White House Director: We Need a ‘Kill Web’ for Modern Warfare

It's my pleasure to welcome Sean Chenoweth, Sean is Director of Cognitive Advantage at the National Security Council, and I first met Sean a couple of weeks ago. Sean, I have to admit, one of the first things I asked you was, what does a Director of Cognitive Advantage do? So why don't we start there? Good voice to start. When you had a look at the traditional elements of military power, there's a dime construct. It's not a perfect construct, but it's pretty good. The challenge with the dime construct is it's broken down into diplomatic information, military, and economic. And forever and a day, it's very clear who owns the diplomatic, the military, and the economic. And there hasn't been, at least in several decades, a good example of where people have really come to the president and the administration with an "I" option, or integrated. And it's a shame, because when you actually look at the dime construct, you don't want to take it apart into stove pipes, which you really want to take a look at it as kind of think of it as a cell. Each of those elements acts as sort of an organelle of a functional cell, and to remove any of those elements means you have an imperfect or a failing cell. And so what I was asked to do for my time in industry is come in and help put the "I" back in dime so that we can provide additional options and advantages across the other elements of dime to national power and provide the president with opportunities to accomplish our objectives that aren't just warheads on foreheads, or threatening economics, or expending political leverage with diplomatic coins. We can enhance those others, but we can also have effects and advantages by using cognitive effects through the information environment. And cognitive advantage, cognitive warfare, gray zone warfare, there are a lot of different definitions of what's happening. If you were to explain to the average American what actually is happening in that sort of gray area, what cognitive warfare looks like, how would you describe it? I think if you look through your military histories, philosophers, politicians, political science, it's all pretty clear that you can kind of pick out the elements. They all have one underlying thread, which is the political victory is the one that matters. I mean, at its core, that's really what we're talking about. Nothing's changed. How human beings are connected, how technology is affected has certainly changed. But the fact is what we really care about is what people do in the real world, in the geophysical world, the world we live in. The point of a cognitive advantage is to leverage that so that the human beings are taking behavior as favorable to outcomes to national objectives, which most of the time are also in their own, in the case of the United States, favorable in their own right. That is what we're driving to get, is those advantages in what people do in the real world by, through their sensing, to make decisions that come back to the real world and have the effects that you want. Can you give kind of like an example of what that would look like? Sure. Variety of topics. Let's say you're doing a negotiation for a piece of land or a base that you need for basing overflight until collect, something like that, that you're going to conduct in a trade-off in negotiations. You know, maybe it's going to bottom line with, if you pay more, you'll get more based off what the value proposition is, but very rarely is it that blatant and simple. So what you'd want to be able to do is understand what advantage we need in the negotiation, what's actually driving this other than maybe just cost or just danger of the risk calculus. You know, there's cultural nuances that affect things, their understanding of WASTA, political implications. So the point would be, okay, let's understand why they would be interested in this in the first place. What advantages to them? What are the cultural nuances? Why wouldn't they do this in the first place? You know, why aren't they taking this action? And what can we do to make sure that the outcome is what we want? Then there's other areas where that applies across the spectrum. Let's say we're conducting counterterrorism operations. We know an objective tends to use a particular cafe. Well, what if they were using a different one that day? What can we do to influence them to go to a place that's more favorable for options to decrease our own risk calculus, either because we're going to do a kinetic strike or it's an arrest action, something like that. Maybe we can't find them. So what if we use that for our end-to-collection and our methods to basically make them come up on comms, change their behavior so it's easier to find them, collect on them, build the data so that we can do physical actions to stop or disrupt them. And you can kind of see how that applies across the board. If you know more than the person you're dealing with, chances are you're going to be better at accomplishing your outcome. Very similar to the werewolf theory, if you're familiar with that. It's a game where two people are chosen to be the werewolf of the village and everyone else in the group doesn't know who the werewolf is. Most of the time, the people who are the werewolves win the game because they have an information advantage over everyone else playing the game. So, you know, it's a human norm. And again, I kind of point out like nothing's new under the sun. It's just that we haven't really thought through the implications of what it means in the information age that we live in where everyone is connected through software to find radios. So, you know, we're a long way away from direct sensing where it's communication and things happening in the real world. Now we have sort of indirect sensing where your fed data feeds and everything else. So we can affect cognitive behavior in ways we never imagined and we will have a thought through just as we can reach people and sell items. And, you know, if I want to find a person whose favorite color is red, whose military age male, whose, you know, really into Magnum PI, I can find that person. Thanks to their software to find their radio. And I can craft messages specifically for someone who fits that demographic and move them in a particular direction. And, you know, that's the first time in history that's really been that's that's been a case. And this has been around, like, as you mentioned, for a long time. I'm wondering, you know, you've got a really unique background. You've got government experience and you've got private sector experience. Why are those two things coming together? How does that give you an advantage in this role? I'm a bit of a unicorn. I think there's a lot of people who have served in military and have been contractors, etc. But, you know, I've I've been in a lot of just by happenstance. I happen to have been in a lot of critical locations at critical times. And I think one of the advantages that that has brought me is I saw the frustration in military when the contracting apparatus didn't work. I was empowered by industry to go fix a lot of those structures and enable the government to do it. And I'm give afforded opportunity to work on policy to make the system really hum. And I think the advantage with that is that when it comes to the information space, there's no control. And I try to emphasize this to any policymaker or power broker or decision maker that you can find. You can control a lock in the ocean. You can put an armor brigade on an intersection, fully equipped fully supported, you know, U.S. armor brigade could own that intersection. You could put a carrier group and a lock in the ocean. You know, there are things you can control. When it comes to information space, no control. It is constantly shifting, constantly changing. You have a binary decision. You are either going to participate, preferably at a level that matters or not. And whatever is going to happen is going to happen. So you could find yourself in an advantageous information space in the morning, lose it by the late morning, beat a stalemate in the afternoon, win it back in the afternoon, lose it again, and do this all through the day. And when you wake up the next morning, you're going to have to do it all over again. There is no, we have information dominance and we're done and we can crack our beers and go on with other things. That's not how this works because every day new information is being injected in the system. People are changing, altering, developing new opinions. Things are occurring and people are going to react to those things, change their opinions, adapt, age out, age in, you know, those cultural references may change. And so it's a constant flux. Now, that's one of the things I think that, you know, from the U.S. government side that we're getting head around. You know, we need effectively an information carrier group constantly operating a float in the information environment, engage 24/7 to affect the exchange. Yeah, it's like Groundhog Day every day really in this business, if you will. Unfortunately, it's not just the United States that has gotten pretty good at understanding or trying to understand cognitive advantage. We see this a lot from China, from Russia. How focused are you on their activities when it comes to doing kind of the exact same thing that you're tasked with doing? They absolutely practice these activities. I call them the cricket. You know, every challenge we're generally dealing with on the tooth and claw side falls on the cricket. So it's your China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, terrorists and transcriminals. And particularly for the nation states, this is exactly how they want to compete. You know, there's two ways to deal with the United States, asymmetrically and stupidly, largely because of our economic and military power, and they get that. They are not interested in the kinetic fight. That is an awful prospect. So the way they want to do this is gray zone activities, in the information space and the cognitive domain. And they outspend us. So I'm not going to say necessarily outperform, but I'll say, you know, if you want to compete in a level that matters, they outspend us, period, full stop. Iran, you know, probably around 1.8 billion plus minus a year, you know, maybe more with their proxies and everything else they do for in this particular type of space. Russia post Ukraine invasion 2.6 something like that somewhere in there. China, 48 plus billion dollars a year. The U.S. If I take all the activities from the DOD State Department and everything else and you put those together, you might approach 1.2 billion. It doesn't mean we're executing those funds either. It just means that that's what we've allocated. So, you know, when you think about how we outspend today for the advantage of the other parts of dime, we're hideously underperforming. And so, and again, all property administration, they are acutely aware of this and the support I've had at the NSE and across the elements of government, the departments and agencies has been stellar. And we're going to continue to work on this and get it right. We have, you know, we have three and a half more years of President Trump's administration to get this right, do the reps and sets and make this a durable policy so that the American people can start enjoying those benefits that comes when we're really focused on this space. I almost hate to ask this question, but I have to. What does success look like for you in this role? And how do you measure it? Measurement's always been kind of a funny thing is people will constantly tell me how hard it is to measure these activities. And the reality is what I found time and time again is we're actually pretty good at these. The issues with the measurements are, again, participating at a scale that matters. I'm going to measure behavior change. We need to measure behavior change. And in order to do that, we need to have clear objectives. What are we after? And the big part of that is who is the target audience that has the agency to do the thing we want? We spend a lot of time making plans, con-ops on sub-target audiences that don't actually have the agency in hopes that they affect the agency. And that's perfectly fine. There are lots of secondary and tertiary, et cetera, on down-condition and a message. But why are we doing assessments against this? We're spending, you know, we spend a lot of time and money generating assessments to TAs that don't have the agency want. Let's focus on the target audience that has the agency. And let's do this at scale. For example, I can -- I'm here in the D.C. area. I can go down to the Potomac River, drop a bucket of water in the Potomac River. I have objectively molecular increased the amount of water in the Potomac River. There isn't a capital S sensor on this planet that is going to detect the molecular change. So you didn't do enough. So the fact is, like, yeah, you might be having an effect, but you don't have a sensor that's going to pick that up. So you need to increase your scale or customize your sensing system to the effect you're having. And that tends to be where the assessments fall apart. It's not -- you know, again, I hear it all the time for decades, and the assessments are so hard. I don't find that to be actually true. What I find is that you have sacrificed assessments for effect, which is fine. It's a risk-calculus. Again, I had a low amount of resources, so I decided to put as much into the effect I wanted. And that's fine. It's perfectly fine. Let's be honest about it. Or we've done it such a low scale that we didn't see the effect. Yeah, because you did it such a low scale. Maybe you had an effect, but you weren't able to detect it. So at the end of the day, you're looking for the real behavior change in the targeted audience that matters. What are the sensors you have on that, and what are you doing to collect that? Public opinion research surveys, building the networks. And we're going to see this, I think, exacerbate further as the AI revolution continues to -- it continues at pace. I was going to ask you about that. Is technology impacting what you're trying to do, your mission, and being the director of cognitive advantage? And then how are you also working with the private sector? Because the private sector is controlling so much of the technology, the innovation and technology that the government needs to work with. So how are you doing that? I think one of the challenges I'm seeing emerge from AI is there's sort of an assumption that AI will fix all of your woes. And time and time again, I've seen the best tools out there do one thing. They model the data they have, and that's the core issue. Okay, but we don't have the data. So, you know, again, I'm back to kind of like, there's not a whole lot of new things under the sun, and the AI models are really good, and they can allow you to find new insights from the data that you have. But new data needs to be created. And so, sacrificing collection methodologies and new approaches to gather the data at the foot of a model is terrible. I mean, I always said the AI snake oil salesman I would deal with in industry all the time would come in and say, you know, oh, you're interested in that? I can absolutely model you the thing. Cool. How does that work? Well, all you have to do is provide me the data, and we'll put all this thing together, and here's where the insights are going to go. Hold on that first part there, like, we provide we don't have the data either no one has the data that's kind of the problem. So, you know, like, let's let's be honest about what we're doing. So I think AI, you know, is going to be a great boon for for for industry and for the government and everyone else under the sun. It's going to have some obviously impacts. But I think, you know, is that is that moves forward? We start looking at how we actually employ that, you know, building an agent or a token for every worker so that they are augmented by an AI that does the thing that they themselves may not be good at or saving them time. It's going to be amazing, but it needs to be undergirded by being able to detect what's actually happening out in the real world. And it's not, you know, that those two things are not necessarily not interrelated. They said like most things are kind of a whole cell that operate in one unit. We can't necessarily bifurcate these things and expect good outcomes. So you have a mission that is difficult to measure is hugely impactful. Adversaries are using as well against American citizens effectively and they're putting in some cases, as you mentioned, a lot more resources toward this. If you had the opportunity to speak to an average American who maybe didn't, you know, wasn't able to get in the weeds on all of this but but wanted to know how they might be targeted by cognitive operations by US adversaries. What would you say to them to look for? Like, how would you sort of educate them on this topic? You need to be mindful of your sources, obviously, right? When I look at the construct of how we kind of approach the cognitive warfare, one of the biggest problems I've had for at least the last 10 years has been the construct of the disinformation. And my issue is it isn't the disinformation, disinformation construct. It's the overuse of it. Disinformation and misinformation are things they have meaning but they but they mean something that is true and people use it for things that are not those things. For example, disinformation are lies. The person projecting the information knows it's a lie. They are doing it to accomplish an objective. The bigger problem of disinformation is misinformation. Those are people who are sharing those lies, not knowing their lies or taking things out of context like satire, etc. and propagating as if it were truth. Those are what those are. But not everything we have to deal with falls into that construct. There are two other portions to this that we have to be mindful of. One is missing information, which used to be the target audience wasn't informed to make a correct decision favorable to them or anyone else, right? Like, it's a tragedy that your family member died and you should mourn their loss. But stop touching the body. That's how you're spreading Ebola, right? Pretty straightforward, pretty simple. Now that we're dealing with nation states with deep pockets, that's been flipped up on its head a little bit where they are practicing active missing information where they will provide wire services into countries saying congratulations. You can use our wire service for free and we'll provide you all stuff. That's your biggest cost except for labor. Isn't that wonderful? The trick is you just have to use our wire service. So if you think stories are going to get into the press through those channels, like, good luck, man. And this isn't happening in the third world. These are happening in major countries and places that you would be shocked at, right? If you run this story, all our connected businesses that are connected through us or other means are going to pull their advertising budget from you. And so again, good luck talking about the story and your environment because no one's going to touch it, no influencer wants a piece of it because they're going to lose their incentive structure and their revenue stream. It's, you know, it's things like that. The other side of the coin and the bigger problem is the rhetoric information. So these are the things that aren't necessarily true or false. They are framed by your value system, how you view things, what you think truth actually is. There are people out there who will say, I think a communist socialist form of government that is highly authoritarian is more stable and therefore better than a liberal democracy. There are people who believe that. Okay. And just by saying, well, that's, you know, history would prove you otherwise. It's not a good enough argument. You need to engage with those people again at a scale that matters and be prepared to win the argument. We've seen this time and time again on the counterterrorism front where we would shut down the comms of a nobody and suddenly that person would come back with the reputation of being something they said was so valuable. And now they're a terrorist thought leader because the Western world thought that they were so dangerous they needed to be shut down. Instead of just accepting the fact like maybe we should just engage with this guy because no one's ever heard of them and point out he's a moron, right? There are ways to deal with this. And just because we think something as we don't like it doesn't mean it's a lie to the person that's spreading it. They might believe it. So before we just title something disinformation and say, well, it's a lie and we can ignore it. That is not adequate in the modern era where everyone is connected because, again, this person has connected to the connective tissue to the Internet. They have web platforms. You know, they can be just as connected as a government if they should choose to be. And if they have the popularity because at its core, regardless of whether or not you're a government or a celebrity or anything else, you are fighting for attention. Yeah, I think we saw some examples of this too in the news after the fires in Hawaii. There was a big push of information of like, oh, the United States needs to be doing more to help the poor victims of Hawaii and not sending money to Ukraine. That was like one of the arguments that we saw sort of come out. It seems like it's difficult for Americans to kind of navigate and know what to believe anymore in this environment. So do you look at part of your success in this current role as helping people understand more of the context they need to make decisions? Part of it is to make sure that, I mean, again, I've been more on the tooth and claw side of it dealing with foreign audiences. But even in that regard, I think that it really matters to say what are the things that we know to be, you know, we feel our objective truths and things that matter that we want target audiences to do because we know it would be better for them and better for our objectives. And then what are the things where we just want to make sure that if a debate needs to be had, we facilitate the debate so that target audience, you know, particularly with an American target audience, which is not my forte. We don't do that in government, right, or shouldn't be. But that needs to be facilitated by Americans pointing out to each other that we do need to have these debates and come to kind of consensus, understanding that there will be disagreements. We should be able to have those peaceably and come to some sort of form where maybe right now this is the policy until at other point we decide to change that, you know. Again, I've never liked the expression of living document because it's like documents aren't alive. People are alive. They can change policies. We have a, you know, we have a government system that allows us to change laws and things like that. Given the current landscape that the United States isn't right now, the world isn't right now when it comes to national and global security, do you think your job is going to be even more important in the future or maybe less? I've never thought the job wasn't important. I think the thing I'm enjoying right now is that everyone's kind of getting their head around what this means. I mean, the sort of overused expression I'm old enough to remember, but I'm old enough to remember when you would try to say, "We need to do some things on Facebook," and you would have policy makers say, "Well, I'm concerned that that would destroy Amazon and Internet commerce," and your head would explode as you're trying to say, "That's just not how the Internet works, man. We can be comfortable operating on these platforms and doing things that we need to do without destroying Internet commerce or the Internet." And now that I think a lot of policy makers in the United States, certainly, they're running their own platforms. They're all connected. They're a lot more comfortable on doing these things. Now it's the point where we need to get to where the resources and the permissions really match the ability to where we could be at and need to be at. I've generally not found too many authority problems. I generally find permissions problems. I generally find that when it comes to authorities, you almost always find that every organization actually has a framework. It actually has a framework that allows them to do things. It's just that someone somewhere in the chain can say no and is all too comfortable saying no because particularly in the past administration, they were very comfortable at avoiding risk and not as comfortable at managing risk. And that is the dynamic that we have to change. The world is a risky place and we need to be out there participating and throwing our elbows around and managing the risk, not avoiding it. So given that you are really focused on giving the United States a cognitive advantage when it comes to sort of these populations outside of our borders, how hard of a job do you think that that is? Hard. Tremendously hard because you're talking about changing culture. I don't think the activity itself and the policy and the things that can be done are hard. I think the hard part will be changing the culture and people's mindsets. Again, we've talked about the three domains. You have your physical domain, your information domain, your cognitive domain. I think that part of that is we have to explode the information domain and actually call it what it is. There is the physical domain, the geophysical domain. But I like a kill web approach. A good kill web will constitute a kill chain that is disrupted and we have to get out of the idea of just a kill chain. We need to get into a kill web mentality when it comes to cognitive effects. What is a kill web? Like, explain that to me. So when we're doing what I'm doing, planning and targeting, what I'd like to start seeing people doing is there's your geophysical world, where things exist in the real world, the place we all live, right? Pretty clear. When it comes to the information domain, though, it used to consolidate a bunch of things. The reality is when we break that down into a kill web, you're looking at your, from your physical domain up to your logic layer. The internet is not some amorphous cloud that wanders around. It's composed of a system of systems that live in the real world. It's data centers, it's servers, it's modems, etc. Where does that infrastructure actually exist? Sometimes the files are in the computer. So we need to be mindful of where does that work, how does the internet, how do these structures work, the mobile networks, etc. From there, it then creates the digital layer, right, where all the trons are that exist. So, you know, you can have effects. That's where your real cyberspace comes into play. That's how the mobile devices work with their own trons. But that is just data. Then it goes up to the persona entity level. So these are the real human beings, sometimes fake human beings, if they're personas, organizations, you know, but entities that potentially could be targeted or addressed or engaged, etc. And then there's the cognitive space. The trick on the cognitive space is it's what happens in the mind. And that mind is influenced by the sensing that goes up through that chain when they process it. And so you're able to interdict on its way up or influence on the way up, and you're able to influence on the way down when a decision is made. You know, for example, something happens in the real world. It's communicated to a decision maker, but it's going to go through the logic layer, transmitted through sensors, computers, emails, phones, etc. To people and entities who are going to process it themselves, communicated to a decision maker who is going to make a decision based off that or an individual or a bunch of individuals, how they process information. And they're all going to make decisions on how to react to that or not react to that. And that's going to go back down to the physical world when they say, I don't really like what is happening, or maybe I do like what's happening. Let's do the thing. So they're going to communicate that down, yes, launch the missiles, or let's have a protest. Here's where it's going to be. And so you can affect the chain up, you can affect that chain down. But that's how it works. And then when you start looking at, we, as United States, have a pipe that exists inside that kill web structure, so does everyone else. And it doesn't matter if you're a nation state or a family or an individual, you have your sensing sources for your indirect sensing. As I mentioned earlier, the direct conversations between people in the real world, but even now, like you and I are communicating completely over that entire structure. And that structure could be affected on the way up as we're communicating to when this is finally produced and goes back out to the real world where suddenly I have AI effects on me and I'm saying things I never meant to say, but the rest of the world is now interpreting that. So I just say that that wasn't my cognitive decision, but you intercepted on the way down. And now you would inadvertently affect everyone else's cognitive approach to what I'm communicating. Mind blown when it comes to all the things that we have to think about in this threat environment, and how I think better understanding your job and what you're doing and trying to give America the cognitive advantage is also helpful for the average citizen to understand, because adversaries are also using these same things against us. Anything I didn't ask you that you were really hoping I would? I think the one thing I'm kind of surprised you didn't ask me because I'm used to really getting beat up on it a little bit more, you know, engaged more is, you know, what is what is the future from a technology in the stand point really look like. I mean, we touched on it, but I found that to be like the question that that is just coming up in everybody's mind because there's a lot of concerns on what that would. Yeah, because I'm seeing like movies in my head and most of them are scary. Well, it's having fundamental changes, you know, I mean, it's going to be interesting to see what happens in the entertainment industry as AI takes over and suddenly people can have more access. And I mean, we're seeing that right we've seen how the music industry went through huge change just on streaming music. We're about to witness what this is going to look like from our more traditional platforms. We've seen how things move from from streaming. I think there is there is a level of adaptation that's going to go with that. I mean, one of the things that that needs to be driven in that fact is how exactly we're going to engage. There is a point where we need to be comfortable with giving sort of guidance to the AIs human in the loop. But if you think that you're going to be able to review every single message that needs to go out in an AI driven world, you're out of your mind. So you need to be able to be comfortable generating kind of here your target audience profiles and give sort of thematic guidance and let the AIs do some level of engagement, you know, against foreign audiences to kind of steer conversations in a particular direction or at least identify where a conversation might be going. So you can do the intervening when it looks like decisions are being made in a bad way. And then find out if that is a open and honest cultural nuance thing where it is about engagement or if it's being steered by your opponent. I think that we are not far and we're probably already in a game where there are AIs versus AIs as we speak in the information environment. Everyone is familiar with BotFarms. Those are increasingly easy to find out. I think it's going to be harder is when the AIs become better at simulating humans and engaging on the social media space. And then, you know, how are we going to be able to detect what's being put on ads? One of the biggest concerns I've had and I'm glad to see that we're getting closer to a solution is TikTok. TikTok is a weapons platform, full stop. And it's not the data extracted. You know, I don't think that people really understood like you can get that data through the terms and services and buy it through the ad space from what people are allowed to do on their phones. If you don't agree to the terms and service, your phone is literally just a brick. You know, its operating system is the app stores that it pulls from and you have a digital profile that allows people to sell you things because you are the product. That is what your phone does. The convenience of the camera and everything else is nice, but the phone is designed to turn you into a marketing tool. And there's been some wonderful advantages of that. But let's talk about what platforms like TikTok really are. These are things that can control things on the back and on the algorithm. So, you know, TikTok does a couple of things that are really kind of terrifying, right? It incentivizes you so you can make money on TikTok and you can get there faster than you can on YouTube. You probably won't make as much as you would equivalently on YouTube, but you're going to get incentivized faster. So, you're on TikTok. It provides a lot of really good free creative tools. So, you're on TikTok because you're getting incentivized. It's easy to be on TikTok because they give you a lot of really free tools to make the stuff. And then the really terrifying part, the part where it kind of comes up the rails, the algorithm. The algorithm right now is controlled by ByteDance, which is absolutely a CCP controlled element. And we do not have accountability on what that algorithm is doing. You know, we know that it operates very differently in a authoritarian country than it operates in a liberal democracy like the United States. And so, whether or not you mean to be a shill for the Chinese Communist Party, TikTok is going to incentivize you to be one. And, you know, and they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on that. Let me see that changing now with this new deal under the Trump administration and Oracle taking control of the U.S. portions. I don't even know what the word is for TikTok. How do you see that changing? I hope positive. You know, again, I think as long as we have 100 percent control and accountability of the algorithm, not, you know, I mean, controlling the algorithm. I mean, it's making sure that a foreign nation is not accessing the algorithm on the back end and telling it to up promote things that are creating the grievance classes and exacerbating the internal strife in our country. I think that would be a good move, you know, because there's, we've seen plenty of that, particularly in recent months, where they were foreign entities are using the Israeli Gaza conflict against the United States to mobilize violent action against American citizens. And we're seeing that where they are using social, social cracks and exacerbating that to also call out violence on American citizens. And those are foreign nations doing that. And then, you know, you mentioned, I mean, in talk to talk about the entertainment industry includes a lot. It's, it's movies, it's video games, it's ways that U.S. adversaries are already communicating with each other and trying to inject messaging, sustain ahead of that sounds also really, really hard. Well, you know, again, we have, we have a couple advantages. The age old statement that God loves drunkards, the United States continues to be true. We are an amazing people without an entrenched aristocracy in our background. And one of the advantages we've had and you see it in the military with the enlisted class or anything else is Americans are inherently free people. We are we are we are decision makers at our core. We can be affected by by influence operations and cognitive effects. Absolutely. We can absolutely be affected by those things. But you can give Americans intent and you don't need to put your thumb on them because they will execute judiciously when left to their own devices. And I still think, you know, when I look at the overseas public opinion research polling, which again, I think polling is a is a fantastic science. And most people do not understand it. But, you know, I can look at, you know, how do you feel about the United States? Not sure. They're involved in a lot of things, kind of Hem and Han, not a fan. OK, would you like to live in the United States? Absolutely. Would you like to go school in the United States? 100 percent. Would you raise your family in the United States? Couldn't think of a better place. OK, so we have a fantastic product. We need to get the brand up to par. And part of that is, you know, getting the eye back in time and competing in those spaces so that so that our our our deeds can match the words. Because right now, I think America does a lot of good that we don't get credit for. And I've seen that before, you know, before USAID was was deactivated, right? It was almost it was almost comical how much good we were doing in the United States, you know, overseas in other countries and how much for granted foreign populations would take that. They would say, you know, well, America is giving doing a lot more for you. They're the number one trade or number one investor giving all this aid. And yeah, yeah, but they've been doing that since the 50s and 60s. You know, they've always done it. So it was just you were doing more objectively than any other country, but you got zero credit for it. You know, and so again, America first is not America alone. And we need to figure out how to make sure that that that rises back up to those cognitive effects where people are aware of how valuable the number one economy is to them. So it's a really interesting perspective. Let me let me throw you out a final question by trying to get inside your mind just a little bit. What's your favorite movie? Thank you for smoking. And why? The intro scene is fantastic. It's about a cigarette lobbyist, right? So it's like he's not at the middle. It's a good I like good story structure. And so this is a story about a guy who, you know, is very good at the cognitive space and his transition to kind of figuring out how to use that for good. But the opening scene alone is worth the watch because he's, you know, sitting at one of these talk shows where he's obviously the villain and everyone in the audience hates him and everyone's there to attack them. And within a few minutes, he's got the audience turned around and he shifted the, you know, shifted the approach. He understood the fundamentals very, very clearly. And it was, you know, things like that are good examples of, you know, human beings are an interesting lot. And again, there are plenty of things that are objective truths, but let's be clear. One of the challenges with the, you know, the Intel community and other things is they'll say, you know, well, the population here is believing this thing. And if we don't get in front of it, they're going to do the following thing to our partner because their government's going to want to not accept risk and shut this thing down. And then we're going to be not able to do things here. And they'll say, it doesn't, it's not true. So, you know, the people can believe whatever they want, but it's not true. So we don't need to worry about it. But here's the deal, man, human beings have this weird habit of it when enough of us think something is true, we will go out and make it true. So you can either accept that and let's try to like prevent this thing from happening. Or again, you can choose not to participate it and they're going to do what they're going to do. And when it lands on you and suddenly you find that you're non-operational for the next 90 days, you can call me then. Yeah, it's, I'm telling you what, you've really given a lot of insight, I think, into a super complicated world that isn't going to get any easier anytime soon. And I really appreciate you taking the time to kind of give us some insights into what your role as a Director of Cognitive Advantage is all about. Shantana with SYNC, thank you so much for being here. Always a pleasure.