Annie Jacobsen debunks Area 51’s alien myths, citing a Q-cleared source who claimed Cold War-era human modification experiments—possibly to counter Soviet disinformation—while dismissing Lazar’s claims as tied to classified programs. She reveals Operation Paperclip’s dark legacy, where 1,400+ Nazi scientists, including Auschwitz doctors, were absorbed into U.S. projects like NASA, normalizing atrocities under "national security." Jacobsen’s research on AI-driven weapons, from DARPA’s RoboRat to Trump-era drone strikes with 80-90% civilian casualties, exposes how tech and secrecy erode ethical boundaries, turning warfare into a profit-driven, algorithmic arms race where human judgment—once critical—is now outsourced to machines. [Automatically generated summary]
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 Basebook.
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 at it, right?
So Area 51 was this secret test base where the CIA was running spy plane programs, right?
So interestingly, my new book is about ground branch, guys on the ground.
That's about air branch, 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 whereby little men who looked like aliens would get out of an and the government would go crazy about it.
And then Stalin would say, look, not only do we have technology better than you, but we have a better propaganda department than you.
I mean people want to believe they're aliens, right?
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 – To power, to morality, to information, to people's desire to know what's going on 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, told me otherwise, that they were genetically...
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?
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. 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.
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?
Well, even if they weren't aliens, right, there's also 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.
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.
I mean, which brings me to another book I wrote called The Pentagon's Brain, which 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.
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, you know, 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.
Yes, 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 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?
He recently died, and he did give me permission to tell his full story after he died.
And I'm circling around that.
I'm circling around that.
But he was absolutely – with a Q clearance, that's what you have when you have access to nuclear secrets.
So if someone has a Q clearance for decades – And they're full of garbage.
You really have to ask, my God, should this guy have a cue clearance?
I mean, that's reverse engineering his credibility.
But I think you should read the whole book because, you know, it'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, why— That's why I'm asking if you think that he might have been lying to you.
And it's all about government – U.S. 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.
Speaking of I want to believe, I was working on a project with Chris Carter, who is the Really?
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.
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 of 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?
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, you know.
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?
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 and what they're – But I mean, why I like looking at history is because you can see the progression.
You see how science evolves 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.
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 what drones are capable of?
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.
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 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 mother ship, was this capable of autonomous flight or was it just they just threw it out there and let it crash?
But the human experiments, were they limited to this mimicry of the Russian experiments where they were trying to get people to look like aliens, or were there something else going on?
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 the way 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.
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. Wells, excuse me.
Right?
It was H.G. Wells' book and Orson Welles read it.
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.
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, ah, 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?
Okay.
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.
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, looking at it, examining it, and using it to their advantage to stay where?
But 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'm telling you that because you're asking me these questions that 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 of his back story.
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 and what you don't reveal.
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 whether it's like if you want people to be safe over here, there's certain people And sometimes you just can't follow the rules.
The way the story started for me, I'm at my house in 2009. A source calls me up.
He says, 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, okay, he is not a diplomat.
I mean, he's weapons trained.
At the time, my boys were young.
There were lots of G.I. 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, you know, 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 the whole, this whole book researching and reporting is about that sort of conundrum, if you will, that moral puzzle, you know, why do we, why do we differentiate?
Like, I'm sure you're aware of the story of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist, who was assassinated by someone, some group of people, and he entered into the Turkish embassy, and 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?
This supposedly was ordered by, who was it supposedly ordered by?
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 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.
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.
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.
You know, 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. 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 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.
They've got halo jumping, which you know about, right?
High altitude, low opening.
So they jump out, 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 hey-ho, 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.
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 gonna take that pole position, you must accept rivalry, right?
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.
So, 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.
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 fascinating detail is that they talk about movies that they see, and whether it's Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down, 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 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.
I mean, he spoke publicly about, you know, if we have to have an atomic war, the Cuban, 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 a 89 now.
And he's been with the CIA for 60 years, okay?
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. 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 – Billy Wah 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 Xop.
And Hua didn't kill Jop, 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, Hua 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?
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 got to stay ahead of the curve and make human eating robots that can shoot missiles.
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?
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.
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 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.
You should have the best version.
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'd 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.
But the thing is, 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 where they killed somebody they didn't think maybe needed to die.
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?
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.
And he said, I'm going to 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'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, you know, when I went to visit Billy Waugh the first time, he's got this, you know, 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, 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.
12 men and actually one or two women, the femme fatale, and they would go after bad guys.
Well, the opportunity takes place usually when you're young and you don't have any responsibility.
That's when you have your options.
Your options are severely limited the more you gather responsibilities.
Like, if I had to...
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 ever get where you want to go.
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.
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 going to...
If you're going to 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've got to have discipline.
Most people don't have those things.
Most people don't understand what it's like to really go for something and to know that the consequences of not doing that are horrific.
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, you know?
But when your life is on the line, right, 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.
I think that most of the people that can tell you the future are full of shit.
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 are you thinking about a person when they don't call you?
That's the argument against it.
But how many times are you thinking about that person they don't call you, but they're thinking about you as well?
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, and they can't believe it.
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 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 tricks.
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.
I mean, I'm going to tell you this trick.
I'm not going to give you how I do it, but I'm going to 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 all 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.
I mean, maybe there's like one lady in Tibet that has a broken gene and she can 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 was something bullshitty about them.
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.
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 this is like, I'm going to fuck this lady over.
She thinks she's going to talk to her husband.
Tell her some nonsense.
Take her money.
I think some of them actually believe they're getting information.
My grandmother used to believe that.
My grandmother was a very eccentric lady.
An 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 I was gonna pick this number and I just add up the last minute I changed the number wouldn't you know what the first one came in and she was so mad and 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.
If you were really psychic, you would have better instincts.
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 experience.
I talked to a lot of the scientists who taught the remote viewing, and I talked 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 the 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.
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.
They had little maps folded up 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.
They had all this pressure.
They couldn't find it.
The heart rate's up.
The guys at Houston are like, you've 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, you know, 900 feet or something.
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, you know, the idea behind what you're talking about that we spoke of as being sort of charlatanism.
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, the story, 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.
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, right?
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, 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?
Yeah.
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?
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 he was talked into saying that, you gotta 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 their career is.
His story 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, 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 is it?
You know, 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.
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.
I can't find any evidence that he says that he saw aliens, but 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.
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 only know they're a piece of the pie.
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.
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 they're like...
Like, you're the descendant of escaped Nazis, and they put together a town down there.
Then I went to Germany and looked in their archives with a fellow, a German PhD, who had real access to stuff and was able to translate for me while we were there looking at this stuff.
So when you consider, like, that 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.
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?
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, you know?
I mean, my God, what he had as a burden, right?
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.
I mean, I'm not pro-swastika, but it's so strange that we've given so much power to this There's a temple out here, I believe it's a Hindu temple, and it was a part of Hinduism.
This swastika predates World War II, it predates the Nazis, it predates their sort of reclaiming of it.
And this building that was built out here, I think it was built in the 1920s, has swastikas on it, and there's a big plaque explaining why there's swastikas on it.
I mean, he wound up having to flee, and he's the guy who created Zyklon gas.
He created Zyklon A, which had smell.
built into it so that it 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.
See, he was a part of World War I when they first started using gas.
And he was...
There's a great Radiolab podcast about it.
I think it's called The Bad Show.
But anyway, what essentially it says is 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 Haber 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, It's 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.
Well, it also comes out of the devastation of World War I, 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...
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.
They really were.
They were human beings who were doing some of the most evil shit, almost demonic, if you really stopped and thought about it.
If there were demons pretending to be people, they would do the same thing.
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.
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.
It's one of the more telling And horrific times in our history.
Because it's one of the more horrific ones that we 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.
But we have...
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 me the most is World War II. Do you think those scientists, when they came here, because I could not figure this out even after writing that whole book, 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.
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.
The ones who survived, they all tell different stories.
And some of them say they just were following orders.
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.
Intense, Landsberg Prison.
And then we, 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, 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.
And then Otto Ambrose, and they even gave him his money back.
That was astonishing.
And the family still has this villa in Switzerland, I believe, or maybe it's the Bavarian Alps that had been in the family, which is money from Nazi Germany.
And 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.
When you were done with the paperclip book and 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, 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, 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.
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 have these teams, you know, that go after high-value targets.
They're just supposed to disappear.
That's the vanish part of the...
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 like, we should know.
But then you think about it, well, the whole thing is you're not supposed to know because it's supposed to be just the hidden hand, the president's hidden hand, they call it.
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 am interested in and intrigued by, is that the successful operations you don't hear about because they are plausibly denied.
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, okay?
Then the Russians go away and now they're back, you know?
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 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.
I mean, they disappear as sort of the CIA's version of witness protection.
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.
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 it's a bit of a rebranding in the modern era of what has You know, people trying to outfox the bad guys.
um What I think has changed is that the desire to prevent war has shifted, and that makes me 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 would be the future?
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 micro actuator materials and energy efficient power systems for extremely SWAP, capital letter S, capital level W, lowercase capital letter S, capital level W, lowercase a, capital P, constrained microbiotic systems.
I expect that such advances will be enabling for applications including search and rescue, you know, Yeah, right.
I mean, that's like the ultimate going way back biology.
Like you have to have a mother, a trusting mother, to breastfeed in, you know, 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?
So they examined that molecule, the brain's moral molecule, 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.
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. 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.
So I, as the journalist, said to myself, well, wait a minute.
If the general's at the Pentagon, and that's a euphemism, meaning the 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 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 in particular, 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 One...
What is the fucking...
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 to...
OnePlus?
OnePlus, yeah.
OnePlus 7. They have this new phone that doesn't have a front-facing camera.
You press a button, 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 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 launch them with no physical human cost on your side.
And I mean, they're literally weapons of mass destruction if you have robots that can go over there and just kill people.
And what they need for that is the world's fastest supercomputer, right?
And what's interesting is that 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 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, okay?
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, but that was his prediction.
But I have a question for you then on that morality issue, right?
Which is, if man has always been a warring animal, right?
Right.
Why do we look so down upon 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.
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.
It's very personal.
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.
But meanwhile, When it comes to civilian casualties, drones are one of the worst inventions ever in human history.
If we really want to examine ourselves in terms of efficacy and the 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%.
I think that's...
We've done this before, right?
Haven't we?
I think it's a disturbing...
I might be conservative by saying it's in the 80s.
It might be in the 90s.
It's a disturbingly high number of people who died who were not the intended target.
President Donald Trump revoked a requirement that U.S. intelligence officials publicly report the number of civilian kills in drone strikes and other attacks on terrorist targets outside of war zones.
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 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.
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 we had on Iran, and the government 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.
And the rest would be children, civilians, but other combatants too.
They might be other soldiers, but...
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.
That all came to be, by the way, right after 9-11.
I mean, whenever we get attacked, it's like Pearl Harbor, suddenly there is a massive swing of what civilians, what the citizenry will tolerate.
And for Surprise Kill Vanish, I interviewed, I told you, lawyer John Rizzo, who wrote what was called the September 17th Memorandum of Notification, and And it gave presidential powers to the degree which had not been seen since the worst part of the Cold War.
And Congress wrote off on that.
In fact, what Rizzo told me is the gang of eight that are in charge of 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 preemptively.
And 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?
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 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, 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.
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.
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.
But it's from like the early days, gather round 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.
Because it only takes 24 minutes for an ICBM to get from the launch pad in Russia to hit New York or Washington.
So we set up this station up there to monitor this so we would have some kind of a jump on this.
Okay, like we'd learn it about eight minutes.
My God, the, you know, it was a radar station.
That station called the BMU site or J site is connected to the NORAD station in Cheyenne Mountain, you know, the one from the movies, right?
Okay.
And it's like the first week of business.
And the guys that are sitting there in the station are 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 endgame, 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 a thousand 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.
So someone had the idea at that BMU site to go outside, and lo and behold, what was there?
A big, full moon.
The system was reading the moon moving and misinterpreted it as a thousand nuclear, thermonuclear ICBMs coming.
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.