The Jordan Harbinger Show - 172: Clint Watts | Surviving in a World of Fake News

Episode Date: March 14, 2019

Clint Watts (@selectedwisdom) is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Center For Cyber and Homeland Security at The George Washington University, and author of Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News. What We Discuss with Clint Watts: How our own cognitive biases are manipulated in an effort to destabilize trust in each other and our very way of life. How hostile entities like ISIS use social media for propaganda and recruitment. Why Western governments can't, even with their relatively infinite wealth of resources, beat ragtag Somali Twitter pirates and ISIS shills. How bias creates social media bubbles, what forms they take, and why this is dangerous. How we can fix these issues or at least mitigate the effect they have on our lives. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. Right now, more than ever, we're hearing about fake news. What we're not necessarily hearing about, though, is how our own cognitive bias is at work and what causes rifts in the American and Western populations. Our guest today, Clinton Watts, he chases terrorists online. We'll hear firsthand how the enemies such as ISIS uses social media for propaganda and recruiting. We'll learn why the government can't, even with all its resources, beat rag-tag Somali Twitter users and ISIS shills. Also, Clinton will show us how and why bias and what types create social media bubbles, what those bubbles do, and how we can fix this issue, or at least try to mitigate it for ourselves. So these rifts and differences in the way we think and feel might not just be the result of using social media, but could indeed be the result of a sustained attack on the way we as Americans and Westerners think. In fact, we are likely being deliberately targeted by state actors in order to weaken our democracy and adversely affect our way of life.

If you want to know how we manage to book all these amazing personalities on the show, I've got a network that goes for days. I use systems and tiny habits, and I would love to teach you how I do this for free. I've got a course called six-minute networking over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now enjoy this episode with Clinton Watts. We were talking pre-show about Jaron Lanier and how essentially social media and online systems are often designed to sort of, they're optimized for control or almost like insidious persuasion. And I know that that layers over what you do, at least to some extent. Can you tell us, essentially, I would say you chase terrorists online, but there's more to it.

Yeah. The idea of social media and why it's such an efficient way for good people or bad people to, reaching audiences, it's designed to give people what they want. And so, you know, I hear the discussion around filter bubble. I like, in social media, I think it's expand to what I call preference bubbles, meaning it's one part of the algorithm, which is there. Eli Pariser, you know, he did a excellent job of spotting that way out in terms of search and how that does that. But it's really about your preference as much in social media. You were choosing over and over and over things that you like when the system is designed to give me more what you like. And you're

blocking out that which you don't like, which then puts you in that alternative space, which I really enjoyed that from that podcast was the discussion of how this puts you in alternative realities. So you have shared perception, but not shared reality. So that is what, whether you're a terrorist or a Russian disinfo person or a mass manipulator like we'll see going to the 2020 election, you want to inculcate your audience in a world that you control based on what they believe is their own choice. So I had written a fiction conclusion to my book, and I made an app in the story called You Know You, which is you make people believe that they're making their own choices, and then they take it on even more because they're like, oh, I am liberated, I'm choosing all this,

but you don't know behind the scenes. Whoever's paying for the advertising, whoever's pushing the products, who's ever changing the words, who's ever delivering you the video that you need to see this specially edited or a deep fake or whatever it might be, is manipulating you in some way. Deep fake is when they change the faces or the voices or something? Yeah, deep fake is a falsified audio or video that is indistinguishable from real world. And so scary. Yeah. You know, we already have versions of it.

You've even seen the White House, you know, speed up to make, I think it was like Jim Acosta looked like he was pushing the woman back and it was tweeted, you know, out of the, I think, the press secretary's account or whatever. But that's already happening. It's going to be most devastating in the third world more than like, the modern world. Why is that? Because there is no filter. You're talking about populations that have gone from no news or very minimal news or friends circles, friends and family circles, to mobile-enabled social media where the source of information is not actually a source,

it's their friend or family, and they have trust based on communal relationships. That's why you see Myanmar, Philippines, Cambodia, those countries, why it's spread so quickly is because trust is based on friends and family. And what is social media? It's trust based on your network, which is based on people that look like you and people that talk like you. Right. So that way, instead of saying something on the news and it generates outrage and people talk about it a little bit and they're like, oh, you got to watch again tonight. Oh, I watch a different source and it was different or there's an update. It's just boom, everyone gets it on their phone. And it doesn't matter that it's a fake video from 20 years, B-roll, something else. I vaguely remember after September 11th,

There was something where they showed, there was like, look at these, this is people in the West Bank celebrating. And it was like B-roll from a new year or something from like eight years prior to that. That's right. Had nothing to do with it, but some intern or someone with malicious intent, actually,

just went and dug up photographs and images of them dancing and celebrating and just went, hey, let's just say this is from September 11th. It'll be a great story. And then people were like, oh, you know what, end aid to them and bomb them next or something. And it was like, what? These are random Palestinians that this has nothing to do with any.

And today somebody even tweeted at me going back to the Russia thing. They said, stop beating this drum. You know, you got Jaron Lanier talking about, oh, the Russians, this, Russians, that. It doesn't matter. The U.S. does the same thing. Everyone does the same thing. Yeah, moral equivalency. Do you agree with that?

Because I don't think that that's the case. No, look, I've worked in the U.S. government or with them for decades. And I've never seen anything like what the Russians did. I've never seen Americans hack thousands of innocent Russians or any country spill their secrets out, timed in order to win the election by advancing it through bogus social media accounts that look like and talk like Russian people for candidates that we have picked along with a propaganda outlet that is pumping information into their population. I'm not seeing that. If there's evidence of it, I would be interested. And usually that comes from the American left. You'll hear that.

Now you hear it from the right a little bit. And they'll say, well, the CIA in the 1970. So, you know, they throw out some example. I'm like, that is not what Russia on social media and, you know, the Internet has been doing. Or they'll say, oh, but, you know, surely we have the ability to do it. And anyone actually has the ability to do this if they want to, you know. And what the Russians did that is different from everybody else is they dedicated an old playbook that they had, which they call active measures from the Soviet era, but that same subversion playbook,

which they'd used on their own people first in social media and exported it. And they know how to do that very, very well. And going forward, they won't even be the best at it because they're resource constraint and their tech constraint. They don't have as good at tech as the rest of the world will have going forward. It'll be political campaigns. They're already doing this to a degree, but it'll get even worse. public relations, oligarchs, celebrities doing reputation laundering. They'll be the worst offenders in this.

They just needed someone to break the playbook out. And the Russians know and understand that playbook. Yeah, good point. Maybe in order to get some new listeners, I'll have a Macedonian click farm, you know, build me up a couple million fake accounts. I call it trolling as a service, which is essentially that there's already a market for someone who can advance your story across all media outlets. who can write stripped out blogs, who can change reality by using computational propaganda

and bots, who can put out a troll army on your issue in advance. We've seen lots of countries do that now. Some of them are more manual. So like in Myanmar or the Philippines, they'll literally just put 100 people in a room on Facebook to just troll away. If you come to America, you know, or some sort of satellite company, they're going to do it in a much more automated way. So the Myanmar thing was actually...

There's people sitting in a room designing this? Yeah. So, you know, in the less tech developed parts of the world, they just use manpower. They literally put them on as propagandist like a boiler room and say, I want you to go after anyone that challenges the regime and I want you to do it, you know, on these platforms. Whatever the platform is in that country, you know, that has the most traction. And there's nothing to stop them because there's no real free press to check them. You know, there's no organic activist army necessarily that can organize together because

in the streets, they would be put down by cops or military or, you know, some sort of manipulation in physical form. That's so interesting. And this is actually not even where I intended to start. It's just that literally today before the show, people were like, hey, man, stop beating that drum. And so, of course, and I guess I just wanted to hit it a few more times. But I wanted to check on that because, of course, wouldn't when someone says, oh, well, you know, the U.S. does all this stuff too.

I just was like, well, I could fire back, uh, or I could actually ask somebody that knows what they're talking about it. Yeah, I mean, you can pick something out and twist it that way. Us going after terrorist on social media saying we're doing counter propaganda or counter influence. Well, you could say that's the U.S. doing a version, but it's not, right? Because we were trying to advance, hey, you should not kill people around the world. It's not propaganda. Like, that's really, literally what we believe in. Making yourself falsely look like and talk like a foreign audience, stealing the Secretary of State, NATO commander, former Secretary of State, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs email, I could go on. That list is hundreds, dumping it out through a third party.

Then getting, yeah, WikiLeaks or D.C. leaks or whatever cutouts you make. Then getting the media to talk about it, you know, and, oh, by the way, setting up all sorts of in-person meetings with lots of people to try and nudge them along, like, hey, you should go look at this. Not seeing that before. And I've never seen the U.S. do that on scale. And I hope we don't. And at the same point, we can't. You know, as a democracy, you can't really do that. It undermines the legitimacy of everything that we do.

And so I hear this a lot of the left. The other argument you always hear out of sort of the left about the Russia story is, oh, I've been to Russia and they're broke and incompetent and they drink too much. I heard that. I heard that. And I'm like, okay, by that logic, that would be like me saying, Okay, I went to a supply base in the U.S. military, and they were out of shape, and they didn't work very hard. And none of them seemed very smart.

And they all wanted to go to Monster Truck rallies, which would be true. And then saying, so there's no way we could pull off the Bin Laden raid. That's the same argument if I put in the U.S. context. So, you know, Masha Gason, I think it is. Yeah. In New York, she advances this. Oh, there's just no way. It's just not that important.

It's not that big. It's not designed to get academic elites in the law. left of New York City to engage with that content. The tweet is stupid, and a million people looked at it, by the way, and they believe it, and you will see them referred to it in person. We had Americans go under the direction of Russian trolls and show up at a protest for and against Islam in Texas. You know, we had two people, one dressed as Hillary Clinton, climbing a cage at a cheesecake factory in Florida under the direction of a Russian influence operator. So, Tamasha and this sort of argument is like, It doesn't have to be any more sophisticated than whatever it takes to get people to do that.

And this is the part with social media misinformation. It's not designed for the highest, most educated people. It's designed for those that don't have a good balance on what is trusted information. That's interesting as well because you do see these things and you go, who the hell believes this? But then it's like five seconds later I'll say, God, Twitter's full of idiots. And then it's like, wait, I think I just answered my own question. Yeah. Right.

I can give you a terrorism parallel, actually, which is al-Qaeda versus ISIS. Sure. I mean, al-Qaeda, if you look at what they did, they designed this incredible plot to take down the World Trade Center. They were highly successful, you know, on this one occasion, it terrorized the United States, committed us into wars. Then they set around for a decade trying to pull off extremely elaborate plots. And it's a little bit of Dr. Evil from Austin Powers, right, where he would be like something super so complex. They'd be like, well, why don't you just kill Austin Powers? He's just like, no, don't you know it's good?

It's like sarcasm. You've got to have sharks with lasers on their heads. Right, right. Look at ISIS, though. ISIS stepped in and said, if we want to kill 100 people, we don't have to create a hydrogen peroxide bomb and cook it in whatever and do this and that. And so guys who weren't very smart and didn't get too complex, terrorized the entire world in ways al-Qaeda never did. If you think back, part of the reason we missed Russia and disinformation was in the summer of 2016, they would do eight attacks and eight days, you know, around the world using guns. and radios and social media coordination.

It's not sophisticated at all. So if you had thrown that out to a bunch of military planners, this is the Masha, you know, comparison, they would have been like that. That would never happen. That's just too simple. Why would they do that? Yeah, drive a van in a pedestrian area and hit as many people as you can before you stab someone and get shot. Same result. No cost, no planning, really.

You know, you have people doing it remotely. And so the very simple, anyone can pull it off, if effectively done, you. over an enduring period is far more effective. And I think that's where you see the elite academic audience sort of miss the rush of disenfo stuff. I've missed the forest through the trees in a lot of ways, yeah. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Clinton Watts. We'll be right back.

Don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Clint Watts. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to jordanharbinger.com

slash subscribe. Now back to the show with Clint Watts. Tell me how you got started with social engineering. It's kind of like it arises like I think most of us do with social engineering, which is out of sheer boredom. Yeah. To give us the story here. I know you were kind of terrorizing.

Speaking of terrorizing, you were terrorizing one of the guys at West Point. That's right. So when I was a cadet at West Point, it was pre-internet. The internet was literally dawning at that point. And we were some of the first people that had email. In like 1991, we all had an intra-email. We had bulletin boards. That was very easy, you know, early and easy in that phase.

But we were also in a prison. We had no phones. We had like one television for every. You said you're in a prison? Yeah. I mean, it looks like a prison. There's no bars, but you can't leave. And, you know, you're sort of locked in there and you just have time to kill.

Yeah, minimum security prison. Yeah. And so, you know, it becomes like any student sort of population, how can I rebel against the system, which is trying to control me. And this is natural, I think, in a lot of those circumstances, like, well, how can I prank, you know, people around the academy? And so we had lucked out that we had one inner intra-campus phone. And we would come back after lunch and usually you had about 30, 40 minutes in there before whatever he had to do next. And so we just got to prank calling, you know, people around the base because it was something fun to do. But then you start getting bored with that, you know, people just hanging up on you.

So it was like, wow, what can we get people to do? And that's really the fundamental of social engineering, right, which is under, you know, a false supposition or persona, whatever it might be, set the circumstances to create a behavior change. And that's what influence is really all about. whether you're ISIS trying to recruit people around the world, the Russians trying to convince people not to vote for Hillary Clinton. So, but ours was, let's just see what kind of, you know, reaction, provocation we can do. And so, yeah, I would just go down the phone book all the way and I would put a little, like, earmark, you know, where I was at the day before. And we would just try, you know, different things. But we had picked up on one individual, he was the meat plan operator.

And I noticed going up the staircase that he had all of his phone numbers. and all of his work shift laid out by phone number. And so I rotated down, you know, first shift leader, second shift leader. And then that's reconnaissance, right, for social engineering. You're like, okay, now I can impersonate. I know the order of the command. So how can I change that to influence? And I would impersonate his first shift leader.

And he fell for that a couple times. You know, then we change the scenario up and would just go around. Then he doesn't answer any of his phone calls. So how do we get his attention? Well, we leave voice messages on an answering machine of a third party, who then calls him. Oh, interesting. But that is, you know, that is social media manipulation, every part of it.

And that's why I liked a couple of your podcasts I was listening to. You can do whatever you want on the platform for controls in terms of service. They were doing, he was doing the same thing. You know, the meat plant guy is like, I'm not going to answer the phone. But then we call his deputy and ask him to answer questions, right? Because we're trying to influence his behavior. He's the target. Or we go to a third party and they unwittingly are an agent or what we call useful idiot

in the Russian context, you know, perpetrating an act on her behalf. And so it's like, how can you get your target and sort of influence them? And that was really the core, too. I was learning at the time about Soviet espionage, U.S. espionage as part of our normal, you know, military course of instruction, what, you know, what's the KGB, what's, you know, these agencies, how do different countries do it? And so between that and the FBI, you know, I just naturally fell into this pattern where that became very useful training, which was a, you know, I was in an understanding.

an authoritarian system where they're trying to suppress me. You know, I'm the opposition. So you learn a little bit about insurgency just from your daily routine. It's just how social media takes all of that to a new level. And that didn't get you kicked out at West Point. I mean, you must have gotten caught. No, I got trouble. Yeah.

I remember I got called once. It was one of the officers came in and was like, I heard you make interesting phone calls. And, you know, that's the death sentence, you know, at West Point. It was like, I hear you're not going to be making any more phone calls or something that effect, you know. I was like, yes, sir. You know, loud and clear. Like, he wanted to punish me, but he's also like, okay, these are silly phone calls.

I'm not going to end this guy's career over, you know. Yeah, well, that's fortunate, right? Because it's, it reminds me of a lot of the problem I think that we're having with, I don't want to pontificate too much on this, but I've got a buddy who is like the most upstanding, smart dude, honest, has a great family, is sort of this blue blood American guy, related to freaking Paul Revere by, you know, six, uncles removed or something like that. I mean, literally, like, house in Georgetown. And he works at Google. And he's like, you know, I think I'm going to work for the FBI. And I said, that's great,

good. I'm sure they would love to have you. Right. He applies and they're like, have you ever smoked marijuana? And he's like, of course. And they were like, see you later. Yeah. And he goes, oh, really? And they're like, yeah. I'm just imagining the guy sitting there going, go back to Google, buddy. And it's like, okay, guess I'll go back to making five times what I would have made here serving the country because I smoked pot in college 11 years ago or 15 years ago. And it's like you want people to chase criminals, but you want them to be altar boys that have never once thought about anything criminal related. Yeah, and they're the worst FBI agents or CIA case officers too.

They've got to be. Because it's like, oh, I'm not going to go do something immoral with this source. Well, he's a hound and he wants to hang out at the strip club and do cocaine. Well, I'm not even going to do that. Okay, be useless. You know, and now we've got to recruit somebody to recruit somebody who's going to go hang out with your source because you don't want to go into the you don't want to go touch that stuff yeah I unfortunately can't go into too many details but I had that happen a couple times where

you're working with another FBI agent or federal employee and you know you want them to police violent crime but they've never left a gated community it gets really awkward which is in a lot of television shows to varying degrees but that does happen which is how do you convince especially in terms I think even more so for I understand the FBI's reasoning behind it more than the CIA or others. You know, CIA's job is to collect foreign intelligence. There's a big difference with the FBI, which is they're actually going to take a case to court and you have to testify on a stand. Sure.

And so let's take the example. Yeah, we were both high on meth, but I'm pretty sure that's what happened. Yeah. Oh, I was a regular drug user. Yeah. That is tough. That's why the FBI has that higher standard. And I feel like I was lucky because I was in the authoritarian system known as West Point in the Army.

You know, I was already under that rule structure my whole career. So that hurdle was much easier for me to get over than, I mean, nowadays, and I actually said that on the Senate floor to Kamala Harris once. She said, why can't we recruit? And I said, I brought that one up. I said, we get upset if people have smoked weed. She actually, I got her to snicker a little bit during testimony because she understands it too. Yeah. Everyone he fundamentally understands it, but we've got to change the law.

So the FBI can't go, okay, we'll take a guy who's done lots of drugs. And then we'll have them work. And then one day he shows up and testifying, they say, you ever break the law? Yes. How did you break the law? Well, I did a lot of drugs, you know, the same and the other. And go, okay, so just like my client, this is where, you know, in front of a jury,

it kind of falls apart. Sure. So if you back that out, though, you know, this is why legalization of marijuana, standardized legalization of marijuana, whatever is super important because then that opens the door for your friend who wants to go work at the FBI. That standard just shifted. And we don't have to worry about him getting on a stand and saying, oh, yeah. Yeah, I broke these same laws.

This other guy did that I just arrested. Yeah, I mean, it was definitely sort of career limiting for me as well. I won't go down this rabbit hole too far. But I used to work at the U.S. Embassy in Panama. I remember hanging out with DEA guys and they were like, oh, what are you doing? You know, and I'm like, hey, I would love to work with you guys, you know, even though they had some colossal screw ups while I was there. Like letting someone walk out of the embassy and get into a taxi and they went, where is he? And it said, he walked past you guys in your Hawaiian shirts.

But, you know, they were otherwise really cool. And I thought, this is a pretty cool occupation. Like, they're interdicting all this stuff coming through South America. And they're really adjacent to a lot of high impact stuff. Like, they're in the bar with all these drug dealers and they're about to, you know, take them down. And then I just saw, like, a whole lot of, a whole lot of, well, you know, you just got to make sure that you don't do any of this stuff. And I just thought, oh, I'm already in trouble and I'm like 20. Yeah.

You know, like. You're eliminated for life. Oof. Yeah. Which that's part of the social media phenomenon, right? I think for younger people. Yeah. And why they are choosing the apps they choose, whether or not on Facebook, they want to be able to get a job when they're 35.

Yeah. They're doing something that might get them trouble or maybe they're doing something that doesn't seem that bad at the time. But when they're 35 is going to eliminate them from whatever they're doing. How glad are you that the dumbest thing you did is not videotaped and up on a server? Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, I don't have to think in that sort of conscience. Sure. And you don't really learn your lesson that way then, meaning that you're not experiencing where right and wrong is oftentimes.

So I used to always say whenever they would give you somebody, he's never made a mistake. I was like, I'm not going with him because everyone makes a mistake ultimately. Like, I would rather that person went for it until they fell flat and then work with. with them after that because I know they won't make that mistake probably again. Yeah, good point. You want them to make mistakes before they get to you, not afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like terrorist attacks. People will be like, oh, should I travel there now? And I'm like, yeah, now they have more security before the terrorist attack. They probably didn't, which is why they had, you know, a terrorist attack. Yeah, good point. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. Yeah, after you see it in the news,

it's probably a better time to go than beforehand, depending on the circumstances. So how do you go from West Point to tracking terrorists? I was in the Army for seven years. I applied to the FBI in like August 2001 because it used to take like two or three years. And then September 11th happened. And I was a company commander in the Army. And we were getting ready for Afghanistan thinking we were going to go to Afghanistan. And then the FBI hired a thousand agents that first year. Wow.

Which is like 10% of their workforce, basically. And I got a call right away. I took the test. I was waiting to see if I was going to just stay in the Army. I wasn't like dead settling. I didn't want to get out. I wasn't like in a hurry. It was like building options.

And they were like, you're in. And I was like six months later, they were like, you've got a slot. When can you start? I was like, well,

I'm commanding an infantry company of 170 people right now. I'm not going to be there for a few months. And the army was a curious thing. They were like, Afghanistan was kind of just going into a hover. And they were like, oh, we're over strength. We don't need anybody.

So we don't have any great jobs for you from here on out. So it's up to you. And I was like, well, I guess I'll go be an FBI agent. Wow. Yeah. And I hated the FBI. Really? Hated it.

The first time I was, I had two periods there. The first time I went, I was very lucky to work on counterterrorism in Portland, Oregon. I really enjoyed the discipline, but the FBI was very much in disarray. And I left inside the first year that time. And I went to grad school in Monterey, we were talking about. We ended up going to the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. And when I was there, probably six months, seven months in, a deputy assistant director of the FBI walked in. And he was like, hey, we're looking for instructors on counterterrorism.

And I did a briefing on a board in there. I was like, if you did it like this, you could train him on all these things. He was like, how the hell did you know that? I was one of your FBI agents like two years ago. He didn't know I'd been in the FBI. And rather than, you know, that's a great, for me, he, I had. I ended up working for him all the way until he retired again, like a few months ago, so over a decade. But that's a great moment, I thought, where he could have just thrown me away like most people have done.

He was like, no, you're going to come work for me, but you'll do it from here. So I started running training programs for the FBI. Then a year later, I just went straight back to the FBI headquarters. Still had my clearances. And they had this thing where you could just come back if you had a clearance as a, special advisor, contract special advisors, mostly for retirees. And I was back at headquarters 2007. I worked either half the time there or with U.S. Special Operations Command on counterterrorism from then until about 2012.

And are you, at this time, are you fighting the influence to stop people from joining al-Qaeda, ISIS? Like, what does that even look like? What are you doing online to help stop? Because there's so many, you can't just be doing it kind of on your own. Yeah, I was super lucky. I worked half in law enforcement space. So that was the Bureau sort of stuff, which was how do we train people to be able to interact and investigate? What resources do they need?

How do we restructure intelligence? I was working on that stuff at FBI headquarters. When I wasn't there, I was all projects around how do we stop al-Qaeda's influence, which ultimately became ISIS, their march to the Internet. What are they doing on social media? So that was early projects where like Al Qaeda is now using YouTube, you know, like this was mid-2000s. And then after 2012, I came here to work for that same guy after he retired. I worked in New York City doing cybersecurity consulting, same sort of intel process, but around cybersecurity. And I was tracking foreign fighters going into Syria and Iraq with my own team, with a couple different teams as a consultant.

And sometimes I fly to different places and show up and be like, hey, here are 50, 60 guys on Facebook that are all in Iraq that are from your country or your location. And some of them are probably going to come back. You know, and in the message then early days, 2011, 12, 13, you know, I'm in the private sector then was that's okay. I'd rather they are there than here. And so they're only there now, learning how to strap bombs on things. I mean, tons of them got killed. many didn't come back, but that was the ISIS wave you saw in 15 and 16. You know, those guys who were coming back into Europe, they were out there 2011, 12, 13 on social media as themselves are very simple cover name. And part of the ISIS fame is that you can show that you're there, you know, and that you're fighting. And so you could see them very visibly. I think at one point we had logged 3,000, 4,000 maybe. So I was doing those kinds of projects and evaluating like why they were being influenced.

And I was through the think tank I work at, I was mostly looking at when ISIS would overtake al-Qaeda, which was not a very popular view amongst counterterrorism analysts just because al-Qaeda did 9-11. And that was very much like they will never overtake al-Qaeda. Now it's sort of like everyone says that. But yeah, what is al-Qaeda, what is ISIS and how do you counter their influence and failing? miserably. That's a chapter from the book, which is why the U.S. really can't do this counter influence and why we shouldn't be able, we shouldn't think we can do what the Russians did either. Sure. We fail miserably against terrorists.

At one point, you're in this food dialogue with this guy, Omar Hamami. Yes. And you end up kind of discrediting him by showing different, you're pulling different levers. And I want to hear kind of the psychology behind this. Can you tell me what that's all about? Because, of course, when people say, oh, you're counteracting influence, my first thought is you're sitting somewhere with a Twitter display and you're just looking at your filtering for keywords and then you're like, no, that's not true. Here's an article. But you can't be doing that.

Even if you had 100 people, you can't be counteracting that. There has to be some more systematic things going on. But at some points, you're actively involved in a very public dialogue with these other public figures from the other side. Yeah. And they're kind of, they know who you are. They're talking to you and vice versa. That's kind of, it's weird. It's like to go back to our childhood.

You're a little older than me, but not by much. It's like the cobra commander talking to the head of G.I. Joe, right? Like, it's like, that's weird. And you're on Twitter talking about food. Well, it was already happening. You know, no one was paying attention until it became a famous American. But you could watch these terrorists online. They were out there.

That's how they were winning people over. And so I've been writing a blog. I wrote a blog about this guy, Hamas. who's from Alabama. He was an American foreign fighter. He had gone to al-Shabaab in Somalia, very unique case. He is then betrayed by his group. He was known around the world because he had rapped on a YouTube video.

That was his big claim to thing, which is the fear of all American counterterrorism analysts, rap culture and popular culture, converging with extremism, making it seem kind of like fun, which ISIS later did. He was really a precursor to ISIS in many ways. and making it seem very Americanized, right? And so he crosses up with the boss of al-Shabaab trying to give it. He thinks he's really important. He's in his 20s. They think he's not that important, but a good propaganda tool. He shoots his mouth off and now the boss wants him killed, you know, very mafia style.

So he goes on the run and his YouTube videos changed to, I've been betrayed by al-Shabab. I still believe in jihad, but, hey, everybody help me out and pay attention to me. And so. Send me some Bitcoin or something. Yeah, back then he just didn't have it. But I mean, he's trying to survive. And that was by raising awareness. And I was documenting this at my blog. And I had heard that he read pretty much everything I wrote. And we had suspicions about this one. You know, many of us in the circle, this is probably him. And the handle was Abu M American. So we were like, okay, that's probably Hamami. And, you know, you just watch it over time. And right after New Year's 2013, it was like, I'm not working for the government anymore. I'm just doing my blog and I'm working at a think tank and, you know, consulting work. I can do whatever I want.

No one can tell me like not to talk to him. And he wanted to talk to me because he knew I would write about him. And so that gets into that social, how do you socially engage with somebody? And I think there's some learning points there which are instructive of this. How do we count counter disinfo? You brought up a great point there. So fake info. Let's talk Russia for a second.

Fake info gets put out. We get a bunch of counter trolls to go, that's a lie, that's a lie. Here's the truth. That's one way to do it. But as we know from social media, it's just bubbles clashing into each other. And if you're in that bubble, you're going to believe what you want. This was different, though. This was let's create dialogue.

Back then, it was the Obama administration. It was all like, let's buy the world of Coke. And so there was this big belief that we could counter violent extremists by just telling them how great democracy is. And, you know, let's give him a hug. Right. Right. I never believed that. And I was like, this is impossible.

You're not going to take a terrorist who's committed his life to terrorism. It's halfway around the world. And with a few tweets, go, oh, you're right. You totally turn my whole world to view around. Look, man, I know you want to kill everybody starting with all the Jews, but we have Xbox. Don't you want to play Xbox? Right, right. You know, that's not going to work.

It just doesn't work. And so I was like, I'm just going to engage this guy. The best tool for countering extremism is just telling his story. He went and joined a terrorist group. he's in Somalia, which is one of the harshest places in the world, and he's been betrayed by his group, and they're trying to kill him. Just keep telling his story, right? So in the FBI sort of language, you know, how do you engage with people?

And why do they talk? What motivates them? And so when you're recruiting an agent or whatever influence or a source for a newspaper, if you're a journalist, I use the acronym crime, which is compromise, revenge, ideology, money, ego. And you line those up and you say, okay, what motivates this person? So Omar is very easy, right? He's compromising on the run. And he needs his story out. So he needs to talk to me.

He's got a huge revenge response because he's being killed by his own terrorist group he joined. Ideologically, he wants to advance the cause. Money is not going to worry for him. You know, he's not motivated by that or he wouldn't go to Somalia. And he's got a massive ego. Like he only wants to talk to people that talk about him, kind of like a president. You know, it's remarkable in some ways the social media phenomenon. I was like, I'm going to focus in my compromise, revenge, and ego with him.

And I'm not going to talk about money. I don't want to say, oh, look how great my life is in America. And I don't want to banter with him about ideology. I'm not going to convince him his ideas are bad on Twitter. So a lot of people believe that at the time. But I'm not going to change him. So I would just write up summaries of his stories, and I would hit on those things, you know. And I recognize, okay, I'll stay in these lanes.

And then I'll find common ground. What is common ground for me and him? Well, he's an American, I'm an American. We both played soccer. We like the same kind of foods. Krispy cream donuts was a big one. And I'm going to hit him back and forth. Then that's how those Twitter exchanges would start.

He would be like, oh, you know, did you read this and that that I wrote? I'd be like, hey, man, I'm going to Chili's right now. What would you order? You know, and I just throw out. And then we just have a discussion. And then at a certain point, you know, once you build some sort of rapport that you feel comfortable, just like you and I now. 30 minutes later, the conversation is less awkward than when we started. Same thing on Twitter like that.

Once you engage 50, 100 times, now you can start talking about, okay, let's talk about really why do you want to be a terrorist and what's going on. Without him immediately thinking he's under attack and he has to defend his position, which is basically all political conversations we see now is just people on the attack back and forth. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's, I'm no stranger to this. it's scary to me because I think if I was 17 and I was just really bored and I was you know part of a certain group that I thought was oppressed there's a good chance I would have been like this is a great idea I'm going to go over there kick some ass and be really awesome take some photos then come back and be this awesome guy who went and did all this cool stuff and I'll be

able to talk about it I'll have all these cool photos I'll have made a bunch of friends I might even have like a girl when I come back it's really appealing yep of course the reality is now you're hiding in a jungle getting bit by snakes because all these guys who have a first grade education now want to kill you who you thought you were friends with. Yeah. And you haven't eaten for a month other than like, you know, the gruel that you're boiling yourself in the middle of nowhere. But what percentage of these guys are just kind of going in for it for the ego because they're young guys looking for glory versus guys that are really committed to this? Depends on where it's from. So in Europe it's different. And it's about, I would say it's 50-50, community connections that bring them in and the other half sort of internet. And they work

together. It's not like there's two worlds, but they are joining because their friends did. It's a pack of guys. They want adventure. Everything you're just talking about, I'm a celebrity now in my community. Look at what I've done. And then they go into the ideology as novices and sort of become more indoctriny as they go because they need to justify what they're doing. They're committing awful violent acts. They've got to justify it. But unwind that. If you look at the U.S. recruits, they're oftentimes one-offs. And one-offs, from my experience, are usually two categories.

One, super devout ideologically, like really believe this utopia vision of bin Laden's global jihad and think they're going to build this perfect caliphate according to the books. And, of course, they quickly learn that's not the case or become a suicide bomber because that's like your two routes. or they're mental issues there. And that's based on the time devoted to the scripture, I would tell you if they're one-offs, like, recruited from the internet. They're not in a group. They're socially awkward. They get to the group. They're socially awkward.

You know, they're in a weird place. And so if you look, the ones that are ideologically motivated have probably been studying the religion devoutly for many years. And I moved to this. The only way I can, you know, do this is to pursue a caliphate. and we have to do that through violence. For the ones that go from, hey, I like soccer to, I join ISIS in like 14 days, that tends to be more like mental health, you know, sort of stuff. That's just my crude assessment of it.

So there's a combination of that as it goes in. The experience of foreign fighters, if they don't go in groups, is very bad. If they do go in groups, it can be a mix, meaning that sometimes entire neighborhoods will go in together and fight. And it's part of their heritage, just like, you know, the, The number one recruiter of a Marine is a former Marine or a foreign military. It's the same for foreign fighters in most of the world. Number one recruiter of a foreign fighter is a former foreign fighter that fought in Afghanistan or Iraq or somebody in their neighborhood or somebody in their family that's like helping coach that along. The more you get into the Middle East, the more it's like physical recruitment.

The more you get to North America, the more it's online. That's kind of the spectrum of it. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Clinton Watts. We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air, and I mean that literally. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals and check them out.

And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to this on the Overcast Player for iOS, please click that little star next to the show. It really helps us out. And now for the conclusion of our show with Clinton Watts. you're eventually able to get these guys fighting each other on Twitter. You're kind of, it's funny because you're sort of stoking these rivalries.

And you're saying, look, you both have these huge egos. You both say you're the best, whatever. Yeah. You know, let me point your canon three degrees to the left. You point yours three degrees to the right. Now you're aiming at each other. How does this outline this process? Because it's actually, it's kind of rewarding.

It's a little bit of a payoff in the book to read about this. Because, of course, these guys are sitting here, trolling and, convincing kids to go join their cause, and now you can get them kind of just punching each other in the face. Yeah, I would do that through the blog post and then trying to get him engaged. The more he talked about American things, the more the crowd he was trying to appeal to, starts the question, is he really for the Americans or is he for, you know, our global jihadi community. Yeah. That confuses them.

I love jihad, but I can't shut up on a chill, baby back, right? Yeah. You know, reading rainbow is one thing, you know, he would reference. And so that confuses them. That's a culture thing. like, why are you engaging on this cultural issue? The other part was always like, what is right, what is wrong? And really what Omar was part of was this social media populism of jihad.

Before we had Trump MAGA and now the resistance and everything here, it had already happened. ISIS is nothing more than a jihadi populist movement on social media that overtook the establishment, which was bin Laden and his crew. That's all it is. It's completely made up, but these are all young guys connected on social media. Just want to go kill people. And they put it under this banner of jihad. And if you watch the al-Qaeda leadership, Zawahari and bin Laden, they're like, who are these guys? I don't know who they are.

That's not what we're going to do. We're not that focused on killing Shia, at least not now. You know, it was a collision. Omar was part of that. I'm on YouTube. I've got my own following. I'm doing raps. People think it's great.

Here's my manifesto. Let's go. I'm going to achieve it. And you put, you push those. It's really an establishment versus a populist movement inside jihad. It just happened years before. And ISIS is sort of a first version, one of the first versions of that. Arab Spring had sort of rolled in there too.

You know, we had that going on. Do you think these guys would have done something else had it not been for the Islamist thing? Like, would he just have joined a street gang and been a drug dealer? Yeah. No, he was smart. You know, when you look at his history in the U.S., he was smart. He was very charismatic. He was funny.

you and I would probably, you know, take jihad out. It would probably talk to him and have fun and laugh about things. He was not dumb. I don't think he would have drifted down one of those things, but he would have maybe been like an intense activist around something. Okay. So, and there are parallels to that. Adam Godin, who became Adam the American, the propagandist, you know, was Zawahiri. It was killed by a drone strike, you know, kind of.

Before that, he was an environmental activist, and he also ran like a hundred, for death metal. So, like, he had death metal tapes and, like, ran like a magazine to everybody knew him. So, you know, they move around. I think what's interesting about them is they're open to moral change and new ideas. But once they get on something, they're very, very committed. So, you know, even if he had come back, let's say, in reform, he would have been the most active. I want to be the number one activist against al-Qaeda, you know, or former Al-Qaeda. He would have wanted status like that. He's very ego-driven. How do you get them to fight each other or something?

slander each other to come to fracture what sort of tactics are you using uh i think in the social engineering way is watch to see who they react to and then i would ask very deliberate questions be like wow you really react strongly to you know this other anonymous account you must know him right and then they would be like yeah i know him and then they want a trash talk yeah he's a punk he just talks he doesn't ever take any action right then the other guy's like oh yeah you know what about you like whatever and one of the things he said was you didn't write your own raps and i And I wrote a whole thing about Millie Vanilli and how Omar was a Millie Vanilli or whatever. Then he's like trying to prove himself.

So I'm just taking pieces of what each of them are saying and basically just repeating it back to the other one, that false competition sort of thing. But you can always tell, you know, there's a lot of social media signatures that are out there that I'm sure people aware of, which is there's technical ones like time zone. So you know they actually are talking in roughly the same time frame. But also if they react really quickly, it's either somebody who makes them very upset or somebody that's somebody that. they actually know. And you can tell that. The other one is like account shutdowns are super valuable. So if you shut down a terrorist account and they start up another account, the first

people that follow the second account usually actually know that person or in email contact. Yeah, because they had to find out some. They had to figure it out. So you can tell a lot about their network, who they react to. Then the second wave is people that hate that person. So, you know, they're the next ones that didn't show up. So you could kind of clump people together and be like, okay, these are the lovers. These are the haters.

and, you know, I'll focus on the issues and get them to talk between the two. Do you have software where you're like, okay, these 50, these 500, whatever accounts, immediately follow this guy. They're probably on an email newsletter or something like that. Yeah. And then do you work with like ISPs to go, hey, can you find, was there anything that sent an email to some large number of these 500 accounts? I don't have that stuff. I just use Excel, you know, when I've done this with teams.

For the most part, use some networking software, you know, that's out there, note Excel, stuff like that, just for visual. But for the most part, you don't need anything too sophisticated. If you have it, it's great. I couldn't afford, you know, most of it. And the goal for me was not big data. It was the right data, which is can you get to the right patches of people in their banter back and forth? What about does Twitter work? Like, are you able to call up and somebody Jack Dorsey adjacent and say, hey, look, these guys are Al-Qaeda?

Like, we want to get in there. I've tried that route. And people are not receptive. Really? Yeah. I mean, this is in the early, this is pre-2016. So whether it was the Russians or terrorists, they don't want to know for the most part, or it's complete narcissistic ego, oh, we are tech, zen gods.

You can't possibly have figured this out from there. We have all the data you can't tell us. I heard a lot of that on Russia, disinfo 15, 16. Oh, you don't know. It doesn't matter. It was only 0.01% of all conversations on the whole planet that day. I was like, but how many conversations in this part of the country, which is a swing state about this issue, you know, and visualizations and how many were real and who amplified it? They didn't really want to know, you know.

Yeah. They didn't believe. That's too bad because it seems like you would, we would, as a consumer, I would love to think that you have a red phone somewhere in your office that calls up somebody who reports directly to Jack Dorsey or to, you know, Zuck and says, look, man, this is a private group that has all these accounts in it. We don't want you to necessarily shut them down. We want to watch them. Here's an affidavit that says, and here's a bunch of probable cause or whatever. And they're like, okay, we have 16 new hires that are dedicated to making sure that we weed out extremism on our network.

They are more that way now. Thank God. I mean, but not really. They really don't want to hear it from the public other than the flagging system for terrorist content, which Facebook did. which was good. YouTube did a version of that, I think, as well. Okay, that's good. There's not many people that are tracking actors, you know, down to the individual level.

And then they have to assess. But really what they want is the government to tell them because, you know, one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist. You know, one person's propagandist is another person's truth. Who's to say this person's bad or whatever? And they get it, they have a tough time with free speech issues. And I totally understand that. But there are a lot of people who could spot this and sort of signal to the. them. And yeah. And you've also got a bunch of data. You could say, here's a six-week head start on

compiling enough data to prove that this guy is recruiting kids on your network to leave Austria. I still watch people that are terrorists as of 2010-11 on Twitter that are still there that I still watch. That's unbelievable. I mean, in other propagandists. But to their point, they legally are trying to have someone validate that that is a terrorist or that is a diso operator or whatever it might be, which is fine until there's violence. violence, and then it becomes a big issue, and then they do shutdowns or whatever. But my experience is, you know, Facebook, despite all the criticism of them, I think has rallied a lot of resources and made a lot of gains in a couple of years.

Twitter is finally starting to get there, you know, some of their stuff. And I like what they're doing with analyzing the community. I also see them, though, is trying to discredit anyone that criticizes them to a degree. Yeah. And that's not going to play to their advantage long run. They have a different resource equation, and they see their platform as a. town square sure which i think is hilarious because if it was really a town square it would just be a massacre of people killing yeah yeah there would be people would get stabbed within seconds yeah it'd be

all sorts of mayhem youtube has a more complex scale problem like a whole bunch of different issues and their algorithm yeah they got a lot of work to do but yeah it's you know they're worried about tides and the russians and terrorist videos and They got their work cut out. Can people show nipples on their videos, you know, all sorts of crazy stuff. YouTube I have a little more sympathy for because you have to find something that can sort of watch a video and decide whether or not it's either obscene, insightful to violence, free speech, et cetera. Whereas in my mind, in my simple non-tech brain, looking at a bunch of tweets with a really powerful computer should be easier. Yeah.

But maybe it's not. Twitter is stuck in some of their own design that they can't unravel. like showing you how many retweets you got. That totally seemed like a good idea. I'm sure at the time, until you do it, you don't realize it, but that actually incentivizes people to write things that will get retweets. Right. Which could be false, right?

Like, that creates curiosity. Of course. Yeah. How do you want to do that? Well, if people didn't know how many retweets they were getting now, they would lose their mind, you know, on Twitter, like, I don't know if I reached a lot of people or not. So all that metric stuff, which seemed like a great idea, now encourages or incentivizes sometimes bad behavior that they can't really police because whose speech is free. Do we go by U.S. rules?

Do we go by international rules? People don't agree on this. I'm sympathetic in some ways. I would appreciate it more if Twitter was less antagonistic to those that would probably just work with them, you know, if they would let them. How does bias or how and why does bias and what types of bias create these social media bubbles? You know, you mentioned earlier the filter bubble.

We talked a little bit about it with Jaron Lanier. how do these bubbles actually get made? Because that's what we didn't really discuss. I don't think a lot of people understand how we get separated, like little pills. You know, you see those videos of a factory, a big pharma that like scrapes the red ones to the left and the pink ones of the right. We don't really understand that that's happening at us. Yes. So the first one for, I call it a preference bubble.

So getting to your preference bubble means confirmation bias. You click like, like, like, share. share, retweet, retweet, retweet. And now you are putting yourself in your reinforcing through your friends and family. This is the bubble I want to be in. And the algorithm then pumps you more of what you like. That's just how it goes. The second one is implicit bias, which is people naturally like to get information from people that look like them and talk like them. That is your friends and family circle. That is not someone you don't know or don't trust. This is where Russia really understands implicit bias, which is if I can create an account that looks like you

and talks like you and I can get into your friends and family circle or just in your community around a perception that you like, I'm a home run, right? Because the source of the information then isn't RT Sputnik or New York Times, Washington Post, it's you. You are now the source. So your crazy uncle that sent you the weird email is the source. You don't see the story as being from another source. They knew that very early on. So they told a lot of their writers and producers, create a persona as you on social media, continue to share our content through you. People won't refute you because you're just saying I'm a citizen journalist or a reporter or whatever. But behind, you're actually delivering RT, Sputnik, or whatever. Or today,

what we would see is maybe a crazy conspiracy video, right, in the non-Russia context. Hey, did you see this video that 9-11 isn't real or vaccines, you know, harm your kid, I didn't see that. Why would my friend lie to me about this? They send it to me. That's the second bias. The third one, I call social media nationalism, which is once tribalism sets in, you get a status quo bias, which is you don't want to break from the status quo of your group and the norm.

And so you will just pull in only information that essentially agrees with the group. And you will personally be silent or not broadcast information that, you will personally be silent or not broadcast information that challenges your own beliefs or that of the group. Once you do that, that really just hardens that entire bubble. And those three biases sort of layer on each other. So these bubbles end up defining who we are because it kind of like congeals or freezes in place after a while. Yeah, your identity shaped around hashtags and avatars.

And I am the following. You see people do that, you know, on their bios. I am the following. Boom, bum, bum, bum. And it was like, when did everyone start putting their resume and, you know, four hashtags on it or whatever the pictures are. I saw that. It was funny because it used to be like husband, father, writer, occasional calzone connoisseur, right?

And it was, but now it's like hashtag maga, hashtag father, hashtag. Build the wall. Right, build the wall. And that's that's a right example, right way or, you know, more rightest example. But there's, then you can find anything. Yeah, you can go to the opposite side. It's resist, you know, blue wave, no wall, no ban, you know, but, you know, but. And that's how people are defined themselves.

Now, they may exhibit no actual real world qualities of doing anything about any of those things. But they want that identity. And so that's the other part of this social media phenomenon is you can pick your identity whether you're really that or not. And it's not just about fake accounts versus real accounts. It's like even as a real account, you may actually do nothing for climate change or any of these issues. It's like a bumper sticker. Right. Oh, yeah.

My kid got that at the library. It's on the car now. I call it hashtag hysteria, which is like we get really ramped up about these things. But it's like, what do you actually do, you know, towards those things? Yeah, my support begins and ends with putting a bumper sticker on my car that says, go green or something. It's like whatever. Oh, I'm not going to buy any less plastic bags, no. But I have the bumper sticker that's made out of plastic that says recycle.

And I'm going to have an eight seat four miles to the gallon car. Right. But I'm really worried. Right. Yeah. Everybody else, though, should ease up on all that. So how does Russia then use the preference bubbles to create, to turn a little crack into a huge chasm in a Western population? So they're picking issues across usually four themes.

And this goes back to their all old doctrine, which is, first is calamitous messaging. If you incite fear into an audience space, they will then go to you as an information source because they want to know, am I safe? Am I, you know, is this true? breaking news, for example. They love that sort of thing. But then right behind it, whatever you deliver, even if it's a falsehood, you're more likely to believe because you're scared. You know, fear is a powerful weapon. The second one is like financial messaging, which they used to do more of and now is more acute, which is attacking the U.S. company with a falsehood, making you not believe in good.

So one of the failed ones from the Twitter trolls was Walmart turkeys are injected with poison. And it didn't take off, but they tried it, you know, so it's like a smear. The big way, though, is you infiltrate audiences on social issues. And this is kind of what you were asking about, which is you pick any cleavage that's ethnic, religious, social, second amendment gun rights, police violence, anti or are for police, you know, stand with blue. And you get into those audience by just sharing and repeating stories with that audience. And once they attract to it, then you go in and you start. just adding a little bit of flavor. If you want to infiltrate an audience, you retweet or repeat 80% of what they're saying.

This is social engineering, right? And if you're a car salesman, you don't come in and try and pitch them on something you ask about them first. You don't say Vladimir Putin's awesome. You say, well, you know, isn't it terrible what the U.S. government's doing? And, you know, you can't really trust the voting machines. And, man, vaccines. That's crazy, right?

Do you think we can trust those doctors don't know what they're talking about? those social issues, then once you do all that, then when it comes in election, you're move towards politics. And you start pushing people towards your preferred candidate in each of those spaces, whether it's left or right. Those politicians have the views that more align with the Kremlin are the ones that they're going to endorse. And they'll push those social issues that direction. So on the right, it was very straightforward. Gun rights, Christianity, where we stand with cops, you know, stand. don't kneel. Then you go the other way and they're doing, man, you better kneel. You know,

can you believe about the injustice towards African Americans, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you know, you stack those issues. Election rig voter fraud. Bernie Sanders got a raw deal. And that's how you pit people against each other without actually laying down any position, right? You're just just noodling people in different groups and then nudging them against each other. And I want to reinforce because people right now have already either sent or are fixing to send that email. that says like, oh, you're another stupid shill Jordan about, you know, the reason that Trump won is because of this. This is in the left and the right. This is not. They're already doing 20, 20, 20, Democrats. They're starting it right now. Yeah. And this is that Tulsi Gabbard sort of stuff that's come up, you know, in the news just over the last week.

I don't even know what that is. So just that Tulsi Gabbard, if you go to RT or Sputnik News, she's in dozens of articles already. is like she is a good candidate or she's being held down by the mainstream media or you know like they're taking a position she has a pro Assad position on Syria so now she's caught up in this storm and they're now going to bring her out as man we should support Tulsi Gabbard and when everybody pushes back on the side position he'll be like this is just the mainstream elite democrats like Hillary Clinton trying to hold her down this is like I mean it was even on air this morning I watched some of this and you're like who is for Assad staying in power really in either party. This was not an issue five years ago when I was watching trolls in Syria. Today, you will hear people on the right in particular advocate for it and even people on the left. This shows you the power of this system for Russia. I don't care about Tulsa Gabb or Trump over five years, but they do care that Assad stays in power and they keep their footprint. And now they have that conversation in both sides of the political spectrum. So this is very deliberate. It's designed for a specific purpose. It's funny. You mentioned arts. People don't maybe know what that is.

Russia today is what this, I guess now is it just called RT? And it's essentially people will even send me things like, Jordan, I know you must read RT. It's the only real news source that exists now. And I'm going, you realize this is actually funded by the Kremlin. Right. Like, it's one of the most unreal in that respect. And I actually got offered to do a show on there. And I went, oh, my God, I'm going to be on a real network.

Let me look at this up. And oh, never mind. crap, you know, and then I thought, have they, if they ever heard anything I've done, because sure. That might be why the one did you want. Maybe, yeah, because they went, oh, this guy's got a reputation for not being a bullshitter, so maybe we can get a non-bullshould. I mean, it's just, they pay well.

I will say that. They offer you. Well, they pay well, but they might get you in there and then batter you about something else, which means get you talking about the Russia stuff and then find something else to go at you about, oh, well, you had such and such honor. What about when you were a kid? You never know what they're going to pull on you in terms of, you know, a stunt like that. Or you might be saying something that they do like and do want to advance.

Well, they offered me a gig there. That's what I'm saying. It wasn't just an appearance. So I thought like, why you have an audience. That's why. Yeah. So look at election night coverage from RT. Do you know who the three hosts were? No. Larry King. Oh, okay. Well, he's huge audience, right? Older population. Ed Schultz, the former, he just died, right? Former MSNBC commentator. Wow, left. And Jesse Ventura. because conspiracy theorist. That is election and coverage. And that shows you sort of how they think about, I would like to bring in an older audience.

I would like to bring in a left-leaning audience. Conspiracy theorists are great, right? This is part of it. You can't trust anything. That's their motto. Question more. R.T. Question more.

That's interesting. Never says answer more. It's just like create doubt, you know, can I believe anything? The government is terrible. Elect officials are awful. And they've now branched that out, too. They have a spin-off, which is their sort of. social media channel one called in case you missed it, I think, ICMI.

Oh, yeah. That is a Russian front, but for younger people, and that's to, you know, blend together the social media satellite television sort of networks. See, I didn't even know that. People send me things from them all the time. In case you missed it? Yeah. Oh, there you go.

Yeah. And I'm always like, eh, because look, you've got to double check. It could be another variant of that or whatever. But if you go to RT, you'll see this. This is our subchannel in social media, younger woman doing very much like what you would think. you know, for a social media broadcast. You mentioned also the death of expertise.

Can you talk about what this is? Because it does create these sort of, and we've all seen this, these tribes are very smug. I see these every day where people go, Jordan, you're an effing chill for this. Like, I can't even listen to you anymore. And they get in this major emotional tantrum.

And then I look at their profile, and it's like super non-PC, as real as it gets. And I'm just thinking, you're so triggered right now. And yet your whole thing is I'm tough. I don't care. zero F's given. And it's like, wow, you're giving a lot of Fs for a guy who's really laid back, you know. So it's the belief in these circles that anybody with an internet connection is as smart as anybody else, regardless of what their experience, academic credentials or life achievements are.

Right. And Tom Nichols wrote the book, Death of Expertise. But, I mean, I saw it in the context of social media in particular, which is go to any kid today and you're like, hey, how do you do this? and I can do that. I could take a heart out or I can start a car and you're like, yeah, but have you ever done it? No, it's on YouTube or it's on Google. You know, I can figure it out. I can figure it out. And on its face, I love the idea that young people think they can figure it out. I want to encourage kids to figure out and young people in general to figure out whatever they can. But at some point, you have to be going, okay, the downside to this is that

this other person dies if I don't actually figure this. Sure. And you don't listen to people who actually know things that are super important, right? So Kim Kardashian becomes an expert on prison reform just because she has the largest audience. But how many activists have worked their entire life on prison reform that could never get an audience with a president, right? It really screws up the balance. And so a lot of bad information can get pushed very, very quickly with the celebrity stuff. Death expertise, I think a great example is the basic, I worked on crowdsourcing a lot. And crowds are really good when it's something they personally experienced. whenever they have some sort of information or knowledge about it and when they have an actual opinion.

But ask them about something else like, how should we pursue vaccine science? Suddenly they have an opinion on it. Now, they've never made a vaccine. They never study medicine, but they read something on the Internet that told them this, or the Bilderberg Group controls the entire world or, you know, Davos or whatever. They don't actually know, you know, how those things work. That becomes a dangerous phenomenon. And this is beyond just like the Russians.

This is like public safety stuff. We've got a measles outbreak right now, you know, in Oregon. How the hell do that happen? Those are really intelligent people on average. Right. I was an FBI agent in Portland. Brilliant people. How the hell are we not vaccinating kids?

We got a measles outbreak. Right. So I was going to ask is that sort of one of those stronghold of anti-vax? My kid will be fine type situation. Hom schooling is another one. You know, that's anti-institution. You can't trust institutions sometimes. I mean, there are valid reasons.

for homeschool. Sure. But yeah, you know, it's all of that. A litmus test always in conspiracy circles is vaccines. And you would even see a troll maybe push that or a disinfo group. I would float out a vaccine conspiracy or UFOs. And if somebody hit on that, I would follow right up with a conspiracy about the U.S. government.

Interesting. For social engineering. Because the person is already saying they're open to, whether it's Omar Hamami or a U.S. voter, they're open to a moral change or a position change. So how does then the Kremlin, you've got these sort of three prongs, and we can wrap with this, how the Kremlin muddies the waters and ensures plausible deniability, which, you know, this requires a sustained campaign. This is not like, oh, let's, this isn't like screwing with people by publishing one article and it goes viral and they're like, wow, that worked. My friend Ryan Holiday wrote a book called Trust Me, I'm lying, where he would sort of bubble up a little, he'd send out to little blogs and, hey, you know this author did this and the author is his client.

And then that would bubble up to a local news source. and then a national news source would suddenly be like, this guy is doing all these crazy things, and here's a bunch of free PR for the book. And in the Kremlin kind of like maybe bought that and handed it out to everybody in their Info War Center. And now we've got these three sort of strategies, alternative perceptions, something called parsing

and then refuting facts. Right. So refuting facts, let's start with the back one, is I call it Flood the Zone, right? And this is sort of the alternative conspiracies. If you watch whenever they want to refute the Scribble poisoning in the UK. The former KGB guy who got poisoned with some radioactive material. So when they did that hit, they then came out with, I believe it was in the 20s, alternative explanations for why they didn't do it.

This makes it so the truth has only one voice, but fiction has as many as you can create. And then you have to try and go at each of these theories and test them out and refute them if you're in. expert, this becomes exhausting and impossible. Then when you get to the quit point, they go, see, we must have been right. He didn't say it was wrong. And you're like, I just refuted 22 before that. Like, when does it stop? Or just it becomes, well, you know, what you said is a PhD and XYZ.

That does make sense. But if that's really true, then how come there are so many other possible ways that this could have happened? And then, of course, you're saying there aren't. Those are all bullshit. Right. But then people go, well, I don't know. it makes sense to me, which sort of dips into your death of expertise bucket.

Yeah. And confirmation bias. Yeah. Like, I really don't like getting shots or I, you know, I really just don't like Hillary Clinton or whatever it is that it started off with. The parsing part, they do in a fantastic way, which is they take out information and they always include a kernel of truth. And if you watch the troll farm, I call them troll farmers. Their entry level job, if they're good, was to write stripped out blogs, which took facts from real articles. just wrote the facts. So then the social media person can come in and grab on that fact and then spin it in a different way. Can you give us an example? So one percent of people that get vaccines get sick, let's say. Okay. I want to take it out of politics. Then in the social media space, and you know what happens those one percent of people? At least 99 percent of that one percent gets

autism. And that's why we have an increased rate. Now, the article never talked about autism or anything. I just said one percent. That's not true. I'm just making that up. That's how you construct the parsing. Then it becomes, I don't know that that's true or not. Where do I go to look for that? Then you go back to an expert, they go, this is completely untrue.

You know, they have to roll out an entire dossier and explain it to you. Then you go, I don't know, you know, I have doubts. That's how you take parsing. You break out parses, you know, parcels of truth. You lay them in different places. Then you redirect with opinion. And so in the media ecosystem, it's R.T. writes a maybe a mostly fact-based story. Alternative media adds another layer to it.

Social media adds another layer to it. RT writes a second article, which cites those social media accounts. So there's one that was great where five of the Twitter accounts they cited, three of them were troll farm accounts. So they're reciting each other. You get to this circle of, okay, long ago, there was an element of truth to this. Seth Rich did die and was murdered. But now it's become eight different stories, right? Sure.

He was the one for WikiLeaks. He was on the run from Hillary Clinton. PizzaGate is another version of that. That's how you sort of parse it and break it out and redirect it in a way. So that's alternative perceptions, parsing and then refuting facts is... Refuting Vax is just outright refuting it. And that's what you see. Putin, Lavrov, or any of their state-sponsored media do so well.

and then it's even more damaging when Americans repeat it or American elected leaders. I mean, Helsinki is that we had nothing to do with hacking the election. Your intel community is wrong, and they will never admit to it under any circumstance. They keep that refutation down, even when caught blindly in the Scribble poisoning, no, we didn't do it. And you're like, yes, you did. Black, there's cameras and whenever, nope, nope, we did not. We've identified the agents. They're definitely Russian.

The guy who invented the substance these people died with is like, yeah, there's no way that said anything else. I designed it that way myself. He lives in America or lives in the UK. And as soon as you offer that rebuttal the next day, they will flood the zone with alternative explanations for that video. So you almost wear yourself out with rebuttals. And no, you didn't. The emails, we know that you stole them. Nope, Seth Rich.

Okay. Well, we know that, you know, the following things happen. And we, nope, here's this. Look at this video. Maybe it's this. Maybe it's this. Maybe it's this. That's the process.

And that's very much moved into the U.S. audience space as well. Like you see American politicians doing this. Northrum, right? Did it, uh, I don't know if that's me in the picture. Well, it's on your page. I don't know. Would have been more believable if you didn't admit it 48 hours prior.

Right. And it was like facial recognition or something. And you're like, that sounds like the Kremlin. You know, when I hear that, it's pretty, pretty eerie. Yeah. What about something as innocent as dating apps? I mean, are we getting, is this stuff affecting, you know, even our dating lives? Is this going, am I going to be on OKCupid and run into this kind of thing?

Or is this strictly social media? Sure. For espionage or influence or infiltration or whatever, dating apps are an amazing opportunity. And so I had an encounter with this using Tinder where I had matched with somebody. And I had even laughed to somebody. I was like, oh, this looks like, you know, Red Sparrow. This is like a weird account or whatever. And I matched with it.

I didn't think anything of it. Never spoke to it. And then while I was traveling overseas, I get a message while in there. It was like, welcome to Falling Country. And thanks for staying in such and such hotel. And we fluff the pillows for you. Thanks for staying. You know, like as a activity.

That was from the Tinder profile. From the tender profile I matched with. And so do I know who's behind it? No. Could it be anybody trying to social engineer? me, you know, possibly, but it was rather ironic because I'm a guy writing about Russian disinfo. You know, this seems to all make sense. I'm overseas.

So now, who am I going to report it to? There is no technical signatures back in the U.S., you know, they can track it down. But that tells you a lot about Tripio, you know, I think, too. Do I think they were in my hotel room? Probably not. Did they fluff the pillows? No. How would I ever know?

I have no idea, you know. But it's, that is a way to sort of go at people. And there's all sorts of creepier things, you know, you could do. Like, you could find, if you could tap into someone's social media dating apps, let's say, and look at all their swipes left or right and all of their conversations, you can create a persona that they will get so suckered into actually going to, down to face symmetry and pictures and all those sorts of things. Someone can just create your dream partner. Yeah. And then, or a bunch of them match them with you. And then, of course, you're going to get into compromising positions.

You're going to get totally carried away with all. Yeah, I talk about it. Actually, I wrote a fiction chapter, which is the conclusion of the. book and I published it at Medium, which is how to win an election. But I talk about how you would use aggregate face swipes on dating apps to pick the next governor of a state by going and finding him based on his physical appearance because you know it will attract to the voting audience that you want to tailor that candidate towards. Scarily, too real. Wow. Thank you very much for coming by. This is been scarily. Thanks for happening.

Great big thank you to Clinton Watts. His book title is Messing with the Enemy, surviving in a social media world of hackers, terrorists, Russians, and fake news. Wow, calling out Russians there pretty big. If you want to know how I managed to book all these great people and manage my relationships, I use systems. I use tiny habits. It's very structured and I'm teaching you for free. Personal and professional use networks really are the life.

It's just a saving grace. I cannot highlight enough how this has positively changed my life for the better. Six-minute networking is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Don't kick the can down the road. You cannot make up for lost time when it comes to relationships and networking. This is the number one mistake I see people make. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Once you need those relationships, you're too late.

It's called six-minute networking for a reason. Don't make excuses about how you don't have time. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway from Clint Watts. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube. channel at jordan harbinger.com slash YouTube. This show is produced in association with podcast one, and this show was co-produced by Jason Filter, Bubble DePhilippo, and Jen Harbinger.

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