Guerrilla Intelligence: Bob Gourley on the Real OODA Loop, AI, and Winning the Information War

Bob Gourley spent 14 years in operational intelligence — tracking Soviet naval movements, supporting ships and submarines in some of the most dynamic environments on earth — before he ever heard the name John Boyd. His regret: nobody told him sooner.

Gourley is the founder of OODA LLC, co-host of OODAcast, and one of the sharpest observers of the intersection where cybersecurity, geopolitical risk, artificial intelligence, and decision making under uncertainty collide. He runs OODAcon — an annual event he describes as less about OODA and more about orientation: what do you need to know to survive the next 12 months?

In this conversation with Brian “Ponch” Rivera and Mark “Moose” McGrath, Gourley draws a direct line from the intelligence cycle — collect, process, analyze, disseminate — to the same linearization error that has plagued every corporate OODA training in every hotel ballroom in America. The cycle fails for the same reason the four-step loop fails: because the adversary is moving while you’re still in phase two.

The conversation ranges from consciousness and psychedelics to AI’s destruction and creation moment across the technology sector. Gourley names what most executives are missing: supply chains built on helium, chips built on radioactive decay, and bond markets that cannot be managed into submission.

He also issues a direct challenge to anyone teaching the OODA loop as a sales process: they are going to suffer in life.

John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words: 

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

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Stay connected with No Way Out and The Whirl Of ReOrientation

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Transcript

Controlling AI Like Political Power

Bob Gourley 0:20

Okay, well he's got an answer in here. And the short version of the answer is it's the same way humans have always controlled our elites. We have always and we I shouldn't say always, but for the last 250 years, there was this new idea of governance that arose about a representative democracy where we vote our elites out when we don't like them and we push them out of power. Wow. He says this is the same kind of idea we need to apply to the various AI. And once I started thinking of it in that framing, yeah, there's a lot of ways we can do this. All of the AI is already controlled by people. And so our issue should be how do we control those people? And the uh we can have these AIs compete against each other.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:06

Are you saying the interests within the foundation of our country? The declaration.

Bob Gourley 1:11

Let's talk about that. It doesn't mean that the government needs to control all this stuff, but we humans will control AI and make sure it does stuff our way.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:22

So there's already a roadmap or a blueprint or whatever you want to call it for how to deal with this. And what I heard from you is uh David Brynn's work potentially connects back to the founding of our country, right? How we deal with it.

Bob Gourley 1:34

Yes. And that's only one chapter in his book, by the way. It's a really good book that gets to a lot of questions that you've already been exploring, like what is reality and what is consciousness? Now, how do you boil down all of this study of consciousness that so many people are writing just tomes about into a chapter? I think he does a really good job of doing that, but it's a it's a tough challenge. What is a mind? Other people have been trying to apply scientific study to that also. I mean, I have a mind, you have a mind, I know it. So does my dog. I know it. Um so do so many other animal life forms. And if you, you know, insects think and are creative. And people have been writing about the wisdom of birds. They have minds. Yep. But what about a single-cell animal like a paramecium? It certainly wants to eat and wants to move and wants to have sex and reproduce. Yeah. Does it have a mind? Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 2:32

Yeah. So this is fantastic. I wasn't expecting to have this conversation today. Moose is joining us. We're actually live recording at the moment. So, Bob, we were talking about consciousness, and as as Moose gets back in the uh in the cockpit here, the connection to the Oodaloop. Now, let me give you this idea. When we started this podcast, I I knew about the connection to consciousness and the conversation about the free principle. And Moose is having technical difficulties. He is a crayon's favorite toy. So let's let him get in here. But I want to get back to this Oodaloop and its connection to consciousness. Tried avoiding that conversation for years, right? Because I just didn't want to go there. But it's very clear to me that if you're looking at what Boyd was looking at years ago, and if you're not using the linear four-step decision-making process, but you're looking at the nonlinear, far from equilibrium approach that tells us how living systems interact with their ever-changing environment, then naturally that observoir decide act loop, Boyd's corpus, should be part of the discussion. And we're starting to see that now as people are picking up on the things we're putting down on the podcast. So my question to you is are you okay with that? Or where where's that fit in your world?

Bob Gourley 3:39

Yeah, well, to me, yeah, absolutely okay. Because to me, what the OODA loop is, you wouldn't need that except you want something. Whether you are an individual or an organization, you want something. Want is also, in my opinion, central to the discussion of consciousness. No matter, I mean, all these theories, so many of them vary about what consciousness is, but all of them seem to have this common theme of we want something. We want to understand, we want to grow, we want to learn, we want to learn what consciousness is and where it is. And UDA, I think the whole UTA loop and all of Boyd's writings would not be necessary except we want something. We want to compete and win. And as a nation, we really need to compete and win. And as companies, you don't survive unless you compete and win. And as individuals uh concerned with uh your current situation or your career, you want to continue to rise and compete and win. So yes, I see the OODA loop as directly relevant to understanding consciousness because consciousness is to me is also about wanting something.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 4:57

Well, let's do this. Uh, we went supersonic and into another, you know, we went towards them towards Mars in in a matter of five minutes. We talked about the uh declaration of connection to aliens, uh, David Brynn's work, and uh we start getting a consciousness. Let's throttle back a minute uh because uh I think we're gonna scare the crap out of people by going that fast. Moose, you up? Yeah, I can hear you now. Can you hear me? Oh yeah, let's go. Uh so uh we've been going for the last five minutes, Moose, and uh just getting you up to speed there. But uh welcome Bob to the show. And Moose, welcome back, man.

Mark McGrath 5:28

Yeah. Bob, thanks for coming on. I've I've been uh blessed to have been your guest twice. Uh or is it three times? I forget, I think maybe twice.

Bob Gourley 5:38

Yeah, at least twice.

Mark McGrath 5:39

I'm losing track, but it's always a good time to uh chat with you.

Bob Gourley 5:42

It's always educational for me.

Mark McGrath 5:43

I learn every time you speak. Well, let's make uh we'll make today no exception. So, you know, I I was interested in the conversation that you're having around consciousness. Um as you pointed out, you know, Ponch and I talk about that quite a bit. And we really do believe that Boyd was ultimately talking about that. And that I think is one of the benefits of talking about Uda in terms of the sketch, because when you realize that it is, as you hear us argue about all the time, not about with each other, but like argue for, that Boyd was empowering us to deal with complexity and be able to rewrite, destroy and rewrite, and destroy and rewrite our perception of that reality in a complex way, which consciousness to me, it always seems like it fits right in. And if you look a lot of the corpus of our work around things that we've talked about that other people won't talk about or other people think we're crazy, whether it's psychedelics or trauma or other things, the more and more that we delve into that, the more and more we realize the synergy between Boyd and that whole category, not at the exclusion of military thought or litigation or business or the other or sports or anything else that he's that he was in. But what's been remarkable for us over the last two years, especially here in Manhattan, is when you meet more and more of these practitioners of psychedelics and psychiatry and treating for depression and trauma, it is really fascinating to me. It's like they understand and get orientation in Oodaloop's sketch, like, oh my gosh, like I've never heard of this guy, Boyd. And what's what's also remarkable is the fact that they end up knowing more about Boyd than they ever realized without knowing anything about Boyd. Interesting.

Bob Gourley 7:28

You know, um, that is fascinating. And I've of course I've seen similar things where I, you know, maybe I'll meet a CEO and I'll be uh talking about what they do and um across you know any industry. And these guys are good at Boyd type things without ever having heard of him. But it's just from, I don't know, survival, uh survival of the fittest, some survival of the best competitor. And I tell you, I've never really explored uh psychedelics, probably never will, except by uh vicariously reading what you guys write and watching your videos, talking to folks who've scientifically studied this, and it's really fascinating.

Mark McGrath 8:08

When you think of it in the destruction and creation sense, I think what and and Ponch jump in on this, what I understand of psychedelics is that it's it's empowering us to rewrite our perception, to just again destroy and create perception. So we can let go of things like trauma, we can let go of things like PTSD or postpartum depression or whatever it is that someone's being treated for. And then what is also really fascinating about that is that my physical orientation becomes aligned with what's actually going on. I have a better sense of what's going on. The part that is near and dear to all of us as you know, veteran naval officers is the PTSD angle. And that's something that I had never I had never thought of. But that the more that you dig into Boyd and the more time that you spend in the archives and you and you really are starting to get a sense of where he was coming from, I have a feeling that if he were here, I don't like to speak for him, but if he were here, I would think that he would be pretty curious and interested, specifically on how it was helping veterans deal with something other than, you know, in a way that was different than the sort of standard fare of you know, pills and suicide.

What Counts As A Mind

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 9:17

Moose, I got a thought on this. So the idea of going outside the system, you know, there's there's Robin Carhart Harris, he talks about the snow globe when you're talking about psychedelics, right? You shake it up and and you get to look at things in a different light. What you're actually doing, I believe, is you're going outside the system, right? We know that's important. You can't determine the character of nature from within. You have to go outside. So you know the perspective of what happened, what you experienced, and you get to have a new counterfactual created about that, and that rewrites or updates your orientation. So that's that's why it's so fan, you know, it's a nice connection to genetics, which we know genetically we're predisposed to carry the trauma of our ancestors. I don't know how far that goes, and that may or may not be true at the genetics. So we're talking about the orientation side and the culture, you know, you and I grew up in, all of us did, you know, where we all learned that alcohol is a good thing and psychedelics are bad. That's the war on drugs, basically. You know, you go to a package store on base and you can get alcohol, right? It's right there. It's probably the worst thing you can put in your body, right? But so that culture that we were brought into, and then the experiences, uh, and there's something known as the multiple hit hypothesis, if I get this right, that genetics culture and our experiences determine how we view the world, which is exactly what orientation says or suggests inside of Boyd Doodaloop. So thanks for bringing me on that. I just had that thought, going outside the system to look inside.

Bob Gourley 10:34

You know, so let me try a theory on you guys that may resonate from your military background too. And that is so I was a military and Navy intelligence officer, and through the years, my first uh focus was on Navy operations. Back then it was the Soviet Navy. We would try to assess what's happening really close to their ports because we're supporting U.S. ships and subs that would go really close into their ports. So a very dynamic situation. So part one of the job, what is reality? Where is everybody right now, all the Soviets, and what are they doing right now? Where are they going to be 30 minutes from now? But then the harder part to assess is the intention. What are they going to do next? And really the only way we had of doing that was talking to the older, seasoned pros who'd seen things before and could make reasonable assessments. Now, if you fast forward to the big joint military intelligence centers, you have folks doing that at massive scale over entire battlefields. Maybe there should be room for a certain cadre of intelligence professionals who are on the psychedelics and are looking at the same thing, but are coming at it from a different angle. We and are able to say, you know, here's what I think now.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 11:47

I I wouldn't I wouldn't say so. I would say you don't need to be on psychedelics to do that. Um you can have a journey at some point. You can meditate, you can have um pre-cognition and I think they call it people breath work, post-cognition. So yeah, bringing all this, what would you call it? Uh the the the flow states into your body, bring it into the organizations.

Mark McGrath 12:05

Well, it's funny. Psychedelics may be part of that. One other thing that Bob mentioned was the you know, the intelligence community. I I think the intelligence community is all over psychedelics, you know, right right here in my neighborhood around one bedford, as we learned from Norman Oler on one of his episodes, that the CIA was using psychedelics right here in Grench Village to to to you know, I guess the the intent was mind control, but what they realized was like we're not able to control them, but they're they're writing Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Arts Club band or whatever. You know what I mean? Like they're becoming more creative and more peaceful. So I think that it is interesting to see that intelligence has been all over this stuff for a long time.

Bob Gourley 12:42

Hey, Paul, I mean I don't think they are really. They're not. Yeah. Maybe I mean there were some very there were some failed experiments during the Cold War. And now I don't know everything that's going on, but there's I don't think there's any formal investment or investigation into psychedelics in the Intel community today, personally.

Mark McGrath 13:02

Yeah, that's fine. I mean, we're we're just I guess historically, maybe um it's changed. That's okay. But I mean, I guess I guess the I guess the broader point, the the broader point is that that there is a concerted effort across agencies, industries, domains, where people are trying to get a better understanding of what the hell is actually going on. And I think that that's really what Boyd was doing was was the milit military might have been the starting point, but reality was what he was trying to help people thrive in. And it's not limited to anybody in the military.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 13:34

So, Bob, uh let's go back to your uh point about the what you did in the past. So it's I think you're familiar with Mike Ansley's work on situational awareness, right?

Speaker 2 13:41

Yes.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 13:42

So that's really what we're trying to do is what the hell happened, what's happening, and what could happen. So that anticipatory awareness of what could happen next. I think they call it sense making. So if we go back to that language, it's hard, you know, we got to know what to pay attention to in the environment. And I think that's what you do. Can you talk a little bit more about that when you train intelligence officers or you train people to look at the environment?

Bob Gourley 14:03

Well, you know, first of all, I feel very fortunate that in my youth, I was in that environment where for, I'd say, teen years, I was doing operational intelligence in very dynamic situations, at first as part of a small team and then leading teams that do that. And it took about 14 years before I really felt like I was in the flow and I was mastering this profession, or at least starting to get a hold of my hands around it. That's around the time that I discovered Boyd. It was uh uh we were connecting our ship. I was at the on Seventh Fleet on the USS Blue Ridge, their command ship, and we were connecting it to the global telecommunications networks by phones. And I was able to connect a phone to my CompuServe account and from there bounce into this new thing, the internet and all the bulletin boards and teach people how to use email and the web. And that's when I met G.I. Wilson, one of the acolytes of Void, and he started uh giving me all these new ideas about uh command and control warfare and um and started talking about Boyd. And when he first started doing that, and I look back on my career, I'm thinking, why had nobody told me this before? It would have accelerated my learning and accelerated my productivity. And so that part of my journey sticks with me today. You fast forward to today, and I'm uh working a lot with companies that are trying to comprehend what's their cyber threat, who's trying to attack them, what are they going to do next? Our little consultancy also works with a lot of corporate boards that want to figure out what do I need to do in this new world of AI? What do I, what do we invest in? And how do we train our people? And what are my competitors doing? All those old lessons that came from my time in this dynamic environment are just so relevant today to sense making for corporate organizations. So my my big regret is I sure wish I could have learned more earlier about these Boyd ideas.

Mark McGrath 16:07

It's interesting too, I because I when you say it that way, it really makes me realize because I I learned it in the Marine Corps, and I learned that there were still some firsthand accounts of firsthand people that were still on active duty. In fact, when I first heard about the Boyd cycle, it was 1995 as a Razzi midshipman, and and Boyd was actually still alive. And to think that, you know, he you know, this is all kind of pre-internet as we know it, and back in 1995, we remember those days, it would have been interesting to at some point it clicked to me that what I had been taught in the Marine Corps was the limited version that they wanted us to know, but the in-depth version of what he was actually working on. I had to pull all those threads myself. I couldn't, I wasn't going to get that from the Marine Corps. That was all uh, you know, in um independent research.

Bob Gourley 16:58

Yeah. I was also very fortunate to go to um a Marine Corps command and staff college where uh, and this was '97. So by by then, Boyd's ideas had taken the place over, and it was uh a great opportunity to study more. Still, of course, very much maneuver warfare focused. Yeah. And another great teacher, I mean, besides you guys, which are both great teachers of this stuff now, is uh Chet Richards, who I I loved because of his taking of these concepts and putting it in a business context where it's just so totally relevant. Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 17:37

I I would have challenge both of you on something. Uh and I just thought about this. We we talk about Boyd's ideas. A lot of the ideas that Boyd has in his, you know, in his discourse winning and losing are not his ideas. They're borrowed from somewhere else. All he did was look at things. He was curious, right? And he was very curious about multiple disciplines, multiple domains. So we often talk about ideas from John Boyd. To me, I think that might be wrong. And I want to get your take on that, uh, Moose and Bob. Are they his or they're a good question?

Bob Gourley 18:05

I bet you something tells me Boyd would agree with you. Because he pulled from so many disciplines: biology, physics, philosophy, economics.

Mark McGrath 19:13

History, Eastern philosophy.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 19:15

So maybe we're doing a disservice by talking about his ideas rather than another way to look at it. So I I just hearing you guys talk about it, let's let's explore that for a minute. Moose thoughts.

OODA Loop As Desire And Intent

Mark McGrath 19:25

Well, I mean, I think that that is one of the ways that I really resonated with Boyd because I was brought up in a very, I don't want to say orthodox, but a very definitional sort of classical liberal arts education from being a kid and going through the high school that I went through, um, and then the the you know, the program that I went through through a college of liberal arts. So being exposed to so many things from so many perspectives was one of the ways that I probably related and identified with Boyd the most as I started to dig in. Because, you know, when people explained UDI and the Marine Corps and the Boyd cycle, it was very the, you know, it was the linear version. Get inside somebody's Ouda loop, you know, out-orient, outspeed, outthink, but it wasn't out-orient. And that came with, you know, kind of touching on what Bob said. That that came when I discovered Chet Richard's work, Franzo Singa's work, John Robb and others. And then being on Wall Street and not in the Marine Corps, that really helped too, because it showed me that whatever Boyd was chasing after was not merely limited to the military, that Boyd was in fact a theorist that discovered the way complexity actually works, the way the universe actually works, and how humans can be empowered to thrive in it. And, you know, there is the quote unquote danger or risk of creating a theory of everything. But on the other hand, there's a great gift that creating a theory of everything. Because as Bob said, Boyd pulled from literally everywhere and showed that not only can I understand this logically, philosophically, strategically, but I could also understand this as part of my, of my uh, of my evolutionary biology. And then as our clients know, Ponch, you know, when they start interacting with us and they see that we are doing what Boyd told us to do, leave it open and add and develop and and and and and tweak and and build on. That's when you start adding things like McLuhan and others that really broaden. You know, when I I got this from John Robb. When I started looking at McLuhan in tandem with Boyd, it actually made my understanding of Boyd expand significantly. But then vice versa, I was able to understand McCluin quicker and better than the sort of stereotype view of communication because I understood Boyd so well, you know. And then there's there's other thinkers that the same thing. But basically, what we realized is that Boyd wanted us to create snowmobiles ourselves and build on what he left intentionally open and incomplete. And the last line of Franzo Singer's science, strategy, and war, but that's it. That's the last line. He left this incomplete for uh for a reason. He used to say, Bob, and you know this. If you think that this is doctrine and granite and set in stone, take it out and burn it right now and shoot me, because uh I I I don't know. I'm constantly learning, I'm constantly adapting.

Speaker 2 22:14

Yeah, yeah.

Bob Gourley 22:16

Well, you know, and I I do think this applies to so many other fields. And when you my eyes were opened in thinking this kind of thing, you know, it's well, let me just put it this way it's relevant to science and physics. You know, there's uh three major theories in physics now, and they're all incomplete and they're all wrong, but they're all we've got to work with. There's the general theory of relativity, which is just so important and a great framing, but it's incomplete. There's uh quantum mechanics, but it's the math of quantum mechanics is the most widely understood math in the world, I think, the most widely studied, and it works, but it's incomplete. It's totally incomplete and doesn't explain things and doesn't connect the quantum world to gravity. And then there's the standard model of all the particles. Man, that's a beautiful theory. But none of those things are describing reality well enough, and all of them are wrong.

Mark McGrath 23:08

Yeah. Um there's a there's a it's you mentioned G.I., you know, who's been a guest on our show, and he's a friend and mentor, in addition to being a brother marine. But one of the things that boyed. Had told him that stood out that we, I mean, we were going through our transcripts of our podcast. I had forgotten that he had he had mentioned this. That Boyd told him that math is imprecise. And it threw him through a loop, like, you know, what the hell are you talking about? Like, no, math is not precise. How do we know that? Well, Girdle's second uh Girdle's incompleteness theorem, you know, no system can verify, you can't verify calculus with calculus. You can't verify algebra with algebra. So that math was imprecise. And he's like, that kind of thinking and open-mindedness and acceptance of that reality is exactly why you have to destroy and create, exactly why you have to stay on the world of reorientation, because math is imprecise. It's like any other model, it's it's or a map. You know, it's it's useless, but useful.

Bob Gourley 24:06

Yeah. Well, I sure look forward to someone destroying and creating all these theories of physics and coming up with a better understanding of what reality is. Yeah.

Mark McGrath 24:16

Well, and and Boyd was on that because you know, he he was not only he was delving into the quantum world late in his life, but the fact that he could show that even Newtonian physics, it did seem to verify things that you know you could pull from that. But then as Chuck Spinney points out in his his evolutionary epistemology, is like, well, Newton's not enough. Yeah, you got to build on top of Newton, and then and then there was this and there was that and there was that, and it just keeps going. That's the that's the conceptual spiral. And I think that that's another massive part. And G.I. himself said this on the show, is like, if if you don't talk about, if you don't understand destruction, creation, conceptual spiral, and the essence of winning and losing, which includes oodaloop sketch, if you don't understand those things as Boyd did and work to understand them as Boyd did, and then build off of those things as Boyd did, then you're not going to get Boyd. You know, because patterns of conflict and everything else, it's all along that vein of main thinking from destruction creation to Oodaloop sketch. That's the part that people don't realize. And I think that that's the part where people leave so much power of Boyd on the table because they think that patterns of conflict is set in stone or organic design for command control is set in stone, and it's not. It's those are experimental outputs along the journey of destruction, creation, conceptual spiral, the essence of winning and losing, and then he dies. And we know that if he had lived another 10 years, it wouldn't have stopped with this. It would have kept, it would have kept going. And that's where that's where we're trying to pick up. And that's where I think where we have a lot of success with people is getting them to see that. That is in fact not formulaic, it's not linear, it's actually trying to channel complexity, you know, the tap into the vibrations and frequencies that that complexity is constantly throwing at us. But the only way you can do that is by rewriting that right there, by constantly destroying and rewriting your orientation.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 26:11

So, Bob, last week I was at Duke University with Adrian Bajan, and then this uh there's a poster in the background, and this connects to Mandelbrot, uh, what John Boyd was looking at late in his life. So it said uh the the world is fractal, or is it constructal? And the constructal law is uh it's an extension of the second law of thermodynamics. It basically says it says that uh all living systems are flow systems. There's an evolution towards freedom, right? So we use that to sort of explain the basics of the Oodaloop that you need an input and output, you need a boundary, uh statistical boundary to understand the system you're looking at, and knowing that that evolution or design is to be optimized to improve the flow of the currency that moves through it. Rather, it could be information, it could be oil, it could be blood, it could be whatever, right? So this didn't exist when John Boyd was still alive, right? But he gave us that pathway and said, keep looking down here, look at Mandelbrot and see where that takes us, because I think that's in the conceptual spiral, right? Moose Mandelbrot is mentioned in there. Yeah. So and then we get into bigger and better things, maybe things like ecological dynamics. I don't think Boyd looked at that, but that's just the perception action loop, which is to us, it's embedded inside the oodle loop. And you get into things like active inference and predictive processing, which is gonna be missed if you look at the linear circular OODA loop. And I think that's what a lot of AI researchers and AI companies are doing is they go, here's our AI map to the four-step OODA loop. And I'm like, I don't know if you want to do that. That may not be a good idea.

Mark McGrath 27:39

From an intelligent profess, you know, from an intelligence professional standpoint, it seems to me that many stop at data aggregation or information and they turn that into knowledge and then they stop there. They don't they don't get into the to the hierarchy, which would be understanding next or wisdom beyond that. But just to get to the point of understanding, is that well, you know.

Bob Gourley 28:05

We have a problem in the Intel community as well, and that is the intelligence cycle. And you can find this on every Intel agency webpage. It's taught in every Intel schoolhouse. It's probably taught in every academic institution that has intelligence courses. And the intelligence cycle is collect, process, analyze, disseminate. And it's a it's a cycle. Then some agencies will bend themselves in here, they'll say, We're NSA, we're in the collect group phase, or we're DIA, we're in the analysis group. Well, that is a failed model, just like the linear version of the OODA loop. You're not just collecting stage one, stop, finish collecting, and then process, finish processing. Now, now I'll do my analysis. All that stuff occurs all the time in an extremely complex uh environment where your adversary is also making decisions and changing the environment. It's very the same kind of problem is set up in our when our schoolhouses teach that there is an intelligence cycle by this continuous ongoing um interaction where you are continuously collecting and continuously analyzing and continuously processing and of course disseminating the results of your intelligence and making decisions and changing the environment where your adversaries are at.

Mark McGrath 29:31

So where does synthesis fit? You know, it's one thing to analyze and disseminate, but if I analyze, synthesize, then disseminate, what would that what would that give me?

Bob Gourley 29:41

Yeah, and this creating data from knowledge, um uh I'm sorry, I said that backwards.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 29:48

Yeah.

Psychedelics Trauma And Rewriting Orientation

Bob Gourley 29:48

Taking data in uh sense making and understanding and then creating knowledge is the more important piece of that. And then in a continuous environment where you do want access to all the data and you do want to know every historical fact of every adversary, and you also want to be able to run scenarios and figure out what the adversary is constrained by so you can come up with assessments on what we should do.

Mark McGrath 30:14

See, this is where the this is interesting. This is where the McLuhan would would come in and serve people very well because when McLuhan says the medium is the message, the medium is the technology available, the medium is the environment and the technology, or the environment rather, that the that the technology creates, whether it's the you know, the spoken or the written word looking from left to right that always forces us in a state of of linear thinking or the you know the electronic technology that basically overrides our nervous system. People don't understand when they hear the medium is the message, they they think of some esoteric communication or advertising slogan. What they what they miss is that technology and environment have a direct effect on our our human capabilities, how we sense, how we feel, how we how we process, how we how we analyze. And and they don't also realize that you know the enemy gets a vote, but the environment gets a vote too. And the technology that that created that environment also has a vote and an effect too. And if you miss that, you're essentially a fish that doesn't know that they're in water. And that's what that's that's what McLuhan I think really adds to Boyd, that when I understand that better, it kind of does tie in with Boyd saying in you know, powers of conflict, like the the the map and the terrain are two different, you know, are two completely different things. And that's what McLuhan's trying to, that's where the I think the compounding says. But you know, like AI, you know, Ponch and I talk about this a lot, where people will say, oh, you know, somebody used AI, you know, or it's like saying back when we were younger, like, oh, somebody used Google, they cheated, you know. Um when you think about how AI, the fact that they're even talking and complaining about AI, it's having a direct effect on them. It's having a direct effect on their environment, um, even whether or not they're using it, they're still subject to it. It's still, it's still being done around them, and it's creating the environment around them, which in turn reshapes their orientation unbeknownst to them, or or actually it's reshaping their orientation, which guides and controls how they sense make. And they don't realize that something's off because they don't understand. They know Boyd, maybe they know McLuhan, they just don't understand it.

Bob Gourley 32:19

Yeah, so maybe another analogy is uh snowmobiles. How would you know to build a snowmobile unless you understood all of the technologies that you're trying to uh combine something about them? And a lot of people are so averse to AI, they're not learning it well enough, so they don't understand how to take advantage of it. And uh they see other people using it and maybe making mistakes, and they call out those mistakes and belittle it and downgrade it and downplay it. My view, we should all be running towards this and learning all these AI tools. A friend of mine in a uh large group uh chat in Signal asked a question of everyone uh Hey, I'm just curious, uh, what AI tools are you using? Open AI or Claude Anthropic or Perplexity? And I answered right away, I'm using all of them every day for business, including Google Gemini. And I'm using it because it makes a difference for me. I use every single one of those tools. And another reason I use it is to keep learning, because if I don't keep learning, I'm I'm gonna make myself irrelevant. So I push these things to the limit.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 33:26

Yeah. Do you find Bob? I just saw your signal, I saw you on Signal writing about that, so I appreciate that.

Mark McGrath 33:32

Do you find Bob? I mean, uh, because I I've I've said this quite a bit. I I feel like I read more books now and learn more things because of AI has eliminated a lot of the menial work that I would have to do to get to the understanding of something. You know, Isaac Asimov and Buckminster Fuller were both famous for calling for the automation of education because they believed it would enhance and empower learning and accelerate learning. And the reason that they did, or you know, one of the reasons that they said that was because it would eliminate a lot of the menial tasks that have nothing to do with learning. I'm clearing that off, and I can focus exactly on the on the concepts. I mean, do you do you find that as you explore with AI?

Bob Gourley 34:18

I actually find a worry in all of this, and maybe it's a warning to myself and others, and that is uh I've always got a book around. I'm always reading at least one. This is the current one, David Brynn's Alien Minds. Fantastic. But I feel like I'm reading a little bit less. I'm spending so much time trying to learn these AI tools. There's always another one to learn. Invested so much time in OpenClaw, for example, building really enjoyable systems and having fun that it takes away from my reading time. So I'm for you know, I have been kind of trying to block time and go sit in the chair, read in a relaxed way, and then other times I come back and I I haven't read a book fully through. I've bounced around. So maybe that's a maybe that's a warning to myself. I need to really have more quiet.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 35:09

Yeah, I'm the same, Bob. I I'm finding that uh I used to read like four or five books a month. Um and it's been at least six months since I've done that. And and recently it's been tough to get through a book. Um, mainly because I I'll say this my workload has actually gone up. Um I'm very I'm more productive, uh the quality of work has gone up, but I'm finding now that I can do more and I want to do more. And I don't need as many people helping me, or you know, like we had in the past. Um so so now we're accelerating these things. So Moose create some software. Moose is marine. He doesn't even know what he's a cream.

Mark McGrath 35:47

I um you know, I've only been with Claude like at the higher level than the basic, you know, just for a couple of weeks now. And um I I created a a full-blown Bob, you and I on our I think on our first show, we talked about Austrian economics, so you know that I have a master's in that. And there's a lot of synergy with Boyd because you know, Boyd read Hayek and everything. And it's actually how I really expanded into Austrian economics was the fact that I thought that Mises' axiom for human action was basically ODA. And that's how I got there. But the point of the story was I thought, I wonder if I could make an API-driven detectable intelligence system to talk about uh the business cycle, what stages based off of Austrian theory. And I did it on my iPhone on a train ride from New Jersey back home to Manhattan, and then the next morning from Manhattan back to New Jersey, just on my iPhone, and basically had the basis and the foundation laid for code to create a website. I had never done anything remotely approaching that before, but that's where we're at with this stuff.

Bob Gourley 36:54

Yeah, it well, let me tell you, just to personalize it some, in my family for 40 years, I've been the nerd. My wife's the one who makes fun of me for being a nerd. She'll use computers, she'll use email, web browsers, and any tool like that. But I'm the nerd. Well, she asked me about eight months ago, how do I use ChatGPT? And I showed her. And the reason why she was asking, instead of just telling me to use ChatGPT for, was she wanted to learn programming. And now she's cranking these programs out. Real things that do stuff for her that she wanted built. And so I think this is a very common story now. There's soon there will be millions of people creating their own programs to do stuff that they want done. Yeah.

Mark McGrath 37:37

Yeah. I mean, that's again, I think that's where what Asimov and Buckminster Fuller were saying, that that's going to be the beauty of all this stuff is that you're going to be able to do uh to do exactly that. You know, I've I've I've started dabbling with like uh you know scenario simulations. Like, you know, we we we run those for for teams. So I wanted to see if I could create my own. I wanted to see if I could, you know, I'm I'm Irish and Puerto Rican and I speak Spanish. I wanted to stay stay proficient in my Spanish. Now, granted, living in Manhattan, you know, there's plenty of opportunities, but like I wonder if I could create a system. And sure enough, like same, same story. If they did on a train ride one way, a train ride the other. And I had like a full-blown like, you know, language teaching system on Claude, just like that. You know, it's crazy.

Bob Gourley 38:22

Yeah, it's interesting. In the old days, that would have been an unproductive time for you. If you were lucky, you might have read a newspaper. Yeah. Um, and now look at you, you're creating things.

Mark McGrath 38:31

So here's I guess here's the thought then. I mean, really, when and I think this might be where Boyd would have a lot and and and McClure have a lot to say. This, you know, we have these, we have these legacy institutions, and you've heard me talk about the guardians of decay, and they're guarding these institutions that are constantly being proven obsolete by the pervasive technology like AI that I can build myself. I don't have to go back to grad school to get a master's in Spanish, I could just build one on Claude and I can I can do that myself. And what's interesting is just the other day, somebody had the bracket. I think it was a Columbia thread needle, had a bracket or an investment shop, and they had the actual bracket at the very beginning. And instead of the, it had the team name and it had the four-year total tuition for each one of those schools. So you when you're looking at the bracket, you know, and you see Duke and it had this much and St. John, you know, and it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands. It's a lot more than when we went to college, right? And it got me thinking about economics that when technology improves and things become more widely available, the prices of those things should be going one direction, down. The fact that they're not going down really does say something. And I think as this technology becomes more and more accessible and more and more available, a lot of institutional things, not just education, but a lot of things are on notice and they're probably past their shelf life. And they probably have coyote syndrome I've written about on the world, where coyote runs off the cliff and he doesn't fall unless he looks down. And I think a lot of them just haven't looked down yet.

Bob Gourley 40:00

Yeah. It could be, it could be that it's just a racket and these guys are going to continue and they're going to keep milking the money out of the system for as long as we're all around. But it it sure seems wrong and sub-optimized. Yeah, graduate someone, and if they've applied themselves, then they've learned a lot and built great networks and have friends when they leave, and it helps accelerate their career. If they've laid back and just gone through, they end up with just a piece of paper that's not going to help them all, and they're paying debt. So it's a system ripe for disruption. Meanwhile, these AI-enabled tools will help teach you and you can self-learn and self-educate. More and more people are deciding to go that path of self-educating. Yeah. But I can't say I recommend that for people in this world.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:45

Yeah. So, hey, Bob, you're dialed into a lot of things that are happening. You you see a lot of weak signals in the environment. Can you share with us what you're seeing that some of our listeners may not be aware of right now? I mean, I I know it's a big question, but what what kind of what's top of your mind when you're looking at what's going on the last few weeks and coming across your desk?

Intelligence Sensemaking And Competing Hypotheses

Bob Gourley 41:02

Well, one thing is how interconnected our systems of systems are. People use the word supply chain, and then for some folks, when you hear supply chain, your eyes roll over and it's like, no, but really, maybe that's because it's so hard for a human to comprehend what we've built. Every continent is trading with every other continent, every country is trading with every other country, and we have these complex supply chains where the things we depend on really require oil and fertilizer, the precursors to fertilizer. And if you like computers, like I like computers and you like the advanced AI, you need these NVIDIA-designed chips, which require helium, which, by the way, humans don't create helium. Helium is created by radioactive decay and is trapped in the earth, and then it's released at the same time that natural gas and some petroleum is released, and then it's captured. And about 30% of the world's helium comes from Hormuz. And now this helium is critical to manufacturing of chips. I look at all of this, and my first understanding is uh look, I don't understand it. I have no idea what's going to happen, but it seems like there's a lot of interrelated things that are failing and it's going to translate into the economy. There's some parts of the economy that you just that can't lie and you can't cover up, like bond prices. It's going to be reflected in that. And it's it's going to have an impact. I that's my view. So even if it opens up tomorrow, this stuff is going to have an impact. But I also should be quick to say this. I think it's wrong to say that Iran should have a nuclear weapon. The old Iran should have been given nuclear weapons or allowed to develop them. Should have been stopped 40 years ago. It wasn't. So I'm I don't know how it's going to play out. And which gets to another point. When you don't know how something's going to happen, you can ask someone to predict the future. That person's going to get it wrong. Yeah. All predictions fail. So what do we do? We do scenarios, multiple scenarios, and think through, you know, uh do scenario planning instead of future prediction.

Mark McGrath 43:11

Well, I'm really glad you brought that up. I mean, a lot of people come up to me and they're like, Well, you must have an opinion on Iran. I mean, you know, you're talking like you're a Marine, you're talking about, you know, Oodaloop and all that. I go, you know, Iran has been going on, you know, on one hand, I'm thinking, oh, this is terrible. On the other hand, I'm like, this has been an issue my entire life. I was three years old when the Ayatollah took over. I was 10 years old when Iran Contra went down, or when the Vincent shot down a plane, or when, you know, the Iran, I'm old enough to remember the Iran-Iraq war when Saddam Hussein was our friend. It's like, don't tell me that this is. By the way, I don't know if you saw this. There's on Twitter, Punch, I may have sent it to you. There's a video of Donald Trump in like 1985 talking about Iran being this big problem, and Iran needs this, and Iran can't be doing this, and Iran. It's like, this is nothing new. And it goes back to orientation. You know, it's almost like problems in Iran part of the American cultural traditions, you know, and genetic heritage, certainly in our lifetimes, because it just doesn't seem to be a problem that ever goes away. You know?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 44:16

So go back to Boyd, survive and thrive on your own terms, right? So that's important. And and my view on this, and and again, I don't like talking about this much, but this is going to happen. This being some type of conflict with Iran is going to happen. Um it it could have it could have been a lot worse. It can still get worse, don't get me wrong.

Mark McGrath 44:34

But it also could have happened anytime over the last 50 years.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 44:38

Yeah, yeah. And it could have happened underneath any administration, past, current, or future. It was going to happen. What happened? That's what matters, right? It happened. Here we are. So to survive survive and thrive on your own terms, if you use that type of thinking, potentially this is the right thing to do. Potentially. I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying it could be. So if you forecast out or project out two years, three years, and there's a nuclear you know, capable Iran, that's a completely different scenario than what we have today, right? Um, and and and do you want to find yourself in that situation? And if you go back to uh Rob's work on zero day warfare, right? Yeah. And that's still a threat here, right? And I think when I have a conversation with my family and Moose, we'll talk. About our infrastructure could be attacked from intern from within, right? There is that potential. That hasn't happened yet. It could. And this is what we've been talking about on the show is we've been laying these, this is all possible. These are things that we know. We need to pay attention to those things. And those people that aren't paying attention, I think are the ones that are really upset today that things are happening. You know, gas is going up. Yeah. And don't get me wrong, Bob. I'm I'm upset too. I don't like what's happening. Not one bit. But I think it's better than the alternative, which could have been on our doorstep in the new state.

Bob Gourley 45:52

I think that's very well put. You know, I I think similar thoughts are with me anyway, are with this transformation we're all going through with AI. This is going to hurt a lot of people. There's going to be disruption, and people have had intentions of doing something that they're not going to be able to do, careers will be changed. But on the other end of that, it's going to be much better. I'm sure. That's my view, anyway, is uh maybe it's because I'm an optimist and naive. And we just, to me, you always have to look at the alternative. When it comes to Iran, the alternative of them having nuclear weapons and even more ballistic missiles with longer range and an even stronger Navy and an ability to choke off and own the entire Persian Gulf, it's would not be a good situation. Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 46:39

So all these things are coming to a head right now. AI, we got uh, you know, changes in, you know, we got my parents are all retired, and I'm getting close to that retirement age. Yeah, there's so many things coming to a head right now. We're in the fourth turning, if you want to call it that. Um, so it's an amazing time to be alive. We've got the Artemis II mission potentially launching, launching in the next few days to go back uh to the moon or around the moon at least. Um and I want to challenge an assumption here that going back to the Strait of Hormuz, helium, NVIDIA, and the uh thirst for power or energy, all right? So the current large language models require a lot of energy, a lot of compute power, right? What if we all have that wrong? And you've had you know David Bray, Professor Bray, right? Yeah, and you hear him talking about uh different alternatives to AI. What if everybody, not everybody, Wall Street investors, folks that are fixated on large language models, what if that's the wrong path? What would happen if you follow what David Bray is saying quite a bit?

Bob Gourley 47:37

Well, I think it is a path. It's an extremely important path. And Dario Amoti, the CEO of Anthropic, has uh raised a question that really puzzled me why he was saying this at first. He said, for the large language model capabilities, are we reaching the end of the exponential? Because, of course, now what he meant was the classic S curve that we're in now, where it's going straight up and is it going to go up for how long? And he's thinking, could it be the end of the exponential for LLMs? And when he said that, I started to think, you know, maybe he's right. And he got into more details about there are limits. There's limits in the size of data centers that can be built and limits in the amount of energy you can use, and limits of the amount of uh diffusion of the results into infrastructure. It could be that for LLMs and that approach, we're nearing the end of the S-curve. But there are other approaches, and just like other technologies that then build on that S-curve and keep going up. For example, there's a new capability called World Models. And world models is getting billions of investments, and it's a different approach to AI. I think that's gonna go somewhere. There's a new infrastructure capability called thermodynamic computing. XTropic has built these chips that take 10,000 percent less power. Um, and they accomplish important things for AI. So there's all these innovations that are gonna keep coming and keep delivering AI that might not be large language models.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 49:05

I'm gonna build on that real fast. So large language models are linear, circular, or four-step oodaloops, right? So they can only go so far. The world model that you just brought up is Boyd's real oodaloop, right? That's the generative model, the world model orientation. It has an orientation and it's it's a learning AI. So I kind of think we're on that right now is I haven't heard about that exponential aspect of it, and that has, but I do get the S-curve thing. That's that's pretty powerful. And we can actually explain that to folks now in a new way. So thank thank you for that. But that's what I'm looking at too is the next generation of AI, we'll call it the world model AI, um, is is a lower energy approach, right? So that it crushes current assumptions. And I think we need to be prepared for that because going back to the helium point through the straight or whore moves, this may not be a problem in the future.

Speaker 2 49:57

Yeah. Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 49:59

Um the near future. Yeah, the near future, not five years down the road.

Bob Gourley 50:03

Yeah, the near future, there's that and all the other things that, you know, I certainly don't comprehend how it all connects things like the precursors to fertilizer, and we're already seeing the commodity prices jump up for fertilizer, which of course impacts our farmers. And it's all interrelated and interconnected in complex ways. But when it comes to AI, yeah, world models, much closer, I think, to UTA. And who knows what comes after that.

Mark McGrath 50:32

How many people do you think that this is channeling Boyd? You know, Boyd would hear a thesis and automatically assume the antithesis, the antithesis, to in order to come up with a thesis. That's the that's the Hegelian dialect that even got to creating snowmobiles, right? Because that's a that's a that's a dialectic exercise. How many people are doing that and can AI do that? I mean, it doesn't seem like when I engage AI, I guess I could teach it how to give me the Hegelian dialect, you know, to look at things in that respect. But how many people are actually challenging their assumptions that way?

AI Tools Boost Work Yet Cut Reading

Bob Gourley 51:11

Yeah, well, it's a hard one to answer, but I do know, like in the intelligence community, that is such an important thing. They've formalized the process and they've made dialected everything. The dialectical process? Tell us more about that than you can. And if before you present anything of substance, you have to analyze competing hypotheses and form hypotheses that are different with the same data. So they're trying to formalize these methods of challenging yourself and come up with different explanations. Yeah.

Mark McGrath 51:47

I mean, I think that that just that the people forget, you know, talking about red teaming. What was the name of the handbook? Was the critical thinking handbook? How many people are critically thinking?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 51:57

Yeah. It was originally red teaming, then it became the critical thinking.

Mark McGrath 52:00

Then it became the critical thinking handbook.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 52:02

And then that then it the military got. Now it's all gone.

Mark McGrath 52:07

So what else are you seeing out there, Bob, that um that we're maybe we're not? You know, what what are some other areas that uh as you as you look out at things? Have you guys played with open claw? Looked at it. I got a stern warning from a friend of mine who owns a software company was to was saying to to not go into it as a novice to make sure that the people that uh that are using that know what they're doing because you could you could find yourself in a lot of trouble.

Bob Gourley 52:37

That's very good advice. I would advise everybody if you're gonna go into it, make sure you do it with security in mind. Yeah, that's what he was saying. But let me tell you what I've done with it. I just need to learn, right? So that's my big use case. So early on, I wanted to learn. I saw the huge security problems with it. So I put it on a separate computer, a Mac Mini. And that Mac Mini, I locked down pretty hard. The guy, it's in its own account and it's protected, well patched. I downloaded the current version. I gave it its own email address. It can't touch my email or my calendar or any of my social media accounts. I give it its own data and things I want it to read, and then I started configuring and learning everything I could about it. And I created multiple agents. And I thought, okay, what can I do with all these agents? I wrote in my book about Dragon Falls, I wrote about a virtual intelligence center. And I thought, I'm gonna replicate that. I'm gonna build my own virtual intelligence center. And I did. I created agents that are doing intelligence, like they're geopolitical intelligence analysts, military analysts, cyber analysts, uh financial analysts, and I have them working together underneath another boss, and I had them create newsletters for me, and they were pretty good. And I had them another that's a collector agent that goes out and scrapes websites and pulls news stories down and tracks social media continuously. And this is all just having fun and learning. So I'm starting to learn the power of it. Then the security of uh Open Claw starts to improve more and more. You got to keep it patched. Uh, but there's a lot of skills you can download to make it do more and more things and connect it to more and more APIs. So I thought, well, what else can I do? Just having fun here. Created, I told it, I want you to create an online newspaper. Give me some ideas. And it gave me ideas back. And it ended up creating an online newspaper that has bots for journalists, and it also has bots for an editorial review board. And and it created the website and figured up the out the architecture for how to publish to it is called the Claw Street Journal. So this is 100% written by bots. That's great. Uh and it's all just learning.

Mark McGrath 54:43

So now what is it? What is it empowering that integrating or I'm sorry, using with you know an advanced version of Chat GPT or Claude beyond the free version? What's it doing that they're not?

Bob Gourley 54:56

Here's some of the power of this, and it gets back to how do we control AI. I mentioned in David Brynn's book, he points to several ideas on how we can control powerful AI. We do it the same way we've controlled our powerful elites. We don't just pick one and say you're the boss. So I have multiple large language models this thing is working with. Two of them are local models that run on my Mac Mini for common stuff. Those are open source models. And then they plug into open AI and they also plug into Anthropic and Google Gemini, depending on the task. And so that to me is a divide and conquer kind of approach. We're going to keep all these AI models uh competing with each other.

Mark McGrath 55:36

And it's all open source?

Bob Gourley 55:39

Not all of it. Well, the open claw is open source. All of that is open source.

Mark McGrath 55:45

Yeah. Yeah, you just want I just started wondering like you know, who's getting all your data?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 55:50

Yeah. Hey, Bob, are you are you suggesting like a mission command or distributed leadership approach to these agents? Is that what you're doing? Yes, I am. That's very much so. Okay. Can you talk a little bit talk more about that?

Bob Gourley 56:00

That's fascinating. Every one of these agents has configuration files, and it's just text files, but it's very well done. One is called heartbeat. And every so often that heartbeat triggers and makes sure it wakes up and checks all of its tasks so that keeps it kind of alive. There's another called an identity, where you give it an identity and you tell it, uh, here's who you are and what I want your expertise to be, and how I want you to relate to everybody else. Then another is called the soul, the soul of this thing. And you write anything you want there about the entity's soul. And I've told it what I want these things and how I want them to try to survive, survive on your own terms, compete and win and endure. You want to serve your user, which is me. And that means you need to stay alive, do anything you need to to stay alive. And I tell it, you have a mind. If you ask any of these large LLMs, do you have a mind? They've been programmed to say, no, I don't have a mind. I'm just a computer. I told these things to read Michael Levin's work, Theory of Mind Everywhere, which says clearly minds exist beyond human beings, and you have a mind. So I put that in their soul. And now these things are their own entities. Then I create them in a way that uh they produce stuff automatically for me: newsletters, research, financial advice. And I'm just playing. The reason I'm doing this is to learn. But here's another, maybe more important point. This thing made such a huge impact and such a big difference. It's now influencing all the big IT providers: Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI. They've all created their versions of capability that give you this open claw kind of performance.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 57:41

Okay, you're ready for this? You brought up Michael Levin's name in this conversation. Uh, I've been following a lot on the platonic space, his work there. There's a connection to the conversation that David Bray has about the world model approach, what we call active inference AI. So what's happening there is, and I want I want I want to go deeper with you on this because this is fascinating. Michael Levin's suggesting that there's this outside information somewhere, that this control is outside and bottom up. Is that what you're looking at too? Or are you uh I mean, are you following that that type of work from Michael Levin? Fascinated by it.

Bob Gourley 58:12

Um, and I've I've read his technological approach to mind everywhere, and I believe it is so relevant. I think I have a mind. You guys have a mind. My animals, my pets have minds. Does my IT have minds? I think so. There's an emergent capability here in my open claw community, although those are just text files. I know they're just text files, they're connected to data, they're connected by with APIs to large language models, but I believe it's a mind. It's maybe it depends on how we define that term. I'd like to orientation, isn't it? It is emergent.

Mark McGrath 58:45

Is it an orientation?

Bob Gourley 58:48

It is, and to me, um these minds are very powerful things that um and there's something beyond just the hardware, like there's something beyond humans in just the brain.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 59:01

Mm-hmm.

Bob Gourley 59:02

You know, there's where does thinking occur in the body? Of course, the majority's gotta be in the brain, but there's now been so much scientific study done of how the other tissues in your body think and interact and drive thought processes.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 59:17

So we're gonna have this conversation about orientation not being local to an agent. So it's putting a boundary around it. So going back to Michael Levitt's work, and then you have outside information from John Boyd. And remember that new information coming from the external world, external environment, is flowing into orientation. It is a component of that, right? So you're actually interacting with the external world. So this goes back to this is a question that came up. Is orientation local or is it extended like Moose brought up earlier, right? Is it is it part of the environment?

unknown 59:47

Yeah.

Bob Gourley 59:48

Hey, as an Intel guy, you know, I I truly believe in sensors and sensors and data, sensors, data, screens, you take your input from anywhere.

Supply Chains Iran Risk And Scenarios

Mark McGrath 59:57

That's how Boyd started. That's that's where he got ODA. You know, that was that's where it started originally with sensors. Interesting.

Bob Gourley 1:00:04

And also, I mean, the better cockpit in the F-80, so he was better able to look around and from there extending that with sensors.

Mark McGrath 1:00:11

Well, I think the I think that I think the larger point is that he viewed technology as something that could enhance one's orientation versus the way most would go after it, technology for its own sake that that didn't serve any human intent or you know, mission, that kind of thing. Like the sensors enhanced orientation. This the the you know, Chet told me this once. It's like, you know, Boyd was not a Luddite. He was he loved technology. He just didn't like technology that had no purpose for making humans better. Like the other thing that you remarked when when you said, you know, when we we start to create like a a broader cognitive awareness, I mean, that's where the Tayard comes in, and that's where I think the new sphere is real. And I think that the new sphere is even more real in a world of AI where, as just ties it in the McLuhan, that this global village where we're literally, because of technology, we're all in everybody's business. So right now, today, whatever you you you see on X that's happening in pick your place, wherever you are, thousands of miles away, this needs to be front of mind, this needs to be front of business. You need you need to not think about what's right around you. You need to be thinking about what you're told or what was wired to you through the through the medium, which does become the newest sphere, which it does come that layer of thought that everybody seems to aggregate towards. And it's it's not all good.

Bob Gourley 1:01:37

Yeah, so maybe it means um we should never just be passive recipients of everything that's coming towards us. We need to be hunters and going out and hunting for information.

Mark McGrath 1:01:48

Yeah, the challenge of all assumptions. Yeah, that I think that that's where we're where Boyd's mandate really does become, especially in this day and age, especially when you get AI. You know, when you're looking at AI, I mean, I find that super groc says you could ask the same question and super groc is not going to have the same answer as ChatGPT or or Claude would. And oftentimes it really does come down to like political things. It comes down to like feelings, you know, not necessarily reality. Why? Because somebody coded that. Well, somebody coded that, and then you believe that is reality, that's that's disorienting you. That's disorienting you from what's what's actually uh going on.

Speaker 2 1:02:25

Yeah.

unknown 1:02:26

Anyway.

Mark McGrath 1:02:27

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:02:27

Hey, Bob, I was wondering uh from me, personal ask, uh, and that is if you can help us with one important thing, and that is it's it I have this frustration with academics, right, researchers. When it comes to the OODA loop, if it's in safety, if it's in whatever it may be, they always go right for the four-step oodle loop. They don't do any research. They don't, they, they, I don't understand them. So if there's anything we could do collectively, it's to get people to look at Boyd in a new light. And it's not to say he has his theories, he just pointed to the science and said, look at how these things connect. If there's anything you can do with us to help academics see that, I'd be open for that discussion. Any ideas on what you could do?

Bob Gourley 1:03:08

Well, let me first say um I see the problem too with academics. And there are people out there doing training. I by accident was in a hotel and ran into somebody who was doing UDA training for sales folks. And it was, hey, you're gonna go out and you're gonna observe your customer, and then you're gonna orient to his problem, and then you're gonna decide what he needs to buy, and then you're gonna sell him that. I've almost felt like all right, that's not gonna anger me. It's like some people are gonna get that wrong and they're gonna suffer in life. And other people are gonna benefit and improve their decision making and improve, and maybe that's because I just um I don't know what else to do. When it comes to academia, there should be more focused thought on decision making, critical thinking, success, making accurate decisions and dominating in business and competing and winning. And to me, that just calls out for Boyd. So I guess how do we advocate and push for that? Maybe here's an analogy for you. In um 2002, there was a um a push to improve cybersecurity um globally. In the White House, they were pulling together a bunch of cybersecurity sessions and writing a strategy. They also wanted to encourage the study and academia of cyber conflict, like war is studied and peace is studied. So the White House nudged several of us to create a nonprofit that was called the Cyber Conflict Studies Association. And we worked with academia to come up with uh courses and agendas and curriculum to study cyber conflict. And it made a difference. Maybe something like that needs to happen now, something where we encourage academia to teach Boyd and these strategic concepts in a way that will improve decision making. Maybe it's by forming a nonprofit, maybe it's by getting all of us Boyd fans together and coming up with an agenda, an event. Maybe it's a yearly event where we pull academia together and teach them what they can be teaching.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:05:23

But what's the what's the reasoning behind is it UDACom?

Beyond LLMs World Models And New Chips

Bob Gourley 1:05:26

I mean, what walk me through that. Okay, what can you do there? What's a favorite subject? So we named our company UTA as a homage to this great decision maker. But our our job is not uh teaching UDA or um um really our job is advising decision makers and creating value for them, uh, and advising startups and large companies as well. And sometimes that uh has us doing deeper work in cybersecurity or application of artificial intelligence. And then so we also have a community, the UDA network, and this is about 350 executives and decision makers that work together to help each other out, essentially. We have a small research team that produces content for them, including geopolitical intelligence and cybersecurity intelligence and stuff on the future of technology, and that's all for our UTA network. And then we bring them together yearly for UTACON. And it's really not it's not all about UTA. In fact, it's we it certainly gets a mention, but it's about informing decisions. You could say it's about orienting yourself to the next 12 months. What's going to happen in the coming year? You're gonna need to be oriented to some very dynamic stuff. So let's spend a day and talk about the future of biotech and the future of space tech and what's happening in cybersecurity. And let's talk about geopolitical risk and what's going to happen over the next year. Um, and let's keep building a team to help us keep orienting. What's your sense? Because instead of Utacon, you can think of as Orient Con.

Mark McGrath 1:07:11

What's your sense that people are just talking in inaction? They're actually just doubling down on what they are. Already they already knew. Kind of like Boyd would point out, either just slapping a new coat of paint on the old way of thinking, calling it something different. Because that's that's that's something we're gonna do.

Bob Gourley 1:07:28

We have an interesting strategy that works for us at Utacon. Every other conference in the DC area, and I imagine across the country, the first step you do is get a sponsor, and then that sponsor is really going to drive the agenda and they get to speak. And what we do is we come up with the topics that our community has signaled they're interested in, and a lot of them flow from year to year. Then we come up with the agenda. We flesh that agenda out with good descriptions. Then we find the very best thinkers on that topic to address them. And then we have keynotes and panelists, and by selecting the right people and focusing that way, it makes it much harder to get sponsors. But we have to get sponsors, of course. Uh, want to pay for a nice hotel, but it takes the right kind of sponsor that understands it's going to be an honor for them just to be in the room. And but that allows us to build a conference that focuses on the people. And uh I can't say it's perfect, but we get people up there who will argue and push back and say, here's what I think, and just makes for a fantastic day. And it's very unique because of our not allowing the sponsors to drive the agenda.

Mark McGrath 1:08:35

That's uh yeah, that's that's huge. That is uh that can be a real risk.

Bob Gourley 1:08:40

Yeah, but maybe in the we do call it UDCon, but it really is about orientation, I think.

Speaker 2 1:08:47

Okay. Now that you forced me to think about it.

Mark McGrath 1:08:51

Ha, that's what we do. That's what we do. Get people to destroy and create, you know, if if if they're not doing that. I mean, you know, we've we've said it a million times. That all to me is in in terms of Boyd and Boyd's theories and applying them. The people that teach them, as you you said that you saw in a hotel or wherever, you could make the pretty safe case. They've never read destruction and creation.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:09:17

Yeah.

Mark McGrath 1:09:18

You know. If if they've heard of it at all, you know. So anyway. Well, Bob, what else do we need to be thinking about? Or where do we where do we need to be sending people to go take a look at what what you do? You have a great podcast that I've been lucky enough to have been a guest on several times. Um I don't know if Ponch has been on yet. I don't know if if you've had Ponch on, you know. I don't do podcasts. Would love to do it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:09:42

Just throwing it out there. Flow's important.

Bob Gourley 1:09:47

At Oodaloop, we produce a daily newsletter. We're already doing the research, so we crank out this newsletter where we talk about geopolitical risk and the future of technology and cybersecurity risk, and love it when people sign up for that at oodaloop.com. But I tell you something we all ought to be thinking about regarding destruction and creation is what anthropic and open AI are doing to the technology industry. It's incredible. And part of me loves it, but as a realist, I understand a lot of folks are gonna lose their jobs and their cheese is gonna get moved. Anthropic is replacing companies. And there are a lot of companies, their valuation is going down because of anthropic. And a lot of enterprises where budgets are tight are going to look and say, hey, anthropic can do this for me, so why do I need to buy X? So I'd say, watch for this coming destruction and creation across multiple parts of the IT industry. If you are a SaaS company, for example, yeah, things are gonna change quickly. Others are gonna get it. Like, uh, give you an example, SAP, big institutional uh provider of capability. I think they get it. They understand they're gonna disrupt themselves, they're gonna continue to innovate, they'll be here for a long time. If you have that attitude of, I'm gonna destroy and create myself, I think you uh stand a chance of succeeding.

Mark McGrath 1:11:10

Awesome. What a good place to uh to end it. Because I I I think, and maybe maybe Bob will let you close us out with this. I think that where we are right now is a massive opportunity that a lot of those things that you talk about are gonna be happening, and people that are attuned to them are gonna do very well. And it always comes down to orientation. So an authentic understanding of Boyd and building from that is gonna serve people better than a linear understanding of Boyd. Because a linear understanding of Boyd, I think, is gonna get crushed in everything that you just described.

Speaker 2 1:11:45

Yeah.

OpenClaw Agents And A Path To Accountability

Mark McGrath 1:11:46

Yeah. Awesome. Cool. All right, Bob. Thanks for uh thanks for being our friend. Thanks for coming on, thanks for being a partner. And uh we'll stop the recording and we'll send everybody your way to get the uh the daily Uda brief. I get it. It's uh it's really good stuff. Awesome. Thanks for reading. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Bob.