Annie Jacobsen

The conversation opens with Joe Rogan describing Annie Jacobsen's new subject, biological war, as possibly grimmer than her previous one, nuclear war, because a nuclear strike at least ends things "in the flash." Rogan recalls an episode of his sci-fi network show, Joe Rogan Questions Everything, in which a scientist who had worked for Russia during the Cold War described huge stockpiles of anthrax. Rogan remembers the man describing "giant vats of anthrax, like enough to kill everyone in New York City." Jacobsen asks whether this was Ken Alibak (as the name appears in the transcript). She notes that several Russian defector scientists came to the United States and described Soviet work involving "tons of anthrax and plague." Plague is also the pathogen she uses in the scenario she writes.

The first disagreement is over what the real threat is. Rogan says a different, American scientist on that show was not mainly worried about genetically engineered viruses. That scientist thought natural viruses were "just as scary as anything that's out there." Jacobsen pushes back. She says the claim that Mother Nature is just as powerful is "actually not true," because genetic modification can make a pathogen more virulent and more transmissible, and can help it "defeat existing vaccines and antibiotics."

Later she backs this up with pneumonic plague, which she writes about in Biological War. By her account, the natural form has a 100% case fatality rate untreated. If antibiotics are given within 24 hours, the rate is about 15%. Her worry is that gain-of-function techniques could "outfox antibiotics," turning a disease that used to be curable into one with "no cure." She calls this "the threat level we're dealing with."

The discussion turns to the congressional hearings with Anthony Fauci, which both speakers say are happening at the time of recording. Rogan says Fauci is "pleading the fifth about everything, including the color of his tie," which is clearly hyperbole. Jacobsen says she found it "really unfortunate" that Fauci took the fifth the day before, because she wants to hear the truth. Rogan replies that Fauci would "obfuscate and dance around it" regardless. Jacobsen argues that COVID "absolutely could have been this incredible lesson," and finds it remarkable that, despite all the resources of national security, the virus's origin is still "allegedly" unknown.

Jacobsen explains how her book handles COVID. She leaves its origin largely out, using the pandemic as a metaphor that "underpins the narrative." She did this on purpose, hoping readers would come away thinking differently about COVID. She says every subject-matter expert she spoke with encouraged her to state that it was "almost certainly" a lab leak. Her phrase "we still don't know" is therefore meant in scare quotes. Her point is that the public answer seems to rest on Fauci, who she says "had reasons to mislead us," judging from what has been released. She does not name the specific documents in this part of the conversation.

Rogan adds that scientists who examined the virus early on said there were signs it had been manipulated. He says they were public about it at first and then "changed their tune." His explanation is professional pressure. Medical researchers facing high malpractice insurance costs and heavy student debt, he argues, would not risk careers built over "20, 30, whatever years" by contradicting someone with the power to "make or break careers." He offers this as his reading of people's motives and gives no specific cases.

most of the people I talk to said gain of function is a euphemism for biological weapons engineering.

Jacobsen says much of this research is funded by the military. She also says the people she relies on have worked under administrations of both parties and are, in her words, people without a financial stake. She adds that Barack Obama stopped gain-of-function research, also called dual-use research of concern, while in office, and calls that "very wise." She says she is confused that the issue later became partisan, with only one side of the aisle taking it up.

She describes a contradiction in the stated purpose of the research. Gain-of-function work is justified as a route to cures, but the method requires making a pathogen more virulent or more transmissible, for example "airborne that wasn't airborne," and showing "that it could cause a pandemic." She says this framing appears often "in the literature." Rogan interjects that "they didn't have any cures." Jacobsen calls the logic "a catch-22 that's incredibly dangerous."

we have to actually make a weapon to be able to defeat a weapon. That's actually what is being said.

Both speakers dismiss the official resistance to the lab-leak theory. Rogan points out that a lab sat right where the outbreak began, and mentions Jon Stewart's comedy bit on Stephen Colbert's show about the Wuhan Institute. Jacobsen says the deeper problem is that people stop forming opinions "based on the facts in front of them" when doing so would be unpopular with their friends. Rogan attributes this to party and ideology: "you're with the team or you're not with the team."

Rogan raises the debate over whether Lyme disease was engineered and says "there's a lot of evidence that points to the fact that it was." His main reason is the Plum Island laboratory, which he places "right off the coast of Lyme, Connecticut," where he says the disease was first named in "the 1970s or whatever it was." He describes research on infecting ticks with diseases and dropping them from airplanes to overwhelm local medical systems and leave an enemy without "an effective fighting force." These are Rogan's claims. He cites no specific documents or evidence here, and Jacobsen does not respond to the Lyme claim directly.

Jacobsen suggests the reasoning is again "we need to create a countermeasure, but first we need to create the weapon." Rogan doubts the planning is that deliberate, saying "I'm just guessing." His theory is that researchers want grants and funding, others profit from building labs, and military officials want military applications, so they help it along. In his view, these groups pursue "their own short-term benefits" without thinking about how it might play out.

Jacobsen asks Rogan whether he knows COVID's case fatality rate, which she defines as how many of 100 people who get COVID die. She says it is one in 100, about 1%, and calls it a CDC and even Defense Department statistic. Rogan says he thought it was much lower. Jacobsen qualifies her figure: it counts people who showed symptoms, and many people who had COVID never did. She says her father and one of her two sons both tested positive with no symptoms.

Rogan counters that the PCR test was "not designed for testing" active disease, and asserts that false positives were "somewhere in the 80%." Jacobsen replies "Huge, huge." She then reframes the exchange around what she calls "the most important point about biology": there is "so much uncertainty." Two people can carry the same pathogen with very different outcomes because their immune systems and physiology differ. She argues that public health officials should have built that uncertainty into how they spoke, but instead acted "with this crazy certainty, which is bogus."

Rogan puts the false certainty down to profit. He says there was money in promoting "one very particular treatment," and sarcastically remarks that the push was for public health even though companies stood to make "hundreds of billions of dollars." He then reads a figure of 0.1%, described as "a fraction of the 1% estimated earlier in the pandemic," and says it matches his belief. His reasoning: with about 300 million people, a 1% rate would mean 3 million deaths, "because most people caught COVID." Jacobsen notes that the CDC still says 1%. Rogan replies, "I think they're full of shit." The disagreement is left unresolved. Both figures are reported in the conversation, but neither speaker settles which population each applies to.

Rogan calls the pandemic response "indefensible," citing lockdowns, keeping children out of school and masking. He criticizes mainstream outlets for barely covering the Fauci hearings. He describes a CNN panel arguing that Americans do not care about what happened five years ago. In reply, he says Fauci received a 10-year blanket immunity covering possible crimes "when he wasn't convicted of any crimes," which Rogan calls an unprecedented pardon. He calls any outlet that treats the hearings as non-news "a propaganda arm" for its pharmaceutical advertisers. He lists the people he says were harmed: those who lost jobs, who had to be vaccinated to keep working and got sick from it, who could not fly or travel, and who were called "plague rats" for asking questions. He insists the news can "look at everything" and should not decide what audiences focus on.

Jacobsen offers a different reading. She thinks the lack of coverage makes people "more curious" and pushes them toward other sources. She also says some groups of people publicly "tow the party line" while holding different private opinions, and she distances herself from that, noting that Rogan does not know her politics. She calls that split especially troubling in Fauci, a public health official who she says was "speaking out of one side of his mouth and writing in his journal another thing that he really thinks."

She returns to her earlier question: why is Fauci treated as "allegedly the only one" who can explain the Wuhan lab? She asks where the CIA, the ODNI and the Defense Department are. Her reasoning is that "If Fauci had it, they had it," and she asks why those agencies are not making the information public. Rogan calls it "a very good question."

Asked why she chose biological war, Jacobsen says her first six books were written in the past tense, including works on the Nazi scientists who came to America, Area 51 and the Pentagon's brain. Her books on nuclear war and biological war are set in the future, as scenarios based on Pentagon war games. She says she moved to that format after realizing that existential threats are "speeding up at the rate of science." She got access to people who run these games at the Pentagon and found that "people are preparing for the worst case scenario. And no one knows about it."

Rogan asks whether that preparation is simply their job. Jacobsen agrees it is, but asks "are you preparing by creating it?" This ties the book's premise back to the earlier gain-of-function argument. She says her motive was mostly curiosity about how such preparation actually plays out.

She contrasts this with what she found while researching nuclear war: there was effectively no plan for the aftermath. She attributes that conclusion to a FEMA director she spoke with.

There is no population protection planning after a nuclear strike because everyone's dead.

This part of the conversation opens with a leftover from the nuclear discussion. Someone Jacobsen spoke to had pointed to Pedialyte as a preparedness item, and that told her that for nuclear war, planners think "It's just lights out." Asked why Pedialyte, she admits she never asked: "I should have done a follow-up question." Her guess is the electrolytes and hydration, which she compares to giving it to babies with diarrhea and calls "better than water." Iodine also comes up, framed as what people usually tell you to take. Nobody explains whether Pedialyte would actually protect anyone, so this stays an anecdote rather than evidence.

Jacobsen says bioweapons are "completely different animal". Disease is not what officials fear most. The bigger worry is how society reacts to it. She says this surprised her. Her earlier books on the Defense Department and the CIA covered programs that are structured and ordered and that run overseas. The plans in this book play out in the continental United States. In the book's third act, the Insurrection Act is declared, Posse Comitatus is lifted (the transcript renders it "Posseicomatotis"), and the military takes over.