#1299 - Annie Jacobsen

May 16, 2019

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

Play Episode

Hello friends this episode the podcast is brought to you by Heineken 0 0 Heineken 0 0 is Heineken but with no alcohol but it tastes like Heineken they've got it nailed Heineken 0 0 is brewed with a different technique which allows the Brewers to gently remove the alcohol and restore the flavors that other products you they lose during this removal of alcohol process I'm sure you've probably had non-alcoholic beer and it's okay right but it doesn't taste like beer it's like makes you want a real beer Heineken 0 0 does not it tastes like Heineken it's very good their process allows for a distinct balanced taste and the ability to enjoy a Heineken at any time of the day alcohol-free you can crack One open at work that has it's like it has zero alcohol nothing but it tastes good driven by

groundbreaking Innovation that never compromises on taste Heineken 0 0 has experienced a huge growth in Europe and Russia we can't trust them can we and the markets where it's still small Heineken will lead the charge with a premium position it's fantastic look I could read you their copy but I'll tell you I drink it all the time it's very good it tastes like Heineken and I'm a fan of Heineken beer so tastes like a good beer but with no booze so if you're a person who's sober or I'll drink the shit out of this during sober October by the way how about that all of Heineken zero zeros Great Taste comes with just 69 calories as well pick up a six-pack next to Heineken original at your favorite local store today we are also brought to you by Blue Apron ladies and gentlemen Blue Apron is a fucking wonderful company that sends you out

cooler that's filled with perfectly portioned little packets of ingredients and step-by-step photographic instructions that allow you to create delicious meals in the comfort of your own home if you're a person who likes to cook but you are short on time you don't you don't have any desire to get a recipe and write down all the things you need then go to the grocery store and try to find those things well you don't have to do that meal meal planning with blue apron is far easier and I'm talking delicious and interesting dishes like seared steaks I don't know how to say this HOA is oh oh HOH isin Hoisin poison poison pan sauce pork chorizo enchiladas with Monterey Jack cheese and sour cream

spiced Curry pork meatballs with garlic rice rice and vegetables so what I'm trying to say in this is there's a gang of these what I'm trying to say is we're talking about interesting food it's not boring it's flavorful and unique and you can do it you can do it their chef designed recipes include amazing specialty sauces with premium Blends that would be otherwise difficult expensive or time-consuming to source and make their whole goal at the test kitchen is to make dinner more accessible more exciting and more delicious than ever I love their food and I think you will too and you can start cooking brag worthy meals at home without the hassle with blue apron try out this week's menu and get $60 off when you visit Blue Apron.com Rogan that's Blue Apron.com Rogan Blue Apron a better way to cook we are also brought to you by steezy steezy is a lifestyle

brand that produces high-quality CBD products I'm a giant fan of CBD products I'm a giant fan of using them first of all to alleviate inflammation they're fantastic for relief of pain and aches they give people relief from anxiety as well if you're suffering from anxiety it's just really good for your health and steezy produces CBD concentrate with the highest potency and Purity that you're going to find they also have Innovative vape pens that are portable discreet and pack a punch they have award-winning CBD noted by High Times Kush doc California Cannabis Awards and OC Weekly and with their little CBD vape pens I mean you can medicate on the go very easily and they're very potent they also have Lifestyle brand clothing the check out their cool clothes and shit they make and

you can check them out on Instagram @ s TI z y so don't go to STI isay wagons and somebody else probably right I don't know they have three eyes st3 eyes z y on Instagram for more information shop their apparel CBD products and more at STI iiz why steezy.com and use the code Joe Rogan all one word for 20% off which excludes batteries not bad not not including battery so excluding batteries you can get 20% off batteries so everything else though 20% off with the code Joe Rogan that's St iiz why.com and the code is Joe Rogan for some fantastic top of the food chain CBD products I'm a big fan of their stuff it's really excellent

okay my guest today is a journalist who has written several fantastic books that are really interesting and I really enjoyed talking to her we talked about Area 51 the CIA and she's got a bunch of great books she's awesome please give it up for Annie Jacobsen

The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast

hello very nice to meet you I'm excited to talk to you I'm super excited to talk to you about several subjects but this one thank you very much for this first edition copy of your area 51 and uncensored history of America's top secret military base book I'm super excited about this I heard through the grapevine you are a fan I'm a freak when it comes to this stuff do you what do you think is going on up there I mean same thing that's going on all over the place when it comes to military Secrets which is stuff that you want to know about very few people know about and every now and then a journalist gets a hint yeah do you think there's any alien stuff up there I write in the book all about that yeah well tell Mass 12 Pages you want me to well he goes what do you think so Area 51 was this secret test base where the CIA was running a spy plane programs right so interestingly my new

is about ground Branch guys on the ground that's about are Branch what we were doing in the air and it was this idea that we should spy on the enemy okay and but if you go back in time why Area 51 really started you learn that it was a base hidden inside of a base nuclear weapons and it was all about beating Stalin at his black propaganda campaign so I write in the book to hoax Americans in a War of the Worlds type scenario whereby little men who looked like aliens would get out of an aircraft and the government would go crazy about it and then Stalin would say look we have not only do we have technology better than you but we have a better propaganda Department than you

real that Joe you got to read the whole book this is like a this is a tough opening you got me was a tough spot but it's a good spot right it's good spy it so Stalin just hired short people what did he do all right I'm going to make you save that I'm going to make you earn it yeah how's that I mean you want me to talk about that right now right off the bat why is it I'm sweating can we get to we're going to get to surprise kill vanish as well I want to just yeah why is it make you sweat oh my God it's such an incendiary topic I mean people people want to believe there are aliens right right okay I mean I've spent five books dealing with the mythology of Area 51 which is phenomenal in its own way because it speaks so much to power to morality to information to you know people's desire to know what's going on and now and the government's desire to keep things hidden so this topic is always coming up because a lot of people want to believe

that there were aliens in that craft and my source who I write about in the book told me otherwise that they were genetically you know that they were me stop you right there because when you say that craft what you mean is the supposed UFO records of crashed in Roswell New Mexico in 1947 that's what you mean right but that was never supposedly taken to Area 51 was supposed to be taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base the legend has it that Truman flew there to meet them and right that's one Legend yeah so in my book I interview a man who worked for the atomic energy commission who tells a different story tells the story of receiving that craft at Area 51 in 1951 which is why the base is called Area 51 oh and that inside the craft were humans who had been altered surgically altered to look like aliens

in a plan for Stalin to sort of twist Truman's arm because at that time

we had the atomic bomb on Roswell happened we had the atomic bomb and the Soviets did not because I'll be there when you say humans that were surgically altered to look like aliens do you mean so this is 1951 so you're talking about four years after the supposed crash yes so what what was the bodies they kept the bodies kept the bodies in one formaldehyde-like with us and also because the idea was and remember or I can't say remember because you haven't read the book yet right and I wrote this book eight years ago mmm but it did really impact a lot of my a lot of my thinking and working on on you know government secrecy projects because it makes you really consider what a hoax means and what it means to a population of people and how the government begins to work with disinformation versus cover stories and all of that but going back to answer your question that is what I was told by the

the source that but how reliable is this Source this is a very incendiary idea to rely upon one individuals recollection of it which is why the book went through the roof in terms of people being upset about it I mean where they the oh my God I interviewed 79 CIA guys Air Force guys spy Pilots Engineers I mean who's mad at you

the conspiracy theorists were mad at me because they said this woman is bananas they were aliens well even if they weren't aliens right there's also there's account that it was some sort of test vehicle and that they were actually just dummies inside their Crash Test Dummies that they used there's been a bunch of different versions of it but the most compelling version of the area 51 alien myth to me is Bob Lazar did you get into that yeah he plays a huge role in Area 51 I mean before Bob Lazar went public no one even knew about Area 51 people people new people it was it was common folklore but there was no definitive proof that there was something going on over there other than some weird VHS footage of things flying around in the desert that seem to be behaving in a way that modern aircrafts are not totally capable of at least modern piloted aircraft are not totally capable of I mean which

me to another book I wrote called the pentagon's brain which you know sort of off this idea was like wait a minute what kind of technology is the government capable of and we have a whole department for that reason called DARPA which looks at weapon systems 25 years out so the idea that you and I don't know what the military is capable of in the air underwater wherever it may be is because we're not thinking 25 years out and they are and they're developing Weapons Systems the great weapon systems of the future that's what they call them right like how they develop the stealth bomber like in that was all out in Area 51 and Groom Lake and yes what do you think about bizarre story because Bob has our story what's it really there's some fascinating aspects to it but one of the most fascinating and some of the things that he's said that people said was horseshit is told has been proven to be true like one of the things the the biometric reader that measured the length of the bones in your hand and that they are unique

as unique as a fingerprint and people are like what are you talking about then they actually found out that this was something they really did have and they have photos of this thing now this is something he talked about and they claimed it was science fiction I mean it's fascinating when someone touches upon a subject that the government does not want known about for any reason and there is a campaign to discredit that person and yeah there's no doubt that that happened to him I mean it was remarkable and I write about him in the book because if you follow the logic that my source told me that these were you know modified human beings as part of a hoax and the reason that I trust the source is because Joe he told me that he also worked on the program so he had like a burden to unload right and so if you follow that logic through then the Bob Lazar story is that Bob when Bob Lazar said I saw an alien it looked like this it was small and had big eyes it's yes those were the jannat genetically I mean those were the surgically modified human

means that the government was doing experiments I think Bob lazarre's exact quote was he walked by a window and he looked and he saw two agents that were it looked there were looking down at something that was very small and looked humanoid but he didn't know it was a dummy or anything and he wasn't even supposed to be looking in there and it was a brief like one second look that he has bounced around in his head back and forth has it ever occurred to you that maybe the guy who gave that information did work there but is also feeding you horseshit well the source was a major player in the Manhattan Project he went on and worked in the atomic energy commission I mean there's a wing of a museum named after him his accolades his awards were so extraordinary it would be them you have never said his name although you know I will say this but you're giving it away like giving away a lot

the stuff the recently died and he didn't give me permission to tell his full story after he died and I'm circling around that circling around that but he was absolutely a you know with a Q clearance that's what you have when you have access to nuclear secrets so if someone has a q clearance for decades and they're full of garbage you really have to ask my God should this guy have a Q clearance I mean that's reverse engineering his credibility but I think you should read the whole book because you know it's shocking what he says but it does make sense if you can get through 400 pages of you know the cia's idea about information disinformation why we need to cover things up why that's why I'm asking if you think that he's he might have been lying to you I don't believe anyone whatsoever Nation no I don't believe I don't believe so you think that the Stalin that the Russian government

definitely did surgically alter people to make them look like aliens I believe we're images of the I believe what he told me did you see photos no I did not see if I don't know here's the rub ready okay when I was writing another book called phenomena which dealt with the CIA and the pentagon's use of Psychics okay over decades I mean this goes back everything I write about pretty much goes back to post World War when my remote viewing stuff yes yes and it's all about government US government takes Pole Position after World War II and we now need to always be ahead of the curve we must lead we can never get beaten by the Russians now it's China okay so the psychic program had a lot of people who really believe in aliens or you know other Intel intelligence from other worlds and when I was writing the phenomena book I learned a whole bunch of new information about how upset they were with my story because they believe and they all

to The Source by the way they knew the source and they believed that he was fed misinformation so these are two sides of the coin which are Super interesting I think if you can look at them with your own biased turned off and not have a desired outcome I want to believe this I don't want to believe this you know speaking of I want to believe you know I was working on a project with Chris Carter the who is the X-Files Creator and the one person I took the source that I wanted to meet the source was Chris Carter and I we went out there together and sat with him and met him and it was well because the source had never even heard of The X-Files it was like oh I know how do you talk about baseball you know really um see I don't have a desired outcome I mean I would love it if aliens were real but when someone starts talking about disinformation and propaganda campaigns but they

you to believe them right but don't listen I'm here telling you the truth I'm here telling you three I'm not saying I'm telling you the truth at all that's why would not you let's wait for an hour three because it's too explosive people have such a horse in the race yeah already they with aliens you think well of I mean maybe you are neutral I don't know I know I'm neutral yeah I will listen I absolutely want aliens to be real hundred percent to be interesting that's I'm not neutral but I am neutral in my perceptions and when I look at things I go hmm I don't know about that me to want to see a picture like what are these what these guys look like I mean what did they do to them did he describe what kind of surgical alterations I stayed with a source I mean after the book published I would go and visit him we'd sit in a Chinese restaurant and eat and talk and I would try to get a droplet of information out of him what was he doing oh my God

avoided I mean look here's another thing when the book came out his wife of 65 years knew it was him okay and I went out to Las Vegas and sat there in a room with the source and his wife and she said tell me this isn't true tell me you made this all up to her husband and he said it's the truth I mean that's a triangular version of getting at the truth but again to reiterate I believe he believes what he told me was the truth that was the truth he was told I think there's certain agents that think it's fun to fuck with reporters and journalists and make things up I really do and I think especially when they're talking about secret information that they were sworn to protect and then all of a sudden they want to talk to someone that they don't even know on the sneak tip let's meet at a diner I'm going to tell you everything that's not how we met well I mean yeah I mean whatever however you mean yeah you know we met because I it was interviewing

being nuclear weapons Engineers who are setting off nuclear bombs in Area 51 mushroom I mean in the Nevada Test Site Area 12 are 23 and they all said to me you've got to talk to the top engineer of all this weaponry and they gave me his name and we talked for days and hours about nuclear weapons and then in one conversation he began to cry and told me this story that I was like what was he crying he was crying because he participated in our version of the human experiments because what the Russians do we do it look I've written five books about that we altered people to make them look like alien according to him we had a small program in 1951 where we wanted to see how the Russians did what they did how they made human beings look like this so what they do take prisoners or something like what who they alter he

said they were handicapped children oh Jesus and he told me that he participated in this so again I mean unless you have someone that lost their mind at age 90 and was willing to tell their wife of 65 years I lost my mind so he's saying that he participated in something that altered handicapped children when you say handicapped me like down syndrome or something like that and they made them look like aliens and then killed them like what did how did they what did they do with this is where we get into drops of information command but what I can say is he had a grandchild that was born that way and and the grandchild did not live long the grand child died and it made him feel so guilty about what he had done that he felt compelled to come to confess if he will and I remember saying to him why are you telling me this why don't you tell a priest and he said a priest would judge me and I can tell you won't

why wouldn't you judge them I judge them well I guess that's why I'm a born journalist joke because I really try not to judge people I mean my new book surprise kill vanish it's about assassins it's about people who work for the CIA who do what needs to be done on the ground in the name of National Security I don't judge them this is why you know what's really at issue here is morality right yeah I mean can I tell you how I got the idea for this book sure but let me know before we go any further that so you want to talk about saying yeah was he saying that there have never been any encounters with alien spacecraft he was totally neutral about aliens he had nothing to do with aliens he could have cared less he didn't watch The X-Files what was his take on Bob Lazar his take on Bob Lazar was that he probably saw something that the government had an extension of the program I mean he didn't know that was speculated we didn't talk about that I mean you know other than inference

he was very limited in his in the information that he would get out but I mean I used 79 sources in that book that all went on the record in name and he was the one anonymous source because but like I said you know he told me after he died that I could tell the whole story but he going to I might you might come back at another book well hey if you give me a break and back off the subject I might come back and tell you and your audience is names your book I want to promote your book I know you want to promote your new book but I want to promote this book as well I mean I'm teasing you right but it's it's like it's an astonishing story and I think the best line of all is that people that read about that in the very end of what we did they go I wish they were aliens hmm you know so Stalin created some sort of a craft that mimic you're going to read it that's what you're going to do the rest of the afternoon nope I'm going to come back on your dog cast and we're talking

I think we should probably get into this a little okay come on with a question okay I'm used to asking the question are you alright as journalists yeah now Stalin and the Russians created something that mimicked UFO something that looked like it would be from another planet is that what they did Mothership in those days drones were there was a Mothership in a drone was attached to it and it was jettisoned off okay so in those days well in 1947-48 what I mean by well they didn't mean that was drone technology then all right so there's a mother a mother craft like an aircraft and then the Drone is like a small aircraft under it and it gets jettisoned off and that was what the craft was it was jettisons off so that so Stalin actually according to the source invaded our airspace which was the Deep embarrassment to Truman so he invaded our airspace and then let this drone crash land on the ground with these things

turned out to be human they look like aliens but it turned out to be humans that were manipulated surgically to look like out yes as a way to and remember I mean not remember but where where this was was you know very close to a nuclear weapons base to our White Sands military base I mean this is like not a place you want the Russians to be able to get near right now I mean what was interesting is that area 51 we then went out and mimicked all of those one of our early drones was a mimicry of that it was the D2 there was an M 21 which was the mothership and a D21 which was the daughter ship so how the of them was it wirelessly like we do now no no then it was like there was a pilot in the mothership and they kind of Let It Go and it flew off I mean there's incredible stories of what the CIA was able to do out there at Area 51 with there are Branch you know the technology they're always ahead of Technology that's remarkable well what Bob Lazar did film that was

shocking was the film the filming of these drones flying around and Performing these really crazy you've seen those videos I'm sure right in the 80s the it gets really crazy with what they're able to do and what their but I mean why I like looking at history is because you can see the progression you know you see how science evolves you know bit by bit and then there's these great breakthroughs because what the government is always looking for is called a revolution in military Affairs and that's certainly what drone technology did later on as drones became developed after the Vietnam War so in the 1980s when Bob Lazar was filming all this stuff you think this was similar to the technology that we see publicly described today in terms of like what drones are capable of sure I mean that's all that's something like that but then there oh you know when

when the F-117 was revealed during the first Gulf War that aircraft was being developed for 20-25 years out at Area 51 actually at Area 52 was where they had it set up to develop that stealth technology think about and what was amazing talk about keeping secrets they had something like 10,000 people working on that no one knew about it that story was never broken by the Press not by anyone it just suddenly appeared in the Gulf War and took out Saddam Hussein's you know facilities hmm that's a revolution in military Affairs what becomes interesting is then it becomes obsolete because now everybody knows about it and everybody's going to mimic that and now you have to have a new weapon system and that's the military industrial complex so was this drone aircraft that was released from the mother ship was this capable of autonomous flight or was it just they just threw it out there and let it crash

the latter right and remember that information I am very limited to that's why it's Drive Pages it's the source gave me these little bits of information which I felt I felt was important to include because it speaks to the big issue why is Area 51 classified I mean now it's not President Obama was the first president to actually say Area 51 publicly some people say because of my book all right meaning it was out the secret was out but before that I went through 10,000 pages of documents from the National Archives and every place you see the word Area 51 was actually redacted right why would you keep that so secret I mean all the guys that I was interviewing say they could call it you know groom leg they could call it the test facility they could call it Paradise Ranch but they couldn't say Area 51 why and the source said will because we did this horrible program out there and the government doesn't want

you want to know about that however I mean their stories of like somebody asking Bill Clinton you know about Area 51 him going white I mean human experiments who wants to be part of those horrible but the human experiments were with a limited to this mimicry of the Russian experiments where they're trying to get people to look like aliens or there's something else going on wow my goodness I mean you read now the Declassified documents tell us how many different human experiments were going on around nuclear weapons okay horrible experiments where they were subjecting people to radiation because they wanted to know they felt well it's more important to know what happens to people then to not know and so they would take groups of people that say had cancer something and test them so there's no doubt that the government has experimented on humans mmm it's just is that something that is wise to make public and you know there's two sides of the coin on that I mean you you when you reveal these kind of

you write about them I mean people get really upset and you know vilify the government partially with good reason and partially it's like bad for National Security so I think that's the justification on the part of the defense department to keep things secret that makes sense wow that's that's an interesting take that I never thought of before but if I was stalling and I was trying to air quotes fuck with the Americans that's maybe way I would do it hey man you got a problems aliens they're coming and there was if people it's hard for people that live in 2019 especially if you're young to really imagine a world not only without the internet but with two television channels right and radio which was where people got all their information from I mean was there two channels how many channels were the in 1947 maybe three maybe three I mean it was radio in World War II right most people most yeah mostly radio and newspapers and that's where people are getting their information

nation and there was a mass hysteria where people were absolutely terrified that we were going to be invaded which is why when Orson Welles war of Worlds which when they released it when they did it on the air they were very clear that this is going to be a reading of Orson Welles were of Worlds book or that HD well scuse me war of were right was HG Wells book and Orson Welles read it yes and when they were talking about this on the radio a lot of people miss that part right and so as the radio went on as the broadcast went on and people are tuning in later in the day it erupted in Mass hysteria people were freaking out hundreds of thousands of people really did think that it was and was also something that was recreated in other countries I don't know if you know that they did that in other countries in different languages when they saw how cute it works in America and you know so you see you can see the logic I mean at first it

absurd and it's ridiculous and that's why I was sweating because it's like I know Ryan right but when you think it through and I challenge you to read the whole book because you start piecing together these various ideas and disinformation becomes less vague and more specific and you go oh that's how it works and you begin to see how people's perception and how they're easily manipulated factors into National Security just like you just described Stalin knew about that he was a master he was the master of propaganda he invented it I mean he didn't invent it but he invented it in a you know on the political stage to be used to mess with another country's perception of things think of what he did with brainwashing right okay so like in the 50s and this is journalist you know said so there was a journalist who was putting out stories about brainwashing and there is this idea which is well taken that totalitarian government's brainwash people and this became a big code word it was

into the American lexicon in 1950 well then we're in the Korean War our pilot start getting shot down there put on TV by the Communists saying terrible things about America the American pilots and suddenly it was like they've been brainwashed it was very convenient to have that story so these things work part and parcel and you've got all kinds of smart people behind the scenes knowing this looking at it examining it and using it to their advantage to stay where in the pole position that's the goal of the US government

so the propaganda that we did that sort of copied Stalin's we're kind of playing catch-up in that sense I mean we're playing catch-up then we're ahead right behind is it's always a it's a game it's I mean you're a competitor you know this that's a crazy thing to do to make a fake spaceship and just Let It Slam into the ground with a bunch of people that you cut up to look like aliens did he say specifically what kind of modification they made to people that made them look like aliens I got drips trail rated in those 12 come on with this 12 Pages I'm telling you that because you're asking me these questions that as if I spent I mean look I did spend literally hundreds of hours with a source we sat there and talked about everything and I would try to squeeze out just like you're trying to squeeze out of me and that's why I'm saying read it because I literally tell you everything that there's I think what's most interesting about the source and why I might come back and talk to you about it and tell you who he is on your show is

because of his backstory mmm right why he did what he did how he wound up in the Manhattan Project sounds like he was probably Jewish from Germany No I'm trying okay come get you morality talk to me out about morality or talk about why we can't talk about certain things well while we're what you were saying before about being a competitor the United States is competitive yeah obviously and when you're playing the ultimate game which is war you have to be very careful about what you reveal what you don't reveal and this is where the conversation about surprise kill vanish comes in because the CIA using these covert operations to assassinate people and whether or not that should be allowed or not allowed whether it's good or bad whether it's necessary whether it's like if you want people to be safe over here there's certain people you got to take out and sometimes you just can't follow the rules

why why are we not supposed to know about that should we know about that the way the story started for me I'm at my house in 2009 a source is you know calls me up he says I'm on my way back from the Middle East going to pop by the house and say hi he brings me a challenge coin that says Kabul Afghanistan State Department I'm thinking okay he is not a diplomat I mean he's weapons trained at the time my boys were young there are lots of GI Joes in the garden and they had little weapons right and the source is showing them about the weapons and they're like so into it because they know he's military trained and then he says if it's okay with your mom and dad I'll show you some weapons boys are like please so he sets up the sniper rifle in the living room and I live up in the hills and you can look across the canyon through this scope he sat up and I can see the veins on the leaf across the canyon and I thought okay so now I know what he was doing in Kabul Afghanistan

he's taking out Al Qaeda with this hmm there's another case on the ground that he never opens

and when the boys go off I say to him what's in that and he said he opens it up and inside there's a knife and it's serrated and I said what's that for immediately realizing you know my naivete and he says to me sometimes a job requires quiet

so why that became interesting to me was because of my own thoughts and perceptions about what he had told me in other words I could I could deal with him with a sniper rifle I couldn't be like okay that's what he does but the knife gave me pause I was like she's sliding someone's throat is it in the ribs and I thought why is it that I am willing to accept sort of the clinical nature of a sniper rifle but I can't I'm uncomfortable with that close-up hand-to-hand killing and that led me to surprise kill vanish because that was the motto of the precursor agency of the CIA it was called the oss the office of strategic Services their motto was surprised kill vanish because they would jump out of aircraft land work with their French partners and kill Nazis with a you know a knife to the throat and I thought okay that's considered okay

because they were Nazis right but we can't we're not supposed to do that anymore in this world we live in why and I spent the whole this whole book researching and Reporting is about that sort of conundrum if you will that moral puzzle you know why do we why do we differentiate

yeah and who are they willing to do that to where do they draw that line like I'm sure you're aware of the story of Jamal khashoggi the journalist who was assassinated by someone yeah some group of people on that day he entered into the Turkish Embassy and they whacked him and chopped him up and carried him out and boxes and it's an international

is was a huge incident right yes this supposedly was ordered by who was it supposed to the Lord by the head of Saudi Arabia MBS Mohammed bin Salman I mean that's the idea is that their head of state wanted him killed because he was a threat because he was a reporter because he's writing some things yeah

and that they this is how they did it yeah I mean and there's that's a great question because what you're saying is like okay so but we all think of that as reprehensible right right why you know cuz cuz he's a journalist and is on our side he's delivering information to people but the government of Saudi Arabia disagreed like that information is our information he's a threat by releasing it yes he's a threat to our livelihood yes yeah and who decides who's a threat I mean a lot of this book is about who's on the kill list I mean there is an actual kill us they're always husband and the euphemisms involved I mean I write history as I said so Eisenhower called his assassination program Health alteration I mean literally in the Declassified documents hilarious Health alteration had a health alteration committee whoa Kennedy had an executive action committee all right it sounds cleaner right guess what Reagan's was called super

Wonderboy power up I don't know what clothes pre-emptive neutralization pre-emptive neutralization wow why do they keep switching the names for it they're burying the nation right and they keep switching around the switch around who has authority to

you know say yes let's go ahead and put this guy on the kill list I mean that was fascinating I mean I interviewed a guy named John Rizzo who is a decades-long CIA attorney I was stunned that he was willing to talk to me and he explained to me how a presidential finding also called a memorandum of notification works that gives the president the authority to put an individual on the kill list that job is then given to the cia's paramilitary Army an operator or they're assassins because the CIA Works under a code called title 50 of so it makes it legal whereas the defense department works under what's called title 10 so in other words and they can't their Rules of Engagement are totally different so the misnomer is like oh the seals killed Bin Laden well they were seals trained but that was a CIA mission

hmm because Pakistan is a Sovereign Nation and the military can't kill people in countries were not at war with so those guys all became essentially CIA operators for the night whoa right and if you look at photographs as I have seen you'll notice that they have no markings on their outfits so that if the job went South and be like I don't know who these guys are hmm and if you look back at Vietnam photos of the macv-sog teams which I also write about in Surprise kill vanish because that's the precursor of that you see no markings right that's that way you can go into you can go Behind Enemy Lines you can go into Laos you know in the Vietnam War you can go now you can go into Pakistan what I learned reporting this book is we're in a hundred and thirty four countries

doing title 50 operations think about that government wants that to be kept secret so in all those countries they're doing things that don't fall under the normal letter of the law not yes not under the Rules of Engagement of the military but the CIA works at the president's behest that that was one thing that really blew my mind to report to research to understand I talked to forty two guys who have direct access to this who are in this world you know from the knuckle draggers on the ground as they call themselves to the lawyer at CIA senior intelligence staff that's equivalent of a general at the CIA those guys explaining to me Annie this is how it works you know and again to your question will why why does someone get to know that and why does the government want why do they allow that information out as super interesting and I believe that has to do with us

certain climate we're in right now about military might in other words what the CIA does is called tertiary optio it's the third option you've got the first option is diplomacy second option is war so if diplomacy is not working and war is on wise you go to the third option which is the cia's paramilitary

and they're in a hundred and how many countries hundred and thirty-four damn well if you wonder why the military budget so big that's what it is folks got to feed those folks a lot of work I mean what happened and you as a competitor would be fascinated by the kind of training they do and what they do I mean so many of these infiltration techniques are mind-boggling you know they've got Halo jumping which you know about right where they high altitude low opening so they jump out they you know free fall down terminal velocity pull the ripcord really low so they're not detected by radar and then they meet up with a team on the ground and go do what they do and they also have hey ho which is high altitude high opening and that way you can fly over airspace where we're allowed and float into let's say a country like Iran

and land gather your team and do what you have to do hmm But like so much of what I report I get information like that and then I asked him a million questions like you've asking me and it's like can't talk about that that's classified hmm you don't you you're a journalist so you're trying not to judge but

is it your belief that this is a good thing for America meaning the president having a third option well I mean I write in the book that that's in the prologue after I tell that story about the source with a knife I say I wanted to know and that exact question like is this a good thing and my answer at the end after its complex not to be vague but it is really complex is also that well if you're gonna take that pole position you must accept rivalry right and

also after talk to I think it's a good thing after talking to a lot of 20 year old soldiers who come back from the war theater missing a limb with intense PTSD

and who essentially serve as cannon fodder I would say my opinion right for the Pentagon that's the second option or the 42 guys that I interviewed you know they're like send me they are professional they are Tier 1 operators there Green Berets their seals there Delta they retire they joined the CIA yeah so they're like professionals at what they do and they're saying I want someone has to do this job we've been doing this since the end of World War II I want to do it so do I think it's better I mean I think that that concept speaks to

choice right because I'm not so sure that the 20 year olds know what they're in for and the 40 year olds know what they're in for and are willing to do it so that it will also the difference between a specialized trained individual with very specific task versus someone who is sort of following orders and at the front of the line yeah right I mean and also has a you know a lot of times I talk to these young kids who go to war and they tell me one of the fascinating detail is that they talk about movies that they see and whether it's Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down even right where the outcome is not necessarily great but they talk about the romanticization of war and of camaraderie and of Brotherhood that comes from that and then they have their experience and some of that does give them that sense but not always whereas The Operators are much more about

you know getting the job done that's what I was fascinated by I mean these guys are really clear their competitors they're like top-tier competitors they have a job they do it they get it done and they asked for the next job so is the oversight when it comes to choosing whether or not this operation takes place or not is it do they have moral guidelines do they have ethical or moral guidelines where they say like this is the president is requesting that this person get taken out the Chiefs of Staff whoever it is is that we do they have to make a an ethical distinction you mean are they like kill him nicely like don't make it harder did they decide like does this make sense or like what if the president is like Rosie O'Donnell she's been talking shit take her out like you know saying well I mean that's you know that's a big issue but

what I try to write in so what I try to report in Surprise kill vanish is the idea that the people we take out maybe our bad guys right one one guy right about his Che Guevara okay because J is often portrayed in the press as you know this amazing hero and that he and we you know I don't know if you know but he was he was killed by the Bolivian Rangers but it was a CIA operation and I interview the man in charge of that operation in Surprise kill vanish his name was Felix Rodriguez okay long-serving CIA paramilitary officer so but I also report why the president to your question wanted Che Guevara did you know he was really advocating for nuclear war

and I show them of our oh well yes I mean he spoke publicly about you know if we have to have an atomic war the Cuban paraphrasing the Cuban people will be happy to have sacrificed themselves that I mean today was also Jay killed anyone who betrayed him he killed he writes about it in his Diaries as I write in the book right so but on the morality question who decides I don't have that answer but I will tell you what I did I went with my main source Billy wall who he's a 89 now and he was he's been with the CIA for 60 years okay I mean he went and he and I went to Cuba for him to do a Halo jump with Che Guevara Sun so we were a guest of the man

whose father was killed by the CIA whoa okay and we had this really interesting discussion in the cigar club where Che and Castro you know smoke cigars and plotted the downfall of the United States and that's what I try to give readers a sense of

the long lens of History how time changes all things and maybe leave with them than with this idea which they can come to their own conclusions about what you asked me if is it right or is it wrong because really what you might ask is is it necessary hmm right I mean I could moralize right wrong but it would just be my opinion but when you see I went really well and I also travel to Vietnam because he was supposed to kill he was tasked to kill the top commander of the North Vietnamese Army a guy named General shop and why didn't kill shop and we had this incredibly this terrible mission that went awry that I write about in the book in the Vietnam War so 50 years later Juan I go to visit the son of General drop are sitting there in jobs home talking about these same issues right and my conclusion of that again is not

it right or wrong but is it necessary I mean we have these wars we keep having these wars is it necessary

yeah what do you think well I mean

my opinion is that the defense department is far too concerned with vast weapon systems of the future which is its mission statement of its science department and so you create what some at the Pentagon call a self licking ice cream cone or the military industrial complex hmm and there's a lot built into that there's a lot to be said about that and there's also probably some concerned about other countries getting ahead of us so you have to do what you have to do if your if your job is to protect the American people and to keep the military strong you just have to operate with that premise that there's a bunch of other people out there that are doing the same thing for their country and trying to take down the United States and we got to stay ahead of the curve make human-eating robots that can shoot missiles absolutely I mean when I was reporting the pentagon's brain which is about DARPA and I was sitting there with Scientists who are working on limb regeneration right all right oh right or working yeah what are they doing oh my God they have these little

salamanders I mean they're showing that salamanders can regenerate their limbs and so human their idea their down at UC Irvine have this incredible lab and they're funded by DARPA because that's where the money comes from right and their idea is that humans should be able to regenerate their limbs and you know 50 years out will be doing that and they're working on the science for that well that's the same science that allows for cloning and so in our discussions because that's how I try to report is like really ask people what they think about future consequences and they said to me your exact question which is well Annie what if one day we wake up and we find out that China has cloned the first human or a dark horse like Saudi Arabia you know the American people are going to freak out and go where the hell was DARPA why aren't we ahead of the curve so it's that there's a chicken in the egg problem with that of like well we have to stay ahead were we

on top we want to be on Des

it's kind of terrifying I mean everything I write about is terrifying I hate asleep sleep well you have to take Ambien I'm more worried of no God no I'm I'm more worried about coming on your show and being asked tough questions when I am about do you think you but then I am about I mean this stuff is informative you know it's informative and it's a longer conversation that's why I think what you do with your podcast is awesome because people can really get into the thinking about things right they can really and they can move away from their own preconceptions their own biases they're bringing into it and they're stopping for a minute and they're going what do I really think about that and to really think about something you need information yeah and information can be boring unless it's interesting Leah presented through conversation through you know uncomfortable conversation well also uncompromised conversation where you don't have a certain time period that you have to smush something into like a four minute

on CNN or something that's impossible what's so difficult I see people have these conversations about books or something that are trying to a complex very nuanced subject the trying to discuss and you know there's another person on their sides like that's not true and the shouting over each other like boy this the pressure the people have to understand that people do understand but you have to reiterate it and it has to be kind of drilled in your head you're when you're pressuring someone and you're yelling back and forth you're not even going to get a good version of whatever this person's argument is like you should have the best version I want like if I'm going to have a disagreement with someone I want the best version of their their point and I want them to get it out with no pressure I want to help them get it out I'd like to reiterate it with them I like to give them plenty of time I want to know how you think I want to know what you're thinking about I would love to talk to these guys I would love to

loved it but the thing is like you they can't tell you a lot of this there's a I mean for national security reasons there's a lot of reasons sure if they want to keep their job and stay alive they have to have to shut the fuck up they can't just talk about what they do and how they do it and how and decisions that maybe they made the were uncomfortable with a killed somebody that didn't think maybe needed to die yeah but but that's the reporter's job or these my job so in other words okay so I go to visit Billy watt is home and I knew I heard stories about he's this legendary operator right and he's also what's called a Singleton so he works alone and when I was at the call them a Singleton right which is like he's got one guy giving him orders whoa right he's out there long I God I mean Billy wall is right I mean back can we back up for a second and give you this very of him okay so here's this guy he's in he's in Vietnam and he's part of what was called macv-sog right and they're doing cross-border missions until

us and it's so dangerous it's like it's a CIA program that SOG stands for studies and observations group is supposed to sound like a bunch of guys and Ivy League Tower with bowties right but the guys on the ground called it suicide on the ground that's how dangerous it was Jesus a hundred percent of the people had casualties right Billy wall has nine Purple Hearts from the work he did nine okay I mean they get shot they bandaged some cells up there you know they're up in an aircraft because they're limping instead of on the ground you know viewing the missions the warrants everybody's furious with the government with the military there's no room for special operators I mean everything it's called the time of Troubles by them Billy was working in the post office

and he gets this knock you know and it's like he's back in the CIA now in 1977 so he was out for was that it was over at Vietnam I mean he was he was you know it was over that was it was working in the post office is working in the hooker Stallone movie it's he was wearing the blue right I mean and he needs you I mean but he's had the most incredible thing to me because he said I and he doesn't ever talk about fear and he said there's only one time my whole life I've ever been afraid and that was in the post office whoa because he was getting back into it probably had like recycled his mind and put himself in a place I'm just a civilian now and he said I'm at a wind up being one of those old guys drinking beer at the end of the bar talking about the war right and instead he gets called up by the CIA and they send him to Libya in 1977 and his cover is that he's training qaddafi's paramilitary guys in Para military tactics

I mean that's the beginning of his career and it goes on all the way until we were in Cuba I think was an actually some kind of a mission because it was like what are we doing here in Cuba doing infiltration and exfiltration techniques allegedly with Che Guevara sont but in any event you know when I went to visit Billy wall the first time he's got this you know he's got certificates and awards and medals all over the walls of his home but there's one framed

item that I'm looking at and it's a knife and there's a seal from the CIA and it says in appreciation to the Assassin hmm

and I said Billy tell me about that and he said you know I can't talk about that so I you know stayed with him for two years and I mean stayed we conversed we traveled interviewed him you know hundreds of hours and I kept asking him about that award and he kept saying you know I can't talk about that but as I write in the book he couldn't talk about it but others did so that's how a reporter works you get introduced to enough of his friends enough of the others who are involved you make sure they're a legitimate source and you begin to find out what he can't talk about and that's what I report in the book and that is very explosive because President Bush right after 9/11 created what was called a stalker team and ironically you know people have this idea that we've been you know sending a team of Assassins around the world in NATO partner countries and that

what I learned had never happened until right after 11:00 with the stalker team 12 men and actually one or two women the Femme Fatale and they would go after bad guys and they adopted the term from the Reagan error so it was called pre-emptive neutralization who was who are the women

there's always one woman on the team that's what I was told by the guy who is in charge of the soccer team and why is that well I mean he he gave me this great example I don't report in the book but I'll tell you right he said so women have a different presentation and this like he told me a story of a woman sitting on a bench

you know in embracing a man right and no one thought anything of it and it allowed her to spy on someone in a manner that would a man would it would have drawn attention and then the soccer team could go so what their job would be to is to conduct surveillance of a Target and they call it making book they have to make book on that individual so they know exactly where the guy is and they're waiting on the president's orders whether or not they should take action and you know that's where the that's where the information stops right I said well then what happens well it's all we can say Annie that must be so exciting like to live like that like all Cloak and Dagger got to be so exciting like its I would take that over a cubicle every day of the week I really would well you might get killed am I dying that damn cubicle two I think it's why so

many of these operators stay in it long term right did you ever see the television show time show what the hell's it called with the fuck's that show called that the the Homeland yes well that's like the whole premise like she's completely addicted to being in that world adrenaline I mean that's what that is Imagine jumping out of an aircraft Landing in you know Behind Enemy Lines and then your work begins and then you have to get out that's why surprise kill vanish I mean you gotta surprise your way in kill them and then get out and if you getting out of they frame your knife and give you a plaque Jamie I'm going to get you a knife and appreciation of the Assassin you're a killer it's just such a crazy way to live your life but you know I'll take that over a boring life I would take that over a boring like every day of the week well it's like the Pink Floyd line you know

then life of quiet desperation I mean that just terrifies that's the rose quote that most men live lives of quiet desperation it's one of my favorite quotes ever because it's true and I've been that guy you just you're just in this world where you just can't wait to just run away and how do people get stuck there how do you think they get stuck their bills bills like Financial but yeah bills and commitment you have an apartment have to pay for you have a car you least you have a wife that you have to feed you have a child you have to raise you have to you have your mortgage you have your this you have you that and that's where it all comes from where do you think opportunity plays into that well the opportunity takes place usually when you're young and you don't have any responsibility that's when you have your options what your options are severely limited the more you gather responsibilities like if I had as a 51 year old father of three married man

pays taxes has a house in the mortgage and a business and all that jazz if I had a quit everything now and struggle the way I struggled as a stand-up comedian it would never work but the only way I could be this person now is if I took that chance when I was 21 when I was dead broke and had my car is repossessed and all that stuff that's the only way you you ever get where you want to go you have to you have to take a path it's dangerous and most people want to take the safe path the safe path leaves you stuck in quiet desperation almost every time it's hell it's hell you're selling insurance or some other shit that you care zero about but can people just make that change I mean you can't believe that you have to plan it out the way you can change is you have to put aside enough money to give yourself a window and then you have to have a plan and you have to spend all your waking hours outside of whatever shit job you do planning your Escape

and you have to come to the realization very clearly that you fucked up you got yourself stuck so whatever you're doing you have to do it like your life depends on it and whether it is you're trying to be an author and you're going to you're going to if you're going to try to be an author and you're working 8 hours a day plus commuting plus family responsibilities or whatever else you have whatever time that you have you have to attack like you're trying to save the world you're trying to save your life you don't want to drown that one and a half hours a day that you have to write goddamn you better be caffeinated and motivated you got to go you got to get after it and you got to have discipline that's most people don't have those things most people don't understand what it's like to really go for something and to know that the consequences of not doing that or horrific and you're desperate and yeah but I do think there is something to be said for fate and Circumstance sure and I always right I mean

people in these military environments that I write about and in these intelligence World environments fate and Circumstance plays a big part because they too can even get complacent you know but when your life is on the line all right A lot of times they have these experiences where they're like I must change and that's what I find really interesting yeah in people sure desperation yeah I think fate and Circumstance or giant Fortune is giant there's no question about it some children get shot in drive-bys you know that's just horrible horrible luck and unfortunate circumstance a lot of a lot of it is fortune and fate how about people getting lost right almost house so the book that I told her I wrote on the psychics phenomenon wouldn't lie about that again I'm neutral right I'm not you're not tell me I wanna hear what you believe is a lot of people are full of shit absolutely my God

all people that are talking about being psychic or full of shit but I do think that there is a strange connection that we have with each other that's intangible and I think that some people have better connections and others just like some people more intelligent like we were talking before the podcast about Elon Musk and it's painfully aware when you talk to him what a champ you are that the he's so fucking smart and his brain is it just it's built different just like some people have defective Hearts some people have a heart like Lance Armstrong this incredible huge an anomaly some people have giant hands yes a big heart literally yes he's literally and they don't know whether or not that's from training or steroids and EPO and or whether or not it's something he was born with they really don't know but yeah as an unusually sized heart usually large but what was my point

fate circumstance getting lost so psychic psychics that's what it is I don't I think that most of the people that can tell you the future of full of shit most of the people that are I think people get feelings I think sometimes you think about someone they call you and I don't know what that is I don't know if that's just complete Fortune like how many times you think about a person when they don't call you that's the argument against it but how many times you thinking about that person they don't call you but they're thinking about you as well how many mean how how often is that was star-crossed lovers they find each other years later and they tell each other the been thinking about each other all the time they can't believe it that's that's and when you get that text from someone maybe that's just someone prone to action but maybe there is some sort of a connection some sort of quantum entanglement between you and someone who spent time with or shared energy with it's possible it's possible but the problem is you have these mediums and psychics and those people are just assholes and I have a friend whose name is banachek and he runs a Las Vegas

to list show where he shows you how he does these tricks but he will tell you absolutely these are true he's been on the podcast brilliant brilliant man but he'll tell you these are tricks I'm showing you how I do this this I mean I'm going to tell you that the truck I'm not going to give you the how I do it but I'm going to tell you while I'm doing it this is a trick but he's pulling all this information out of people about their past their childhood he's guessing people's ages he's guessing where they grew up I mean and it's all little sneaky shit you know it's the way they do it's a skill as much as anything and so when you see these people that are channelers or you know psychics they're telling you about someone in your pasta trying to contact you they're con artists almost exclusively I mean maybe there's like one lady in Tibet that has a broken Jean and she could tune into the next Dimension and pull some extract some information from it but in my experience the vast majority

already of those people that I've talked to that claim to have psychic ability were also at least partially full of shit they had weird ego problems that were glaring that they didn't notice you know like I could see it that this is a gross way to behave and they don't see it their interpersonal relationships the way they communicate with people was like an agent like a fake Hollywood person or something there's something bullshitty about them yeah and people who lie a lot I think if you lie a lot it's very difficult for you to tell what a lie is oh that's interesting yeah I think you lose your connection I think when you when you bullshit I think you also bullshit yourself now think these psychics are a hundred percent honest even with themselves I don't think this like I'm gonna fuck this lady over stinks got to talk to her husband I'm a towel or some nonsense take her money I think some of them actually believes are getting information you know my grandmother used to believe that my grandmother was a she was a very eccentric

lady and old Sicilian lady and she would tell you about the like all the talion ladies all like want to play the lottery they all have numbers there and she was playing the numbers wasn't even the lottery it was like the organized crime numbers Racket and she would always I was going to pick this number and I just add up the last minute I change the number of wouldn't you know it the first one came in and she was so mad but it was always that that I had a dream of this and I had a vision of that it was all visions and dreams and psychics but everything worked out horribly for her it always did like if like you were really psychic he would have better instincts like this is just this inclination that people have that there's something special about their perceptions and that their psychic and it's always he's really wacky people that believe their psychics in my my experience which I mean it's your I think you're talking also about that what some scientists would call the self-fulfilling prophecy you know that if you believe this things happen

manifest themselves and you can convince yourself that you believe this but for me I'm super interested in

people who really believe in psychics right like that's what and the military for example and you know the motion talk to Ed Danes your talk to those guys the remote viewing guys II talked to a lot of the scientists who taught the remote viewing and I talked to a number of remote viewers and for the book but the most interesting of all was the astronaut Ed Mitchell all right and he was so so I'm interested in like the psychology behind what are you looking for in that and I saw that I was doing some research in an archive and I came across a photo of what turned out to be Ed Mitchell on the moon reading a piece of paper okay it's this extraordinary image because you're like wait a minute he's on the moon and he's reading a document what is that document I found out the document was a map of the Moon okay Mitchell got lost on the moon and literally pulled the map out of like okay got I'm he was trying to get to a certain crater and they had a very limited amount of time there is right there right okay there he is

I mean think about that like the most advanced technology of the time why don't invite with the camera tell them where to go

good picture but hey bro this one I have left we go let's just follow our Footprints we're the only ones walking what are you stupid turn around look at the ground see those things that's where you walked let's go that way Jesus Christ I'd be so mad at him I'm like bro you pulling out a map who wrote that map who's and no one's even been here come on man they had little Maps folded up in their in their pockets in case they got lost they were on the way to this crater and in that crater there were going to find allegedly rocks that we're going to solve the mystery of the moon's creation the origin story they like all this pressure they couldn't find it the heart rates up the guy's a Houston or like you got to turn back your heart rates going crazy and think about it Mitchell tells me I went to interview him at his house when I think it was his last interview before he died and he said there we had gotten 240,000 miles to only to get lost they missed the crater by like you know 900 feet or something really yeah so he never got to the crib never got to it he was devastated and on the way back from the Moon he

this what he told me was a psychic change right he his his Consciousness flipped and he became convinced that psychic powers were real and that is really the beginning of his for a I mean Mitchell became a huge proponent of psychic Warfare of you know the the the idea behind what you're talking about that we spoke of as being sort of charlatans ism and he dedicated the rest of his life to it but he was really cute but he had some wacky beliefs about aliens as well and I think that comes we're definitely in contact with the aliens and and that comes from like he was so vilified by the scientist and by the astronauts by the kind of military men because this was just he told me the story of when they were in quarantine after they came back from the Moon right he and Shepherd were sitting there you know eating breakfast waiting and Shepherd the stories a story broke that Mitchell

done some ESP experiments on the way back from the Moon and Shepherd's said to him like look at this nonsense the newspapers will do anything to sell Mega Bach and Mitchell said I did that I actually did that and what experiments he was doing ESP experiments on the way back from the Moon he had a psychic in Chicago a Swedish psychic that he was sending messages to like she got it was an old Swedish man right I don't think named Olaf right but I hear Swedish cycle yeah my psychic can't wait to take my clothes off yeah no I'll introduce you too Olaf okay okay I saw the movie Frozen didn't see that one Olaf's the little snowman you got younger kids yeah miss that one minor older anyway sorry so Ed Mitchell was talking to this hot chick in the hot old man in and and the story broke because the the the Swedish psychic could not resist telling you no lie

into the press that he had done these experiments what experiments were they well psychics trained on these little cards called zener cards right so like you have a different symbols on them and you know one one person that's how they decide whether or not they're being psychic like there would be a veil between us and I would say what are you seeing right and you would call it out so it's like a control system and Mitchell had these items with him on the way to the moon and did these experiments to try to see whether you could have a psychic connection with someone back on Earth mmm I mean he that was you know did it work well no and he took notes and he showed me the notes it was so wild to be at his house in Florida and he pulls out this old spiral notebook with like water stains on it that actually went to the moon hmm I was like wow this is really

something else I mean it was one of those moments in time where you're just like I don't know there was a feel there was a feeling of sadness around all of it mmm with Ed Mitchell sitting there in his you know his chair and talking to me about what it was like to be an Apollo astronaut on the walls I'm with a lot of these sources with like incredible amounts of awards on the walls but what does that mean after time passes right so his experiments didn't work but he still believed in psychic powers yes I mean and that's and he okay so what was that he was ridiculed you know and he had such a tough time with it and so the people who propped him up and the people who gave him a lot of encouragement had sort of more radical ideas as he grew older and one thing you know conspiracy theorists who really kind of used him because he was an Apollo astronaut and so he was so much more famous than

of them would ever be and they really took advantage of him I think so you think they manipulated him with information and tried to get it more and more enthusiastic about their I mean it's speculation on my part but you kind of go where the love is right it was an older guy to seen some interviews with him as he was getting older and older and he seemed to be having some difficulties like thinking about things clearly and people take advantage of that yeah he was really obsessed with extraterrestrial life it's really interesting because didn't he claimed that he had seen something while he was up in space

I think people helped him make that claim that was my understanding of it of reporting I mean I stayed away from some of the crazier speculative things about him because what I was really interested in when I was writing that book was how his authority and power allowed the program to get funding right so much of this is it's like who's funding this stuff and why and it really does come down to Authority which is always a which is always a narrative that I find fascinating right how do people get the authority to say go on these programs or you know we should do the I mean the question you asked of like how does who's in charge right right and in all of this what I learned more than anything is that the Office of the President has a lot more power than I think any of us are aware oh I'm sure what did you find anything about Ed Mitchell did he say anything about see if he said anything about seeing

the UFO or seeing extraterrestrial life but the problem is if he believes that boy you know if the he was talked into saying that you got to wonder about a lot of the other things that he said as well the other thing is as these guys get older

that becomes their career the career becomes discussing their experiences and the more outrageous those experiences are the better the career is it's absolutely true change their stories you know Michael Collins changed his story his story when he just got back from the Moon excuse me when you just got back from the Moon his story was they couldn't see any stars but then as he got older he wrote in depth in his book and things in the 90s you know decades later how Vivid the stars were and how incredible it was out there with no atmosphere but there's a press conference when he came back from the Moon right after the Apollo 11 Moon launch he was talking about he couldn't see any stars so everybody's like well what what is it did you know they there's they get lost right they're older it's been so many years since whatever they did when they were working with NASA and really it becomes

that's their focal point of attention like what the where they get their attention from and where they make their career is from their attention and so they start telling these inconsistent stories I'm in one of the great Perils of you know living on your laurels is exactly that and it's why I mean like a guy like Billy why I was so intrigued by that he was constantly Reinventing his own role within the CIA as he talked to me about it length because he never wanted to just become one of those husband's right so his cover later became just another old man

which is like super interesting like he was in Sudan in the 90s and he actually took the first reconnaissance photographs of Osama bin Laden before Bin Laden was on anybody's radar except for the cia's and his I mean how do you run or he said to me how do you run around Sudan which is a country made up of like really tall black Dinka tribesmen if you're a five foot eight old white guy the 72 you know supposed to get reconnaissance photographs of Bin Laden right into work wear golf shirts you know you have a photograph I'm he wore like you know those socks like that go all the way up to your mission a dork yes and little shorts and a sweatband over his head and he said my cover was that I was an old man on a fitness craze and there he is running around Sudan I mean there's no sidewalks right and he's just jogging away and he said Ben Laden's dogs used to come after him and so he would have to run with a lead pipe wow

back the dogs on the nose and should they stop coming after me wow

Jesus

I can't find any evidence that he says that he saw aliens but there's evidence I'm seeing different reports that based off of his conversations with lots of different people he believes that aliens at some point visited Earth and that it's being covered up don't don't I mean that's an easy narrative - Wayne yeah sure yeah and I mean how much they tell Ed Mitchell they say thanks for going to the Moon well look one of the most interesting things about reporting this is what that you find out these people that you think have access to all the information right only know there are piece of the pie how much do they Trump knows do you think they keep stuff from him because I would say like he's kind of a loose cannon I wouldn't tell him about the alien

I mean everybody I often wonder that like can the president be like I demand to know about the yeah and then can they say no sir or they say as I write in one of my other books it's like you don't want to know about that because you don't want to have to lie well that's nonsense I definitely want it I would want to know and I'll be the only reason to become president he doesn't figure out why you have to lie like whether or not if you have to lie make sense to you right like there's some things that you know that we're done like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment where you go what the fuck are you doing like no you can't do that but then there's some things you go oh I see why you how to do that yes you know so it would have to be like which one of those things isn't is it one of those things where it makes sense where you had to go and assassinate someone who was plotting some sort of a nuclear attack on Chicago or is it some nefarious plot to Turn Down syndrome children into

surgically constructed fake aliens and crash them into the Earth and the Curiosity Factor would be outrageous I mean can you imagine being the president and saying I want to know about you know JFK and they're like sir you don't want to know right then you would go well of course I want to know now I really want to know I mean that happens to me as a reporter all the time when I can't talk about that that just becomes the obsessions like yeah that's the first thing I'd want to know I'd almost run for president to learn about aliens I'm like come on bro but then if I found out there was nothing I'd be like well fuck this job I quit I don't want I don't want to run the world I just want to find out about the aliens and then there's all these things that you find out Jamie and I were talking about that before it's like you know Jim is obsessed well it's obsessed with Chicago all right no I rather Columbus and we were we were talking about Nazis I mean I wrote a book about Operation Paperclip and my God talk about a rabbit's hole it's a rabbit hole the rabbit let's explain to people that don't

what we're talking about Operation Paperclip was when after World War II the United States gathered up a ton of scientists from Nazi Germany brought them over to America and even Wernher von Braun they had Wernher von Braun run NASA he was a Nazi like a hundred percent not see good friends with Hitler type not say yes he was he ran a Berlin rocket Factory where they hung the five slowest Jews they would hang them out front so everybody would know like this is what happens when you work slow will hang you I mean the Simon wiesenthal Center said that if Wernher von Braun was alive today they would prosecute him for crimes against humanity yes I would and that was a head announcer that was the head of NASA that was the guy who got us to the Moon that was the big cheese guy yeah so we were willing to put a lot of really dark things aside in order to gather up the best scientists of the Soviet Union couldn't get them all and they got a few of them as well but we got how many

more than a thousand right allegedly 1400 but I would not be surprised if you know

the story changes and there were more right yeah but that goes back to our discussion earlier about being in pole position I mean that's why we grab those Nazis we were like if we don't get them the Russians are so I get it and you know and I'm sure the Nazis could say I didn't want to do it they made me I'm a nice person I love Jews you know that was part of the mythology was like we got the good Germans well we didn't we got the we got the top Germans and who do you think the top Germans were yeah they were coveted by Hitler Himmler Goering you know yeah I mean these guys were right I mean there were guys that we grabbed out of the docks at nürnberg literally to come be part of our program you know one of these got Mart you're an asset right mean that's what Genghis Khan used to do you take Warlords from the other side and capture I'm gonna listen just come over here bro come on work for me I'm the Man I mean what you know ideology aside I'm super smart and I want

about to be known that's kind of that's that's a competitor right I mean you can't you cannot be the best rocket designer in the world and not want those talents you know demonstrated that's one of on Brown story that's the story of all of them and that was so shocking writing that book because it's a like wow you know huge amounts of talent but how far will the competitor go to see their baby come to fruition what are they willing to put this aside yeah did you pay any attention to the other places where Nazis went when they escaped Germany like Argentina in particular the ever seen any of that stuff they have entire German towns down in Argentina all right they do Oktoberfest down there they wear Lederhosen and they drink at a Stein's it's crazy they speak German and you're like what the fuck is this like my friend Tim Kennedy went down there and he said he was literally talking to people interviewing people and they

photos of ss soldiers on their wall and they would talk about how grandfather was a hero and like like you are your the descendant of escaped Nazis and they put together a town down there I mean the way the Nazis were able to flee is X I can't read enough of that I mean that's what Jamie and I were talking about it's like oh my God and it's endless I mean there are so you know the ones that we there was a famous guy that we got he was the Surgeon General of the Third Reich I mean think about that okay dr. Walter Schreiber I mean he was such a bad dude he was in charge of the vaccine program I mean you just put those words together in your mind goes really dark right but we wanted him because he was an expert in vaccines and we brought him to the United States he was the only not see I found of the ones the paperclip scientist says who came here that that was actually outed right

he was outed as a Nazi and that's because one of the investigators at the Nuremberg trials recognized him oh Jesus and we he's the only one we got out of here and guess where he went Argentina lived out the rest of his life there the show was called finding Hitler there were trying to find evidence that Hitler somehow escaped is really a bullshit premise of the show but what was interesting is that there were thousands and thousands of Nazis that made it to Argentina and set up shop throughout South America it's a lot of Germans down there it's kind of weird if you can imagine me on book tour of like the kind of questions I get because we're talking right having written books about Area 51 Nazis right assassins me so long people I mean just last night I was reading books giving a signing and people are like is Hitler really dead you know Carly I mean that right if he was alive he'd be the oldest man alive right

and he was probably like how old was he during World War II he had to be in his 40s right behind rights you know I mean no no I meant but right or this a be cloned himself fired six years old honored 20 now that's what it is oh geez Jamie knows that's an old man I mean there's been a hundred twenty year old people but it's fucking pretty rare yeah so Operation Paperclip was not even publicly acknowledged until what was it like the 90s like when did they when did it become public for I think was through the Freedom of Information Act was it was a very Intrepid journalist named Linda Hunt who shout out to Linda yeah I mean sheet but you know she broke the story that's what's amazing I mean as a journalist you're always riding on the shoulders of those before you write and she had it really hard because she did a Freedom of Information Act request got all these documents that no one

had ever seen and then the government sent her a bill for a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars

and she had to spend a lot of time this is this what I understand I never interviewed her but for xeroxing fees

what I just love that detail because it's like it's such a kovar way of getting someone to stop it's like okay here's the information we had to give it to you but now here's your bill imagine if the government's coming down on you for a hundred twenty-five Grand yes he doesn't come to me want to call a bunch of rich people go hey let's all just donate $1,000 to this lady and it's a different world now you could do that you could do a GoFundMe campaign oh my God in the 80s and the 90s you were just like out on a limb yeah they would crush you financially we actually had this very same discussion yesterday with my friend filled demurs who's being sued by marine land and because of he was a walrus trainer and trained orcas and he's showing how horrific it wasn't black fish that's see world but it's SeaWorld is actually the way he says it's a day in the park compared to Marineland Marine Lance horrific place in Canada and anyway they have been trying to squash him with legal bees by dragging out his legal fees by dragging out his case but he

we set up a go fund me and always legal bills get paid for from people that want him to win the good fight and this is a this is an option today that wasn't available to Linda when she was exposing this bloody not $25,000 do you assholes like she should sue them for misappropriation of funds like it does it cost you really $125,000 of print those things out of it does you guys should be in jail like that's like with like those $10,000 hammers that they have and mmm the Pentagon yeah yeah so she gets all this information and does the government immediately acknowledged that the important is Nazis that no I mean she wrote the first book and it was just stunning and and you know it was this late 80s early 90s okay and you know then more gets revealed because they gave her a certain amount I mean I filed a bunch of foias there was releases I went to Germany

foyer meaning Freedom Freedom of Information Act yes then I went to Germany and looked in their archives with like a fellow German PhD who had you know real access to stuff and was able to translate for me while we were there looking at the stuff I interviewed a lot of grandchildren of Nazis and children of Nazis and you know I mean this one extraordinary oh my God there's a guy I told you about Schreiber right I'm on the narrative level humans acting I'm so interested in rivalry and competition right as a concept because this is what America does to be the best and also as humans right because people are like that they're built like that so the Nazis had Rivals amongst themselves and schreiber's rival was dr. bluhm who is in charge of the biological weapons program for Hitler okay and Blum had a son and Blum was prosecuted at Nuremberg you can see a picture of him of the big duel

skaar you know he was a bad dude he was a dueling scar dueling scar duel like a sword sword fighting it was like among the Nazis they would they would duel with one another when they were younger students and then they would pack the wound with horsehair to make it even more pronounced because it looked ferocious really can't let me pull up Jamie pull-up bar in which is that what's his name well you can pull up dr. bluhm Bo lme but also a scar on his right and also you can pull if you pull up Kurt debus who is the director of our JFK Center he was part he was NASA's Von Braun's number two he had a huge dueling Scar and yet when you knowing look at there he is right there knowing what we know now it's like come on that you're trying to tell me that guy's not a hardcore Nazi so those guys had dueling scars on their face you see him how often did they duel

well when they were in college death no no it was like on guard you know and then they wouldn't sink fencing fencing oh this guy had it too yeah have they not get poked in the eyes oh I guess that was the gentleman's rules how do you fucking listen you going for the cheeky hit the I like that's happens all the time I mean they must have cut a lot of eyeballs out I haven't seen any photographs of missing eyeballs but there's a lot right on the cheek so maybe that was the whole point it was actually just a bit for Show Oh weird but but it was a it was a badge of honor yeah there's more and and but also they all had on their face yeah it's all the same spot dueling scars yeah wow so imagine like wanted to have these scars that was a Jesus Christ oh they had goggles on oh there you go that's how they didn't take up epidemic fencing it says academic fencing so what they were essentially doing they were having fencing matches with real swords not with ones with tips

okay wow and cutting their faces up fuck man oh Jesus look at this guy's face yeah like sex

wow doing Colts Colts that is crazy so when you consider like the people people did not know about that and then you've got these Germans walking around America as part of our space program in our science programs and these are the good Germans I mean now you really have to say to yourself come on Google communities and they gasp yes cars in their face wow

that's dark man if I Club yeah right OG super oh gee yeah God it's crazy wow so I go to interview

doc sometimes you as a journalist you can get amazing information from these guys oh my God they're sliced up

Magic on European martial arts yeah well I mean that is a martial art means an Art of War really a sword fighting is a martial art I mean many martial arts have weapons sorry so you got two interviews people so

to piece together the story right I can't tell you others can write sometimes in the to find out more about the Nazis I went to Germany and sought out some children of these top top Nazis to see if maybe they didn't have journals or anything they might share with me and one of them was dr. bluhm his son I tracked down I found him and he said yes you may come visit me and it was such a remarkable Journey was like he lived in the Black Forest I take like a taxi through the mountains up over the hill down through the valley you know into a courtyard behind a church to dr. blooms house so he was the junior to his father who was this horrific not see I mean a top Nazi had favor of the fuhrer were what was called the Golden party badge right Hitler gave out these little buttons blum's was I believe number 6 so that's how favored he was and his son dr. Kurt blome where's the father was in charge of the biological

program so his plan was to you know murder people with biological weapons from nature right the sun had been a medical doctor but had left the profession to cure people with flowers it's called Bach flower therapy so he was this very interesting individual who had never given an interview before and he agreed to let me come to him so I go on that journey I go to his house and he was remarkable I mean he was so interesting talk about the sins of the father you know I mean my God what he what he had what he had as a burden right and he and I asked him to tell me everything he could about his father and he did and then he asked me to tell me what I knew about his father I had information from the German archives about his father that he did not have like what kind of stuff like that his father had given something I'd just come from this archive and found these documents dr. bluhm ordered that 6,000 tubercular Jews begin

Sunder be handling that's the German word what does that mean special treatment there is a euphemism for you that was kill those 6,000 tubercular juice when you say tubercular is that people with tuberculosis they were suffering from tuberculosis and he dr. bluhm worked closely with Himmler and they just decided to kill them and you know sitting there talking to this man tell him about his father at his request was remarkable and then he's telling me what he knows and then as I'm getting ready to leave he says to me

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

and I was like

I can't have them and he said I don't want them and you should have them

and he gave them to me so I had this stack so I was like on my trip home it was so perplexing because I threw out all of my clothes I was like screw the clothes I mean I just carry I've traveled with a carry-on bag right so I in my carry-on bag all I have is this Nazi paraphernalia in right in Germany that is dr. bluhm so my good Deputy Surgeon General of the third reich's documents from Nuremberg covered with swastikas oh my I mean he was acquitted at Nuremberg based on all these documents okay and that by the way based on human experiments and I'm at the airport and I realized suddenly oh my God swastikas like this is illegal

if they go through my bag I'm going to be arrested I'm carrying I mean I'm carrying these incendiary you have any copies of your book on you so you can internalist oh yeah no no no I was just like holding my breath I was least one Joe I was sweating almost as hard as I was sweating at the beginning of this interview all right I think he's ready harder I was I went through because you know it's like wow I went through no problem got home I have them in my office and check anything no I didn't say boo like you didn't go through Israel well you know what it's not the swastika is not a lot there but it is in Germany you may not have any Nazi paraphernalia whatsoever in fact my paper clip book which has a swastika on it had to be redesigned the cover for the German publication and it just has like broken up images of the Nazis because you cannot reproduce that image and germinates it's I mean I'm not pro swastika but it's so strange that we've given so much power to this

design that you can't even see it it used to be there's a there's a Temple out here that I think is I believe it's a Hindu temple and it was a part of Hinduism that this swastika predates World War II it predates the Nazis predates they're they're sort of reclaiming of it and the this building that was built out here in the 19th it was built in the 1920s has swastikas on there's a big plaque explaining why their swastika is on it I know it's happened at a different angle hmm yeah but I mean talk about branding right I mean my God that was and the Nazis were you know Kings of that I mean they were only that the mustache

that guy killed that mustache there's not another thing like that but he didn't kill the dueling scar right that could come back do you think no not if not after your show what do you have 4 million viewers probably right and people don't think about it that way they don't think about the dueling scars being a Nazi thing no no that's what I find remarkable right they really don't what the Nazis did the Nazis did in the new look there's an amazing photograph of JFK Lyndon Johnson Kurt debus sitting at you know for a launch a moon launch and there's Davis with his huge dueling Scar and I'm like and their position was oh he's one of the good Germans well that culture was a culture of ruthlessness I mean it was a even the good ones there he is yes good job Jamie look at that can you believe that scar on his face

they still give out an award by the way that's called the Kurt debus award and I rang them up and said like why are you guys giving out this award he was a hardcore not see what do they say they were like they've hemmed and hawed and I finally said well at least tell me what you say to people who ask that question you know they said well no one's ever asked us that question before Annie

well they will now Jesus it's when you really stop and think about the horrific nature of what the Nazis did I mean how inhuman it was how crazy it was like that had to permeate the entire culture there is no good Nazis there was not one even one of them that was looped into that had to be responsible for some awful awful shit I mean Einstein said it the best when he said you should you know you could have left like people who could have left should have left your right well do you know the story for its harbor right the go yes I mean he wound up having to flee and he's the guy who created zyklon gas and he's you know he created his icon a which had smell built into it so that would warn you when you were using this pesticide and then the Nazis turned

zyklon B where they remove that element that added the smell and just this odorless horrific poisonous gas that they used to gas the Jews and he was a Jew I mean you know then when you think about he became he was no longer useful to them because only if figured out he really was a Jew yeah well once World War II came around so he was a part of World War 1 when they first started using gas and he was there's a great Radiolab podcast about it I think it's called the bad show but anyway what essentially says that he was winning he was up for the Nobel Prize at the same time he was wanted for crimes against humanity because he was up for the Nobel Prize for creating the harbor method of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere which was used for fertilizer which to this day they say 50 percent of the nitrogen in human bodies was created by the harbor method so what you get from food from vegetables like that nitrogen 50% of it at least is coming from this guy's method who

a scientist who was a Jew who is working in Germany before became Nazi Germany and then was the guy who figured out how to use gas on people it's a dark his story resisted dark story mean he died looking for medical treatment because he had to flee Germany and he's had a bad heart he died on the road trying to get to Switzerland that's think it was Switzerland yeah yeah it's I mean Nazi Germany is like the pole position taken way too far right and that's what's remarkable that the Pentagon was like okay but we can learn from this and there is there are elements that are dark in the well it also comes out of the devastation of World War 1 right the economic Devastation the defeat the Germans are in this terrible State overall in terms of their morale and then Along Comes This charismatic psychopath that is just really good at screaming to this day I don't speak German but this to this day when you watch that guy scream and yell at all those people and see them

finally gives you chills like that kind of Charisma that kind of influence that someone has where they can do that in front of thousands and thousands of people and everyone's goose-stepping and so woo to see we're very fortunate there's not something like that right now and our forefathers and our grandparents and who ever fought in World War Two if it wasn't for them who knows where this world would be right now because that was a literal evil empire straight out of Star Wars I mean that was like the Sith Lord they were they really were they were human beings who were doing some of the most evil shit that you could almost demonic if you really stopped and thought about it if they were demons pretended to be people that would do the same thing I mean it that's why I think it's a rabbit hole because it's so hard to comprehend that like a culture of educated individuals

in that moment in time that you talked about between World War to World War one and World War Two could could completely become manette malevolent yeah that's one of the more disturbing things about the Nazis was that there were so many of these people that they did extract through Operation Paperclip brilliant engineers and scientists that were also evil like those two things are very uncomfortable for us we like to think of our scientists as being the people that are out there trying to solve the mysteries of the universe and provide us with the technology to make our life better here on Earth not the Nazis they were trying to figure out how to kill people better they were trying to figure out how to use Rockets to shoot them at Europe and blow people up and it is a it's one of the more telling and horrific times in our history when you read because it's it's one of the one of the more horrific ones that we have footage of because we don't have footage of Genghis Khan we don't have footage of Alexander the Great we don't we have story

and tales of Napoleon and some photographs and drawings of dictators past and prep but we have a lot of footage from Vietnam we have a lot of footage from World War Two we have a lot of footage from Modern Wars and out of all of them the one that scares us the most and it scares me the most is World War II do you think those scientists when they came here because this is a this is a I could not figure this out even after writing that whole book is it do you think they came here and actually thought about what they had done or they were able to convince themselves that they were the good Germans that they were part of it because I never saw a single bit of remorse ever like no one ever acknowledged what they had done so it made me wonder because results vary right I mean I think this probably two people that go through the same thing and one person has no problem with it and the other person literally can't sleep

I don't know it's a good question it would be interesting to interview them the the ones who've been caught who been prosecuted and have been chased down and they've got one fairly recently the caught a Nazi like just a few months ago so one of the last ones using his 90s I believe the ones who survived

they all tell different stories and some of them say they just was following orders and you know some of them say that they didn't do it they're being framed and they all have different stories

it's it's one of the you know you write a book about that and or you think about it and you kind of have you go down the rabbit hole and then you have to you have to ask yourself what is this mean or you kind of it's too dark right and so I asked that question to a Auschwitz Survivor okay who I wrote about in the book is name is Gerhard Michelle ski and he the reason he was he survived Auschwitz was because he was taken over to the labor camp which was called Buna so it was a rubber Factory and it was led by this truly evil man named Otto Ambrose who became part of Operation Paperclip okay after being tried at Nuremberg and being convicted of mass murder and genocide right we got him out and he worked for us you got to read the story of I mean it's just it's just astonishing Auto Ambrose really extract a chemist oh my God right but he

so heat so Gerhard was at Buna this Factor this Rubber Factory and he lived and I did an interview with him because I was asking him you know the flip side of of all of that and his whole family was killed at Auschwitz and I said to him what is any of you know we went through all these questions to try to get some closure to this or some meaning and I said and then I'll we landed I said you know we couldn't we couldn't answer what does this mean right what does it mean for today couldn't answer we are so when I asked him what matters about all this he went like this he lifted up his sleeve

and he showed me his tattoo and he said that matters

and I have that image seared in my mind I had never seen a tattoo from Auschwitz before and I have not sense and it also made me think as I thought he's going to die soon and he has died since

and then that tattoos gone

so all you have is the exchange of information and people talking about it yeah the eyewitnesses die

how did they get that guy out of Nuremberg how did they get them to release him well okay so he was convicted at Nuremberg then he went to prison he went to the prison where we had all the didn't execute him know where I mean obviously they executed like the top Nazis and then a lot of these guys went to prison so there was a bunch of Trials and so I went to the prison I saw his cell I mean in Germany was intense Landsberg present and then we because we were sort of policing Nazi Germany after it was not you know after the war was over we are policing Germany and then can't and a guy named McCoy was in charge he was kind of like the governor-general of Germany and the Germans wanted Germany back and they were like we're tired of you guys policing us the threat from the Russians was very real and so deals were made I mean I write about all this in paper clip you know based on the documents and one of the provisions

we want our guys out of prison we want them back in society and that was arranged and again you don't even know these things you know they're like but that was and then Auto amperes and they even gave him his money back that was astonishing and the family still has this Villa in Switzerland I believe or maybe it's the the Bavarian Alps that had been in the family which is money from you know from from Nazi Germany and I called up the sun to interview him he was not as forthright as dr. bluhm son and you know he hung up on me and said if you if you ever contact me again I'll you know they have very serious privacy laws in Germany I thought about going and knocking on his front door my lawyer was like Annie do not do that they have very different laws in Germany for promising yes even if issues like the son of a Nazi yes absolutely well I would imagine look if he didn't do anything he shouldn't

responsible for what his father did know but he has the Villa that was the point where I had all the money right and he got that money from his father who got that money from stealing it from people yes during World War tells ya like what happens there yes but if you go back to that like we should really find out who had the plantations in America and who benefited from that like go several Generations from there I mean you could get weird with with war reparations are big Deeds were people profited yeah I mean which is sometimes a reason why you I realize in looking at these in reporting these books which is why certain things are kept secret I mean the open up a whole can of worms about reparations sure you know yeah wow was operating Operation Paperclip writing that book was that one of the most disturbing one's for you I mean that was so dark my husband is amazing he's Norwegian right and the northern Norway was occupied by the Nazis for five

like people kind of forget that but he he grew up there in his mom you know was a grade Schooler and was really impacted like didn't go to school for five years while the Nazis were there they were going to breed with the Norwegians because they were such lovely are on people right so my husband having a Norwegian mom was like when I was writing paper clip out it would be so dark sometimes I would be like down in my office like a can't you know honey I can't you know I and he'd be down there with a sandwich or coffee and say but are you throwing another Nazi under the bus and I would say yes needs a keep typing right and then I realized well wait a minute the neutral journalist has to really make sure that she's not just throwing Nazis under the bus without really good reason and so when I was in Germany at The Archives I went to Dachau the concentration camp and I asked the lead archivist if I could come and see the worst possible photographs that no one wants to see and he said absolutely and I didn't write about

in the book because I didn't want to subject people to that kind of horror but I looked at them and I watched I saw with my own eyes people moments before they were killed you know and then the bodies afterwards and these are inhuman experiments to you know to see whether or not Pilots could survive height or you know they simulated different things in Chambers high altitude or speed and I saw I saw photographs of you know freezing people to death right because they were trying to develop programs where they would they wanted to see at what temperature humans actually died right and so they experimented on Jews these are the these are some of the doctors that came on our programs and I looked at those that evidence and I was that blew me away and then I knew when I left there okay I can I can throw these Nazis under the bus it is it's such a crazy time in history where you really stop and think about all the different experiments that they did do it's almost like they just opened up the Vault of evil itself

listen we have an opportunity these people aren't people let's do whatever we want it's like they're fake people it's like like they were an invention I mean the perception really played into it so gross it's so scary to think about that humans just you know a generation or two away it capable of doing that yes and so I think what it when it all comes around full circles all these government programs I write about is that idea of an evil enemy right I mean we talked about that earlier when you brought up khashoggi right yeah I mean you know people often say to me and these are sources that are like a nice Audi Arabia is the root of all evil I mean I hear that constantly and why are they are a lie

why are we protecting them you know oil right yes pretty simple right yeah so money and influence in the Middle East and to have an ally over there and it's why I think people the benefit of you know people often say to me why do you write these 500 page books well because I mean hopefully they're interesting and I do know they're interesting because I got this great email Joe the other day from a reader and he said Annie I'm a truck driver and my whole life people have tried to tell me I'm stupid but I drive around in my truck and I listened to your books I read the audio on my books and he said now I know I'm really smart okay he's stupid not guys ridiculous hey when your whole life everyone's telling you you're stupid and then you read some books ago now I know I'm smart like well he come on give him some space right now he says they're smart doesn't get any space I think he was making a point that he has

the ability to listen right maybe he's not the world's greatest reader that's how I took it those are your books available I'm just joking about this guy obviously but are your jokes of books available in audio form yeah I read all my books oh that's great I love that yeah I get bummed out when someone reads a book that's like but my friend Graham Hancock had a really good point he's like not my fiction books because he writes fiction books as well he's like my fact base books I read myself but fiction I hire an actor I'm like that's a good move nice he's only got to do voices and inflection and yeah I love the stuff no it's amazing to read them I mean because you really also feel like later on down the road you connect with with people sure yeah and then people that are hearing you right now the hill they'll that same voice when they get your audiobook and because I write things that are so at the edge of conspiratorial thinking right there is a certain sense of others are real human there right this is not government propaganda

right and I can relate to this and I can hopefully I don't want to say trust but I can recognize an authenticity yes of working with sources when you are done with the paperclip book and you know you published it and you have to live with all the information that you had to gather and run through your mind did that book was that the book did that change you that book like was it the most altering of this different subjects that you covered

I mean each book has a huge impact for different reasons but when I think of paper clip I think of this one saying that was over the gates buchenwald and it was it said he Autumn dusk Xena and what that means is everyone gets what they deserve and that was horrible and I still think about that because it's such a piece of Nazi propaganda was like saying to the Jews you guys deserve this and so I know much of my reporting and my general just way of being as a human is there's no such thing as what you deserve right there's what there's what happens there's what you do there's what you're responsible for and there's what you can change hmm but there's that idea is reprehensible for some reason that really stuck with me as the as just the worst possible thing that I could think of Jesus because it's the psychology behind why they did what they did yes

the dehumanizing but the weird thing is that that was less than a hundred years ago that seems like that should have been something that took place if you hear about the Inquisition you go okay well that makes people that know any better back then but 1945 is not that long ago it's just not

duh

I mean people people just read and read and read about World War Two for good reason you know and everything I write starts it all goes back to the Nazis and every book I the the trail the paper trail at the National Archives or individual University libraries and people's papers where I go they all refer back to that because it was so remarkable that the Nazis LED in weapons technology and they almost took over the world because of it all right and that is the premise of all of this I mean in Surprise kill vanish it's like these are the guys on the ground in the pentagon's brain it's this is the technology in the sky but we must we the government's position whether it's Pentagon CIA is always we have to stay ahead because the next Nazi Germany is right around the corner yeah and that's a that's really something to think about is that alarmist I don't think it is history repeats itself

I mean huh if we went and stopped and looked at all the instances throughout history of people being evil dictators there's quite a few and there's you know we look at North Korea right now and that guy assassinated his own uncle right with a what was up with a missile coming out of a helicopter I think

put him in a field yeah

yeah

I mean that's straight up messaging yeah

right which is another thing I think is interesting about the cia's paramilitary program it's all meant to remain plausibly deniable it's supposed to be secret like we're not supposed to be giving out the message that we have these teams you know that go after high value targets right there just supposed to disappear that's the vanish part of the so that and that as someone who is really interested in transparency and people being educated and having information that always puts me in conflict with you know the government in essence because I'm like we should know but then you think about it well the whole thing is you're not supposed to know because it's supposed to be just The Hidden Hand the president's Hidden Hand they call it what has to be this distinction that they have the ability to break the rules because it's how they protect us and that that's that's the rub right and the stories we hear are often the failures because those are the ones that get reported in the Press

there is a sense undergirding this narrative which I really like and I'm interested in and intrigued by is that the the successful operations you don't hear about because they are plausibly denied right yeah there's got to be a ton of them that went through the you don't hear nothing about and your kids will hear about bowing maybe when you think about protecting us from something like another Nazi Germany that's when people are willing to give up some of the freedoms they're willing to give up surveillance or willing to give and this is this is where things get real slippery right I mean also when you think about Russia because all of this cold war

science technology operations all of that was to beat back the Russians okay then the Russians go away now they're back you know the Russians are the master assassins and they do it through poisoning I mean look at scrape all right I write in the book about a Defector who came over in the 50s and said I was an assassin for the KGB and gave us all kinds of information it's fascinating to look at those documents and realize like this is how it works this is how it worked you know 60 years ago and then you kind of see Echoes of that of how it's working today and you can only imagine the defectors or those who come over from the other side who we learn from and they just disappear

into him and they disappear as sort of the cia's version of Witness Protection

wow do you because of the subject matter that you choose to write about does this affect you as a human like a you suspicious of everything now do you look at everything and terms of like things that are happening in the news to try to look at the hidden mechanisms behind the scenes and I think the opposite I I really believe that information gives you a certain understanding of like the Long View right it does not make me paranoid at all in fact the opposite people often say like my God the world's about to end and I say well wow you should really read about what it was like in 1959 or 1960 to when we were really almost at war with the Russians thermonuclear war right that is essentially at Bay for now so I don't know maybe it's my personality but I actually take comfort in the fact that what is happening now is sort of as you just said it's a bit of a

branding in the modern era of what has always been there which is Rivals seeking Supremacy over one another you know people trying to Outfox the bad guys what I think has changed is that the desire to prevent War has shifted and that makes me that makes me upset because we used to sue for peace we used to want a peaceful world I mean war was outlawed in 1928 right and now we just the military-industrial complex is such that it's really a lot better for the defense department to be in a state of constant War because then you're in a state of constant weapons production and you can always be creating those vast Weapons Systems of the future for the next war that comes along and and that's troubling because those 18 year old kids are the ones who get sent into the line of fire

what if any research have you done on artificial intelligence and Robotics and autonomous weapons and the the future of warfare which a lot of people think it's going to be like what we're seeing now in Yemen with drones that we're going to be seeing that with robots on the ground and that this will be the future huge amount for the book that I wrote called the pentagon's brain

really impactful moment was going to Los Alamos when I went there to meet a DARPA scientist who was working on an artificial brain for DARPA I mean this stuff is way official brain

quit trying to create a system you know a free-thinking system and what his name is Garrett Kenyon what he told me was just utterly fascinating because again that human thing I'm always after it's like what are you doing we leave the science you've had lots of guys on here I'll talk to you about the high-technology elements but I'm interested in who's doing that who's creating that science and why and he said to me

this is like like where artificial intelligence is right now with Scientists who are really looking into this it's like Magellan you know like who will discover the new world but on the on the idea of frightening artificial intelligence he told me an interesting story about his daughter and he said people seem to think like you know facial recognition software is like telling us that we're one step away from a i true Ai and he said if he's he was he showed me on his iPhone this was a couple years ago and he how much trouble the iPhone had recognizing him like if he put a hat on or if he made a funny face and he said my daughter can recognize me from across a baseball field you know if I have a hat on just by the way I walk right and he said if if she couldn't there would be something really wrong with her in other words her human recognition abilities are true

Lee intelligent and that is a system of systems a biological system of systems that no scientist has you know the algorithm for which no one has ever able been able to figure out yet and he believes that were far away from that but the defense department on the other hand is moving Us in that direction and absolutely wants autonomous weapons to be fighting Wars look there was a program that said I quote this in the book it says the battle place is no place for humans

whoa

so drones are the way of the future right but they're used to kill people which and which also means that the enemy is creating drones their stores and pretty soon that's going to be a big a big issue yeah that's the big fear the big fear is that they're going to be the first ones implement it then what scares you about AI everything DARPA think say I could help troops telepathic control machines of course they do and they probably can't I mean they've already got cursors that people can move around their paraplegic they can move them around with their mind and their eyes yeah I think there's going to be quite a few of those things what is this a me adjusting this is called the synapse this is a read this thing that's though DARPA funded program develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels more simply stated it is an attempt to build a new kind of computer with similar Form and Function to the mammalian brain

artificial brains would be used to build robots whose intelligence matches that of mice and cats Jesus Christ robot cats robot cats coming to get us well they created something called the robo rat that was the first bio-hybrid right so bio-hybrid is when you mix animal on a machine and DARPA was doing that right before 9/11 and people freaked out they were like you cannot put brain chips and rats and make them move through a maze by a you know remote control which is what they were doing and I interviewed the guys who are all working on this program before 9/11 and so the morality of the citizenry was like no then 9/11 happened and suddenly all this money got pumped into DARPA to do anything they wanted the morality issue and out the

window and they started creating all kinds of Bio hybrids as I write in the pentagon's brain so they put they now have pigeons that are mixed you know animal and machine Hearts they created something called there's a moth so there's Amanda cassettes tomorrow that's what it's called a large moth and science DARPA scientists put brain chips into the larvae okay so that when it cocooned and became a flying moth it had the the chip built into its system making it easier to integrate and they could fly the mothe around the lap and that was a huge step and this is now four years ago that I was interviewing these scientists do you see any of this stuff I didn't see them off but I I told you I saw that the limb regeneration lap was a trip and this is all what we're going on there well they were just cutting limbs off of salamanders and watch

the limbs grow back right and examining that and saying well if a salamander can do this so can we one day and I said to them but wait that's impossible you know and they said well it's not actually because humans have they broke I love scientists who break it down into terms I can understand it's like what Elon Musk didn't know yeah right because and they said to me you were once a single cell in your mother's womb and then you were too and then you were in it right so you can regenerate

and that's their premise I mean these are the tops of the world's top scientists in regeneration what is this Jamie The Moth being stimulated by electric currents in its abdomen so the stimulation of the electrical currents they can cause it to go left or right is that it yeah I just looking up these bio-hybrid moths what was the thing you threw your hands on your head like you're freaking out Macaulay Culkin at home alone this he's reading something he went type to visit I started typing bio-hybrid stuff and this is the first thing that popped up was this shrimp article yeah it says through they're going to test them through olympic-themed events oh my God look at this DARPA MTO seeks Innovative proposals for the development of micro to Millie insect scale robotic technology shrimp where developed will develop okay so shrimp is the an acronym problem assol right okay love and acronyms will develop and demonstrate through a series of olympic-themed events multifunctional mmm 2cm scale robot

platforms so I guess that's millimeter centimeter scale robotic platforms with a focus on untethered Mobility maneuverability and dexterity to achieve this goal shrimp will also provide foundational research in the area of micro actual actuator materials and energy efficient Power Systems for extremely swap capital letter S capital level W lowercase a capital P constrained microbiotic systems expected such advances will be enabling for applications including search and rescue yeah right search and rescue disaster relief yeah we're going to help people hazardous environment inspection or killing motherfuckers with an evil nuclear be that's all you need to know is the searching recipe that goes in your mouth and blows up fuck that's crazy I mean they do all kinds of

planning for the future yeah search-and-rescue thing is a it's a great sort of you know way in which to present DARPA as doing all this great stuff I interviewed DARPA scientists who said look Annie we've got were able to send robots into Fukushima to twist the cores you know right then and yes that is great but that's far from the only thing yeah they're trying to kill people yeah well here's a trip you want to hear I mean it gets there are rabbit holes there because

I sourced all these documents and also interviewed generals at the Pentagon who are like we don't like AI we want like we want this we want our guys on the ground you know we they believe in the human the warrior that concept and so that the generals were very opposed with the DARPA took a vote and it was like no AI we want humans in the mix and so what it DARPA start doing and they all the generals they said why don't you why can't we go more autonomous and the answer was we don't trust the machines okay so right around that same time what a DARPA start doing it started looking into and hiring scientists who were working with how trust works in the brain specifically with what is called the moral molecule and it's this molecule in the brain that Mother's emit when they're breastfeeding okay oxytocin yes so think about that and I mean that's like the ultimate going way back biology

you have to have a mother a trusting mother to breastfeed in you know prehistory or otherwise you'd be eaten by you'd be like this is a bad idea I'm stopping to do this I'm going to die right so they examined that molecule the the brains moral molecule and they began a program to work with that to be able to give that to soldiers so that their that they trusted AI machines and that's where I think you're getting into really spooky dark multi levels of manipulation about what humans want versus what the pentagon's wow the worried about trusting the machine scares the shit out of me because that's what everyone's worried about when it comes to a I like that's what Elon Musk keeps warning people about that these things are going to have super human capabilities and they're going to be sentient and it's a matter of when absence so I as the journalist said to myself well wait a minute if the

at the Pentagon and I'm you know that's a that's a euphemism but the meaning that the actual Opera you know the guys that are in charge here don't want that who does want this and where my research took me to was the group that wants that is what's called the defense science board and those are the individuals who are counseling the Pentagon in the manner in which they should proceed and now those individuals are all sitting on the boards of the defense contractors so you can really see how money drives the rubric the generals don't want it the humans don't want it but guess who does the people who stand to make the money creating the autonomous systems and that's exactly what Eisenhower warned us of in his farewell speech you know the military industrial complex and the other part of that speech which people don't don't know as well is that what he said his antidote Eisenhower said this the antidote to the military-industrial complex

is an alert and knowledgeable citizenry it's why I write my books because an alert and knowledgeable citizenry has the ability to kind of push back and go but we don't want that I think what we're worried about is Pandora's box right with it when it comes to Ai and we're worried that first of all if we're not the ones to open it what if they open it all right what if the Chinese open it now and obviously their technology is super super advanced mean they're electronic technology particular their cell phones are cutting inch mean apple and all these other companies are struggling to try to keep up with Huawei and these 1 FC R 1X what is the fucking one St what does that one what does that big company

that they just released some they just hired Robert Downey jr. to give them millions of dollars to 1 1 plus yeah 1 plus 7 they have this new phone that doesn't have a front facing camera you press a button it slides out of the top they figured out a way to make it the entire phone all screen they're incredibly Advanced terms of their Electronics we deeply are concerned that they're going to be the ones that Implement military autonomous sentient robotics before we do because then you can essentially you can launch them with no physical human cost on your side and I mean they they they're literally weapons of mass destruction if you have robots that can go over there and just kill people and and what they need for that is that world's fastest supercomputer right and what's interesting is that we just we America just overtook the Chinese in having again having the world's fastest supercomputer but they had it for a couple years

and think about this okay because you were saying hard to believe the Nazis were only you know not even like just in just in our grandfather's age right so go back in time to then listen to this about this really freaked me out in terms of progress right after the war guy called John Von Neumann got a grant from the atomic energy commission to essentially build the world's first computer I mean they existed but he built the first computer that could actually do calculations okay before that calculations were done with like by calculators computers were humans but there's this amazing story of Von Neumann in the basement of the Princeton Institute for advanced study where he built this computer with government funds and he because he was a brilliant polymath he could add faster than anyone around him okay he's also the guy who calculated at what level the atomic bomb should explode over Hiroshima for the most blast okay because it didn't hit the ground it wouldn't kill as many people's right so this is how his mind worked so he's faster than the

he has a pen and paper in front of him and he can outperform the world's fastest computer with his own brain two and a half years into it and like 1949 the computer beats him and he made a statement then that said one day artificially intelligent machines will be the ruin of man I mean I'm paraphrasing but that was his prediction but that was in 1949 and the 50s Marshall mcluhan said that we are the sex organs of the Machine World

I'm going to have to really think about that that's a deep one that is very deep yeah that we are the propagators we're the ones who were their progenitors yeah that's it that's our baby we're going to make that baby mmm then we're going to die most likely that's going to be the new living thing who said that Marshall mcluhan

yeah

Gillette stop and think about that that soup figuring that out in the 50s so looking around and going oh we're giving birth to these things but I have a question for you then on that morality issue right which is

if man has always been a warring animal right why do we look so down upon the throat you know the knife to the throat and why do we as a society except drone strikes because that's the whole question I asked in Surprise kill vanish and I'm not sure I answered it to my own satisfaction because it's such a complicated question well one of them is very personal the other one is like a video game you know to stab someone to look them in the eye and and shove a knife through the ribs that's a six different kind of person we don't think we want that person around us interesting you think it's a proximity issue its

it's just different you know one of them is throwing a rock at someone that's nowhere near you the other one is beating a guy to death when he's right in front of you there want but it's very personal you see someone struggling and we don't like to think that someone can put that aside and still twist that blade we don't want that we don't want that on our side we don't want our people to be Noble and just and but meanwhile when it comes to civilian casualties drones are one of the worst invention ever in human history if we really want to examine ourselves in terms of efficacy and the Moral Moral High Ground terms of Engagement like launching missiles at apartment buildings because you found metadata in there that indicates that most likely an Al Qaeda operative has a cell phone in that building like that that's some shit that people have done I mean that has been done and the casualty rate for

means when it comes to drones strikes for innocent civilians is stunning I think it's in the high 80 percent I think that's we've done this before right have a wing I think it's um it's it's a disturbing I might be conservative by saying it's an 80s and might be in the 90s it's a disturbingly high number of people who died who were not the intended target which would which would be an argument for that played for the blade yeah the blaze you know who you're stabbing and that that Warrior is going in there aware that he too might die what do you got Jamie

what's that face 3% 3% what that's what this says that's horseshit now who released that maybe three percent accuracy no I know there was there's been some serious discussions among Scholars about this that's not true whatever you read in the can't be right yeah so just one operation was 3% just to throw this out there because there is that big debate I mean CIA paramilitary Army tiny defense department huge CIA using either ground operators or drones defense department I read the statistic the other day 7,200 and change bombs dropped on Afghanistan last year I mean people don't even realize we're still seven seven thousand that's what they just practicing here goes President Donald Trump provoked a requirement that us intelligence officials publicly report the number of Civilian kills in drone strikes

tax on terrorist targets outside of War zones oh so we're going to get shit information now but pull up 2017 I don't know that you have to fight well you got to really look hard to get that statistic there's an inspector General who covers Afghanistan right for the government he looks at all the statistics and by the way this Administration just canceled his job so we will no longer have that information but he's the one that is in charge of reporting that because it's called the Reconstruction effort right but that number of bombs really makes you think long and hard at least me about you know the big footprint versus the small operation and I again I think this is why most people don't want to talk about this because it's a dark Rabbit Hole to go down you know people prefer to believe that we're just safe and sound here and not not at risk and I mean that's that's the endless question of are these are these threats real and must they

dealt with what's very hard for people to expect to be a hundred percent aware of something they're not experiencing right and right now we're not experiencing a war currently in our in our neighborhoods but yet it is happening overseas and the United States technically is involved in these wars and I think that right now we're not experiencing sentient robots running through the streets murdering people but that could happen we're not experiencing Nazi Germany anymore we've got past that we'd like to assume that that's in the past but if you just looked at the vast amount of History that's dedicated to atrocities that are committed by armies against their enemies it seems like that's just what people do it seemed it's a part of what people do and if there is a real technological race in order to develop autonomous sentient robots that are capable of killing people we should be fucking horrified and who are you most afraid of

no China hundred percent well you know they keep they keep outperforming us in that supercomputer they also have a total integration of their government and their industry you know the everything is connected it's not like us you know like the gut like they like they'll play the long game their strategic in their ability to plan for things and not have them be currently profitable they don't have to operate on a bottom line like someone who's be holding the stock owners and they don't have an informed public yes at all I mean they have Google censorship I mean they they convinced Google to go over there I was talking to an executive at Google and they were saying essentially we're willing to let them sensor because we know we're going to they're going to just they're gonna do what they want to do anyway they're going to copy all of our information and just redo Google in like we think at least this way we will protect our interest

by being over there my do you know how crazy that sounds you gonna let the Chinese government help you going to help them censor people

on an interesting note of that in the mirror all my books are published in China wow like the DARPA book they were right on that they had that translated into Chinese I have a copy of it it's spooky it's like you see the Pentagon all this Chinese writing I don't understand a word of it except for my own name I hate wow but it's like wow they are reading they are reading us of course anything I mean there's anything that makes us look bad there is an interesting story about the Freedom of Information Act and Iran which came to mind with this new activity in Iran which is that they filed a foia to get all the information that that we had on Iran and the government it went to when very high up in the judicial system to say we're not going to release this information to them even though they had the right to have it because it would benefit them we better pull up then I found a couple of better information I might have misread that it said the something I just found showed something like

only 2% are the high Target strike are the targets that's what I meant the rest would be so the children civilians but other combatants to they might be other soldiers but part of the reason I got to get rid of that sorry part of the reason on why the strikes things has changed because the Trump Administration is carried out way more than the Obama Administration ever did over eight years that well I think Trump basically told the military you know what you doing just go do it I mean basically let them just run the military instead of having the same sort of oversight that other presidents insisted upon and the military people like him for that and people aren't focused or interested in drone strikes anymore they're more interested in the wall and watching the battle and the yeah the conflict and the name-calling and the shouting it's like it's like throwing rocks without Warfare you know China is making robots to kill us absolutely right Chinese people please be nice was this a okay

us drone strikes fighting Isis in Iraq and Syria of killed at least 1257 civilians according to the Pentagon are Wars estimate the number to be as great as 7500 here only yeah just this year yeah they are they're doing a weird thing they are shooting people from a remote location with a robot that all came to be by the way right after 9/11 I mean whenever we get attacked it's like Pearl Harbor you know suddenly there is a massive swing of what civilians what the citizenry will tolerate and first surprise kill vanish I interviewed I told your lawyer John Rizzo who wrote what was called the 17th September 17th memorandum of notification and it gave presidential powers to the degree which had not been seen since you know the worst part of the Cold War and Congress wrote off on that in fact what Rizzo told

is the gang of eight that are in charge of you know the intelligence committees in Congress said is this enough and that's where the drones became such a big issue because the idea of pre-emptive neutralization the idea we're going to take out bad guys you know we should have taken out Bin Laden and we didn't we're going to now do that preemptively and it set off it set us on this entirely different course which continues to this day although it's fallen out of the news which is let's strike someone before they strike us and it's such an interesting chicken or the egg because you know yes you have civilians dying and yes you have more terrorists being created on the other hand you really want the Pentagon dropping 7400 300 200 bombs on Afghanistan in any given year and it seems so detached whereas if you sent someone over there to assassinate these guys with a knife

you would think of that I don't want that person in my neighborhood that person is willing to stab somebody and what are they into unintended consequences of that and we never even know you know I'll tell you an interesting story that's not in the book which is that Billy Walsh showed me a number of plans that he had presented because sometimes the operators are asked like what do you think we should do and it doesn't mean we do it is just that those plans get sent up the chain of command and then it comes back so he said he showed me these drawings they were going to go kill Chavez right this is when Bush was in power and you know he was like teaming up with Ahmadinejad and he was really bad guide you know a threat to us and so the plan was to Halo in take the team down go kill Chavez and vanish and the plans got rejected they were like no way we are not doing this according to Billy wall well Billy Walsh said to me recently I mean thank God we didn't do that can you imagine if we had we would be blamed right now for everything that is going

on in Venezuela it's a really interesting point I mean who has to make that decision I'm glad it's not me can you imagine no yes kill this guy but don't kill that guy that's a good idea yeah

it's intense and it's the world we live in that we don't discuss and we don't think about because it doesn't affect our daily lives in terms of like it's not something you hear it that's unavoidable but I think it's super interesting because it also comes back to your own humanness right what are you making judgments about what are you for or against and why are you really are you really do you do you want that opinion I mean I think that's so interesting and important and and discuss it with your children you know and let people have my my favorite expression is just as long as you don't make me do it you know I'm pretty tolerant of other people's opinions about things don't force me into it yeah but this stuff impacts all of us it really does really does are the robots going to be taking over your Shoujo no no well they probably could

to a certain extent I don't think robots are currently capable of spontaneous humor right that's the only thing saving a person like me no there's nothing funny about a drone no not yet but what is the difference between wetware and hardware and silicon-based you know interactions like if there's a computer that can beat the greatest Chess Masters and they can't they have and then the greatest Go Master now to which they thought was even more complex that people just get destroyed by these computers now like what what what makes us think that creativity is so unique and special I think what separates us really is our biological instincts and that these are things that are programmed into our DNA over thousands of years of survival that this is these are the things you have to worry about this is the information we have and act on that our intuition trust you know should I trust should I not and you take that out of the equation really bad things could happen

but yeah I Barn I worry I worried that we're creating a thing that's going to surpass us but I think that that's inevitable I mean if I was a champ and I was worried about becoming a person I should probably you know seem silly it's inevitable you want to hear that scariest AI story I know it's old right it's like in dim the lights a candle on but it's from like the early days it gather round children this is like early days of DARPA okay and this is when we were really seriously afraid that the Russians were going to send you know a hundred thermonuclear Warheads at Washington and take out the whole country okay so DARPA sets up this station at the top of the world to monitor the Soviet launch so that you know because it only takes 24 minutes for a ICBM to get from the launch pad in Russia to hit New York or Washington okay so we set up the station up there

and to monitor this so we would have some kind of a jump on this okay like we learn at about 8 minutes my God the you know was a radar station that station called the be mousse site or J site is connected to the no rad station in Cheyenne Mountain you know the one from the movies right okay and it's like the first week of business and the guys that are sitting there in the station looking for the alert are sitting there and they've been trained like the alerts never go off and all of a sudden the alerts go from one two three four number five is endgame okay so the information that the technicians are getting is now 1000 Soviet Thermo nuclear missiles are on their way to Washington DC with 99.9% certainty actual story okay the guy panics but he trusts he says wait a minute you know because he's supposed to now give the launch code let's try and get the generals on the phone they can't get the Pentagon general in charge of no Red they get a

Indian guy named General Sleeman and Sleeman you know my God we should we launched should we launched suleiman's like wait a minute human thought he remembered that the night before he thought he saw Khrushchev on TV at the UN you know that him he's famously banging his shoe and he says where's Khrushchev right now they check he's in New York City why would the Soviets send a thousand nuclear weapons are way while their own leaders in New York they said I don't know sir but the radar returns are reporting this and they're so someone had the idea that that beam oocyte to go outside

and lo and behold what was there a big full moon the system was reading the moon moving and misinterpreted it as a thousand nuclear thermonuclear ICBM BMS coming crummy didn't launch so we came that close to the end of the world I mean in it's an astonishing Story the documents are now Declassified but is an actual indication of why that element of human intervention why trust why other information like oh I think I saw Khrushchev on the TV last night is so important because the machine said with 99.9% certainty this is happening you must we must launch and retaliation

true story and he freaked me out thank you thank you for everything thank you for the books thank you for your talk here with us your new book which is surprise kill vanish Area 51 which I will read I promise you I will read it and if people want to get ahold of you on social media what is your what you Jacobson is it as well on Instagram you know it with her okay all right thank you Annie I really appreciate it thank you so much for having me it's fun thank you whoo thank you everyone for tuning into the show and thank you to our sponsors thank you to steezy checkouts teasease apparel and they're awesome CBD products and more at Ste z.com and use the code Joe Rogan for 20% off excluding batteries that's St iiz why.com and the code is Joe Rogan all one word for 20% off their fantastic CBD products thank you also to the

apron delicious food that you can cook yourself ladies and gentlemen and you can make it a part of your weekly routine they have amazing recipes super delicious and you can start cooking brag worthy meals at home without the hassle with blue apron check out this week's menu and get $60 off when you visit Blue Apron.com / Rogan that's Blue Apron.com / Rogan Blue Apron a better way to cook thank you also to

Heineken 0 0 what is that I'll tell you what it is is Heineken with no booze kids and it's good it tastes delicious a drink it all the time tastes like Heineken all of Heineken zero zeros Great Taste comes with just 69 calories so go pick yourself up a six-pack next to Heineken original at your favorite local store today thank you friends thanks for tuning in I hope you enjoyed it check out and he's books she's really fantastic I really enjoy talking and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did so that's it for today see ya bye