#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Annie Jacobsen, an investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and author of several amazing books on war, weapons, government secrecy, and national security, including the books titled Area 51, Operation Paperclip, The Pentagon's Brain, Phenomena, Surprise Kill Vanish, and her new book, Nuclear War. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is the best way to support this podcast. We got Hidden Layer for securing your neural networks, as one must. BetterHelp for securing your mind. Policy Genius for securing your insurance on all fronts. And NetSuite for securing the awesomeness of your business. See what I did there? Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, including to work with our amazing team, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but friends, if you skip them, if you must, I shall forgive you in this life or the next. Both, this life and the next, I will forgive you. But you should still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Hidden Layer, a platform that provides security for your machine learning models. This episode with Annie Jacobsen is terrifying on many fronts. It's terrifying because you get to see just how close we are to the brink of self-destruction, just how few people are involved in saying, yes, launch nuclear war, just how easy it is for little mistakes, little misunderstandings to lead to nuclear war. And on this point of hidden layer of cyber security, just how easy it is to hack a system that creates misinformation that results in nuclear war. Cyber security, the attack on the defense, is really the story of the 21st century. This is where the battles will be fought. This is where suffering might be created or alleviated or prevented. So this is a really, really, really important field. And it's not talked about enough. There's a sexy field of sort of AI safety where you talk about the existential risk, the ethical risk, all of that kind of stuff of artificial intelligence as it becomes smarter and smarter and smarter. But sometimes it's the stupid stuff. It's the vulnerabilities. The stupid stuff is not the so stupid stuff. It's the basic capacity of an intelligence system to be hacked. So I'm a really big fan of Hidden Layer doing this kind of work of helping businesses figure out which are the secure models, which are not, which are the basic steps to take the low hanging fruit of it all. Visit hiddenlayer.com/lex to learn more about how Hidden Layer can accelerate your AI adoption in a secure way. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P help. This is about securing your mind. I've been getting attacked more and more on the internet, such as the way of the internet, friends. But it's important to figure out systems for yourself. This is in your own private life, even when just getting bullied in school by a few people. First of all, you should learn how to fight, how to do jiu-jitsu, how to strike, all those kinds of things. But that's besides the point. But the big thing you should learn to prepare yourself for the world is how to secure your mind in a way that doesn't callus it, make it cynical or make it unable to feel the beauty and the pain of the world, and yet make it so it doesn't descend in the depths of darkness as the human mind can. Talk therapy can help with this. BetterHelp is one of my favorite things because of just how easy it is to do. It's available everywhere. They have helped millions of people. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by PolicyGenius, a marketplace for insurance, all kinds of insurance, life, auto, home, disability, all of that, and it gives you really nice tools for comparison. I'm a huge fan of tools for comparing stuff whenever I'm shopping for anything, whenever I'm researching anything. I would love it if there's a pros and cons thing for every idea in the world. There's really nice pros and cons websites for very heated political topics, very popular political topics, but I would love it if there was that pros and cons analysis and ratings and all that stuff for very nuanced conversations. In general, there's also places, I think it's called like manifold markets where you can bet on the outcome of different ideas. It's a pretty cool way to explore different possibilities about the future, but also to in so doing to debate different topics. I love it. So whenever somebody does that kind of thing well, and Policy Genius does it well, the comparison, I really celebrate it. You should go check it out. With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. Head to policygenius.com/lex, or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com/lex.