Metawar: Winn Schwartau on How to Win the Fight for Our Minds

Cocktail Hour. I'm Joe Patti. I'm Adam Roth. Adam, we're dressed more or less the same today, except move your hand. You've got the official shirt. I have the unofficial shirt, the generic one.

All right. We need to cancel this recording then, because you have the official. That's part of the rules in the contract.

Well, we can't cancel because we have a guest here waiting for us, joining us. Okay, fine. Okay. We have the esteemed Wynne Schwartau. Wynne, how are you doing?

Waking up, waking up. I'm not an early riser. I really like the crack of noon.

Well, it is Sunday also, so hopefully you had a good night last night.

It's any day. Any day. I end up late, and then I get an idea, and I'll read, and then I'll wake up in the middle of the night, and I'll read for a couple hours. So by then, what's the point of being up before noon?

We can pause and maybe have a drink here. Oh, sure.

We've got a little wine going on today. I got wine also in my nice official security cocktail hour glass. That'll be available in the store soon.

Book drunkard.

Book drunkard, okay.

Yeah, I'm drinking wine out of the martini glass. That's class.

That's the official Security Cocktail Hour glass. There we go.

But Wynn, this is actually what you recommended to us. Cote du Rhone, which believe it or not, I'd like to think of myself as somewhat knowledgeable about wine, and I've never heard of this one before.

I am not knowledgeable about wine. I really want to make no claims. Over the years, in the wine world, everybody goes, oh, we have the big and the thing. We got 42 layers of flavors and notes and all that. And I don't like big wines. I like simple drinking wines. And I spent a fair amount of time in France. So some number of years ago, I discovered Cote d'Aron as a nice simple wine and it's a southern part of France and it has the dry soil similar to the Rioja region in northern Spain. So they're very, very similar. And this is not wine expertise, this is just through experience.

Well, if you just like it, that's cool.

That's the best thing. To me, you knew the soil and what it does. I sound like expertise to you.

No, no, no, no, no. That's not my field. But the one above me, if you want to spend a little more than Cote d'Azur, and I did it the other day. It was a special occasion. I got a bottle of Grosse Hermitage, which is basically Cote d'Azur is here, then Grosse Hermitage is here. then if you really want to spend more money, go up to shots enough to pop. And it's all from the same region. And those are the three wines that you can actually really, really tell as a non-expert that they are better versions of that very simple, simple wine drinking experience without 45 layers of Beaujolais and 12 sommeliers calling you an idiot.

So I'm going to throw my expertise in there. I'm kind of a wine connoisseur. I pick up my wine at the local drugstore or bodega on the corner. But before that, I was really into- Do they have it behind the counter? It's funny, I was watching, I gotta be careful in case somebody watches the latest Deadpool, but they were drinking, rubbing alcohol during the show. So that's a good drink too. It helps your liver.

Stick with the Coteron. The nice part also about the French wines is that if you would, in an evening perhaps, drink a little bit to excess, because of the purity laws and stuff goes on in France, the sulfates and nitrates basically create a headache-free environment.

Why did you tell me that? Because I need a headache-free environment. Seriously.

This show is not a headache-free environment at all. Headache-full. Well, I've got to say, I really haven't had this before. This is pretty good. You also scared the hell out of me because when I first won, it was like Cote d'Aron, a French wine I never heard of at all. I thought it was going to be expensive. Then when the guy pointed it out to me, it was like 13 bucks. I'm like, oh, thank God. Our show budget is very modest. It's like zero.

We have a budget because we don't have a budget. As a matter of fact, we're in a deficit, which is why we need more listeners and more people to sign up and some people who want to support some of our episodes. Look, I'll do it.

Friends, they know that when they, if we're at a conference or something, they know when cheap French red wine got their own. And I don't go for the big, fancy, expensive stuff. I don't like it.

Well, you know, when speaking of that, maybe we can get somebody to support our episode that also is a wine manufacturer. The same. I'll call Francois later. Thank you. Much appreciated.

Cool. All right. Well, now I can drink guilt-free knowing I won't have a headache for the rest of the day. So, awesome. I guess we're going to actually talk about security. So, Wynn, you have had a long and esteemed career. You are the author of several books. You talk all over the place. I think you've spoken to Congress and all sorts of other esteemed bodies and whatnot. So, we're honored to have you. We kept a pen too.

I'm sorry. No, these cat me out.

They're around Joe's yours. Because that's trying to get out the door.

So when what are you up to these days? I think you have a new book out, right?

Yeah, the book is called the art and science of metal war. And it if you go back twenty seven hundred years i guess uh... twenty two hundred years and it was the art and science of war the art of war by sun tzu uh... which kind of directed uh... an awful lot of the thinking of the psychological aspects of uh... various types of what i'll use the word conflict as warfare and idea and yeah we'll say conflict because it's the world has changed uh... then i've been involved with uh... information warfare in the late eighties i had this bright idea all what if all of the technology became weaponized and testified before congress and i said all your chicken little now that'll never happen on on on off and one of the the congressman said to me mister schwarzkopf can you explain to this uh... committee why the bad guys would ever want to use the internet and You sometimes try to avoid choking in public when somebody says something, and I'm not terribly good at hiding my feelings.

And I've heard that members of Congress can say shockingly stupid things at times, so much so that you're like, oh my god.

I'm not going down that road with you. I could have sworn Robert Lee said the same thing.

And so it turned out, unfortunately, because I was put on the human dartboard and I was saying things that were very unpopular. And I did not know at the time that everything I had written that the government, the military Pentagon, they thought was classified. And I wrote a book. And so they banned the book in England for six weeks until they realized that it wasn't gonna, that wasn't gonna stick.

Well, wait, were you like working for the Intel community for DLD at some time? So you just wrote a book and they said... Oh, my God. That's frightening, actually.

So then we had the young kids and then the CIA and the FBI and all these guys are coming by the house. Well, who told you this? Where did you get this? And in the book, it was called Information Warfare, which is still available for free on Amazon in whatever format they do. And they've got the yellow stickies. Well, tell us about where you learned this. Where did you find this? It's either public source, such as it was in the late 80s and early 90s, which meant newspaper clippings, largely.

Yeah, you had to actually go to the library and look at paper and microfilm.

Or I made it up, and they go, well, there's no way. You know this is all classified. I go, I have no idea what's classified. So we went through this battle, but basically, Because I became the human dartboard, people really didn't want to listen, didn't want to hear that technology was going to become weaponized, that computers were not going to be your best friend, and that it would end up ultimately in what I called Class 3 information warfare, which is cyberterrorism, nation-state conflicts, things that are common now, but back then, They said I was out of my mind. So I did all that for a while and did a bunch of other stuff. And then a few years ago, I don't... Cat, you're not going out now. Just listen. No, you're not going out now.

Can you tell your cat we're having a podcast, please, to keep it down?

The other one knows better. The metaverse was kind of becoming a semi-buzzword in intelligentsia and with the media. And I said, oh, cool. Not that I had planned on writing a book. look at the security and privacy considerations regarding immersive technologies vr all of that stuff and as i got into the process of research and spending a fair amount of time in europe uh... uh... for reasons i can explain that uh... it ended up being a completely different book it really changed me completely fundamentally changed who i am as a human being because MetaWar is about your cognition, your belief systems. It's about how you identify yourself and what do you believe. Reality is only a keystroke away. And today, and increasingly so, we are living in a world of complete reality distortion where The idea of what is real, what is not real, what is truth, what is not truth, and all those various adjectives that you can use there has become so mishmashed because we do not have any sort of form of cognitive security defensive mechanisms like we have built up over cyber security in the last 30 years. So the book evolved into something that is much more prescriptional as to, God, what the hell are we going to do? how can we learn to really survive as human beings with technology? We are not as humans. We were not born and designed biophysically to survive information or survive technology. And we've got to learn how to coexist.

It's funny you bring that up, right? Because I did a master's on ethical warfare, ethical cyber warfare, and I'm doing a doctorate now. Yeah, I'm crazy. And it's all about Concentrating on ethical cyber warfare though. I won't know what I'm locked into until March But as I was researching my last paper, which I'm still it's due Tuesday I looked at the movie war games and in war games. It was ahead of its time. Oh, yeah 1983 they were talking about hallucinations When they did a simulated warfare It goes, it's a hallucination! It's a hallucination! It's not real! Yes, I watched the movie yesterday, and I've been watching it, and then the other part to it was, even though it was a local threat, it was all about how you infiltrate somebody's infrastructure. I know it was a dial-up modem, and people, believe it or not, still use dial-up modems. The Wappinator, or the War Operations... Yeah, the Whopper. Yeah, they called it the Whoppernator or the Whopper. Yeah. WPR for War Operation Something Response. Planned response. And what the whole idea behind it was to keep them planning the demise of the world and who would win. But what I'm getting at basically was this was in a way kind of a metal war because now you're trying to figure out what type of response you can do in cyber in order to win or kinetic war through cyber. to figure it out. So we had 1983.

Yeah. Larry Lasker was very far ahead of his time when it came to that. And one of the smart things that he did, uh, was come to the InfoSec community and hang out with us and listen, listen to our folks.

Oh, no wonder it was good. Wow. Okay. Right. Well, and then we get to today and this new stuff. And I mean, when the stuff in the book, like you just laid it out, is pretty heavy. And I'll tell you, when I read it, when I started reading it in the prologue, you got a quote from Schopenhauer. And I said to myself, dude, hang on. This is going to be a rough ride. I mean. For people who don't know, he's the philosopher who was too depressing for Nietzsche. I mean, this is some heavy stuff. And you did not disappoint. There's a lot in here. Wow.

Yeah. It's so much of what we saw back in cyber war, we knew was going to be coming, and we chose to ignore it. Right now, the United States has Zero cognitive defense or cognitive defense efforts. They've all been shut down in the United States. In the UK and in the EU, the current budget sponsored by public dollars is up to 5 billion euros a year in order to develop mechanisms for cognitive defense at the population level, at the military level, and at the enterprise and educational levels.

So I admit I didn't read the book. I'm sorry. but can you especially for our audience in addition to me can you define cognitive defense for us?

cognitive defense it's we all the mind the brain there's fundamentally two brains that we have and so for you neuroscientists out there i am doing really an oversimplification but it goes back to the work of william james at the end of the nineteenth century with the idea of the conscious brain and the unconscious brain So now that we have neuroscience, we know that the unconscious portion of our brain operates at about 400 billion bits per second. That's a whole lot of data. Our conscious mind operates at between two and four kilobits. Who's in charge? And when you start looking at how the influence of what we are, what our beliefs are, what our actions are, and we look at our sensory systems, in the kinetic world it's pretty straight ahead. You're walking down the street of a city and you hear a horn and You may immediately turn as that gut reaction go into a pause because it's a survival mechanism. However, the brain is also tuned to be able to judge distance exceedingly quickly. And if it judges that it's three blocks away, you're just going to kind of keep on going. That's part of the general noise. Cognitive defense is about strengthening the mental immune system to be able to handle the constant influx of too much information into our sensory systems. In the world of cyber, we have DOS, Denial of Service, and DDoS, Distributed Denial of Service, when we overload a system. And we've seen this and still see it. I don't know if the Netflix, the Tyson fight the other night, was that so conflicted? It was the same effect. We have the same thing, our brains. We all go, no more, that's it, time out. I'm gonna go have a drink, I'm gonna go to the movies, I'm gonna play with the kids, I'm gonna go take a walk. Overloaded, because we have a total maximum limit of 74 gigabytes of amount of information that can come into our sensory systems per day. That is the maximum. If we were awake and alert and interacting 24 hours a day, part of the mental system and strengthen that mental system is learning not so much you know misinformation disinformation or because that becomes highly politicized what have you recognizing that too much information is coming your way. If too much information is coming your way, and we have this constant, we've been to Times Square and Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, Piccadilly Circus in London, where it's this constant onslaught. What we are not teaching our kids, teaching ourselves, training ourselves, is critical ignoring. How can I make myself mentally healthier, strengthen my cognitive immune system, strengthen my cognitive defenses by paying attention to less stuff? And that is really part of the first step before you get into critical thinking or disinformation or any of the other politicized aspects of it.

Well, don't we have a certain innate capability in that? Because I am no expert in neuroscience, but I have read a bit and from what I understand that you know that We get all this sensory data. We get all this information about the world coming into us. It is impossible and even unnecessary for us to process it all. And what we experience is essentially, it's filtered. It's a simplification of the real world. So we have some innate capability there.

We do have innate capabilities. We have the innate capabilities when it comes to biokinetic survival. That is what nature taught us. We were bred to survive bears and tigers and lions, oh my, and don't drink the stinky water. Those are the things that we were biokinetically designed to be able to survive.

So yeah, it's interesting. I'll tell you this. The kids this generation, they all talk about sensory overload. Uh, they, they can't handle too much. And then for me personally, what I've done when is I'm tasked with a lot of different things in my life. I'm, I'm probably doing too much, but what I do is I use a program and everything I need to know that I have to do. I put it on a task list and then I feel a little bit relieved because I know that all those things are prioritized and Joe and I constantly talk about this as well for our podcast and other things that we're doing in our lives. What's most important? What's not important? We prioritize. Maybe we've learned that because of our age, but a lot of kids these days, they claim they all have ADHD because they can't focus. And that seems to be a sensory overload.

It is sensory overload. The top of the level of the entire meta-war thesis is called, it's about information overload. Again, avoiding all the political stuff that goes on. What happens with cognitive loss? You get confusion, anxiety, sleep deprivation, attention loss, memory problems, poor decision making, and too much information. We now have the statistical studies from the universities and the experiments they've run, too much information is the leading cause of disinformation. We do not have an innate ability to be able to use the word filter. In cyber terms, I might use ACLs, firewalls, access control. The models are exactly the same because we're dealing with information. We know how to do this stuff pretty well in cyber. world. What we have not done has gotten the politicians, the policy makers, the psychologists, neuroscientists, security people, all of us together to migrate the processes we already know and understand into building better mental immune defenses.

Yeah, to me it's just really interesting because my life personally... Maybe you should read the book. I know now I'm going to have to read the book and I know there's going to be a test on it.

You can expense it. You can try one out of the budget.

Thanks, Joe. That's exactly the point I'm going to make. I tend to focus on things that are prioritized. For example, if I don't get my homework in time for my doctorate, I'm going to get in trouble. If I don't do things for work, I prioritize that because that's my income. So things move up and down that list. But one of the things I have found that has made my life just a drop more sane, not completely sane, I'm probably insane, is I put things on my calendars. I put things on my to-do list. I become a minimalist, purposely, so that I have less things I have to worry about in my life.

How well have you learned how to say, no?

I'm getting better at it, but, but,

In other words, not very well.

I'm getting better at it. No, but it's funny. I'm not going to go to whom and where, but somebody recently told me in a review process, I got to learn to say no better. However, I'll tell you this saying no does not make your life easier. Sometimes it makes your life harder because when you don't take care of something, then it ends up becoming your priority and becomes worse later on. So I get what you're saying, Wynn. You're right. Say no. Just say no to helping my friend shovel the snow. There's no snow.

No, no, no. Hold on, hold on. Don't go there. I'm thinking purely cognitively here, for example. Oh, OK. Sorry. Purely cognitively, purely informationally based. OK. OK. You're on whatever feed, whatever online channel. And along comes a story about Kanye and the Kardashians. I gotta ask you this question. How many fucks do you care about that?

Oh, I, you're a hundred percent right, Wynn. I have made the mistake of going down, and I don't have real social media really, down the social media rabbit hole. I'm like, oh my God. Like the other day, I was laughing. Sometimes it's really funny. It makes me happier. Cop pulls somebody over and says, why did you park there? She said, parking. of uh parking is fine or or or fine for parking fine for parking okay that made me laugh i felt better about myself i i i it may be a little bit less stress a little less anxiety you know i i so sometimes going down that rabbit hole taking yourself out of something for a moment taking a break and getting back in it's sometimes better than you gotta pick your rabbit holes though I've been in plenty of rabbit holes. Don't judge me on my rabbit holes.

Doom scrolling is one of the mental health issues of the day, which is cat videos or doom scrolling. And it's all about too much information. And you've got to decide and recognize that you only have so much time. To pay attention.

Exactly. And that's why the calendar. Yeah.

And the entire goal of ad tech and big tech and media is to grab and hold your attention because the longer they hold your attention, the more money they make.

And Joe and I just had this conversation about our ventures together about budgeting time. Joe and I had a discussion about that and I had that discussion with my wife and my family. Budgeting time because budget because money could be infinite though. I don't have infinite money time is finite It's the only asset you have Yeah, and it's the only thing we are sharing amount of no matter what? Wait, wait, hold on. It's like I think I think uh, I think I've been going down this rabbit hole way too much That's right.

You need a refill but So when you talk about cognitive defenses, what kind of stuff are you talking about? What do you mean there? Other than just turning it off, which of course people aren't going to do, obviously.

One of the things that, I made the example of the car horn in the city, and do you pay attention, do you not? I was in New Orleans, walking down, this goes back 20 years, in my early Infant War days, and I'm walking down, what was that, Bourbon Street, the main street, and I had my first time there, and all of a sudden I hear, hey, shwankow! Wow! That was some Army guy, Air Force guy, he's out of a bar. And so that captures your attention. In order to make decisions, number one, you have to have the attention. But that requires something that we use in cybersecurity, and it's called the pause. Take a second. What do we tell our kids when they're upset? Take 10, count to 10, calm down. when we have a potential threat to our perception of physical survival, that is built in. So now along comes some headline that says, Duke Ferdinand has returned from the dead, and here are the details of it. That's maybe noise to some people, maybe not to others. Do you pay attention? How do you get your brain to be tuned to building in that cause, just a cause to make a judgment of, do I go to the next step? Do I care? Do I have the time? It's all outlined in the book on how to go through these steps, but ultimately they're going to have to be Portions of for the enterprise they're gonna have to be part of security awareness training because the enterprise has to Take care of itself. It needs to be built into educational systems in Finland they teach toddlers preschoolers about misinformation and disinformation in fairy tales it's in a context that they understand and Why believe everything? Why take it all in without that pause? And that first pause is critical ignoring, not critical thinking. Critical thinking is further down the line.

I'll tell you what I find very interesting in this. We're talking about this high-tech stuff, too much information, all this kind of thing. This reminds me of some very old things. I'm one of those crazy people who got into Stoic philosophy at one point. And they say, you know, control your mind, have discipline, don't be distracted. And one of the things that comes up is people say, well, what if you're startled? What if you have an alert, you know, the horn or whatever. And they say, well, you know, it's okay to be startled. That's your normal reaction. But then calm yourself down, think, you know, and give it more thought or whatever. The one I'm thinking is the bad news is we've been working on that for like 2,000 plus years And it's only getting harder.

It seems I'll take this joke. Yeah, I'll tell you this right so I'm always amazed at special Operators special warfare operators like the Navy SEALs and the Rangers and all those guys and all those women they're trained to handle the most I circumstances and be for the most part calm. I've never done that. The closest I've ever done which is way down the list is get into a boxing ring and remain calm in a fight and do an EMS but what I've learned after the fight, what on yourself?

Yeah.

Yeah. I'm a minister of health but so but we know about fight and flight, right? Uh or fight and fight or fight and When you start doing deep breathing, you're telling your body everything is calm. You're getting blood to all your organs and everything else. We know that when you're ready to fight, blood rushes only to the necessary organs and your thinking goes into a different process. The point I'm making here is some people have been very privileged and have learned how to deal with this better. And some people have never been exposed to this and they shut down because they don't know how to handle that levels of stress. I'm not saying I'm an expert, I'm certainly not, but I would think a lot of these special operators that do these missions, they have learned to be psychologically broken down and brought back up. I would think that's how it is.

Absolutely. They are, and I hate, I really don't like the word trained because that brings up again some political kind of interpretation that, no, they are trained, absolutely. MetaWar thesis is saying is that for we as humanity, the vast majority of humanity, that we have never been given the tools in order to allow the brain to do its own immune system strengthening. And it's all internal. It's just like mRNA. mRNA doesn't infect you with something. It only provides the instructions on the process on how to do it. The same thing with what is called pre-bunking. a psychological profile mechanism that came out of the nineteen sixties and was not revisited for over fifty years until some dutch scientists and now they're working out of cambridge show that pre-bunking is a mechanism by which the brain can teach itself, train itself to pause and give it give it a second before knee-jerk reactions. Knee-jerk reactions are what Kahneman and James from the 19th century said is the unconscious mind is a knee-jerk reaction. You hear that noise, that's a knee-jerk reaction. A surprise mechanism, a startling. What is the reaction to that startle? people end up with knee-jerk reactions and, I mean, I'll just say a bar fight. Somebody heard the wrong word, bam, knee-jerk reaction, bar fight. And that's something we've all seen somewhere, if not in life or in the movies, is how do you temper that knee-jerk reaction to be more thoughtful? And the brain can teach itself how to do it.

And that seems to be one of the biggest things about all these lawsuits in uh law enforcement shootings right you go into a thing you think something's happening you pull your firearm you're trained you make a split decision in a second and then people are judging you like oh that was the wrong person you shot it should have been the other person or that person was innocent or that person did not have a knife very hard to do in that moment.

We do not live in the present, we live in the past. We react to the past. There is no such thing as the present to our conscious mind. And so when, in the case of police, one of the comments, it takes three years to be able to become a barber and become a hairdresser, but you can carry a gun after six months. And I certainly have some issues with that, given that haircutting accidents, you have a hell of a lot more time to be able to react to something.

It's funny you say that, because the amount of hours it takes to become an EMT in New York State, I believe, is less for the for the license or the certification, we call it certification, than it is to become a hairdresser or somebody in the beauty realm, because there's a lot more cleaning and other fluids and other stuff that you learn. It's kind of weird.

I don't know how they did it, but it is the amount of hours a lot much more But it's that reaction time and so in the case that you just brought up. There's a bad guy incident or whatever cop pulls his thing within 250 milliseconds that's when a life-or-death decision is made and him pausing could be deadly to him. How is that all balanced out? We don't know. This is part of what the meta war thesis of the book is about that we need to get into this far deeper across all aspects of society from national cognitive defense down to individual disciplines that will improve the cognitive process and create a better thinking society.

So that being said, the example we just mentioned, a police officer, he or she goes into a dark home, somebody is present, they pull their firearm and they shoot. How do we train somebody like that? And the world is harsh because they made a decision that might have been post, you know, a bad decision, but they made a decision they thought was proper at the time.

I tend to avoid throughout the book, and I think Joe, you can echo this, I don't get into the kinetic issues very often. I reference them and acknowledge them, but I am focusing on the informational aspects of this exclusively because we've had guns for a long time, we've had police for a long time, we've had kinetic response to hostile and exaggerated situations that create tension and anxiety. From an informational standpoint, this has really only started to exist since 1956, and I use that as an arbitrary date that I outline why in the book. It's about the information as they said in, what, Sneakers. Marty, Marty, it's about the information. I love that movie. So it's the model, the concept is very, very similar, except with the case with the mental immune system, the mental immune system, like mRNA, can enhance itself significantly. And we know the techniques on how to do it, which are process, not content.

Yeah, but what, uh, I don't know, what I worry about with this is that there are some, there are techniques that work for this, you can, and various stuff, some of which are actually pretty, you know, pretty old and a bit around. It's difficult. And it involves things that, you know, let's be honest, a great deal of thoughtfulness and taking a step back and constantly evaluating and critically looking at everything that's coming at you. For most people, that's not a strong suit.

That's because, again, you're making, and I don't want to say mistake. Oh, tell me I'm making a mistake. We'll send you a t-shirt. People tend to dive very, very quickly into critical thinking. Everything you just said is absolutely correct. The only thing I'm saying is that we now know enough and we have the evidence with millions of examples of studies that have been done that you cannot get to critical thinking until you've got the mental immune system somehow strengthened just to pause, just to get it away from the knee-jerk reaction. And before, that all has to occur well before you go down any critical thinking, any fallacy detection mechanisms, evidence-based analysis, all the things that we know. This is all the step before that we have not acknowledged. get the brain to self-pause before it knee-jerk reacts.

So are we evolving or are we devolving?

I don't want to go down there now with you because that's a fairly different discussion. There is evidence to both in various ways depending upon culture and society. But I don't want to go down there, but I'll reference that if you go to the Journal of Neuroscience, you'll find an awful lot of the papers that are discussing that right now. We do know that there are neuronal patterns that are very, very different with digital natives than there are with our generation. or either of our generation. We know that there are neuronal pattern differences in activities and action potentials that occur within the brain. We've measured them, we've seen them, but we don't know yet what it all means.

Well, here's what, here's what I worry about with that. You talk about this training, whatever it is, strengthening yourself, doing the pre-bunking all over again. It's not easy, it's challenging, whatever. You know, the truth is we are up against an adversary here. We're up against people who figured out how to push our buttons, and very deliberately so, make the biggest impact. And not only that, but a lot of times when we have to have our guard up most, I would think, and do a you know, be looking out for these things, is when we're doing things that are really entertainment, that we kind of think of as our time off, and we want to let that stuff down and just look at a funny cat video or something.

The funny thing about entertainment is, and it's not funny, unfortunately, is that because people largely do not have this pause button, this strengthened mental immune system yet, they get an awful lot of their history lessons from Cecil B. DeMille and Oliver Stone. And when something is highly entertaining, we are open to listening. We are open to the experience. We're open to the believability and will accept that knowledge as data because there's nothing, as good data, because there's nothing to contradict it during this enjoyable experience. To your other point about that this is difficult, it is not. The studies, and I'm gonna go a little geeky on you here, sorry about that, but I'm a geek, you knew that. The studies have shown with between Two million people was the first basis of the test, and it was called the Misinformation Susceptibility Test, MIST. And when people went through this test, and it was all willingly, there was no compulsions, They found that after one seven minute exercise, a 51% increase in people's ability to immediately get that pause button going.

Really interesting. Did that last over time?

Okay, perfect question. Thank you. Because according to the theories of, I'm sure you're familiar with analog network security and time-based degradation curves. The same thing happens in the mind. And this work goes back to the Ebenhauser teaching from the 1860s called the forgetting curve. When you learn something, how long does it take to forget it? Depends upon the input to the stimulus of the senses, but it's a pretty steep curve. How do you reinforce it? Repetition and rote. How do you get people to believe stuff? Say the same shit over and over and over and over again until... So the same thing occurs with pre-bunking. It, the effect, does degrade over time. So, how often do I get my shot, my COVID shot? I'm not getting political. I do it because I travel a lot and I'm old, and I just want to make sure that I've had COVID twice. I want it to just be mild, that's it. It's like your flu shot. It's just keeping up. If you don't ride the bicycle, it's like riding a bike. Yeah, you still kind of got to get your act back together. If you don't do something for a while, psychokinetically, you've got to get your feet back. With pre-bunking and these seven-minute exercises, your curve will go up. so that you can become exceedingly well cognitively defensive.

So I have one statement.

Again, I am not the scientist behind all of this. That is my interpretation of updating a security database, getting new threat intelligence information, updating my systems and detection mechanisms within whatever security I have in my networks. So I don't see any difference from an architectural standpoint at all. To me, they're identical, just with different words and different technology. We've got the carbon-based technology and all this crap's got silicon-based technology.

So my statement is what you're saying is really no different from losing weight. And then the second question I have is... If that were true... No, no, no, no, no. What I mean is that, you know, you might lose weight But a little over time, they're going to end up gaining more and more and more.

You're bringing it into the kinetic world.

I know, that's how I am.

All right, but I'm going to say no. I'm going to say French. My French, I learned French very early. And I've gone back and forth with the school in Switzerland when I was a kid. So my French was really good. But I didn't use it for 30 years. And now I use it again in business and when I travel. So I've had to re get it up.

If you don't, it's my wife, she she knows Hebrew and she she feels like she's a first grader.

If you don't use it, you lose it. So I respect what you're saying with the kinetic stuff, but I stay out of the kinetic world. Because I want to focus on all of cognitive defense being just here.

So go ahead. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Joe.

I was going to say, Adam, I'm going to agree with you and give you props here. I mean, your on-the-surface ridiculous analogy about weight loss is actually very true.

Ridiculous!

I'm being nice. That's a backhanded compliment, though.

I love getting backhands from you. No, seriously.

The way... People lose weight all the time. You know, they do. However they do it. It's keeping it off that's hard. And the way to keep it off, they say, is you really need to change, make a change in your life. Change your lifestyle, make it a part of you. And when it sounds like you're saying something very similar with building up your cognitive defenses here, that exercise you go through, You need to do it. You need to say, it's not something I do when I need it. You do it continuously.

Does that sound right, Joe? The question is, I go to the gym to try to stay in shape. What type of shape is another story? I go, I box. How do you stay in shape?

Cognitively, let's go to something that we know how to do. I was one of the early pioneers of the security awareness industry, going back to the early 90s. And now the security awareness industry is multi-billion and what have you. Security awareness training is repetitive. Phishing testing is repetitive. It is not kinetic, it is all cognitive, every single bit of it. By adding certain components of cognitive strengthening, using pre-bunking as an example at some level, using fallacy detection mechanisms at another level. There's deep levels that you can go down to with critical thinking. Make it part of the security awareness, and I'm using that as a broad term, culture, because ultimately it's still about, in that case, protecting the enterprise.

Okay, but where do I sign up?

uh... i don't know about anything that you can sell the one-year subscription to this i don't have to get something that we don't even have a cat that all i can say is that there are some efforts that are really being worked on right now at the same time there are some uh... severe counter efforts being worked on to defeat these positive efforts and that's one of the reasons i've spent a fair amount of time doing my work in the u k d u

Well, I would expect that like the ongoing cat-and-mouse game in cyber, there's a very similar thing going on here. As you make an impact in getting people more cognitively defended, the adversaries are not sitting still, I'm assuming, because they have a lot of money at stake.

Power. It's all power and money.

Exactly. And that's what happened with social media, right? I don't want to start mentioning platforms, but there's only a few.

Go ahead.

These social media platforms, their goal was to kind of, one, they've actually played scientific tests on people by picking a group of people and then giving them depressing stuff. That's another story to see how they would act. Some of them have turned around and pushed political views in order to sway people for elections. Others have turned around and done other things. But the point I'm making is, That's kind of in my unscientific, didn't read the wind book opinion. That's how you sway things by pushing your agenda from an information standpoint so that you see it so much repetitively. Oh my God, that's horrible. Look what they're doing. Oh, she's horrible. He's horrible. That's what they're into. And it might not even be, directly out there it might be overt, it might be suggestive.

The techniques that are being used, I'm trying to be very careful how I phrase this, but the techniques that are being used by people echo and follow word for word the prescription of a gentleman known as Yuri Bezmenov. Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB propagandist from the early 1960s and his goal was to used propaganda to control the population of Russia at that point, but they also recognized exceedingly well how much external influence can be done through pre-social media campaigns. You know, you're talking, you know, Walter Cronkite days, you know, we're talking, you know, way back, but still disinformation.

There was mass media before the internet. A whole different line of people.

Very good, thank you. That's all I got.

I know very little Russian.

Yeah. Oh, man. I spent a year in Russia one week, so that was enough. I spent a year in Russia one week. Wow. Yeah, that was quite an experience.

Wow. Well, this is an episode I definitely need to... No wonder the CBA came to you.

Well, that's a whole other story. Actually, I was able to tell the CIA and a lot of our intelligence services about Russian IAW or information warfare because of my contacts that I had with those folks back in the day. Fundamentally, the difference between our form of Information warfare in those days the terminology and theirs is ours was technically based and theirs was psychologically based They only went after the mind And Here we are and we were warned Warned us exactly word for word and I'll paraphrase one of the most powerful he says in a few years and America will no longer be able to tell the difference between what is true and not true. And whether it's leaders are lying or telling them facts.

That's not true, because you can tell any leader how they're lying. You know how you know? They talk.

Yes. That's the lawyer joke. Yeah.

Yeah. I think if you go back well before 1984, um, there's plenty of politicians who have not told the truth about some major stuff.

We got the McCarthy era, of course, but the point is that it was, this has all been formalized. This is stuff we knew we knew and we chose to do nothing.

It's funny how you picked 1984.

I didn't he did that's when the irony is quite clear Love your love letter to America the links to it or it's all free the links to it are in I'm plugging my book, of course, but they're all in there. There's 700 We'll give you a link to wins book.

Yeah, where do you get your book you say that loud?

Oh

Go to Amazon. Go to Amazon. It's the art and science of meta-war in Kindle and hard copy. Kindle version is not so good, obviously, just because there's charts and graphs and images, but it's there.

Support those who support us. Support Wynn. Supporting Wynn is a win.

Well, it's supporting the effort. I am not technically, yeah, I guess, I don't know if I'm retired or not. I hate that word, but I have a mission now to get, strengthen the cognitive defenses of Western society.

Well, this time went faster. We're at 56 minutes right now. Oh my God. Seriously.

Wow.

Well, this is an important topic, and you know what? There's a lot there, this book. It's yet another book, you know, we've talked to the authors of books about, you know, surveillance, capitalism, and everything, and God, they're scary. Yours is pretty heavy.

There's one other thing I want to mention, because you were talking, Adam, about the social media effect. I believe the name of the book is called Hooked. And it was written by, you know, he wrote it, really good author, but again, I'd reference it. It is one of the Bibles of Silicon Valley. And the tenet fundamentally is, unless your service and or product is highly addictive, we're not interested.

Is that the one where the guy, I think it was like from the gambling industry or something? And he started using the same techniques they use for bringing it to town.

I'm trying to remember the gentleman's name. I'd have to look it up. I don't have it.

We've got to look that up somewhere. But yeah, that's some heavy, heavy stuff, too.

Yeah, we haven't touched on the addiction. issues here we haven't talked about algorithmic anxiety that algorithms are running our lives and we're allowing and choosing that and this all builds into the too much information model of the stress and the mental health problems that we're having in all western societies because all of these problems tied together fundamentally from too much information and our inability to cognitively defend ourselves.

So the irony is also is that most of the models of buying things in shrink-wrap one-time payments have become something reoccurring now. So it's funny how reoccurring also becomes addictive. in order to maintain, you have to keep on paying.

Well, that's how people think they have two services at $35 a month, and they've actually got 15 at 300 a month. And it's a part of the attention economy. And part of ad tech's goal is to have you distracted from where they're not making money and pay attention on new sources of revenue.

Yeah, I've actually a couple of months ago, I went through my credit cards and I said, why do I have all these reoccurring things? I don't need them. And if you do the what ends up happening is you do the trial and then you forget. and then you get no more e-mails, and like, I didn't realize it was still playing. I'm paying for cat videos every single month. Catvideos.com.

Wait, but hold on. We have a ritual in our house. There is TV channels just for cats. So every evening, as we're done, TV's in front of the bed, and the cats come up. and ask us for which cat video they want, and then we put on the cat TV, whether it's birds, or hamsters, or chipmunks, or whatever it is, and they play with the TV for a little while, and then we shut it down. So there's a very different industry there.

All right, I gotta ask you, and this is important. This is something that really touches my life. Does it keep the cats from fighting? Because in our house, when we go to bed, the cats start fighting all night.

all of our capital of the other three siblings from the same letter all of those of us a lot of smart fighting is it's roughhousing And typically after the lights go out, they'll tear ash throughout the house back and forth, rumble and clumble, and then that's it. No, the Mark Hatch don't fight like that.

We got two siblings, and then another one we got, and I was counseled, don't get another one, don't get another one, it's going to wreck your house. And that's exactly what happened. I should have recognized that that was not misinformation or anything when I got that.

So that's another whole episode in itself about how the pets have taken over America. Now in New York City, there's a war on the books that they're going to give you, like, you know how you have your own sick days and then you have family sick days? Now you're going to have pet sick days. If your pet is sick, you can take the day off.

Oh, come on. Seriously? I'm not lying.

I agree with what it makes me think of is people that get on an airplane with an ostrich or a pheasant as their mental health animal.

Their service animal, yeah. Look, all the people have service animals. I respect it. But dogs and cats.

I mean, the pheasant. Dogs and cats.

Look, when I see that, I start looking around. I go, where's the camera? Who's filming this?

I've seen the little pigs. OK, I'm good with that. The mini horses. I have not seen that on an airplane.

Yeah, I know somebody had a mini horse. But for me personally, the problem I have is while I respect everybody's ability to have pets and have service animals, I'm extremely allergic to dogs and I've been on planes sitting next to two dogs and I've asked to be moved because I said and I tell the people directly I have all the respect in the world for your service animals. I'm allergic to animals. I need to be moved to the farthest point of this plane because I am definitely allergic to animals.

I'm sorry about that. That just sucks.

It does. And one of the most Surreal moments of my life was I was working EMS in the 911 system in New York City, and they brought this girl, this woman in, girl, young woman, my age, and I said, what happened to her? And she was in, she went from respiratory distress to respiratory arrest to cardiac arrest, and I believe later on she died. I was told she died. I didn't see that she died. She was in the ER from exposure to an animal. And I've been hospitalized for dogs. Don't get me wrong, I've touched dogs recently. Certain dogs on the outside, I can touch and wash my hands. When I'm inside a room for a short period of time, 30, 40 minutes, even working EMS has become an issue, but the adrenaline has countered that. But when I've dealt with animals in 30 to 40 minutes minimum in a home, I can go into respiratory distress.

Sounds like you were scrolling to me. It's the same thing, isn't it? You just go down to that, you end up with an overload. In this case, it is your biological immune system, in this case, is what is going into overload and then the reactions that occur after that versus the mental overloads with all the negatives that are associated with that.

You see, the problem is Adam is living in Staten Island where everything's easy. And if he had the guts to move to Jersey and get exposed to what we got here, he'd be immune to everything.

Well, it's funny. It's funny you say that. Stuff wouldn't bother you. You know, in Israel, kids are not allergic to peanuts. They're given peanuts at an early age, under one. I've heard that's true. Yeah. So look, exposure to certain things in your life will give you immunity. And your immune system.

I mean, I grew up in Manhattan. Go to Central Park. Come back. I don't care how dirty you are. What do you think? Eating a mud thing, now get in the bathtub. Well, I'm allergic to trains now, so that's a weird thing. Allergic to trains? Quit licking them.

All right, when we get down to train licking, I think that means that it's the end of the episode. That's getting a little heavy. Well, Wynne, thank you so much for joining. This is, you know, I tell everyone, if you're interested in this stuff, you got a lot of reading to do. Starting with your book and then with the whole, there's a whole other world of things that have been going on here. And it is important. It's impacting you whether you realize it or not. That's how I look at it. All right. Okay, Wynn, thanks again for joining us.

Thank you all very much. And anytime, there are just so many aspects of this we can talk about.

Adam, it's been fun as always. It always is. Okay, we'll see you all next time. Thanks.