0:00:00 - 0:00:21 So I wanted to share some thoughts about one of many things that would probably happen before any kind of invasion of the United States. And I sure hope that I'm not gonna say anything in this video that gets me a knock on the door or black helicopters flying around my house. Uh I think everything that 0:00:21 - 0:00:46 I'm going to say is public information. So that's good. And obviously, I don't want anyone to do things like this. This is all about helping folks prepare for anything in the event that that this or something like it happens. So my, my purpose in this is not just to talk about the specific example, but 0:00:46 - 0:01:06 actually more than that to share some general principles that are tools that you can apply to any situation. It gives you a much better grasp on P Act uh accurately predicting the future. And uh I'm gonna try to extract those and share those in a way where we don't have to talk about where they come 0:01:05 - 0:01:31 from or go into the depths of uh what would be far too complicated of topics to convey in a quick, quick and easy way. So the first principle is that when predicting the future, people have much higher expectations of the past repeating, then they should now, obviously, the only thing you have to go 0:01:31 - 0:01:52 off of really is the past in forming a model of the future. However, you need to pay attention to things that happened in recent history and use an awful lot of common sense to put all this together in a way that that is as accurate as possible. The fact is that an invasion of the United States would 0:01:52 - 0:02:15 be like anything ever seen. And one of the reasons for this is, is that, and I've spoken about this before, the Chinese culture and strategy. It, it's very different than what we're used to. It's a very different culture. The Russians are also very different than people in the United States and the kinds 0:02:15 - 0:02:38 of people that the US military is used to fighting. And so one aspect of any kind of activity that comes from them is that it will be uh unexpected. It, it won't fit the pattern of the things that have happened before. And also for reasons I've spoken about before. China has every reason in the world 0:02:37 - 0:03:03 to make this as subtle as possible. It's not the shock and awe, a shock and awe all at once attack. They will maximize unconventional warfare as much as they can and attacking in ways that can't be traced back to them. In fact, they will be so subtle that the lead up to the invasion will be invisible 0:03:02 - 0:03:23 to untrained eyes. And this might seem like quite a claim. But actually, it's an easy one to make because it's already happening. And again, in, in another video, I I spoke about this with the weather balloons with fentaNYL running freely across the borders. More Americans die per year from fentaNYL 0:03:23 - 0:03:43 overdoses right now. And that fentaNYL primarily comes from China and it is a military incursion. But more Americans die from fentaNYL overdoses per year than died over the duration of the Vietnam war. And so they are fighting a Vietnam war every single year and there's no retaliation from us. There's 0:03:43 - 0:04:03 nothing being done about it and that's just one vector. There are many vectors. And in this video, I want to talk about biological warfare as a potential vector, not because that is going to happen. And not because the specific example I'm giving you will happen like I'm saying, but in order to help 0:04:03 - 0:04:27 you extract out of this principles that you could apply to many situations that might happen. And the key point is so that you can help inform your decisions and become more prepared emotionally for whatever may occur. So another note on accuracy of predictions, it turns out that it's much easier to 0:04:27 - 0:04:59 predict the direction of an event. Then it is the degree this is similar to the fact that it's easier to predict uh binary variables like true false male, female and so on. I use that one on purpose than it is to try to, to pick a stock price or pick someone's weight. So if you, if you want to predict 0:04:58 - 0:05:21 stocks, it's easier to say whether stocks going to go up or down than it is to say by how much it will. So if you want to increase your accuracy of predictions, what you need to do is zoom out a bit from the specifics and you want to look at various examples of potential things and try to distill general 0:05:20 - 0:05:47 principles that will be true across the broadest set of possibilities. In this case, you should be thinking about countermeasures that would be effective across the broad set of potential outcomes. So with all that preamble, what would make a biological agent a good weapon in this scenario, if your goal 0:05:47 - 0:06:09 was to eventually invade the United States, how would a bioweapon help you to do it? And what kind of bioweapon would? Well, first off, you'd want one that would be very hard to trace. You don't want them knowing where it came from. Now. One unfortunate reality is that the world is dotted with biolabs 0:06:08 - 0:06:38 , some of which have questionable security protocols and safety protocols and we have recent experience with, with some of these situations globally. So if someone were say to disperse a biological agent, close to a lab in the United States that happened to be working on that agent. That would probably 0:06:37 - 0:07:05 be a pretty good way to have plausible deniability and cover the origin of what was actually an attack. The question is, how long would it take to figure out that it wasn't an accident? Second, you want a biological agent that causes mass panic and that's from a collection of specific situations. You 0:07:05 - 0:07:26 want people to be moving around a lot because that, that clogs up highways, that gives you more avenues of dispersing this agent. It also increases the secondary and tertiary effects of it. If people are getting in car accidents or blocking up highways so that aid vehicles or, or any other sort of convoys 0:07:26 - 0:07:48 can't get through all of that is a bonus. You want riots, you want starvation, you want disease, uh you want the sewage to fail, you want the power to go off. You want all these, you want uh first responders to not show up to work. So mass panic creates all of that. You also want mass casualties, casualty 0:07:47 - 0:08:10 does not just mean death. It also means immobilizing someone taking them off the battlefield. In this case, we're talking about civilians. So you want to make it impossible for them to continue with life as normal. You want a high infection rate, but you also want it to be communicable before the symptoms 0:08:10 - 0:08:32 are detectable. And for that you either want symptoms that are quite normal. So no one knows, hey, do I have the flu or this terrible biowarfare thing. And you want people to be traveling around spreading it before they know they have it. So pre symptom and this is very important and this is probably 0:08:32 - 0:08:54 the hardest one, the hardest criteria to meet. You want it to not spread among your soldiers when you finally invade. So if you pull out a menu of all the potential bio agents that all these countries have been working on for a very long time, you'll find several that meet these criteria. But we're just 0:08:54 - 0:09:16 gonna talk about a pretty good fit. Just one which is t lamia. So you probably haven't heard of it. It is something that pops up every once in a while in the United States in the wild. But for the most part, it, it's not something we face, but it has been studied for about 70 years extensively and several 0:09:15 - 0:09:41 countries have performed gain of function research on this bacterium. It's a bacterium, one strain of it that is not top secret. It's, it's not, uh, it's not hard to find per se. There are papers written on it. I cite one at the bottom of, of the slide here. One specific strain of this bacterium has 0:09:41 - 0:10:07 a lethality rate of between 30 60%. Now, it is treatable by antibiotics but not all people respond to the same antibiotics who, who get this, this infection. And it's very important that the right antibiotic get administered properly. Within a very short time of being infected. And so if that doesn't 0:10:06 - 0:10:32 happen, then there's a 30 to 60% lethality rate. Now, what's really interesting, I don't have the specific information about it takes very little of this bacterium to get you infected. Very, very little. Now, keep that in mind because it can be deployed by air. So you could, let's see how much detail 0:10:32 - 0:10:47 do I? I think I'm gonna minimize the detail here. So I don't get accused of encouraging people to do anything like this. Not that you can go to Walmart and buy this stuff. It's very much controlled. But like I said, every major country has a stockpile of this. I shouldn't say stockpile but they have 0:10:47 - 0:11:06 it and they can replicate it if they'd like. But you can disperse this by plane by car. You could pop some in the subway. You could let it loose on a, on, on a plane or you could spray it with a plane. Uh It can be added to the water supply. So if people drink this and, and like I said, a small, small 0:11:06 - 0:11:34 quantity of this will get you sick. It has a 1 to 21 day incubation and when you start showing symptoms, they are common symptoms to just normal sicknesses, fever, swollen, lymph nodes, chills, sweating, stiffness, headache. You're not gonna say I got infected by tularemia, right. You're not gonna know 0:11:34 - 0:12:01 until it's really bad. Now, here's the kicker on this. Remember I told you that one of the hardest criterion to match is the, prevent your own people from getting it requirement. Well, this bacterium will not replicate in a human. So what you spray or, you know, however you disperse it, what you disperse 0:12:00 - 0:12:26 ? That's all there is. And so once people aren't getting sick anymore, you're good. Your people can go in there and they're not gonna get it because it's gone now. But while it's still out there and it hasn't been metabolized by, by people's bodies, it can spread. And so like if you get hit with this 0:12:25 - 0:12:45 on a subway car and then you don't know, you have it but it's on your clothes, on your coat, let's say. And then you see these news reports that there's this thing getting spread around. Oh my gosh. And so you were run off into the country to visit your cousin Ted who lives out in the wilderness, you're 0:12:45 - 0:13:13 going to kill Ted's family before anyone knows that you have it because it's all over your coat and you just need a few of these to get sick. So, uh, and it's, it's inexpensive to mass produce this. They already have weaponry to spread it. And it's studied in the US in Biolabs. So if you wanted to soften 0:13:12 - 0:13:35 things up a bit before an invasion, this might be one vector that you choose to do it with because you could leak this set it up to look like it leaked out of a lab and it would create havoc in a geographical area much broader than the lab. And then you could also of course, apply it in different parts 0:13:34 - 0:13:58 of the country that don't have a lab knowing that the attention will be on the lab league hypothesis while it matters. And will they ever really be able to prove that it, it didn't all come from there? You know. So, um not too long ago, we had a bunch of balloons from China floating over the US. Now 0:13:57 - 0:14:19 , as far as we know, they didn't do anything except spy on military installations. But who's to say that that they weren't spreading things or they could spread things in the future because now we have a documented non response and they can do it whenever they want and no one will do anything. All right 0:14:19 - 0:14:42 . So let's say that something like this happened in something approaching the way I've described it. What would be the result? Well, first off there would be riots before people knew quite what was going on. People would know that there's some kind of pandemic occurring. Now, this is a bacterial infection 0:14:42 - 0:15:05 . But um that, that people would have the symptoms. People would know that something is going on and when the food trucks stop arriving every three days or so to the grocery stores there, there would be riots. People would, would smash the windows of of grocery stores and take all the food and then there's 0:15:05 - 0:00:00 no food unless you're growing your own food in the middle of nowhere, there's no food. And so that creates these knock on effects of a, a breakdown of civil society, the police would be deployed, the National Guard would be deployed. And the question quickly becomes how many of them show up to work. 0:00:00 - 0:15:50 And if they do and they're in an area that's affected, they would get infected. And so then they wouldn't stay at work. There would definitely be a lockdown. There would be roadblocks. They tried to stop this from spreading before they even knew what it was. Eventually, they would figure out what it 0:15:50 - 0:16:15 is. And because it's a, a widely studied bacteria, they would hopefully figure that out sooner rather than later. And now we get into the fun. How does the government save us in this scenario? Well, there's a national stockpile of life saving equipment, including antibiotics and they have a written protocol 0:16:14 - 0:16:39 as to how they distribute this and guess what? It's not just that the public comes and it's first come first serve. There is a priority order and the first priority is government officials, strategic personnel, first responders and their immediate family members. Isn't that interesting? Isn't that lovely 0:16:38 - 0:17:00 of them? Like we need the first responders? Sure. Ok, we need the government people, but also their families. Isn't that interesting? So now the question is how much of this do they have? And of course, that's not known it would be pretty silly for them to, to, to publicly release how much they have 0:17:00 - 0:17:25 . And of which antibiotic is another question, but they don't have enough for everybody. So I want you to imagine these long lines of people queuing up to get their meds and there's not enough for everybody and you need a two weeks supply. So maybe they're gonna give it all out at once. But what if you 0:17:25 - 0:17:44 have to keep coming back regardless? You got this long line of people who are special people who are gonna get the life saving drugs to prevent 30 to 60% death. And then you've got everybody else who doesn't get it. What do you think those people are gonna do when they're looking at a 30 to 60% chance 0:17:43 - 0:18:11 of death? Exactly. Right. So then there's the fact that while we do have this national stockpile it's distributed, I think I saw on this website that I've quoted here. It's in 70 cities. So, first off, it's in 70 cities, it's not out in some weird town in the middle of nowhere but they, that distribution 0:18:11 - 0:18:34 . If, if only certain cities get exposed to this, they have even less to distribute and you're not going to be able to move this stuff freely about the country when people have any clue of that kind of lethality being out in the open. Do you see all the problems. This is just one thing, folks, this is 0:18:34 - 0:18:59 one easy thing. So I already kind of talked through these. One thing that I didn't talk about is how do you deal with the bodies? 30 to 60%. There's gonna be a lot of dead people. But beyond that, there's a lot of sick people and those sick people might take months and months to get better, nine months 0:18:59 - 0:19:28 or more And a lot of them will have permanent serious problems, permanent serious health problems. So something like this would be extremely effective in helping to destabilize a population prior to an invasion. And so in another video, I talked about the high likelihood of rein reinstitute uh reinstituting 0:19:27 - 0:19:48 the draft in the United States. And on a comment, I said, yeah, but if that happens, I think you've got bigger things to worry about. The bigger thing is what would have to happen in order to necessitate that. And if there's any likelihood of them actually invoking the draft, it would be because of something 0:19:47 - 0:20:18 like this. If that happens, then you've got bigger fish to fry because a 30 to 60% death rate from some biowarfare agent is probably a much bigger risk to you than you or your Children being drafted. So getting back to the fact that it is highly unlikely that this exact scenario will occur, what is the 0:20:18 - 0:00:00 probability that something like this will occur? And when we're assessing this, we always have to tack on an expected time frame. So what's the probability that something like this will happen in the next two years? What's the probability that something like this might happen in the next five years? 0:00:00 - 0:20:59 What's the probability that something like this might happen in the next 10 or 20 years? And as we extend the time horizon, the probability increases substantially because the United States has a lot of enemies and those enemies, China principle among them are under a time limited pressure. China does 0:20:59 - 0:21:19 not have enough food to feed their people. China does not have any of the other resources needed to continue the increase to the standard of living that would be required for them to not overthrow their government. They are time limited. And this has been known for a very long time, Jared Diamond wrote 0:21:19 - 0:21:47 about this in one of his books more than a decade ago. So if the probability is measurable that this will happen in say 20 years within the next 20 years, something like this, it's very reasonable to ask the question, where would you want to be if it did? And if you want to be there, how badly do you 0:21:47 - 0:22:10 want to be there? And if you want to be there badly enough, what does your plan look like to get there? Now, if you just have two years, it might be pretty tricky to, to pull off. But if you had closer to 20 then you could cobble together a plan that is very reasonable to get you there within 20 years 0:22:10 - 0:22:34 . But now is the time to start thinking about that sort of thing and making the moves because what has already begun to happen will continue to happen is that your ability to obtain the resources to make that kind of move will be eclipsed by the increasing cost of doing so that could take many forms 0:22:34 - 0:22:58 . The most obvious is the cost of land. So it's still the case that some people at least can save the money if they tighten their belts. If they do what they need to do to make it happen, they can save the money to afford to move to a place that you'd want to be in if something like this were to occur 0:22:57 - 0:23:22 or a host of other undesirable outcomes that are also uh somewhat probable at least, but the time will come where those windows close for good for more and more people. And then all of a sudden, the only, the only recourse you have remaining is to pack what you can on your back and start walking. Now 0:23:22 - 0:23:42 , in the event of something like to Lamia walking to where you want to go is probably really not what you want to do because the odds are high that if you get there and it becomes increasingly difficult to do so whoever you're going to is not gonna want you anywhere around them because odds are you're 0:23:42 - 0:24:05 infected. And so it gets pretty nasty pretty quickly. But I hope this is a nice concrete example of something like what might happen and helps you start to think more along the lines of having a more accurate idea of what could absolutely happen very soon. It doesn't require any new technology, it doesn't 0:24:05 - 0:24:19 require anything to change, just someone to pull the trigger and you start to realize what a tenuous situation we are already in. Not to mention where we could be several years from now.