Annie Jacobsen -- Bestselling Author, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, and Storyteller

In episode three we speak with bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen. Annie is the author of 6 books (listed below) and has a 7th on the way. She is an expert on many areas of the intelligence community and  the U.S. national security apparatus.  In this episode Annie and Aaron discuss aliens and UFOs, new war-fighting technologies, China's surveillance state, biometrics, and whether CIA has an assassination program.   

Annie on Twitter: @AnnieJacobsen
 Annie's Website: anniejacobsen.com
Her Books: AREA 51; PAPERCLIP; PENTAGON'S BRAIN; PHENOMENA; SURPRISE, KILL, VANISH; 1ST PLATOON
 
UnderSimplified Music by:  Arethusa Strings
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Transcript

Annie Jacobson, welcome to the Under Simplified Podcast. Thanks for being here. Thank you for having me.

Well, this is quite the treat for us. You will be the first person that we have recorded with who is from completely outside the government. We, we have a plan to hopefully not just record all of my friends from the military and the government. And, now that you're here, we, we can say that we have effectively at least executed the beginning part of that plan.

So thanks for joining us. There you go. 

You got your first author, journalist on the show, and this is, I'm 

happy. It's me. And, and I was, I, you already answered question number one before I had to ask it. I wanted to ask you, you've done so many things, throughout your career. , you've written a number of books on a number of different topics, and I wanted to ask you how, how you do identify yourself at this point?

When, when people say, what do you do? Mm-hmm. , and it sounds like author, journalist is what you went to intuitively there. 

I'm a storyteller, really. I mean, I love great stories and I find the truth to be the most interesting stories. I guess you could also say I'm a national security reporter because I always write about war and weapons about security and secrets.

That's the, the subjects that are covered in all six of my books soon to be seven. 

Well, congratulations on, I'll congratulate you in advance on the seventh, Uh, storyteller is, is a great way to define yourself. I, I'd like to think of myself as the same,  it's something that I definitely do enjoy and. I wanted to ask you, because we all arrive here on different paths, how did you end up in this particular line of work, not just an author and journalist and storyteller, but author and  journalist and storyteller in areas that are extraordinarily unique?

I think, 

I think there's two leading, two things that kind of lead the charge with my desire to tell stories, to hear stories, to know stories. One has to do with people who are extraordinary, right? And that has to do a lot with circum. I find, so much  emphasis these days is on,  birthright and sure,  biology is destiny in a way, but really and truly what people do is what interests me.

I mean, my God, I have had the privilege in my six books that I've written of hearing some of the most extraordinary people get themselves into and out of astonishing situations that quite frankly most humans, including myself, could simply not endure. And that is a story I wanna listen to and I wanna write 

about.

Yeah, and I mean, that's a fascinating way to capture it and I think,  it's no surprise that these topics are the topics that people want to hear about, want to read about, and your case also want to watch television. About do you, from all of these things that you've investigated?  Do you have one of your investigations that stands out in your mind as the one that was your favorite,  to conduct?

Uh, impossible to choose. That would be like saying, who's your favorite child? You know, , there are two processes, writing books, there being a journalist, there's the listen. To the sources and then the writing of the material. But for me, they always go hand in hand. They're interwoven.

 I always have a journal with me. Sometimes I'll do an interview with someone and sit in the parking lot and write what will turn out to be almost verbatim paragraphs in a book.  Other times I'll labor for God knows how long to get something right. Trying to reset it in my mind based on an audio tape interview.

But everyone that I have interviewed that ends up making the cut of my books is, is, is just, is a remarkable human being. I mean, I, I just smile thinking about it, you know?  I also really like old people. I find that as I get older, right, um, to be a really interesting thing to reflect on. So I've been writing books now for what, 12, 13 years.

And I didn't know when I began that I would spend so much time interviewing people that are in their eighties and nineties. But that's what I do. And there's something super cool about that because people who have done extraordinary things, I find tend to have extraordinary memories. And like in an interesting way, maybe decades have passed since anyone even cared to hear that story.

 Them flying a U2 over the , Soviet Union,  them doing a recon mission behind enemy lines in Laos. No one's listened. Heard that story for decades. And then I come along and wanna know about it. Imagine the chemistry there. 

Yeah. This is, uh, a fascinating thing because, you know, I think so many of those folks when they get to 70 or 80 or 90, the thing they wanna do most is tell those stories and have someone want to listen to them.

 I've had so many family members write to me and say, Thank you so much for like, revealing grandpa to me. Or I've even had wives write to me and say, Thank you so much for revealing a part of my husband that I wasn't able to know about either Bec and people have even been as honest as to say because I didn't ask or because I couldn't access it.

Sure. And I, I imagine there's some procrastination in there too. You, you always intend to go after those stories from your relatives. Something always comes up and there you are, you swoop in and, and do it professionally and, and capture it in writing for everyone to read, uh, forever. And yeah, I can imagine they're quite grateful.

Well, I'd like to, uh, see as how you didn't choose which,  child you loved most, uh, of these books. I, I'd like to point you towards one. That is probably the one that, that comes up very often.  And because I just, How can you have a podcast and not start with aliens, , uh, and Area 51, and this is a, this is a interesting one for me because I spent, a good portion of a career in cia.

And,  just because you're there in CIA doesn't mean you can, you know, click the, the CIA Wikipedia article for area 51 and, and read about it. And so this was never a topic that, uh, you know, By way of my desk, but I'm, I'm very much interested in it. And, uh, talking about aliens, I think interests everyone.

As soon as aliens come up, what's the first thing, that comes to your mind on this topic?

It's obviously rich with,  conspiracy theories and,  real classified documents and people who know stories, but they don't necessarily. Other people's stories and strikes me as a fascinating one. 

I hear Alien, I hear ufo, uap. Um, and I just automatically think storytelling. I think archetype, myth, religion secrets.

 I know more than, you know, those kind of, uh, feelings we humans have about ourselves and about one another. You know, I saw that, I saw it with my own eyes, you know? No, you did. I mean, this is what I've been listening to and hearing about for 13 years. I mean, on a practical level, who's got the information?

I don't think Cia, I, as I often mention, I think n o, the national reconnaissance. The agency that itself was classified for 31 years. No one even knew it existed, but its employees. Um, and I've interviewed many of the early founders of NRO for my Area 51 book and others. I, I always get a little bit of a wink and a nod whenever I am speaking to someone who knows a lot about n o, that that is where the real secrets lie.

The real truth about who knows what in the space domain. So 

why, why do you think it's n o What about, uh, n o's actions or, or the mission that they have? I, I'm gonna be straight up honest as I, I always hope to be, I know very little about Theo 

myself. Okay? So back up a pinch, right when I was. Origin stories are part of what I write about because I think they're incredibly interesting to dein intimidate you, right?

So in other words, , if you just go back to how something began, you can, you can understand it. , I, I began writing a lot of these books when my kids were kind of like, you know, little, And it was like you'd sit with them trying to explain basic physics and realize, Oh my God, the most elemental beginnings of things helps you understand how things advance.

And if you look at area 51 and you think of overhead surveillance and you think of, , technology looking, looking at the world from above. Right before that, you know, from the cia, so much was human human intelligence. And suddenly in the 1950s, that's not very long ago, the whole world OFS signals intelligence, imagent, image intelligence, mason, you know, materials intelligence.

This blossomed all at area 51 in this tiny little,  dry desert lake bed in the middle of the Nevada desert adjacent to where nuclear bombs were going off because that would keep it secret. And I interviewed the very first director of science of CIAs Directorate of Science and Technology, but, And he sat with me and like gave me the origin story about all of this, and I write about it in Area 51, so I won't drone on about that.

But that is kind of to, to, to speak to the point of how the National Reconnaissance Office came to be as the CIA was building the U2 spy plane, which was going to be the first groundbreaking weight spy on the Soviet Union from 

Marker

overhead, because we couldn't get any human sources on the ground trying to get spies across the Euro River.

It was impossible. And so the, the CIA came up with this idea about sending an airplane to do it. It had to fly really high because it would get shot down. I mean, the, the technical specs are fascinating, but at that same time, the CIA was knowing it was gonna get shot down and thinking, Hmm, what else can we create?

Dr. Bud Whelan led the charge to create the world's first satellite called Corona. Is all chronicled in any in area 51 for any of the nerds that wanna know more, you wanna go dbm? Yeah. But that's where it began, right? And now, oh my God, now you think about the 8,000 satellites circling the globe, and they, they bring us everything from television to, you know, ICBM alerts 

and they're, Yeah, they're on track  to increase exponentially as this goes commercial and, and commercial satellite imagery becomes much more prevalent than anything the NRO will, will ever be able to do.

So we're in for, uh, I don't know if I believe that on the, so , on a,  numbers, uh, category. So like, you know, you get a lot, obviously sensors, , from specialized satellites can do many, many things. Some of which,, I will not, talk about,, from this side of the microphone, but we'll, we'll welcome your comments on those things.

 But I think there's something to be said about just sheer numbers of satellites,  and what they can do when  you go with. What Planet Labs hopes to do and image the entire Earth once a day. I mean, that, that's a, that's a life changing moment once we can have it an up to date image of the earth every single day when, when they reach that.

And I, and I suspect they will.  But yeah, no, you're right. I'm certain NRO will race to have the most high tech satellite for hopefully,  the rest of the future that I have to, worry about that we have it and, and not someone 

else. I have yet to really, honestly know about a technology developed in the civilian sector that didn't have either a DARPA or I APA origin story.

And I have even spoken about that public, like publicly. I have made the misstatement of saying,  Google did this better than nro. And I have been taken aside by kind of a spook in an overcoat who showed me his card and said, Let me correct you for the record in a way that I can, that is not, you know, and give me some unclassified information to demonstrate that I was wrong.

In other words, I really do believe, and again, definitely could stand to be corrected that the US government science and technology agencies lead science and technology, they do not follow. 

So you're definitely taking us into the very next topic that I would, I would love to discuss, because this is an, an interesting one for me as I transition from government and,  obviously having an inside perspective and now to the private sector and, and getting at least a bit of an outside perspective. And I would like to pull the thread on that a little bit, I do wonder if that will remain the case that the government will lead technology, at least from the perspective of innovation.  Because I feel like. Innovation now has shifted back to the private sector. Now this shift has happened a couple times over,  the last a hundred years of technological innovation anyways.

And I think you could be forgiven for thinking it was Google at one point when it might have been darpa, cuz sometimes now it could be Google, then DARPA and then Google again. Mm-hmm.  or, or choose your company. I, I only recently in doing some research for, uh, this discussion learned that Siri started effectively at darpa,  which is as good example of something you would not suspect unless you knew it already.

That techno, the Google technology, by the way, began with the Navy. So it wasn't darpa. I was corrected by, Anyways, keep going. No, that may and it makes sense. Submarine. Submarine, you know, looking at submarine warfare and its Eland systems was how that began. But anyways, I cut you off. No, that 

makes sense.

No, and, and, yeah, that's right. I was gonna toss it back to you  and just pulled the thread of. 

What makes you think that the government will still be at the head of innovation when there's just so many easier paths to innovation in the private sector? 

Well, I think my understanding of it right now could change comes from research and interviews I was doing when I. The Pentagon's brain, which was, is about darpa and just a little tiny detail in, in the first director of DARPA's, uh, statement to Congress back in the 1950s when DARPA was being created, when he was asked, What is it you are trying to do with this new fangled agency at the Pentagon?

And don't we already have something like that? And Neil McElroy said, At DARPA, we will create the vast weapon systems of the future. And so he didn't say, We're gonna make sure that what we have is the best. He was specifically talking about the future. And that's where the concept of blue sky technology comes from.

This idea  that you had to be. Ahead of everything that is happening. And so when books later, I'm writing about technology systems,  ubiquitous technical systems that are looking at the whole world in many ways, and people might say, Well, China is more advanced than us.

My answer to that is, Well, hang on. China copied what we did. Right? They are very good at stealing  intellectual property that is developed by the Defense Department or around a whole system of intellectual property, a system of systems, and then,  advancing on that really quickly because they didn't have to spend the money, time, treasure, et cetera, on their r and d.

Now then, Guess what? You can be sure that DARPA knew that was gonna happen and is already creating the next generation vast weapon system of the future. In this case, we're talking about a surveillance system because they,  witnessed that time and time again. You know, I'll close it with this little parable.

Right? Go back to area 51.  When Gary Powers flew, the U2 over the Soviet Union got shot, shot down in 1960, everyone was a, Oh my god. You know, it was like groundbreaking news right from my interviews, from these declassified documents. I was able to demonstrate that years earlier.

Richard Bissell of the CIA knew that the U2 was gonna be shot down over the Soviet Union . They were already building the A 12 oxcart out at Area 51 because they knew the U2 would be come obsolete at any moment. And that, I think, is the same analogy for the surveillance systems in China. 

 So I agree with much of what you said, , and then I'm gonna take it again a step further because I think what's happening in China is a really interesting case where, where we can noodle around, uh, on this point of it, the thing that I think China is proving very adept at and, and also has a, an upper hand in, is that they're proving really good at consuming, preserving, and then using vast amounts of data, huge, huge amounts of data.

Uh, now obviously Google and, and various other US entities even I think in the United States government has proven fairly capable of that, but we're bound by. Google is bound by a number of laws and ethics in, in morals and, and the government even more so, and China has taken a different path on this.

And they are actually weaponizing these surveillance tools against the Uighurs, which I've, I've heard you speak about before in Shong province.  And I think because they have,  a multimillion person population against which they can array all of these technical sensors and technical collection and surveillance tools, that they are able to more rapidly engineer the next generation of surveillance tools or hone surveillance tools with real world practice that we would never want to do as a country.

And assuming no major law changes and the near term we would never be able to do from a legal structure. And I just wonder, looking at. You know, in this case that's, a government and civil fusion in China,  the civil private sector of China is not separate from the government and therefore they can iterate back and forth faster than the US can.

And that plus a test population to me, gives them a, a serious advantage that I don't see how we compete with it. And I, I just wonder if you've given mm-hmm. , uh, any thought to that and, and cuz it, this is what keeps me up at night and some of my compatriots 

Well, there's a couple things. So I think what you're saying is, is China, is the communist party of China going to be able to somehow double down on all this technology and, and advance beyond, let's say, a DARPA into the weapon system of the future that outperforms ours before we even get there.

Yeah. I, I think that's right. And,  thank you for separating out the Communist Party of China from China. This is. Not just a, a good way to discuss it from a, an accuracy standpoint. It actually muddles the picture when you don't think of it split like that. Because again, the whole system is designed to protect a party, not a country.

Absolutely not a constitution, 

just a party. I think you have to say that because I think, I mean, personally I think a communist government is very dangerous to the people because,  it, it just, like you said, it's looking out for itself.   So I don't know.  I would like to say I wouldn't give China that much credit, but that's, then I, those words even come out of my mouth and that, that sounds like, you know, famous last words because they have brilliant engineers.

 But if we talk specifically about, Their biometric surveillance program. I think  there's two parts of that which are important. And I do think this is an issue that everyone wants to pay attention to and no one is paying attention to. Right? So the amount of people that ask me about aliens, and don't ask me about biometric surveillance technology is like the scales of justice gone awry.

Because people should not be worried about aliens, in my opinion, and they should be very worried about,  communist party style biometric surveillance. Right. So let's just break it down for a second what we're talking about, because you have a system whereby,  the government of China has singled out what it sees as  a segment.

It's of its population that it believes is threatening to its existence, the weakers. And they have therefore required a program called Physicals for All, and that requires every person of weaker descent to submit fingerprints, iris scans, and dna. Okay? So with that information, with that biometric information, the Communist Party now has a catalog of a certain group of people.

Separate from that are the overhead surveillance systems and the ground surveillance systems. Everything from, you know, you walk down the street and you see cameras on the  light poles, and except go on and on and on, right? Everywhere they have that kind of a system that is looking at people.

And so  what happens? If people are already cataloged, is the system, the big grand surveillance system is able to identify those people by number instantly because the algorithms and the computer systems are so much more powerful than any human ever could be. You know, long gone with the days of the policeman saying, I mean, I see your license, and then like, Oh, you're so and so and calling it in.

But when you say,  China can do things that we can't, that's where I take issue because I don't agree because my research reporting and interviewing with sources tells me that the government here in the United States is in a manner, maybe not with the same kind of draconian in. Of the Communist Chinese party requiring Annie Jacobson to give up her DNA is nonetheless creating a massive catalog of all of its citizens, including me.

And so you have to really, really live off the grid with purpose to not be part of that system. And you also have to, by the way, never travel outside the United States, because I'll end with this, that when we, we, you know, everyone always thinks when you come into the United States and you stare into that camera that they're taking your, your picture.

They're not, they're well, they are, but they're also taking your IRIS scans. 

Right? I mean, even, , to come join you today, I've, I've signed up for clear, uh, to navigate the airports much more quickly, , most of the time. And yeah,  the function of that is by way of your iris, uh, you, you sally, up to the machine and, and share the.

And the State Department recently turned over all of its photographs of all of the citizens, the ones that it has photographs of to the biometric, , divisions  of the fbi. And so you have a catalog going on. I mean, a million questions are raised from the pandemic. I have always thought, you know, in times of war and pandemic, , governments  tend to move off of their more democratic ideals out of necessity.

Right. And this is such a, such a dangerous topic to, to we're not dangerous, but it's a very, one wants to tread carefully when discussing this issue. I certainly do because I think loose thinking, you know what others would call conspiratorial thinking, I often just call loose thinking. It's just like, it's just like, you know, , 

you haven't applied logical rigor to the 

Yeah.

You haven't really. Which is, which is okay. Most of us do lose thinking a lot of the time, but you haven't really carefully parsed out what it is you're suggesting. Right. Which is important in this day and age because of how wacky things are, things are becoming about certain ideas. But I do think that the pandemic indicated to all of us that, you know, DNA testing has become, which seemed so draconian when you think of Chinese, the, the Communist Chinese party taking DNA samples from people.

Like, that's spooky. But there was a suggestion to me when I looked deep inside and spoke to analysts with, you know, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency about all this. There's some real concern about what those metrics were. But then even more freaky to me at the time was what was called what, what has now been called pattern of life. Okay, Activity based intelligence abi, which is now an official intelligence collecting process in of the United States government, but wasn't then. So the point here is that the, the Facebook of IT services the government ultimately because the government, and when I say the government, I mean the intelligence community, and then with its military partners realizes how to leverage that.

So activity based intelligence becomes super interesting and spooky to me because it says you are what you do. And so it says, we are going to follow people to figure out who they are based on what they. And I have interviewed many of the engineers and scientists who worked on these overhead systems.

Gorgan Stare, for example. Argos is, these are military systems that were in Afghanistan, Iraq, staring down at would be terrorists from thousands of feet above, right? And then collecting intelligence on them and figuring out who to drone, strike and kill activity based intelligence, you are what you do.

Well that worked a certain way in the war theater, and we know how it ended for a lot of people and a lot of people standing next to bad guys for better or for worse. But we must ask ourselves, is that where it's going? In civil society. 

 You're into the space right now where I will often either let my mind wander or I'll drive it, uh, in this direction and drive it into a cement wall.

Oh, . Sometimes that's what it feels like.  Or into a dark space. 

And I can go mean if I'm waiting for the first person to be drone striked in America. By 

an American drone, you mean? Yep. God, help us, that that never happens. , you, you couldn't sit across from a greater opponent, , than me on that topic because that slope, , is so slippery.

It's not a slope. It's a cliff. And, and, , once we fall off, we're not going back up. Okay. But I'm gonna 

interrupt here just for a second. Just No, please. To be agitative, if that's a word. , look, you're in good company. I do cup words all the time. I recording on drones, and I have, I wouldn't even say mixed feelings.

Definitive feelings on both sides of the aisle about drones. Drones, right? But, and a lot of information on them. But what I did find fascinating was  how many people went berserk over drone strikes, right? And how, also, on the same token, how many people, , ignore, In other words, what I'm talking about now is putting your own value system, putting, putting your value system of a, of a Democratic civilian into the war theater.

It's just, it's very complex. You had people, the same people that were the Code Pink Ladies come to mind that were for better or for worse, you know, storming Congress and Furious that the Bush administration was drone striking people to death. Well, and, and then torturing people. And then you had, Obama comes along and I wrote about this in Surprise co vanish and solves the Torture program or the enhanced Interrogation program with a drone, with an advanced drone strike program and ends up drone striking more terrorists than the Bush administration did.

And there's less comments about that because, you know, fill in the dots and so jump forward to where we are now. And people were, remember the Fearer people had about drones, right? And then all of a sudden I opened the news yesterday or the day before and there's a Star Wars meet character meme about how great, you know, it's like pro drone striking Russian soldiers.

And my only point here is pay attention. Pay attention to the weapons systems at work and your own perception of whether you decide that's an appropriate use of lethal power.

This is a fascinating one. , it's, it's fraught with, , hazard for me, as you might expect, , given , my career.

But, , I think I can,  dabble in some areas here that , would be fascinating, , for folks to hear from you on. So I wanna go back to the, , potential drone strike in the United States and, and just draw that one out just a little bit because it, at least in my understanding of, you know, the, the origin of wide drones and, and why use them the way that they were used was, had to do with people existing in places that couldn't be gotten to any other way and represented, , a persistent and real threat.

And those things were in conflict, can't get to them, but yet they. We, we've 

all agreed. Oh, so I'm a Bin Laden in Afghanistan, Cofer Black and Hank Crumpton wanting to take him out with a paramilitary team and being told by cia. No, you can't. 

So I've, I've heard these names and things previously, so you can go back even further.

I was in the Rangers in the late nineties after the bombings in Africa. And, , Bill Clinton, you know, had sort of the same issue where he was thinking about should he send troops or, or, you know, should he use, in this case, cruise missiles, , to potentially take on Melo. And, and our units were all on short recall.

I didn't know it at that time. I've since learned this history, , via other means. But this was a, a fascinating thing to look back on. Uh, but you're right. A perfect example. Uh, Afghanistan, then Afghanistan again, and then Pakistan, of course. But I wonder to go back to the US example, because I think people will key in on this and, and certainly the folks who know me well will expect me to.

Pull on this a bit, What do you think would be the situation in the United States? What would have to come about such that the US government or an apparatus of the US government would decide that they needed to take a drone strike rather than any of the other means available to them to carry out whatever action needs to be carried out?

I 

mean, I can think of 50 or 150. 

I'll take two to start with, but I'm, I 50 is, is way more than I can 

imagine. But you could go to the classic,, nuclear weapon, ti ticking time bomb scenario. Right? That would be a classic one because it would give reason for why the offset technology had to be there, why you had to strike someone at a distance.

  In the nuclear, , bomb scenario, you're envisioning, , a bad actor as somehow has a dirty bomb or a du doesn't matter, something that could cause extraordinary damage.

And they're off in an area that for whatever reason, 

they're working on the weapon, they're assembling 

the weapon. So, but in this case, if they're assembling the weapon, it's not yet ready. If we know that that's what happened. It's happening. It's not yet ready to go. What, what would be the thinking of the government to go with a drone strike over?

You know, in this case it would probably be the FBI's hostage rescue team that would be called in, , for this. Or you could even see, , a US military force being called up to work on this particular problem. There are forces whose sole job it is to think about handling this exact scenario. And so, yeah, I just wonder how it would come about such that a drone strike would make more sense than a surgical team going in and dealing with that individual in that threat.

And we're way off in hypothetical land now, so I get that. 

So specifics of that, I think I would leave to the jack writer, the Jack Ryan writer's room where I spent some time and, and again, that's entertainment, but what isn't? Entertainment is real. That's real. Life is serious business and I, when I think of drone strikes in the United States, I think less about Jack Ryan and I think more about the reporting I have done on actual drone strikes, on people that people I have interviewed who have pulled the trigger on those drone strikes, who have authorized those drone strikes, like lawyers at CIA who have said, Don't send the drone, send me because they're CIA paramilitary operators, and they'd rather go kill the individual themselves.

I've interviewed all of these people. I have written about them in all of my books and the decision to do so, Drone strike versus Surprise Kill, Vanish Knife at the throat is, in my experience of listening a decision that comes from above a decision that comes from the P. And, and in very rare circumstances, the president turned over those decision to the cia.

Right. 

 Maybe the drone strike in the United States is, is a little bit harder, at least for me to, , visualize how that scenario would come about, but we could probably hypothetical five more times and, and get to one.

I think just by briefly thinking about it, what I am more concerned about at this point is the drone as an autonomous weapon system in large numbers. I think what we're looking at here in the not due distant future, if it's not already here, is the idea of drone swarms. , vast numbers of drones being given targets or marching orders.

And then allowed to autonomously, I'm gonna say decide, I'm not sure if decide is the right word here from a, an AI standpoint, but autonomously, the drone itself will make decisions about how it carries out those orders. And that's an area to me that just seems extraordinarily scary. If I put myself in the mindset of, you know, 20 year old Army Ranger, Sergeant Aaron Brown, and I think about what it would feel like to be on a battlefield where at any time a hoard of drones could come over the ridge line and engage you autonomously from any direction that just strikes fear.

Well, without, without a shadow of a doubt, that is precisely where the defense department is going and has stated as such in it. Documents going back to 2012 when I was writing the book with the Pentagon's brain, there is not even a question that the defense department is moving toward having autonomous weapon systems.

And I think the most interesting, you know, pushback against that, which I wrote about was an in, uh, a series of, of interviews and questionnaires with generals, and this is back in 2012, asking how they felt about moving towards autonomous weapons, moving toward first, you know, man computer interface and then fully autonomous weapons like you're talking about.

And the majority of the generals said, We do not wanna go in that direction. At which point DARPA began a program with something called the moral molecule to look into chemistry about how to change people's opinions about things. And when you look at those, you have to read a lot more of the details of it before you really think that's impossible.

You're saying that the people can't see, but I was smiling at that one because I'm, Yeah, I've not heard it, but the absolute truth, 

you know, and, and, and so that is where things are. And you know, the Jason scientists who have long been associated with conspiracy, , I interviewed Merf Goldberg, the founder of the Jasons before he died, whether the Jasons, I'm not familiar with the Jason scientists were starting in, you know, the early days of darpa, the intellectuals of physicists, the scientists who solved the government's hardest science and technology problems, beginning with nuclear weapons, beginning with ICBM weapon systems.

And they were all scientists who were full-time professors and part-time defense scientists. And they have worked for the government for decades until. The last decade when they started to push back against a lot of the defense department's ideas about things, specifically autonomous weapons, specifically putting brain chips in wounded warriors heads and working at being able to control brain signals remotely.

The 

JS in this case, to give them back use of a limb 

or something. Well, that's the pretense. But the problem, and this is, these are quotes from the Jason scientists, which you can read exactly in my book, right? The, the Jason Science were like, Uh, that is a bad idea. That is a bad idea. It could lean to fill in the dots and add the Chinese Communist Party's behavior, Okay?

Mm-hmm. . And what happened? The Jason scientists were fired in favor of the Defense Science Board. Now, this is all information relayed to me. A DARPA program manager that was directly involved in it. This is all on the record stuff, but before we get too far in the weeds about that, the drone, I want you to think about this with the drone system technology, right, where you talked about the Dr.

Army of drones, we can both visually coming up over the horizon to go after you. Well have a look when you go home and anyone listening, have a look at the CIA's Briar program. Okay? I know you work for the agency, but I also know you're not responsible for 

all of their programs. As soon as you say Brier, I think Black Briar, and that's Jason B, and that's, that's where I'm going.

But Bryer 

is in an acronym for, uh, you'll see. Okay. And you have to go to I a rpa, which is the CIA's darpa. Sure. Okay. Yep. But I always look. , what IPA is doing to kind of get an idea of the vast weapon systems of the future. And the Briar program is specifically looking at biometrics, not eyes, not fingerprints, not dna.

Mm-hmm. , but limb movement. Yeah. Mo recognition and, 

and such. Yeah. 

Now ask yourself why, why do they need to know about how people move? Well, it goes back to this idea of human identification and ultimately, I hate to say it, but it probably will link up with drone striking. Okay. Because, A long holy grail of biometric technology.

And I'm sure you know this has been seeing things at a distance so you can, you know, the first IRIS scans were thought up going back to the nineties when the, remember the Cobar towers? Sure. Two terrorists driving a truck bomb as fast as they could at an American military based in Saudi Arabia. We meaning that the, the guards saw the truck coming, if only you could do something right.

And want someone in that analysis came up with the idea. And you can look at the origin documents. Oh my God, if only we could have known the, you know, we could see the whites of his eyes. And that kind of let, that is the real origin moment of Iris technology. That's when John Doman started saying, we, you know, let's, let's advance this.

  

So it's fascinating  you hit on another one that, uh, gate recognition is a, is a hobby horse, , of mine right now because I do think it's an extraordinarily powerful biometric that can be gleaned from at a distance as far away as you can get. Uh, something that looks at geometry and, and it's one that I would offer to you.

The private sector, to my knowledge right now is, is far out in front on gate recognition as a biometric identifier for reasons of fraud.  And, and a host of other reasons as well, but fraud is the one that pushes so many things forward in the private sector from a technological standpoint because it's, it's about saving money and mm-hmm.

saving money drives lots of innovation and multifactor authentication right now. You know, can you walk up to an ATM machine and, and never be fearful that someone can use your card ever again, because not only you won't even need your card, uh, in this circumstance, right. Your biometrics will be your password.

Uh, Bank of America did this already. They've tested it, an ATM machine where you need nothing but walk up and present yourself to the ATM machine in order to access your bank account because they're so confident in the biometrics of this and of which gate is one of them. So crazy. Was this for people who used it, that they had to put the pin back onto the machine purely for psychological reasons, because people could not handle the idea that their account was open when they walked up.

But this is one where I think the private sector's gonna get there first, and they're not even gonna make any attempt to protect. The technology that ends up being able to, you know, effectively see in the dark. 

I don't know, but here's my thought on that. Right? Wh so it's interesting that you say fraud, but I still think that DARPA has more money.

And then when I say DARPA also now mean ipa and God knows NRO probably has their own APA at this point. But, but, so I think 

IPAs is NLS as well. So that is, they share it. The I IPA is the 

intelligence, Intelligence community community, but I'm sure they have their own secret one, right, that we don't know about and we will in 10 years.

Um, but what comes to mind is a program involving limb regeneration, right? So, in other words, and this was something that was funded by DARPA and. The scientists who I interview who were doing this, this is one day of the idea that we could grow back a limb, right? Sure, yeah. At like, kind of, you know, set humans aand, right?

Yeah. But, , I was asking why isn't the private sector, Why didn't the private sector lead on this? Because you would think there would be so much money in it. And, you know, a whole host of reasons that became clear were, somewhat obvious. , they said an interesting thing to me, which is that DARPA is willing to invest the government, the US government is willing to invest in technology 50 years out, and the private sector is not.

Yeah, that's 

a great Dar , example. I think, , and I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to noodle that one uh, a little bit because you're right. The government is much more capable of spending money way into the future. They're not looking for a return tomorrow, right? I mean, DARPA is never looking for a return other than being successful about 15% of the time.

And not being beaten. And not being beaten. And so, and, and that by the way, before it sounds like I'm like anti darpa, which I'm not. I tried to just be agnostic. I'm reporting these things. But even some of the scientists said to me, you know, uh, how would you like it if  Saudi Arabia or  China or comes up with the newest weapon system that the US cannot defeat?

And so if you flip that around, you think of, , now we're circling back to the point that you made, that really has me thinking about whether or not China will develop the new surveillance. System. Like what is, what is the next step that it will do with its biometric catalog, its surveillance system capabilities.

Where will that go? I think 

we know, So I think this is, Where is that? So  it's everywhere where there's a hike vision camera or a Wawe router, or a Wawe 5g mm-hmm.  system. Uh, you know, one of the fascinating things that I've learned about China, and again, I, I've gotten more from the Human Rights Watch reports on China, on technology at least than I have from any other quarter.

And, 

uh, the human rights watch, who will not admit that China's Uighur program was taken outta the Defense Department playbook, despite my asking them to, 

because it was, we could get, we, maybe we'll go down that rabbit hole here in a second. No, that's okay. That that's an interesting one too. And, and you referenced that earlier.

, and I didn't totally follow it as a lead, but, but maybe we can circle back to that one. Cause I don't know that I fully understand that one, but here we are, , , I'm convinced I couldn't be talked out of it at this point, that China is definitely doing a masterfully better job than us at designing, , a surveillance state in a way that just works really well inside the United States.

No, no, no, I'm sorry. Inside China inside. But will they be able to, This is where they're starting to export it right now. So like a really good example is, uh, you know, they have these light poles in China that you maybe read about that are just passive signals collectors at this point. They're perfect for it, right?

The, the, the design of the light pole has to be powered and now they're solar powered. , it's just perfect for passive signals collection. And so the Chinese are, are masters at collecting, the unique identifiers of your phone that your phone broadcast out all the time. , in China you have to have your ID card on you all the time, no matter who you are.

And there's an R F I D indicator and that there's R F I D indicators and all kinds of ID cards, including some US ID cards now. And these passive signals collectors are just constantly looking out for this information in order to, like you said earlier, Find someone if they need to be found at the last point that they went by a sensor.

My fear is, and, and this is not a fear, it's now we're seeing it happen. In reality, they're exporting these tools to other countries, some of whom are, don't have nefarious intentions for them, but why not have the switch to turn on should you need it? And then others of them are absolutely looking to control populations with them.

And as they continue to export these technologies, they're just going to get the Chinese communi part. China, Chinese Communist Party is just gonna get better and better at it. And then, because they'll always own that data for the most part, even when some of these countries try to fight back against the Chinese taking this data back to China, they're usually failing at that.

They will know more and more about the world. Going back to data as a weapon and data as, , a way to know the future. They will know more and more about the future with those data collection systems. Then we ever will because we just won't do that. At least not as a well. Will they know 

more about the future?

Will they know more about the present? Well, 

they'll certainly the present, right? They'll, they'll know the present for sure. My concern is as you collect data at scale and you aggregate it and you use machine learning and ai, you know, machine learning and AI has tons of foibles. A lot of the ideas about where it's gonna take us right now are probably not correct.

And you know, I think there's a strong argument that we're entering maybe another AI winter right now. I, I think if we are, it'll be short, but we won't go there. , Google will , certainly have something to say about if there'll be an AI winter right now based on the amount of money they're putting to this.

But I think when you look at the way that you can use data to look at past behavior, well humans are creatures of habit and we activity based intelligence. Yes. I was thinking about it when you said that as you start to think about how China can think about that data, look that they can look back into the past and see what the data tells them about the past.

It's almost certainly a good predictor of the future. . 

That last line is where you lost me. So, because I don't think, I, I think that the past is a good predictor of pattern of life intelligence, right? Like, so specifically if I, but it's not a predictor of the future at all to my mind, because favorite things to write about fate and circumstance intervene in our lives in the big picture and we go on different paths.

And so you could, I think I would qualify that if I was to agree or disagree and say some sectors of the, in some sectors of the population, it is predictable, but in others it is not. Y 

Yeah, I'm sure. Maybe a concrete example.  And talking about predicting the future, what, what I see this causing is, We don't even need to continue to focus on the people's Republic of China and the Chinese government because there are plenty of companies that are doing this right now for profit where they will look at the data that represents an indicator of something that's now proven.

  Google searches of covid symptoms was one of my most favorite examples of ways you could use data to predict things or know things that were happening in the present that you could know no other way. Right. Google was proved very good at knowing when the next covid outbreak was gonna happen because people were searching their symptoms in massive amounts of ways.

That's interesting. And so what you know then is there's some other piece of data that's, that probably predates the search of symptoms. I can't postulate what the machine can know. It in retrospect now, in retrospect it can go back and like, okay, we knew that here the symptoms increased because of the searches.

Yes. Is there something that happened before the symptoms that's also in the data? Yes. That machine learning can help us pull out. Yes. And that's what I mean, tell the future. So now they go back and they say, Okay.  Uh, Uighur Citizen X traveled from this gas station to that storefront.

Once he got to that storefront, he met with a dissident leader. That's forbidden. Okay? We tracked the gas station to the storefront. Well, something happened before the gas station. We didn't know what it was until now, but now let's go back and look at that. Okay? Now we found out that he only borrows his neighbor's car when he's gonna go visit the dissonant.

Now we know when he borrows the neighbor's car that that's what he's gonna do in the future. So that's what I mean. 

Yes. When I say in the future, I'm with you. And the reason I'm smiling is because it goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning with the origin story of things, because I'm having a flashback of Bud Wela, the first director of Science and technology for cia.

Age 80 or however old he was describing to me what it was like those first moments to look at the very first photographic images from the very first Corona satellites and exactly that. Of course, they didn't have the guy, you know, at the 7, 11, 10 minutes before because the intervals of the photographs were  different and because they were analog.

But that's exactly how it began. And so what I'm interested in is less than predicting the future, is more understanding how it came to be. Right. And then I think the idea. Predicting the future becomes a big gasp. And maybe just curiosity, because I'm not in the intelligence business and you guys in the intelligence business, it's your job to know what's gonna happen in the, you know, But Okay.

But now we get into, okay, we're smiling, but we should not be smiling. Oh, for sure. 

I, I can see, right? Because unbelievable 

hazard. Yeah. What? But, well, because, and another thing is, is that I know I, I'm, I'm sure we have a similar life experience in what I'm about to say, and you from being an insider at CIA and me, from being an outsider interviewing decades worth of people or people who for decades served the intelligence and military community.

And that is that they're just human. They're just a bunch of guys and women. They're just a bunch of people. There's not, they're not like, I mean, with exception, you know, a few Nobel laureates I have interviewed. Are exceptional in terms of how they think and what they think. But for the most part, it's a bunch of people being like, Okay, we gotta come up with something.

Oh my God, we gotta spy on the Soviet Union. What the hell are we gonna do? Right. . Yes. Yep. So the point being is that people are just human and in the United States tend to solve problems when asked.

Right. And that's where I would agree with you on the private sector where the private sector is really beginning to lead and in many ways is  becoming almost as interesting to me as military intelligence technology because those individuals, when you look at the real technology founders and what they're doing now, they're realizing, they feel like they have a reason.

And what's interesting is that's often led by numbers, by dollars, , whereas military intelligence is led by national security. How will those merge in the coming years? I think we're both 

interested in that. Oh yeah. This is something I think about almost every day  you've opened, , the door, at least a crack, uh, to one of the last topics that I would like to discuss with you.

 You covered, one that I like to bring up and I, I will try to bring up all the time about my, my colleagues and government across the whole of government, but the intelligence and special operations community in particular, and I, I wanna say it as often as I can, for people who don't really understand and haven't had the inside picture, they are just people, right?

They're your neighbors, they're your classmates from college. , they go home and change dirty diapers, just the same as the rest of us. They worry about these problems, they worry about their work and the consequences of it. , and they, for the most part, for the most part, have truly, you know, not only the United States best interest at Har, but humanity's best interest at heart.

That's what I've found anyway.   One of the things we promised to do in this podcast, and I would like to do every single time if I can, is have the difficult conversations that sometimes people don't know how to have .  One of the things you, you wrote about, and, and we, we hit on a couple times as you walked, , through your, your stories here was, , surprise kill, ban.

 This is a really tricky one, I think. For the agency in its current form, Right? Because the agency has a very storied past and it is always trying to almost write its own, present and future. Right now, and this is a tricky one because I think when you write history and you tell the stories of, um, Billy Wa and, and the folks from Max h v and, and some of the things I had to do, uh, and then you fast forward to Afghanistan, and this is where I'm finding myself knowledgeable about a topic, maybe the only one  that we'd really discuss that I feel like I have, , some command of,  you reference a source in one of your books that comes back from Afghanistan and has a sniper rifle,  and a knife, 

and some of us will hear that, who know these stories quite well and the. We'll look at that individual two ways, right? Here's, here's an opportunity for him to tell some of his stories. And we all tell stories slightly differently than we might maybe would if we heard the story and then we're able to tell it.

, or some people just for whatever reason decide to tell a story the way that they would like themselves to be viewed. And I picked this one in particular because when I thought about, , him talking about, , killing someone silently with a knife, I think a good number of us would look at an indivi individual like that if we were there for that particular retelling of the story and say, That's not how it is in those locations anymore.

 We would judge that person I think. To a certain degree. Now it will be quite comical should I know that person and I have not judged them and I'm not asking for who that person is. And, and, and I wouldn't. But when I hear that, it, it, it brings me to a point where I wanna ask, like when you, when you get that information from a source and you don't necessarily have 12 people to interview at that time and say, does that perspective represent your perspective?

 What gives you the confidence to, maybe confidence is not the right word. How, what does it make you feel when you have to rely on that person's story to sort of be the story for the whole thing? 

Mm-hmm. . No, it's okay. Great. But I have two clarify two things for me. One, are you saying that you might not believe what the source said is true, and two, are you saying that you, your perspective is that I should have someone else corroborate.

An individual sources statements, and I mean, this's just earnestly for clarification, and I'm gonna speak to both of 'em. So 

I, the first thing, going with the latter first, because that's the easy one. I don't think I would, I would not, by any means attempt to, tell you how to do that portion of your job.

I've never been an investigative reporter, and I certainly can slightly glean the challenge of being an guest, investigative reporter into a secret domain. A corroborative source would be great. I'm sure anytime you can get it. But how many can you actually get in this, in this realm?

It's tricky. So not that, no, I don't know necessarily that, it's not that I don't believe him, like there's it's warfare. , there's lots of ways you conduct warfare and, , unfortunately there's lots of ways to kill a person. It's more the way. He conveyed it. Okay. Whether or not he did 

it or not. Okay. So two things to say about that.

One, remember, I'm an outsider, okay? So I have no horse in the race. I don't need to make CIA look good or bad. I don't need to make DARPA look good or bad. I totally, I try to keep my opinions about things to myself. I've written a, you know, I won't digress there, Okay? I heard on your podcast another a colleague speaking who I respect, , but he said something that made me smile because I, in my experience, I know a different story, right?

Mm-hmm. , he said you, and I'm paraphrasing him. You have to understand, Ev people have this idea about cia, that it's guys running around doing rogue things. We write everything. , everything is paper. Sure. And I thought, Hmm. Well that's interesting because I have an on the record, and again, not to defy this fellow, but just to un, this is what it is, being an outsider.

Right. I have an on the record interview with CO for Black who is second only to the director of CIA telling me, quote unquote, that he used to give everything to Billy Wall verbally. It was never written down. And the point he was making was a little bit snarky with me. I quote him directly in the book, something like, Annie, you have no idea.

You know, because everything that really mattered only got spoken between me and Billy. .  , of course we don't write everything down, which I know to be true from 10 other CIA guys I've interviewed who many of whom have now died.

But people like Bob Whelan, people who are major players, So there's no such thing as everything is true. Which kind of also speaks to the critics because most of my critics are like, She is ridiculous. That never dot, dot, dot. Well, show me of that. Never. Right? It's just, that's just in my opinion, a little myopic.

Right. But I want, what I wanna say about that source is that, first of all, two things. One, no one has any idea what I don't write in my books and the things I don't write in my books are what sources say to me. Annie, I'm gonna tell you something about me. About me, and this is called. Right. This is because what matters most to me, and at the end of my life when I go to the grave and look back at my books, I want to know that I represented the best I could.

The people who trusted me with their life story, their heroics, their failures, and everything in between. Mm-hmm. . And they, almost everyone who has really meant something to me that I have worked with as a source over long periods of time, has taken me to the side with no recorder running, no one listening and told me one or two or 10 incredibly painful things about themselves, things that I relate to, and things that make me a better person because guess what?

I'm not perfect and neither are you and neither are they. And they are just another human being, like you said in the lead in question to here, trying to do what they think is the right. Okay. Cause I don't write about villains. I write about villains in the third person. And so to answer your question about the fellow in my living room, he's a trusted source.

I've known him longer than any other, almost any other source. I knew him back when he was a federal agent, and so I know. 

Period. Yeah. And I, so it's an interesting,  way to have this conversation, right? Because I, wouldn't call into question what he did or what he didn't do, , because I don't know,  and I can certainly see where opportunities would present itself, , to conduct yourself in, in that way, it was more the, the, the manner, , that it was conveyed.

And not because I agree or disagree with. What was being discussed? I mean, you can see like I'm even having trouble, , saying it out loud as I try to navigate the, the hazards of my, , . But 

look, you know what I think you're touching upon? I think what you're really touching upon is the second part of that I reported in there, right?

And I think this is true of all of us as humans, because what I said at the end of that story, and to me it doesn't really matter how I reported the story, what you know, I mean it, what matters is what I felt in terms of my own hypocrisy at the end of that experience, which is that later that night I sat around go feeling funny that I could accept him shooting someone from a distance.

Mm-hmm. . But I had trouble thinking about someone who I know trusted care about. Stabbing someone to death. Yeah. That just freaked me out. Yeah. I'm not a war fighter. Yeah. I, I am Annie Jacobson, a journalist who sits at home and writes and interviews people out in the field. And the thought that really got me in the gut, no pun intended, and it really made me think about hypocrisy, about perception, about morality, about, And I think that's when I really think about it.

And that's, I just wanna be a better storyteller. Meaning I wanna tell, get more at a certain truth. And you're never gonna please everybody. So just pretend that 50% of the people are gonna dislike you and 50% of 'em are gonna like you. But I know for my own self I wanna get at, you know, it's, every book I write is a, is every book you read is a mirror at you.

So I think that bothered you cuz it probably bothers, There's probably something about your own self that you will advance. One of two things will happen to you. You'll either advance your thinking and become more evolved or more thoughtful because of it, or you'll become a dumb critic. Oh, I 

a hundred percent you're correct.

And I mean, you, you're talking about you not having been a war fighter, but yet that makes you squeamish. And again,  I've been in and around combat, but I've never been in a combat situation. I've never been,  in Firefi, you know, even though  I trained  and probably have that mindset still operational in there, and it gives me, , pause, , to think that through.

That's certainly one piece and a hundred, there's no question. A hundred percent. That's right. The second one is also this, , this feeling that I have about that community, which I feel I, I owe something. I do, I don't feel I owe something to that community, especially that I've chosen to have a public voice on this.

And on this one in particular, I wanted to make sure we discussed it. And I, and I love the way you're discussing it because I think we're getting at it, is the other picture that, that paints, , to a lot of folks who. Know any better right? Is of an organization that's out there with, with kill squads, across the world, , potentially  in large numbers.

And, and how much is that representative of a greater organization? And this is where I'm happy to reveal my inside information on this, and say that that's, that's just not the case, that that exists. And even if the in there's history, , to point to where it did and, and there's no question, , you have the history down way better embarrassingly so, uh, better than me, but in the part that I know, not because it was history, but because mm-hmm.

I lived it, it just doesn't 

exist like that. When you live something you have your individual experience. True. When you're a historian slash investigative journalist, you have the entire broad perspective of it. So I rarely have judgment on a lot of the things I'm writing about, particularly if they're from the Korean War, for example.

Sure. Right. Yeah. But. You are called to count with your own internal moral scale sometimes, and that's where I think it becomes really interesting. And I also think you're gonna open yourself up to criticism with it and you have to really not care at a point because, Because what I'm more interested in is what I want.

The reason why I use that as a prologue in Surprise Kill Vanish is because I wanted people to be able to think precisely about what you're saying. Like, why is it okay to perceive the Jedberg, the OSS Jedberg who, who killed Nazis with knives as fantastic, and let's see some more movies about them and somehow think it's ro, it's Toxic Masculinity, or whatever the buzzword is of today, which I find ridiculous for some guy in Afghanistan to ju you know, risk his life, jump out of a aircraft and go kill someone at the president's behest.

Why is that wrong? Why is it better to drone strike someone? I don't have the answer. You can tell from how heated I get that I obviously recognize that these things are really complex, right? And if you're gonna just send out a simple tweet that says like, men are terrible, you know, you're just not my reader.

Now that, that, that's, it makes total sense. And I should definitely make sure that I, I hit this one too.  I don't think killing someone with a knife in Afghanistan, if you found yourself in a position where that was the way that you needed to do it and, and you, you had to do it in order to either preserve your life, accomplish the thing you were trying to do, or protect somebody else.

No question. Not wrong.  In my opinion, and absolutely legitimate way to get that done if it needs to be done. I wouldn't disagree there at all. , and certainly that's happened. I don't know, I don't have an example of that and I'm not revealing some incident that I'm aware of. But my, my gut tells me that, That has happened.

 I think it's incredibly rare for lots of reasons that we could do a whole nother podcast on World War I experiments abound on this in the trenches, but it, it was more, I wanted to get there and I think I got there a little bit slab cuz I don't have as much practice at this. , just wanting to get out there that even if that did happen, and I, and I presume that it did, I'm not judging the source.

It isn't representative of 99% of CIA operations at this point in time. Which I have certainty of. Like, I, I know this for , a fact. I'm making up the percentage. I don't, I have to do some math I actually figured out and I just wanted people to know that, at least from me, even if we disagreed. And we can certainly, , disagree on that one.

Maybe another time because I, I know we're, I've, I've got you up against the clock here and I wanna ask you one more, , thing  and totally pivot from this  I wanted to end on a totally different note and see if we can't just take a shot at some optimism that you might feel, , for the world.

Because I mean, we went deep into the bus optimism two sounds. I am an optimist at heart. So if you're, if you're looking at the world right now and you're looking at all these technologies, it could be the technologies, it could be the, the way that,  world is shaping up in, in other ways. What gives you hope?

What, what makes you feel optimistic right now? Is it one of these brilliant inventions will bring the cure to cancer, or do you think that, at some point we'll design a mm-hmm. , a war fighting technology that will  caused peace to break out across the world

I think because I am a narrative storyteller at heart, I would have to say it has to do with. Information. Right. The kind of information that, , advances, thinking, advances, ideas, takes people into a place that they couldn't have possibly imagined, Right? And what comes to mind  particularly when I hear on the pessimistic side of that,  social media is ruining children, et cetera, et cetera.

Right? I just, I don't think that way at all. Mm. And I think what I think about is, More like someone like James Burke, the British science historian, talking about the advent of the printing press and how people went crazy when it was invented. Because before that, only the, the, you know, the clergy knew how to read and only, and therefore the clergy could give the people the information, you know, stove piped in the manner that they would, that they needed to be good and moral.

I mean, you get the idea here. It's like, Oh my God, you're just depriving. We the masses of the ability to think and grow and learn and prosper as individuals, and that is what I care about and I don't care what century we are in. It doesn't change. It comes to me through information. It used to be storytelling, now it's reading.

I resisted reading my own books because I thought people should be reading. I was a bit like the, the old clergy saying that, you know, I read my, my books on tape outperform, my actual paper copies sold because people like to listen. They're getting information. I think we're at the hopeful thing is that we're in this real, , sea change literally of how people deal with all this technology at their fingertips and it will only get better and more exciting.

I love it. That was perfect.  I would've given that, that to you written down if I could have That's exactly, where I wanted to go. Annie, this has been a fantastic conversation.  

I wanna thank you for coming. Is there any, any hint that you can give about the upcoming book? I know you probably got all kinds of. Legal, it's about 

nuclear war and it scares even me. 

Well, , you hit the current affairs button right on the head.  With that, maybe I should have asked for that hit,  earlier, but that I, I, I'll look forward to that and, uh, we'll all pray that you don't get,  scooped by some crazy event in the world here.

 But thank you very much for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure  thank you so 

much 

for having me.