CYBR.HAK.CAST
CYBR.HAK.CAST is the official podcast of CYBR.HAK.CON., where cybersecurity professionals, hackers, and thought leaders come together to share their stories, insights, and lessons from the front lines of the infosec world. Hosted by Michael Farnum and Phillip Wylie, the show dives deep into topics shaping the modern cybersecurity landscape - from red teaming and ethical hacking to threat intelligence, blue team tactics, and the human side of security. Each episode brings candid conversations with speakers and experts from CYBR.HAK.CON., offering listeners a behind-the-scenes look at the people and ideas driving the future of cyber defense and hacking culture.
CYBR.HAK.CAST
CYBR.HAK.CAST Episode 13: Winn Schwartau
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This episode of CyberHackCast features Winn Schwartau in a wide-ranging, philosophical discussion that moves from the early, experimental days of cybersecurity to today’s hyper-commercialized landscape—and into his current work on “cognitive security.” Schwartau argues that the biggest threat facing defenders isn’t just technical, but cognitive: overwhelming information flows that push humans into “mental DDoS.” He introduces the concept of “critical ignoring” as a prerequisite to critical thinking, framing cybersecurity, biology, and human cognition as interconnected systems governed by OODA loops. The conversation culminates in a provocative question: are we already experiencing a “cognitive Pearl Harbor,” where belief systems – not infrastructure – are the true attack surface?
SHOW NOTES:
Things Mentioned:
- Winn's website: https://www.winnschwartau.com/
- The Cognitive Security Institute: https://www.cognitivesecurityinstitute.org/
- Upcoming CYBR.SEC.Community events: https://www.cybrsecmedia.com/conference/
- CYBR.SEC.Careers: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cybr-sec-careers/about/ fundraisers:
Episode 13 Timestamps:
00:00 – 06:00 — Intro + Community updates
Hosts (Michael Farnham, Philip Wiley) open with banter and promote CyberHackCon, speakers, and CyberSecCareers nonprofit workforce initiatives.
06:00 – 14:00 — Schwartau’s origin story
From fixing TVs as a kid to early work in computing and security in the 1980s. Emphasis on “tabula rasa” era—no rules, everything experimental.
14:00 – 20:00 — Early cybersecurity vs. today
Discussion on how innovation has been constrained by VC pressure, commercialization, and loss of “garage-level” experimentation.
20:00 – 28:00 — Transition to cognitive security
Schwartau explains his shift from traditional cybersecurity to studying cognition, neurophysics, and system-level survival models.
28:00 – 40:00 — “Critical ignoring” vs. critical thinking
Core thesis: humans cannot process all incoming information. Filtering (ignoring) must come before analysis, or we enter cognitive overload (“mental DDoS”).
40:00 – 50:00 — Parallels to SOC operations
Hosts connect ideas to alert fatigue and AI-driven SOC tooling—reducing noise to enable meaningful analysis.
50:00 – 60:00 — OODA loops and time-based reality
Everything—cyber, biology, cognition—operates in delayed reaction loops. We are always reacting to the past.
60:00 – 70:00 — Cognitive overload and misinformation
Exploration of disinformation, narrative formation, and limits of human processing in modern environments.
70:00 – End — “Cognitive Pearl Harbor”
Schwartau poses the central question: has a large-scale cognitive attack already occurred? Discussion spans individual, enterprise, and societal levels.
Do you have a question for the hosts? Reach out to us at media@cscgroupllc.com
Keep up with CYBR.SEC.CON.:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Cyber Hackcast. I'm joined by my BBFF bald fest friend forever, Michael Farnum.
SPEAKER_03What's up, Phil? How you doing, man? Good.
SPEAKER_04How are you?
SPEAKER_03I'm good. That never gets old. I just enjoy that.
SPEAKER_04I don't want you to forget. So it's kind of hard. One of the things, one of the things I know you appreciate or think about from time to time that I I kind of feel left out. You ever go somewhere and your wife or your daughter get compliments on their hair, but we never do get compliments on our lack of hair.
SPEAKER_03No, that's the flowing locks. I wish I had the flowing locks.
SPEAKER_04So how how things have been in your world?
SPEAKER_03Oh man, busy, you know, everything getting ready for, and I know you're gonna talk about it in a second, but getting ready for Cyber HackCon, uh, getting ready to do some career stuff on our nonprofit side. Just been busy. Feel like I haven't seen you in forever.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's been a while. It's been this last week was my fourth consecutive week of conference travel. Kind of started out with uh with our and ended last week with uh a the NITA, which is a heavy equipment cat dealers, cat dealers that resell caterpillar equipment. That was kind of where it ended. So kind of good to be home for a couple weeks, but uh excited about what we got coming up next month. Yeah, I guess we'll go ahead and uh kind of make the announcement for that, but also thanks to Wynn Chartal for joining us. When I, this would be the our second podcast together because we did uh something together for the Cyber Circus Network. I think it was the first part of 2025 or the end of 2024, something like that.
SPEAKER_01Well, but that was in the past, right?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I I'm gonna bow and say, Yes, I agree with whatever you say.
SPEAKER_04You and you and Greg, Greg Carpenter was on there too.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. When Greg and I get together, things can get yeah, it was fun.
SPEAKER_04It was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we have a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_04So Wynn is also a friend of the Cyber Circus Network and Lynn and all those guys. So some of you folks are probably familiar with those guys. But I guess first thing we would discuss is our upcoming conference. Cyber HackCon is coming up really quick. It's May 27th. The call for papers is open and it actually ends on the 24th. So it'll be ending here soon. Not sure if it'll be ending before this episode airs or not, but uh that's going to be in Plano, Texas. Call for Papers and Call for Villages are currently open. Uh, our keynotes are Dustin Dykes, aka Wirefall, founder of Dallas Hackers Association, and our opening keynote is Jason Haddock's, as well as we have uh Hutch Hutchins as one of our invited speakers and also Tim Medine. So if you're not familiar with Tim Medine, he's the creator of Curb Roasting. So we'll have him as one of our featured speakers. So it should be a good time.
SPEAKER_03I think we just added somebody else to yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Larcy Robertson was also added as well.
SPEAKER_03And Marcus Carey, he's gonna we got a good group. I mean, this is a this is like a hackers hacker conference. I'm really excited about this group.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it should be a lot of fun, and also Hutch is AI CTF, which should be very interesting.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, he always does a good job. If y'all don't know, Hutch does all of our CTFs now. He's did it for uh CybersetCon. Um, he's doing it for this one, so he does all of our CTFs and he does a fantastic job. He's been doing those a long time. So well, the next thing we're gonna quickly talk about is Cyberset Careers. So, for those of you don't know, Cyberset Careers is a nonprofit partner of Cyberset Community, which runs all of the Cybersec events. You might sense a theme there, cyber, cyber, cyber. It's cyber without an E, though, because we're like that. That's what we like to say. And uh I've literally got it on the back of my shirt, it says that. And uh the other reason when is because our domains are easier to register without the E. I'm just saying it's a realistic I I I get it.
SPEAKER_01Finding domains these days is oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_03So try to get an AI domain. So CyberSet Careers is the nonprofit partner we have, and that is all about workforce development. And we're doing our first fundraiser for that group, and uh that's all workforce development for veterans and students, by the way, trying to get them into cybersecurity, trying to get them up to speed on cybersecurity, get them in a world where they have experience in cybersecurity and aren't just entering in without any good experience. So that's a big thing for us. So we're doing our first fundraiser down here in Houston. Uh, that is a clay chute. So if you're in this area, skeet chute, clay chute, it depends on it. It we're calling it cyber clay chute because cyber, but it's gonna be real clays, clay pigeons, not fake ones, not ones on the screen. Um, so we're doing that on June 5th at the American Shooting Centers in Houston. Um, this is all for fundraising. This is 501c3 nonprofit. So, all of this, if you want to sponsor or if you want to get tickets for it, it's all tax deductible. And you'll have instructors coming out showing you how to shoot if you never shot skeet. We're gonna have raffles, we're gonna have prizes, all kinds of good stuff. I'm really excited about this first one. Uh, so we'll have the link in the show notes, but um, yeah, cybersetcareers.com or.org again, cyber without the e. And then the big event, obviously, September 15th, 16th, CybersetCon is coming up as well. That's our big flagship. So I think that's it for announcements, Phil. Right? We got anything else? I believe that's it. Well, I think probably time to talk to Wynn if he's ready. He's got his notes.
SPEAKER_01All I'm probably one of the few people that still has reams and reams of paper, lots of ink, a small printer room.
SPEAKER_03You got a print server, that really tells if you're a geek.
SPEAKER_01No, no, no, it's not that much. No, yeah, it's just an HP that's replaceable that actually has survived for like seven years.
SPEAKER_03Good. So I think the ink is more expensive than the printers now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, if you go to the off-brand ink, it's sort of fun because an HP yells at you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, doesn't like the little code or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Doesn't like the code, then I get an email. Your your print quality is gonna suffer. Gee, I'm printing out black and white notes for God's sake.
SPEAKER_04Oh gosh. So, yeah, so uh pretty interesting your background. So if you wouldn't mind kind of sharing your your uh origin story, kind of how you got started up until what you're doing today. I don't know, or do we have that much time?
SPEAKER_01All right, when I was all right, when I was six, I was fixing televisions for 50 cents a pop. There you go. Because all you had to do was take the back of the TV off, unplug it, discharge a capacitor, remove the tubes, go down to the drugstore, find the bad tube, come back, and you were a six-year-old hero and got 50 cents. So that's my origin story. Well, I'm really glad you didn't get blown across the room by you know my father was an EE, he was uh part of the original uh radar development people from uh World War II. So I had um non-optional electrical engineering stuff from the age of five.
SPEAKER_03That's an important thing, is that exposure to stuff that early on gets you excited about it. Yep.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, if you want to eat dinner, this is gonna work. If you want to be if you want to live to 10, you're gonna make this.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I'm actually actually old enough to remember when the little setups they had at the drugstore where you go in there and test the tubes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I nearly bought one of those machines in early COVID, and I'm glad a lot of people talked to me out of it.
SPEAKER_03It'd have been cool to have sitting around, though.
SPEAKER_01No, we all have enough cool shit sitting around. No, no, all right.
SPEAKER_03So you survived six. What happened?
SPEAKER_01All right, the way I got into security, I went into rock and roll and all that, did uh TV production, TV shows. I was on the audio side of things and tiny bit of computer stuff back then because automation and TV was just coming along. Burned out of that, burned out of audio concerts, records, and everything, took some time off. And there used to be a thing called newspapers, and they used to have a thing called classified ads. And it said, want somebody to help us with computers. And I go, good, I know nothing about computers, but they're digital. I grew up analog. This has got to be easy. And I went and got a job at a startup place in California, and then uh two years later, Western Digital asked me to consult on a security project. Can you help us? Absolutely. You know a lot about security, absolutely. This is 1983, and that got me hooked. That it was like, and so so that that got me started. And then we uh started do designing some stuff for uh DOD, got a DOD validated security product, one of the first in the PC world of the days. Then we did a NOVE security system to meet what was called in those days C2 standards, did some and then did some really cool, weird stuff for the British government, and it it just you you know the path. We don't really predict it, it kind of happens to us, and you have a choice. You can flow with it and learn from it and make some awful mistakes, or you can get out of it. And I just fell in love with the freedom to be able to we were dealing with Tabula Ross and none of us knew what we were doing, we were all making this up as we went along, and sometimes things worked.
SPEAKER_03Do you think that freedom still exists today?
SPEAKER_01With the current way that capitalism and VC and all of that requires quarterly profits in the tunes of billions of dollars, no, no, uh, things get diluted, ideas get diluted. Uh, having uh there there are a few little places that allow moonshots, DARPA does some moonshot stuff. There's some things here and there, but sitting around the your your own lab and coming up with something that's really cool and having a hope of making a living off of it, not becoming a billionaire, just becoming a useful member of the community with some cool tools. No, the opportunities have really left us because of the economic climates and and the focus on quarterly returns by billionaires. That's my opinion, by the way. Nobody else's opinion.
SPEAKER_03Well, and that's fine. I mean, I don't necessarily disagree. I deal with a lot of VCs and see, but I also see I don't know this anecdotal. It's not like done scientific research on it. I'm sure I could go get Richard Steen and or somebody to show it, you know, what the startup numbers are these days. But it seems like there's a massive number of startups out there, and but to your point, that's all VC driven, right? There's nobody starting something out of their garage again. They all have to go the angel.
SPEAKER_01I I have no doubt there's some angels around. I've met a couple of angels and I know a few that do that, but the culture is not what it was 40 years ago, where again, we didn't know what the hell we were doing, we didn't know what we were trying to do, but we went ahead and did whatever that meant, and that evolved into what we have today into into uh today's culture because this was not a multi-trillion dollar business back in the early 80s, other than the if you guys remember January 1st, 1983, one of the biggest events in cyber history. Anybody remember January first? January first, nineteen eighty-three, and it has nothing to do with Unix expiration dates. No, that was the breakup of AT.
SPEAKER_03Hey, Wen, can I be really mean and say I was eleven?
SPEAKER_01You're not being mean.
SPEAKER_03I I wasn't even 11. I was I turned 11 later on.
SPEAKER_01It was a big deal because then you had sudden seven baby bells, and over the next umpteen years it's collapsed back into what three, arguably.
SPEAKER_03Well, my dad worked for um Southwestern Bell, so I do remember like he had the whole phone jacks, you know, where he climb up on the pole and had to make a phone call. I I still don't know why I didn't become a freaker because with all of the stuff. I know why, because I ended up in backwoods, Mississippi, and I didn't like you know, had a computer but didn't have the uh way to get to the bulletin board sensors anywhere without doing long distance, and my dad wouldn't teach me how to get around that stuff.
SPEAKER_01Back in the 70s when we were building studios on zero money, you know, your bosses we'll pay you a salary, but you've got to do everything else for free. Well, how the hell do you do it? Figure it out. So we used to a dumpster dive down to the HT buildings, and they you know, like in a in a rack of relays, if one relay goes bad, they replace the whole rack. So us, you know, early 20 somethings, that's gold. And so stealing, not stealing, repurposing all of the old telco stuff to make it work in audio. That was a hell of an education. And again, that's something that you're it's I'm not sure you could pull off today quite as easily.
SPEAKER_03I don't know how. I mean, my brother's an old phone guy as well, but you know, he had to come to me to learn what IP was when he was moving everything to IP telephony, and all of those old systems are just nobody's using them.
SPEAKER_01I wanted to go to work back when high school and I were negotiable. We'll just leave it at that. I I wanted to go to work for do research and learn everything. So the first place I went to was IBM, and I passed all the tests and all everything, and then they said, everything is great, all you gotta do is look like him. Because I mean, you know, it was 17, 18 years old, the hair and whatever. And there was a picture of Ross Perot, and it was oh hell no. And so the across the street uh on Madison Avenue and 56th Street was ATT. I said, I'm gonna go for applied job at ATT because they got bell labs, and I could go out and move out to Jersey, Morristown, I think it was, and okay, and I'll learn and they'll teach and all that, and that's great. So I went to the uh HR lady, and I know math, I know English. I mean, all the stuff that you needed, and I had an electronics background, and then the final test. Back in those days, we had cables, but yay big, but 2048 twisted pair. And the HR lady picked them out and says, What color is this? I'm colorblind, which at that point disqualified me from getting hired by any telco whatsoever. And so I went into the music business instead.
SPEAKER_03Wow, music business.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, my father was a producer, he produced Peter Bowman Mary, Bob Dylan, all that stuff. The Lonius Monkey was in those. My mother was in the first audio engineer at NBC during the war in New York. So um, I grew up around it and it resonated, and that's what I went and did.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, my first boss, and I you're talking about Nova and stuff. That was kind of my first networking stuff, but he he was colorblind. But by that point, they had the systems where you know you could tell from end to end if it passed, so it was completely fine. But yeah, he was all the time, he would be like, Hey, Michael, what what yeah, that's green, that's real.
SPEAKER_01I missed why we're we're not gonna go through all of this that my hubris of believing I could fake it.
SPEAKER_03That's hard.
SPEAKER_01So we actually had to end up building colorblind test equipment in order to buzz out and then work on circuits. So you had to build your own tools that weren't available. Again, that was, I guess, hacking, for lack of any other word, was designing stuff to make it work. That's in hacking is engineering in many ways. In a lot of ways, like the ultimate hack. I always go back to Apollo 13, and uh they bring out this box of crap and they dump it on the table down at the mission controller's office, and he says, This is all they have, this is what you have to make them survive. Failure is not an option, and that is one of the greatest hacking episodes in a movie, I think. That has been over.
SPEAKER_03And then Big Bang Theory comes along years later and spoofs it with the toilet episode where he has to fix the space toilets.
SPEAKER_01Well, and Big Bang, and then they prove the earth is flat, and so good.
SPEAKER_03I think Artemis had something to say about that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, where are all of those alien cities on the back side of the moon?
SPEAKER_03It's a shame. I was really hoping for them.
SPEAKER_01Well, with AI, they got real-time adjustments now. So the feed they're getting, the feed that we're getting are two different and somebody's in the middle of it, right?
SPEAKER_03Just leaking, leaking code all over the place. Thanks for running through that. That's a good backstory.
SPEAKER_01Then you're in security and it happens.
SPEAKER_03Well, that's why we wanted you on here, though, is just because you're the stuff you've been through and stuff you've seen. It's still there's to that's why I asked the question about the freedom because we just don't see that purity of creation as much as we used to.
SPEAKER_01So I got the department, was it the Ministry of Defense in and I've never had a clearance, but I think that most people in the hacking community keep their lips sealed much better than people who are in often in the community uh intelligence community. We we really guard our knowledge. And the MOD said hypothetical question, and this is in the days of 2400 or 1200 acoustic modem. Hypothetically, how can we secure a spy who gets killed in a phone booth on the streets of London when he's online with us? And that was the question. And I I remember, and it was one of those duh easy ones. It's easy. You put in a magnetic switch that detects it's basically an accelerometer that detects the angle of it. Is when the angle goes over an acceptable level, you'd make the disconnect because the guy's been shot. Oh, we never thought of that. Yeah, it's I mean, it's a real simple analog thing. So there were a lot of opportunities back in those days to do that because again, nobody really knew much of anything. We were all fake it till you make it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, what do you think? Well, um, yeah, let's I think jump into what you're doing these days.
SPEAKER_01Oh, uh, let's see. Uh it's no secret. I sold my last company uh nine years ago, and uh I'm not gonna say getting bored with cybersecurity, but it kind of echoed what had happened to information warfare when I was in doing an early cyber war stuff with all the militaries and what have you, is that it became so big, so commercialized, so the fun was gone for me. It was just, and so I started poking around into neurophysics and the quantums and all of those things. And the company that had bought us gave me uh the opportunity to run around the world and go to conferences that I had no business going to whatsoever. But that was bring out the notes and talk to a lot of people and start learning. So now I'm involved very heavily with cognitive security, cognitive defense, and then mapping out how cybersecurity, biological security, and cognitive security are really three different flavors of uh an OODA loop system, a system that's required for any system to survive, whether it's at the cosmological level or at the quantum level or anything in between. All systems have certain basic requirements. So I started looking at the world through that standpoint, and then I published a book called Metawar, which uh brought a lot of these concepts together about all the loops and how they all tie together. And then it was the addiction, all of the things that involved with cognitive security. And I'm finishing up a project now, and I know Bill uh knows about it, and it is I'll be doing it in uh Houston, and it is called Critical Ignoring. Uh fundamental problem that I postulate, again, coming from cybersecurity, is that the cognitive problem, the biggest one that we all have, is too much information. And they go, Well, go critical thinking. No, you can't you cannot go critical thinking. There's a step before that because if you critically think everything that's coming at you, you are in mental DDoS mode. You cannot do it. We have limits. We have a sensory input limit of 11.1 megabits per second, while we have 10 to the 24th amount bits amount of information coming at us from out here. We have our biological filtering, which does the critical ignoring of the light that we can't see, the sounds we can't hear, all of those types of sensory things that are outside of us. Then we take that 11.1 megabits per second that hits the uh nerves into the brain, and we have to reduce it to roughly two to four kilobits per second for processing internally, and then for conscious awareness between eight and 40 bits per second. All of that is about critical ignoring and paying attention to those things that really matter to meet one single goal survival. That's it. It's only about survival. When we look at cybers, DDoS, well, that's the that's the end. That's it. You know, what are you gonna do? And this is what we have been doing to ourselves since the dawn of the digital age, which I put at 1956 for another stories reason. And so I've been working on how do we not turn off the idea of critical thinking, but put it at the proper place in the OODA loop, the proper place in the survival loop. And the proper place that you have to do that in order to be able to do critical thinking is to get rid of 99.99% of all the stuff that doesn't, I don't care, it doesn't matter, I don't have time for it, it's pure BS. Working out the taxonomies that we use in biology, we use them in cyber and applying them to cognitive defense so people can actually start critically thinking inside of a range that our systems will actually allow comfortably. Does all that make sense? I'm sorry. I I'm trying to figure out how to put these all in sound bites and I'm experimenting on that.
SPEAKER_03Experiment with us. That's fine. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, it's the I mean, literally, I just before we started recording, I know it's not an exact correlation, but I think it is a correlation. It's like that's security operations centers, just for instance. I mean, that's you know, there's you got a constant analysts have a constant input, and we worked for years and years and years to try to limit that input down by saying, Okay, let's let's do some analysis on these detections to say if that's real or if there's not, so let's whittle that down. And we have machines and machine learning prior and what they called AI prior to what they're now calling AI to whittle that stuff down. It didn't do a very good job, but I was on a call with an somebody doing a POC on an AI sock, and they show the numbers that it's whittled it down to get the analysts where they have a reduction and how much they have to pay attention to. But not only does it whittle it down, now it's actually doing the analyst work to go look up all the stuff to see if something is real. And then if you're lucky, it gives you a feedback back around to reduce the detections that you got in the first place, so you don't have to worry about those later, so you even further reduce it. But then there's always more input coming in later on because attacks don't just stay static. You know, people find new attacks, they do new stuff, so you've got those inputs. Yep. To me, it it's in that same way, you're just applying that to the human brain and trying to help reduce those. Am I am I summing that up?
SPEAKER_01You're summing it up instead of the human brain, I would say cognitive process, okay. Um, because there's a big difference there. But the process of what we react to, how we behave, what makes us behave in one way or another is exactly what you're saying from the cybers is how we behave, is how our body behaves, and it's how the universe behaves. They're all identical. It's a matter of finding. How do you make these translations so we can end up speaking similar languages around the same meta theme, if you will, instead of trying to battle semantics? And that's one thing throughout my career, I have absolutely said, I'm not going to argue semantics. We all know we're talking inside this box. Let somebody else go worry about the name. Can we go on from there? The details are devilish and they're really important, but I am really working at the meta-level, trying to get people to think more of a systems view that lives in an loop. Interlocking OODA loops.
SPEAKER_03Would you repeat that again? Walking OODA loops?
SPEAKER_01No, interlocking.
SPEAKER_03Oh, oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01Interlocking OODA loops that no system survives on its own. You may have the butterfly effect where the systemic influence through a chaotic interaction is unpredictable, but that's still part of the loop. It may be minor, maybe a very minor, unlikely, stochastically limited amount of capability effect, but it's still there. And uh looking and it's us human when you're walking down the street, you're got right now. I'm hearing a siren from uh an ambulance, whatever. Do I react and no, because my brain has learned how to determine distance, so that is not an immediate threat. If I'm sitting on the streets in New York and I cross because I got my phone and I hear this loud ass honk coming from a taxi, my first gut reaction is to whoa! Step, step back and survive. This is all about adding the time domain into our cognitive processes because our cognitive processes all have built-in delay functions. And it ends up from a philosophical standpoint, we are living only in the past. We are reacting to the past, but we're only living in the past and trying to react now, but the now that we react with is still in the past, and this becomes very difficult for people to really you know to put this into their brain. But this is also exactly how cyber systems work. You're looking at something that happened in the past and then you're reacting to it. And if you go back to my book on time-based security, protection had to be greater than time-wise in the time domain than detection and reaction. If you can't do that, you're gonna lose. And this is the original work that came out of the military with uh Colonel Boyd in Montgomery in 1984. Get inside the adversary's decision loop in order to have a chance of winning. Cyber military dogfight, biological, get your shot before you get too infected. Cognitively, create cognitively, we need to do that. Critical ignoring, be willing, take the time, and have the awareness that you don't need to know it all. It all doesn't have to come into your system because if it does, you're gonna lose. You will lose. And then you hear people say this thing uh, well, I multitask. There is no such thing as multitasking, does not exist. The brain cognitive functions are a linear function. What do we call them way back when? Uh in the 70s, and he's time share. Oh, yeah. Time are exactly and our cognitive processes echo more of what computers did back 50, 60 years ago, such as they were. And we have missed that point. Michael, you don't need to agree with a thing I say. These are just my these are my momentary beloviations.
SPEAKER_03Well, what I'm trying to do is take time to react and absorb when I'm trying to take your advice seriously, make sure that I'm understanding all of the you're gonna critically ignore all. I don't ignore, I think it's there's I love the fact that there's philosophical pieces to it, and then there's you know, realistic, like realistic things we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, and anything that makes me think. So I'm reacting to what you're saying, and I'm saying, okay, what's the and maybe this is a question, like maybe it's not. I'm gonna I'm gonna get there.
SPEAKER_01It's like that's what Bill said up here, the thing warping minds since 83. I have made you think and you are stuttering, I have done my job.
SPEAKER_03You have, you actually have it because it's a it's a reaction. What I'm trying to, I guess what I'm trying to get to is like what is the implication to the fact that we are always reacting, and like what are we do? What are we doing when we're not reacting? Are we just always reacting? Because there's that's that whole thing is like, what are you thinking about? Nothing. Well, that's BS. I know you're thinking about something, but you're reacting to something when you're thinking about something, even if it's only inside your own brain. Like, where's the origin of that? And what are the implications of figuring out where that origin is?
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm not gonna go too far down that, but you're implying uh the Buddhist thought cone. Okay, and the thought cone says, Where's the germ of an idea? Where's the first thought come from? And it's down at this irreducible, allegedly irreducible point at the beginning, and then it manifests itself up. And they teach this in Eastern philosophies. The same thing occurs in particle physics. So I'm just trying to take things, apply it here. Is it gonna be perfect? No, do I have all the answers? Oh, hell no, I don't. But I do know that reducing the amount of information that I allow into my processing is very calming. When I went well, and for example, and I it's obnoxious, but again, we're you know, for the hacker community, we're all doing a hacker thing, we've all got our drinks sitting there, and bury a good buddy of mine, heels got when what about saying? And I go, I am critically ignoring you. And he goes, Why? Is that because I don't have the bandwidth, the time, the thing, plus I don't give a shit.
SPEAKER_03Let's see if I can tell some of my employees that see what happens.
SPEAKER_01Critically ignoring because that is full of shit.
SPEAKER_03Well, maybe not the last part, just like I just don't have time.
SPEAKER_01It's I don't have time is at the top of the there's six elements of it. I use six because a lot of the work that is um Bill says home, and I'm gonna go Buckminster Fuller with uh triangular uh-based reinforcement and tensegrity in the way information works, in the way physical world works, and it's the same way the brain works. So, yes, that there's a lot of philosophy that goes in behind this, absolutely. And what I'm working on now is with uh with the as you know, I'm with a computer, not computer, cognitive security institute. And I'm one of the directors so much that I direct, I just kind of think and warp minds, I hope. We're trying to come up with some methodologies that would be similar to what Oxford did on the misinformation, disinformation tests that they started in 2017 and work out is there a process by number that we can measure with some degree of efficacy, whatever the margin of error may be, that can also be corrective. Does that exist? So I'm engaging with the academics of the world. I say, I know the question, please help me reframe the question into your language. Now, can we take that and give it to some of my cyber guys to do a POC? So that's kind of the world I'm spinning in right now. It's I'm not nobody's gonna do this alone. More than ever, the implinarianism that is required for the cybers is required for the cognitive and for the biological, as we're learning more and more of uh a number of years ago, statistical biology. What the hell do that? Nothing, but now statistical biology and all of the biomechanic, all of those things are now new fields because of the interdisciplinary effects of disruptive technology. So I want to our brain is being completely disrupted all the time. So I'll ask both of you a question, and I'm gonna be silent, waiting for your answer. Have we, US, in the world, are we, have we seen, are we part of a cognitive Pearl Harbor? Whoa.
SPEAKER_03Okay, I think I know I think I know what my answer is, but I'm I'm kind of waiting to see where Phil goes with it. Oh, you're you're passing the ball to Phil.
SPEAKER_04No, I can kind of I can kind of see that, especially, you know, you kind of mentioned earlier disinformation, all the overloaded disinformation out there could be could be used to weaponize, so I could definitely see that. I mean, it's just kind of crazy the amount of disinformation you see out there nowadays compared to what we saw in the past, or I guess maybe it's maybe easier to recognize in some cases.
SPEAKER_01That's part of the process of developing Pearl Harbor because even the traditional Pearl Harbor we referenced to was slow, it was a very slow, meticulously planned event until bang in the cognitive space. I make the bang parallel of belief. Salute dying belief. Has that happened to us already?
SPEAKER_03Well, does does that imply that the meticulous planning, because the meticulous planning that went into Pearl Harbor, they knew why they were doing it, they knew what they were doing. Or is there an implication that if we are there? First, the question is if the bang has happened. So at which stage are you saying Pearl Harbor? Like they've reached it.
SPEAKER_01I'm not gonna ask the question in any public forum.
SPEAKER_03Okay, yeah, I didn't I didn't think you might.
SPEAKER_01Um I thought you know, because Bill just said it over there on the side.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, maybe that Bill that's not getting in the pot in the podcast.
SPEAKER_01No, I you see what I'm saying here. I totally get what you're saying. It's a cognitive pearl harbor that occurs at three different levels, it occurs at the individual level, yeah. From uh your parents at the age of three. What do you believe? What do you think it's all belief systems? It's all our entire existence is about the narrative, our belief system, our filtering system, our mental processing system is all about the narrative and how we handle the narrative. Then we have a cognitive pearl harbor that can occur at the enterprise level where so much information has gone out. Well, we'll apply somebody today's Enron, right? Oh my god, now with today's tech, we can predict it and it's going to be anything, and then suddenly the entire Enron thing collapses because of a cognitive Pearl Harbor. Was that what happened back in those days? No, I don't know about Enron to say that, but maybe it's worth looking at. And then you have societal, community-based issues of entire cultures suddenly believing something that may or may not have any validity whatsoever. So there's various levels, again, interlocking three large domains. And I merely question people are we in a cognitive curl? Has it already happened to us?
SPEAKER_03There's I know we're getting to the end here, and we're probably gonna have to let go, but I think that we're getting to the end.
SPEAKER_01That is just too precious a statement for you to make right now.
SPEAKER_03We're getting close to the end of this podcast, but I think there's always been some form of that, and that's just to me, you know, you can debate a lot of things, but from a human evolution standpoint, how our minds that we we formed in societal groups at one point, and that was an evolutionary positive because it gave us the ability to survive. So the narratives that get created were a function of very small communities that were built, and as those got larger and larger and larger, that evolutionary positive, I think you would say, probably can be easily turned into a negative because of the amount of information that's coming in and your brain trying to do exactly what it's always been trying to do, and the narratives get formed, we're tribal by nature. You know, it's I don't know at what point we get out of that.
SPEAKER_01You you are now walking down part of the path that I've been walking down now for almost nine years, and you're searching for that aha moment. I haven't found an aha moment yet. That's journey. There's a gazillion aha's of with oh shit.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, aha's turn into oh shit.
SPEAKER_01Just saying, so we could actually have a debate about this in Houston.
SPEAKER_03I can't well, and I know we're probably gonna have you on Cyber Setcast, but we might as well say here that you're gonna be doing the opening keynote at CybersecCon in September, um, which I'm extremely excited about, especially after this conversation. I'm very excited about it. I you you know, in all warning and fairness, and Houston has got a fairly conservative ideal behind it, but there's we've got so many people coming from so many different walks of life here too, because we have the extremely diverse group of people in sorry, and you sit my microphone in Houston that I think there's going to be a lot of people who are gonna be you're gonna get a crowd wanting to talk to you after that keynote, and I'm really excited about seeing it.
SPEAKER_01The thing about a lot of it is that you can explain, I can explain something to you. What I am incapable of doing is understanding it for you.
SPEAKER_03It's lead a horse to water about all you can do.
SPEAKER_01Again, I I try to keep all of this out of divisiveness, but unfortunately, the very nature of this entire cognitive discussion at all levels of it is about difference, yeah, and coexistence. And we do not know how to coexist with the technology that we have created. We created AI in our own image, and we don't like what we see, yet we're plowing ahead.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, nothing's gonna stop this train now. No, Wynn, thank you very much. My pleasure.
SPEAKER_01I'm sorry I couldn't give you all the answers you were hoping for, Michael.
SPEAKER_03We don't have time for you to give all the answers. The answers would all be we can always jump on another session somewhere else that we're not recording, so you can speak more freely on some of those.
SPEAKER_01Um, I think we we all need to be really, really careful and frame these discussions in non-divisive ways. You know, it's about the narrative, it's about how the brain reacts, it's all of these things. We understand enough of the pieces not to have to bring in the divisiveness issues themselves. It's much more interesting for me, especially to look at from the engineering and physics standpoint and the biophysics, the neurophysics behind it, to see what's going on and interfacing with a tremendous group of people in the Cognitive Security Institute. 50% of them are PhDs, and they actually talk to me and they don't laugh me off. It's kind of it's fun to have a new challenge. So back to your opening point. Yeah, I'm having a lot of fun now with something that is tabula rasa. This is all new.
SPEAKER_03This new stuff, fascinating stuff. Yes, it is. Phil, I think we got some media partners to call out too, right?
SPEAKER_04Yes, yeah. We'd like to thank our media partners, barcode, cyber distortion, and the kill chain radio podcast. Thanks.
SPEAKER_01Shout outs to all of them, they've all been tremendous.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yeah. This is kind of stuff I can see. Lynn going about Lynn, no, going about 30 miles deep, dude.
SPEAKER_01This is oh no, when Len and I get again, we're back to LobbyCon. We did this at the CS icon and the LobbyCon, I was again, there's a lot of the academics there. And I said, Well, what are you gonna do for dinner? I said, I'm gonna do LobbyCon and order in. Well, what does that mean? Oh, good point. I said, show up here and you'll get it. And they there were maybe 12 of us for the evening, and it ended up going till I I got I left around noon midnight, and they kept going till four in the morning. But that's what lobbycon is. Yeah, and so fun. Yep, absolutely a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_03All right, sir. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01Thank you very much, both of you. Thank you, Bill, very much. Look forward to talking about whatever I can do to help out in Houston. Can't wait to see you.
SPEAKER_00This has been a Cybersec Media production. Cyber Hack Cast is hosted by Michael Farnum and Philip Wiley, with production and editing by Lauren Andris. Our music is by Kike Guts. The views and opinions expressed on this show are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent. This show is for informational purposes only and does not render or offer Twitter personalized advice. Subscribe now so you never miss an episode. You can find all of our podcasts, articles, blogs, and conference talks on cyberspecmedia.com. That's cyberwithout. And follow cyberspecs media on LinkedIn at Instagram and Facebook at Cyberspecs Media. You can keep up with CybershatCon by following us on LinkedIn at Instagram and Facebook at Cyberspec Con. And you can learn more about CybershatCon or by TikTok at Cybershatcom.