Mackenzie Jackson: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Secure Disclosure. Winn, I'm so glad to have you here. Thanks for coming out here.
Winn Schwartau: Are you kidding? 115 degrees heat, I wouldn't miss that for the world.
Mackenzie Jackson: It is actually crazy.
Winn Schwartau: It is the worst it has been for the last 40 years since I've been coming in.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to do that to you.
Winn Schwartau: Well, it's clearly New Zealand's fault.
Mackenzie Jackson: For sure. Well, yeah, and we did have a discussion before. I had spent some time in Australia. I expect this kind of nonsense from Australia, from out of spring, so I wasn't quite prepared for here. But you know what? We persevere. I wanted to get straight into it because you have a fascinating background. You're a published author of many books and you're someone that's kind of been pretty vocal about some of the issues that we have. But it all started, you were an audio engineer before you kind of entered. How did that journey happen?
Winn Schwartau: My father and mother were both audio engineers. My mother was the first audio engineer at NBC during World War II, the female audio engineer. My father produced Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, gave me my first trumpet lesson. I grew up in the industry and then high school and I didn't really get along very well. So I went to work in a recording studio, you know, here's the broom and you start off absolutely at the bottom, but I had an affinity for it and I already knew electrical engineering pretty well. And I spent the next, I think it was 13 years and I fried. It was just too much of it all. And I left right after the RSO, the Stigwood controversy back in '81.
Mackenzie Jackson: Right. That's so funny. We kind of have somewhat of a similar background because my whole family, from my grandparents, my parents, and my brother are all musicians. I grew up on tour with them. My brother lives in Nashville, he's a country musician. My parents were more kind of Celtic folk musicians and they called me the black sheep of the family because from as early as I can remember, all I wanted to do was mess around with computers and they were like devastated by this kid.
Winn Schwartau: We didn't have that option way back when.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. Well, you know, at some point you kind of ended up pretty passionate about, and I believe you referred to it as kind of like the cyber Pearl Harbor that was kind of coming up.
Winn Schwartau: The original phrase was Electronic Pearl Harbor, right? And then John Deutsch from the CIA changed it to Digital Pearl. The terms have shifted over the years, but the original was Electronic Pearl Harbor.
Mackenzie Jackson: Right. And I mean this is something that you brought to Congress that you were very passionate about, but this is back in the 90s, you know, at the end of '91, I think.
Winn Schwartau: Well, 9/11 I think.
Mackenzie Jackson: And so it's pretty early to have foreshadowed ultimately, you know, the kind of day and age that we live in. But what kind of led you to thinking about that? And how did you, how did it kind of end up with you in front of Congress talking about this trying to.
Winn Schwartau: We're really going to get woo woo here. It was a vision literally. I do my best thinking in the shower, cascading water. And back then it was, okay, viruses, that's about all we had. And it was, well, what if a bad guy did two? What if he did 10? What if he had an army of people? Well, what if he used passive interception? What if he used all of the various technologies that we had available in those days, you know, 35 years ago, and launched an attack all at once, a serious cyber attack against infrastructure and everything. And that is the genesis of the Electronic Pearl Harbor. It became Pearl Harbor.com, which became Die Hard 4. And then the books, Information Warfare, I think there were three volumes of those. And it was in those days I was called Chicken Little, it'll never happen. One congressman says to me, "Mr. Schwartau, could you please explain to this committee why the bad guys would ever want to use the internet?" And I was really fairly stunned. Then my answer at that point was because they can.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's asking, it's like that is the equivalent today of saying, why would the bad guys want to use AI? It's really the equivalent of that.
Winn Schwartau: With an equal amount or perhaps greater trepidation today, because back in '91, corporations were, "The internet, should we ever use it?" And those were the discussions in the 90s.
Mackenzie Jackson: And so what was it like watching what unfolded from there? Watching the internet develop with this going? Ultimately, I kind of want to ask you the question of, like, did we do a good enough job at building this thing out?
Winn Schwartau: Oh Christ, no. Listen, the reason things are worse now than they were then, and the reason is we have more complexity and the designers of the technology, not the security end of things, but the technology itself, are every quarter because of the way our capitalistic system works, you have to have a new feature, you have to have a new this, a new that. And as you add complexity to any system, it is going to be more prone to failure, and in the case that we're talking about, it's going to be more prone to hostile actors. We never designed any of this with security or privacy or any of those words in mind. Every bit of it has been a bolt-on.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: Let's see if we can strap security.
Mackenzie Jackson: Reactive, it's always been reactive.
Winn Schwartau: I understand reactive. I really do. But it's while we were trying, we were trying to get people to think about security, and this is in the mid-90s and designing all sorts of crazy stuff back then, it was still why do we need all of these features? Why are you giving all of this complex capability to somebody who basically needs a word processor?
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: And today, a Mac, it's a really great machine. I'm a fan, but it is too complex. When something goes wrong, I struggle sometimes to go, where is it, and how do I Google? All right, how do I do it? And I'm supposed to know what the hell I'm doing.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: What do the 95% of people who aren't geeks, techs, and live in this? What do they do? It's a, so we have screwed it up in both ways from the security standpoint and from the fundamental design standpoint of the technology itself. It's just too damn complex.
Mackenzie Jackson: I totally get that whole point of view. I think part of the thing that I kind of think about is now my immediate blame is we kind of create these like, these sledgehammers to do minuscule jobs. We try and we create these things that can just kind of like, do everything.
Winn Schwartau: Yes.
Mackenzie Jackson: And we live in this world now where everything, the stakes become so much more intense of doing something wrong, right? Clicking on the phishing email link 20 years ago was maybe you kind of like, okay, maybe something could happen, they could access something. But now, like, you click on the wrong phishing link and like, your whole identity, your whole life, your crypto wallet, whatever you're dealing with, it's all just.
Winn Schwartau: Or one in the enterprise, one person in the enterprise does one thing by accident, let's not say it's a hostile insider, can bring down a good portion of the security value of that particular company and partners depending upon how they're connected. And what sort of synchronous and asynchronous communications occur between the various networks and enterprises. And people think, oh, it's just my little, it's just me. No, it's just not you. You are connected to everything. So, like we're out here in Hacker Summer Camp for the week with all the conferences. And the night before I left home, I'm going through, my wife says, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm locking down everything. I'm turning this, I'm turning off most everything just because."
Mackenzie Jackson: Just because.
Winn Schwartau: Don't contact me.
Mackenzie Jackson: There are ways.
Winn Schwartau: It's actually the safest thing out here is just to stay on 5G. It's really the safest.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah, I get nostalgic looking at old TV shows where someone calls a restaurant to, to, to, like, you know, to find someone. I was kind of thinking it's kind of nice that, you know, it took effort to annoy someone back in the day. Now you get a thousand notifications every minute.
Winn Schwartau: That is where a lot of my work is taking me now in the cognitive world.
Mackenzie Jackson: Well, before we kind of get into some of the newer stuff, I want to talk, I want to talk a little bit and then we can move on. One question I was dying to ask you is, I think every viewer would agree that you were pretty much right in the Pearl Harbor analogy, going through. But one thing that I wanted to kind of ask is, what did you get wrong or what did you, what did you think would happen that didn't, be good or bad? What, what were you wrong about when you kind of came up?
Winn Schwartau: I don't want this to be arrogant, but, but unfortunately, most everything. I watched it all come true.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: I watched it. I didn't predict exact months, days, years, but you know, the tendency, the trending of the hostility, and the weaponization of the technology by, well, first, you know, the one-off guy, and then the small little criminal gangs, all the way up to nation states. When I told Congress and a lot of folks back in, when I was training military units for the US and UK and around the world, they said, "You really think that there's going to be a cyber war conflict between nations?" And I said, "Yes, absolutely, exact date, I don't know." And we've, we've seen it inch, inch forward, step by step by step. And I really wasn't happy about being right so much. Yeah, okay, kind of cool. I saw something. But damn, we had warnings.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: We had warnings. We knew. But technology is not for everybody. And when you're talking to senior leadership of an organization or of the military, just on those two alone, they don't understand it. And it was a little visionary in its day. So we're playing catch-up and we're losing.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. And I, I feel like we're playing this out all over again. It must feel like déjà vu for you at the moment in this space. We're building out things so fast with no considerations for security.
Winn Schwartau: It is the same thing. Every time something, we did that in the 80s, no, we did that in the 90s. We did that in the noughties. It's the same stuff all over because weaponization of technology is independent of the technology itself.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: Whatever tech comes along, it's going to be weaponized.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: Because we can and human nature being what it is.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. No. And we're like, absolutely. You talked a little bit about the kind of cognitive space that you're kind of dealing with now. Is this in kind of like a lot that when I was looking into you, there's a lot around kind of the Metawar that's coming up? Is that kind of like in this space or?
Winn Schwartau: It is, um, different, a little bit different. Metawar is the combination of kinetic warfare, or for you geeks out there, layer one of the stack. Cyber war takes place in layers 2 to 7. I've introduced layers 8, 9, and 10, cognitive layers, cognitive warfare for the individual, for the enterprise and for nation states, you know, the larger entities, NGOs, what have you. And it matches exactly what information warfare was, the same three types of classes and they map on top of each other. And when you add cognitive conflict, cognitive hostile actors to the equation, then you have Metawar because meta is sitting on top of all three of those layers of, well, the 10 in the new OSI that I'm proposing and across all domains. And to me it was again intuitively obvious.
Mackenzie Jackson: How, how is it intuitively obvious to you? Like, I'm curious about this because if it was intuitively obvious to a lot of people, I don't know if we would be in the predicament. Or perhaps it is intuitively obvious to everyone, we just don't care. I'm not sure I have an answer for that one.
Winn Schwartau: When I started, I sold my last company to a big company and it was all good and everything. And they said, "What do you want to do?" I said, "I just want to keep designing stuff and figuring stuff out, but I'm really interested in the mind." Because I had been working in various levels of the security awareness industry for many years. And I got really intrigued by what works, what doesn't work in training. And basically most security awareness training, no offense, all of you guys out there, it is sort of meh at best when you look at it from a neuropsychological standpoint. And so I spent several years running around conferences and going to universities and talking to people and learning what we knew because neuroscience is really very, very new in the big scheme of things.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: And I realized that the attack vectors were identical. The attack vectors to the physical structures, to the cyber structures and to this. They're all identical and they map against each other very, very well. And that's what got me started into Metawar that there is no difference whatsoever. And for me that was intuitively obvious again. And I can't, when people have an intuitive idea, they don't know where it comes from.
Mackenzie Jackson: Right. Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: But it was one of those. Then you spend three years researching it, trying to figure out, all right, am I full of it or not? And so giving a lot of talks for many years before I really started, before I published Metawar, it was, "Hi, my name's Winn. My job here is to mess with your mind, really screw with it, and your job is to call out my." And that means you stand on a chair and go, "Winn, you're full of it!" And if you're right, I'll buy you a beer, but if I'm right, you buy me a nice glass of French red wine. And because none of us really know what we're doing in the big scheme of things, a lot of it is guessing. And so with the work that I'm doing now with cognitive warfare, a lot of it's guesswork. It's let's throw the idea out there and get people discussing things. And when I started coming up with the thought of cognitive Pearl Harbor, that really started getting people a little bit upset and talking about cognitive surrender at the general population level of any organization or nation, NGO, right?
Mackenzie Jackson: You know, like you just said, cognitive surrender there, and my brain, and I might be completely wrong about this, but.
Winn Schwartau: No, you're right.
Mackenzie Jackson: Where my brain's kind of going to this is like something that I'm being stressed out about and I think can be easily explained by like the GPS is that I live in the Netherlands now, and I can map out all the places I've lived for much shorter times before I had GPS better than I can my own town because I've kind of surrendered my ability to navigate to the GPS. Right?
Winn Schwartau: Sound like my daughter.
Mackenzie Jackson: Well, I've actually started to make an effort to try and do it. But if we take that concept of surrendering this one thing to this machine that, okay, I no longer need to exercise this muscle, you know, which according to research, is actually the best thing to prevent things like dementia, is this like navigation, but that's a conversation for another day.
Winn Schwartau: No, absolutely. No, I know what you're saying is absolutely right.
Mackenzie Jackson: And is cognitive surrender when you're talking about this and cognitive warfare, do these types of things play into it?
Winn Schwartau: This is nothing new, nothing. Cognitive surrender. One could argue is as old as civilization. I don't want the Pharaoh to kill me, so I'm going to do what the Pharaoh says, right? Go through history, things happen, and it's a rinse and repeat of power and control over the years. And to bring it up into the 20th century, we had the idea of the Manurion Candidate. Let's get some guy's mind and we're going to program it to do all these nefarious things and there will be a trigger word and that'll happen. Yes, semi sort of kind of. But the issue of control of a population is what cognitive surrender and cognitive Pearl Harbor is. And if you begin in 1933 in Germany, there's a perfect example of an entire population suddenly that bought in. They cognitively surrendered to a belief system.
Mackenzie Jackson: That became what it was. And do you think that like this electronic warfare and this kind of cognitive warfare, can accelerate each other? Like.
Winn Schwartau: Oh, absolutely, where it's one of these hockey stick curves. Absolutely. Because you have synergy between them. You have symbiosis between them. And then you have force multiplication that occurs, especially with the addition of AI.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: And force multiplication is the military term for how do I make something blow up faster, bigger, and have a greater effect.
Mackenzie Jackson: This is probably a skeptical approach, but I think, like, founded in reality is.
Winn Schwartau: Please be skeptical.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. Well, with the AI models and the AI training and everything like that, we're, we're entering into an area of a single source of truth, you know, and it's been a pretty rough, like, you know, I think you think of, I was never really into conspiracy theories until they all started coming true. And like there, there's this, like, a lot of this where it's like, if we all come to this point where we're dealing with these, these AI models that are kind of building us all into the same, same kind of way. If you go into a presentation, a conference now, you'll notice that a lot of people's slides look almost identical. You know, like, we're all starting to look.
Winn Schwartau: I still, I still build mine by hand. I do. I've used the same stupid format for years.
Mackenzie Jackson: Well, you can always tell a good presentation by, by how, how, like, by where it starts.
Winn Schwartau: You know, I do the identical thing. A few words, a picture to mess with your mind, black and yellow. And I'm colorblind so I can see the black and yellow. And it just, I don't want to design something to make it just for form. People are there for content.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: And you don't want to overload them.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: And in today's society, in fact, one of the slides that I'll be presenting at the Cognitive Security conference on Thursday or Friday, the opening slide is, "What in the hell is wrong with everybody?"
Mackenzie Jackson: So, do you have an answer for us?
Winn Schwartau: Yes, I have an answer. I have a that I'm proposing in an upcoming book. It's called TMI. Too much information, right? If you look at the history of information, go back 50,000 years, when we kind of became this version of hominid, there was under one kilobit of information that hit our brains every day. And it goes up and up and up and up and then you have a Gutenberg and all this stuff, then computers, there's all these big steps that have occurred throughout history. And today, the amount of information that's coming our way is somewhere in the order of 10 to the 30 seconds, right? What is the cognitive limit of your brain in bandwidth in networking terms?
Mackenzie Jackson: I have no idea.
Winn Schwartau: 11.1 megabits per second. 82% of that is vision, right? Anything else that's greater than that is a cognitive overload or DOS. Your brain is being DOSed. And when your brain gets DOSed, you lose agency, you lose identity, you become addicted to the technology. You fall for the echo chambers because that allows the feel-good chemicals in the brain to resonate with you. And that's part of what a cognitive Pearl Harbor and cognitive surrender is about is we as humans want to feel good. And whatever it takes to feel good, and that's ultimately what potentially is going to destroy us if you believe in my existential, uh.
Mackenzie Jackson: Your cheery, your cheery outlook on the world.
Winn Schwartau: I'm doing a paper now for the Journal of Information Warfare's 25th anniversary and they asked me to look 50 years out.
Mackenzie Jackson: Right. Okay. Well, let me ask you this here question. Where are we in 50 years and what do we, and what would it take to have that be positive?
Winn Schwartau: Well, let's look at ontological shakeups. What was, when we talk about 9/11, I'm just picking that as a major event for everybody in the world. And we'll often say, "Before 9/11, after 9/11." Today we say, "Oh, before COVID, after COVID," because they were ontological shocks to the collective psyche of everybody. Those were arguably cognitive Pearl Harbors because they shifted everything. We had the physical Pearl Harbor in 1941 that shifted everything. The Berlin Wall coming down, another kind of, not quite as impactful. And I'm looking at the same issues from the cognitive standpoint and who is running the show. And the answers, unfortunately, and I can see it in your face right now, you don't like the answers you're even coming up with right now.
Mackenzie Jackson: No, no, no. Yeah. There is, yeah. There's no good answers.
Winn Schwartau: How do you retain agency? How do you know that your ideas, your thoughts have not been subverted or unduly influenced by others? It's like what kind of jeans you wear? Some people only will buy these jeans for whatever the hell reason. Because an actor says to buy these jeans because they're really good. And what they are using are basic psychological techniques of persuasion. And that has been called adtech.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: And they know very, very well.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: How persuasion works.
Mackenzie Jackson: Absolutely. And there's, yeah, just so much. And we have now, when you add in, like, AI bias and things like this, where I'm asking an AI agent something that I know is false, well, as in, you know, if it gives me an answer that I know is false, I still will, like, if someone said that to me, I would say, "No, you're full of it. Winn, you're full of it." If an AI agent said it back to me, like, oh, I have to look.
Winn Schwartau: There is something, there's a technique that I'm, I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's one that I use and a lot of my colleagues have come to use. So typically you go to your AI, whatever it is, and you have a question, you have a thing, whatever. And that's called the prompt. What I've built is a prompt suffix. It's a paragraph. "Don't lie to me. Treat me as an equal. Do not hallucinate. Verify your sources at least two layers deep if I'm doing something that's perhaps on the academic end of things." And it's a whole way that I want my AI to be able to behave. I want to put the guardrails into every single prompt I do. And my AI has been learning that. It says, "Well, Winn, you don't have to tell me that every time." I said, "Yeah, but over time, because people don't realize every time you use an AI, it changes. If I ask it a question now and I ask it a question in one minute, I'm going to get a different answer."
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: So, I want to build my own guardrails in. And so, that is one approach. Is it perfect? Has it been studied? No. It's one of my crazy ideas.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: Well, I think it's a great idea to have these guardrails out. And I think it's a great idea if, like, if you can control the guardrails yourself too.
Mackenzie Jackson: To a certain extent, you should be able to define it.
Winn Schwartau: It, when you raise your kids, you have physical guardrails to protect them. You have some level of psychological guardrails of candy, strangers, what have you, behavior. And then today, and I've got a grandson who's seven, so I'm living through this now, how much tech and what kind of tech, and how do I avoid him falling into everything that I'm now predicting is going to happen? So you should be able to, people need to be able to build their own guardrails. Don't trust big tech guys. It is not in their best interest.
Mackenzie Jackson: So let me go back to kind of that original point that started off here is, where are we in 50 years? What does the world look like in 50 years? If we continue down the trajectory that we appear to be going down and you predicted it in the 90s, we're kind of reliving it again. So in 50 years, where are we?
Winn Schwartau: I am going to be very cautious here because.
Mackenzie Jackson: Because someone might play this in 50 years.
Winn Schwartau: No, I'm, I've got the articles coming out. I got the journals and I've got a new book.
Mackenzie Jackson: Right. Right.
Winn Schwartau: We don't want to give away, and I want to make, not, I'm trying to not preempt it. I am working on the phraseology for a soundbite that doesn't sound clinically insane. Because as I look at the progression of these technologies, influencers, weaponizations.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: It's not good. Not good at all. He who controls the technology controls the narrative.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: He who controls the narrative controls your belief system. And now, how do you avoid that? There's some techniques that have been worked on in various universities around the world that I've been very fortunate. They've accepted me into some of their communities. It's not good because the answers are very, very soft because we are very, very soft. Our brain is highly malleable, highly easy to screw with. It really is. I, I did, and I'll give you an example. Really smart physicist and I was hanging out with him somewhere and I said, "Did you guys read the paper that came out?" And I said it was from Kyoto University and I think it was with Purdue and they went in and discovered that there was a 0.0032% error in what we've been estimating at the speed of light. And one of them went, "Yeah, I read that paper." The other guy goes, "Wow, I had forgotten." And it was all. So everybody is susceptible because they want to be nice. They want to be accepted. And it's all part of what we view ourselves as trying to be decent social creatures. And that's why we buy into, and the detection, we as a species have to do a hell of a lot better.
Mackenzie Jackson: Well, it reminds me of those experiments that people would did where you had five people in the room, four of them were actors, and they all gave the wrong answer, you know, obviously. And the one person, like 90% of the time, would change their answer to meet the group.
Winn Schwartau: Yeah. They've done that in a lot of psychology 101 classes as well to get to, because people don't want to stand out.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. Yeah. So, like, when you go to a conference and you're sitting there and somebody's up there talking for you, or in French for a person to disagree with the authority figure on stage. Well, I know he's not that much of an authority figure because they allow me on stage.
Winn Schwartau: Yeah.
Mackenzie Jackson: With my crazy ideas.
Winn Schwartau: And so I hear stuff and I will challenge the hell out of them and other people won't. They'll either buy it completely or reject it completely as a binary function and we live in an analog world.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: So they lose all the, because they're afraid to stand out and afraid to be wrong.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: And I love being wrong. That means somebody's listening to me and we can have an argument.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's actually the main motivation why I started the whole podcast. I just wanted to talk to interesting people and be challenged in different ways. And so you're definitely the kind of catalyst of this at the moment, which is great.
Winn Schwartau: I, I am, I'm definitely worried for the future, for the short term. One could argue that we're experiencing cognitive Pearl Harbors right now around the world.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: You look at just some of the political situations, we'll just take Europe for an example. There's been some major shifts that have occurred in, I'll use the three big ones, England.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: France and Germany. The Netherlands have stayed the hell out of it by and large, but they're still doing something.
Mackenzie Jackson: We had our own, we got our own thing about.
Winn Schwartau: We had our own things happening. We're not, we're just small enough that people don't really care.
Mackenzie Jackson: And the technique is fear.
Winn Schwartau: Yeah. And fear creates uncertainty. And that opens your mind to somebody else's narrative.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah. No, absolutely. Well, look, I want to start, I got to, we, we could go on forever, but I got to start wrapping up. But I, I usually finish a show on a game, but I, I want to change it up here and I want to kind of, I want to ask you two questions, kind of both kind of very, very similar, but take it back to the 90s. You had a magic button to turn off the internet and it never came to be, would you have pressed it or would you have wished you had?
Winn Schwartau: There almost was.
Mackenzie Jackson: Right.
Winn Schwartau: There almost was by Larry Ellison.
Mackenzie Jackson: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Oracle. Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: When he came out and I think it was '95 or '96, he was doing the stateless endpoint where there was no intelligence whatsoever. For all intelligence was over there and you basically were giving the user functionality without the complexity. So I actually supported that conceptually back then from a security standpoint. Would I have turned off the internet? No, because I still had hope. I know Robin Williams still have some hope that we were doing enough in the security field and doing enough awareness. And I, so no, I probably would not have. Okay, well, this leads me.
Mackenzie Jackson: Well, this leads me into the next question, which you probably guess what it is, is that with all that, knowing how it went, now the magic button is turning off AI. You could get rid of it. We go back four years and we never have the breakthrough of the large language model that we. Would you turn the, would you press the button now?
Winn Schwartau: Oh boy. You know, that gets into who's, who's into a control, power shift thing. The biggest problem that I have with AI is that even the people that are building it don't understand it.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: Yet the receiving end, the consumers, some people treat it as a god, as a religion.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: Some people treat them as their life coach. And they're taking the easy way out and aren't thinking about it, about the damage that it actually causes. And this is an acceleration to your point earlier of a force multiplier. What's going to happen to those folks when they become so fully indoctrinated into certain belief systems and behaviors? That anything that you try to do to change their mind creates cognitive dissonance, turns it off, and they walk away because they can't handle it.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: So, what I have, in retrospect, I probably would like to, I think it's a lot more dangerous than what we went through in the 90s.
Mackenzie Jackson: Well, it's been a pretty fascinating conversation.
Winn Schwartau: Well, thank you for one that's left with cheery vibes.
Mackenzie Jackson: Yeah.
Winn Schwartau: You know, thank you for getting up to speed on some of my eclectic work. I appreciate that.
Mackenzie Jackson: No, well, I was really thrilled to have you on the show. I appreciate you coming out here, despite the heat. So, thank you so much, Winn, and I really hope to have you back on the show.
Winn Schwartau: Well, thank you. And anytime.
