to send, you know, a hundred thermonuclear warheads at Washington and take out the whole country. Okay.

So DARPA sets up this station at the top of the world to monitor the Soviet launch so that, you know, because it only takes 24 minutes for an ICBM to get from the launch pad in Russia to hit New York or Washington. Okay? So we set up this station up there and to monitor this

so we would have some kind of a jump on this. Okay? Like we'd learn at about eight minutes, my God, it was a radar station. That station called the BEMU site or J site is connected to the NORAD station in Cheyenne Mountain, the one from the movies, right? And it's like the first week of business

and the guys that are sitting there in the station looking for the alert are sitting there and they've been trained like the alerts never go off and all of a sudden the alerts go from one two three four number five is end game okay so the information that the technicians are getting is now 1 000 soviet thermonuclear missiles are on their way to Washington, D.C. with 99.9% certainty. Actual story, okay? The guy panics, but he trusts. He says, wait a minute, you know, because he's supposed to now give the launch code. Let's try and get the generals on the phone. They can't get the Pentagon general in charge of NORAD. They get a Canadian guy named General Sleeman. And Sleeman, you know,

my God, should we launch? Should we launch? Sleeman's like, wait a minute. Human thought, he remembered that the night before, he thought he saw Khrushchev on TV at the UN, you know, he's famously banging his shoe. And he says, where's Khrushchev right now? They check. He's in New York City. Why would the Soviets send 1000 nuclear weapons our way while their own leader is in New York? They said, I don't know, sir, but the radar returns are reporting this. And so someone had the idea at that BEMU site to go outside.

And lo and behold, what was there? A big, full moon. A big, full moon. The system was reading the moon moving and misinterpreted it as a thousand nuclear, thermonuclear ICBMs coming. Jesus Christ. And they didn't launch. So we came that close to the end of the world?

I mean, and it's an astonishing story. The documents are now declassified. But it is an actual indication of why that element of human intervention, why trust, why other information like, oh, I think I saw Khrushchev on the TV last night is so important. Because the machine said with 99.9% certainty, this is happening. We must launch in retaliation. True story. Annie, you freaked me out. Thank you.

Thank you for everything. Thank you for the books. Thank you for your talk here with us. Your new book, which is Surprise, Kill, Vanish, Area 51, which I will read. I promise you, I will read it. And if people want to get a hold of you on social media what is your what's your Annie Jacobson is it as well

on Instagram Twitter okay alright thank you Annie I really appreciate it thank you so much for having me it was fun

thank you woo Thank you.