Beyond Manipulation: The Annihilation of Personal Agency with John Kirbow

In this episode, Louise Levin sits down with John Kirbow—a former U.S. Army Psyops specialist—to unmask the tactics used to fracture societies from the inside out. From the warzones abroad to the algorithm-driven battlefields of social media, Kirbow breaks down how psychological operations, false binaries, and engineered outrage erode our ability to think, connect, and choose freely.

With the calm of a therapist and the precision of a strategist, Louise and John explore how we reclaim agency in an age of manipulation. The conversation moves from critical thinking to compassion, from division to dialogue—urging listeners to look beyond the noise and interrogate the systems shaping their beliefs.

This isn’t about left or right. It’s about waking up.

His Book: Combating Domestic Extremism: A Post-9/11 War Veteran’s Perspective – How lessons from the warzone can help us confront radicalization, conspiracy, and civic decay.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Welcome to Soft and Savage. I am your host, Louise Levin. If you are interested in our conversations, please subscribe and like and follow our channel. My guest today is John Kerbo. John, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Yeah, sure. So I'm uh I was in the Army for uh six years active duty and part of what we call psychological operations and information warfare. And after that, I was in Afghanistan for the Defense Department with this thing called the human terrain system. So that was about understanding the tribal system, human behavior, language and culture, and kind of being a marriage counselor, so to speak, between army combat teams and Afghans. And then I did I return home, saw parallels between that and how divided we were tribally in America and the need for better ways to be on the ground and understand our communities, understand the fractures within our society, and try to bring about an understanding of human behavior so we could better tackle these issues and you know, generously listen to one another and close the empathy gap. And how we were continually failing to do this as we is hyperpolarization pushed us more into these rival groups where ideology became paramount over facts and truth. So I also have a background in language, I speak uh um Arabic and um Russian, some others, however, imperfect. And I've I've I've learned a lot about uh you know various ideologies, from radical Islam all the way to white extremism, and I see a lot of commonalities. So, what I do now is I try to equip uh fellow veterans and citizens about information warfare and propaganda and how extremism works and how ideologies can be um have really made inroads through social media and into our minds and how our minds are vulnerable and and how how do we really communicate that to people across the red-blue divide, across demographics. So that's kind of what I focus on now through writing, podcasting, and trying to socially innovate, if you want to make that a term, you know.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

But you are not you're not actually allowed to to do anything to intervene with with U.S. citizens.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

This is something that's oh no, now when I say psyop background, I'm talking about formal psychological operations. When I talk about what I do now, I just apply the tools of understanding people. I mean, you could talk about mass marketing, psychology, advertising, Edward Bernays, who I know you you study a lot. Um so an understanding of how people are manipulated, that's a general, you know, topic. And I try to apply those tools and what I learn from the war zone about radicalization, sectarian violence, uh, counterinsurgency, how you know the best way to respond to riots is to address the conditions that led to those riots, not to fuel polarization on Twitter. So I try to apply this and educate fellow citizens. So when I say psyop in an official sense, that can only be done in, you know, through authorized areas of operation. It can't be done against American citizens or NATO allies, and nor should it be. It's it's a constitutional kind of firewall we have where the government shouldn't psyop the American people. So whenever I'm on Facebook or Twitter and some left-wing or right-wing nutcase is saying, you're a psyop, you're psyoping me right now, I don't know what they're talking about. You know, so it's it's one of those words people throw around a lot, but formal psyop is a complicated process. People use the term loosely to talk about getting into people's heads, but that's really not what it means. It's a formal, systematic approach to identifying a target audience, understanding their vulnerabilities, and delivering messages in a very careful way and disseminating them in a very pinpointed manner to influence the desired behavior. That's what the Kremlin has been doing for about a century, and they're probably the best in the world at doing it. But you could have a right wing or left wing or whoever, even someone without an ideology, you could have a troll in their mom's basement apply the principles of Psyop. Maybe they're not doing the full process, but they're applying those tools, and they're dividing and manipulating people on social media by simply understanding how to press their buttons. You could take, I could train a 10-year-old to manipulate adults on liberals and conservatives fairly easily just by pressing the right buttons.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Same thing, the uh Well, and I think one of the buttons, you know, I think one of the buttons, if you're using that metaphorically, is that because we have all been suckled and weaned on a patriarchal authoritarian paradigm, which is an either-or paradigm. You know, either you're either you're a success, you know, a winner or a loser, either you're a virgin or a whore, either you're one of us or another. You know, and I think that what's happened is that this one of us or another has has recently been weaponized. I think that the you know that that that's always been a part of the way that Americans have felt about one another, but I think that it has been exacerbated and it has been weaponized in the in the in in the past decade.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Aaron Powell I couldn't I couldn't have said it better because um the this black and white fallacy, this all or nothing, this false dichotomy, I think I personally think that's one of the most destructive um fallacies of our brain because I see it not just weaponized, but people fall into it on so many topics. Like uh if you're not if you're against the war, you're a traitor, you know. You could go, if you're not for everything the social justice movement says, you don't care about people of color, you must not support social justice. And of course, these are all false choices. Um I saw this a lot during um analyzing Islamist propaganda and insurgent propaganda um in Iraq, for example, saying, you know, or in across the Middle East, where the only alternative to a secular authoritarian dictators, often backed by the West, is to join an Islamist group and the purity of Islam in a political form, known as Islamism, is the only option to these secular dictators. And of course, that leaves out the third option, which is democracy, freedom, human rights, and a kind of Islam that's compatible with that system, which plenty of people are supporting in these emerging movements for, you know, human rights across the Middle East and Iran and places like that. So this false binary is, I think, hardwired into our brain. When the brain's in anxiety mode, it tends to split things into black and white. You know, like if, for example, when I was at the Left Forum a couple years ago, and I like to go to these forums so I can really test the waters and try to have productive conversations and depolarize. So I worked with a friend of mine who's an ex-Muslim and another guy, and we had a panel on how we can talk about problems within Islam, including human rights abuses, while also defending Muslims and combat bigotry against Muslims and distinguish between a system of ideas and traditions versus Muslims as people. A lot of people on the left have so much anxiety about being Islamophobic or hate crimes against Muslims, which is a serious problem, they're afraid to say anything bad about Islam. And we saw this with a Sam Harris Ben Affleck dumpster fire moment on Bill Maher years ago, where you know Ben Affleck just went off on Sam Harris. A lot of people do this as a reaction, they split the world into black and white. Like if you any criticism of this must mean you're against that. They don't, it takes energy for the brain to find the nuance to say, okay, we can do both. These things can both be true. There's bigotry against Muslims as people, there's also problems within the Islamic world that we need to address. And there's so much nuance there. Um, but a lot of people on the right tend to, you know, create this black and white paradigm and and the left as well, and it creates these flame wars that leaves out the space for nuance and compassion. And social media amplifies this because it amplifies the most obnoxious voices on any side. So it does this with feminism, with BLM, with Antifa, with with the men's rights movement, where it's just this false choice. If you're, you know, subscribe to everything on this side, you know, everything feminists say, or you're or you're a sexist, or if you say men have any rights, then you must be anti-women or whatever. Or if you buy into anything feminism says, because it's a very wide tradition of ideas, then you must be against men's rights. It's a very it's a s it's like a third-grade way of thinking, but adults do it, I think, more than children.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Oh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Well, but if you look at social media, you know, I could never understand why everybody was so apoplectic about what Mark Zuckerberg was doing, because I was in marketing years and years ago, and we used to collect all kinds of data on people because at that stage of the game, the most sophisticated tool that you had to market were were mailing lists. And we would collect as much data as we possibly could so that we could do direct mail pieces that were targeted. And I thought, you know, who cares that Mark Zuckerberg is just doing the modern day version of collecting data. But when I saw the social dilemma, and I saw that not only are they collecting the data, but any of the information that you get when you're on a search engine or the advertisements that are coming into you are geared specifically and directly to what your proclivity are, what your prejudices are. Because I could never understand why it was that some of my friends, who I consider to be very bright and very articulate, um, were were reading the same things that I was reading, and they had a completely the direct antithesis, you know, of you know, version of what it was that I was talking about. And then I realized it was because they weren't reading the same thing that I was reading.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

So these algorithms expose them to things they want to see. It's like a feedback loop of their own bias, their own confirmation bias. So these they call them filter bubbles sometimes, where people filter someone's news based on their political preferences and their ideological bubble. So really you're living this in this illusory, illusionary world of like-minded opinions that you're not being exposed to counteropinions. And this is this means that a lot of liberals and conservatives literally read different news when they have their coffee in the morning. Absolutely, yeah. It's and I think this puts people in a frame of mind where they're not seeking truth or nuance or facts. They're not asking the question, could I be wrong? They they're they're more after the feeling of psychological comfort. They just want to be on a team. And that goes against everything I grew up believing when I read, you know, Carl Sagan and the need for intellectual curiosity and intellectual humility, the willingness to change our minds and continually adapt is what fuels everything from science and innovation to, for example, the development of mixed martial arts or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, where you're always tapping out and always learning and adapting, reality-based pressure testing. It applies to business innovation, pretty much every domain of human progress we have is enabled by being wrong and adapting and being able to learn from our mistakes, the willingness to be wrong, except ideology, pol political, you know, religious and political dogma, where you can't change your mind. And that's so destructive to arriving at answers in everything from police reform to poverty to systemic racism to um how to deal with propaganda and polarization. And and the fact that m so many people don't see this on both sides, it it it drives it it's beyond me. I don't understand how people think this mode of thinking is productive. It's like it's good in everything else, but somehow you you compartmentalize with your politics and you think in this dogmatic, rigid ideological style, and you think that's the best way to so I think we need to revive pub culture. We sit down, drink a beer, and uh talk to each other, pull the stick out of our fourth point of contact, you know.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

And well, you mentioned Ed Bernays, and he was the one that introduced this concept in the United States. Ed Bernays is considered to be the father of public relations. He was uh Freud's nephew. And he brought public he brought propaganda to the United States of America, but he felt that the word propaganda was unpalatable, and so he called it public relations. And he he developed the first system for persuading people, persuading quote unquote people. And actually when Goebbels, who was the minister of of information and propaganda for for um Hitler, was devising his his programs, he was looking at Ed Bernays to And it's weird, Ed Bernays refused to work with the Nazis, but his stuff was used by you know and he did work with a lot of sketchy people like the fruit company and the Guatemalan coup and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

But an analogy I use, and then like I told you, I'm writing a book on explaining psyop and information warfare and disinfo for average Americans to understand, kind of have an easy playbook to recognize it and respond to it. I think propaganda is like the force in Star Wars and the use of psychological warfare is like the force. It's not inherently good or bad. Different people can tap into it and use it. Absolutely. Unfortunately, there are far more Jedi's, or no, they're far more Sith right now tapping into this than there are Jedi. So you need to build a team of Jedi. But the difference is Bernays had this benevolent dictator mindset where like an elite few, an anointed few know what's best for society. So we should subconsciously nudge people to doing what's best for them. I take the opposite approach. I think we should equip Americans directly to have the tools to understand how they're manipulated, to understand you're biased, you're an emotional creature, your mind is not rational, and you can never, you can never be fully rational. You're always going to be manipulated, but you can can you can minimize that to a great degree, and you can recognize propaganda, and you can decide to reclaim that space of information warfare, and you can decide to be a patriot by you know training your neighbors, educating your peers and friends, and and finding a way to fight back. So I think it's about empowering people and educating people on how this stuff works and really making it user-friendly.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Well, I think Steve Bannon would disagree with you. I saw him do a program at uh at Oxford University. I don't know if it was two years ago or three years ago, and he talks about the fact that it is impossible to persuade anyone to do anything in this in this time in America. That's not true. Because people are so saturated that they believe everything or they believe absolutely nothing, and all you can do with people is motivate them. And if you look at Trump, when Trump was in power, Trump, whether you were for him or against him, he motivated everybody to rage.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

Yeah. On a large scale, he's there is some truth to that. It's hard in mass, it's very difficult to change people's beliefs and values. What is easier to do during election cycles, and political science would would agree with this, is to try to motivate and galvanize the base. And that does work for election cycles, but it unfortunately has a long-term effect of reinforcing these bubbles and it doesn't address the core problem. I think it is possible over time to create new coalitions of reason and compassion and try to replace this idea of dogmatic left versus right ideology with a new paradigm where the real axes are truth, facts, and reason, regardless of what your political ideology is, and also compassion and human freedom and dignity. So if you're gonna ru people are gonna respond to a movement about, say, police reform and injustices toward people of color, instead of immediately kicking into a political defensive mode where a political brain signals that this is the other team, we have to be against it. So they immediately think of the most extreme versions of this conversation. They'll think of extreme quote-unquote SGWs or cities burning or whatever, and they'll say, Oh, I want nothing to do with this. That's a the political brain firing off. What people should do is say, all right, where is human dignity being violated? And if it is being violated, what are the facts? What are the best ways forward based on real data to reform and change our system and have something in line with human dignity? That should be the guiding question. And if we do that, we don't really need these polarizing ideologies. So I challenge people, show me one thing that left or right ideology can do that can't be better done by reason and compassion. Show me one thing. I've never heard an answer to that.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

But but people are very polarized around what human dignity is and what comprises a human dignity.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

That is true, that is true.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

So how would you how would you implement that? How would you go about it? I think a lot of it goes How did you do it when you were when you were overseas and you were embedded in science?

SPEAKER_01 16:10

That's a good question. When you're overseas, you have to accept that while we have our enlightenment traditions and we have the idea of equality and um human well-being. So, for example, we believe in the abolition of of torture and we need due process. We believe in men's and women's equality, at least in theory, however imperfect that is. Um, it implementing this in different cultures and different parts of the world is obviously very impractical. It can't be done from the top down. You can't force people to change. It has to be bottom up, it has to be locally led in a way that's compatible with their uh cultural framework. So, movements for women's rights, for example, in Iran, they have to be led by Iranian women voicing what they want. And what we can do is simply empower them and help them, give them cybersecurity, give them platforms, give them crowdfunding, and try to assist them as best we can, but it has to be their voice and their desires. And then eventually that can sway the culture to adapt itself. So those movements for human dignity have to be bottom-up. And that's when people talk about a kind of landscape of of like human rights and beliefs and values, though those are going to be different based on the human terrain of a country. And I use the word human terrain to refer to people and culture and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

So Well, that's probably also why movements always have a youth component, because if you indoctrinate slash educate children from from early on, then then you've got then you've got a cohort group that is believing in and and and proselytizing whatever it is that that you're trying to Right.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

And it's hard it's a hard line between um giving pe empowering people with knowledge to make up their own mind versus indoctrinating, because I don't think we should indoctrinate kids, but I think we should expose them to what's right. So 50 years ago, the idea of you know equality in a lot of ways we take for granted today would have been considered unthinkable. So, you know, it the the line of indoctrination versus universal human values and rights and dignity tends to it's like the moral arc, as Dr. King put it, you know, the moral arc, the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but it's a long road. So, you know, I think we should inculcate people with values, but also with critical thinking so they can think for themselves and learn to change their mind. And one of the biggest mistakes, I think, during COVID, in a way that's unrelated to the medical side, was um obviously aside from all the death and all the unpreparedness, the fact that we had a whole year of online education. There's been philosophers and people who have proposed a lot of ideas for teaching critical thinking. And when people say critical thinking can't be taught, that's not true. It can. People have to want to learn it, but there are ways to do it virtually. And we could have had a whole program to educate an entire generation of children to think for themselves. We didn't do it. We didn't even have that ready to deploy.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

Because in whose best interest? You know, you get back to propaganda and you get back to who's in charge and who's, you know, who's got control of the conversation. And again, I go back to Steve Bannon, you know, he's saying that you cannot, you cannot, you know, convince anybody to do anything.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

It's a very general statement. But unfortunately, but I get, you know, I mean, these people have this idea that the masses are sheep and they have to nudge them. And a better way to understand this is our our minds, whether we're smart, quote unquote stupid, educated or not, our minds are extremely vulnerable to different types of biases, motivated reasoning, belief. You look at um things like, you know, whether it's QAnon or it's any belief system, Scientology, etc., people think, oh, nobody smart could ever believe these things. No, smart people sometimes are better at rationalizing things they arrived at for emotional reasons, and you can manipulate that and press those buttons. Um, we're also uh social creatures, social primate species. We like community, and a lot of radicalization or beliefs come from the need to be part of a community online. And so as humans, we have to admit we're not sheep, we're not dumb, but we are vulnerable, our minds are vulnerable.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Do you feel we're tribal as well?

SPEAKER_01 20:12

Extremely so. I mean, and now the specifics of tribalism is mediated by environment. Like we're not naturally racist, we're not naturally divided in any particular way, but we do tend to bond and form groups. That in-group-outgroup dynamic is part of, I think, hunter-gatherer survival for hundreds of thousands of years. But the environment is what mediates that. So if you raise someone the right way, they can, they don't have to be tribal, but it is somewhat hardwired into us, I think, to form teams. Um, and hyperpolarization in social media has exacerbated the degree to which we side with tribe and team over truth. So, like you could do an experiment on Facebook, take something a conservative said and a liberal said and switch them around, or take what Trump said or did and make attribute it to Joe Biden, and you'll get people to side against their own team without even realizing it. Yeah, it's kind of pathetic. And I I don't I don't look down on most people, because I don't think most people do this, but far too many people do it. And it's not because they're stupid, it's because they're engaging in a poisonous style of thinking, a very dogmatic or tribal style.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

Yeah, and again, it's I think the vulnerability is because we have all been suckled and weaned on a patriarchal, authoritarian, either-or paradigm.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

Right.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

So we're all ripe for that. We're all ripe for that.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Well was that about you said, do you think we can uh No, I think that we're all ripe for that.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

We're all right for that for the divisiveness because of the way that we have been conditioned.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Well, I do. I think it it's it's it's a very simple way of processing information. Like it takes literally takes energy for the brain to really engage in nuance, but it's easy. It it's an energy saving mechanism to just see the world in all or nothing. So that false binary, um, I think it's dangerous across a range of no question. Um and how do we undo it? I I think we need more like face to face conversation. Maybe across um videos and things like this, where we're sitting down, and just have people humanize each other and hear that have that space for nuance and get more people to you know engage in that space. And I think the same tools that polarize people through social media can be used to bring them together in some ways.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

Unquestionably, it just depends on what what's who whoever's running the show, what their agenda is.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

Right. It really is. It really is.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

That's interesting. Um, one thing about Edward Bernays, I want to bring up uh an example is uh that can be relevant today. So convincing people that it's their idea and that it's part of their, you know, self-interest or their movement or their group. Um, the lucky strike cigarettes, you know, we called them torches of freedom for women to be empowered, you know. And, you know, another example is uh De Beer's The Wedding Rings, using social proof to convince people you have to spay, you know, spend like three months' salary on a wedding ring. That's all propaganda, that's manipulation. That's planned by corporate marketing. Um, and I use these examples to get people to think that, you know, you're not dumb, but you're vulnerable. And then you can give them examples of how people are manipulated by political propaganda campaigns, by Russian influence or Iranian influence, or a troll in their basement with a fake BLM account, a fake neo-Nazi account, a fake men's rights activist account. And they use these bots or these not just bots, but like fake accounts to create flame wars and just get people really riled up.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

So Yeah, I think that, you know, to to sum up, I think that it's not that people are bad or good, it's not that they're right or wrong. I think that they're just vulnerable. Absolutely and I think that unless you understand what the mechanisms are for convincing you that there really is no way to mitigate the information, you know, and and to process the information that's coming in in a way that is gonna form it gonna help to create community and understanding.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

So well, thanks for thanks for having me. This has been a really fun conversation.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Thank you very, very much for coming. I'm delighted to have you. All right, great. Thank you for joining us on Soft and Savage. If you enjoyed our conversations, please subscribe and press like.