kennedy: between isis and ebola the news is very disconcerting president you get the feeling the world could easily unravel. it's a little uncreative to -- tonight we thought we would widen the net to find all the ways the world could possibly end. how prepared are you for an alien invasion. what about a nuclear strike that melts our financial grid. how quickly could a financial collapse end our economy. we'll spell it out tonight. apocalypse how, this is "the independents." i'm your host

ms. kennedy. very glad you joined us for the beginning of your awesome weekend. it's reason magazine editor matt welch and a man who loves posting holes in anyone's hysteria. together we are "the independents." as general xers we were raised your honor under the umbrella of appear think. maybe it's taking in too many images of total destruction like this. [explosion] kennedy: oh, the mushroom crowd. makes me crave anti-pasta. while we're still waiting, the president tried to assure us, it's not the russians we have to fear. he put it rather bluntly in march. i continue to be much

more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in manhattan. kennedy: he's the president. surely he reads his intel reports. what does he know about a dirty bomb in new york? that's horrible. what should we fear more. fist -- all out nuclear war with russia? let's ask our party panel. kt mcfarland and we've got ambassador james woolsey. he joins us from washington. he's an energy specialist and former director of the cia. so let's tackle isis. first how likely is it that someone with a bone to pick and an axe to grind get enough atomic material to really do some damage to a big city and the homeland. ambassador woolsey i'll turn to you first. >> thank you. good to be with you. i'd say a few months

because when uranium is being enriched. if they they've enriched it to 20 percent you'vef your work in order to have material that can be used in an explosion, and the design of a nuclear weapon if you're not going to do something sophisticated with it, if you're just going to blow it up, can be very, very simple. so if you are concerned about -- and i think we should be a rogue state such as iran in a year or two being able to launch a simple missile up above the stratosphere over the united states that could as you said in your introduction be something that would fry most of our electric grid, and then we're living not in the 1990s preweb, but in the 18 nineties preelectronics and very few of us have

enough water pumps. kennedy: and we will talk to you later in the show about emps and stuff. what is more likely a dirty bomb in the hands of isis or some other jihads group. we know with recent groups in syria there are many more groups at the ready who are hell-bent on israelis destruction and ours as well. what is more likely a dirty bomb or a nuclear war. kt i will go to you. you're not as concerned about the dirty bomb scenario. why? >> i want to say, first of all, when i used to teach a course at mit. that was a more dangerous period. we didn't what an the other guys were doing. we knew they had plenty of nuclear crisis. we had crisis in the past. the cuban missile crisis. this is an oddly safer time because we don't have the soviet union saying they're going on

nuclear alert, but i do worry about going forward then we have a more serious problem because av ron potentially gets more weapons. as there's more material introduced in the middle east that ends up falling in the hands of groups -- countries which aren't even groups. groups which don't worry about somebody getting them after the fact. they think it's part of the game. that's terrific for suicide bombers. it's the combination of suicide bombers and nuclear devices. kennedy: i want to ask you quickly before the gentlemen step into the fray. what about our own nuclear arsenal that is in ill repair. some of it is poorly guarded and in bad condition. is that ripe for the picking for people who want it to die? >> the degree of rust on the nuclear weapons probably doesn't have a great deal effect on whether someone will try and grab one and use it.

they will be constrained on how to debt net it and so on. >> you were part of the rums felt commission part of the late 1990s that were talking about the threat of ballistic missiles in rogue state. there's a lot of language of north korea being five years away and iraq being ten years away. that was report alarmist at the time and more importantly does the deterrent factor work against states that actually have to control borders? >> i think it was a good report. i think don did a good job chairing it. we all worked fairly hard on it. the problem with relying on something from that era is that something that bernard louis said, back in the cold war, we thought of mutual assured destruction as a deterrent. the problem now is for some countries it's an indeuvment. if the leadership of iran believes what some

of them say and they would just assume die and have us die and we go to hell and they go to heaven from their point of view and it's all over, that's a very different kind of threat than russia bureaucrats and military officers i've negotiated with those guys four times. they didn't want to die to each according to his ability. kennedy: let's get into the nuclear threat with russia. obviously the president has ratcheted his reticular in regards to the ukraine. they're making some bold news. how soon before it goes nuclear? (?) >> the conflict with russia, united states/russia that would be under the context of nato. the russians invade a nato state. all the nato people respond.

it's called article five. one for all, one for all. that would be the only response you could see. the question how soon it would go nuclear. that's always been a debate with big countries with nuclear weapons, if they start fighting each other, would it immediately start on nuclear war. i wrote my dissertation on that, i don't think so. the one example we had china and russia. they did fight each other, but it didn't escalate to nuclear war. kennedy: and ambassador i'll ask you the same question. what would it take to escalate it. >> i think one dangerous thing is that the russians are building small tactical weapons that they might be tempted to use something small much than they would be tempted to use a large weapon to wipe out a whole part of the united states, for example. i think they're making it easier on themselves

and also relying on nuclear weapons is a lot cheaper than building an adequate military force. the russians are -- don't have an economy that can do anything except really produce oil and some gas, and they're hurting for money because of the price of oil and so forth these days. i think they're in a situation where they could be tempted to rely much more had he ever on nuclear weapons because it's more cost effective from their point of view than to rely on convertible forces. >> i wonder, casey, do you share that belief that russia may use nuclear weapons. >> here's the one that keeps me up at night. it's pakistan. an unstable country with supposedly a democracy. and it's a country that has a very large jihadist, taliban group in it it has 90 to 100 weapons. how secure are those weapons? the big nightmare when

talking nuclear is terrorist. how do the two get together. i don't think they're going to happen in months coe. kennedy: pakistan concerns you more than north korea. >> what concerns me more about north korea. i don't think they'll wake up and say let's go nuke san francisco. what are we going to sell? let's sell them to some bad actors who has a lot of extra change in their pocket. kennedy: they got more bad actors then anyone else. all right. we've tackled nukes and it seems all too easy for a sweaty liberian to hop on a plane. if it's not crash and bleeding, which

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>> the most optimistic of the spread of the virus is 24 hours, 36 hours. forty-eight hours. kennedy: forty-eight hours. for germ freaks and travel foes. how easily can this virus spread and threaten us or are there other bugs that might bump in the night. dr. alvarez, he joins us here on the independents for the first time. >> great meeting you. kennedy: so good to have you. let's talk about terror. could the world end at the hands of superbugs

with tent ackles. >> i would say, yes, and it's probably happening right now (?) we're losing the war on bugs. if you ask any physician they'll tell you that there are a bunch of bugs that we don't have any bugs for in the hospital just because they have mutated into different forms. we don't have the antibiotics to treat them and that's why we keep fighting the war on bugs nowadays. kennedy: what about ebola? this is something that has a 50 percent mortality rate. at least the strain going on in west africa right now. do you see this morphing into something that could take out millions of people around the globe. >> for months now i've been saying that nobody is paying attention to it. of course, i'm laughing at the way the president and the government has been dealing with ebola. it was always an african problem which to me was short sighted. in africa and in many countries you don't have the infrastructure to kind of handle any

medical emergency especially to the degree that ebola needs. right from the very beginning case number one, case number two, case number three, we should have been there to help them with the infrastructure so that you don't have this spread. there are culture differences. patients are sometimes not educated. they're fearful of the health care providers. what you have right now, you have a global mess. 3,000 people. the genie is out of the bok. this is going to get much worse than better. and before you know it, it's going to be here. >> are you worried some of the diseases we have domestically that are starting to make a come back, measles, smallpox things like that? >> listen, just this week, rob schneider, i think was canned from doing commercials with state form because he is a very vocal individual that patients should have a choice not to vaccinate children. if you look at pockets,

measles -- used measles we had it under control. in the 1960s we had hundreds and thousands infected with measles. now, all of a sudden we're seeing measles in populations in california in places that you would expect parents to sort of be educated. i could have an argument with you and say, hey, manny, we have too many evacuations. i understand that. but there's some core diseases that they don't need to have those diseases in order (?) to get to the next level and that's why, you know, i don't like people that hide behind a public voice. a celebrity, somebody, and render an opinion. go to medical school before you speak. kennedy: okay. what about one of these super flus. what is the microbe that could potentially take out millions and millions of people. >> one of the problems you have is globalization and

globalization means interaction very quickly around the planet. when yellow fever -- when teddy roosevelt was building the panama canal. now, the -- you put a couple of people and you're in a another continent. that allows for any kind of viral or bacteriaial organism to mutate and adapt and that could happen and we've seen that with a lot of the flu viruses, for instance, over the last 15 years where they have quickly mutated to adapt to new populations. >> we guaranteed that a lot of those things would explode, bird flu, swine flu. we could look at 9018 and the flu epidemic. that was a big deal. if we have the infrastructure to deal with those things we don't have to worry about something like ebola jumping the sea and coming --

kennedy: what if it goes airborne? >> the only argument that i would give you on that is the following, back 40 years ago when we had penicillin and you had gonorrhea, i could give you a couple of shots of penicillin, it would go away. now, you have penicillin resisting gonorrhea. so somehow gonorrhea sort of adapted itself and said i'm okay with penicillin. go do something new. we haven't done a lot of research in antibiotics. in a world of virus that's a different kind of worm. that takes interaction with animals and things like. where it can mutate. we expect the worse and sometimes it doesn't happen, but one day it will. and one day we will have 100,000 people afflicted and one day we don't have the infrastructure to deal with that problem. it's not here yet. kennedy: all it takes is one

soul to fall in love with the pig and it's the end of humanity. grab your gold and hand lamp. dive under the bed. the financial collapse might be closer than you think. and it might be a little easier to get flat broke. our next guess jeff, he's here with us. stay with us. keeping a billion customers a year flying, means keeping seven billion transactions flowing. and when weather hits, it's data mayhem. but airlines running hp end-to-end solutions are always calm during a storm. so if your business deals with the unexpected, hp big data and cloud solutions make sure you always know what's coming - and are ready for it. make it matter.

kennedy: welcome back to the independents. we're also regal from the financial collapse

of 2008, but have we done enough to keep our financial ducks in the a row? nope. our spending is out of control. society could totally fall apart, but how does it start? how quickly does it progress and what on earth can you do to stop it? do you buy gold? let's ask jeffrey miron. welcome back, jeffrey tell us how the world could end at the hands of a financial collapse. how does it start. where does it go? you've laid out this chain of logical probation walk me through it. >> it starts with countries take on spending (?) that they ultimately can't afford. that can go on for a while because frequently other countries will lend to you to afford this excessive level of spending. but at some point those other countries realize you're not going to be good for it. they start charging you higher interest rates to

bother from them that makes your deficits even bigger. and the problem no one figures out why exactly it starts when transistors t starts or when exactly it's going to start. we sort of go along until, boom, we're in a pickle. kennedy: so people make a run on banks and then all of a sudden cop cars just catch on fire and people eat each other. >> i mean, it's more of bankers start to get nervous. people start worrying about debt repayment. there's lots of movements in stock prices. not so many runs on banks per se because most places have deposit insurance sometimes run on quasibanks on other financial intermediates, but basically interest rates go up and countries don't want to lend to us if we're in this terrible debt. so countries to have cut their superdome and so

people on medicare, social security, other government programs (?) find they're getting much lower payments. that's what happened in greece. people are much poorer. they're actually only as poor as they actually were. they thought they were a lot richer than they were until the crisis occurs. >> we've had a long period here of low interest rates so the debt looks more manageable what will happen if we get back to interest rates the kind that we saw like 20 years ago what if that suddenly happened right now what would be the impact on the economy? >> so having the interest rates going back to historically average levels will all by itself add billions of billions dollars to the deficit. that would make the debt go up faster. does that mean things will crash 20 years later unfortunately no one has a good answer for that. we know at some level,

like the us has projected to be can't go on forever, but we don't know what that causes to stop. when you exactly get to that point. of course, some places make adjustments before they get to that point. they don't get to the point of crisis by reining in their spending. kennedy: i need to ask you a very serious question because this is something i've been thinking for years. should people buy gold? if there's a should people buy gold. >> gold is going to do you no good whatsoever in that case. the only thing that would do you good is led in the form of bullets. it's truliy armageddon. in the world you use credit cards i'm not sure anybody is going to be accepting gold coins as payment too.

>> the returns on gold historically have been very poorly correlated with the returns on other things. you get a little of diservegz by owning a little bit of gold. like 1 percent. (?) as a protection against armageddon. kennedy: that is sound analysis. >> lead over gold. kennedy: i appreciate where you're coming from. thank you very much. you're one of the smartest people we know. we've been pretty straightforward. nukes, ebola, financial melt down. next we'll bring down a scientist to show you how it could get weird really fast. there's no warning that will save you from what lurks around the corner. apocalypse how? it's about to get pretty -- ug. with centurylink as your technology partner,

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kennedy: that's the big wave that always gets you. the meteor that took out the dinosaurs. we are mortal meat sacks. we don't stand a chance, but what is the probability we will meet our ultimate fate from a dirty ice ball? will a meteor take us out? let's talk to the star of nationa national geographic channel. he's a scientist. he's an author. he's also a futurist. let's run through some of these scenarios. we're talking about the end of humankind. so an destroyed or a

meteor. is it possible we will run into one of these things in our lifetime. what will it do? >> it's very likely something like that will happen. just look on the news. a few months back there was the meteor that crashed in russia that caused so much damage. there was a huge one that hit in serbia and tusk a. and we often dearchitect very large steroids on the earth even as close as -- that are as large as county and even states. we don't know where these things are. kennedy: is there anything we can do right now to redirect its path if one comes too close. >> everyone thinks we have this amazing the time space shuttles that bruce willis will get in. but we really don't. we will hopefully find the one that will hit and us cause the most damage many, many years

before it does so we could build a spacecraft. launch a spacecraft. take a long time to go out to it and start pushing it out of the ways. if we find one will hit us next week, we're all toast. >> we hear about these things a lot more often these days. are we doing a better job of finding them or are there more of these smaller objects near us? >> no, we didn't just produce more of them. they've been here since the sun was created. we've been getting better at finding them from a professional and mutual standpoint there's a whole army of amateur people looking for these. we're finding them more and more. now, we'll here nasa say things, we hope to have 99 percent of these objects categorize and had we know where we are within the next few years. if you don't know something is out there,

how do you know you've got 99 percent of them. kennedy: that hurts my brain. maybe you've heard about the undergrawnd super volcano percolating. how problematic is that. doctor, break it down. >> well, it actually exploded about three times that we know of. a couple million -- 2 million years ago -- or, 2 million years ago and about a half a million years ago something like that. but it's unlikely that will at that it will happen now. if it did happen now it would be devastating to this country. the ash cloud that would throw up into the sky, it would drop ash as far as new york city, atlanta, it's going to be covering the country with a big cloud. we'd have to ground most airplanes. if there were airplanes that would withstand the wind, the ash would make them crash as well.

the devastation from the initial eruption would not be the biggest deal. it would cause our oceans to heat up by 20 or 30 degrees. and it would cause hypercranes created. kennedy: it's frightening yet sexy all at the same time. and speaking of sexy, aliens, we know they're out there. will they take us out? will they be all sweet and gooey and look look like this? or will they be a little more aggressive like this? [film playing] kennedy: so dr. tail or, what do

you think, do we stand a chance? >> no, we don't stand a chance. they've got technology that's more advanced than we could ever comprehend. they would show up and about 17 seconds we would be destroyed or beg them to take us as their slaves. >> your show is great. in terms of response, who is going to rally the troops is it going to be the president with a group of elite scientists or is it going to be your motley crew of people in huntsville, alabama. >> the simple way to find out what would happen is look at a picture of the earth at nighttime and you see where all the bright lights are. paris is the brightest city. it's going first. then washington, d.c.. new york. la. those cities are gone. the response would have to be from the dark rural areas. if we're going to survive it's going to be

billy joe in the rural areas. >> it will be really a duck dynasty. dr. taylor thanks for. you and your 420 friends love hemp, but what about hemp that shuts down our power grid our next guest says it's the most likely doomsday story we face. it's apocalypse day on "the independents." your customers, our financing. your aspirations, our analytics. your goals, our technology. introducing synchrony financial, bringing new meaning to the word partnership. banking. loyalty. analytics. synchrony financial. enagage with us.

kennedy: slowing it down. getting sexy. how we doing? you know how nervous you get when your phone is lost or broken now, imagine if that happened, but an emp knocked out the nation's infrastructure at the same time leaving us

without plumbing or food or itunes here to discuss that at deadly propositions. he's a former -- and he knows all about the emp business. let's talk about first a high altitude nuclear emp known as hemp. what could that do to our infrastructure? >> first of all, it's the same thing that's been happening the first 4 billion years the earth being bombarded by locator magnetism. the sun has been doing that for a long time. now human beings can do it and the simplist way to do it is to launch a missile with a warhead on it something 20 to 5 miles an hour and whenever you want to blow it up. you don't have to reenter the atmosphere. you don't have to be accurate. none of that. just detonate.

and that would shut down essentially all the electronics that are within line of sight. it might be a reasonably small segment of the earth's surface. the real problem is there is another type of pulse very long wavelength that runs along the transmission lines once the detonation occurs and the transmission line carries it to destroy the transformers. the transformers are the heart of our electric grid. something like that could produce an outage of continent wide of our electric grid. kennedy: don't they have surge protectors like we do in our home. >> they have some things, but they've done very, very little in the course of the last few years. one of the studies said do the basics, but it only cost $2 billion to take care of hardening a

sizable, but certainly not a complete portion of the grid would take about $20 billion so compared to the other things we spend money on this is a tiny bit of money. it hasn't been done yet and the electric utilities generally are opposed to spending any money on anything because they have a commodity and they don't want to -- their electricity to be turned away from from someone buying that is a quarter of a cent kilowatt cheaper and they have not been helpful on this at all. kennedy: because their cartel -- they have cartels, ambassador. >> even more than oil, they have cartels. but electricity is a government sponsored cartel in a sense because of the after deregulation, the system grew up chfgz people no incentive to --

kennedy: i'll allow neil to jump in here. >> is this the sort of thing that people could target not that i recall at the united states. if they were to blow something up in the earth's orbit would that have reper cushions to them as well. which would take away some of the incentive for them to use it. >> it depends on how high you go. if you want to take just the eastern half of the united states, you might launch your satellite 100 miles high let's say something like that. if you wanted to take out the entire united states, you would launch is higher. let's say several hundred miles and over the middle of the count. it might be if there's a (?) country off by itself like say australia it might be possible to do in this in a more specific focused way, but this is a blunt instrument anyway. >> ambassador, you referenced history and

how nature has already been doing this to you. we've had two events, if those events especially the 18591. happened above new york city, what would happen? >> that was a famous category ton event which burned out all the world's telegraphs which were the only electronics around at the time. telegraphs were about a million times (?) less vulnerable to locator magnetic pulse than what we have today by way of computers and the like. on the other hand, those systems are a million times more capable. they're also a million times more vulnerable. so we have a really terrible vulnerability in our electric grid, and it's just got to get fixed. kennedy: that's absolutely right.

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kennedy: it's one thing for us to frighten you our loyal viewer with doomsday it's just not enough. i asked other people how the world might end. how is the world going to end. >> ebola. terrorism. as steroids. one more for as troidz. >> how do i think the world is going to end? aliens. they're going to come down and they're going to let us know. >> that's my first one.

>> ice age. >> how is the world going to end. >> never end. >> global warming or something with the sun. >> global warming might be the kick. >> how is the world going to end? >> with a clock? >> is the sun going to explode and consume us all in flames? cow farts you know what the only cure for ebola is? tee keel a. we'll survive. i hope it ends in a positive way (?) >> how's it going to end. >> you confessed that you thought the aliens were the number one. i saw it on videotape so it must be true. so let's hear about your theory. kennedy: i think aliens will figure out how to tra verse wormholes, and they're going to see us as threat because they'll see we're organized and we're done. >> we can't go across

wormholes. why develop all that awesome technology and come over and stomp us like an anthill. kennedy: i think the collective conscious is to be ultimately imperialistic and kill people. >> don't you want to take them over and be their master. >> yeah, you don't kill them just take them over. kennedy: they said we would make great pets. >> that's true. not many of them they can say on television. dr. taylor travis we had on earlier he said the most important thing we can do is to keep the secrets. think about that. so as not to induce panic. >> sounds like a great movie. kennedy: what do you think neil. neil: i'm expecting everything to go quietly. kennedy: i mean, the sun is going to explode before the universe is cold. >> we'll leave.

we'll colonize other systems before that. we'll colonize other systems once the sun goes. the human raceon will continue. >> what's interesting about the answers you got on the show is that no one had any religious event that happened. there used to be at least a lot of people -- kennedy: maybe if we're in another part of the country. >> you don't hear that much of a view -- it's not an evangelical christian thing when i was growing up in southern california. people aren't keyed to that in nearly the same way they were a few years ago. kennedy: you know what's out of fashion. doomsday coats. >> i think y2k just cashed that out. kennedy: i guess for another thousand years. better get the party going. who wants to meet in my office for gin. speaking of cocktails. someone will join us to

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kennedy: every mushroom cloud has a silver lining. john tierney is an internal optimist. he joins us to offer us peace of mind. he's a columnist at the new york times. so, john, these scenarios are exhausting. i mean, aliens, ebola, dirty bombs, hemps, what do you think, is this all hysteria? >> it's mostly hysteria. there are few things worth worrying about. there is a deep human need want to to believe in the apocalypse. the easiest way to get a crowd is to scream the

world is ending. the media loved to write about it. the amazing thing about this they're so wrong about it time after time they keep doing it. kennedy: what are some examples? >> you got examples going back to the 19th century the 18th century. the world is going to starve to death. this got picked up in best-sellers like our plundered planet and the road to survival and then paul picked it up and hundreds of millions of people were going to starve to death. united states was going to have food riots. and the biggest problem we have today is that people are too fat. so much farmland we don't need anymore now because we've got so efficient at agriculture. >> do you feel likeof our natiol short-term memory that allows to erase the shame. i remember growing nup y2k. i wanted to believe in

y2k. not everybody gets to be on the cusp in the millenium. it totally fell flat. people wait and exhaled and until they got into the next panic. >> there's no punishment for it. obama's advisor, they wrote these articles suggesting ways to stair lies people, to sterilize a population. in fact you know it's funny i checked on amazon from these books from the forties. our plundered planet. they predicted that there would be wars over ten because there would be no copper no telephones because we were about to run out of these things. >> the thing is these aren't stupid people making these theories.

they have the best intentions and make bold predictions like we're totally going to run out of oil tomorrow, but they are routinely wrong. >> experts always underestimate how much they know. they underestimate what will occur. and often the people might be really smart, but not about this. paul was a butterfly in a researcher. and he knew nothing about economics, but he issued enormous predictions and people are pretty different from butterflies. and so you often get these people in biology and in ecology who don't understand economics and think natural systems are the same as human systems. kennedy: i know you love to miergt and you are afraid of birds. you are our very special butterfly. absolutely wonderful. thank you for watching tonight you can follow us on twitter. on facebook you can also email us independents at

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