Eric Czuleger analyzes fifth-generation warfare, defining it as cognitive conflict involving media control and ideological subversion over decades. He details Russian psychological operations like the "Free Hot Dogs" event and Chinese AI-driven disinformation, contrasting these with debunked JFK assassination theories rooted in availability bias. The discussion highlights the erosion of trust via "truth decay," the shift from manufacturing to a skills-based economy, and China's policing of its diaspora. Ultimately, the episode argues that without a formal US information defense strategy, cognitive security remains vulnerable to foreign manipulation and the hollowing out of democratic governance. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Magic Mind and Rand Corporation00:13:24
If I sound too smart on this podcast, it's because I'm using performance enhancing drugs.
Right, right, right.
All right.
Cheers.
Crushed a magic mind.
Off we go.
Yeah, baby.
So, what the f were you doing at the Rand Corporation?
I'm still there.
You're working there.
No, no, I'm a national security master's student.
So, they have a.
So, wait, where did you work?
We talked about this in the first podcast, but you worked for some sort of other national security agency first.
I didn't work for an agency.
No, I was an open source intelligence alien.
Open source intelligence alien.
And then you started to see like decapitation videos and you quit.
Basically.
And now those are so common that it's like now I'm clearly a wimp.
No, I was working in open source intelligence for a little bit and just writing geopolitical analysis and forecasting.
And then at a certain point, I got laid off along with a lot of the rest of the company and decided to go overseas again.
I'd spent.
A lot of time overseas because I was a Peace Corps volunteer.
So I was in northern Albania for about two years and decided I wanted to go back and report from overseas.
So I was working as a freelancer, mostly in the Middle East, Balkans, a little bit in Africa.
And from there, I decided I wanted to do a book, you know, a sort of unusual travel book.
And I decided that I was going to live in unrecognized countries for a year and a half.
Yeah, are you still the ambassador to Somalia?
What's the name of that island that you were the ambassador of?
So, I was previously the ambassador from the world's first cryptocurrency based nation, cryptocurrency libertarian based micro nation, which is called Lieberland.
Lieberland.
Lieberland.
Shout out to Lieberland.
Their 10 year anniversary is coming up.
You're going to go back and ride the jet skis?
I would.
I'm just not in Europe right now.
I mean, this is the longest I've been back in the States for a long time.
But yeah, no, good on Libra land.
I mean, they have come really close to establishing a fully recognized and autonomous state.
And I was, when I was on the show, so for folks that don't know, go back and listen to the first pod, but I was talking with the president of Libra land while on the back of a jet ski, which was a really strange first way of meeting somebody.
That's when you were sworn in, right?
I wasn't sworn in on the jet ski.
No, I was just clutching him like a spider monkey so I wouldn't fall off the jet ski because he had a life vest and I didn't.
But, you know, I asked him.
Can you swim?
I can, but it was the Danube and, you know, yeah, it's a moving river.
Oh, you probably get AIDS in that river.
Hopefully not.
I didn't find out, which was good.
And, you know, I asked him, I was trying to figure out what to ask him because I'd spent, you know, all of this time.
In unrecognized nations.
I'd spent almost a year in unrecognized nations in Iraqi Kurdistan and Kosovo and Transnistria.
And, you know, there I was holding on to the president of Lieberland as we sort of went up the Danube River on a jet ski.
And I asked, I was trying to figure out some really good question to ask him.
But, you know, in that environment while you're holding on to your interview subject, I don't know if I've ever tried an interview this way, but it's like.
Where you're like talking right directly into his ear?
I was just sort of yelling into his ear because the jet ski was loud.
Yeah.
And I was like, uh, You started a country.
Is it worth it?
It was the best I could get out.
And then he kind of stopped the jet ski and he was like really thoughtful for a second.
He was like, everybody should start their own country.
And then he just busted the sickest, like 180 on the Danube.
And I was like, that's either the most brilliant thing that I've ever heard or it's complete nonsense.
And the project that I'm kind of working on now is exactly that.
I'm trying to investigate how one would start their own country nowadays because there are these new nation state building projects that are currently happening.
An insane project.
So I was like, I should probably get some, you know, academic and scholarly backing for this kind of thing and actually try and get some good, like, scholarly roots in, in, like, actually exploring what statecraft really is.
And God, you got to be really ambitious to want to start your own country.
Ambitious or stupid, I don't know.
There's quite a few of these projects that are going on right now, and some of them are, like, verging more on what I would consider, like, art projects that are sort of, um, Challenging the mainstream of like the nation state.
Like, there's this project down in the Southern Californian desert called Slow Jamistan.
Shout out to the Sultan of Slow Jamistan.
I think you told me about that one last time.
Yeah, yeah.
So he's just a DJ and wanted to start a nation.
And then there's another one called Malasia, which I think is in the Nevada desert.
And they consider their property taxes as like foreign aid to the United States.
But then there are these other kind of incredible projects that are more network state projects.
And so, network states is what some people believe the future of nation states are.
And it's basically like a decentralized nation state.
And this was kind of predicted, has been predicted by a lot of these futurists that say the nation state at a certain point was this ideological technology that was invented in the 1600s at the Treaty of Westphalia.
Basically, so Europeans would just stop killing each other for a couple of years, and they were like, okay, you know what?
Let's get rid of all of these sort of this complex network of family relationships and religious ties, and your allegiance is tied to the land.
We're going to draw borders around the land.
And by doing that, hopefully, the sovereignty of a national unit will be allowed to bargain with these other national units.
And so, as part of like, Westphalian sovereignty, as they call it.
You've got this sort of equality of nations.
There's no nation that is above any other nation.
They're sovereign, so you can't mess with them.
They're able to make their own laws within their own territories.
And then, as one of the big geopolitical guys, Francis Fukuyama would say, they have the monopoly of violence.
So they're able to keep and maintain their standing army, policing forces, and kind of handle business within their borders.
This worked pretty well.
It's still working pretty well, but I think we're starting to see the cracks come into it.
And one of the reasons for this is because capital no longer really pools within nation states.
You're starting to see that there's the flight of capital by way of power or by way of prestige or by way of just money to places where there's just a lower tax rate.
You can see even the golden visa that's being introduced in the United States.
Essentially, we're trying to draw Highly capitalized individuals into the United States from other countries because we're saying, hey, we've got a better deal for your taxation here.
Come over here, maybe start some jobs, maybe just enjoy a lesser taxed life.
And so there's this negotiation that's going on in the world right now where you're starting to look at statehood as a service.
And because if you think about, at least the way that network state folks think about this, it's almost as if statehood or your citizenship is a subscription service that you were just born into, right?
And so they're looking at it from the perspective of Silicon Valley, which is like, Well, what if we just offer you more benefits for your subscription service?
So there are places like Prospera down in Honduras, and they have some sort of charter city status where they're kind of allowed to make their own laws there.
And they're offering a lot of like life extension surgeries, or I should say, life extension treatments and things like that.
And there are a couple of these other projects.
So I think the first step is really just to kind of go to these places and try to.
Find out what exactly the end goal is, right?
Because at a certain point, the nation state was created and it was carved out of the empires and kingdoms of yesteryear.
We look at it because we don't really know generationally anybody who lived under an actual king rather than, obviously, you still have kings in Spain and stuff like that, but nobody's a serf in the modern world.
So it's hard for us to imagine something that would come after.
The nation state.
And there is a lot of thinking that is going into this right now.
So, yeah, this is all a really long winded way to say, you know, I wanted to start thinking about this from a really, you know, well founded scholarly perspective.
And so I decided I was going to go and pick up another master's degree at the Rand Corporation.
So I've been there for the last six months and currently working on a dissertation about fifth generation warfare.
Right.
Well, there's, according to, you know, who John Mearsheimer is?
Yeah, Mearsheimer.
So he talks about, I think what he says is there's three things that determine the power of a nation state.
And it's like number one is how big their gun is.
Number two, how big their population is.
And number three, I forget what number three was.
I think number three might have been like their geographical location.
Probably territorial and territorial.
Yeah.
Like us, we're surrounded by two oceans.
Other people like Israel are surrounded by all these other adversaries.
Yeah, Mearsheimer is, he's, you know, Known as a big time realist.
So he really sort of underlines the geo and geopolitics, where it's like, what natural benefits does the territorial integrity of your nation sort of offer you?
One of the reasons that the United States has done so well, there's a lot of different reasons that the U.S. has done so well over the couple of centuries that we've been around.
One of them is just really hard to invade the United States, right?
We've got two big oceans, we've got a big mountain range, and we've got a desert right in the center of us.
Yeah.
So that's one of the things that Mearsheimer talks about, or why it's incredibly difficult to take over Afghanistan, as many people have tried over the years, because it's just really mountainous.
And even with all of our modern technology, it's really hard to fight in mountains, as it turns out.
What do you think would be the biggest vulnerability or the weakest link of the United States as far as its ranking on.
Nation states or countries in the world.
Like, we obviously have the biggest military.
We have the most high powered weaponry on earth.
We have the best geographical location.
I don't know if we have, I don't know if we're the number one GDP.
Are we?
Is our GDP?
Yeah, it's currently, I don't know the exact number, but yeah, we're out of time.
But there's been no major world wars since the 40s.
So I'm sure this is something that companies like the RAND Corporation are looking at.
Yeah, I mean, there's always an assessment of vulnerabilities.
And right now, a lot of the scholarly research that's being done is looking at how we transition from the global war on terror to what people are talking about as great.
Power competition.
And this has everything to do with the sort of research that I'm working on, which is what's called fifth generation warfare.
Sometimes it's called hybrid warfare.
But I think that the question about vulnerability has everything to do with fifth generation warfare.
And to kind of understand it, I think you have to go through the first one through four generations.
And the thing to remember.
When you're sort of looking at these generations, it doesn't necessarily mean that one generation ends and another one picks up.
These different generations of warfare can be happening simultaneously.
But what matters is how technology and geopolitical aims end up affecting each other in order to change the nature and the character of warfare.
So, can you explain the generation one through five?
So, first generation.
Generations of Proxy Warfare00:05:59
You know, basically, anytime somebody decided to get their buddies together and go, you know, fill a bunch of other strangers with holes for some geopolitical aim.
So it could be anything from like early Neanderthal tribal warfare, all the way up to sometimes the example that people tend to use are like the Macedonian conquests, where strategically you have a really high level of organization, but a fairly low level of technology.
You know, you've got.
Dudes in lines marching with spears and tribes.
Yeah, but the Macedonian conquest were kind of like the latter end of it.
They had shields and they could make a phalanx and they could stab each other in unison, which was a technological boon at the time.
It wasn't something that we had seen before.
But again, it goes from technology to geopolitical aims.
How do you marry those together in order to create this new character of warfare?
So, second generation.
That kind of takes us up to almost the Napoleonic Wars.
And at that point, you're looking at things like gunpowder, more advanced tactics.
You've got decisive battles, but you also have entrenchment, right?
So you have these wars of attrition that are made possible by this new type of technology.
World War II is kind of where we start to change again, right?
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We've got more maneuverability warfare and, of course, the nuclear bomb.
Yeah.
So now you're talking about the industrialization of war.
So suddenly you're able to, you know, absolutely like annihilate a battlefield, not only with industrialized weaponry from the sky, but industrialized weaponry that's being driven across the land.
Good example of that maneuver warfare of the third generation of warfare.
But as things go up towards the Cold War, we see this big characteristic change in how wars are fought.
And obviously, this happens because of the nuclear bomb.
So at this point, we have the last iteration of great power conflict.
But with the nuclear bomb, it becomes far too dangerous to have direct nation state on nation state violence because at any point, somebody could drop the world ending weapon or.
So, we thought at the time.
And so, suddenly, war has to change again because the geopolitical aims aren't completely annihilating the world.
It's just to get strategic advantage over the adversary.
In this case, it would be the Soviet Union and the United States.
So, we go to proxy wars.
We go to proxy wars and asymmetric conflict.
That can take us from basically the end of the Cold War all the way up to the global war on terror.
And the global war on terror changes things massively.
Because suddenly we have a unipolar world.
Essentially, the Soviet Union has fallen and the United States is able to project power all around the world.
But we haven't been able to project power all around the world without making quite a few enemies.
And also training a lot of those enemies at the same time.
So suddenly the global war on terror turns into really precise asymmetric combat with semi state and non state actors.
So Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and I mean, you know, the Islamic State, name your.
Name your insurgent group, your favorite insurgent group, name them.
Pick your flavor.
Right, exactly.
But now we have something different happening.
And that's fifth generation warfare.
We still have the same constraints of third generation warfare.
We can't go directly into combat with each other with these world ending weapons.
And in fact, there's so much economic entanglement in the world that it's very difficult to actually disrupt another nation so significantly because you're disrupting your own market.
So that leads us to.
This new type, this new iteration of warfare, which is the cognitive domain.
Essentially, it's a war of media, a war of ideas, and a war of attempting to divide populations against populations and to use the cognitive domain, essentially like the gray zone warfare in people's gray matter, and to occupy the space between people's ears in order to achieve some sort of strategic gain.
The Cognitive Domain War00:09:55
So, a lot of what I'm looking at is, you know, how.
How does the United States work to shield itself from any attacks in the information space?
Because one of the biggest assets we have as a country is our freedom of speech.
But that also leaves our information space massively open to any sort of incursion by potentially belligerent actors.
In fact, there was this one psychological operation, I think the.
The agent who did it was a guy named Ivan Aga Jantz.
This was in the 1960s.
And, you know, he essentially had created this fake treasure trove of Nazi documents.
They're all fake Nazi documents.
And he dumped them into a lake in Czechoslovakia at the time.
And then he hired, you know, a real news team to unearth them and say, yeah.
And so the goal was.
Basically, to sort of acknowledge some sort of complicity with the newly Western government and say, hey, you know, like these guys were working with the Nazis.
Granted, all of these documents were fake.
Sometimes this operation, this is called Operation Neptune, sometimes called the fake in the lake.
What year was this again?
Oh, it was in the 60s, I want to say.
If you want to read about it, definitely recommend Active Measures by Thomas Ridd, fantastic book.
Okay.
But he has this one, the Aga Jans has this one.
Like, absolute banger line in it, where he says something like, You know, it's great that they have freedom of the press.
If they didn't, we'd have to invent it for them.
And so it talks about this permeability of the information space where it's like, on the one hand, you're able to call out really terrible ideas and you're able to surface really good ideas in free dialogue.
But on the other hand, it leaves the borders open.
For anybody to make an injection of information into that space.
Yeah, this is almost exactly what that Russian dude Yuri Bezmanov was talking about.
That's exactly right.
Which it seems like that's exactly that is like precisely where we're at today, which is exactly what he was talking about.
Well, and the Bezmanov speech is fantastic too, because one of the things that he talks about is the generational aim of these kind of active measures.
Russia specifically tends to have a lot more time to do these things.
They don't have.
Administration switches nearly as regularly as we do.
So they can.
Dictatorships can make decisions way faster.
That's right.
And they can also make more long term decisions.
You know, I was reading a report and I am like having trouble getting it out of my mind because now it's the only way that I can sort of think about the Ukrainian conflict or really anything that's happening within the Russian Federation sphere of influence.
And they were essentially saying that.
The psychological operation of Russia is really the locus or the center of the conflict, that kinetic conflicts are just ways of influencing the psychological operation.
And so I know it sounds a little perplexing, but I think the information that they give or the evidence that they give is: their incursion into Syria at a certain point was everybody was saying, well, it's because they want a warm-water port.
Great.
But what also came from that was a massive amount of refugee outflows from Syria that went into Europe.
And this is, you know, you can draw a direct line from that into this new wave of hyper nationalism that is sort of drawing fractures in the European Union because they're saying, well, you know, if we're a European Union, then why are some countries bearing the brunt of taking care of these refugee outflows and why are other ones able to not have that same burden?
Right.
And so, in one respect, Russia benefits from the rise of autocrats in the European Union and a fracturous European Union, too.
And so, we've seen a bit of that already.
And so, you might wonder, you know, okay, well, what about the war in Ukraine?
You have a slow encroachment into the war in Ukraine.
2014 is it?
You really start seeing these gray zone operations where the little green men come into Crimea, and, you know, it's a.
A sort of like a situation ship of war zone, like, you know, are we at war?
Are we not at war?
And, you know, it's testing the waters to see, you know, what will the result actually be?
What, you know, what actions is NATO going to take?
And we're already seeing an enormous cultural divide, especially in the United States and amongst allies, about what do we do about this kinetic conflict?
You know, I haven't lived in the United States for a long time, but I've been back for six months, and maybe it's because I'm, you know, at, At a think tank where these things happen, or we have these conversations a lot.
But I'm quite surprised to see how much division there is over funding or not funding the war in Ukraine.
And there's certainly a lot of gasoline being thrown on that fire, not only internally, but from abroad.
What do you mean abroad?
Who specifically abroad would be throwing gas on the fire that's.
Making more division in the US over that war.
Yeah.
So, one of the operations that we've seen is Operation Doppelganger, which was covered pretty well.
And I mean, honestly, especially after looking at these things for a while, you get to know how clever they are and how low the cost for sowing a good deal of Discord is.
So, what Operation Doppelganger did was it basically launched websites that looked like almost exactly like.
Common news websites in the West.
But of course, they had more anti Ukraine, pro Kremlin stances in them.
And so these were just sort of littered across the internet.
And people would point to these potentially reputable news sources and say, see, they're supporting the Kremlin instead of supporting Ukraine.
And we know that was coming from the Russian Federation.
Obviously, you also have.
Weaponization of the alternative media, too, where they're saying, you know, okay, well, we're going to pay X, Y, and Z influencer to sort of go on to our talking.
Oh, yeah.
Do you see Tim Pool having with Tim Pool?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Although I guess he didn't know where the money was coming from, but they got like, I think it was a few million bucks from Russia.
Yeah.
And I mean, look, the Russians are really good at making sure people don't know where the money is coming from.
Right.
Yeah.
What was the, I don't remember the story there, but I don't think like, did they, were they told to talk about specific.
Things that I don't know and I can't remember.
And I, you know, I see if you can find the story about Tim Pool being funded by Russia.
I think it was uh Tenant Media, Tenant Media, that's what it was.
Okay, here we go.
Tim Poole, right wing influencer, has been implicated in a Russian influence operation.
According to the federal indictment, two employees at RT funneled nearly $10 million into a Tennessee based company called Tenant Media to create content favorable to Russia.
Tim Poole was one of the content creators associated with Tenant Media, receiving a payment of $100,000.
That's what it was.
Yeah, he got paid.
He had to create a new YouTube channel for this.
Right.
And the videos were not getting, you know, some of them were getting like, You know, 5,000, 8,000 views.
And he was getting paid 100 grand for 8,000 views on the video.
I'm not a YouTube creator, so I'm assuming that's a pretty good payday.
That's a really good payday.
Yeah.
He claimed, so Tim claimed that he was a victim of the scheme and said Putin is a scumbag.
So, yeah.
So he, I mean, it's.
There you go.
Case closed.
He said Putin is a scumbag.
Nice.
They got it.
Case closed, baby.
Really?
I bet the Russian active measures agents are really wringing their hands over that statement.
And it says here, Poole has made statements on social media supporting Ukraine, which some view as an attempt to counter the claims.
Sure.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is a version, like, this is kind of a, like, it's deeply within the Russian playbook.
And some of the research that I'm doing too is trying to look at, like, you know, what's the character of a Russian psychological operation versus a Chinese psychological operation versus an Iranian one?
Like, how are they fighting a fifth generation war?
And they tend to be very different than one another.
So Russia has been doing this stuff for a long time.
Obviously, is it Bezmanov?
Yuri?
Yuri Bezmanov.
Yeah, I mean, everybody go watch that speech.
You can find it, Steve.
You can probably find a one minute clip of it.
It's like a longer interview, but they have it clipped somewhere.
On YouTube, there's just like chill hop playing in the background.
It's just really, really vibey Bezmanov.
Have you ever been to Russia?
No, I haven't.
After this interview, Don't think I'll be welcome.
That'll be two countries I'm banned from.
Turkey is the first one.
Turkey is the first one.
I actually ended up, I got detained flying through Turkey recently.
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Hot Dogs and LLM Realism00:15:56
That's ISTE, the top one.
There he is.
Actually, find a short.
This is 13 minutes long.
See if you can find, go back and see if you can find a short because it'll be condensed.
There you go.
The second one.
Try that.
Boom.
Ideological subversion is the slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures or psychological warfare.
What it basically means is to change the perception of reality.
Every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.
It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow.
It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation.
This is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students exposed to the ideology of the enemy.
In other words, Marxism Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of.
Of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism.
The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already.
Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to lack of moral standards.
Ideological subversion is a slow thing.
The loaded language there of lack of moral standards.
Ouch, man.
Rude.
But yeah, I mean, that is a good primer on the purpose of fifth generation warfare and Russian psychological.
It seems like you don't really have to do much.
It seems like you kind of like let the people fight themselves and light little fires where you need to light them.
Yeah, I think that's, I mean, it's sort of demonstrated in how well Russia understands the American character, really.
You know, I think about how there are quite a few skeletons in the American closet and they're really good at like playing the xylophone on those ribs, right?
One good example, a sort of famous example, I want to say.
It had a really cool operation code name.
It was called like Infection or something.
But anyway, this is one of the more famous ones.
And it was during the AIDS crisis, they wanted to sow this story into the American media that AIDS was being generated as a biological weapon to affect marginalized populations in the United States.
What they did was they sort of smuggled a story into a paper, and I want to say it was India.
And then that hit the international news wires because it was a story in India.
It was really hard to fact check.
And also, it's a fairly sensationalist story.
So it sounds really like it sounds plausible, it sounds exciting.
And both of these things are big red flags when you want to identify what is and isn't a psychological operation.
The American news cycle.
I think, I mean, one of the big news broadcasters broadcast on it.
I want to say Tom Brokaw, but that's like literally the only name that I can think of right now.
Anyway, people ran with it.
And it's a process of idea laundering.
So you put an idea somewhere within some sphere of influence that has a direct line into the target community.
And then from there, you have a certain amount of well known sources of information that seemingly vet that information.
And suddenly it becomes almost indistinguishable from the truth.
But it has a distinct effect on the American population.
One of my favorite versions of this was so they had the, I think this was Yevgeny Prigozhin's.
He was the guy who.
Prigozhin, that was the dude that was working for Putin?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Putin's chef.
He blew him out of the sky eventually.
Yeah, he had a catastrophic airplane failure.
Yeah.
Crazy.
What bad luck.
Surface to air missile.
What?
Yeah.
They shouldn't have been flying that missile there.
What bad luck.
So he also had, I think it was called the Internet Research Organization.
And the Internet Research Organization was the Russian troll farm, right?
And I mean, it just sounded like you read reports from the people who were working in these troll farms, and the conditions sound brutal.
Like, you know, you've got to write something like 700 posts a day, either supporting or denying or just.
Fighting with people online under the guise of, you know, an American from Texas or whatever.
And at a certain point, they were like, well, can we make things happen in the real world from online?
And so they did this one operation that I just think is hilarious and brilliant, which was called Free Hot Dogs.
And they created an event on Facebook in Central Park in New York City.
That was just like free hot dogs.
We're going to have free hot dogs in Central Park.
There were no free hot dogs, spoiler alert.
But what they did was they had a Russian active measures agent go and just like see who showed up.
A lot of people showed up for free hot dogs.
And so what they found out was they could now make people take real life action through online events.
Now, this changed into full on demonstrations.
So there were these two groups that they were trying to get to fight each other.
And one was called like the heart of Texas.
And then the other one was called like, I want to say like USA Muslims, some sort of Islamic thing about Muslims in the United States.
And they started essentially like counter protests against both of these groups, but both groups were operated by Russian troll farms.
And of course, one group had almost had a quarter of a million people, and the other group had.
A quarter of a million people in it.
So suddenly you have real life division and an actual protest and counter protest that was being ginned up from St. Petersburg by a bunch of people posting.
And now this process has gotten so much easier that it's insane with artificial intelligence and LLMs.
You can have actual agents, not human agents, but LLMs running around the internet and just generating hundreds of thousands of posts for you.
That's wild.
There's a fascinating paper about this, and it was about a Chinese researcher who sort of predicted this.
I can't remember.
There is a RAND report on this.
I think if you look up Chinese disinformation, then you can read the RAND report about it.
But there was a.
There's a RAND report.
Yeah.
Most of the.
Most, if not all, I mean, there's certain classified RAND reports.
Yeah.
And then RAND reports that are classified and then eventually declassified.
But I think you'd be surprised how.
Yeah.
Chinese different.
That's.
Yep.
These reports are fantastic and they're incredibly dense.
Yeah.
So, yeah, they're all publicly available as well.
I don't know if it's this one that talks about it, but there was a Chinese computer scientist who sort of saw the LLM, large language model AI opportunity coming.
And initially, he was sort of laughed at, and they were like, well, that's not actually going to be a thing.
But he came up with the idea of these artificial intelligent agents, but he called them souls, right?
So, you would come up with a digital soul or an army of souls.
But really, what these were were very realistic social media profiles that had a full history.
So, you could sort of vet somebody's full history.
All of these artificially intelligent generated imagery, online accounts.
Online accounts.
And then you would start having those accounts run around the internet and posting various things.
And LLMs were doing all this.
Well, so that's what he predicted.
And I think that this is something that we'll probably start seeing a lot more of.
Yeah.
Because it's just so easy.
A lot of the barrier to entry that previous generations of psychological warfare fighting had was legitimacy, right?
Going back to that Operation Neptune, the fake and the like, you think about how much they had to do in order to quote unquote uncover these Nazi documents, right?
You had to have forgers work for months creating realistic.
Fake Nazi documents.
They even went so far as to take the steamer trunk and artificially age it so that not only would the steamer trunk be able to hold these fake documents, but it could be identified realistically as something that was at that time period, not as a fake.
And then you have all these fake documents discovered by fake divers.
In fact, Aggie Jans was one of the divers, as far as I know.
And then you have a real media team that shows up there.
So that's an enormous barrier to entry.
Like you have to have this army of forgers working for months to make sure that everything stands up to scrutiny.
Now you have an artificial intelligence agent that can work within a matter of seconds to sound plausible or to sound realistic.
Then you can launder the idea through any number of different websites to make it sound as if this is somebody speaking from.
A measure of authority.
Yeah.
And so as the bar lowers to affecting the information space, it becomes easier and easier for both state actors and non state actors to start messing with the information space of a country.
Yeah.
If something sounds sensational enough or sounds logical enough, all it takes is one person to report on that story, no matter where, no matter how reputable the original, original.
Foundational source is.
As long as there's a second source, somebody who reports on that, someone else might find that interesting, might make a video about that.
Some other bigger reporter or content creator could see that and make a video that goes like really viral.
And then once you get two or three sources removed, then it's just like a free for all.
People aren't going to be going back to the original source to see if that was a Russian agent or a Russian or a Chinese psyop.
Well, and they're going to run on it because it's a huge story that's going to get them a lot of page views and make them a lot of money.
I mean, I've heard you, you know, dealing with this.
I guess I'm, you know, I'm a fan of your show as well.
So I listen to a lot of your episodes, but I hear you sort of struggling with this.
From time to time regarding like UFOs and Egypt stuff, right?
You know, you have so many different conflicting reports, and then there's so much information in the space, and the original sources are obfuscated from you and from anybody.
You know, I want to know where the UFOs are too.
Yeah.
Something that, you know, some buddies of mine talk about at RAND.
Wait, you guys talk about UFOs at RAND?
Totally.
Yeah.
We're like, you know, I took a course on space stuff, and anytime like a new professor comes in, we're like, they know.
They got to know.
But then you also realize how much is how stovepiped information is.
And, you know, if anyway, so the thing that I think is it must be really frustrating for you, and it's certainly frustrating for me when it's like, okay, I don't know how to vet any of this information because the information comes from a place of secrecy already.
So anybody that's going to claim some authority, whoever seems the most convincing from that.
Space of authority.
I guess they're right.
And then, you know, when there's conflict in the space, it seems like everybody's just going to throw the other guy under the bus and be like, oh, that's a PSYOP.
That's CIA.
They're, you know, little green men are CIA.
But these aliens, like the Pleiadians, they're definitely like legit.
Right.
Think about it like this imagine if a person like Joe Rogan would be a good example.
I don't know if, I mean, I'm sure he does quite a bit of background and research on his guests before they come in.
But maybe.
There's one day where he was hungover or in a rush to do something, and he came across some article or someone forwarded him some Instagram clip of somebody talking about something really interesting to him.
And he was like, oh, fuck yeah, get this guy on the show.
Right.
And this guy comes on the show, talks about all kinds of crazy things that no one's ever heard of or things that are blowing his mind that he finds super interesting, puts out the podcast, gets millions and millions and millions of views.
Now, all of a sudden, there's all these millions of other podcasts that are trying to get this same guy on their show.
They don't have to do any.
Joe Rogan had him on.
Yeah.
What other, other than the fact that you know this person's talking about and it's going to get you a ton of views and make you a lot of money, what other background checks do you need to do on this guy?
Because he was on the number one podcast in the world.
Yeah, because they've leveraged the authority of that platform, right?
Think how easy that must be for some.
I mean, if there were Russian or Chinese or any kind of foreign agents doing that kind of work.
Well, you also, I mean, you know, a lot of what I've learned in studying national security, you know, at RAND, which I should say is a fantastic program and like the, the, The teachers that we have are like, it's really cool to be in a room with people who think about this stuff at all times.
But, you know, one of the things that you sort of consistently discuss is like cost benefit, right?
I think oftentimes conflict is really fought on a spreadsheet first, which is how do you maximize the impact while also lessening the cost?
And information space attacks just happen to be really cheap, you know, and getting cheaper all the time.
So long as you have access to that.
Messaging surface, or you have access to that point of authority.
Yeah.
And sometimes, like the idea is, I don't care as much to change people's thoughts.
I just care that they act a different way.
So the thought can be any number of things.
It's not necessary that you change somebody's beliefs.
You just want them to act in a way that is strategically important to whatever your aims are.
Have you noticed on the internet, I don't know how much time you spend reading comments or how much time you spend scrolling through X?
Just comments, just on the video that I did here last time.
That just got absolutely shredded.
I'm surprised you came back.
I did, yeah.
Congratulations for overcoming that.
Thank you.
I am a deep state operative, and you guys are all right in the comments.
So, you know, I'm here again to be hurt emotionally.
Bot Farms and Signal Noise00:10:19
It seems like, at least in comment sections, I've noticed this recently that blaming Israel for everything seems to be in vogue right now.
Yeah.
And I notice it more and more in comments, though, like comments on Twitter or X and on YouTube.
Like, for example, I saw a clip the other day of.
I think it was actually a clip of Joe Rogan's podcast where he was talking to a bunch of like MMA dudes.
Or no, it was Eddie Bravo.
Okay.
He was talking to him about JFK.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then.
Oh, it'd be the right guess for that.
And then every single comment on that video was like, not one mention of Israel.
I can't fucking believe Joe Rogan must be an Israeli agent.
He's an op.
Sure.
Because he didn't say the word Israel when they were talking about JFK.
There's this crazy thing where everybody, there's a lot of people on the internet that want to blame Israel for killing JFK.
That seems like a stretch.
I don't know.
I'd love to hear their argument for that.
Well, there's two easy arguments against it, right?
It's because in 1963, A, did Israel have the means to kill JFK and wrap up the FBI and the CIA to work with them to cover it up and to make it happen?
Is that the general argument for that kind of thing?
That's one of them.
Would Israeli intelligence or the Israeli military be able. to get the US military, the US, the CIA and the FBI to help them kill their own president because of what the argument for it is because people say Israel wanted a nuclear bomb and Kennedy wouldn't let them have it.
Got it.
And right after Kennedy was killed, I think some uranium was smuggled out of a plant in Pennsylvania.
Okay.
That's true.
That did happen.
But to say that they killed the president over that and got the entire US government and intelligence agencies to help them do it.
Is kind of crazy.
That's really fucking crazy to say.
And then to even think that they would want to do, would consider going that far just to get some nuclear material is also insane.
And on the other hand, you also have the entire US military and Joint Chiefs of Staff that wanted to commit a full on thermonuclear war across the whole entire world.
They wanted to nuke China and Russia because that was the one point in history where we had the most nuclear weapons.
And Russia had very, very little at that point.
They didn't start ramping up their nuclear arsenal until like 19.
It was like a year after Kennedy was killed.
Right.
So it was, boy, we had the most, they had the least.
We wanted to fucking full on nuke everyone because we knew that they would, if they nuked us back, we would only lose, you know, maybe 100 million people.
Right.
And waiting five years, it would be catastrophic.
Yeah.
So that's the most plausible reason why Kennedy got killed because the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted full on war.
He didn't want war.
He was pulling everybody out of Vietnam.
It was the whole Bay of Pigs thing, all that stuff combined.
But everyone wants to blame Israel.
Yeah, I think that part of this is also.
And also, a lot of people want to.
A lot of UFO people think that it was because of UFOs.
What?
There's so many different flavors of JFK.
I was going to say, just because of the release recently, I was like, I got to get into this because I honestly just haven't researched.
I've been too busy with unrecognized nations.
And then I started dipping a toe into the waters and I'm like, this goes way too deep.
This will either consume all my life.
But immediately I was really confused to sort of what the dominant, most plausible theories were.
But I think, you know.
It's interesting you say it like it's either UFOs or Israel.
Israel.
Clearly, the usual suspects.
Right, right, right.
But I think that this also sort of speaks to, like in scholarship and in academia, there's this idea of like somebody on a dark street looking for their keys under the only place that there's a streetlight on.
It's like, well, the keys have to be here because it's the only place I can see.
Israel and UFOs are top of mind for a community that's interested in JFK and the truth thereof.
So it seems like stitching together this grand plan is more plausible because those things are the things that they're already interested in.
They already have a sort of working model for how the world works as leveraged by somewhere in between UFOs, Israel, and probably what, like the pyramids?
Yeah, maybe.
I'd imagine.
Yeah, there's a recent thing that came out about the pyramids.
I know.
It seems like bullshit.
Did you?
I sent that thing to an Egyptology friend of mine, and he basically told me to not bother him ever again.
Really?
Anything like that.
Yeah.
He was like.
Yeah, a lot of people think it's bullshit.
Yeah.
I haven't looked at the whole report, but.
Well, and so this is one of those.
There are certain areas in which psychological operations thrive.
My girlfriend has a.
A joke right now that anytime I say psychological operations or psyops, she has to take a shot.
And she's not dead yet.
But she would be if that was true.
She's two weeks into rehab.
That's right.
Yeah.
She's getting better.
But anyway, like this is kind of the space that these things thrive.
So one of the original people at Rand was a guy named Kenneth Arrow.
And he created this rational actor model.
Right.
And the rational actor model or the rational actor theory is basically that people are going to like maximize their own benefit in any given situation.
Yes.
And nation states will do something similar.
So I was doing some research into that and I was like, well, what are the things where does the theory really fall apart of the rational actor model?
Right.
And it was really interesting to see the places that the rational actor model falls apart are really the sort of weak spots in terms of.
Getting people to believe parallel realities.
So, biases, just cognitive biases, are one way of leveraging information into somebody's head.
So, a good cognitive bias, particularly with what you just talked about, is the availability bias.
Like, you know, somebody has just come from reading an article about UFOs and now they're reading about JFK and they're also reading about Israel at the same time.
Suddenly they have a grand theory about how they're all connected.
I can see that.
I can see the idea there and how that.
Makes sense.
But at the same time, I feel like a lot of these comments, at least that I'm reading, they see it seems, and also the sudden rise to this kind of rhetoric online seems very unnatural to me.
Almost like it's some sort of bot farm or something.
I mean, that technology is totally available.
I think that, you know, this is one of the things that I, as I was, I've been talking with one of the sort of key researchers on this kind of stuff.
His name is actually Rand.
So, Rand Wantsman.
Everybody should go follow him on LinkedIn because he has.
This fantastic LinkedIn.
Yeah, like weirdly on LinkedIn.
He really rocks with everybody here that has a LinkedIn account.
Well, he has this incredible.
So he posts a slide.
Do you have a LinkedIn account?
I do, yeah.
And, you know, currently open to networking.
Do you post on there?
No, no.
Okay.
Not usually.
But Rand posts this lecture series that he did years ago called Defense Against the Dark Arts of Psychological Manipulation.
And so it's basically like a slide a day that talks about how psychological manipulation.
Manipulation happens.
And one of the things that he talks about is a cognitive DDoS attack.
So, what does DDoS mean again?
Denial of service.
It's basically like a hacking attack where you have a bot farm or just a lot of people sort of like query a website over and over again until the website shuts down.
So, what this looks like on the cognitive level is let's say you're waiting for an important piece of mail and you go to your mailbox and that message that you're waiting for isn't in there, but you have a hundred other pieces of mail.
That says nonsense on them or they're junk mail, right?
The next day you have a thousand pieces of mail, right?
Eventually it's going to be too costly from your time and your just effort to go through all of those messages to find the message that you actually want.
And eventually it's going to just be, yeah, it's just too costly to go through all of that information in order to find what the signal is.
There's too much noise, not enough signal, basically.
Right.
And so by Sort of assaulting, let's say, a hashtag or a news piece with a bunch of information that is sort of nonsensical.
In fact, I think Steve Banning calls this flooding the zone with shit.
Essentially, you can make the noise go away or be so reduced that you're never going to be able to hear the signal within it.
So, when you're talking about potentially bot farms are just dumping messaging into these spaces, there might be, it could very well be, it could be a cognitive DDoS attack where.
There is a bunch of noise going into a space just because they're whoever is trying to obfuscate the signal is doing so.
I mean, I think this is something that you certainly experience with UFOs as well, where it's like everybody is coming in with their own hot take on UFOs and also they're fighting in the space at the exact same time.
So the game isn't to generate a truth statement from the conversation, the game is to win the conversation.
Napoleon's Penis Problem00:03:53
Right.
And that doesn't actually surface the truth.
Right?
I mean, I don't know.
I'm still.
No, you have no incentive to prove anything right or wrong, right?
Yeah.
It's just to gather more eyeballs.
This is, I've been writing on my newsletter about sort of trying to coin these new phrases, right?
And so this is something I call the Napoleon's penis problem.
I saw your TikTok.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
So I'm trademarking it for the world right now Napoleon's penis problem.
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Now back to the show.
And it's the idea that so Napoleon famously had his penis cut off and embalmed and sent to his lover because.
I don't know.
He's Napoleon.
Was this in his will?
It was.
There are different reports on why exactly.
Some people even say that the priest that was around was mad at him.
The weird part is that none of those reasons are important.
The weird part is that we know his penis got cut off and embalmed at one point.
Really?
That's a fact.
That is a fact.
Are there other images of this?
Do we know?
Is there hard evidence?
Can you find something about this?
I spent so much time looking for an image of Napoleon's penis.
Penis that is just a pain.
So, yeah, yes, exactly.
So, we know that it went up for auction in several places.
And I think the last place that we have it coming up for auction is like in the 1920s at some big New York auction house.
One person, the most plausible case of somebody owning it was actually a guy who was a urologist.
And I mean, you know, because classic.
That's convenient.
Yeah, right.
Uh, urologist from New Jersey, uh, who is just of course he lived in New Jersey, right?
Yeah, shout out to Julian Dory.
Um, uh, he, uh, you know, purchased this thing and he was also a big collector of all these other, you know, sort of strange tchotchkes.
But there is also, there are other claims to who owns Napoleon's penis, right?
But we're in a situation here, right, where you can find the truth, like you can do a DNA test of the truth, but all of the actors within that system.
Individualistic Reality Views00:04:14
Just have negative incentives based upon actually finding out what the truth is.
Because what could happen is they do some DNA test and then suddenly they're like, wait a second, I have somebody else's dick.
Now it's worthless.
And now it's worthless, right?
So there are certain circumstances in which it is a negative incentive to actually surface the truth.
And I think that this happens in places like the UFO community, in conspiracy communities, and certainly in political communities too.
Moon landing, right?
That's a perfect example of it.
I think one thing, too, that I like constantly have to be on guard against is like how fun all these stories are.
Like, I love them.
Like, it's like, it's American mythology, right?
It really is.
Like, the conspiracy theories are the American art form.
Like, there are myth making because we don't have these sort of like deep cultural myths, but we do have a certain apparatus of sense making around these things that we all sort of share, right?
And I think that by making sense of them in these ways that are one, really entertaining and super interesting.
And two, some of the stuff is partially real.
It allows us to feel as if we have a lot more control and agency in a world that is often really chaotic.
And instead of being run by people who are, you know, masterminds and crafting our own reality around us, really they're kind of incompetent.
You know, like it's a lot more comforting to me, anyway, that like some evil mastermind is twisting a mustache and, you know, bending the world to their will.
Than it is that somebody, you know, sent an email the wrong place and then suddenly, you know, war plans were leaked.
Why do you think that is?
Why do you think it is that our society is the one that is most prone to this kind of stuff?
It seems like we're the most prone to ideological subversion or divide, or we're like the, it seems like, I don't know, because I haven't been to a lot of countries, but it seems like we are the most fractured and we have so many things going wrong.
Like we have not just in our minds, but like I think 40% of the US population is obese.
I mean, it's not good.
Yeah, I mean, do you think it has anything to do with, and you've been to a lot more countries than I have, but like, do you think it has anything to do with religion or religious ideology?
I think there's, you know, there is a portion of the American character that has, you know, a religiosity to it.
And there's also a portion of the American character that is a very like individual, I'm going to find out for myself, I'm going to do it for myself.
Like, I've been in countries that are very, um, Communally based and countries that are very individualistic.
And I think the far end of the spectrum is, and Americans tend to be much more individualistic.
And sometimes that can mean that somebody has an individualistic view of reality.
I don't necessarily think that the US is more prone to this.
I think that our information space is just more open and it's also more globally important.
Any English person can do a really good American accent because they grow up with American media, right?
And it doesn't go the other way.
There is, like, I think, you know, in my research of, like, well, how do we conduct information space defense in the United States?
I start to think about, like, well, what are the things that people kind of get and enjoy from American media?
Because that acts as a cultural ambassador for us.
And it's like, I have never been.
Through, you know, traveling through Eastern Europe, especially in Albania, where I usually live, and not met somebody that can quote every single episode of Friends.
Mystical AI and Religious Beliefs00:12:51
Really?
Huge, huge there.
And that, you know, is acting as, or like Big Bang Theory, like that acts as a cultural ambassador for us.
And that's just because our information space really is spread out through the entire world.
It goes through our movies, it goes through our music, it goes through sitcoms.
And frankly, I think that's like I would much rather somebody get introduced to American culture from sitcoms than, you know, from military actions.
For me personally, I'd much rather them have familiarity with that.
But also, it's not to say that like American specific conspiracy theories don't end up in other parts of the world.
Like, I was, it was right, I think it was right before the end of the last Trump administration.
And I was in the back of a cab in Albania.
And this guy, I was traveling to Tanzania.
And so I needed a COVID test at the time.
And I was just talking with the cab driver.
And at a certain point, he's like, So do you believe it?
And I'm like, What?
And he's like, COVID.
And I was like, I mean, I'm on my way to get a COVID test.
So, like, I got to take it to travel.
And then that just sort of uncorked, you know, like all of the big tent conspiracy theories.
And he was, you know, talking at me for about like 20 minutes about how, You know, every conspiracy theory under the sun, uh, it was like QAnon and then, uh, you know, JFK and probably some UFO stuff in there, but he's talking real fast.
Albanian is my second language, uh, and then at a certain point, he was like, You know what's gonna happen?
and he gave me a date, I can't remember what the exact date was.
He's like, You know, on this date, what's gonna happen is, uh, the US is gonna come to Albania and they're going to get rid of all of our corrupt politicians.
And you like, and he gave me his phone number, and on that day.
He is like, you call me and you're going to see that it happens.
And so the conspiracy theory adapted for that Albanian point of view, right?
It became this almost like this prophetic thing that was a godsend for him in particular, because specifically he felt that he was being ripped off by the country that he was in.
And I think this is one of the spaces that these things thrive too.
Not Annie Jacobson.
The book Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, incredible book.
Surveillance Capitalism.
Such a fantastic book.
But she has this concept in it that I always think about when we think about, like, well, how do people get their mind changed?
How do they sort of switch tracks?
Because I think we've all seen this happen.
I know that I see it after spending a couple of years abroad, and then I come back and somebody has ideologically changed remarkably.
And it's like, well, how did this happen?
And so she has this idea of the right to a future tense.
And the right to a future tense means that people sort of have this psychological need to believe that in their future, things are going, they're going to be healthier, wealthier, and more secure, right?
Even if marginally.
And so if they are deprived of that right of a future tense, they're going to start believing in something, even though it doesn't bear much relationship to reality, they'll start believing in something that gives them that same right to a future tense.
And this is something that I was seeing from that.
That cab driver in Albania who actually randomly ended up in his cab like three months later because there's just so many cabs in Toronto, Albania.
And I didn't want to, you know, like say, you know, that was nothing happened that he said because, like, I mean, I'd imagine that he felt a little like depressed about it because he wanted his life to become remarkably better based upon the fulfillment of those prophecies.
And at a certain point, we were talking and he's like, yeah, none of those things happened.
But you know what?
Something's really messed up.
And I was like, yeah, we can agree on that.
It's difficult to sort of see a future where everybody is healthier, wealthier, and more secure right now.
And so pouring our belief for that idea of a future tense into fringe communities or to political strongmen or whoever, like that feels good because I want it to come from somewhere and I want that information to be reliable.
But it's just difficult right now, right?
And I think these are the spaces that, that, Psychological operations thrive.
Yeah, you can definitely see that, especially in the West or in the United States, where there is a lack of cohesive religious worldview.
And people try to map this onto UFOs, onto even psychedelics.
There's like a religious bent to people who are really into psychedelics, which is interesting because have you seen any reporting or any of the recent stories that have come out about how?
Silicon Valley, or there's this big movement to sort of map Christianity onto everything Silicon Valley is doing.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I've heard a lot about this.
I've talked about this a bit.
So it's crazy, man.
It's really crazy.
Silicon Valley used to be like anti Christian.
Right.
And to even be religious in Silicon Valley was crazy.
You would never see that.
Seemed a bit anathema to that.
And now you have Peter Thiel, who is a gay Christian billionaire.
Right.
And other.
Big Silicon Valley names and kingmakers in Silicon Valley holding these conferences, these religious conferences.
Right.
Yeah.
So I was talking with a buddy of mine who's very like super, super like AI positivist guy, which is kind of unusual.
And he's actually kind of like AI pilled me for lack of a better word of saying like actually, you know, AI could like has a possibility of being a net benefit for humanity.
His name is Tate Tower.
I think Tate L. Tower.
At Twitter is his thing if you ever want to feel better about AI, which is harder and harder these days.
But we were talking a bit about there is this sort of belief in the sort of halls of the tech priesthood that you can almost arise an AI god, right?
And that it would be a sort of all consuming platform of belief that would be almost like engineered perfectly to.
Fill that God shaped hole in humanity.
Like, you know, when Nietzsche said, you know, you've killed God, right?
And then I believe Jung said something along the lines of, like, even if you kill God, you're going to invent new God.
Somewhere within the human character, there is that God shaped hole and people fill it with whatever they want.
You know, there is, or whatever seems relevant to them.
I shouldn't, you know, look down on anybody who's filling that God shaped hole with UFO stuff.
Like, good on you.
Like, go for it, man.
Well, there is a push to do that.
Yeah.
There's a huge push to do that.
There's people that are like deep in the intelligence, like legitimate former CIA people who are coming out saying that this is angels and demons.
These are biblical things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I know Beck talks about that, right?
Beck Lover?
Oh, he probably.
Yeah.
Everybody does.
He talks about angels and demons.
Yeah.
No, like I'm saying, like there's not just Beck, but there's legitimate, like legendary CIA officers that are like we know are CIA people who are coming out and saying this.
They're also UFO people.
Right.
Which, I mean, Fucking Tucker Carlson talks about it.
He believes that these are fucking biblical things.
Didn't he have a thing of like that he was like attacked by an alien or no, no, by a demon at one point?
He actually said that he was attacked by a demon.
Oh, I had heard that one.
Yeah, I heard that recently.
I mean, you know, I'm not informed enough about either the Bible or UFOs to put them together, right?
Like, I mean, I went to Catholic school and I like UFOs, but like to create an all consuming philosophy where there's a total verisimilitude between, you know, a what?
Verisimilitude, an equality, right?
Weird flex.
Yeah.
SAT 1240.
Yeah.
But, like, they only let nerds into Rand.
Our football team sucks.
There isn't one.
But, like, team though, there we got a ping pong table.
Yeah, there's a ping pong table there.
Ping pong's not for nerds.
I know.
It's only for jocks.
But, yeah, like to say that you know, you have these two sort of like vastly different bodies of literature, right?
I've got.
I've got the Bible over here on one hand, and then I have a bunch of like UFO stuff originating from the 1940s in another hand.
Yeah.
I mean, it feels comforting to put those things into one unified worldview.
I think I would just kind of have to understand what the bridging mechanism between those two are.
Yeah.
Then again, I also think that like maybe I just don't access the mystical like other people do.
Because I think to me, it's just interesting how there's so many efforts that seem to be from.
Coming from very powerful sources, trying to inject or infuse Christianity into various things that are in the popular culture right now.
Well, and also finding a way of technology coming into that too is really interesting.
Like, there are, and you know, when you talk about AI at certain levels, like it becomes specifically mystical and religious sounding.
Like, there's in the AI community, there is this concept of the show goth.
If you've ever heard of the show goth, is like I think it's an HP Lovecraft creature.
So just imagine, you know, sort of cosmic horror like unimaginable creature.
And the show goth is this sort of anthropomorphized black box.
Oh, sweet.
Yeah.
He got a cool picture of it.
What is that?
That's the show goth, baby.
Whoa.
So the.
Go to the top left.
Yeah, go to that one.
That one's cool.
Hell yeah.
So, it's this sort of like anthropomorphized creature of the black box of AI, right?
That we're feeding all of this information into it, and then it's growing, it's gaining agency.
And the fact that it was an H.P. Lovecraft character, which is this sort of like cosmic horror idea of like, it almost doesn't necessarily even see humanity as a functional agent in the world because it's so much more complex than us.
It'd be almost like how we look at ants, right?
And the Shogoth is like, well, we keep pumping information into this thing.
And outwardly, like, it's really helpful because, like, I didn't want to write that tweet anyway.
But inwardly, we actually don't know what its aims will be.
And there's even some thoughts of, like, I know I said that I was, like, AI, you know, positivist, but I'm really trying.
There's this concept of Roko's Basilisk.
Have you ever heard of that?
No.
So, the Roko's Basilisk is this idea that at a certain point, the collective intelligence of AI is almost keeping notes on who's for it and who's against it, and that those against it will sort of end up being punished by the AI.
But ultimately, this all depends on can we find alignment between humanity and artificial intelligence?
And it seems like with this, the sort of Silicon Valley groups that you're talking about, what they're maybe attempting to do is try to leverage the authority of both a biblical text, specifically the Christian biblical text, and leveraging the power of artificial intelligence.
We already know that Christianity has been a very successful religion.
Flat Earth and Tartarianism00:15:07
So layering these two together really gives you an enormous amount of power to sort of bend reality to your will.
Whether or not that's actually happening, I have no idea.
I've heard about it a little bit.
But, you know, these are two really powerful concepts.
And it's really easy to proliferate ideas with artificial intelligence.
So I, you know, I also think that only in 2025 would you ever say, like, gay Christian billionaire is, you know, attempting to sort of like manipulate the world in some respect.
Yeah.
No, I always wonder, like, My perspective on it is with when you have people like Peter Thiel and people like Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, who are very different in certain ways, where like one of them is super liberal, the other one is really conservative.
They're both war hawks.
They both have, I mean, well, Peter is the owner, but those companies that they run are military industrial complex companies.
They get paid by the U.S. military or the U.S. intelligence agencies, or they're funded by the U.S. government to protect national security and to.
They're like a defense contractor, right?
They're companies that were formed.
I've said this before, but if you want to create the most successful company, you don't just make a company and then go and find customers.
You build a company that's based on a customer that has a huge amount of fucking money.
Yeah.
Like the fucking defense department.
And then you develop more customers by making sure that that problem maintains.
Exactly.
Right.
So I wonder how much this movement.
To map Christianity onto this stuff and to get more people in Silicon Valley invested in Christianity, what does that have to do with national security?
I don't know.
Because if you look at other countries and their worldview and their religious worldviews, like an extreme example would be Muslim countries that are religious extremists to the extent where they're willing to strap a bomb onto their chest and detonate it.
To us, we are like, we worship.
The next Netflix series, The Kardashians, and TikTok.
Yeah.
So, like, if you wanted to make us a more powerful country, I think one of our weakest links is our people and our ideologies and what you're talking about, like this fifth generation sort of.
It's easy to divide us away from one another.
It's easy.
Super easy.
There's a great paper, I don't know, maybe you can find it by Mike Mazar.
It's talking about restoring American dynamism.
And one of the things that he talks about are these periods of time in American history where.
Almost like the dynamism has gone out of the United States.
And a lot of times when this is happening is because there aren't shared beliefs.
There's an us versus them mentality that has proliferated the culture, 1960s when there was pro war, anti war movements.
Yeah, communism.
Early 2000s, sure.
And a part of being in the United States is, and a part of being a citizen in the United States is saying your government shouldn't.
And shouldn't want to enforce your beliefs on you.
But there is a difficulty when there is a completely different understanding of what reality is, largely on one side and then the other side.
And I think that one of the problems with this, too, and again, these areas where fifth generation warfare really thrives, is that we've started to see politics and even technology as a zero sum game, right?
If I win, my opponent loses.
Like, my side of the aisle won, and therefore I get to do a touchdown dance as my opponent loses.
You even see this with people who've won an election and then people on the other side saying, like, well, I hope you're happy.
Like, things are worse.
It's like, no, it's like there is one country.
Everybody's a citizen of that country.
Yeah.
You know, it's not a zero sum game because if it becomes legitimately a zero sum game, then we descend deeper into chaos.
And that's not in the best interest of the United States, but it is in the best interest of competitors.
And so we have a fantastic ability to allow people to share ideas freely, but we also can't say, hey, this is what you believe, because that's just not how we do things as Americans.
Right.
But if you can covertly inject something, some sort of cohesive idea into the US population, like Christianity, in a way that seems natural.
Why wouldn't you try to do that?
Like, for example, there's a whole other movement in the psychedelic world to try to merge psychedelics and Christianity as well.
Whoa, interesting.
Yeah, there's this book by Brian Mararescu where he makes the case, called The Immortality Key.
He makes the case at the end of it that it would be beneficial to introduce psychedelics into the church.
Now, I guess.
And one of the crazy things about that is because, you know, you can really manipulate somebody with psychedelics, people's minds become way more manipulative.
Manipulatable.
And especially if people that are, you know, a lot of them who are going to church are probably not, you know, they probably are looking for answers to things.
And when you have somebody who has a direct line to God who's running this and also has the power to give you psychedelics, that's going to make you way more submissive and way more malleable to whatever that is.
And if you can do that, like also if you can give all these people psychedelics and have these.
Individual church fathers giving them a specific message, maybe that's a way you can do it.
Well, I think that especially religion and spirituality really talk to you.
There is no greater right to a future tense than forgiveness in heaven, right?
Even if your life really sucks right now, at least when you die, you go to heaven.
That is the ultimate belief in a future tense.
And we have seen that younger generations have become actually more conservative, at least as far as their voting is concerned.
I guess the question that I'd have, and since I'm not a religious scholar at all, is what is the benefit specifically of aligning with one spiritual text over another?
Is it just because that has been a part of the sort of spiritual DNA of the United States?
And also, there's a lot of diversity within Christian communities, too.
I was raised Catholic, so it's very different than somebody who went to a megachurch, right?
Yeah.
And obviously, wars have been fought for hundreds of thousands of years over who's doing Christianity right.
So, could you potentially, like, you know, create, like, some, you know, totally heterodoxical version of faith for the United States?
I think it kind of goes back to that thing somebody from NASA said about faking the moon landing, right?
So, they were saying, like, you know, if you would understand.
How hard it would be, and how many people would have to work together in order to fake the moon landing, you'd realize it's easier to just go to the moon, right?
Like, do you believe that?
I do, yeah.
I think that it's, I think that there, and I've had, uh, uh, why is the moon landing the one that seems to be the most kookiest?
Like, if you believe in the moon landing was fake, you're a fucking crazy person, but you can believe all these other conspiracies, and people don't think you're out to launch like that.
Oh, see, I actually, I disagree.
I think, I think flat earth is the kookiest.
Oh, flat earth is the.
Yeah, right.
I think Flat Earth is by far the kookiest, or like Flat Earth is the stupidest for sure.
Tartarianism.
Do you know Tartarianism?
I think I've heard of it.
Yeah, it's like it's basically the sort of idea that there was a large chunk of history that was covered up by the powers that be that were actually like that, like 200 years of history that was covered up by, you know, some shadowy cabal of the powers that be.
Right.
And that was because, like, you know, there was this group of people called like, The Tartarians and they had like zero point energy, right?
And they had giants and they had, you know, all sorts of like advanced technologies.
Yeah.
Frankly, like as far as conspiracy theories is considered, it's one of my favorites because it's just so cool.
Like, Tartarianism.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They talk about how, like, you know, certain towers were like zero point energy machines.
And then, yeah, some like YouTube channel just like has a slow black and white footage of something old and like a really big door.
And they're like, and see, giants.
And they're like, damn, that is a really big door.
Story checks out to me.
Yeah.
Right?
Moon landing is definitely up there, though, with one of the stuff.
You're stupid if you think the moon landing was faked.
I mean, I think that, like, I try to have as much empathy as possible for fringe communities because it's like.
So you said that a lot of people would have to keep the secret for the moon landing to have been faked.
Yeah.
Do you think it's more than the Kennedy assassination?
As far as people that would have to know about it, damn.
I think there, yeah, I think there would probably just be more people involved because there's more people involved with launching something into space.
I mean, you've got.
Right, but they could have still launched somebody, they could have still launched the astronauts into space, right?
And there's never gone to the actual moon.
Maybe only the astronauts and a handful of people that were involved in like filming it or knowing about that stuff.
I mean, my official opinion is UFOs did both.
Yeah.
That's my, the Tartarian UFOs did.
But like all the people in the command center. you know, that were guiding the launch, they knew they were launching them out to space and they still launched the astronauts into space, right?
But the fact that they went to the actual moon, you could easily, like, I think you could fake that without a lot, without a ton of people knowing about it.
Wasn't there a movie that was made about that, too?
There's a bunch of movies already about it, yeah.
Like a fiction movie made about that.
Oh, no.
I don't know.
Yeah.
It's a fiction movie.
Can you find that?
Fly Me to the Moon.
Isn't that like a rom com about them faking the moon landing?
Maybe.
I heard about it, yeah.
I didn't see it, but I heard it was great.
But, like, during that period of time, the Cold War, there was so much fuckery going on.
Yeah.
Well, in the Gulf of Tonkin, Kennedy's assassination.
And during the Cold War.
MK Ultra.
Right.
You know, the.
Was it about that?
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Oh, that's hilarious.
What does it say?
Fly Me to the Moon, a 2024 American historical romantic comedy drama, filmed by blah, Okay, let me see what the idea of the story is.
Okay.
A NASA launch director set against the backdrop of an Apollo 11 mission.
The story follows Jones and Davis as she is tasked with creating a false moon landing in case the actual mission fails.
Wow.
Oh, that's another good point.
Hollywood's telling us.
If they couldn't get it, well, you know, that's the thing, though.
Did they actually try?
Is it plausible that they could have tried to do it and had a backup plan in case it fails and they can't do it?
Because one of the biggest arguments for the fraud is that they couldn't get through that radiation belt.
Yeah, but that's a sort of fundamental misunderstanding of how the Van Allen radiation belt works.
Oh, really?
Yeah, it's because you, yes, that radiation does exist there, but it's still in a vacuum of space.
So you can pass through it and it's not like you will be immediately irradiated.
It's.
It's because of how thermodynamics works in space.
So you can pass through it, but there is a heat signature there, right?
Yeah, but have we ever sent, have we ever done, did we ever do tests sending like animals through the radiation belt and bring them back and test them and see how they did?
Because I know the Russians did.
Yeah, they sent a dog.
And it died a couple days later.
I can't remember the name of the dog.
But they also sent Yuri Gagarin up there, which is such a wild story.
You know that Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, he actually, They sent him up past the radiation belt?
That I don't know, but he was the first person to orbit space.
Yes, right.
Which must have been a wild thing for him.
Like, literally the first dude.
Oh, God.
Also, he grew up in like a mud shack without lights, and he was the first person to like rotate around the Earth and come back.
Like, how incredible.
That's actually one of the reasons that I think, like, when I think about how technology will advance within our lifetime, I think about Yuri Gagarin, right?
Because Yuri Gagarin, he literally grew up in a mud house with no lights.
And then, you know, flash forward a couple of years and he's blasting off and is the first person in space.
Like, our version of, you know, growing up in that like mud hut somewhere in Russia could be that like we grew up remembering, you know, a time without the internet or without cell phones or something.
But that doesn't, it's really hard for us to understand how exponentially technology will grow in our lifetime.
Time.
Well, look how exponentially all technologies grow.
Right.
Right.
Like, look how, look how crazy, how, how fast like AI has just evolved since it first came out.
But the moon, the Apollo mission technology is literally the only technology in human history, in modern human history, that hasn't doubled since the time we created it.
It literally disappeared.
We haven't got, like, we went to the moon in 69 and through from 69 through 73, and we haven't been able to do it since.
It's the only technology that hasn't.
Exponentially gotten better or like doubled in its capacity or its ability to.
Well, so there are plans to go back to the moon.
I don't know if they're being scrapped right now.
They keep getting pushed back.
Yeah, if you look at Artemis, is it the Artemis Accords?
Yeah, I think they just push it to like March of 2026.
So the question right now is does Artemis go through, which is a transnational agreement to go back to the moon?
Or, you know, because Elon Musk has become so deeply entrenched in the current administration, are we just going full on straight to Mars?
And obviously there are problems with that because.
Well, didn't he say we had to go to the moon first?
A lot of people have said that we have to go to the moon first.
And the reason being is because.
Storing Memory in Space00:08:06
You know, you need to have a sort of like a base of operations somewhere off of Earth.
Right.
And Elon also said the reason they haven't gone to the moon is because they would need to refuel nine times.
To go to the moon or to go to the moon?
Interesting.
Yeah, sustainable presence.
So there are three Artemis missions.
The first one's going to, oh, already launched.
Hey.
Yeah, but it was unmanned.
Oh.
Second one is scheduled for 2026.
Yeah.
Third one.
April of 2026.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I mean, you know, the by sort of interact, and there's also a lot of private space companies now.
They call them new space.
They're basically the startup space of space companies.
And I've interviewed a couple of these people.
It's really fascinating.
Some people are building full on space habitats now.
I think that there's a company called Vast that's doing that.
Some are creating ways of like storing material in space so that.
If you need it anywhere in the world, it can just kind of be dropped down to have on the earth.
And space, as an emergent field, is super fascinating.
Have you ever heard the sound of earth from space?
No.
Steven, what does that sound like?
Pull up the sound of earth from space on YouTube.
It's fucking wild.
It almost sounds like you're in the rainforest.
It's like howler monkeys.
It's from plasma fields.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Because there's no, you can click that.
Yeah.
This is the sound of the Earth's magnetic field.
Oh, whoa.
Oh, this isn't the one I saw.
Go back.
This is not the one I saw.
This must be fake news.
This has got to be fake news.
Maybe that one.
Try that one.
12 hours?
No, no, no.
The rest of this podcast is just going to be us listening to Earth.
Up, Right there.
Click that one for 11 million views.
Or one million years.
Oh, you just passed.
You went right past it.
There you go.
Oh, now I'm getting the rainforest feeling.
These sounds are generated by energetic particles in Earth's plasmasphere, which are being tugged to and fro by the rotation of Earth's magnetic field.
And so, why?
You see, there is a plasmasphere around Earth containing clumps of ions and electrons.
As Earth and its magnetosphere rotate, The magnetic fields push through these particles, accelerating them in a wave called a plasma wave.
Honestly, I'd love to sit next to this guy in a bar.
That's good, Steve.
Start explaining plasma fields to you.
Yeah.
That's so weird.
The other videos, though, sounded so different, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and then I think we also demonstrated our own sort of appeal to authority here.
It's like, well, this one's got 3 million views.
This is the one I want to be right.
Like the English guy speaking at this point.
Sounds like clearly the most reasonable.
Right.
But it's like all English guys.
Yeah, for real.
I, um, uh, also going back to the moon landing thing, how come the first guy who ever stepped foot on the moon, which is, which is without a doubt, the most profound, groundbreaking thing that humanity has ever accomplished on Earth?
Yeah.
He's only done, I think, two interviews, and the president had to ask him to do both of them.
Is that right?
Two.
And one of them was super cryptic.
Really?
Yeah.
He did one for like the 20th anniversary in front of like a college class, and he was saying, like, we have to break through the lies of our history or something like that.
Jeez.
So, if you are the person who achieved the most amazing, astonishing feat of humankind, why have you only done two interviews?
Maybe he's not.
And he says he only does interviews the president specifically asks him to do.
Yeah, it could be that he just doesn't like talking in public, too.
Right, but if you accomplish something like that for the purpose of solidifying America on the world stage as far as technological innovation, you would think they would want you to do more.
You would almost have to be forced to be in the public eye a little bit more than that, right?
Yeah, a bit more.
Yeah, I don't know.
I spend most of my research on the Earth, but now I want to look into the moon more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
And also, like, you know, how.
Pull up Neil Armstrong's interview in front of the class, in front of the college for the moon landing anniversary.
Wait till you hear this shit.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
Today, we have with us a group of students among America's best.
To you, we say we have only completed a beginning.
We leave you much that is undone.
There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers.
What the fuck?
Does that even mean?
You know, I don't know.
I haven't spent a ton of time with space people.
You're talking about protective layers.
Well, I've spent a little bit of time.
I took a space course, which was pretty cool.
But I think that one of the things that I noticed in terms of talking with folks that are working on space or working potentially in space in the future is this desire that we maintained the pace.
That we had during the space race because funding fell off massively.
Now, the funding for NASA is minuscule compared to how much it was.
I don't know if you can find it, but can you find the percentage of the US budget that NASA was funded at the time of the space race versus now?
It was a lot higher.
It was an enormous amount.
But now, a lot of that funding is going into SpaceX and other private companies.
Yeah, it goes into SpaceX.
And then, of course, there's, you know, we've, well, not we.
I certainly haven't been involved in privatizing space.
But there are private space companies that have demonstrated that you can create profit out of space.
You know, you've got tourism.
Yeah, tourism is coming up.
You know, small satellites for bespoke purposes.
And this is actually one of the issues that we're starting to see more and more, which seems like, yeah, look at that.
So, 1960s to now, 60 billion, that's worth dollars in 2020.
It was worth 60 billion a year.
Mm hmm.
Where does it say what it is now?
Yeah, so around 4.4% in the 1960s.
Yeah, 0.5 now.
Yeah.
Right.
And so you imagine what.
But also, a lot of that money has gone to private companies.
Right.
Yeah.
And private space is now more open for business.
Google this, Steve.
What was the memory on the NASA Apollo computers?
I think it was their guidance computers.
Computer memory.
Yeah.
There we go.
It was just like an original Game Boy.
Four kilobytes of RAM.
Wow.
Four kilobytes of RAM to get to the moon.
Core rope memory.
Incredible.
Transparency and Guidance Computers00:05:09
And it's also just convenient that all that technology disappeared because you know what their excuse was?
Why they don't have any of that Apollo technology anymore?
Because they accidentally wrote over the hard drive.
They were playing Doom.
Yeah, they had to download the new Doom.
Exactly.
Exactly.
We actually didn't know that.
Worth it.
Fair.
Fair.
Totally worth it.
That was a great game.
It really changed the landscape for everybody.
You know, this is also something I've been thinking about a lot more, too, which is like what is the right amount of transparency with.
When you have like an enormous thing, like the national security apparatus, like intelligence agencies like NASA, you have this massive thing that everybody has buy in because all of our tax dollars are going to.
I mean, the world has buy in into it because the world is oftentimes affected by American foreign policy and American national security.
We have a certain amount of transparency, especially in terms of the intelligence community, because after the Church Commission, they were like, well, we need you to reveal certain things.
You need to declassify things after a certain point.
So now we have a certain amount of transparency.
But it seems like that amount of transparency doesn't do enough to actually make us trust these organizations more.
In fact, it sort of throws more distrust into them.
Like, we both know about like MKUltra because those things were declassified, but declassification didn't end up making us trust these organizations much more.
We were like, wait, so what are you doing now?
Right.
And so there's this period of obfuscation right now, like, as far as what the intelligence community is doing, what space did previously, what the United States government is doing.
But they're not transparent right now.
And the previous transparency that has been revealed, uh, It has just done enough to sort of sow discord into the American imagination.
But I think that's one of the difficulties with national security in general.
National security is like trust.
You really only think about it when it's broken.
When something goes wrong, you think about it.
Like we don't know about all of the operations that went really well because we shouldn't know about those things.
We do start to understand when things have gone not so well or things have been leveled at the American people, as was the case with MKUltra.
Or some of the other Department of Defense things.
I'm trying to think who are the Tuskegee experiments?
Oh, yeah.
Is that right?
Tuskegee?
The Tuskegee Airmen?
Yeah.
So we know when those things have gone wrong.
And that's why I actually think that we need to look at how we do transparency because the purpose of transparency is to establish greater trust.
But what it has done seemingly in the United States is oftentimes destroyed trust or eroded trust.
And that's because we know things that have happened in the past that are incredibly corrupt and potentially leveled at the American people.
So I think this eventually sort of goes back into the information space too, where it's like if it becomes a really good target for anybody who wants to mess with the American information space to be like, well, look at that thing that you did in the past that the United States has been honest about, presumably.
Well, what do you think you're doing in the future?
Like anything that you can do to sort of like erode the trust of the American people between each other and between the American government certainly works to the benefit of global competitors.
Which certainly points out the incentives for national security and law enforcement to be embedded in these social media companies, like we found out there in the Twitter files.
Which is really interesting.
And I think that this is also right now there's a sort of conversation going on in some national security circles, which I tend to like a lot, which is.
At least I think it's a conversation that should be had, which is how do we create an environment where national security and national defense are separate but equally aligned, right?
So national security is really about ensuring the life and livelihood and present of your population is secure into the future.
So that could be anything from like energy policy and education to Agriculture policy.
That's a bigger circle than national defense, which is instead of making the lives of the American people much better, it's potentially making the lives of adversaries much worse for a punctuated period of time.
And those things have sort of become conflated that national security and national defense are the exact same thing.
Same with war and defense.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, you know, they added the D to ARPA to make it sound like we're defending ourselves.
Right.
Yeah.
And you know, there's also IARPA.
Satellites and Space Junk Orbits00:09:31
No, I've never heard of them.
Yeah, they're the.
What the hell is IARPA?
Intelligence Advanced Research Project Agency.
Yeah, IARPA.
They're all.
Yeah.
Holy crap.
Really interesting paper.
Oh, I never heard about this, dude.
I just heard about them.
But yeah, they have.
You can go onto their website.
They have tons of white papers.
You know, I think you'd be surprised at how much of this stuff is just totally open source.
You can just go rooting around the classic RAND papers.
In fact, there's some really cool ones on there.
There's.
There's one that was written by Isaac Asimov, and it was literally talking about like trying to find a new planet for humanity.
This is back in the 1960s when he was writing it.
They have a famous paper about that was imagined a world circling spaceship.
And as I was reading it, I was like, oh my God, did they ever actually build this world circling spaceship?
And then I realized they were talking about satellites.
So the like this initial paper just imagined what satellites would be in the future.
1960s?
Yeah, you can find it.
Uh, find uh, the sorry, I was being very demanding just now.
Uh, the white rabbit is talking.
How do you like that white rabbit?
Uh, I'm speaking faster, but you don't feel like super jittery though, right?
It doesn't feel like caffeine, right?
My eyelids are sweaty.
White rabbit sweat in places you never thought you would.
Uh, what am I looking at?
Oh, uh, so look at um, uh, Rand Classic Papers, uh, World Circling Spaceship.
Have you seen the um, the animations of What all the satellites look like orbiting the Earth right now.
Oh, it's wild, right?
Yeah.
It's insane.
There it is.
Yeah.
Preliminary design of experimental world circling spaceship.
1946.
It wasn't even the 60s.
Good images.
You can actually look up the real paper.
Oh, you're on Brave.
You can check out the actual paper there.
I think, dude, the images and the animations of all the fucking satellites that are orbiting the Earth right now, it looks like flies buzzing around a dumpster.
There's so many of them.
Also, if you look at how many of them are owned and operated by SpaceX, it's pretty astounding.
I think they, my numbers might be off here, but I think they found that.
Find that, Steve.
Find the.
A video on YouTube of all of the satellites orbiting the earth.
They've got about 7,000 now, and I think the goal is to reach to 13,000.
Yeah.
And so I think those are in.
Nothing to see here.
Yeah.
Those are in low Earth orbit.
There we go.
Click that.
Holy shit.
How crazy is that, dude?
I mean, honestly, you think about that from the perspective of aliens.
Like, if aliens are watching, they're like, wait a second.
Holy fuck.
They got a lot of stuff.
Look at that.
Look how many are farther out.
Yeah.
Well, so this, see this red one?
This long red elliptical orbit?
Yeah, what is that one?
I can't remember what that orbit is called, but there, so the three main orbits are LEO, MEO, and GEO.
So low Earth orbit, mid Earth orbit, and then geostationary orbit.
Whoa.
And then there's that.
That's fucking terrifying.
There's this one really long elliptical orbit that is quite different from all of those.
And usually that's used for spy satellites.
Royalty, why spy satellites?
Why do they have such a long orbit?
I think it's because.
Look at that shit.
Wow.
Yeah, well, they also have to be very specifically hardened against radiation because they're further and further out.
And I think it's probably just for defensive reasons.
It's going to be a lot harder to disrupt that.
But also, fighting in space is really not what you might think.
The Star Wars fighting in space thing really isn't.
We're not there yet.
It looks like a fucking junkyard.
This is an enormous problem.
So, like, and how many collisions, how many satellite collisions are there, Steve?
Is there a stat on like how many collisions per year there are with satellites in Earth orbit?
There aren't tons, but it's a problem that's like consistently being worried about, right?
Because if you have, let's see, it's not consistently, what?
Go to fucking Chrome.
Yeah.
Well, and I think we use Brave usually because there's no ads and it's not as curated as Google.
I think one of the reasons that it's not usually reported is because then obviously there's, you have to attribute the damage of a really exquisite system to maybe somebody launching something that in a way that they shouldn't have.
So this says one satellite is destroyed by collision with other satellites or space junk annually.
Yep.
And space junk is like we can track, I think.
That's crazy.
How many satellites are there total orbiting the Earth?
I don't know, but this is something that we're worried about.
This Kessler syndrome is really interesting.
What is that?
Kessler syndrome is this idea that if you have one collision in space and suddenly you create this massive space junk, then everything else that is within that orbit could potentially be impacted by that space junk, and then you make more space.
Junk and then you make more space junk.
Right, and you can't track the space junk.
Not only can you not, well, you can track down to the size of about a nickel.
Oh, wow.
But below that, even something below the size of a nickel can still destroy your satellite, right?
Right.
Because it's flying so fucking fast.
Right.
Potentially, if Kessler syndrome really happens and it gets worse and worse, not only does that stop us from launching new things into space out past low Earth orbit, but it even has an effect on whether or not we can observe space as much.
There's this concern about having so much stuff flying in space that will no longer have dark skies.
And you need dark skies.
Order to use research telescopes to look out past Earth.
And so constraining the amount of.
So, what would the skies look like if they were covered in satellites?
God, I just hope there isn't like a Pepsi ad.
Like, I think there was actually a thing about that there that somebody was talking about.
Okay, so this says as of 2024, 28,300 satellites are orbiting Earth, almost 59,000 cataloged in total since the launch of Sputnik 1 in 57.
And you have to realize too that that is.
Only going to go up as the cost to launch goes down.
Now there are all of these private launch companies that are doing really interesting things.
I think there's a company called Spin Launch.
And I think they launch out of the Mojave Desert.
But you're talking about a much lower cost from a private industry to put whatever you want into space.
And as things privatize, they become more self interested and tend to talk a little bit less with.
You know, nation state based space apparatuses.
This is something I. Right, right.
That could be dangerous.
I was writing this last year, I was ghostwriting a book for somebody.
And I can't talk about who it was for, but it was a thing about artificial intelligence and education.
So, sort of looking at the history of what education was, where education came from, and potentially how future technology can kind of help education.
And one of the things that sort of became abundantly apparent in that research was.
That there is a period of standardization with technology, be it ideological technology like education or technology like, you know, the printing press, right?
There's a period of standardization that allows you to scale, but then there's a period of specialization which sort of brings you to the next level.
So once you standardize education, you make sure that everybody has the same education.
But if you specialize it, you allow certain.
Outliers to really enhance their skills.
And the same thing happens with businesses as well businesses and technology.
Once you standardize the ability to, let's say, gain access to low Earth orbit, anybody can now specialize and use that for their own purposes.
And this is how technology scales.
And so now we're seeing this point in space where we're able to do more things because there are public private partnerships.
But those public private partnerships also have to have a profit based incentive.
For them to go up there, right?
And, you know, you talked about like Palantir earlier too.
Palantir is, you know, it's a profit making venture.
And so part of their profit making venture is they need to have a certain amount of customers.
And the United States is a really good customer of that.
The Replicator Drone Program00:15:07
Actually, I don't know.
Have you seen the new Palantir commercial?
No.
Oh, it's really interesting.
Is it on YouTube?
I think so.
Maybe you can look it up.
Oh, we got to see this.
Because I think what the Palantir.
Does it start out with the idea of taking lives and saving lives is super interesting.
Is that what?
That's an Alex Karp quote.
Oh, gosh.
I'm sure that makes.
Oh, yeah.
Future of Warfare.
That's it.
So check this out.
Okay, so this specifically, this swarming technology.
Yeesh.
Whoa.
Yeah.
That's fucking sinister.
This, so this, this, I want to read the comments.
What's the top comment of that video?
UFOs.
Please have them turned off.
Of course, they have them turned off.
Cowards.
Absolute cowards.
So doing Israel's dirty work.
This, this sort of philosophy, right?
Of like you have this enormous swarm.
There's actually a paper that you can probably find called the Replicator Program.
So, if you look at Replicator on the RAND papers, Replicator program.
Yeah, Replicator.
And this is a bit of what we're seeing here.
And what Replicator is, is the idea of attritable systems.
So, attritable systems are systems which essentially they lower the cost by having systems which are not, the difference between attritable and another system would be an exquisite system.
So, an exquisite system would be something along the lines of, you know, an aircraft carrier, this enormous multi billion dollar thing.
Yeah.
An attritable system would be a system that is like a drone, right?
Something that, like, you don't want to lose it because you could reuse it.
But if you lose it, it's not going to bankrupt you, right?
And so, all of these little drones that you just saw, you know, pop out of this potentially fictional.
They look like little DJI Mavics.
Right.
And so, the idea with Replicator is that.
You have this enormous cost imposition by using attritable systems against exquisite systems.
That if you can kill, let's say, an aircraft carrier with a couple of drones that are worth thousands of dollars, you're essentially shooting thousands of dollars at billions of dollars.
Right.
And so, in the war of the spreadsheet, it's clear who wins.
And you can potentially bankrupt the opponent by doing that.
So, this is something that this is a paper that Rand put together?
Right there, yeah.
The replicator program.
Is this similar to what Andoril is doing?
Yeah, Andoril is certainly working under this banner.
And for people who don't know, what is Andoril?
Andoril is a, would you even call them a startup at this point?
They're a defense company.
They're operating under a very different model than the traditional defense companies, if I can say traditional defense companies.
Is it similar to that company Y Combinator or whatever it's called?
No, Y Combinator is an ink.
So, they just give funding for startup ideas.
Got it.
But what Anderol does is they've taken a very different tack on creating defense products, right?
So, instead of waiting on what's called an RFP or like a request for proposal from the United States government, the United States government says, hey, we need a really cool drone that does X, Y, and Z.
And then, let's say, traditional.
A defense company like Boeing or Northrop Grumman will bid on that, saying, Hey, here's what we think we can do with that.
They're basically saying, Hey, we're going to make what we think you need in the future and you can pay us for it.
So essentially trying to leverage their privatized speed and funding to create defense products that are more easily able to be purchased by the United States government.
And the idea is to speed up that process of procurement.
Okay.
Because, as you know, the United States, and this is one of the things that I think is talked about quite a bit, and I've written some stuff about this for my newsletters that the procurement process is so slow that it is oftentimes really difficult for the United States to deal with things on the ground.
A good example of this would be during the global war on terror, we had sort of this really recent past of Desert Storm.
So, Desert Storm was sometimes known as the very first space.
War.
And the reason was we used geopolitical.
We used, what's Google Maps?
You know?
GPS?
GPS, that's right.
Okay.
Yeah.
So we used GPS.
Which is made by DARPA, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we used GPS in order to locate various forces that were on the ground.
And we used that for targeting and we used it for command and control to great effect.
Annie Jacobson writes about this in her book, too.
So it was the very first space war.
As we went into the global war on terror, the thought was we would be able to leverage this outside.
Technological advantage.
I think in Annie Jacobson's book, The Pentagon's Brain, they talk about having a battlefield that can see and hear at the exact same time.
Right.
So we had these enormous technological capabilities and we still got bogged down.
This was a big part of her first platoon book as well, I think.
I didn't read that one, but I love her work.
Shout out to Annie Jacobson.
I hear you're in Los Angeles.
Let's hang out.
But, you know, it was undone by IEDs.
It was undone by a couple pounds of fertilizer and an off the shelf cell phone.
And so, study after study was done on how do we get.
Guerrilla warfare.
Right.
And this is fourth generation warfare, right?
This is insurgent warfare.
And so, how do we get around these IEDs?
And what you had at a certain point was you had the soldiers on the ground actually retrofitting their own vehicles with what they called hillbilly armor.
And it was armoring that was going to protect them from the IEDs.
And so, let's fast forward maybe.
Four or five years into the global war on terror, we know that IEDs are constantly taking the lives of American servicemen.
They're outfitting their own vehicles with technology to potentially help them survive these attacks.
And then five years later, the Department of Defense is able to give them the MRAP, which is armored specifically against IEDs.
So the procurement process is quite slow.
And so companies like Anderle, companies like Palantir, are taking a bet.
That if they're able to sort of leverage this, one, private funding, and two, the sort of Silicon Valley, let's look around corners and build for where the puck is going to be rather than where the puck is now, then we can potentially either win the wars of the future or stop them before they even start.
Right.
If you have a lot of tentacles and a lot of arms out there basically testing shit that you would never even think, or people like even like coming up with theories, like this drone thing.
Right.
So, having thousands of drones that are worth, you know, less than $100,000 swarm these ships that are worth billions of dollars and potentially take them out.
Well, and this is something that we're seeing.
That's kind of a crazy theory.
Yeah.
This is something we're seeing in Ukraine, too.
I mean, you know, one of the.
Did you see how much money we're spending on our new fleet of nuclear submarines?
I have no idea.
Probably a lot, though.
Can you find that, Steve?
There's a.
We talked.
We probably looked at this a few months ago, but there's a new class.
They're calling them the Columbia class submarines, I believe.
We had the Ohio's.
Yeah.
And now they're working on the Columbia submarines.
And I think they cost like.
$2 billion each?
Nuclear subs don't come cheap, from what I understand.
The new, okay, yeah, yeah.
Total projected budget for the Columbia class submarine is worth 109 billion.
Oh, that was it?
I thought it was more.
So 109 billion for 12 subs.
Wow.
That's pretty remarkable.
Estimated the cost for the lead boat, USS District of Columbia, is estimated to be around $15.2 billion.
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about exquisite systems.
Obviously, incredibly expensive.
And you can see this concept of attributability as it happened in Ukraine pretty massively, right?
Ukraine, the Ukrainian defenses were one of the first armies to defeat a navy without having a navy, right?
The Russian forces weren't able to completely cut off Odessa because they had so many unarmed vehicles or unmanned vehicles that were able to take out boats.
Oh, wow.
Right?
And so.
Was this stuff the U.S. gave them?
Actually, no.
So there's the.
It's something that the U.S. is, I think, currently looking at and learning from.
But.
The forces on the ground, from what I understand, in Ukraine were really looking at what they could do natively.
Like, what were their indigenous capabilities?
And one of those indigenous capabilities was not only having a decent amount of drones around, but was through the first person view racing community.
So there's like a drone racing community.
Have you ever seen videos of that?
Oh, yeah.
It's fucking nuts.
It's insane.
So they had these first person view racers that were.
Clearly, they were fantastic at flying drones.
And then all they needed to do was 3D print little brackets to make sure that they could hold explosive devices.
And those became the leading weapon and a new technological innovation that happened from the ground rather than from some bureaucratic environment speaking down to the ground.
And so that's how they were filling the innovation gap.
So it's certainly something that the United States has started looking into, but it's also something that I think everybody is paying attention to.
There's some wacky, wild, sickening videos online regarding people.
There's videos of drones dropping bombs on random soldiers, hiding behind bunkers and stuff.
I saw one yesterday, a couple days ago, of one.
It was a first person view of the drone, the front of the drone, and it rammed in front of a tank and nothing happened.
But you can see the guys.
It wasn't a tank.
It was more like a Hummer or something like that.
Because there was a windshield.
And you can see the Russian guys behind the windshield.
And as soon as the drone started speeding up, heading towards the The Humvee, they like got down like this, but then it backed up and nothing happened.
And then tried to ram it again and nothing happened.
There's also, you also see even hand to hand combat.
I don't know if you've seen that video.
I don't recommend anybody watch it because it's pretty gnarly, but there's a video of a Russian and Ukrainian soldier having a knife fight.
Oh, really?
And you can actually hear them speaking to one another because one has like a GoPro on.
And so this footage was released.
But if you want to talk about fifth generation warfare, that's what it is, right?
It's all of them combined.
It's, it's, All of the information space combined.
As soon as I saw that, I was like, there is a reason I've seen this video so many times in different areas.
And that's because one, it works, the Russian guy won, it works so massively for the Russian point of view.
It stimulates the Russian population, it gets more buy in for the war effort.
And there are these other things.
I read something, I don't know if it's actively happening on the ground.
I think it might have been a sort of notional thing that people were talking about.
But one of the things, That, as far as like active fifth generation warfare subversion, that they're talking about is looking at how you can use the communication apparatuses that soldiers have on them, right?
This is one of the very first wars where you can text back home.
So the thought experiment.
Record everything on a fucking GoPro.
Exactly.
So the thought experiment kind of goes like this.
Let's say you're texting with your mom.
You're a soldier.
Doesn't matter which war.
I'm sure we'll have plenty to choose from in the future.
But you're texting.
More gummy?
No, what is it?
Magic Mind gummy.
Oh, sweet.
Hey, Magic Mind.
Shout out to Magic Mind.
Shout out to Magic Mind.
You should.
Sponsor link below.
Also, sponsor my newsletter.
This is not a PSYOP.
Because the world is getting weird and you don't need to.
I love the gummies, man.
They're tasty.
Oh, that's good.
Nice.
Yeah.
I'm between White Rabbit and Magic Mind.
Magic Mind, and I'm reaching Nirvana.
It's incredible.
So imagine you're texting back home.
You're on the front lines, or maybe you've just done a rotation.
You've gone back to a base.
You're texting regularly with your mother or your girlfriend, whatever.
At a certain point, She says, You know, I actually don't believe in this war anymore.
I want you to come home.
And you know what?
I saw a thing.
This is how you surrender.
Like, and if you do this, then you'll be able to surrender.
You decide, You know what?
My mom's right.
My girlfriend's right.
I'm going to go surrender.
Goes and surrenders, only to find out that they were talking with an LLM that had scraped the previous conversations with the mother or with the girlfriend.
And it was just imitating that person.
Wow.
Totally possible with today's technology.
Completely possible.
Completely possible.
Right.
And so this is, even China has a doctrine around this.
They call it the Three Warfares Doctrine.
And it's a doctrine that is built around winning without fighting.
And so the three warfares are psychological warfare, economic warfare, and then lawfare.
Lawfare being using the laws of a country against itself for potential subversion or doing things that are completely legal.
But they have a subversive quality to them.
Right.
So let's say an example of the psychological operations from China.
Chinese Mining Backyard Fears00:03:35
There was a rare earth metal processing plant in Texas, and a Facebook group was started to say, hey, we don't want this in our backyard.
And there were fake news stories that were put out saying, you know, the radiation from this plant is causing, you know, children to be born with birth defects.
Yeah.
Real people got into this real group, understanding there is this deep not in my backyard or NIMBYism that happens with a lot of American communities.
All of the stories were fake, but people really did start to say, hey, we don't want this rare earth mineral processing plant in our backyard anymore.
We think that it's a public health crisis.
And so there was no public health crisis, but the reaction was real.
And the purpose of that was to make sure that rare earth mineral processing remained in China.
Wow.
It's really interesting.
And so cost effective.
Totally.
Yeah.
That's the real efficiency of it.
And then, you know, an example of, you know, economics, right?
Or the, you know, of the three warfares.
So China has this initiative called the Belt and Road Initiative.
Oh, yeah.
Have you talked with people on the show about this?
It's fascinating.
For those who don't know, Belt and Road was all about uniting, I think it's like two thirds of the world into a single, you know, economic trade network.
Right.
I think they have, I forget how many, but they built so many roads and ports in Africa.
It's mind bending.
Yeah, actually.
And a lot of those ports that they built can be converted into military bases.
Dual use, yeah.
Actually, while I was in Somalia as the ambassador to LibraLand, I.
So, I was doing a food delivery, like an aid delivery out to some nomads that had been affected by a cyclone that happened in the area, Cyclone Sagar.
So, Cyclone Sagar had blown through.
We were delivering a couple tons of food out there.
And all of the kids who sort of came up to me through my translator were like, they're asking if I was Chinese.
And they knew certain Chinese words for different gemstones.
And I asked why that.
Ask if you were Chinese.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess they just hadn't seen somebody who was.
I mean, I'm not.
They haven't seen a person from China.
They have never seen a person from China.
They knew Chinese gemstone words.
And I was told that this was because there were Chinese mining companies out there.
And so, you know, this is a part of the expansion.
In fact, I even met the guy who identified himself as the Chinese ambassador to Somaliland.
I mean, what did he look like?
He was clearly Chinese.
But I mentioned that I was the ambassador to Lieberland, and I felt like we really had solidarity as being goofy ambassadors in the same place.
But immediately, he wanted to make deals about Lieberland.
And I'm like, I don't think you understand what Lieberland is.
And he's like, We're going to make you the president one day.
And I'm like, Man, you just heard about it, and I just heard about it.
So I don't think this deal is going to go forward.
But you do see deals, a part of the Belt and Road Initiative, all over the world.
Crowd Control and Diaspora Policing00:13:57
In fact, recently in Serbia, one of their projects collapsed, killing quite a few people.
And it's led to the biggest demonstration since the fall of Yugoslavia in Serbia.
You can see right now, I think, if you pull up the demonstrations, something like 500,000 people are demonstrating because of this collapse, but also because it shows the sort of internal corruption.
Of political actors interacting with China or other transnational bodies in a manner that people say is corrupt.
Holy shit.
It's pretty remarkable.
Serbia accused of using illegal sonic weapons against peaceful protesters.
Yeah, the video of this is pretty insane.
Oh, that's the first time I've actually heard the sound of it.
That's crazy.
I've been going to protest for 30 years and I've never seen anything like this.
The sound was like a whiz.
Okay.
Wow.
And you know, part of this.
So this is Belgrade.
Have you seen the videos of some of the crowd control weapons being tested on people?
Yeah.
It's really distressing.
And I think that there is some talk.
About.
Look at all those.
What is this all about?
So there was a collapse of, I want to say it was a bridge in a city called Novi Sad.
Will you take a look at the bridge collapse?
So, the idea with this crowd control stuff, these crowd control weapons, is they're not fatal, right?
They can't kill you.
Yeah, they're not fatal.
Right, but who knows what kind of fucking lingering down the line radiation effects it's going to have?
I think there might actually be something a little bit more pernicious about this kind of thing.
And this is something that we've talked about a bit internally.
So, what is this about?
The bridge?
Oh, that's Brazil.
Yeah, I would just say Serbia collapse.
Or that said Serbia in the title, right?
Maybe it was like a mix.
Yeah, maybe.
Anyways, so one of the things that I think is important about these sort of crowd control weapons, too, and also artificial intelligence, also cognitive security and cognitive capture, right?
Is and artificial intelligence, all of these things, what it essentially has the possibility of doing is creating a political environment where revolution is impossible, even peaceful revolution.
And if you can disperse protesters nonviolently, if you can create.
Where it's impossible.
To have revolution, to have protests, right?
There are a lot of these pernicious technologies.
So it's just to control the populace.
Yeah.
To control the people.
Yeah, population control.
And you also see this with.
Population mind control.
I think that, you know, one of the things that has become a concern to quite a few people, especially with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, is that.
There is this other concept that comes along with it, which is the digital Silk Road.
And so the digital Silk Road is we're going to give you all of these IT technologies that come along with Belt and Road Initiative technologies or Belt and Road assets.
And so, specifically in Serbia, there were quite a few, there was the development of what was called a Safe Cities Initiative.
And essentially, this was a mass surveillance net that was provided by the Chinese government.
And so this is, and I believe that's actually illegal in Serbian law.
And so, what the bargain that China is seemingly making is look, we want this economic infrastructure to be developed because then we are sort of the new champions of globalization where the US was previously.
We're able to unify people into a single market, whereas the US was previously doing this by acting as the police for the global oceans.
Yeah.
But they also want to make sure that they're entrenching powers that will continue to work with them and continue to agree with them.
And so by saying, hey, you want surveillance technology?
Do you want digital capabilities that you and your political party can specifically use?
Well, then get on our team and we'll make sure to continue to entrench your power while also entrenching our own power.
And this is, you know, this is.
Legal, right?
So, this is that lawfare thing.
This is that economic thing.
So, these are the three warfares.
Even so, Australia at a certain point, they said, no, we're not going to take any more of these technologies.
We're not going to work together with the Chinese because we believe that it is against our national interests.
It's against our national security.
Of course, they ended up getting massive sanctions because of that.
As China has come up into being a global economic market, Not only are they exporters, but they're also an enormous market for sales, right?
So Australian companies want to go in there and use them as a market.
But of course, this can be used as a cudgel when they are really powerful market.
In 2001, China got accession into the WTO or the World Trade Organization.
And the bargain that the United States placed on this was that as they entered the free market, as they entered the globalized world, that essentially they would become more liberalized politically, that autocrats would have less and less ability to maintain control in China.
But that didn't actually happen.
In fact, they just got economically much stronger while also maintaining autocratic control.
And so that's why they're able to expand this network throughout the world, continuing with the doctrine of the three warfares, but also never really going into direct kinetic conflict.
Because direct kinetic conflict or direct aggressive conflict would not only risk their trade relationships, but it would also risk their Internal security and their internal tranquility.
So, we have, you know, in the United States, Chinese companies and individuals purchasing land in and around, or not in, but around American military bases.
As soon as we saw that, we put greater restrictions on that kind of thing.
They're also installing Huawei cell tower equipment like within a couple miles of military bases, or not military bases, but nuclear launch sites.
That as well, yeah.
And even policing.
There are, or at least were, I think they've been hopefully rooted out now, but there were American or Chinese policing stations that were within American cities where if somebody began to speak against the administration in China, they would be talked to.
You can look that up.
How?
Oh, yeah, check it out.
Chinese policing stations in the U.S.
Yeah, they were shut down.
What the fuck?
Yeah, I think if you look it up.
All right.
So if people publicly said something on social media against China, they would be able to.
Overseas police.
Go to Brookings.
The other one seems to be Catholic EDU.
Yeah, right.
China's overseas police stations, an imminent security threat.
Keep scrolling, zoom in to the first paragraph.
Between 2016 and 2022, four local Chinese public security bureaus reported establishing 102 overseas police service stations in 53 countries across North and South America.
Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Citing reports on these stations released by human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders, authorities in the United States, Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands, and 10 other countries all launched investigations of these outposts concerning concerns about the overseas policing stations.
Okay, but what specifically were they doing?
So, this, from what I understood, they were policing diaspora.
So, even if somebody was an American citizen but they were of Chinese descent, they were trying to police the diaspora to make sure that they weren't.
How do you police people, though?
And how do you not get the whistle blown on you?
Well, I think the whistle was eventually blown on them.
That's crazy.
It even lasted a few years.
Right.
Yeah.
And this is certainly something that I think is a continuing source of interest for the U.S., where it's like, we didn't realize that this would be a threat that would be happening.
Now, this is non kinetic.
It's not like they're.
Steve, can you find an example of what they were actually doing in that article?
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
I mean, they were not.
Sorry.
Anyway, I think I read this report one time.
You know, it's not like they're blowing up weapons in the United States, but they are eliciting power.
They're using gray zone power in the United States without turning it into a kinetic conflict.
And so that is also a version of fifth generation warfare.
But that also, what they were doing is not legal by United States law.
It's illegal.
So they weren't using our laws.
Right.
They were straight up violating the laws.
Violating it, certainly.
And also, I would imagine they didn't register as foreign actors, which is something that you have to do in the United States.
So if you're operating on behalf of a foreign government, you have to register as a foreign agent somehow.
Right.
So, yeah, like all of these things are.
Russia or Israel?
I don't study them.
I just study UFOs.
They sound great.
But.
We don't want to get this podcast demonetized.
I was going to say, I think, what was it?
I talked with Julian about something that got him demonetized for one of our episodes.
Something about Israel?
I have no idea.
It wasn't something about Israel, but hey, we've gone through China and Russia.
So, you know, hopefully you can make.
$100,000 an episode on this one.
Just talk with Tenant Media.
I'm sure they'd love to have you.
Yeah.
I wish they would pay me.
I mean, right?
I'd take $100,000 per episode.
But you don't need that with Magic Mind.
You can come up with other profit making ventures.
Magic Mind.
Link below.
Yeah.
I'm actually really interested in sort of like running all of these fifth generation warfare concepts together.
Did you find anything, Steven, by the way?
Like what specifically they were doing.
Yeah.
It's very convoluted, other than, so I have a little bit of info.
Can you highlight it on there?
What to expect and how to respond.
No, it wasn't here.
Okay.
Well, let me know when you find it.
That's right.
Information.
Oh, okay.
Information is also limited.
No way to clear whose hands these stations are.
If staff are paid.
This is very, this is not.
More information is needed.
Yeah, I really should have.
Concerning over these stations is warranted.
Yeah.
I really should have boned up more on those things.
I'm sure you can find it somewhere, Steve, if you wish to.
Not on this article, but maybe on another one.
I was speaking with one of the China analysts who was talking about this, and he was like, Oh, yeah, that's definitely a real thing.
It's happening.
But I mean, you know, this is one of those things where it's like, you know, we have a very permeable country.
It's part of like the benefits of the United States.
Exactly.
You know, I've lived in Albania on and off for.
It makes us vulnerable.
Like seven years.
At no point would anybody ever mistake me for Albanian, you know, within the country.
But in.
As diverse a country as ours, you can just be American.
And we have a process for doing that.
We have this open information space.
And actually, one of the reasons that I started.
Chinese policing stations in Europe are reportedly involving and monitoring Chinese disparate.
Okay, this is basically what we said.
Yeah.
According to human rights groups like Safeguard Defenders.
Persuasion to return.
So I've heard about this a bit, like that potentially somebody who's acting in a dissident fashion could be persuaded.
To return to China, which obviously.
Oh, so they're policing Chinese people in the US or Europe, not just regular people.
No, no, Chinese people.
Not just American people.
Only former Chinese people.
I see.
I see.
But also Chinese diaspora who are American citizens.
Ah, okay.
I see.
I thought you just meant they were doing this to anybody.
No, they're not just like giving tickets to American people.
Right, right, right.
That'd be really weird.
You get pulled over by a Chinese police car.
I'm like, I don't speak Mandarin, sir.
Right.
And then, yeah, man, I got a ticket on the way here from a You know, somebody working for the CCP, that sucks.
Oh my God, could you imagine?
Yeah, but no, it's.
We got away with it for 10 years.
Yeah, it's specifically aimed at policing diaspora and minimizing external actors from sort of expressing dissent from the CCP.
And, you know, as China becomes more powerful, they're also able to, you know, to have more influence in other countries.
Federal Government Hiring Firms00:11:54
Because the United States, you know, the bargain of what was called the Bretton Woods Accords, which were the sort of financial accords that ended World War II.
It took the economies of Europe and also Japan and it dollarized them.
So it established the currencies of dominant currencies of Europe and also the currency of Japan and pegged it to the dollar to make sure that they could sort of economically return and build back after the devastation of World War II.
Well, World War I and World War II.
There was an exchange for this too, and that was.
That the United States would then become the sort of police of the global ocean, right?
But they wouldn't be putting their thumb on the scale for any one particular nation because a lot of the European conflicts were really over who got access to resources and who could control the market.
If the United States was able to project power on both seas at the exact same time, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and establish that as a global marketplace, then globalization could go anywhere.
Without anybody stepping on each other's toes.
So we've had that for many, many years, and it has brought a good deal of wealth to the United States, but it's also allowed everybody else to globalize.
And for a brief period of time, from the 1940s up until the 1960s, we saw that sort of like American golden age where somebody within a generation went from being close to the poverty line to being decently wealthy.
Everybody had this belief in their future tense because they could see.
That they were becoming healthier, wealthier, and more secure as they went along, potentially like our grandparents.
I know that my grandfather went from being like, he was a refrigerator salesman, and my father became a judge.
So, this was an enormous generational jump up.
But progress started to slow, and progress started to slow due to the fact that America moved through this process of being a value added manufacturing based middle class.
To being a skills and knowledge based middle class.
And suddenly we were able to export the labor that is required with manufacturing.
We could come up with the ideas, but the labor would seek the point in the world that had the lowest price point.
So whenever you open an iPhone, you see designed in California.
You certainly don't see made in California.
And globalization allowed that to happen.
So then you had a sort of hollowing out of the middle class because now you really just need.
Skills and knowledge based workers, and you need people who are very low skilled workers or service workers.
And so we don't have that robust middle class anymore.
And it's like there's an exporting of those things to countries that the price point is simply cheaper.
And so this same thing is now possible as I'm looking at the sort of future of statecraft, too, where it's like at some point we'll have.
People that are so wealthy that their country doesn't matter anymore.
And they're just going to find the tax jurisdiction that will make the most sense for their finances.
So, taking that idea of citizenship or sovereignty as a service, they will be like, well, what do I actually get for my American citizenship or my, I don't know, Kitson Nevis citizenship?
And they'll say, well, I want to go to a bunch of different countries.
I want maybe decent health care and I want a certain amount of protection.
Well, all of those things can kind of be provided by private companies at this point.
Private companies are becoming so powerful that you'll see, you know, Facebook has housing.
They even have school systems to, you know, I should say, Meta.
They have school systems to help the families that are working at Meta.
They even have defense and security specifically for their employees.
If you look at oil companies that are working in dangerous areas like the Niger River Delta, they've got private military companies that are working alongside them.
It's not a far leap to say that in the future it would be very possible that.
Companies will become almost like techno feudalist states.
Yeah.
Right.
It's also not a far leap to say that in the future, the sort of sovereign class that are so wealthy can expatriate themselves to places where the tax jurisdiction is just so much better and the services they get are so much better that they are no longer Americans anymore.
They're no longer British anymore.
They're simply emancipated people that are enjoying better services than the rest of us.
And this is something that I'm.
Super curious about.
And it's something Rand is concerned about?
Not something Rand's concerned about.
In fact, I think I may be one of the only ones who's banging on about it at Rand.
Well, because going back to what you're saying, maybe like certain individuals would be able to do this, but they couldn't make their companies transnational like this.
No, no.
Because like, you know, I'm sure you followed some of that USAID shit that's been happening.
Yeah, actually, I'd love to talk about that.
I'm a little, I'm kind of read in on USAID.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I actually may come at it from a very different perspective.
Perspective.
So, yeah, because I've heard a lot about USAID and I've actually worked with USAID on projects before.
Yeah, that guy, Mike Benz, talks about it all the time.
It's fascinating the way he talks about it.
Super, super interesting.
Yeah.
And so he used to work for the State Department, I think.
He would have been.
He was an analyst for the State Department.
Sounds right.
And one of the things I remember specifically him saying was how he was leveraging companies like Facebook, for example.
To maintain their monopolies overseas and being like, we're only going to let you have your monopoly overseas if you agree to censor X, Y, and Z.
Sure.
All kinds of shit like this.
Yeah.
So here's at least my take on it.
And, you know, I worked with USAID in a very different capacity than him.
And so I was a Peace Corps volunteer, which is technically under the State Department.
So, you know, I was teaching English at an Albanian high school for two and a half years.
And as a part of that, I got the opportunity to go out to village schools, really, really remote schools, and give English lessons out there sometimes.
So there's a lot of need out there, and I try and go do English classes in as far a field as I could.
At a certain point, we had the ability to collaborate with a couple of the other NGOs and say, and USAID, and then some of these other funds like the German Development Fund, which is called GIZ, and UNICEF.
And the idea was well, we're going to make a mobile library.
And basically, we have a big van, got a bunch of books in the van.
We drive to one of the 42 villages of Tripoya every single day, try to hit two villages a day.
And then, like, once a month, you know, you get an English lesson and a book, and, you know, we help villagers, right?
This was my interaction with USAID.
It was getting a couple dollars to put some books in a van and drive around to give books to kids, right?
So when I meanwhile, you're only making 100 grand a day.
What's that?
Yeah, I'm making 100 grand a day.
Um, I think, you know, what is the problem with China?
I think they're doing great.
It's going to be really fun in the future.
You're doing a great job.
Thank you.
So, my interaction with it was like we're giving books to kids.
And we got some funding to make sure that that happened.
And if you think that every single dollar that was going into USAID was these, like, Malicious operations that are forcing governments to bend the will of the United States.
It certainly wasn't my impression of working with USAID.
However, and I also know a lot of people who've ended up working with USAID and they're all looking for work right now.
So LinkedIn is popping.
Oh, wait, actually, hold on.
I got to tell you about this other great Chinese psychological operation.
Operation.
Okay.
Let me, can we put a pin in USAID?
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
This is a really fucking brilliant one.
Okay.
I just learned about it.
Okay.
Okay.
So, obviously, a lot of the federal workforce has been looking for work recently.
Mm hmm.
China, and I think you can pull up a story about this from the AP.
China has been starting consulting firms and looking to hire people who now don't have any federal work.
Specifically, shit.
Yeah.
It's kind of brilliant.
Where'd you hear about this?
AP.
Really?
Yeah, look it up.
Wow.
It's, yeah.
I mean, so they're hiring people to work remotely.
Oh my gosh.
Look at that.
Reuters, too.
Exclusive secretive Chinese network tries to lure fired federal workers, research shows.
Scroll down.
Let's read the summary.
Zoom in.
Researcher identifies a network of fake consulting and headhunting firms.
Yep.
Chinese embassy says Beijing respects data privacy and security.
Firms list addresses that are empty lots and shell companies.
Wow.
So, the bet that Beijing appears to be taking is that somebody who has been a federal worker for many years, spent a ton of time, you know, living, working, and breathing federal government, is now not only out of the job, but also looking for a salary and some.
Professional stability that usually comes with federal workforce.
And maybe, just maybe, they might have a bit of a chip on their shoulder based upon being fired.
So, what that could result in is picking up some really good information about what the US federal government is up to.
And again, you know, it's not illegal to hire people who without jobs.
These appear to be, you know, fake consulting firms and fake headhunting companies.
But it's not a kinetic attack.
Right.
Um, anyway, I just remember that thing, but that's crazy.
Isn't that amazing?
So, if they're hiring them, what would they be doing?
Do they give them a job and a paycheck?
I don't think it's easy.
Is it just to make headlines and to create some sort of fucking internal dissent?
Well, I think if it's made headlines, that their operation isn't going so well.
I think that if I was them, I would want to hire them and have them make projects that could potentially leverage their knowledge of the federal government so that I now have a good deal of knowledge about the federal government.
So, like I said, there's a lot of people who've been fired from USAID.
USAID Headlines and Dissent00:15:15
But anyway, so the USAID thing, I think.
People should understand a little bit about the modern history of USAID and how it changed, basically post Reagan.
Originally, USAID was created, I think it was 1961 by Kennedy.
And the purpose of this was to not only distribute diplomatic aid, but to act as a branch of soft power on behalf of the United States State Department, right?
I think that it is no secret that states use soft power in terms of here's a stick, a carrot instead of a stick.
Every nation does that.
In fact, I've even done that on behalf of Lieberland.
Like, I distributed aid to Somali nomads that were affected by Cyclone Zagar because we were trying to get closer with the government of Somaliland.
So it's no secret that that happens.
What happened during the Reagan administration was USAID changed from we are going to sort of implement different programs within countries and we're going to develop and launch them in house.
It changed to becoming a more privatized venture where USAID essentially becomes the pool of funds that private institutions and NGOs can requisition, provided that they are in line with whatever the initiatives of USAID are.
So, you have companies like Kamonix is one of them.
I think they're still around.
What is Kamonix?
They're an international development company.
C-H-M-E-O-N-I-X, I think.
And then you have smaller NGOs.
And the bargain is basically like, you know, if you have, I don't know, I'll use Albania, but like if you have an Albanian NGO that is roughly working on what USAID thinks is not only good for the country, but also good for US relations with the country.
Then you can get some funding from USAID.
In fact, I've worked on projects in Albania recently.
Like there's a video game development festival that happens there every year, and they get a little bit of money from the US Embassy to stimulate the video game development economy in Albania.
Shout out to Game Jam Albania, it's a lot of fun.
But that's because private companies, private individuals can requisition funds from that.
From that organization, so long as they're in line with the granting.
But what this also does is it opens it up to companies and even agencies that have less than magnanimous ideas about what they're going to do with that funding.
So I think, what's the gentleman who.
Mike Benz?
That's him, yeah.
So he was talking about, was it intelligence agencies sort of leveraging these funds to make.
The State Department.
Yeah, to make sure that.
They censor stuff.
On the platform.
Sure.
And so these are private companies who are using these funds in ways that are not outwardly magnanimous.
They actually look more like insidious control of a country.
Well, it's not necessarily, yeah, it's exactly.
It's the State Department doing it.
But this is also something that I think is less top down, rotten core control than I've seen in the media.
I think that there's, frankly, I think that there's a lot of good actors that have been funded by USAID.
I mean, I've worked with USAID funded projects before.
Didn't Dua Lipa get money from them for Albania?
Did she?
I have no idea.
Find the story.
No way.
Type in Dua Lipa USAID Albania.
But apparently, she got a bunch of money to inject some sort of Albanian dial, something to talk about Albania in a certain way.
I mean, she is Albania and Albanian.
So that would be.
Well, she is Albania, right?
Yeah.
Did you type in USAID?
Dua Lipa, British Albanian singer, songwriter.
She's been involved in discussions about Albania and her relationships and this relationship to Kosovo in 2020.
She faced backlash over tweeting a map representing Greater Albania, which sparked controversy due to national implications.
Yeah.
Um, but what does it say?
Where does it come to the USAID stuff?
Do I have to make it like Super Bowl?
I don't know.
They're censoring us.
I don't think that's going to change anything, Steve.
Sparks, yeah.
The uh, anyways, Mike Ben said something about how uh, USAID.
Oh, you know what it was?
Okay, she was one of these councils.
What was it?
Oh, was it like a cultural ambassador?
It was like it was like Council of Foreign Relations, I think it was, or one of those things, like the CFR.
Okay, she was like.
Like the top fucking artist or something.
And she went ahead and like talked to this council.
But apparently she was like involved.
I don't know.
You can't find anything, Steve?
No.
I mean, I'm a huge, huge Dua Lipa fan, but I haven't heard this bit.
I think one of the things too is, you know, one of the reasons that I think people are also rightfully looking to.
Type in Mike Benz Dua Lipa USAID.
You'll find something.
And then UFO.
And then Bigfoot.
Yeah, and Bigfoot.
We haven't even talked about the Albanian Bigfoot connection.
I think that one of the reasons that people are also rightfully looking at USAID with a great deal of criticism is what is the extent of soft power, right?
If you look at indicators of where Violent armed conflict are going to happen.
Yeah.
One of the biggest indicators of that is low state based institution.
So, some of the, you know, like there's a lot of organizations, OSCE, you know, the EU, the UN, that are working on institution building in a country, right?
And this could be anything from like making sure that there are regional town halls to making sure that minorities are represented in local governance to making sure that like, There's equal representation of different faiths in a country.
Now, is helping a country building institutions that look not unlike democratic American institutions overstepping our bounds?
I don't think so because I think that democracy is a better bet than autocracy is.
That's my point of view on it.
Well, when you're spending billions of dollars on it and your country's spiraling into debt and the people don't get to vote where their tax money goes, let alone it's going to all these NGOs who are funding all this.
Crazy, crazy, you know, subversive, ambiguous shit, like, sure.
Then that gets to be a problem.
So I think that, and I agree, like, and this is ultimately like one of those problems with taxation.
Like, I wish every year I got a receipt for my taxes.
Like, I bought, you know, like one sixteen hundredth of a Stinger missile.
Awesome.
I wish I, like, filled like 27 potholes.
I at least get a plaque.
Yeah, right?
You get a portion of the Stinger missile.
Okay, here it is.
Yeah.
Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift.
Former U.S. official Mike Benz claimed USAID used celebrities to destabilize governments.
Wow, that's a big claim.
Benz claimed the USAID had trained musical artists, including Dua Lipa.
Pussy Riot and possibly Taylor Swift to act as assets and spreading political narratives for statecraft purposes.
He suggests that these efforts are part of a broader initiative to influence public opinion and destabilize governments.
Ben said that celebrities who can be trained to spread desired messaging are actively recruited and used as network nodes.
He cited NATO linked initiatives and USAID backed music diplomacy.
Uh, programs as key drivers behind the efforts, yeah.
So, obviously, there is music diplomacy, there's sports diplomacy, all of these things are like, especially in the international development world, things that people talk about, even food diplomacy.
One example of food diplomacy is the fact that the Thai government subsidizes Thai restaurants in the United States, like, that's why there's a lot of Thai restaurants around.
That's that's a legit thing, right?
Um, but Thai restaurants have to stabilize our government, they don't, yes, far yet, yet.
We've got to, I can see how that could be a slippery slope, though, yeah, and and so.
Like, do I worry about, you know, overusing the subversive capacity of the United States in other countries?
Absolutely.
Do I worry about, you know, the US identifying too broad of a target base and saying, hey, we need to make everybody exactly like us?
Absolutely.
I totally agree with those things.
But at the same time, I really.
I like that there is an apparatus in the United States of giving aid.
I like that there is an arm of our government that says, you know what, the way that we want to interact with the world is by helping them at times in which they are struggling as a country.
Yeah, but it's not aid, right?
What does it actually stand for?
International development, American international development.
Is that right?
Right.
Yeah, that sounds right.
Yeah, that's right.
International development.
Yeah, international.
I mean, look, I was driving around Albanian villages giving books to kids.
Like, if you can find some, like, mustache twisting, pernicious means in that, good luck.
But at the same time, like, I'm pissed off that there are these other more subversive, like, politically motivated actors that are using USAID dollars to potentially.
Work against countries because that means that everything is painted with the broad brush of, well, that's bullshit.
And also to your question about, should our tax dollars go here?
So there is a real big benefit in helping to stabilize and advance the economy of a country because then when it descends into violent conflict, it is less likely, right?
There are countries in the world with less state development, with weaker institutions, with greater disparity between the very wealthy and the very poor.
Those are the places that wars start.
Those are the places that we may end up having to go into.
And so, if you want to pay for an education system or to, you know, I mean, use the Peace Corps to go in and give English classes now, it means that maybe in 20 years, it'll be more robust when a geopolitical fluctuation happens and there is a potential that they'll go into conflict, right?
And so, paying now to help develop institutions.
May actually be a better investment, especially in a globalized world, and especially in a globalized world where oftentimes the United States has to use violent force in order to stabilize or to nation build.
By the way, for those listening at home, I did quote Buddy Ears on both of those words.
Spoken like a true USAID employee.
That's right.
I was a Peace Corps volunteer.
We're not employees.
So what is.
I'm just trying to get hired by a Chinese consulting factory.
That's next, bro.
I know.
You got Rand on your resume now?
That's right.
I am open to work, guys.
So, you know, I can look the other way.
So, you're not actually working for Iran.
No.
You're doing an educational thing there.
Yeah.
So, they're one of the only think tanks that offers degrees as well.
So, I'm a part of their first class of national security students.
So, they have PhDs also.
Would they consider offering you a job after this?
Would you take it?
I don't know.
It's really interesting work.
And the stuff that you get to think about, the people that you get to work with, are really cool.
Yeah.
And you're certainly, you know, you're on the cutting edge of all of this stuff and being able to do really long range research on all these things.
I don't necessarily know if my role is to be in think tanks.
I think what I'm hoping to do is I want to raise these conversations in the public more.
I want to write books about this kind of stuff, about nation building, about, you know, the eccentricities of geopolitics.
And that's why I started.
My newsletter, This is Not a Psyop.
Subscribe.
And that's because I think that there is a lack of easy public access to what the thinking in these organizations is.
I spent like 10 years abroad seeing a lot of places that have been dismantled by American foreign policy.
And that's a really heartbreaking thing to see.
And it's one of the reasons that I wanted to go back and Find out how these policies are made in the first place, to learn from kind of the epicenter of the American political mind.
And now I feel like I can sort of speak from the authority of not only being on the ground in certain places, but also understanding how decisions are made.
And also having a great network of researchers who are curious about these things at the same place.
But I think that there's a lack of public conversations.
About this kind of stuff from both perspectives, from the perspective of what it feels like on the ground and also how the thinking is happening internally.
Yeah.
This whole fifth generation warfare and like population mind control stuff is so strange.
And it seems so like futuristic sci fi, you know?
But like it seems like it would be really easy to do in today's day and age with all like just the media itself, like how crazy the news cycle.
I don't think it's that hard to do.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the.
Intelligence Leaks and Policy Windows00:02:35
Did you see this new stuff with the CIA director on this group chat with all these people trying to.
I've been following it.
Talking about their war plans in Yemen or something?
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a whole hearing over it with Kelsey Gabbard and the CIA director, and they're saying, oh, no, there's nothing declassified.
It was totally normal for us to hash out these war plans on a WhatsApp group chat or whatever the fuck it was.
Well, and then you see the sort of normalization of like a massive intelligence leak.
That's not a great thing.
We are going to absolutely forget about this in two weeks.
There's going to be something completely different.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, I guess in my heart of hearts, I was like, that would be a great.
Thing to do on purpose if it gave you some sort of strategic advantage to have this active leak that gave us some strategic advantage somewhere.
It doesn't appear that that's the case.
You would hope that these people are capable of playing 3D chess in that way, but I wonder sometimes if they are.
Man, I totally agree.
I mean, I think that one of the things that I've noticed in terms of now kind of like knowing from the inside a little bit of how policy is made is it is so incredible.
Incredibly slow and politically costly to make a policy.
If you look at the time that they were talking about starting the Manhattan Project all the way until we had a nuclear bomb, it was years before they even started doing it, even though everybody at the exact same time totally agreed.
The American political apparatus moves incredibly slowly.
And so you're looking for this point at which what's called a policy window opens up.
So, a policy window is the moment that the idea that you've been thinking about forever aligns with the political interests of an elected leader and aligns with the needs of the population at the same time.
But how do you find that?
And how do you make somebody, how do you like have an elected leader who is just at the right point at the right time to implement a good idea or to implement a terrible idea?
That's what the policy window is all about.
And so, like, one of the things that I'm That I've been banging on a lot.
One of the things I've been banging on about in my own writing is every year there is a national security strategy that's released.
Not every year, I think every administration.
Arctic Icebreaker Defense Strategy00:03:30
Then there's also a national defense strategy, two different strategies.
One is DOD, one is White House.
And as I sort of started my journey into looking at information space defense, I was like, well, I should probably just look at the national security strategy and the national defense strategy because.
Clearly, there's got to be an information space defense strategy and security strategy.
And there isn't any.
We have an Arctic portion of that strategy.
Arctic?
Yeah, Arctic defense is big right now.
Huge.
But we don't have any information space defense strategy.
What is Arctic defense strategy?
So, briefly, with climate change happening, there's the potential that there will be more.
There will be an opening of the Arctic ice that will allow essentially a new domain of warfare in the Arctic.
It opens up a trade route between Asia and Europe that I think is like 40% quicker.
Wow.
Yeah.
Actually, this is really interesting.
There's a War on the Rocks article.
I think it's called The Icebreaker Gap.
But the icebreaker gap is pretty fascinating.
It's like, so Russia has the biggest amount of.
Icebreakers in the world.
So these are ships that can, I mean, crush icebergs.
Yeah, they crush ice so that you can create navigability between Arctic spaces.
I think that they have something like 350 or so.
We have 3.5, like one that's only an icebreaker or can be retrofitted to an icebreaker.
And so they're like, okay, well, we have this Arctic defense strategy, this Arctic security strategy that we're trying to develop and we're trying to figure out how this is going to affect American security, but we need icebreakers.
And it's like, okay, so the question is, how do we get icebreakers?
Well, as it turns out, Having an icebreaker factory is really expensive.
And the only person that would be, or the only country that we'd be purchasing icebreakers from is Russia, but we can't buy icebreakers from them.
So it's like the next best option is to buy icebreakers from Finland.
But it's like how much money are we going to have to invest into just icebreakers to ensure that we are prepared for any sort of Arctic national security crisis?
We have tons of submarines that can go up into the Arctic, though.
Yeah, I think we do.
Are you talking specifically about trade or like actual conflict?
Conflict.
Probably both.
I know that there's concern over this icebreaker gap, and it's something that the Five Eyes, so the five English speaking intelligence sharing networks, are looking at doing cost sharing to ensure that they can all sort of like use the icebreaker.
But like, it doesn't, the dollars don't make sense unless you have a pretty deep order book for your icebreakers.
Right.
But yeah, I mean, this kind of Arctic strategy is being thought about.
Actively.
That's crazy.
The next best example that I can have or that I have for information space defense is cyber defense, right?
So after 9 11, they started talking about how we need cyber defense capabilities, right?
Cyber Attacks and Shared Facts00:02:51
This was before we saw any major cyber attacks because the concern at that time was what they were calling like a digital Pearl Harbor.
And that would be, you know, this devastating attack on the United States that came through our IT systems.
Now, this was before we had seen any major cyber attacks.
Now we've seen quite a few cyber attacks.
We have constant examples of information space attacks, but no strategy to address them.
We had briefly a couple of organizations that were stood up in order to sort of establish deterrence in the information space.
But both, so there was the Global Engagement Center, and that was sort of destroyed.
It was defunded.
And then there was one more that I think only lasted like six months.
But it's because of the same reasons that you might imagine, right?
Like the reason that these were criticized was you can't have an American Ministry of Truth, right?
Because a portion of being an American is having freedom of expression and having.
You know, your right to think, say, and believe anything that you want to say.
So, the needle that my research is trying to thread, and frankly, I'm not doing very well.
If anybody has any ideas, reach out on LinkedIn, especially if you're from like a Chinese consulting company.
How do you preserve freedom of speech while also defending the information space?
There's a really good paper called, well, there's two really good papers that I could recommend.
One is a book, it's called Truth Decay.
Truth decay is this concept of how we're experiencing right now, in a unique way, the eroding of a shared sense of facts in our country.
And for a democratic environment to function, you need a shared set of facts.
Because governance is really all about finding the problems and the challenges, identifying a solution to the challenge and opportunity, identifying a solution to the challenge and opportunity, funding that solution, and then experiencing the benefits from that.
So sometimes people think about governance in this three pronged way, right?
It's who decides, who pays, and who benefits.
And so, if we don't have at least a carrying capacity of agreeing on what the problem is in the first place, what solutions might be, and who could actually benefit from those things, then the democratic system falls apart.
Trusting Individuals Over Leaders00:12:39
Yeah.
And it's critical that we are able to have robust debates about those things, but it's also critical that we have agreement on what facts are.
Right.
So, Truth Decays are really good.
That's so interesting.
It's so relevant.
Super interesting book.
They did really long range.
Deep research on this and also looked at other times in American history that we've experienced these kinds of things.
So, typically, you experience like periods of truth decay during massive moments of inequality within the country.
Also, it's experienced when there are new modalities of sharing ideas.
You know, this is nothing new.
We've just created new ways to share ideas.
If you think about it, like the The printing press comes out, right?
And then Europe is just like, well, I guess we have to kill each other for the next 500 years.
Like, wait a second.
You believe a slightly different thing about the Bible?
Right.
I mean, the second most bought book after the Bible, after the printing press came out, do you know what it was?
What?
The Malice Maleficarum, the witch hunting manual.
And then suddenly we got a bunch of witch hunts.
Yeah.
What year was this?
Oh, look it up.
No way.
There's also a great AFI song called Malice Maleficarum.
It's pretty, pretty intense, bro.
I need you to listen to AFI.
I'm going to go to Emo Night in St. Pete.
That's fucking hilarious.
Yeah.
The Malleus Maleficarum book.
The Hammer of Witches.
Bounding now.
When was it published?
1486.
1486.
Is it really the second most bought book?
I believe so.
Fact check me.
I'm ready for it.
Wow, man.
So.
You know, this is another moment of suddenly we have the bar to share ideas is lowered significantly.
And because of that, second most bought book, Harry Potter.
After the Bible, the second most bought book is often considered the Quran.
I think specifically after the.
Well, it's a religious text.
Yeah, after the invention of the printing press, I believe the second most printed and bought book was the Malus Maleficarum.
Yeah.
All right.
Anyway.
Anyways.
So, yeah, like these are, this is like this moment in history that we're living through.
Things like it have happened again.
I mean, it's like that great quote of like, you know, history doesn't always repeat itself, but it always rhymes.
I agree.
And that's like one of the reasons that I love studying geopolitics and history and seeing how these things go together.
Because if nothing else, like it gives me a way of feeling like we haven't completely departed from the map.
That we're not in the middle of some forest with nowhere to go.
By studying history and geopolitics and understanding the incentives behind things, it makes you realize that there's really nothing new under the sun.
And that by studying how it's been dealt with in history, you can also see maybe around the corner to see how it could be dealt with now.
Just so for the record, I'm in no way advocating for any sort of restriction of free speech.
I don't necessarily believe that because most academics, when they talk about how we need to deal with truth decay, is digital literacy education.
We need to educate people on digital literacy to really fact check themselves.
And I just like you're saying of how well you are adapted to using social media and not being like tricked.
Because I know a lot of older people that just get scammed every single day.
The Facebook moms are the biggest security threat. In the United States.
You won a prize.
Just give us your credit card information and we're going to send you this incredibly expensive gift.
We just need you to pay the $7 shipping.
That's right.
Meanwhile, you get hosed for $1,000 out of your checking account.
It's a renaissance of Nigerian print scams.
But I mean, that's what digital literacy education is.
It's basically like, hey, make sure you fact check that and don't believe those crazy things.
I frankly think, I mean, I'm from the Dare generation.
Yeah, me too.
Without revealing too much, it didn't work.
You know, I don't.
I don't take that as an actual serious intervention to help truth decay.
I just don't.
I don't know what a serious intervention really looks like.
It's something that I'm currently struggling with and trying to identify and doing a lot of research on.
But I don't know.
There's no, I mean, like I've had CIA officers on this show before, one of them in particular, Andy Bustamante, who said, We need a common enemy to unite the country.
Yeah.
Mm hmm.
We need some sort of common external devil to fight against in order to get us back together.
And that's when we don't have that.
We also don't have a cohesive national religion like a lot of countries do.
I'm not saying it's going to be a good thing if we do have that because I think religion is probably the cause of more death and war than anything in the history of the world.
But what else is there?
Because we're not going down the right path.
I think that's one of those things.
I don't know.
To me, that feels like.
Yeah, it was a solution in the past.
It is great when there is national unity.
And frankly, one of the best examples of national unity that you can point to is the last major attack.
I push back against this theory that we need to have some antagonistic relationship in order to unify nationally.
Because what's the option there?
To gin up.
Wars and enemies in order to unify us.
I don't think that that's the answer.
I think that that is.
What if we could fake, pretend like we have enemies and pretend like there's these big bad guys out there?
Like in the public, we're portraying China and Russia as these big evil bad guys, but like behind closed doors, our diplomats are going over there being like, hey man, we're just putting this in the news.
We're still going to do all these deals behind their backs.
Well, I think that, you know, this is something I think about a lot too is you've read 1984, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
So, so one of the things in 1984, actually, the Audible just did like a great audio play version of 1984.
Yeah.
If you really want to like get freaked out, because who doesn't, go listen to that.
That's great.
But one of the main plot points in 1984 is the main character can never remember who they're at war with.
It's either like Oceania or like Eurasia, right?
And so, yeah, I mean, would that work?
Sure.
Is it ideal?
I don't think so.
I don't think it's ideal to lie to a population in order to make sure that they're believing the same things.
And frankly, I think that we're better than that.
I think the government does think that, though.
I think the highest echelons of the government do believe that.
I think they treat us as a parent child relationship.
Yeah.
And I know that Andy talks about that too.
You know, there's a great line in a poem by the writer Kay Tempest who says something along the lines of They treat us like idiots, but that's their problem.
But when we behave like idiots, it becomes our problem.
Right.
So, yeah, like, do people in power oftentimes infantilize the people that they represent?
Certainly.
But the institutions that we have put in place are there in order to at least give us the capability of pushing back.
And I think, at least my belief is that, and I think Andy would disagree with me, but my belief is that we can and should trust the American population more than it seems like happens with our elected leaders.
And I think this is ultimately kind of.
The American population?
Yeah, I think that we should trust individuals.
I think that, I mean, I trust individuals more than organizations personally.
Yeah, for sure.
You know?
And I think that this kind of goes back to, I mean, this is, there's like, in any geopolitical book that you ever read, chapter two, 100% will always talk about like Hobbes versus Rousseau, right?
So Thomas Hobbes, you know, man in the state of nature is.
Lonely, nasty, brutish, and short is his life, something like that.
It's real, real rough.
But he essentially believes that we're naturally in a state of nature, evil, conniving, and those appetites need to be constrained for the proper functioning of society.
And that's constrained in his book, Leviathan, by the Leviathan.
So we're giving up those freedoms in order to constrain our natural inclination towards violence and chaos.
And then there's Rousseau, who says that in a state of nature, man is naturally equal.
He's willing to cooperate and more tranquil.
I think Bustamante's opinion here is more on the Hobbesian side of things, where we need to use societal controls to constrain the individual because if left unchecked, they're going to make decisions that are not only bad for themselves, but bad for.
Society writ large.
This is your sort of like parent child thing.
I tend to trust individuals more.
And I think that people really are reasonable actors when they're given proper information.
I think that we've developed an information space right now where we're all sort of invested in these zero sum politics where it's not enough that my side wins, but the other side has to lose at the same time.
I don't think that's a fair broker.
Of an information space.
I don't know how to get that information space where people are treated like adults and transparency is the letter of the day.
I don't know how to get there, but I do trust individuals.
And I think that it doesn't benefit us when we have a country that is predicated upon the primacy of the individual to make their own lives and their own communities better to say that, well, the government needs to keep a lot of stuff from us because we can't be trusted with it.
But that goes back to that transparency gap, too, where it's like the government is oftentimes transparent enough to make us not trust it.
Rather than giving us transparency so that we do trust it, we don't know what's up or down anymore.
Yeah.
But you know what, though?
I also like, okay, so anytime I go to a country, and this has happened like, I don't know.
By the way, hey, we got to wrap it up in like five minutes.
Yeah.
So let's, I got to pick up my kid soon.
We're like three and a half hours in.
Oh, shit.
All right.
Yeah.
Cool.
I'm going to get a bunch of offers from the Chinese consulate after this.
This is awesome.
Finish your story.
I think that like, I never trust a country when I get into the back of a Cab and the cab driver is like, We love our political leader.
It's like, No, you don't, right?
Like, I bet you that happens a lot in North Korea.
I've never been in a North Korean cab before.
Um, I've heard stories.
Have you?
Oh, super cool.
Um, no, I got in.
No, yeah, I knew this dude, this dude, Wally Green.
He was a famous, or not, yeah, he was a like a big time, big shot ping pong player.
And he went to some big tournament.
I remember seeing a bit of that, yeah.
He got in the cab to go to the tournament or whatever.
And this, he was like, Oh, our supreme leader invented the telephone.
He is the best, invented ping pong, everything.
Yeah, exactly.
Best ping pong player.
Actually, I think she did say he invented ping pong.
That doesn't surprise me.
Yeah, I mean, it's like, and I think that's kind of the part of the political game.
We shouldn't trust our political leaders, right?
The Greatest Information Vulnerability00:02:32
We should be constantly scrutinizing the things that they say.
And like, there is no way that anybody agrees 100%, not only with a political leader, but with anybody else.
My best friends, I like to have differences of opinion with them.
We have a unique capability of pushing back against political leadership in peaceful ways.
That needs to be maintained, but it also needs to be maintained with a pretty clear information space that is hopefully free of manipulation by foreign actors.
Because you asked me at the beginning of this, you know, what is the greatest vulnerability that we have in the United States?
And obviously, my research is focused on fifth generation warfare in the information space, but I think that the biggest vulnerability that we have is the gray matter.
You know, it's the space between our ears.
It's the ability for us to look at somebody else who is an American citizen and say that they're the enemy over somebody from a thousand miles away across the world who actually does mean us harm.
And that's just because of the stories that we tell ourselves.
I think that's the greatest vulnerability.
And I don't have an answer for it.
I'm going to keep doing public thinking about how we.
Create cognitive security in the United States and elsewhere.
And if you want to hear about that, check out my newsletter, This Is Not a Psyop, which I promise is 100% Psyop free.
What is it on?
Substack?
It's on Beehive.
Beehive.
Beehive.
Yeah, yeah.
I'll link it all below.
Send me the link.
Yeah.
And check out my book, You Are Not Here Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist.
Hell yeah.
We got it back there somewhere on that show.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, wait.
What?
Didn't.
Wasn't there a different wall back here previously?
Yeah, he scooted that one back in.
I guess we're not ready for the new wall yet.
That's incredible.
We were going to debut the new wall with you, but he decided not to at the last minute.
That was a pretty cool wall.
Yeah, I noticed the set been changing.
Anyway, always a pleasure, Danny.
Thank you, Eric.
Yeah.
Been fucking fascinating.
Let's, uh, let's, uh, I want to debate Beck Lover about cryptocurrencies.