The New New Artificial Intelligence Game of Interaction and Isolation with John Robb | Ep 40

Ever wondered who's truly in control of AI?

In our dynamic conversation with John Robb, we unmask the gripping evolution of artificial intelligence and large language models, shedding light on the shifting landscape of technology control. As we traverse the boundless world of AI, we touch upon the potential implications of these models on external environments, revealing the potential risks and opportunities that lie within.

Brace yourself for a thought-provoking exploration as we delve into the possible threat to civilization posed by a centralized approach to AI. We take you on a journey through the impact of network tribalism on traditional decision-making models, the role of technology in modern warfare, the decline of military recruitment, and the chilling ascent of cold wars. John’s riveting insights illuminate the gravity of these issues and the importance of a decentralized AI approach.

Our dialogue culminates by examining the future of creative production under the influence of AI, and its potential to capture and preserve our world in an expansive neural network. We ponder the potential of AI tutors to mediate education, the need for an outlet for creativity, and even the existence of extraterrestrial life. As we journey together through these fascinating topics, we promise to provide fresh perspectives on the current state and future of AI.

Don't miss this captivating exploration of the future of technology!

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

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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

Mark McGrath: 0:57

Well, john, thanks for coming back on no Way Out. You're our first repeat guest and you were on episode number five, and a lot has happened since then and a lot of the things that you discuss frequently, particularly around the idea of the technologies that we use daily being used as a means to shift and alter our orientations. Now, where do you see us now from where you saw us at the beginning of the year, when we spoke in January?

John Robb: 1:26

Oh, wow, sure, exactly what I said back then.

John Robb: 1:33

You know, the funny part is that most of the stuff I was talking about for the last three, four, five years how AI would roll out, and I mean the way it would operate and, as opposed to the vision that AI would be human like and have a singular consciousness, all of its impacts on society and everything else are pretty much in line with early writing.

John Robb: 1:59

So when it does actually happen, I'm like, okay, you know, it's not exciting anymore, it's not really worth writing about and I let everyone else catch up writing about it. Yeah, but the AI space is developing pretty quick and it's pretty much a dominant space because the large language models, this kind of meta construct that kind of condenses everything that we know and we talk about, we teach in terms of how we use the language. It's like built into the grammar and use of words, is going to be the new interface kind of the thing behind any kind of visual interface you have. It's going to be the driver and big changes in computing and big changes in technology happen when the interface changes. So you go to GUI changes right, which is a graphical user interface when we went to Windows. So you know we're going to see a lot of apps develop and built on top of that, and control of that really is the big battle that's going to be a huge battle.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:08

So who has control right now? Who do you see taking control?

John Robb: 3:12

Well, I mean based on what I saw with OpenAI, when it was like talking to the Senate and the Senate, you know, completely clueless as to what was going on.

John Robb: 3:21

You know where they had Sam Holtzman and they were like putting their hands on his shoulder saying, hey, guy, take care of us. He said I will take care of you, just keep on supporting me and I'll make sure it doesn't go bad for us. But yeah, it's mostly corporate. It's pretty much out of it, in part because the government doesn't have the data or access to data is not allowed to legally to get the data that you know Facebook and OpenAI have had access to. And if you talk to anyone at the senior in the NSA, they go man, if I had anything like what Facebook had, it would have been different story. So, yeah, it's corporate and they're proceeding ahead because they you know if it can be built, it will be built. Google was ahead and they claim they're being, you know so, responsible and that's slowing them down and they're losing their edge, losing their lead, and they're dumbing down all their products, when they do, release them and fouling them and not pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Mark McGrath: 4:32

You've been talking about these patterns for years and one of the things, of course, with John Boyd.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 4:37

Yeah, we'll just continue here. So John Mark was asking more about the. You know the connection back to the patterns that Boyd has talked about and you brought up large language models and you know there's a. There's some new talk about naturalistic approaches to artificial intelligence, using what we know from neuroscience and play on that towards AI potential dangers or opportunities with that. In this landscape right now, with large language models dominating, things like chat, gpt and I think it's called BARD in your mind, is there a next level of artificial intelligence that's coming down to pike, or are we kind of stuck in this passive approach to building out these world models and then trying to use large language models to understand what's going on in the external environment?

John Robb: 5:24

Right. So large language models are already going to multi-mode, meaning that they're adding pictures and video. So you'll take a picture and say ask the model, you know what's going on here, right, and it will describe what's going on and it could identify who's in it and it could do all that stuff and put it into text that then can be utilized within the models. So you'll see more and more capabilities glommed down to the existing large language model. So the large language model makes it I mean, it's really the driver here because it allows you to do natural language processing or natural language programming, and that just takes a lot of logic rather than knowledge of a specific language. You know computer language and makes it accessible. So you could build amazing things using that. You know natural language programming or prompting, and that it's also accessible by the delay user.

John Robb: 6:32

Then you'll start adding. Then we'll quickly see audio interactions radically improve, right, and so you'll have two-way discourse added onto the system and then augmented reality, which is going to kind of complete the loop. So Apple's VR stuff was just first foray into it. It looks like AR but it's actually VR and that'll allow complete manipulation of the visual environment and yeah, so we're going to see these things just get bigger and bigger and glommed down and multimodal and become the computing platform of choice for almost everything we're doing. It makes a lot of sense and even neural networks in AI are going to make it into the basic core processes that we see in basic graphics work or basic work that was typically done by the CPU. So you'll see AI cores in the CPU. We'll see AI cores and we're already seeing AI cores in the graphics processors, and that's a radical speed increase where a fraction of the energy tiny, tiny fraction, like a 1, 1,000 of the energy for the same function.

John Robb: 7:53

So, you're talking about the processing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 7:56

We're looking at processing as one aspect of this, and the other aspect would be. I know a lot of people are thinking about what type of jobs are going to be lost or created in this, and from my experience I learned Fortran 77 back in the day I learned a little bit about C++. I didn't do a lot of programming in my life. I have coached a lot of programmers in the agile space, and what we're seeing now is an impact where one programmer, one software developer, has the ability to do maybe 3x to 10x what they were doing in the past with access through our LLMs, if you will. Is that what you're seeing as well? Is there a bigger factor in that? And then, what impact does that have on jobs going forward in the software space or the technology space?

John Robb: 8:38

Yeah, I'm not too worried about the software space. I mean more productive programmers is not a bad thing. I mean, the whole world could be upgraded with software and there's an endless demand or appetite for software that does stuff, and the fact that it's making it easier with certain types of AI functions. If that's incorporated into the product you're delivering, it would take thousands of man hours to do exactly what that AI is doing, let alone the productivity of the programmer and actually getting things done. So software is not going to be a problem. It'll start to be a problem in other areas, particularly in driving.

John Robb: 9:27

Autonomous AI drivers right now are already better than at least the Tesla. One is already better than the standard driver. It's just not perfect yet. So there's complaints about it. But given that almost everybody driving a fully upgraded Tesla car is not driving at all anymore they barely ever touched the steering wheel the fact that it's not like resulting in mass death or an accident a week or something like that where somebody's getting killed, is a pretty strong indicator that the software works. And then there's talk about you know, I'm building another super computing AI to finalize it. Go that last extra couple percent in terms of quality. So yeah, driving is in the biggest job category. Right, you wipe that out. Yeah, there's what? Two and a half million people that are going to be out of work? Oh, wow.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:28

But that doesn't absolve anybody from looking around left and right. When they crosswalk right, they're on their iPhone when they walk across crosswalk now.

John Robb: 10:35

Oh, the AI, let's check them. No, no, that's the whole thing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:37

Okay.

John Robb: 10:39

Yeah, the AI will be. The drivers are going to be protecting them.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:44

So we can go around Clueless. Then we can walk around with low situational awareness and be protected by AI. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, John. Yeah, well, I think it's good.

John Robb: 10:55

I mean, once you do autonomous driving and it becomes safer than regular human beings driving, the insurance premiums for driving yourself are going to go through the roof and then it will make it really expensive to drive yourself. And then the fleet car systems will be really, really inexpensive and they'll be ubiquitous and on call all the time, everywhere, and so it's going to be like why should I spend any money on a car when I can get one anytime I want, within a couple of minutes, and I can do other stuff and I don't have to worry about it? So once you go fleet cars, then you don't have to build the four doors sedan that everyone needs for the weekend. Right, you don't need it for your commute, but you need it for the weekend. So then you can start going.

John Robb: 11:39

Okay, here's a single car or single occupancy electric vehicle. We can fit five times as many on the road as we do with a standard car, and it changes the whole dynamic in cities. There's no parking in cities anymore. Yeah, a lot of big changes, big social changes if this thing is rolled out fast.

Mark McGrath: 12:01

John, you talked about in one of your more recent global gorillas reports about how the academic body of knowledge is getting consumed in this order, completely by these models, and that AI was outperforming TAs, filing exams, writing exams. And I guess it goes back to what we always talk about, john Boyd people, ideas and things. Now that we have this thing that's able to replicate our body of knowledge, what do you think that means for the human in going forward in their endeavors and their learning and education?

John Robb: 12:38

Oh, I think actually it's a great thing. No, it's an amazing thing, but it has a big danger associated with it. You say, okay, so if we can model all of what an intelligent or educated human being is supposed to learn and what we think about things right now across all the variety of subjects possible even the specialty subjects, if you add specialty data and information that's great. But what it does imply, though, is that we can create tutors. We can leverage that information by creating teachers that interact with everybody at that level and like 24-7 teachers, tutors that are always around and always helping you and always making it possible for you to learn.

John Robb: 13:30

I think I've seen it in terms of that educational value always tends to be skewed in tutoring's favor. Tutoring is like much more effective than industrial classrooms, and so it's possible and it's really close. It's only like three, four, five years out, I think, before we start seeing AI tutors that will walk you through almost any topic all the time. You can attach it to a kid and they can talk to him, and it will be a tutor for life. I mean it's potentially everybody could have one, I mean all over the world in their natural language, and it's like you've read at Diamond Age, right With the young ladies. Illustrator. Primer.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:14

Okay, so Diamond.

John Robb: 14:15

Age is a science fiction book from the early 2000s, I think. And who was the guy? Neil Stevenson. And so he wrote it and it was about a world where you had this. There was this book that would teach people and they started distributing it, but it wasn't nearly as capable as what we have available now because it didn't include a full on AI. So imagine having a teacher for everybody, a tutor that can bring top notch stuff. Now the danger with this and the danger with all this AI and everything associated with it, is that networks tend to centralize, they tend to aggregate power. Yeah, it tends to only be one at the end of the day, and that can be dominated, and there's a tendency in current culture to use that level of domination to kind of control what people should think and what should be approved knowledge and what's disapproved knowledge, which is that long night narrow orthodoxy that I was worried about. So that's why I've taken an open source approach to a lot of this.

Mark McGrath: 15:54

So more Tron for science fiction fans, right With Tron Freezin, opens the system versus Matrix, matrix being that there's a centralization to the point where you're completely controlled.

John Robb: 16:08

Yeah, I mean, if the corporations and the governments that have a hand and creating this tutor that rolls out on a global basis, the ones in charge right now probably won't make it amenable to any type of religion. And how would it incorporate religion? Would it even want to? Would it want to? It would teach a set of values, and values are always part of the educational experience, and the only way to ensure that there is like a safety valve for civilization as a whole is that we use open source tools, open source AIs, and we build these things, these tutors and other tools that we use on that open source base, which will allow a diversity of what we do, and this isn't something for some small group to do. It's going to take a lot of work to do these things correctly. So if you wanted an Islamic AI that's teaching kids, if you want a Christian AI that's teaching kids all the various denominations if they're big enough, they can afford it you should be able to do it. If you want a conservative one based on traditional values, if you want to whether it's pro-US and not US was problematic. That's what I'm writing about now is the idea of undermining patriotism and nationalism by destroying the tribal story. You should be able to have that outlet.

John Robb: 17:38

But there's lots of great open source AIs out. There's large language models from one came out of Metta and there's others that are out there. They can run on your desktop. I mean they don't have to. I mean you should be able to get a cloud instance. But yeah, I mean, if we want some kind of, if we want a diversity or true diversity, intellectual diversity, I mean of ideas going forward and the ability to innovate, meaning take the outlier position and promote it right, the entrepreneurial approach, we're going to have to have that open source valve Because otherwise it's all going to be locked down and it's a maximal. What people are pushing right now at the central level is a maximal rule set, not a met. Like the internet worked because it was a minimal rule set TCP, ip, ip, everywhere, it's just like simple. Everybody got it and what you want to do locally, it's up to you. Everything that you was hiring the stack and what we're seeing, at least nationally, is a tentative have a maximal rule set imposed using technology.

Mark McGrath: 18:44

So that everything is bound to read Everything is rule laid in. Everything is exactly as whoever's in charge wants it to be.

John Robb: 18:55

Right. Well, that body of knowledge is being pruned constantly, so they'll prune it at the origin what data gets input and the takes that the AI has on the different historical elements, what's going on in the news, the values that are put in, all that stuff, if done centrally at the globalist level right now, it's probably something that most people wouldn't agree with, they wouldn't buy into.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 19:24

John, on a continuum where we look at open source on one end and maybe more of a centralized approach on the other end. Who would you place on the left end right now and who would you place on the right end? And I'll give you a good example Elon Musk. Where does he fit in that continuum and the way he's thinking?

John Robb: 19:39

Yeah, he's a little bit towards the open source side, but not nearly far enough. I think he should have open sourced his AI work, using Twitter as a basis and any kind of other data that he could get, and give everybody that's participating in a share in the upside, and we have the crypto that would make that possible very, very easily. It's like crypto was kind of like laying the railroad tracks and without a train, and AI is potentially the train that needs to have that kind of railway network to really shine. It's that I'm willing to give data into an AI to make it better, work on it, making it better if I have some participation in the upside, and hopefully that's there.

John Robb: 20:30

Open AI and those guys are all on the far left, corporate side or whatever. I don't want to say even left, but they're on the corporate side. Microsoft is kind of in the middle. They're just rolling out tools as fast as possible. They don't really care. Google is probably at the farthest in terms of corporate control and restraint Meta because they were behind and their AI team wasn't really too impressed with the tools that are out there now. They're not as human, like and conscious as they'd like them to be, which I think is a pain. Hope, yeah, they open sourced their stuff, so Meta opens sourced their AI.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 21:11

Okay. So on this continuum, what I heard from you earlier is a potential threat to tribalism, to some of the negative sides of things. It's going to be on the towards the side of the spectrum or continuum, that is, more of a centralized approach. Is that what I'm hearing?

John Robb: 21:29

I think the long term threat to civilization is a centralized approach, and the tendency is that people will say things are so disordered. We face so many dangers from the permacrist both political permacrises, the environmental, to the pandemic resurgence, all that other stuff that we're going to have to have a centralized approach. We're going to have to control this and that, control values and the difference between an AI moderating conversations at a national scale or global scale versus a team of people to do it. It's like imagine all those censorship organizations in Stalin's Russia and Astazi in East Germany, and they would have rooms full of bureaucrats Just to look at a tiny fraction of the conversations and things people are doing, watch what they're doing, make sense of what they're doing in photos, make sense of what they're saying.

John Robb: 22:26

I redirect them, reeducate them, punish them all without much tweaking. Once it's out there, it's trained up to a sufficient level it could do it and there's no way you're going to get around it. If that's the core tool, so I can see why people will want it, because they want to say I don't want as much chaos as there is, but I have no problem with people disagreeing. So it's like, okay, some set disagrees, is that often?

Mark McGrath: 23:02

how a dictator or tyrant comes to power is that people are just fed up and they want to have the chaos go away or they'll accept a Franco or a Hitler or whoever, because they just think, well, somebody's in charge and finally getting stuff done or whatever. And then all the things that come with it you don't really pay attention to or you don't really realize until it's too late.

John Robb: 23:26

Yeah, that's the classic Napoleon right. So after the terror he comes into a riot in Paris and feels with it with a great shot. It's funny, I hit it a lot.

Mark McGrath: 23:37

So brought up lately that you offer to go back and look at the French Revolution, because you know, the French Revolution comes in and makes this sweeping change and everybody thinks everything's going to be better. And then the people that make this sweeping change, they can't get along, they can't agree, and then the people that started it get their heads left off and then, as you say, napoleon emerges and Europe is subjugated to a tyranny, in a war, decade or so, until Waterloo. Do you see now that the medium has changed? Right, but the patterns are still there. I mean, do you envision things like that to occur?

John Robb: 24:13

Yeah, I mean this is like more patterns now than ever and more complex patterns now than ever, and so the patterns approaches are really the only way to even look at this. I mean the difference between somebody who looks at technology and makes predictions and based on you know what's possible with the technological development between them, and somebody who's good is that the person that's good actually looks at all the social elements and how it interacts with everything. And this you know, the economic demand and that would be driving it, the social pushback that would occur, the social goodness that would zoom because of its introduction. So you have to look at that wider thing.

Mark McGrath: 24:55

Well, I was saying you know sticking on that it was the original question, because I direct myself, yeah a narrative that a tyranny can emerge amidst people saying that, look, I'm going to turn a blind eye to whatever they're doing behind the scenes. But you know, the lights are back on, or the money is worth something now, or the economy is thriving. You know, when I was a kid in West Germany we had a cleaning lady in our house and my mother asked her how could this happen? And she says well, you know, before Hitler we were eating turnips, and then when Hitler came, we had oranges, which was something that we never had before, right? So people become seduced by these tyrannies.

Mark McGrath: 25:32

It's a lot like what we talked about the other day with Michael Ashley around his book. Neuromind is that the? I've heard Elon call it a mind virus or whatever. But people just become, as you say, seduced by these things and then they give a pass to things that they otherwise would not give a pass to. It's we've used with the Boyd words, you know, schrepphunkt and Alfthrag and finger schmissing of fuel, but the one that you've used before in your writing is Gleik Schaltung. You know, maybe that's something to talk about and make people aware of, about the people aware of, about that, because that's kind of that's how. That's how people get unified, right? No-transcript.

John Robb: 26:12

Yeah, right, yeah, unified alignment in a network world, that's like getting everyone to Sign on to agreement with the common enemy. And so you in the common enemy list, you know, keeps on growing. And you know, eventually the I mean the, the thing that happened in Germany, as you know, kind of as a example of that, using glideschulting, a common enemy as a, you know, unified way of thinking, as a way to kind of, you know, keep people in line, is that you got to keep on increasing the, the degree of threat and the immediacy of the threat, because people come, become a nerd to it, they become, you know, desensitized to it, and so, and then number of threats grows and eventually you're at war with everybody in New York's, terminating your own population and mess. It's like it's a self-defeating, self-limiting method and we're certainly on it. You know we went from Anti-Trump to anti-Putin to Cold War with Russia. Let's go to, you know, start a Cold War with China. You know it's like that kind of thing just and you know Maga was a kind of a riot is disorderly influence, becomes a insurgent threat.

John Robb: 27:41

I tell you know, and you know the ubiquitous terrorist rat, it's like everything is like becoming an enemy and it, you know goes back to that, the whole network tribalism approach. You know traditional tribes, you know you have this positive narrative that you know explains why you're together and While you're better together in the future and what you've done in the past, that has been noble and good and it empowers you like, it brings you together and the current Narratives for these network tribes is all you know. Isn't this enemy evil and we? We should all band together to fight it and and let's spend all our time talking about that evil, even though we can't agree about what we do. Once we won kind of the negative narrative, is everything now Stominate?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 28:35

so we can see the effects in a lot of places. Now. I mean, you got this permit crisis that that's happening all around us. You know, I don't know what's gonna happen in 2024, but something bad's coming. Yeah, look at the with the. You know what? What happens in our environment? One of the things that that struck me in the last couple weeks is confidence in the US military. We all served here Back of the day. I used to be extremely high. Now we're looking at 60% confidence level for the military towards the military and I mean there's there's all kinds of other Cascading events that are happening as a result of all this. You got to get athletes that are kneeling.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 29:12

This goes back to the narrative. You know, to me, I just spent some time up at Gettysburg with my children and I saw Barbie than the same Barbie in the same day, right. So you know, taking them back to the narrative, our history and understanding the Civil War a little bit, and then watching Barbie that night. I tell you where they gravitated towards and that was the, the Gettysburg right. That that's the best learning. Unfortunately, that's not happening in most of society. You're watching Barbie and learning that we have to hate things about the way we're brought up so great. So many things happening in our environment right now. John, I want to know if there's anything that comes to your mind as far as Some of the outcomes of this tribalism.

John Robb: 29:53

Yeah, you know I, as long as we see a trend towards states becoming more Powerful and running alternatives To the central narrative, I think things are gonna be okay. As long as we have escaped valves like open-source software, I mean, you know, if we're in a complex environment, that means that you can't plan Solutions centrally. There can't be just one or two solutions. That always fail, always. So the best approach is to have lots of experiments underway, and If you had 50 experiments in the United States, each trying different approaches, how do you live and survive and thrive in a complex environment? That's better than just one, mended and that includes values and includes you know what you think, you tell yourself about. You know Each other, about why you're together. You know the military is having problems, you know recruitment and the like, in part because we've Degraded and denigrated the one of the core decision-making models. For you know our, our nation, and that's that tribal model.

John Robb: 31:05

The traditional tribal decision-making model was like the first one. It's like part of that Achilles, timon network, their tribes, institutions, markets, networks, each are. You know major categories of Social decision-making. Tribes was the first. You know the earlier ones. You know decision-making systems never go away.

John Robb: 31:26

So tribes is you know it provides you cohesion as a group, even a even a, you know, diverse, extended group, like a nation, like a 350 million people, like we have now, and that it means, you know, if you do it right, if you build this tribal narrative about why you're Together and why you're better together and why you're going forward and it's all positive, it will mean that when somebody says something, you don't instantly distrust them as an enemy. You'll take what they say as as Potentially as a fact might not agree with it, but you're not going to treat it as, as as poison. And when you destroy that central narrative, everything People weren't exactly like you are saying Is instantly treated as, as as an attack. It's something to do to stabilize and weaken you and they won't even you won't, they won't even accept your facts Because they distrust him at course. So there's no cohesion and that means there's no coherence and without coherence there's no group decision-making and it gets worse and worse from there.

John Robb: 32:40

So, going back to that tribal model, we went, we spent the last 20 years, you know, telling kids and in each other that it was a, a complex system and then it became problematic and then it became, you know, very troubled and and and Evil in many places and and that did it really wasn't we didn't progress much. You know, over the 200 some odd years that we've been together and that has an impact that the founding fathers were all flawed and they're, and they're, you know, compromised and corrupt and evil. When you do all of that, there's no central narrative to keep people together and it's replaced by this network tribalism. And the network tribalism is based on, you know, very flimsy foundations. It's just a common enemy. You ask anyone who's like Evolved in any of these network tribes, whether anti racist or anti fascist or anti whatever, what their version of justice is, what they're for and no two can agree.

Mark McGrath: 33:47

They know what they hate. But they don't know what else, that they agree on a cohesion, on well, what does justice look like?

John Robb: 33:57

Ask, ask, ask anyone you know what is. What is racial justice? What is a anti-colonial justice look like? And and you know it'll be wild It'll be all over the map. You know, money, return of lands, subservience is payback, or you know? At least with the older model we had the kind of the constitutional written thing where it's say everyone's equal, and we progressed to make that even more and more equal. Equal at the start, you know, focused on making sure that people had as close to the same opportunity as each other and it's not.

John Robb: 34:39

Making sure that the the outcomes were equal, because that it removes human agency. Yeah well, we spent you know what 30, 40, 50 years now going trying to Individualize value creation of value formation. So you know, that's the reason why most mainstream Protestant is is almost dead and it's depopulated the churches and it's done so in Europe in a big way and people are making their own judgments as to what's moral and what's ethical and the like, and that means there's a lot of diversity In approaches and and almost everything, and so you can't ask people what they're for, because everyone's formulated on their own. Now, you know, if you're the right's different. That then the left did.

John Robb: 35:34

The left is trying to say, okay, let's just be, you, tamp down and ban all the things that we hate, and the rights, like, let's just slow down this central thing and Disrupt it so we can go about our lives at the periphery, which is, you know, a chaos agent. So we're in this like horrible situation where you know we have both sides contributing to the decline of military recruitment and, and you know, future military preparedness. At the same time, we're ramping up cold wars. I mean, even in Ukraine, in this modern environment, they were only able to mobilize what 700,000 men, and you know the standard, you know total war metric would be 10%, which would be about two and a half million.

John Robb: 36:24

Hmm so you know, they, they, they're, they're not even able to mobilize it one third of the people that you would typically see in a total war and they're a bunch of need to, you know, in this environment.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 36:39

Do they need to? I mean, we talked about technology and artificial intelligence. Oh yeah, you're in the context. Do you need to do that still?

John Robb: 36:45

Oh yeah, I mean, this is a war of attrition and and put this bogged down. And they're burning through bodies. They, they're offensive. This the summer would burn through their bodies pretty quick Because they're running against prepared remember the Battle of Kursk but the prepared positions, the Germans had the punch through it, just like. That is terrible. And and and the Ukrainians and that.

John Robb: 37:11

That whole situation is pretty interesting because the Ukrainians got a whole bunch of different weapon systems you know dribs and drabs of all these different advanced weapons systems and and they went to go train on them and and kind of bring them together as a whole, cohesive, all, and it turned out to be a mess. It's not possible. It takes a lot, a lot more work, a lot more standardization to make that possible. So they're they're discoordinated and, as a result, they're trying to distract us with attacks, with drones on Moscow and Crimea which are destabilizing potentially on the nuclear side. And what else are they doing recently is just, but mostly it's just like hey, we're still making progress, give us f-16s and like what f-16 is gonna save you? It's gonna take a couple years for your pilots to even get up the proficiency using them. It's not gonna Change the result on the ground. In this instance they're gonna be Pretty conservative. They're used because who's gonna send a weapon against kind of their defenses the Russians can set up.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 38:19

Yeah, what is the way out of this for in your mind In Ukraine, how's what is the way out?

John Robb: 38:25

It's not pretty, I mean going. The good news is that we haven't seen a push into you Crimea that would would have prompted a nuclear use. So if the Ukrainians actually had been more successful and and pushed into Crimea, we probably send nukes. So that's great, given that we've ratcheted up, ratcheted up the hostilities up to the edge of nuclear use. It would probably be in the US's best interest, now that we started a Cold War with China, to de-escalate with Russia and I tried to drive a wedge between the two, the Kissinger's insight so we thrown them together Made them dependent on each other, particularly economically, through embargo. So we want to add some competition to that kind of cooperation.

John Robb: 39:17

But I, you know, I don't see us being able to cut a deal where the current borders are, you know, as they look on the ground right now, are Become the ceasefire line, and I don't see us succeeding to the fact that the Russia will demand that Ukraine is not part of NATO and that they, you know, I think if the Russians were going to cut, trying to cut a deal, they, they probably would try to disarm Ukraine, because if they don't, they have this, even if Ukraine is out of NATO, it's going to have an incredible amount of weapons and drones that will constantly be a threat, like right at the heart of Russia. So, yeah, I don't see how I mean, if you want me to predict how it's going to go, probably the Russians will take the country and dismember it. I don't think they have Any other option. From a national security point, a point of view, there's no, there's no outcome that we would agree to that doesn't put them into serious danger.

John Robb: 40:17

As you know, from a, it's like a. It's like if Mexico was armed against us. There's really nothing that we would do to say you know, we wouldn't let them become a part of a Chinese treaty, we wouldn't let them have any weapons they could danger and put us in danger. There wouldn't be a lack of empathy or putting ourselves in that scenario to try to Dismember that?

Mark McGrath: 40:39

ever. You know if, if the Chinese had a base in Canada or if it. You know if the Russians and the Chinese had a joint base, and you know Baja California.

John Robb: 40:51

Yeah, it's not even empathy, it's like it. You know, it's like wars between mines to mines and you have to understand what the other mine is thinking. You can't like just go, oh, that's just bad thinking or that's evil, or that's like something that we're not going to accept, kind of thing. Or If he, if Putin, uses nukes, it's it proves us right that he's, he's evil. You don't want to get in that situation. You don't want to like. You have to think in terms of what the other guy is thinking and what they, what's gonna, what motivates them and what, what's going to Yield you a better outcome at the end of the conflict. You have to think beyond the ceasefire or the end of the hostilities and think about is this they, is this something that's gonna last? Oh, it's gonna say, is this beneficial punch?

Mark McGrath: 41:36

I was talking on Aaron McClain School of War podcast and GI Wilson, who collaborated with Boyd, was actually on our show talking about this. So I wanted to get your take on this. So a lot of the, a lot of the defense movement, a lot of things seem to be. Let's build this giant Magineau line in the South Pacific. So there's a naval showdown. We will prevail an unable showdown because we have the world's best Navy and the world's best naval forces and air forces, etc. Whereas we might be looking at this as a chess game or something like that, whereas the opposite side is playing a different game Maybe go or something else, where they're gonna use they're not gonna try to confront us and a head-to-head naval showdown. They're gonna use tick-tock and they're gonna use the news and they're gonna use sports, they're gonna use Drugs. They're gonna use everything else except what we think that you know you would do head-to-head the South China Sea. What do you think of that?

John Robb: 42:29

Oh yeah, I mean that that's typically Chinese strategy. I mean, it's how they dealt with the Mongols, right, it's tried to you arm one group to have them fight, so they're not invading you or raiding you on a constant basis. Chaos outside the borders is okay and all the focus is inward and inward stability and Solving problems and getting the resources they need. So as long as they continue to do that unimpeded, they're gonna, it's gonna be fine, at least from their perspective. Yeah, yeah, one thing they do kind of do badly is alliances, right. So navies work best with alliances and you have to have places to for your boats to go, you know, and your ships to go. Your ships have to be able to, you know stage, and we're better at doing that with Japan and South Korea and Philippines and and and the like.

John Robb: 43:26

One of the things that I like to think about is the potential for you know, autonomous weapons to set up barrages, kind of a mobile, maneuver-based approach, where you just infiltrate an area and you close it off Like it's not there before you do it. It's like it pops up. It's like a pop-up a 2AD hostile environment for anything that enters, anything that goes in, is dead kind of thing, not where humans should go and do that in a multitude of places and strategic places and basically contain an enemy and disrupt them in a way, even in their own territory, behind you know, in their mountain ranges and other places. If you infiltrate these drones, you know, autonomous weapons can go slow and they can go ahead of time and they can dig in, they can self-provision, they can last for decades. It's like a mine that's intelligent but it's mobile and it's also self-refueling and it can gather information too, sounds like transformers.

John Robb: 44:39

Yeah, it's kind of like, but it's very doable. It's not like it has to be cognizant of everything, but within the context of what it does it could be very doable in this environment, and these pop-ups I mean Chinese are more likely to be the ones that develop this. So if they go into, like the, straight to the formus, or into some country in Africa, and then pop one up, say you know, this is a no-go zone for American ships, you know what are we going to do? You?

John Robb: 45:16

know, there's no Chinese soldiers necessarily even involved in this. Like they set it up and it just goes forward.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 45:25

John, I have to disagree with you on your way out of the current situation, the current crisis. Sure, the way out of this is through aliens, uaps, right? So I mean that's clearly happening right now. Any thoughts on UAPs? What's going on? How are we in contact or what's happening in your mind?

John Robb: 45:49

I mean it kind of is a good example of the amount of chaotic thinking that's going on right now, particularly on the left. When they left Twitter, they left their kind of central pattern making apparatus. Now they're even more chaotic and disorganized than they ever were. At least they had something central a couple years ago. Uaps I don't think it.

John Robb: 46:13

I mean I've seen one, but I'm a pilot too and you guys have that kind of experience. I mean I've seen one, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I think it was an alien. I saw something unusual and that may mean that I just didn't have enough information to process it correctly. Or, you know, if whoever is recording it didn't have enough information to make a conclusion as to what it was. Is it likely that we see aliens? Probably not Money, because I mean, you've heard of the Fermi paradox. Basically, fermi said if there's so many aliens you know there's so many habitable planets out there which would create life why aren't we seeing aliens?

John Robb: 46:55

And the answer is time, you know. I mean the Earth is what? 12 billion years old or whatever, and it's had multiple attempts at intelligent life Over a time period of, say, six or seven or eight billion years for a local area of the universe and you think of all the habitable planets, maybe even millions of habitable planets. Intelligent life may emerge in any one of those and the span of where we're at in terms of technology and sophistication, you know, probably at max will be about 10,000 years.

John Robb: 47:35

Okay, so beyond that level of development, you know, if we had another 8,000 years, we're probably going to be unrecognizable, just like an ant looking at us. Just see shapes, you know. Just see a foot or a big hard thing laying on your head. But the thing is it's not. It wouldn't be recognizable as something within its context. So figure all these little 10,000 year blips, bump, bump, bump. Some don't make it, some make it and try to do it within a, you know, six or seven billion dollar or a billion year time frame, unlike we were ever going to bump into anyone. It's just. It's just. The probability is way too low. I could probably crunch the numbers on you, but it's like points You're saying there's a chance though.

John Robb: 48:22

Okay, the dangerous ones. The dangerous ones is if something stays at the current level of technology within this 10,000 year thing, and it goes sideways, it prioritizes sustainability. It becomes like the two other species on our planet that have survived millions of years Ants and termites. Okay, they're adapted to their environment and they don't. They prioritize survivability. But intelligence is a knowledge, acquisition is not a survival trait, it's not a survival trait.

John Robb: 48:57

So you have to wipe that out. And you have to wipe out compassion, because it's too volatile, but on and on motions, so anything that persists at our level of technology or you know better. Given that it's ships maybe traveling interstellar distances and it's lasted millions of years, you don't want to meet them, right? It's a horrific news. So if they found us and how would they find us, would they travel ships across the gap? Probably not. Probably want to go wormhole, but you can't fit anything big through a wormhole. What you can do is fit information-dense nanotech. So you slip a piece of nanotech in and it spends a god-awful amount of time acquiring the resources necessary to build something interesting, and then all you have to do is then bridge it with information. So you know you use quantum coupling or whatever, and then you could utilize that planet the way you want it. So what we're seeing is potentially things just popping up that they built, which would be pretty awful. Regardless, it would be that awful outcome kind of situation.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 50:09

So what are the USP sightings? I mean, you know, the Navy F-18 drivers have seen these things, these little TikTok-looking things, yeah.

John Robb: 50:19

I've seen lights make right angles in the sky. I was down in Cancun looking out of Veranda and I saw this thing that looked like a helicopter and I was like okay, cool, and it made a right angle. It made a right turn like 90 degrees Like instantaneously. It was probably not a good rate of speed. I was like what the hell? Yeah, so what was it? I don't know.

John Robb: 50:42

We're in a world of UAVs, right, and advanced UAVs and deep, deep military programs. Uavs are probably not going to be stuff that we're going to know about until the next big conflict, right, and so that could be driving a lot of sightings. I mean, a lot of the sightings occurred. It really started taking off in the US after the first nuclear weapon, after the first test, Then Roswell I'm that excited to do even more and it aggregated mostly in the US and then it went global. So maybe it's just an artifact of the rate of change in our technology.

John Robb: 51:26

Right, we've substituted religious miracles for UAVs or UAPs, right, you know, instead of seeing miracles and meaning in things, that whole Jungian thing, it's like you see that meaning, you see that God, or you see that hand of God at work. You're seeing objects and reading, meaning into it. So uh boy, I don't know. I don't want to be a skeptic on this, but I don't think the outcome would be good if we got found.

John Robb: 52:01

I like the dark forest approach to development, meaning that in a big forest there's lots of predators and you don't want to be found, so until at least you're space faring or you're up to a point where you can't hide anymore because you're a type 2 civilization and you've encircled your son in a, your star in a Dyson sphere and you're grabbing all the energy off that massive fusion reactor so that would be visible everywhere and you can't hide it anymore. So the dark forest is good. It's kind of like the way most alternative ways of thinking now operate. They use the dark forest approach, they're off the major networks and they kind of hide in the shadows and think and talk.

Mark McGrath: 52:54

John, I wanted to bring it back to the point and bring it back in a way where people we think that you know that we work with and speak with and that they can tie this together. Sure, and I think that's the words evil and corruption. All the time, and a lot of times when people bring it up it's an epithet or it's meant to injure, harm or discredit or something. But I think that Boyd, in strategic game, his two definitions of those words are worth reflecting on because it's observable, I think, and when you think about it this way, you realize that evil is not necessarily people in a boardroom twirling their mustaches planning how to poison babies, that it could be all around us. So let's start with evil.

Mark McGrath: 53:37

Boyd says in strategic game that 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 those very same codes or standards to undermine the personal well-being and social approval of others. And then corruption, says corruption occurs when individuals or groups, for their own benefit, violate codes of conduct or standards of behavior that they profess or are expected to uphold. The one thing that really catches my attention when we're reflecting on Boyd and we're reviewing strategic game, when he says the definition of evil twice the term. Social approval Right.

John Robb: 54:22

Yeah, I think it was tied into moral warfare. And when a group acts in its own self-interest, for social approval, being in its own self-interest at the expense of others, that can cause you to lose the moral war. You know, I always saw it. You know kind of moral wars as gravity. You attract people by being selfless and you know you recognize their needs and meet them. But it's all about, you know, shared sacrifice and shared goals. But if you act in your own self-interest in a way that harms the people that you're attracting or attempting to attract, then you're going to lose kind of an anti-gravity. Yeah, we see, I mean we see a lot of moral warfare now, mostly because that's the way the left fights. It's through moral warfare. It was all you know about moral warfare and the right was about maneuver warfare and disruption, you know, at a psychological level, and the left's moral warfare put everything in that context. This is evil, this is good, but not necessarily.

John Robb: 55:39

In the Boydian constraints there's a, you know, a hypocritical kind of element to the Boydian definition. So what we see is people saying, okay, I'm in favor of climate reductions, I'm in favor of, you know, reducing energy use and saving the planet, but they go, travel constantly, you know, and they are constantly doing things that would keep their homes at 67 degrees. And they, you know, drive everywhere, they travel everywhere, they burn energy in ways that would be counter to that belief. Yet they're more than willing to say, okay, let's constrain the activities of other people to prevent climate change, but not you know why, they're not doing themselves or the same thing, like we just saw in Boston yesterday, right? So it's like a group saying, okay, we're in favor of illegal immigration. They get illegal immigration and they declare a date of emergency because there's 22,000 family or people in their shelters in Boston. So it's like they're in favor of this stuff, but they don't necessarily want to live through or pay the cost of doing it and they're more than willing to, you know, spread the cost to other people that weren't in favor of it in the first place.

John Robb: 57:05

In any case, it's because it's distant and it doesn't impact them. And then the right, you know, it's like, okay, a lot of people were against. Well, I'm not going to get it, I'm not going to touch the COVID stuff, because that's just crazy. Even mentioned that kind of thing because people have strong beliefs on that. But I mean, they're in favor of a strong country, but they are willing to support Trump. I mean, in some ways he's in favor of that, but he's very destructive of many of the institutions that would make the country strong.

Mark McGrath: 57:38

Yeah it doesn't Well, especially for you know, sort of worse at what it kind of hits on. It makes it harder sometimes to make sense of things Right.

John Robb: 57:51

Yeah, and the kind of like anti-military approach and granted, it's like against the policies of the US military, but it's also impacting recruitment and other things like that and the desire to equalize, you know anyway, that kind of hypocrisy, that kind of like split thing is oh no, totally yeah, yeah, yeah, that too when we're working with. That makes sense, or is that an answer to your question?

Mark McGrath: 58:17

Sports team doesn't matter the way Sun Tzu or Boyd would divide moral, mental, physical. I think it's very important to understand those concepts and, knowing that, say, if I'm only focused on the physical and I'm misaligned on the moral, I'm going to have adverse consequences as time advances, I'm not going to improve my capacity for free and independent action. Right, and I feel like when we go deep on Boyd and we read destruction, creation, we read conceptual spiral and even the strategic game Because, as you say, you know he was talking about the moral, mental, physical levels of warfare I always feel like we could cross out warfare and we could put business, we could put anything.

John Robb: 59:04

Oh yeah, there's a great business example of this. I wrote a report, like, I think, last year about how corporations were aligning and that 60% of people in developed countries want corporations to take on many of the functions of government and go into areas that they're not willing to solve, which is wild. It was based on the Edelman survey and I pointed out that it would cause friction. You know, when a corporation starts taking a stand on different issues, they're going to create political friction with the opposite group, and that we saw that with Miller Light or Bud Light. So Bud Light I mean it was one of those brands that it was a top brand. It just minted money, printed money. It's like you could put an idiot in charge of that and have it just print money year after year after year.

John Robb: 59:55

It's like cheap beer everyone bought it, no one really thought about it, they just did it's hard to overstate how valuable that you know a couple of billion dollar businesses and then somebody got their idea that they wanted some social favor, you know, and they were trying to be a little cooler, a little hip with it, a new set of potential customers, but they were already drinking Bud Light.

John Robb: 1:00:22

But they, you know, when they increased their bond and gained social approval for demonstrating moral alignment. They did the you know the trans ad campaign, which then resulted in a political backlash. And then people started leaving the brand because they didn't agree with that new image of the company and mass and that slammed it and it fell in the rankings and now it's like a also ran kind of beer. And then the company behind bud tried to reverse course. They said they dumped the head campaign and tried to go back to their previous you know blind alignment. And then they got hit with the other side, so all the gay bars and everything else which they call banned their beer and protest, so they lost even more. I mean, it's just like a good example of how that don't be evil kind of thing it can cause, because you're they're looking for that social approval, but it's done at the expense of the people that were already supporting it really is a catch 20.

John Robb: 1:01:32

In the sense that it really is a catch 22, right, and then it set off a chain reaction of how do you destroy your whole brand? Yeah, I mean corporations going political, depending on the politics and pending of the line that they demonstrate has to be done really, really carefully. Well, john, we're coming up on an hour.

Mark McGrath: 1:01:53

You're going to pause the for the podcast edition that will roll out and then we'll head over to some extra content in the in the YouTube channel on the YouTube channel. But we want to thank you for being the, the first repeat guest of no Way Out and we're glad to be glad to have you in our network.

John Robb: 1:02:12

All right, thanks, oh, thanks for having me. I know it's always a pleasure talking to you guys. Those listening head over and catch us on YouTube channel, we'll have a little more with John Rupp.

Mark McGrath: 1:02:26

So thanks for listening to no Way Out. We'll do a little. We'll do a little extra content here. You good on time still, john. Just back to evil and corruption, because again it keeps. It keeps coming up on on on other other episodes and we've had a few people encourage I haven't done it yet but to put a post out on explaining the boy definitions again, because they're so crystal clear, they're so applicable to today. You almost wondered did he foresee? Sometimes you wrote you wonder if he was foreseeing social media, because a lot of the things I think you've used the term before field tea, when you know people would put stuff on on social media in order to gain social approval. Was that that was called field tea, correct?

John Robb: 1:03:12

Well, no, I use it when they context a terrorism. So it's like it's different than being hired, it's different than joining a group. It's a decentralized loyalty, meaning that you are independent operator and you make yourself subservient to the Lord, to the one, some senior decision maker, some senior group, so you're allowed to continue to operate independently. And then you have those. You have those ties of loyalty that ultimately make you subservient. Weird, it's a, but you get their blessing and support, but not if there's nothing really laid out. Field tea is. You know, you can. You can use field tea within the context of signaling and this you know a lot of the social stuff we're talking about. So approval, you know they talk about virtual signaling. That's a, you know, demonstrating field tea. So if you're part of a network tribe by putting likes on the right posts and saying the right things at the right time, you're demonstrating field tea.

Mark McGrath: 1:04:21

It seems that um, yeah you're exactly right. I guess in a lot of respects you would think that, going back to the definition of evil, it might be best to stay like for, say, a company, or maybe to stay out of those sorts of sorts of questions or issues.

John Robb: 1:04:36

Yeah, there is a. There is a downside is because of you know if customers are demanding it right and they won't buy a product, or, though you know, unless it has that attached or talented people won't work at a company because unless they're demonstrated, they're demonstrating this alignment. Um, that's a problem. So sometimes there's probably no choice. I mean, I know a lot of talented programmers won't work for different companies because they don't have the right kind of social right to do.

Mark McGrath: 1:05:13

I mean, you have the right to do that, so um and the cut right, oh yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:05:20

Hmm.

John Robb: 1:05:21

It just adds a, yeah, it just adds another layer to the marketplace. Uh, it is possible potentially to. You know, just to stay neutral like a traditional business is kind of on the politics front. I say AI but it's going to be hard. I was going to say back to AI.

Mark McGrath: 1:05:36

I saw something, uh, just in the last couple of days how social media influencers are being replaced by AI generated social media influencers. What are your thoughts on that? What are your thoughts on that? I think you may have had something on your discord server about.

John Robb: 1:05:51

Oh, yeah, well, yeah, uh, one of the best ways to to uh, generate creative and useful stuff using AI is just to create it and throw it out there and if people like it, you reinforce it, and that I mean that's kind of Darwinian system. It's like a produce AI influencer content and if it does well, um, then do more of it or, you know, reinforce it, make it even better and try it out. Um, the feedback loop is is whether it's good or not, or whether people people think it's good. Yeah, no, I, I don't doubt that a lot, of, a lot of the personalities we see will be AI, only characters that we'll interact with and look, in many cases, lifelike. Um, you know, I don't know if you saw the interesting and hard to determine whether they're AI or not. Let's get it set on that. If you saw, if you look at, my most recent LinkedIn post on Friday.

Mark McGrath: 1:06:49

I do want to case you on a Friday, and I'll say, uh, leaders or readers, you know what are you reading? Just to get people's insights on books they should be reading, or articles, et cetera, and it's a picture of John F Kennedy. I've used a couple of them, but it's a picture of John F Kennedy, uh, sitting in different types of chairs in a suit. You know, and it's all. It's all AI. Or the picture, the picture rather, the picture rather is all AI. Right?

Mark McGrath: 1:07:13

It's not a uh um, it's not an AI post. It's a picture of John F Kennedy that was created by AI, which I find that John F Kennedy, if you put in John F Kennedy for whatever reason, mid-journey seems to be really good at producing pictures of John F Kennedy more realistically than others. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of photos of him.

John Robb: 1:07:30

Yeah, I mean creating lifelike versions of JFK based on his writings and his life. That you could interact with on ongoing basis.

Mark McGrath: 1:07:37

You know, a buddy of mine showed me on. Sunday uh and then you know it's like on a Wednesday, but he showed me this just past Sunday. That uh a movie trailer, a full on movie trailer, with you know titles and characters and cinematic uh drama and it's completely concocted with AI, not real.

John Robb: 1:07:59

Yeah, no, I definitely see people building and that's why they have the writer strike right now in Hollywood. Um, is that you'll be able to go from soup to nuts with in building a movie, uh, just using AI. So, like the small indie production will be, you know a writer director who you know writes with the aid of AI and then uses that language to create scenes and then tweaks them and creates video segments and ends up creating it's. You know, a small independent production with unique characters and, um, unique scenes and it's complete. I mean you could go on for hours and potentially then take that whole thing and, with a couple more tweaks, turn it into a game, like it's immersive, so it's like wow.

Mark McGrath: 1:08:53

Yeah, I mean, would you even hire a graphic designer? You can have a creative individual and not too disjointed and have a logo. Amazing Two seconds.

John Robb: 1:08:59

Well, acceptable, but okay, then the standards go up right, and then the quality that people demand is getting for you, since, so what you, what you'll end up doing with designers is they'll leverage themselves, using, uh, image and video based AI's to produce even more elaborate and more, um, detailed and and better, and they can create, and, uh, there's certain things that you can get out of the AI, but you can also, uh push it to develop or explore different themes and different, you know, styles.

Mark McGrath: 1:09:32

When you see it, when you look across the the, you know the industry's replacement for a designer you know, buckminster Fuller wrote that in the future, all specialists will be replaced by automation. And I wonder if, when you think of a guy like John Boyd, for example, who was a radical generalist that pulled from every discipline, is the? Is the generalist likely to thrive going forward and be more resilient than the specialist, who may be more subject to artificial intelligence or automation than the, than the generalist? What do you think on that, um?

John Robb: 1:10:07

I uh it. It is kind of tough, is that? I think that everything that we do will eventually find its way into some level of automate. So, um, you know, capture the world, basically capture everything that we do in this world and and and find a way to preserve it in its entirety in an in our neural network, and that will only push us to find new, new things that we can do so we can preserve it in AI. Interesting thing is is that this is self-referential. To say AI, right, it's the termination of what is good that's coming out of. It is up to us. We're the ones that say this is good output and this is useful applications and the like. If we come up with new stuff that we find useful, we're going to use this AI to capture it and or make it possible.

John Robb: 1:11:09

I don't know, there is a creative burden that will hit. It may not be beneficial to have a lot of people, you know, like big, big big populations, like it used to be in the past. The cognitive load that you have to have in order to operate in this environment is pretty high. But you know what? What might happen is if you give tutors you know, ai tutors to every person in Asia, right From a young age, and there's something visual that you can see and interact with, and it teaches them about everything all the time, guides them, prides them values and outlook, mediates for them. If somebody else is harassing them or whatever, what is the potential output of a population that's raised that way? So it would be something like along the lines of people who don't understand or replace by AI.

Mark McGrath: 1:12:06

but people that understand AI can work with AI will replace people that don't. Is that maybe more along the lines? Yeah?

John Robb: 1:12:14

Oh, 100%, yeah, yeah, I mean you'll do more and better things. That's why I was always kind of focused on trying to find make sure that we still have an outlet to keep on going out, because I'd rather not have all that creative focus and drive focused inward, you know, trying to root out faults and inward battles.

Mark McGrath: 1:12:36

I'd like to see us get out of this, so, as we drive at home, I guess the thing I would tell everybody, that's listening or watching us on Yeekspeed, to take full advantage of dialing into your network on your Global Gorillaz report, which is now on on Substack, I think. With a paid subscription you get access to the Discord server, which I find more informative than any news outlet that I can find, and we would direct people there I'd also. We said it on the first episode with you Brave New War is a book that everybody needs to read because we're talking about patterns that haven't changed much, even though the medium might have changed. I guess that kind of begs the question is have you thought of a revision or an update of that book, or maybe a continuum to that book, just given everything that we've seen since 2000?

John Robb: 1:13:30

Yeah, it's hard to write anything that's solid like a book in this changing environment and I know I would benefit from it and it would be great if I did it. And I don't know, it was really hard to write that first one. I mean holding an entire book in your head like so it runs, it's smooth throughout and everything connects, and it was a real chore. I know some people can just throw out a bunch of different chapters and kind of stitching together lately, but I tried to make it all one cohesive story and it was kind of painful, but maybe I'll do it. I mean, there's plenty of things that could happen, I mean in terms of AI, I think the social governance, globalization versus localization, all that stuff would be cool to write up.

Mark McGrath: 1:14:21

Maybe close with this. Where are things that you're reading regularly or books that you've come across lately? That you recommend to others that are trying to maintain their ability to thrive and disruption and be resilient.

John Robb: 1:14:34

Oh wow. I think most of the resilient stuff that people used to rely on is kind of outdated with the kind of social environment we live in now. A lot of the resilience that's focused on and just surviving the kind of social pressures. Making your household resilient and against disruptions is pretty straightforward. Making your life resilient against social disruption and social manipulation is harder. Getting unadulterated information flows is harder. How about some stacks or more? As you say, the technology has changed so much that may be a physical book, but living and breathing, like your Discord server.

Mark McGrath: 1:15:23

I mean that's a participatory environment where people can come together and learn and teach each other.

John Robb: 1:15:29

Yeah, I mean a wide information diet where you're looking at a lot of different things, trying to get both sides of the conflict, both types of networks, so you can see how they see each other, which is always awesome. I can give you a heads up on the kind of language and the structure of the conflicts coming forward or going forward, spend time playing. You know, I spend time playing with AI, just playing with them. I mean, I got a stability AI running on my, which is an image AI running on my desktop. If you have a BPPC, you can do that. You know running the tools and seeing how they work, you know, and it gives you a feel for how they operate. And if you can get a feel for a technology, then you start thinking. It gives you a kind of an insight that you know, fingertip feel for how it's going to roll out, how you can use it to amplify or leverage yourself. But you got to play.

John Robb: 1:16:28

I play games too and games are great too. I was doing like the modded Skyrim and just modding, modding, modding, modding, modding, modding, modding and how it went from this like kind of clunky game which is a good core game but through modifications becomes like a, you know, a tactile environment. It's like really amazing and all the different types of approaches that people use to mod, mod this or that. This is expressing emotion, dialogue using AI, voice synthesis and AI dialogue being folded in. It gives you a real good sense of what AI will feel like ahead of time and the kind of you know rapidity of change. That's impossible. How you modify that environment. So that's playing again. But the most part is just, you know, spend time dipping into different history books.

John Robb: 1:17:24

You bring up Marshall McLuhan and a lot in the library to find out.

Mark McGrath: 1:17:28

People have never heard of Marshall McLuhan. I should look into him and compare him Because I have on your, on your sort of advice, so to speak. When I read something he had written years ago, I wound up getting all of McLuhan's books and really trying to dig into them and you know very, very similar insights to what's going on.

John Robb: 1:17:49

Yeah, I know I like his views on warfare and the like. We're really useful. A lot of his later stuff you know hot and cold media and stuff like that I just kind of like that. I mean, that's just he's reaching at this point and people spend a lot of time talking about the kind of the weak stuff. I really like the way he got a feel for how technology is rewiring and the impact of that and if you can get suss that out of his books and your books are really lightweight reading, yeah it's good.

John Robb: 1:18:25

And, you know, just get a feel for how he thinks, and it's a surprising number of insights into what we're experiencing now. We will, if we're going to survive this age of the global village where everyone is, you know, nosey and vicious and always trying to kind of dominate each other. Inside this kind of environment where everybody's just, you know, sharing their thoughts and they're right in front of you, on the tip of your nose, on your phone, we'll have to build a social artifact that mediates that. The social artifact means a technology artifact. Technology gives structure to our environment in a way that prevents us from, you know, like all the old programs and like all occurred to this little village.

Mark McGrath: 1:19:12

We'll cancel you, we'll kick you off the platforms. We're going to debank you.

John Robb: 1:19:15

You know you don't conform, You're banished or you're dead. We'll hack you to death at night and burn down your house.

Mark McGrath: 1:19:22

Well, it goes back to Boyd saying that it's a game of interaction and isolation A lot of the interacting amongst tribes is isolated.

John Robb: 1:19:30

You know it has that kind of tribal mentality for us.

Mark McGrath: 1:19:32

And then discredit them, defend them, delegitimize them to the point where they can't, they don't have the capacity for freedom of action anymore. Yeah, we are, we ourselves. Are us right?

John Robb: 1:19:45

Right, right, and you mean? The classical name that most tribes had for themselves is always people, the people. Everyone else wasn't the people, yeah, and they're not us they're enemies. And even you know, when Barter was only developed as an economic vehicle, it was exchange among enemies. It was like an arms length transaction done between enemies, Not like a friendly thing.

Mark McGrath: 1:20:14

So you know again, you're assuming the other side is the same the patterns of conflict goes back all the way to recorded history to find every example of warfare.

John Robb: 1:20:19

Yeah, it's rough stuff in the past. Boyd did mean, just seems that the means changed A lot of it.

Mark McGrath: 1:20:23

The medium and the means changed, but the patterns don't really change that much.

John Robb: 1:20:28

Yeah, some of the patterns don't change. Some parts of the pattern or emphasized or de-emphasized. In terms of warfare, yeah, boyd was right on. And in terms of, you know, social decision making systems I like the Archeola stuff, the Tenman Network, or tribes, institutions, markets, networks. That seems to work. It's a good paper to read. You want to read it and all the stuff he wrote on that. I think we could go to your office.

Mark McGrath: 1:20:54

We'll pause here, and then we'll do a.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:20:57

Patrick of your return to no Way Out.

Mark McGrath: 1:21:02

We'll keep the dialogue up and we'll make sure that we're linked to global gorillas. Make sure people, if they've not read Brave New War yet, they should. And even though it's hard to believe, right, it's coming up on 2020 years since you wrote that there's still a lot of validity in the patterns and thinking that one needs to apply as they encounter their world. Well, hey, we'd love to collaborate. I mean, that's the whole point of no Way Out is to keep developing and advancing these ideas that Boyd was so precious about.

Mark McGrath: 1:21:37

As complexity, sciences and other things become more and more understood, and realizing that the requirement to understand complexity no matter how they define it, whether it's VUCA or other acronyms that the time is now and the orientation being so critical. I mean again. I'm biased because I've been consuming your work from what seems to be very beginning, when you emerged on the scene back around the great financial crisis. You're constantly trying to show others that they have to maintain an orientation that's aligned to reality as circumstances unfold, and they have to be able to create and destroy models fast. They have to let go of things that are no longer true or valid fast enough so that they can adapt. They can turn and adapt in order to thrive so awesome. Well, we'll hit the stop on the recording. Thanks again.