Understanding SVB: Game B, Complexity, Risk, Markets and Nested OODA Loops with Jim Rutt | Ep 12

Jim Rutt is a renowned innovator and creative mischief maker. He is known for his work as the first CTO of Thomson-Reuters, and for having served as the former CEO of Network Solutions. Following his successful sale of Network Solutions during the Dot Com Boom, Jim changed his focus to scientific research and has been affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute since 2002—a world-renowned think tank dedicated to research in the fields of complexity science, evolutionary and adaptive systems, and artificial intelligence. Jim is also the host of the popular The Jim Rutt Show podcast, where he interviews leading scientists, thinkers, and innovators to explore cutting edge ideas in science and technology, with a particular focus on the future of the economy, politics, and society.

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Santa Fe Institute
The Jim Rutt Show
Jim Rutt on LinkedIn
Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence 

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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

Transcripts are machine generated and are NOT edited for grammar or spelling.

00;00;00;29 - 00;00;24;10
Jim Rutt
I'm Jim Wright. I'm a guy who did a lot of stuff in business up till 2001, mostly building the Internet and the things that came before the Internet, online businesses of various sorts. I retired at that point soon, got involved with the Santa Fe Institute, the home of Complexity Science. I went out there originally as a researcher, a rather junior researcher.

00;00;25;16 - 00;00;53;10
Jim Rutt
For better or for worse, I got sucked into the governance side, helping run the place. I ended up on the Board of Trustees Executive Committee and eventually ended up as the chairman of the Santa Fe Institute. Stepped down from that 2012 and moved back to Virginia and helped start something called Game B, which is a radical lens on social change and maybe will become a social change movement at some point.

00;00;53;20 - 00;01;05;03
Jim Rutt
And I've been doing that was a lot of other things, including the last four years, almost four years. This podcast, The Geographic Show. Check it out, available on 155 podcast apps.

00;01;05;24 - 00;01;28;09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Nice. Thank you for that introduction, Jim. And oh, we appreciate you being here with us. So how did we get connected? That's number one. And that has to come back. That comes back down to a tweet about four weeks ago, five weeks ago about looking at nested amino loops. Can you talk about what you were thinking back then and why you tweeted that up?

00;01;28;09 - 00;01;51;01
Jim Rutt
It's, you know, one of my sort of pet little things. I think I first heard about Oodle Loops maybe in 2011 or 2012 and I realized that I had been unconsciously doing something similar in my businesses, though not exactly the same. And, you know, as soon as I understood at least vaguely what I knew to loop was I said, You know what?

00;01;51;13 - 00;02;20;19
Jim Rutt
What goes on in a company is something closer to nested OODA loops, right? Because, you know, Boyd came up with this thing as a, I believe a Korean War fighter pilot or soon after the Korean War. Basically one man airplanes, you know, saber jets, you know, f-100 one's, you know, F1 oh fours, all that kind of stuff. And those are, you know, essentially one person making a bunch of high stakes decision at in a relatively short period of time.

00;02;20;19 - 00;02;39;22
Jim Rutt
Don't get your ass shot down by the boys in the MiGs. Right. And well, in business, which is, you know, a fair bit of my life, you know, things are considerably more complicated than that. You know, there's a reason that a company has 50,000 employees is probably not a good reason. Probably only need 17,000. It still needs a bunch.

00;02;39;22 - 00;03;03;16
Jim Rutt
Right. And so if we're going to use the metaphor of OODA loops, then I immediately started thinking about embedded sort of loops within the loops and in the game B world. We talk about this a lot actually that we talk about that that there's pacing that higher level OODA loops are obviously operated much slower cycle times than edge OODA loops one's in between, etc..

00;03;04;12 - 00;03;17;04
Jim Rutt
So yeah. So I think that's why I tweeted it out. You know, it's just when I think about OODA loops, I naturally and think about nested OODA loops and embedded OODA loops loops operating with other systems, etc..

00;03;17;16 - 00;03;36;01
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. So Jim, if it's okay, I want to agree with you on one point and disagree with you on another point one. Yes. On the message to loops 100%, no doubt about that. But let's talk about some other myths right now. And actually, I'm going to turn it over to Mark. Mark, you want to walk through some of these for us?

00;03;36;10 - 00;03;58;08
Mark McGrath
Yeah, I was I was a guest on a podcast this morning. And one of the questions was, help me dispel the myths. And the gentleman was that was asking the question was coming from the cybersecurity industry and software development and says the prevailing myth is that there's a fighter ASW from the Air Force in the Korean War that came up with this concept of OODA loop.

00;03;58;21 - 00;04;27;17
Mark McGrath
And we use it as a tactical mental model, which is one of any other type of mental models that we could use and in earnest was trying to dispel this myth because that's a prevailing Boyd myth. And we spent about 20, 25 minutes going through really the concept of OODA on how it's so much more than that. And actually, boy, did a reversion to his days in the cockpit not it didn't the development of a loop did not generate from the cockpit.

00;04;28;00 - 00;05;06;22
Mark McGrath
It came it came much later. And one of the things that we even talked about was that his own feeling on his own thoughts on how to loop actually evolved. You know, originally it was something just a a loop, as you're saying, with with that's nested, embedded. And we identify them and we get inside the opponent's loop. But as time went on and he studied more things right up to as literally as is his deathbed, the concept of OODA became a much bigger, a much a much bigger discussion point of how we can interact and deal with complexity versus versus the tactical model.

00;05;06;22 - 00;05;31;27
Mark McGrath
And that was how that's how that's how we go about it. And you know, Brian and I both come from similar but somewhat also different angles. But but that's the that's one of the myths we love to bust. It's not that it's not that that experience wasn't important to his work because because it was, but it really wasn't on his mind when he was coming up with these concepts.

00;05;31;27 - 00;05;44;23
Mark McGrath
In other words, he was thinking more of a of a of a learning adaptive measure to deal with complexity, not a not a, not a tactical decision matrix in a in a closed or fixed space.

00;05;45;00 - 00;06;06;26
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
One, if I add one thing here to Jim, right show is about the loop. It's about the evolution of the loop. Right? So that's why we're big fans. You had in your Seth on there you had been you to Roy on there. You're talking about complex adaptive systems, neuroscience consciousness. You are the extension of John Boyd. You know, so so we are thrilled to have you on here to talk about this.

00;06;07;22 - 00;06;08;28
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So, Jim, you had a comment.

00;06;10;15 - 00;06;35;06
Jim Rutt
That was good. What was it? I was going to say, I've never been a deep student. Boy, I do recall in my early days finding on the Internet some hand-drawn pencil slides and going through them and say, oh, this is pretty interesting. I don't know when they day trail, but yeah, I'll confess to have heard the method and have probably believed it that it came out of his experience in the cockpit.

00;06;35;06 - 00;06;36;17
Jim Rutt
But it's it's useful for that.

00;06;36;19 - 00;06;56;02
Mark McGrath
Full disclosure, Jim. So did I. I was an officer in the Marine Corps. And that's how we're taught. We're taught that way. We're taught that it's a tactical model that you use. And the the broader context application did not become apparent to me until I stepped out of the Marine Corps. And I was in the investment management space engaging with capital markets.

00;06;56;02 - 00;07;02;16
Mark McGrath
That's when it really opened my mind of what Boyd was working on. It really changed my thinking on it too.

00;07;03;05 - 00;07;25;10
Jim Rutt
Yeah, that's cool. That's good. Maybe I'll hopefully I'll learn some things here today, you know? You know, sometimes I talk about talk about oodle loops. I will again, this is hand-waving. I will sometimes say, you know, maybe we really ought to think about, oh, see a loops and have a coordination step in the middle and you know, maybe in in your form voodoo loops that's implied.

00;07;25;10 - 00;07;34;04
Jim Rutt
But to my mind, you know, that takes it out of the tactical and makes it sort of much more general and much more scalable.

00;07;34;25 - 00;07;37;13
Mark McGrath
Yes, it's fractal and scalable. Totally.

00;07;37;17 - 00;07;37;26
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah.

00;07;38;03 - 00;07;53;08
Jim Rutt
And coordination fractal. This fractal this is what we love about in game B, we're always looking for rules that can operate using essentially the same code at all levels and OODA or at least hooked up can do just that.

00;07;53;29 - 00;08;12;16
Mark McGrath
So I would say that the coordination would come in where you have more, more than one person and go all the way up to X. It could go up as high as you want as long as there's people making decisions and acting that coordination effect, if they're trying to do anything together, that's that's naturally going to align inside of inside the orientation.

00;08;12;16 - 00;08;30;24
Commerical
For example, Ponch and I have orientation alignment. That's why we're business partners, right? That's why we're we're co-hosts, you know, orientation is aligning with you. That's how we're sharing this learning in this podcast, right? There's some how we're doing that coordinating implicitly not x, not explicitly.

00;08;31;16 - 00;08;54;04
Jim Rutt
Yes, so very much. Oh, give me give you another reason why I have always been interested in food issues. I heard about it, why it shares a data with my previous practice, even though I never heard of loops, which is one of my main business strategies, was speed. In fact, I would like to quote I used to quote 100 Thompsons faster and faster til the thrill of speed exceeds the fear of death.

00;08;54;14 - 00;09;20;12
Jim Rutt
Right. And and I would always say we could cycle faster than our opponents. I didn't use the terms our OODA loops are are inside our opponents OODA loops, but as a mostly either startup guy or industry disrupt, they're kind of guy, you know, it just became obvious to me that if I could drive our company twice as fast as our opponents, you know, a little startup could beat a $4 billion company, which we did one time.

00;09;20;21 - 00;09;48;07
Jim Rutt
And and so that's the other thing that I love, the fact that the emphasis that speed of loop is an important sort of a parameter of the system, though, of course. And this is what my other I hope we'll get into this. The other key thing is there's both too fast and too slow. There is an optimal pace making decisions and I see errors all the time.

00;09;48;07 - 00;10;06;19
Jim Rutt
But people who make decisions too fast and too slow. So when you're thinking about pacing your OODA loop or any other, you know, decision making practice, essentially having realization on what the pace is or what the signals are that the time has come to make a decision is really hugely important.

00;10;07;09 - 00;10;31;24
Mark McGrath
There's a massive difference between speed and haste. I think what you're alluding to is haste. And a lot of times people are doing things out of haste because there was no deliberate no deliberate action or no coordination, as you mentioned earlier. So you're speaking our language, not going out of the park. I mean, speed is a massive benefit of a aligned orientation that's able to cycle through to faster than it's competitors or faster than the rate of change.

00;10;33;03 - 00;10;34;10
Jim Rutt
Yeah.

00;10;34;10 - 00;10;40;20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Learn more about your to learn more about game B, how this fits into this type of thinking.

00;10;41;00 - 00;11;30;07
Jim Rutt
I'm sorry, B is a idea for a radical social change and maybe in the process of turning into an actual social change movement and it has many, many, many aspects too many to go into, in short. But it's that society is way too top down. It's way too dominated by a single simple, a single symbol and a signal, which is money, money on money return, and is essentially driven by the inner loop of money up my money return in a way that has frankly corrupted our culture, corrupted our persons, put our extended livelihood here on the Earth itself at risk.

00;11;30;18 - 00;11;53;07
Jim Rutt
And so, again, be looks at developing civilization from the bottom up. And one of the beauties of doing it from the bottom up is we can build it inside a game. We are not utopians, we are not revolutionaries. We do not think, though there are some days, I think that we should just go to the places that roll the guillotines out and start lopping heads.

00;11;53;07 - 00;12;19;25
Jim Rutt
But that's not the game B version. Game B version is we build bubbles that operate under the game B operating system and then we actively parasite game because we can actually operate better if we have high coherence, if we have high trust, if we have good virtues, we can operate better than companies that are full of low trust, bad virtues, you know, lack of intellectual honesty about information, etc..

00;12;20;02 - 00;12;56;23
Jim Rutt
And so the, the, the ideas that we can build at first, these small bubbles and the bubbles interoperate with each other and build membranes across bubbles and not just in a concentric circle, but in multi-polar ways. So let's say a community of 150 people, which we call a proto big a Dunbar number entity, it might include some businesses in it that those businesses might include some people that aren't in the Puerto B and the Puerto B might belong to both its regional Puerto B membrane, let's say the Stanton, Virginia, Puerto be membrane.

00;12;56;23 - 00;13;27;10
Jim Rutt
It might have 25 Puerto B's in it, but it may also belong to the Guild of Metalworking Puerto B's. It may turn out that many of the businesses in our power to be happened to be metal workers. So we align also with the metal metal working people as a guild, essentially, and so we can build civilization up through nested membranes that are multipolar and inter, penetrate each other in a way that will be way more conducive both to human well-being.

00;13;27;10 - 00;13;46;27
Jim Rutt
Because nobody pays attention to human well-being. It's money on money returns. If human well-being falls out of that sometimes as a side effects, it's literally a side effect. What happens if you design a social operating system for human well-being and of course, living within the natural boundaries of our earth? Money on money return doesn't care about that at all.

00;13;46;27 - 00;14;10;28
Jim Rutt
Right. And so you layer on one infinite levels of top down government regulation, which we all know is grossly inefficient, often unfair, subject to manipulation, etc., but if rather one of the coordination signals that we all operate in within the flight of Game B is operating within global planetary limits. We can reach those things without top down dictate, right?

00;14;11;13 - 00;14;14;13
Jim Rutt
So that's a flavor of what it's about.

00;14;14;13 - 00;14;36;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's about there are some solid connections to, you know, points thinking on top down command control, leadership and appreciation, what the ideal situation ought to be, and his view on outside and bottom up control of the organization. So what we coach this and we look at the Toyota production system, we're looking from the customer as a way to control an organization.

00;14;36;23 - 00;15;00;12
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
If you go back to your interview with are your call or your conversation with Dr. Seth about how we create a reality, it's the same way right outside and bottom up is are the signals that are coming in, but we construct the top down inside out, right? So the overlap between neuroscience and cognitive science and then how organizations run and you can have a Toyota production system tells us to do things there's a there.

00;15;00;12 - 00;15;01;23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. And I think.

00;15;01;23 - 00;15;41;11
Jim Rutt
This is a very important point that alignment we know why I'm so interested in cognitive neuroscience in game B, there is not a CEO in your brain making all the decisions, right? Decisions are made collectively as an ensemble of cooperative processes and yes, and hence it's our view, not hands, but it is also our view in Game B that we should operate our society and our businesses and our communities the same way, and that the collapse to the big man was a big mistake that we made with the rise of the early empires after the invention of agriculture about 6000 years ago.

00;15;42;02 - 00;16;07;27
Jim Rutt
And it actually works, unfortunately, better than many of the alternatives. But we can't play that game anymore because we're at the end of the rope or that game is still a sensible game to play because one where we have already exceeded some of our planetary limits and we'll see all the rest before the end of the century. And if you haven't noticed, game culture is driving people particularly young people, literally crazy.

00;16;08;25 - 00;16;31;27
Jim Rutt
I don't know if you've seen the statistics on mental health issues. Yes. Of of the zoomers, the teen agers, and they're very young adults. It's like 50% of them are fucking nuts, right? Yeah. At least they describe themselves that way. I think some of that is defining craziness down, but also reasonably convinced. I'll get to work with people like Jonathan Haidt that this is a very real thing.

00;16;31;27 - 00;17;01;21
Jim Rutt
And it's not just in the United States, it's across all the advanced countries. And so it may well be that frying ourselves with greenhouse gases is not actually what's in civilization. It may be that we drive ourselves crazy. We are we destroy our ability due to collective sense making to make collect good collective decisions. Look at some of the ash clouds that have been elected to leadership positions in the Western world over the last ten or 15 years.

00;17;01;28 - 00;17;26;26
Jim Rutt
I mean, it's unthinkable that you'd have some of these jackasses elected, say, in 1964, and yet in 1964, people don't know this in the United States, half of the adults had not graduated from high school. Yeah, today, 90% of graduated from high school. About 36% have four year college degrees. So were allegedly far better educated than let's say my parents generation works.

00;17;26;26 - 00;17;45;12
Jim Rutt
My my father dropped out of high school after ninth grade. My mother left home when she was 14. You know, they were, you know, more or less typical of their times and but they were very sensible. Folks know how to make a decision, knew how to operate their life, you know, knew how to build community organization they both participated in.

00;17;46;09 - 00;18;11;10
Jim Rutt
And life was actually pretty good here with a lot more. And by the way, we're a lot richer than people were then and we're a lot more educated. But our collective decision making is terrible. Oh, yeah. So I just I suspect that may be what what brings our advanced technological civilization to an end, not nuclear war or not or climate change.

00;18;11;10 - 00;18;15;14
Jim Rutt
Just the ability to no longer make decent decisions collectively.

00;18;16;01 - 00;18;35;29
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Oh, yeah. We spent a lot of time helping organizations make sense of the world, using sense, making tools and why is that important? Because we're trying to build a collective orientation. Right. But I want to unpack something that you brought up here in this this nice little conversation about how we make decisions from our perspective on John Boyd.

00;18;36;04 - 00;19;02;23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
At the individual level, you have genetics, you have culture, you have previous experience, right? So it's not one place in your brain or your mind body that makes decisions. It's the collective right. And there's actually some ideas that we make decisions with other humans at the same time. So through genetics, we know and if you think about your point about how civilized civilization ends genetics, we pass our genes off on to the next generation.

00;19;02;23 - 00;19;29;26
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So the trauma that we inherit or that we experience and the trauma we inherit from our grandparents and great grandparents, it's carried through us. And if you think about what's happening now, this could accelerate the way you view the end of civilization, right? That and the previous experiences that we're all having, the fact that we had to wear masks, my my nine and ten year olds had to wear masks during some of the most important developmental years of their lives.

00;19;29;26 - 00;19;49;27
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. And they had to work on computers from home without any social interaction. So this is one of the reasons we have the podcast, is to help people understand what does orientation look like for the individual and what does orientation look like for the collective? Right. So a very, very powerful point there about your view on the world.

00;19;49;27 - 00;20;16;03
Jim Rutt
Let me jump in there a little bit. It's not actually true that our lived experience gets passed on genetically. In fact, that's the marquee and fallacy, right? That's what Darwin overturned. There is, however, a related phenomenon called epigenetics. Yup. And so if we want to distinguish them, epigenetics can pass on the lived experience of one generation to the other.

00;20;16;03 - 00;20;42;25
Jim Rutt
And an example of the epigenetics are the, the cellular material in the egg cell of the mother. Right. And so the way the mother lives stressed or not stressed, good nutrition, not good nutrition, you know, but good exercise or sitting around playing video games all day can have some impact on the chemistry of the cell. But the nucleus, the actual genetic material, is not affected by what happens to you during your life.

00;20;43;02 - 00;21;20;02
Jim Rutt
And that's a hugely important distinction. And some of these arguments about trauma being passed on epigenetically, not much evidence for it at this point in time, if I would suggest that that transmission is much more likely to be social, right. If your parents are messed up, then that increases the probability you're going to be messed up. Yeah. So so it's social propaganda and some epigenetics, maybe for some things, but probably not the equivalent of psychological trauma, maybe more strongly on things like nutrition or serious disease, things of that sort.

00;21;20;07 - 00;21;34;23
Jim Rutt
And then genetics is actually inviolate to all those, which is actually quite interesting that the stack of stack of three leads us to who we are. And probably genetics and social are more important than epigenetics at the level of humans.

00;21;35;07 - 00;21;47;04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. But and this, this is evolving science and the epigenetic view is awesome. I mean, I mean, we're still learning a lot about that right now. Right. And I think you've had some pretty good neuroscientists and biologists on your show to talk about that.

00;21;47;04 - 00;22;09;20
Jim Rutt
So it's really at the surface and I wonder is I felt like I had to jump in here at the Center to Evolutionary Theory. And Evolutionary Science is very central to what we do. Absolutely. You know, it's really hard to understand fact. You can't understand biology and even a human being without understanding evolution and getting it right.

00;22;10;03 - 00;22;28;04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. So let's talk about Santa Fe for a moment. Unpack the complex adaptive systems and then before we get into that, one of the reasons Santa Fe Institute is so important to us, Boyden, is if you want to call it avoidant, as we understand it, John Boyd spoke there to a bunch of Nobel Prize winners years and years and years ago.

00;22;28;18 - 00;22;42;27
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I think you're not aware of that. And there's no evidence other than what we have from Grant Hammond's work on John Boyd. But can you tell us a bit more about the Santa Fe Institute and what why is that so important and what are they do?

00;22;44;04 - 00;22;53;23
Commerical
You are listening to No Way Out Sponsored by Adults. Now let's get back to building your confidence in complexity.

00;22;53;23 - 00;23;17;23
Jim Rutt
Yeah. Since Cynthia Stuart was started in the early eighties and it was essentially a a new group that was founded by some people who were associated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory where they made the atomic bomb. There's a famous research group called the Nonlinear Dynamics Group, which was exploring complexity from a with a little bit different lens.

00;23;18;02 - 00;23;49;15
Jim Rutt
And so a group of leading thinkers, including three Nobel Prize winners, decided to start the Santa Fe Institute as a non-classified home for complexity and related research and since then, it has become, without a doubt, the dominant research point in the world for the science of complexity. You know, much of the formal scientific work, not necessarily applied work, but the scientific work around complexity was developed either at the Santa Fe Institute or people affiliated with the Santa Fe.

00;23;49;15 - 00;24;26;01
Jim Rutt
It's too it's actually fairly small, like a dozen full time faculty, then another 15 or 20 postdocs who were there full time. But we also have we call the external faculty, which is like 110 people who come to the institute at least once a year, sometimes for a week, sometimes for a month, sometimes for six months, and publish complexly related stuff, typically under both their home institution name and excuse me, something to keep in mind is it is very theoretical.

00;24;26;01 - 00;24;48;12
Jim Rutt
While we we work with people doing applied work, our focus is on theory and but we also have something called the Applied Complexity Network where we partner with, I think at this point, about 50 companies who belong to the Applied Complexity Network and come to special events for them to learn about how to apply complexity theory to their businesses.

00;24;48;26 - 00;25;17;11
Jim Rutt
They organize their own events. It's really quite interesting. And so the impact of the when you look at the impact literature, impact on the scientific literature, this tiny little place, Santa Fe Institute, you know, is about on par at the highest end of scientific paper publishing of a big old place like the University of Wisconsin. All right. It's it's astounding the impact that this small organizations has been one of the great privileges and, you know, fortunate occurrences of my life.

00;25;17;11 - 00;25;22;18
Jim Rutt
So over the last 20 years, been affiliated with the place.

00;25;22;18 - 00;25;24;28
Mark McGrath
Is that where you are? Are you in Santa Fe?

00;25;25;14 - 00;25;28;05
Jim Rutt
No, we moved back to Virginia about ten years ago. I live.

00;25;28;11 - 00;25;29;15
Mark McGrath
I see deep.

00;25;29;15 - 00;25;40;22
Jim Rutt
In the Appalachian Mountains in the lowest population density county east of the Mississippi. It's probably also not a coincidence. It's a county that only has about four ways in and four ways out.

00;25;41;22 - 00;25;51;05
Mark McGrath
Okay. All right. We'll have one. We're not recording. We can compare because my my in-laws are in a county in Virginia, as you just described. So we can take off like.

00;25;51;05 - 00;25;52;11
Jim Rutt
Well, be the same one.

00;25;52;29 - 00;25;53;15
Mark McGrath
Could be.

00;25;53;26 - 00;25;54;06
Jim Rutt
Yeah.

00;25;54;19 - 00;26;15;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So, Jim, can you walk us through why complexity is so important? And I just want to hear your perspective. We talk about all the time with clients. You know, Snowden is our advisor. Not a lot of people, in my opinion, understand what complexity means for complex adaptive systems being why is is so important for a business leader a parent you know teacher.

00;26;15;22 - 00;26;17;05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Why why do we need to know this.

00;26;17;18 - 00;26;46;01
Jim Rutt
And political leaders above all else. But but everybody which which is that most of the problems we confront as a species today are problems of complexity, not of complicated ness. You know, you know, for instance, our electric grid is very fragile and it is a known complex system. But I just had a really interesting talk. A woman who's an expert on the grid and we talked about how the grid has to adapt.

00;26;46;07 - 00;27;08;15
Jim Rutt
And there's no you can't engineer the grid because the grid is this dynamic system with customers coming in and producers coming in, especially now with things like solar and wind. They come in, they come out, you know, minute to minute. And so there is no formal way to engineer that for stability. It's a dance. And I like to describe.

00;27;08;15 - 00;27;41;00
Jim Rutt
And the same is true of the economy. We're having a little blip in the economy today as we speak. The Silicon Valley bank has melted down, but closed by the FDIC. And whether that results in a avalanche in a cascade of other bank failures is unknown and our work at the Santa Fe Institute would say is unknowable, that we have found that these cascades tend to organize in we're called power laws, which basically means there's big ones, there's little ones, but the big ones are more likely than you might think.

00;27;41;26 - 00;28;10;21
Jim Rutt
And so whenever I see a pebble like this, I say, is this the pebble that will start the avalanche? I don't say yes, because complexity will tell us. We don't know. But complexity will also tell us it's perhaps more likely than you think. And, you know, and I'll turn it back to you, the analogy that I have found that I like a lot on complexity is that with the reductionist scientific view that we've seen before, complexity is still very important.

00;28;10;21 - 00;28;34;11
Jim Rutt
By the way, I am not an anti reductionist at all or reductionist thinking is absolutely necessary to do most useful work. You can think of the reductionist as the study of the dancer and you can think of complexity as the study of the dance. And and so, you know, I wouldn't think about anything serious without applying the complexity lens to it.

00;28;34;11 - 00;29;04;28
Jim Rutt
And I think there's a lot of us there's a hell of a lot more of us now than there were 20 years ago when I first started getting involved with this stuff. So remember the my my first attempt to explain a complexity perspective in a business context when I delivered a talk to the top group of executives at the Thompson Corporation, now Thomson Reuters, where I was the CTO and I explained the concept of dynamic fitness landscapes as the correct lens for crafting our merger and acquisition strategy.

00;29;05;09 - 00;29;16;17
Jim Rutt
And we used to buy about 80 companies a year and sell 20 or 30, so we were quite active in M&A. And you know, the initial reaction was, what the hell is this man from Mars talking about?

00;29;16;17 - 00;29;19;21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You're talking biology inside of business. There's something wrong with you, Jim.

00;29;20;02 - 00;29;39;06
Jim Rutt
There. And then I'm going to give my peers at Thomson Credit over a couple of years. They got it and they started talking about, you know, attacking down the ridgeline rather than through the valley of death, doing paratrooper attacks. And if you do a paratrooper attack, you better be very well provisioned because you don't have a connecting ridge line.

00;29;39;06 - 00;30;00;24
Jim Rutt
Right. And, you know, and the tendency of bureaucracies to march up a hill and trench, which is what they do. Right. They're local hill climbers. Most they're dumb ass bureau bureaucracies. But then I say, you better know, is your hill growing or shrinking? If you're on a growing hill, it's probably a good thing to get to the top of the trench if you're on a sinking hill.

00;30;01;01 - 00;30;29;01
Jim Rutt
Like one of our biggest businesses was newspapers. We had $2 billion a year where the newspapers, myself and another aggressive systems thinker, amazingly talked the corporation into selling those newspapers just in time, and we got full value for them before they sank. It was extremely obvious to us they were going to sink. And so there's an example where, you know, having this dynamic fit, this landscape perspective, literally gained the company billions of dollars.

00;30;29;01 - 00;30;34;23
Jim Rutt
So, you know, this is not these aren't just toys. Anyway, I have a tendency to rattle on about this stuff because I'm so.

00;30;35;12 - 00;30;50;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
We've used the same approach in the military talking about complex adaptive systems. We use some fitness landscape work from Dave Snowden as well. So I'm I don't want to say what he told me in confidence, but he wasn't impressed with a lot of our leaders in the military. Let me just say that.

00;30;51;00 - 00;31;05;00
Jim Rutt
Yes, I know, Dave. In fact, he was going to be on my podcast in think a few weeks when the newest version of his his new book comes out and I've had him on before. He's certainly a good apply complexity thinker.

00;31;05;24 - 00;31;13;28
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, he's fun to hang out with every now and then. My kids laugh because he used to hang out on our couch back here. They're like, He's got Santa Claus on there, Daddy.

00;31;13;28 - 00;31;19;12
Jim Rutt
I haven't ever met him in person. I look forward to it someday because it seems like it'd be a fun guy to have a up a whiskey with.

00;31;20;07 - 00;31;37;01
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's it's for. For a guy like me and Mark. I'm going to speak on behalf of Mark. A five minute conversation leads to about 40 hours of research for us. Right. We have that's that's our level of understanding of what he understands. But it's great to be in this in the space of trying to connect not not trying to connect.

00;31;37;01 - 00;31;59;05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Boyd but a lot of Boyd's research was his research. His ideas were built upon early, complex, adaptive systems thinking. And in fact, Dave Snowden and I, we went up to Quantico. We had a session up there where he looked at Ginevan and Italy and it was more of a exploration to see what, you know, just what are the connection connectors, what's the overlap?

00;31;59;29 - 00;32;13;25
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
How do they I hate to say how they fit together, but how do they complement each other? So it's so Dave and I have done some pretty good work on that. And, you know, he's always going to be one of my mentors because there's no way I'll ever be that smart. So good luck to you on that on that show.

00;32;14;09 - 00;32;30;13
Jim Rutt
Yeah, it'll be fun. We we crossed swords occasionally because we do have a few things we disagree about, but I would say we're probably about equal in our capacity. Yeah. So, so, so it makes for a good fight and a good conversation. But more we agree on a lot more than we disagree on. So it'll be it'll be a good thing.

00;32;30;15 - 00;32;54;15
Jim Rutt
What do you mention? The Marine Corps, the Marines for a long time. We're a member of the what came before our Applied Complexity Network. And they had some people at the Naval War College who came out all the time to the Santa Fe Institute. And they told us that the swarm and complexity view was starting to inform some of the strategic innovations around the Marine Corps.

00;32;54;26 - 00;33;20;07
Jim Rutt
And we also heard after the fact that it was perhaps some of this self-organizing make decisions closer to the ground approach that we encouraged that resulted in the Marines being, you say, in the second Iraq war in ways that you would never have expected Marines to be used. Right. Or are you supposed to be used to it? They beaches and we were within a hundred miles of the shoreline.

00;33;20;07 - 00;33;37;19
Jim Rutt
But in Iraq to the Marines were sent all over the country because they were at least, you know, people told us what's true or not. I wasn't there. But the Marines are better than the Army at, you know, adaptive self-organization on the fly. And that's what counterinsurgency really requires.

00;33;38;18 - 00;34;11;05
Mark McGrath
So as a marine of course, I emphatically agree with that statement. But I don't say it. I don't say it flippantly. You know, I was I'm the son of a retired Army officer who went to West Point. So I've experienced both worlds and in great depth. To your point about the Marines, you know, the Marine Corps has always been one to smash its model and revise itself and understand that it did have to have a decentralized approach inside of a bureaucratic behemoth, and it did have to innovate and it did have to constantly justify its existence.

00;34;11;05 - 00;34;33;24
Mark McGrath
So, you know, it's no shock to me that they were involved at some point with the Applied Complexity Network because they engage Buckminster Fuller on geodesic domes when when he designed those, and they were the first branch to really test helicopters. And how helicopters could change things. And, you know, we're old the clock ahead to the late seventies, early eighties.

00;34;34;07 - 00;34;58;25
Mark McGrath
They somebody like John Boyd coming in and speaking radical things was was not unusual to to Marines. And I think that he even jumped on that and threw gas on that further and further such that that were, you know, Marines are the intellectual, well, well-read branch that are willing to challenge assumptions and willing to put things to the test in a very decentralized and open way.

00;35;00;02 - 00;35;29;10
Mark McGrath
Not to say that there's not some very clear codes of conduct that we you know, we follow both in the Marine Corps in, you know, the years I've been out, we still I still try stick to it. But that that kind of openness and acknowledgment that the world is indeed complex and that combat is complex. And if you've read the the treatise War Fighting, you know, our ethos in a marine Corps doctrinal publication, number one, the whole entire thing is to get your mind open to the fact that you cannot make complexity go away.

00;35;29;10 - 00;35;34;11
Mark McGrath
You have to learn how to lead and influence people in it in order to thrive.

00;35;34;22 - 00;36;02;29
Jim Rutt
So I have to read that four Marine Corps family. My father was one of Uncle Sam's misguided children in the South Pacific in World War Two. And my younger brother was also a marine before he became a cop. Both of them. What Marine Corps cop? You know, classic Irish Catholic route, you know. Yeah. And I would say neither of them were dumb ass muscle monkeys, you know, the the stereotype of the Marines, they actually were both thinking people.

00;36;03;08 - 00;36;08;01
Jim Rutt
And my own experience, particularly with senior leadership in Marine for very impressive people.

00;36;09;07 - 00;36;37;20
Mark McGrath
Yeah it's by design. And since Boyd engaged with the Marines, things emerged like reading lists, you know, and having people discuss open they have open debate about, you know, battles and tactics and ideas. And he look at those reading lists, how they've evolved over the years. They include business books and it would include books like, you know, books that we might see on a complexity bookshelf, you know, to get people in that right way of thinking and challenging and challenging the assumptions.

00;36;37;20 - 00;37;03;08
Mark McGrath
So that's good to hear that they were that they were out there. I wanted to tie back to what you said, too, about when we're talking about Dave, who is our our first guest, but he met you mentioned biology and Dave pointed out and we had a we had a video clip of this that podcast I can put up on LinkedIn that John Boyd's favorite book of all the books that he read, which it's thousands and thousands.

00;37;04;02 - 00;37;07;08
Mark McGrath
It was actually how the leopard changed its spots.

00;37;08;03 - 00;37;19;18
Jim Rutt
Well, that is a that's a that's a classic complexity story of the way the the pigments arrange on most spotted animals is actually a complex adaptive system which just got it. Yeah.

00;37;19;18 - 00;37;47;04
Mark McGrath
And there's a little sticky in it on the video. We can send it to you. And Dave holds it up and shows and it says Dad's favorite book. So ostensibly his daughter, Mary Ellen, wrote that it was his dad's favorite book. Her dad's favorite book. The other thing to tie back to what you said was Dave, front of a comment that it would have been interesting to see had John Boyd lived another ten or 15 years because he really was on the verge of complexity thinking.

00;37;47;04 - 00;38;08;06
Mark McGrath
He really was an early adopter of of thinking about the world as a complex adaptive system and OODA loop as we know it. That's actually where that emerges from. You know, that version that we all know comes from 1996, the year before he died, and that's years and years and years after he was doing air to air combat maneuvering.

00;38;08;06 - 00;38;14;06
Mark McGrath
So he he really was a pioneer, I think, in that respect.

00;38;14;06 - 00;38;34;04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Sir Jim, you had a conversation with John Robb. I think John Rogers on your show quite a bit, which is an awesome is just an awesome human being. What's happening in the world right now with fifth generation warfare, this misinformation, disinformation, you've had a lot of guests on. You talk a lot about this. Can you give us your perspective on what's happening?

00;38;34;04 - 00;38;55;23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And even in today's news with Silicon Valley Bank, the January six files coming out, the Twitter files coming out, we're finding it say we're finding out all these things that may or may not be true. But what's going on in your mind as we start to unravel from COVID and look at this, this world from the information warfare perspective?

00;38;56;05 - 00;39;30;15
Jim Rutt
Well, there's no doubt that the power of the periphery has grown tremendously with the development of online systems. And I'm an old enough dude. I go back to before the Internet. I actually worked at the very first consumer online system company called The Source back in 1980 282. I worked there and we were really one of the very first that offered email bulletin boards and the precursors to social media, etc., and you could actually see things forming up online.

00;39;30;28 - 00;39;56;29
Jim Rutt
Then later, I was heavily involved with the well starting in 1989, which still exists by the way. Welcome, very high quality if someone antique online community and a lot of things got started there like the Electronic Frontier Foundation got started there. Wired Magazine I think you could arguably say started their Craigslist. Craig Newmark was on the well and was saturated in the well war.

00;39;57;21 - 00;40;21;13
Jim Rutt
And so there's these networks have produced a tremendous amount of peripheral activity are getting bigger are discussed is mostly virtual. We do have occasional face to face encounters etc.. But, you know, there's thousands, tens of thousands now probably people who would consider themselves getting be people who have encountered our messages online and meet up online and to try to do things.

00;40;21;13 - 00;40;47;11
Jim Rutt
So that's the pure old Internet model. But of course, as John makes the point, once there's a capacity to the powers that be, are going to see how they can use it and corrupt it essentially, I think. So we now have information warfare and of course in between you have advertising, which is essentially a different kind of information warfare driven by the body of money returned looping.

00;40;48;02 - 00;41;09;21
Jim Rutt
And the online world has that exceedingly easy because unlike traditional advertising back in the days which do traditional advertising, the data that they're saying from the ad agencies is probably half your money on advertising is wasted, but you don't know which half, right? So you got to keep spending your money in the online world. You know what ads are working?

00;41;09;21 - 00;41;33;01
Jim Rutt
Know, I do some online advertising part time and, you know, a day later, you know, okay, this ad outperforms that ad, but neither of them actually pay their way. So killer both. Let's a third. No, that would work. So let's ramp that up. And and so but that also applies to state actors or non-state actors who are trying to manipulate the public mind.

00;41;33;12 - 00;42;00;11
Jim Rutt
And, you know, I would suggest that the Obama election was the first that organized essentially the periphery to get their candidate across. I mean, it was quite a surprising upset that Obama was able to beat Hillary Clinton for the nomination when he had been in the Senate for like four years, I think at the time, something like that.

00;42;00;20 - 00;42;28;12
Jim Rutt
And but it was because he he was able to tap into the enthusiasm and the periphery, which was not well organized and began to organize it. The Trump campaign, the the systems started to come more organizers very interesting flow. I talked with John about this flow of ideas out of the dark corners of the internet like for Chan, which would then get picked up on a subreddit called The Donald, which had hundreds of thousands of people.

00;42;28;12 - 00;42;53;09
Jim Rutt
I used to do some computerized analysis of the content on The Donald, and then it would get picked up by Fox News and then Trump would repeat it and. It would then cycle back out and get modified and adjusted and it would come back up. So they had this essentially informal and self-organizing meme factory operating on the Internet, and I think that was a fair bit of the success of the Trump campaign.

00;42;54;26 - 00;43;35;23
Jim Rutt
Then you started seeing, you know, state actors like and around the same time, you know, the Russians, the Chinese, the Americans, of course, you know, hear about all the bad shit that Americans do. But, you know, we're doing it probably more than anybody else to attempt to build synthetic or Astroturf organizations to get things stirred up. And of course, steering the narrative as things like the Twitter files are showing us where they were actually suborning the editorial controls of private operators of online platforms to up regulate some messages and downright regulate others.

00;43;35;23 - 00;44;07;25
Jim Rutt
And then of course, there's the countermovement to that, which is the the non central platforms like the blockchain or loosely sensible ones like Gab and and then the new video or not, that new video platform Rumble for instance. So there's this, it's this wild, complex systems evolution going on in the info sphere and it's not clear who's going to win.

00;44;08;04 - 00;44;34;05
Jim Rutt
You know, John argues this for this thing called the swarm, which is essentially what the game committee would call the blue church or the conventional wisdom of society's elites, you know, the Ivy League, and then they call it the Ivy League or the New York Times and The Washington Post. And, you know, he believes that this swarm is what has pushed America into the war with Ukraine.

00;44;34;05 - 00;45;01;20
Jim Rutt
As an example. And that also led to some of the bad decisions around COVID. I suspect the COVID more than the Ukraine. I think there's good, solid, principled geopolitical reasons why we're fighting in Ukraine and how it's all going to end up. We don't know because these information systems are evolving all the time. And I think that the new addition of large language models like chatty CBT is going to change things even more.

00;45;01;24 - 00;45;25;13
Jim Rutt
I I've put up a GPT enabled chat bot to the content for my podcast. You can chat not Jim Rutger Cobb and you can ask your questions and it'll respond based on a combination of the things that are in my podcasts. And then the language part comes from GPT three, which is kind of the guts of Chatty Betty.

00;45;26;12 - 00;45;47;20
Jim Rutt
And I'm talking to people literally weekly about new possible information platforms that are entirely new and operated on new principles that are enabled by these new large language technology. So we're still in the early innings of the game here, but there's no doubt if one wants to influence the world online, online is the place to do it.

00;45;48;10 - 00;45;57;21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. And the game that we're talking about from a points perspective, we believe, is the strategic game of interaction. Isolation, right? Amplify the things you want, dampen the things you don't want.

00;45;57;21 - 00;46;33;13
Jim Rutt
And that's regulation to regulate, as we say in game B terms and also in biological terms, which comes from essentially enzyme networks, enzymes, upregulate reactions and other ones downregulate reactions or lack of enzymes down regulate reactions. And that's what people are trying to do in the online world. But it's also interesting to note that I would say one of the big surprises of the Ukraine Russia conflict so far is how relatively ineffective the info sphere has been on the scale of things and and cyber warfare.

00;46;33;13 - 00;46;53;17
Jim Rutt
Right. Both Ukraine and Russia were considered to be cyber warfare superpowers, but there hasn't been much in the way of at least reported action around cyber. And, you know, one of the big fears of us supporting the Ukrainians was that the Russians would attack attack us with cyber. It seems like they haven't I don't know if we've stopped them or we just showed them.

00;46;53;26 - 00;47;19;03
Jim Rutt
You know, it's like opening your jacket and showing of your 44 Magnum maybe that we did that and said, Hey, you fuck with us, we'll fuck with you and we can fuck with you a lot more. You can fuck with us. I don't know quite what happened. We'll find out someday when the histories are written, but I think it is quite surprising that cyber has not been a significant factor and nor do I think the info sphere has been a factor as much as good old fashioned, you know, state interest politics.

00;47;19;03 - 00;47;34;14
Jim Rutt
You know, this was a time where the leaders actually came together, made some decisions and stuck to it, which is kind of a a pleasant, pleasant change from some of the ash cloud trade we've been seeing of late.

00;47;34;14 - 00;47;50;17
Mark McGrath
John talks about the end of John Raab, talks about the end of the Westphalian system. You know, that system of a formal a formal state that we could trace back to the Treaty of I mean, you continue this. Would you see that continuing to wane in its influence.

00;47;51;19 - 00;48;25;26
Jim Rutt
It's one of the game be world type of game B hypothesis that eventually the Westphalian state becomes either invisible or entirely irrelevant, but I tend to be more on the side that the Westphalian state is going to have impact for longer than people think. You know, it is a strong system. It has legitimacy with people. It is, you know, the system by which violence is authorized, essentially, which is a quite powerful tool.

00;48;26;13 - 00;48;54;01
Jim Rutt
You know, you can yap on the Internet all you want, but if we send a man to your house and put a nine millimeter through your forehead, that's the end of that discussion. So I do hope that eventually this system of inter operating membranes, which I described as great game, be comes to replace the Westphalian system. But I think that some of these some of these comments about it going away soon are probably overstated.

00;48;54;07 - 00;49;16;19
Jim Rutt
Certainly it's lost power. I mean, relative to something like Google or Google now has more power than your typical small nation state, though at the end of the day, you know, the U.S. could still send the FBI out there and arrest all the Google people and close down their data centers. It's unlikely that they do it, but they could and and I doubt they'll back off from keeping that power.

00;49;16;27 - 00;49;45;05
Jim Rutt
And, of course, then we have the alternative, the the other attractor of the bad in my mind, China, right where the government is, the Westphalian state of China, is way more powerful and more pervasive than any nation state in the West in terms of its pervasive ability to control everything from what you see to what you eat, to how many kids you have and everything else.

00;49;45;05 - 00;50;06;20
Jim Rutt
So I suspect one of the competitions over the next hundred years will be will this decentralize ise multipolar approach that seems to be happening elsewhere prevail or will the monolithic top down with some bottom up is not as monolithic as the cartoon version shows whether that system will prevail, time will tell.

00;50;07;24 - 00;50;29;17
Mark McGrath
Do you think? Like, you know, I remember I was a kid. We lived in West Germany, which doesn't even exist anymore from 1983 to 1986. And my father was an active duty Army officer. And I asked him, I said, Dad, when you were over there in 1985, 86, did you ever think in three years or four years the Berlin Wall would be no more?

00;50;29;17 - 00;50;36;05
Mark McGrath
And then the Soviet Union would would collapse and break up the way it did? Do you ever do you ever think of a scenario like that?

00;50;37;27 - 00;50;59;26
Jim Rutt
And, you know, it is interesting cause I have talked to Russian studies scholars and none of them anticipated it, you know, even in 1988. And people have surveyed the literature and they found like six experts that predicted the near fall of state, and this was out of a thousand. So essentially expert opinion was, you know, no, it would never happen.

00;51;00;05 - 00;51;20;10
Jim Rutt
And of course, our complexity lens tells us just that, that, you know, right tail events happen more often than you think. You know, it's possible that today's Silicon Valley bank failure could lead to the collapse of technologically advanced civilization. I think it's relatively unlikely, but it's possible so the.

00;51;21;08 - 00;51;29;25
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
The weak signals of Philby from if we look back over the last month or two or three months, were they there was anybody tracking this?

00;51;29;25 - 00;51;52;29
Jim Rutt
Was there were the signals? I didn't hear a thing. And of course, on the other hand, I'm not currently involved with the kind of I'm not close to where those signals sort of emerged from. But, you know, we knew we knew there were stresses growing from the, you know, the biggest bubble of all time, which is round the clock right now, decline in value of long term treasury bonds.

00;51;53;08 - 00;52;18;26
Jim Rutt
Well, I heard last night and this morning is that SBB was heavily invested in ten year treasuries and have taken at least a nominal hit. And now, in reality, if they hold those treasuries to maturity, they'll get all their money back. But, you know, banking is always this delicate balance of investing long and and assets short. And you can oh, a bank run is always possible.

00;52;19;04 - 00;52;37;29
Jim Rutt
And and so it's you know, it's not a surprise, actually. And the question is, how much how many other banks also have asset mixes like this don't know. It's not an area I currently work in, but if there's a lot, then there could be contagion. If there isn't, there won't be. And of course the interventions will matter as well.

00;52;37;29 - 00;53;14;27
Jim Rutt
The FDIC closed SBB today and has said that they will fully indemnify the insured accounts. Now, the question is what will they do about the uninsured accounts? During 2008, they ended up indemnifying a number of uninsured accounts as well. And that will be a sign that that there is fear in the air. If you see the FDIC starting to indemnify insured accounts or money market accounts, which are not insured, you know, beyond what the FDIC actually does, insured, FDIC could clearly handle SBB.

00;53;14;27 - 00;53;19;25
Jim Rutt
It's not that big. But if any of the bigger banks start to wobble, that's a different story entirely.

00;53;20;15 - 00;53;28;14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So building on this, how do organizations manage risk in the fat tails of the right side of the in the power loss? What do you recommend? Yeah.

00;53;28;22 - 00;53;51;27
Jim Rutt
This is really a fundamental problem with game, right? You know, which is our status quo very, very difficult for companies to manage fat tail risks. The reason being is that we are locked in this very short term money on money return loop where, you know, your earnings are down $0.03 for the quarter. You get your company stock goes down, you might well get fired.

00;53;52;14 - 00;54;12;00
Jim Rutt
And then there's a second order effect where money managers, people don't understand this so much. But the the competition among money managers is one of the main things that accelerates this hyper short term, this among our companies, because money managers lose their assets if they don't invest in companies that outperform on a relatively short term basis, one, two or three years.

00;54;12;20 - 00;54;36;10
Jim Rutt
And so companies are caught in what we call in the game B literature, a multipolar trap where people are forced into a bad pattern because the other guy is doing it. You know, let's say let's say that your grid operators, let's say, give you an awful lot of good example airlines. Right. You know, there's a competitive airline situation and it's a lot of it's about price.

00;54;36;10 - 00;55;01;25
Jim Rutt
Right. If there were some costs associated with making the planes more robust to solar storms, let's say solar storms are a classic that tail risk the look up the Carrington event I think was 1850 something was a massive solar flare. If would occur today, it would destroy that grid, wipe out, knock planes out of the air, all kinds of stuff.

00;55;03;10 - 00;55;45;07
Jim Rutt
Maybe it's sensible to make planes robust against the Carrington event, but the whole industry would have to agree to do it together. If one, one or two parties decided to make their planes more robust. But the others didn't. They could undercut them on ticket prices, and a once in 150 year event is not something that the financial markets earn money on, money return in general knows how to think about, and hence there the multipolar trap is you can't do the right thing if the other guy also doesn't do the right thing, because doing the wrong thing provides a short term financial advantage in our economy is rife with this, you know, absolutely rife with this

00;55;45;14 - 00;56;15;09
Jim Rutt
in the online space. Everybody's milking the users attention harder and harder with crappier and crappier ads and more and more inflammatory content to keep you on. And the reason is because if they stop, they'll lose market share to the guy that continues doing that. That's why. So they're caught in a multipolar trap. And this is one of the fundamental reasons that game will drive humanity over a cliff, because this is a absolute dynamic of game.

00;56;15;09 - 00;56;24;12
Mark McGrath
And could we say in another way that more people would rather be wrong together than right on their own or not?

00;56;24;14 - 00;56;42;21
Jim Rutt
No, that's a little different thing. But I think more specifically about this is doing the right thing in doing the right thing for the long haul if it doesn't pay off in the time horizon of financial markets can't be done in an late stage financialized game.

00;56;42;21 - 00;56;45;22
Mark McGrath
Well, just thinking in terms of the contagion and stuff that you mentioned, Mike.

00;56;45;23 - 00;57;09;20
Jim Rutt
Yeah, that's true. That's a second order thing. That's like the venture capital market mostly. Yeah, it's about 10% smart people, 90% cheap in the venture capital industry. And that's why they they they regularly drive off cliffs because most of them just follow each other's buttholes, that nose up their buttholes. And so if, if, you know, it's hilarious. But yeah, they are definitely sheep.

00;57;10;14 - 00;57;17;17
Jim Rutt
There's lots of because, you know, you all get fired for making the conventional decision even if it's wrong. Yeah, that's.

00;57;17;17 - 00;57;18;01
Mark McGrath
What I mean.

00;57;18;09 - 00;57;25;18
Jim Rutt
Yeah, that's true in corporate America is, you know, IBM was famous for that, right? Everybody did the same thing because that's how you didn't get fired, right?

00;57;26;21 - 00;57;38;09
Mark McGrath
Well, if one of my favorite Twitter handles to follow is inverse Cramer and apparently Cramer was very bullish on B the other day. Street sweep B fairly recently has.

00;57;39;05 - 00;57;43;13
Jim Rutt
So yeah I've heard that inverse Cramer is actually a perfectly good investment strategy.

00;57;44;11 - 00;57;46;27
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, there's a I think there's an ETF on it actually.

00;57;47;08 - 00;57;51;28
Mark McGrath
They're trying to make one. Are they were they were or they have you know but it's.

00;57;53;01 - 00;57;55;10
Jim Rutt
The main thing you say about Cramer is that he's loud.

00;57;56;04 - 00;57;56;26
Mark McGrath
Oh yeah. Right.

00;57;58;01 - 00;58;06;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
There is a character here. Have you had any guests on to talk about trend falling or different ways to look at the market using?

00;58;06;24 - 00;58;10;15
Jim Rutt
Don't know by definition. Okay, we'll talk about the market at all.

00;58;11;02 - 00;58;13;17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay. Why is that? Just out of curiosity.

00;58;14;02 - 00;58;40;03
Jim Rutt
Not because it's something that I now just find totally boring. I'm not interested in that. My research at Santa Fe Institute was actually about price formation and securities markets. And when I was at Thompson, we had we ran the Thompson financial business, which built out the infrastructure that much of Wall Street used and still uses. And so I used to be very deep on all that, but I'm bored.

00;58;40;03 - 00;58;43;24
Jim Rutt
I got bored with that about 24. And so I don't even look at it, you know.

00;58;44;02 - 00;58;50;12
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It just brings up another question. How about any relationship with anything to Taleb on Antifragile, any of his work?

00;58;50;12 - 00;59;15;12
Jim Rutt
Black Swan I am certainly anti fragility is a very interesting concept, but it's one that gains overused and used inappropriate. You know, something that is antifragile is literally made stronger by having harm done to it, right? Or you know, and the classic example which he does use, you know, he's agreed to come on my show. I need to reach back out to him and get him back, get a book somehow.

00;59;15;12 - 00;59;38;14
Jim Rutt
He's very interesting guy. I loved his early books in particular Black Swan and particularly Fooled by randomness. That's a book that talks about these fat tails. It's all about the fat. They all it's really good. But, you know, so for instance, picking up a heavy weight in the weight room actually produces micro tears on your muscles. And the recovery of those micro tears is what makes your muscles strong.

00;59;38;22 - 01;00;03;08
Jim Rutt
So muscles under the stress of picking up a heavy weight is an example of anti fragility tendon setting. So I'm slightly pudgy wimpy kid through Parris Island is definitely an example of anti fragility they pound the shit out of this poor kid physically and mentally. Probably not like they did in my dad's day or my brother's day because they're a bunch of, you know.

01;00;04;14 - 01;00;28;25
Jim Rutt
But I can imagine Parris Island being all that politically correct. And so, you know, you're getting physical and psychic harm done to you. And guess what? When you come out of it, you are a much stronger and better person for the experience if you make it. It's you know, that's another classic example of anti fragility. I do find people use the term in ways that are not correct and I just find it annoying.

01;00;28;25 - 01;00;45;17
Jim Rutt
So, you know, think carefully before you use the term and if you're somebody else, use the term, see if it actually involves word damage makes you stronger. And if it does and it's anti fragility, if it isn't, it's something else.

01;00;46;11 - 01;00;52;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Here's another one. How about Mandelbrot and the work on misbehavior markets? Any any connection there between you and Santa Fe and.

01;00;52;25 - 01;01;29;07
Jim Rutt
Well, this is this is my own work actually is that a huge amount of the movement in markets is essentially random. And in fact my own work was on the evolution of trading strategies in the complete absence of actual information. And we were is a lot of this is a famous body of work we institute I had my own little part in it that zero information markets in markets that have no actual economic signals at all still have all the same kinds of competitive trading strategies going on.

01;01;29;07 - 01;01;56;03
Jim Rutt
And they have very statistically similar looking trajectories, similar technical patterns, etc., even if there's no market and no economic information at all, just people playing trading games. And I think this is hugely interesting and of course we know that a typical Fortune 500 company, a big company, if you compare the lowest stock price for the year and the highest stock price of the year, it's a big percentage like 30 or 40% of its mean stock price.

01;01;56;11 - 01;02;18;25
Jim Rutt
We know for a fact that the real economic prospects of a Fortune 500 company, it doesn't vary 30% a year. So it's these endogenous trading strategies that produce a shitload of noise in the in the marketplace. In fact I figured out how to mine that make piles of money back in 2003 out of it. But I was too lazy and too bored with it.

01;02;18;25 - 01;02;22;03
Jim Rutt
Even do it even though someone offered me a lot of money to do it. It's boring.

01;02;22;21 - 01;02;27;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
How does it how does how does Brownian motion fit into this? Is this what you're talking about or why now?

01;02;27;16 - 01;02;54;29
Jim Rutt
Well, we're ending emotions. Another kind of randomness, I guess, you know, essentially the way molecule oils in solution bounce around, just sort of physical randomness. It's actually, I think the thing that Einstein got his Nobel Prize for or was weren't as early as one of his four big papers in 1905. Brownian motion and photoelectric effect special relativity. I don't remember what the fourth one was, but yeah, that's just randomness.

01;02;54;29 - 01;03;26;11
Jim Rutt
You know, two things are bouncing off each other. The trading strategies are more interesting because Brownian motion is just physics. Trading strategies are built around anticipation of anticipation of anticipation of anticipation of anticipation, etc., etc. In theory, infinite regress. Because they're their agents, they make strategic decisions and they consider their and they use their guesses in models about the behavior of the other agents to craft their strategies.

01;03;26;20 - 01;03;49;23
Jim Rutt
And so it's way more complex than Brownian motion and important to our work on these zero intelligence markets. It's one of the main drivers of the, you know, the figures and patterns that you see in the markets. And so, you know, my take is, you know, don't be fooled by that stuff because it's just noise. It's fancy noise, but it's still fair.

01;03;49;23 - 01;03;50;16
Jim Rutt
It's just noise.

01;03;51;11 - 01;03;57;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And artificial intelligence, understanding, this type of complexity. Any thoughts on that? Well.

01;03;57;26 - 01;04;03;08
Jim Rutt
I mean, a whole lot of different things, right? Yeah.

01;04;03;08 - 01;04;07;04
Mark McGrath
And start start with chat. That's on everybody's minds.

01;04;07;08 - 01;04;35;02
Jim Rutt
Yeah. It's actually t totally useless to analyze stock market prices. No, it's, it's not smart at all about things like that. It's superpower. Is that it, in my view is that it speaks language amazingly well, which is both its strength and one of the things that makes it a bit dangerous to play with it quite a lot. And as I mentioned, I actually have built a gym rat show chat bot using GPT three, which is a chat stubs underlying thing.

01;04;35;02 - 01;05;03;10
Jim Rutt
I just got access to the API for chatbot itself two days ago. I haven't played with again actually to see what I can do with that. And so. So if you if say for instance, you give it a bunch of fairly garbled text, let's say you took Boyd's hand-drawn slides and transposed them and gave them to Chad GPT and said, Please smooth this out and turn it into a nice essay.

01;05;03;22 - 01;05;32;20
Jim Rutt
It would do a great job on that. It's really good at summarizing, extending, editorializing, copy, editing, things of that ilk. On the other hand, don't trust its facts. And and here's a big insight I had is specifically don't trust its facts because it's so good with language. You know, as I mentioned, both my father and my brother were in law enforcement for their careers.

01;05;32;29 - 01;05;57;11
Jim Rutt
And so I learned a little bit about how detectives work. And detectives are pretty good at spotting liars and that is because liars, when they lie, they don't speak the way they do. When they speak the truth, they tend to put too much detail in strange places. And of course of us who are parents. I know the same thing about our teenagers rates, but Chad does not know what's lying.

01;05;57;11 - 01;06;24;27
Jim Rutt
So it's lies are linguistically to its truths and therefore they work around our human lie detectors and hence the complete bullshit that they make up. Sounds exceedingly believable, which makes it very dangerous. If people don't know that that's what it's doing. And this is this is really important stuff, actually. You know.

01;06;24;27 - 01;06;44;25
Mark McGrath
I was going to say, I, Chad, myself, like, you know. Right, right. Of Introductory biography for Mark McGrath, Chief Learning Officer of AGL X. You know, I put my LinkedIn tag for it to go and it gave her a glowing biography that was not me at all.

01;06;45;12 - 01;07;08;03
Jim Rutt
I did the same thing and, and it was like born the wrong year in the wrong state, wrong college, wrong major, wrong employers. I mean, it was just all wrong. But on the other hand, as someone who just vaguely knew me, it would sound plausible because it wasn't ridiculous stuff. It was just another one. Interesting one. I asked it, who are the most prominent guests on the Jim Ross show?

01;07;08;09 - 01;07;35;15
Jim Rutt
And they gave me like eight. And all of them were plausible, just the kind of people I might have on the show. But only one of them was somebody that was actually on the show. Even though I know that it has digested the transcripts of my shows and I think this is also an important point on the way these neural nets work, is they're kind of a statistical not exactly statistical, but kind of like statistical extraction of what's in the world.

01;07;35;26 - 01;07;53;07
Jim Rutt
And so I, I would strongly suspect that they would not get well-known facts wrong. Yeah. Ask it. What's the capital of France? They would tell you, Piers, give me a short bio on George Washington or Bill Gates. It's going to be pretty accurate. But when you get to marginal stuff, out on the edge is like you're in my bios.

01;07;54;03 - 01;08;22;16
Jim Rutt
It's a knows ranges or small towns or obscure historical events or well documented where it'll just make stuff up. That's the nature, literally the nature of the neural net technology that they're using. So the warning on that is the language skills of them are amazing and we can use them in a nice way. But don't depend on the facts, particularly about more marginal occurrences or people or things.

01;08;23;04 - 01;08;46;13
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. Hey, Jim, do you mind if we ask you about the podcasting? You've been doing this longer than we have. And I mentioned earlier that I in an Uber yesterday in Houston and I discovered the Uber driver had a podcast. So everybody has a podcast. How is your SO successful? What's what's your magic sauce? What are you doing different than everybody else?

01;08;46;13 - 01;09;17;17
Jim Rutt
I'm just myself and I don't bullshit around. I get guests on, I just jump right in and get to the meat of the matter. And I attempt to operate at a very specific intellectual level, which is seriously intellectual, but not such that a person needs to be an expert to understand it. So I think I've have an unusual decision, editorial decision, about where I place my content.

01;09;17;24 - 01;09;49;29
Jim Rutt
For instance, say unlike some other podcasts, do almost no bio on the on the guest zero. I basically read a one or two sentence intro and then we're just off into the content and and we're doing a pretty high level. On the other hand, I get a lot of feedback, my guests in my audience saying that I'm doing a good job of not letting the guest speak in jargon or go down technical rabbit holes, etc., and make them provide tangible examples of what they're talking about.

01;09;50;09 - 01;10;13;24
Jim Rutt
So I try to I deal with hard things and I try to make it accessible to an audience of smart but not expert people. And it turns out there's a fairly number of smart but not expert people in the world who are looking for this kind of content. So I think that's that's that's my brand identity. And I believe it's why my podcast is, you know, been more successful than.

01;10;13;24 - 01;10;17;18
Mark McGrath
Most and you pull from so many corners to pull from it.

01;10;17;25 - 01;10;43;01
Jim Rutt
So my own kind of, very I'm a generalist. I'm not a specialist in anything. Right. And I have I've read 6000 books in my life, something like that. And So I know lots of strange things and I am interested in lots of things. And so I also do have a very wide reach of the kinds of folks I have on, but I don't compromise the level.

01;10;43;03 - 01;11;00;27
Jim Rutt
Right. So it may be something that I don't usually follow, but it's somebody who's really a top thinker in the in the domain. And so that's, you know, so I suppose this is in marketing 1 to 1 is, you know, figure out who you are, then actually be that.

01;11;00;27 - 01;11;01;25
Mark McGrath
So imagine that.

01;11;05;17 - 01;11;28;08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's been a great conversation, some some thoughts from from us when, you know, we're listening to your show and we're looking at new ideas and going back to avoid looking across different disciplines. What we've discovered is that these a lot of these experts don't know what's happening in other fields. And I think that's what you're helping others make.

01;11;28;08 - 01;11;53;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
The connection through is seeing what's going on and the similarities across different disciplines. I think that's what John Boyd was doing as well. You know, we've looked at constructor theory construct a law, we've looked at active inference. I think, you know, and Seth may have talked about that with pacing inference as well. There's so many overlapping concepts and ideas out there that I don't think the deep experts are seeing.

01;11;53;22 - 01;11;58;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And I think that's what you're bringing to your audience, is making those connections. Do you feel the same way?

01;12;00;20 - 01;12;23;12
Jim Rutt
I don't think I probably set out that as the intent, but I suspect that is happening, and particularly the fact that I tend to use the complexity lens on everything I see. So that provides a unifying principle that people can use. See how neuroscience and economics and radical social change and military strategy are all amenable to a single analytical frame.

01;12;23;12 - 01;12;47;01
Jim Rutt
I call the complexity lines. So I think I think it's fair to say that that's an emergent result. I'd also point out the Santa Fe Institute is famous for its radical, transdisciplinary. You know, research team might include a physicist, a biologist, an anthropologist, a political scientist and a mathematician, or to look. Cormac McCarthy Yeah, my good friend. Cormac Wright.

01;12;47;24 - 01;13;13;24
Jim Rutt
You know, he's he's a writer and to some degree an architect. And he participates in our scientific meetings. And he's a real asset. Let me tell you, this is one smart dude. And so I do think that S.B. Institute and other intentionally cross-disciplinary scientific enterprises are quite important. You're right. You know, much of academic research is very, very narrow.

01;13;13;27 - 01;13;39;25
Jim Rutt
I sometimes joke they know more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing. But I do think we need the generalists, we need the cross-disciplinary. And and yeah, that's probably why I found the Santa Fe Institute. I fit in good out there of a general ist. I could hold my own on almost anything, but only an expert in a very small number of things.

01;13;40;19 - 01;13;58;15
Mark McGrath
It's evident when you go there to it's it pulls from all walks of life because everybody's connecting on things that are universally true for everybody, not synthetic differences like, you know, were talking about politics or whatever. Like, like people are able to come together and work constructively on things.

01;13;59;12 - 01;14;25;25
Jim Rutt
And that's, of course, important. Something we're starting to lose in this country, in this world, is to be able to put aside our differences and focus on our agreements, you know, like I was amazed and then saddened by the fact that parents today would be more upset if one of their children married someone of the opposite political party than of the opposite religion or race or almost any other factor you can imagine.

01;14;26;21 - 01;14;49;10
Jim Rutt
I mean, that's to my mind, they very dangerous. Like I just reading a great book about Julius Caesar in the final days of Julius Caesar's life. 1200 pages. Oh, by God. But I just finished reading it and not for my podcast and for my own edification. And and and I think we're seeing some very and the author made this point in the last chapter.

01;14;50;04 - 01;15;08;13
Jim Rutt
This movement in our world today than our political. The other political side is not just wrong, but evil is. What probably was the cause of the end of the Roman Republic? And it could bite us in the ass too, if we're not careful.

01;15;09;00 - 01;15;12;00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So how do we correct? How do we do we girls get on a good course.

01;15;13;02 - 01;15;22;19
Jim Rutt
That's a I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm writing a whole essay for Quetelet coming up fairly soon that will address some of this but it's a very.

01;15;22;19 - 01;15;38;15
Mark McGrath
Narrow I mean do you find like these kind of conversations where we're talking about things like neuroscience and other things that that are gender driven and universal principles or founded in things that are universally true, that that gives us a better opportunity maybe to bring.

01;15;38;15 - 01;16;17;11
Jim Rutt
People together I would say our game world, for instance, there's essentially no team red team blue political talk. And we have people from across the political spectrum all the way on both sides from, you know, Marxists to alt right people. And because, as you say, we're talking about things that those opinion oriented aspects are transcend. Right. And I think if we can get more people to think about the world in real and less and less in tribal terms and and realize that while your preferences are legitimate, they're not universal.

01;16;17;11 - 01;16;46;17
Jim Rutt
You know, you know that I think abortion is murder. I think abortion is not murder is an opinion. Right. And if you recognize it's an opinion and it's not law of nature, we have a much better chance of being able to build a plural, pluralistic society. In fact, one of the key of Game B is the idea of coherent pluralism, which is that the Game B community will agree on a relatively small list of parameters.

01;16;46;17 - 01;17;13;09
Jim Rutt
Mostly that we're building a society to improve human well-being within the constraints of planetary boundaries. But how people choose to do that is up to them. And I do believe that one of the bigger challenges we'll have is shaking loose of our unwillingness to accept other people making different for a boss. And that's a skill that I think it'll be very important to build the years ahead.

01;17;13;16 - 01;17;31;24
Jim Rutt
And I do like your your perspective that focusing on that which is universally true or demonstrable is a good way to get away from these parochial opinion based divisions, particularly, we take on the big challenges together.

01;17;31;24 - 01;17;51;20
Mark McGrath
Yeah, I think that they're the value that we endeavor to create. And I and I know that you're on the same path in that sense. You know, it's a as you say, it's a decentralized bottom up approach. And maybe that's the way I get people to focus on things that are true for everybody. And we can maybe bring more people together than the sort of the top down hammering.

01;17;52;22 - 01;18;23;14
Jim Rutt
Who wants to be hammered? Nobody. Right. And if you're fighting for control of the top, then, yeah, you'll kill the other guy. But if I can have my village, we do X and you can have your village and you do Y. And as long as we're willing to tolerate each other's existence, we can both cooperate. But if it's a top down world, only one top, it's actually that actually brings up in my my little rut isms, which is I'm not willing to have planetary until we have at least five planets.

01;18;24;25 - 01;18;25;15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
How much?

01;18;26;25 - 01;18;49;28
Jim Rutt
I like that for the same reason. I think a planetary governance is too dangerous. It's too much worth fighting for. Now, we do need to have planetary coordination. But as you guys know, and it's the game, the world knows that complexity, science knows coordination does not require a single big man at the top. Right? Right. Could make all the decisions we need to.

01;18;49;28 - 01;18;55;03
Jim Rutt
Protect our planetary boundaries without having one boss, one ring to rule them all.

01;18;55;24 - 01;18;56;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah.

01;18;56;14 - 01;19;20;14
Mark McGrath
When you went about setting up game B or talking about and you had a series of meetings in Stone Virginia, correct? Correct. That. So how, how did you reach out to the people initially that, you know, maybe you're pulling from all walks of life or multidisciplinary? What was the case that you were making to them to come together in Virginia and and work these things out and talk about these things?

01;19;21;00 - 01;19;42;24
Jim Rutt
It was actually very organic. I wrote a 65 page paper and sent it to one friend of mine, and he read it and said, Hmm, I think we should send this to somebody else. And so with my permission, he sent it to a third person. And then the three of us started talking by email and maybe Skype, I don't even remember.

01;19;42;24 - 01;20;03;12
Jim Rutt
And then we said, maybe it ought to be some other people involved in this conversation. So we just brought in some others from different disciplines and different expertize, and then we were fairly quickly got to a group of about a dozen. We said, Hey, let's convene in person. So we did. And then, you know, we basically had five meetings over a period of nine months and the group continued to grow.

01;20;03;21 - 01;20;11;13
Jim Rutt
And so it was very, very organic and not at all designed, I guess I would say.

01;20;13;03 - 01;20;20;27
Mark McGrath
What were the biggest, you know, from those series of meetings? What were the biggest learning points that you would share and say made it all worthwhile?

01;20;21;07 - 01;20;53;10
Jim Rutt
Well, there's there were numerous but one above all else. And I say there's one insight that the game movement has had so far that's worth memorializing, is that many social change people's focus either on personal change or institutional change. Right. And I think our key insight is the to have to spiral together. The new institutions, frankly, can't be made by people with the old values and the old characteristics.

01;20;53;22 - 01;21;17;00
Jim Rutt
At the same time, people who change their values and characteristic if the institutions around them aren't supporting that change, it's going to be very, very hard for them to stick to it. If all the signals they receive all day, every day, say you're a more important person if you drive a Porsche, then you're going to believe that it's going to be very difficult for you to resist the temptation to go out and buy a Porsche after you to get some money at the same time.

01;21;17;01 - 01;21;39;18
Jim Rutt
And so so the institution, the institutional change and the the new values, new virtues, new ways of thinking about the world to spiral together. And this dance is going to be very difficult, very intricate, and getting good at this spiral of personal change and new institutions is going to be the superpower that brings Game B and to be.

01;21;41;08 - 01;21;57;20
Mark McGrath
What we like spirals. I know, I know. I those two. Yeah, we like we like spirals in a couple of senses. One, of course, Boyd's conceptual spiral is a is a big, big, a big influence on us. So we really like that approach.

01;21;58;26 - 01;22;06;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So Jim, this has been an awesome conversation. Is there anything that we can help you with or any any questions to us that you may have?

01;22;07;01 - 01;22;19;09
Jim Rutt
Oh, well, just really fun is, as I said, I really did my looking at Boyd back in 2013 a little bit in 2014 are more current sources that would be worth taking a look at.

01;22;19;15 - 01;22;23;29
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Why don't we do this? Why don't we go to Quantico? You're here in Virginia. We can meet up there, maybe for lunch.

01;22;24;10 - 01;22;26;04
Jim Rutt
Yeah, let's don't do that. In fact, my.

01;22;26;09 - 01;22;34;28
Mark McGrath
Be happy to take you in to take you into the archives and really show you what he was, what he was working on. And you'll you'll be able to bust those myths quick.

01;22;35;01 - 01;23;07;27
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yes. So some of the guests will have on here. We've already recorded with them. Charlie Crossman goes back into post-World War to Japan, takes us back through how American management was instilled in there, through the military use military. So we get into the Toyota production system and then he takes us through his experience looking at the archives from a lean perspective and seeing how John Boyd brought a lot of the Toyota production system into his thinking and where some of the lean thinkers actually have it wrong, which is kind of nice.

01;23;08;07 - 01;23;31;02
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So Charlie is a singer prize winner. You know, we have doctors on board looking at this from factors and better decision making inside of the inside of surgical teams. You know, with with Dave Snowden looking at it from a complexity lens as well. But going back into the archives is really where you get to see what Boyd was looking at.

01;23;31;02 - 01;23;52;27
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Cybernetics, quantum theory, all that. That's the source of a lot of the stuff that Mark and I are talking about. And then we're trying, you know, John Boyd left it open for all of us to kind of evolve. And that's what I believe you're doing with your show. So there's a there's a great connection there. And I believe if you want to go on there and take a look around with us, happy to take you up there.

01;23;52;27 - 01;23;58;17
Jim Rutt
It might do it, but well do it. Turns out my parents are buried at the veterans cemetery. Quantico.

01;23;58;29 - 01;24;00;09
Mark McGrath
Oh, in Quantico. Yeah.

01;24;00;12 - 01;24;07;24
Jim Rutt
Okay. And does my dad's Marine Corps connection and. Yeah, I haven't been up there in a while, so give me be excuse to do that. Do.