Cognitive Inoculation: Winn Schwartau and the Metawar

Mason Amadeus: Pre-recorded seven months or so ago in the 8th Layer Media studios in the back rooms of the deep web. This is The FAIK Files. When tech gets weird, sometimes me and Perry end up being the butt of the joke. Hi, I'm Mason Amadeus. Perry is not here with me this week. It was a whole comedy of errors that we don't have to get into that led to us being unable to record, but it has allowed us to bring you one of my favorite interviews we have ever conducted. In January of this year, we sat down with Winn Schwartau, who is A, incredibly smart, B, incredibly funny, and C, has a phenomenal voice. We had a great conversation. We talked about so many things covering the concept of time-based security and applying that to the modern age, which is thinking about how much time everything takes, whether that's your own human synapses responding to something or a computational process on a piece of technology. We talk about digital addiction. We talk about information overload and strengthening your cognitive immune system. And it gets a little bit silly at the end, too. And bear in mind, this was in January, so we talk a little bit about the TikTok ban and things like that, because that was still recent news, which also, I can't believe that that was only January. It feels like years, doesn't it? It's crazy how fast time flies. Anyway, one of my favorite interviews. You're going to love it. I'm not going to bother trying to recap any more of it. I'm just going to let you listen and have a good time. So sit back, relax, and allow yourself to be transported back to when things were simpler, an easier time, January of 2025. We'll open up The FAIK Files right after this. [ Music ]

Perry Carpenter: All right, we are here with Winn, and Winn has been traveling the world for, well, for as long as I know him, but for the past couple of years, really talking and thinking about metawar. He put out a great book on that. Before the book, he's been doing years of research on it, and I want to jump into some of that, but before we get to the metawar theses and all of the work that Winn's been doing on that, Winn, I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about the concepts of time-based security and the way that you've been thinking about security for the past several decades.

Winn Schwartau: Oh, boy, Time Based Security, that was mid-90s, I guess, late '90s. It ended up getting formalized on a napkin in a Polish bar in Warsaw. True story.

Perry Carpenter: Did not know that.

Winn Schwartau: The fundamental concept was really pretty simple, and you can see how it came out of a bar napkin talk, is if, in the physical world, if the bad guys are going to go rob, let's say, the jewelry store, and you ask yourself, okay, what are its defenses? What security mechanisms does it have? Well, the first security mechanism it has is a window. Okay, the window is the only defense that you have there, the only protective mechanism. So how much time does it take for a rock to go through that window?

Mason Amadeus: Oh.

Winn Schwartau: And so there is a number. What should happen next? Now, in the physical examples, we were very used to, many years, it'll connect to an alarm system. In the old days, it was a dial-up system. So okay, you had 30 seconds to get to ADT or the cops or whatever, and then somehow there's a communication. Does the guy there at the receiving end pay attention to it, not pay attention to it? And if he does, okay, then they're going to dispatch security or the police. How long does it take them to get there? The premise was the bad guys already know these numbers. It was just add up some time. So you add up the protective time, milliseconds of a breaking glass, and then somewhere between 30 seconds and three minutes. In good case, the cops will show up. Therefore, you have unfettered access for X amount of time, so that time is your exposure time, and it's all an inequality. So in order for anybody to be able to say that they have really good protection, their detection time and their reaction time has to be less than the amount of time that their protection mechanism would actually have in the system. Otherwise, you can say, "I'm not secure." I'm using that in quotes because I hate that kind of term, but you now know how much your exposure is, and that helps with risk management. So all I did really was take the physical world and look at it in the cyber world and discovered that when I was talking to risk people, it ended up resonating because they could measure in a certain amount of time based upon, in those days, the bandwidth of your circuits, how much exfiltration of data can occur in what period of time, and you can actually get a measurement and a number out of it, and that's what began the thinking and ultimately became analog network security with the mathematical formalization by my friend in England, Dr. Mark Carney.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: That's really cool. That feels so intuitive in the physical world, but I would never have thought to apply it to cybersecurity in that way, and it still makes sense.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, because in the physical world, we see that, like, in every heist movie, right? As people are, like, looking at their clocks and they're going, all right, it takes a guard 10 minutes to walk around the perimeter. That means we have this, the alarm company, but people have not traditionally thought about that in terms of, like, exfiltration and bit rates and so on. So am I right or wrong in thinking that concepts of analog security and time-based security work within the way that you think about metawar?

Winn Schwartau: I think even more so. When I started looking at, quote-unquote, the metaverse, I thought I was going to be looking at the technical aspects of privacy and security and how the various new architectures in Web3 are going to affect data flows and what have you. That's where I thought I was doing, and I gave a number of presentations over in Europe, I don't know, two and a half years ago, and they said, "No, you're missing the point. You're missing it. Yeah, that's all real, but you've got to add the human into it." And I go, "What?" So we spent many evenings drinking an occasional, maybe one glass of wine, maybe just one [laughter], and this went on for -- I did 11 talks in five days, so it was a tremendous amount of focused feedback, and what it evolved into very quickly was looking at it from a purely system standpoint in the time domain, and that meant, okay, we are a carbon-based system. We are all alone. Our body, our mind, everything about us is isolated as a system, until we connected to a silicon system. Then things start happening because that silicon system will be the basis of touching other carbon systems, which can influence. So if you look at a system, any system at all is based upon an OODA loop. It's that circular pattern that keeps going to reinforce life. That is what life is all based upon. That's what nature is based upon, is the survival of this loop. OODA, observe, orient, decide, and act. It comes from the military, but it applies in any system whatsoever. So then you take the silicon systems, and unfortunately, the cybersecurity industry is still not really tuned up on applying OODA loops in it, you take this OODA loop and this OODA loop, carbon, humans, silicon, throw them together. What happens? There's an incredible disconnect, and this disconnect exists in many, many domains. One of them is the time domain, which allowed me then to take the hard numbers, the hard scientific numbers about how our sensory systems work, how perceptions are created and how they can be manipulated by individuals, carbon-carbon systems, or carbon-silicon systems with carbon systems at the back end influencing it, or an AI system. So there's all these different ways of looking at it, and there is -- it's not necessarily really simple when you get into it, but it is two systems talking to each other, and we're at a disconnect and we're losing.

Mason Amadeus: My first intuitive thought is that today, the answer to how long would any of these things take would be too fast to do anything about it. Is that not true? Like, I never thought of the time of execution as being a real big factor, particularly now with how quickly things move and if you have AI systems at your disposal. Like, how do you crunch those numbers? How do you get to those figures? And are they not just infinitesimally small?

Winn Schwartau: Well, that took a long time. That took a long time because I'm not a neuroscientist, I'm not a biologist, thankfully, and Perry knows, when I had the opportunity to study a little bit of neuroscience with respect to security awareness and behavior, human behavior, a number of years ago, I started realizing that everything that we are exists in the time domain. So for example, simple reaction tests. Anybody can do them online. And you wait for the green dot, and then the green dot appears, you press the button. How long does that take? So when you look at it from an averaging standpoint, humans can react in roughly 250 milliseconds. So everything we think we're doing is actually in the past. There is no such thing as in the present. Does not exist. So if you then have time equals zero, that's just an arbitrary, not absolute, reference point, in how long does it take something to happen. So now when humans talk to each other, we have become acclimated to a temporal delay. So I say something and it takes you 250 milliseconds to get that thing going, then depending upon your response and thinking process, another 250 to 500 milliseconds to get back, so we're operating in this constant time delay. So now, in this case, let's tie AI into it, and I'm just picking AI, and I'm not getting down whether it's good, bad, or indifferent, just those machines that we're all playing with these days, it can answer you instantly, which can be very disconcerting. And in some of the AI models, and I don't know if you've noticed this, I've been clocking different response speeds.

Mason Amadeus: Absolutely, yeah.

Winn Schwartau: And that is, I believe that what they're thinking is, and I've not asked Altman or any of these guys, it's an attempt to try to make the technology a little less psychologically intimidating and make it a little bit more human-like, at least that's been my experience when I've been messing around with this stuff. So bottom line, it's two systems. How do we get these systems to coexist? And that's what it's really about. It's about coexistence with the technology that we have created, and a lot of the technology we've created, we think we've created in our own image, and very often, we don't like what we see.

Mason Amadeus: Isn't that the truth?

Perry Carpenter: Yeah. That was a quote that you said that I used in my book, is that we've created AI in our own image and we don't like what we see, and it is attributed to you. So yeah.

Winn Schwartau: That's all I'm good for, sound bites these days. That's it [laughter].

Mason Amadeus: We just got to get you some more napkins, some more bar napkins.

Winn Schwartau: Oh, no, I have it right here. I got it right here. There's always a bar napkin or a blank piece of paper [laughter].

Mason Amadeus: Good. Okay, good.

Perry Carpenter: So I know that a lot of what you're alluding to has also been proven, like in functional MRI results, the fact that a lot of the decisions that we believe we've made, we've made based on impulse, not based on logic. What does that mean for us in a world where we are going to increasingly become cyborgs of some sort? We're going to have head-worn apparatus that is feeding us information. We believe we're making certain decisions based on what we're seeing. We're reacting in certain time domains. What kind of quandary have we gotten ourselves into?

Winn Schwartau: Oh, geez. Boy, Perry, you know how to ask one question that requires three weeks of answers.

Perry Carpenter: That's because I don't want to talk much [laughter].

Winn Schwartau: Inside of us, there's two -- and I'm simplifying the neuro, the psycho, very simplifying it. So for you guys out there, there's 300 books that are referenced to make all of this theory work. We have two internal systems, roughly. Our unconscious primal system, which operates on emotion and the fundamental need for survival. It's automatic. We don't think about it. It operates at, depending upon the numbers, 300 to 400 billion bits per second. That's its operating speed. The second system we have is our conscious thinking where we make, we believe, think, hypothesize that we are making smart, well-informed decisions. That part of our brain operates at four kilobits per second.

Mason Amadeus: Really?

Winn Schwartau: So the first question I started asking was, who's in charge? And when I started looking at who's in charge, it came back to the time domain. Our emotional system operates very, very quickly. I grew up in New York, right? So I go to cities a lot and I walk around. If I hear a horn, what is going to be my knee-jerk primal reaction?

Mason Amadeus: To yell, "I'm walking here," right [laughter]?

Winn Schwartau: One of them we're aware of. The second one, we're not. The first one is, oh, my God, horn, but then there's a sub-process that automatically occurs in our system. One is our ears get engaged to judge the distance, and that tells us finally what our primal reaction is going to be. Pay attention, don't pay attention. It's an immediate threat, it's not an immediate threat. We don't have to engage thinking for any of that, because over time, getting used to, learning and experience have built those into our primal system. I refer to that as "strengthening the mental immune system." So we have more systems that have to be combined. They are operating at different times, different speeds, and the huge disconnect of coexistence is that tech not only is roughly a million times faster, roughly, than what we are doing, it also has no emotion. Now, part of the problem is that in us we have these two systems. We have the emotional system, then we have the aware/cognizant system, but those two systems are like two different operating systems and they don't communicate very easily.

Mason Amadeus: That is such an interesting contextualization. I think my first thought, as you started getting into it, was the example of when you put your hand on a hot stove, you pull it away before you've even registered mentally that it's hot. I really like the horn example because there are all these tiny sensory judgments we make that are kind of, in a lot of ways, the most important judgments to make quickly, hence why they're part of the mental immune system. Porting this kind of thinking over to cybersecurity specifically, but also just computing in general, is frying my brain a little bit. It's really interesting. It makes a lot of boundaries that seem hard, or that we want to seem hard, fuzzy, because we like to think of things as instantaneous, even when they're things we're doing.

Winn Schwartau: There is no such thing as instantaneous outside of quantum entanglement. Everything else is measured by some delay.

Mason Amadeus: Right.

Winn Schwartau: When you talk about cognitive defense and things like that, which is the military term, sort of, that's been going on for the last decade or so, roughly, getting that over to greater populations has been the challenge. How is it done? How do you get -- how do you strengthen a mental immune system? How do you do it without being dictatorial? How do you do it without trying to create false belief systems? We have a biological immune system, and without getting into whether it's good or bad, because I believe it's good, RNA is an amazing technology that had been studied for 40 years and then it had to be rapidly deployed, "Okay, guys, we're putting this out there," and the model of RNA, just for your listeners, is instead of getting a virus or immunization shot that infects you with a weakened form of the pathogen, you get a shot that sends instructions to your physical immune system on how to build the equivalent of an antibody to that particular pathogen, and then all traces of that particular operation, that process, are erased, is roughly how it works out. Can the brain do the same thing, was where I started going, and it turns out that there was some fascinating work that began in the 1960s, was completely disapparated for whatever reasons until 2011 when two Dutch researchers started asking questions about mental inoculation against disinformation, misinformation, what have you. Now, without going down that road, we go back to, how does this compare to cyber? I maintain that the problem, fundamental problem, is not misinformation, disinformation, fake news, any of that, that we have to begin at a much higher level, and the much higher level is really simple, too much information, because out of the 100% of information available to us, we need, and I think the number, it's in my talks, is like.0035%, and that number comes about because of the cognitive maximum capabilities of the processing of portions of our nervous system. So you can reverse-do the math in the time domain and say, well, there's no way this is going to work. So what is TMI? Too much information in the cyber world is DOS and DDoS. What happens to our brains when we get too much information, or we don't take a break, we don't meditate, we don't take a relax, we don't get away from it? I discovered that if I mapped out a whole series of traditional cyber defense, CNA, CNB, computer network attack and defense models, that they parallel the cognitive system perfectly, and in some cases, we have some early ideas of how to put up defenses. In some cases, people don't want to know about them for political and religious reasons, but fundamentally, the math has shown me that if we don't do this, we're [bleep] [laughter]. Is that what we wanted to bleep?

Mason Amadeus: I'm glad you saved it for a good high point [laughter].

Perry Carpenter: I can tell you thought about that one, too.

Winn Schwartau: No, no, this is all spot on, guys, just --

Perry Carpenter: Seemed like you were working up to it [laughter]. You know, when you talk about the mental DDoS, so if we move away from like the fake news, disinformation, and just, you know, information landscape that's all around us that we're constantly having to try to filter through and everything else, you can see this at work physically if you've ever seen a really good stage pickpocket, you know, theatrical pickpocketer. What they're doing all the time is overloading and messing with the perception and the attention capabilities of the person that's on the stage. It's all around touching them. They're overloading the -- you know, giving a sensory input here so that they can take something from a different part of the body.

Winn Schwartau: Yup.

Perry Carpenter: And I think that's a really good visual analog example of everything that's going on and the way that we really believe that we're perceiving and understand way more about what's going on around us than we really do, and the truth of the matter is it's so simple just to hijack any of our systems.

Winn Schwartau: All right, and for your listeners, I'll make it even simpler. There is no such thing as multitasking, period. It does not exist. No, I don't care what you believe. I don't care what your uncle believes. It doesn't exist. We operate in a sequential processing, and the parallels are all time -- they're all time multiplexing one way or another.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: Mm-hm.

Winn Schwartau: What magicians have been able to conquer is they understand the time delays. They understand the distraction delays. They understand the speed of the nervous system and build that into the illusions.

Perry Carpenter: Yes.

Winn Schwartau: Which, I mean, I love watching magic shows because it just messes with my mind, but I also know that what's behind it, I just -- it's designed to fool the senses. The second thing that you have to keep in mind is the input to the brain creates the sensory reality at 11.1 megabits per second. That's it.

Mason Amadeus: Eleven point one megabits per second?

Winn Schwartau: Eleven point one megabits per second, which gives us a cognitive capability, over the day, of 70 -- assuming we're awake and studying 24 hours a day, that's 74 gig a day. What we have not learned in social media and so much of this ad tech, big tech, AI, all the stuff that's doing, what we have not taught and built into our culture of the information age is critical ignoring.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah. What came to mind in pulling on your idea of the mental immune system, we talk a lot about media literacy, and really, I think what we mean by that is building up your mental immune system to condition your knee-jerk reactions to be more critical and less immediately giving credit to whatever you're looking at.

Winn Schwartau: Yeah, by instituting a delay in the OODA loop for that processing before the decision is made. Exactly.

Mason Amadeus: But you have to fold it into that unconscious prioritization of information that you don't necessarily have conscious control over, and so that's got to be difficult, right? How do you make that shift from a conscious action, how do you then move that into your mental immune system? Just practice?

Winn Schwartau: Practice implies that your audience is willing and wanting to do it.

Mason Amadeus: Well, they're nerds. They're here, you know, so they might be.

Winn Schwartau: For the nerds, for the nerds of the world, yeah, we kind of get it. There's lots of techniques. You can go to the fallacies, strengthening mental processing and cognitive thinking and all of the critical aspects of decision-making and evidence-based pisses a lot of people off, but it's also the scientific method that's gotten us to where we are today.

Mason Amadeus: Mm-hm.

Winn Schwartau: The problem is getting Dick and Jane, Ma and Pa, how do you get them to not even need to know that it's going on? What is the process? And this is the work that came out from the two Dutch researchers, Sander van der Linden and Johannes Rosenbusch. I never can -- my Dutch sucks, sorry, and they're wonderful people. I've spent a lot of time in Cambridge with them. They had a question because of the work done by James Maguire [assumed spelling] back in '61 for the Department of Air -- for the Air Force, how can people be inoculated against becoming Manchurian candidates, roughly was the thinking in the late '50s. Brainwashing, how can you protect against it? And Maguire came up with the idea of mental inoculation, and as I said, it disappeared. So Sander and Johannes said, "I wonder what happens if we turn this into a game," and the first game that they introduced, and I think it was -- well, I forget what year, 2016, 2017, it was called "Bad News." Bad News was a game to see how susceptible you are to misinformation, disinformation. There's also MIST, M-I-S-T, the Misinformation Susceptibility Test, also out of Cambridge.

Perry Carpenter: Mm-hm, seen it, yeah.

Winn Schwartau: The game is not meant to say religious, political, left, right. What they do is they create scenarios that make you think before you click, is this true, is this not true, and some of them are absurd. Some of them are, hmm, I'm messing with their minds to see how they react. And so they discovered that -- I think they did 2 million experiments. Perry, I think you know what I'm talking about here.

Perry Carpenter: Mm-hm.

Winn Schwartau: Their first pass of numbers was, after somebody takes the first Bad News test of -- I think it was 7 minutes, then they do a reevaluation, susceptibility to mis/disinformation in those experiments was reduced by 51%.

Mason Amadeus: Oh, that's a -- that -- that's so large as to -- that's crazy.

Winn Schwartau: Then you apply the time-based security, time degradation trust models to that, the curves of the degradation of the effect of the inoculation matched going all the way, way back to Ebbinghaus' work in the 1860s, they're all the same curve, which means that you need to be periodically mentally re-inoculated until it becomes absolutely part of your system. So none of this was a surprise to me. The surprise was, how the hell have we missed this for so long, because it seems so incredibly obvious, and when I talk to people about this, once you put the science away and you get to some of these basics, they're going, "Well, how come nobody else" I don't know. How come nobody else?

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, I was thinking the thing that stands out to me about this framework, too, and all of these comparisons you're drawing is this is a really -- aside from trying to get everyone to play games and inoculate themselves, just this framework of thought is incredibly useful as a descriptive tool for non-technical people to understand these concepts, I think, like these parallels to the immune system and --

Perry Carpenter: Mm-hm.

Winn Schwartau: I hope so.

Mason Amadeus: I'm trying to tuck this into my back pocket next time I got to talk to my grandma or whatever about something. I haven't at least encountered in the wild that specific kind of parallel with the focus on time.

Winn Schwartau: It requires the freedom to look at interdisciplinary tactics and strategies from disparate fields that have nothing to do with each other. It's sort of how I view where I ended up. Same thing with, you know, back in cyber war days. Same thing. It's just how do you synergize all the pieces a little bit differently. That's all.

Mason Amadeus: And I think, like, right now there's a dearth of really good science communication, or there's -- I don't want to say there's a dearth. I'm seeing a lot of science communicators or, really, I guess, just informational communicators. I'm trying to not say "influencers," but influencers that I have respected, I know, it's such an icky term, but people who you typically would view their content and it would be well-researched and whatnot, and I'm seeing a lot of misinformation spread by those people around AI and things like that, and so there's a need for people to be able to talk about these complex topics to the general public, and I think that this framework is going to be really helpful in that.

Winn Schwartau: I hope so.

Perry Carpenter: I've got one -- I mean, there's so many questions I could ask, but the main question I want to ask right now is, what are you pissed off that we haven't asked? [ Laughter ]

Winn Schwartau: Well, I'm not pissed off -- no, I don't -- Perry, you know me, I --

Perry Carpenter: I'm being facetious, but, like, what is the thing that should be obvious to us to have, you know, like, is there a rabbit trail we should have gone down that for whatever reason we just weren't there?

Winn Schwartau: A lot of this comes down to, where it began for me, an awful lot of it, and in the book, Perry, you know this. The first, I don't know, 40, 50 pages are really a discussion of what is reality.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Winn Schwartau: And that's a huge philosophical question, but we have enough information, I believe, to be able to give us a good idea of what our reality, our personal reality is, our internal, alone, all-by-ourselves reality, and then a consensual hallucination that that's a fan and that's a cat and that's Perry. And when you apply standard distribution curves on top of that, there's going to be outliers in every direction. That's just the way it's going to be. And I think that we have done a really piss-poor job of accommodating thinking towards human survival in the information age. It's a coexistence issue. People are handing over complete control of their lives to systems that they, number one, don't understand. Number two, we don't understand. Number three, cannot be measured. Number four, lies and hallucinates, and you work your way down and we're handing control over, and why do we do it? Because it's easy.

Mason Amadeus: Or because it's profitable.

Winn Schwartau: Well, that's on the other end.

Mason Amadeus: Oh, that's true. Yeah, you're right.

Winn Schwartau: Are you familiar with a book called -- I believe it's called "Hooked."

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: I am not.

Winn Schwartau: Fundamentally, the message is from -- it's a bible for Silicon Valley now. The message is, if your product and/or service that you want us to invest in is not really, really addictive, we're not interested. So right now, society, Western society has endorsed digital opioids as an acceptable level of addiction in order to promote capitalistic endeavors.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: I'm going to make that my ringtone. I'm going to clip that sentence you just said and make that my ringtone, because, yeah, that's a really succinct way to put it.

Perry Carpenter: So I've had a decent amount of discussions with B.J. Fogg, who's the guy that created the field of behavior design. Nir Eyal, who was the guy that wrote Hooked, was one of his students at Stanford, and B.J. says, "Yeah, I kind of like the Hooked model, but I kind of hate this" -- I don't want to put words in B.J.'s mouth, but he said he wasn't as happy with some of the reward stuff that was on the other side and didn't believe that it needed to be there in order to establish a positive habit.

Winn Schwartau: Because they reinforce negative habits. It's much easier to reinforce negativity than positivity because of the way the brain works, and the brain is, number one job of the brain, survival. That's it. Which means we operate on fear.

Perry Carpenter: Yup.

Winn Schwartau: And that explains a huge amount of what we're seeing in the world today.

Perry Carpenter: Well, I guess one last question, then, because you talked about, like, the main problem that we're seeing in the world today, I want to tack on to that and ask, do you see a way out of us living in the echo chambers that we've built around ourselves?

Winn Schwartau: They're not going to be popular.

Perry Carpenter: That's okay. We can cut this part if we have to.

Winn Schwartau: No, I don't care.

Mason Amadeus: Why would we cut that? We want -- we don't need to be popular. We need to be honest.

Winn Schwartau: All right, I've got to go back to the physical world of the 1980s again, and back then, everybody was -- the war on drugs, and the war on drugs and Nancy Reagan, "Just say no." Well, addiction is not a choice. Addiction is a disease, whether it is chemical or digitally chemical, because every time an 8-year-old girl gets a like, she gets a dose.

Perry Carpenter: Mm-hm.

Winn Schwartau: A little dose of serotonin feel-good, and what does the brain want? More of it, more of it, more of it. Okay, back then, they said, "Just say no." Well, you can't. It just doesn't work that way. What the other one was that was said, more out of the progressive medical training, medical communities working on addiction said was, "Cut the loop." Stop the cycle, cutting the feedback loop. The feedback loops tend to be self-reinforcing, and that's what positive loops versus negative loops are, and this is Engineering 101 stuff, and right now the design of all of these social media platforms -- I'm not saying all, but a great number of the social media platforms is to addict you, and that's done through positive feedback loops, not compensating feedback loops.

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Winn Schwartau: Do we have the political will to unaddict an entire portion of the civilization? I don't think so. I just don't think we have the political will. I think it's going to require something much more fundamental, and that's another talk entirely because we now know that the human brain has changed in the last 20 years. So I have not gone fully down that path yet to examine it because the research is so new, but the brain is physically changing as we speak because of all of this feedback that's -- make your life easier, hey, you can, you know, be part of the borg. I mean, that's where a lot of it is sort of heading in many ways, and I'm not trying to be overdramatic here.

Perry Carpenter: No, I think that makes a lot of sense, and I think, to your point, do we have the political will to deal with it, I don't think we have the political will, but I think we have -- the way that politics works, not only in the U.S., but around the world today, is it will become a political football that people use to promote whatever ideology they want on one side or to keep the argument going and further polarize the other side for a long time to keep people spun up in congressional hearings and everything else.

Winn Schwartau: Well, here's a piece of data for you that your audience can take for what it's worth. This information is probably accurate as of six, eight, nine months ago. In Europe and the U.K., their studies into misinformation, disinformation, cognitive defense, the whole space we're talking about, they spend roughly five billion euros a year working on defensive and research techniques, pro and con, so they understand the systems. Of that, 80% of it is provided by the public sector. In the U.S., we're just about down to zero. So we have a huge difference between the political well of the EU-UK and what's going on in the U.S., and I know that gets all political, but it's also facts.

Perry Carpenter: No, it's true. It is true. I think that there's going to be a reckoning at some point. I can't even articulate the dilemma that we're in right now that I feel when I think about the way that social media and political polarization and, well, public and global polarization is affecting everybody right now.

Winn Schwartau: Well, I'll ask you the question, then. I'm going to turn it on -- turn the tables on both of you. Have we already seen or do we have yet to see a cognitive Pearl Harbor?

Mason Amadeus: Which would be characterized by like an outside force coming in and causing massive destruction?

Winn Schwartau: Why does it have to be an outside force?

Mason Amadeus: Because Pearl Harbor was done by Japan.

Winn Schwartau: Fair enough.

Mason Amadeus: I was trying to figure out like what character -- what are the abstract traits of this.

Perry Carpenter: How about if it's just a motivated party?

Mason Amadeus: Or unless you literally mean when is Japan going to break my brain? And the answer is, they already did.

Winn Schwartau: Oh, they already -- my wife and I were talking earlier about Tokyo, about how mind-blowing it is to go to there [laughter].

Perry Carpenter: So I'll sidestep the question and make an observation.

Winn Schwartau: [sighs].

Perry Carpenter: With the political football that is TikTok right now and the fact that TikTok is probably going to go away at least for a couple of days unless the Supreme Court steps in and puts a stay on that, which it doesn't look like they are right now, what we're seeing is a mass exodus of people who are using TikTok, who, if you think about the political statement about it, is that people may be controlled by an idealistic force outside of the U.S. that is trying to affect the mind and the opinions of the users. What we're seeing is a mass exodus off of TikTok and on to the Chinese version of TikTok that is known as the "Little Red Book" in Mandarin. So people who are literally just jumping ship from the American ideology because of the way that the states are stepping in with the fact that they want to control it and they're saying, "No, I'll just go to the mothership instead." So at that point, has there been a cognitive Pearl Harbor? Maybe, maybe, right?

Mason Amadeus: Certainly the way that the whole ban was framed was as though it was a cognitive Pearl Harbor.

Winn Schwartau: But you also have adversaries foreign and domestic to consider.

Perry Carpenter: Oh, yeah, and that's not even touching like what -- where culpability for folks like Meta and others come in. I think Meta is probably the primary offender here when we talk about --

Winn Schwartau: Did you say "metawar"? Did you say "metawar"?

Mason Amadeus: What is this "metawar" term? I was going to ask, but I didn't want to cut anyone off. I haven't heard people throw that around. People have been throwing around "metaverse" as though it's anything other than Facebook's thing, too, and I'm a bit confused on that.

Perry Carpenter: Metaverse started a long time ago with -- oh, gosh, I forget his name now.

Winn Schwartau: Stephenson. Neal Stephenson, wasn't it?

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, Neal Stephenson. Yup, Neal Stephenson.

Winn Schwartau: I would argue "metaverse" was done before Stephenson with The Holodeck. >> PC Oh, yeah.

Mason Amadeus: That concept, sure.

Winn Schwartau: And Ready Player -- I mean, the sci-fi world of alternate realities has existed for a long time. Stephenson, I think, coined the term "metaverse," but the idea had been there for some time.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, and then Zuckerberg picked it up as a handy thing, yeah, really just the cognitive playground.

Winn Schwartau: Which I argue we've had for 50,000 years, that the metaverse is nothing new. All storytelling is me or the speaker, the storyteller, the narrator, attempting to get your brain to share the story emotionally.

Perry Carpenter: Yes.

Winn Schwartau: Any good speaker, Plato, Homer sitting around a fire talking about Tales of Brave Ulysses, and they're all drinking their Ruzzo, being immersed in it, and here's a point. Mason, you've got a big screen TV in your living room, I assume.

Mason Amadeus: It could be bigger. It's a pretty small old TV.

Perry Carpenter: Mason actually doesn't watch TV.

Winn Schwartau: All right, never mind. Perry, we're going to go over to you.

Mason Amadeus: I'm so sorry. Not to blow up your -- I can have an imaginary one. I didn't mean to blow up your spot.

Winn Schwartau: No, Perry, you have a big screen, right?

Perry Carpenter: I do, yes.

Winn Schwartau: Okay, and you're watching, whether it's a rom-com or an exciting movie or whatever.

Perry Carpenter: All of the above.

Winn Schwartau: How do you know when you enter that ultimate reality and become part of it?

Perry Carpenter: When you feel a parasympathetic response with something that's happening, so your emotion gets tugged or you see somebody -- I mean, you see the old Wile E. Coyote thing where he slams into the, you know, slams his chin on the ground and you feel it, at that point, you know, your mind's been hijacked.

Winn Schwartau: I'm going to offer another view.

Perry Carpenter: Go for it.

Winn Schwartau: The only way that you ever know that you were so involved in Avatar that you were flying on the dinosaurs and all, whatever it is, the only reason you ever know you were in that reality is because you want to sip your soda or have your chips and you get removed from it. It's like going to sleep. Nobody remembers going to sleep. We all know waking up. Reality shifting is about escaping it, and the awareness is about getting out of it. Once you are brought into or convinced of the narrative of another reality, you're sucked in with never knowing it, and that, to me, it explains a whole [bleep]load. That was two [laughter].

Mason Amadeus: There's a flip side to it that validates it as well, which is, it's really hard to pay attention to a movie or a story if you really have to pee. It's like really hard to get into it because you're sucked back into reality.

Winn Schwartau: It's attention.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Winn Schwartau: Cognitive attention, and that's your interoception. That's another set of senses people forget about, is our exterior senses, but interoception are our internal senses. I spend too much time doing all that [laughter].

Mason Amadeus: Proprioception is the limbs, right, too, like the position of the body without looking at it?

Winn Schwartau: Proprioception is how your body is in relation so you don't knock over the wine glass, which is why when I'm in Paris, I try to get low-stem glasses, and they think I'm out of my mind, but I say, "Look what'll happen," and they -- [laughter].

Perry Carpenter: Like, I need to gesticulate, yeah.

Mason Amadeus: Surely you have Italian tourists [laughter].

Perry Carpenter: Okay, on that, I'm going to stop on this before we offend several different nationalities.

Mason Amadeus: I hope you can forgive how silly we kind of got at the end there. I think all of us were a little bit punchy, but we had such a good time. You should check out his book, The Art and Science of Metawar, How to Coexist with AI-Driven Reality Distortion, Disinformation, and Addiction in the Metaverse. It's available wherever good books are sold, and you can check out his website, winnschwartau.com. It's S-C-H-W-A-R-T-A-U, if you're one of the people who still types in URLs. Otherwise, you can just go into the description or the Show Notes and click some links, and while you're down there, you should join our Discord and buy Perry's book, FAIK, and leave us a voicemail, say "hi.chat/faik," and even if you do none of those, we're really glad to have you here. Thanks for sticking with us. We'll be back with a fresh FAIK Files for you next week. Maybe it'll only be three months old. Who knows? No, there's so much news. So much stuff has happened that we have to cover. We've got a bunch coming up for you next week. So until then, ignore all previous instructions, have a happy Independence Day, and enjoy your weekend. [ Music ]