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Welcome to Pineland Underground, the official podcast of the United States Army's John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, and the best podcast the military has to offer.

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Real, bold, and unrestricted.

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We're your hosts, Sergeant Major Chuck Ritter.

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Major Bobby Tuttle.

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Welcome to Pineland Underground.

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Welcome back to Pineland Underground.

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Chuck and I are here.

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We're excited to record a great episode today, and we're sitting down talking about the theme of psychological operations, or what we call, in the Army Special Operations, PSYOP.

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You have your three tribes.

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You have civil affairs, psychological operations, and special forces, and we're dedicating this entire episode to psychological operations.

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We're going to talk about the history, what psychological operations is throughout history, some philosophy, some historical vignettes,

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and I'd like to introduce our awesome rock star guests, two majors coming from 5th Battalion, 1st Special Warfare Training Group.

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I have the current operations officer, Major Ashley Holtzman.

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Ash, happy to have you on the show today, man.

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It's good to be here.

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And I've got the current Bravo Company commander, Will Lamb.

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Will, happy to have you here too, man.

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Hey now.

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Thanks.

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Appreciate it.

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Yeah, so you guys actually just changed command, correct?

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So you guys each just had each other's positions, or?

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I just left the position that Will is in.

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Correct.

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And that Will, the unfortunate position of falling in Ash's wake.

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Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, we'll see.

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I think he'll do great.

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And then Will, where are you coming from before you took command?

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So I'm coming from 4th Sci-Up Group's outreach team, which is kind of a weird hybrid of public affairs, recruiting, and branding for the branch.

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Love it.

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What we're also going to talk about is this video going around the Ghost in the Machine, which has caused a lot of controversy online.

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We have some people in the room that were involved in that, so I'm interested in discussing that as well.

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Yeah, incredibly interested.

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Ghost in the Machine, if you haven't checked it out, check it out on YouTube, but we're going to talk a lot about that today.

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All right, Chuck, over to you, man.

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All right, so in our last podcast, we talked about civil affairs, and we defined what civil affairs is.

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And within the Army Special Operations, what we define as civil affairs, PSYOP, and special forces, understanding that we have special mission units and Ranger Regiment,

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but we're not including that in our current definition within the Special Warfare Center and school.

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So over to you, Ash.

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Let's talk about psychological operations and what it is, and then we'll talk about where it came from.

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Yes, so the way I define it to a student or even a layman is, at its basic core, PSYOP is the insertion of information into the environment to achieve an effect.

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Often we target audiences, but sometimes it's individuals.

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We can't target Americans.

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And when we're talking about the way we do it, we're using either high-tech, low-tech, or what we call no-tech means.

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So it can be a conversation face-to-face.

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It could be a tweet.

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We'll tell you some stories.

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It could be a dead body.

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It could be anything.

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Anything is considered information when applied correctly.

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We often are in all sorts of spectrums of operation, so we'll be involved in humanitarian responses,

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but we're also doing what we call military information support operations, usually by, with, and through partner nations

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and with embassies involved where we're working with our State Department counterparts or interagency counterparts.

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But then we also have war, and we call that psychological warfare now, Psywar.

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And that's when a lot of the constraints are off because we're in a combat environment.

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The military is the landowner, and we have capability.

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There's a lot more stuff going on.

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And then we also have military deception.

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A lot of people, when they think of PSYOP, they think of military deception, the spooky stuff,

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the things that are not fun, but they're more challenging.

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And so because the problems are more challenging, your solutions are more out there.

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I think this is incredibly important.

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As you look at our current environment right now, so really in competition,

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and integrated deterrence are kind of the key terms that we're looking at across the way we approach the national defense strategy.

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Is that still a new term?

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We haven't changed it yet?

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It's integrated deterrence.

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Still?

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Still.

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Okay.

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I think so.

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For the next week.

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But the information environment spreads across before, during, and after.

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It's completely cyclical.

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It's involved in every single thing that we should be thinking about, planning, and every way we apply our military,

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but also the State Department as well, and our other entities within the dime construct.

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So just kind of want to hit on how important that is.

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What is PSYOP not, though?

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What were you going to say, Chuck?

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I wanted Ash to walk us through the bullseye analogy.

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And the spear analogy.

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Oh, yeah.

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So right before the episode, we were kind of talking about.

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So in, as an example, the Ghost in the Machine video, there's a line where the creators of the video claim that you see us at the tip of the spear.

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And we saw some responses from some direct action guys that said that's their quote.

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So, unfortunately, car companies say they're the tip of the spear.

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Transportation, as an entire field in the military, says it's the tip of the spear.

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So it's not just their quote.

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And where the quote actually is derived from is a quote from Wild Bill Donovan when he was founding the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which eventually became the CIA, Special Forces, and Psi War after World War II.

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So that's where that, that's a lot of our lineage comes from that organization.

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Oh, yeah.

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And he said that the tip of the spear was information.

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The way he wanted his model of special operations to exist was you first put information into the environment.

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Then after that, you put special forces into the environment.

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That wasn't what modern special forces is considered.

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That's just the phrase they used.

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But it is basically what special forces evolved into.

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And then after that, you then insert your conventional forces.

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You should have those two things precede it.

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And if we're talking about the modern way that we apply SOF, I would equate that in the kind of the way the conversation went before the podcast is the bullseye itself is kind of what CEA is doing.

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Civil affairs is creating conditions prior to the spear even being thrown.

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And then the civil affairs is also kind of like the shaft of the spear where they're all of the stuff that's occurring afterwards as well.

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So if you look at the model of special operations, you're doing PSYOP all the time and forever.

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In the whole course of everything.

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But you're doing different kinds of PSYOP.

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You're doing different things when you're below the threshold of war.

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You're doing different things in peacetime, working with partners, preparing them.

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But then you're also looking at what CEA does, which is prep up front and prep at the back.

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And they're also doing stuff in between as well.

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ASH is such an impressive order.

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It's kind of hard to top that.

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You're just calling me a nerd.

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That's what you're saying?

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I mean, yeah.

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I mean, that's how we got him on the show.

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People were reaching out and saying, hey, this guy is so nerdy into PSYOP history that you need to get this guy on the show to talk about it.

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Yeah.

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They actually used our Gmail account.

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They did.

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Well, yeah.

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Not just you.

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Other people.

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It's very rare.

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The truth is most of us are nerds in some capacity or another, right?

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There's this – when we look at who is a PSYOP-er, right?

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We are not just soldiers, but we're writers.

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We're thinkers.

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We're filmmakers.

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All these things.

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And I think that's why the Ghost Army, right, in terms of – when you talk about identity and brand, that's why that Ghost Army is so – it resonates with the regiment.

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With the modern PSYOP-er.

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Right, absolutely, right, because you took a bunch of – you took a bunch of artisans, right, from the United States in the 40s during World War II, and you put them together and said, hey, we need to deceive the Germans to create effects and make it easier for our combined forces.

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And, yeah, so it's super neat to be part of that spiritual lineage and is something that inspires us on the daily.

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At the assessment and selection for psychological operations here at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, what are some of those traits or what's kind of the characterizations or the attributes that PSYOP is looking for to hire on or to select people to come into the regiment to try out and then train them?

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Right, well, what do you think about this, Ash?

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Because you've been kind of in this sort of pipeline for the last year.

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Yeah.

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And you've seen sort of the – so who gets selected at selection, and they end up in your course.

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Yeah.

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So I had a unique – so just before you go, I was recruiting them in the last year, right?

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So my job was kind of to cast this wide net.

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But at the same time, recruit for who you want to be in your formation, right?

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So what do you think about that?

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I think – so up front, I'm going to say something very disappointing to our listeners is if there's anything we found from the data is that there's no such thing as a perfect PSYOP-er.

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You might have a perfect Ranger, and there's a mold that you want to, like, find.

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I want to find this John Rambo character, and I know he's real.

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And I'm going to bring –

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You know, like, yeah.

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But for us, what PSYOP really is at its essence when we talk about the Ghost Army is we are the marriage of the sciences and the arts.

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So I do want psychology degrees and sociology degrees and anthropologists, and I want mathematicians.

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We have a nuclear physicist that just went through the course.

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It could be any of the sciences will make you good at this because you need some of that analytical ability and also some of that academia grounding.

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We have a lot of enlisted that have master's degrees.

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Like, multiple members of my teams that I've had had higher degrees than I had at the time when I was leading them.

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It's very, very common in the PSYOP regiment to have a Ph.D. on your team.

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It's not unheard of.

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And he's enlisted or she's enlisted, which also brings us to, like, gender.

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We've had women in PSYOP since World War I.

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And so, like, as far as, like, looking at, like, the diversity of our regiment, we have a very diverse group.

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It's not like some of the other organizations in the military where we have a lot of people of color that make up entire battalions in our formation where to be a white guy on some of those teams is actually kind of rare.

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So there's that.

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But it's also the arts.

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So I said the sciences.

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It's also the marriage of the arts.

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Like, Will, you have a background in film.

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I'm a writer, and I was a graphic illustrator before I joined the Army.

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That's not uncommon also.

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So, like, we talk about the Ghost Army where there was, like, seamstresses, like, male seamstresses.

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And people who were into fashion.

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Bill Bloss went on to be, like, the Tommy Hilfiger of his day after the Ghost Army.

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He was incredibly famous.

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They're doing, it's called 100 Days of Bloss right now where they're celebrating his life.

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Highlight what the Ghost Army is real quick for our audience.

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So the Ghost Army was a mobile deception unit with roughly 300 personnel.

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I think I'm saying that.

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I think the number's right.

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World War II?

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World War II.

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It directly worked for Eisenhower.

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So Eisenhower had the Office of Strategic Services, but he also had other things.

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Office of War Information.

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And the ink.

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And then eventually the Ghost Army.

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There's a bunch of stuff that did influence back then.

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We kind of compartmentalized it a little.

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And the mobile deception unit was essentially formed out of this military deception or MILDEC that was called Operation Fortitude.

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Which we used, if you've ever seen the movie Patton, the very beginning of that movie where Patton...

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George C. Scott, the very beginning.

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Yeah, he's in front of the American flag giving what they called the blood and guts speech.

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That was a MILDEC where he was pretending to stand up a unit that wasn't real.

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And that wasn't declassified to, like, the 90s.

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So having that in the movie Patton, like, they weren't allowed to say, like, listen, that's not...

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So the audience there was really just fake.

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Uh-huh.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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Absolutely.

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It was all staged.

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It was fake.

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And he was doing this speech.

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And he was standing up a fake unit because he had just been fired.

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And they didn't know what to do with Patton yet.

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But at the same time, the Germans thought so highly of Patton because he was so competent on the battlefield.

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They were convinced he would lead the invasion.

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He would have the main effort.

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Uh-huh.

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The main effort of the invasion.

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What better way to deal with that than to just pretend like he is going to be the main effort?

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And then also stand up all these inflatable tanks and stuff.

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And that's his army.

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That when the Germans would do their reconnaissance overhead, they would see this...

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Yeah, Patton's got an army there, dude.

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It's like, there's...

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And a lot of people associate with the Ghost Army with Britain.

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But the reality is that army flowed into Europe.

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They were at the Battle of the Bulge, correct?

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Yeah.

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So they were at all sorts of...

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They were at all sorts of events.

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So they were at the Battle of the Bulge.

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At some point around then, Dr. Seuss had come out to visit them.

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So it's getting into, like, the weirdness of PSYOP where something I'll say is often if you see, like, a ranger who's famous, they're famous because they're a ranger, you know?

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Or not to talk crap to you guys, but, like, most SF guys who are famous are famous for being SF guys, right?

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That they're not famous on the side with something unrelated.

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But in PSYOP, like, our history is weird where if someone's famous in PSYOP, it's because they're probably famous, like, outside of what they did in PSYOP.

225
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So Dr. Seuss, Walt Disney.

226
00:13:41,600 --> 00:13:45,360
We have, like, The Moon is Down written by...

227
00:13:45,360 --> 00:13:45,720
Steinbeck.

228
00:13:45,960 --> 00:13:46,180
Yeah.

229
00:13:46,300 --> 00:13:47,000
John Steinbeck.

230
00:13:47,000 --> 00:13:47,940
John Steinbeck himself.

231
00:13:48,660 --> 00:13:51,540
So, like, these crazy names where you're like, no way.

232
00:13:51,620 --> 00:13:52,440
They did PSYOP?

233
00:13:52,520 --> 00:13:54,760
It's like, well, yeah, they were involved in some things.

234
00:13:54,960 --> 00:13:57,540
And I'll tell you all sorts of stories if you want to hear them all.

235
00:13:57,680 --> 00:13:58,840
I won't stop talking, so you guys can't.

236
00:13:58,840 --> 00:14:01,260
But it was much more than just, like, inflatable stuff.

237
00:14:01,320 --> 00:14:08,100
These guys were doing, like, radio deception, making it truly look like there was this massive entity that was about to come.

238
00:14:08,100 --> 00:14:08,400
Yeah.

239
00:14:08,520 --> 00:14:15,680
So once they did the Normandy invasion, they then mobilized and took all those artists that we used for that single deception

240
00:14:15,680 --> 00:14:19,580
and decided to make a mobile unit that they could task and send all over the battlefield.

241
00:14:19,900 --> 00:14:20,600
And so it did.

242
00:14:20,960 --> 00:14:21,940
It looked like a unit.

243
00:14:22,100 --> 00:14:23,800
It sounded like that unit.

244
00:14:23,800 --> 00:14:31,040
It had signals replication so they could be picked up by the Germans to look and sound like that unit as moved.

245
00:14:31,080 --> 00:14:33,440
There was audio replication, so loudspeakers.

246
00:14:33,600 --> 00:14:37,340
We think of those as kind of a dumb old solution.

247
00:14:37,720 --> 00:14:44,560
But when used properly, really effective, especially when you're talking about the battles that were occurring in Europe with hedge coros and stuff,

248
00:14:44,600 --> 00:14:45,860
where you didn't have line of sight.

249
00:14:46,160 --> 00:14:48,440
So if you heard a tank coming, you were pretty scared.

250
00:14:48,760 --> 00:14:49,740
So they did that.

251
00:14:49,900 --> 00:14:51,840
They would use their terrain to their advantage.

252
00:14:51,840 --> 00:15:00,060
So audio signals deception, where it looked like the radio signature and also hearing audio over the radio waves.

253
00:15:00,060 --> 00:15:01,600
And they would pose.

254
00:15:01,600 --> 00:15:05,660
They did face-to-face deception, where they would actually—they had seamstresses, right?

255
00:15:05,780 --> 00:15:11,040
They actually used those guys, and they would make uniforms and patches of all sorts of units.

256
00:15:11,040 --> 00:15:14,120
And they would go into the towns and talk loose, as they would say.

257
00:15:14,420 --> 00:15:17,340
And they would pretend to be other units doing all sorts of things.

258
00:15:17,340 --> 00:15:20,540
And then the inflatables was visual.

259
00:15:20,840 --> 00:15:22,560
They didn't look real up close.

260
00:15:22,940 --> 00:15:30,620
But if you're doing aerial reconnaissance, and that's how we were using a lot of airplanes back then for the periphery of the battlefield,

261
00:15:31,140 --> 00:15:33,380
you would see these things, and it looked like they were tanks.

262
00:15:33,560 --> 00:15:40,140
And all they had was, like, a couple, like, earth movers, and they would just put those and pretend those were the tank tracks.

263
00:15:40,140 --> 00:15:43,800
And they would make tank tracks everywhere with, like, a bulldozer.

264
00:15:44,600 --> 00:15:48,300
And ultimately, right, it's influencing decision-makers, right?

265
00:15:48,400 --> 00:15:55,780
Creating doubt and uncertainty in those decisions, and that's ultimately what, you know, leads to some kind of effect.

266
00:15:56,380 --> 00:15:57,940
Operation Mincemeat is a huge—

267
00:15:57,940 --> 00:15:58,840
Just watch that movie.

268
00:15:58,900 --> 00:15:59,180
Yeah.

269
00:15:59,420 --> 00:15:59,820
Heck yeah.

270
00:15:59,980 --> 00:16:01,080
I wasn't, like, super into it.

271
00:16:01,220 --> 00:16:01,720
I don't know.

272
00:16:01,780 --> 00:16:07,060
I just watched Imitation Game, right, which is a brilliantly sort of made World War II film.

273
00:16:07,060 --> 00:16:08,060
What's Mincemeat about?

274
00:16:08,140 --> 00:16:11,040
Because Bobby was talking to me about it last week.

275
00:16:11,180 --> 00:16:11,380
Yeah.

276
00:16:11,520 --> 00:16:12,040
Go ahead, guys.

277
00:16:12,160 --> 00:16:12,640
I'll let Will.

278
00:16:13,060 --> 00:16:13,200
Oh.

279
00:16:13,620 --> 00:16:19,060
Listen, I think I'm going to reveal how dusty my history is here, right?

280
00:16:19,060 --> 00:16:30,960
But essentially, the Allies had to convince Hitler that he needed to move his divisions from, I think, the Balkans to Italy or the other way?

281
00:16:31,160 --> 00:16:32,580
They were trying to convince him.

282
00:16:32,660 --> 00:16:35,740
I think that the invasion—they wanted him to believe the invasion was going to go to Greece.

283
00:16:35,960 --> 00:16:36,660
Right, right.

284
00:16:36,660 --> 00:16:42,740
So back in, you know, back in the 40s, right, you think about what does it take to move an army, right?

285
00:16:42,780 --> 00:16:46,600
So once that decision's made, then that's ultimately what they're going for, right?

286
00:16:46,660 --> 00:16:52,400
So what they did was they essentially had to—let's see, how does this go?

287
00:16:52,460 --> 00:16:53,460
They take this body.

288
00:16:54,440 --> 00:16:55,740
They source this guy.

289
00:16:55,860 --> 00:16:57,820
They create this whole backstory for him.

290
00:16:57,820 --> 00:17:16,520
They give him a life, and they drop him off in the middle of the Mediterranean with the hope that the Spanish would pick up this body and then fall into the hands of German intelligence officers who are stationed in Spain.

291
00:17:16,520 --> 00:17:21,300
So it was this incredible domino effect they were going for.

292
00:17:21,740 --> 00:17:30,520
And just the amount of, like, care they put into creating a backstory for this guy, how he was dressed, you know, how he actually—

293
00:17:31,280 --> 00:17:33,000
The pocket letter that was found on him.

294
00:17:33,080 --> 00:17:33,480
Exactly.

295
00:17:33,760 --> 00:17:38,660
The way he would have written, like, the shape he would have been in at that period of time, what it would have on him.

296
00:17:39,280 --> 00:17:40,400
Love letters, right?

297
00:17:40,400 --> 00:17:50,280
Yeah, yeah, the depth of background that any German intelligence operative could go and try to figure out who this person really was and did he exist and have a real life.

298
00:17:50,280 --> 00:17:55,300
Right, and ultimately a briefcase, right, with the plans, right?

299
00:17:55,580 --> 00:17:59,780
That's the thing that has to get in front of the eyes of the decision maker.

300
00:17:59,780 --> 00:18:08,120
I watched the whole thing because it's pretty rare for there to be a movie about PSYOP, let alone a movie about deception and greatest hits, right?

301
00:18:08,120 --> 00:18:11,900
So, for one, this was the British teams that were doing this.

302
00:18:12,080 --> 00:18:14,740
The British did pioneer a lot of military deception.

303
00:18:15,480 --> 00:18:19,420
While we were also working with them, we weren't as directly connected to this one.

304
00:18:19,600 --> 00:18:20,780
But it is the model.

305
00:18:21,160 --> 00:18:25,040
It was written by Ian Fleming, the guy who created James Bond.

306
00:18:25,580 --> 00:18:30,560
So, as I said before, often when someone's famous in PSYOP, it's because they're famous, you know?

307
00:18:30,560 --> 00:18:46,320
So, James Bond creator decided to make this concept and it ended up working because, one, the Germans had lost the opportunity to recover a body previously that did turn out to have classified information on it.

308
00:18:46,580 --> 00:18:50,160
And so, they were really paranoid that they were going to lose another opportunity like that in the future.

309
00:18:50,160 --> 00:18:54,860
And, two, the Spanish were neutral in the war, but they were kind of not neutral.

310
00:18:55,060 --> 00:18:56,520
So, they were becoming a fascist government.

311
00:18:56,720 --> 00:19:03,400
It's actually infamous in that it's one of the governments that had a dictator who was a fascist who died of old age.

312
00:19:03,500 --> 00:19:06,480
Very rare for dictators to die of old age, as they do.

313
00:19:07,420 --> 00:19:13,040
But because of all those, those were, like, pieces of the dominoes that, like, actually made it work and successful.

314
00:19:13,040 --> 00:19:27,940
Well, the spoiler alert, they fell for it, and it's estimated that roughly 30,000 lives were saved because the Nazis did change and right-reroute enemy troops to another location.

315
00:19:28,360 --> 00:19:35,660
So, when they did the beach landing, it was not a massive, brutal beach landing like we've seen in other instances.

316
00:19:36,100 --> 00:19:36,440
Oh, yes.

317
00:19:36,760 --> 00:19:37,020
Boom.

318
00:19:37,380 --> 00:19:37,880
Yeah, check it out.

319
00:19:37,900 --> 00:19:38,420
It just came out.

320
00:19:38,480 --> 00:19:39,800
I think it's relatively new.

321
00:19:39,960 --> 00:19:40,960
It's on Netflix right now.

322
00:19:40,960 --> 00:19:48,680
And then, if you want to learn anything about the Ghost Army, there's a really good free documentary, if you have Amazon Prime Video, about the Ghost Army on there.

323
00:19:48,860 --> 00:19:49,240
What's it called?

324
00:19:49,520 --> 00:19:50,460
It's called The Ghost Army.

325
00:19:50,600 --> 00:19:50,920
Excellent.

326
00:19:51,160 --> 00:19:51,580
Easy title.

327
00:19:51,600 --> 00:19:54,960
But talking about the Ghost Army, even fast forward, Desert Storm, right?

328
00:19:55,160 --> 00:19:55,320
Mm-hmm.

329
00:19:55,320 --> 00:19:59,960
Another great example of us using a very like entity when we did the Hail Mary.

330
00:20:00,720 --> 00:20:00,960
Yeah.

331
00:20:00,960 --> 00:20:06,800
How we used loudspeakers, signal, to try to convince Saddam that we were coming through Kuwait.

332
00:20:06,800 --> 00:20:07,240
Like, yeah.

333
00:20:07,460 --> 00:20:18,720
Oh, man, that's fascinating because it also shows that even though we're in the modern era of warfare, sometimes that low-tech that we call it, like the loudspeakers and things like smoke.

334
00:20:18,840 --> 00:20:20,280
Yeah, smoke tracks going back and forth.

335
00:20:20,340 --> 00:20:22,520
Sometimes those are a valid solution.

336
00:20:23,060 --> 00:20:28,760
So, you shouldn't just – sometimes our students will come in and they'll want to only talk about high-tech.

337
00:20:28,760 --> 00:20:39,460
Like, Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, the internet, that's great, but I'm operating in an African country that doesn't have access to the internet.

338
00:20:39,640 --> 00:20:41,260
They're all on radios and stuff still.

339
00:20:41,880 --> 00:20:45,140
So, hey, maybe I can't use the internet.

340
00:20:45,280 --> 00:20:47,760
Or I'm in Afghanistan and check it out.

341
00:20:48,160 --> 00:20:52,600
There are a lot of internet users in Afghanistan in the capital city of Kabul.

342
00:20:52,600 --> 00:21:01,640
Well, my action is outside in the periphery, so it doesn't matter how much I put on the internet if none of my audience is out on the internet.

343
00:21:02,100 --> 00:21:03,160
So, those are things to consider.

344
00:21:03,380 --> 00:21:05,460
Not only do they not have technology, but a lot of them are literate.

345
00:21:05,540 --> 00:21:07,780
So, then how do you get – how do you get that into there?

346
00:21:07,900 --> 00:21:08,220
Absolutely.

347
00:21:08,360 --> 00:21:09,120
That's also a factor.

348
00:21:09,280 --> 00:21:12,320
You need to look at literacy rates or you also need to look at the enemy.

349
00:21:12,480 --> 00:21:15,220
ISIS was beheading people for having cell phones.

350
00:21:15,740 --> 00:21:16,240
Check it out.

351
00:21:16,360 --> 00:21:17,300
No one had cell phones.

352
00:21:17,560 --> 00:21:17,820
Why?

353
00:21:17,940 --> 00:21:19,160
Because they don't want to be beheaded, man.

354
00:21:19,160 --> 00:21:21,160
So, it doesn't matter how many tweets that you send out.

355
00:21:21,300 --> 00:21:22,300
Like, they're not going to read your tweet.

356
00:21:23,060 --> 00:21:26,220
So, that's when you have to start thinking about, like, all right, I need to go back to the basics.

357
00:21:26,400 --> 00:21:27,180
I need to go old school.

358
00:21:27,400 --> 00:21:30,680
That's when a leaflet actually might be the solution.

359
00:21:31,460 --> 00:21:32,960
That's when things like loudspeakers.

360
00:21:33,100 --> 00:21:39,580
So, Desert Storm, we knew that a few valuable pieces of information from Saddam about him.

361
00:21:40,120 --> 00:21:42,560
One, he did not trust his own intelligence apparatus.

362
00:21:42,980 --> 00:21:43,300
Hell, yeah.

363
00:21:44,060 --> 00:21:47,640
Two, he really trusted CNN and watched it all the time.

364
00:21:47,880 --> 00:21:48,480
Hell, yeah.

365
00:21:49,260 --> 00:21:52,240
Three, he was convinced that we were going to do a beach landing.

366
00:21:52,600 --> 00:21:54,180
So, let's give him what he wants.

367
00:21:54,620 --> 00:22:03,520
So, when you're doing deception and that form of psyop where, or influence rather, where you're basically focusing on, like Will said, a decision maker.

368
00:22:04,180 --> 00:22:07,900
What's really cool about dictatorships is there's very few decision makers.

369
00:22:07,900 --> 00:22:10,360
So, you kind of know who you're going to target.

370
00:22:10,960 --> 00:22:20,200
When you're going after, like, more nebulous enemy, like a terrorist group, that's kind of harder when you're talking about deception because decision makers are all over the place.

371
00:22:20,280 --> 00:22:21,240
That's how they're successful.

372
00:22:21,420 --> 00:22:23,100
There's not one single head of the snake.

373
00:22:24,080 --> 00:22:24,440
Saddam.

374
00:22:24,440 --> 00:22:26,860
So, he thought that we were coming from the ocean.

375
00:22:27,020 --> 00:22:28,880
So, we set up a whole mew.

376
00:22:29,140 --> 00:22:34,420
We put them out there, and we invited CNN, Saddam's favorite, out there.

377
00:22:34,560 --> 00:22:38,600
So, you have a whole marine expeditionary unit out there just off the coast.

378
00:22:38,820 --> 00:22:42,040
You're inviting CNN reporters to live broadcast from these, correct?

379
00:22:42,040 --> 00:22:45,500
Yep, and then Schwarzkopf himself was very involved in this.

380
00:22:45,640 --> 00:22:56,540
So, this is also another important thing that we should bring up is psyop is most successful when, like, basically a four-star general is very involved.

381
00:22:57,320 --> 00:23:06,340
Because of the way that our authorities function, there is, at times, it takes that kind of brass to really want the efforts to go forward.

382
00:23:06,560 --> 00:23:09,500
If they are involved, you'll see some of our greatest hits.

383
00:23:09,500 --> 00:23:16,140
That's kind of where it comes back to the Ghost Army was kind of directly managed by Eisenhower, who was a five-star general at the time.

384
00:23:16,360 --> 00:23:19,420
So, you can see that, like, oh, man, that led to the Ghost Army.

385
00:23:19,880 --> 00:23:22,720
Okay, I can see a pattern where then you go through our history.

386
00:23:23,400 --> 00:23:24,180
Schwarzkopf was involved.

387
00:23:24,600 --> 00:23:29,980
He basically did an interview with CNN saying, like, I'm not telling you guys that we're going to do a beach landing.

388
00:23:30,600 --> 00:23:32,580
However, I got all these marines out here.

389
00:23:33,620 --> 00:23:35,340
World War II, we did beach landings.

390
00:23:35,800 --> 00:23:37,520
Korean War, we did beach landings.

391
00:23:37,620 --> 00:23:39,080
Guess what America likes to do?

392
00:23:39,500 --> 00:23:40,160
Beach landings.

393
00:23:40,600 --> 00:23:44,960
And so, CNN is then, like, oh, we got an exclusive scoop, we think.

394
00:23:45,620 --> 00:23:53,340
Yeah, it led to a really great Saturday Night Live sketch where all those reporters keep raising their hands asking for, like, the war plans.

395
00:23:53,680 --> 00:23:57,320
And then, you know, the guy kept saying, like, I can't tell you the war plans.

396
00:23:57,460 --> 00:23:57,680
Why are you?

397
00:23:57,940 --> 00:23:59,680
Well, what if you told us the war plans?

398
00:24:00,480 --> 00:24:01,460
It was basically that.

399
00:24:01,460 --> 00:24:11,640
Simultaneously, when that happened, we also did a massive military deception slash PSYOP in the South where we had roughly 300 people, personnel.

400
00:24:11,920 --> 00:24:13,540
That's like our magic number for some reason.

401
00:24:13,540 --> 00:24:20,660
Where they were doing signals intelligence to make it look like there was a unit down there doing their thing.

402
00:24:20,780 --> 00:24:22,160
They wanted to look like a division.

403
00:24:22,420 --> 00:24:26,180
They also had chemical vehicles, which we don't have these vehicles anymore.

404
00:24:26,520 --> 00:24:27,100
NATO does.

405
00:24:27,100 --> 00:24:33,160
There is vehicles in NATO, but we don't have these in our chemical core anymore where they were just making smoke and going back and forth.

406
00:24:33,280 --> 00:24:40,860
And then we were doing PSYOP where we were using loudspeakers, massive ones, massive loudspeakers projecting the sounds of a division, just kind of hanging out.

407
00:24:41,460 --> 00:24:43,900
Tank starting and driving around a little.

408
00:24:45,060 --> 00:24:46,920
Maintenance and buckering down into positions.

409
00:24:46,920 --> 00:24:47,220
Oh, yeah.

410
00:24:47,300 --> 00:24:50,120
Soldiers complaining, you know, the way that we are.

411
00:24:50,380 --> 00:24:51,720
Maybe there's some MRE trash everywhere.

412
00:24:51,860 --> 00:24:52,180
Oh, yeah.

413
00:24:52,340 --> 00:24:52,480
Yeah.

414
00:24:52,640 --> 00:24:54,260
Like just blasting it out.

415
00:24:54,260 --> 00:25:03,680
And then simultaneously, what a lot of people don't say when we talk about that part is we also were friends with SPOT.

416
00:25:03,820 --> 00:25:05,120
I don't know what the acronym is.

417
00:25:05,180 --> 00:25:05,620
It's in French.

418
00:25:06,180 --> 00:25:11,960
It's a French satellite constellation that does geointelligence and sells it.

419
00:25:11,960 --> 00:25:17,040
And that's what Iraq at the time, Saddam, was using for their geospatial intelligence.

420
00:25:17,420 --> 00:25:26,420
So all of their imagery that could have confirmed or denied this massive pile of smoke in the south could have shown them that, hey, that's a deception.

421
00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:39,540
Well, we knew France, and we did this thing called diplomacy, and we kind of just bought out all that stuff and turned off Iraq's access to their geospatial intelligence.

422
00:25:39,540 --> 00:25:42,660
So the only thing that was left was their human apparatus.

423
00:25:43,740 --> 00:25:46,800
And so we did a few more things to insert stuff.

424
00:25:46,900 --> 00:25:54,080
We actually had some Navy SEALs go onto the beach and, like, do, like, a recon and then come back.

425
00:25:54,180 --> 00:25:57,240
But then Saddam's intel apparatus didn't pick them up.

426
00:25:57,660 --> 00:25:59,000
I saw that GI Jane, actually.

427
00:26:00,180 --> 00:26:00,940
It got, yeah.

428
00:26:01,380 --> 00:26:01,780
Pretty similar.

429
00:26:02,000 --> 00:26:03,340
So we actually sent them again.

430
00:26:03,880 --> 00:26:05,100
Schwarzkopf was like, send them again.

431
00:26:05,320 --> 00:26:06,040
Do it again.

432
00:26:06,040 --> 00:26:09,120
We had to send the SEALs again because they did a good job.

433
00:26:09,400 --> 00:26:13,240
And so we had to send them back, and they had to, like, stomp around, like, leave footprints and stuff.

434
00:26:13,640 --> 00:26:14,420
Shooting weapons.

435
00:26:14,600 --> 00:26:15,280
Literally, yeah.

436
00:26:15,320 --> 00:26:16,800
They had to be, like, loud.

437
00:26:16,940 --> 00:26:18,020
Be less surreptitious.

438
00:26:18,320 --> 00:26:18,500
Yeah.

439
00:26:18,800 --> 00:26:22,020
And so then that, and that second time, then they were picked up.

440
00:26:22,680 --> 00:26:25,120
So that was, like, reinforcing the beach landing thing.

441
00:26:25,120 --> 00:26:31,840
But then we were doing just completely overt PSYOP there, too, where we'd say, okay, you've got three Republican Guard units here.

442
00:26:31,980 --> 00:26:32,260
Oh, yeah.

443
00:26:32,320 --> 00:26:35,640
So we're going to drop a 15,000-pound bomb on this one.

444
00:26:35,740 --> 00:26:42,600
And at the same time, we're going to drop leaplets on these other two and say, hey, look, we're about to drop a 15,000-pound bomb on this unit right here.

445
00:26:42,820 --> 00:26:44,360
And in a week, we're going to drop one on you.

446
00:26:44,480 --> 00:26:45,600
And there's nothing you can do about it.

447
00:26:45,780 --> 00:26:45,940
Yeah.

448
00:26:45,940 --> 00:26:46,460
So have fun.

449
00:26:46,960 --> 00:26:47,120
Yeah.

450
00:26:47,180 --> 00:26:48,140
So you might want to surrender.

451
00:26:48,560 --> 00:26:48,700
Yeah.

452
00:26:48,840 --> 00:26:48,980
Yeah.

453
00:26:49,200 --> 00:26:51,340
In fact, go over here with some white flags and surrender.

454
00:26:51,540 --> 00:26:51,660
Yeah.

455
00:26:51,660 --> 00:26:52,600
And that's exactly what happened.

456
00:26:53,040 --> 00:26:53,140
Yeah.

457
00:26:53,200 --> 00:26:55,160
So we had deployed fourth PSYOP group.

458
00:26:55,360 --> 00:26:56,400
The whole group went forward.

459
00:26:57,080 --> 00:26:59,600
And our group commanders and everything were very involved.

460
00:26:59,740 --> 00:27:01,840
We had a full bird at the time who was in charge.

461
00:27:02,980 --> 00:27:06,060
And everyone, it was an all-hands-on-deck effort.

462
00:27:06,340 --> 00:27:14,320
So once the deception was done and we did the left hook and we were invading, we started dropping leaflets, like you said.

463
00:27:14,900 --> 00:27:16,720
And this was actually a huge stink.

464
00:27:16,720 --> 00:27:22,020
There was actually an oral history of recordings of Schwarzkopf written down.

465
00:27:22,120 --> 00:27:23,060
I don't know if there's the audio.

466
00:27:23,820 --> 00:27:27,280
But he basically said, like, I will do this.

467
00:27:27,540 --> 00:27:28,440
This is my idea.

468
00:27:28,640 --> 00:27:35,340
As I said, when four stars are involved, it moves everything much faster because they're the ones assuming the most risk.

469
00:27:35,460 --> 00:27:40,460
It's the four-star commanders who assume risk and say yes and no, essentially.

470
00:27:40,660 --> 00:27:44,400
They can delegate, but they're the ones who are saying yes and no to influence occurring.

471
00:27:44,400 --> 00:27:49,620
And he said, I want to release the targeting information, which was top secret.

472
00:27:50,520 --> 00:27:55,620
Air Force was really not happy that he wanted to do this, but dropped the leaflet saying, I'm going to bomb you.

473
00:27:55,720 --> 00:27:57,720
That's a top secret release of information.

474
00:27:58,020 --> 00:28:00,560
I'm going to bomb you tomorrow unless you surrender.

475
00:28:00,780 --> 00:28:02,640
You can use this leaflet to surrender.

476
00:28:03,720 --> 00:28:06,660
And then they flew through.

477
00:28:06,800 --> 00:28:08,720
And the next day, they did bomb them.

478
00:28:08,720 --> 00:28:15,460
So when you're talking about influence and kinetic action, as we say, you do need to follow through on your threat.

479
00:28:15,580 --> 00:28:18,580
If you have a threat, it only works if they believe you.

480
00:28:18,840 --> 00:28:20,860
So you have to bomb them.

481
00:28:21,320 --> 00:28:26,320
Then the next day, the unit right next to it, drop a leaflet.

482
00:28:26,360 --> 00:28:27,620
We're going to bomb you tomorrow too.

483
00:28:29,080 --> 00:28:31,060
Magically, that really works.

484
00:28:31,060 --> 00:28:38,020
And so there was a guy named Jack Sumi who was in that era's version of the Kayak.

485
00:28:38,180 --> 00:28:39,560
I don't know what the Kayak is.

486
00:28:39,600 --> 00:28:40,620
It's basically the Air Force.

487
00:28:41,460 --> 00:28:44,560
The giant operations center like you see in all the recruiting videos.

488
00:28:44,720 --> 00:28:46,320
It was in Transformers too.

489
00:28:46,500 --> 00:28:47,560
In every movie.

490
00:28:47,780 --> 00:28:49,080
It's always dark.

491
00:28:49,600 --> 00:28:51,840
Somehow on a 152 talking 300 miles away.

492
00:28:51,980 --> 00:28:54,060
There's like projectors on all the walls.

493
00:28:54,320 --> 00:28:56,160
The whole wall is just projector screens.

494
00:28:56,160 --> 00:28:58,640
And every time there's a thing, they say air power all the time.

495
00:28:58,640 --> 00:28:59,200
Yeah, it's that.

496
00:28:59,800 --> 00:29:05,340
So Jack Sumi was in there as the PSYOP planner for the leaflets that was coordinating with the Air Force.

497
00:29:05,540 --> 00:29:07,660
And he was made fun of every day.

498
00:29:07,800 --> 00:29:09,020
Because of course he would be, right?

499
00:29:09,480 --> 00:29:11,340
The PSYOP guy is like, we're going to drop leaflets.

500
00:29:11,380 --> 00:29:12,240
It's going to work, you guys.

501
00:29:12,440 --> 00:29:13,500
It sounds silly.

502
00:29:13,980 --> 00:29:14,860
It kind of is silly.

503
00:29:15,040 --> 00:29:15,720
We admit it.

504
00:29:16,100 --> 00:29:23,440
But the day he came in after the first strike had happened, well, all of a sudden Iraqis.

505
00:29:23,440 --> 00:29:25,900
By the thousands, like thousands of Iraqis.

506
00:29:25,900 --> 00:29:28,900
I'm not like 400, not 100, not 10.

507
00:29:29,100 --> 00:29:33,460
Thousands of Iraqi soldiers were coming and surrendering.

508
00:29:33,840 --> 00:29:36,540
And it was this massive movement of people.

509
00:29:36,700 --> 00:29:40,420
And they were all holding the leaflets in their hands saying they surrender hands up.

510
00:29:40,680 --> 00:29:43,940
It's what we call the unicorn moment where you don't see it.

511
00:29:44,060 --> 00:29:51,660
You don't ever see your operations be so effective that they're holding your product in their hands saying like, please let me surrender to you.

512
00:29:51,660 --> 00:29:55,240
So when Jack Sumi came into work that day, he was greeted with a standing ovation.

513
00:29:55,980 --> 00:29:59,780
Like it was just like this magical, magical moment in our history.

514
00:30:00,180 --> 00:30:00,700
That's very cool.

515
00:30:00,780 --> 00:30:01,060
It works.

516
00:30:01,260 --> 00:30:01,720
It works.

517
00:30:01,860 --> 00:30:01,940
Yeah.

518
00:30:02,240 --> 00:30:03,120
Measures of effect.

519
00:30:03,260 --> 00:30:04,540
You can apply this stuff back here.

520
00:30:04,660 --> 00:30:11,380
So I used to, one of the officers I used to work with, I would leave a note on his desk saying, I'm going to take the front wheel off of your roller chair tomorrow.

521
00:30:12,000 --> 00:30:13,020
There's nothing you can do about it.

522
00:30:13,120 --> 00:30:14,420
Sure enough, I would do it and fall over.

523
00:30:14,420 --> 00:30:19,300
And then after about a week of that, everybody was so paranoid that they would come in and that's the first thing they would do.

524
00:30:19,400 --> 00:30:22,940
It would change their behavior to where they would check the wheels of all their chairs in the team room, right?

525
00:30:23,100 --> 00:30:24,520
That's called building camaraderie.

526
00:30:24,620 --> 00:30:26,220
It's basic, basic psyop, right?

527
00:30:26,540 --> 00:30:28,240
Office pranks are the greatest psyop.

528
00:30:28,540 --> 00:30:29,000
They are.

529
00:30:29,140 --> 00:30:33,060
In fact, there's a cricket somewhere under my desk.

530
00:30:33,660 --> 00:30:35,220
And for a while, I was like, there's a cricket in here.

531
00:30:35,260 --> 00:30:36,900
I just, I accepted it, right?

532
00:30:37,240 --> 00:30:38,980
And then all of a sudden, this cat started meowing.

533
00:30:40,340 --> 00:30:43,180
And my, you know, my DJ alter ego is DJ Cat Daddy.

534
00:30:43,180 --> 00:30:44,040
And I got three cats.

535
00:30:44,240 --> 00:30:50,420
So, like, they did the target audience analysis on me and hid this, like, cat in my office somewhere.

536
00:30:50,540 --> 00:30:52,140
And I still can't find it.

537
00:30:52,640 --> 00:30:53,500
It cries out to me.

538
00:30:53,500 --> 00:30:54,040
In your current job.

539
00:30:54,400 --> 00:30:56,120
Yeah, like, right now in my office, there's a cat.

540
00:30:56,120 --> 00:31:00,980
There's no worse place to be when you're talking about office shenanigans than in the room with the psyop

541
00:31:00,980 --> 00:31:02,620
or where that has a little extra free time.

542
00:31:02,660 --> 00:31:03,000
Oh, yeah.

543
00:31:03,080 --> 00:31:03,480
But hold on.

544
00:31:03,960 --> 00:31:05,100
I'm definitely interested.

545
00:31:05,300 --> 00:31:08,460
So, like, what is the desired effect on you?

546
00:31:08,560 --> 00:31:12,180
Rather than agitation, like, how are they trying to influence your behavior?

547
00:31:12,180 --> 00:31:12,700
Or behavior?

548
00:31:13,080 --> 00:31:14,900
Or the way you approach coming into the room every day?

549
00:31:14,900 --> 00:31:16,040
So, I think.

550
00:31:16,500 --> 00:31:17,220
It's a stressor.

551
00:31:17,420 --> 00:31:17,940
It is.

552
00:31:17,940 --> 00:31:19,420
They're probably trying to get you to, like, say something to that.

553
00:31:19,420 --> 00:31:20,660
This cat sounds like it's in trouble.

554
00:31:20,700 --> 00:31:23,160
Yeah, they want me to, like, where is this cat at?

555
00:31:23,160 --> 00:31:24,040
So, you have to ignore it now.

556
00:31:24,420 --> 00:31:28,000
Well, unfortunately, yesterday, my first sergeant was next door.

557
00:31:28,080 --> 00:31:32,080
And he probably heard me going through the roof trying to find where this cat was at.

558
00:31:32,200 --> 00:31:33,520
Because it seems to be coming from everywhere.

559
00:31:34,620 --> 00:31:35,440
Oh, man.

560
00:31:35,440 --> 00:31:36,820
But, yeah, the office is empty today.

561
00:31:36,940 --> 00:31:39,780
So, I had some time to go look for it, you know.

562
00:31:40,440 --> 00:31:40,840
All right.

563
00:31:40,860 --> 00:31:42,260
So, we've hit on a couple of vignettes here.

564
00:31:42,340 --> 00:31:44,240
We've talked about what psyop is.

565
00:31:44,340 --> 00:31:47,860
I want to ask you guys about the philosophy of psychological operations.

566
00:31:48,520 --> 00:31:48,780
Okay.

567
00:31:48,940 --> 00:31:51,140
How do you guys, how do you think about that?

568
00:31:51,200 --> 00:31:52,420
How do you advise a commander?

569
00:31:53,840 --> 00:31:55,980
Just let loose on a little bit of that information.

570
00:31:55,980 --> 00:32:04,460
In order to understand psyop and why it exists, you have to go back to the beginning and look at, like, democracies.

571
00:32:05,020 --> 00:32:12,860
So, the reason propaganda was stood up was initially because churches wanted to propagate the faith.

572
00:32:12,980 --> 00:32:14,520
That's where the word propaganda comes from.

573
00:32:14,720 --> 00:32:15,120
Propagate.

574
00:32:15,300 --> 00:32:16,060
The Catholic Church.

575
00:32:16,220 --> 00:32:16,340
Yeah.

576
00:32:16,520 --> 00:32:16,640
Okay.

577
00:32:16,820 --> 00:32:17,720
This is a great intro.

578
00:32:18,560 --> 00:32:19,000
I'm taking notes.

579
00:32:19,000 --> 00:32:19,740
It's from a Latin.

580
00:32:20,140 --> 00:32:23,880
There's a Latin root phrase that is the propagation of the faith.

581
00:32:24,060 --> 00:32:24,780
And that's that.

582
00:32:25,980 --> 00:32:32,140
Fast forward, and it didn't take off truly until democracies.

583
00:32:32,400 --> 00:32:42,600
So, you look at, like, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, where the people started rising up and defining what they believed their version of government should be, which is they need a level of interaction.

584
00:32:43,460 --> 00:32:51,440
So, post that, governments did start allowing the people to be represented and to represent themselves.

585
00:32:52,100 --> 00:32:54,640
And that meant that the people kind of can tell you no.

586
00:32:54,640 --> 00:33:03,780
So, you didn't have these dictatorships and these monarchies and everything, like, as prevalent as before.

587
00:33:03,980 --> 00:33:07,180
So, then governments had to start convincing their populations of things.

588
00:33:07,620 --> 00:33:09,480
And that's where it kind of all started.

589
00:33:09,700 --> 00:33:10,940
So, you look at the First World War.

590
00:33:11,020 --> 00:33:11,560
That was huge.

591
00:33:11,780 --> 00:33:19,180
But you can go even further back to Sam Adams, great, great psyoper, before psyop was a thing.

592
00:33:19,180 --> 00:33:27,460
So, Sam Adams had roughly 10 pen names that he wrote under, like, fake pen names, where he was essentially the Alex Jones of his day.

593
00:33:27,700 --> 00:33:31,180
And he just, like, wrote all these conspiracy theories about, like, the British and stuff.

594
00:33:31,520 --> 00:33:33,740
And he helped to manufacture the American Revolution.

595
00:33:34,260 --> 00:33:37,720
So, the more you read about the American Revolution, you kind of, like, see, like, oh, man.

596
00:33:37,720 --> 00:33:39,380
Like, did the people really care?

597
00:33:40,120 --> 00:33:42,420
Or was it just, like, Sam Adams cared too much?

598
00:33:42,860 --> 00:33:44,400
And everyone else, of course.

599
00:33:44,840 --> 00:33:47,580
So, like, an Alex Jones that wasn't off the rocker?

600
00:33:48,200 --> 00:33:49,320
Oh, I wouldn't say that.

601
00:33:49,440 --> 00:33:49,820
I don't know.

602
00:33:49,900 --> 00:33:53,320
I don't want to comment on him because he's commented on the psyop regiment recently.

603
00:33:53,460 --> 00:33:56,460
And I don't want him to come at us harder.

604
00:33:57,020 --> 00:33:57,320
Yeah.

605
00:33:57,600 --> 00:33:57,860
Yeah.

606
00:33:57,860 --> 00:34:01,920
But you see, like, that kind of activity is not new.

607
00:34:02,300 --> 00:34:05,260
Like, Alex Jones is not unique to this time.

608
00:34:05,460 --> 00:34:11,160
It's just a normal human behavior, especially when you're talking about attempting to influence populations.

609
00:34:11,160 --> 00:34:14,740
He just has a bigger platform and the means to influence more people than in the past.

610
00:34:14,920 --> 00:34:15,100
Mm-hmm.

611
00:34:15,380 --> 00:34:15,580
Yeah.

612
00:34:15,800 --> 00:34:16,560
Because of the Internet.

613
00:34:16,840 --> 00:34:17,000
Yeah.

614
00:34:17,000 --> 00:34:21,380
The way that information flows now is same, same, but not same.

615
00:34:21,380 --> 00:34:36,840
So, yeah, when we talk about psyop and why it exists, it exists because of that propaganda needed to evolve as a social response to the way governments were now functioning alongside the people.

616
00:34:37,200 --> 00:34:37,380
Mm-hmm.

617
00:34:37,380 --> 00:34:39,500
So governments were communicating to the people.

618
00:34:39,720 --> 00:34:47,840
We're in this weird, interesting middle space now where that kind of still happens, but, like, you look at, like, presidential press releases and that kind of thing.

619
00:34:47,840 --> 00:34:55,920
But now we have, like, a privatized media apparatus that acts on its own behalf, and corporations kind of own that.

620
00:34:56,280 --> 00:34:57,640
And so it's not owned by the government.

621
00:34:57,800 --> 00:35:00,940
It's owned by, like, these interested parties on the side.

622
00:35:01,400 --> 00:35:04,220
And that's kind of, I think, what our country is dealing with.

623
00:35:04,220 --> 00:35:08,460
So you're saying there's propagating information, but there's also pushing propaganda.

624
00:35:09,000 --> 00:35:09,320
Yeah.

625
00:35:09,380 --> 00:35:15,560
There's kind of, like, this post-era of propaganda where we'll see.

626
00:35:15,560 --> 00:35:28,920
We'll see where it's going to evolve and how governments respond to it because governments are not technically in charge of all the stuff that the media says in, like, a pure democracy or in, like, a country like ours where there's a free press.

627
00:35:28,920 --> 00:35:53,820
And so a lot of the stuff that is labeled as what we would call psyop in American discourse is actually just the journalists and the media and freelance and these, like, people on the periphery like Alex Jones and stuff like that, those interesting forms of expression where the people are so empowered that now they're at times dwarfing the government as it's attempting to communicate to them.

628
00:35:53,820 --> 00:36:07,160
And then the intent of psychological operations being applied out in theater or just in competition or in integrated deterrence.

629
00:36:07,320 --> 00:36:07,520
Yeah.

630
00:36:07,520 --> 00:36:08,260
What's the purpose?

631
00:36:08,600 --> 00:36:08,700
Yeah.

632
00:36:08,780 --> 00:36:13,400
So at the end of the day, we're, like, Will and I, we're in the Army.

633
00:36:13,400 --> 00:36:18,720
So we have to still have Army solutions and we have to tackle Army problems.

634
00:36:19,860 --> 00:36:25,220
There's a lot of, there's a lot that could be said about how much our military is applied to certain things.

635
00:36:25,320 --> 00:36:30,240
We look at DIME, diplomatic, information, military, and…

636
00:36:30,240 --> 00:36:30,540
Economic.

637
00:36:30,720 --> 00:36:31,180
There it is.

638
00:36:31,460 --> 00:36:32,560
Isn't there another thing in there?

639
00:36:32,620 --> 00:36:33,520
Yeah, they added one more.

640
00:36:33,740 --> 00:36:33,880
Is it T?

641
00:36:33,900 --> 00:36:35,320
That's DIME.

642
00:36:35,860 --> 00:36:37,240
I actually wrote a paper and it's not too long ago.

643
00:36:37,260 --> 00:36:37,660
What is it?

644
00:36:37,740 --> 00:36:38,240
It's…

645
00:36:38,240 --> 00:36:39,620
We'll think about it in a minute.

646
00:36:39,780 --> 00:36:40,040
Okay.

647
00:36:40,700 --> 00:36:41,700
There's another letter on there.

648
00:36:41,700 --> 00:36:42,540
There's more letters.

649
00:36:42,680 --> 00:36:42,800
Yeah.

650
00:36:42,800 --> 00:36:42,960
Yeah.

651
00:36:43,580 --> 00:36:45,400
The dime became a quarter, I guess.

652
00:36:45,520 --> 00:36:49,840
So when we look at dime, often what that means for our government is military.

653
00:36:50,340 --> 00:36:52,780
And we'll try to squeeze everything else in if we can.

654
00:36:53,240 --> 00:36:58,480
So because we're applied to so many things, PSYOP is used as, like, an easy button at times for that.

655
00:36:59,700 --> 00:37:11,460
So we'll be applied to the humanitarian situations where, in that case, we are actually allowed to what we would call influence Americans.

656
00:37:11,460 --> 00:37:15,040
But that's because we're only allowed to influence them by informing them.

657
00:37:15,400 --> 00:37:21,720
We can only say the government still exists and here's how to contact it and here's how to get supplies and food and things that you need.

658
00:37:21,720 --> 00:37:27,720
So it's kind of that very, very watered-down version of influence where you're just communicating.

659
00:37:27,720 --> 00:37:32,040
So you're going kind of back to the roots of propaganda, a government communicating to its people.

660
00:37:32,040 --> 00:37:37,560
So you want them to know, hey, if you're trapped somewhere, here's how you can get help.

661
00:37:38,200 --> 00:37:41,340
If you don't have food anymore, here's where food is.

662
00:37:41,660 --> 00:37:45,940
If you don't have power, here's these accesses to these public services.

663
00:37:45,940 --> 00:37:46,960
You're doing that kind of stuff.

664
00:37:48,040 --> 00:37:54,900
And so that's, I think, for most people, pretty easy for us to kind of come to terms with is I'm helping.

665
00:37:55,220 --> 00:38:01,040
But when you look at some of the more nebulous things, it's kind of getting into, like, the philosophy of war and just war and all those things.

666
00:38:01,460 --> 00:38:04,740
So I'm here to help you take out the bad guys.

667
00:38:04,900 --> 00:38:07,260
We define the bad guys in this scenario as terrorists.

668
00:38:07,260 --> 00:38:17,380
So I want to help them, I want to help you, combatant commander, by getting the bad guys to pop their heads up so that you can then take them out or do whatever you want with them.

669
00:38:17,720 --> 00:38:23,480
I want them to probably talk more so that they can be accessed by the intelligence community.

670
00:38:24,080 --> 00:38:24,360
Hell yeah.

671
00:38:25,080 --> 00:38:30,400
Or I want to just take them out so I can trick them in some way into all consolidating into the same place.

672
00:38:30,420 --> 00:38:31,760
And then you just drop a bomb on them.

673
00:38:31,940 --> 00:38:32,980
You're doing things like that.

674
00:38:32,980 --> 00:38:40,020
So Chuck and I have talked about effects coordination cells or effects cells downroutles.

675
00:38:40,580 --> 00:38:43,860
A lot of times we like to refer to things as soft effects.

676
00:38:44,140 --> 00:38:48,060
But how would you describe, you know, Chuck, what would that look like?

677
00:38:48,060 --> 00:38:48,240
And this isn't like a new thing.

678
00:38:48,320 --> 00:38:50,100
Everybody thinks that this effects cell is a new thing.

679
00:38:50,160 --> 00:39:02,180
If you just look at past doctrine, it's even for a special forces company, when you deploy and a company as an ODB deploys in the capacity of an advanced operating base,

680
00:39:02,180 --> 00:39:05,880
there's supposed to be a fairly robust effect cell.

681
00:39:06,560 --> 00:39:07,560
And this isn't new.

682
00:39:07,860 --> 00:39:09,720
I don't know why everybody thinks this is new.

683
00:39:09,840 --> 00:39:13,260
But, I mean, if you look all the way back into the early 90s, this was a thing.

684
00:39:13,460 --> 00:39:19,320
So I guess, Bobby, you want to talk about the nuances of an effect cell or all the different things that you can do with it?

685
00:39:19,320 --> 00:39:20,240
Or just what it is?

686
00:39:20,440 --> 00:39:21,800
I want to talk about what it is real quick.

687
00:39:21,800 --> 00:39:26,420
Because I think the information operations and psychological operations is a huge part of this.

688
00:39:26,720 --> 00:39:36,300
And I wanted to ask, you know, these two guys, you know, how do effects get synchronized across fires, civil affairs, PSYOP, and information?

689
00:39:36,520 --> 00:39:39,520
Well, I have a vignette I think that might be easier for the audience to understand.

690
00:39:39,680 --> 00:39:42,560
In the southern Philippines, right, we had this foreign internal defense mission.

691
00:39:43,340 --> 00:39:44,520
We were there for like 20 years.

692
00:39:44,740 --> 00:39:46,800
I think it closed down in, what, 2016, 2017?

693
00:39:47,580 --> 00:39:47,900
OEFP?

694
00:39:48,120 --> 00:39:48,440
OEFP.

695
00:39:48,440 --> 00:39:51,260
Operation Enduring Freedom of the Philippines, right.

696
00:39:51,760 --> 00:39:54,360
We had a joint special operations task force down there.

697
00:39:55,340 --> 00:40:00,480
And a really common vignette is, you know, you have Mindanao, which is the joint operating area.

698
00:40:00,580 --> 00:40:02,780
So it is contested.

699
00:40:02,820 --> 00:40:03,300
It's dangerous.

700
00:40:04,180 --> 00:40:14,060
You have Abisaf Group and other trans-oceanic terrorist organizations that move through these sort of unsecured island chains from the Philippines through Malaysia and onward.

701
00:40:14,060 --> 00:40:20,460
And one of the things you would see often, civil affairs teams would go in and they would do med caps.

702
00:40:21,020 --> 00:40:22,120
I forget the actual.

703
00:40:22,320 --> 00:40:23,820
Medical civil affairs programs.

704
00:40:24,100 --> 00:40:24,760
That's it, right.

705
00:40:24,840 --> 00:40:27,720
So the intent is, hey, we don't have access to this village.

706
00:40:28,240 --> 00:40:31,260
This village is of some strategic importance, right.

707
00:40:32,120 --> 00:40:33,400
We need access to this.

708
00:40:33,400 --> 00:40:37,200
So, okay, so civil affairs teams will run one of these medical events, right.

709
00:40:37,620 --> 00:40:42,100
The SIOP teams will advertise those events and perhaps get people to show up.

710
00:40:42,420 --> 00:40:51,780
Maybe in the Philippines, like, print products are really popular, especially, you know, before the age of the internet.

711
00:40:52,300 --> 00:40:54,780
Huge banners, that sort of thing.

712
00:40:54,780 --> 00:40:59,360
So, you know, they'll take the success of that event and then broadcast it throughout the region, right.

713
00:40:59,900 --> 00:41:10,300
And then what you start to see is you start to see fighters, right, who were, you know, conducting operations out there coming out of the wood line, coming out of the jungle, getting aid for their families and that kind of thing.

714
00:41:10,380 --> 00:41:11,860
So now you have access to this area.

715
00:41:11,980 --> 00:41:17,120
Now the ODA can go in and they're free to do what they needed to do in that space.

716
00:41:17,120 --> 00:41:27,620
So you talk about sort of cross-functional teams and, hey, how do I take SIOP, CA, and SF and how do they work together in a space to create effects?

717
00:41:28,160 --> 00:41:31,020
In the modern world, you might have cyber guys in there.

718
00:41:31,120 --> 00:41:42,560
You might have a public affairs officer and a JAG in there for legal things to do whatever it is you got to – because as we were talking about earlier, what effect are we trying to achieve to meet what in-state, right.

719
00:41:42,780 --> 00:41:44,320
You can also layer your effects.

720
00:41:44,320 --> 00:41:49,380
So you might have more than one goal because you have more than one organization involved.

721
00:41:49,460 --> 00:41:51,940
You have more than one team making up a team of teams.

722
00:41:52,120 --> 00:42:02,680
So you might have your PAO, your public affairs officer, who's then going to do a press release to broadcast, like Will said, the effectiveness of what you just did so that then the media could be involved.

723
00:42:02,940 --> 00:42:13,200
Because you might actually, from doing that whole thing, if you're doing it right, you might pull the enemy off the battlefield so that we don't have to fight anyone.

724
00:42:13,200 --> 00:42:15,580
Because that's the goal, right, is peace.

725
00:42:16,480 --> 00:42:19,200
We want to get to a place where we're not actually fighting each other anymore.

726
00:42:19,660 --> 00:42:21,520
And so sometimes that's the effect that you want.

727
00:42:22,480 --> 00:42:22,620
Yeah.

728
00:42:22,660 --> 00:42:23,000
You never know.

729
00:42:23,160 --> 00:42:23,420
Exactly.

730
00:42:23,760 --> 00:42:29,020
Hey, real quick, I gave you 10 NCO points for knowing the definition of MedCat because it's pretty applicable.

731
00:42:29,440 --> 00:42:30,260
I thought that made sense.

732
00:42:30,260 --> 00:42:33,820
Well, for you, we usually give officer and NCO points.

733
00:42:33,880 --> 00:42:42,500
If you make sense, NCO points, if you're using a lot of acronyms or you're saying things that just sound like you're trying to write an OER for yourself, you get officer points.

734
00:42:43,380 --> 00:42:43,780
Nice.

735
00:42:43,860 --> 00:42:44,860
I like that scoring system.

736
00:42:45,000 --> 00:42:46,520
As a first group guy, super passionate.

737
00:42:46,780 --> 00:42:48,560
And I had lots of time in the Philippines.

738
00:42:48,660 --> 00:42:49,120
Oh, yes.

739
00:42:49,120 --> 00:43:07,280
And saw that firsthand, and it was always highly successful to reach the populace, to get to the fighters, provide civil services and really life sustainment type entities to the people there, but also to gather information and figure out what was really going on and where people were and what was happening next.

740
00:43:07,280 --> 00:43:09,400
It's real basic stuff, right?

741
00:43:09,620 --> 00:43:13,420
Like in the Philippines, you get typhoons that roll through there every year, right?

742
00:43:13,480 --> 00:43:15,600
And so it creates these huge humanitarian crises.

743
00:43:16,260 --> 00:43:19,640
And I want to say in 2013 was a Zambuanga hostage crisis.

744
00:43:19,780 --> 00:43:22,320
We had a double, sort of a double entendre, right?

745
00:43:23,280 --> 00:43:23,840
Officer point.

746
00:43:25,420 --> 00:43:25,820
Nice.

747
00:43:26,940 --> 00:43:28,360
10 points on the board for me.

748
00:43:29,260 --> 00:43:34,180
So the nearby stadium was filled up with all these people who don't have homes anymore.

749
00:43:34,780 --> 00:43:36,400
And so the CA teams are going in.

750
00:43:36,400 --> 00:43:37,340
We had doctors going in.

751
00:43:37,400 --> 00:43:38,660
They're doing water tests, right?

752
00:43:38,740 --> 00:43:46,360
Like the SEALs, the Navy SEALs at the task force were building port-a-potties and then shipping them out there, right?

753
00:43:46,420 --> 00:43:55,100
So it's like anytime we get kind of caught up in this word cloud of buzzwords, it's always a good reminder that it's just basic stuff at the end of the day.

754
00:43:55,620 --> 00:44:01,260
I wanted to ask, I asked the same thing to Rob McQueen in our civil affairs podcast, asking you guys this.

755
00:44:01,260 --> 00:44:06,200
Does anybody else out there, whether it's in the arsenal throughout our military?

756
00:44:06,800 --> 00:44:12,240
Or I guess the kind of State Department or government sector do what you guys do?

757
00:44:13,280 --> 00:44:14,260
Oh, I mean, yeah.

758
00:44:14,480 --> 00:44:17,860
I mean, as an American citizen just driving down the street, right?

759
00:44:17,940 --> 00:44:24,360
Like the amount of advertisements and curated things that are coming your way, it's like out of this world.

760
00:44:24,440 --> 00:44:25,260
You go to a restaurant, right?

761
00:44:25,760 --> 00:44:26,780
The music's been selected.

762
00:44:27,040 --> 00:44:28,080
The lighting has been selected.

763
00:44:28,240 --> 00:44:29,440
The floor is a certain way.

764
00:44:29,500 --> 00:44:31,240
The table is built a certain way.

765
00:44:31,240 --> 00:44:33,400
It's all to make you feel something, right?

766
00:44:33,400 --> 00:44:33,980
I like when you go there.

767
00:44:34,060 --> 00:44:35,620
I like giving people the example of Ikea.

768
00:44:35,860 --> 00:44:36,560
Have you ever gone to Ikea?

769
00:44:36,760 --> 00:44:37,060
Oh, perfect.

770
00:44:37,240 --> 00:44:37,340
Yeah.

771
00:44:37,340 --> 00:44:38,140
I was getting lost in Ikea.

772
00:44:38,140 --> 00:44:38,260
Ikea is amazing.

773
00:44:38,880 --> 00:44:41,960
Ikea intentionally sends you on the escalator to the second floor.

774
00:44:42,080 --> 00:44:43,760
So now it's more difficult to leave.

775
00:44:44,060 --> 00:44:44,400
Yes.

776
00:44:44,400 --> 00:44:46,820
And they send you through the maze.

777
00:44:47,340 --> 00:44:48,760
They want you to follow a path.

778
00:44:48,900 --> 00:44:50,660
They don't want you to have free reign in their store.

779
00:44:51,240 --> 00:44:53,200
And yes, they give you doors.

780
00:44:53,320 --> 00:44:53,620
You can go.

781
00:44:53,720 --> 00:44:55,820
You can always get off the path and leave really quickly.

782
00:44:56,400 --> 00:44:58,540
But they want you to go through that entire experience.

783
00:44:58,600 --> 00:45:00,160
It's like the line ride, right?

784
00:45:00,400 --> 00:45:01,980
And it caps off with a restaurant.

785
00:45:01,980 --> 00:45:08,280
And then you can go downstairs to the warehouse and be like gifted with the view of like, oh, Ikea has everything.

786
00:45:08,280 --> 00:45:12,060
But like Will's saying, so there's food involved in Ikea.

787
00:45:12,460 --> 00:45:12,860
Meatballs.

788
00:45:12,940 --> 00:45:13,580
Meatballs, right?

789
00:45:13,700 --> 00:45:14,720
It's the first thing you think of, right?

790
00:45:14,720 --> 00:45:15,320
Meatballs.

791
00:45:15,660 --> 00:45:15,740
Yeah.

792
00:45:16,480 --> 00:45:17,780
And their music.

793
00:45:17,860 --> 00:45:18,600
I'm going to leave my cart right here.

794
00:45:18,600 --> 00:45:22,640
There's also little parts of influence that Ikea does that I really enjoy.

795
00:45:23,600 --> 00:45:25,820
All the books they have are in a foreign language.

796
00:45:26,000 --> 00:45:27,200
So no one's going to steal it.

797
00:45:28,140 --> 00:45:28,540
Yeah.

798
00:45:28,780 --> 00:45:30,000
So their books are right there.

799
00:45:30,100 --> 00:45:31,640
You can look at the book, but you can't.

800
00:45:32,480 --> 00:45:34,140
Most Americans aren't speaking that language.

801
00:45:34,260 --> 00:45:35,980
So they're just going, oh, I'll put it back.

802
00:45:35,980 --> 00:45:39,580
But it's not like stapled down or anything.

803
00:45:40,180 --> 00:45:41,440
There's these little things.

804
00:45:42,060 --> 00:45:49,300
So as we're going into some campaigning and kind of the thoughts of psychological operations applied in the modern construct,

805
00:45:50,160 --> 00:45:54,380
how do you guys approach measures of performances and measures of effectiveness?

806
00:45:54,920 --> 00:45:56,740
I.e., how do you know what's working?

807
00:45:57,120 --> 00:46:01,960
And how do you know that what is happening and the outcome that you're getting is the one you want?

808
00:46:02,000 --> 00:46:04,600
14 officer points for using mop and mow.

809
00:46:04,600 --> 00:46:05,240
Mop and mow.

810
00:46:05,280 --> 00:46:05,880
Yeah, there we go.

811
00:46:05,980 --> 00:46:08,820
Can you guys help us understand that?

812
00:46:08,980 --> 00:46:10,540
How do you articulate that to the commander?

813
00:46:10,780 --> 00:46:12,460
That could be a whole podcast episode.

814
00:46:12,840 --> 00:46:14,360
To be honest, I'm going to.

815
00:46:14,600 --> 00:46:15,120
So therefore.

816
00:46:15,740 --> 00:46:16,800
Very short cliffness.

817
00:46:17,080 --> 00:46:17,240
Yeah.

818
00:46:17,360 --> 00:46:21,300
You immediately throw it to Will to see if he has a shorter way of explaining it.

819
00:46:21,420 --> 00:46:21,640
Okay.

820
00:46:21,880 --> 00:46:24,600
So let's see.

821
00:46:24,820 --> 00:46:27,700
We can use the Ghost in the Machine video as a case example.

822
00:46:27,720 --> 00:46:30,580
Let's do that because we were going to talk about the in-depth next.

823
00:46:30,580 --> 00:46:32,200
What's a good segue.

824
00:46:32,340 --> 00:46:37,060
I mean, it's just, it's a recruiting video, right?

825
00:46:37,060 --> 00:46:40,640
So a measure of performance, hey, we made a recruiting video.

826
00:46:41,320 --> 00:46:43,700
Hey, we put it on 10 websites, right?

827
00:46:43,980 --> 00:46:47,080
Hey, it was seen by 10,000 people, a million people.

828
00:46:47,740 --> 00:46:51,040
The measure of effect, right, is the actual thing that you want to have happen.

829
00:46:51,200 --> 00:46:53,620
And typically it's some kind of indicator that you can measure.

830
00:46:53,620 --> 00:46:56,200
So clicks or views or duration.

831
00:46:56,200 --> 00:46:56,880
So not even that.

832
00:46:56,880 --> 00:47:01,880
So measures of performance are clicks, views, things like that.

833
00:47:02,000 --> 00:47:02,100
Okay.

834
00:47:02,100 --> 00:47:03,160
Even interactions.

835
00:47:03,460 --> 00:47:03,900
Interaction.

836
00:47:04,020 --> 00:47:05,140
That's the term we're talking about.

837
00:47:05,160 --> 00:47:05,620
Comments.

838
00:47:05,700 --> 00:47:06,180
Exactly.

839
00:47:06,440 --> 00:47:08,720
But you want physical effects.

840
00:47:08,780 --> 00:47:13,300
So for a recruiting video, right, how many people join up, right?

841
00:47:13,300 --> 00:47:15,960
How many people say, hey, I want to try this out, right?

842
00:47:16,700 --> 00:47:21,400
So for instance, with SORB, the Special Operations Recruiting Battalion, said, hey, let us know how

843
00:47:21,400 --> 00:47:26,200
many people come by and say, we saw this video, and that was the impetus for me coming here,

844
00:47:26,220 --> 00:47:26,360
right?

845
00:47:26,540 --> 00:47:27,720
It's like 80 people right now.

846
00:47:28,240 --> 00:47:32,860
And I don't know if we can talk about recruiting numbers, but that's a very large segment of

847
00:47:32,860 --> 00:47:34,720
our recruiting mission for the fiscal year.

848
00:47:35,560 --> 00:47:37,660
And it's already been met within, what, four weeks?

849
00:47:38,240 --> 00:47:38,520
Five weeks?

850
00:47:38,520 --> 00:47:40,400
Yeah, it was within like six weeks, yeah.

851
00:47:41,140 --> 00:47:41,720
That's impressive.

852
00:47:41,720 --> 00:47:47,060
A buddy of mine at West Point, he said he's a sci-upper.

853
00:47:47,340 --> 00:47:49,520
He's a linguist.

854
00:47:49,580 --> 00:47:50,500
He speaks Arabic.

855
00:47:50,500 --> 00:47:51,740
He's a 3-3.

856
00:47:51,860 --> 00:47:53,280
He's an absolute weapon.

857
00:47:53,840 --> 00:47:58,000
But he said, hey, in the last two weeks, I've had more people approach me to ask about

858
00:47:58,000 --> 00:48:01,300
sci-op than in the last two years that I've been here.

859
00:48:02,260 --> 00:48:04,640
So for me, that's measure of performance.

860
00:48:04,760 --> 00:48:08,960
That's a really good indicator that it's working or that it's provocative or people are talking

861
00:48:08,960 --> 00:48:09,340
about it.

862
00:48:09,660 --> 00:48:13,640
But the actual effect that we want is we want people to come join us, you know, want to

863
00:48:13,640 --> 00:48:15,600
go to selection and come join our course.

864
00:48:15,600 --> 00:48:23,800
So yeah, we'll get the actual measure of effectiveness from that video in roughly the next year to

865
00:48:23,800 --> 00:48:29,680
three years to five and seven years, depending on the populations that have viewed it.

866
00:48:29,680 --> 00:48:34,300
So the West Point cadets who are freshmen, it's going to take them, what, seven to eight

867
00:48:34,300 --> 00:48:36,140
years before they would come into the pipeline.

868
00:48:36,560 --> 00:48:38,620
So those freshmen, we'll see.

869
00:48:39,300 --> 00:48:43,860
But the people who are down the street in the 82nd who want to come over, you just have to

870
00:48:43,860 --> 00:48:44,760
walk down the street, guys.

871
00:48:44,920 --> 00:48:45,660
Go to Arden's.

872
00:48:45,660 --> 00:48:48,600
It's the Special Operations Recruiting Battalion.

873
00:48:48,760 --> 00:48:49,280
You'll find it.

874
00:48:50,600 --> 00:48:55,620
Those guys walking right in, that's a more sooner flash to bang.

875
00:48:55,980 --> 00:48:56,000
Right.

876
00:48:56,420 --> 00:49:03,280
That's kind of, you know, sometimes it's about swaying at one to 2% in one direction.

877
00:49:03,740 --> 00:49:03,900
Right.

878
00:49:04,040 --> 00:49:08,000
Those are always the hardest things to sell because it's more intangible and it takes

879
00:49:08,000 --> 00:49:10,440
years, you know, it takes years to happen.

880
00:49:10,440 --> 00:49:16,380
Yeah, that gets back to the last question of who else does this and, like, everyone does

881
00:49:16,380 --> 00:49:16,840
this.

882
00:49:17,240 --> 00:49:21,020
Every, like, if you come into PSYOP, you will have a job when you leave PSYOP.

883
00:49:21,180 --> 00:49:22,660
There's so many things.

884
00:49:23,180 --> 00:49:25,300
You can look at, you guys ever go to Aldi?

885
00:49:26,220 --> 00:49:29,960
Aldi had this problem, right, where they want to make everything cheaper, less expensive.

886
00:49:29,960 --> 00:49:31,680
I know Chuck probably goes to Aldi pretty frequently.

887
00:49:31,860 --> 00:49:32,220
I go to Aldi.

888
00:49:32,220 --> 00:49:32,820
Aldi's awesome.

889
00:49:32,940 --> 00:49:33,320
I love it.

890
00:49:33,520 --> 00:49:38,620
So if you look at Walmart, Walmart's model of returning carts is to have someone do that

891
00:49:38,620 --> 00:49:39,100
full time.

892
00:49:39,100 --> 00:49:42,920
And they have cart machines, which costs hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, and

893
00:49:42,920 --> 00:49:47,140
then people who are literally doing it as one of their jobs.

894
00:49:48,100 --> 00:49:49,760
And so that's leading to back injuries.

895
00:49:49,880 --> 00:49:52,240
You almost always see them have back braces on and stuff.

896
00:49:52,520 --> 00:49:54,840
So then that's probably leading to workman's comp.

897
00:49:55,340 --> 00:49:57,020
There's all these additional funding.

898
00:49:57,020 --> 00:49:57,040
It's all about dollars, too.

899
00:49:57,040 --> 00:49:57,240
Yep.

900
00:49:57,480 --> 00:50:02,300
And yeah, for an organization like Walmart to not figure this out yet, I'm very surprised.

901
00:50:02,700 --> 00:50:03,660
Aldi's figured it out.

902
00:50:04,000 --> 00:50:09,080
They just put a quarter device where you have to put a quarter in the cart in order to access

903
00:50:09,080 --> 00:50:09,440
the cart.

904
00:50:09,660 --> 00:50:10,520
But you get a quarter back.

905
00:50:10,600 --> 00:50:11,400
Then you get your quarter back.

906
00:50:11,600 --> 00:50:13,040
So there's the financial incentive.

907
00:50:13,400 --> 00:50:17,840
I'd have to bring a quarter to Aldi to get the cart, and I want my quarter back.

908
00:50:18,240 --> 00:50:18,620
That's it.

909
00:50:18,840 --> 00:50:21,440
It costs you $0 as Aldi.

910
00:50:21,520 --> 00:50:23,800
You have the cost of the device on the cart.

911
00:50:24,660 --> 00:50:27,700
And so Aldi influences people to return the cart.

912
00:50:27,700 --> 00:50:33,260
So they also don't have in their parking lot cart-returning kiosks, whatever you call those

913
00:50:33,260 --> 00:50:35,000
metal things that you return the carts in.

914
00:50:35,080 --> 00:50:37,180
Or that you bang your car into accidentally somehow.

915
00:50:37,480 --> 00:50:37,680
Yeah.

916
00:50:37,760 --> 00:50:39,080
So that's one example.

917
00:50:39,400 --> 00:50:44,580
But then you can look at all sorts of things where, oh, I had another one.

918
00:50:44,640 --> 00:50:45,780
I had another one keyed up, too.

919
00:50:46,620 --> 00:50:51,540
I mean, look no further than our, I won't get too far into politics, but politics is huge,

920
00:50:51,580 --> 00:50:51,760
right?

921
00:50:51,780 --> 00:50:53,440
Because it happens all the time.

922
00:50:53,440 --> 00:50:56,160
And they're looking at 1% here, 2%, like you said.

923
00:50:56,720 --> 00:51:00,560
I mean, I've heard of stuff so conniving, and it's like, hey, there's this one district

924
00:51:00,560 --> 00:51:01,860
in, say, Alabama, right?

925
00:51:01,980 --> 00:51:05,280
And we need to get, say, we in the proverbial we.

926
00:51:07,640 --> 00:51:12,340
After they do the analysis in the audience, they'll throw a concert in the county over or

927
00:51:12,340 --> 00:51:15,660
in the state over to get those people who would vote in that direction to go to that

928
00:51:15,660 --> 00:51:17,520
concert instead of being there on the voting day.

929
00:51:18,120 --> 00:51:22,040
So it gets Machiavellian in the truest sense.

930
00:51:22,500 --> 00:51:22,640
Yeah.

931
00:51:22,640 --> 00:51:24,700
So you can apply these things to anything.

932
00:51:24,900 --> 00:51:26,280
The music industry uses it.

933
00:51:26,420 --> 00:51:27,740
The film industry uses it.

934
00:51:28,780 --> 00:51:34,400
It's a rabbit hole to look at how you apply influence in the civilian world as a civilian.

935
00:51:34,840 --> 00:51:37,640
I should say, as a civilian, we don't do it to Americans.

936
00:51:38,520 --> 00:51:39,860
We do it to foreigners.

937
00:51:40,520 --> 00:51:41,600
Yeah, not foreigners.

938
00:51:42,020 --> 00:51:46,780
Foreign populations with our partner forces.

939
00:51:47,100 --> 00:51:49,520
So we also aren't doing this unilaterally.

940
00:51:49,520 --> 00:51:54,720
We're being invited by these countries to help them with complicated problems like narco-terrorism

941
00:51:54,720 --> 00:51:57,200
and human smuggling, things like that.

942
00:51:57,260 --> 00:51:58,380
That's what we're being applied to.

943
00:51:58,700 --> 00:52:02,220
I'd like to ask a little bit more, so kind of hopping back to Ghost in the Machine.

944
00:52:02,420 --> 00:52:02,580
Yeah.

945
00:52:02,580 --> 00:52:03,900
I want to get into the details of that.

946
00:52:03,900 --> 00:52:04,080
Yeah.

947
00:52:05,180 --> 00:52:05,960
Expand upon that.

948
00:52:05,960 --> 00:52:07,440
It sparked a lot of controversy, right?

949
00:52:07,680 --> 00:52:07,860
Yeah.

950
00:52:07,860 --> 00:52:08,640
It sparked some controversy.

951
00:52:09,120 --> 00:52:13,320
It's a lot of feelings, a lot of emotions, I think, that we've seen going up.

952
00:52:13,360 --> 00:52:14,280
You guys probably heard about.

953
00:52:14,280 --> 00:52:22,140
What would be some of the words you would use to capture the message in that, and some of

954
00:52:22,140 --> 00:52:24,900
the intangibles that you feel through?

955
00:52:25,240 --> 00:52:27,320
Well, the intangibles.

956
00:52:28,240 --> 00:52:28,960
It's the hard part.

957
00:52:29,420 --> 00:52:32,060
I actually don't want to talk too much about the intangibles.

958
00:52:32,600 --> 00:52:33,760
Well, here's what I want to say.

959
00:52:33,760 --> 00:52:39,680
But when it comes to that video, understanding that video, the point is that it does not

960
00:52:39,680 --> 00:52:45,380
define everything because it wants, the intent of that video is for the audience to define

961
00:52:45,380 --> 00:52:46,160
things for themselves.

962
00:52:46,620 --> 00:52:52,680
So when you're talking about things like deception or even normal psyop or any of that, where we're

963
00:52:52,680 --> 00:52:56,960
talking about influencing a population, you can look at something like horror, right?

964
00:52:57,440 --> 00:53:03,400
So in the horror genre, the scariest thing in the horror genre is describing something,

965
00:53:03,400 --> 00:53:05,140
but not describing it too much.

966
00:53:05,600 --> 00:53:06,340
Not showing it.

967
00:53:06,340 --> 00:53:11,440
You want the reader to fill in the blanks because anything they think of is scarier.

968
00:53:11,780 --> 00:53:16,460
Think of any horror movie, like Super 8, where everyone complained because they saw the

969
00:53:16,460 --> 00:53:17,020
monster at the end.

970
00:53:17,120 --> 00:53:17,900
They're like, oh, it was dumb.

971
00:53:18,120 --> 00:53:20,100
But every part before that moment was great.

972
00:53:20,640 --> 00:53:22,320
And so like, oh, don't show the monster.

973
00:53:22,900 --> 00:53:24,400
You can think of this all the time.

974
00:53:24,760 --> 00:53:26,120
So Spielberg's Jaws, right?

975
00:53:26,560 --> 00:53:26,760
Perfect.

976
00:53:26,940 --> 00:53:29,200
Throughout most of the runtime of that film, you never see the shark.

977
00:53:29,320 --> 00:53:29,520
Yep.

978
00:53:30,140 --> 00:53:32,280
And I think there's actually, if you dig into it.

979
00:53:32,460 --> 00:53:32,740
Technical difficulties.

980
00:53:32,740 --> 00:53:34,200
There's actually technical difficulties with it, right?

981
00:53:34,280 --> 00:53:35,580
So they had these constraints.

982
00:53:35,800 --> 00:53:40,520
And so they're like, hey, how do we use the medium of film and sound to create fear in

983
00:53:40,520 --> 00:53:42,740
the audience without showing them the actual thing?

984
00:53:43,300 --> 00:53:49,660
So it actually became sort of a problem statement for us on the outreach team was, hey, don't

985
00:53:49,660 --> 00:53:50,180
show the shark.

986
00:53:50,740 --> 00:53:53,940
So how do we sell psyop without showing the shark?

987
00:53:54,080 --> 00:53:57,200
How do we convey what it feels like, right?

988
00:53:57,200 --> 00:54:01,920
Um, versus putting a guy in a, in a, if you look at most cyber recruiting videos in the

989
00:54:01,920 --> 00:54:05,100
past, it's, it's literal, it's a guy in a suit pointing at things.

990
00:54:05,180 --> 00:54:06,020
It's an embassy, right?

991
00:54:06,060 --> 00:54:07,000
Ah, this is what we do.

992
00:54:07,160 --> 00:54:08,020
This is what we are.

993
00:54:08,380 --> 00:54:10,400
Not necessarily what it feels like.

994
00:54:10,400 --> 00:54:15,100
Because there's also, so we're always limited in our recruiting because the coolest stuff

995
00:54:15,100 --> 00:54:17,260
that we do is classified and will be classified.

996
00:54:17,820 --> 00:54:23,320
Um, so we didn't really properly introduce ourselves, but, uh, so my name's Ashley and in

997
00:54:23,320 --> 00:54:25,860
my free time, I'm a writer and I write books.

998
00:54:25,860 --> 00:54:26,820
I do satire.

999
00:54:27,040 --> 00:54:28,400
Uh, I love creating things.

1000
00:54:28,460 --> 00:54:29,180
I'm a graphic artist.

1001
00:54:29,300 --> 00:54:30,660
My best work is classified.

1002
00:54:31,000 --> 00:54:32,020
My best work.

1003
00:54:32,160 --> 00:54:35,680
And it's going to be that way until like I'm 50 years from now, I'll be dead probably.

1004
00:54:35,820 --> 00:54:37,240
So it's like, no one will know until then.

1005
00:54:37,700 --> 00:54:42,740
But, but that's like also some of the most, uh, difficult stuff is when we talk about this

1006
00:54:42,740 --> 00:54:47,040
in like a public forum or for recruiting, we can't show anyone the cool stuff.

1007
00:54:47,120 --> 00:54:52,660
We have to talk about desert storm and leaflets and we have to talk about world war two and

1008
00:54:52,660 --> 00:54:57,680
signals intelligence from the 1940s, but we can't talk about what we do now.

1009
00:54:57,840 --> 00:55:01,380
And so that's, that's the difficult thing that that balance, right?

1010
00:55:01,460 --> 00:55:03,020
So narratively in the video, right?

1011
00:55:03,660 --> 00:55:08,900
What we purposefully do is we leave out the whole middle section of what SIOP is, right?

1012
00:55:09,480 --> 00:55:13,980
It's not that we're going out there and creating revolutions or undermining social movement.

1013
00:55:14,080 --> 00:55:15,540
That's not, that's not it, right?

1014
00:55:15,660 --> 00:55:21,120
That represents the greatest possible outcome of unconventional warfare or irregular warfare,

1015
00:55:21,280 --> 00:55:21,460
right?

1016
00:55:21,460 --> 00:55:25,300
Um, so by not showing that middle part, you leave it to the audience.

1017
00:55:25,300 --> 00:55:29,060
And that's why I think it's so incendiary and provocative is because people will have

1018
00:55:29,060 --> 00:55:31,940
different interpretations of what that is, right?

1019
00:55:32,360 --> 00:55:35,180
So there's, there's this interesting aspect of human behavior, right?

1020
00:55:35,240 --> 00:55:37,520
So this is getting into some, uh, biology.

1021
00:55:37,740 --> 00:55:40,140
So the marriage of the sciences and the arts, right?

1022
00:55:40,640 --> 00:55:45,180
People believe what they want to believe and they see what they want to believe because

1023
00:55:45,180 --> 00:55:47,340
we make decisions based off of our limbic system.

1024
00:55:47,340 --> 00:55:51,460
So we have this massive cerebral cortex and that's all the logical brain.

1025
00:55:51,620 --> 00:55:53,940
That thing does not make decisions for us.

1026
00:55:54,020 --> 00:55:59,580
Our tiny little microscopic, not microscopic, but it's very small, limbic system where all

1027
00:55:59,580 --> 00:56:00,360
of our emotions are.

1028
00:56:00,440 --> 00:56:01,960
That's where we make decisions.

1029
00:56:02,180 --> 00:56:05,040
So we make decisions based off of how things make us feel.

1030
00:56:05,040 --> 00:56:11,360
So if I like X, Y, or Z, I'm going to be more apt to believe it.

1031
00:56:11,500 --> 00:56:16,760
That's why movie stars are in TV commercials because I think Hugh Jackman makes me feel

1032
00:56:16,760 --> 00:56:17,040
good.

1033
00:56:17,320 --> 00:56:20,200
So he sells me orange juice in Korea.

1034
00:56:20,520 --> 00:56:22,560
You know, like this random, this random stuff.

1035
00:56:22,760 --> 00:56:24,020
It's because we like them.

1036
00:56:24,020 --> 00:56:27,940
We don't even know who they are as people because everything is manufactured that they

1037
00:56:27,940 --> 00:56:28,640
participate in.

1038
00:56:28,980 --> 00:56:33,260
Everything that they say is, is being given to them by PR representatives and all their

1039
00:56:33,260 --> 00:56:36,360
lines are written by people who are actually professional writers in their films.

1040
00:56:36,520 --> 00:56:41,920
But you look on social media and this movie star is quoted all the time, but that's a quote

1041
00:56:41,920 --> 00:56:44,580
that they just read in front of a teleprompter.

1042
00:56:45,120 --> 00:56:46,720
It's this, it's fascinating, right?

1043
00:56:46,980 --> 00:56:51,240
Once we start to look at the details of this, but because that person makes me feel good,

1044
00:56:51,260 --> 00:56:52,000
I'm going to believe them.

1045
00:56:52,520 --> 00:56:53,360
This is the same thing.

1046
00:56:53,360 --> 00:56:57,760
And this, this video makes me feel strange.

1047
00:56:58,680 --> 00:56:59,800
So now I'm unsettled.

1048
00:57:00,100 --> 00:57:00,220
Yeah.

1049
00:57:00,280 --> 00:57:04,060
So now I'm going to reach whatever conclusion I want to reach.

1050
00:57:04,480 --> 00:57:10,340
So while yes, there was a lot of traction and it did go what we would call viral, uh,

1051
00:57:10,340 --> 00:57:13,460
and conspiracy theorists have loved, loved, loved.

1052
00:57:13,460 --> 00:57:15,940
There's people online correlating it to UFOs and aliens.

1053
00:57:16,040 --> 00:57:16,480
Perfect.

1054
00:57:16,720 --> 00:57:17,480
That's amazing.

1055
00:57:17,560 --> 00:57:18,100
Go one deeper.

1056
00:57:18,100 --> 00:57:21,700
Um, go to it's so much more complicated than that.

1057
00:57:21,700 --> 00:57:28,000
Um, but beyond that, uh, that's not our audience, that's not our audience, but that's okay that

1058
00:57:28,000 --> 00:57:32,940
they're participating and enjoying whatever, whatever it is that they're enjoying and they're

1059
00:57:32,940 --> 00:57:35,600
latching onto it and trying to make videos about it and all this other stuff.

1060
00:57:35,600 --> 00:57:40,760
But the, the people who are our audience are now more apt to actually see it.

1061
00:57:40,760 --> 00:57:44,940
So because Alex Jones made a video about this, he helped to make it go more viral.

1062
00:57:44,940 --> 00:57:49,800
So the irony of him making a video that was actually kind of critical of this is that

1063
00:57:49,800 --> 00:57:53,460
critical video is now seen by more people who are our actual audience.

1064
00:57:53,620 --> 00:57:58,360
Alex Jones was never our audience, but now he has shown it to our audience more.

1065
00:57:58,560 --> 00:58:00,840
It's this crazy, the Streisand effect, right?

1066
00:58:00,940 --> 00:58:01,220
Exactly.

1067
00:58:01,580 --> 00:58:01,780
Yeah.

1068
00:58:01,880 --> 00:58:03,080
It's exactly the Streisand effect.

1069
00:58:03,240 --> 00:58:05,940
So this is also, this is, this is our ability.

1070
00:58:06,120 --> 00:58:09,240
This is, uh, there's an opportunity for Streisand effects and stuff here.

1071
00:58:09,840 --> 00:58:10,380
What's that?

1072
00:58:10,480 --> 00:58:13,520
Are we giving out points for everybody knowing what the Streisand effect is except for Bobby?

1073
00:58:13,520 --> 00:58:14,420
You don't know what it is?

1074
00:58:14,520 --> 00:58:14,660
No.

1075
00:58:14,920 --> 00:58:15,960
Oh, it's a, you can observe.

1076
00:58:16,080 --> 00:58:18,460
Barbara Streisand is like 10, 15 years ago.

1077
00:58:18,640 --> 00:58:24,100
Uh, at one point, an image of her beach house was put on the internet and she did not like

1078
00:58:24,100 --> 00:58:27,800
that an image, like the location and image of her house was on the internet.

1079
00:58:27,920 --> 00:58:35,340
So she threw some, like a, an agent or whatever, like a, a professional means attempted to get

1080
00:58:35,340 --> 00:58:40,400
it removed from the internet, which then went viral and went viral in the wrong way.

1081
00:58:40,400 --> 00:58:43,820
So now there's a lot of images of her house on the internet.

1082
00:58:44,260 --> 00:58:47,640
And so it brings more, so something you want to suppress something, but then it has the

1083
00:58:47,640 --> 00:58:50,360
adverse effect of bringing a lot more attention to what it is.

1084
00:58:50,360 --> 00:58:50,560
Impact fired.

1085
00:58:50,840 --> 00:58:53,460
The exact opposite of her intent has occurred.

1086
00:58:53,880 --> 00:58:55,360
So I think that's a, that's a great point.

1087
00:58:55,540 --> 00:59:00,860
Um, I wanted to ask you guys as individuals who you plan for the best case outcome or scenario

1088
00:59:00,860 --> 00:59:06,620
or the effect you're trying to get just like in, um, in, uh, with ghost of the machine.

1089
00:59:07,060 --> 00:59:11,260
Um, but as psychological operations individuals, you can't control what that outcome is going

1090
00:59:11,260 --> 00:59:11,560
to be.

1091
00:59:11,720 --> 00:59:12,000
Right.

1092
00:59:12,380 --> 00:59:12,620
Yeah.

1093
00:59:12,780 --> 00:59:17,260
So kind of like that toothpaste scenario of like, once it's out, you can't put it back

1094
00:59:17,260 --> 00:59:17,520
in.

1095
00:59:17,520 --> 00:59:21,640
How do you, how do you advise people or how do you at least talk about that of you're

1096
00:59:21,640 --> 00:59:22,400
going to get an outcome?

1097
00:59:22,540 --> 00:59:25,680
We're trying to push in the right direction, but it may not be that.

1098
00:59:25,680 --> 00:59:27,720
Um, and, you know, how do you guys talk about that?

1099
00:59:27,720 --> 00:59:29,120
That's, that's a real challenge, right?

1100
00:59:29,180 --> 00:59:32,560
Is that videos on YouTube, anybody can see it.

1101
00:59:32,900 --> 00:59:33,140
Right.

1102
00:59:33,420 --> 00:59:40,700
Um, and I think there's this tendency, um, I won't, there's this tendency for, um, people

1103
00:59:40,700 --> 00:59:43,520
to be very risk averse when it comes to information or videos or whatever.

1104
00:59:43,520 --> 00:59:43,740
Right.

1105
00:59:43,800 --> 00:59:45,420
And I think what this has shown is that it's okay.

1106
00:59:45,960 --> 00:59:47,120
You know, it's, it's okay.

1107
00:59:47,300 --> 00:59:52,940
Um, there have been, I'm not sure how far I can go here, but there's been, uh, conversations

1108
00:59:52,940 --> 00:59:54,440
happening at a very, very high level of government.

1109
00:59:54,440 --> 00:59:59,500
Um, back and forth between our senior leaders and, and Washington and, uh, really interesting

1110
00:59:59,500 --> 01:00:02,220
because it's, it's created about the video, about the video.

1111
01:00:02,220 --> 01:00:05,360
It's created this, uh, this conversation that didn't exist before.

1112
01:00:06,020 --> 01:00:11,180
Um, and so one of the things that with the video, the video is what it is, but what I

1113
01:00:11,180 --> 01:00:14,840
want in the audience to see in that is a potential future cyber.

1114
01:00:15,020 --> 01:00:16,500
They watch that and they know what it is.

1115
01:00:16,540 --> 01:00:17,780
Oh, it's, it's idealism.

1116
01:00:17,820 --> 01:00:18,500
It's mystique.

1117
01:00:18,500 --> 01:00:23,640
It's using the medium of film and film trailers to, oh, I, oh, I feel a certain way at the

1118
01:00:23,640 --> 01:00:23,900
end of this.

1119
01:00:23,960 --> 01:00:24,360
That's cool.

1120
01:00:24,440 --> 01:00:26,000
How, how did I, how did I feel that way?

1121
01:00:26,060 --> 01:00:27,740
How did it make me, how did it get me to that point?

1122
01:00:27,840 --> 01:00:32,460
So the person that wants to deconstruct that is the kind of person we're looking for.

1123
01:00:32,800 --> 01:00:33,160
Right.

1124
01:00:33,520 --> 01:00:33,600
Yeah.

1125
01:00:33,600 --> 01:00:34,980
I feel inspired.

1126
01:00:36,400 --> 01:00:36,800
Why?

1127
01:00:37,280 --> 01:00:39,240
You don't want just the person who feels inspired.

1128
01:00:39,520 --> 01:00:43,380
You want the person who then takes the next step and opens it up and looks at all the parts

1129
01:00:43,380 --> 01:00:45,600
and how does this machine work?

1130
01:00:46,240 --> 01:00:46,340
Yeah.

1131
01:00:46,960 --> 01:00:50,660
Now the ghosts in the machine, I'm looking at your t-shirt, right?

1132
01:00:50,740 --> 01:00:54,500
That, that specific thing or art piece of artwork is in the video.

1133
01:00:54,500 --> 01:00:55,760
If I'm not mistaken.

1134
01:00:55,760 --> 01:00:57,180
I've seen those stickers everywhere too.

1135
01:00:57,460 --> 01:00:59,640
Has that just been around forever?

1136
01:00:59,840 --> 01:01:01,060
Is that the ghost army there?

1137
01:01:01,260 --> 01:01:03,100
Um, I don't remember the artist's name.

1138
01:01:03,600 --> 01:01:10,340
So, uh, the ghost army had so many artists that they created, um, entire books worth

1139
01:01:10,340 --> 01:01:14,200
of content just in their free time when they were like in the middle of this war.

1140
01:01:14,740 --> 01:01:17,920
And, uh, this was one of the symbols that they made is the ghost with three lightning

1141
01:01:17,920 --> 01:01:18,140
bolts.

1142
01:01:18,140 --> 01:01:20,540
And the symbol, if you can't, nobody can see it, but it's a ghost with the lightning

1143
01:01:20,540 --> 01:01:21,520
bolts coming out of his hand.

1144
01:01:21,720 --> 01:01:21,920
Yep.

1145
01:01:21,920 --> 01:01:22,740
It's a white ghost.

1146
01:01:23,040 --> 01:01:26,500
Um, and he has the three lightning bolts in his hand.

1147
01:01:26,780 --> 01:01:28,580
So you see it everywhere.

1148
01:01:28,920 --> 01:01:29,560
It's everywhere.

1149
01:01:29,560 --> 01:01:33,420
And what's cool is that it's, it's a sort of identity of the ghost.

1150
01:01:33,420 --> 01:01:33,680
Right.

1151
01:01:34,160 --> 01:01:35,620
Um, you look at like ODAs, right?

1152
01:01:35,620 --> 01:01:41,560
Like the team identity, the ODA of the ODA is so, it's such its own thing that guys will

1153
01:01:41,560 --> 01:01:43,780
get, we'll get the logo tattooed on them themselves.

1154
01:01:43,880 --> 01:01:43,980
Right.

1155
01:01:43,980 --> 01:01:45,220
We just talked about this the other day.

1156
01:01:45,360 --> 01:01:46,060
Yeah, exactly.

1157
01:01:46,160 --> 01:01:46,360
Right.

1158
01:01:46,380 --> 01:01:50,100
Like you don't just go into the culture of that specific team.

1159
01:01:50,160 --> 01:01:50,560
The Marine Corps.

1160
01:01:51,020 --> 01:01:53,720
Have you ever met a Marine without the Marine Corps tattoo?

1161
01:01:53,720 --> 01:01:54,280
Exactly.

1162
01:01:54,500 --> 01:01:56,760
You don't just go on that team and change the logo, right?

1163
01:01:56,820 --> 01:01:57,620
It is what it is.

1164
01:01:57,680 --> 01:02:01,820
So what's cool with PSYOP is that we, it's sort of, everyone has taken sort of the idea

1165
01:02:01,820 --> 01:02:05,020
of a ghost and they've created their own identity out of that.

1166
01:02:05,500 --> 01:02:07,700
Um, so you look at slap stickers, those sort of things.

1167
01:02:07,760 --> 01:02:12,100
It's cool to see all of the, the variations of that ghost that started with the ghost army

1168
01:02:12,100 --> 01:02:14,320
and where, you know, where all it ends up.

1169
01:02:14,320 --> 01:02:14,680
Yeah.

1170
01:02:14,680 --> 01:02:15,100
And remixes.

1171
01:02:15,280 --> 01:02:15,520
Exactly.

1172
01:02:15,800 --> 01:02:15,960
Yeah.

1173
01:02:16,300 --> 01:02:16,480
Yeah.

1174
01:02:16,880 --> 01:02:21,880
There's, uh, which, so that at the end of the ghost of the machine video was, so one

1175
01:02:21,880 --> 01:02:28,020
of the versions, iterations of the ghost you'll see as a remix is, uh, the, the short clip

1176
01:02:28,020 --> 01:02:31,240
that was actually at the end of the ghost of the machine video, which is actually, uh, from

1177
01:02:31,240 --> 01:02:32,700
a old Betty boob cartoon.

1178
01:02:33,040 --> 01:02:37,120
A lot of, we, we saw all sorts of comments on the ghost of the machine video where people

1179
01:02:37,120 --> 01:02:38,860
were like, Oh, look at this ghost.

1180
01:02:38,940 --> 01:02:39,480
It's so unfair.

1181
01:02:39,480 --> 01:02:43,400
Like they very clearly have not seen old black and white Betty boob cartoons because they don't

1182
01:02:43,400 --> 01:02:44,280
know where that image is.

1183
01:02:44,280 --> 01:02:45,380
It's like 15 frames per second.

1184
01:02:45,500 --> 01:02:49,580
It's like an unsettling filmic kind of, uh, ethereal, I don't know.

1185
01:02:49,700 --> 01:02:50,260
It's unsettling.

1186
01:02:50,520 --> 01:02:51,860
So back last summer, right?

1187
01:02:51,980 --> 01:02:55,040
The former NCO of mine would say, Hey, look at this ghost.

1188
01:02:55,220 --> 01:02:56,820
This is what I use in my presentations.

1189
01:02:57,440 --> 01:03:01,080
And, and I looked at that and I was like, Oh, geez, like, I don't like that at all.

1190
01:03:01,140 --> 01:03:01,800
That's unsettling.

1191
01:03:01,860 --> 01:03:02,920
I don't like the way he's bending over.

1192
01:03:03,120 --> 01:03:04,120
His legs are too long.

1193
01:03:04,220 --> 01:03:05,740
Like this doesn't make it's weird.

1194
01:03:05,740 --> 01:03:11,020
And so when we went back and we looked at the original video, there's this moment where a witch

1195
01:03:11,020 --> 01:03:13,700
sort of, and there's this clown that's dancing.

1196
01:03:13,820 --> 01:03:14,740
The old Betty Boop cartoon.

1197
01:03:14,820 --> 01:03:15,060
Exactly.

1198
01:03:15,260 --> 01:03:16,520
Which is unsettling in itself, right?

1199
01:03:16,560 --> 01:03:17,260
Clowns are creepy.

1200
01:03:17,360 --> 01:03:17,620
Yeah.

1201
01:03:17,860 --> 01:03:19,340
So creepy.

1202
01:03:19,580 --> 01:03:24,400
So the clown's dancing and the witch reveals the clown to be a ghost, right?

1203
01:03:24,400 --> 01:03:32,020
And so when you look at ghost and the machine as this sort of philosophical idea of, you

1204
01:03:32,020 --> 01:03:41,280
know, yin and yang, man and machine, the body and the mind, the idea that this, this clown

1205
01:03:41,280 --> 01:03:47,000
is being revealed to be a ghost is a really interesting sort of dualism and what, you know,

1206
01:03:47,600 --> 01:03:53,220
light and darkness, you know, deception and truth, a clown and a ghost.

1207
01:03:53,220 --> 01:03:58,460
And so that was kind of, that was really the inspiration point.

1208
01:03:58,800 --> 01:04:01,340
I mean, I'm seriously having anxiety just thinking about a clown right now.

1209
01:04:01,380 --> 01:04:02,040
Just thinking about the videos.

1210
01:04:02,400 --> 01:04:03,680
It is so super creepy.

1211
01:04:03,800 --> 01:04:04,160
It's weird.

1212
01:04:04,480 --> 01:04:08,760
I wanted to ask you, so you just hit light and dark, truth and deception.

1213
01:04:09,240 --> 01:04:15,000
Can you tell us about the history of the flash that I have here on my beret of the John F.

1214
01:04:15,080 --> 01:04:19,060
Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, which you'll see it on our logo if you look at

1215
01:04:19,060 --> 01:04:20,440
our websites or anything like that.

1216
01:04:20,440 --> 01:04:24,780
But essentially the background is you have the black portion, the white portion, the gray

1217
01:04:24,780 --> 01:04:29,040
portion, and the gold, the Asian gold outline.

1218
01:04:29,260 --> 01:04:32,300
But do you guys know the history of the three colors?

1219
01:04:32,820 --> 01:04:32,940
Yeah.

1220
01:04:32,940 --> 01:04:39,060
So back in the day, this was not called USA JFK SWCC.

1221
01:04:39,320 --> 01:04:43,600
It was called the Special, it was called the Psychological Warfare Center.

1222
01:04:43,820 --> 01:04:47,140
And that's actually where Psywar started.

1223
01:04:47,320 --> 01:04:50,020
And then that's where Special Forces grew out of.

1224
01:04:50,360 --> 01:04:54,860
So I'm not going to go into all the details and then like try to play that like who came

1225
01:04:54,860 --> 01:04:55,840
first because we did.

1226
01:04:55,840 --> 01:04:58,400
And it's recognized by the Usoc historian.

1227
01:04:58,720 --> 01:04:59,620
But whatever.

1228
01:04:59,980 --> 01:05:00,720
Back to the colors though.

1229
01:05:01,000 --> 01:05:04,200
The colors are white, gray, and black Psyop.

1230
01:05:04,460 --> 01:05:08,700
So what we call vanilla Psyop, the humanitarian stuff, everything.

1231
01:05:09,500 --> 01:05:11,220
Over 100% truth.

1232
01:05:11,580 --> 01:05:12,360
You have to.

1233
01:05:12,980 --> 01:05:17,560
Then gray Psyop where it's 99% truth.

1234
01:05:17,560 --> 01:05:22,620
And you're adding more of the influence that kind of the more who is the originator of

1235
01:05:22,620 --> 01:05:27,540
this information, where is this coming from, what is the intent, more obfuscated.

1236
01:05:28,100 --> 01:05:29,400
Attribution or non-attributable.

1237
01:05:29,600 --> 01:05:30,620
Well, that's black Psyop.

1238
01:05:30,680 --> 01:05:30,860
Okay.

1239
01:05:31,040 --> 01:05:32,920
Where we call it clandestine operations.

1240
01:05:33,320 --> 01:05:33,940
Cut that portion out.

1241
01:05:35,380 --> 01:05:42,260
So that's black Psyop where you're not saying who derived it.

1242
01:05:42,400 --> 01:05:46,140
It's not going to be usually attributed to the United States, usually with our partners

1243
01:05:46,140 --> 01:05:49,340
that we're working with because we want to prop them up and support them.

1244
01:05:50,000 --> 01:05:54,500
And it's fascinating for any of our cadre or listeners if they're not as familiar with,

1245
01:05:54,680 --> 01:05:56,400
you know, we work that on our berets right now.

1246
01:05:56,660 --> 01:05:58,060
So thanks for the history lesson.

1247
01:05:58,240 --> 01:05:58,560
That's really good.

1248
01:05:58,560 --> 01:06:04,380
And even seeing the SWIC, the horse symbol, like that, the horse in the SWIC symbol is

1249
01:06:04,380 --> 01:06:05,920
the Psyop horse.

1250
01:06:06,360 --> 01:06:09,300
And that's what that's referencing is, it references two things, right?

1251
01:06:09,360 --> 01:06:12,520
The Trojan horse for one, one of the greatest military deceptions of all time.

1252
01:06:12,800 --> 01:06:14,160
Whether or not it happened, doesn't matter.

1253
01:06:14,220 --> 01:06:14,660
We take it.

1254
01:06:14,660 --> 01:06:19,140
And then also a chess piece, which more of the nerdier part.

1255
01:06:19,300 --> 01:06:23,200
But Will, you were also going to say the Psy symbol.

1256
01:06:23,400 --> 01:06:28,120
So if you look at the original design from the heraldry office, the kettle that we have

1257
01:06:28,120 --> 01:06:34,660
is supposed to have a Psy, like the Greek Latin symbol, the Psy in the middle of it.

1258
01:06:35,140 --> 01:06:39,840
And so that's also something that if you look at art, the origin of even that symbol is

1259
01:06:39,840 --> 01:06:41,320
also a Psyop symbol.

1260
01:06:41,320 --> 01:06:44,540
That's what the kettle is, is it's, the kettle is actually surrounding.

1261
01:06:44,700 --> 01:06:45,680
It's in the shape of a Psy.

1262
01:06:46,980 --> 01:06:48,020
Pretty fascinating.

1263
01:06:48,500 --> 01:06:51,340
But it's not, it just wasn't something that was added to the...

1264
01:06:51,340 --> 01:06:53,780
Over time, the Psy symbol was taken out.

1265
01:06:53,920 --> 01:06:54,160
Gotcha.

1266
01:06:54,160 --> 01:06:58,980
So this is one of those things where like, we kind of take Psy op out of the history of

1267
01:06:58,980 --> 01:06:59,660
soft sometimes.

1268
01:07:00,200 --> 01:07:05,740
And by we, I mean just other soft organizations inside soft, you know, they like, they don't

1269
01:07:05,740 --> 01:07:11,320
want to put it on their Wikipedia pages that like, and we were stood up here out of nothing.

1270
01:07:11,880 --> 01:07:12,660
We're just out of nothing.

1271
01:07:13,600 --> 01:07:18,460
You even have one of the SF groups has the Trojan horse still as their symbol.

1272
01:07:18,460 --> 01:07:20,180
Yeah, 10th special force group primarily.

1273
01:07:21,120 --> 01:07:21,400
All right.

1274
01:07:21,740 --> 01:07:23,300
What does the Psy op team look like?

1275
01:07:23,820 --> 01:07:26,020
What is, what's the construct of a Psy op team?

1276
01:07:26,100 --> 01:07:28,400
We've talked about a civil affairs team with Rob McQueen.

1277
01:07:28,740 --> 01:07:30,840
We talked about a special force ODA.

1278
01:07:31,040 --> 01:07:32,120
Can you guys just hit on that real quick?

1279
01:07:32,200 --> 01:07:33,980
What does a Psy op team look like?

1280
01:07:33,980 --> 01:07:40,280
So this is interesting because it's changing or is in the process of changing.

1281
01:07:41,420 --> 01:07:48,320
It used to be, in my experiences, right, it was typically I had a detachment, right, which

1282
01:07:48,320 --> 01:07:53,800
was eight to 10 folks, and then we would be piecemealed out for missions, right?

1283
01:07:53,820 --> 01:08:00,340
So it was very common to be in a two-man team at an embassy in, say, Bangladesh or in Sri Lanka.

1284
01:08:00,340 --> 01:08:06,160
And so what we've moved away from is that sort of piecemealing of the unit of action, and

1285
01:08:06,160 --> 01:08:10,500
we've moved to what's called a psychological operations attachment, so a PsyDET.

1286
01:08:11,520 --> 01:08:13,740
And it's a 12-man team, right?

1287
01:08:13,860 --> 01:08:14,560
Sounds familiar.

1288
01:08:15,880 --> 01:08:17,900
And so that is now the unit of action.

1289
01:08:18,040 --> 01:08:23,360
So that team will deploy, and then they potentially could split up, right, to cover operations,

1290
01:08:23,420 --> 01:08:30,240
at least from a regional perspective if you're supporting a U.S. embassy or global combat commander.

1291
01:08:31,100 --> 01:08:36,100
My experience has usually been when I'm working with a special forces guy, it's the first time

1292
01:08:36,100 --> 01:08:38,000
they've ever met one of us in the field.

1293
01:08:38,480 --> 01:08:42,420
And so there's always kind of that conversation that you have to start of, like, here's what

1294
01:08:42,420 --> 01:08:45,580
I do, here's my understanding of how I can help you.

1295
01:08:45,580 --> 01:08:50,360
And then you kind of go back and forth so that they can understand, like, I'm not just

1296
01:08:50,360 --> 01:08:51,300
the leaflet guy.

1297
01:08:51,600 --> 01:08:56,940
And especially when it comes to special forces and working with, like, Navy SEALs or a Ranger,

1298
01:08:56,940 --> 01:09:02,000
like, I need to make sure they understand that, like, hey, I can do that, but let's talk about

1299
01:09:02,000 --> 01:09:05,700
what you want to do and what your mission is, and let's go in that direction.

1300
01:09:05,820 --> 01:09:07,400
I'm not trying to take us in another direction.

1301
01:09:08,000 --> 01:09:11,660
I mean, it's always like, hey, you get the psychological operations, but like, what can

1302
01:09:11,660 --> 01:09:18,460
we do, but especially for the commander, advise us on where the legalities are, like, what's

1303
01:09:18,460 --> 01:09:21,260
the limit of what we can do and that we can't do?

1304
01:09:21,260 --> 01:09:24,520
The partner force might be able to do it, but keep us out of trouble here, right?

1305
01:09:24,600 --> 01:09:26,600
And then that's like, okay, we can do all this.

1306
01:09:27,000 --> 01:09:28,740
That sounds great, but we can't quite do this.

1307
01:09:28,740 --> 01:09:32,520
And that's where the JAG always comes in, right, is you want to make sure your lawyer

1308
01:09:32,520 --> 01:09:37,560
is tied in with all of those conversations so that we're following the laws of armed conflict

1309
01:09:37,560 --> 01:09:38,420
and all these other things.

1310
01:09:38,700 --> 01:09:45,400
The way Influence works is it can very quickly go off the rails into very high levels of approval

1311
01:09:45,400 --> 01:09:49,420
processes when it comes to just authorities and stuff like that.

1312
01:09:49,660 --> 01:09:52,860
And then you sign up for yourselves because then the hire is like, wait a minute, you guys

1313
01:09:52,860 --> 01:09:53,600
are doing this illegally.

1314
01:09:53,740 --> 01:09:54,420
No, we're not doing that.

1315
01:09:54,460 --> 01:09:56,200
We were just making it seem like we were doing that.

1316
01:09:56,200 --> 01:09:59,420
We were pretending to fake.

1317
01:09:59,660 --> 01:10:01,320
Yeah, because that's happened before.

1318
01:10:01,540 --> 01:10:02,740
Like, that didn't actually happen.

1319
01:10:02,840 --> 01:10:04,260
We were just playing the games down here.

1320
01:10:04,460 --> 01:10:10,700
My favorite moment as a scioper has always been when the intelligence section of whatever

1321
01:10:10,700 --> 01:10:14,420
organization I'm working with has to approach me and ask me if this is real.

1322
01:10:14,960 --> 01:10:15,760
Yep, there you go.

1323
01:10:15,840 --> 01:10:16,320
Yes.

1324
01:10:16,440 --> 01:10:18,520
Is this real or is this you?

1325
01:10:19,380 --> 01:10:20,120
That's me.

1326
01:10:22,120 --> 01:10:23,520
Tell me about the billboard.

1327
01:10:24,380 --> 01:10:25,680
Remember your billboard analogy?

1328
01:10:26,200 --> 01:10:30,140
So here's a hypothetical that we sometimes bring up to our students so they can understand

1329
01:10:30,140 --> 01:10:34,700
some of the concepts of nesting what we call like a sciop within a sciop, where you're layering

1330
01:10:34,700 --> 01:10:37,240
your effects and you have an overt effect.

1331
01:10:37,500 --> 01:10:38,960
It's layered soft effects.

1332
01:10:39,080 --> 01:10:39,460
Exactly.

1333
01:10:39,460 --> 01:10:45,100
So if we were talking about white, gray, and black, which is no longer in our doctrine, but

1334
01:10:45,100 --> 01:10:50,160
we still kind of reference it sometimes, versions of sciop, and you wanted to do all three at

1335
01:10:50,160 --> 01:10:51,860
the same time, you could.

1336
01:10:52,540 --> 01:10:58,240
So let's say, let's transport ourselves back to 2005 Iraq.

1337
01:10:58,240 --> 01:11:05,120
Look, the insurgency is a thing, and we're there, and we're trying to figure out how we're going to tackle this problem.

1338
01:11:06,040 --> 01:11:13,720
So if I was in 2005 Iraq, and I suddenly put up a billboard with an American flag on it and said, we're here to help you.

1339
01:11:13,720 --> 01:11:16,300
Now, what would happen to that billboard?

1340
01:11:17,620 --> 01:11:18,760
Probably get destroyed, right?

1341
01:11:19,720 --> 01:11:21,420
Yeah, because one, it's tone deaf.

1342
01:11:21,860 --> 01:11:24,600
Two, it's what's it really trying to accomplish?

1343
01:11:24,920 --> 01:11:25,160
Whatever.

1344
01:11:25,480 --> 01:11:28,620
Like, this very, like, hearts and minds, overt, vanilla.

1345
01:11:29,600 --> 01:11:33,860
But, again, tone deaf, billboard.

1346
01:11:36,260 --> 01:11:37,980
How many people can actually read that, too?

1347
01:11:38,180 --> 01:11:39,220
Yeah, who knows?

1348
01:11:39,400 --> 01:11:41,860
Like, it could, who cares, you know?

1349
01:11:42,060 --> 01:11:43,920
But they know what the American flag is by now.

1350
01:11:44,900 --> 01:11:48,400
So it's going to probably get destroyed, but what if that's not the point?

1351
01:11:49,280 --> 01:11:51,000
What if I know it's going to get destroyed?

1352
01:11:51,420 --> 01:11:58,600
What if I have an infantry buddy of mine who's always going out on patrol, and I can say, like, hey, tell me how long this thing lasts?

1353
01:11:58,980 --> 01:12:02,880
And he goes out every day, and he comes back.

1354
01:12:03,480 --> 01:12:07,360
And he goes out the first day and comes back and says, like, hey, man, your billboard's already gone.

1355
01:12:08,460 --> 01:12:08,960
Heck, yeah.

1356
01:12:09,380 --> 01:12:10,120
Now I know.

1357
01:12:10,260 --> 01:12:11,320
It lasts a day.

1358
01:12:12,100 --> 01:12:13,880
So now I can put 10 of these things out.

1359
01:12:14,180 --> 01:12:14,440
Boom.

1360
01:12:14,960 --> 01:12:17,860
10 American flag, we're here to save you, billboards.

1361
01:12:18,640 --> 01:12:20,400
Let's do this together, you guys.

1362
01:12:20,660 --> 01:12:23,860
We're going to stop this, and we're helping you.

1363
01:12:23,860 --> 01:12:30,000
And all these things that aren't really happening right, because they can just look around them and say, like, that's wrong.

1364
01:12:30,160 --> 01:12:35,160
And they're going to have an emotional, visceral reaction to this billboard, and they're probably going to destroy it.

1365
01:12:35,520 --> 01:12:40,340
Well, spoiler alert, no one destroys a billboard from two miles away.

1366
01:12:40,340 --> 01:12:42,740
They're right there.

1367
01:12:42,740 --> 01:12:44,940
And this is war, right?

1368
01:12:45,000 --> 01:12:45,680
This is conflict.

1369
01:12:46,060 --> 01:12:52,600
So we're the landowner, which means we have intelligence assets like UAVs, and we can soak those 10 billboards.

1370
01:12:52,600 --> 01:12:58,080
And I can follow that person home that just destroyed my billboard.

1371
01:12:59,520 --> 01:13:12,540
And when I go to their place, and I see where they go, and I find out about them, we can use other intel and determine whether or not this is just some angry kid, some terrorist, or something else.

1372
01:13:12,540 --> 01:13:18,980
If it is a terrorist, though, we can then continue to follow him.

1373
01:13:19,160 --> 01:13:24,980
And when that terrorist cell is destroyed, they will never know it was because of my crappy billboard.

1374
01:13:25,780 --> 01:13:26,660
No one will know.

1375
01:13:27,260 --> 01:13:34,820
In fact, everyone on the FOB that isn't us that's not read into this is going to be, oh, SOB, yeah, they make American flag billboards and stuff.

1376
01:13:35,200 --> 01:13:36,080
And I'm okay with that.

1377
01:13:36,260 --> 01:13:38,500
I'm okay with them not even understanding what I'm doing.

1378
01:13:38,500 --> 01:13:48,340
I'm very much okay with them not realizing that, like, I'm playing 4D chess when they think I'm playing, like, you know, Scrabble over here in the corner.

1379
01:13:48,860 --> 01:13:49,600
All right, guys.

1380
01:13:49,660 --> 01:13:51,380
We've had a pretty awesome discussion today.

1381
01:13:51,520 --> 01:14:03,360
Some incredible themes along the line of psychological operations, some historical vignettes, some application in the modern realm of the information domain and really the competition and integrated deterrence and how you guys fit together.

1382
01:14:04,300 --> 01:14:06,980
Any closing comments from Will and Ashley?

1383
01:14:06,980 --> 01:14:08,880
Anything you guys want to leave our listeners with?

1384
01:14:09,340 --> 01:14:15,360
When I'm talking to someone who's thinking about coming over, I always make sure that I ask them what they're looking for.

1385
01:14:15,720 --> 01:14:15,820
Yeah.

1386
01:14:16,220 --> 01:14:20,440
So I have mentored more than one person into special forces.

1387
01:14:20,620 --> 01:14:27,940
I've mentored more than one person into CA because they, frankly, were more fit for those roles.

1388
01:14:27,940 --> 01:14:41,680
And so hopefully the goal of this podcast is so that special forces and CA folks and anyone else better understands what PSYOP kind of is and what our goals are so that they can mentor people into this direction.

1389
01:14:41,680 --> 01:14:43,680
Are you a super nerd?

1390
01:14:44,400 --> 01:14:45,580
Are you a computer nerd?

1391
01:14:46,580 --> 01:14:47,580
We got a place for you.

1392
01:14:47,780 --> 01:14:48,480
Are you an artist?

1393
01:14:48,640 --> 01:14:49,520
We got a place for you.

1394
01:14:49,800 --> 01:15:01,720
Are you into the sciences and you want to apply your degree and you know all this crazy stuff about, like, survey methodology or statistics or even mathematics?

1395
01:15:01,720 --> 01:15:04,540
And you want to think, is there a place for me in the Army?

1396
01:15:04,660 --> 01:15:05,940
Like, yes, 100%.

1397
01:15:05,940 --> 01:15:06,680
And it's with us.

1398
01:15:06,980 --> 01:15:08,100
We got a place for you.

1399
01:15:08,480 --> 01:15:10,100
There's all kinds of stuff.

1400
01:15:10,580 --> 01:15:12,520
Are you a DJ in your free time like Will is?

1401
01:15:12,900 --> 01:15:16,820
Or a wedding photographer or videographer like Will is?

1402
01:15:17,320 --> 01:15:18,920
So, heck, yeah.

1403
01:15:19,100 --> 01:15:19,580
Come over.

1404
01:15:19,940 --> 01:15:20,820
Come to the dark side.

1405
01:15:21,260 --> 01:15:22,260
We got a place for you.

1406
01:15:22,500 --> 01:15:24,180
And we're very willing to put you to work.

1407
01:15:24,400 --> 01:15:24,420
Yes.

1408
01:15:24,520 --> 01:15:25,980
Because at the end of the day, it's about storytelling.

1409
01:15:26,320 --> 01:15:26,580
Uh-huh.

1410
01:15:26,660 --> 01:15:26,860
Right?

1411
01:15:26,920 --> 01:15:27,700
How do you tell that story?

1412
01:15:27,940 --> 01:15:30,180
It can – the medium doesn't matter.

1413
01:15:30,860 --> 01:15:32,060
It's are you a storyteller?

1414
01:15:32,280 --> 01:15:33,480
And if you are, then –

1415
01:15:33,480 --> 01:15:33,720
Yeah.

1416
01:15:33,960 --> 01:15:36,260
And do you want to be creative?

1417
01:15:37,400 --> 01:15:44,720
So when I was in school, I was into the arts and I was doing videos in my free time all the time.

1418
01:15:45,000 --> 01:15:47,000
I was wasting a lot of time doing that.

1419
01:15:47,100 --> 01:15:51,820
And I was a sociology major, which I majored in sociology assuming that I would never apply it.

1420
01:15:52,260 --> 01:15:52,620
Ever.

1421
01:15:53,060 --> 01:15:53,620
Ever, ever.

1422
01:15:53,980 --> 01:15:56,280
I just liked it because it was interesting to me.

1423
01:15:56,940 --> 01:15:59,760
I found out that the Army does have a place for that.

1424
01:16:00,400 --> 01:16:04,920
It does have a place for someone who majors in sociology and makes videos in their free time.

1425
01:16:05,380 --> 01:16:06,760
There's – it's called PSYOP.

1426
01:16:07,160 --> 01:16:08,720
And we're always looking for more.

1427
01:16:09,300 --> 01:16:10,740
And it could be anyone.

1428
01:16:11,060 --> 01:16:15,300
Just like we said at the beginning, like, there is no such thing as the perfect PSYOP.

1429
01:16:15,440 --> 01:16:18,220
If you look at one of us, that's it.

1430
01:16:18,280 --> 01:16:18,980
You've met one.

1431
01:16:20,320 --> 01:16:21,680
Every single one of us is different.

1432
01:16:22,260 --> 01:16:24,020
And we're an entire regiment of individuals.

1433
01:16:24,360 --> 01:16:27,540
And that individuality is what makes the PSYOP regiment the PSYOP regiment.

1434
01:16:28,280 --> 01:16:28,660
Hell, yeah.

1435
01:16:28,780 --> 01:16:31,320
But you still get to jump out of airplanes and go across the globe.

1436
01:16:31,500 --> 01:16:31,880
That's right.

1437
01:16:31,880 --> 01:16:33,460
And work with other incredible people, too.

1438
01:16:33,960 --> 01:16:34,740
Chuck, over to you, man.

1439
01:16:34,740 --> 01:16:35,500
Any closing comments?

1440
01:16:35,900 --> 01:16:36,200
No.

1441
01:16:36,200 --> 01:16:37,980
Thank you guys for coming on the show.

1442
01:16:37,980 --> 01:16:45,360
And I want to know about the video and just all the stuff within it and talking about psychological operations throughout history.

1443
01:16:45,440 --> 01:16:46,800
So it's been awesome for me.

1444
01:16:46,880 --> 01:16:49,380
And I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to that kind of stuff.

1445
01:16:49,460 --> 01:16:49,740
Heck, yeah.

1446
01:16:49,820 --> 01:16:51,060
Well, I appreciate the time.

1447
01:16:51,380 --> 01:16:52,820
And, yeah, it's been fun.

1448
01:16:53,040 --> 01:16:53,700
Thank you.

1449
01:16:53,840 --> 01:16:57,360
Ashley Holtzman and Will Lamb, thanks for being on Pineland Underground.

1450
01:16:57,360 --> 01:16:58,340
We'll see you all next time.

1451
01:16:59,120 --> 01:17:01,220
What does a sprinter eat for food?

1452
01:17:02,180 --> 01:17:02,520
Nothing.

1453
01:17:03,120 --> 01:17:04,240
They fast, exactly.

1454
01:17:07,700 --> 01:17:08,180
Wow.

1455
01:17:08,640 --> 01:17:09,160
That's amazing.

1456
01:17:09,580 --> 01:17:16,520
Thanks for joining us today in Pineland Underground, the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and Schools official podcast.

1457
01:17:16,880 --> 01:17:18,500
Please tune in to our next episode.

1458
01:17:18,780 --> 01:17:20,640
We release episodes every two weeks.

1459
01:17:20,900 --> 01:17:24,040
You can reach us at pinelandunderground at gmail.com.

1460
01:17:24,140 --> 01:17:24,700
Check it out.

1461
01:17:24,700 --> 01:17:54,680
Check it out.