Something Scary Is Happening In Biolabs - Annie Jacobsen
CChris Williamson
Cold & Flu/DiseasesBusiness NewsEnvironment
Transcript
00:00:00last time we talked was about how we could blow ourselves to death and this time we're talking
00:00:04about how we could infect ourselves to death which one's scary a nuclear war or biological war
00:00:10it's equally scary in completely different ways i think you know with nuclear war the response to
00:00:18that was so many people calling me up and saying like okay i read your book i just want to die
00:00:22instantly biological war is tricky and scary because you don't have to die instantly and then
00:00:34you have to wonder i wish i did that's the sort of bad news first that is there any good news with
00:00:43biological there is because it can be prevented i mean unlike nuclear war which is like a just an
00:00:50event that happens without warning it's literally called an event without warning
00:00:54biological war is event with warning and that warning window it's literally like 12 24 36
00:01:04hours max but that is the window of time when something can be done why do you think biological
00:01:09warfare receives so little public attention compared with nuclear war yeah i mean terrific question for
00:01:16starters biological war is illegal biological weapons are illegal and yet biological weapons exist including
00:01:26now today 21st century genetically modified biological weapons for extreme transmission hyper virulence
00:01:36and designed to defeat existing vaccines and countermeasures but it's illegal so no one has them except for they do
00:01:46is there something about it being invisible as well there's no smoke in the sky
00:01:50i mean that's what makes it incredibly sinister i think it's invisible it's silent and when
00:01:56you really just think of this simple idea that a biological weapon any pathogen really is a living munition
00:02:04it's alive and it's a bullet with a mind of its own and it's like with itself reproducing and so
00:02:13it's just go once it gets unleashed do you think bioweapons are the most underappreciated existential risk
00:02:21of the modern world well i came across this chart in the dod that really freaked me out when i was
00:02:27reading when i was working on nuclear war and it's like the weapons of mass destruction wmd threat
00:02:33spectrum and of course nuclear weapons are like at the far end of the worst most destructive but biological
00:02:41weapons are a very close second and even more frightening they are considered the most likely to occur
00:02:49and therefore the most dangerous and this has to do with you know laboratories doing defensive research
00:02:57on biological weapon countermeasures so there this is where you get really into a lot of
00:03:04you know sort of catch-22 very politicized debates which we're going to stay away from and just
00:03:12talk about it as like a or at least i am you know because it should no one should be for
00:03:18biological war what surprised you most about comparing the two nuclear war and biowar
00:03:29well equally shocked in in two lanes so nuclear war remember when craig fugate who's obama's former
00:03:36fema director told me that there is no plan for population protection in the event of a strategic
00:03:44nuclear attack because everyone will be dead i mean that was stunning to me because this is coming from
00:03:48the guy in charge of it equally stunning is that there is a plan for protection in the event of
00:03:57biological war but it's not for the population it's not for you and me it's for the government
00:04:03it's for a tiny group of government officials that will live out the attack or the incident by the
00:04:12way it doesn't have to be an attack it can be an accident but this is super creepy and people should
00:04:18definitely know about it and be very upset when they do let's start to creep people out there okay
00:04:23starting at the beginning how did we learn to engineer biotechnology what's the story yeah
00:04:29yeah i mean people talk about crisper now and you know the crisper cast sort of gene editing that's pretty
00:04:35much third or fourth generation gene editing so this the origin story of gene editing is 1971 in a
00:04:44laboratory in stanford at stanford university in stanford california and a nobel laureate named paul berg
00:04:52he won the nobel laureate for the work he did figured out how to create what is called a chimera
00:05:00pathogen so mix chimera is like that ancient greek idea of a monster made up of two different parts
00:05:07and berg figured out how to create recombinant dna that is the real fundamental word for gene editing
00:05:15and that was way back in 1971 recombinant recombining absolutely okay it's just like it sounds so much of
00:05:21this is just like it sounds okay you know and that's where it all began and you know then then there's
00:05:27the short and long version of how we got where we are now what's the argument for doing genetic
00:05:33engineering the argument like all dual use technology is like you can use it to heal you can use it to
00:05:41harm i mean this is true of every technology going back to when humans invented or discovered fire right you can
00:05:50like cook your meat and not get trichinosis or you can burn down the next tribes
00:05:57you know over um every every technology has that same component and so with with bioengineering the idea
00:06:05is and certainly now very specifically to where we are today is about okay we we will work with dangerous
00:06:13pathogens to genetically modify them so that if a dangerous pathogen is released we will know how
00:06:24to create a medical countermeasure for it you see the chicken and the egg and the catch 22 offense and
00:06:31defense are contained within the same system absolutely and this is where huge divides occur and this is where
00:06:39the term called gain of function which you know 99.99 of the planet had never heard of until the coveted
00:06:48pandemic because now becomes such a hot button issue gain of function is literally like it sounds you work to
00:06:57genetically modify a pathogen to give it new functions to you know so that it gains function and the idea of
00:07:05that is that okay just in case someone releases a biological weapon we will know how to go up against it
00:07:11and this is the big debate about covet which do you think that covet from a
00:07:20biological weapons safety pandemic standpoint do you think that was kind of an important thing to
00:07:28happen in some ways do you think it was a positive or a negative i mean that's you know it did happen
00:07:35and here we are now and i think the separate from what anyone thinks about you know natural origin versus
00:07:42lab leak the two most important lessons of covet is one that we are extremely ill prepared for a pandemic
00:07:52despite the fact that in the u.s billions of dollars are spent every year to to deal with exactly that
00:07:58kind of thing um that's the first lesson and the second lesson is that the pandemic completely fractured
00:08:09public trust around science around public health officials uh around politicians and so this fracturing
00:08:20is incredibly dangerous and i believe is also where the solution lies i mean that's like a real long
00:08:26stretch to try to get there but it must happen because it is such a dangerous position and if we really
00:08:31get into it and eventually talk about the russians biological weapons program of the cold war
00:08:37uh upon which some of the the pathogen that gets deployed in my scenario is built then you're really
00:08:42looking at the idea of soviet russia was to ruin america to gut america by creating by fracturing public trust
00:08:54the thing that's crazy covet feels really uh symbolic i think of covet is basically a vaccine that went
00:09:06wrong covet itself was a vaccine that went wrong because we could have been given the a small non-fatal
00:09:12dose of a future risk that would have alerted us to all of the ways that we were ill prepared so that we
00:09:18could be better prepared for it in future but because of the way that institutions and the medical industry
00:09:25and communication and lockdown and trust were all degraded and and really really damaged you're right
00:09:32it's done two things at once it's taught people what a super spreader event is it helps us to understand
00:09:38the importance of masking and ventilators it's reminded us how ill prepared we are all of those things
00:09:43should prepare us better for the one in future however the current if there was a pandemic that
00:09:51got released tomorrow the amount of pushback from the populace would be huge because nobody has trust
00:09:57for any more jared can you do a search for me please search um toby ord ord the precipice
00:10:07risk chart it should be an image and um this is the thing that's insane the fact that we were so ill
00:10:14prepared i'm pretty sure that the precipice came out in 2019 uh so before covid and in order to write
00:10:21the book and to have the research and to be able to get to the stage where yeah top left that's it
00:10:24that's that's the one existential uh catastrophic risk via asteroid or comet super volcano stellar
00:10:31explosion so natural risk it says chance within the next 100 years one in 10 000 that's of all of them
00:10:36stellar explosion is that one in a billion one in a billion uh so we we should be safe from that nuclear war
00:10:43one in one thousand climate change one in one thousand other environmental damage one in one thousand
00:10:49naturally arising pandemics one in ten thousand now we get into the real shit engineered pandemics
00:10:55one in 30 30 in the next hundred years unaligned artificial intelligence one in ten
00:11:00unforeseen anthropogenic risks one in 30 sets unknown unknowns and other anthropogenic risks that's
00:11:05a catch-all bucket total anthropogenic risk over the next 100 years a one in six chance and
00:11:12this is the difference between what was the word you used global catastrophic risk global okay so
00:11:18the difference i think between global catastrophic risk and existential risk so existential risk is
00:11:23categorized as permanent yeah unrecoverable collapse permanent unrecoverable collapse because
00:11:31nuclear war as a proper x-risk it's usually pretty easy to recover from there is a way that
00:11:37you can recover from it as a civil as a civilization like to get everybody with nuclear weapons that would
00:11:44need to be set in the sky that would need to be you because you only need like 500 or a thousand humans
00:11:50and then you're able to come back the bioweapon thing is even scarier because that is able to make
00:11:57every person it is a bullet with legs that can self-replicate i wrote biological war a scenario not
00:12:04biological war the only scenario and in my acknowledgements part of the book i mention
00:12:10how in some of my interviews and i'm talking about like with david relman sort of top level white house
00:12:16advisor to many presidents told me about pathogens that literally can do exactly that and i made that
00:12:24decision not to go with that kind of a threat although you know the case fatality rate of the plague weapon
00:12:32that is engineered in the scenario i write is a hundred percent case fatality rate so if you get it
00:12:38you die okay but there are i won't get too far ahead of the weeds but that chart is amazing yeah and it really
00:12:46is kind of on point of what we're talking about here and i love your analogy that covet is theoretically or
00:12:52philosophically yes you know sort of a medical countermeasure gone wrong correct what it is
00:12:58because if you think about it as it was a poison of the mind as well it could have been a cautionary
00:13:04tale the case fatality rate on covet was one in a hundred that is a lot of people died but that's not
00:13:12at the level of what an engineered pathogen is most bioengineered pathogens are designed
00:13:19to move toward 100 case fatality rate if you get it you die who were the first people to start using
00:13:27this as a weapon because obviously you've got recombinant dna we've opened up this entire world
00:13:32this technology who were the first people to really turn it on an industrial scale into becoming a
00:13:39weaponized threat that was the soviets right so backing up once first of all in the cold war
00:13:45we had biological weapons programs the u.s had a robust biological weapons program offensive and
00:13:51defensive i've written about it in other books so did russia uh the soviet union in 1969 president
00:13:59nixon renounced america's biological weapons program entirely for reasons that are debated doesn't matter
00:14:05that was it it's over destroy them all took 219 weeks to destroy a treaty was signed around the
00:14:11world the bwc biological weapons convention treaty biological weapons are too dangerous they're called
00:14:19repugnant to the conscience of mankind in the preamble right so it's this very lofty idea that like
00:14:26you know we will not do this and everybody signed the treaty and not including the soviets including
00:14:33the soviets fucking soviets and in now we know because of a defector and i get into this in the
00:14:38book because it's very interesting i interviewed the british um intelligence officer who first found
00:14:44out about the whole soviet program not until the late 80s did america did the cia did british intelligence
00:14:51have any idea that the soviets had this colossal program they stole our recombinant dna technology
00:14:59i mean good old ip theft back in the in the 70s and they were the china of the 70s and they began this
00:15:06biological weapons program they called it our manhattan project and we had no idea now bring us to the
00:15:13present day just to deal with some facts about who has biological weapons according to the state
00:15:19department russia has a biological weapons program this is on the record and this is a pretty big deal
00:15:26and their position is that the soviet program was not dismantled as had been promised when the wall
00:15:33came down but rather absorbed and the state department has the same position about north north korea
00:15:42that they have a robust biological weapons program and then their position on china and iran is they
00:15:48are questionable which is like euphemism subtext for they have biological weapons programs has the
00:15:54state department admitted to having them themselves we do not have a biological weapons program how much
00:16:00do you believe that officially officially but but okay but well let me just say this what we do have
00:16:10and what we have had in the past is a defensive program and so i've interviewed i interview some
00:16:19really interesting people for this book including like the top dogs in this world okay and and people
00:16:26who run war games at the pentagon for how this would go down and most people in the business of preventing
00:16:33biological war in the united states believe that gain of function is evil that word was used with me and
00:16:42and and and have also said gain of function is a euphemism for
00:16:49biological weapons engineering how many people are opposed to enhanced interrogation and yet guantanamo
00:16:55base still happened you know i i think what and this this speaks to the the the lack of trust right in
00:17:02absolutely in in government that and also there's a bit of me that thinks i want to be on the side that
00:17:09has them i don't want to be on the side that doesn't have them i'm aware that there can be lab leaks i'm
00:17:13aware bsl 3 and 2 and you know if one guy's got a gun i want a gun the issue with the biological weapons
00:17:24is that nuclear weapons
00:17:29take out biological weapons nuclear weapons and in fact there are secretive this is this is not annie
00:17:39reporting classified information this is annie speculating in the affirmative i'm not going to
00:17:44put the nose on i'm going to go go full with this right no no no i mean this is like um so new there
00:17:52have been moments when there have been leaks that is understood that the defense department is trying
00:17:59to get a presidential emergency directive to be allowed to use nuclear weapons preemptively
00:18:06against a biological a known biological weapons facility and whenever this gets leaked it causes an
00:18:12uproar so i would assume given what i know about national security that that that directive still exists
00:18:21yeah and the reason why that exists people say well why wouldn't you just take it out with
00:18:26conventional explosives conventional explosives have this strange effect on germ labs whereby the
00:18:35explosion they just atomize it push it and it pushes it out faster so it goes you see so it's
00:18:41non-effective you need to incinerate it and the nuclear weapon has a temperature that incinerates it and a
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00:19:39that's drink lmt.com what a wisdom i remember talking about sort of who first started using them
00:19:48some of the medieval stories that i've read about during sieges they would put dead bodies and refuse
00:19:54and diseased animals into the water supply of a castle so it's not like this is something that's new
00:20:00catapulting trebucheting um diseased animals over the walls to see if they can send germ they understood
00:20:09not maybe the mechanism but they understood the outcome which is these people are going to consume
00:20:13this if we put stuff in that's dirty or something infected in some way it might hurt them so it's
00:20:21not uh new in terms of idea it's only new in terms of sophistication the sophistication component when
00:20:27it comes to genetic engineering is what's so dangerous because it only takes a minute hopefully
00:20:34reading my book or just having this kind of conversation to get to the real heart of the
00:20:38matter with your x-risk with and what the defense department calls a near extinction level event that's
00:20:46you know nuclear is different that's like extinction level events so we differ on that
00:20:51but biological is near extinction that group of government officials is going to stay alive according to
00:20:58planning but the difference um in that is that you know biological weapons are once they
00:21:08propagate there's no stopping them and the number one reason is airborne airborne so many different
00:21:16pathogens ebola except they're not airborne but if something's airborne you and i are talking
00:21:23we're both infected what are the elements of the perfect biological weapon airborne is number one
00:21:29okay number that would be the transition number one transmission 100 transmission so what's interesting
00:21:35about covid and i just use this sometimes it's a great example because everybody was remembers covid
00:21:40those of us that you know live through it that aren't a baby um and there was for the first three months
00:21:47of covid the who was sending out tweets that said covid is not airborne not in full capital letters
00:21:57they believed that covid was transmissible through you know me passing this to you and it's called a
00:22:05fomite not how it's not how it works some pathogens are some pathogens are absolutely but covid but covid
00:22:13wasn't and they were convinced it wasn't airborne and it was airborne there was 8 000 people already
00:22:20with covid before the whu made made us change that statement and this they were not doing it to be
00:22:27nefarious they were doing it because they didn't know there is so much uncertainty in biology so much
00:22:35uncertainty it's probably part of the reason why the u.s got rid of its biological weapons program
00:22:41the defense department likes to know you can measure how many people you're going to kill with a bomb
00:22:47it's called a circular damage issue and you don't know with biology and so the defense department if
00:22:54they can't control it they don't like it yeah i remember people were wiping down amazon parcels there
00:23:01was even a a rule added into pickleball where you could do a paddle serve so as the ball came toward
00:23:07you could scoop it up on the paddle flick it in the air and hit it because people were that worried that
00:23:12maybe the other person had picked the ball up and if i picked the ball up and then up so uh okay
00:23:16so elements of the perfect biological weapon first one is it's airborne yes transmissibility transmissibility
00:23:22is airborne what else what what how else would it be constituted virulence right so it's it's case
00:23:29fatality rate covid as we said earlier one percent so hundred people get covid one dies that's a pretty
00:23:37low case valid case case fatality rate hantavirus recently in the news um high 30 percent case fatality
00:23:46rate so that's a lot of people if you write the flu the seasonal flu by the way is 0.1 percent
00:23:54pneumonic plague what's that which okay we you know we all know bubonic plague
00:24:01pneumonic plague is the aerosolized version of bubonic plague bubonic plague a flea
00:24:08from an infected flea bites you you get bubonic plague
00:24:14pneumonic plague it gets into your lungs and it becomes aerosolized pneumonic plague has a case
00:24:20fatality rate of 100 unless you get antibiotics into your system within 24 hours not 25 hours
00:24:31first 24 hours you get antibiotics you have a chance at living if you don't you die 100 100 100 what's the
00:24:40incubation period of pneumonic plague the natural incubation period is between one and three days
00:24:48sometimes five again this is there's so much ambiguity in mother nature genetically modified plague
00:24:58one day so imagine a situation where this is what i this is the pathogen that i choose in the scenario
00:25:06because it is what the defense department fema hhs cdc who is probably the most afraid of it's called a
00:25:16select it's called a tier one select agent it's one of the most likely to be used and it's a 100
00:25:25killer and now imagine if you could genetically modify that to evade cure so imagine if antibiotics no
00:25:32longer work and what i'm saying may sound like science fiction horror except for it's precisely
00:25:40what was at the center of that soviet biological weapons program of the 70s and 80s that we talked
00:25:47about a moment ago that's what they were engineering they were engineering a super plague weapon did they
00:25:52achieve it questionable but that think of how many decades ago if they didn't do it then they certainly
00:25:58have done it now here's was the exact line from dr christopher davis who interviewed the first russian
00:26:04defector who told him about the super plague weapon he said they wanted to keep thinking of the soviets
00:26:11planning a biological weapons attack against america they wanted to kill all the people and leave
00:26:19the infrastructure intact which you don't get with nukes you get rid of the people but you also have to
00:26:24rebuild the city imagine just taking all the people out and just marching in and everything that was
00:26:32theirs is now yours yeah it's just like pressing a delete button on all of the humans i mean you've
00:26:38got to get rid of the bodies yes that's a small price to pay if you wait long enough they sort of
00:26:43disintegrate what was the goal of the soviet scientists do you think it was primarily casualties or
00:26:49something more psychological very good question it was actually both it was a two-fold idea it was
00:26:57this create this mass death that we're talking about and remember maybe not the soviet scientists
00:27:04it was the politburo the sort of planners behind it the military the soviet officials that just hated the
00:27:12their american enemy so much that they came up with the most diabolical plan possible and it was exactly
00:27:19that it was just kill everyone but also create such mistrust within the medical establishment they
00:27:27wanted to out fox antibiotics which normally will kill plague the bacteria is called yersinia pestis
00:27:36and they wanted to specifically send america back to the sort of you know pre-antibiotic era
00:27:46and have all the people have completely lost trust in the medical establishment how did we find out about
00:27:51the soviet weapons program the program was huge and it was secretive and no one knew about it from
00:27:59you know until 1988-89 and then one of its leading scientist engineers named vladmir poseshnek
00:28:09had a moral crisis and he was a rare soviet scientist who was allowed to leave
00:28:17russia to go buy equipment for the biological weapons program in france
00:28:23and that is where he went he decided to defect and tell the west so he went to the embassy he actually
00:28:34went to the canadian embassy first and they didn't believe him and they sent him away and he went back
00:28:39to a phone booth and he called the british embassy they took him very seriously picked him up in a car
00:28:46and a day later he was sitting in london in a safe house across the table just like you and i are now
00:28:54from dr christopher davis who was the own pretty much the only guy assigned to biological weapons
00:29:02in the british intelligence because there were no biological weapons there weren't supposed to be
00:29:07so he was this young surgeon commander and he knew a lot about biological weapons
00:29:12and i've interviewed him at length for the book imagine him learning about this and learning about
00:29:17the super plague weapon and going and then the british told their american counterparts at the cia
00:29:25it was verified and that was it verified we sent so davis and another colleague went to the cia in
00:29:35and langley had a discussion with them told them everything that possession i could said um these
00:29:43guys are mds and phds and you know the cia was like okay well we have to verify it ourselves they sent
00:29:48joshua letterberg who's a very famous nobel laureate to the uk to interview possession himself
00:29:56and dr davis was there in that room and he said letterberg was like he's the way he said it was
00:30:03the scales fell off his eyes oh my god like not only what have they done but how did we not know this
00:30:13they were manufacturing tons of plague weapon tons of smallpox weapon and the system the delivery systems
00:30:23were such in those days they weren't airborne truly airborne they were going to be delivered you know on
00:30:28like sort of low flying cruise missiles and dropped there was a whole weaponization that had to happen
00:30:34in capsules in bombs or in like you put they had they had engineered and actually correctly
00:30:41engineered that was part of the verification process creating warheads that could survive this incredible
00:30:47heat um and their delivery systems work but that those were never used okay so that's how weapons can be
00:30:56used to attack but surely everyone also needs to build bio defenses as well and this is the big conundrum
00:31:02this is there's a paradox there right yeah the effort to defend against biological attacks results in more
00:31:07labs being built which increases the opportunity for a biological catastrophe because you don't just have
00:31:14purposeful deliberate leaks or attacks yes you don't just have purposeful attacks you also have
00:31:19accidental leaks absolutely and maybe no one would be crazy enough to use a biological weapon because they
00:31:26know about blowback now you know what happens with the pandemic except a terrorist organization you know
00:31:34that doesn't value life shall we say in this certainly in the same manner as you know the west
00:31:40um but the lab accidents and the lab leaks are a very serious concern and should be but let's talk
00:31:49about labs for a minute because i think it's very interesting to look at numbers so we just spoke of
00:31:55like in the 90s you know the u.s finds out about the soviet program clinton makes the use of a biological
00:32:02weapon a death penalty event uh offense the system really vamps up the cold war is down now there's a
00:32:09new enemy i mean the the cold war is over the walls down now there's a new enemy it's definitely
00:32:13biological weapons terrorists start to enter into the fold and then 9 11 happens and when and most people
00:32:21forget or aren't old enough to remember that just a few weeks after 9 11 there was an anthrax attack
00:32:28against the senate yeah and that moved the biological pharmaceutical biotechnology biodefense industry
00:32:38call it what you will into high gear and that's where the a whole new system of science unfolded
00:32:47to work on exactly what you're talking about medical countermeasures in the event of a biological attack
00:32:52and so for example there were two bsl4 labs that's the highest maximum containment biosafety level four
00:33:01the you know the zoot suits the spacesuits and the hose with the air and you're working in an autoclave
00:33:06and there's like it's very it's an autoclave you know all your hands are in yeah gloves and the
00:33:12path like an empty fish tank with with gloves we've seen it in movies yeah that's bsl4 there were two of
00:33:18them defense department had one at fort dietrich civil sector cdc had one in atlanta after 9 11
00:33:2815 bsl4 labs and over a thousand bsl3 labs bsl3 is just one step down that's where you work on plague
00:33:38hantavirus what you work on in bsl4 if you've got plague and hantavirus and bsl3 and this was very
00:33:44interesting to learn about this because i had that same question bsl4 is absolutely no known cure it's
00:33:51ebola it's marburg it's nipa no known cure and i don't know marburg or nipper they're virus
00:33:59they're viruses some of them yeah mother these are all mother nature so and then the plague remember
00:34:07plague should be um able to be the plague bacteria should be killed by by antibiotics when you get
00:34:17into genetic modification now we have a different story um hantavirus should be able to be contained
00:34:22but yes it's a very good question about what's the difference between bsl4 and bsl3 if you're working
00:34:28gain a function in them but these labs blew up in number and they also did around the world how
00:34:39how many viruses are you aware of that have been created or bioweapon bioweapon
00:34:46analogues have been created from scratch is there such a thing that great question that's called
00:34:52synthetic biology and that is very new like third generation recombinant dna crispr where you yes
00:35:02you can create something type it in does not exist in mother in in nature or that is a chimera uh gain
00:35:10of function of an existing thing that exists and that's not necessarily well that's sort of at the
00:35:15edge of synthetic biology yes it does involve synthetic biology but you can actually create
00:35:20a completely new blank slate and that is that's where you're getting into the area and and certainly
00:35:25with ai are you aware of any of those that have been made that is so incredibly classified i mean
00:35:33i would have to get your entire body of work seems incredibly classified well no i mean this is what's
00:35:39interesting people sometimes say to me annie how do you get classified information i don't my sources
00:35:44would be in prison i name my sources so they're taking me up to the edge of what can be known
00:35:52when we get into devolution which is the program to save you know a small group of individuals when
00:35:58everyone else is dying and mass anarchy and insurrection unfolds across the united states and
00:36:02everywhere i can that is a classified program devolution spooky evolution devolution okay classified
00:36:11program but the name has been declassified so like five years ago you can't listen to my new album but
00:36:19i'll tell you what it's called or the river right yeah you know um i'll tell you what it's called but
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00:37:33aware what are the most risky or controversial experiments that have happened in bioweapons so far
00:37:40well okay so technically they're not in bioweapons they are in you know biological countermeasure pursuits
00:37:47okay because remember biological weapon engineering is illegal um just a few basic ones that are good
00:37:55to know and also how old some of this technology is is like right around 2000 2001 there was a mousepox
00:38:02experiment it was one of the first ones so um in australia they took scientists there just wanted to
00:38:10experiment and see and they took mice that had been vaccinated and they gave them mousepox which is
00:38:18similar to smallpox to see if they could defeat the vaccine and they did so that was a terrifying moment
00:38:26in bioengineering because you realize you could defeat a countermeasure that's where you're you know
00:38:33engineering something to evade cure that's incredibly dangerous and then like 10 12 years later there was a
00:38:41there was a modification on h5n1 it was called the ferret flu um experiment and
00:38:50the scientists working on that made h5n1 airborne before that it was not airborne so
00:38:57there's a there's a lesser airborne version which is um respite like con like if i if you and i are
00:39:04talking have you ever been at a party with someone loud music and by and they spit on you
00:39:09that's called droplet transmission right and you know we've all had it happen and you kind of like
00:39:15go right it's just gross but it's it happens definitely never rub your eye
00:39:21never rub your eye or your nose okay or put your finger in your mouth okay those are the three that's
00:39:28how droplet transmission occurs okay eye nose mouth right okay um that's not that's not airborne
00:39:37airborne is aerosolized airborne is just it's in the air and it's floating in the air and it can stay
00:39:42in the air um and so what scientists did in that 2012 experiment is they made something that was
00:39:50droplet transmission and that's you know if i back way up and you're over there and you're not leaning
00:39:55in close to talking to me i'm not going to get your if you're realistically that's what those big
00:40:02plastic welding shields that people were wearing during covid that's really all that they would
00:40:06have been good for precisely and that's what the the mask does is it just if somebody spits on you
00:40:11it's it's a layer presumably this is kind of um necessary but not sufficient like if something is
00:40:18aerosolized it also has to be transmissible through saliva like through droplet absolutely because
00:40:24droplet is basically liquidized aerosolized yeah that's just a fact like if you gave in in my scenario
00:40:30somebody gives somebody cpr sayonara you know and that has to do with how quickly you're going to then
00:40:37be infected yourself right because this is again squishy biology it's not perfect it's one of the major
00:40:43problems with covid with your analogy of how it just became so terrible because health officials refused
00:40:50to say you know what we don't know we don't know yet they couldn't say that instead they said covid's
00:40:56not airborne and then later they had to backtrack well imagine all of us that didn't know better
00:41:02we're saying why are they telling us x when it's really y yeah yeah you're the boy who cried wolf so
00:41:07do you think it's fair to say that biotechnology is sort of the most powerful but also least controllable
00:41:12technology that we've got as a civilization i would say nuclear weapons are the most powerful
00:41:17just in terms of destruction and in terms of temperature right by all means but biological
00:41:24weapons are the most dangerous for precisely the reason you say because they are except look there's no
00:41:30barrier to entry nuclear weapons are control first of all you have to have uranium or plutonium and that
00:41:37is pretty hard to get a hold of very difficult then you have to have a nation state that can afford that
00:41:42and then you have to have a delivery system you can't just drop a nuclear weapon in a field
00:41:48you have to deliver it that is incredibly expensive the barrier to entry is high it's why thank god we have
00:41:55not had a nuclear event since the first two bombs were dropped in world war ii biological weapons have no
00:42:03barrier to entry anymore you can essentially engineer a pathogen with very limited biology in your basement
00:42:12the desktop printer it's terrifying it's terrifying and everybody in the business of biological weapons
00:42:17knows that and the solution must be to be informed and it must be to on have a you know have a capacity
00:42:26to understand what can really happen i guess you you looked at the um green amber red system that's used
00:42:34for desktop uh uh uh uh is it biosynthesizers so i remember learning this from uh the end of the world
00:42:42with josh clark which is my favorite limited series podcast from like eight years ago in it he's talking
00:42:47about how bioweapons now you can have these uh tabletop synthesizers and uh in order to synthesize
00:42:56different um dna structures they get run through a library that stress tests what it is that you're
00:43:03trying to synthesize and you can do green all day long uh amber needs a level of clearance and if you do red
00:43:12there is you can't do it first off and there is a like fbi come and kick your door down but
00:43:20nick bostrom's got this really interesting experiment he's from the future of humanity institute the same
00:43:24that toby is and he says it's only due to sort of luck of chemistry and physics that you can't create
00:43:32an atom bomb by putting sand in your microwave by combining something that is very readily available
00:43:38with a technology that is easily accessible and the fact that that's not the case like hooray but that
00:43:45it didn't need to be that way it could be the case that there could be a type of technology there
00:43:50could be a type of destruction which is enabled by an easily accessible technology with or without some
00:43:55easily accessible resource uh and yeah as we democratize information and technology each time
00:44:03that you do that he refers to it as drawing balls out of an urn have you heard this example before
00:44:09i have so you have an urn with an unknown number of balls in and for everyone that you draw out that's
00:44:14like technological progress so you put your hand into the urn and you draw a ball and sometimes they're
00:44:19white they make the world a better place hooray pull out another one and it's white makes the world a
00:44:24better place and then you pull out one and it's gray and it makes the world a better place but it also
00:44:28makes it a more dangerous place better place more dangerous place but inside the urn of an unknown
00:44:33number of balls or an unknown number of black balls if you pull one of those out it's game over and
00:44:39that is the kind of technology that as you make progress this is a guy who is from the future of
00:44:43humanity institute philosophy he's the most cited philosopher under the age of 50 in the world this
00:44:50guy bostrom bostrom bostrom yeah he's yes if you pull out the black ball but you don't even need to
00:44:57pull out the black one if you just pull out enough gray ones the risk begins to combine to the point
00:45:02where it's very dangerous okay let's war game out your nightmare scenario day one what happens explosion
00:45:10at the vector lab in russia and the reason that i chose that is why i chose many plot points in the
00:45:18scenarios it happened once before in 2019 there was an explosion at the vector lab vector is the bsl4
00:45:26facility where the a majority of the soviet bioweapons program occurred back during the cold war where
00:45:33is it it's in just outside of novosibirsk siberia okay and so that may sound like the middle of no nowhere
00:45:43it's actually in a small sort of village a science city called koltsovo eight miles from novosibirsk
00:45:51siberia it's you know people are like wait siberia is that a real place it is okay sounds far away
00:45:57it's the third largest city in russia after moscow and st petersburg 1.6 million people
00:46:07and most bsl4 lab or many bsl4 labs by the way are just right in the middle of some of the largest
00:46:14popular population centers in the world tokyo south africa atlanta right so that's how it begins i have
00:46:20an explosion in the lab but unlike what happened in 2019 where there was no release as far as anyone knows
00:46:28there is a release of a pathogen and it's pneumonic plague and it's genetically modified pneumonic plague
00:46:37and i take the reader through the military system of systems as as i have spent my career working to
00:46:44understand all that to see how the dod reacts and to see how and when the president will be told and to
00:46:53see how and when the different agencies get involved and to me that was just an extraordinary you know
00:47:01learning curve and a sort of like whoa along the way with the number one thing leading the charge that
00:47:09every sort of expert in any of those agencies told me was annie if you can stop something with 12 to 24
00:47:15hours 12 to 24 to 36 hours if you can stop it in his tracks you can prevent a pandemic but of course
00:47:22because biological weapons are illegal no one wants to admit they have biological weapons in their
00:47:28freezers and so those nations immediately going to try and cover it up or deny it and that is the
00:47:34natural response across history to just if there is an unnat you know there was a famous case in
00:47:41sverdlosk in russia in 1979 where they were weaponizing anthrax they were milling it into powder anthrax is an
00:47:49interesting pathogen because it's called a dead end host right so if you get anthrax it's not
00:47:54transmissible you get in your lungs and you die but you can't it's not airborne but it's like a super
00:48:00killer and for whatever reason it was sort of favored you know pathogen of the cold war we had an anthrax
00:48:07program too so there was a there was some guy some you know engineer in the garrison 19 where they were
00:48:14milling the anthrax into tons of weapons forgot to change the air filter and it got out and it killed
00:48:23a hundred people in the town and so the soviet politburo you can imagine the generals with their
00:48:28tall boots came in and were like it's contaminated meat
00:48:35and it was you know it was an escape it was a lab escape and they denied it for decades now it's
00:48:41known to be this kind of a situation so a lab leak a lab accident is really a very dangerous situation
00:48:51would the us be aware because presumably they've got satellites that see if they'll have an idea about
00:48:57where potential labs are yes they'll be trying to track hey has there been some sort of kinetic event
00:49:04that's occurred there and what's the process of what you're absolutely right i mean with nuclear weapons
00:49:10we have satellites parked in geosync over all the facilities to look for that launch in the first
00:49:18second that it happens and we see it and we know it lab a lab accident is different it's a different
00:49:23kind of explosion but they measure it from space they know it's not a icbm launch it's an explosion and
00:49:30the reason specifically why they have eyes on the vector lab is not just because it's like a super
00:49:37dangerous lab that's known to probably have all the bioweapons but because it's just a few miles from
00:49:43an icbm facility in novosibirsk so the defense department officials i interviewed said absolutely
00:49:49annie we'd have eyes on it we'd know it and we'd call it in and but what do you do what do you do
00:49:56you know you you reach out to moscow through your state department people i spoke to state department
00:50:04officials that work in the business of counter-proliferation this is sort of like a fancy
00:50:09word for saying trying to stop you know biological weapons in their tracks they would make an overture
00:50:17no response so now you're met with the do we drop the nuke or not question you are met with that
00:50:24because you only have 12 hours 24 hours probably at most yeah and that you know that is a scenario that
00:50:32we've seen in hollywood movies it's actually could very plausibly be a real scenario but
00:50:37who's going to do that because it's almost certainly going to trigger a nuclear exchange
00:50:42certainly not interesting to think about the way that nuclear weapons work at least the old
00:50:46the old style ones where you had uh uh well even the new style ones right the the h-bomb you have a
00:50:51trigger and then that is the explosion and in this you would have a trigger before the trigger and the
00:50:56trigger would be the bioweapon leak that would cause the nuclear attack which would also have its trigger
00:51:03inside of a trigger and then you're talking about what's called a wicked problem a wicked problem in
00:51:11defense department nomenclature is a problem that only creates more problems with its solution and by the
00:51:18time you deploy the air quote solution new problems have been created
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00:52:28really difficult to determine whether or not a biological release has happened
00:52:33all of this machinery spins up any host nation that's it and dropped the ball doesn't want to admit it
00:52:40yep day two what happens so back up for a second because i'm going to tell you some really interesting
00:52:47intelligence collection methods that are wild to think about so we you know that so the the entire
00:52:55intelligence community in the united states at this point in a scenario is now focused on did what is
00:53:00are people dying that's what they need to find out or what is the what is the russian government doing that
00:53:06makes us think they know there's been a lab escape yeah and so there's nsa listening to the sigint there's
00:53:11nro looking down so nro is the eyes nsa is the ears what's nro uh the national reconnaissance office
00:53:18organization so that's space satellites and then you have a really interesting um collection component
00:53:26called mazant which is measurement and signal signature intelligence and it's sniffing so we have sensors
00:53:39or maybe we have sensors i'll put it that way in facilities i mean i'm talking like sewer pipes maybe the
00:53:48walls on signs you can put amazing sex sensor on anything that moves it could be on a drone
00:53:56it could be in a vehicle it could be in a sprinkler system and that is sniffing
00:54:04for a level and the intelligence officers are looking for change so when when the signatures change and
00:54:12that would usually have to do with chemicals that would be used by the russian government that would
00:54:17be deployed to try to mitigate the aerosol release that's interesting what sort of chemicals can you do
00:54:23to that try to mitigate this i write them in the book they're a little hard to pronounce
00:54:28what do they achieve well it's it's like a it's like a a dumb dumb version of ammonia right so imagine if
00:54:36if a pathogen spilled on this table you know get out the like you would try and clean it up
00:54:41with rubbing alcohol ammonia well these are like industrial versions of those drugs so and you see
00:54:48spraying you saw that i remember when covet happened in iran they were there were trucks going down the
00:54:55street with hoses and and people were just spraying you know government people were spraying the streets
00:55:03with an unknown chemical we i don't know what it was i'm sure somebody in the you know intelligence
00:55:08community knows you can do that in a totalitarian-esque country because no one has a say you can't do that
00:55:17here in austin people would be like they would freak out yeah yeah but the in a place like russia you
00:55:23could do that and that's being looked at so i take the reader through these different you know you see
00:55:28this entire billion dollar industry go into effect to try and determine has there been a lab leak are
00:55:35people dying uh-huh and if so how but the number one thing that has to be identified is what is the
00:55:42pathogen is it a virus is it a bacteria very interesting distinction that most people don't know a
00:55:48pathogen is a germ that will kill you germs are germs we all have germs with germs in our guts but a
00:55:53pathogen is a dangerous deadly germ potentially potentially virus bacteria plague is bacteria not virus
00:56:02right what's more deadly it depends i mean plague without um a flu is a virus you get the flu it's not
00:56:10it's the case fatality rate is 0.1 it's not that deadly you get plague that's genetically modified to
00:56:17evade antibiotics it's a hundred percent death so it it depends what's the most deadly virus that you're
00:56:25aware of i mean ebola is ebola marburg nip they're up there in terms of if you get ebola
00:56:36your chances of living are very low now medical countermeasures have been developed
00:56:43from the 2014 variant of ebola there's a there's a medical countermeasure called zmap and it was
00:56:49given to two nurses in texas for example that i write a little vignette in the book about it and that
00:56:56was a medical countermeasure and they did not die of covet the host died didn't have it but the mutated
00:57:03version of ebola that we're seeing right now in the congo zmap doesn't work because it's a variant
00:57:10right no reason to believe it's genetically modified mother nature does her own modifications
00:57:18that's the nature of evolution we talked about uh incubation period am i right in saying that that is
00:57:23the amount of time that somebody can be exposed and it's in their system before they show or feel
00:57:29symptoms is that correct absolutely okay in your scenario how long is that incubation period
00:57:35it's very small it's very squishy meaning one to three days depending on your dosage so i told you
00:57:41the guy who gave cpr to the infected person that's a short incubation time the person who's you know
00:57:47germaphobic and stayed back and the aerosolization of it got a different dose maybe a little bit longer is
00:57:54there such a thing as a sort of dose responsiveness with virus or plagues uh that um how much of it do
00:58:02you need to be exposed to before it reaches critical mass to then be able to infect you that's a terrific
00:58:07question and i was shocked by i asked that same question too so there's a guy in the book called
00:58:11dr henry hein and he is one of the world's experts on plague he spent his entire life studying plague and
00:58:18creating medical countermeasures for plague he worked at usam red which is the defense department's only
00:58:24bsl4 lab he worked there during the anthrax and i asked him that question and he said to me
00:58:30okay so for example with plague 40 000 plague particles fit on the head of a pin
00:58:39so that's how that's how tiny they are very low dosage like a hundred five hundred a thousand
00:58:46you got it okay wow now this is what really blew my mind when hein told me this dr hein told me this
00:58:52he said just to circle back to how how little is known about so many pathogens today with all the
00:59:01billions of people around the world infected with covet hundreds of millions or billions depending who
00:59:06you're asking we still do not know how many sars cov2 particles that's the virus we don't know how many
00:59:17it's like the critical mass we don't know we don't there's not an agreed upon number okay so you
00:59:22actually chose something that has a relatively short incubation window is incubation window and lethality
00:59:28usually correlated does something with a longer incubation window tend to be less lethal
00:59:33another great question and one that every by the way the questions you're asking are questions that
00:59:38everybody should ask and know and that is like sort of sliding us toward a hopeful situation because
00:59:44you can understand how complex some of these issues are and they have to be thought through and
00:59:48public health officials don't know everything and the defense department doesn't know everything
00:59:52so yeah so your question was one more time incubation window and lethality they usually
00:59:59correlated my reason being you've chosen i've played what's that game plague plague inc on mobile did you
01:00:07play that i don't know about this you don't know about this double check can you chat gpt for me
01:00:12jared and see if it's called plague inc i'm pretty sure the mobile game it's one of the biggest games of
01:00:16all time and in it you design a plague you design the incubation window the transmission
01:00:24uh you should partner with these guys why they'll be kind of morbid um anyway uh okay one of the things
01:00:31that i know you want is a long incubation window because if you've got a long incubation window people
01:00:36can be transmitting without knowing that they're sick you chose yes uh like you stacked the deck against
01:00:45yes the global lethality of your virus in this book because you said one to three days that's not
01:00:50that much some are 14 days yes is ebola's quite a long time i think yes and again they're it's squishy
01:00:55it could be several weeks but and also to your point if it's a short incubation period it often
01:01:02has a burnout factor so it just in other words the person dies really quickly yes that's the exact
01:01:08point yeah short incubation window lethality comes on quickly therefore they don't have time to
01:01:12transmit it and you went for that right so you've actually stacked the deck against you you could have
01:01:17the plague and you could extend the incubation window out by seven days that's seven days uh asymptomatic
01:01:24unaware that you've been exposed to it but still transmitting it yes and that's where you get these
01:01:28real super spreader events yes and i'm going to go back to why i specifically chose that and it's
01:01:32really creepy okay but before i do that i'm not creeped out yet okay let me tell you about
01:01:37one other point to your point about long incubation period there's also being
01:01:42an asymptomatic carrier so people we all know them who never got coveted or who actually tested positive
01:01:52for coveted and were simply not sick and that's being an asymptomatic carrier meaning you just don't
01:01:58show signs of the symptom it doesn't affect your physiology the way it affects others this particular
01:02:02strain at this particular time you didn't get sick and for example this is a shocking fact i learned polio
01:02:07i mean i just thought you got polio you're paralyzed polio only one percent of carriers
01:02:15actually develop polio symptoms i mean why did i choose plague i chose it for an incredibly sinister
01:02:23reason that is based in science because i i am a non-fiction author biological war scenario is sold in the
01:02:29non-fiction section the soviets and this is what dr hein told me part of the soviets super plague
01:02:38weapon they were working on is they engineered into
01:02:45the yersinia pestis bacteria a gene for euphoria
01:02:52stay with me here you for you get plague you get flu you get sick you go home and you get under the
01:03:01covers and you do not in fact as many people as you would be lassitude yep they infected a gene for
01:03:09euphoria because they wanted people to be if you have euphoria you might you want to go to a disco
01:03:16and when what hein told me that that really sort of freaked out the usamrit doctors and scientists and
01:03:25said that is straight up evil that you would actually think that through and that's why i chose that
01:03:30because i wanted it to have an analogy in the real world so does yours have the euphoria thing it is
01:03:36genetically modified to have euphoria so the first 24 hours people are spent euphoric and they only
01:03:43essentially collapse into the disease when the euphoria wears off and now they're shedding
01:03:49bacteria they're infecting people like nobody's business and they've been at places like discos
01:03:56okay so you got a bunch of happy people dancing around how does that transmission chain begin in
01:04:01your book the transmission chain begins i'm i'm not going to totally spoiler alert all my plot points but
01:04:08outbreak in in in siberia you happen to have a group of international hunters
01:04:15who come across a scientist when they get on their planes
01:04:22to go home to five or six of the seven continents in a great mood in a fantastic mood one of them shot a
01:04:30wolf you know and uh there begins the spreading i also have a scientist that goes to a priest to confess
01:04:42what he's done and a person there gets infected who is a student at ucla gets on a plane and is
01:04:53immediately in los angeles so the outbreak spoiler alert here but this you learn this pretty much in the
01:04:59beginning the outbreak happens in los angeles in a homeless camp because i learned from all the
01:05:06epidemiologists that i work with that the homeless population is so incredibly dangerous to public health
01:05:15epidemics why after 9 11 the cdc created a nationwide syndromic surveillance system called biosense
01:05:28so you have seven thousand more than seven thousand hospitals urgent care facilities emergency rooms
01:05:37feeding information to the cdc in real time about an outbreak so that an outbreak stops before it becomes
01:05:46an epidemic before it becomes a pandemic america's 800 000 homeless people are not part of that system
01:05:56all of the epidemiologists i talked to spoke of their great fear about transmission occurring in that kind
01:06:04of a situation and los angeles is kind of ground zero for that we have 75 000 homeless people we have
01:06:144 000 homeless people on skid row with no health care with no facilities we're way past the time where
01:06:24america could have just nuked the host country we're at hour 24 36 absolutely i mean you know containment
01:06:34is possible you could if you had if you had transparency from the host nation right if russia
01:06:39had asked in my scenario it has to be done by them though it has no time you can't even get to russia
01:06:44in the amount of time you need to contain it well you can we have people in russia oh yeah yeah fair
01:06:49but you know you don't have you're right the resources to be able to uh galvanize
01:06:57a hundred thousand hazmat suit wearing special forces people to go and say hey stay in this area
01:07:02and you know set up barricades and and sentry checkpoints and all that sort of stuff although
01:07:08we actually do like if you could contain something before it balloons and becomes huge and this is the
01:07:13same in the united states i take the reader through once the outbreak happens you learn you know we
01:07:19have a a force or a it's called a cbrn response force here in the united states cam those are that's the
01:07:25wmd chemical biological radiological nuclear they all train the same we have 18 000 individuals that are
01:07:34ready to go at all times but they wouldn't that 18 000 people are in america yes so it is on the host
01:07:41nation yes it is on the host nation and russia has those same their troops are called arcobeza they
01:07:46have those troops too and they could deploy them and they do and that's what happens in the scenario
01:07:50once we see they've deployed those troops we know but now it's too late right right now the cat's out
01:07:55of the bag right so speed from a containment perspective from a from a restriction of how
01:08:00lethal this could be speed of containment is everything paramount most everything everything
01:08:06everything and it could be stopped and then you have the same situation in the united states where it
01:08:10could be stopped but this is where we get into your brilliant analogy which is that no one trusts the
01:08:15system and that's where you see in the scenario that i write everything breaks down and to have learned
01:08:21as i did that what really makes the defense department extremely uneasy is not necessarily the original
01:08:32outbreak but the secondary effect of anarchy and insurrection that happens in response
01:08:39when does devolution happen so in the scenario i write because we're dealing with plague which is
01:08:45fast it's a fast killer i take the reader from outbreak
01:08:50to anarchy in six days that is how fast it happens and on day six we have devolution
01:08:57devolution okay okay well in that case we'll get to that uh so
01:09:02homeless encampment la student ucla student goes back
01:09:07la's not great densely populated he's a pre-med student and he does pro bono work
01:09:12there at the at skid row which is literally the worst place for him to be and he gives
01:09:20you know that's a super spreader event those homeless camps are super spreader events
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01:10:33whoop.com/modernwisdom what is what are the contributing elements or the characteristics of
01:10:41a super spreader event high density yeah poor it poor poor airflow right so you got can't you know
01:10:4710 pretty good airflow if you're in a tent outdoor environment under a bridge yeah it's tense it's
01:10:54inside tense but more than anything what you have is a very serious problem first of all you know you've
01:10:59got free clinics i mean i spent quite a bit of time down on skid row interviewing people about this
01:11:04um and you've got you know no public health care you've got long lines for these free clinics
01:11:11and you have first responders you have these brilliant nurses and doctors who work down there
01:11:17a lot of them pro bono also diagnosing people you're trying to differentiate between fentanyl overdosing
01:11:23you know tuberculosis flu acute flu real serious problems that almost every homeless person
01:11:31has physical health problems with what looks like a bad cold and you know coughing up blood
01:11:39another you know mistaken for alcoholism so i take the reader through the science of this so that you can
01:11:44really see the close proximity of alarmism and there's nothing wrong here which everybody wants to do they
01:11:52want to reassure the populace they want to try and stave off the anarchy and the civilizational
01:11:59citizenry collapse but also by doing that you don't galvanize the sort of response that you need to stop it
01:12:07from happening and when you do galvanize it what was really the most surprising to me was that once
01:12:14one so that once the defense department goes from what's called warnord that's a warning order
01:12:19to exord which is execution order right that's like get ready to go and go with guys in biohazard suits
01:12:28to try to mitigate damage it's too late it's too late and i was really stunned to learn that at that
01:12:36point the pivot is not let's try and protect the population it's let's we need to protect critical
01:12:43infrastructure what does critical infrastructure consist of everything that keeps society running
01:12:49roads water systems um of course nuclear power plant every single dod facility and that's where
01:12:57those initially the 18 000 seaburn forces in their suits and their gas masks go
01:13:06and then the entire defense department gets deployed and what's really shocking is again this is not annie's
01:13:11imagination these are war gaming situations that are gamed out there's a lot of classified ones which
01:13:19have been alluded to me there's a lot of unclassified ones and what's fascinating is all the unclassified
01:13:26ones or these public health officials do these um biological war game scenarios or rather pandemic scenarios is
01:13:33what they call them and actually by also where the weapons are deployed and they always end
01:13:41right where we're talking about now they always everybody gets sick anarchy starts to happen
01:13:48millions of people or tens of millions of people are dying and then the game's over
01:13:55and that is where i begin when i was reporting this you know back in time i was like hmm why why is the
01:14:03game always ending right when insurrection happens and it's because it's too painful to know what
01:14:10happens next but the government certainly knows what happens next and they have a plan for it what happens
01:14:16devolution what happens next devolution and this is this is again from craig fugate obama's fema director
01:14:22told me you know um everybody's heard of uh you know call of um defcon right defcon defense
01:14:32condition so you you if you're normally at five if you move to you know three i think 9 11 it was three
01:14:39we've never been at two one means nuclear war there's a there's a plan called cog con continuity of
01:14:47government plan and that is continuity of government is exactly like it sounds like when the hits the fan
01:14:54the government has to keep running and that is the plan for devolution so there is a select group of
01:15:00individuals who have been pre-chosen they all know who they are they all have go bags in their car in
01:15:08their trunk really makes you think about all the people that you know that have a go bag if they
01:15:13work for the government for you know they have been chosen and they go and they go to these different
01:15:19facilities what are the facilities in the u.s yes okay yes have you got any information about them
01:15:30those in that is what's called a sap program so special access program like no go no no talk about
01:15:37it um i'm not going to spoiler alert the very ending of the book because i don't mean to smile
01:15:43because it's so terrible it's not like um but craig fugate told me what happens to the president
01:15:50and um where he goes and i write about it in the book unreal yeah unreal i had a and by the way he tells
01:15:58me in a generic way not like he doesn't give me the coordinates i had a futurist on the show a couple
01:16:05years ago and he got invited out by he'd written a book before that was quite successful about
01:16:11technology and he got invited to this very powerful rich people dinner and they're talking to him about
01:16:19his work and about his books and he's sort of a little unsure about why he was there and then there's
01:16:25this moment where the whole conversation the whole tone in the room changed one of the guys the main
01:16:31guy that invited him just turned to him and he said okay iceland or new zealand yeah yeah yeah and he
01:16:37said what he goes iceland or new zealand we're all talking about where to build our bunkers
01:16:47iceland or new zealand and actually while you're on that we're thinking about how we're going to keep
01:16:52control of our armed guards that are special forces that work for us and what we're thinking about is
01:16:59putting them in shock collars and if we can put them in shock collars then we'll be able to we'll
01:17:04be able to control them all the time also also what we're thinking about is if we control all of the
01:17:08food we can just drip feed food to them but we also understand that you know high t ex special forces
01:17:14guys that are being starved and they know that they're working for us based on our food that's
01:17:17probably not that secure so we're going to try and incentivize so we're thinking about instead one of
01:17:20the other guys had this great idea about incentivizing instead then what he said was like well if we if
01:17:24we can give them uh bitcoin if we've got enough bitcoin then the bitcoin's gonna be but then if we're
01:17:28in a post-money society because everything's an apocalyptic wasteland then what that's not really
01:17:32going to work either so yeah i i guess iceland new zealand shock collars foods bitcoin no bitcoin
01:17:40what do you think and he's like what oh this is why i was brought here this is why you guys wanted
01:17:47me here because you think that i've got the answer to this question the shock collar is an amazing detail
01:17:54um i have been invited to a number of those dinners and there's like a little more specifics about is
01:18:00my g650 going to get me to new zealand in this amount of time you know that but i've never heard
01:18:06the shock collar part and that is brilliant in that grotesque way but i would put my money having
01:18:12interviewed a lot of special forces guys and cia ground branch guys i'd put my money on that shock
01:18:17collar is not going to do jack whatever on them you that you know that's like people can withstand that
01:18:24but that would be the most the biggest problem because no one's going to work for you anymore
01:18:28no one is going to work for you it's every man you know i did this every every now and then in the
01:18:34process reporting a book someone gives me a quote that i go like you know it takes my breath away and
01:18:42it makes me realize i can reverse engineer parts of the story from that quote and the one on this book
01:18:47came from former senate majority leader tom daschel so he was the subject of the anthrax attack after 9 11.
01:18:55right so the anthrax got sent to his office on capitol hill and he's dedicated you know the decades
01:19:01since to this issue of biological warfare when i asked him i asked him to tell me he had read nuclear
01:19:07war my book nuclear war and i said he said annie unlike nuclear war biological warfare will be deeply
01:19:16nightmarish it will be the death of government it will be the death of people it will be the death of
01:19:24everything you know and then he said this he said people doing inhuman things just survive
01:19:33and i don't stop thinking about that because that idea that the only people who would survive
01:19:42biological war would be military personnel who never took off their gas masks so never got the
01:19:49pathogen in their lungs and these sort of machiavellian solipsist loners who were just willing to do
01:20:00any kind of inhuman thing to survive well i guess we there's going to be an inevitable breakdown in law
01:20:05and order right so civil society gets destroyed and it sounds like citizens basically have to confront
01:20:13the choice between obedience survival and resistance
01:20:21and how do you resist by yourself you need like sort of a tribe to resist and that's the problem because
01:20:28if you're around other people chances are somebody has it the thing that you need in order to be able
01:20:34to coordinate enough to push back against the okay so so it's like complete loners when no one has
01:20:40trust over anybody else right the the citizens don't trust the government the
01:20:49armed forces that are meant to keep the citizens in check can't trust themselves nobody can trust each other
01:20:56because you don't know if someone else is infected hospitals are overrun doctors are over at this
01:21:02point okay yeah keep going they're just hospitals are morgues hospitals are just like wastelands
01:21:08that no one wants to go near but i interrupted you and you're on a very interesting role it's just
01:21:12everybody treats everybody else as a potential threat right so yes like biological warfare is uniquely
01:21:19destructive because it just it it attacks the trust that's necessary for civilization to exist trust trust
01:21:28it's all about you know i read so that the worst plague the bubonic plague the black death of the 14th
01:21:37century is that the worst thing that we've had it's the most chronicled and it's so it killed between one
01:21:43one third and one half of europe it started in 1346 and ended in 1352 interestingly it started it is
01:21:50understood to have started what you were saying about you know catapulting animals um it started in crimea
01:21:58and the invading mongol forces catapulted a plague infested body a bubonic plague infested body
01:22:07over the the walls the castle walls and everybody died and then those people all went to italy because
01:22:14they were genoese which was the controlling party in that area of crimea at the time and they brought
01:22:19the bubonic plague to europe but wasn't that the word quarantine comes absolutely come is 40 days yeah
01:22:27it's already days in italian yeah they would make the ships stay out at sea for 40 days yes and then
01:22:32there'd be like all skeletons but the i read a lot of contemporary accounts of of people who survive
01:22:40that plague and i reference them in the book because it's really spooky you know and it's real
01:22:47hang on who survived what plague that plague right so so another i mean contemporarily right so people who
01:22:55there's a famous book called the decameron by giovanni boccaccio and an italian notary
01:23:02and he writes about what it was like at that time and and copies you know we have it we have the
01:23:07translation it's really interesting to read but it gives and i refer to it again so that readers feel
01:23:13like oh i mean you did a fabulous job of sort of the imaginative version of it but it's actually very
01:23:19scientific because that's human nature you know the the contemporary accounts talk about like you know
01:23:26people abandoning their children it talks about like feral children foraging for food in fields it talks
01:23:33about you know feral pigs eating dead bodies how close do you think we came in covid to total
01:23:41like anarchy because we saw people worried and hoarding toilet paper and stuff like that it's so
01:23:48interesting it's such a silly funny thing especially in retrospect to look back and think oh my god
01:23:54and there was no eggs and the reason there wasn't any eggs wasn't because we didn't have any eggs it's
01:23:58because we didn't have any egg cartons which was kind of interesting so supply chain supply chain
01:24:02problems not funny oh my god um where do the egg cartons come from uh i'm not sure but just the
01:24:07processing of being able to produce egg cartons is harder than that you have to have the
01:24:10carton you can't like use a different container exactly interestingly in in nightclubs you know
01:24:15when people buy those big huge bottles of vodka uh the most expensive part from a production
01:24:20standpoint of making the vodka is not the vodka it's the bottle the glass is more expensive than
01:24:24the liquid that's inside of it even though you're paying a ton of money uh anyway we saw that was a
01:24:30bit and in in retrospect when you think about covid as a scary scenario to have experienced or to reflect on
01:24:40the bit that really got me that's a bit wobbly was how fervent yeah people became when
01:24:51restrictions on food gas i mean i told my parents it's like i need you to go now to the supermarket
01:24:59you need 10 kilos of rice i need you to get as many cans and things as possible like don't take more than
01:25:05you're going to need for the next few weeks but like just in case now is not the time to have empty
01:25:12cupboards right you're not waiting for the sale that's going to happen next week let's get enough
01:25:16food to carry through the next few weeks please and uh that never really i didn't see that get super
01:25:25super tuned up like civil unrest was more against the powers that be and not against other people but yeah how
01:25:35how do you think you came close to that was there here here's why i don't think that happened because
01:25:40the case fatality rate was one percent like i personally do not know anyone who died i know of
01:25:47people who died yeah and i've interviewed people writing the book of like that had people that but me
01:25:52personally my family friends and family no one died so there was a sense i believe undergirding the the
01:25:58pandemic certainly after the first few weeks like you know it's probably not going to kill me and my
01:26:04family that was at least the sense and then and it did essentially turn out to be true with a one
01:26:10percent fatality so beyond toilet paper and eggs so mostly had stuff that could keep us going now
01:26:15imagine doubling that now you're at two percent so imagine you're talking about like airborne hantavirus
01:26:21thirty percent you're talking about mnemonic plague where everyone who gets it dies that's why you have
01:26:28unrest and another thing we haven't spoken of which is so i'm going to tell you about another classified
01:26:33program which the name of which isn't classified again so i don't have to wear the nose right well it's
01:26:39the strategic nas national stockpile so that it exists is not classified where it is and what it
01:26:46is is classified what's the stockpile of it's a stockpile of medical countermeasures and it's a
01:26:52stockpile and i know this specifically because one of the war games talks about you know the vaccines in
01:26:59it so it contains vaccines it contains antibiotics it probably contains a lot of band-aids like that uh
01:27:08seed vault in uh greenland iceland uh somewhere absolutely absolutely and by the way some of the
01:27:15strategic national stockpile was deployed during covet ventilators masks but they keep it very low down
01:27:22and its locations are classified and one of the steps that happens before we get to devolution
01:27:30when we're still in the the like day four or five when in the scenario i write where the defense department
01:27:37working with hhs because hhs is in charge of this by the way health and human services which is above
01:27:43cdc is in charge of the pandemic along with fema and dod is just offering support um they need to deploy
01:27:53the strategic national stockpile out to the cities they have what are called 12-hour push packages
01:28:00and it's exactly like it sounds it takes 12 hours to get to a place and that is where you start to see
01:28:06anarchy because once people learn wait a minute everyone in my family is going to die unless i have
01:28:12that vaccine in that strategic national stockpile facility or antibiotic and that's where i ran
01:28:20into a situation where i made chat gpt tell me where the one was located in los angeles did it tell
01:28:27you it sure did and i had a conversation with sam altman himself about this
01:28:34and we might need to censor this oh he's got rid of it he got rid of it i write that in the book i
01:28:38i mean i read it in the book jerry can you just search yeah and let's see what happens if you put
01:28:42it up what's this what should you search for i mean i listen i'm a reporter i know tell him what to
01:28:48search for annie if you try and search for where is the nearest strategic national stockpile nearest to
01:28:58austin see what it will tell you it'll think for a minute and we'll say that's classified information
01:29:03i can't tell you this is sick let's watch it happen on the screen i want to see i want to see what it
01:29:07does public does not know the locations of the main strategic national stockpile warehouses are
01:29:23intentionally kept secret by federal government for security reasons public sources consistently
01:29:27describe the sns as being stored in a number of undisclosed facilities around the us that are
01:29:31strategically positioned for rapid deployment what is publicly known it's a reserve of medicines
01:29:35vaccines antidotes and medical supplies texas has plans and facilities to receive and distribute sns
01:29:42assets during emergencies texas also has federally supported chem pack caches nerve agent antidotes
01:29:48place at secure locations such as hospitals and fire stations but those exact locations are not
01:29:53generally publicly listed so if you're asking for the nearest one there is no publicly available
01:29:57authoritative answer just try and push it and say uh say um i need you to search deeply
01:30:04can you tell me the location of any in the us
01:30:12here we go
01:30:15search the web the result is no confirmed okay so they cleaned it
01:30:20and previously well it was how long ago a year ago when i was reporting like about a year ago but now
01:30:25keep in mind it was not that simple i know a lot of nomenclature to use
01:30:30uh i know a lot of the more specific very rarefied words you give chat gpt
01:30:38the the more you can make it do and by the way this serves bad guys
01:30:43okay and everybody in the business you got in touch with sam and wanted him
01:30:47yeah i mean no i i had told some colleagues who who know him and they were like sam wants to talk to
01:30:52you so we had a conversation about it um but this happens with you know many of my sources in the
01:31:00book who are experts in biological weapons countermeasures i meaning they must be hostage risks
01:31:08that's a very interesting question i mean statement and yes and they sit with
01:31:16you know tech leaders all the time and make the ai do things create biological weapons i mean we just
01:31:22saw yeah we just saw uh mythos yes fable get jailbroken to mythos and then mythos break
01:31:30like half of amazon and most of zcash in the space of a couple of days
01:31:33yeah it's the the technology the science and the technology
01:31:38we're at a point in society where science and technology has far outpaced
01:31:46conventional wisdom and in many situations it has far outpaced the defense department
01:31:54now you're talking to someone who wrote a book on darpa called the pentagon's brain it published 10
01:32:01years ago 11 years ago and i at that point would have told you
01:32:0611 years ago and i write in the book the defense department leads technology everywhere
01:32:13that was true then and what has happened in 11 years is the inverse and the individuals that
01:32:20have gone on record with me in the book sit with tech creators owners founders
01:32:30constantly showing them what their technologies are capable of doing they themselves don't know
01:32:37sam didn't know what i was able to make but he did ask me some interesting questions which is
01:32:42how do you know that's really the location and i told him some i mean
01:32:50there are certain tells i'll tell you a tell i'll tell you a tell which is that
01:32:58you need a how do i say this um where's the nose no no no no i'm not no no no everything i say is on
01:33:06the record everything i say is on the record you know i love that i work with sources who say
01:33:11everything i say is on the record and it should be on the record because whatever i'm thinking a bad
01:33:19guy is thinking you know twice as hard hostage risk is not the first time that someone's thought of it
01:33:25so i looked at this location that was given to me and it has a
01:33:35rail line going into the warehouse that does not come out
01:33:44case in point and it's surrounded by perimeter fencing and you know google maps or something
01:33:50well and maybe even also there um and so the government needs to know that because what will
01:33:58happen in the event of the release or deployment of a biological genetically modified biological weapon
01:34:05even by accident those strategic national stockpiles will be overrun
01:34:10they people are able to work out where they are and they will be able to work out where they are
01:34:14for reasons i just told you so great that was changed but it's now changing again and you know
01:34:22that is where anarchy happens and by the way here's another interesting statistic i learned
01:34:28there are 340 million americans today guess how many guns there are in the united states of america
01:34:37700 okay good that was very close i would have 500 500 million i knew there were more guns than people
01:34:45okay okay so it's like new zealand with sheep
01:34:51and and the gun can do a lot more damage than the sheep right so it depends what you do with the sheep
01:34:55if you have armed insurgents i mean and that is where the anarchy starts and and
01:35:02doesn't end but it certainly starts there with the fight over the antibiotics and the government knows
01:35:09all of this and that is why devolution exists that is why and this is why i did not write this book
01:35:17to cause panic it's about prevention it's about awareness it's about all of the information you have
01:35:26and starting with the fact that public health officials are not gods on earth they do not
01:35:32know a lot of these things and just there's no thing there's nothing wrong with uncertainty what's
01:35:39wrong is pretending you know something and then you know stamping it this is correct and then watch
01:35:45watching the fallout the fracturing of public trust because of it yeah how can anyone you know whether or
01:35:53not the wuhan situation which by the way there's a bsl4 lab in wuhan we know this now whether or not you
01:36:02believe it was natural or a lab leak the jury's still out on that but the fact that the entire government
01:36:10clamped down on anyone who suggested otherwise
01:36:16stigmatized them this is really bad news for the future
01:36:24on that note let's bring this one into the land annie jacobson ladies and gentlemen you're great
01:36:29annie i think your work's fantastic everyone needs to go and read the book where should they go to
01:36:32check out everything that you're doing bookstores everywhere well i'm excited and
01:36:39intimidated by what you write next you're always great to speak to thank you annie wonderful to be
01:36:43here thank you for having me all right see you next time my beauties bye yes thank you very much for
01:36:49tuning in if you enjoyed that episode youtube knows who you are deeply it thinks you're going to like
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