Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2174 - Annie Jacobsen
Uploaded: 2024-07-10T17:00:16.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2174 - Annie Jacobsen' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-07-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2174 - Annie Jacobsen' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-07-10. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2174 - Annie Jacobsen

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Showing by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Good to see you again.
Hi, Joe.
What's happening?
Thanks for having me back.
A lot's happening.
My pleasure.
I've heard a lot about your book.
I haven't read it, but I've heard a lot about your book from a lot of people
that you freaked
out.
Okay.
Well, hopefully you can read it and then you can decide if you're of the
freaked out
crowd or of the really freaked out crowd.
Oh, there's only two options.
I think so.
It doesn't end well.
That's the spoiler alert.
Okay.
Hold the book up.
It's called Nuclear War.
Yeah.
What motivated you?
Nuclear War, a scenario.
And a very plausible scenario from what I understand from all the defense
officials I interviewed.
What motivated you to write this?
Well, six previous books on war weapons, U.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.
Jesus.
You begin to realize when you, well, you quickly realize as you read the book
that, you know, there are-
Jamie, your mic's on or something?
Something just made a weird noise.
Oh, yeah.
It's Carl.
I was like, what's going on?
It's the animal humor in the difficult subject.
You know, there's, you know, literally hundreds of thousands of people in
nuclear command and
control who practice 24-7, 365 what would happen if deterrence failed and we
had a nuclear war.
They are practicing this, Joe.
And it's like, talk about being behind the veil.
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.
Yeah.
All that's nonsense.
These people think like Zuckerberg is building a bunker in Hawaii.
He's going to survive.
He's building a hurricane shelter.
Yeah.
And also-
Even that might work.
Unless he happened to be there in the exact moment when all of this went down.
Yeah.
You'd have to know in advance that we're about to launch.
The whole thing is terrifying.
It's also- I don't see a way that it- like if you think about the timeline
between 1945
and today, it's kind of extraordinary that no one has launched a nuke.
No one's- but it almost seems like a matter of time.
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.
Like until- but when?
And now?
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.
We are hunter-gatherers again.
In the words of Carl Sagan, who is the author of Nuclear Winter.
But I think what's also crazy, to your point about 1945, is like when this was
all set up,
when the nuclear arsenals were beginning, and I take the reader through it
really quickly
because I want them to just get to what happens at nuclear launch.
I mean, the book is really about nuclear launch to nuclear winter.
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.
And when you say the systems are the same, what do you mean exactly?
So the system of nuclear war, this idea that, well, okay, so let's start with
some basic
facts, there's a nuclear triad.
You know what that, okay, 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 counter-attack,
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.
Jesus.
And they're all pointed?
Are they all, do they need a coordinate?
Do they need, or are they all, like, aimed at a specific area already?
Important question.
They're technically targeted to sea, out at sea.
So they don't have a specific target.
But when the command goes.
So is that if they accidentally go off?
Go to the sea?
Jesus Christ.
Imagine you're out there on a sailboat.
Just enjoying your time.
What a beautiful place to be in the middle of the ocean.
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?
You know, I actually haven't done a lot of research on that specific narrative.
I know of it.
I know of it for sure.
And it's, I think, I mean, I always approach the UFO phenomena with, or I try
to at least, with like the eye of, or the point of view of Carl Jung.
This idea that it's, this idea that it's, that what leads here is our
perception of things and our sort of deep shadow self of fear.
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.
Jesus.
And so the order of magnitude of destruction, of, in an instant, according to
Carl Jung, who looked at the UFO phenomena and the nuclear weapons phenomena,
hand in hand, encourage anyone to read his stuff about it.
Because he has a much sort of, you know, bird's eye view of it all about why
that's so terrifying to people.
So the narratives, to my eye, the narratives of nuclear, of, you know, alien
ships hovering over nuclear bases, I don't, I have never spoken to a firsthand
witness who experienced that.
But I would, I would see that in terms of the narrative of Carl Jung.
So Carl Jung's perception was that he believed that it was essentially people
perceiving these things or hallucinating these things.
And it was a, like, almost like a mass hallucination.
Part of the.
I don't know if he went that far.
I think he left a lot more open to interpretation.
I think his, my read of his analogy was more like the way that hundreds of
years ago or thousands of years ago when Christianity was first being developed,
people saw existential threats as part of the narrative of God.
So his, my read of Carl Jung is that he's saying now in the mechanized modern
world, the existential threats, the sort of damnation is tied to machines,
which is tied to, you know, is easily tied to little machines from, or big
machines from outer space.
That was his take on it, which I think is interesting.
It's interesting, but also Jung wrote this when?
The 60s.
The 60s?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I think we know a lot more now than we knew then.
I mean, this, like, the way I, 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.
That is, that is an interesting narrative, too.
And that sort of, but again, that's a bit, to my eye, like the deus ex machina
idea, that God would intervene and, you know, save the, save the faithful and,
or rather the, you know, in this situation, it might be that, that he's going
to save those people that are paying attention.
Hmm.
Well, just save the human race from its folly.
What is Carl doing, bro?
You can't let that little fucker roll around.
I think Carl likes my shoes.
Oh, yeah.
He likes to play.
Carl didn't get enough exercise this morning.
Marshall wasn't here.
He's not worn out yet.
So, the young thing is interesting, but, like, we know more now.
We know more now about possible other dimensions that we can't access.
We know more now about planets in the Goldilocks zone.
We know more now about all of these whistleblowers that have come out and
talked about crashed retrieving programs where they're re-engineering, back-engineering
these things and trying to understand what these things are.
And Diana Posolka'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.
So, like, that's one of the only ways that I see, like, if we did get to a
point that we launched nuclear weapons at each other, everything is over so
fast.
And 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, you know, it's going to wipe out who knows how many different species.
I mean, it's, it's going to kill everything.
And even the people that are left over, what are you left with?
Any, whatever, two billion people that still survive, where and what?
What do you have left?
What is the environment like?
Like, how polluted is everything?
How, what kind of mutations are going to come from their offspring?
I get into that in the end of the book.
So I write the book in essentially three acts, like the first 24 minutes, the
next 24 minutes, the last 24 minutes, and then nuclear winter.
So nuclear winter is very well described by a fellow called Professor Brian Toon,
who I interview in the book.
He was one of the original five authors of, do you remember the nuclear winter
theory of our sort of high school years?
Yes.
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 paw-pawed 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, 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...
Right, but hunting an