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No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Neuromined: Digital Manipulation, Techno-Fascism and the War for Our Minds with Michael Ashley | Ep 33
Prepare for a journey through the ominous specter of information warfare and cognitive warfare, shepherded by a former Disney screenwriter who now significantly shapes the publishing landscape, Michael Ashley. We'll traverse through the dominance of deceptive language, the menace of internet trolling, and the threats posed by ‘techno-fascism’. Our exploration will pull back the curtain on the manipulation and control mechanisms simmering beneath the surface of our digital world, equipping you with the needed awareness to withstand them.
Our conversation touches on the distortion of language and reality via platforms like Wikipedia, to the evolution and impact of internet trolling. We confront the chilling reality of AI bots sculpting public perception and the sinister implications of Edward Bernays' theories of invisible propaganda. As we brush against the chilling edges of ‘techno-fascism’, we underscore the importance of cognitive diversity as a bulwark against the homogenizing forces threatening our individuality and freedom.
Finally, we steer our discourse towards the crucial importance of historical awareness. Here, we ponder the threat of replacing faith in higher powers with faith in the state, and the perils of erasing history. We extol the role of literature in preserving the lessons of the past and encourage you to question authority, always. As we wrap up, we shine a spotlight on the groundbreaking ideas in Michael Ashley and Robert Edward Grant's new book, Neuromined, a must-read for those yearning to delve deeper into the concepts we've touched upon. Tune in for a provocative journey that peels back the layers of our digital existence, exposing the hidden forces shaping our perception and reality.
Michael Ashley Publishing
Michael Ashley on LinkedIn
Neuromined: Triumphing Over Technological Tyranny
Robert Edward Grant
NWO Intro with Boyd
March 25, 2025
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I actually watched one of your podcasts with your co-author, robert Ewer Grant, and I saw so much overlap between what Moose and I have been talking about with information warfare, controlling the flow of information and your book touches on quite a bit of that. And then we get into cognitive warfare, where we try to influence the brain and the mind from within, and we can do that with pathogens, we can do that with viruses. Does this sound familiar, by the way?
Michael Ashley:A little familiar.
Ponch Rivera:yes, so tell us a little bit about your background and your book.
Michael Ashley:Sure, ok. Well, originally I'm from St Louis, missouri. I was a playwright and reporter back in college. I went to film school at Chapman University, got a master's degree in screenwriting and then I worked in Hollywood. So I was in development for a creative artist agency, which is the biggest agency in the world with talent, and then I was a Disney screenwriter. I'll jump right ahead. I didn't really care for Hollywood in terms of the movies and TV shows that they were producing at the time. My undergrad was in philosophy and I really wanted to say something in Hollywood, and that wasn't really available to me, and so I moved to the publishing world in 2015. You mentioned my company name earlier. We started it with the idea to have a company in which we would enable our clients to become thought leaders to the power of narrative and storytelling, and so far, I've written nearly 50 books from my clients, including Neural Mind, the one that we're going to talk about today.
Ponch Rivera:In your book. You have several chapters in here. One of them is the ministry, which is crossed out, but the monopoly of truth we have a saying in some of our group chats about if you can't hit it over the net, you lower the net, right. You start changing definitions, you start going 1984 on people. Maybe it's a doxene, or maybe it's shadow banning, there's all these things that are happening around us. But in that chapter you do some pretty nice work about talking about changing definitions, which I've seen quite a bit and I think Moose has seen quite a bit. An example would be changing the definition of a vaccine, right. So how big of a threat is that to? Or the flow of information, controlling the flow of information? You actually control minds. So how big of a threat is that in your mind? Sure.
Michael Ashley:Well, I think that the idea that you mentioned at the top of the hour is that we're in a new kind of war, and it's a war for your mind. Literally, the battleground is our minds, our hearts and minds. And so, if you think about what's going on right now, one of the most powerful tools that tyrants have always had has been the power of language. And so, if you think about the book 1984, which was very predictive of the moment that we're living in right now, even that wasn't predictive enough. So the main character in that story, winston Smith he's tasked with working for the Ministry of Truth to actually erase or redact or burn books, but don't talk about physical books right now. It's much easier. You don't have to do that in 2023 because you can memory whole ideas, you can disappear things from the web and that's much more powerful.
Michael Ashley:So we have that problem, which is one and that's what I meant about crossing out Ministry of Truth. Really, we're dealing with a monopoly of truth, because most of us, most of us tend to get our information through the internet. Right now, and when you can change the information that people have access to, you, control and shape their minds. And then there's another aspect to this as well, which is our vocabulary. If you don't have a vocabulary to address what you're dealing with, you're at a cognitive disadvantage, and I think that's also what's going on right now. For many years, we've had a politically correct movement that wants to change the words that we can use, change the definitions of words, and all of that plays out again, like I'm saying, in the battleground of our minds.
Ponch Rivera:Now that's spot on. We know that one of the things humans try to do is maximize evidence for their own internal models or minimize surprise, and one way to minimize surprise is to shut off the flow of that information. At some point and, if I remember correctly, somewhere in your book you start talking about Wikipedia. I remember going through my MBA years ago and we learned that Wikipedia is not a good primary source, and Mark and I have seen this in running this podcast. Many people use Wikipedia to come challenge us and we're like where did you get this information? Well, I got it from the French Wikipedia page on John Boyd and we're like I cannot think of a worse place to find information on. You know the strategic game of interaction and isolation. People use that as a primary source. But I do believe the way you frame Wikipedia up in your book, as that's a place where you can actually go change information that influences how people think. Is that correct?
Michael Ashley:Absolutely. I mean, you mentioned the word recession earlier. That's one they absolutely did that to. In fact, you can go on. It might still be available right now, but you can go and see all the different times they changed the definition of the word, the editors there, and so the danger that we have with Wikipedia is exactly what you mentioned. People think it's a valid source, but what they don't realize is it exhibits centralized control. So you're at the mercy of the editors there, many of which you'll never meet or never hear of, right, and so they can change words. But, more importantly, they can also change our understanding of consensus reality. And I'll give you an example.
Michael Ashley:A few months ago, I shared a video with a guest host a host in general who named him is Kim Iverson, and so the video was about the Nord Stream pipeline getting blown up, and Seymour Hirsch did excellent reporting, demonstrating that America did do this.
Michael Ashley:In fact, joe Biden said we were going to do it, so it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise, but the legacy media narrative is that we did not do it, that Russia for some reason blew up their own pipeline.
Michael Ashley:Anyway, kim Iverson had Seymour Hirsch, I believe, on a show, or at least, was talking about his journalism, and so I shared that video with a family member, and, instead of interacting with the content, with the reporting, they decided to look up Kim Iverson on Wikipedia, and, as you can imagine, it doesn't look so good for Kim Iverson on Wikipedia, and that's what we talk about in the book. I also mentioned Chris Hedges, who was labeled as a plagiarist on Wikipedia. For anyone that would go to visit Wikipedia just a few years ago, this is the interpretation of reality that you would get, and so you can imagine. I don't know if you have a Wikipedia page, a ponser or mark, but if someone wanted to denigrate you in the public eye, it'd be very easy to do so, because we're talking about centralized control through the source that many of us get our information from nowadays.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, centralized control. So we talk about complex adaptive systems quite a bit Quite. In fact, mark and I were kicking around the idea that in a complex adaptive system there's really no centralized planning, right? But yet some people still try to go find that centralized place of plans, if you will. It's an emergency that is really happening. So if we create the conditions, we're going to see these things happen over and over and it may give the appearance that there is centralized planning. It may be happening, but for the most part my view on that is I doubt that to be true. But the conditions are set where people can create the reality that they think is best for everybody else. But you do talk a little bit about trolling in your book. Can you bring us up to speed on that?
Michael Ashley:Well, what is your definition of trolling? Let's start there, because I don't use that exact.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so, yeah, yeah. So the connection back to the Vietnam RF4s were they would go out and set these traps for MIGs right. So they call it trolling for MIGs. They go out and they set up a cap and they show a little bit of leg to get that MIG to commit and then make it easy for them to shoot them down right. So that's where the original concept of what's being used today for internet trolling came from, is back in the late 1960s, early 70s, the concept of trolling for MIGs from the US Navy. It's an interesting connection.
Michael Ashley:No, I'm sorry. What do you mean by internet trolling? What's your definition of internet trolling?
Ponch Rivera:Oh yeah, trolling on. So let me give you an example of people that troll us. No matter what we put on the web, they're going to come and attack it. They're going to try to discredit us, claim that these things are not connected. If it doesn't fit their worldview, they're going to do everything to discredit you or attack you, Kind of like what you brought up with your couple of points.
Michael Ashley:Well, sure, I mean, I think we're going to go back to what we talked about in terms of consensus reality.
Michael Ashley:I mean, we are very social creatures, and so it's very important to understand the word through tribalism, right, and you're either in the in tribe or the out tribe, and regardless of what tribe you're in, there is a lot of power in discrediting individuals, and so if you can make the public believe that this person is a liar or this person is being disingenuous to any extent, you undermine their perception, and so we were talking about consensus reality earlier.
Michael Ashley:If you can control how people view you by, let's say, creating a bunch of an army of AI bots that, every time you post something, they say, well, that guy's a liar or they tried to undermine you in some way, you can imagine how difficult it would be to get your message out there. And this is it's not something we cover in the book, but this is very much, I think, a part of what is going on right now basically a sigh of the public to infringe or to change the perception of reality as to how many people agree with you or disagree with you, and so you can see how that could be a very potent weapon if the battleground is online. Is the public discourse happening through cyberspace?
Ponch Rivera:And that's an easier battle to fight than it is to actually put. You know, we used to say bombs on foreheads or, you know, put it still on the ground. Is we're actually going to go ahead and attack the flow of information? And that goes back to your point about the mind being the battle space for the 21st century, and Mark any thoughts on that?
Mark McGrath:connecting back to Boyd, Well, it reminds me of our conversation with Adrian Bijan. I think he was saying that the difference between one of the things that he observed the people that lived in communist countries and people that didn't was that in the communist countries everybody knew the government was lying. They knew, but the people outside they believe that the government was telling them. Government was telling them the truth. So I mean I think that's kind of the things like Wikipedia that start up for his example, kind of a like sort of a market solution, that's an open source thing that gets infiltrated and centrally controlled. Something very beautiful that is emergent becomes something very insidious and in evil in that it's damaging our sense making. Is that kind of you know, maybe we talk about that, about how it's damaging how we make sense of our world. It's not necessarily in our own best interest or it's in somebody else's best interest.
Michael Ashley:Well, I have one thing there too, which is it's often been said that Americans are the most propagandized people on earth, and if you go back to the book Propaganda by Edward Bernays, he says the most effective propaganda is the propaganda that you cannot see. And so, to your point. If you think about a communist country, they know they're being lied to. In the US, many people unfortunately do not realize just how powerful legacy media is, and they don't understand the connection between the private partnerships with the government. They are not familiar with what the Twitter files exposed and, by the way, anyone that was paying attention to the Twitter files would know that this has been going on for a long time. And it's not just in Twitter, by the way. It's in Facebook as well, or any other social media platform that you can think of.
Mark McGrath:Well, I can go back to newspapers and radio broadcasts and other things in the pre-internet. Are there correct?
Michael Ashley:Of course you can go back to Operation Mockingbird, which the church community exposed the collusion between I don't think they used the word the deep state back then. But that's the same idea that you are changing the narrative, literally implanting different people that have a vested interest in controlling or shaping the narrative. These are the journalists that work for publications like the New York Times or other publications that are very much impacting the way that we understand and get our news.
Mark McGrath:A real world example. We homeschooled our children for about seven years and universally, the one thing people would say immediately, almost reflexively, like a nervous tick what are you going to do about socialization? What are you going to do about socialization? And that's just an example of how people are conditioned to think Certain things. Whether it's political, whether it's public health, it is really, as you say, the most propagandized country. That's certainly very believable. I think that's something people need to really start questioning and understanding better. Sure.
Ponch Rivera:We talked about liminal warfare, fifth generation warfare. It's that space where it's ambiguous, there's very little ability to attribute information in response to that environment. So that's what's going on now is we are in a liminal type of warfare, a fifth generation type of warfare, a warfare for the mind. And that's, I think, when you're reading your book, that's what you're writing about. And when we look back at what John Boyd gave us as far as talking about trying to fold your enemy upon themselves, you do that through propaganda. You do that through today, viruses, pathogens. You can attack people individually. You can use things that we may have seen in Havana, like the Havana syndrome.
Ponch Rivera:I'm not saying that's true or false or anything like that, but those type of things are coming down the pike. So it's technology has really enabled this. We can get into epigenetics in this conversation, how technology is moving us more towards the spectrum, reducing our social skills, going back to being social creatures. But this is the type of warfare that's going on. And, more importantly, when you take a step back from just looking at the United States, you look at China's policy on this. It's called mind superiority right, that cognitive dominance. How do you dominate people? And that's absolutely central in Boyd's ideas of people, ideas and things, in that order. In fact, he wrote and we talk about this quite often machines don't fight war as people do, and they use their minds. So this is the liminal space we're talking about, and it's kind of scary that a lot of Americans are not aware of this.
Michael Ashley:Well, even the way that we wrote the book was in recognition of that. So, if you think about the issue of techno fascism, unfortunately, when we're dealing with things that are of a technical nature, you can lose people. Not only can you lose them cognitively, but you can lose their visceral or investment of the heart, right. And so we meet, robert and I my co-author and I made a conscious choice to write every chapter in what we call a show and tell format, and so we wanted to connect people, your hearts and minds. So the show part of every chapter is written as a fictional story and narrative, with characters that people can empathize with, that they like, that they can see themselves in, so that they can imagine themselves in these stories and what would happen to them. Because this is here.
Michael Ashley:We're not talking about some future, that's, you know, 50 years down the road. This is going on right now. And then the second part, of course, is the tell. And so for that part, you know, that's for the more analytical side of our brains, and to understand that there is third party scholarship that supports the ideas and the fictional story. There is context that demonstrates that this is real. This is what's going on right now, and so our hope was to kind of utilize the same type of strategy. If you will understand that there is a war for our minds, but in the same way, we can take back our culture. We can take back our strength in this situation when we wake people up to what is really going on, playing the same game that the other side is already using to such great effect.
Ponch Rivera:The point about narrative, I was watching a Black Mirror last night, one of the newer ones, and then talking to my wife about one that we saw four or five years ago about social credit, and I think that's the one you talk about in your book. That one is amazing because we're actually seeing that in actually all over the world right now. Right, I can't remember the name of that episode Nose Dive.
Ponch Rivera:Is that it? Yes, yeah, yeah, About social credit scores and it's getting that. It's kind of like when you jump in an Uber and you rate your Uber driver and they get to rate you and all that, right. Yes. So, that's actually happening, is that not?
Michael Ashley:Oh, very much. So I mean, if you think about some, people don't know what the social credit system is in China, so I think I should explain it real fast. But basically it's a carrot and stick approach. If you imagine right now that you can rate the movies that you love on Amazon from zero stars to five stars, now imagine if you can rate people based on their behavior. And so in China, if you don't go along with the company line, if you are a good boy or girl, you get to have highest scores and you get to participate in the economy in regular life. But if you don't, you get the stick. And so if you make a mistake or if you, let's say, speak out about what's going on in Taiwan, then you can expect your score to get lowered. And if it gets bad enough, then you can't rent a car, you can't get a job, you can't have an income, you can't participate in society.
Michael Ashley:So that is really going on right now in China, and so it's being exported to the West through things like ESG, and so we wanted people to understand that this is not some hypothetical. In fact we've been primed and I didn't mean to have a pun there, but we literally, we've been primed to adhere to this for many years. So, whether it's through Amazon Prime, where we're rating things, or, let's say, yelp, we're used to the idea that we can rate businesses and, in turn, we can be rated ourselves. Someone recently told me that they were afraid to say something on Airbnb because they didn't want to get a bad score as a guest, and so we've been for many years, slowly acclimating to this idea that everything that we say or do can be used against us. It's kind of like that old adage this can go under permanent report. We heard that when we were in school. Well, that's coming to fruition. It's coming to fruition in real life, before our eyes, in 2023.
Ponch Rivera:Hey, Mark, I'm sure you got some things to say about ESG. One of the fascinating things I came across in your book is I think Lockheed Martin had a higher ESG or better ESG score than Tesla. Is that correct? That's true.
Michael Ashley:Yes, that's so people understand why.
Michael Ashley:Now, this wasn't my conjecture actually goes back to what Kim Iverson said that host I mentioned earlier, but she was wondering why that would be the case.
Michael Ashley:Now I have my own problems with Elon Musk, but he did say last year that he's beginning to increasingly believe that ESG is the devil incarnate. And so, yes, you're right, lockheed Martin has, or at least at the time of the book writing, had a better score than Tesla. Now, if we accept, on his face, the idea that Elon Musk is contributing to the world because one letter of ESG is the environmental aspect right, and so here we have a car that's supposed to make our world more environmentally friendly you would imagine that the guy would get a higher score than a company that creates bombs that kill children in foreign countries. But of course, that's not what happened. He's getting a lower score, and Kim Iverson's belief and I have no reason to doubt her is that he was so outspoken about the COVID lockdowns and things like that. He's not saying the right things in public, and so, for his pains and efforts, they are reducing his ESG score.
Mark McGrath:So I was in asset management for a long time and ESG is, you know, that's sort of the mothership of a lot of it where it became again, almost seemingly overnight, reflexively, like the first thing somebody that was asking about was you know, tell us your ESG score. I think diversity, equity, inclusion, which you know punch, and I think some are important. You know, I'm Puerto Rican, we're both Hispanic and we think that that DEI is important, and but it's become something else. That's not. In other words, it's not a gathering of multiple perspectives from multiple backgrounds, where people come from unique circumstances or cultures and they can bring what they know to the form, so to speak. It's become a hey, we all look different, we all think alike which is dangerous, but these again.
Mark McGrath:These things become just so reflexive, like a nervous tick people are diverting away from other things that they might be considering. That's what it seems to me, hey.
Ponch Rivera:Mark, one of the challenges I have with DEI is as a first generation college graduate, as a Native American, hispanic this is what I see. I never want anybody to look at me and think he got that position because of the color of his skin or his background. I want to win it on merit. I don't want my kids to grow up in that environment either. Now the unintended consequences of these DEI programs may have that effect on people too. So that's how I view it is. I do believe in leveraging cognitive diversity. I think it's amazing. I think a lot of tools we provide people help do that. I don't think shoving it in people's faces is the way to go.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think it becomes a gimmick or a label that loses its meaning, of its real value, and I think that the United States is a tremendous mosaic of people from all backgrounds, from all parts of the world, from all religions, all cultures, and all of those contributions make us what we are. I think where it becomes and I think, Michael, I think this is kind of maybe where you're talking about where something becomes centralized and it becomes defined and we all have to think about it a certain way that's where the problems come and that's where the value of those sorts of concepts, where we are cognitively diverse, I think that we're missing out. We're not learning from each other. We're being told what to think about people and we're classifying.
Mark McGrath:We're actually doing the opposite of what it's intended to do. We're actually doing the exact opposite. We're putting people in boxes and labels, and we're not supposed to be doing that. We're supposed to be interacting with others. It goes back to what you said at the beginning, Ponce it's a game of interaction and isolation. When we interact, we learn, we improve. There's perspectives that we didn't previously have and that benefits everyone. Everybody can learn and take away from that. Otherwise, we're going around putting people in boxes. I don't think that's as effective and that's what we have here, Michael. We think it's actually detrimental to the culture, to organizations, to society, everything.
Michael Ashley:Sure, I mean, I believe in the marketplace of ideas, and I graduated from college in the early 2000s, way before the era that we're dealing with right now and I felt like there was an open exchange of ideas in my university. Was it perfect? No, but I did feel as if it was a place in which people could trade in ideas, many of which were unpopular. I don't think that that's possible in 2023 for most college institutions. A state of fear, abetted by technology, has this has descended across universities throughout this nation, and it is not in spite of what they talk about. In creating safe spaces, to your point, mark, I mean. The irony is there aren't, right. There aren't safe spaces for you to have intellectual conversations in which we can challenge each other's beliefs, right? Instead, you can expect that you'll be canceled or worse, they'll go after your livelihoods, they'll go after your family, and so I believe that there is a benefit.
Michael Ashley:Of course, that you said earlier about having a plurality of viewpoints. I very much believe in that and I very much believe in the meritocracy To Pontius point earlier. I want my children to believe that they got where they got because of their value and their worth and what they contributed, and likewise for myself as well, and I think that's what makes America so wonderful. There's a reason so many people want to come to this country still because they believe in the American dream that it's not based on you being a part of the nobility or a king or queen or whatever, that in America still in 2023, that you can rise and fall based on your own efforts, and it's my hope that that continues in the future.
Mark McGrath:And to add on to this too, you mentioned the word techno fascism earlier.
Mark McGrath:I think the other thing that's really alarming and scary and everybody I've seen of, across political spectrums, across cultural perspectives, I think that they see the harm in this is the coordinated effect of If I don't agree with Michael Ashley and we deem him unworthy on a media platform, I'm gonna call his bank, I'm gonna call his food suppliers, I'm gonna call his strategic partners, I'm gonna call his web host, I'm gonna call. And there's not only centralized but there is a coordination and you're seeing it happen to people and that's extremely scary and it goes back to 1984. It kind of makes 1984 look like a children's story versus as something that's truly evil and truly corrupt. And we can pull up the John Boyd definitions of those terms, because I do think that they're very clear and they make a. When we think of those definitions, we're not thinking of people gathered around a campfire or a boardroom and twirling their mustaches and coming up with evil plans. We're seeing people actually violate codes and not holding themselves to it and doing things to others.
Michael Ashley:Well, I think there's two things about that. You mentioned the concept of emergence earlier. I mean, you think about how something can take root and then it wasn't the intended plan, but the social, the political structure or the atmosphere begins to infect and it gets worse and worse, becomes an additive negative problem when we're dealing with that, and so I think that that is absolutely what we're seeing right now. And to go back to what you mentioned, the coordinated effort, so one thing that we talk about is this concept of debanking or deplatforming. Now, deplatforming is probably a little bit more common. We've heard about people losing their Twitter account or their Facebook account getting locked out. We've heard of that but the debanking one is really the major threat that I would recommend that people look into, and I talk about how this is not new. It's being accelerated, but Julian Assange experienced this in 2011 when he exposed what was going on with our legal actions and the Afghanistan war and what was going on with Iraq, and you saw a coordinated attack against him that payment processors would no longer allow money to go to WikiLeaks, who was actually doing real journalism. Now, of course, it's going on again. Just recently, as you mentioned in the book, there was a handful of left-leaning journalists who were not on board with the push for the war in Ukraine, and they found that they were locked out of there. I believe it was either their Venmo or their PayPal or both.
Michael Ashley:And of course, this is happening to people like Kanye West, and what I always say is what I'm doing speeches is okay. You might think that these people are fringe. Kanye West you might think he's fringe, okay, but it always happens that the tyrants and there are betters go after the fringe people first, and so slowly it then affects the people in the middle, people like you and me, but by then it is too late, and so we think about the First Amendment. It's meant to protect the most odious speech, the speech that no one likes. Right, if you like the speech, you don't need protection, and so, similarly, I would say that if we're saying these people are fringe and they should not be able to bank anymore, okay, but eventually it will come back to you, it will come back to all of us.
Mark McGrath:That seems to be. That's the Frankenstein model, right? Eventually, the monster kills the creator, right? It's fine if your camp is in power, so to speak, but then the shoes on the other foot, then what Then? All those things that we've taken away from sort of the moles and ethics of you, brought the First Amendment. I mean those are, it's exactly right. I mean, we have a First Amendment to protect what we don't like, as you say, as you say odious, but then that shoe goes on the other foot, and that's when you say techno-fascism. I think that a lot of things start out with the greatest of intentions, sure, and then they completely reverse into a tyranny. That, because even the people that started a French Revolution, they all got their heads cut off eventually.
Michael Ashley:I mean, that's true right, People get carried away very easily.
Mark McGrath:And, by the way, that's what creates a vacuum or a platform for an emergent Napoleon or an emergent Hitler. They fill that void very quickly and then we're in a lot of trouble. Then we're really gone too far.
Michael Ashley:But I'll mention I think there's a positive side to this. Right now We've been talking so much about the negative, but I do think it's right, for and the first part of the book is problems and the second part of solutions. And right now, speaking of emergence, I see another way that we can begin to turn this around, and that's through critical mass.
Michael Ashley:I would imagine most people, if they truly understood what is going on with the technofascistic reality, are not on board with this. They do not agree with what is going on, but what it requires is it requires people to wake up. In fact, a great wake up to is what I would call the opposite of the great reset, where, if enough, people recognize, first of all, this is not the way that they want their country to go, this is not the way they want their lives to go, and they start to awaken other people and say, hey look, did you know this is going on? Okay, we can turn this around If enough people recognize their own power. Going back to the Constitution, it's about we, the people. The government is supposed to work for us. The Constitution is supposed to tell the government what it can and cannot do, not the regular people, and we need to wake up to our own power in this country and realize we have far more power than we realize.
Mark McGrath:Well, you strike a chord there with. You know, ponce and I are both naval officers by background Marine Corps and Navy and we swore an oath to defend and uphold that. So that's, I think, another thing from our perspective as veterans that I find troubling and very puzzling that something I swore an oath to is, as you say, sort of misunderstood broadly but also misused almost like a badge to do something wrong versus a check on a power.
Ponch Rivera:In market, given one time. There's only 1% of the population is serving in the military right, so that's a thin slice of our fabric, right.
Mark McGrath:So not everybody's read the.
Ponch Rivera:Constitution either.
Mark McGrath:No, and as some of the things that we're talking about where people are getting their narratives now, and a lot of things that Michael writes about in the book are not giving them that reality of what something actually is or even allowing them the space to weigh out. It seems generally that everything's binary it's either left or right, or it's this or that. There's no third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, a hundredth way and us dealing complexity. We know that that's the way the universe actually works.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, I think we brought this up the other day when we talked about psychological safety, as you're destroying that in a culture or an organization or a group by doing some of the activities that we've already talked about, and I think this is a part that's often left out I do not feel safe to speak up. In a lot of places I did in the past Four years ago I would speak up. Now I won't even talk about things. Why is that? Because I know those concepts or ideas that we're gonna talk about in that setting are not gonna go over well with folks and they're gonna see me as an extremist, so I just don't talk anymore. The very thing I coach organizations on on how to create a psychologically safe environment these activities that are happening around us are actually destroying that ability to do that.
Ponch Rivera:So this is not just a. This takes on many fronts. So if you go into the office space and you do not feel safe to speak up outside of there or inside of there, we're not gonna have any variety, we're not gonna have any rapidity, we're not gonna have any innovation, we're gonna lose out on all those things, and that goes back to a lot. What John Boyd gave us too is it's all about the interactions. We have to find ways to create that harmony, not necessary alignments, right? We don't have to be aligned on the way we think. We need to be harmonized on what we think right, and I believe the Constitution allows us to do that. But going back to the earlier point, not enough people have read that.
Michael Ashley:Well, I think there's something else to apply here as well. So the book we mentioned in our book is called the Coddling of the American Mind, and that's where they came up with this idea of safetyism. And it's so funny Everything we're talking about seems like an inverted version of what it should be right. We're talking about college campuses right now, where many young people feel so unsafe that they gotta go to safe spaces. And what do they do there? They have coloring books, they have stuffed animals, because they don't feel safe in the real world anymore, but at the same time, like you said, you don't feel safe talking out about these things.
Michael Ashley:And so if you think about that, if you take it to its logical conclusion, there is a chilling effect. You are self-censoring your own words. And what happens when not enough people speak out? People like both of you that know what is going on? Well, things get worse and worse and actually it makes us a more unsafe place. It's the inverse, as I mentioned earlier.
Michael Ashley:But what I would say, and what the authors talk about in the book the Coddling of the American Mind, is that actually it's the opposite the more risks that you take, the more that you put yourself in a place of danger, the more comfortable that you become when it comes to real things that are unsafe. Conversely, if you live in a padded room and you never go outside and you're afraid of everything, you become much, much weaker, and I think what is so wonderful about the American experiment that is under siege right now is this a nation of risk takers, of adventurousness. You think about the independent spirit that runs through so much of our culture. That is under attack as well, and that goes back to what I said earlier. We can take this culture back. We can remind ourselves of the values that we once possessed.
Mark McGrath:You know, when I was a kid, my father was in the Army and we lived in West Germany, which doesn't exist anymore. But where we lived was in Bavaria, which is a very independent minded state within Germany, very Catholic, very pastoral, and it was also the birthplace. Really, the Naziism ignited and exploded in the most unlikely of places and it was always puzzling. I still talk with my mother about this. She says I never understood when we lived there how could that be possible?
Mark McGrath:And the more that you study these things, the more that you study the propaganda and the hive mind and the conditioning of the mind, it sets that platform where people become. Their moral and ethical senses are so reduced that they don't even resist when something like that maybe aligns with a few phrases or thoughts or ideas that well, yeah, they're right, or yeah, they're right, oh, I can stand with that, or I'm tired of this, and these things explode. Yes, I mean. When you think about these things, I mean how, um, even trying to maybe another way to ask for those listening like what are some of the things that you would tell somebody that's, that's a tuned in here? And listening like what are some of the self-reflective points that you bring up to try to avoid that sort of that trap, avoid getting caught that avalanche.
Michael Ashley:I have a sense of personal history with this. So I'm Jewish and most of my family died in the Holocaust, and so on my mother's side there's almost no one left. In fact, the the diamond in my wife's ring comes from a very distant relatives of ours that I'd never met. He watched his sister kill before his eyes. He lost his parents, and that diamond was given to my grandmother, which was given later to me and my great-grandfather my great-grandfather, was in Auschwitz. Actually, he fought very well and and admirably in the first World War World War and so Hitler himself allowed a few people to leave that concentration camp, and he was one of them. He had 24 hours to get out of Germany, and so I grew up learning a lot about the Holocaust. I had an entire year on it and Sunday school. I've been to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, and so I spent most of my childhood not most, but a lot of it thinking about how this could happen.
Michael Ashley:I'd read and Frank. In fact, I remember going to a presentation about and Frank when I was the age of my son, when I was eight, and I wanted to know how this could happen, and so I do have an answer, now that that I'm older and, and it's this the the atrocities of World War two, of the Holocaust, or what happened with with chairman Mao's China. They don't happen necessarily because you have Nazis and jackboots telling people what to do. It happens because regular, everyday, ordinary people allow it to happen. It's what's called the banality of evil. And so there's a book called the origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, and what she talks about is how could she want to know the same thing? When it came to her book, she was a Jewish woman from Germany and she wanted to understand how this could happen. And and her answer and and I think she's right About this is it comes down to what we believe in.
Michael Ashley:And so what was going on at the time, in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, was you had an absence of God and religion. People had lost their faith in a higher power, and it's not as if, when you become an atheist or you no longer believe in God, that you just don't have beliefs. Instead, your beliefs go to something else, and so they put their beliefs instead in the state, and of course, the state was the Weimar Republic, and we know how corrupted they were. And so, little by little, you begin to lose your values and your beliefs and you begin to Submit them to something more powerful, and eventually you get swept up into something, into mass hysteria. What was going on in the Holocaust?
Michael Ashley:And of course, I don't believe that those people believed that they were doing wrong at the time. I do believe that their ideas were perverted and they were able to lose that. They're higher ideals, and I think we're in danger of something similar right now. Many of us have lost the faith in God. They've lost the faith in a higher power and instead we supplant it with our faith in the state, and the state, you know it is only as good as the people within it and and what they choose to do. And so we do have a danger at this moment, right now, and it's very important for us to come back to more benevolent ideals.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I want to, I want to.
Ponch Rivera:Bring up something that's that's happening here in the in America right now and it may may connect back to your story when we started racing history Changing things, changing names, doing that, what effect does it have on future generations? And and then has it happened in the past?
Michael Ashley:Well, sure, I mean, if you think about what's going on right now, that that is a problem, because if you don't, if you can't remember your past, you're doing to repeat it, right. And so if we have collective amnesia, we don't know the mistakes that we made. And so I'll give you an example. I wrote a book a couple years ago. It was about how we return civility to our discourse, and so my, my co-author and I had a disagreement on this, and he was of the mind that we should be taking down things that trigger people. And so the example that we went to was, you know, a Jewish person should not have to see a picture of Hitler, and I'm not suggesting that that's a great idea, that we should have pictures of monuments of Hitler throughout the world, because, you know, because we want to remind people, and that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, if you look at, whether it's the Confederate flag, or if you look at statues of people that we would not idolize today, it's important that we remember these things, even if we Disagree with them.
Michael Ashley:It goes back to what I mentioned earlier about odious language. We're not putting them out there because we subscribe to their ideals. We're putting them out there or leaving them out there, because it reminds us who we are and the mistakes that we made. You think about it. You know all of us are a product of our memories and the story that we tell about ourselves. Then, if you can't remember your own mistakes that you made when you were 15, or the the times in which you said the thing that you wish you could take back, well, what kind of person are you going to be? The same thing is true, writ large, when it comes to cultures and Governments and society. We need to remember who we are, where we came from, so that we don't make the same mistakes, so that we can do better as a people.
Ponch Rivera:Thank you for that, michael, that I've been trying to search for a better way to explain that to folks, because we've seen a lot of names changes around us in the military, a lot of people trying to change the name of ships, and I couldn't imagine, if you went out to Poland and knock down Auschwitz, what that would actually do. I mean that that's if we misremember the past, we cannot improve the future. So we have to preserve these things and I agree with you, if we don't, there's things we get wrong. You know over time. But you know the people that actually win the wars or win things. They get to rewrite history or write the history they want to, and that's not necessarily a good thing.
Michael Ashley:Sure, I mean, if you think about how valuable the zeitgeist is, I mean what values that we have collectively in 2023. I know this is not monolithic, I know not everyone has the same values, but the way that people view what's going on right now, the lens that we interpret reality in 2023 is very different from the one that, let's say, 1920 or 1850, and the idea that we can Go back and say that this person should not be listened to and their, their books should not be read Because they don't adhere to the social more is in 2023 is just absurd. I mean, it goes back to what I mentioned earlier people, a change. Obviously we grow and we learn.
Michael Ashley:But if you Discount or erase our history or what they're doing in publishing right now, which is to change the, the literature, the actual words, the actual material, what are we left with? I mean, we talked about this earlier. It kind of comes full circle. But that's what Winston Smith's job was in 1984. He was changing past history. He was changing books to affect the people in, in the, in the present. Again, this goes back to consensus, reality, the war for your brains, for your hearts. Right? If you don't know these things, if you don't have a vocabulary, if you can't even point to Historical examples to prove your point within, you're stuck in the permanent now and you're completely adrift. I mean you can fall for anything because you have nothing to compare it to.
Mark McGrath:I I think of. You know I'm a liberal artist, right, my undergrad history in a, in a banned book and just a. You know what we were talking about, wikipedia and other things earlier, just even going off the American Library associations, you know you look at famous banned books to kill a mockingbird, lord of the Flies, fahrenheit 51, ulysses, brave new world, beloved by Tony Morrison, catcher in the Rye of mice and men. It's just hard to it's hard to posit that like it's already been comprehended. I think that and I can't, I can't imagine you know the richness of the literature, that of learning through through high school and then through, you know, liberal Arts College, within the University, but but but studying liberal arts.
Mark McGrath:I can't imagine not having a lot of those books as part of the, the canon, to give you perspectives that even all these years later I still Remember the description of the dust bowl in grapes of wrath. And you know, of course we talked about Orwell earlier, about animal farm, or I Couldn't imagine that reading to kill a mockingbird, I can't. Even I came in, I came and comprehend that, but but at some point these things are banned or you can go back further in in antiquity, right, and people were burnt at the stake if they thought that the earth wasn't the center of whatever it is that we that were part of, or the. I was like to tell my kids I have four teenagers about your Donna Bruno.
Mark McGrath:You know who was right a lot of the science things that he posited and he was burnt at the stake.
Michael Ashley:I Think there's another if you think about the two big dystopian novels that people think of. The other one is brave new world, and I think that our reality is really a combination of the two, because in brave new world it's not as if that they have to create the, the violent mechanisms that they do in 1984. Instead, they get people to drop out on their own accord. And how do they do it? They make life so Pleasurable and give people what they want so much that they stop caring about it. So they give him soma, they let him have as much sex as they want, all that right, and so they get. So they get basically so lulled into pleasure and he didn't stick the light that they stop caring about their own lives, and I think that's also what's going on right here. So, in addition to books being banned, like you just mentioned, mark, something else is going on too now.
Michael Ashley:Chat Gbt was not around when we finished writing that book. It only came out Really in last November. But you don't even have to ban books necessarily for people not to read them. You can just create something like chat Gbt that will do your reading for you and you don't have to write your papers anymore and you don't have to know about anything because, boom, you got this wonderful Techno technological tool. And why would you want to waste your time reading the wonderful books of the Western Canon when chat Gbt will write your papers for you?
Michael Ashley:And so the other danger I think we should be very much aware of and and be cognizant of is the fact that people are doing their own Self-censorship in a different way. They are not engaging with these books, they're not taking personal responsibility for their lives and going out and reading these classic books on their own. Unfortunately, I would bet that if we did a random survey of people on the streets right now, most of them have not read these books and more. They've even read many books and they don't understand what is going on. And really that's on all of us. It's not just the globalists, and you know. You know doing their own machinations. We have a responsibility in this as well. We should be more. We should know about our Constitution, we should know about these books and we should take an active participation in our own lives.
Ponch Rivera:So, michael, you brought up tech. I woke up this morning to my electronic nicotine and logged in right away. Start reading stuff, right? So technology has a lot in in our modern age to do with how we think and how we sense, decide and act. In your book you talk about I think it's 65% of those between the ages 18 to 21 fall asleep with your phone. Is that correct? Does it get that data right?
Michael Ashley:Yes, it sounds about right. I don't have it from yeah.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, yeah. There's 6.64 billion people on the planet that have a smartphone. You called them bondage gadgets, right. It's kind of cool, but there's a lot of, a lot of great things or a lot of nice connections to how technology is really influence us. But there's another aspect of technology that is the surveillance side of it, right? So how are we being surveilled, what's going on with that, how are we contributing to that and what are the dangers there? So I just want to throw that in your, in your Pocket there.
Michael Ashley:Well, I think this is going on in different ways. I mean, you have the purely governmental version, which, of course, the Patriot Act allowed to happen, so they're able to spy on people in masks right, listen to all their conversations, and I think that one's pretty people are pretty aware of that. But I think the other one that people are not as aware of is what's called surveillance capitalism, and that comes from a book by Shoshana Zabuff, and, speaking of terms and the power of language, this book, I think, came out in 2018. I became aware of it in 2019. In fact, that's how Robert and I bonded. We were, that's, my co-author with NeuroMind. We were both very much influenced by this book, and so the idea was, shoshana Zabuff was Creating a word, a term, if you will, to explain the business practices of big tech companies like Google or Facebook, and basically they data minus.
Michael Ashley:They make their money based on our information. There's a reason why data has replaced oil as the world's most valuable, powerful commodity, right, and so you could begin to use this data for all kinds of purposes, but I'll just give you a few. I'm sure you've had the, the, the wonderful situation where you're mentioning a car that you like, or, let's say, a piece of furniture that you're interested in, and then the next day you get an ad for that Car or that furniture in your inbox, right? Most people have had that. So that's the obvious example In which they're using it as a way to market as products. But there are more insidious versions of this, where Surveillance capitalism is nudging us into making certain behavioral decisions right, and so on.
Michael Ashley:Shoshana Zabuff Was very influenced by BF Skinner, and so her book talks about this idea of conditioning people To do different things, and that's also what's going on with surveillance capitalism. So, in addition to you know, the government surveilling us, in addition to big tech making money off of our information, they're also nudging us in different directions. So there's a lot that's going on with the whole surveillance situation.
Mark McGrath:So we wanted, as we drive it home, there's a couple of things I threw up there in the chat and let's let's start with the first one there Love your impression on this. This is from John Boyd, who our podcast is a living memorial to him. But he's famous for saying you got to challenge all assumptions. If you don't, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after, and I think that resonates with a lot of what you've written About and a lot of what you shared with us today. What's your reflection on that quote? When you see a quote like that, I 100%.
Michael Ashley:I think you know when I, when I was a kid, I got in trouble a lot, and so I was always in the principal's office and I think that so I didn't do well in school until I until I had a kind of a low point in high school and I had to go back and learn everything I was supposed to learn, but what it did was it allowed me to question everything. I'd always had a problem with authority and, and so it kind of propelled me to do my own research and to learn on my on my own. And it's interesting, in 2020, places like the New York Times were saying don't do your own research. But it's important for us to not accept what we are told necessarily just because we're told it right. We should do our own research and make sure that it resonates with our own, with our own internal Interpretation of the world, with our own heart, with our own morals were, with our own values.
Mark McGrath:And this is, and then the last two things, michael. You know, punch mentioned at the beginning a brief that John Boyd was famous for, the strategic game of Question mark and question mark, which are revealed to be interaction isolation. He defines evil and I want to get your impression of Corruption and we want to get your impression of these two definitions because we believe that they're really accessible and it's something that gets you off of the you know, the bad guys from James Bond type of Caricature or or people sitting in a closed room twirling their moustaches, like I said earlier. But Boyd says 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 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. Close us out with what you think of of those two definitions from John Boyd.
Michael Ashley:Sure, well, I think that goes. Definitions. Go back to we talked about. When I go back to Hitler's Weimar Republic.
Michael Ashley:Right, we have people who believe that they were doing the right thing most of them, I would imagine and yet they got swept up into something they call it the banality of evil. But I would add one more aspect of that and that's this I believe, going back to narrative, that everyone believes that they're the hero of their own story. If we were to go to the extreme example of Hitler or Chairman Mao or Joseph Stalin, I don't think that they thought that they were that same caricature, truly mustache villain. I believe that we make narratives in our own mind to justify our own actions. Yes, of course, there are people that are sociopaths, that are our, our hellbent on doing evil in the world. I'm not disputing that. But I think for the majority of people, we believe we are doing the right thing, and that's why it's so important for people to be well versed on the topics We've been talking about right now. Know your history, read as many books as you can and come to your own conclusions.
Mark McGrath:I Think you mentioned Anne Frank earlier and when I remember reading that book as a kid, I think one of her famous quote was in the end. I believe that people are all good at heart.
Michael Ashley:Yeah, I agree with that too.
Ponch Rivera:So, michael, we know you have to run right now a couple things. You close the book out with something very interesting. You give a description on the way out. Can you do you remember what that is?
Michael Ashley:Sure. Well, there's a few different things I talk about, but we talked about that, the towel piglet and this idea that you know, in that story he would be the most unlikely hero is this little, tiny, little tiny animal right there, and I think for a lot of people right now we're talking about things that seem so huge and it's very easy To get to moralize. It feels like in some ways where Luke Skywalker going up against the Empire. But what I would remind people is, if you think about any of your favorite stories, there are always involved the same kind of hero an underdog, a person or an animal. There's up against something that they can, they can hardly fathom a power that's almost beyond comprehension, but it's important to remember that. How did all those stories win? They win when we wake up to our own power and we take action and become the hero in our own lives.
Ponch Rivera:Thank you for that. How can our listeners find more about you and what do you have coming up in the future?
Michael Ashley:Sure, you can check me out on at Michael Ashley publishingcom. That's the website from my company, who I am. You can also find all my books on Amazon, so just look up my name, michael Ashley. There is another author named Michael Ashley, so you might want to put in Michael Ashley Neuromind, because an effective thing. There's more than one Michael Ashley on Amazon books, so that's a good way to find me both of those.
Mark McGrath:Don't type it in on iTunes, a podcast. I found out that you to your point, there's a very different Michael Ashley, that's not talking about the things.
Michael Ashley:Type in my name on LinkedIn. Those are three different places to find me.
Ponch Rivera:All right. Well, thank you for being a guest on no way out. We want to encourage our listeners to read your book Neuromind, along with your co-author, robert Edward Grant, and if, for those of you who are not familiar with Robert Edward Grant, go look him up immediately, learn a little about sacred geometry, go have your mind blow, go learn a new paradigm. Absolutely an amazing human being. So congratulations on the new book and we look forward to talking to you in the future.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, thank you very much, Michael. Thank you, thanks, guys, you.
