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
PsyWar Primer: Liminal Warfare, Flow, 5GW, Sun Tzu and More
Hey No Way Out listeners!
We’re thrilled to bring you this exclusive primer episode for our highly anticipated conversation with Dr. Robert Malone. This mashup episode is your gateway to the upcoming deep-dive discussion on Dr. Malone and his wife’s new book, PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order.
What’s Inside?
This special mashup includes invaluable insights from some of our top No Way Out guests like David Kilcullen, PhD, James Giordano, PhD, Adrian Bejan, PhD, Michael Ashley, and James Gimian. Each offers diverse perspectives on critical topics like liminal warfare, information dominance, and cognitive manipulation.
What to Expect:
- Fifth-Generation Warfare: Discover how today’s battles are fought in the mind, with information as the ultimate weapon.
- Cognitive Manipulation: Learn how manipulation is central to warfare, leadership, and even daily decision-making.
- Surveillance Capitalism: Understand how big tech uses your data to influence your behavior and make decisions for you.
- Liminal Warfare: Explore the spaces between chaos and complexity, and complexity and order, and its role in modern conflicts.
- The Art of War: Dr. Malone breaks down why this ancient text remains crucial in today's volatile world.
Want Early Access to the Full Dr. Robert Malone Episode?
Here’s the deal: Help us hit 10 five-star reviews on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we’ll release this must-hear conversation immediately! Your support makes it happen.
Stay in the Loop. Don't have time to listen to the podcast? Want to make some snowmobiles? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive deeper insights on current and past episodes.
Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
Want to develop your organization’s capacity for free and independent action (Organic Success)? Learn more and follow us at:
https://www.aglx.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@AGLXConsulting
https://www.linkedin.com/company/aglx-consulting-llc/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/briandrivera
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markjmcgrath1
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemccrone
Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
Acta Non Verba – with Marcus Aurelius Anderson
Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
...
No Way Out listeners, thank you for tuning in. We're thrilled that you're here with us and I want to give you some background on this upcoming episode. It's a mashup of sorts. It is intended to be a fifth generation or psychological warfare primer for the upcoming no Way Out episode featuring Dr Robert Malone. Now, that's right. Dr Robert Malone and I have a conversation anchored around his and his wife's new book, psywar Enforcing the New World Order.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Now, when will that episode be released? Well, how about we do this? If we can get 10 five-star ratings on Spotify, apple or wherever you listen to no Way Out, we'll release that Dr Malone episode immediately out. We'll release that Dr Malone episode immediately. So please leave a review, provide a rating and we like five stars and we will release the no Way Out episode featuring Dr Robert Malone immediately. Now for this mashup in preparation for the episode featuring Dr Robert Malone, we're pulling together some key segments from previous no Way Out guests and we also have a short segment from the recording with Dr Robert Malone. In this mashup you'll hear from David Kilcullen, professor Adrian Bajon, james Giordano, michael Ashley, buzz Renfer, james Gimien and, of course, dr Robert Malone. Now, in this first segment, steve McCrone and David Kilcullen discuss liminal warfare and unrestricted warfare. Okay, can we?
Steve McCrone:shift tack a little bit to the idea of liminality and for the listeners who are familiar with the Kenevan framework, liminality features there in the space between the complex domain and the complicated and in the space between the complex domain and the chaotic, and that's where you're not in one or the other, but rather you're making that sort of transitory change between the two and the system is fundamentally changing. Can you talk about liminality in respect to your work and how you apply that concept in your consultancy?
David Kilcullen:Yeah, so liminality is a broad-based concept, as you mentioned. It's a very common concept in anthropological work, which is my academic background, but it just means a threshold or a transitional zone or a transitional territory or transitional population right between established. You know, when things go plastic temporarily before they reset in a new form, that's a liminal moment. But it also means riding the threshold of detectability right, and that's how I use it in my context. And that's how I use it in my context. We've had the emergence of what military people call UTS ubiquitous technical surveillance in the last 15 years, where it's basically impossible to be covert or clandestine. Covert means the existence of an operation is detected but the identity of the sponsor is unknown. Clandestine means that the entire existence of the operation remains undetected at all. It used to be feasible in the special operations and intelligence world to be fully clandestine on a more or less permanent basis. That's not true anymore. What we're talking about now is more like delayed attribution, where the adversary will eventually figure out what's going on. It's just a question of how long. And there are different adaptations to respond to that new ubiquitous surveillance situation. One of them is one that the Russians have made a speciality in which is riding the edge between detectability and ambiguity, so conducting operations where they're not trying to be covert, they're not trying to be clandestine, they're not clear enough that we can mount a response, and they play a political warfare and information warfare game in that space to delay and obfuscate and limit a response, and that gives them a play space within which to manoeuvre. The Russian takeover of Crimea is a good example of that, where they had the so-called little green men. Nobody had any doubt really that that was Russian military, but the Russians were just denying it in a completely bald-faced manner on international media and elsewhere and saying, no, no, nothing to see here. That's not our guys and we have no intention of ever annexing or taking over Crimea, let alone the rest of Ukraine. It's just a temporary humanitarian intervention. And that delayed and obfuscated the response from NATO for a few weeks, which was all they needed to consolidate control. And then suddenly, on the 18th of March 2014, they announced okay, we're having a referendum on annexing Crimea. Next day, they annexed Crimea Following day. You know it's part of Russia.
David Kilcullen:So that's an example of what I describe in the book as liminal warfare, right riding the edge of detectability. There are other ways to deal with it. A classic Chinese model, which is sometimes called unrestricted warfare, is to go outside of the boundaries of what we define as warfare, so that even if we can detect what's going on, we don't necessarily recognise it as a form of conflict. Think about what's happening with technical standards, with access to semiconductors, critical commodities like pharmaceutical precursors, those kinds of things. They all fit within a Chinese warfare strategy called unrestricted warfare, but Western countries typically regard those as just parts of normal commercial interaction. So you're moving outside the bounds of what is traditionally considered to be war fighting. So there are different ways to handle that approach.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Now it's time to hear from the scariest person I know on the internet, and that is James Giordano, phd. He's the author of over 300 publications, seven books and 20 government white papers on neurotechnology, biosecurity and ethics, and in this segment I asked Dr Giordano to talk about the difference between information warfare and cognitive warfare. We also make some connections and references to John Boyd's OODA loop. So listen up. What about the mind here, the battlefield, the brain at the battlefield as a 21st century that you write about quite often. In fact, in one of your papers you bring up right away, the key to victory or defeat in war is people. The key to people lies in the brain.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We also know that I believe China's doctrine right now is about mind superiority, and then Russia has something known as reflexive control doctrine. And, of course, john Boyd famously said machines don't fight wars, people do, and they use their mind, people, ideas and things in that order. Some of the things you just talked about were really about how do we fold our adversaries back inside themselves, right? Morally, mentally and physically, without suffering the same fate ourselves, right? That's something that we get from John Boyd. So at the end of the day, here we're talking about maybe information warfare and cognitive warfare, or overall cognitive dominance. How do we understand what's going on in the minds of others, and so forth. Dr G, can you help us understand the difference between information warfare and cognitive warfare if there is a difference, and perhaps take a look at it through the lens of the OODA loop?
James Giordano, PhD:No, I think it's important to consider those as existing along a constellation or spectrum of capabilities and also context, right. So I mean, if we're talking about information, information is important to cognition. I mean, what we do cognitively is we take in sense data. We then assimilate those sense data with regard to some prior disposition or orientation to what those things are based upon, how we're sensing. That gives us a perception. That perception very often is linked to some cognitive domain that we like to call emotionality, and there's nothing that is neutral. Anything is either positively valent or negatively valent. It's just a question of where, on that sliding scale, we list them. I mean, if you really think about it, ask the listeners to think about it, think about your idea of neutrality. You're not really neutral about anything, you know. You could say well, I'm kind of neutral about Brussels sprouts, yeah, but wait a minute. If it was a question of Brussels sprouts and ice cream, well, okay, somebody would go for the ice cream, somebody would go for the Brussels sprouts, brussels sprouts versus pizza, somebody's going to go for the pizza.
James Giordano, PhD:So what tends to happen is that neutrality is really a relative neutrality and what we're really doing is we're hierarchizing things all the time based upon the way they relatively feel to us in terms of gain or loss, pain or pleasure, understanding that information plays into the cognitive domain, because information, both in terms of current information, as it may have some speculative and predictive value this will lead to X, y or Z or, as it has, referential value, this then reflects Alpha Bravo, charlie is important because it's evocative for not only those cognitive domains but those emotional domains that drive decision-makings and actions.
James Giordano, PhD:So the informational space and the cognitive space really represent an interdigitation, a true interdigitation of one hand sort of washing the other. The way we cognitively make sense of information is based not only on the information itself and the relative radicality of the information, what in the philosophical language is sometimes referred to as the ding on zich, the thing unto itself, but realistically, our perception, based upon our sensation of that that is then ground to some recollection of its relative meaning. Contextually, for us, dynamic, as an important cog in the cognitive wheel, can become exceedingly important in controlling and influencing narratives, symbols, expressions, dynamic interactions that are all operable within the human terrain.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:In this segment, professor Bijan addresses the suppression of ideas on social media and its relation to the loss of freedom. He draws parallels to the early 20th century's popularity of Marxism and fascism. He also comments on the belief that certain elites know better than the common people. So here's a question about freedom. So the suppression of ideas on social media or anywhere through fear or concern that you're going to be canceled is that directly related to the loss of freedom in this concept?
Adrian Bejan, PhD:of the so-called popularity of Marxism at the turn of the previous century. That's what's going on with what you bring up and, just like more than 100 years ago, smart people, well you know, with advancement, with ready money, with food that's easy to access, and all this comes the arrogance and, of course, with degrees from Harvard and other places, the arrogance that you know better than the common man. That is what happened more than 100 years ago. In fact, one of my daughters published a book about fascism in the interwar period. Fascism in the interwar period is associated with the brown shirts, meaning with vulgar fascists and anti-Semites, and all this meaning with the workers.
Adrian Bejan, PhD:No, fascism in the interwar period was the baby of the intellectual elite of the world. The leading thinkers, artists, writers were gaga about it. I mean, just as they were with, by the way, fascism and Marxism are the same thing if you look at the history of it. So, and they were gaga about you know communism as well, and so arrogance breeds this attitude of well. That's why I call it a replay, or a feeling or pretense that you know better than the common man. It is destructive and it's dangerous, and this is why it's important. It's important especially for those who have access to education pupils, and then students and eventually professors to go through life with eyes open and questioning what they hear. Question.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:In 2023,. Robert Ever Grant and Michael Ashley co-authored Neuromind In this segment. Michael Ashley takes us through the concept of surveillance capitalism.
Michael Ashley: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 mass 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. That's my co-author with Neuromind.
Michael Ashley: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, mine us. 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 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.
Michael Ashley:But there are more insidious versions of this, where surveillance capitalism is nudging us into making certain behavioral decisions. Right, and so Shoshana Zaboff 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 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.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Now, if this is a primer for the Dr Robert Malone episode, then we have to talk about COVID vaccines, and to do this here is retired US Air Force Colonel Thomas Buzz Renfro. Now Buzz read a book called Unyielding Marathons Against Illegal Mandates. In this segment. Buzz recounts his initial trust in the system during the COVID-19 pandemic, believing that vaccines would be handled properly and lawfully.
Thomas "Buzz" Rempfer:I didn't want to spend just like I had spent the previous 20 years tilting windmills over anthrax vaccine. I did not want to get into another one of these whifferdales. So my initial approach was, you know, I tried to trust in the system that they were going to put out a vaccine for a legitimate public health threat, that they were going to do it right this time and they were going to follow the law. And I was actually very impressed initially that the military, when it was fully acknowledged that the vaccines were emergency use, authorized that they were actually having a voluntary program. So I was, you know, I was applauding the military.
Thomas "Buzz" Rempfer:Early on, I did some research for Children's Health Defense, assisted Robert F Kennedy Jr and Dr Merrill Nass, who was one of the doctors that actually helped us during the anthrax vaccine era, and they did a citizen petition in order to try to halt any kind of mandates. We were working on this in the spring of 2021, before there were mandates, and I was very naive, very idealistic. When you read my book, I mean I think that's basically the picture in the memoir that is painted for you that, you know, the only reason I fought this stuff is because I'm idealistic and so, going into the COVID era, the pandemic, and prior to the mandates, I was very idealistic. I was thinking there's no way they're going to mandate this stuff. This is not FDA approved, so sure enough. The Department of Defense immensely disappointed me because they ended up doing mandates when only emergency use authorized product was available and that's why it was a patently illegal order. And the government did the same thing for civilians with mandates, even though the law specifically says that they're supposed to have the option to accept or refuse and that any consequences are strictly medical. If you look at the context of consequences in the law, they're strictly medical. You can't be taking away people's jobs, keeping people from going to school. That is the law.
Thomas "Buzz" Rempfer:The military law was a subset of the earlier law I cited. The military law is 10 USC 1107A for emergency use authorized products. Soldiers have to have their prior consent right. You cannot punish them, and the precedent I mentioned in the Federal Register, which is on my website, unyieldingorg, says the same thing you cannot punish them. And the precedent I mentioned in the Federal Register, which is on my website, unyieldingorg, says the same thing you cannot penalize the troops for exercising their prior consent rights. So when COVID came around, initially I was idealistically trusting, but ultimately the government fundamentally violated the same laws. It disappointed me and that's why I finally put the book together. I said, hey, people need to understand the patterns of the bad behavior that have reemerged.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Now James Gimion has been studying and teaching the art of war, the Sun Tzu, bing Fa, since 1980. Now he served as a general editor of the bestselling translation the Art of War, the Denma translation.
James Gimian :In this segment, james discusses the relevance of the Sun Tzu I believe it's actually called Sun Tzu, the art of war in dealing with today's uncertainties, constant changes and interconnectedness, much like the turbulent times of the warring states period in China times of the warring states period in China, when people identify so immediately that it is the reality we're facing now, the uncertainty, the constant change, the interconnectedness which for some time we've forgotten was the ground of the world we deal with and we attempt to lead. So it does help create, you know, a lot of people will say to us what does this ancient Chinese text have to do with me? You know, the art of war seems like it's hard to understand. I'm going to spend a lot of time, I'm never going to get there.
James Gimian :Why? From it to apply to a leadership, a broad leadership training conversation. It creates the ground of talking about what's important to people, what they experience and, like you say, everybody's experience is things are uncertain, increasingly uncertain, they're changing constantly. It's hard to make a plan and fulfill it. You don't know about your supply chain. You don't know if you're going to be able to get the labor that you need to do your job. I mean on every front. Hundred years all of the rules and regulations and laws and cultural norms were being reshaped and reformed, and so the art of war was a manual for a leader dealing with that reality, and that's why it is so helpful and relevant to our times.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So on that, manipulation or deception, leadership and manipulation are the opposite side of the same coin. Right, to be a good leader, you actually have to manipulate people, but that's not what we say.
James Gimian :right, we're not trying to deceive people, but please build on what Mark pointed out there and help our listeners understand what's in the book we wrote in the particular way we did about reception, about deception, just because it's the first task is to get somebody extracted from that reaction of negativity and a a negative value that's automatically put onto that word. And we're not saying that those, those negative things don't exist. But it's a limited understanding. As many books have pointed out in scientific work, we use deception in nature in our lives in multiple ways. I think the attempt we made was to set aside those most seemingly egregious expressions of it outright lying, to manipulate for personal gain, you know, is certainly not what we were talking about. But the I mean the starting point from our point of view is the multiple realities that coexist, that we choose to sort out in our individual ways. So, right from the beginning, to think that we're all talking about the same external reality, that we experience the same, is a misconception. So therefore the notion of deception changes completely if it's not about there is some right thing out there that I'm going to distort your understanding of what's being talked about in the Bingfa the art of war. The art of war is that knowing, for me and for others, is a central element to success. Clear seeing leads to effective action. So if I'm trying to prevail by having my goal succeed. It may mean that part of that is to shape others' understanding of the elements so that they can't mount resistance in ways that in fact might be counterproductive for them.
James Gimian :And when you talk about leadership as manipulation mean leading, what does that mean?
James Gimian :That means others are following.
James Gimian :So you know, we don't, we don't blanch at the word leadership that it's evil because we're hoping other people will follow us, because the presumption is we're doing that for the success of the whole, for their success, for the enterprise's success, that people will benefit from that leadership.
James Gimian :So that, therefore, shaping the world, which is making choices about what's real and what's not real, what's important and what's not important, you could call that deception, but it's inherent in bringing about something that could benefit all. So that is the presumption in the way we're applying this work, the leaders we're talking to. Their goal is in fact to surmount the obstacles to bring about a success that will benefit the company, the customers, the society, the people that they lead, the staff and workers in that enterprise. So I think just normalizing that common human capacity is a very helpful thing and it doesn't necessarily mean we're now endorsing that you can go and lie about your taxes or lie about your, you know, whatever it is. That's purely about fulfilling your sole limited benefit as opposed to the interconnected reality, the interconnected entity that you're a part of. So that changes the view of deception right there If you're acting on behalf of the whole.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Here's a short segment from the upcoming episode featuring Dr Robert Malone. In this segment, dr Malone discusses how the Sun Tzu, or the Sun Tzu, remains relevant in the context of fifth generation warfare.
Dr. Robert Malone:I agree. Okay, Sun Tzu is full of fifth generation warfare tips and tricks, except for the difference is the technology, the information management technological base that now exists, compared to what has existed historically. Humans don't change A lot of the core strategy remains the same, but the tools and technologies now available to 5G not cell towers is so powerful. I say again and again, and again the objective here is to control everything that you encounter in terms of information, everything that you think, everything that you feel, everything that you believe is actively being manipulated. And when I lecture on this, I talk about a surrealistic landscape that, once you step into this, you know the famous quote the only way to win at fifth generation warfare is not to play as soon as you step into this battlefield and and you are stepping into a Cywar battlefield as soon as you engage in social media, whether or not, you acknowledge it.
Dr. Robert Malone:So it is a full-on battleground and it's only getting more so. Right now, and as soon as you step into that, you are subject to a huge array of technologies and manipulation. That makes it so that if you really think it through and process what's going on here, it's hard not to conclude that it becomes increasingly difficult to separate what is you and what is your soul, what are your thoughts, from what has been injected into you, manipulated into you. And if you're honest about it, you have to recognize that a lot of the things, the biases that you carry, the things that you believe of the things, the biases that you carry, the things that you believe, the things that you feel, are a product of the manipulations that you've been subjected to. Right and
