Joe Rogan | The Nazi's Almost Took Over the World w/Annie Jacobsen

When you were done with the Paperclip book and you know you published it and you have to live with all the information that you had to gather and run through your mind, did that book, was that the book, did that change you, that book? Like was it the most altering of the different subjects that you covered? I mean each book has a huge impact for different reasons, but when I think of Paperclip I think of this one saying that was over the gates at Buchenwald and it said, Yaddam das Zayna. And what that means is everyone gets what they deserve. And that was horrible and I still think about that because it's such a piece of Nazi propaganda. It was like saying to the Jews, you guys deserve this. And so I know much of my reporting and my generalist way of being as a human is there's no such thing as what you deserve, right? There's what happens, there's what you do, there's what you're responsible for and there's what you can change. But that idea is reprehensible. For some reason that really stuck with me as just the worst possible thing that I could think of. Jesus. Because it's the psychology behind why they did what they did. Yes. Right? The weird thing is that that was less than 100 years ago. That seems like that should have been something that took place. If you hear about the Inquisition you go, okay, well that makes people didn't know any better back then. But 1945 is not that long ago. It's just not. I mean people just read and read and read about World War II for good reason, you know? And everything I write starts, it all goes back to the Nazis. In every book, the trail, the paper trail at the National Archives or individual university libraries and people's papers where I go, they all refer back to that because it was so remarkable that the Nazis led in weapons technology and they almost took over the world because of it, right? And that is the premise of all of this. I mean in Surprise Kill Vanish it's like these are the guys on the ground. In the Pentagon's brain it's this is the technology in the sky. But we must, we, the government's position, whether it's Pentagon, CIA, is always we have to stay ahead because the next Nazi Germany is right around the corner. And that's really something to think about. Is that alarmist? I don't think it is. History repeats itself. If we went and stopped and looked at all the instances throughout history of people being evil dictators, there's quite a few. And there's, you know, we could look at North Korea right now and that guy assassinated his own uncle, right? With a, what was that, with a missile coming out of a helicopter I think. Put him in a field. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's straight up messaging. Yeah. Right? Which is, another thing I think is interesting about the CIA's paramilitary program. It's all meant to remain plausibly deniable. It's supposed to be secret. Like we're not supposed to be giving out the message that we have these teams, you know, that go after high value targets. They're just supposed to disappear. That's the vanish part of the, so that, and that as someone who is really interested in transparency and people being educated and having information, that always puts me in conflict with, you know, the government in essence, because I'm like, we should know. But then you think about it, well, the whole thing is you were not supposed to know because it's supposed to be just the hidden hand, the president's hidden hand they call it. What has to be this distinction that they have the ability to break the rules because it's how they protect us. I mean that's the rub, right? And the stories we hear are often the failures because those are the ones that get reported in the press. And that makes sense undergirding this narrative, which I really like and am interested in and intrigued by is that the successful operations you don't hear about because they are plausibly denied. Right. Yeah, there's got to be a ton of them that went through that you don't hear nothing about. And your kids will hear about it. Well, maybe. When you think about protecting us from something like another Nazi Germany, that's when people are willing to give up some of their freedoms. They're willing to give up surveillance. They're willing to give up, and this is where things get real slippery, right? I mean, also when you think about Russia, because all of this cold war, science, technology, operations, all of that was to beat back the Russians, okay? Then the Russians go away and now they're back. The Russians are the master assassins, and they do it through poisoning. I mean, look at Skirpal, right? I write in the book about a defector who came over in the 50s and said, I was an assassin for the KGB and gave us all kinds of information. It's fascinating to look at those documents and realize like, this is how it works. This is how it worked 60 years ago. And then you kind of see echoes of that of how it's working today, and you can only imagine the defectors or those who come over from the other side who we learn from, and they just disappear. They disappear as sort of the CIA's version of witness protection.