Episode Description

In 2020, telling people that organized actors were using bots to shape what the public believes got you called a conspiracy theorist. 

The one audience that didn’t need convincing was the national security community, which had been thinking about the battle for perception long before it had a commercial market.

Now, the problem has a name — cognitive warfare — and it has changed shape. The target is no longer the information environment. It is cognition itself, and AI has collapsed the cost of attacking it. Blackbird CEO Wasim Khaled returns to All Quiet to walk through what narrative attacks look like now, who is actually getting hit, and why monitoring the problem was never the mission.

What’s happening on the Second Front

• Why “misinformation” and fact-checking became the wrong frame, and what narrative intelligence replaced them with
• What AI did to the economics of a narrative attack — from troll farms to autonomous agents, and from “where are the bots?” to “where are the people?”
• Who gets targeted now: members of Congress, CEOs, even shareholder votes — not just the credulous
• Why most platforms stop between observe and orient, and what it takes to close the loop through decide and act
• Prediction that isn’t fortune-telling, it’s reducing the number of futures that can surprise you

Wasim Khaled is co-founder and CEO of Blackbird.AI, whose Constellation platform helped define the narrative intelligence category; a computer scientist by training, he built and scaled an Inc. 500 company before turning to information warfare.

Connect with Wasim

• LinkedIn: Wasim Khaled

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt