Transcript

Annie Jacobsen:
COVID had a 1% death rate. 1%. Pneumonic plague, you get it and you don’t get antibiotics inside of 24 hours, you’re dead. With 100% case fatality rates.

Brian Keating:
Is it up to us? And what can we do?

Annie Jacobsen:
I’m talking to presidential advisors, secretaries of defense, STRATCOM commanders, epidemiologists, directors of Operation Warp Speed, people who have their hand on the pulse. He gave me this line which just floored me. He said, you know, Annie, in a large-scale biological attack, There’s nothing you can really do to prevent it. You can only handle mitigating extermination. Essentially, a kid in a basement, with the help of a computational system, an AI system like Claude, could potentially make this kind of bioweapon. And that’s the fundamental danger. Bio is very, very, very different. I take readers from outbreak to anarchy in 6 days.

Annie Jacobsen:
Instead of being home under the covers, not infecting people, you’re out disco dancing…

Brian Keating:
Hello.

Annie Jacobsen:
…in a very crowded, crowded place, and you’re essentially in the middle of a superspreader event. That’s straight-up dark-hearted evil. If there is a lab leak, if the outbreak can be shut down in the first 12 to 24 hours, you can actually prevent the dystopian ending. But once it’s 24 hours, once it’s 48 hours, 96 hours, it’s out of the bag.

Brian Keating:
What scenario scares you more, nuclear war or biological war? Quick thing before we start. Most of you watching this aren’t subscribed. If you’ve ever gotten something out of one of my conversations, subscribing is a single thing that decides whether guests like Andy say yes to the next pitch to the episode. The scenario book that you’ve written this time is also kind of in a similar genre as, as your previous book, which is just some of the— I call it, um, hard science fiction. You called it science fact. I agree, except up to the point when There’s actually a disaster that’s going to take place in this book. And it’s very hard to talk about books that are A, embargoed, and B, I don’t want to give away too much of this.

Annie Jacobsen:
You know, I sometimes say in my tweets and such, spoiler alert, it has a dystopian ending.

Brian Keating:
That’s right. And for those, you know, 10 of you out there who haven’t read Nuclear War, you will have 2 treats in store for you because these books are both incredibly historically accurately researched. You’re a journalist, you’re, you’re, you’re trained as a journalist, you actually do the hard work of being a journalist, but you see it from the eye of a storyteller. You write for television. I guess the first place I’d like to start is, yeah, with, with what you’re not supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. So I want you to take us through this incredible new book, Biological War: A Scenario. So tell us about the COVID the title, and the subtitle, which is just a scenario.

Annie Jacobsen:
Well, it’s a beautiful cover, and I have to give credit to the art department for that. And you’ve been a a lot more places, a lot more radical places around the globe than I have. You’ve been to a continent I haven’t been. Yet.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, we may take you there.

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah. You know, Biological War: A Scenario follows in the vein of Nuclear War: A Scenario. Not that I expected to write a follow-on book, although when I was reporting Nuclear War, a number of my sources said to me, Annie, you have to look at bio next. These are people who work in counterproliferation, a fancy word for God forbid, you know, we need to make sure that this kind of an existential threat doesn’t happen. And, you know, they’re similar in terms of the title and the front, but oh my goodness, they are different millenials. They are different scenarios. One note on your like science fiction versus something. In fact, what I like to say is it’s, you know, it’s hypothetical.

Annie Jacobsen:
It’s a hypothetical scenario. based on wargaming that is done at the Pentagon. And you will note, I list my sources in the front of the book, not the back.

Brian Keating:
Yes.

Annie Jacobsen:
My first 6 books have the sources in the back, but I want readers to realize, because I’m now writing scenario, that this is who she spoke with. And so you realize I’m talking to former presidential advisors, secretaries of defense, StratCom commanders, epidemiologists, directors of Operation Warp Speed, people who have their hand on the pulse, if you will. And one of the individuals in this book I was fortunate to interview was Colonel, retired Colonel Tom Earhart, who worked in the Pentagon for a very famous office there called the Office of Net Assessment inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It was run for decades by a guy called Andy Marshall. They called him the Wizard.

Brian Keating:
Hmm.

Annie Jacobsen:
And the wargaming that was done in there is deeply classified, but Colonel Earhart helped me to understand what What it is, how it works. And most importantly, he gave me this line, which just floored me and became a lot of the scenario, which is when he said, you know, Annie, in a large-scale biological attack, there’s nothing you can really do to prevent it. You can only handle mitigating extermination. That freaked me out. And that became a real locus of this book. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
compare the two. I know that’s like asking you to compare your children, although when I do that with my mom, she’ll say, oh, it’s like comparing my left hand to my right hand. I say, Mom, you’re left-handed. I mean, it’s pretty obvious which one you like better. But when you think about these, the role that I thought of as a physicist was how important, like you just said, you call it wargaming, we would call it simulation. How do you back that up with the report? How do you get this gripping, just violent, mind-melting detail without compromising? I mean, you don’t have security clearance. I mean, right? How do you do that on a practical level?

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
How do they give you the access that you have and how much of it has to be kind of conjecture on your part, shall we say?

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah, that’s a really interesting long conversation, but the short version of it is, and first of all, you’re absolutely correct that I don’t have a security clearance. And also really important to know is I do not receive classified information. People often, I’ll be on other podcasts from, how’d you get all this classified information? I don’t get that because my sources would be violating their security clearances if they gave me that information. And so what’s interesting is I’m taking up to the edge of what can legally be known. And that has to do with the fact that many of these operations that are highly classified, there are parts of them that become unclassified or declassified, and the public doesn’t really ever know about them.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
And a lot of times that’s me learning keywords that I might use to request something from the National Archives. And so I’m always sourcing my stories. They’re kind of like a big puzzle, and there’s different pieces of the puzzle. Firsthand sources, always in quotes. You know, you can go to the notes and see, oh, she found this out in the National Archives. That’s where this is from. Or other journalists’ work. I stand on the shoulders of many, many incredible reporters who’ve come before.

Brian Keating:
Before this gets any darker, it’s worth saying what Annie thinks the point of her book actually is. The really challenging part for me with your writing is that you’re You’re, you’re so damn good at it. Um, it’s, it’s, it’s terrifying. I told my wife I was talking about it. She’s like, how does Annie sleep? Like, when you talk about these things, I mean, you know, spoiler alert, nuclear war goes through 24,000 years of human history, you know, from 88 minutes ago to 24,000 years in the future. Biological war takes place on a much sharper timescale. Plus, it’s very vivid. You know, we haven’t been through, you know, none of us really lived through, you know, Hiroshima and things like that.

Brian Keating:
We can talk about it abstractly.

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
But we all lived through COVID and we all saw what happened. And there’s many parallels in here. You do a very careful job distinguishing between what would be used as a weapon versus what would be used for rational sort of production. And the thing that most struck me when I had Katalin Karikó, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology for the COVID vaccine, we’ll talk about her in just a bit. But I said, is gain of function, is that really so bad? I mean, when I had COVID, I had COVID once, I had a vaccine, I didn’t have all the boosters, and I just couldn’t take it after a while. And, you know, so I did have the vaccine, I had a booster, and that was it. But when I had COVID after getting the vaccine, after having the booster, I lost my sense of taste and smell for a while. And so I lost, I lost weight.

Brian Keating:
I, I say, I like to say I dropped 5 pounds from my, my chin to my stomach. Now, I dropped 5 pounds, I lost weight. And I thought, well, you know, what if there was, you know, God forbid, because millions of people died. The vaccine definitely saved millions of people, right? And my friend, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s now the director of the NIH, who’s been in this chair, so to speak, he was very big proponent of the vaccine, so let’s not get too politicized unnecessarily. But are there beneficial reasons that the average person might, might say, you know, maybe we shouldn’t stop gain-of-function, which is, you know, plays a role in this book, which we’ll talk about? Is gain-of-function always a bad thing?

Annie Jacobsen:
Gain-of-function, for people who are listening or watching who aren’t professors, um, and didn’t almost win the Nobel Prize, gain-of-function is like— it’s, it’s very much like it sounds. gaining functions. So it’s a form of genetic modification, of genetic engineering, where you’re looking at a pathogen. And of course, for viewers, listeners, a pathogen can either be a virus or a bacteria. In the scenario, I go with bacteria for reasons we get into, but you are genetically modifying that so that it gains new function. And the 3 most important functions to be gained when you’re thinking about modification in this world of, is it really dangerous or is it really positive? Do the risks outweigh the rewards in this debate? Would be virulence, right? Like you can make something more lethal. Transmissibility, you can make it more contagious. And can you make it defy a medical countermeasure?

Brian Keating:
Hmm.

Annie Jacobsen:
So can you make it sort of override an existing immunity that you might have from a vaccine, can it override an antibiotic you might take in the case of a bacteria? So, the proponents of gain-of-function will say, absolutely, the reason we do those experiments is we need to be prepared in the event of a pandemic, an epidemic or a pandemic. We have to be able to get at it fast. And the only way to do that is to understand what a bad guy could maybe do.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Annie Jacobsen:
So, it’s this very catch-22 situation. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Now, the people who are against like sort of very anti-gain-of-function, including Colonel Erhardt, who called it evil, including Andy Weber, who has decades in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He served under the Obama administration, back to the Reagan administration. He’s really a veteran in understanding this. He told me that he believes that gain-of-function is a euphemism for biological weapons engineering.

Brian Keating:
Wow.

Annie Jacobsen:
And biological weapons engineering is illegal.

Brian Keating:
To understand why an accident is the scenario, you need to know how many of these labs there are now and where they are. To me, that does sound— yes, of course, we have to talk about, you know, the lab leak and the kind of— the way that it happens in this book, you know, is sort of unexpected. I mean, nuclear war, you know, when I saw the title for that book years ago and I fell in love with it, you know, I thought, oh, Russia’s launching a war, you know? And it was right after the invasion of Ukraine, and everything was just like— everything you do is like, Very topical, very timely. I was like, okay, so it’s coming from North Korea and that, you know, obviously spoiler alert, but for a 4-year-old, 3-year-old, right? So we could spoil it. All right. And in that, in that context, that was a little bit of a surprise. And then everything goes haywire, right? And that was an intentional act of war on behalf of North Korea. We’re not really sure why, but you know, it does happen right here.

Brian Keating:
It, it, it’s not, it’s, it’s sort of the munitions of a war that are being created. So we should set the stage. The premise of this book is different. It’s not an active attack. It’s a sort of a passive attack. The results are equally as catastrophic, some ways more horrifying, as we’ll talk about. But let’s set the stage for the listener or viewer, um, who hasn’t read it, because it comes out today. Um, so go ahead and get it.

Brian Keating:
I recommend the audiobook because Annie reads all of her books, and I just— you have a great voice. I mean, there’s no denying it. It’s very mellifluous, is the way I describe it. So let’s set the stage. Let’s go back to where it is, uh, takes place. I have my handy globe here.

Annie Jacobsen:
Right.

Brian Keating:
So it takes place in Siberia. So let’s start there.

Annie Jacobsen:
The inciting incident.

Brian Keating:
Yes. The inciting incident. So it’s in Siberia. Let’s take us there.

Annie Jacobsen:
Yes. Before I do that, let me just set the stage with this concept, which is that in looking at doctrine of how biological war is looked at, both at the Defense Department and at FEMA, okay? And also at the US Department of Health and Human Services, which would be in charge of like the nation’s public health were something to happen in the United States, in all of that doctrine, Planning Doctrine, listed in biological— in the BW category, is a biological— a catastrophic biological incident or attack. And that is— when you are a reporter and you suddenly ding, ding, ding, that is a moth— mic drop moment because you realize, oh, this is not just biological warfare in the old-school sense of like, you know, let’s drop some biological bombs on them. Not like the movie. An incident means an accident. It means a lab leak. It means a lab escape.

Brian Keating:
Regardless of how it happens.

Annie Jacobsen:
Regardless of how it happens. And that is profoundly dangerous. I mean, throwing out a number here, BSL-4 labs, biosafety level 4, the spacesuits that everybody sees in the movies. There were 2 in the United States before 9/11. There are now 17, 15 or 17, 2 of them are being constructed. BSL-3 labs, which you can work with plague, hantavirus. I mean, these are serious pathogens. There are 3,500 around the world.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, there’s some here in San Diego.

Annie Jacobsen:
And many of them in 110 countries are in places that are actually current war zones. And so now consider the idea of an incident as a lab leak or a lab accident, and then you might realize why I began the scenario that way. Because you cannot— there can be no arguing of like, that could never happen, because accidents happen.

Brian Keating:
Mm.

Annie Jacobsen:
And so there is a lab accident in Siberia at a very famous BSL-4 lab called Vector. And there was an accident at Vector in 2019 where a building caught on fire. And I always want readers to know, I do those little references to that so you can realize you are reading science fact, not science fiction. Yes.

Brian Keating:
I want to go back to what you just said about any modality in which it escapes. You kind of divide things— biological warfare before escape, before accident, before intentional leak. I want to start with that because to me as a scientist, and having interviewed benchtop scientists, biologists, Nobel Prize winners, like I said, like Katalin Karikó, perfect example She was working on, you know, recombinant DNA, which also plays a role in the book, which was established— you know, first discovered and won the Nobel Prize in 1971, I think you talk about in this book. They’re doing things for the sheer scientific thrill, the challenge, the desired curiosity that all great scientists have. And then maybe later it’ll have some application. Although in her case, she had a torturous career. She was threatened with deportation by her postdoc advisor. She’s a stoic.

Brian Keating:
She actually ended up forgiving him. And he tried to have her removed from the country with a young child. She had all of her lab equipment thrown out. out of the bench at UPenn, lesser of the Ivies compared to Brown and Princeton. And it was, you know, thrown out unceremoniously. She was kicked out. And then, okay, when she wins the Nobel Prize, then they try to retroactively reinstate her as faculty, to which she said, quite rightfully, F you. And basically—

Annie Jacobsen:
Wow, what a story.

Brian Keating:
She’s an amazing person. I’d love to introduce you guys next time she’s— she visits here quite frequently. But she explained in such— getting chicken’s eggs from her father in Hungary to do, you know, simple tests on how different bacteria and salmonella and things as a child. And then that carried through to her and sustained her as an adult. And then you have the people on the other side of the lab bench, what we call translationalists, that take it from a laboratory, from a university, from a research setting, and then they want to make money or they want to make weapons with it. What would you do in that situation? How do you advise a young scientist, many of whom are listening, Nobel laureates listen to this podcast, how do you advise them? Because at a certain level, where does it stop with a lot of the nuclear scientists that you talk to? deeply regretted their involvement, as you talk about in your book, in Area 51 and, and, um, Paperclip as well, right? You did the firsthand research. A lot of them, including our late, great mutual friend Herb York, regretted it to some extent. How do you stop them? Or is it ethical to stop them? How would you— how do you handle that? Do you kind of kill baby Hitler? What level do you intervene? Or do you not? Is it not right to intervene?

Annie Jacobsen:
I mean, I’m not a scientist, so I, I don’t— I can’t answer that question. But I can certainly, and always do in all of my books, raise that issue for scientists to think about for themselves. And I am just simply relaying stories of, you know, historical stories of scientists on the record struggling with this, you know, complex question, usually later in their life after they have done something often that they regret.

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

Annie Jacobsen:
And, or maybe regret is too strong of a word. Maybe it’s sort of wish they had thought through a little bit more. And the best example or certainly in this book, is you mentioned Paul Berg, who really has that origin story of recombinant DNA. Again, sounds just— it is just like it sounds, like you recombine DNA. And this was done in 1971 in a lab in Stanford University. And I quote Berg giving interviews later, he won the Nobel Prize, talking about how we weren’t even thinking of nefarious use of this, you know, and Then later he says, or one of his colleagues says, we should have. Because that time, that moment in time in history is so important to the question you’re raising from a sort of real locus of the shift about biological weapons. So many people don’t realize that once upon a time, biological weapons were legal.

Annie Jacobsen:
They were legal in the United States. They were legal, meaning they weren’t illegal.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Annie Jacobsen:
And the United States was building a massive arsenal of biological weapons. This is on-the-record known work, primarily at Fort Detrick in Maryland, but also at several other places around the country. And starting in 1969, President Nixon just sort of mysteriously— there’s air quotes around that— decided to give up the biological weapons arsenal. You know, he talked about them being repugnant to the conscience of mankind.

Brian Keating:
Hmm.

Annie Jacobsen:
And And the treaty, as a result, the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty, which is also known as the BWC, that was signed by all these nations starting in 1972, including Russia.

Brian Keating:
Hmm.

Annie Jacobsen:
And the reason why I choose Siberia, Russia, as the lab leak, the vector lab, is because there’s historical precedent of Russia absolutely kind of crossing its fingers behind its back as they signed this treaty. They began, by their own admittance of their scientists that defected to the United They began a colossal biological weapons program. And so, when everyone else, like the United States, was destroying its arsenals, the Soviets were not only not destroying theirs, but they were building new weapons using recombinant DNA technology that they, in essence, stole from Bert.

Brian Keating:
What do you think is their motivation? I mean, they have more nuclear weapons than they did for a long time. The missile gap was closed in the ’60s. What would be their motive? I mean, play armchair psychologist for a moment. What is their rationale? I could see a rogue state wanting to do it because it’s a poor, you know, crazy warlord’s version of a nuke, but why would they do it?

Annie Jacobsen:
Well, I don’t have to play armchair speculation because it’s on the record. Because a number of the Soviet biological weapons engineers defected to the United States in the 1990s. And they came here and they told us what they were doing and they told us why they were doing it. And the reason was twofold. One, they were told by their powers that be, their military minders, that of course the United States was cheating on the treaty. Of course they were making biological weapons.

Brian Keating:
Projections.

Annie Jacobsen:
That was the one, which, you know, historically is not true. As far as I know, that is not true. As far as I know, we really did spend 214 weeks destroying our arsenal. They were told that. And then the second point is that they were told, listen, America, the West hates the Soviet Union so much, they will do anything to annihilate us. And so we have to do anything to annihilate them. You know, lie, cheat, steal, kill, et cetera, et cetera. And those two really disquieting concepts underpin the whole narrative.

Brian Keating:
Mm.

Annie Jacobsen:
You know, this idea of paranoia, this idea of you cannot trust anyone. So if there’s any sort of ballast to that that I think the book offers, it’s to try and really have people reconsider how dangerous mistrust and paranoia are, both in an individual and in a nation.

Brian Keating:
Do you feel somewhat paradoxically more hopeful now that no nukes have been exchanged in this current conflict in the Ukraine, or do you feel even that we’re still on this razor’s edge?

Annie Jacobsen:
Well, certainly, it’s like a profoundly great thing that no one has been crazy enough to use a nuclear weapon. And Russia often threatens tactical nuclear weapons, which they have in their arsenal. We do not. Right? And we do not for a reason, because they would be too easy to use. But, you know, I make it really clear in Nuclear War that from my experience and my understanding and everything I have learned about it is that everybody in the business of preventing nuclear war knows that if nuclear war begins, it only ends in one way, which is total annihilation. And so I would say you can’t use nuclear weapons. So is it a good thing? Of course it is. And does it make you wince every time, you know, Putin or Lavrov or somebody suggests that they might be used? I mean, I just, you know, hold my breath.

Annie Jacobsen:
Bio is very different. It’s—

Brian Keating:
and again, that idea of an accident, an incident, a lab leak, So not far from this campus is Illumina Genomics, great many Nobel laureates, including, you know, hopefully future guest Frances Arnold from Caltech. Hopefully she’ll be— she’s a board member. And there’s sort of the industrial version or the professional version of 23andMe, which recently went through bankruptcy, then emerged. And there was a great, you know, concern that, you know, people’s DNA would be used against them to tailor, you know, handcrafted bioweapons. Is that scenario doesn’t take place here per se? But that came to me sort of that you could basically have a much better weapon if you could tailor it. Putin happened to spit in a cup someday and Zelensky wants to get him out, they could just take him out by having some pathogen that could get to him. Are there more less catastrophically world-ending scenarios where bioweapons could be more humane, that they could be targeted to just specific incidents and that could be viewed as a proper tactic of war? Or are they always, and for all time, to be never used in any scenario?

Annie Jacobsen:
I think of that more in the category of targeted assassination.

Brian Keating:
Yes.

Annie Jacobsen:
No, I’m talking about that. Which is something I wrote about in another book about the CIA’s paramilitary called Surprise, Kill, Vanish. And people have been targeting and killing one another with poisons, with toxins, since time immemorial. So, you know, and there’s actually an interesting anecdote from one of the Soviet defector scientists where he He talks about, and this is back in, let’s say, the late, probably the early ’80s, where he talks about someone from the Politburo coming into his office. The person I’m referring to, his name is Ken Alibek, and he kind of famously wrote a book called Biohazard. I think he published right around the millennium. And he tells this story in that book, and I’m repeating it, paraphrasing it, which is that Politburo guy comes in and says, hey, if we wanted to, Let’s just say hypothetically, there was somebody I wanted to get rid of. And if we were to put Ebola, let’s say, on his steering wheel, would he get it and die? You know, I mean, it was literally that specific.

Annie Jacobsen:
And I’m pretty sure the pathogen was Ebola. And then you can read the book and see, you know, Alibek’s reaction. And it’s like, yes, it would kill him, but it would probably kill a bunch of other people.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Annie Jacobsen:
And so, though, I think what you’re speaking to is very interesting in terms of science and computational science and where we are today and realizing you can do it. The answer is yes. Any question you ask me, yes. Can we target— fill in the blank? Yes, yes, yes, yes. All of this can be done. This is a major concern of everybody working in the business of preventing biological warfare. And even scarier is whatever it is that they’re working on can also escape from the lab.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. And so would you advise somebody not to get these kinds of synoptic genetic testing? I mean, just for the off chance that they may become, you know, the next Kardashian, and then they do an interview on a podcast and they, they, their saliva gets used to go to, you know, some malevolent DNA processing. Anyway, would you advise people just like your own kind of digital hygiene, now genetic hygiene? Should we be more cognizant of that?

Annie Jacobsen:
I’m always going to fall into the category of me not advise. I’m not gonna advise anyone of any— anything except for maybe my kids. Actually, it’s good now that they’re over the age of 18. It’s more like, here’s what I would suggest, or here’s what I would do.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Annie Jacobsen:
One of my favorite sayings is just don’t make me do it, you know? And that literally, like, so that’s why I’m all about information. I just think information is beautiful. Information is illuminating, and information is so satisfying because you You get to make personal decisions for yourself or for somebody who asks for your opinion that you care about based on the information you have. And you can also say, this is just the information I have.

Brian Keating:
If you had written this book in 2019 or something like that, before COVID would it have been different? Would you have maybe gotten some things wrong in your projections or maybe the scenario, would it be different?

Annie Jacobsen:
I don’t think I could have written this book in 2019 because I think I would’ve gotten some pushback from myself and others maybe of like, this hasn’t happened since 1918.

Brian Keating:
Mm-hmm.

Annie Jacobsen:
Since the Spanish flu, the influenza pandemic. Let me say this. It’s like, when you read the book, as you have, and, you know, I think people that have read the book say to me, Wow. It really made me think about COVID differently. So in other words, they didn’t say, wow, that’s really interesting, your opinion of COVID Right. ‘Cause you don’t know my opinion of everything from the lab leak or the origin story or what I think about vaccines. None of that’s in there. It doesn’t need to be.

Annie Jacobsen:
You don’t need my opinion. What I do is give you the facts and I give you quotes from people that are in the know and you get to think what What did that really— what does that mean? What happened? But maybe even more importantly, could it happen again?

Brian Keating:
Could it happen again? And I keep thinking about that. And as I’m reading the book, and I’m seeing the reaction, and I’m just like— it was sort of— there was an element of PTSD at some level, I have to be honest. But that’s just an indication of how vivid you are as a writer. And just, again, I wish you weren’t so damn good because it really did give me some sleepless nights. And it’ll give you— it’s the best type of thing. I joked on Twitter recently, you know, like, I have to write a book, Bedtime War, because I need to go to sleep. It’s some kind of antidote to how just extraordinary you are at telling facts and speculation. But you’re very careful in both books.

Brian Keating:
You say, this is not the scenario. This is not guaranteed. This is avoidable. But I thought back to January 15th, 2020. I was at a Shabbat dinner with a bunch of my friends, and I was talking. And one of my friends is a businessman. He travels around the world. And I said, have you ever been to China? Because I just got invited to view this astronomical telescope in China.

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
to maybe be one of their external advisors. And he’s like, where? And I was like, oh, it’s actually in Tibet. No, I’m sorry, I said China, but I meant Tibet. And it’s at 50,000— you know, it’s at 15,000 feet in Tibet. And it’s a big honor for me. And there— I’d never been to China. You know, I’ve been to other parts of the planet, like you said. But he’s like, well, you— when, when do they want you to go? And I said, March, April of 2020.

Brian Keating:
He said, I think you better hold off a little bit because, you know, have you heard of COVID And I’m like, no. You’re like, it’s coronavirus. And I’m like, I’ve heard of coronavirus, who cares? The common cold’s a coronavirus. And he said, well, just hold off, you know, do me a favor. I’ve been to China, you know, it’ll still be there. It’s been there, you know, 5,900 years. It’ll be there a little bit longer. How did he know? Like, that kept coming back to me throughout the year.

Brian Keating:
Like, we spent trillions of dollars, all the 3-letter agencies there. I mean, you interview, like you said, their references. This book has more references than my PhD thesis. I mean, it’s so thoroughly researched.

Annie Jacobsen:
Coming from you, that’s a very serious compliment. Thank you.

Brian Keating:
I mean, everything you define, like I forgot to do gain of function.

Annie Jacobsen:
What does it mean?

Brian Keating:
Here’s the actual first reference to it. I mean, I read, and I wish that I would listen to the index read by you, but unfortunately you wisely decided to skip it. But at a certain point I kept thinking, and they still don’t know it in 2026 when this book takes place, right? They don’t know with their trillions of dollars, their satellites that can see a plume of a puff of a cigarette over Yakutsk or whatever, they don’t know.

Annie Jacobsen:
Right.

Brian Keating:
what my friend knew. 2 months before it really hit here, it was shut down in March, March 13th, 2020. He gave me 2 months’ notice and I actually did start preparing. I sold some stocks. I actually had a huge supply of masks, not full chemical suits, but we ended up having this good discussion. And then I felt like with trillions of dollars and the 3-letter agency sprinkled on it, they knew nothing. They didn’t help us at all. In fact, there was a lot of disinformation.

Brian Keating:
You talk about FOMO, Imagine the ludicrous idea that you’re going to wipe down a package from Amazon that’s going to prevent you from getting COVID. It was insane, yet we did it. How come with all this apparatus, we knew nothing more than my Yenta friends at the Shabbat dinner?

Annie Jacobsen:
I mean, for starters, COVID showed us 2 very specific and frightening things. One, which is precisely what you just say, which is that all of the billions of dollars on biodefense we were completely unprepared. And 2, as a result of the misinformation and, you know, just use any synonym for that word.

Brian Keating:
6-foot distance, the sit down in a restaurant but don’t stand up.

Annie Jacobsen:
The fracturing of public opinion just became intense and it has only gotten worse. And if there’s another thing I would hope about people reading the book is they would go, whoa, why am I wasting my time? I mean, obviously some people’s careers were ruined and that’s a day, but like just your average or Jane is like, you know, I have this big opinion about— okay, enough of that. Why don’t you just like really start to learn about actually what we’re up against? Because that’s really valuable for yourself and for your family. To your point about like the January 20th date and what did we know, you know, I learned how uncertain biology is. And this is— I interviewed, like, I use the plague pathogen, spoiler alert, you know, pneumonic plague.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, pestilence.

Annie Jacobsen:
I mean, it is a killer. COVID had a 1% death rate.

Brian Keating:
1%.

Annie Jacobsen:
This is 20%. 1 out of 100 people died. Pneumonic plague, pneumonia as in the lungs, not bubonic plague, which is in the lymph system. Pneumonic plague, you get it and you don’t get antibiotics into your body inside of 24 hours, you’re dead with 100% case fatality rate certainty.

Brian Keating:
Okay?

Annie Jacobsen:
That is shocking. One of the people I interviewed at length in this is a former USAMRIID bacteriologist, Dr. Henry Hine, brilliant person. spent his entire life working with Yersinia pestis. And, you know, he explained to me that anyone who tells you they understand the human immune system, how any— really, how a lot of this works, is lying to you. And so, I loved the— here you have this brilliant person who knows so much about something, and he’s the first person to admit that he can’t possibly know everything. And we got so much wrong information right out of the gate. May I give you one specific example?

Brian Keating:
Please. Okay.

Annie Jacobsen:
So I reprint in the book a tweet sent out by the WHO, the World Health Organization, sort of the world’s sort of, you know, people look to it as like, they must know, they know what’s going on. They don’t use the word they must know what’s going on, although now they might. Because at the end of March, Trump had already closed the borders.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
End of March, they tweeted out, COVID is not airborne, and they put not in in big letters.

Brian Keating:
Yes.

Annie Jacobsen:
And this was retweeted by the CDC. This was also the CDC’s position. COVID was airborne. How on earth could they have made that mistake months into the pandemic? And why, more importantly, why have they never admitted that and said, we are deeply sorry, here’s why? That’s what I want to know, because I want them to say, we can’t know everything. We don’t know everything. We didn’t know it was airborne. We had a lot of scientists who didn’t want it to be airborne. We had a lot of scientists who wanted it to be fomite transmissible.

Annie Jacobsen:
And for those who don’t know what a fomite is, that means if you, if some, if the bacteria is on a surface, I can get it by touching it. As it turns out, that 1 in 10,000 cases of COVID comes from fomites. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
It was performative theater that made you feel good about it. But a lot of human psychology depends on the theatrics being They’re there for a reason. Why do you turn off your phone on an airplane? I’m a pilot. It does nothing. It does absolutely nothing. But it’s a form of control. If we get you to do that, we can get you to do other things.

Annie Jacobsen:
Why did WHO, because they certainly haven’t answered my question despite repeated requests, why didn’t they say, listen, we don’t know if it’s airborne. We want to think it’s not. Why didn’t they say that?

Brian Keating:
Remember there were things like protesting, it was also the George Floyd situation 2 months after COVID. COVID really broke here. And they said things like, you know, it’s protesting Black Lives Matter. These are public health issues that supersede— remember in LA there was huge riots.

Annie Jacobsen:
Of course.

Brian Keating:
And the local health coordination said that those were sanctioned. They didn’t say that you should not gather for those. They later would say things like, yeah, you can’t have more than 5 people at your July 4th barbecue. But in the beginning times, I think that ignorance, but also perhaps motivation, thrives in low-information environments. They really wanted to have some sense that somebody was in control. Everyone wanted to feel it. But I think the mark of a good scientist is to say you don’t know. And I think there were a lot of good scientists—

Annie Jacobsen:
Uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty.

Brian Keating:
My friend Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, double PhD, PhD, MD, Stanford University, now a director of the NIH. He did just a simple study like, if there is a vaccine, we can’t get herd immunity. It’s just going to— I’m sorry, herd immunity is the only approach for early stage mitigation and trying to avoid it by by quarantining is actually counterproductive. He was investigated by Stanford. He had funding taken away. Fauci and Collins made a public declaration that he needed to be taken down publicly. There’s a FOIA request for that information was revealed.

Brian Keating:
He was called a fringe epidemiologist by Collins. Just horrible. But he was asking, he was saying, look, this thing. And then when the vaccines came out, I interviewed a very famous person. I’m not going to say who it is because I’ve lost a lot respect for this person. But this person was a very, very stringent, strong opponent of Donald Trump, hates Donald Trump, is very active, one of the leading scientists online, hates Donald Trump. And when the Warp Speed was successful, he was one of the many people, along with former Vice President Kamala Harris, said, I wouldn’t take a vaccine and I don’t think you should take a vaccine. Which meant, because he would later say everyone needs vaccines, boosters, everything else, and she would say the same thing too.

Brian Keating:
that they’re partially responsible for some people dying. They thought they were doing so much good opposing Donald Trump. Now, on the other side, my friends, you know, are right-wingers, will say, oh, the COVID vaccine, you know, you’re just a control. Like, there’ll be people in this interview, I predict, say, how many boosters did this guy— looks like he had boosters. Or, you know, did she— how many did she get? You can say whatever you want. You’ve all had vaccines out there. There’s not a single one of you listening hasn’t had a vaccine. So you’re in the club too, buddy.

Brian Keating:
Even if RFK has had vaccines, right? So, but the point is it was developed by Trump. So wait, so now you’re this pro-Trumper and you think you’re MAGA and everything, but you also are now rejecting one of the greatest contributions to science. And like I said, Katalin Karikó, greatest contributions in record time, right? So both sides are to blame. The scientists on both sides, the politicians on both sides. I think it was awful and I don’t think anything’s changed. I think things have gotten worse.

Annie Jacobsen:
I believe they have gotten worse, but I think that the uncertainty component of it can and should really be leaned into. And you almost have to put on earmuffs against your political opponents if you are in a position of leadership and work with a gifted team from both sides of the aisle to decide how to convey uncertainty with a certain degree of authority. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s not. If you say— you would do this with your kids. I would say, guys, I don’t know. And then they’re like, at least mom’s like, Got some authority about what she doesn’t know, right? Because that is the truth. And, you know, information is king. Just to learn that COVID was a novel virus.

Annie Jacobsen:
What does that mean? Just like it sounds, new. Okay, Mother Nature mutates. And so yes, a novel virus can come out of Mother Nature. A novel virus can also come out of a lab. And then you begin to realize, well, if something is new, not only is there no immunity against it. Not only is there no existing medical countermeasure, but it’s going to take some serious get your hands dirty work to figure out a medical countermeasure. That kind of basic science, as far as I recall, was not even really conveyed ever. It took me writing and researching this book to understand what we didn’t know, what people were never explained.

Annie Jacobsen:
Right.

Brian Keating:
The next This part is the detail I couldn’t stop thinking about. It literally gave me nightmares. It wasn’t invented. It comes from what the Soviets were actually working on. The thing that was so fascinating, and that you did, and again, it’s a spoiler, but that’s okay, is that the virus by itself, you know, has lethality and has transmissibility, but it didn’t have the social engineering aspect of it until you brought it to mind. Now, your novelty in the Jacobson, you know, variant of this Yersinia pestis was to to add in a social enhancement called euphoria. What made you come up with that? And what is the key enabling vector that that element provides? I found it fascinating and terrifying, as usual.

Annie Jacobsen:
Even more terrifying is that’s not from my imagination. That’s from history. So here, okay, so for listeners and viewers, in the scenario, you learn very quickly that You know, whereas pneumonic plague, Mother Nature’s pneumonic plague infects you and you’re just like, your lungs are shedding necrotic debris. I mean, you are dying, you know, you’re coughing up blood, your head feels like there’s an ax in it. And so you are like on the floor or in bed.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Annie Jacobsen:
And instead, in the scenario, people are experiencing euphoria. And so instead of being home under the covers, not infecting people, you’re out disco dancing.

Brian Keating:
At a rave.

Annie Jacobsen:
In a very crowded place. And you’re essentially in the middle of a superspreader event. Now, that is not from my imagination. That is from Dr. Henry Hynes sharing with me that when he was at USAMRIID, that is the US Army’s medical research place, Fort Detrick, which is where biological weapons were developed, you know, worked on when they were still illegal, and now countermeasures are worked on. And Hein, one of the world’s leading experts in plague, told me that they learned that the Soviet bioweapons engineers were doing precisely that. So that is his reference, and it’s noted in, in the book, which is just— and he, he said, we realized that was some pretty evil stuff.

Brian Keating:
Yes.

Annie Jacobsen:
And that real— and that’s why I chose that, because you literally can’t That’s straight-up dark-hearted evil.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, it’s, it’s mal-evolution. You’re going against evolution, which would make it very— if something’s very transmissible and very lethal, it doesn’t spread, right?

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
The only way to get that is to override it, which makes it like anti-Darwinian. I mean, this is the most evil. And the people that are working on it are medical, are physicians, the Hippocratic Oath. You’re talking about this, and I just feel like knowing other scientists and knowing, you know, people have oftentimes, I think even you, to push back with a little love and respect, this, this kind of image of some scientists maybe as being just, you know, just above everything, just so curious. They don’t have— I always say, look, scientists are like children. They’re curious, they’re imaginative, they’re creative, but they also don’t like playing with others. They don’t want to share their ball. They’re jealous, they’re petty, they’re spiteful.

Brian Keating:
They’ll do anything. And so there’s both sides. So I, I wouldn’t say that I’d put it past anybody, but in the realm of You know, the bioweapon. And the thing that makes your writing terrifying in these 2 books, and not as— I should say, not all your books are terrifying. These 2 are particularly gripping because they’re cut from cutting-edge, you know, scientific-backed research and first-person accounts and archival research. And you’re just like, you know, such a pro at what you do. What makes both these 2 books in general terrifying to me is that there’s only one thing— I always joke with my kids, there’s only one thing that’s literally free, right? Water costs money, but the only thing thing that’s really free besides love— okay, I want my kids to love it, I give them love for free— is air, right? The only thing— we don’t pay our air bill, right? I mean, you live in LA, which is a lot smoggier than San Diego. I used to live there, uh, it’s gotten better, but then the fires came, which make a role in this book.

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah, sorry.

Brian Keating:
And you talk about the fires in this book, and just again, another public policy that’s scientific that could have been avoided, that’s public policy disaster. But let’s— but you’re not political, I want to make that nuclear. But air, air is something we get for free, and it’s both the mechanism and the medium by which this disease is transmitted, and most of the fallout and the death and destruction come from new— what is it about air? I mean, there’s, you know, famous breath, from breath to air, or how when breath becomes air about, you know, someone who’s dying of a lung disease, right? What is it about air? Why is it this vehicle? It’s life-giving, but it’s also the thing that connects us. And what’s your, what’s your take on it? What, how do you react to that?

Annie Jacobsen:
I love the way you framed that, and it makes it It’s kind of very sorrowful to think about that. But in the realm of biological war, air really means airborne. And airborne is terrifying because unlike Ebola, let’s say, which has a case fatality rate of between 60 or 90%, depending on the variant, you know, and you bleed out your odds and, you know, you bleed to death. If you had Ebola and you were over on the other corner of that room, I would not catch Ebola. I would have to physically hold you. That’s why loved ones, that’s why first responders, doctors and nurses get Ebola and die of it. Yeah. It is contact.

Annie Jacobsen:
Airborne is totally different. If either of us had an airborne pathogen in our lungs that was a killer, you know, it would linger after we were gone. The CDC keeps a list called Tier 1 Select Agents, and it’s kind of shared with the Defense Department, with FEMA. And This is what they’re most afraid of. These are the pathogens that, to their eye, are most likely to be used. This was kind of developed in the sort of post-9/11 world to be used in a biological weapons attack, which was thought to originate from a terrorist organization. And the Tier 1 select agents always, almost always, involve something that is airborne.

Brian Keating:
I think one of the things that I keep thinking about, and obviously it’s impossible when you write books to not think about what your next— you, Annie Jacobs, and not me, or one, what your next book is going to be. And I kept thinking about this air again, and I thought of, well, what’s another thing that’s in the air, either in the zeitgeist, in the German air, in the air, in the spirit, a spirit air respiration, right? So that’s what that means. But there’s 2 things that I think about with regard to air. One is physically in the air, and that’s climate change, and the other one is AI. And I think of those 2, I guess I guess, which would be a next topic for an Annie Jacobson book, because they’re both airborne, they’re both kind of in this realm, non-physical realm, at least that you can’t see. Which one would sort of terrify you more as an existential threat? Which one could plausibly be a next scenario? Global warming, global climate change, catastrophic, engineered maybe malevolently, or AI, which could obviously be the first non-human scenario, which ends human life. Which of those 2 could maybe, if you’re working on one, you don’t have to give it away.

Annie Jacobsen:
Again, I like the way you framed that because it really speaks to the world we are in now and moving into the future, you know? But many of the subject matter experts I work with work in these cross-disciplines because they’re looking at counterproliferation of these threats. And so, I have been given a number of ideas. Whereas you pose that as a question, it’s been posed to me like more of like a suggestion, like, here’s what I think you should do. And so that’s interesting. But it’s also encouraging because, you know, I write these 2 books now with these just like horrific dystopian endings, and yet I’m a very optimistic person, and I do sleep at night.

Brian Keating:
Mm-hmm.

Annie Jacobsen:
And that is because the point of the books is not panic. The point is pressure.

Brian Keating:
Yes.

Annie Jacobsen:
The point is to sort of, within your own self, your own family, within your community, to kind of demand more than what we have. We can get into the real spoiler alert, which is Act 3 of the book, which is really what happens, which is really what the Defense Department, which is what all of the planners are afraid of happening in a case like this, which is anarchy, I don’t want to do that, but I’m going to do that.

Brian Keating:
But first, I want to touch upon what you just said because it’s really a beautiful passage. So parallel structure between the 2 books is you talk about nuclear winter, which Carl Sagan popularized and many other very highly qualified scientists have written about it, including folks here and elsewhere, but also the controversy around it that it’s not universally accepted. You talk about that at the end of Nuclear War. But in this book, there’s a parallel, biological twilight.

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
So nuclear winter and biological twilight. You talk about act 4 now. I guess this is long after.

Annie Jacobsen:
That’s called the denouement.

Brian Keating:
The denouement. That’s right. You literature major. No, you weren’t a literature major.

Annie Jacobsen:
Okay.

Brian Keating:
You say this beautifully. Humans are a paradox, brilliantly endowed with the capacity to imagine and create, often also incapable of restraint. If biological war scenario like this one comes true, it will mean that the same mind that mapped the cosmos which really struck me, that landed machines on planets and the moon and charted galaxies. Again, every single dot there almost that’s not— that doesn’t have a 6-pointed star on it is a galaxy in the distance. That’s from the James Webb Space Telescope. And charted galaxies billions of years away could not safeguard its own biosphere. What do you make of that? These, these, you know, chimp primates that can do such incredible things as do this and do all the the things that get destroyed at the end of nuclear war, which brings tears to my eyes when I think about it. Just the record of mankind may be what’s responsible for the erasure of mankind.

Brian Keating:
How do you balance this tension between, you know, the beast and the angel that we all have within us?

Annie Jacobsen:
So here’s where the literature major in me comes, you know, comes to bear because I think about this idea of evolution when you’re talking about the chimps and that, you know, we’ve spoke of Kubrick’s 2001 before and that idea that we have evolved into this incredible, you know, species that can do all of those scientific maneuvers that you just mentioned, and a zillion more. And how— what a remarkable time to be alive. And then I think of— spoiler alert— the third act, which I learned that the government has a plan in place. Okay, so hold the thought, the word evolution. This is the literary major reference.

Brian Keating:
Mm-hmm.

Annie Jacobsen:
You know, then you find out if you’re Annie Jacobson and you’re researching, wait a minute, the government has a plan in place if this all happens and anarchy and insurrection takes over for itself. They have a plan in place for itself. And it’s not all of government, it’s a tiny group of people. And the plan is called devolution.

Brian Keating:
Mm.

Annie Jacobsen:
So, it’s like putting everything a de- in front of evolution. And it’s exactly like it sounds. I mean, it actually derives from like a British term of like a secondary group of people that dot dot dot, but it really is the devolving of evolution. It’s going in the other direction. And so that is our fatal flaw, hopefully not fatal flaw, but that is certainly something that must be looked at.

Brian Keating:
Yes.

Annie Jacobsen:
In the world in which we exist, where technology is outpacing law and justice and democracy and all It must be looked at through a new lens.

Brian Keating:
That’s fascinating because just hearing you say that, and I’m remembering in the book that that’s what it was called, and also thinking about nuclear war where you talk about the study that you read about apes and how they do battles and what’s the origin of warfare in general. But also it seemed to me like a normal— Darwin studied finches and galápagos. They don’t go back. They don’t lose their—

Annie Jacobsen:
They don’t lose a tail.

Brian Keating:
Your thumb, right?

Annie Jacobsen:
Well, we did lose our tail. You don’t—

Brian Keating:
we lost it, but you grow it, so hopefully. That’s right. Yeah. Unless you’re a salamander or something, but we must be, yeah, this, this only species so capable of, of doing such great things as creating, you know, life and meaning and culture and music and arts. And again, all the things that get destroyed in nuclear war, but maybe come back at the very end, tens of thousands of millennia later.

Annie Jacobsen:
The literature major in me, by the way, really thinks your fatal flaw is hubris.

Brian Keating:
How so?

Annie Jacobsen:
Because it always is. It always is. Look at anybody without mentioning any names that you admire, that suddenly you don’t, you no longer admire them, right? And again, I really believe that the personal is the political. Like, if you look in your own personal life, you can pretty much figure out anything in politics, how it works, which is why I don’t write about politics, why I don’t write about my personal life. But you can see, like, you see somebody that you really admire and you go like, God, their downfall or their shift. And it’s like, if you really look at it objectively without having to publicly announce it, you can pretty much track it as hubris.

Brian Keating:
That came across vividly in this book when I thought of Fritz Haber, who was a German— of course, German Jew, very nationalistic, very patriotic. He invented nitrogen fixation that, that you and I benefited from a couple hours ago when we got coffee and a croissant, right? We wouldn’t exist. We couldn’t support 8 billion people without his invention. And yet, what else did he do? He not only invented chemical weapons, he witnessed them personally at his own desire as part of the German Science Corps. He would go to the trenches in World War I and he would witness the horrific death. I mean, biological war, yeah, it’ll happen over a couple— it’s awful, right?

Annie Jacobsen:
Mm-hmm.

Brian Keating:
But people in the book live a couple days, some of them, right? Not a great way to live or to die. rather, but these people, horrific chemical burns and their faces ripped off, kind of a hybrid between nuclear and biological war. Maybe that’s your next book, Chemical War. In this case, he lived to see so much tragedy from what he did. He killed millions and he saved billions. So how do you reconcile that? And again, the scientist as this all charitable, all giving, knowing, and curious, it’s just not true. I mean, we have our pettiness, we have our desire. I mean, like I said, he won the Nobel Prize, after World War I.

Brian Keating:
I mean, they knew what he did. And then his own family was murdered by Zyklon gas produced in the very same chemical processes and factories that he helped build for Germany.

Annie Jacobsen:
The hubris in that, I must add, is that the man he was trying to please was Adolf Hitler.

Brian Keating:
Yes, exactly.

Annie Jacobsen:
Who murdered his family. And he was exiled to, where was it, Austria? And he died a miserable death.

Brian Keating:
His wife committed suicide, one of his kids committed suicide.

Annie Jacobsen:
What a fascinating cautionary tale. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
And to think about this goal, like Prometheus, desiring the technology, wanting to— I like to call it the Tower of Babel. We want to be— and maybe AI is that thing. Maybe AI is, some say, humanity’s last invention. I have my doubts. We’ll talk about that over lunch maybe later.

Annie Jacobsen:
Well, just to jump in there, and this comment I’m going to make has been rapidly increasing in the past 3 months, not 6 months, not 9, 3 months, that presidential advisors on bio, who also have kind of, you know, look at AI, look at LLMs, are increasingly, rapidly increasingly getting concerned that bio is actually the threat in AI.

Brian Keating:
Claude, which is made by Anthropic, they have a new product. It just came out. It’s called Claude Science. This is great. You know, I’m going to be able to discover the mysteries of the universe. and find out exactly what’s going on with those aliens over there. It has genomics, it has this database, it has NIH, it has all these papers, PubMed, blah, blah, blah. Nothing, not one topic had anything to do with anything other than bio or biochemistry or genomics.

Brian Keating:
All these things are centered around bio. Bio is not the only science. I hate to break it to my biology colleagues and my friend, Gentry Patrick, past guest, my cousin. There’s other things besides bio, but this is all the AI is really— Yes, it is. You ask Dario Moti or Sam Altman, what does a scientist need? Oh, they need a genomic protein fold. No, they don’t. We need stuff for physics. Physics is the core of all science in many ways.

Brian Keating:
And I think just as you said this, yeah, it’s no surprise because these tools are somehow— first of all, they’re neural networks, right? They’re optimized, they’re modeled on the brain. I got a brain over here somewhere. And they’re modeled on biological systems. So yeah, they’re very good. You’ve heard about quantum computing.

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Quantum computers have one killer application, and that’s predicting how quantum computers will work. They’re very good at understanding quantum systems. Neural networks are really good at understanding brains. The people that get jobs nowadays that are writing the best books about AI, they’re not computer scientists, they’re cognitive scientists. Princeton professor I just talked to, Tom Griffiths, amazing. He’s a cognitive science professor and a computer science professor. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. They should be worried about it because these tools—

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
are now like a 12-year-old or whatever, it’s a 50-year-old in some place on the map here can have the cutting-edge Nobel-quality research delivering and maybe optimizing things for— and that’s maybe where the greater threat could come, both on the personalization of the kind of vector that’s so precise it can target individuals, or that is so indiscriminate that can kill nations. It’s a really gripping thought to think about. I want to get to some of the research that you do because there’s just so many Like Easter for nerds like me. I mean, for my audience as well. You talk also about like thalidomide in the book and how, you know, who designs the anti-nausea medicine. I remember like my mom was like debating whether she should take it. She told me she didn’t take it, you know, in the late ’60s with my older brother. He did.

Brian Keating:
She didn’t take it. So he’s fine. But it was to, to solve something really important for mothers. You know, I don’t understand how it feels to be, have morning sickness. You know, I’ve never not wanted to eat in the morning, but, uh, but my wife went through it. But talk about that, these things that like Yeah. They do evolve, they do pathologize from some— maybe they’re actually really good. It was very good antinatal medicine.

Brian Keating:
Unfortunately, it caused horrible birth defects. And it’s related to something called mirror life that is really terrifying. If you’re not terrified already, you’ll get there in a few minutes when we talk about mirror. Talk about thalidomide and how that came from these Nazi scientists basically, and then percolated through, and then the Russians really kind of abandoned it and didn’t use it. Talk about it. what role that played or what that is emblematic of in this book and science in general.

Annie Jacobsen:
I think it’s emblematic of, you know, you called it— what did you call it? You had a term earlier which was mal-science. It’s like malevolent.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
Having written the book on Operation Paperclip, the Nazi doctors, in addition to just being horribly evil, and their goal was to really push science and put— and in the field of biology, what they were doing is trying to find medical cures for things for their own pilots. And for example, the thalidomide link has to do with the fact that a lot of the chemists that were developing chemical weapons and biological weapons, they wanted to know, they were trying to find antidotes, right? So, and they were— what I learned from going to the Bundesarchiv in Germany and the National Archives, and the real tragedy is that we, the Americans, knew a lot of this and declassified these papers, which I was able to get declassified. The Nazi scientists were experimenting in the concentration camps on the Jewish prisoners because they considered them no different than guinea pigs or rabbits. And they would— you can’t really find the antidote properly without testing on a human. You just have to spend so much time testing on an actual guinea pig.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
Then you move to primates, and you’re doing human testing once all these trials— so you can’t just, like, kind of cowboy your research. And that’s what I found so horrifying. And that’s the sort of thalidomide component of it, is that the German pharmaceutical company had hired a bunch of Nazi scientists who had skipped through a lot of the trials because they were experimenting on humans. Right.

Brian Keating:
There’s a passage in the acknowledgments of Annie’s book that isn’t in the story itself. I asked her to let me read it out loud, and she graciously agreed. This is so horrible to think about, but again, I cannot not mention it. I mean, it’s fair game, it’s in your book, and I just, I don’t want to look at it, but it’s like a car accident. You must confront it because if we don’t confront it, like you said, we can still do something about nuclear war, about biological war, about bedtime war, whatever. We can still, we have the agency, and I think people surrender their agency to influencers. We’ll talk about the pernicious elements of social media later perhaps, but I want to read this passage about So-called mirror life, which is in the acknowledgments. Beyond the surveillance-driven biotechnical future lies an even greater horror.

Brian Keating:
I mean, that’s saying something for a book that’s about one of the most horrific, hopefully fictional for all time, but very hard science fact-driven scenarios that you could ever imagine. Okay, beyond that lies an even greater horror. I learned that there exists a hypothetical concept within synthetic biology called mirror life. That sounds fun. Not a mirror, I’ll look at myself. No, no. That could extinguish the entire human race. This is an area of science we should forbid, says Stanford University professor and White House science advisor David Relman.

Brian Keating:
Mirror life means engineering an organism with a reversed form of biology, a mirror molecule. This is called chimeric chiral biology. DNA has right-handedness, and this would be making an identical copy but with left-handed DNA. A synthetic organism that, if created, the human immune system will almost certainly not recognize and could not be controlled, contained, or People at the highest level say, holy bleep, this sounds really horrible. We can’t allow this to happen, Raman tells us. And yet, when it comes to making sure no one ever creates mirror life, he says the responsibility gets deflected back to the scientists. As of now, there are very few legal constraints. We have a sort of form of mirror life, at least mirror chemistry.

Brian Keating:
So these are called isomers. These are different forms of chemicals that, as I said, have different handedness. So actually, one of them is You’ve probably had in your— I’ve eaten a lot of it. It’s basically synthetic sugar, which has instead of right-handed structure for sugar, sugars will also be right-handed or left-handed. They make left-handed and the body doesn’t digest it, so it excretes it.

Annie Jacobsen:
That’s saccharin?

Brian Keating:
It’s an interesting— The blue packets. Yes, the blue packets. Exactly. So that is basically left-handed sugar.

Annie Jacobsen:
I didn’t know that.

Brian Keating:
So you can’t digest it, so your body excretes it. It’s not deadly, but left-handed or mirror life. So you take a DNA molecule, put it in a mirror, it becomes mirror And this is almost certainly happening. So how do we sleep at night? I mean, do you accept the fact that somewhere someone is working on this, perhaps aided with the aid of AI? Is it in a lab now? I think it’s almost certainly, yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
That is from an interview with David Relman, who’s like one of the most respected science advisors to the president, to many presidents. And he did that interview with me on the record. You know, I chose not to put it in the narrative because it’s just too horrific. But the point was I wrote biological war, a scenario, not biological war, the only scenario, or biological war, the worst scenario. And so if you read this and you’re freaked out and then you find out, wait a minute, there’s even worse scenarios. And that was Relman’s point in telling me. And there have been articles in the newspapers about mirror life.

Brian Keating:
Yes.

Annie Jacobsen:
And the scientists that wrote those papers debated Even making it public, but they decided they certainly needed to make it public for your exact point. The bad guys are certainly doing that, some bad guy, whether it’s, you know, and there’s an incredibly low bar for entry with bio, unlike nuclear weapons, which require fissile material. You have to have weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. And we hear all about that with what’s happening in Iran. We know how difficult that is.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
Right. And so nuclear weapons are controlled by a nation’s command and control. It safeguards its systems, and nothing like that exists in bio. And essentially, a kid in a basement could potentially, with the help of a computational system, an AI system like Claude, like OpenAI, could essentially make this kind of bioweapon. And that’s the fundamental danger. And I think Relman’s point is very important, is that what he was saying to me is he’s going to the White House and elsewhere and kind of raising the alarm and being told, yeah, that’s really alarming. So what are you guys doing about it? And hey, that’s better than not raising the alarm, but that alarm needs to be ratcheted up in terms of what is being done about that.

Brian Keating:
Mm-hmm.

Annie Jacobsen:
And obviously I don’t have the answer. I’m a journalist, but I would hope that bringing that to the conversation is moving things in the evolutionary direction as opposed to the devolutionary.

Brian Keating:
One thing, you know, that just came— struck me as you said that is that, so Iran’s trying to get to where the US was in 19— you know, actually today is the, uh, July 16th is the Trinity Test date. So happy Trinity Day to you, Amy. I was re-listening to Nuclear War the other day and I realized, oh, she’s going to be here on Trinity Day. How wonderful. So that’s July 16th, 1945. So at that time, what Iran’s trying to do now is get back 80, whatever years, 81 years back to that timescale. So good luck. But actually, as you talk about in this book, it’s not a fission bomb, it’s not like Fat Boy, it’s the thermonuclear bombs, the atom bombs, hydrogen bombs that caused the end of the world in nuclear war, the end of civilization at least as we know it.

Brian Keating:
The world will still exist probably, still float around in space, but very, very much worse. But nowadays the analog of a hydrogen bomb in biological war are these, are already here. They’re already here.

Annie Jacobsen:
That is the recombinant DNA is essentially the atomic weapon because it was very rudimentary in 1971. And that is the point with the people I interviewed who are the former handlers of the Soviet defector biological weapons makers who in the ’80s and ’90s were saying, here’s what we were working on. Here’s what our plague superweapon looked like. And this is 40 years ago. And so you have to say, whoa, what is being done now? And that’s, I think, Relman’s point with MirrorLayer. And that’s obviously but one example.

Brian Keating:
Of course. Now, in the case of nuclear technology, we get a great deal of benefit from nuclear technology, whether it’s in the medical realm, whether it’s in the power. We have 6 nuclear reactors surrounding us in San Diego. You know, don’t you feel great? You know, thankfully, as I said, as you’re driving down from LA, I said, you know, you’re going to pass by the 2 nuclear reactors at Camp Pendleton. But luckily you didn’t put them in nuclear wars to give me even greater nightmares. You put it somewhere in Santa Barbara that was taken out first or second. But in this case, we have benefits from it. Are there any benefits from the types of technologies that feature in this book?

Annie Jacobsen:
Well, that is certainly the debate that we spoke of in the beginning, right? Which is really, I don’t think, you know, is gain of function good or bad? It’s like gain of function. And again, this is for people way above my pay grade. There needs to be guardrails in terms of what kind of, you know, manipulation of pathogens can be done, should be done, is being done. And I think that all begins with a motion to really examine what it means that biological warfare is illegal, that biological weapons are illegal. And yet the State Department is writing now in all of its annual reports about compliance with the BWC is saying, we know Russia and North Korea have biological weapons programs. And we know that Iran and China have weapons, or rather have biology programs of concern, which is kind of a euphemism. I think it’s pretty much clear that the State Department believes those 4 nations are actively working on biological weapons.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
So if there wasn’t so much stigma around what research is being done, if you didn’t have this idea of people cheating and doing sort of offensive work, offensive biological work, work on offensive weapons, as opposed to defensive work, because there’s a little clause in the treaty which says, You can do work for prophylactic purposes, which allows for the medical countermeasures. So there has to be some more transparency about what that actually means and more honesty about what it means. And then you can begin with, okay, so where do we go from there?

Brian Keating:
I thought of one thing as I was reading the book that you could use the types of laboratories or research, and that’s from an unlikely nexus between your previous books and, and this one, which has to do with a question first posed by Enrico Fermi, which is essentially, where are all the aliens? Right? The universe is big. The galaxy is big. The galaxy is old. The materials to make life are abundant. You know, water is the 2nd, 3rd most common molecule in the universe. You know, carbon’s extremely prolific. And a lot of that research was done here by my colleague, great colleagues, Jeff and Margaret Burbidge and Willie Fowler and Fred coined the term the Big Bang as an insult about cosmology at the time. And Fermi asked this question to Herb York, was at the lunch with him in 1950.

Brian Keating:
And it was interesting. So when, when Fermi asked that question of Herb York, and there were 3 other scientists at the table, so they talked about flying saucers in this New Yorker cartoon. And basically, uh, Fermi says, where, where is everybody? And York says, maybe they didn’t last long enough. Maybe they killed themselves.

Annie Jacobsen:
I did not know that.

Brian Keating:
I don’t know about— and then asked, obviously, which of these solutions— and we’re We’re going to—

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
But before I do, I want to give you 2 gifts. So one of the ways I think that we could benefit from the apparatus, the tools, the researchers, the talent, the brainpower that we have in this book is countermeasures, but not countermeasures against humanity. Because if life in the universe can be of one of the 2 mirror isomers, the either left-handed or right-handed like, like our life is based upon, then it could be that life could come to the, to the planet and they could be very different from us. In fact, they could be mirror life. They could be microbes, they could be bipedal, they could be sentient plasmoids, like, uh, apparently Alina Luna has been talking about interdimensional beings. Anyway, we’ll, we’ll talk about that over, over a cocktail someday. But one way that material can get here is via what’s called panspermia, which is something that Fred Hoyle worked on. And actually Francis Crick worked on this, this idea that life on Earth could have originated elsewhere in the galaxy and then been brought here by meteorites.

Brian Keating:
So this is a meteorite. It’s one of many.

Annie Jacobsen:
Love that idea, by the way.

Brian Keating:
So it is, it is. It’s also one of those words that sounds dirty, but it’s like a panspermium.

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
But here—

Annie Jacobsen:
Caleb Scharf, I think, is doing the work today.

Brian Keating:
Yes, Caleb is. He’s been a guest on the podcast. So here I have a meteorite which doesn’t have any mirror life on it because I’ve been, you know, playing with it for years and I haven’t dyed it. Uh, this is a real meteorite. This came from a star that detonated a nuclear, uh, implosion, a nuclear fusion device in space, and its contents then spread throughout our galaxy and eventually coagulated into make you and I in the core of the Earth. So it’s very magnetic, and it actually joins up with this monolith on the back of— you know that I, you know, claim to have lost the Nobel Prize. That’s a matter of debate. But this is the Keating Prize.

Brian Keating:
So this is to you, Annie Jacobson, July 16th, Trinity Day.

Annie Jacobsen:
That is incredible.

Brian Keating:
And that’s Arthur C. Clarke on the front.

Annie Jacobsen:
I get the meteorite?

Brian Keating:
You get the meteorite.

Annie Jacobsen:
Wait, can you tell me a little bit more about the meteorite?

Brian Keating:
Yeah, so actually you will get a card that has information on it. I give those away to anyone with a .edu email address in the US that, uh, joins my mailing list. This is going to be a special link just for Annie. We’re giving away 6 copies of her book, signed copies, Biological War and Nuclear War. And you go to briankeating.com/annie and you’ll be entered to win one of these incredible gifts. You’ll get a meteorite, you’ll get a book potentially, and you’ll also get— well, you won’t get— they won’t get this, but you’re gonna get— this is a piece of the moon. Okay, so this proves to you, Annie, the material. So this— a meteor hit the moon, blasted off material, and it landed in Northwest Africa 20 million years later, and it was collected about 8 years ago.

Brian Keating:
And I bought it from a collector that I know. I’ve got a dealer.

Annie Jacobsen:
This is a moon rock.

Brian Keating:
That’s a moon rock. That’s a meteorite. And this one is rocky, so this is non-magnetic. This This is 1,000 times more expensive than that. So don’t lose this one. This is 1,000 times more expensive than this. This is 1,000 times more expensive than this. These are, yeah, if I can send them out to hundreds of people a month, they’re not that expensive, but they’re very interesting.

Brian Keating:
This was found in Argentina, in Argentina in 1560 or something. It was discovered by the natives that lived in Argentina. It fell about 8,000 years ago and has the exact composition, not only of the Earth’s core. So it’s showing that we evolved from this pre-Earth environment. But the iron in your blood has the same composition as the iron in this meteorite. And so you’ve got the specs. I’ll show you the radiograph that we took of it, the chemical composition and everything.

Annie Jacobsen:
Yes. So that’s a variation on we’re all stardust.

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

Annie Jacobsen:
Exactly. Wow. That’s amazing. Thank you so much.

Brian Keating:
You’re welcome.

Annie Jacobsen:
Thank you. That is, I have to say, that is a profoundly unique gift. I like it. Incredibly cool. And I have a, I actually have a rock collection.

Brian Keating:
Oh, you do?

Annie Jacobsen:
I do.

Brian Keating:
Oh, I didn’t know that. I knew you were.

Annie Jacobsen:
One of them is, um, from the Sedan Crater.

Brian Keating:
Oh, really?

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah, where I went with Al O’Donnell from my Area 51 book.

Brian Keating:
That’s amazing.

Annie Jacobsen:
So this is going right there.

Brian Keating:
That is great. Okay, you know, and we could do that.

Annie Jacobsen:
Thank you so much.

Brian Keating:
You’re welcome. I’m so glad that you’re here.

Annie Jacobsen:
It’s really amazing.

Brian Keating:
So maybe of the 2 different scenarios, and maybe there’s many more in that, in that enormously talented brain of yours, but what do you think of this Great Filter that civilizations like York is proposing? We don’t live long enough, and so maybe there’s no one out there to come to either rescue us or save us, or maybe Maybe to be concerned about bringing mirror life to destroy us.

Annie Jacobsen:
That’s probably why I love watching science fiction films and reading science fiction books so much, which, by the way, I have found out over the years that many more high-ranking Defense Department and public health officials and federal emergency management officials also love reading science fiction, which is where so many of the discoveries have from? And scientists, you know, to find out that the scientists, these early skunkwork guys who, you know, were developing these radical technologies were science fiction vets. Charles Townes told me that the reason that he invented the laser was because as a kid he was obsessed. He would lie in bed, he told me, with a flashlight reading the Garen Death Death Ray by a Soviet science fiction writer. I mean, this must have been in the ’20s. Yeah. That’s incredible. You know, and he could see the death ray and he could see the laser.

Brian Keating:
And that was his— Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
And he told me one other anecdote I have to share.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, yeah, please.

Annie Jacobsen:
Which is that he said that he brought— he was at Princeton, at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and he’d been thinking about this before the laser. And he took the idea to his neighbor— his 2 colleague neighbors there. Like, you know, one was von Neumann and the other was Einstein.

Brian Keating:
Einstein.

Annie Jacobsen:
Right? I said, well, what did they say? And he said, they had very different reactions. Von Neumann said, it’ll never work. And Einstein said, that’s a good idea. Keep trying. And, you know, and I said, well, what does that mean? Because you had to know from Charlestown what it meant. And he said, he said, and I’m paraphrasing, it means that sometimes when you have a really great idea, Not everyone wants you to win.

Brian Keating:
It is true when they say, you know, for every great idea, there’s an equal and opposite great idea. And I think that’s a mark of a good scientist. Yeah, the scientists will, you know, they typically will think that we are right and our colleagues are wrong, but that lacks the so-called, psychologists call it theory of mind. Like, I am thinking about what you’re thinking about, like kind of a meta type of cognition. But that means that, like, if we all think that, then nobody’s wrong or everybody’s wrong. So we can’t have it both ways. We can’t think that we’re always right and our colleagues are always So you have to be open to this idea that, yeah, you might be completely wrong, but you need the hubris. I like to say you need these 2 different attributes.

Brian Keating:
You need chutzpah and you need humility.

Annie Jacobsen:
You have to have a tinge of hubris and you also have to have a tinge of humility.

Brian Keating:
And how do you keep those in check?

Annie Jacobsen:
Or maybe not hubris, you just have to have some good, healthy ego.

Brian Keating:
Exactly.

Annie Jacobsen:
Enough drive.

Brian Keating:
So one part in the book you talk about, and the acknowledgments are, you know, there’s just, there’s so, I love acknowledgments because, you know, 99% of readers won’t read it, but 99% of authors put so much effort into it. The book is not done until the book is done and the copy editors and they can all sign off on it, and then you’re like 80% done, right? But you talk about a scientist, I’m going to mangle his name even though I’m part Russian. Milton Leitenberg gave you Igor Domarenko hand-typed pages, and Domarenko spent his career inside the Biopreparat in the Soviet Union on plague genetics and antibiotic resistance. So one question I had is, is this Yersinia, is it coming from him? You must have had things in those pages that couldn’t make it into the book.

Annie Jacobsen:
In Domorodzky’s book? Yeah.

Brian Keating:
I mean, you had it, but you had his personal handwritten notes. So what did you keep out? Were there things in there that were just too terrifying maybe to conceive of or include?

Annie Jacobsen:
That’s a great question. And I hate to say this, but I wish there were. But it was actually, So I think what’s interesting is, and before we were recording, you and I were talking about that book that you recommended, Galileo’s Daughter. We’re talking about Galileo writing letters to his daughter, who was a nun. I can’t wait to read that book because—

Brian Keating:
Yeah, Dava Sommel.

Annie Jacobsen:
I have a feeling that there’s more, you know, of course, you have to think of who you’re writing to. So of course there’s, you know, there’ll be certain things that are not in there, but it would be maybe a little more revealing. Whereas Igor Dromorodsky had— they were typed, his hand-typed notes, right? So the journalist reporter in me is like, okay, there’s one degree of this when you’re writing it in your journal. We all know that. And then you type it up. So you’ve had a little time to edit yourself. And then also he shared them with Milton Leitenberg, who’s now in his Every time I would interview him or want to come to his house, he’d say, I’m writing another book. I can’t meet with you.

Annie Jacobsen:
And we would do a quick phone interview. This guy has written more books than you can imagine. He really is a giant. In the 1960s, he was the world’s expert pretty much on biological weapons. And he’s been working at it ever since.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Annie Jacobsen:
He’s got a book on the Soviet bioweapons program, which is this thick. So to that point, I think there was a lot of editing that Dombrovskis had done at that point. He was writing that from inside Russia after the wall went down. So he had to have an idea that the KGB was going to read it. So he didn’t really reveal state secrets, but you do see intention. And he was the top plague expert in the Soviet Union for decades. And so there is a lot to learn from him.

Brian Keating:
Wow. Yeah. The dog that didn’t bark as often is interesting as the one that does. Khrushchev And you quote, you know, the survivors will envy the dead in nuclear war. It seems like, you know, most of nuclear war will actually— there’ll be almost no survivors, and the ones that do will die soon after, as you talk about. Biological war, you know, is different. It does seem like— well, do you think— what do you think Khrushchev would say? I mean, he undoubtedly knew about their programs. What do you think he would say? Is it also the same thing? Will we envy— will the survivors envy the dead? I don’t know.

Brian Keating:
unfortunately. We went through COVID, originally was thought to kill millions, hundreds of millions of people. Thank God it didn’t. But what will be the aftermath scenario?

Annie Jacobsen:
Khrushchev would’ve had a different take on this because the world was very different and most Russians couldn’t really leave Russia and had no interest in coming to the West, or at least the Russians didn’t want them to. And biological war in the Cold War was very much simpler than it is now. The basic idea was, Create a vaccine that you will then use for your troops and your people. That’s what Dolmurovsky was working on.

Brian Keating:
Okay.

Annie Jacobsen:
So create a vaccine. We make a plague vaccine for us. By the way, there is no plague vaccine in the United States. There is allegedly in Russia. Make the plague vaccine, vaccinate all of us, and then kill all of their troops with plague. And then we’ll go in and take everything. We’ll leave the infrastructure intact. True quote.

Annie Jacobsen:
Okay? So that was where we were in the Cold War. That’s where science was. Now things are so different. You can’t have a situation without having essentially blowback.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Annie Jacobsen:
And so I don’t know what Khrushchev would’ve thought, but I know that many people that read Nuclear War said, I would just wanna die in the flash, and I probably would. So that’s the good news. Bio’s very, very, very different. Very different. You know, I take readers from Outbreak to anarchy in 6 days. And then when you learn that anarchy and insurrection just will happen, and this is in wargaming, you know, so fast as everybody scrambles to try and get what they think are going to be the medical countermeasures to save the lives of themselves and their family. That is really horrific. And there is a quote from Senate, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, And this is personal to him because he was the subject of—

Brian Keating:
The anthrax.

Annie Jacobsen:
The anthrax attack right after 9/11. So some nut, we still don’t know who it was, you know, the FBI had never solved the case, sent an envelope of weaponized anthrax to Daschle’s office, to another congressman, and to media outlets. What he said to me, because he’s been working on this issue for all the decades since, was biological war will be death And he’s talking about the different kinds of death that will happen. But then he ended what he said, and it’s quoted exactly in the book, with people doing inhuman things to one another just to survive. And I don’t think any of us want to be around for that.

Brian Keating:
In the book, there’s a terror that’s unleashed, which is, you know, 100% controllable and 100% unavoidable, which is the social plague that sweeps over, as you said, anarchy, But also desire, there are people in the book that are just desperate to get Instagram and be seen and be famous and making AI-generated images and misinformation and disinformation. That adds to the terror, right? I mean, Iran shut down the internet completely for the last 2 and a half, 3 months. In both books, the president can do things to— but there’s a whole bunch of people underground that will—

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Things will get out. So since this hopefully will never happen, what would be some of the— if you were a president, if you were in the upper echelons of power and you had the connections to make anything happen, what would you do in such a situation? I mean, this has happened throughout history. I mean, as you make the point, we’ve had nuclear war and we’ve had biological war. We’ve had attacks in both counts. We’ve had chemical war.

Annie Jacobsen:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
But this is the first time the of them would arrive with social media war and information war. So what would you do, President Jacobson?

Annie Jacobsen:
Well, never mind what I would do. In the scenario, spoiler alert, the president shuts down the internet. And the reason I did that is because I learned from the former Deputy Commander of Cyber Command how that would work. Lieutenant General Charlie Moore took me through, again, what can be known. You know, there’s certain classified components of that. And I think people will be surprised to learn that that can be done and how easily it can be done. And also that the Defense Department has its own channels, SIPRNET being one of them, to be able to communicate with that shut down. You know, the general takes us through, like, what would remain and what wouldn’t, but that’s really fascinating that you can just pull the plug.

Annie Jacobsen:
But I think also readers will take away the point that the influencers are not to blame. They’re just a product of where we are right now.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
And also, on balance, the internet, that real-time reporting, is a real place to see as a potential savior because real-time reporting is precisely what you need. If there’s another takeaway of the book, it’s that, oh my God, if there is a lab leak, if it can be shut down, the situation, the outbreak can be shut down in the first 12 to 24 hours, you can actually prevent the dystopian ending.

Brian Keating:
Hmm.

Annie Jacobsen:
But once it’s 24 hours, once it’s 48 hours, hours, 96 hours, it’s out of the bag. And so the internet, that real-time reporting, is how you could get information out to the people. And you’ll see from my reporting that also the WHO, which was very loath to kind of move off their old analog way of like, we will have the reports come in and then we will look at them, it’s so old school. They now have systems where they are really leaning into epidemic intelligence, using computational systems, delivering information in real time. And that is like a real place to look in terms of a positive future.

Brian Keating:
Interesting. That’s really good to know on one hand, and also again, as usual, terrifying. Supposedly the South Pole where I’ve been, as I showed you my— this was ice about 10 years ago from the South Pole Antarctic Station. There were no cases of COVID there. Supposedly in station also. There were 6 people on the space station. They never got COVID. They actually go through a lot of screening at the South Pole to make sure you have no diseases because there’s no doctor there most of the time, or the doctor that you need is not going to be there.

Brian Keating:
Dentist is not going to be there to pull your tooth out in the middle of July is much worse. Very isolated community. Actually, the NSF has studies on when they do open up the station on things like how depression spreads and how social viruses and then actual viruses spread. But why wouldn’t we put, like the president have another nuclear Yeah. Football or something. I mean, it’s very hard to imagine how these things would get there, but I mean, what are the kind of fallback measures, safety measures to protect at least some mode of leadership? We’ll talk a bit about who that should be maybe. But yeah, why don’t we have data centers on data centers in space and presidential footballs in different places? Is it really just the single point failure mode that’s probably likely to be the undoing if this should ever, God forbid, Maybe there are 2 different questions, ’cause I suspect that we do have a lot of fallbacks and fallbacks and fallbacks.

Annie Jacobsen:
But the speed at which the convergence happens of something going out of control happens so fast. And what are you falling back to? I mean, what good is the nuclear football if—

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
I mean, there is a threat, and I have different generals tell me those threats that are being looked at in the Pentagon. When you have an outbreak like this, and when the United States, in the event that the United States was moving toward insurrection, How all nuclear forces go on, you know, alert because that would be the time that another nation would strike. But we know from COVID that any pathogens, you know, spreads how people travel. It’s not 1950 Cold War where there’s no Russians leaving Russia.

Brian Keating:
Right. So there would be an own goal of the worst and greatest variety. I want to close with a couple of maybe more on the human side of things. When I think about the people that are most vulnerable, it’s kind of ultra-melancholic because the ones that give, the first responders are the ones that die fast, right? And they die first. And the ones that are selfless, and we saw a lot of that in COVID, by the way, and we saw that in 9/11, firefighters rushing into buildings that people were fleeing out of. What do you make of that? I mean, these are special people. I mean, you’ve interviewed so many of them, and do they know? And you also make the point that, you know, women are more disproportionately likely to probably be the victim of this attack. So what do you make of that? Is that a flaw in our engineering?

Annie Jacobsen:
Women would be the victims because the women are going to always take care of your kids. You know, I mean, I quote contemporary literature from the 14th century bubonic plague, Black Death, you know, because you get to see survivors’ accounts of how people behave, and how they changed and how people became incredibly solipsistic. They just needed to live alone. But I believe that that’s after the women and the mothers die because, you know, a mother’s gonna— your child is sick. I mean, unless you’re a sociopath, you know, you’re just like, your reaction is this. That’s your job.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
And also the first responders have a similar vein to them. That is people who go into that. I mean, I’ve interviewed countless people who you know, call, you know, send me. There is that idea in law enforcement and fire, you know, first responders that they’re just like, I’m doing my job. And they don’t think about their own. I mean, they think about safety. Literally shot first. Because they are trained to be, they’re very conscious of safety, but they don’t think about their own demise in the way that maybe the rest of us, a little more selfish, And so, that is a great tragedy.

Annie Jacobsen:
And there have been monographs written by the Army about that. And the bottom line is, they’re the first to go.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. It’s almost like you’d have to engineer, again, something to de-evolve the maternal or the first responder instinct that, you know, certainly many people much more brave than I have. But to overcome that, right? You’d have to engineer something. It would have to be something counter to our wiring. You know, it’s one of the beautiful things about us. Like, we can map the cosmos, like you said, but we can also, love and give, you know, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when that means it might be our last act, right?

Annie Jacobsen:
What’s also interesting is the Defense Department, and I still call it the Defense Department until they change it in the Constitution.

Brian Keating:
What do you call the Gulf of Mexico?

Annie Jacobsen:
Not the Constitution, but till they change it in, you know, by an act of Congress.

Brian Keating:
Correct.

Annie Jacobsen:
Defense Department of War. The Defense Department is in a different lane.

Brian Keating:
Although, pardon the interruption, but it would be great for your book. Yeah. Department of Nuclear War, Department of Biological War, Annie Jacobson’s Department. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Annie Jacobsen:
But DOD looks at its soldiers, at all of its personnel in their own lane. And various generals and colonels and soldiers took me through this, how not only do they have medical countermeasures, whether or not they’re going to work for a novel pathogen is a different story, but in their chem-bio kits.

Brian Keating:
Mm-hmm.

Annie Jacobsen:
And this has been studied intensely by Defense Department because there’s been this idea that soldiers may, counter biological war on the battlefield. And so, there is a different sort of plan for the soldiers. There’s also the idea that the— or the fact that the Defense Department has issued 1.7 million gas masks.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Annie Jacobsen:
Which, to the airborne point of this, is necessary to not get infected. And so, in my mind, when I write Biological Twilight, and this is the one area that is in Annie Jacobs’ Jacobson’s Imagination, the denouement, which is the biological twilight. I suggest that the world is not going to be a very holistic place because you’re gonna have a lot of soldiers. The military is, you know, there are only 17% women in the military.

Brian Keating:
Yes.

Annie Jacobsen:
So you got a lot of men with a lot of gas masks and a lot of guns. And then you have a lot of people who are sociopaths, very Machiavellian, Who would be willing to kill someone from a distance, not knowing whether they’re infected or not? I mean, this is the science fiction realm for sure.

Brian Keating:
The Dark Triad on steroids.

Annie Jacobsen:
And so that’s where you really have to say, oh my God, what kind of a world? Talk about de-evolution. That’s not a world that’s suitable for most people.

Brian Keating:
You made me think about, you mentioned people in the book, like mutual contact maybe that we have. Peter Thiel, I’ve met a couple times and he’s reportedly looking for places to bug out to in different places. But it made me think of this company Palantir and these other for-profit— we’ve only been talking about nation-state actors, but are there for-profit actors? Does OpenAI have a biolab somewhere? Are these people— Palantir, I don’t know. Are there possibly not rogue countries, but rogue industries or rogue capitalists or whatever you want to term anyone who is? that are also a threat in a way that doesn’t exist for nuclear. I mean, to have a thermal fusion device is a pretty challenging thing for a company to just port around with them. But on the biowar side, is that also another kind of gruesome element that we haven’t touched upon?

Annie Jacobsen:
I mean, I don’t know about nefarious actors who are non-nation states. I don’t know. I would hope that there’s someone in the Department of defense that’s looking at that or examining that, keeping an eye on it, the FBI. But that would be their job. But what I do know is I had an interesting conversation with Sam Altman because I wanted to see if I could make ChatGPT do something that wasn’t in the vein of creating a bioweapon, which I knew would be— I’d be shut down. Yeah, too extreme. Right? I wanted to see if I could make it tell me some classified information. And that’s a spoiler alert I’m not going to reveal because I think it’s interesting for readers to come upon it.

Annie Jacobsen:
But what I will say is that—

Brian Keating:
But it’s a found— I don’t want to say it’s not a fictional element. It’s actually what you bring up in the scenario is actual places.

Annie Jacobsen:
And I wasn’t going to include it in the narrative, except for an interesting thing happened, which is I had someone that I know mentioned it to Sam Altman. Altman. And I had a conversation with Sam and they said, Sam wants to know what you were able to make ChatGPT do. And I explained it to him and he asked me a few questions of how I knew. And I explained it to him and it has since been changed in ChatGPT. So you can no longer do this. And I explained to readers what it is.

Brian Keating:
Did you have to have your book reviewed by government agencies or anything?

Annie Jacobsen:
I’m a journalist, so I don’t have any clearances and no obligations, but I do have an obligation to safety in my own sort of motherland.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, of course.

Annie Jacobsen:
Right. Yeah. What was interesting is that the point I thought was interesting in there is that OpenAI was very quick to make the change, which is great, but not everybody’s a journalist and not everybody has access to Sam Altman.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Annie Jacobsen:
And not everybody gets to say, hey, did you know it could do this? And not everybody makes that change really quickly. And that is obviously a place of concern. And I believe that that’s what the leaders of these different, the CEOs of these big companies now know.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
Again, being advised by people like David Relman saying, hey, because I’m not the only one. I had a conversation with David Relman about what I could do. Those are the people that are able to do it on a much more scientific pathway.

Brian Keating:
And now with open weight models and Chinese models that are getting to be on parity with American models, there’s no controls over it. Who’s to say that what you— and again, we’re not going to reveal what it is because I think it’s hard to— it’s also gripping, just a thriller, the story. addition to being so heavily sourced and fact-based. But yeah, there’s no constraints.

Annie Jacobsen:
So my final thought on that, which I think is an interesting thought, it’s a conversation that people should be having because you framed the question as if maybe someone had something nefarious in mind, which I have no reason to believe that is the case. But what I do know and what you know is that all business CEOs want their business to do better than the other guy’s business. And so when I read read in open-source literature, whether it’s the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or wherever, about these sort of battles of the tech bros, you know? And I have my own access to individuals and have different conversations. I wonder where the line is between competition. In other words, I have heard discussions about maybe this all needs to be shut down. What this all is, I could not define, but I know it has something to do with bio. Like, maybe we need to pull the bio lever. So is there a in these large language models that has to do with bio that can be partitioned off? I don’t know, but they know.

Brian Keating:
Hmm.

Annie Jacobsen:
And that is really the question is, and who is willing to do that? And then are you in a paradigm where I was talking about where if there’s mistrust and paranoia, we certainly see that with the fight. When I look at the fight between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, I don’t see necessarily like 2 guys, I may want what other people are saying. I’m seeing more like what is getting lost in the safety component of all of this because the anger and the virulence and the vitriol is so great. What is— I mean, again, and I’m speculating here, but this is just as an observer because that’s human nature. And is safety being jeopardized at one wanting to beat the other?

Brian Keating:
I think it absolutely is. I just talked to Nate Suarez who wrote a book with Elliot Yudowsky called it If Anybody Builds It, Everybody Dies. And spoiler alert for their book, whatever, it’s also a year old. There’s a biopathogen introduced by super intelligent, uncontrolled, and unpredictable. The worst part, I’m told by people like Roman Yudowsky, he believes that AI, because it’s fundamentally unpredictable, means we can never control it. So to wrap up, you’re from Hollywood. There’s a scene in the movie A Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson is, you know, kind of on his high horse saying, you know, he says basically, you know, did you put— you know, did you order the Code Red? Again, spoiler alert. This is 40-year-old, 36-year-old—

Annie Jacobsen:
Everyone’s seen them. Everyone’s seen them. Yeah, I love them.

Brian Keating:
And the late Rob Reiner, we miss him. Tom Cruise says, you know, what were you doing out there? And Nicholson says, you know, guys like you, you don’t know what we do. We are on that wall in the middle of the night taking a watch so you can sleep soundly in your bed. But what you don’t know is you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. Did you order the Code Red? You’re goddamn right! Do we have people on the wall? You know, and in both of these books, in these 2 most recent books, are you confident? Are there people out there that are gonna, you know, take the watch and stand on the wall? Or are we, you know, or is it up to us? And what can we do?

Annie Jacobsen:
I interview mostly former… So these are people who served, and then they leave government, which makes them— it much easier for them to talk to me. It’s a whole different kettle of fish if you’re a reporter trying to get them the story that’s happening right now because of people’s security clearances.

Brian Keating:
Yes.

Annie Jacobsen:
And so the people that I talk to are always concerned of what’s happening now. And one can’t know if that’s because you’re not there anymore and you’re saying, but I did a great job and who’s doing it now? And if there is nothing, if nothing is happening, I think that’s impossible for me to be the judge of it. But I do know that much can be learned from the tales that we hear from those who served saying, this is a danger point. This is a danger point. This needs to be looked into. And that always must be fused with the current consideration that we go back to, that technology is moving at lightning speed.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen:
It is moving faster than any congressional hearings could be held on subject X, Y, or Z. And also that there’s so much chaff in the zeitgeist, in the air, whether it’s UFOs or algae in Washington, DC, in the pond.

Brian Keating:
Oh no.

Annie Jacobsen:
Is that really important? Is that really an existential threat? And that on balance, maybe a lot of people don’t want to think, they don’t want to spend their 90 years on Earth thinking about these existential threats and take the position of like, you know what, life rolls on. So that’s the Herb York conundrum. I don’t know, but it’s interesting to think about. You like thinking about it, I like thinking about it, and I certainly like talking about it.

Brian Keating:
Absolutely. It touches into everything and it really gives you this rare gift, which is to realize that you have right now a rare gift, that we can act, that we can breathe, that we are safe, and that we can do things. We live in a free country, we can have influence over our politicians and our government, and that I think the definition of depression is when you have no hope and you feel helpless and you— nothing we can do. No, that’s not true. This book is a hopeful book despite the, you know, the, the gut-wrenching gripping moments. But I just want to thank you for the work that you do, the writing that you do. I mean, from, uh, Princeton University to Pulitzer, uh, shortlist to, uh, I think you played ice hockey. You have so many different talents.

Brian Keating:
You’re just a rare, you know, polymath, multimath, and, uh, such a treat to, to talk to someone who’s who’s absolutely at the peak of their craft and what you do to inspire. As I said, it’s a hopeful book. It really is. And I hope that you all get it and listen to the— I recommend the audiobook. I think you get more royalties on the audiobook than the— no, no, but in any case, get the book, any format that you get it in. We’re giving away 4 to 6 copies, Nuclear War, Biological War, signed by Annie with a meteorite. I hope that you’ll take advantage of it. Annie Jacobson, thank you for coming all the way down and being such a Just a phenomenal intellect to talk to today.

Brian Keating:
Thank you for being a scholar and a gentle lady.

Annie Jacobsen:
Wonderful conversation. Thank you so much.

Brian Keating:
Thank you. If Annie’s books terrify you as much as they do me, that’s good. It means she’s making a difference. I plan to have Annie on again, and until then, I want you to, I want you to watch this conversation with Niall Ferguson about existential doom. It’s linked on screen, and don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment. What scenario scares you more, nuclear war or biological war?