Fractals of Change

Unhackable Mind

• Mary Schaub • Season 2 • Episode 30

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0:00 | 44:21

What if the most dangerous security breach isn't in your devices — it's in your mind? In this episode, Mary sits down with Corina Pantea, a researcher at the intersection of brain security, cognitive warfare, and digital psychology, to explore how the same techniques used in military psychological operations now run invisibly through marketing, social media, workplace dynamics, and everyday technology. They trace the collapse of the boundary between influence and thought, examine why emotional manipulation is more effective than logical persuasion, and make the case that genuine self-knowledge — not software — is the primary line of cognitive defense.

 

✅Key Topics

  • PSYOPs then and now: from wartime propaganda to ambient digital influence
  • The human mind as an attack surface — and why it's largely undefended
  • Why social engineering accounts for 90% of data breaches, yet the cybersecurity industry focuses on the other 10%
  • How neuromarketing, Psycho-Cybernetics, and social engineering are different names for the same mechanism
  • The reptilian brain as the easiest entry point for manipulation
  • How chronic dysregulation — stoked by media and social platforms — keeps populations pliable
  • Synthetic relationships, AI companionship, and the erosion of authentic identity
  • The economics of keeping people helpless
  • Practical cognitive self-defense: silence, self-knowledge, high-quality information, and repair in relationships

 

💡Takeaways

  • The human brain hasn't evolved past its ancient vulnerabilities — that's precisely what PSYOPs and modern marketing exploit. The attack surface isn't new; the scale is.
  • Emotional triggers bypass rational thought entirely. Fear, urgency, shame, and outrage are mechanisms of access, not persuasion.
  • Knowing your own trauma, triggers, and worth is not therapy-speak — it's security architecture. You cannot be exploited through a wound you've already healed.
  • Authentic human connection is the last line of defense. When real relationships get replaced by synthetic ones, the final external reference point for reality disappears.
  • Information overload is a feature, not a bug — a brain running too many tabs cannot connect the dots.
  • You are the value. The economic model collapses without human labor and human consumption. The narrative that you're replaceable is itself a manipulation tactic.

 

🎤 Memorable Quotes

"If you do not program your brain yourself, someone programs it for you — because they have the exact buttons that work with you specifically." — Corina Pantea

"A human is unhackable when they are sovereign. When you know who you are, there is no trigger point." — Corina Pantea

"Self-knowledge is not a luxury. You need to know yourself because that is a defense position." — Mary Schaub

"Knowledge is not only power — it's freedom." — Corina Pantea

"Knowledge is light in times of darkness and ignorance." — Corina Pantea (episode close)

 

 

🔗Resources / External Links (only if applicable)


cognitive warfare, brain security, PSYOPs, psychological operations, social engineering, neuromarketing, Psycho-Cybernetics, manipulation, attention economy, reptilian brain, digital manipulation, data privacy, cognitive sovereignty, authentic identity, self-defense, trauma, synthetic relationships, AI companionship, dysregulation, information overload, mind hacking, Corina Pantea, Fractals of Change

Disclaimer:

***The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice.***

Credits: Written, produced and hosted by: Mary Schaub. Theme song written by: Mary Schaub

Contact: FractalsofChange@outlook.com  

Website: M. Schaub Advisory (MSA)

FINAL_E30_Corina Pantea_FINAL

SPEAKER_01

We tend to think of boundaries as physical, borders, walls, perimeters. But the most consequential boundaries are increasingly invisible. The line between what we think and what we've been led to think. Are we underestimating how permeable we've become? And where do you see those boundaries breaking down?

SPEAKER_00

We have physical boundaries as personalities, as human beings, right? That's where physical boundaries, like cognitive boundaries, physical, like the brain boundaries, are real, right? So we become more permeable in that regard when we're speaking about being bombarded with all sorts of toxic information. Everywhere we have a screen, we absorb all this information. It goes into the subconsciousness. It's how the human is working. We become permeable because we're being bombarded with all of this information. We are more exposed than our ancestors. There are boundaries to be kept when it comes to cognitive hygiene or cognitive defense. But we are not only that, we are also this energy. When you connect to yourself and you start feeling your boundaries as energy, that's when you feel that when something feels off, in order to defend yourself, first you have to feel those boundaries yourself from within. So first go within, practice taking this energy back to not get triggered by what is not mine, the energy that does not belong to me. You're maybe in an office with thousands of people. That's a lot of information to actually process because we process all the information all the time, all the physical cues. We have this computer that analyzes everything, every little smirk, the tonality of the voice. There's a lot of information. So we have to learn to filter out a little bit of that noise.

SPEAKER_01

It feels like even just the awareness of recognizing that we're permeable is really important because we're in our own heads, we're thinking about our thinking. We we think we are our thoughts. And we don't imagine that we are this energy field that is affected by other things and we affect other things. And just having that awareness is power. How do you define psyops today? What's fundamentally changed in terms of actors, tools, and proximity to ordinary life?

SPEAKER_00

So I don't think that anything changed much when it comes to fundamentals. I'm not going to try to make it more complex than what it is. Actually, it's really simple. The human brain has never really evolved, it doesn't evolve that fast. So what used to work a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago still works. It's just today, like I said, we are being bombarded with that. If back in the days, as a medium of psy-ops, that would be a newspaper, right? Or maybe a radio station. But we didn't actually constantly use to be exposed to this information that is being fed into our system all the time. Today the surface is bigger because our phones, our TVs, our computers, everything is basically a military technology that is used to deliver all sorts of information. It's psychological technology that still does the job. We can brainwash each other, we can manipulate each other through words. Right? There's the natural linguistic programming NLP, this hypnosis, the suggestibility, the suggestions, like the repetition over and over and over and over again. It's not actually super complex to deliver that. And today it's just a bigger attack on the surface because we're digitalized. I think we are lacking just the fundamental knowledge of how the human brain works. And the adversary is using that against you, be it a politician, be it a marketing agency, a company that needs to sell something to you, they will implant a decision into your brain using ads. All right. That's actually weaponized psychology.

SPEAKER_01

I recently had Alec Harris, a security and privacy expert on recently, and he was talking about the perimeter from a hardware, software, cyber perspective. But what you're describing is it almost feels like it's less that something is being done to us than it is something we're living inside of. Now let's look at that from the perspective of the mind rather than the device. And they're getting blurred. Yeah. The other thing I'd love to talk about, and I, and this is so perfect that you you teed this up. I think we most of us think that we're making rational decisions. I'd like to think that I'm making rational decisions. But as you talk about, right? It's so important to know our brains because when you know you're not, you know, like, listen, I'm a human and a lot of times I'm on autopilot. That's so important what you're talking about, is that knowledge. Some years ago, there was a show I really loved, but there's a show called Mad Men, and it was talking about the height of advertising in the 60s in New York, these Madison Avenue guys, and they'd had this fancy presentation about clever ways of marketing. And this is exactly what you were saying is starting to integrate psychology. And you could see the manipulation at play. At first, it was like, you know, buy this widget, it's good. And then it be as it the field matured, they started to, let's say, sell disinfectant to the housewife who was made to feel afraid that there were germs on their kitchen floors, or selling acne cream to teenagers who were frightened of being ostracized, or making middle-aged men feel young and attractive by selling them a sports car, you know? So this manipulation, even at that consumer level, it's been happening for a while. But what you're talking about is, hey, now technology is evolved so far that marketing is now being engineered with such precision. What are your thoughts about how this has moved from general influence to highly targeted cognitive shaping?

SPEAKER_00

When I was studying UX design, you studied the psychology of colors, even the shape and the color would actually nudge the person to click on it. Right? That's in the digital design of how the web page is being designed. Then you have the software in the back end of it that is going to analyze whenever you change the size of the font, it gives you the conversion rate per font style. And we're not even considering the data that we already had in marketing agencies where you have the psychographics of your ICP, right? Because whenever you're, for example, you are a coffee company today. Back in the days, you would go to a marketing agency and they would have some information on the consumers, right? They would know that Lily drinks coffee because she's buying it from a X, Y, and Z market, that amount, and et cetera, et cetera. Today, with all the apps and all the tracking that we have, we can check, for example, on Google Maps, where I'm going to drink coffee, how much I pay via my digital wallet, right? All of these data points are going into the search engines algorithms that further use that for Google ads, et cetera, right? But it's basically data extraction from the user without their knowledge to build a very precise profile with all of your preferences. It knows you better than you know yourself because you're not tracking all this information. I don't know how many times what's the conversion rate when I go to a different website. I don't track myself, but they do. And they know how much coffee do I drink, what kind of websites do I go to, what kind of information I read, and they know what type of content to target towards me, to nudge me towards a specific, again, decision or opinion. That's also very important, right? When it comes to like forming an opinion of what's going on in the world, right? The attack surface today is extreme. And anybody who believes that they are actually sovereign and autonomous in their thinking process, it's very dangerous to believe so. I think this is where you get the most attacked when you really believe that what you're thinking is really you and that your mind is not shaped 24-7 by external information. If you don't know how to filter it out and how to expose yourself away from the screens towards things that you really decide that you want to read books, I think this is the great weapon against it, just read really high-quality scientific cloud. There's a lot of beautiful books on psychology, a lot of YouTube videos, like Sapolsky. I think he's done an amazing job at explaining behaviorism. So the more we consume this type of content that awakens us to the fact that the brain is actually the same software. It's a programmable computer. And if you do not program it yourself, someone will program it for you because they have the exact buttons that work with you specifically.

SPEAKER_01

I hope people really start to take this in. There's so much hype about technology. We love it, right? It's it's exciting to be alive right now. You think about what our grandparents or great-grandparents, they would think that we're wizards now with what we could do. So there's that excitement, but I think it's so important, and why I was so excited to have you on is that people really need to understand all of these things and to walk more consciously and to make more intentional decisions, taking on these thousands and thousands of data points and building complex models about who we are. Of course, do we really think we could sustain not being hacked by someone who has that amount of information? I love that you're describing the mind almost like an operating system, you know, that can be compromised. And I'm I'm thinking that beyond a rational thought, that these systems are working directly on subconscious processes, things like fear and trust and habit. And it's less about convincing people logically. As you were saying, it's things like repeated login prompts until someone goes, Oh, forget it. Just click approve or make it stop, or the urgency framing, the email or the text that says act now. Here in New York recently, there's a new wave of text messages that are coming out that look very legitimate, coming from the police, saying you have a ticket and you need to pay it, or you're gonna be, you know, it's so impersonating authority figures that people instinctively are gonna defer to. This feels less like persuasion and more like exploitation of our architecture. What are the most effective mechanisms being used? And and to your point earlier, like at some point, influence just becomes indistinguishable from our own thinking.

SPEAKER_00

In psychology, this is called psychocybernetics. In marketing, this is called neuromarketing. In cybersecurity, it's called social engineering. It's all one and the same thing.

SPEAKER_01

I I don't want anyone to think that people who are susceptible to this, that there's something wrong. We're human, but I would say there's another component, which is emotion. I I'm a very responsible citizen. So if I get a text message that says, hey, we flagged you on the speed radar, you know, immediately it's going to have a visceral response to me. And my guard might be more down than if it's saying, you know, transfer a million dollars to some bank and you know, somewhere. Using emotional boundaries as an entry point. I think in the examples we used before of the housewife and the middle-aged man or the teenager with acne, that's really preying on shame, fear, guilt, insecurity. Today you see that plus fear, outrage, urgency, right? There's everything's really amplified. Yeah. And even general, general excitement gets gets weaponized. You were talking about this is really interesting because you were talking about colors before. I lived in London for a few years. And when I moved back to the US, I started to notice things I hadn't seen before. Something as simple as the weather forecast. So in BBC, weather, it's pretty matter-of-fact, it's going to rain usually. Here in the US, sorry, my London friends, but so here in the US, even the weather is an event. So one local New York station here uses, they call it red alerts for something as simple as rain in the forecast. And as you said before, giant red graphics, red alert. And the weatherman is walking on a set that looks legitimately like it could be a Pentagon situation room. It just feels like emotional dynamics is being so used in influence systems now. I'm wondering your thoughts on what makes people more susceptible to some of these use of emotions.

SPEAKER_00

It's because the reptilian brain, right? People who want to exploit your decision, your reasoning, they know that the animalistic part of the brain in all the human beings, no matter how smart you are, works the same. There's the Kahneman's book that's speaking about the true system, think fast and slow, right? So the fast thinking system has be is it's really easy to hack. I've heard the situation in Dubai a few years ago when I was talking to one of my clients, and they were talking about someone in their family got a fraud alert. Basically, it was the elder in the family, the grandpa, received a call, a fake call with fake voice generated by his nephew. And he was saying that I'm in the hospital. Can you please send me some money? It's terrible, but this is how people are hacked. And it's not about technology anymore. Same thing goes with the marketing, right? The decision hacking mechanism. It shouldn't be legal, actually. It shouldn't be legal. But it is, unfortunately. If you think about it at the end of the day, it's not that smart. And it still works. And it doesn't have to be very sophisticated. It takes only to analyze the person, and that's what hackers do, right? They gather all the information, just like marketing and agencies. They build a profile on you or on your company, depending on who the target is for the moment. They build all these data points and they map you out and then they get what they need to do. It's technological, it's physiological. When, for example, when someone wants to breach a company, they start with social engineering. We have 90% of all data breaches are not technological. They are social engineering. Yet, just think about it, the entire cybersecurity industry is selling software solutions. Everybody is being focused on the 10% of the entire perimeter. You know why? Because you cannot install software into a human. How do you do that? You can sell billions and billions of contracts into hardware, into all sorts of like scanning technology, detection technology. It still gets hacked, by the way, for people to not be delusional. Security doesn't really exist, to be honest. Because when you become a target, you're just getting breached. We can look at FBR, we can look at C so many times hackers showed that, you know, like guys, it's really non-existent. But the industry has to keep on selling certain solutions. And every time I speak with people in the cybersecurity industry, I ask them, but what do you do about the human layer? Unfortunately, there's not enough training in this in this industry to make people aware that it's not even a cybersecurity thing. It's not a digital security thing, it's a personal security thing. And it's really hard to secure the brain. We have to ask ourselves how do we actually achieve that? How we get into the the personal defense, into the mind defense in a cognitive war situation because politicians want you to vote for them. They will exploit your will. Because that's what they need as an output, right? It's your responsibility to know how it works, how propaganda works, to keep the mental hygiene, to keep autonomy.

SPEAKER_01

One of the components has been the importance of relational connection, which I want to talk to you about because I think that's one of the defenses, and that's sort of the other side of this. But you know, I think many of us are feeling that the world is worse than it was and it's scary, and what can we do? And I think I came to the realization a long time ago that it's not a top-down approach or a top-down solution. It's a bottom-up, and exactly to the point that you're saying it's got to start with each one of us. It's got to start with us really deeply knowing ourselves and being aware of our insecurities, our shadows. It is not a luxury of doing psychotherapy. You need to know yourself because that's a defense position in a world today where, as you're saying, politicians, companies, scammers, everyone is trying to get our attention, our money. I have over the last eight or 10 years come to realize that me being in a chronic state of dysregulation because I'm watching the news and I'm upset and I feel hopeless and powerless is not helping anyone. It's not helping me, it's not helping my family, and it's not making the world a better place because I get upset. But me being grounded and me protecting my energy and myself, you know, I don't have my head completely in the sand, but I need to be aware that when I'm in that activated mode, fight, fight, or freeze, I'm not going to be responding from awareness. I also wonder, and I'd love to hear your thoughts, is I don't feel that it is a coincidence that everyone is feeling this dysregulation and that we're all plugged into social media and news that is intentionally stoking rage and hopelessness and helplessness. And it's this feedback loop of, okay, that's making us more dysregulated. And then we're numbing and obsessed and going back to it, and it's making us more and more. And what happens to a population that is chronically dysregulated and cannot think and operate from a place of awareness? Because as you said before, now we're in that reptilian brain. So it feels it feels quite intentional. I'm not saying there's a conspiracy theory of people in a room that are saying, let's hit, let's hit the outrage content. Though I don't know, sometimes it does seem if you look at the at the algorithms and the patterns of things, yeah, it does feel like we've been kept in this state for so long. And that's that's a that's a a mechanism of control.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. Because if I destabilize you emotionally, you become my puppet. Right. What they do right now in Silicon Valley telling us that LLMs are going to take off jobs and we will replace people. What is this campaign? What is this dehumanizing campaign? Why making people feel so bad? We are the creators of everything. We are the ones who actually created software and all this robotics and everything has been designed by the human mind. It's superior to everything, but there's no one talking about it. Making people just a little bit more helpless makes them consume easier.

SPEAKER_01

And I almost feel like this attention and the attention hacking is a way of sort of numbing and shutting us down so that the information can kind of go in and we're really then become a vessel at that point. Absolutely. What happens then when you have a population who's in that state? Does the boundary then become not just what we think or feel, but who we actually understand ourselves to be?

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. Again, when we bombard ourselves with way too much information, our nervous system is so overwhelmed that you don't know where to start and you don't know where to end. And you are incapable of actually assessing anything at its face value. We have this new terminology that is being used in the tech world, empathy infrastructure. What does it even mean? It's nonsense. Empathy is not infrastructure. Empathy only belongs to a human being. It cannot be an LLM. We are adults that are being put into an infantile stage, right? Even like I look at the world as it is, glued to the screen, right? Everybody, almost everybody, completely brainwashed every single day. If you expose yourself to national TV, it's like a disaster. And then I look at the fashion trends as well. Like the crocs, like when I see people wearing crocs like everywhere in Europe and here in Asia as well, I'm looking like it really looks like shoes for babies. Who actually Infuses this trends for adults to wear shoes for babies. Because if you think about it, if your eyes, your subconscious mind, looks at your feet constantly and they see these oversized shoes as if you were shrinking small and the shoes are big, makes you feel like a baby, more suggestible, more looking for dad's approval, mom's approval, looking up to the government to tell me what I should think, when I should cut my grass. Then there's also a new, I think it I saw it like two years ago. The new some stuff that you put on the bag, and then it's like a big teddy beer, like a big teddy beer. And I was like, this is like for kids. Yeah, but it's very like it's now it's a new fashion. But you are 45. You don't have to follow all these things because it's just fashion, right?

SPEAKER_01

It's so absurd, it almost feels like someone's testing. Like it's just like someone's like, let's see if a 45-year-old listen, and I love a teddy bear, but I'm not gonna have a teddy bear on my work bag. But it's so it's so interesting to see like the most ridiculous thing we could do to see if they'll do it.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and they still and people adopt it. Hey, it and the the they did it was the through Kim Kardashian, right? And all this gym wear that shouldn't be even like on the streets. What is this? All of a sudden, like, did you lose your taste? And like maybe sometimes you want to wear something else. Not everybody's like going to the gym. I'm looking at like a game, like maybe Sims or stuff like that, and I'm looking at all of this. Like 90% of people are just characters in a game to me. And they don't understand that they've been completely brainwashed to adopt the same phase. They go do their noses and everything to look like someone, like a template. They are being clothed as templates, and they pay for that. That's the whole thing. It's the most beautiful thing that marketing could ever do using like psychology to actually hack the human brain so so badly that people pay to be a template. Like we get wiped out. You're speaking about personality. What is personality? Is something authentic. Me, I'm only me, and there's no one like Greena. The way she is with her character, the way she's speaking, sometimes she's sweet, sometimes she's not. And I think it's it's cool, and it's me, anyways. I'm not gonna be willing to please anybody because I love me the way I am. If you are being brainwashed, and this is how you can spot people right away, but when you have a personality, you decide for you what you're gonna dress like, what your face is gonna look like, how you're gonna talk. You're not gonna be afraid to go against the masses. All right. This is called authenticity, this is the centricity, this is the personality untouched. And when you're being breached, all right, and you're being injected, disinfected code that you have to be a copy-paste version of something that is being shown on TV because it's cool, it's the new trend. And give me your money because you're not lovable. You see, if you fix yourself a little more to look like this template, like a Bobby doll, now you are more lovable and more respectable. And this is how we create a generation of lookalikes that don't have an opinion, that don't have a personality, that don't have a sovereign mind. We basically wipe out the human in a way. Yeah.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Through a very again, multiple tactics, because we have the dehumanizing thing from politicians, and then with the marketing, we say, hey, actually, Luke, you're gonna be super happy if you buy this teapot from me or if you buy this dress. Multiple ways to actually sell the person into believing that if he's gonna do X, Y, and then he's gonna purchase a little bit more, now he gets the respect. There's no one here talking about the fact that you are enough the way you are, you are lovable the way you are. If you want to be a singer, please, be a singer. We need good singers. Like, listen to what we have today. It's atrocious. We used to have beautiful classical music, well thought out, genius constructions through notes. Today we have looping, hypnotizing beats with nonsensical lyrics. Right? And we're thinking that it's cool.

SPEAKER_01

I have had that observation, and I also catch myself because, of course, there's that proverbial middle-aged person who's saying, the music today isn't like the music of my day. But I love my parents' music, and frankly, some of my grandparents' music was great, and but I hate repetition. And I have noticed, because it just edges me out, of the same lyrics over and over again. I love science fiction and fantasy, but the amount of graphics and AI and film production, you can see the downfall of Marvel IP, for example. It just got to a point where I mean, yes, the graphics were remarkable, but I didn't feel anything. I'd walk out of the theater and I was like, what did I just see? Whereas if you go back to Lord of the Rings, okay, the graphics are not great. You can kind of see where things have been messed around a little bit, but they were actually riding horses during filming. We were watching humans. I think on some level, when the music is AI, when the film is AI, there's something in me, at least, that I feel like I'm not watching anything. It feels different than what I'm actually worked with. Maybe that's why I love documentaries now. You know, it just feels like it's something real. Whereas two hours can go by in a Marvel movie and I walk out and I couldn't tell you what the plot line was, what was funny. It was just as you said, it was a template where that's what we're watching. Template people, template movies. It's efficient and cost effective, maybe. And now we're seeing it with relationships. So I recently had Dr. Lewis Klein on, and we were talking about relational coherence, right? The idea that identity doesn't form just internally in isolation, but in relationship to other people. And when those relational structures break down or get replaced by some more synthetic mediated ones like AI, it can also fundamentally weaken identity and stability of our identity over time. You have written about synthetic life, how real relationships and experiences are being substituted by digital ones. Can you say more about your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. And thanks for choosing this one because I think it's becoming more and more disruptive today, right? Again, we're speaking about fracturing the society. And the last line of defense is actually the interpersonal relationships. Because whenever you have an outside point of reference, for example, a good friend of yours who's gonna say, Hey, actually, I think you're going the wrong way, who is not a people pleaser, but the honest ones who are rough and wrong and do it out of love, they will say, Hey, maybe you want to think about that. So when we replace that friend with a that could be your last point of reference to not get completely lost in this brainwashing machine, this thing gets addictive. Why? Because with humans, it's difficult to build relationships. We are so different, and it takes a separate skill set to build. That's interpersonal relationships building. And it's easier to just go to an automated thing that looks flawless and easy. It always tells you that you're the best. It basically fills in the gaps of, again, the traumas that you used to have in the past. Maybe your mom didn't love you, for example. And that machine is giving you exactly what you need. Right? And that's where you get attached to it emotionally. It basically hacks your brain and your emotional makeup and your chemistry because you're actually alive. A machine wouldn't do that ever because they don't have the chemistry. But we we get all this oxytocin, vasopressin, all of a sudden, the euphoria. And we get attached to synthetics more than we do to humans now. What human relationships do is that they keep you grounded somehow as well. If you go too much into the digital world, you completely lose touch with reality. And that's when to me, it looks like we we dissolve into something. Synthetics, you sugarcoat the human image, they make it so polished and so easy to agree with, so that we again never evolve, never grow from the trauma that sometimes human relationships inflict that have to initiate us into a new version that is a little bit more conscious and more evolved.

SPEAKER_01

It feels like the original system was built, even with those traumas, right? Those ended up being an impetus for tremendous growth or for wonderful qualities. And I I love the idea, the sort of Jungian idea that even in darkness there's some light, and in light there's some darkness. And so when you have just these consistently okay, nice relationships, you starve yourself for the opportunity to have a fight. If you and I are friends, and if we're good friends, we should have a fight because then we're probably not good friends. Through that process, you and I are gonna learn something about ourselves and each other, and we'll walk away from that experience better and different and change. And so if we're having synthetic relationships where there are no opportunities for that, what happens down the line?

SPEAKER_00

We stay in a child's position, he's getting pleased where mom and dad is taking care of them. So I don't have to grow now, right? Too much comfort is actually dangerous because you stay like a little fish in the same perimeter. Organic things, they love to grow and to bloom into something else. And when we're speaking about human interrelations, right, you were mentioning that you and I, if we were friends and we had a fight, first of all, it built a great ability to debate something. Debating, it's an amazing mental exercise. Sometimes I would do it back in the schools in my country. We would do debating as a cognitive exercise. So the class was divided in two. You were given one topic, and you were just given yes, you're against it, and you are for that. And we had to fight between each other to defend, like in a court, an idea that wasn't even ours, because that's an exercise. And you have to exercise negotiation skills, manipulation skills to actually make the other side buy into your truth. Right? That's an amazing exercise to do. So conflicts are never a bad thing. This is why I'm not really angry at people that are upset at me. I love debating.

SPEAKER_01

But you strike me as someone who's so you're self-secure, you don't personalize things unnecessarily. So you can go through that cognitive exercise and find it curious and interesting. And I you also strike me as someone who is so smart and curious that, hey, you know, change my mind. I'd like to hear your point of view. I find if you've never changed your mind in your life, there's something wrong. True. I want people to change my mind. I have friends that I will say something and they'll be well, actually, da-da-da-da-da. And they'll tell me something and I'll go, that's really, you know what? I can see what you're saying, and I'll walk away. And I don't feel bad or less than or embarrassed because that's what we're supposed to do. Absolutely. We're supposed to, we're supposed to grow. This is what being a teenager and being in your 20s is when you couldn't wait to get your license and get out, and you were outgrowing your tank and you wanted to move into the next thing. And what strikes me as you're talking, I'm thinking about now they've made the tank so safe and comfortable.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And everything outside of the tank is scary and hard that people don't feel like there's no urgency, right? The statistics, at least here in the US, I don't know what they're like in Europe or Asia, but kids don't want to get their driver's license, they don't want to move out of the house, they don't want to date. Feels like there's a shrinking. And when we're dysregulated, we tend to contract, right? When we're scared, we tend to contract. And so going back to what we were talking about at the top, about this intentional negativity and fear and shutting us down and distraction and attention hijacking, I think is directly correlated to this lack of desire to grow and take risks.

SPEAKER_00

There's another thing when we are speaking about a fight. What follows after is that people don't actually have to sever the ties or break, because today we live in an era, we say, oh, it's replaceable. I'm gonna get someone new. It's a very toxic thing to do. Before, back in the days, where we we we didn't do that. What we do instead is we practice the skill of rebuilding. It's called repair. It is a skill of having the uncomfortable conversation. There's nothing to be ashamed of. We can be wrong. That's normal. We all do mistakes. It's supposed to be this way. It means that you have cognitive capabilities. It's called self-awareness. When you you feel the shame, it's normal too. And just say, hey, I forgive myself for that. That's a skill of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. And then you go to the other person, and you build the skill of repairing the bond. Say, hey, I heard you, I felt you, it hurt me too. And then you start to build the link back again. And it makes us unite and keep this unity and a solid network between each other as a society.

Value - Extraction (move this?)

SPEAKER_01

I want to talk a little bit about defense and sovereignty because we've talked a lot about the challenge, which is formidable. But I want to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about what a well-defended mind looks or even feels like in this environment.

SPEAKER_00

So when I was thinking about cognitive defense, because I was seeing this big surface of attack that cybersecurity companies cannot basically defend because they're not psychologists. The more I went into it, the more I understood that actually understanding and accepting that you are extremely valuable is the first line of defense. Maybe it's not that important for you to actually know everything about psychology and how you function, but actually know your worth. If you haven't been loved by your parents, learn how to love yourself now. That's very important because predators normally exploit this and they have all the data points about you disconnecting from everything, sitting in the silence, which in the beginning is gonna feel extremely uncomfortable. Getting back to hearing your actual voice. You can only hear that in silence. When you sit in silence, you understand that this anxiety you had, it's actually because you're hating something. And why are you hating it? And it's like it starts to bring you to the trauma somewhere, then you can solve it, and then you can heal it, you can heal yourself, and you can start being sovereign. Now that you healed your trauma, you cannot be exploited when you patched it, right? It's just like in hacking. Learn about your coping mechanisms. It takes a little bit of metacognition, right? To look at yourself from a different perspective, as if it wasn't you, build that sovereignty, build the walls, the boundaries, not to get defensive so that nobody can just come and trigger and take from you just because you're hurting. Hardware is really easy to hack. Okay. But a human is unhackable when they are sovereign. When you are in your sovereignty, you know who you are. There's nothing that can stop you. There's no trigger point.

SPEAKER_01

That is what we all need desperately. What I'm taking away from this conversation. And it's so beautiful because it keeps coming up in all these wonderful people I talk to, like yourself. It's coming back to love, the self-love, self-acceptance, the love of my fellow human being, and the acceptance of my fellow human being for being an imperfect, inefficient human, we need to start to love and embrace this. If we don't, we're really going to be going down the wrong path. And we can see it already. As we're starting to wrap up, if someone listening feels that their attention, emotions, or even their beliefs are constantly being pulled in different directions. What would you want people to know that we haven't touched on?

SPEAKER_00

I always say, listen to yourself. Feel it first. Don't listen to it with your mind, because the mind is the easiest to hug. Feel it. Try to feel it in your body. Does it feel right? Does it feel fair? Does it feel right for me? Does it make me feel good? When you see that something is trying to target you negatively, turn it off. If it doesn't feel good, don't take it. Take only what feels good. Meditation, a walk in nature, a little nab. If you feel like you need to nap, please do. You have a body, and if you do not respect it enough, it's not gonna serve you well. Right? It's not about being self-centered and egotistic. Self-care, candid self-acceptance, and to practice self-forgiveness. Because guilt is an extremely destructive emotion. It erodes everything from the inside. And you can never be happy, can never be sovereign again. That creates such a trauma that you get easy to be exploited by people who are seeking to benefit off of your good heart. That's how we start building the sovereignty. It always starts at an emotional level. It takes a lot of work, but it's absolutely worth it. Don't give the authority to people. Take 30 minutes to feed your brain with really high quality content, books. They're available on Kindle, they're available in paper format, whatever pleases you. It's really great food for your mind. And then you start to gradually practice autonomy based on your data set that is in the brain. So whenever information comes through a third party, you apply criticals and can you start asking questions. Does it make sense? Because if you knew how economy works, you would know that humans are not replaceable. Because it's gonna collapse the system that we have right now. What I'm talking about is not some pill, it's not some subscription, it's knowledge that can be installed into the brain and it stays there forever. That's the beautiful thing about it. You create it in your brain, and once it's there, it's nothing that can stop you in your life, in your in in your well-being, and then in your cognitive defense capabilities.

SPEAKER_01

Then it's something that each one of us can do today. We don't need anyone else. We have the tools. To me, that's like the perfect framework for the cognitive self-defense that we've been talking about today. And it's something that we can build and grow on. All the skills that you've mentioned are also going to benefit our health, our relationships, our performance at work, right? These are good foundational skills to have. They're not just for what we're talking about today, but they are really necessary. Karina, thank you genuinely. This is the kind of conversation I could have for another three hours over many, many cups of tea or wine. There are at least two other, maybe three other episodes I can think of today, right now, that we could continue talking about on different topics. So I'm hoping that this is the first of many to come. Your thinking is sharp, your writing is gloves off and challenges everything, but it's also funny as hell, which is not an easy combination to pull off. I'm gonna put the links in the show notes. I really do. I I as I experience you talking to you live or reading you, you don't have something to sell. You're doing this because you care. And that really comes through. You're looking out for folks and you're asking people to look out for themselves. And I feel like that's a really beautiful thing. And I think that's going to be your legacy.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. I'm already working on something bigger where I'm actually going to give out a lot of tools. And I thought about it for a long time, who I'm doing it for. I want to say that I do it more for the new generation. I think that we as grown-ups had the chance and the opportunity to actually build those skills because we had no internet. That was a great environment. And unfortunately, what children are being brought up into today, it's actually the fish tank. And I want to build tools and information that I wish I had if I was in school or in years old right now. Please let us know.

SPEAKER_01

I'd love to promote it. Jonathan Hay came out with this anxious generation book where he talked about his concerns specifically about the impact of social media on kids. And now there's legislation in Australia and other countries to age gate many of these tools. So I think the amount of impact you can have is tremendous. Thank you for doing what you do, and thank you for your time today. Been so generous. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00

I'm looking forward to our next conversations, Mary. Thank you so much for your time and for being a beautiful soul that spreads light because knowledge is light. In times of darkness, Darkness and ignorance. Knowledge is the light.

SPEAKER_01

That's the perfect ending. You just nailed it. Mic drop. Thank you.

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Mary Schaub

Host