Speaker 1: Okay, So I want to start our time together today
by having you take a little like a rapid fire
pop quiz. Oh boy, yeah. I want you to answer
these honestly in your head as I say them, just
to test your your baseline assumptions about the world.
Speaker 2: Ready, I'm ready, let's hear it.
Speaker 1: Number one, do eggs raise your cholesterol? Number two? Do
you really need to drink eight glasses of water a
day for optimal health?
Speaker 2: Standard advice right there, right?
Speaker 1: Number three? Does milk build strong burns and teeth? Number four?
Are diamonds actually inherently rare? And number five does depression
come from a chemical imbalance in the brain.
Speaker 2: It sounds like a standard trivia game you might play
at a pub, honestly, but the reality behind those specific
questions is, well, it's far more insidious than simple common misconceptions.
Speaker 1: Exactly because it's a trick question. I want you to
look closely at those answers in your mind, because none
of those statements are true, not a single one, not one.
And we are talking about innocent mistakes here. We aren't
talking talking about, you know, outdated science that just naturally
evolved over time as researchers learn more.
Speaker 2: No, these are the results of highly coordinated psychological operationsops syops,
carefully crafted, incredibly well funded campaigns designed to control consumer behavior,
shape public.
Speaker 1: Perception, dictate what you buy, exactly.
Speaker 2: What you buy, what you think, and ultimately how you
live your life.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads Today. We're taking your sources and
pulling on a thread that is going to fundamentally unravel
the fabric of how you process the news, your social
media feeds, and honestly, maybe even history itself.
Speaker 2: And it is a fascinating, if slightly terrifying thread to pull.
Speaker 1: Yeah, terrifying is a good word for it.
Speaker 2: What we are exploring today, based on the intelligence documents
and research notes we've been reviewing, is the reality that
we are.
Speaker 1: Being programmed every single minute.
Speaker 2: Every minute of every day. There is a silent battle
being waged for your attention and your foundational beliefs, and
most people have absolutely no ideas happening because the architecture
of the deception is invisible by design.
Speaker 1: But there is a mathematical way to see the matrix.
Speaker 2: Yes, there is a rigid, identifiable structure to the deception.
Speaker 1: And that's our central mission for this exploration into the
source material. By the time we finish unpacking this today,
you are going to be equipped with a literal, deployable
framework to detect manipulation in real time.
Speaker 2: It's powerful stuff.
Speaker 1: It really is. We are looking at the groundbreaking work
of an intelligence expert named Chase Hughes. The source file
details his background and man it is extensive. This is
a guy who spent two decades, twenty full years training
military personnel, Navy seals, the CIA, and the FBI, and
the dark arts of influenced behavioral analysis and interrogation.
Speaker 2: He literally trains the people who run psychological operations for
a living right.
Speaker 1: And out of that deep classified experience he created something
called the NCI, the Narrative Credibility Index.
Speaker 2: The NCI is essentially a light detector for reality, or
maybe more accurately, it's an engineered reality scoring system.
Speaker 1: I like that engineered reality.
Speaker 2: Because Chase Hughes spent years studying hundreds of distinct psychological operations.
He looked at government propaganda, corporate malfeasans, modern social media
manipulation campaigns, and historical disinformation, all the big hits, all
of them. And what he realized is that these campaigns
aren't all unique, highly original snowflakes. Because human zychology is
relatively fixed, the methods to manipulate it are also fixed.
Speaker 1: They all rely on the exact same predictable mechanisms exactly.
Speaker 2: So he built a twenty question diagnostic test to detect
these patterns before they can take root in your mind.
Speaker 1: Let's actually break down the mechanics of how this secret
sauce works, because I really want you to have this
in your mental toolkit right now. It's a twenty question
test and it gives you a score from zero to
one hundred.
Speaker 2: Precisely, each of the twenty questions on the Narrative Credibility
Index assesses a very specific, isolated tactic of cognitive manipulation.
Speaker 1: We're talking about metrics like over use of novelty, tribal division,
suppression of descent, or linguistic isolation.
Speaker 2: When you run a news story or a corporate press
release through the NCI, you score each of those twenty
questions on a scale from one to five points. You
tally it up, and you get a final score out
of one hundred.
Speaker 1: Now, the interpretation of that scale is where the real
value lies. If a narrative scores below forty you are
generally looking at legitimate information.
Speaker 2: Right, it might be biased, I mean, all human communication
has some bias, but it's just normal, messy reality. It's
not a weaponized campaign.
Speaker 1: However, if a narrative score is above a seventy, you
are looking at a confirmed psychological operation.
Speaker 2: The mathematical density of manipulation tactics is simply too high
to be an organic coincidence.
Speaker 1: But then there's the middle ground. And this is the
concept that really shifted my perspective when I was digging
through the materials. What happens when a story sits right.
Speaker 2: In the middle the danger zone? The danger zone the
score between forty and Sive Hughes argues in the historical
data strongly supports this that this is arguably the most
dangerous category of.
Speaker 1: All because it's subtle.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, a narrative in this range isn't complete fabrication.
It is a story built around a very real, verifiable
kernel of truth.
Speaker 1: But that truth has been deliberately weaponized exactly.
Speaker 2: It is twisted and surrounded by a hidden agenda. And
that agenda, as the sources point out time and time again,
is never designed to empower you.
Speaker 1: No, definitely not.
Speaker 2: It's designed to profit off you or to control your behavior.
The truth is merely the bait on the hook.
Speaker 1: The bait on the hook, that is the perfect way
to visualize it. You see a piece of news that
is technically factually accurate, that's the bait. But the delivery mechanism,
the emotional framing, the omitted context, that's the hook. That's
the hook. So to you, the person listening to this
right now, I want to make a promise. By the
end of this deep dive into the sources, you are
going to be able to see these manipulative patterns everywhere.
The veil is going to be lifted.
Speaker 2: And we have to warn you up front. It might
just make you a little bit angry.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, when you realize how often your emotions, your empathy,
and your outrage have been played like a fiddle by
people who do not care about you, it's a deeply
sobering moment. It is to really grasp how the NCI
exposes these operations. We need to look at a textbook
historical example. We're going to start with a classic pr
siop a masterclass in selling a war.
Speaker 2: We need to go back to a very specific moment
in geopolitical history. The date is October tenth, nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: Set the stage for us. What is the context of
the world on that specific day in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2: Well, the impending Gulf War is dominating the political landscape.
A few months prior, in August, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces
invaded and occupied the neighboring nation of Kuwait. The George H. W.
Bush administration in the United States is strongly advocating for
a massive military intervention to push your rock out. They
are massing troops in Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield.
Speaker 1: But there is a massive, seemingly insurmountable hurdle standing in
the way of the administration's.
Speaker 2: Goals, A huge hurdle. The American public by and large
has absolutely no appetite for a war in the.
Speaker 1: Middle East, and you have to remember the historical hangover
at play here. The shadow of Vietnam is still incredibly
heavy over the American consciousness.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The public is highly skeptical. They are completely unsupportive
of sending American troops overseas to die for what many
explicitly viewed as a regional conflict over oil.
Speaker 1: Interests, and in a democratic system, you simply cannot sustain
a major protracted war without robust public backing.
Speaker 2: You can't. The administration was hitting a brick wall. They
needed a catalyst.
Speaker 1: They needed an event so visceral and so morally clarifying
that it would shift public consciousness overnight and render all
geopolitical debate utterly obsolete.
Speaker 2: And the administration found their catalyst in a fifteen year
old girl.
Speaker 1: She appeared before the United States Congressional Human Rights its Caucus.
She was introduced only by her first name, Niira, supposedly
to protect her family, still trapped in occupied Kuwait.
Speaker 2: The testimony she delivered that day is something straight out
of a dystopian horror script.
Speaker 1: Just reading the transcript of that testimony in your source
files makes my stomach turn.
Speaker 2: The details of her testimony were specifically designed for maximum
psychological impact. She tearfully informed the lawmakers that she'd had
been volunteering at the Aladan Hospital in Kuwait City when
a rocky soldiers stormed the medical facility.
Speaker 1: She claimed on the official Congressional record, under oath, with
national television cameras rolling, that she personally watched these soldiers
enter the neonatal ward.
Speaker 2: She described them taking premature babies out of their incubators,
stealing the incubators to ship back to Iraq, and leaving
the infants to die on the cold hospital floor.
Speaker 1: And the impact on the country was instantaneous, wasn't it?
Speaker 2: It was seismic. Senators immediately cited her testimony as the
primary moral justification for military action. The public was completely outraged.
Speaker 1: The debate over oil interests or regional stability vanished instantly.
Speaker 2: Within a matter of months, the United States Congress authorized
the use of military force and we were formally at
war with Iraq. The narrative had completely flipped.
Speaker 1: Sadam Hussein was no longer just a problematic foreign dictator, right.
Speaker 2: The incubator story framed him in the public consciousness as
an existential, monstrous evil directly comparable to Adolf Hitler.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's take this incredibly pivotal historical event and
run it through Chase uses NCI framework. How does a
tool designed to detect manipulation process the NAIRA testimony.
Speaker 2: The results are staggering, and they highlight the predictive power
of the framework. Let's look at how Hughes scores this.
First look at the metric of timing. Okay, the NCI
gives this a flawless five out of five. The scoring
criteria for timing asks, does the revelation of this information
perfectly align with the immediate strategic needs of the entity
delivering it.
Speaker 1: And in this case her testimon he landed at the
exact desperate moment the administration needed to manufacture consent for
a war nobody wanted.
Speaker 2: Yes, it wasn't a random journalistic investigation. The timing was
perfectly synchronized with a political deadline.
Speaker 1: Then we moved to the NCI metric of emotional manipulation,
again a five out of five, and it's easy to
see why the source material refers to this specific tactic
as psychological napalm.
Speaker 2: That is the most accurate phrase possible.
Speaker 1: Nothing overrides human logic. Nothing shuts down the critical thinking
and analytical centers of the prefrontal cortex faster than the
mental image of innocent infants being brutally murdered.
Speaker 2: It's an evolutionary hack. Human beings are biologically hardwired to
protect the vulnerable. When you trigger that specific protective instinct,
it bypasses the intellect entirely.
Speaker 1: You hear that story, and you aren't asking for a
nuanced breakdown of Middle Eastern geopolitics anymore.
Speaker 2: No, you aren't questioning the logistical supply chains of the
Iraqi army. You are just seeing read you are primed
for violence to stop the perceived threat.
Speaker 1: But wait, let me push back on the framework for
a second. Here, let's play Devil's advocate. Just because something
is highly emotional and perfectly timed doesn't automatically mean it's
a psio right right, Terrible things happen in war, and
victims speak out when they get the chance. How does
the NCI differentiate between a genuinely horrific event and a
manufactured narrative?
Speaker 2: That is the exact right question to ask, and it's
why the NCI relies on a clustering of twenty different metrics,
not just one or two. The real tell comes when
we look at the structural delivery of the narrative. The
NCI metric for uniform messaging and authority pressure scores another
five out a five.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a rumor circulating on a bulletin board exactly.
Speaker 2: This was official congressional testimony. The inherent institutional authority of
the United States Congress was weaponized to validate the story
without question.
Speaker 1: Furthermore, every single major news outlet repeated the exact same story,
using the exact same emotional language and approved talking points.
Speaker 2: There was virtually no independent journalistic verification taking place. It
was a closed loop echo chamber of state sanctioned outrage.
Speaker 1: And that leads directly into the NCI metric of missing information,
which also hits a five out of five. When you
actually look back at the historical record, there are no
other witnesses brought forward to corroborate Naira's account none.
Speaker 2: There were no follow up interviews allowed with her by
the press. Independent verification on the ground in Kuwait was
conveniently blocked due to the occupation.
Speaker 1: The entire justification for a massive global conflict rested on
the unverified word of a single fifteen year old girl.
Speaker 2: When you tally all of these structural red flags upon
the NCI scale, this event scores an incredible eighty eight
out of one hundred.
Speaker 1: And eighty eight.
Speaker 2: That is wild and eighty eight out of one hundred
is a screaming siren. It is an overwhelming, mathematically dense
signature of a highly coordinated psychological operation. The system flags
it not just as biased, but is entirely manufactured information.
Speaker 1: And the tragic irony here is that the NCI system,
had it existed and been widely used by the public
in nineteen ninety, would have predicted the lie a full
decade before the truth actually came out.
Speaker 2: Because ten years later, the full, unvarnished story was finally revealed.
Speaker 1: And it is sickening. The entire thing is a.
Speaker 2: Fabrication, complete fiction. Naiia was not a random, brave hospital volunteer.
She was Naira al Saba, the daughter of the Kowhiti
ambassador to the United States.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable. She was not even in Kuwait during the invasion.
Speaker 2: No, she was living comfably in Washington, d C. She
was never at the Ala Dahn Hospital. There were no
babies thrown on the cold floor by Iraqi soldiers.
Speaker 1: Amnesty International and other human rights organizations later investigated the
hospital and found the entire narrative was a calculated, written script,
A script written by who. That's the part that really
gets me. Who sits in a boardroom and comes up
with something this dark? Who engineer's psychological napalm?
Speaker 2: A public relations agency, specifically a massive, highly influential pr
firm called Hill and Nolton. Hill in Nolton, a group
called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which was essentially a
front group heavily funded by the exiled Kuwaiti government, hired
Hill and Nolton to orchestrate a massive lobbying and public
relations campaign to ensure the United States entered the war.
Speaker 1: Hill and Milton understood the behavioral psychology of the American public.
Speaker 2: Intimately, they knew that you couldn't sell this war on strategy, logic,
or oil. You had to cheat to win.
Speaker 1: You had to manufacture an atrocity so horrific, so emotionally
paralyzing that rational debate became socially unacceptable.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for you, the listener?
Why should you care about a PR stunt from over
thirty years ago.
Speaker 2: You have to look at the real world cost of
this manufactured reality. We are talking about severe generational consequences.
Speaker 1: Over one hundred Americans dead and nearly five hundred wounded
in action and estimated thirty thousand to one hundred thousand
Iraqis killed, and.
Speaker 2: A direct financial bill to the United States taskpayers of
roughly sixty one billion dollars at the time which when
you factor in long term veteran care and the interest
paid on the borrowed money, stretches into the trillions.
Speaker 1: Over the decades, all of that blood, all of that treasure,
mobilized not by a genuine threat to the homeland, but
by a pr agency operating in the shadows, pulling the
levers of human psychology.
Speaker 2: It highlights the terrifying, almost unchecked power of these agencies.
When you have an entity that understands human emotional triggers
better than the public understands their own minds, they can
quite literally conjure a war out of thin air.
Speaker 1: They use the media infrastructure not as a check on power,
but as a passive delivery mechanism for their psychological payload.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly dark.
Speaker 1: It really is. But as we transition to the next
piece of this puzzle, the source material reveals something even
more unsettling. Hilen Nelton's playbook wasn't some new, desperate invention
of the nineteen nineties. Now, the incubator story wasn't a
one off phenomaly. They had been perfecting this dark art
of corporate and political syops for decades.
Speaker 2: They absolutely had. The architecture of deception is iterative. To
trace the lineage of this specific type of high level manipulation,
we have to travel back even further in the timeline.
Let's go to the winter of nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 1: He guess there, to.
Speaker 2: The luxurious Plaza hotel in New York City.
Speaker 1: This is such a cinematic moment in the notes. Picture
a smoky room, heavily draped full of men in tailored suits.
The chief executives of America's major tobacco companies, the heads
of American Tobacco Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, have all
gathered in one room.
Speaker 2: And they are in a state of absolute existential panic.
Speaker 1: And they had phenomenal reason to panic. Their own highly
funded internal scientists had just confirmed that the broader medical
community was beginning to strongly suspect cigarettes cause lung cancer.
Speaker 2: The internal research was unambiguous, the correlation was clear, and
the data was damning.
Speaker 1: The public was starting to ask questions. Articles were beginning
to pop up in magazines like Readers Digest.
Speaker 2: The executives knew that if this definitive scientific link became
widely accepted as established fact, their entire industry would collapse
virtually overnight. Billions of dollars in annual revenue, millions of jobs,
entire supply chains completely wiped out.
Speaker 1: They are staring down the barrel of total corporate annihilation.
So who do they call to save them? A specialist,
a man named John W.
Speaker 2: Hill, the co founder of Hill and Knowlton.
Speaker 1: Yes, the exact same PR firm that would go on
to sell the Gulf War decades later. And John W.
Hill comes into this panicked meeting at the Plaza Hotel
with a strategy that is simultaneously brilliant from a business
perspective and profoundly evil from a human perspective.
Speaker 2: He tells these executives, listen, we don't need to prove
that cigarettes are safe. That is a losing battle. The
science is against us. All we need to do is
prove that the science isn't settled.
Speaker 1: It's a subtle but devastating shift in strategic communication. They
move from denial to obviously.
Speaker 2: This brings us to a quote from a later infamous
tobacco industry internal memo that perfectly encapsulates this entire era
of corporate manipulation. Doubt is our product.
Speaker 1: Doubt is our product. I want you to really let
the weight of that sink in. They recognized that they
weren't just selling tightly rolled tobacco leaves anymore. They were
selling the psychological comfort of doubt.
Speaker 2: Because doubt, historically speaking, is the duct tape of corporate crime.
Speaker 1: Doctape of corporate crime.
Speaker 2: Wow. John W. Hill understood human psychology deeply. He knew
that people genuinely liked smoking. It was culturally ingrained, and
more importantly, they were chemically addicted to nicotine. Right If
the public was sold definitively, with a unified scientific voice
that smoking would absolutely kill them, a large portion would
go through the pain of quitting out of self preservation.
Speaker 1: But if it only might be dangerous, if there was
a manufactured controversy, a lingering sense that the experts disagree
or more research is needed, then the addiction would win out.
Every single time.
Speaker 2: Smokers would cling to that manufactured doubt as a psychological
excuse to maintain their habit.
Speaker 1: So let's run this multi decade campaign through the NCIS
scoring system. How did they actually manufacture this doubt in
a way that fooled the world for so long?
Speaker 2: When you apply the NCI to the tobacco industries communications
from the nineteen fifties through the nineteen eighties. They score
a massive eighty two out of one hundred and eighty two.
Let's look at the specific components of how they achieved
that score. The NCI metrics of cherry pick data and
authority overload both score a flawless five out of five.
Speaker 1: How did they do it? Hill and Knowlton advised the
creation of an entity called the Tobacco Industry Research Committee.
Speaker 2: Just the name itself sounds incredibly official, very academic, very objective.
Speaker 1: Exactly, it was designed to sound like a neutral scientific body,
but it was a complete front. Its sole operational purpose
was to fund and aggressively promote any studies that muddied
the waters.
Speaker 2: They hired credentialed scientists doctors with impressive degree ease whose
only real job was to testify before Congress and speak
to the media, constantly repeating the mantra that more research
was needed.
Speaker 1: They flooded medical journals with industry funded papers to create
the artificial illusion of a deeply divided scientific community.
Speaker 2: To the average citizen reading the newspaper, it looked like
a legitimate scientific debate was raging, when in reality, the
consensus was already formed and the debate was entirely fabricated.
Speaker 1: Oh wait, surely there were independent doctors and scientists trying
to sound the alarm. How did the tobacco companies deal
with the truth tellers?
Speaker 2: That brings us directly to the ncimetric of suppression of descent,
which is another five out of five. The industry didn't
just promote their own fake science, they actively destroyed real science.
Speaker 1: Scientists who published genuine, rigorous research linking smoking to cancer
were ruthlessly harassed.
Speaker 2: The industry used their massive legal and financial weight to
attack these researchers' reputations, tie them up in frivolous litigation,
and frequently pure universities to pull their grant funding.
Speaker 1: They aggressively and systematically silenced the truth tellers to maintain
the illusion of doubt.
Speaker 2: And finally, we have to look at the financial gain metric,
which is obviously a five out of five. What was
the result of all this manipulation?
Speaker 1: By manufacturing doubt, they successfully delayed meaningful government regulation, warning labels,
and public health interventions for roughly forty years.
Speaker 2: Forty years. Every single year of delay meant billions upon
billions of dollars in continued uninterrupted profits.
Speaker 1: They knew their product was lethal. Their own internal memos
proved they knew nicotine was highly addictive, and they coordinated
a lie to the public for four decades.
Speaker 2: And again, the NCI system, had it been applied to
their press releases and funded studies at the time, would
have predicted this deception instantly. With that score of eighty two.
Speaker 1: It is the perfect historical encapsulation of the corporate sye up.
And what's crucial for you to understand is that this strategy,
the doubt is Our Product playbook pioneered by Hill and Nolton,
did not die with the tobacco settlements.
Speaker 2: No, it became the gold standard. It became the foundational
playbook for virtually every major industry facing public backlash or
existential regulatory threats.
Speaker 1: I want you to think about the modern equivalents that
affect your life today. The sources draw a very clear
direct line from that smoky room in the Plaza hotel
to controversies we've all lived through. Think about the fossil
fuel industry.
Speaker 2: They use the exact same PR tactics and in some
cases the exact same legacy PR firms to rebrand the
scientific consensus of global warming into the softer, more ambiguous
term climate change.
Speaker 1: They funded fringe think tanks to frame the entire issue
as an unsettled debate, because again, it doesn't matter to
them if the climate is actually changing. What matters to
the bottom line is that the public keeps arguing about it,
effectively paralyzing any policy changes that would.
Speaker 2: Hurt profits or Consider the food and beverage industry, specifically
the sugar industry in the mid to lay twentieth century,
when early credible research started clearly linking high sugar consumption
to the rise in heart disease and type two diabetes,
the industry didn't just deny it. They actively shifted the blame.
Speaker 1: Using the exact same playbook. They funded studies out of
prestigious institutions like Harvard that specifically pointed the finger away
from sugar and toward dietary fat.
Speaker 2: This manufactured narrative sparked the entire low fat dietary craze
of the nineteen eighties and nineties.
Speaker 1: Oh Man, I vividly remember that if you were alive
in the nineties, everything in the grocery store was suddenly
plastered with neon low fat labels, aggressively marketed as health food.
Speaker 2: There's a biological catch. When you take the natural fat
out of food, it tastes like absolute cardboard. It's inedible.
Speaker 1: So what did the food companies do to fix the taste?
They loaded all those low fat products with massive, unnatural
amounts of refined sugar.
Speaker 2: It was a complete, mathematically engineered, manufactured reality that made
millions of people significantly sicker, all while enriching the sugar
industry under the guise of public health.
Speaker 1: And perhaps the most devastating lethal recent example mentioned in
the source files is Purdue Pharma and the opiard crisis.
Speaker 2: The foundationally claim that oxyconton was an effective painkiller but
crucially not addictive was a highly coordinated, intentional psychological operation.
Speaker 1: They used pr agencies and marketing firms to ghostwrite scientific studies,
which were then rubber stamped by doctors they had on
the payroll. They didn't rely on actual independent scientific inquiry.
Speaker 2: They paid key opinion leaders to act as authoritative mouthpieces
at medical conferences. It is the exact same NCI playbook, authority, overload,
suppression of descent, and massive financial gain.
Speaker 1: The patterns of manipulation remain identical, whether it's nineteen fifty
three or twenty ten. The only thing that changes is
the product being sold.
Speaker 2: The playbook never changes. The psychological vulnerabilities of the human
mind remained.
Speaker 1: Constant, but the delivery mechanism, I'm sure has evolved, and
this brings us to a terrifying, almost sci fi evolution
in our deep dive today. Corporate syops historically relied on
print media, television advertisements, corrupted medical journals, and congressional testimony.
Speaker 2: They were slow, they were expensive, and most importantly, they
required constant human orchestration and oversight.
Speaker 1: But then the digital age happened. Social media arrived. Social
media took these highly refined weapons of psychological manipulation and
put them directly into the pocket of every single person
on earth. Running twenty four to seven.
Speaker 2: This represents a pivotal paradigm shifting change in how information
warfare is conducted. We are moving from human directed, top
down manipulation to algorithmic emergent manipulation.
Speaker 1: To truly understand the gravity of what this means for society,
we have to look at a highly documented incident from
November twenty twenty one in Ethiopia.
Speaker 2: This is a really heavy, tragic story in the notes,
but it is essential to understand we are talking about
Professor Marrigamari.
Speaker 1: He as a sixty year old university chemistry teacher, a
respected academic, and a father of for he belonged to
the Tagrain ethnic group and he was living in the
Amhara region during the intensely brutal Ethiopian Civil War.
Speaker 2: His ethnicity in his location made him incredibly.
Speaker 1: Vulnerable, extremely vulnerable. The political and ethnic tensions were at
a boiling point during this conflict. A localized Facebook page
with roughly fifty thousand followers actively targeted him.
Speaker 2: They didn't just criticize his politics. They posted his photograph.
They repeatedly labeled him with a specific, highly charged ethnic
slur that translates to hunter.
Speaker 1: They publicly accused him of being an enemy of the state,
an act of combatant, and most dangerously, they posted his
exact home address and the routes he took to work.
Speaker 2: Now, his son, who was living out of the country,
saw this happening in real time on his feed. He
knew immediately, given the context of the civil war, that
this post was a literal death sentence for his father.
Speaker 1: He reported the post to Facebook multiple times, practically begging
them to take it down. He utilized all the standard
reporting tools the platform provides. He flagged it for hate speech,
for inciting violence, for dosing.
Speaker 2: And what was the response from the tech giant.
Speaker 1: Absolute silence. Nothing happened. Three weeks went by, the post
remained live, The algorithm kept feeding it to more and
more people, going viral, whipping the local populace into a
violent frenzy.
Speaker 2: And then the inevitable happen.
Speaker 1: Armed men followed the professor home from his chemistry class.
They assassinated him right in front of his house, and
as they walked away, witnesses heard them chanting the exact
same slurhunter that had been popularized and amplified by that
specific Facebook post.
Speaker 2: It is a profound, senseless tragedy. And what elevates this
from a local crime to a massive systemic failure is
that Facebook finally responded to the Sun's frantic reports and
removed the post eight days after the murder had taken.
Speaker 1: Place, eight days too late. Now you have to ask
yourself the critical analytical question, how does a multi billion
dollar tech company with thousands of content moderators allow this
to happen?
Speaker 2: Was there a malicious human sitting at a desk at
Facebook headquarters actively deciding to target this specific chemistry professor
in Ethiopia.
Speaker 1: The answer is no, it was the algorithm, and.
Speaker 2: We know exactly how this mechanism works behind the scenes
because of the explosive testimony of a whistleblower.
Speaker 1: Francis Hogan, a former product manager on the Civic Misinformation
team at Facebook, testified before the United States Congress about
exactly what was happening in the code, specifically referencing how
the platform fueled ethnic violence in places like Ethiopia and Mannar.
Speaker 2: She explained the cold, mathematical reality of how the platform operates.
Hagen's testimony was a watershed moment. She explained that the
Facebook algorithm was inherently causing ethnic violence, not because it
was programmed to be racist, but because of how its
core engagement metrics were optimized.
Speaker 1: The algorithm's primary overarching goal is to keep users on
the platform for as long as possible. Why because user
attention equals AD and pre R and AD impressions drive revenue.
Speaker 2: And what did the machine learning models figure out drives
engagement better than anything else? Anger, outrage, hate.
Speaker 1: The algorithm figured out entirely on its own, without any
human engineer explicitly coding it to do so that posts
that made people furious, fearful, or hateful got the most clicks,
the most shares, and the longest red times.
Speaker 2: So to fulfill its prime directive of maximizing engagement, it
actively promoted hate speech and incendiary content. It wasn't designed
to be evil. It was designed to maximize profit at
all costs.
Speaker 1: The violence was just an externalized cost of doing business.
Speaker 2: Let's apply Chase Hughes' narrative credibility index to this algorithmic behavior.
When you score the algorithmic amplification of this specific event,
it comes out to an alarming seventy eight out of
one hundred.
Speaker 1: A seventy eight for an algorithm. Let's look at why
a piece of code scores so high on a Syoup matrix.
Emotional manipulation scores a five out of five. The algorithm
was literally identifying and weaponizing ethnic hate and existential fear
during an active civil war.
Speaker 2: Uniform messaging another five out of five, as the algorithm
ensured the exact same false claims and slurs spread virally
across multiple interconnected pages and echo chambers.
Speaker 1: Missing information a five out of five because The system
provided absolutely zero friction, zero fact checking, and zero context.
It was just a pure, unfiltered pipeline of outrage.
Speaker 2: And we can't forget financial gain, which scores a four
out of five here, because the entire foundational reason the
algorithm behaves this way is to generate profit for the corporation.
Speaker 1: When you step back and really look at this, it
is pure philosophical horror. We aren't talking about a government
trying to sell a geopolitical war or a pr firm
trying to sell toxic cigarettes.
Speaker 2: We are talking about literal lines of code, an automated
machine learning system that accidentally scored a seventy eight on
a psychological warfare index just by doing its job efficiently.
Speaker 1: That is the chilling reality of the modern information landscape
that you navigate every single day. The algorithm doesn't know
what a civil war is, It doesn't know what a
human life is.
Speaker 2: He has no ethical framework. It only knows that outrage
equals engagement, and engagement equals money. It is an automated,
self optimizing sciot machine.
Speaker 1: And we are all permanently plugged into it.
Speaker 2: Okay, we need to take a deep breath here, because
we are about to move into the most complex, nuanced,
and frankly contentious part of the NCI framework outlined in
the sources.
Speaker 1: We've looked at the government manufacturing consent, We've looked at
corporations manufacturing doubt, and we've looked at algorithms manufacturing outrage.
Speaker 2: Now we have to look at what happens when the
waters get truly muddy. We have to look at information
warfare where both sides of a massive public debate are
playing dirty.
Speaker 1: This is a crucial concept for understanding the modern world.
Psychological operations are not always a simple binary case of
black and white or good versus evil.
Speaker 2: The most dangerous moments for public comprehension, the moments where
society truly breaks down, occur when an issue becomes highly
polarized and both factions deploy manipulation tactics simultaneously to win
the narrative war.
Speaker 1: And to clearly illustrate this dynamic, we're going to look
at the massive global debate surrounding the origins of the
COVID nineteen pandemic. Now, before we dive into this, I
need to pause right here and speak directly to you,
the listener.
Speaker 2: This is important.
Speaker 1: I want to be crystal unequivocally clear about our parameters.
We are not taking a side here on thrilling threads.
We're not endorsing the natural origin theory, nor are we
endorsing the lab leak theory.
Speaker 2: We don't have the definitive biological proof, and more importantly,
the NCI framework doesn't care about the underlying biological truth.
Speaker 1: Our only mission right now, as explicitly outlined in the
source material, is to impartially analyze the communication tactics used
by both factions during the height of the debate.
Speaker 2: That is exactly right, and it requires a suspension of
your own bias to evaluate. We are strictly analyzing the
delivery system of the narrative, not the package itself. Cast
our minds back to the chaotic landscape of early twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: The world is rapidly shutting down. There is massive, unprecedenting
global fear and uncertainty, and two primary competing narratives emerge
regarding where this novel virus actually came from.
Speaker 2: Side A is the natural origin theory. This is the
idea that the virus jumped naturally from animals to humans
at a wet market in Wuhan, China.
Speaker 1: This is a known, well documented biological phenomenon called zoononic spillover.
It happened previously with stars, it happened with mers. It
is highly scientifically plausible.
Speaker 2: Side B is the lab leak theory. This is the
idea that the virus, whether natural or modified, accidentally escaped
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a facility which happens
to be located just a few miles from that same
seafood market and was known internationally to be actively studying
that coronaviruses.
Speaker 1: An accidental lab breach also highly plausible. Both of these
theories desperately needed rigorous, open, transparent scientific investigation.
Speaker 2: Open investigation the vital scientific discourse was almost immediately and
forcefully short circuited. On February nineteenth, twenty twenty, the Lancet,
which is arguably one of the word's most prestigious and
influential medical journals, published a statement.
Speaker 1: It was a letter signed by twenty seven prominent credential
public health scientists. This letter unequivocally declared that anyone who
even suggested the virus might have leaked from a lab
was promoting a dangerous conspiracy theory and the.
Speaker 2: Chilling effect of that single letter was massive. It effectively
shut down all rational debate. Overnight, the mainstream media ran
with it as gospel truth. Major tech platforms started algorithmic
flagging and removing lab leak discussions as harmful misinformation, and
credential scientists were banned from social media for simply asking
the question.
Speaker 1: So, let's run SIDEA the natural origin campaign through the NCI.
Speaker 2: When you apply the metrics, side A scores a seventy
out of one hundred. It sits right on the absolute
border of a confirmed coordinated psychological operat.
Speaker 1: Let's look at the specific tactics. The metric of authority
overload scores a massive five out of five. You have
twenty seven elite scientists using the immense institutional weight and
legacy of the Lancet to essentially claim they represent science itself.
Speaker 2: The framing was deliberate. Anyone disagreeing with them isn't just
factually wrong. They are inherently anti science.
Speaker 1: And that leads directly to suppression of dissent, which is
another five out of five. The letter created an incredibly
toxic environment where other virologists and scientists were terrified to
publicly discuss the Labliku possibility because it equated to professional suicide.
Speaker 2: You'd be instantly labeled a xenophobic conspiracy theorist by your peers,
and your funding would be at risk.
Speaker 1: But wait, let me play Devil's Advocate again. Couldn't you
argue that these twenty seven scientists weren't running a malicious
sigh up. Maybe they were just panic public health officials
desperately trying to stop a wave of anti Asian hate
crimes by shutting down rumors. How does the NCI differentiate
betwe between good intentions and actual manipulation.
Speaker 2: The beauty and the ruthlessness of the NCI is that
it doesn't measure intent. It strictly measures methodology. Even if
their intent was noble, the tactics they used to achieve
their goal were manipulative.
Speaker 1: And this becomes glaringly obvious when we look at the
missing information metric, which gets a four out of five
for SADAY. This is a critical point in the source material.
Speaker 2: It was later revealed through FIA request that the Lancet
letter was organized, drafted, and quietly pushed by a man
named Peter Dazak. He is the president of the Eco
Health Alliance.
Speaker 1: This is an organization that had massive, previously undisclosed financial
ties and was actively funneling US government grant money to
fund research at the exact Wuhan lab in question.
Speaker 2: Wow, that is a massive, massive conflict.
Speaker 1: Of interest exactly, and that critical context, that financial relationship
was intentionally hidden from the public when the letter was
published to shut down the debate. That is the definition
of omitting vital information to control a narrative.
Speaker 2: So Side A is utilizing incredibly heavy manipulation tactics. But
as we mentioned, modern information warfare is a two way street.
What's good SIDEB the proponents of the lab leak theory
during that same time period, how do they communicate their
narrative to the public?
Speaker 1: SIDEB scores a sixty six out of one hundred on
the NCI still firmly embedded in the danger zone. Let's
break their specific tactics down. Authority overload gets a five
out of five for SIDEB as well.
Speaker 2: Many politicians, pundits, and commentators on this side began claiming
on national television that the Lab leak was obvious, common
sense or settled fact, long before any actual on the
ground investigations or intelligence community reviews could be completed.
Speaker 1: They spoke with unearned absolute certainty to project authority.
Speaker 2: They also score a five out of five on tribal division,
and honestly, this is perhaps the most destructive tactic used
by SIDEB. They took a complex public health mystery, a
novel virus of unknown origin requiring nuanced investigation, and immediately
weaponized it into a deeply partisan, rag radioactive political issue.
Speaker 1: If you believe the natural origin theory, Side B framed
you as a naive trader or a literal shill for
the Chinese Communist Party. If you believe the lab leak,
Side A framed you as a racist conspiracy theorist. The
actual science was completely lost in the crossfire.
Speaker 2: And finally, emotional manipulation scores a four out of five
for SIDEB. They actively weaponize public anger, fear in some
cases of xenophobia, turning a vital scientific question into a
geopolitical loyalty test.
Speaker 1: So if we pulled back, what is it? So? What
insight here? What does it actually mean for you the citizen?
When Side A scores a seventy and Side B scores
a sixty six.
Speaker 2: This is the profound takeaway that the source material drives home.
The NCI doesn't care who is factually correct. When both
signs of a major societal debate are scoring high in
the danger zone or psyop range, honest debate simply dies.
Speaker 1: You are no longer participating in a rational pursuit of truth.
You are trapped in a crossfire of information war. Both
factions are aggressively trying to bypass your critical thinking skills
and trigger your primal tribal instincts.
Speaker 2: That is exactly the point when you recognize that those
manipulation patterns are coming from all directions, you have to
mentally step back. You have to realize that the communication
environment itself has become toxic to the truth. You cannot
find reality while you are being actively manipulated by the
people claiming to deliver it.
Speaker 1: That is such a crucial lens to view the news through. Okay,
we've covered the government's selling a war, corporations selling tobacco,
algorithms pushing hate, and the polarized pandemic debate. Now we
are going to pivot to a topic that might seem
totally out of left field, but it perfectly illustrates how
the NCI pattern can be applied to literally anything. We
are going to talk about UFOs.
Speaker 2: It's a sudden shift in subject matter, but the phenomenon
of UFO disclosure is actually a fascinating textbook case study
in narrative manipulation. We can apply the exact same mathematical
metrics to a story involving non human intelligence that we
apply to the tobacco industry. The tactics remain the same.
Speaker 1: Let's look at a very specific near future incident detailed
in your sources to illustrate this. We are fast forwarding
slightly to January twenty twenty five. A man named Jake
Barber steps forward into the public eye.
Speaker 2: He's a former Air Force Special ops pilot, highly credentialed.
He goes on the news Nation Network for an explosive,
highly promoted interview with journalist Ross Kolfar.
Speaker 1: Barber claims on national television that he was part of deep,
black secret UFO retrieval missions for the US government. He
says he personally got within one hundred and fifty feet
of a retrieved crashed craft. He describes it in vivid detail,
an egg shaped, white metallic object about the size of
an suv, completely smooth, with no engine, no flight surfaces,
and no thermal signature.
Speaker 2: It is an incredible paradigm shifting story back by verified
high level military credentials. It's exactly the kind of story
that sets the Internet on fire.
Speaker 1: But before we allow ourselves to get swept away by
the profound sign i fi implications of the claim, we
must forcefully run the delivery of the story through the NCI.
When we evaluate the Jake Barbara disclosure event, it scores
a sixty three out of one.
Speaker 2: Hundred sixty three, right smack in the middle of the
danger zone. Let's unpack exactly why it scores so high.
First up timing a massive five out of five y
because you have to look at what else is happening
in the world.
Speaker 1: This explosive reality altering whistleblower story dropped exactly during a
period of massive, unexplained and highly concerning drone sightings swarming
over sensitive US military bases, specifically Langley Air Force Base.
Speaker 2: The timing for maximum public distraction from a real world
security failure was impeccable.
Speaker 1: Then we look at the metric of financial game, another
five out of five. Right around the exact time Barber
goes public with these universe altering claims, public records show
he forms a private aerospace consulting company called Skywatchers LLC,
and perhaps predictably, it is revealed during the media tour
that he is writing a book.
Speaker 2: There is always a book.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's almost a running joke at this point.
If you literally have the classified secrets of the universe,
if you have proof that we are not alone, why
is the very first step in your disclosure plan always
securing a lucrative publishing deal.
Speaker 2: The NCI also gives high scores for overuse of novelty
a five out of five for the hyperbolic, breathless language
used by the network constantly claiming this single interview will
change the world forever.
Speaker 1: And uniform messaging a four out of five, as every
single media outlet repeating the story uses the exact same,
clearly approved specific buzzwords like non human biologics.
Speaker 2: So a score of sixty three tells us definitively that
we are being manipulated. But we must be very careful
with our extrapolation here. A high NCI score does not
definitively mean aliens aren't real. It doesn't mean Jake Barber
is entirely lying about what he saw.
Speaker 1: What it means is that the delivery of the information
is heavily intentionally engineered by someone behind the scenes. When
a UFO story hits the danger zone, the source material
suggests it generally points to one of three underlying realities.
Speaker 2: Let's go through these three realities. This framework completely changed
how we look at these types of new cycles. Reality
number one package disclosure. This is the scenario where the
core phenomenon is entirely real. The government actually has these
non human craft, but.
Speaker 1: They are terrified of the ontological shock and public panic
that would ensue, so they don't just dump the raw
classified files online.
Speaker 2: Instead, the use syoptactics, trickling out information slowly through controlled,
vetted assets like Barber, managing the narrative pacing, and using
emotional manipulation to slowly acclent the public to the reality
over years without causing a sudden societal melting.
Speaker 1: Exactly, the truth is real, but it is being aggressively managed.
Reality number two, the cover story in this scenario, The
entire UFO narrative is a complete manufactured psychological operation designed
specifically to hide terrestrial classified military testing.
Speaker 2: If major aerospace contract actors like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon
are testing next generation leap ahead drone technology or propulsion systems.
They absolutely want foreign adversaries and the American public looking
the wrong way.
Speaker 1: A UFO frenzy is the perfect cover. As long as
the public and the media are breathlessly debating whether a
craft is from another star system, they aren't asking hard
investigatory questions about unacknowledged defense budgets, secret weapons platforms, or
black project funding.
Speaker 2: And then there's reality number three, the distraction, a shiny
object deliberately dangled in front of the public to make
us forget about a very real, very immediate, very terrestrial problem.
Speaker 1: Remember the NCI metric of timing massive unidentified drone swarms
penetrating restricted airspace over US military bases for weeks on end.
That is a colossal, unacceptable national security failure. Heads should
roll for that.
Speaker 2: But the exact moment that Jake Barber UFO story drops,
the media cycle completely vaporizes the drone story. We stop
asking why our billion dollars b are vulnerable to off
the shelf drones, and we start arguing about aliens on Twitter.
The distraction work perfectly.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to a brilliant, vital distinction highlighted in
your source material regarding these prominent UFO figures, we constantly
hear from people like David Grush or Louis Alazano or
Jake Barber who are almost universally labeled by the media
as whistleblowers. But we need to define our terms carefully
because language matters in information warfare.
Speaker 2: Yes, this blew my mind. If a so called whistleblower
goes on a popular podcast or sits before Congressional Oversight
Committee and says, I cannot tell you X because it's
highly classified, but I am cleared by the Pentagon to
tell you why. They are not a whistleblower in the
traditional sense of the word.
Speaker 1: A true whistleblower, like an Edward Snowden or a Chelsea Manning,
breaks the law to expose perceived wrongdoing, regardless of classification.
They burn the ships.
Speaker 2: If someone is operating entirely within approved talking points, maintaining
their security clearances, and having their books reviewed by the
Department of Defense prior to publication, they are a government spokesperson.
They are conducting a controlled, officially sanctioned release of information.
Speaker 1: It is a vital, necessary distinction. It means the narrative,
however wild it seems, is still entirely under the control
of the intelligence apparatus, And this realization brings us to
the ultimate synthesis of everything we've discussed today, the metasiop.
Speaker 2: The metasyop. Let's pull all these threads together. We've talked
about pr firms selling wars and doubt. We've talked about
algorithms monetizing ethnic violence. We've talked about political factions weaponizing
public health, and intelligence agencies managing UFO narratives.
Speaker 1: When you pull all the way back to the thirty
thousand foot view and look at the big picture of
modern American information flow, what is the ultimate goal? What
is the point of bombarding the population with constant, overlapping,
low level psychological operations.
Speaker 2: The ultimate goal, the overarching meta goal of these intersecting campaigns,
is through division. The entities holding institutional power in society,
whether they are massive corporate conglomerates, entrenched political parties, or
unelected intelligence agencies, benefit immensely when the populace is fractured.
Speaker 1: They actively want an engineer an environment where citizens are
deeply fundamentally suspicious of one another.
Speaker 2: I want you to think about your own life right now.
Think about your social media feeds. Every single time you
get sucked into a vicious name calling fight about politics
on Twitter or Facebook, every time you cut off a
family member over a cultural issue.
Speaker 1: You are falling for the manipulation. You are doing exactly
what the algorithm and the unseen architects of these narratives
want you to do, because anger gets clicks. Sure, that's
the financial side, but more importantly, from a power perspective,
a divided populace is a distracted populace.
Speaker 2: Exactly if the working class and the middle class are
endlessly fighting each other over manufactured culture wars, engineered controversies,
or the nuances of the Lablak theory, they do not
have the collective energy, the unity, or the focus to
look up and question the people actually pulling the strings.
Speaker 1: They aren't uniting to ask the difficult systemic questions that
threaten the status quo, questions like what really happened to
Jeffrey Epstein and his network of elite clients. Where does
all the untraceable dark money in our political system actually go?
Who specifically profits when the cost of living skyrockets in
the middle class is hollowed out.
Speaker 2: You simply cannot organize and ask those fundamental questions of power.
If you're too busy hating your neighbor over a sye op.
The powers that be absolutely thrive in our division. It
is their shield.
Speaker 1: But there is a countermeasure, There is a way out
of the maze. The source material outlines a unifying force
that can cut through the noise of the metasyop and
it's grounded in basic human nature.
Speaker 2: And this is my absolute favorite part of the notes
you provided. It brings all of this high level intelligence
theory back to a grounded human level. Imagine two neighbors.
Let's say neighbor A is a staunch traditional conservative who
watches Fox News neveror B is a bleeding heart progressive
liberal who watches MSNBC.
Speaker 1: If you put them in a room and ask them
about tax policy, or the education symptom, or healthcare reform,
they are going to argue until they are blue in
the face. They disagree on fundamentally everything regarding how society
should be run.
Speaker 2: But if you strip away the partisan framing, if you
remove the algorithmic outrage, what do both of those individuals
fundamentally want At their core?
Speaker 1: They both want the truth. The conservative wants the actual,
unvarnished truth about where COVID came from. The liberal wants
the exact same truth. They both want the truth about
what the government actually knows about UFOs and black budget spending.
They both want the truth about elite corruption rings.
Speaker 2: Like Epstein's, the core burning desire for truth, unmanipulated raw
truth is the great human unifier. It is the one
thing that crosses every single political, socioeconomic, and cultural boundary.
Speaker 1: And that is precisely why the Narrative Credibil Index is
such a vital empowering tool. It puts the power back
in your hands. You don't need a top secret security clearance,
you don't need an investigative journalism degree. You just need
to recognize the mathematical patterns of deception.
Speaker 2: You can use the NCI every single day to protect
your own mind. When you watch a primetime news broadcast,
when you read a slick corporate press release, when the
algorithm serves you a viral outrage video that makes your
blood pressure spike, you can pause.
Speaker 1: You can run the numbers. You can identify the emotional manipulation,
the forced authority, the tribalism, the missing information. You can
finally see the matrix for what it is. You can
realize that your sudden surge of anger isn't an organic,
natural emotion. It's a highly engineered response designed by someone
else to profit off your reaction.
Speaker 2: So we have reached the end of our exploration today
and I have a mission for you. We want to
know exactly where you stand now that you've seen the
blueprint of the matrix, now that you understand the mechanics
of the twenty questions of the NCI, what is a
major news story, a viral debate, or a cultural controversy
happening right now in your world that sets off your
NCI alarm bells?
Speaker 1: Do you think you've been caught in one of these
algorithmic syops without even realizing it. I want you to
really ponder that, look at the world differently today, and
please leave a comment below to let us know what
you think. We read them all and we want to
know how you are applying this.
Speaker 2: It is the crucial first step in reclaiming your cognitive sovereignty.
Recognizing the trap is the only reliable way to avoid
stepping in it.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us for this edition
of Thrilling Threads. We are going to leave you with
one final provocative thought to chew on the next time
you are scrolling through your feed and you feel that sudden,
hot surge of outrage bubbling up in your chest over
a headline, before you type an angry reply, before you
share the post to your friends, stop, take a breath
and ask yourself one simple question, who is profiting from
my anger right now? Stay curious, stay sharp, and we
will see you next time.