Annie Jacobsen

Like skin of a deceased person?

That's really frightening.

Probably not.

And what's even more remarkable to me about that is that's Japan.

And Japan follows treaties and rules about human testing and whatnot.

And imagine what is going on in countries that don't adhere to those treaties.

They're there for the CCP.

Which is where you get that chicken and egg paradox that we talked about earlier having to do with strong defense, your theory of the military-industrial complex.

Well, you have adversaries and enemies who not only benefit from intellectual property theft, they steal the technology that our R&D has spent decades working on and developing.

They just take that so they begin –

With almost no cost.

And then they don't have the same set of rules.

So they can advance technology, usually in a weapons environment.

And that is always the argument, at least to the people I talk to in the, air quotes, military-industrial complex, for why strong defense is so necessary, why we must constantly be pushing the envelope.

And it's hard to wrap your brain around that

in a balance of, well, what makes the most sense and how are we not going down a path that is leading toward this dystopian future we've been talking about?

You know, I interviewed just three days ago a woman named Setsuko Thurlow who lived through the Hiroshima bombing.

She was 13 years old.

I write about her in Chapter 2 of this book.

She's called The Girl in the Rubble.