A Networked-Run World: A Brave New Conversation with John Robb | Ep 5

John Robb is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, where he was a pilot serving in Tier 1 Special Operations, working with Delta and Seal Team 6. In the private sector, John was a pioneer in the field of technology and business, being the world's first professional internet analyst at Forrester Research. He also served as co-founder and president of Gomez Advisors, a financial industry performance testing company, and as CEO of UserLand Software, where he developed the foundational technologies and user interface for social networking in 2001. He is the author of the book Brave New War, which was a prescient look at the future of warfare. His unique background and insights makes him an invaluable resource for business leaders and teams.

Be sure to use the Chapters Feature on Apple and Spotify to quickly browse and navigate to segments of this episode.

//John Robb and links to his work//
John's Global Guerrillas Report
John's Twitter
John's Substack
Brave New War

//People, ideas, and things mentioned in this episode//
Books by Tucker Max
Books by Daniel Suarez
The Edelman Trust Barometer
Understanding Media  –  by Marshall McLuhan

//The Papers of John R. Boyd//
John R. Boyd Collection, COLL/2949, Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division, Quantico, VA.

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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
Salience – with Ian Snape, PhD
Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
The F-14 Tomcast – with Crunch and Bio
Economic...

Transcript

(Note: This transcript was created using AI. It has not been edited verbatim.)

Mark McGrath
So, Ponch, I'm looking forward to our conversation today. It's with an author, thinker, somebody that I've been following for years, someone whose work has been very influential. Some of it's very it's all very principles driven that you can pull out and apply and look at the world very differently. And that's John Robb.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
John, fired up that you're here with us today. And I want to try something new before we get you airborne. And that is I want to have a quick conversation with Mark about what we think of today's conversation ought to be about and maybe some of the areas we need to explore. But what I'd like you to do is just kind of sit back and listen in and then we're going to launch you and get you airborne.

So, Mark, back in December, you and I looked at the strategic game of question mark and question mark together. Interaction and isolation. That's what the question marks are. We looked at John Boyd's three domains physical, mental and moral. We could talk about that here in a second. But I think there's a strong connection with what John Robb writes about from his books and his global guerrillas, and that's focused on network decision making or sensemaking.

I think there's a strong connection to fifth generation warfare, liminal warfare, cognitive warfare, cognitive dominance. Some connections to what's happening in the world today. There's also a strong connection to complex adaptive systems thinking. And we recently had Dave Snowden on the show to talk about that. We also think there's another aspect of this not just warfare, but the application of this type of thinking from John Boyd, from this fifth generation warfare liminal warfare, disinformation information to leadership and building teams and looking at your customer as a complex adaptive system.

So that's kind of where I'm sitting right now. What do you want to dive into with John?

Mark McGrath
I would concur, and I would love to get his perspective on how that that type of thinking and the things that you have to do in order to arrive at that thinking, be the research that you have to do, the challenging of assumptions, the integrating of Boyd's principles, the understanding of complex adaptive systems, what they what they even are, and take those principles out and then continue to show the leaders and teams that we work with, show them how they can use this today, that these things are universal and when properly understood, it can help them negotiate the VUCA volatility, uncertainty, complex ambiguity that they're going to continue to face on a nonstop basis.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. So when we pull this together, I believe when we dive into John Boyd's work with the matter energy information domain, and that is the physical domain. We look at the mental domain, which is really about emotional or intellectual activity, but that third domain is very powerful and that's the rules of the game. We'll call that the moral domain.

And that's what John Boyd calls it. And I think we really need to dive into that to understand what this moral warfare is really about. You know, we have these shared cultural codes of conduct or standards of behaviors that not everybody abides with. They kind of go inside and outside of that. And we know from Boyd's work that he actually calls it corruption and evil.

Right. So we might learn something about this type of warfare that's happening all around us. And many of us don't even understand what's going on. But there's a positive side to that, and that is the application to developing customers, developing people in your organization, setting the right conditions, looking at complexity and emerging. So there's our time. Let's go ahead and get John airborne.

So, John Robb, let's get airborne. What do you have for us.

John Robb
On those topics?

Mark McGrath
Absolutely.

John Robb
Yeah. I started writing about the Global Gorillas Report. I did the blog forever and it's really kind of a monthly thing. And now I'm getting into the thing of writing every week and substack and stuff like that, like everybody else now. But I did a little earlier is I focused in on what was going on in the political domain.

It's I started off in the guerrilla warfare and now how networks make decisions in Iraq and then moved on to protest and then went on to politics. And it, you know, gives a good example of the kind of three realms warfare that we're talking about. And in fact, our political system is really pretty much organized like that right now.

And that, you know, I focused in initially on the weaponization of social networks. And then you had, you know, one network that was focused on moral warfare and largely, you know, against Trump and his group. And Trump and his group was focused on insurgency, which is kind of a maneuver warfare, which is in the psychological realm. And then you had these like corporations in the background government were focused on nutrition and physical warfare where they would disconnect you and make it in incapacitate your ability, abilities to actually interact on the system.

And, you know, that developed over time. You know, if you heard about fast transients and creating this hodgepodge of different, you know, ideas and movements, I used to kind of confuse the enemy and make it impossible for them to make high quality decisions. That's exactly Trump's super power on Twitter, right? You know, he was constantly throwing out new ideas and using that Twitter to get it out to 100 million people.

And in that raw feeling that those fast transients moving from topic to topic to topic to topic, made it very hard for the opposition to mount a, you know, a decision making process that yielded results. As a result, they're focused more on the moral warfare. And it was really focused on turning the opposition into evil and enemy and that, you know, moral warfare, you know, the way I envision it, at least in my head, is that it's like two centers of gravity, you know, it's like a, you know, a planet and a star.

And you want to be the star and you're pulling pieces off the planet by showing that they're selfish or they're misguided or they're evil or whatever. And more and more of the mass of the planet ends up in your gravity world and eventually just destroy there, destroy them, or break them into pieces as they fall apart. Not cooperative centers of gravity as a planet is broken apart through all these moral attacks.

So how does that relate to business? You know, I had a friend years ago used to my early thinking on how to conduct maneuver warfare online and in the public sphere to promote his books. You know, Tucker, Max is familiar with him, his work, you know, trying to figure out ways to actually promote his books and the idea of actually going out and putting confrontational ideas out, like running a billboard that says, you know, something controversial to generate pushback or actually taking the position of the opposition to his books and putting it up there in the public sphere and to generate controversy and controversy sold books and sold millions of books every year.

As a result of that, fast transients worked for him and the more he changed the topics, more he flipped from one controversial thing to the next, the harder it was for the opposition to actually take him out. So if you're facing, you know, an opposition that is intent on taking you down like, you know, Musk is doing right now running Twitter constantly changing topics, helped him to a certain extent avoid a concerted effort to completely steamroll.

Go ahead. As I think he said, that's absolutely the trend. Okay.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. So I want to see if you can unpack a few things for our listeners. You talked about urban warfare, by the way. Tucker Mack's book, I Hope They Serve Beer and Hell is something I read when I was a junior officer. It was pretty entertaining. Yeah, I'm very familiar with his work, but third generation warfare, fourth generation, fifth generation should just, you know, for the listeners that don't have a military background, what does that mean when we talk about different types of warfare and maybe even for those listeners that are familiar with that, can we even revisit network centric warfare and where we went wrong with that or where we went right with that in the military?

John Robb
Yeah. So I know LED and all that whole group on the fourth generation warfare front and you know, got involved in the early aughts trying to figure out what was going on in Iraq. Fourth generation warfare was really a description of all the kind of insurgency movements we've seen over decades. And it was tied into this idea that the state was in decline and that insurgency was increasingly the way in which these nation states fought.

They didn't fight directly. You know, they were hemmed in by nuclear weapons and a nuclear piece. And therefore, the only way they fought was through this insurgency approach and that over time, as the state got weaker and weaker, these insurgencies became more and more dependent and that they would be able to latch on and create primary loyalties of loyalties that were higher than to the state, and that people would be loyal to these alternatives.

And these alternatives would then allow them to wage war and, you know, gain ground. Like you say, a cartel has delivers services in a town. They gain the loyalty of it and that town protect them. And they have a primary loyal to the cartel rather than the government and then fifth generation warfare. And I dabbled around it.

I wrote about it way back, probably 2004 or five or something like that. Their little battle over what it meant and whether we should actually open up this new can of worms. You know, just as people were starting to get their heads around fourth generation warfare. For me, the idea of the fifth generation warfare was that it was the center of gravity of the conflict was online, and that everything that you did in the offline world was done to move the online conflict forward.

So if you had a protest, the protest was to demonstrate something that or to create a controversy that allowed the online conflict to move forward, and that the online conflict would always be the center of gravity and it's the one that would allow you to ultimately win and lock in your wits. And so, you know, I was looking at the larger context that we're in, and I see the kind of political landscape where we have and it's more or less the Republican versus Democrat or left versus right in the traditional context.

What we have now is more let's do it all together. The consensus, of course, consensus versus a kind of let's not dissent, you know, let's not do anything together or as little together as possible and let's put that to bed. Don't even approach that. And the and the winner gets control over the corporations. And the corporations actually can institute this through censorship, through control, through disconnection.

And these corporations are increasingly more powerful than the state because the state can't do the kind of things that they do. Control the public debate, control who's a candidate, who's not a candidate at the international level. They're currently operating at so I spanned a lot of concept there, but it's like it's a it's a it's a very complex and rich field, you know, combining all these things and seeing how it actually operates in the real world and how it can apply to the, to the local as well.

Mark McGrath
It seems like a big move away. You talked about a lot of your work, you know, move away from sort of the state Westphalian model. That's, you know, the big structured organizational model. Then maybe in business that's the industrial or the Frederick Winslow Taylor model. It seems that for, say, businesses or leaders, there's a lot of opportunity to kind of go in a different direction than that, right?

I mean, isn't that isn't that in other words, those sort of old ways of doing things are misaligned or disconnected from the reality that's continuing to unfold that a more and more rapid pace.

John Robb
Yeah. I mean, the online world gives a lot of benefits. I mean, there's a reason why I Musk took control of Twitter. We decided we had an agenda and space. You had an agenda with cars and, you know, autonomous driving and everything else. And the only way to actually promote that over the long term, in the next 20 or 30 years, is to take control of a big portion of the online space where companies can get blindsided by what's going on.

in the online world, it can damage your products, damage your corporation's reputation, damage your brand virtually overnight. And that, you know, it can be conducted by forces that didn't even see happening. And I think we're seeing I the emergences of online kind of warfare is that increasingly what corporations do is increasingly seen as a political act. So, you know, I just got I'm going to write something about the Edelman survey.

You know, Edelman is like started off as a PR firm for Microsoft back in the day. So I was, you know, Internet analyst back in 95 after getting out of the military. It was like Edelman was the one who was trying to handle me. So I did damage Microsoft, which I did. I cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Bill Gates tried to get me fired, but like Edelman was super sharp and they ran a survey on Global Trust, and they've been doing it for many, many years. And they found that there's been a big shift in trust from away from governments and towards corporations. And now corporations are seen as both more competent and more trustworthy.

And governments, governments are seen as less trustworthy and largely incompetent, particularly after Covid.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And I think military officers and leaders have fallen on that as well. We're no longer at the top of that ranking. And I think small business owners are ranking higher as well. Right.

John Robb
That yeah. But small business. Yeah, small businesses dying. It's getting crushed. I mean, everything is centralizing it. And, and the number of startups seems to be falling off and small business starts dropping, looking more like the rest of the world where the big businesses pretty much dominate and networking tends towards concentration, which is, you know, the standard flat lot.

So the number of connections, you know, you have number notes, you have, you know, obviously the value of the network by the square is the move towards this kind of online world. You know, at least for a corporation is to that they're going to have to play a social role. And what they found over most of the Western countries, including China, is that corporations are going to be seen as in charge of social governance.

They both have to set the goal for where they want to go. And they're expected to actually be not only more competent, but more moral, ethical, whatever, and capable of actually making a better future. And, you know, the it's like 60, 70% of the people are actually expecting that the shift has been amazing. People are actually asking the, you know, for corporations to basically run the world since they don't see governments as the means to do it.

And to a certain extent, you can actually see that there's nothing new coming out of government, though there's no big solutions to anything has been for a while. It doesn't feel like there's any kind of new ideas there. And the political divisions are getting, you know, more and more acute, as is the, you know, governments get steamrolled by globalization.

So, you know, for corporations, you got to learn how to work in this world of moral warfare online, moral warfare online maneuver warfare, learn how to survive in that environment, you know, how to thrive and make money and secure yourself a good place in the future of that environment. So, you know, this is this is a, you know, certainly relevant for anybody, whether you're midsize or huge.

Mark McGrath
Do you anticipate continued centralization or do you think at some point it becomes unsustainable as a as a centralized behemoth?

John Robb
I think it's going to be more centralized. I mean, you can centralize to large extent just by building a platform. So like Microsoft Windows as a platform. And then all these apps are being built and it looks like there's like a lot of choice and stuff, but ultimately the power rests once you see that with these big, large language models and different A.I. social socialization, not as in the traditional sense where, you know, all these AI scientists over the years have been focusing on human like or even human equivalent intelligence as well.

They've always fallen short and they never really pulled it off. And they only think that that's the elegant solution. All these social AIs are focused on solving bits and pieces of this, leveraging our collective knowledge to yield, you know, amazing results. And those can become platforms that users are used to concentrate. People will build on them to build their companies, build their products and services.

Virtually everything that you see in the products and services space in 20 years will have some component from this. You know, this these socialize AIs built into it front of the funny kind of thing on that was that a couple of years ago I was in front of the Senate doing talking about this, you know, what kind of protections and things that they should put in and, you know, one of the things I was suggesting is that, you know, we shouldn't go down the privacy route with this data.

We should, you know, go to data towards data ownership. So if a piece of ownership of this participation in this economy, but places like Europe, where they had been putting privacy restrictions and destroying data and limiting A.I. and limiting all of these technological advances was very extreme. Leftism is like, you know, not allowing cars because it would disrupt the horse traffic and that all their products and services going forward would be hamstrung and hampered by their lack of participation in building these AIS because these AIs get really good at for your local markets if they have that local data, you know, you're not going to have the kind of German spin or the French spin or

the Italian spin on the on the goods and services powered by these products. If they aren't participating by contributing data to the development, you know, making them smarter. So it's like a it was it was important for us as a country like China to get it right, do it right going forward.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
John, in this new operating environment, weaker players now have the opportunity to participate, right. So you don't need to have large, huge capability. You can have small groups of people manipulating the environments. Right. It should go back to 2016 and 2020. And what's happening today, this type of warfare some people call it liminal warfare as well. It's kind of connected to fifth generation warfare, but it's really about it's a survival mechanism for those that are lack the power to compete with a larger organization or a larger state.

But the same is true for smaller businesses to do to disrupt the environment because they don't need to have the traditional model of delivering value or creating flow of a product. They can do it kind of like Uber did. And what we're seeing with Twitter, are we going to see more and more of this going forward? Are we going to see the death of these larger corporations, large organizations, or are we going to see fewer of them, such as Google and Apple, emerge out of this in the next few years?

John Robb
Yeah, I think the bigger corporations will just get bigger and because they scale still are scaling really, really well. But as a small operator, you can leverage these technologies with these platforms to move really quick and we were doing this back in 20 years ago, 25 years ago. When you're doing startups and you get on the Internet and you look like a 50 person company and you're only five people, then you get through 150, you look like a thousand person company.

It's like we're more right. Look, you can make yourself look huge because you're leveraging and yet you're using this kind of amplification that's available. I was going to say about this. Yeah, I mean, it allows you a lot of maneuver, but you got to watch out for the big guys. I mean, what happens in classic platform politics is if you get too successful, the platform decides to take you take your lunch.

Right? So, you know, it's like, oh, all of a sudden, that's going to be a feature on our platform because your product is supporting all your people and everything else is now just a feature. We're just going to roll with it and offer for nothing. So that becomes a problem. There was another piece here. Your question, though.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Liminality and the liminal warfare aspect is all right.

John Robb
Yeah. Okay. So one thing I tried to figure out early on with Boyd's OODA loop and mind versus mind warfare. Is that in this online environment, this networked environment, it's in particular you don't just have two months, you have many, many versus one or many versus many. And it is how do you coordinate that action? How do you get, you know, kind of synergy associated with having all those decision makers involved?

And early on, I found that, you know, this insurgent warfare that we saw in Iraq was focused on open source mechanisms. Where you have a like open source software is you have a plausible promise. You have an idea where this what this could be. And it's very, very simple. And that's something that all of the participants agree to agree on, that maybe that's the only thing that they can agree on and they stick together and innovate towards achieving that goal.

In the case of open source software, it's great because you build better products. You have all these new features and new capabilities and all this innovation and tinkering works nicely. But insurgency, with all this innovation, you get, you know, the US rolling out through $3 billion in aid effort. You know, they roll out a counter and then two weeks later, somebody comes up with a solution counter to the counter and it rolls out across the entire insurgency within a couple weeks after that.

So, you know, all of that effort goes for naught because you know, these tinkering networks are so innovative.

Mark McGrath
Is that old way that is that old way of thinking, dealing with a novel threat? I mean, is that is that.

John Robb
You know, I came on it by looking at how do you, as a small group, take on a bigger foe. And I could I came up with a leverage right away using the technology, the platform that celebrity grew up. But you're still small and even without leverage. You mean even if you get a million to one ROI, you know, return on investment for your attacks and things like that, is that you would not be able to take out the bigger target.

And what I came up with is this, you know, solution is that if you band together with these other groups using that kind of plausible promise, you only have to leverage yourself for a portion of it. And these other ones will move the ball forward and you won't, you know, you can you can stay. It's a way to for these smaller groups to do bigger damage.

And also the type of attack I was for like that the smaller groups over time would go from an a blood and guts terrorism that we saw in the past, which had, you know, low value over time towards a more systemic or system disruption approach where they would disrupt the core systems. And then the collapse of that system would amplify the effects of the attack.

What we've seen online is that people are doing that within the core systems aren't necessarily just infrastructure. The core systems are trust relationships and institutional functionality and trust in government. How the process works and that kind of thinking is the thing that is actually being disrupted.

Mark McGrath
I would wouldn't you say that corporations that they amalgamate power like that? I mean, they're destined to wind up the way states did over time? Or could that accelerate, given the nature of technology? I'll give you an example. So bearing the Bering Sea Bank example in the nineties we're all familiar with, you know, we hear about rogue trader in the great movie with Ewan McGregor.

And as if that rogue trader did it all himself single handedly, as if that company for years and years hadn't had bureaucratic rot or, you know, a hollow infrastructure that a catalyst like a rogue trader could bring the whole thing down, not single handedly. The way that the narrative says. But I mean, don't when power gets amalgamated like that, I mean, doesn't that run the risk of the sort of run on the inside.

John Robb
Yeah. Rouge trader and Snowden and those kind of things. You know, it kind of dawned on me when I heard something of inside stuff on the way Snowden was handled and I heard it was that in order to get the maximum output from your employees, you often have to really give them leverage and capabilities that they normally wouldn't have, and that inside the NSA was knocking down all the barriers between a lot of the information silos internally, so they could start sharing information and leveraging their actions more fully with a, you know, the rogue trader is like given their inability to actually make trading decisions at a larger scale without with less supervision so they can act more with more force in the market and that yields incredible returns when it's working nicely. But all it takes is that one guy to come in and say, okay, I'm minister grabbing stuff from all these servers or I'm going to take this capability and take some extreme risk and blow it up. So or some people would just go, I'm going to sabotage everything.

So you have access to these systems. So it's that's kind of like the paradox of, of modern tech as it applies to empowering your employees is if you give them too much capability. You're running the risk of having the whole thing blow up, which means that you if you do that, you have to focus more and more and more on the motivations and, and your trust level with every single employee in what their background, what's going you really have to get them aligned with you in order to make it work.

Mark McGrath
Yeah. You wonder. I've never I guess this the case of the trader I've looked at, but you start to wonder what was the cultural environment like at that company that he even thought in the first place that that's sort of a moral lapse to do what he did was even okay and how it went over so many heads and nobody cared about it until the last the last possible minute when it was too late.

And just kind of tying it back to Boyd, you know, the sort of the you know, at the moral level, it seems like there might have been a massive disconnect.

John Robb
Yeah, well, as long as you keep on making money, they don't pay attention. Right? Right. The same thing with the whole financial crisis. I mean, there were so many things that were happening. I mean, you saw this. It's like piles of fraud. You know, it's like we know this product is crap, right? We're selling the pension funds, you know, triple A, you know, it's like, you know, oh, yeah, here you go.

Take this. Yeah. You know, no one, you know, no one cared. As long as you're making the money and pulling down the numbers and everyone kind of just let it slide.

Mark McGrath
So back to Boyd then. So, you know, moral, mental, physical, it just seems like so many people were focused on sort of the physical natures of business by way of increased revenues and others without thinking about is there anything at the at the center of all this, at the moral level that could cause, you know, rupture?

John Robb
It's definitely I mean, within a general collapse of a lot of this kind of and moral infrastructure inside of corporations. Yeah. And of cultural influence. I mean, that's a byproduct of globalization where, you know, it's like you are now a citizen of the world if you're operating in a global company. And they changed the you know, your cultural tradition becomes less important when you're operating in a global level, natural byproduct of doing that.

And then, you know, the loss of a lot of nationalism we're seeing is like, you know, the decline of the Cold War end of the Cold War meant that this threat wasn't there anymore. And, you know, doing things that, you know, that were good for the country, not necessarily became less and less important over time. And that affects decision making.

You know, it's like a I see a lot, you know, a lot of problems with the decision making at the state level since 2000. But everything from after 911, you know, with WMDs still not a believer. You know, all this stuff, it's like that was sold. It was sold intentionally and no one paid any price for that.

And, you know, even the Abu Ghraib stuff that no one even paid any price for that either it was a moral lapse across the board. And then, you know, we saw the financial crisis of fraud that wasn't punished. No one went to jail. I know it's complex and white collar crime is complex. But I mean, if you've seen a mortgage boiler room up close, we've seen they are terrible.

And they were you know, everything was you know, it was just thrown out the wazoo, but it was built with tens of thousands of people actually selling crap and pushing the moral boundaries. And there was no reckoning for that. And then, you know, just we go on and on and on. Since then, it hasn't really improved at all.

Mark McGrath
You know, kind of an interesting analogy people could relate to when you talk about people going unpunished for things like that. The big scandal of the movie, It's a Wonderful Life, was that Potter got off scott free. That that was a the movie was scandalous in the sense that he did not receive retribution for what he did to George Bailey.

And that was one of the more controversial things of the movie. But to your point, yeah, I mean, people wonder about that or is it this way that some of us look for that, but it gets sort of flushed out of our heads by sort of the mass psychosis or that or the things that we see in Twitter and other things.

It just kind of we just kind of move on and forget that. And when you talk about these things, it's ancient history. It doesn't even people don't even think it's relevant anymore.

John Robb
Especially in this environment. But, you know, being on the scene right as it was going and I just felt everything break. I mean, it felt like the kind of system just broke in 2008 when no one was punished for that. And it was sold as kind of who cut it out. You know, it's a bolt from the blue.

And these guys were getting bonuses for cleaning things up and hidden subsidies from the Fed, 5 trillion in subsidies for these banks to get on their feet again. And everyone was like a lot poorer. Black households in particular lost half their net worth through the crisis and hadn't covered it a decade after that. So it's like, no, it just the trust in the system just broke.

And I think that lack of thinking, you know, led to the disruption later that we saw in the political sphere and what we're seeing today. But it's even, you know, the stuff that from a year and a half ago, I mean, we saw Afghanistan that retreat and the extraction out of Kabul was that was a disaster. That was an unmitigated disaster.

We were like pleading with the Taliban not to sell the airport. They kind of held all those people hostage and they wouldn’t be a thing we could do about it because the nearest airport that we had access to was 1500 miles away. It was just it was a nightmare and not one person, from what I could see, pay any price with penalty for that for that.

And it was just a year and a half ago, people still don't they just flushed out of their memory.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Got it, John. So one of the things that we find challenging is coaching leaders in understanding complexity. And you write a lot about complex adaptive systems and emergence here. All that is associated with that and that's really what you're talking about here, is it's we have to understand how do we deal with a complex adaptive system? And then humans are complex adaptive systems.

So as we think about complexity and we look at, you know, we kind of went through this phase and we're still going through it of disinformation, misinformation online. There's no centralized planning anywhere. As we understand, with complex adaptive systems is distributed. We create the conditions for things to emerge. But I kind of want to shift in that area there to see what your thoughts are on this moral war happening online through the lens of complex adaptive systems as well.

John Robb
Huh um, I don't think I have. Maybe I haven't framed it well in my head as to how that specific topic is addressed in this kind of context. You know, it's a you know, it is a complex environment that we have to adapt to and that it will make changes and change the way we do business over time.

And largely for the reasons I was mentioning in terms of that Edelman survey is like expecting corporations to be more. I mean People won't work for a company that's doing bad stuff. When they make a choice, they try to pick the company that's doing the good. So this makes them feel a little bit better, plus the consumer choice, plus the pressure from the networks on the company and their ability to interconnect with other companies that's going to be impacted.

You know, I think the kind of trends on the network is towards this kind of, you know, integration at the moral level. You're not going to have the choice over what that morality is. You're just going to have to sign onto that and that your ability to operate will be based on those interconnections. And those interconnections won't be made available because of that adoption or that alignment.

Mark McGrath
It's almost like it's removing our some of our functions as complex adaptive actors inside of a larger, complex adaptive system.

John Robb
Yeah, it's a one of the ways that we've kind of dealt with this. You know, I see this as a evolving network decision making system, you know, run folks like Tim and structure, you know, tribes, institutions, markets, networks. But tribes institutions and markets were really well developed. Decision making, social decision making systems that evolved over the last four or 500 years.

And they've gotten better and safer and more productive over time. But this network piece is still in its early phase. And last time we saw something like that was during the rise of the printing press and all the wars and disruptions and everything else that happened as a result of that. This emergence is pretty, pretty messy, and a large group of people have decided to solve this messiness with something I think is a maladaptive approach to achieving a level of order that is done this by creating a kind of inverting the tribal network approach is that, you know, tribes are usually formed by saying that why they're good together and why they'll be good in the future and they have rituals and things like that and it's a positive thing and that drives tribal variance. The tribes we're seeing that developed online, we're doing it based on because they couldn't agree on anything. Couldn't Agree on a way forward. They could agree on what they disliked and what they hated. And so there was like these tribes that came together to oppose, like racism or sexism or whatever it is.

You know, there's all these antis. And each tribe that formed on that created a description of the enemy. And that enemy was a big pattern that they described. And that pattern was co-created online by millions of people. So whenever they saw a bit of news or something that happened, they would tie it to that pattern, the pattern became more and more complex, but more and more rigid.

And the closest thing you could even point it to would be kind of ideologies of the past. The big thing that is, you know, communism, fascism like. But this is more dynamic and it's more hidden that it's not it's not written down anywhere. It's kind of done online. And it's done through this kind of cohesion drive from focusing on the enemy problem, with focusing on something as an enemy.

These tropes and to see anyone who is either on the fence or in the enemy's camp is ultimately, you know, tribal, tribal mentalities. You know, we're great. You remember like a oh, I remember Apocalypse Now. Yeah, right, right. Okay. So that tribal mentality is that didn't see the enemy as people like when you like they're.

Mark McGrath
Not human, like they're dehumanized.

John Robb
Yeah. Yeah. And the name for most tribes like, you know, Aboriginal, you know, basic tribes is that the name of the tribe is usually work for human for person. Right. And the people who are, you know, the other tribes are not human and other people outside are not human. That allowed all these. KURTZ You know in the movie was trying to get his soldiers steeped in the Western tradition to think like those tribal warriors that they could go out, do horrible things all day against what they saw as non-human, then come home and then hug their kids and sleep like babies.

Kiss their wives you know, they kind of think they could separate. That is soldiers could yeah. They couldn't work at that level of that horrible and sadistic counterinsurgency doing that. And that tribal kind of mentality is sit down to the online. So we see people categorize as the Ultimate Evil constantly, which makes things more and more. It's a maladaptive network to things, right?

Mark McGrath
So it ties right into Boyd when you go to the strategic game, his definition of evil occurs when individuals or groups embrace codes of conduct or standards of behavior for their own personal well-being and social approval, yet violate the same very codes or standards, undermine the personal well-being and social approval of others.

John Robb
Right? Yeah. Yeah. And but, you know, that's often used to attack the opposition, but when you.

Mark McGrath
Violate your own codes, right? Like. That's right. Yeah.

John Robb
But this is, you know, the way these tribes work is they train people online by likes and, you know, whether they see it, whether they approve it. And it's done every day and it's done through all these different social media connections and these people are trained. It's like it's you turning on your.

Mark McGrath
You turn me on to a word years ago, if I say this right, you have to correct me but feel like people were going on Facebook when it when something would happen and they have to come out of the gate to the state fealty pledge. I think it was something along those lines.

John Robb
I know that was something that the operator was using and some of the some of the Middle Eastern terrorist groups in the north, what they would do to attract online participants or if, you know, if they were doing it completely online, is that they would ask the person about to do an attack to kind of videotape it and then pledge an oath to feel guilty, just like different is like basically saying in the Middle Ages that fealty was.

I operate independently, but I'll operate in your benefit. Right. And what I do is reflects on you and you know it. You give up. It's a very kind of decentralized system. It's different than what we're used to. And they would pledge that loyalty and that fealty to that creator.

Mark McGrath
Was the decentralization, how they were gaining momentum.

John Robb
Well, it allowed those new members to actually, you know, they're taking a task to prove their fealty like taking a quest to prove the field is a it's not a gaming mechanism in the current context. Do this attack. Go ahead.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. So a while ago I learned this from Dave Snowden that every village has an idiot, the Internet brings them together. Right. So now we have this idea that when you're in doubt, you just kind of imitate you just do what others are doing online. We also know from the world of complexity, theory and complex adaptive systems is it's really simple to modulate them.

You amplify the things that you want and you dampen the things that you don't want. So this can be leveraged by outside organizations or small organizations like we already talked about. But there's another aspect of John Boyd, where it connects to how our brain kind of works, and it's about mismatches. We don't like mismatches or we don't like surprise and the way we deal with surprise as we take the low energy approach, which is just to suppress it, shut it down, turn it off, make sure we don't hear it.

The way to adapt to the environment requires more energy, right? So we minimize surprise in our brain. That's how we perceive the world. But John Boyd writes about this as mismatches. We've got to reduce mismatches in the world. So that's what that's what's happening when people get suppressed online, when their views get suppressed.

Those that are doing the suppression, in my opinion, are the ones that are going to implode or fall on themselves. But I just want to see what your thoughts are on that space with the mismatches and information flow and what we've seen over the last several years and including what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter now, I want to get more thoughts on that.

John Robb
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. One thing that the whole social networking works on is that you would find novelty the early days of blogging what we did, the early thing is you find some piece of novelty, some surprise you share. But what these networks do is that they take that piece of novelty and they fit it into the pattern.

And you get rewarded if you're you know, you get lots of traffic in likes. If you if you find something new that's happening in the world or some something old that ties into an existing pattern of oppression, for example, often when there's like a new technology, people, I tend to call it like a cognitive filter too, is they won't see certain things because they are just too new and they operate in frameworks that they don't have access to.

So like early on in social networking, it was impossible, impossible to get people's heads around it. It was like a couple thousand of us doing it. It's like, but it was just coming on in dribs and drabs because people wouldn't see the value of doing any of it. Now they're on it all the time. Like, non stop. But I think, I think we're ultimately in a kind of a losing game because of the way the system has evolved.

Like wrote about it a little bit this morning. This is like a kind of taking Boyd's framework, you know, at the at the largest possible scale. That could be in is that globalization took global civilization up to the maximum. It's the size of this area. In the global commercial civilization is everything. There isn't any external states anymore, really, or external environments.

You know, when we were making decisions towards a nation state within a larger context, but now we're everything and that means two things. One is that when your world that you're operating in is the same, you're the same size of that, your level of uncertainty goes way up. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle kind of thing, where your mass is equal to massive thing you're observing, the uncertainty goes to the moon and our ability to solve problems.

And this, you know, is going to go down and down and down and we get messier, messier. The other pieces is that when the civilization is the scale of the world, exporting entropy up to the larger physical and social environment, is that you start accumulating entropy and it thermodynamic thermodynamically closed system. So the entropy starts accumulating and  it becomes messier, messier, messier.

So we got these two things pushing mess and you know, we're not fixing it. We're in this closed thermodynamic system in work. You're only operating at a at a at a global scale. And the way out of this and it's just justice. And the only way that really moves forward is to think larger grid, a bigger sandbox, is that you start to thinking, what if we look at the road forward as Earth plus the near earth environment, maybe the, you know, your solar system environment.

And if you start to think in those larger contexts, things start to really start to fall in place. It's like, oh, and it's all accessible. You know, one thing I was reading down Dense was this new stuff. It's like had dealt with the unions, this new one critical mass come Monday. What we're three is like, you know, asteroid mining offers resources beyond you know, for thousands of years of what we what we would use and then space based solar offers energy that could be many, many, many, many, many, many times what we currently produce, all done externally, entropy is exported.

It seems fantastical, but it's really fantastical Only because we are. It's not because the technology is too far out. It's only fantastical because we turned in on ourselves so much that we're only thinking about solving, you know, we're navel gazing and that navel gazing is the end game that's like collapse. And you can't get once you're so focused on trying to perfect the this system, you know, your observations, your problem solving as we saw is going to diminish it.

You know, diminishing returns, diminishing. You have to get better. You have to think larger. And it's a psychological vector forward as well as the solution to what we're doing.

Mark McGrath
Snowden talked about that when we when we had him on episode two, he talked about how the focus shifted off the group, the collective, the shifted to solely the individual, to the point where, you know, I guess to the point we're at now that people don't think in those terms anymore.

John Robb
Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that's what makes a collective action so tough now. So we can't agree, you know, when we see religion declining, it's in free fall right now and. Now what people see as a as a as a beneficial future is something that most people can't agree on. It becomes difficult to do anything as a collective, except we can apparently we can agree on what we hate what we want to destroy.

Mark McGrath
How much of that is synthetic? I mean, how much of that comes from what you call the swarm or, you know, how much of it? It's our it's a narrative that people get from the mediums of social media that they're engaged with. And then, in turn, I mean, because I've I mean, we've all I guess we've all had those experiences with people where you can show them something.

And if it goes against that, it doesn't matter if it's true or not. It's not what they heard on X, Y or Z.

John Robb
Yeah. They don't even see contrary information. It's totally invisible to them because if you accept that contrary information, it's something contrary to the pattern that they're curating. It puts the whole pattern into question. Okay. Plus the whole being accused of being disloyal. The problem with these swarms is that, you know, I thought they were just kind of more nuisances up until recently. And then I saw one take the whole Ukrainian invasion and turn it in overnight into a new Cold War. And we're up at the brink of nuclear weapons use. And all the people that would normally be talking about aren't would be, you know, saying you should have like articles everywhere, talking about cost structure and process and how we deal with this in a way that doesn't cause everything to blow up.

But you don't seem to be able to do that anymore. It's. Go ahead.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
John. I came across this recently. It's called the Witiko virus. It's a form of psychosis. It's really about those who are afflicted believe they can see this collective psychosis can be linked to anti information have you and this has come I think from levy does a lot of work in quantum physics have you come across that at all.

John Robb
And no you know, most times I hear that kind of disinformation, misinformation, so usually about second order effects. It's not about the actual data itself, right? It's how they are interpreting the data. And often that interpretation isn't necessarily incorrect. It's just not it's not in line with their views of how it should be interpreted. Right. So, you know, whenever I see a misinformation expert or disinformation expert, I kind of like, oh, yeah, is it but is there okay, so you're thinking is there a memetic kind of virus that could kick things off?

I saw that early. It's no professional. I had that right. That was like memetic hacking. So, you know, memetic are part of politics. Now, everything that everyone's doing, it's memetic hacking is everything. Now we're deconstructing and reconstructing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So there's a phrase here interpretation fixation. I think that's what we're talking about, right? You fix it, you turn on your own interpretation of the outside world.

John Robb
Yeah, well, I mean, you can use I turn to I try to build frameworks for people to kind of make sense of things in the short so they're not stuck. So if you're decision maker, you're getting all this, you know, contrarian information or newly arrived information is moving too fast. Sometimes you can't make a decision. So I give them a framework for making sense of it.

So they have some Cubbies to put it in. But I don't want to say that that this framework is going to stay pristine forever and it will mutate, but it's good enough now based on the current data, and it gives you some insight into some of the future twists and turns ahead of you. So you're unstuck. But the way these networks work is that they are fixated in putting everything into the context of their pattern.

Everything has to fall into that so that it's very rigid in that regard and that, you know, everything has to have, you know, racist spin or sexist spin or whatever it is, you know.

Mark McGrath
Or a pro ESG or something like that.

John Robb
Or anti, you know, anti pollution. Right? So it's like it's and then they start to combining these things right? So you're against global warming and you're against racism and you're against income inequality and you're against this and that. You mash them all together and you build these, you know, things like ESG, right? And find out and trying to, you know, damage the enemy.

Yet no one can agree on exactly what justice means or what a what no one can give you a really good insight into or description of what does a world look like that's energy neutral or, you know, entropy neutral. Right. No one could envision that. Don't even talk about it. Because, you know, if they did actually describe it, like Sri Lanka was neutral, but that meant no computers and no light, you know, most of the lights in your house and no electric cars and no any of that stuff, all that stuff has to go that you would available.

There's nothing.

Mark McGrath
Isn't it ironic that the technological marvels that we have I mean, I guess we're all Gen-Xers. I mean, when I was a kid, I thought by 2023 we'd have a moon base and a mars base and, you know, no pollution and everything would have been figured out. We'd be on our way to Star Wars or something.

John Robb
Yeah, no, we turned inward somewhere in the nineties and then that inward turn is like gathering momentum. What surprises me now is that even though very, very little, I mean, just paltry billions that be spent on space, I mean, people really begrudge it. They hate the idea that people might be going out and anytime, anywhere. But yeah, it's like, how dare you leave us?

John Robb
How dare you say how negative they are? And the whole idea of space is like, you think this is like escape for billionaires or something, but it's, it's the only way you get through this move forward in the future is like, I've never seen an organism radically reduce its energy consumption without sacrificing almost everything you talked about.

Mark McGrath
I've heard you talked before about autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles. And like one or two people get killed in a freak accident with them and they shut them down or they do their best to scare everybody about them. But then there's anybody look at the accident statistics for regular cars, you know. Yeah.

John Robb
They're not even that even doing it. Apples to apples comparison, which they should be doing is like if this is 50% safer than, you know, regular drivers, why not roll it out? I mean. Right. I mean, what's is offering a demonstrable benefit? And this is substantially better than an even that from what I can see on the numbers, because people are dying right left by inattentive drivers and it's getting seems like it's getting worse that people are worse at driving now post-COVID.

Mark McGrath
Well, back to Boyd it's just seems to me also that people have a hard time braking and shattering their previous models of correspondence. They have a hard time adapting to a new one. So they're holding on to what something was a time ago. And over time, that process of OODA is deteriorating and sending them in a general decline versus the opposite, like they're.

John Robb
Yeah, well, there's two, there's one group that's like more on the conservative side worried about new technology, damaging what little they've been able to accumulate today.

Mark McGrath
Is that bunnies and horse whips against cars like that kind.

John Robb
Of thing, just that they don't trust it to actually provide benefits to them. Oh, the difficulties kids are having in school and, the directions that things are going and their incomes aren't increasing and they blame it on technological change that promised improvement but didn't deliver. Right. And then the other group is more about gaining control of that technological change to improve safety.

But their definition of safety is skewed. I mean, it's like nobody gets killed or hurt. And then number of, you know, it's got to be completely controlled in order to deliver that and that that that's an impossible standard, an impossible way to go forward. It means the controlling all thought in controlling all action and controlling everything in order to make sure that no injustice is ever, ever occurs.

And that's kind of those long night thing I was worried about with networks that, which is that, you know, we've allowed these corporations to build the totalitarian infrastructure that would make every totalitarian of the 20th century blush that or, you know, just green with envy. It's like it would be, like, impossible to imagine something so complex and so capable, somebody, you know, with AI support is that they can monitor physical action as well as conversational conversations for billions of people.

So simultaneously it make sense of them and then take action. And that action could be as simple as just disconnecting a connected world. That's like having an open air prison. So yeah, we're, we built it and it, all it takes is just a little bit of a switch to kind of flip it over and give them the permission, the legitimacy to actually put it into place.

And that scares the heck out of me right there. Scares me too.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, yeah. Okay. You ready for about the strangest question you ever been asked?

John Robb
Okay, go ahead. It's like a.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So between Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk, who both been in the news lately, who has a better OODA loop.

John Robb
Elon, Because I mean, just on the results, right? So is he still a billionaire? Yeah, that's a.

Mark McGrath
Legitimate.

John Robb
One. This is the ultimate yes. The ultimate legitimize. Are these least.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But you have to admit, SBF got inside the OODA loop of some very smart people.

John Robb
Yeah, but he ultimately failed. Right? So he wasn't able to deliver results in a way that actually prevented him from the collapse that eventually consumed it. You know, Elon, you know walked that same thing. He was able to use the network to raise money at critical points and deflect criticism and keep his companies alive and growing. And he took a big risk with Twitter.

If he had waited another year, he probably would have been in much better shape doing this. But he saw the long term potential and he did make some early mistakes in terms of how he dealt with it. He adopted kind of Trump's first strategy. You know fast transients and, you know, passing things out there to get people distracted.

Mark McGrath
He unravels stuff, that's for sure. Right. Like Boyd would say, and Sun Tzu would say, like he's unraveling his like whereas Clausewitz might be hit them with power, like he's unraveling them. I'll avoid all the Sun Tzu when he's up against somebody.

John Robb
He did that great during the acquisition process. Mm. You saying it's off, you know, changing focus to do that. And by the end of it you had the opposition actually saying that you should, you, you have to buy them. They're actually turned around completely to the point where they were saying we should force Elon to actually buy this company.

And then when he finally bought it, he went a little overboard on the fast transients. He should have taken a little bit more calming approach.

Mark McGrath
Approach.

John Robb
Personally. And if he had done that, he might be in a better place. But also he had to keep it loose because he was going to fire three quarters of the people inevitably. So, you know, it's one of those things that, you know, it's hard to actually determine exactly what would have worked better, you know, since the acquisition.

Mark McGrath
It's interesting, though, how fast someone goes from, you know, bringing in clean energy cars to the world. And they're a big hero to the next day being the worst person that ever lived. It's just like.

John Robb
You know, you showed he wasn't aligned, right. You know, with that with they're looking for aligned CEOs. You know, it's just it's the same kind of thing happened to Jack Ma and China. Right. Soon as he made one speech that was critical, he was one speech to far he wasn't aligned with the government's goals and the network in general, and he was removed.

John Robb
They sold off his companies that gave them to party members. Yeah, no, it's the same thing happens here. That's, you know, the swarm that went after Elon over alignment that is pretty big and powerful. It's the same kind of know, same general people that went and amplified Ukraine and the same people that are amplifying other big, you know, crisis events and responses to those a lot of industry insiders, a lot of media people, I think a lot of people in government, they think they.

Mark McGrath
Business leaders can antidote that that they you know, again back to Boyd you know people ideas and things. And you set up a business to care for people and you have a company that's made up of people. Right. I wonder I wonder if there is an opportunity for business leaders to kind of reverse go back to that focus on people rather than sort of the ideas and things that prevail where they think that they have to be aligned.

Or I've heard you talk about, too, when one company does something, then the other wants to do it in sync. You know, whether eliminating somebody from existence seemingly out of the public sphere or whatever, it just it happens simultaneously and in coordinated. I'm just wondering, like for, you know, where are some of the things that leaders could or could take from all this stuff as they're caring for people of all sorts of all backgrounds and all, you know, all things that they don't want to necessarily have a litmus test if I bring him one as a client or you can't buy my product unless, you know, you see a lot of that lately.

John Robb
Oh yeah, I know. Yeah. Because that larger social context. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to navigate that and then also navigate the internals because the internals you know, determine who you can hire, right? So if you have like a reputation for X, you're not going to get a lot of people playing. You know, it's like brutal interior, interior environment.

The it's going to be reflected in the in the boards almost immediately, then it's like I see my kids are software programmers. They make a lot of money in that. They can be selective because they're good and they can if they hear about X, Y, Z being terrible, they're not going to go, you know, even if the money's a little bit better, it has to be better because they deserve it.

But it's so you have to navigate that. I would focus also, though, is, you know, internally is keep it more about business. I mean, a lot of people on the internal boards, they have this like sometimes let this whole political chat thing go and social chat stuff operate on these boards and it becomes kind of a favorite place for people to hang out.

That never ends well. Okay. That that never ends well. Why is.

Mark McGrath
That? Because it's disconnected from people.

John Robb
Well, the external environment becomes the internal. Yeah. The external kind of warfare that you see out there in the political realm, the kind of consensus is that you're battling it out every day becomes your internal corporate environment you want to do is focus on getting the people on the same culture in the company. And the company has a, you know, like the classic Jack Welch GE thing is all you really can do is sit at the helm of a big company.

Even a medium sized companies as a CEO is focused on culture and how people think about the people they work with and how they think about the customers and how they think about the company and how it goes forward that how you know how to solve problems that whole and some of the tribal elements of that, you know, what's our story from, you know, why are we better together?

You know, why will we succeed in the future? Those internal stories can be separate from what you see outside. Yeah. And you can actually, you know, create those and those could actually be stronger in an online internal environment than a lot of companies are doing.

Mark McGrath
I've often found that when you talk about and this is, I think one of the appeals that really has drawn me to Boyd to get more into Boyd after I left the military and just kind of learning the processes, but getting out and learning the whole scope is that when you talk about things that are universally, you know, universal principles, it's always amazing to me the various backgrounds of people that synthetically from other things, maybe would have nothing to say to each other.

But when you get them together and you talk about universal ideas that affect us all they they're completely different. It's a completely different experience.

John Robb
With finding those kind of ideas that are external to the current debate is tough. Yeah, yeah. Everything seems to be being swallowed up by that. A good test of like internal trust levels. And you really have to focus on trust inside these core online corporations is a good test of that is if somebody says something like they have an observation of what's going on, it's important you people trust that information to other people in the company.

All kind of implicitly trust that that information that they're being delivered is true and accurate. Yeah. Potentially. Even that interpretation of that information is true. That that that's you know, that's why that's one of the problems we have as a society now at least that is that when somebody says something that is even factually accurate, you don't trust that their what they're saying is actually true because of their other affiliations.

Right. You think that that they're actually feeding you facts and information to lead you astray, damage to you. And so, you know, people reject them out of hand, access to a company that could be.

Mark McGrath
So another guy you got me into in buying his books and reading was Marshall McLuhan. Who. Oh, yeah. It's funny when I first remember you talking about him, I'm like, Oh, that's the guy from John Lennon. And Yoko Ono went to go interview them. But he said something along the lines that tech and media have become extensions of humans sensemaking in human sensibilities.

And I'm just wondering if you think that. Yeah, I mean, I think we could probably all agree it does have an effect, sometimes positive, sometimes negative on how we sense make. But then I wonder if it to it fit erodes things like empathy and understanding openness to perspectives.

John Robb
How books changed our way. We make sense of the world and how we think and process information. Same thing with definitely with the online world. I do think it's rewiring us. I mean, there's actual physical rewiring of our brain connections when we start, when we learn to read.

Mark McGrath
Tell us more about that. They tell me like dopamine hits from social media. I mean.

John Robb
What do you know? Certain elements of the areas of the brain were reinforced and became denser, a result of learning to read early on. And that became population wide. As your reading became universal. And we're seeing this now with the online environment, we're seeing increasing ability to multitask, which was really never a good capability. And people are lagging in that.

We're seeing an ability to offload cognitive function more easily. So if you like, don't think about this, think that you just rely on the tech to do it for you, which is, you know, it's classic.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I think they call that like an illusion of knowledge as well. And we get into neuroplasticity, neurogenesis in the brain. Right. We lose human capability with automation. We talk about that a lot in aviation. You know, when you're flying aircraft and when I was flying 20 years ago, it's a lot different than it is today. Right?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. We lost a lot of capability.

John Robb
Yeah. But you also gain it. So if you I think all the others all these changes are net gains for us because with just this new environment, with more information, our brains have to kind of change physically in order to take advantage of it. I mean, the rewiring has to change and the brain is entrepreneurial in that regard.

I mean, it goes where it's rewarded, right? Dopamine hits, obviously, but it's also in how you do that in the larger environment.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
There's an opportunity for sensory substitution where we can use peripherals on our body to do such different things. We can actually retrain the brain, and that's what we're learning about right now. So there could be some really positive things coming out of, you know, technology and what's happening. But it's really up to us as it is, you know, humans to sort that out.

John Robb
Yeah. You know, the thing with McLuhan and he has a lot of little pop stuff that you just have to just filter out. But he has important messages that are pretty amazing is that, you know, as technology changes, we change. We change physically. I mean, it's like we walk less because we have cars and we're less physically active because a lot of other changes, it changes our body, the same things happening with our minds.

And those changes are reflected in society. We're going to reorganize society as a result. Okay. So, you know, learning to read in the printing press and things that, you know, changed us from a feudal monarchy to kind of a constitutional system, you know, we were the printed document, the Constitution. Great, but scientific papers and the bureaucracy of science and you know that.

And the university system and all of those even the even the financial system, because of receipts, records and things like that, largely printed and recorded in paper and the like. So the social changes come out and they caused a lot of disruption. And we're at the very beginning of the social changes associated with rewiring our brains for this online environment, and it's just going to get worse when we talk about augmented reality and stuff like that.

So it's hard for me to describe what's going to happen with that. But adding digital objects and digital manipulation of your sensory input, you know how you hear sounds and what you hear and the things you see and you know, reskimming the external environment and changing the, you know, what people look like and what they're wearing and, you know, their facial expressions and whether it's smiling or not, I mean, it's like you could change everything and that manipulation is going to completely change how we interact with each other as well.

So I think so, yeah, that could be explosive and terrible at the same time. Yeah, you know, I generally always bullish on the future of humanity, but that's pretty much just yeah, I down the pipeline it's going to be fast.

Mark McGrath
It makes the matrix look like a like a pre documentary like a.

John Robb
Yeah I'm not really into the kind of a virtual reality versus augmented reality. Virtual is like these worlds, right? And usually those are fantasy and fantasy worlds tend to be fragmented. There's lots of different ones with different roles and different looks and feels that would never be universal. What is universal is our physical environment, and you could add and modify that using digital information and that, you know, having control of that physical environment can change your house, you can change you.

What you see when you look out the window, you can change night the day and rain to sunshine. You can change the look of your talk. Only thing that you don't get is when you touch it, right? But it can be changed, including the sounds and you can actually improve your vision. And you're hearing these things that actually don't just add stuff to it, it can improve it.

Mark McGrath
Like operating in Avatar like a Yeah, well, or being in a or being like, you know, you wonder like if people would volunteer to say, Hey, it's just a lie down on a thing the rest of my life. Keep me alive and let me live in this virtual thing I designed. Like The Matrix.

John Robb
Yeah, these virtual environments as well as the augmented reality stuff is going to make the real world pale in comparison. You won't want to turn it off. You want to have it on all the time. It's like going from Technicolor with black and white works of it.

Mark McGrath
Yeah, I have a friend involved with like VR and embedded all that and I tried it and man, you start sweating and when it's over, it takes a while to kind of.

John Robb
Yeah, you're getting the same I got the same kind of thing I got on the early simulators.

Mark McGrath
Yeah.

John Robb
That, that little bit off is enough to make me kind of feel. Yeah. Unless it's really good VR simulation if it makes me kind of nauseous, have problems with the big full screen games. If that's really not good stuff. Yeah, I have this a lot of pilots I think too you're expecting certain kind of you know parallax process and you're not getting it sometimes so I like the slower yeah it's got to be it's like why people like games right it's the games you know big these big MMOs make more sense than reality because you put a certain amount of effort in and you get a result, a tangible result and it in the real world, you put a lot of effort into a lot of things. So you could get nothing, absolutely zero. And it's like a people are going to be attracted to this alternative environment and they'll just do what the minimum necessary in the real world in order to make it possible for them to spend the maximum amount of time in this alternative is going to be a lot more compelling.

And that's a giant negative to John.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
The reason we created the show in this podcast is so we can help people deal with the changing environment, right? And then having you on today is just absolutely fantastic. And I know. Okay, thanks. We want to be respectful of your time and all, but do you have any questions to us or anything else we can help you with?

John Robb
Yeah, I mean, any kind of like questions on what we talked about? Always looking for improvement of my thinking and or any kind of pushback. I didn't quite get it or that's always useful.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But I think your thought process is phenomenal. It's just trying to model mine. After years of the awesome. Yeah, we'd love to have you back. Sometime in the future, we're going to have some neuroscientists on board to talk about how the brain functions will connect back to the OODA loop quite a bit back to John Boyd's work. You know, we're still pretty early in this and this podcast, but we find it to be absolutely necessary to help people cope with the changing environment.

And having you on board today was just phenomenal. I'm going to kick it over to Mark to see if he has any other comments.

Mark McGrath
Yeah, John, maybe just in the in the close as we bring this home, if you share with everyone and certainly Ponch and I, but you know, your impressions of Boyd and the ideas that you gravitated towards that Boyd came up with in their relevance today and why they're important.

John Robb
I focused mostly on the core material because it made sense for me as a way to explain what was going on. You know, exterior environment it was more useful than what I saw. We alternate other places, you know, it was, you know, relatively rudimentary, but it offered a depth that was very useful when I saw other models that were more complex.

But, you know, the complexity didn't add any value to what it provided. And then there are the other things that in terms of thinking about how we make decisions in different environments, how we improve things, how we innovate, I haven't seen really anywhere else that does as good a job and as holistically as, as you know, I've seen with Boyd and of course, I take it from the warfare model because it's like coming from the warfare model because it's so it's unforgiving in terms of its acceptance of, of ideas.

Right. So either works or it doesn't. Is there is quantitative here it is. And, you know, I like I like the examples and how they applied to that. And I yeah, I just found them. I found his thinking useful for some, I think I'm actually kind of related to him like couple of generations. Back with Boyd as one of our family names and Oh, get out.

Yeah, that's fine. But it's like a very distant relationship. It's my brother's name, Boyd. Middle name, but the same name. Yeah. No, it's a family name of Boyd.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's like, oh, no. John, Ron, John. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Robb
I know. It's a four. It's a four. It's a four by four.

Mark McGrath
Four by four. Yeah, it is.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But it is a good point. Solid.

John Robb
Yeah, so, you know, I found, I found this stuff incredibly useful and that utility is everything to me, you know, it's like I'm pragmatic. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And I don't have a lot of time for it. But He just has he has a depth to that. That allows me to apply in a variety of circumstances that I find it useful.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Did you come across the OODA loop when you're on active duty or was it afterwards? Just how did you come across it?

John Robb
I ran into him in the nineties when I was still active and, you know, got into it more when I was in the early aughts when I was trying to figure out what was going on in in terrorism and in Iraq and you're trying to make sense of all that. And I had time between companies and I was doing the social networking stuff, and I was trying to figure out how social networking worked and how people made decisions and how things were going to roll out.

And I gravitated towards it. So it worked within the context of my frameworks and it fed into my intuitive sense for what how things work.

Mark McGrath
There's a lot of things we could send you that we found. Ponch and I were in the archives in early December and it's just apparent that Boyd was onto something huge, so much bigger than what he's what is commonly known for. Ponch and I have been on the mission of you know he's often reduced to just OODA loop.

John Robb
Right? No.

Mark McGrath
When you look at the scope of everything that he studied in what he was working on and someone who knew him told us, you know, he was working on this till he died. And it just be interesting. Dave Snowden said it would have been interesting to see had he lived another ten years to really see where he was taking this.

And that's yeah.

John Robb
Darren Cigarettes man yeah. I think he had A.D.D. put the.

Mark McGrath
Cigars out in people's pockets.

John Robb
Yeah.

Mark McGrath
Well, that's. I mean, that's and that's our mission is, you know, he left it open and we want to advance awareness about his ideas, but also to the development. And that's and that's an open thing that we can all contribute to and keep.

John Robb
Oh yeah. I know. If you have any pursuing that you dug up, that was interesting about where he was going with this. I'd love to see it, you know, love to kind of see if I could make any sense of it.

Mark McGrath
Oh, yeah, sure.

John Robb
Sure. Great.

Mark McGrath
We can do that. We can talk about that after stop recording. And you know and I will tell you, that's where we got the name of the podcast was a section of a brief titled No Way Out.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Actually. We learned recently from Chet Richards that this is the conceptual spirals' original name.

Mark McGrath
Was. It was no way out, no idea.

John Robb
Nice.

Mark McGrath
So excellent.

John Robb
It's just not a good name for a company. No, no.

Mark McGrath
Well, yeah, it does. It does require some context for that. You know, the people that are listening, you know, it's I mean, the idea is to do this, to have these conversational learning exercises that we're all learning from each other. But the no way out is, you know, there's no way out of the requirement to reorient and break your models because of what we're subject to via entropy and uncertainty and everything else.

There's no way out of reorienting unless you want to be consumed and defeated by those things.

John Robb
So if you guys know the OODA loop guys, you know.

Mark McGrath
Or.

Bob Gourley in those.

John Robb
Guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah they did. I mean I went down and spoke at their conference just recently and. They did a pretty good job and they built the community around. People were policing the cyber warfare space. Yeah. Based on these ideas and it worked out pretty good. It's a lot of my stuff ends up in their content.

They have a full time content manager, they kind of keep my stuff and sent it out and that allowed that community allowed them to, you know, build up that kind of success that they've had with it.

Mark McGrath
Yeah. I mean, my thesis has been you could take Boyd's ideas and in the things that he pulled from and because of the universal nature of what he's talking about, you know, we figured it out in the military and we all learned it in the military. Right. But anybody I guess that's another part of our mission is to show people how to do these things so they don't have to have spent one day in the military because we're all again, we're all sub.

There's no way out. We're all subject to this and we can help. And that's what we do.

John Robb
Yeah. Teaching orientation is probably the toughest thing, but it's the most useful thing that's the most important. How do you orient successful play? And if you can if you can find ways to teach people that, yeah, that's even I think that's even deeper than the cultural piece, you know. So it's like any company that can get people oriented correctly.

Mark McGrath
Yeah.

John Robb
You're, you're done.

Mark McGrath
It's not easy. It's.

John Robb
You know, it's incredibly hard.