Narrative Intelligence: How Adversaries Weaponize Stories with Joe Stradinger

(applause) (upbeat music) - In recent years, there's been a lot of attention paid to a new phenomenon or a new area of interest for the intelligence community. It's called Narrative Intelligence. And here to talk about it with us in this episode is Joe Strattinger from Edge Theory. He's also the creator of the National Center for Narrative Intelligence down in Ole Miss. And he's the perfect person to explain this. Enjoy the episode. (upbeat music) - Joe Strattinger, welcome to Intelligence of the Edge. We are so glad to welcome you today. - Glad to be here, finally. - Yeah, we've been wanting to do this now for a couple of months, I think. So we finally chased you down. So thanks a lot for coming into the studio. So the first thing I want to do is get a little bit of background on you because you have an interesting background how you first got your start in industry, what you were working on, and now what you're doing with Edge Theory and the National Center for Narrative Intelligence. But cut it, give us the brief recap on your career. - Yeah, so I'm a Recovered in CPA. So that's how I started my career and living Europe for a while came back to Dallas. I worked for what became Accenture. But long stories in the late 90s, I started my first company and it was to influence people on chat rooms to buy CDs. So that's how it started and that's really what-- - Compactives, music, music tests. - But we thought, that was back in the days when no one knew that chat rooms were the weird place and everyone thought the internet was a place just to browse. But we learned through some friends that is a very good way to go influence people and tell stories and tell narratives and then we'd link them back to our clunky e-commerce website and we sold music. So I really, at that point, this is crazy, but that's 1998, I thought, man-- - Wow, back back then. - Yeah, like guys, the world's gonna be noisy, but little did I know how noisy it would become. I was seeing myself, my thesis was, the internet, everybody's thinking since 1995, it's just a place to go browse and search. And search really wasn't a big thing, it was browsing. And then I realized if people are gonna be able to talk or converse, it's gonna get really noisy. And so that was sort of where I, my little aha moment and been doing stuff around that space sense. - Okay, then why did you create or stand up Edge Theory and the Center? - Yeah, so Edge Theory, I realized early on through a lot of different ventures that came and went that although people like the internet and people use social media, most of the people in social media were just consuming, and not actually creating content. Most people, typically that's why the, sometimes the radical right and radical left own the narrative, most of the time, and we just, most of us are in the middle just consuming. And so I was helping a lot of different, little ventures we had helping professionals understand what to say to go find customers. And so that's sort of where I got the first start in the commercial sense. And then our world sort of changed when the government approached us. - Okay. Now the other thing to, I think, appreciate about you and your background is you are from the great state in Mississippi. Silicon Delta. - So you and I've talked about this, but can you tell us a little bit about why storytelling is something that's important? - Yeah, I don't know if you know this, but actually in the first second grade, I lived in McLean. My father was the right hand of the Mars family. And so, but we ended up in a long, long story, ended up in the Mississippi Delta. So I grew up in the poorest county in the nation, but it was the most incredible experience. So I grew up third grade on in the Delta. And in the Mississippi Delta, we don't have a lot. There's not a lot of industry. It's the most rural, but we tell stories, right? And we know how to tell stories. It's why the governor of Barbara, Haley Barbara is the great storyteller, right? And a lot of politicians from the South, but we learned that's what we did is we actually talked, we go to people's houses on Friday night and just tell stories 'cause there was no new restaurant like Dallas, Texas. There was no big, there's no sports team, stuff like that. So I really gained an appreciation for that. And then fast forward, I was very blessed to live all over the world and came back to Mississippi to raise a family. But as I've gotten older, I realized how special and how we take it for granted sometimes, but storytelling is a very powerful thing. And now if you look at the world and what we're talking about today, it's a weapon, right? Fiction is a weapon. And so fast forward, Mississippi and Oxford, where we have our company and the National Center as well, is from people love literature, it's the home of storytelling. Some of the home of the greatest Faulkners of the world. And a list of folks, so it's the right place, I think, to have what we do. - Okay, so let's talk about sort of the national security issue of play here. So you've coined the term narrative intelligence. And this, frankly, is gaining traction alongside with, you know, another phrase that people are using more and more these days, cognitive warfare, the two sort of go hand in hand. But for our audience, can you kind of briefly describe what is narrative intelligence? What is it all about? How is it different from social media analysis or previous things that maybe the intelligence committee was involved? - When you think about narrative intelligence, one of the things that I like to first state is the statement that, you know, and I think this is true since the beginning of time is those that control information, control perception and those that control perception, control the narrative and those that control the narrative control the outcome. And narrative intelligence, very simply put, is the visibility of that. And how do you make that visible when it's not so obvious? And so, you know, what's more powerful, right? A kinetic action or changing millions of minds to your position. And so, narrative intelligence is the study, the ability to understand how narratives start, form, spread, grow, by whom, whose patient is zero of that narrative, that idea. And what is the measure of effect of that narrative? Is it going to, how's it driving anything from belief to behavior to decision making? - Okay, so let's step through those phases a little bit. First of all, the detect. I mean, I think, yeah, we, for years have been witness to the power of social media. And we, everyone sort of has experience with that. But I think what you've hit on in more recent years is even more powerful. You're, you're layering bear these algorithmic, I've even heard the term, like, ballistic narratives, right? You can actually track these things from inception to where they land at their intended audience. Can you kind of walk through that part of it? Like how, how, where do you collect it? How do you collect it? - There's one of your friends that actually coin, they were intercontinental ballistic narratives. - I'm Kristen Wood. I'll give her a question. I'm not a VPNs, but the big difference of this, 'cause I always start, this is not social media monitoring, right? If you look at most, what I would say, even in the military, we're very, we're very biased to kinetic, and we're very biased to the now, the moment. The moment is too late today. And so what we do, and what narrative intelligence is, is much more of a steady stare. It's the long look, right? The steady state. And so when you think of most Ocent collection or tools that look at the now, social media monitoring, they're more worried about what are people saying today, right? What's happening now that this event occurred? Nere intelligence is the study of how a narrative shifts over time way before, during and after, some kinetic event or some now. - Okay. - And so when you do study time, we as a company have never thrown data away, which is pretty odd if both people are listening, because we're very, very specific on how we look at the data, but if you look at something over time, we look at the CCP and their proxies over 10 years, right? So when you do look at what, say, for example, our adversaries are doing and how their narrative is shifted, based on also other layers in the cognitive spaces. Cognitive warfare has multiple layers, right? What is the effects physically, or the effects in the cognitive? And so when you study over time, you can detect patterns. And so when you can detect patterns, you can save lots of time, predict things, et cetera, et cetera. So Nere intelligence is much more of a long look. - So I don't want to get too esoteric here, but when you look at, and these could be, not just social media postings, but official pronouncements, press, articles, - Anything publicly available. - Anything publicly available. All right. Is, have you developed a system or a method that then divides purpose behind these patterns? In other words, yeah, people could arrive at opinion and start sharing narratives organically. Sometimes it's directed. Are you able to discern the two? - Yeah, 100%. And we do what we do. Our AI, our proprietary AI primarily, is doing just that, right? We study every ICBN, right? Which could be a blog, it could be a webo, it could be VK and Russia, it could be telegram, it could be red note in China. It doesn't really matter. And what we do with that narrative is we classify it in lots of ways. What is the narrative is going through lots of different things? And so we can classify tremendous things all the way to the emotions that's stoking, to the likelihood that it's in sight and thousands. And so we've now catalog our own AI to know what are the narrative attack vectors that it is hitting someone, right? So this is driving the pills to emotion or pills to this. Is that helpful? - I think so. So again, this is trend analysis. So not just a moment in time, but you'll see something. And I want to get into an example here in a minute. But then the last phase of this that you mentioned is the impact, right? Now, back in my day at CIA, we use the phrase measures of effectiveness. So if an intelligence service is engaged in some sort of covert influence campaign, all well and good, right? You want to influence the target audience. Understanding the impact was always devilishly hard, right? How is your organization structured to do that? - Yep, question we get all the time, you know, especially, you know, it's easy to know that if you shoot a physical missile, it takes something out, right? It's very easy to do that measure of effect. In our world, I would argue it's very measurable. You know, there's several other ways, right? How do you measure a, if you want to call it a cognitive attack, right, for talking about cognitive warfare? And we want, and someone wants to go influence someone, or we want to see if someone's influence changed the behavior of someone. The measure effect is multi-domain. So first, as we raise to measuring the effect in the cognitive level of a narrative, because we look at the steady stare, we have baselines before, the offense was done, and then we have a base, then we can see how the baseline was affected. So if you did a narrative to want people not to do something, and they start talking about they did not do it, that's very simple, that is one way to measure the effectiveness, right? The other way, in which is what's really becoming, when you think of cognitive warfare, and all that's going on is, what are the other effects? What are the physical effects of a cognitive battle? Okay, and so there are other ways outside of a narrative intelligence when you can go in, and we partner with obviously companies to understand that they actually did not go there, and they can prove they physically did not go there. Okay, is that make sense? That's a physical move, yeah. But in our world, the answer right away is the measure of effect is very easy. If you do what we do, and you look at the long look, the reason people challenge that early on is because they're thinking of social media monitoring, they're thinking of the now, if all you have is the now, and then you throw the data away, you have no way to have any baseline. Okay. But all we do is pattern detection. So let's chew on the substance a little bit more here. What are the patterns that you're seeing, and can you give an example or two of a narrative attack or a narrative campaign at work? I think one of the greatest, and I'm up here this week talking about this to the other folks, but they're one of the most amazing examples of cognitive warfare right now, as we sit here, is data centers. Oh, right. And obviously-- That's very popular these days. Not, yeah, in certain places, we're in North Virginia, right? So, but, and I'm not here to opine what's true or false, 'cause that really obviously doesn't matter. What matters is what decisions are being made, and so you have incredible data centers, what are the stakeholders behind data centers? What's not just the data centers themselves, right, it's municipalities, it's energy companies, it's the capital markets that fund these data centers, and there is a lot of, a lot of, of narratives going around, and so we look at how our adversaries are playing in that, right, because clearly, China does not want to slow down the AI race, they just don't want to be over here, right? Okay. Russia wants to go amplify any division, that's typical Russia play, right? And so we can show very clearly, and it's stunning how aggressive we're seeing narrative warfare and cognitive warfare around the data center narrative. It's the truth or false, right? And the stakeholder of narrative intelligence can help, obviously what it can help them do is understand the decision environments that are being affected by this narrative, because in a decision environment is a city council, right, that's a decision environment. So narrative intelligence can help you, if you look at over time, how narratives are shifting can help you make some serious decisions. - Yeah, if I could just, and what is, like what is the A narrative, I guess they're probably several, but what is a narrative that concerns you around data centers? - Well, personally, I don't have an opinion, but what we're seeing is again, probably in the last 30 days, I looked at this morning, there's over 600 sub-narratives around data centers that are adversaries are amplifying. - Okay. And what, that they're-- - It could be rise in energy cost-- - Environmental danger, right? - Environmental, it's gonna kill the animals at the zoo next door, I mean, yes, it's everything. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Okay. - And again, I'm not apining, I'm just saying that, that is a clear example of a very powerful narrative, and there is a war between very, very legitimate grievances on both sides. It's a war. - And walk us through a little bit on the, you know, the killed chain of, there's a narrative that's playing out, you mentioned Northern Virginia, so maybe there's a city council debate, a narrative that's appearing there and tracing it back, 'cause you mentioned adversary involvement in amplifying it, how do you track that, what are you saying? - Yeah, it depends, you know, on what adversary you're talking about, you know, there's things like, they're typically, our adversaries, the Rhesha side, or more taking existing grievances and amplifying them big time, right? - Okay. - So they're, what I call, AI slop, is a word you might have heard lately, right? Just AI slop, right? And just amplifying existing division, right? We've seen this in adversaries and narratives for years and years, how they just want to divide us, right? And that's the most powerful thing, is not to opine but divide. And so when you just throw AI slop on everything and you just amplify both sides, it just confuses people, right? And it just further the amplification. So that's one strategy, the other strategy, you know, more so is little more, when you look at the CCP, it's much more of their style, as much more, you know, patient, long term, orderly, very myopically focused, but clearly they're all involved. - All right. And what I'm hearing underneath this is AI and technology. So it seems that AI slop is synthetic, synthetically generated by AI material that isn't real, people aren't actually creating it. - It is powerful. - But it's powerful. And so talk a little bit about like, what impact AI is having both, I guess, for the benefit of adversaries and maybe even for people like you are on the defense? - Yeah, I think, you know, back to what I was saying earlier in this, what I call the chain of influence, right? From information, perception, narrative, outcome, right? What AI has done is a different, if you look at the, you know, cave pains influence each other, but in that for generations, and then if you look at the written word in the 1400s for decades, we used it to influence each other and then there was radio and TV broadcast, which was years, but what AI has done is collapse the chain. - Okay. - And it has literally collapsed the influence chain, where what took cave paintings, generations, what took, you know, broadcast years, right, now take seconds. So AI, because of this new medium along this whole, you know, thing of artifacts of communication technology, it has literally collapsed the chain. And so it is within seconds, you can use AI to go influence someone, right, very quickly. And so if you do a lot of it, it just creates a lot of confusion. And with more confusion, it's really hard to make decisions. - Yep. Let's pick on another adversary for a moment, because, you know, I'm, you know, very focused on the Iran war and what's been remarkable in this round of conflict is the rapidity with which a pro-Iranian, narrative has gained traction in the West and sort of the sophistication of some of the memes that you see promulgated. - Hollywood style. - Hollywood style, the Lego movie motif is catching fire with young people, it seems. What is your analysis of that situation? And again, so how do you trace it back? I mean, it's just right back to Tehran or how do you view it? - Yeah, I mean, you know, again, like, you know, we use AI obviously to take out 1500 targets and took everything away from them, but they won this war in the sense of the narrative, right? I mean, it's shocking. It's shocking to me. If you ask me what shocks me and I've seen a lot of crazy stuff, it is shocking to see how sophisticated Tehran, and it's proxies, right? They might not have a ship, but they know, and what their style is, whereas the Russians like to divide us, the Chinese like to just really methodically CCP over time, Tehran is all about ideological kind of thinking, right? - Okay. - And more regional. And so they are using, we're tracking, they're using these Lego videos, that's just one of many things, but of course, some people have seen those. They're using 10X Hollywood quality videos to go literally change the minds of youth, not, of course, in our great America, you know, I say, it's America, but well over in other areas we really care about, they are influencing young people who now literally have sympathy for an evil regime. - Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. - It's, that's one thing. - Certainly bolstering their opposition of the war, right? - Absolutely. - Yeah. - Absolutely. And we saw this in Gaza, we saw this, you know, across everywhere, but I've never seen anything so dramatic of us, what we do measuring the sympathy and all these emotions that these little LEGO videos did. And what's sad sometimes, Chip, is a lot of our, you know, some people don't even know they even exist, you know, because we only get what we get our echo chamber, right? And I think that's one part that I really, we need to wake up and realize there's a lot of different mediums out there, but it's very, very real. Yeah, to the unsavisticated viewer, right? They see these videos and they have no idea that they had an origin in Iran, sponsored by Iran or Iranian sympathizers. Is your organization able to sort of tag it back to a specific actor? Absolutely. So, I mean, you know, I jumped through that earlier, but, you know, narrative intelligence is the ability to understand what is the narrative first, what is rising brewing, not the loudest, but the dominant, more the killing before the fire, as we say, it's what is it? What is the killing in the last five minutes? You know, 'cause we're perpetual, we never stop. But then who's behind it? Attribution, classic attribution. But or not, who's behind it, right? And we have a lot, you know, synthetic or not, right? And so we do classify that stuff, but, you know, so number two, who's behind it? And then of course, it's, you know, who's behind it? Could be a lot of things. And then of course, what is the measure of effect, right? On decisions being made. Decision advantage is the classic really what narrative intelligence is selling is decision advantage. But attribution, it's very important to know who's behind it. Now I had someone right after the Gaza thing, October 7th, years ago, asked me on that, you know, did we, did the IDF bond the hospital out of human history, exactly? Right, really days in the hospital, yeah. So, sir, you know, with all due respect, that's really the wrong question. It's not really, is it true or not? It's who's behind it? And what is the measure of effect it's having right now? Or maybe another way I think about it is, early days in the war, there was a hospital that suffered a hit. It was unclear who delivered it, whether it was a rogue, a Palestinian element or the IDF. I think your point is it didn't matter. It's just what do people believe? Yeah. What is the narrative that's gaining traction? You know, thinking about this now from the position of like the defense, all right? So this is happening. I mean, I would hope regardless of political stripe or anything as an American, you're sort of opposed to foreign adversaries deliberately trying to manipulate our information environment. But it's got to be challenging at the person level, right? If you go to somebody and you say, well, you've been influenced, right, your actions or your perspective on an issue have been manipulated. It's a hard, that's a hard conversation to have. Everybody wants to believe or actually does believe that they come to their belief system and their actions, sort of honestly, that they're not subject to this. How do you respond to that? How do you cope with that? Well, first of all, it depends on the customer, right? And the customer, so just obviously work with a national, a federal customer. We do not ever, ever, ever look at US citizens, zero. So we don't do that, right? At all. If it's a commercial customer, it's called marketing, right? And so we can obviously help them understand their competitors, right? That's just marketing 101. So it depends on the customer. But when it comes to Title 10, we do not look at US citizens, whatsoever. OK. OK. Gotcha. So what has the perception been like in Washington to this whole issue of near-erent narrative intelligence as a new phenomenon? Yeah. So it's been a long haul. But I think there's a lot of Lieutenant General Charles Cleven, former USOC commander, says there's a lot of muscle moving right now, is what he says. But I think we're very, very thankful, you know, obviously I've come from the great state of Mississippi. And we have a wonderful senator, Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he's been extremely supportive, as you know, for years. And so we've got a lot of Congress has taken notice. The Senate Armed Services Committee, House Armed Services Committee, on multiple things over the last several years. Thus, why people are talking about Congress of Warfare and narrative intelligence. And I think there's a lot of good things happening. Really, for a while, there was just, hey, this is something that we need to be thinking about. That was sort of the initial stuff. And then now, who owns it? And I think that's the big question at hand, in the government, who owns this? And that's something that's a big question that's unanswered. So who owns it, Joe? You know, I think it goes well beyond even-- this is a big thing. I don't remember all the history. But back in the days, before, in '99, we disband the Department of Agency for Information. Because the Cold War was done, it's over. And it's all GWOT, kind of thing. So we don't have that anymore. There is none of that, of course. It's been gone since-- there is no agency around this stuff. I don't know-- there are answers I don't know. But I know it's bigger than the Department of War. It goes beyond that. It's Department of Transportation, it's Department of Energy. I mean, this stuff is agnostic. I mean, there is impact commerce, even from a national security perspective. Our adversaries exploit everything that happens. I mean, Baltimore Bridge claps. We've done studies on that. How that was completely amplified by adversaries, right? To show that we don't have good infrastructure in America. Silicon Valley Bank. Is it a feeling economy, feeling democracy? Silicon Valley Bank years ago failed. They leverage that because we don't have good financial rule right order in America. So this is a-- I believe it's beyond USG. Our adversaries don't care so much they want to divide us. And so we obviously help commercial entities understand how adversaries are affecting their industry and/or themselves, right? Because they're a proxy for America, an actual company. So it's complicated. But I think it's-- I'm excited there's a lot of support behind it. And I think there's a good movement. But I don't think it's been answered who owns it, especially in the government. OK. But it's definitely in top of mind. Lots of owners, though, I would note the Trump administration has created a new position-- 100% in the National Security Council to sort of coordinate this. Yep. Sean, Chenoweth, who's an amazing advocate. Sean wants to put the eye back and die, right, national power. And I would-- I agree with him that information effects, diplomacy, information effects, military information effects, economics, right, and the national power. But Sean's an amazing advocate. And we were very pleased to-- I first met Sean at OSS dinner. And then I was like, this guy was great. I mean, I just-- we didn't know what to think. And as the director of cognitive advantage, he's amazing. OK. Great. So let's focus for a minute, then, just on the piece affecting the intelligence community. What changes are you seeing? Are they becoming more focused on narrative intelligence, cognitive warfare? What do you see as their role and their mission? Yeah, I think we work with intelligence side of both in the department and outside the department. And I think there's good reception. But it's been a long time coming. But I think there's more and more-- I remember your word of how we talked about Ocent or Ocentail. Is that the-- Yeah, Ocentail. Ocentail. But I think there's still a lot of people think there's only one kind of trade craft. I mean, it's really hard. This is-- 99.99% of this is all in the public domain. It shouldn't be-- it's very open. That's how they want it to be, right? So I think when it comes to the community, I think there's still-- there are certain things that are going to always be very open and are not in a classified sense. So I think there's still probably a lot of debate of that. But I think we see it being very welcomed. OK. So shift now to policy for defense. And this is a fraught issue politically because of political flare ups over recent elections and foreign interference or denial of foreign interference. So it's a sticky issue. But from your perspective, are there some sort of basic things that we as a nation should be doing to build our resiliency, or protect ourselves against bad narratives, or harmful narratives? You know, I think, again, back to the-- on the federal side, it's more we help people understand, right? What bad-- what-- understand our adversaries. I think it's a-- what's the right-- we're not a whole government, but it's even bigger. I think to really-- number one, we have the greatest story, America. We have the greatest story of all time. And-- but we're a democracy. And we obviously-- and we have freedoms. And that's an awesome thing. We never want to-- so it's very complicated. Because our adversaries know that, right? And so it's just weird thing because they know that we are-- we are very free. And that's what I love about this country. So they know that anybody can believe anything, right? So they sort of use that against us a little bit. They use our freedoms against us in a weird way. But I don't think we should ever, ever, ever go the influence route. So I think we need to-- there's a lot of things we can do with our adversaries. And that's where our focus should be on the national front, for sure. I do think we had voice from America. We had the Global Exchange Center. We had those kinds of things. Radio free Europe back in those kinds of things, dropping pamphlets, and I don't know where all those authorities sit, but I do think we have a great story, and I think we all, as Americans, if we all told our story better, I think that's the power of America, is if we all, we shouldn't rely on the government to go tell our story. We have incredible stories, as entrepreneurs, as people work in the government, and I think we don't do enough as people in America to go tell our own stories, 'cause that's the most powerful thing, and if we did, we would dilute their stories. - Okay. - But they write fiction, and then we parrot their fiction many times, media. Right or left, parrots, they're fiction, and so we need, as Americans, we shouldn't just look to the government or look to media, forget to say, to go tell our story. We need to tell our story, so I don't know how that's done, but that's my prayer, right? Is how do we all tell our stories? Every one of us have a story. - Are there any good and valid lessons to be learned from, I won't just focus on adversaries, but foreign actors who are leveraging the technologies and the information environment as it exists today. Are there lessons that US citizens, US companies, the United States government should be drawing that are actually fruitful, consistent with our values, something that we should be pursuing, because thinking back on what you said earlier about the Iran War, we're just getting, our butts kicked right in the narrative space. So US should be competing more effectively, but how can we do that? - Yeah, another thing that Kristen told me one time is she keeping going back to the word deterrence, right? We have deterrence, and we don't nuke each other 'cause we both have nukes, right? The classic deterrence, but in this space, when you don't have any thing, and you're not sharing, you have no deterrence, right? And they call our bluff every day, right? So, but I think, I think, I would just say not so much for the government, but for any business person, just put in that context, stop and ask yourself, or all of us, we should do more of our own due to just going, who's behind this, right? I mean, I don't think we stop and say who's behind this. We just live in our echo chambers, and we're all guilty of it, but I think just stopping and saying who's behind this, frisk your soul and say who's behind this, and then when you start, I mean, like think of the data center, you're not gonna go about data centers, there's a lot of people pro and con that are behind these narratives. So, you know, when you just don't believe a narrative, because that's what my neighbor says, go do your homework. You know, and so I think we need to be more critically minded, or you know, critically think, I think. But I think obviously that's where there's a person of the government, but I think most time we just ignore it, and we just go with it. - Yeah, and I can see the need for, you know, even greater education for our youth and our student population, how to kind of proactively consume information, I won't just say news, but information, and critically evaluate, that's the skill that has to be developed and learned. - Yeah, and so that's something that we're really, really, really strong on, and we're doing, we're very heavy in what we call workforce development around this world, and so whether it's, we in our lab in Oxford, you've been to it, we have, we've brought in, last week, we graduated West Point cadets, training them on being critically thinkers to understand cognitive warfare in narrative intelligence. We've had a psychological operations group, come out of Fort Bragg, we've had executes from very big companies come through, and we give certificates on this, because that's what we believe is really the best thing we can do right now is educate people, educate leaders all the way down to internships. We have, you know, in our lab, we have interns from 25 states that constantly study over 200 languages, and so we're really big in a workforce development, and that's a big thing, training people to understand this stuff. And those interns go off and they work at the Pentagon, they work at Deloitte, they work wherever, but that's a big push for us. - You know, it seems to me that this is an area that really would benefit from, you know, tighter collaboration between governments and the private sector. You know, to share my personal view, I sort of, having served in the intelligence community, and I love the intelligence community, I am a little skeptical that they will, you know, put the resources and effort, you know, necessary to do that perpetual stare, as you've talked about, for good reasons, and maybe not so good reasons, but I just think that's probably the reality. So there is, how can organizations like yours support the nation, support government in this effort? - Well, one of the things I should say earlier, that one of the biggest things in its hobby had the backing of folks up here on all levels, is that I was part of it in the very beginning, was the National Center for Narrative Intelligence. And that's the whole purpose of that, which has been supported by Senator Wicker and many others was how do we get out of the beltway, and how do we bring together government, academia and industry together to understand this thing called Cognitive to Warfare and Narrative Intelligence, and whatever else, people are defining it to be. But how do we really bring all people together, you know, so that's a FIBL and C3 nonprofit, which is a whole goal is to bring together collaboration, policy formation, research development, and workforce development. So that's, that's, so if, if there's any companies that are interested, reach out to the National Center for Narrative Intelligence, and that's why I think that we really want to get a lot more industry involved. - Okay, Joe, this is absolutely fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for coming in. Educating us on Narrative Intelligence. We'll have to have you back. Would love to see maybe some future case studies. - Yeah. - When you've got them, and please everybody, look into the National Center for Narrative Intelligence. It's a great outfit. - Right. - Thank you, Joe. - Thanks so much. - All right. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)