#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
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The following is a conversation with Annie Jacobson, 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? She was wise, my friends.
Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, including to work with our amazing team, go to lexfreeman.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 Andy Jacobson 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 cybersecurity, just how easy it is to hack a system that creates misinformation that results in nuclear war.
Cybersecurity, the attack and the defense is really the story of the 21st century. This is where the battles will be fought. This is where suffering may be created or alleviated or prevented. So this is a really, really, really important field, and it's not talked about enough. There's this sexy field of sort of AI safety where you talk about kind of 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 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 is the way of the internet, friends. But it's important to figure out systems for yourself. This isn't your own private life, even with 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 of 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 callous 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've helped millions of people.
Check them out at betterhelp.com slash flex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash flex. This episode is also brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for insurance, all kinds of insurance, life, auto, home, disability, all of that, and it gives you really nice tools for comparison.
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