#2174 - Annie Jacobsen

S. national security secrets. Imagine how many people told me they dedicated their lives to preventing nuclear World War III. And so, during the previous administration, fire and fury rhetoric, I began to think what happens if deterrence fails? That idea of prevention, what happens?

And I took that question to the people who advise the president, who work at STRATCOM, who, you know, command the nuclear sub forces. And learned that it doesn't end. well. Not only does it not end well, five billion people are dead at the end of 72 minutes.

Oh, yeah. It's Carl. Oh, it's Carl. I was like, what's going on?

No one knows. It's why I think the response to this book, it's been out for three months, has been so extraordinary. And from both sides of the aisle. Because people now are beginning to realize if nuclear war begins, it doesn't end until there is a nuclear holocaust. And it happens so fast.

There is no quickly going to your secret bunker you have.

Like, it'll be a blip in history. Like, we look at it now. Oh, because of mutually assured self-destruction or mutually assured destruction. That's what's prevented people from using nuclear weapons. But when?

Until now? Like, what is 80 years in terms of human history? It's nothing. It's a tiny little blink. It's a little nothing.

And it could go sideways at any moment, and then we're back to the cave era.

But the buildup is fascinating because, first of all, it happened so incredibly fast. And it happened under incredibly secret, classified terms, so there was no, like, outside opinion. And originally, nuclear war was set up to be fought and won, which itself is absurd. And we know that now. So the rules of the game have fundamentally changed.

And yet the systems are all the same. That's what's, I think, the most dangerous component of today versus, let's say, 1952, when the thermonuclears began.

– OK, so triad, really simple, three. So we have missile silos. They're called ICBMs. inside of them, 400 of them. Then we have nuclear-powered nuclear submarines that launch nuclear missiles.

There are 14 of them. Then we have the bomber force, 66 nuclear-capable bombers, triad. The president chooses what elements of that triad he's going to use when he launches a counterattack. if we ever are attacked. That system essentially exists.

That was what was being developed in the 50s. The only difference was in the old days it was we're going to actually use these and fight and win a nuclear war. And now it's. we're going to have these all sitting around ready to launch. We have 1,770 nuclear weapons on ready-for-launch status, Joe.

They can be launched, some of them in 60 seconds.

And they're all pointed? Are they all –? do they need a coordinate? Or are they all aimed at a specific area already?

And you see –.

What do you think about the stories of UFOs hovering over nuclear bases and shutting down their weapons? I know you've done a lot of research on this stuff. How much of that is bullshit?

And once the nuclear weapon was invented, man – I mean our grandparents had to confront this new, fundamental, new reality that just simply didn't exist before. And then it was – that's with the atomic weapons. And then, in the 50s, once thermonuclear weapons were invented and the thermonuclear weapon is essentially an atomic – a thermonuclear weapon is so powerful. It uses an atomic bomb, like from Hiroshima, as its triggering mechanism.

60s. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we know a lot more now than we knew then. I mean this – like the way – the reason why I'm bringing this up is like the people that have hope, one of the hopes is that aliens are observing us and they're going to wait until we are about to do something really stupid.

And then they're going to come down and shut everything down.

So the Jung thing is interesting, but like we know more now. We know more now about possible other dimensions that we can access. We know more now about planets in the Goldilocks zone. We know more now about all these whistleblowers that have come out and talked about crashed retrievement programs, where they're back engineering these things and trying to understand what these things are. Diana Pasolko's work, where she's talking about how they're essentially donations, that these crafts are donations, that people are being given these things so that they could see this extraordinary technology and try to figure out how to make it.

But that's one of the only ways that I – like if we did get to a point that we launch nuclear weapons at each other, everything is over so fast. If I was an alien species, an intelligent species from somewhere else, and I recognize that this is a real possibility and that the earth has all these different forms of life other than human beings that are going to get destroyed as well. It's going to wipe out who knows how many different species. I mean. it's going to kill everything.

And even the people that are left over, what are you left with? Whatever? two billion people that still survive, where and what? What do you have left? What is the environment like?

How polluted is everything? What kind of mutations are going to come from their offspring?

Right? So that was – Carl Sagan was the lead author on the paper. Toon was the young student. And he's dedicated decades to looking at nuclear winter. Now, originally it was very pawpawed by the Defense Department.

It was said, this is Soviet propaganda. This is never going to happen. And the computer systems and climate modeling have changed to the degree where we can see. not only is nuclear winter what was thought in the 80s. It's actually much worse.

So whereby originally they thought there would be a year of ice sheets across large bodies of water from Iowa to Ukraine, across the mid-latitudes of the globe. Now that could be up to seven or ten years. So think about that much frozen land for that long. You have the death of agriculture. You have a – like you are talking about.

You have the complete disruption of the ability for people to grow food and eat food. And so man reverts to his hunter-gatherer state. And this is all –.

And yet this is – people are not paying attention to the fact that whatever is created by man essentially would theoretically have a man-made solution. Like there is a solution to the nuclear weapons threat. It's not – although the results of a nuclear war would be very much like an asteroid striking the United States or the world anywhere. There's a solution to nuclear war. There's a solution called disarmament.

You could – we have a total of 12,200 and some odd nuclear weapons.

But when – do you remember back when we were in high school, when Reagan and Gorbachev got together for the Reykjavik summit?

I'm not doing this. And that one guy saved us. I don't remember what the incident was. Do you remember? What was the exact issue?

And he saw what he – what the radar screen, the radar scope, was reading as five ICBMs coming from Wyoming, five. He knew that we would send 1,000 missiles if we were going to launch. And so he questioned the data, which is just so remarkable in its own conception when you think about that. He questioned it, and he didn't send it up the chain of command as a missile attack.

Confirmed fact. That's why nuclear war begins and ends in 72 minutes, because the SIBRS satellite system sees the launch, and then the U.S. nuclear command and control goes into – begins. And, by the way, an ICBM cannot be redirected, and it cannot be recalled.

That number is not going to change. That's gravity. That's physics. That's what it was in 1958, 59, and that's what it is today.

I write for the layman. I think part of the reason why nuclear war is not spoken about in the general public is because it's set up to be intimidating. You know, you'll hear a lot of defense people and analysts using very esoteric language, and it kind of excludes the average Joe or Jane, Joe or Annie. So I ask really basic questions like, how does a ballistic missile work? And it's very simple.

That 26 minutes and 40 seconds I told you about, so there's three phases of a ballistic missile. It launches. It has boost phase. First, five minutes, imagine a rocket. You've seen launches, that fire coming out the bottom.

That boosts the rocket for five minutes. That's when it's detectable from space. Then it enters mid-course phase, which is going to be 20 minutes, arcing across the globe to its target. That is the only place where the interceptor missile can get it, if it can. And it's 500 miles up, and it's traveling at something like Mach 23,, 14,000 miles an hour.

Okay, so that's 20 minutes. And then the last phase is called terminal phase, appropriately so, 100 seconds. when the warhead, the nuclear warhead, reenters the atmosphere. Boom. It explodes over its target.

The interceptor system is designed to take out the missile in mid-course phase. So we have 44 interceptors. Remember, I told you we have 1,700, let's say, nuclear missiles on ready for launch status. Russia has about the same. We have 44 interceptor missiles.

How are 44 interceptor missiles going to go up against more than 1,000 Russian nuclear weapons coming at us? Never mind the fact that each interceptor has a 50% shoot-down rate, and that's by the Missile Defense Agency spokesperson. So there's this perception that we have a system like the Iron Dome that could take out these incoming missiles. And we simply don't. Which is why, when nuclear war begins, it only ends in nuclear Armageddon.

Jesus.

I'm trying to get you to read what I write, because I found it super interesting reporting it and learning about it. And also, the whole process for me that I think is the most interesting is going to some of these people who are truly some of the smartest scientists in the world, and getting them to explain it in the most basic... Like I say, you have to tell it to me, like I'm a kid because I don't have a science mind. And that part is... So that excitement, part of it balances out with the terror of it, because I do also understand why most people don't want to know about this.

It's too dreadful. But they also don't want to know because they end up feeling sort of looked down upon, I think, if they ask basic questions like, wait a minute, how does a missile work? Or, like you said, can't the hypersonics... Shouldn't we invest in hypers... Well, who really wants to be lectured?

And so what I try to do is condense the lectures that I receive about how it all works into this dramatic form, which is how I landed on this format for this book, which I think is really effective, which is giving it to you like a scenario. Like this is what would happen. And then, going back to all my sources. I mean, like, okay, here's an example. We haven't even talked about submarines, but the submarines are completely...

You cannot find them in the sea. They are stealth, beyond stealth. I interviewed the former commander of the nuclear sub forces, a guy called Admiral Conner. Never given an interview like this before. And I said, like, how hard is it to find a nuclear armed sub?

And he said, Annie, it's easier to find a grapefruit sized object in space than a nuclear sub under the sea.

And these things are, by the way, I have a map in the back of the book that shows you how close our adversaries, enemies, call them what you will, China and Russia, how close they come to the east coast and the west coast of the United States regularly. Which means it reduces that launch time I told you about of 26 minutes, 40 seconds. That reduces it down to sort of 10 minutes or less.

I'm sure you saw the drones that blew up on a beach. The bombs that were launched that killed civilians in Russia. You didn't see this?

But Russian civilians, including one young girl they were showing in this article, were killed by these cluster bombs that were launched by drones that are ours.

What is that word? A.T.A.C.M.S. Bomblets, rain down. What does that mean? Do you know what that means?

A.

T.

A.

C.

M.

S.

I mean, it's pure terrorism.

Do we know what this was about, where they were launching them towards?

S. State Department denied the accusation, saying that the claims were ridiculous and hyperbolic. The U.S. supplies weapons to Ukraine in the ongoing war with Russia and recognizes Crimea as a part of Ukraine. despite Russia's annexation.

Ukraine has previously outlined plans to use long-range weapons supplied by America in Crimea specifically to target infrastructure supporting the Russian invasion.

This is just terrifying stuff. It's terrifying because it can all be happening while you're just going about your business, walking your dog. You have no idea that the entire world is in grave danger.

And that is why Reagan reached out to Gorbachev. And that's why we have the record summit. It was called the Reagan reversal. So, in other words, my point is Reagan, who, you know, the axis of evil speech, like this idea of seeing your enemy as the, as the arch evil villain, had to change for him when he understood nuclear war by seeing a film. And so when I look to today and I consider that the current president isn't speaking to the president of Russia, it doesn't make any sense to someone like me.

That's probably why I wrote this book. Like, please understand this. And one has to imagine that the current president, with all his decades in office, understands all of this. And so I don't fundamentally understand why there is no communication. It is way too dangerous.

Hence, what you just showed us. And, you know, the facts will come in of whose weapon systems those are. But either way, the perception, to your point, the fact that the perception, a misperception, could ignite nuclear war, could ignite that situation that is unreversible. That should be astonishing to all of us.

If there's a person that can have some sense, that can say that we are on a path to self-destruction and we need to stop and we need to reverse this path. You know, you're going to have people in the military, in the Defense Department, that are being influenced by these contractors. It's like, listen, there's plenty of places we can move things around and get things done. And don't you know about these guys? These guys are bad guys.

We need to get over there. We need to do something about this. We need to do something about that. And this escalation is motivated by the fact that they're making fucking ungodly amounts of money by making and selling these weapons. And this is a massive part of our economy.

It's a massive part of the structure that runs the government itself.

But what was even more interesting about interviewing Panetta was that he said to me at the end of our interview, it's good that you're doing this. The American people need to know. That's a direct quote from him. So here's a guy who has spent his entire life entrenched in that system that you're talking about, and then, outside of it, once he retires, puts on his, shall we say, grandfather's hat, the human hat, and is suddenly like, this is really going in the wrong direction. I would hope that that would lead to more people thinking wisely about what it is they're doing when they're in office, as far as nuclear war is concerned.

We're not good at anything that's detrimental. We're not good at regulating overfishing of the oceans. We're not good at environment. We're not good at energy. We're not good at manufacturing.

We're not good at regulating anything. Everything we've done has been a for-profit thing. When we allowed jobs to go overseas and decimated American manufacturing, there was no regulation of that. They didn't think that out. They didn't do a good job of managing that.

No, they completely devastated manufacturing here. And we saw during the COVID crisis, during the lockdowns, oh my God, we can't get anything because everything's overseas. Everything's made overseas. Medicine, all the computer chips, everything. They're not good at anything.

By having an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, and the word alert, I think, means engaged. You have to be able to talk to people in a way that they can, oh, wow, that's interesting. Well, I don't understand how that works. How does that work? And have these conversations.

So in that regard, I would say that's a positive sign in the right direction. I think people are much more open to having an opinion about all of this than they were in, say, the 1950s. But there's a balance, because now opinion somehow seems to be taking over the Department of Facts in many regards.

It just doesn't seem like the general public is completely aware of how dangerous these threats are and how close we are inching towards it. Even the nuclear subs off the coast of Cuba was barely a blip in the news cycle. It was replaced by Taylor Swift and her boyfriend. It just goes in and out quickly.

But the way in which America seems to me have almost become, like, you know, the way that the UK used to be obsessed with the royal family. To such a degree where...

We have so many that we watch and so many things that we pay attention to. that are nonsense, that distract us, that we like to sort of apply those same viewing habits to the whole world.

You know, if you can get your curiosity satiated, you don't become so angry. And so I, and again, I have to be an eternal optimist, particularly writing the kind of books that I do, or it would just be, you know, it would be my thinking would take a negative turn. And so I am an eternal optimist and I do look to conversation and new media as a means to a better way or a means to a way out of this kind. I think that I believe the tide will turn.

And podcasts are at all time high. There's how many of them? are there, Jamie? Like 5 million? I think there's something like that, like monthly, you know?

Yeah.

And I find that kind of like brain conditioning really valuable, because I will listen to a podcast for three hours. And also in a continue, you know, it might be on an airplane and then, oh, my phone tells me I have this much time left on the podcast. So I continue listening it on a hike. And I think that it is a very different kind of mental stimulus, curiosity in a new way forward than the old days of reading a newspaper. You know, it takes you this amount of time to read.

And then, I mean, newspapers barely exist anymore.

Restart it again when you're at the gym.

And it's just a different thing. It's a different way to communicate this idea that people don't have attention spans anymore. How is that possible? They're just people. People didn't change.

That's so stupid. If people always had attention spans and all of a sudden they don't, maybe they're just getting distracted by things that are very easy to absorb and very addictive, like TikTok videos. It doesn't mean that the human mind is different. It's been altered forever. And then now no longer people are interested in long term conversations.

That's just stupid. I've rejected that from the beginning. Like one of the first things this podcast is, even my good friends were telling me, like, you have to edit it. Like, you have to make it shorter. Like, why?

No one's going to listen to something for three hours. Then don't listen. That was my take. I was like, I don't care. I listen to things.

I've always listened to, like, lectures and old Alan Watts speeches. Like, I listen to things.

I listened to a lot of his speeches and a lot of the different lectures that he gave. I don't think people changed. I think that's nonsense. I get hooked on YouTube reels or Instagram reels. I get hooked on them.

I'll be sitting there if I have nothing to do. What is that? Why is he doing that? What's that? Oh, look at that guy.

It's just a part of being a human being. We're easily distracted. It doesn't mean we don't have an attention span anymore. That's stupid. That's ridiculous.

There's still people that are graduating from universities with PhDs. There's still people right now that are in the residency in medical school. There's still people that are learning how to engineer fighter jets. Like, there's people that have attention. This is nonsense.

The idea that human beings have radically changed because of this one medium that's addictive is just so stupid.

We all benefit from seeing how easy it is to develop a habit and how hard it is to move yourself away from a habit as you become entrenched in it. I think there's complete value in that. People suddenly realize, I've got to stop watching TikTok videos and I've got to go to the gym, which is another….

Like, wow, you got a flip phone? That's crazy, Bob. Why'd you do that? You know what, I realized. my mind was getting taken up by these things, and now I have my mind back.

I like it. People want to call me, they can call me, but I'm not watching things and reading things and absorbing things. But then there's the argument like, okay, but now you're out of the cultural conversation. I have friends that have flip phones and I'll try to ask them, did you see this new thing about the new quantum computer? that's like 100 billion times better, or 100 million times better than the last one they released in 2019??

And they're like, no, what? So they're missing some things too. So the key is mitigation. You have to figure out how much information makes you anxious and how much information. where you just sit there and you scroll and you waste your time.

And then you're like, what did I do with my life? I'm wasting hours. And you look at your screen time. at the end of the day, it's six hours. Like what?

Six hours of looking at my phone? Is that real? So you have to do that, but then also you don't want to miss out on things. So you do want to kind of be informed. And part of my job is to be informed.

I can't be the guy who people have to tell things about, because I don't know anything. Like what? What's going on? Crimea? Where's that?

I can't like, so I have to have some, I have to have some involvement. I have to have some input where I'm getting input from social media and from all these different things. As a comedian, I have to know the temperature of the country. I have to know like what to make fun of, like what's ridiculous, what people are accepting. that doesn't make any sense.

You just have to know, like when you're getting sucked into the point where it's becoming detrimental. And I think that's where people struggle. People really struggle with that. Like figuring out what's, how much, like you can eat a cookie. Nothing wrong with eating a cookie, but you shouldn't eat a whole bag of cookies.

You know, you shouldn't eat cookies every day. That's not good. But if you have dinner and you want to get dessert, yeah, I'll get a piece of tiramisu. Okay, you're going to be fine. You're going to be fine.

You eat tiramisu every day, you're going to die. You know, and that's what social media is. It's dessert. It's candy. It's things that are kind of fun.

up to a point. But you just got to know what that point is and how to manage your own attention span. And just also have sovereignty over your mind. You have to control your mind. You have to be able, like, if your mind starts getting anxious, okay, I know we're getting weird.

It's time to work out. Okay, I know, maybe we should meditate. Maybe we should do this. Maybe we should do that. Don't just keep scrolling.

You got to know when and when. But most people don't have that kind of self-control and discipline. They don't have to. All most people have to do is, when the alarm goes off, get up, wash yourself, brush your teeth, eat something, go to work. Do whatever minimal amount you have to do to keep that job.

And then, and the bathroom breaks, and whenever no one's looking, look through your phone, be distracted, come home, watch Netflix, go to sleep, repeat. That's most people. So they don't have to do anything because they haven't set up their life in a way that requires serious attention and an objective sense of your perspective and your interaction with humans and the way the world is working. They don't have the time. They don't.

They have family problems, job problems, their car's fucked, something's wrong with their house they got to fix, they have bills, everything's piling up, people are immensely distracted. So what social media does for them is it gives them a brief rest from their own problems. to just look at some fucking drag queen reading stories to kids and get outraged. Or some new thing that's going on with some girl that made some crazy video, and now everybody's talking about it. Like, it's just, most people don't have much discipline.

And they don't have to. And they've gotten through life being overweight and eating processed foods and drinking too much and smoking too much and taking all kinds of pills to mitigate all these problems that they have because they've not taken care of themselves. So they're on anti-anxiety medication and anti-depression medication and anti-this and that, and they're trying to lose weight. so they're on Ozempic, and that's most people. That's most people.

You know the number one drug in America is a peptide that helps you lose weight?

I think they're saying within five years, 30% of the population is going to be on Ozempic.

I think there was always people, like during the Vietnam War, there was always people that distrusted the government, but they didn't have the kind of access to information that we have today.

You're unhealthily overweight. That's that fine line of stuff I find really interesting is talking about things that make people uncomfortable. I don't think that should be so taboo.

but you know you're obese. Everyone knows you're obese. You're just not dealing with this very obvious problem. When someone says you need to lose weight,

I went to her doctor and she has all these autoimmune problems and she was morbidly obese. Like giant. She said that the doctor started body shaming her and she was so upset that she felt uncomfortable that the doctor was telling her that she needed to do something about her weight loss and recommended perhaps bariatric surgery or ozempic or any of these things. and this person was talking about this and was like what a betrayal that their healthcare provider was calling them obese and that they did not feel safe with them anymore. and the comments were interesting because almost everyone in the comments was like that fucking person is trying to save your life.

You have all these autoimmune issues. Well, guess why? Guess why? You're 500 pounds. You shouldn't be 500 pounds.

That's not a normal weight for a person, especially a woman, who's like 5'8". This is crazy. Like what you're doing is crazy, and for you to be upset that your doctor is telling you you're doing something crazy. It's like a person coming into the doctor's office getting screened for lung cancer with three cigarettes lit in their mouth. That's what it's like.

It's like hey, what do you think is causing this lung cancer? Do you think maybe it's this fucking poison that you're sucking on every day? Like, yeah, that's probably it right? Yeah, well, that's the same thing. You're just doing it.

It's a slower poison, but it's a very obvious poison. Like you're consuming poison. You've gotten your body to the point where it's dying and she's telling you this doctor's telling you hey, you've got to do something about this, and your response is to go on social media and talk about the horrors of being body shamed.

but you can't fix what you can't face.

He's a historian of science and technology and he goes like way back, you know, like bubonic plague he'll write about of how that changed industry across Europe in these really general, easy to digest, fascinating ways. But in terms of your technology, TikTok, is the world going to hell in a handbasket. I think of him because he said that when the and this is a great analogy, I think that I think of with my kids and social media.

is absolutely all of society thought the world was like going to go to hell in a handbasket. Because before that the only people who could read really were the priests, and so they kept all this information and they doled it out according to their line of thinking. And then the printing press came along and the could read or would begin. that began really the birth of mass populations being able to read, which is where we are today. And sometimes I like think about James Burke and I think about that as an analogy to where we are today that what is going on is just an upheaval, like the printing press, in terms of making a lot more people more literate.

And so maybe it's not even I mean I used to think of literacy, and its true definition is actually reading.

I read all my own audio books and I originally thought that listening to me read my own book was somehow you wouldn't have the same experience of reading it yourself. And then I realized I was putting my standard. I actually enjoy reading. I like to read, that's the way I'm wired. I can't do math, but I can read.

And now I realize.

that maybe is a new 21st century form of literacy, which is really makes my head go in interesting places, because language is very different than reading. You know, communicating.

disparate. You go from one thing to the next thing, and that's the way it's all set up. Whereas a longer form podcast, you're asking people to stay with you with your ideas. You might go off on a riff about obesity. I might go off on a riff about literacy.

But the brain is being stimulated. The brain is being curious. And then that carries over to your own life.

And what I've learned is that this entertainment form this, whether it's podcasts or audio books is something that's being consumed while people are doing other things where they normally would not get this information, like driving, going to the gym, working, doing menial labor, doing things. we can listen to a podcast. That is a new thing. It's a way to be entertained while you're doing other things. And that's a big part of this.

And that's a whole area that wasn't addressed before. It kind of was with talk radio. So people listen to talk radio in their cars. But nobody listened to talk radio at the gym. Nobody listened to talk radio on an airplane.

Now you can download things and consume them anytime you want. And most of the time people are consuming these things while they're being forced to sit in the doctor's waiting room, while they're doing something that ordinarily they would just be just bored.

actually, the way they're built, the way they can, the way they're engineered, the way they are, the way they've become, allows for them to sit in the waiting room and be super interested in observing. Maybe you're an elite director to do that. But most people are going to be, you know, restless, irritable and discontent. And therefore the podcast, the audio book, is an additive to your life.

Find out if Christopher Nolan uses email. I'm pretty sure he's one of those guys who's like no phone, no email, nothing completely disconnected. And I would imagine, if you want to be very creative, that's probably a very good strategy.

I will carry a pay as you go. dumb phone thing. Yeah.

What does it say?

I got it. I nailed it.

I have a feeling that in the future there's going to be way less of those people. And you know, there was a lot of people I remember in the day that had no email and they thought it was cool. I don't even have email. man. You can call me.

You know I don't answer. like my friend Joey would not answer text messages. He'd get mad at you if you sent him a text message. Call me. And but now he texts me.

Everybody texts. I think it's going to be harder and harder to be that guy. But kudos to him.

So he was like maybe nine years old when the first iPhone came out. And I had one, and he just thought it was so cool and I will never forget. he said at the dinner table, Mom, just to be clear, when you were born they didn't have these iPhones.

JFK was so worried about that exact movement that you made with your finger. The dial phone. There was a true red phone that would be used in a nuclear crisis for him to call Nikita Khrushchev. And he became worried that that wasted too much time to get through. And so he hired a guy called J.C.R.

Licklider to develop computers that could move faster. And at the time the computers were the size of this room in the Defense Department. And there were these old mainframes. And Licklider is. he's called the Johnny Appleseed of the Internet.

In essence, he's the guy who created the ARPANET, which is now the Internet. And so there's this interesting dual-use technology idea that everything that at the Pentagon, at least in the defense world, so much of our amazing technology is born out of trying to save the world from existential threat. And I always think that dual-use part of everything is super interesting. Look at lasers. Lasers are arguably perhaps the most important technological defense-borne.

system of the 20th century. Laser printers, laser surgery, laser eyes. And then you have laser weapons at the Pentagon, so classified. I can't even get anywhere near that. They're called directed energy weapons.

And so anytime I have been at the Pentagon or wherever asking about directed energy weapons, it's really a.

Go to the smartest guy in the room. So Charles Townes, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the laser. I called him up.

Okay. And he was 99 years old when I interviewed him. Still keeping office hours at Berkeley. Wow. Had his secretary on the line and gave this incredible interview and I asked him about his development of the laser.

But you might be interested in this. So he... he... is the guy who invented the laser. I mean, when you really think about that.

And he told me.

. I said, well, who do you go to when you're having trouble, when you're Charles Townes? And he said, well... I took that particular idea to two colleagues. Einstein and von Neumann.

Okay. That's interesting. I said, who said what? And he said... Einstein...

This is when Townes was having trouble making it work. And he said that Einstein said, keep trying. And von Neumann said, it'll never work. And I said, what do you make of that? And he said, well...

Einstein was very generous of spirit and he was always encouraging other scientists to think big and try. And von Neumann was the kind of scientist who believed if he didn't come up with it, it probably wasn't a good idea.

But here's another interesting thought about the laser. Charles Townes, and he didn't share this fact for decades, but later in life he wrote a lengthy article, I believe it was for the Harvard Alumni Magazine, that the idea for the laser came to him when he was sitting on a park bench from above.

Like how so?

He made it sound very much like it was a religious experience for him, but he never wrote about it for a long time, because, particularly in the sixties and seventies, you couldn't be a scientist and have faith at the same time, or at least you would be belittled or be looked down upon, is what he said.

And it's not just me. he told this. You can read about this in that Harvard article.

And I think he wrote that when he was in his late eighties. But absolutely. So. he was really making a plug for listening to whatever it is that guides you, which is a very powerful statement.

But whatever we want to call divine intervention.

that believed that their knowledge came from a divine inspiration. Like they had a dream type situation. I write about all this in my book, Phenomena.

See if we can find that. See if we can find that quote. But I believe this was like considered the beginning of science. So the beginning of science. Here it is.

In his third dream, the angel came to Descartes and said, conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and measure. That was the beginning of the Cartesian way of dissecting the natural world. One of mechanics, formulae, etc. Surely the conquest of the natural world has been achieved that way. Proof surely that the angel was right.

So the beginning of science.

Everything came from an idea. The idea comes into the person's mind. It combines with all the currently available ideas and improves upon those ideas, and it manifests itself in a physical thing. And that physical thing is what we do. That's the number one thing we do.

We do a lot of different things. We have children and families. We have jobs. We take up hobbies. But if you looked at an overview effect, if you looked at the human race from above, you would say, if you weren't one of us, you would say, what is this species doing?

Well, it makes better things every year. That's what it does. It doesn't make the same beehive every year. It constantly, consistently, makes better things. What motivates us to make these better things?

Ideas. Ideas, and then the competition of these ideas. Now, if something wanted a thing to manifest it in the world, to make it exist in the world, what would it do? It would get inside that thing's creative structure, get inside that thing's mind, and impart these ideas, impart these inspirations, and get this thing to go out and put these pieces together and manufacture this thing, and then test it and improve upon it, and keep doing it until they get it right. And then other people will take those things and have new ideas.

I know how to take that and turn it into a tablet. I know how to turn that into this. I know how to make this better. Let's do quantum computing. Let's do that.

These are all just ideas. So ideas that human beings turn into real things and those real things accelerate the evolution of technology in this radical way where we can't even comprehend where it's going. You know, there was an article I put on my Instagram today. I just put the title of it, How Crazy It Is, that AI was like 500 million years. AI has extrapolated, like they're calculating what evolution looks like in 500 million years.

Yeah.

And one of them is materialism. Materialism, status, all these different things that we have. where with materialism? you always want the newest, greatest thing. If your friend has an iPhone 15 but you have an iPhone 10, you look like a loser.

What are you doing with that old, look at that stupid old camera. Oh, my God. What are you doing with that? You need the best one. You need the new one.

If you have a 2007 car and your friend pulls up in a 2024 car, like, oh, I need the new one. What does the new one do? The new one does all these different things that the old one doesn't do. The new one drives itself. Oh, I got to get the new one.

And so what does that do? It pushes innovation. It promotes innovation.

Materialism fuels innovation, because we're always buying new stuff. If everybody stopped buying things, if everybody looked at their phone and said, oh, this phone's perfect. I don't need a new phone. I could have that phone forever. You don't need a new iPhone.

I could have that phone forever.

They would stop innovating. They would stop making things. It would just stop and then nothing would get done. But because of materialism, because of this keeping up with the Joneses thing, where everybody wants the latest thing in their driveway to impress their neighbor, you want to pull up to the fucking diner and show all your friends, all that stuff just fuels the creation of new and better things. And we're all part of it.

And every year, there's like a thing you didn't know. Like, I just got this phone. Check this out. This phone, I can make a circle on things and it Googles it instantly. This phone transcribes all of my voice notes and then summarizes them for me.

This phone, this Galaxy S24 AI, it has AI in it.

So it'll show, like, I'll put the phone down.

And this is just beginning.

You're like, that's not exactly what he said. You've kind of distorted and twisted those words. But the point is, like, these all come from ideas. And I didn't think I needed the ability to circle an image and immediately Google searches it, but it's so convenient. Like, if you want something or you see something, like, what is that?

What is that? Take a picture of that thing. Circle it. Then immediately it goes to Google and shows you, like, instantaneously.

are you talking about maybe consciousness? Yes. Okay. So this, and then how does, what are your thoughts on how individual people are, because you talked about a beehive and it made me think about a hive. Like, are we all part of the same consciousness?

Like, again, Carl Jung would say.

If you live my life, I think you would be me. And I think if I lived your life, I would be you. I think what consciousness is, is the life force of all living sentient things on this planet and perhaps all in the universe. And it's experiencing reality through different biological filters, different bodies, different life experiences, different education, different genetics, different parts of the world, different geography, different climate, different things to deal with. But it's the same thing.

I think if I lived in Afghanistan and my whole family was in the Taliban, I would probably be in the Taliban too. Because I think you adapt to whatever circumstances and environment you're in, and then you think that way, and you speak this language, and you have these customs, and you engage in these religious practices. But I think consciousness, the thing at the heart of it, all, what that person thinks of when they say me, what I think me, I think this. I think that me is the same in every person. I think it's everyone.

That's why we're all connected. That's why we all need each other. That's why loneliness contributes to diseases, and it's terrible for human beings. I think we're all universally connected with this bizarre goal. And I think this bizarre goal might be to create artificial life.

I think that might be the end. I've said this too many times. If you've heard it, I'm sorry. But I think that we are an electronic caterpillar making a cocoon, and we don't even know why. We are just constantly building.

And I think this is probably how life separates from biology to something far more sophisticated that's not confined to the timeline of biological evolution, which is a very slow, relatively speaking, timeline in comparison to electronic evolution. Electronic evolution is exponential. It happens radically. It happens very fast, and especially when you get into things like when AI gets involved and quantum computing gets involved, then things accelerate so fast. Like, look at what's going on with AI.

Five years ago, AI was not even a concern. Nobody even thought about it. Now it's at the tip of everyone's tongue, and all everyone's talking about is what happens when CHAT-GPT-5 gets released? What happens when 6 gets released? What happens when artificial general intelligence is achieved?

What happens when these things become sentient? What happens when these things make better versions of themselves? When does that stop? Does it ever stop? Do they become gods?

Is that what God is? Is what God is? this primate becomes curious, starts inventing tools. Tools lead to machines. Machines lead to the Industrial Age.

The Industrial Age leads to electronics. Electronics lead to artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence leads to God.

Wow.

Right? And I remember that, watching that, it's like the four hours, and it's so magnificently filmed, and it's so interesting, and that moment where they go back in time and you realize someone had been videotaping the previous generation of chimps, and that their anger and their fighting was based on revenge, that blew my mind, that they, that, because I often think, because I write about war and weapons, I always think about nature versus nurture, and were we built this way, and are we, you know, this is a very interesting thing to think about, like your electric caterpillar.

Yes, they've entered into the Stone Age.

Recently? Yes. He's hanging on to a tree, and he's got a spear, and he's jabbing fish out of the water with his spear. It's wild to see.

That's just one of many instances of them using tools, using things. They're starting to enter into this phase where they start evolving. I mean, and it's a slow process, and we went through it somehow or another. We went through it in an accelerated way. That's very confusing, also.

Like the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years, apparently is the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record. How does this one thing that created the fossil record double over a period of two million years? What are the factors? There's a bunch of different ideas, but all of them are just ideas. No one really knows.

His idea that the nuclear arms race was apes on a treadmill, that we and the Russians were just slavish, like essentially ignorant beasts, just slaving away on this treadmill, trying to win, not even realizing there is no winner. It was a famous article. Everybody spoke about it in D.C., and then it disappeared. Well, the anecdote comes from recently. a group of scientists wanted to try to answer the question that we're talking about, like how did apes go from bipedal or from knuckle walking to being bipedal?

How did that happen? We still don't know why. They were trying to figure out if it had to do with energy consumption. They outfitted apes, they put them on a treadmill, they outfitted them with oxygen masks, and then they had humans doing the same thing. They were measuring energy levels.

During this experiment, and they kept making them do it over and over again, the humans and the apes on the treadmills. During one of the experiments, one of the apes was basically like screw this, I'm not doing this anymore. He pushed the button and got off. And the anecdote to nuclear war is if apes can figure out how to get off the treadmill, why can't humans?

I think you and I, being here right now, having this conversation where there's not a nuclear war going on, speaks to that. Like we've had nuclear weapons for a long time and we haven't used them. I don't think it's... I don't think it's inevitability that we destroy ourselves, but it's a possibility. And I think there's a lot of foolish people that are ignoring that possibility.

And that's what's scary. And what's scary is that the type of people that want to become president, congressmen, senators, some of them are great people and some of them are... They're wise and they're good leaders. and some of them are just people that are too ugly to be on TV. They're too ugly to be actors.

They're too ugly to be.

. They can't sing. They want attention. And so they want to be a leader. And so they want to say the things that people want to hear, because those things get them positive attention and they feel good.

And then they get a bunch of people who love them and they feel good. And then they have their face on a billboard and they have bumper stickers and, like, everybody likes me. And the people who don't like me, they're communists or losers. And so it's a cult of personality thing that is just a part of being a charismatic person and garnering attention. And that's a giant part of our whole political process is narcissists and psychopaths and sociopaths that have embedded themselves into the system.

And then they all feed off each other and help each other. And they're all insider trading. And they're all involved. And then, when they leave office, they get paid to speak in front of bankers and make a half a million dollars. We're overrun by sociopaths.

He doesn't ask the SECDEF, doesn't ask the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, doesn't ask Congress. He launches. Furthermore, we have a policy called launch on warning. So when he is told that there is an incoming nuclear missile on its way to the United States, which is how this begins, he must launch on warning. That is policy.

We do not wait. That is a quote from former Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry.

Now, before taking office, many of these presidents say that they are going to change that insane policy because it essentially creates this volatile situation where every foreign leader knows they're going to launch on warning, and so am I. They say they're going to change the policy before they take office. This is documented. You know, Clinton, Bush, Obama, not Trump. And then they don't, and no one knows why.

Why do you think that is, that you would have a position, before becoming president of such an extreme policy needs to change and then become silent on that?

. If I was going to have a conversation with Trump, the number one thing that I would want to ask him is, what is the difference between what you thought it was like and what it is like? What happens when you get in there? What happens when you get in there? No one knows.

It's so secretive. The meetings between heads of state, between senators, congressmen, behind closed doors, all the different meetings with the head of the Pentagon, the head of the intelligence agencies, we don't know what those meetings are like. No one can know. It's a point of national security. So if you're not president, of course you can't go to the fucking meetings.

So then you become president, and then you get briefed. So then they sit you down, and they hit you with all the problems in the world that you don't know about, that nobody knows about, but them. And I bet they're numerous, and I bet it's terrifying. And I bet that's a giant factor as to why people change between... I mean, a lot of what they say when they're running for president, they know they're not going to do, but they're saying it because they want people to vote for them, and then they get in there, and they go, I'm not going to release the JFK files.

They do things like that. That's what they always do. But I think a lot of it is also, you can't know what you're talking about until you get that job, until you're in there. You don't know what you're talking about. You have no idea.

And also, it's so tiring reading these presidential manuals, or memoirs, rather, which then say absolutely nothing, original to any of us, the citizenry, about what's really happening as president.

I might have the page wrong.

So in this scenario, he's talking to this carpenter. And he's telling this carpenter, isn't it crazy? They landed on the moon. And the carpenter says something to the sound of, I don't believe anything. those television fellers say.

And he goes, I think they can fake anything, somewhere along that line. And he goes, back. then, I thought that guy was a crank. He goes, but after my eight years in the White House, I started thinking maybe he's ahead of his time.

Now, just imagine saying that about the biggest achievement in human history, landing another human being on the surface of a moon. Another planet, essentially. One quarter the size of our planet, 250-something thousand miles away. And he's saying, maybe this guy who thought it was fake is ahead of his time. That's not something you accidentally say.

That's not something you frivolously write down and just add it to your book. Did you find the quote?

And it got kind of glossed over, except for the moon landing hoax community who went, yeah, I told you it's fake.

But that's interesting. And that guy wrote all that longhand, by the way. He wrote that all on composition books, just notebooks, wrote it all out.

Honestly, I can only find it written on Wikipedia. It's linking to the book, but this is what it says on Wikipedia. There it is. Perfectly. Perfectly.

Okay, here it goes. Just a month before Apollo 11, astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague Michael Collins aboard Spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon, the old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened. I said, sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed. He said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that them television fellers could make things look real that weren't.

Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that make me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time.

I've read the quote. It's just more of the same. It's just abbreviated. The whole thing, that's the point of the quote, that's the meat. is, the old carpet.

asked me if I really believed it happened. This is all not taken out of context.

They don't know how it unfolds. They don't know how fast it is. Did you know that they have a six-minute window to make a counterattack? Six-minute window. And that comes from President Reagan's memoir, by the way.

He said that, there's a quote from him, which I have in the book, a six-minute window to have to make a decision to possibly end the world is irrational.

They were trying to say, Russia put him in office. He's a Russian puppet. He's a Russian thing. It was all a lie. They made it up, and they said it everywhere, and you're allowed to do that.

You're allowed to do that. So not only are you taking a person and asking them to not be a person, but then you're looking at everything they've done, and you're allowed to lie about it, and you're allowed to lie about it in cahoots with the media, who spreads this lie on television every day with no consequences. So the problem is not just that we don't have good leaders. It's that I don't know if it's possible to have a good leader. I don't know if those kind of humans are real, and I wonder if AI, even though everyone's terrified of it, and I am too, I wonder if that's our way out.

I wonder if the only thing that can actually govern society fairly and accurately is an artificial intelligence, something that doesn't have emotions and greed and narcissism and all the other contemptible traits that all of our politicians have. What if it doesn't have any of that? First of all, what if it's far smarter than us and realizes a fair and reasonable way to allocate resources and to eliminate pollution, to mitigate overfishing and all the different issues that we have? It looks at it in an absolutely accurate and brilliant way that we're not even capable of doing. And this idea of us being governed by people and not wanting those people to behave like every person ever who's been in power.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Everyone knows it, but we just assume that we're going to have this one guy that's like his morals are so strong that when he gets in there, he's going to right the ship and drain the swamp. I don't think those people are real. I don't think that's a real thing. I think the folly that human beings have displayed is built into the programming.

I don't think it's unusual. I think it's usual.

I mean, Kennedy, said a lot of amazing, brilliant things, but he was also deeply flawed. And if he was alive today, oh my God, the skeletons they would have pulled out of that guy's closet. It would be crazy. He would never make it. He would never get anywhere close.

But that's just, he's a human. And you could kind of be flawed and also have these brilliant takes on things like he did then. But look what happened to him. They fucking killed him. And then they covered it up.

And then today, even today, they won't release the files. Today.

I mean, there's a lot that goes into that. that's very, very deep. There's a lot. The Warren Commission report is horseshit. If you read it and if you...

David Lifton, wrote a book on it called Best Evidence. Did you ever read it?

This is all undisputable, absolute truth. that was going on at the exact same time. And to think that that's the only thing that we're lying about is just that stuff. Everything else is above board. That stuff was important and we were just trying to get to the bottom of things.

not the same degree of an alert and knowledgeable citizenry in the 50s and 60s. Everyone just took everything at face value, and it is remarkable as a historian, and Tom O'Neill's work also speaks of that, to go back in time and look at that. Part of just as interesting perhaps is the facts of the matter, like the Warren Commission, is to say, how did everyone simply accept this as fact? But then I think it's valuable to have the old look in the mirror moment and go, what is it today that we're not looking at?

What is it today that will be, in 10, 20, 30 years from now, I can't believe they were all falling for that concept. That's the old you can't face. You can't fix what you can't face.