the Battleground is your mind this kind of tech is being deployed against you by multiple actors simultaneously all seeking to shape how you think feel believe in this episode I sit down with scientist and physician Dr Robert Malone to discuss his latest book SAR co-authored with his wife Dr Jill Malone we used to have salons we used to read books we used to discuss things with each other and now we just kind of sit by the sidelines and shoot spitballs what methods are powerful forces using to propagandize and shape behavior and what effect is this having on society everybody agrees that we become more and more splintered and fragmented and that's not a good thing and it mostly benefits our adversaries this is American thought leaders and I'm Yan Kell Dr Robert Malone such a pleasure to have you back on American thought leaders it's been a while and I'm always grateful for the chance to talk to you and learn from you in past episodes we've talked quite a bit about all sorts of things related to the covid-19 pandemic and today I want to focus really on trying to explain some of the basic approaches of the psychological warfare and also some of your proposed Solutions to dealing with this because it comes off as being frank deeply frightening frankly let's talk about SAR what is it SAR is a term I didn't invent it's actually used by the Brigade down in Fort Brag that call themselves The SAR Soldier it's a it's an abbreviation of psychological warfare which has become increasingly a core um uh function a core capability in militaries all over the world but um absolutely in the west and in particular uh the United States and Great Britain have uh really pioneered the use of psychological warfare or fifth generation Warfare militaries have encountered the challenges let's say gently of uh the modern insurgencies such as Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in which uh those uh movements have very effectively exploited uh religion and other social Dynamic kind of psychological aspects in as part of their overall battle strategy and so the uh Western militaries have found it necessary to try to develop capabilities that would be able to match or exceed those of these uh um kind of indigenous insurgencies that have been so effective going back to the Vietnam War something that struck me not too long ago is that we actually really live in a society where it's become kind of normal uh for people to try to manipulate you I mean a lot of advertising and functions this way and especially with the Advent of social media and then especially with uh Juiced up with AI to you know study your well the entirety of your profile I guess that it's called and and and feed you exactly what will impact your buying choices best that's just one example of many but we that's just how things work today isn't it increasingly so it's that's very much the norm in uh marketing for sure uh in psychological warfare is an adjacency to marketing propaganda is an adjacency to marketing it has a lot of the same uh forces the same Technologies the same approaches the same underlying psychological in social science underpinnings that uh drive it and uh earlier on we were talking about Edward bernes and in in one of the early chapters in the book we talk about the modern history of psychological warfare as very much derived from the uh academic and practical discipline of of marketing and propaganda and uh we all recognize that in marketing for instance the use of sex to sell US Foods or hamburgers or cars or whatever at some level a large fraction of society is beginning to really become increasingly uncomfortable with that and yet it is incredibly powerful the thing about this whole Suite of Technologies is that they're grounded in modern psychology really Advanced psychological understanding of the nature of the mind and how we uh form a structure of reality and how we process information and uh a lot of these Technologies and strategies are designed to access our subconscious rather than our conscious mind and uh I think that's that's a problem well it just it's interesting because it kind of I think crept up on us I did I realized myself that I I I I never thought about it right you just kind of assume that you're just swimming in it yeah you're just it's the way things are that's right that's right and I didn't think about the moral veillance of it yeah right and that nor did I the truth is nor did I until until I encountered this seminal event where our initial book on how to just prepare and protect yourself from the novel Corona virus was deplatformed by Amazon essentially we could no longer publish it or circulate it and uh we'd worked really really hard to get it out in the beginning of 2020 and we just did it mostly as a a community service based on our knowledge of of biod defense and proper uh Public Health measures and to have it deplatformed and then um asking again and again and again why have you done this to us why have you taken off our work our our mental um uh contribution and uh then finally getting the answer because it violated Community standards and then reviewing what the community standards were finding out that there was nothing that related to anything in the book uh it was just a euphemism and now of course we're used to this euphemism of violation of community standards it's that's become a widespread uh justification for all kinds of censorship and Facebook and everything else but back then it was a shock for me and that was kind of the moment when I realized that with with what was deployed during the co crisis we had moved into a whole new era and phase of the use of methods to manipulate human opinion that uh exceeded anything that I'd been aware of in the past it it was so overt that for many of us it it uh was something that couldn't be overlooked Robert we're gonna take a quick break right now and we'll be right back and we're back with Dr Robert Malone co-author of SAR so tell me more about these different sorts of tactics that are used in this psych cybor psychological warfare so there's a whole range of tactics that are used that span from uh the nitty-gritties of digital manipulation of information and targeting of specific individuals with manipulated information and that includes uh selective withholding of information or alternative points of view as well as promotion of other information or points of view that might be Al more aligned with the interests of whoever is doing the information management but one of the simplest to kind of serve as an entry level for understanding the nature of this and the logic is nudge technology nudge technology is largely emerged from uh academics in the United Kingdom and uh the example we always use when we talk about nudge is we talk about a practice that was implemented in skipple airport in Amsterdam where there was a problem with the urinals and cleaning of the bathroom rooms and men not um being careful let's put it that way and it was found that if you put a picture of a fly as a sticker inside the urinal suddenly the cost of cleaning the bathrooms went way down the bathrooms became a lot more clean for obvious reasons it would distract the person and they would aim at the fly and they wouldn't end up uh contaminating the other space so this is the really one of the simplest examples of nudge technology but nudge has evolved into a a large suite of logic and capabilities to uh gently direct individuals and populations towards a various agendas that those that are doing the social engineering think are beneficial so for instance we generally most of us now believe that smoking causes cancer it causes empyema it causes all kinds of problems both direct smoking and and secondary smoke so we can all agree it's a time to get rid of smoking so what are we going to do for the people that are still smoking even after all of the information has been shared well we can start doing things in which we provide subtle cues in a variety of different formats including in all the programming remember there was a long time when you weren't allowed to see anyone smoke a cigarette on television that was forbidden and it largely was forbidden in the movies if somebody was smoking a cigarette the the movie ratings would shift because that was you know was akin to uh porn uh showing somebody smoking was a bad thing and we needed to stop that so we were no longer to show people we don't want to romanticize it presumably absolutely the greater good for the we can all agree on that it's a public health thing uh and so there were all these subtle cues and in the in the UK if you buy a pack of cigarettes you find images of diseased lungs and things like that on the cigarettes and with any advertising a Canada as well yeah you have to you you encounter these horrible images all the time so we can all say that that's probably a good thing and then another example of nudge is is uh that we now live in in a diverse culture it's ethnically diverse it's religiously diverse and there's this history of uh of bias against people who are different and so what can we do to reduce that bias well we can uh make it so that media content shows ethnic diversity uh and shows things like interracial marriages uh and represents uh religious diversity uh and um if it's necessary in order to make the point that we uh over represent certain groups compared to the their representation in the population well that's a good thing because we want to get to the point where we are able to eliminate these kinds of biases in the general population so I can sort of see where where this this is going but this is this is all what you would call nudge that's that's very interesting and and nudge now extends down into all kinds of policies sure and this is very deliberately and systematically being deployed in all sorts of sectors it just in particular by public health right um there's something about public health and it has to do with the way that Masters in public health people are trained the focus is on the population not on the individual and when you think about nudge technology and this being deployed by governments and non-governmental organizations and transnational organizations like say the United Nations or the World Health Organization um you end up in a situation in which some somebody is making a decision that this is the way the world should be and this is the way you should think and so we're going to take this very powerful subtle ability to provide cues to manipulate how you're thinking what your emotions are what your beliefs are and we're going to deploy it for this topic or that topic or the other topic and maybe it has to do with things that are controversial uh that that there isn't broad culture consensus on uh then you're in a position where you are making a unilateral decision you could say a an authoritarian decision someone is making a decision uh about how people should think what they should think how they should feel how they should behave in the world uh without consult them and you're using a technology that is so powerful and effective that you're literally reprogramming their mind without their consent you do a really remarkable job actually in in SAR of documenting sort of the various different types of methods this being uh this being I guess kind of like a basic example yeah it's the easiest nudge is the easiest the one that that bothers me the the most frankly because of who I am as a physician is what I call psychological bioterrorism my awareness of this as a process uh was relatively recent basically you're creating a a fear narrative fear of infectious disease in this case but it can be many different things can be fear of climate change uh so you promote this existential fear this fear of death okay one of the most powerful fears we have you promote this fear through this series of steps and then you provide a some sort of a magical resolution um the the this leader or that person or this Corporation suddenly has the solution that will resolve your fear uh and then that allows whoever the promogator of this strategy to then uh capture whatever the benefit was that they were seeking whether it was profit because this I I believe this is now being done routinely as a marketing Ploy by the pharmaceutical industry one of the advantages of psychological biot terrorism it's propagated through media it's propagated through the internet in a global fashion in a harmonized way with almost no cost uh it's it's amazingly effective and this is another example of how this kind of psychological warfare can be deployed and it's the one that I find most concerning because fear is such a powerful motivator and all sorts of people I mean this is what's coming to my mind with the absolute best intentions well want to share that information this is it's very serious I used to refer to this is fear porn uh but I think that's a gross oversimplification the the the the logic behind the term fear porn like we have food porn or other things that you know people love to see certain types of Imaging and certain types of messaging and they'll obsess over it they'll seek these things out and certainly fear is a great stimulus we can see this we're about to come up to Halloween and uh people love to be frightened they love to go to these roadside attractions and they love to watch scary movies it's a great uh dopamine hit fear is really effective but this is far more powerful and more Insidious this is considered to be standard spycraft for me as somebody who considered himself an expert in biod defense and an active participant in the bi what we would Now call the biod defense industrial complex this part of what I did for a living um since I left Academia to learn that I was just a cog in a wheel that was using this approach to advance other interests and purposes and of course this has a socket with another one of the things that I talk about which is disaster cronyism so to give a recent example uh there was the promoted narrative about uh well lately it's marberg but it was about the second round of monkey pox remember we had the Canary Islands monkey pox outbreak that the who considered to be a global emergency and turned out to pretty much be a nothing Burger uh and then we had another round of that being promoted uh more recently and uh um if you tracked the news pieces that were coming out when that narrative was being being promoted by the World Health Organization and others uh and it became a a narrative a common narrative in CNN and most of the mainstream corporate media Outlets you could also track the that narrative in the literature about the stock market and about investing and you had multiple articles being run simultaneously about who you should invest in this company or that they gave the ticker numbers and what their technology was and how it related to the Potential Threat of monkey pox and what the potential upside was and this has a you know this direct socket connection with uh something that I've long railed against which is this pump and dump strategy that occurs in my industry all the time in which uh naive investors are manipulated to make investments in emerging technologies that are not yet mature you know we can all see it with the promotion of narratives about cancer treatments and some new biotech will come up with what they assert to be a breakthrough cancer treatment it has great potential it could cure cancer uh and we're all afraid of cancer uh they just need another 100 million or 500 million or fill in the blank to finally uh prove this technology and so there's a rush to invest right and and the way that ecosystem works is that once those Investments are made if that technology never matures or if it takes longer to mature than was projected or if it doesn't really meet expectations the company still holds all that Capital now the the market cap goes down the valuation of the company goes down the valuation of the stock all those people that put money into that stock have lost money but the managers the the people that are deriving their salaries that find it necessary to continue to have that pool of money they keep all that cash and they can continue to spend it however they want this pump and dump strategy so that this whole ecosystem flows from uh psychological biot terroris to disaster cronyism or what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism to uh pump and dump Investments on Wall Street to fuel uh emerging Technologies and startup companies when people encounter this or when I show the videos from the SAR Brigade down in Fort Brag the recruitment videos uh people come away dumbfounded and shocked uh and frightened I think most people have a a sense that that there's a cloud of this around them but they they it's very jarring to be forced into recognizing that it's happening well we have a lot to figure out as Canadians As Americans you know members of these free societies Dr Robert Malone it's such a pleasure to have had you on thanks for having me and uh for uh sharing your opinions and perspective also I always learn from you thank you all for joining Dr Robert Malone and me on this episode of American thought leaders I'm your host Yan Kell [Music]