Episode 3: Cognitive Warfare

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:04]Quick question. How long can you read something before you feel the urge to check your phone? If the answer is less than 2 minutes, I need you to hear what I'm about to say. As ironic as what I just said, your attention span didn't shrink on its own. It was engineered to shrink. And the entity that engineered it isn't a Silicon Valley startup chasing ad revenue. It's a foreign government running the most sophisticated influence operation in human history.

[00:00:29]Cognitive warfare is the deliberate targeting of how you think. Not just what you think, but your ability to think clearly at all. It's the difference between propaganda, which gives you bad information, and cognitive warfare, which destroys your ability to process any information critically.

[00:00:44]>> Probably the worst of all these methods is cognitive warfare, where it takes over your brain for life. It kills your critical thinking. So you can't bring in other factors to arrive at the truth.

[00:00:59]And so you basically become a sheep.

[00:01:02]>> When you can't think critically, you can't resist. You can't organize. You can't fight back. You just consume whatever you're fed and believe it.

[00:01:09]That's the goal.

[00:01:13]Let's specifically talk about Tik Tok. I know you've heard about this before, but I want you to understand it had at a level that most coverage never reaches.

[00:01:20]Tik Tok is described as a Chinese Communist Party controlled app that acts as a data harvesting weapon disguised as a social media platform. It has over 170 million American users before it was switched over and sold off. And Tik Tok's parent company, Bite Dance, operates under Chinese security law, which compels it to cooperate with intelligence work upon request with no ability to refuse. Here's what makes Tik Tok different from Facebook or Instagram. The algorithm doesn't just serve you content you like. It's trained to find your psychological pressure points and it amplifies content that really hits those points. Now, this is actually a documented design because the Chinese version of Tik Tok doesn't do that. The Chinese version is censored and heavily regulated so that users are not exposed to bad behavioral content.

[00:02:00]Now, Tik Tok's heating feature allows content to be artificially pushed viral by operators independent of organic user engagement. Essentially, the CCP can choose what narratives go viral in America. Evidence from Taiwan's 2024 presidential election showed Tik Tok actively spreading probation narratives with irregular CCP linked accounts increasing by 1,600% in a single year on the platform.

[00:02:20]>> Yes, you do care because if you you know you if you love social media, guess what? 90% of it's all weaponized information disinformation. But everything you see on the new social media will be propaganda and you will you and you have to be on it a certain number of hours a day. Uh or you'll get a bad social credit score. Um your your neighbors have to report you because they saw you or you said something about freedom or you said something about the administration and so their credit score goes up and your credit score goes down.

[00:02:56]that includes your own children are incented to rat you out.

[00:03:01]>> And on that Chinese version called doin, it limits children to 40 minutes per day and feeds them science history and educational content. Meanwhile, the version they export to America pushes dopamine loops, outrage cycles, and brain numbumbing entertainment with no limits. Same company, but two different vision for what the population they serve should be looking at.

[00:03:24]Now, this isn't a metaphor. It's actually part of neuroscience. Our ability to take in information is getting worse or we're getting dumber in that sense, right? So, in this time, how do you get somebody to actually believe what you say in this cognitive space?

[00:03:38]>> Well, great question. And my answer is you're the reason you have a 60se second um attention span, which by the way is the attention span of a gnat. Um that's a compliment. Um the reason you have that is because you're being played.

[00:03:54]Social media is dumbing you down.

[00:03:56]They're giving you this information in very tight sound bites and and uh you know doom scrolling and and dopamine hits. You're being drugged. You're being you're being addicted um by an ultimate captor. Former FBI director Christopher Ray told the University of Michigan that Tik Tok could be used to manipulate the American public and that the Chinese security law of liing Chinese companies to cooperate with intelligence work means that the CCP holds the authority to drive the app's recommendation algorithm to manipulate content to conduct influence operations. And it gets worse when you factor in when this is all happening to your brain.

[00:04:34]>> Here's the other problem with high schoolers and Gen Z's. Your brain doesn't finish developing until age 25.

[00:04:43]Your the final portion of your brain, the preffrontal cortex for your executive thinking, uh your u uh consequences, all these things, the last part of your brain doesn't finish till age 25. That's by the number one brain doctor who scanned over 300,000 brains, Dr. Daniel Aean. But even today that is that age 25 uh studies are saying that's now age 32 that your brain doesn't stop doesn't finish developing. So anything that happens to your brain up until age 32 has a catastrophic effect a magnified exponential effect. So when you're smoking weed you're killing your brain.

[00:05:26]Um those are permanent and it's not the weed of yesterday. the weed today. We can talk about it later, but it's it's loaded with all these extreme carcinogens from the Chinese Communist Party. The prefrontal cortex is what gives you the ability to evaluate consequences, resist impulses, think long term. And the CCP is targeting that exact window, flooding it with algorithmically optimized content before it finishes forming. And the result is a generation that struggles to distinguish real from fake. in that shorter attention spans than any in recorded history and statistically more sympathetic to socialist ideology than any generation before. Because all you need to understand is one thing. We're supposed to believe that communism is better. A Rasmusen's report survey from 2025 of 1,500 Gen Z and millennial respondents found that over half want a democratic socialist in the White House by 2028. A result that counter intelligence analysts link directly to years of education system and social media operations.

[00:06:26]But cognitive warfare and drug warfare aren't separate categories. They actually overlap deliberately, >> you know. And so we've got kids going into I know it sounds like we're doing a detour, but we're not. But that we've got kids and young adults going into emergency rooms with permanent psychosis.

[00:06:42]That means it's permanent. Your your brain is not no longer just fried. It's fried forever with psychosis.

[00:06:50]This is your enemy. Law enforcement across multiple states have raided illegal cannabis growth that were operated by Chinese nationals. Out of Oklahoma alone, there were hundreds of operations that were linked to organized networks with ties to the Chinese organized crime. And many of these operations use pesticides and chemical additives banned in the US. And the product they're all getting into legal dispensary supply chains. So you don't need a secret government program to damage generations cognitive function.

[00:07:14]You just need to flood the market with products that fry their prefrontal cortex and or tell them that marijuana as well as other sort of drugs are cool.

[00:07:26]There's one more mechanism of cognitive warfare I want to share and get you to understand it is the information environment itself.

[00:07:32]>> You're just like, "Okay, where's my food? Where's my shelter?" And and okay, that's what they're saying. That's what it is. And if you tell a lie enough, Yuri Besminoff, total communist that defected to the US in late 80s, middle 80s, um if you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.

[00:07:52]>> So understand that you're already be take you're already being uh victimized and you're already being played.

[00:07:58]>> This is a quote from a Soviet defector, but the CCP has operationalized it at a scale that the Soviets could never have dreamed of. 170 million Americans use an app that can push any narrative viral without those users knowing the algorithm is essentially staring them.

[00:08:11]Well, you don't need to convince anyone of anything thorough through arguments.

[00:08:15]You just repeat it until it feels true.

[00:08:17]And that's the way that they do this through the algorithms. Make you feel like the environment in which you are living through and scrolling through is the real thing. And the way to fight this is know that it's happening. The awareness alone is armor. Stop doom scrolling. Extend your attention span deliberately and read long form. Watch full conversations. Read long books, not just clips.