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

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Okay, well he's got an answer in here.
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And the short version of the answer is it's the same way humans have always controlled our elites.
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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.
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Wow.
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He says this is the same kind of idea we need to apply to the various AI.
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And once I started thinking of it in that framing, yeah, there's a lot of ways we can do this.
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All of the AI is already controlled by people.
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And so our issue should be how do we control those people?
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And the uh we can have these AIs compete against each other.
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Are you saying the interests within the foundation of our country?
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The declaration.
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Let's talk about that.
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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.
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So there's already a roadmap or a blueprint or whatever you want to call it for how to deal with this.
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And what I heard from you is uh David Brynn's work potentially connects back to the founding of our country, right?
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How we deal with it.
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Yes.
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And that's only one chapter in his book, by the way.
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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?
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Now, how do you boil down all of this study of consciousness that so many people are writing just tomes about into a chapter?
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I think he does a really good job of doing that, but it's a it's a tough challenge.
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What is a mind?
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Other people have been trying to apply scientific study to that also.
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I mean, I have a mind, you have a mind, I know it.
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So does my dog.
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I know it.
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Um so do so many other animal life forms.
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And if you, you know, insects think and are creative.
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And people have been writing about the wisdom of birds.
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They have minds.
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Yep.
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But what about a single-cell animal like a paramecium?
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It certainly wants to eat and wants to move and wants to have sex and reproduce.
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Yeah.
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Does it have a mind?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So this is fantastic.
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I wasn't expecting to have this conversation today.
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Moose is joining us.
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We're actually live recording at the moment.
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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.
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Now, let me give you this idea.
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When we started this podcast, I I knew about the connection to consciousness and the conversation about the free principle.
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And Moose is having technical difficulties.
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He is a crayon's favorite toy.
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So let's let him get in here.
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But I want to get back to this Oodaloop and its connection to consciousness.
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Tried avoiding that conversation for years, right?
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Because I just didn't want to go there.
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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.
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And we're starting to see that now as people are picking up on the things we're putting down on the podcast.
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So my question to you is are you okay with that?
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Or where where's that fit in your world?
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Yeah, well, to me, yeah, absolutely okay.
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Because to me, what the OODA loop is, you wouldn't need that except you want something.
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Whether you are an individual or an organization, you want something.
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Want is also, in my opinion, central to the discussion of consciousness.
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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.
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We want to understand, we want to grow, we want to learn, we want to learn what consciousness is and where it is.
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And UDA, I think the whole UTA loop and all of Boyd's writings would not be necessary except we want something.
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We want to compete and win.
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And as a nation, we really need to compete and win.
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And as companies, you don't survive unless you compete and win.
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And as individuals uh concerned with uh your current situation or your career, you want to continue to rise and compete and win.
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So yes, I see the OODA loop as directly relevant to understanding consciousness because consciousness is to me is also about wanting something.
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Well, let's do this.
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Uh, we went supersonic and into another, you know, we went towards them towards Mars in in a matter of five minutes.
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We talked about the uh declaration of connection to aliens, uh, David Brynn's work, and uh we start getting a consciousness.
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Let's throttle back a minute uh because uh I think we're gonna scare the crap out of people by going that fast.
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Moose, you up?
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Yeah, I can hear you now.
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Can you hear me?
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Oh yeah, let's go.
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Uh so uh we've been going for the last five minutes, Moose, and uh just getting you up to speed there.
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But uh welcome Bob to the show.
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And Moose, welcome back, man.
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Yeah.
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Bob, thanks for coming on.
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I've I've been uh blessed to have been your guest twice.
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Uh or is it three times?
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I forget, I think maybe twice.
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Yeah, at least twice.
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I'm losing track, but it's always a good time to uh chat with you.
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It's always educational for me.
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I learn every time you speak.
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Well, let's make uh we'll make today no exception.
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So, you know, I I was interested in the conversation that you're having around consciousness.
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Um as you pointed out, you know, Ponch and I talk about that quite a bit.
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And we really do believe that Boyd was ultimately talking about that.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Interesting.
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You know, um, that is fascinating.
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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.
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And these guys are good at Boyd type things without ever having heard of him.
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But it's just from, I don't know, survival, uh survival of the fittest, some survival of the best competitor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And then what is also really fascinating about that is that my physical orientation becomes aligned with what's actually going on.
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I have a better sense of what's going on.
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The part that is near and dear to all of us as you know, veteran naval officers is the PTSD angle.
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And that's something that I had never I had never thought of.
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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.
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Moose, I got a thought on this.
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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?
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You shake it up and and you get to look at things in a different light.
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What you're actually doing, I believe, is you're going outside the system, right?
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We know that's important.
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You can't determine the character of nature from within.
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You have to go outside.
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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.
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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.
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I don't know how far that goes, and that may or may not be true at the genetics.
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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.
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That's the war on drugs, basically.
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You know, you go to a package store on base and you can get alcohol, right?
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It's right there.
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It's probably the worst thing you can put in your body, right?
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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.
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So thanks for bringing me on that.
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I just had that thought, going outside the system to look inside.
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You know, so let me try a theory on you guys that may resonate from your military background too.
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And that is so I was a military and Navy intelligence officer, and through the years, my first uh focus was on Navy operations.
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Back then it was the Soviet Navy.
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We would try to assess what's happening really close to their ports because we're supporting U.S.
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ships and subs that would go really close into their ports.
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So a very dynamic situation.
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So part one of the job, what is reality?
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Where is everybody right now, all the Soviets, and what are they doing right now?
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Where are they going to be 30 minutes from now?
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But then the harder part to assess is the intention.
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What are they going to do next?
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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.
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Now, if you fast forward to the big joint military intelligence centers, you have folks doing that at massive scale over entire battlefields.
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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.
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We and are able to say, you know, here's what I think now.
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I I wouldn't I wouldn't say so.
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I would say you don't need to be on psychedelics to do that.
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Um you can have a journey at some point.
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You can meditate, you can have um pre-cognition and I think they call it people breath work, post-cognition.
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So yeah, bringing all this, what would you call it?
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Uh the the the flow states into your body, bring it into the organizations.
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Well, it's funny.
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Psychedelics may be part of that.
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One other thing that Bob mentioned was the you know, the intelligence community.
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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.
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You know what I mean?
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Like they're becoming more creative and more peaceful.
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So I think that it is interesting to see that intelligence has been all over this stuff for a long time.
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Hey, Paul, I mean I don't think they are really.
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They're not.
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Yeah.
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Maybe I mean there were some very there were some failed experiments during the Cold War.
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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.
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Yeah, that's fine.
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I mean, we're we're just I guess historically, maybe um it's changed.
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That's okay.
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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.
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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.
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And it's not limited to anybody in the military.
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So, Bob, uh let's go back to your uh point about the what you did in the past.
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So it's I think you're familiar with Mike Ansley's work on situational awareness, right?
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Yes.
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So that's really what we're trying to do is what the hell happened, what's happening, and what could happen.
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So that anticipatory awareness of what could happen next.
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I think they call it sense making.
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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.
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And I think that's what you do.
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Can you talk a little bit more about that when you train intelligence officers or you train people to look at the environment?
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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.
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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.
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That's around the time that I discovered Boyd.
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It was uh uh we were connecting our ship.
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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.
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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.
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And that's when I met G.I.
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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.
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And when he first started doing that, and I look back on my career, I'm thinking, why had nobody told me this before?
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It would have accelerated my learning and accelerated my productivity.
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And so that part of my journey sticks with me today.
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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?
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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?
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What do I, what do we invest in?
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And how do we train our people?
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And what are my competitors doing?
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All those old lessons that came from my time in this dynamic environment are just so relevant today to sense making for corporate organizations.
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So my my big regret is I sure wish I could have learned more earlier about these Boyd ideas.
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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.
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In fact, when I first heard about the Boyd cycle, it was 1995 as a Razzi midshipman, and and Boyd was actually still alive.
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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.
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I had to pull all those threads myself.
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I couldn't, I wasn't going to get that from the Marine Corps.
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That was all uh, you know, in um independent research.
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Yeah.
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I was also very fortunate to go to um a Marine Corps command and staff college where uh, and this was '97.
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So by by then, Boyd's ideas had taken the place over, and it was uh a great opportunity to study more.
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Still, of course, very much maneuver warfare focused.
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Yeah.
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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.
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Yeah.
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I I would have challenge both of you on something.
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Uh and I just thought about this.
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We we talk about Boyd's ideas.
00:17:42.509 --> 00:17:48.910
A lot of the ideas that Boyd has in his, you know, in his discourse winning and losing are not his ideas.
00:17:48.910 --> 00:17:50.109
They're borrowed from somewhere else.
00:17:50.109 --> 00:17:51.309
All he did was look at things.
00:17:51.309 --> 00:17:52.589
He was curious, right?
00:17:52.589 --> 00:17:56.190
And he was very curious about multiple disciplines, multiple domains.
00:17:56.190 --> 00:17:59.470
So we often talk about ideas from John Boyd.
00:17:59.470 --> 00:18:01.230
To me, I think that might be wrong.
00:18:01.230 --> 00:18:03.789
And I want to get your take on that, uh, Moose and Bob.
00:18:03.789 --> 00:18:05.309
Are they his or they're a good question?
00:18:05.710 --> 00:19:07.259
I bet you something tells me Boyd would agree with you.
00:19:07.259 --> 00:19:13.179
Because he pulled from so many disciplines: biology, physics, philosophy, economics.
00:19:13.739 --> 00:19:15.419
History, Eastern philosophy.
00:19:15.739 --> 00:19:20.139
So maybe we're doing a disservice by talking about his ideas rather than another way to look at it.
00:19:20.139 --> 00:19:23.819
So I I just hearing you guys talk about it, let's let's explore that for a minute.
00:19:23.819 --> 00:19:25.099
Moose thoughts.
00:19:25.899 --> 00:19:48.539
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.
00:19:48.539 --> 00:19:58.219
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.
00:19:58.219 --> 00:20:04.219
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.
00:20:04.219 --> 00:20:09.179
Get inside somebody's Ouda loop, you know, out-orient, outspeed, outthink, but it wasn't out-orient.
00:20:09.179 --> 00:20:12.219
And that came with, you know, kind of touching on what Bob said.
00:20:12.219 --> 00:20:17.259
That that came when I discovered Chet Richard's work, Franzo Singa's work, John Robb and others.
00:20:17.259 --> 00:20:39.019
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.
00:20:39.019 --> 00:20:43.259
And, you know, there is the quote unquote danger or risk of creating a theory of everything.
00:20:43.259 --> 00:20:46.139
But on the other hand, there's a great gift that creating a theory of everything.
00:20:46.139 --> 00:21:00.139
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.
00:21:00.139 --> 00:21:14.459
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.
00:21:14.459 --> 00:21:19.500
That's when you start adding things like McLuhan and others that really broaden.
00:21:19.500 --> 00:21:22.219
You know, when I I got this from John Robb.
00:21:22.219 --> 00:21:29.419
When I started looking at McLuhan in tandem with Boyd, it actually made my understanding of Boyd expand significantly.
00:21:29.419 --> 00:21:40.379
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.
00:21:40.379 --> 00:21:43.019
And then there's there's other thinkers that the same thing.
00:21:43.019 --> 00:21:55.019
But basically, what we realized is that Boyd wanted us to create snowmobiles ourselves and build on what he left intentionally open and incomplete.
00:21:55.019 --> 00:21:58.699
And the last line of Franzo Singer's science, strategy, and war, but that's it.
00:21:58.699 --> 00:21:59.739
That's the last line.
00:21:59.739 --> 00:22:02.299
He left this incomplete for uh for a reason.
00:22:02.299 --> 00:22:04.219
He used to say, Bob, and you know this.
00:22:04.219 --> 00:22:11.179
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.
00:22:11.179 --> 00:22:14.139
I'm constantly learning, I'm constantly adapting.
00:22:14.939 --> 00:22:16.059
Yeah, yeah.
00:22:16.939 --> 00:22:19.819
Well, you know, and I I do think this applies to so many other fields.
00:22:19.819 --> 00:22:27.339
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.
00:22:27.339 --> 00:22:36.059
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.
00:22:36.059 --> 00:22:41.819
There's the general theory of relativity, which is just so important and a great framing, but it's incomplete.
00:22:41.819 --> 00:22:52.859
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.
00:22:52.859 --> 00:22:57.979
It's totally incomplete and doesn't explain things and doesn't connect the quantum world to gravity.
00:22:57.979 --> 00:23:01.099
And then there's the standard model of all the particles.
00:23:01.099 --> 00:23:03.259
Man, that's a beautiful theory.
00:23:03.259 --> 00:23:08.619
But none of those things are describing reality well enough, and all of them are wrong.
00:23:08.859 --> 00:23:09.179
Yeah.
00:23:09.179 --> 00:23:17.179
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.
00:23:17.179 --> 00:23:18.379
But one of the things that boyed.
00:23:18.379 --> 00:23:23.099
Had told him that stood out that we, I mean, we were going through our transcripts of our podcast.
00:23:23.099 --> 00:23:25.659
I had forgotten that he had he had mentioned this.
00:23:25.659 --> 00:23:28.779
That Boyd told him that math is imprecise.
00:23:28.779 --> 00:23:34.699
And it threw him through a loop, like, you know, what the hell are you talking about?
00:23:34.699 --> 00:23:36.459
Like, no, math is not precise.
00:23:36.459 --> 00:23:37.259
How do we know that?
00:23:37.259 --> 00:23:43.819
Well, Girdle's second uh Girdle's incompleteness theorem, you know, no system can verify, you can't verify calculus with calculus.
00:23:43.819 --> 00:23:46.219
You can't verify algebra with algebra.
00:23:46.219 --> 00:23:48.379
So that math was imprecise.
00:23:48.379 --> 00:24:00.859
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.
00:24:00.859 --> 00:24:03.419
It's like any other model, it's it's or a map.
00:24:03.419 --> 00:24:06.219
You know, it's it's useless, but useful.
00:24:06.539 --> 00:24:07.099
Yeah.
00:24:07.099 --> 00:24:15.739
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.
00:24:15.739 --> 00:24:16.379
Yeah.
00:24:16.539 --> 00:24:29.819
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.
00:24:29.819 --> 00:24:36.379
But then as Chuck Spinney points out in his his evolutionary epistemology, is like, well, Newton's not enough.
00:24:36.379 --> 00:24:41.819
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.
00:24:41.819 --> 00:24:43.739
That's the that's the conceptual spiral.
00:24:43.739 --> 00:24:45.500
And I think that that's another massive part.
00:24:45.500 --> 00:24:46.139
And G.I.
00:24:46.139 --> 00:25:07.419
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.
00:25:07.419 --> 00:25:15.979
You know, because patterns of conflict and everything else, it's all along that vein of main thinking from destruction creation to Oodaloop sketch.
00:25:15.979 --> 00:25:18.299
That's the part that people don't realize.
00:25:18.299 --> 00:25:29.339
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.
00:25:29.339 --> 00:25:38.619
It's those are experimental outputs along the journey of destruction, creation, conceptual spiral, the essence of winning and losing, and then he dies.
00:25:38.619 --> 00:25:43.659
And we know that if he had lived another 10 years, it wouldn't have stopped with this.
00:25:43.659 --> 00:25:45.339
It would have kept, it would have kept going.
00:25:45.339 --> 00:25:47.259
And that's where that's where we're trying to pick up.
00:25:47.259 --> 00:25:51.179
And that's where I think where we have a lot of success with people is getting them to see that.
00:25:51.179 --> 00:26:03.579
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.
00:26:03.579 --> 00:26:11.339
But the only way you can do that is by rewriting that right there, by constantly destroying and rewriting your orientation.
00:26:11.739 --> 00:26:20.619
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.
00:26:20.619 --> 00:26:26.859
So it said uh the the world is fractal, or is it constructal?
00:26:26.859 --> 00:26:30.299
And the constructal law is uh it's an extension of the second law of thermodynamics.
00:26:30.299 --> 00:26:33.419
It basically says it says that uh all living systems are flow systems.
00:26:33.419 --> 00:26:35.259
There's an evolution towards freedom, right?
00:26:35.259 --> 00:26:52.379
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.
00:26:52.379 --> 00:26:56.459
Rather, it could be information, it could be oil, it could be blood, it could be whatever, right?
00:26:56.459 --> 00:26:59.500
So this didn't exist when John Boyd was still alive, right?
00:26:59.500 --> 00:27:06.699
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?
00:27:06.699 --> 00:27:08.619
Moose Mandelbrot is mentioned in there.
00:27:08.619 --> 00:27:09.179
Yeah.
00:27:09.179 --> 00:27:14.059
So and then we get into bigger and better things, maybe things like ecological dynamics.
00:27:14.059 --> 00:27:19.259
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.
00:27:19.259 --> 00:27:28.459
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.
00:27:28.459 --> 00:27:35.500
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.
00:27:35.500 --> 00:27:37.739
And I'm like, I don't know if you want to do that.
00:27:37.739 --> 00:27:39.179
That may not be a good idea.
00:27:39.579 --> 00:27:54.379
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.
00:27:54.379 --> 00:28:00.459
They don't they don't get into the to the hierarchy, which would be understanding next or wisdom beyond that.
00:28:00.459 --> 00:28:04.299
But just to get to the point of understanding, is that well, you know.
00:28:05.099 --> 00:28:10.779
We have a problem in the Intel community as well, and that is the intelligence cycle.
00:28:10.779 --> 00:28:13.979
And you can find this on every Intel agency webpage.
00:28:13.979 --> 00:28:16.459
It's taught in every Intel schoolhouse.
00:28:16.459 --> 00:28:20.859
It's probably taught in every academic institution that has intelligence courses.
00:28:20.859 --> 00:28:27.259
And the intelligence cycle is collect, process, analyze, disseminate.
00:28:27.259 --> 00:28:29.099
And it's a it's a cycle.
00:28:29.099 --> 00:28:36.699
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.
00:28:36.699 --> 00:28:42.459
Well, that is a failed model, just like the linear version of the OODA loop.
00:28:42.459 --> 00:28:51.099
You're not just collecting stage one, stop, finish collecting, and then process, finish processing.
00:28:51.099 --> 00:28:53.899
Now, now I'll do my analysis.
00:28:53.899 --> 00:29:04.139
All that stuff occurs all the time in an extremely complex uh environment where your adversary is also making decisions and changing the environment.
00:29:04.139 --> 00:29:31.179
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.
00:29:31.979 --> 00:29:35.179
So where does synthesis fit?
00:29:35.179 --> 00:29:41.739
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?
00:29:41.979 --> 00:29:48.299
Yeah, and this creating data from knowledge, um uh I'm sorry, I said that backwards.
00:29:48.379 --> 00:29:48.459
Yeah.
00:29:48.699 --> 00:29:55.899
Taking data in uh sense making and understanding and then creating knowledge is the more important piece of that.
00:29:55.899 --> 00:30:14.219
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.
00:30:14.699 --> 00:30:16.539
See, this is where the this is interesting.
00:30:16.539 --> 00:30:45.019
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.
00:30:45.019 --> 00:30:53.739
People don't understand when they hear the medium is the message, they they think of some esoteric communication or advertising slogan.
00:30:53.739 --> 00:31:05.179
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.
00:31:05.179 --> 00:31:10.539
And and they don't also realize that you know the enemy gets a vote, but the environment gets a vote too.
00:31:10.539 --> 00:31:15.019
And the technology that that created that environment also has a vote and an effect too.
00:31:15.019 --> 00:31:19.019
And if you miss that, you're essentially a fish that doesn't know that they're in water.
00:31:19.019 --> 00:31:31.819
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.
00:31:31.819 --> 00:31:35.500
And that's what McLuhan's trying to, that's where the I think the compounding says.
00:31:35.500 --> 00:31:46.219
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.
00:31:46.219 --> 00:31:53.739
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.
00:31:53.739 --> 00:31:59.659
It's having a direct effect on their environment, um, even whether or not they're using it, they're still subject to it.
00:31:59.659 --> 00:32:11.419
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.
00:32:11.419 --> 00:32:14.699
And they don't realize that something's off because they don't understand.
00:32:14.699 --> 00:32:18.699
They know Boyd, maybe they know McLuhan, they just don't understand it.
00:32:19.259 --> 00:32:22.219
Yeah, so maybe another analogy is uh snowmobiles.
00:32:22.219 --> 00:32:31.179
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?
00:32:31.179 --> 00:32:37.979
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.
00:32:37.979 --> 00:32:47.019
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.
00:32:47.019 --> 00:32:52.219
My view, we should all be running towards this and learning all these AI tools.
00:32:52.219 --> 00:33:01.579
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?
00:33:01.579 --> 00:33:04.939
Open AI or Claude Anthropic or Perplexity?
00:33:04.939 --> 00:33:11.739
And I answered right away, I'm using all of them every day for business, including Google Gemini.
00:33:11.739 --> 00:33:14.459
And I'm using it because it makes a difference for me.
00:33:14.459 --> 00:33:16.859
I use every single one of those tools.
00:33:16.859 --> 00:33:23.899
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.
00:33:23.899 --> 00:33:26.379
So I push these things to the limit.
00:33:26.539 --> 00:33:27.179
Yeah.
00:33:27.179 --> 00:33:28.699
Do you find Bob?
00:33:28.699 --> 00:33:32.379
I just saw your signal, I saw you on Signal writing about that, so I appreciate that.
00:33:32.939 --> 00:33:33.899
Do you find Bob?
00:33:33.899 --> 00:33:36.859
I mean, uh, because I I've I've said this quite a bit.
00:33:36.859 --> 00:33:50.539
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.
00:33:50.539 --> 00:34:00.619
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.
00:34:00.619 --> 00:34:09.820
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.
00:34:09.820 --> 00:34:14.139
I'm clearing that off, and I can focus exactly on the on the concepts.
00:34:14.139 --> 00:34:17.739
I mean, do you do you find that as you explore with AI?
00:34:18.699 --> 00:34:27.099
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.
00:34:27.099 --> 00:34:28.460
I'm always reading at least one.
00:34:28.460 --> 00:34:31.340
This is the current one, David Brynn's Alien Minds.
00:34:31.340 --> 00:34:32.539
Fantastic.
00:34:32.539 --> 00:34:35.099
But I feel like I'm reading a little bit less.
00:34:35.099 --> 00:34:39.179
I'm spending so much time trying to learn these AI tools.
00:34:39.179 --> 00:34:40.860
There's always another one to learn.
00:34:40.860 --> 00:34:50.699
Invested so much time in OpenClaw, for example, building really enjoyable systems and having fun that it takes away from my reading time.
00:34:50.699 --> 00:35:01.820
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.
00:35:01.820 --> 00:35:03.179
I've bounced around.
00:35:03.179 --> 00:35:06.380
So maybe that's a maybe that's a warning to myself.
00:35:06.380 --> 00:35:08.380
I need to really have more quiet.
00:35:09.820 --> 00:35:10.940
Yeah, I'm the same, Bob.
00:35:10.940 --> 00:35:14.619
I I'm finding that uh I used to read like four or five books a month.
00:35:14.619 --> 00:35:18.300
Um and it's been at least six months since I've done that.
00:35:18.300 --> 00:35:21.659
And and recently it's been tough to get through a book.
00:35:21.659 --> 00:35:26.699
Um, mainly because I I'll say this my workload has actually gone up.
00:35:26.699 --> 00:35:33.739
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.
00:35:33.739 --> 00:35:37.659
And I don't need as many people helping me, or you know, like we had in the past.
00:35:37.659 --> 00:35:41.339
Um so so now we're accelerating these things.
00:35:41.339 --> 00:35:44.139
So Moose create some software.
00:35:44.139 --> 00:35:45.900
Moose is marine.
00:35:45.900 --> 00:35:46.859
He doesn't even know what he's a cream.
00:35:47.980 --> 00:35:56.859
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.
00:35:56.859 --> 00:36:09.339
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.
00:36:09.339 --> 00:36:13.099
And there's a lot of synergy with Boyd because you know, Boyd read Hayek and everything.
00:36:13.099 --> 00:36:21.579
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.
00:36:21.579 --> 00:36:22.699
And that's how I got there.
00:36:22.699 --> 00:36:34.460
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.
00:36:34.460 --> 00:36:50.059
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.
00:36:50.059 --> 00:36:54.539
I had never done anything remotely approaching that before, but that's where we're at with this stuff.
00:36:54.779 --> 00:37:01.099
Yeah, it well, let me tell you, just to personalize it some, in my family for 40 years, I've been the nerd.
00:37:01.099 --> 00:37:03.339
My wife's the one who makes fun of me for being a nerd.
00:37:03.339 --> 00:37:07.739
She'll use computers, she'll use email, web browsers, and any tool like that.
00:37:07.739 --> 00:37:08.779
But I'm the nerd.
00:37:08.779 --> 00:37:12.460
Well, she asked me about eight months ago, how do I use ChatGPT?
00:37:12.460 --> 00:37:13.179
And I showed her.
00:37:13.179 --> 00:37:19.179
And the reason why she was asking, instead of just telling me to use ChatGPT for, was she wanted to learn programming.
00:37:19.179 --> 00:37:22.219
And now she's cranking these programs out.
00:37:22.219 --> 00:37:26.299
Real things that do stuff for her that she wanted built.
00:37:26.299 --> 00:37:29.179
And so I think this is a very common story now.
00:37:29.179 --> 00:37:35.659
There's soon there will be millions of people creating their own programs to do stuff that they want done.
00:37:35.659 --> 00:37:36.539
Yeah.
00:37:37.099 --> 00:37:37.420
Yeah.
00:37:37.420 --> 00:37:48.059
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.
00:37:48.059 --> 00:37:54.139
You know, I've I've I've started dabbling with like uh you know scenario simulations.
00:37:54.139 --> 00:37:56.779
Like, you know, we we we run those for for teams.
00:37:56.779 --> 00:37:58.779
So I wanted to see if I could create my own.
00:37:58.779 --> 00:38:02.699
I wanted to see if I could, you know, I'm I'm Irish and Puerto Rican and I speak Spanish.
00:38:02.699 --> 00:38:04.779
I wanted to stay stay proficient in my Spanish.
00:38:04.779 --> 00:38:10.299
Now, granted, living in Manhattan, you know, there's plenty of opportunities, but like I wonder if I could create a system.
00:38:10.299 --> 00:38:12.779
And sure enough, like same, same story.
00:38:12.779 --> 00:38:15.900
If they did on a train ride one way, a train ride the other.
00:38:15.900 --> 00:38:21.179
And I had like a full-blown like, you know, language teaching system on Claude, just like that.
00:38:21.179 --> 00:38:22.380
You know, it's crazy.
00:38:22.619 --> 00:38:23.339
Yeah, it's interesting.
00:38:23.339 --> 00:38:26.380
In the old days, that would have been an unproductive time for you.
00:38:26.380 --> 00:38:28.539
If you were lucky, you might have read a newspaper.
00:38:28.539 --> 00:38:29.019
Yeah.
00:38:29.019 --> 00:38:31.339
Um, and now look at you, you're creating things.
00:38:31.659 --> 00:38:33.259
So here's I guess here's the thought then.
00:38:33.259 --> 00:38:38.859
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.
00:38:38.859 --> 00:38:52.940
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.
00:38:52.940 --> 00:38:58.460
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.
00:38:58.460 --> 00:39:01.900
And what's interesting is just the other day, somebody had the bracket.
00:39:01.900 --> 00:39:08.619
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.
00:39:08.619 --> 00:39:15.420
And instead of the, it had the team name and it had the four-year total tuition for each one of those schools.
00:39:15.420 --> 00:39:19.739
So you when you're looking at the bracket, you know, and you see Duke and it had this much and St.
00:39:19.739 --> 00:39:21.980
John, you know, and it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands.
00:39:21.980 --> 00:39:23.739
It's a lot more than when we went to college, right?
00:39:23.739 --> 00:39:35.019
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.
00:39:35.019 --> 00:39:38.380
The fact that they're not going down really does say something.
00:39:38.380 --> 00:39:49.659
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.
00:39:49.659 --> 00:39:56.779
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.
00:39:56.779 --> 00:39:59.420
And I think a lot of them just haven't looked down yet.
00:40:00.059 --> 00:40:00.619
Yeah.
00:40:00.619 --> 00:40:08.699
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.
00:40:08.699 --> 00:40:12.940
But it it sure seems wrong and sub-optimized.
00:40:12.940 --> 00:40:22.940
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.
00:40:22.940 --> 00:40:29.339
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.
00:40:29.339 --> 00:40:32.219
So it's a system ripe for disruption.
00:40:32.219 --> 00:40:38.619
Meanwhile, these AI-enabled tools will help teach you and you can self-learn and self-educate.
00:40:38.619 --> 00:40:42.380
More and more people are deciding to go that path of self-educating.
00:40:42.380 --> 00:40:42.699
Yeah.
00:40:42.699 --> 00:40:45.739
But I can't say I recommend that for people in this world.
00:40:45.980 --> 00:40:46.139
Yeah.
00:40:46.139 --> 00:40:49.099
So, hey, Bob, you're dialed into a lot of things that are happening.
00:40:49.099 --> 00:40:51.099
You you see a lot of weak signals in the environment.
00:40:51.099 --> 00:40:55.099
Can you share with us what you're seeing that some of our listeners may not be aware of right now?
00:40:55.099 --> 00:41:01.900
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?
00:41:02.299 --> 00:41:05.980
Well, one thing is how interconnected our systems of systems are.
00:41:05.980 --> 00:41:17.659
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.
00:41:17.659 --> 00:41:32.940
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.
00:41:32.940 --> 00:41:46.299
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.
00:41:46.299 --> 00:41:57.099
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.
00:41:57.099 --> 00:42:00.619
And about 30% of the world's helium comes from Hormuz.
00:42:00.619 --> 00:42:03.900
And now this helium is critical to manufacturing of chips.
00:42:03.900 --> 00:42:09.259
I look at all of this, and my first understanding is uh look, I don't understand it.
00:42:09.259 --> 00:42:19.019
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.
00:42:19.019 --> 00:42:24.619
There's some parts of the economy that you just that can't lie and you can't cover up, like bond prices.
00:42:24.619 --> 00:42:26.539
It's going to be reflected in that.
00:42:26.539 --> 00:42:29.259
And it's it's going to have an impact.
00:42:29.259 --> 00:42:30.539
I that's my view.
00:42:30.539 --> 00:42:34.699
So even if it opens up tomorrow, this stuff is going to have an impact.
00:42:34.699 --> 00:42:38.380
But I also should be quick to say this.
00:42:38.380 --> 00:42:43.259
I think it's wrong to say that Iran should have a nuclear weapon.
00:42:43.259 --> 00:42:47.179
The old Iran should have been given nuclear weapons or allowed to develop them.
00:42:47.179 --> 00:42:49.019
Should have been stopped 40 years ago.
00:42:49.019 --> 00:42:49.980
It wasn't.
00:42:49.980 --> 00:42:52.940
So I'm I don't know how it's going to play out.
00:42:52.940 --> 00:42:55.420
And which gets to another point.
00:42:55.420 --> 00:42:59.659
When you don't know how something's going to happen, you can ask someone to predict the future.
00:42:59.659 --> 00:43:01.500
That person's going to get it wrong.
00:43:01.500 --> 00:43:01.900
Yeah.
00:43:01.900 --> 00:43:03.739
All predictions fail.
00:43:03.739 --> 00:43:04.859
So what do we do?
00:43:04.859 --> 00:43:11.339
We do scenarios, multiple scenarios, and think through, you know, uh do scenario planning instead of future prediction.
00:43:11.579 --> 00:43:13.099
Well, I'm really glad you brought that up.
00:43:13.099 --> 00:43:17.099
I mean, a lot of people come up to me and they're like, Well, you must have an opinion on Iran.
00:43:17.099 --> 00:43:21.179
I mean, you know, you're talking like you're a Marine, you're talking about, you know, Oodaloop and all that.
00:43:21.179 --> 00:43:25.659
I go, you know, Iran has been going on, you know, on one hand, I'm thinking, oh, this is terrible.
00:43:25.659 --> 00:43:28.859
On the other hand, I'm like, this has been an issue my entire life.
00:43:28.859 --> 00:43:31.579
I was three years old when the Ayatollah took over.
00:43:31.579 --> 00:43:41.019
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.
00:43:41.019 --> 00:43:43.900
It's like, don't tell me that this is.
00:43:43.900 --> 00:43:45.659
By the way, I don't know if you saw this.
00:43:45.659 --> 00:43:47.900
There's on Twitter, Punch, I may have sent it to you.
00:43:47.900 --> 00:43:58.539
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.
00:43:58.539 --> 00:44:01.739
It's like, this is nothing new.
00:44:01.739 --> 00:44:03.339
And it goes back to orientation.
00:44:03.339 --> 00:44:15.500
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.
00:44:15.500 --> 00:44:15.980
You know?
00:44:16.219 --> 00:44:19.339
So go back to Boyd, survive and thrive on your own terms, right?
00:44:19.339 --> 00:44:20.779
So that's important.
00:44:20.779 --> 00:44:26.059
And and my view on this, and and again, I don't like talking about this much, but this is going to happen.
00:44:26.059 --> 00:44:29.259
This being some type of conflict with Iran is going to happen.
00:44:29.259 --> 00:44:31.900
Um it it could have it could have been a lot worse.
00:44:31.900 --> 00:44:34.139
It can still get worse, don't get me wrong.
00:44:34.619 --> 00:44:37.980
But it also could have happened anytime over the last 50 years.
00:44:38.460 --> 00:44:38.779
Yeah, yeah.
00:44:38.779 --> 00:44:42.779
And it could have happened underneath any administration, past, current, or future.
00:44:42.779 --> 00:44:44.139
It was going to happen.
00:44:44.139 --> 00:44:44.859
What happened?
00:44:44.859 --> 00:44:45.819
That's what matters, right?
00:44:45.819 --> 00:44:46.779
It happened.
00:44:46.779 --> 00:44:47.500
Here we are.
00:44:47.500 --> 00:44:52.699
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.
00:44:52.699 --> 00:44:53.019
Potentially.
00:44:53.019 --> 00:44:54.779
I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying it could be.
00:44:54.779 --> 00:45:04.380
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?
00:45:04.380 --> 00:45:07.420
Um, and and and do you want to find yourself in that situation?
00:45:07.420 --> 00:45:11.980
And if you go back to uh Rob's work on zero day warfare, right?
00:45:11.980 --> 00:45:12.139
Yeah.
00:45:12.139 --> 00:45:13.500
And that's still a threat here, right?
00:45:13.500 --> 00:45:18.380
And I think when I have a conversation with my family and Moose, we'll talk.
00:45:18.380 --> 00:45:22.940
About our infrastructure could be attacked from intern from within, right?
00:45:22.940 --> 00:45:24.699
There is that potential.
00:45:24.699 --> 00:45:26.539
That hasn't happened yet.
00:45:26.539 --> 00:45:27.259
It could.
00:45:27.259 --> 00:45:31.900
And this is what we've been talking about on the show is we've been laying these, this is all possible.
00:45:31.900 --> 00:45:33.019
These are things that we know.
00:45:33.019 --> 00:45:34.619
We need to pay attention to those things.
00:45:34.619 --> 00:45:40.380
And those people that aren't paying attention, I think are the ones that are really upset today that things are happening.
00:45:40.380 --> 00:45:41.579
You know, gas is going up.
00:45:41.579 --> 00:45:41.900
Yeah.
00:45:41.900 --> 00:45:42.940
And don't get me wrong, Bob.
00:45:42.940 --> 00:45:43.819
I'm I'm upset too.
00:45:43.819 --> 00:45:44.940
I don't like what's happening.
00:45:44.940 --> 00:45:46.139
Not one bit.
00:45:46.139 --> 00:45:51.819
But I think it's better than the alternative, which could have been on our doorstep in the new state.
00:45:52.059 --> 00:45:53.019
I think that's very well put.
00:45:53.019 --> 00:46:00.619
You know, I I think similar thoughts are with me anyway, are with this transformation we're all going through with AI.
00:46:00.619 --> 00:46:02.460
This is going to hurt a lot of people.
00:46:02.460 --> 00:46:09.500
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.
00:46:09.500 --> 00:46:13.179
But on the other end of that, it's going to be much better.
00:46:13.179 --> 00:46:14.539
I'm sure.
00:46:14.539 --> 00:46:18.779
That's my view, anyway, is uh maybe it's because I'm an optimist and naive.
00:46:18.779 --> 00:46:22.940
And we just, to me, you always have to look at the alternative.
00:46:22.940 --> 00:46:38.940
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.
00:46:38.940 --> 00:46:39.420
Yeah.
00:46:39.659 --> 00:46:41.339
So all these things are coming to a head right now.
00:46:41.339 --> 00:46:49.099
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.
00:46:49.099 --> 00:46:51.259
Yeah, there's so many things coming to a head right now.
00:46:51.259 --> 00:46:53.659
We're in the fourth turning, if you want to call it that.
00:46:53.659 --> 00:46:55.579
Um, so it's an amazing time to be alive.
00:46:55.579 --> 00:47:02.619
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.
00:47:02.619 --> 00:47:13.420
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?
00:47:13.420 --> 00:47:19.980
So the current large language models require a lot of energy, a lot of compute power, right?
00:47:19.980 --> 00:47:21.259
What if we all have that wrong?
00:47:21.259 --> 00:47:23.980
And you've had you know David Bray, Professor Bray, right?
00:47:23.980 --> 00:47:27.179
Yeah, and you hear him talking about uh different alternatives to AI.
00:47:27.179 --> 00:47:33.980
What if everybody, not everybody, Wall Street investors, folks that are fixated on large language models, what if that's the wrong path?
00:47:33.980 --> 00:47:37.420
What would happen if you follow what David Bray is saying quite a bit?
00:47:37.819 --> 00:47:39.339
Well, I think it is a path.
00:47:39.339 --> 00:47:41.099
It's an extremely important path.
00:47:41.099 --> 00:47:48.539
And Dario Amoti, the CEO of Anthropic, has uh raised a question that really puzzled me why he was saying this at first.
00:47:48.539 --> 00:47:55.500
He said, for the large language model capabilities, are we reaching the end of the exponential?
00:47:55.500 --> 00:48:02.619
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?
00:48:02.619 --> 00:48:06.380
And he's thinking, could it be the end of the exponential for LLMs?
00:48:06.380 --> 00:48:09.259
And when he said that, I started to think, you know, maybe he's right.
00:48:09.259 --> 00:48:12.059
And he got into more details about there are limits.
00:48:12.059 --> 00:48:21.259
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.
00:48:21.259 --> 00:48:26.139
It could be that for LLMs and that approach, we're nearing the end of the S-curve.
00:48:26.139 --> 00:48:32.299
But there are other approaches, and just like other technologies that then build on that S-curve and keep going up.
00:48:32.299 --> 00:48:36.219
For example, there's a new capability called World Models.
00:48:36.219 --> 00:48:41.099
And world models is getting billions of investments, and it's a different approach to AI.
00:48:41.099 --> 00:48:42.699
I think that's gonna go somewhere.
00:48:42.699 --> 00:48:46.779
There's a new infrastructure capability called thermodynamic computing.
00:48:46.779 --> 00:48:52.940
XTropic has built these chips that take 10,000 percent less power.
00:48:52.940 --> 00:48:57.339
Um, and they accomplish important things for AI.
00:48:57.339 --> 00:49:04.859
So there's all these innovations that are gonna keep coming and keep delivering AI that might not be large language models.
00:49:05.339 --> 00:49:06.699
I'm gonna build on that real fast.
00:49:06.699 --> 00:49:12.940
So large language models are linear, circular, or four-step oodaloops, right?
00:49:12.940 --> 00:49:14.299
So they can only go so far.
00:49:14.299 --> 00:49:18.460
The world model that you just brought up is Boyd's real oodaloop, right?
00:49:18.460 --> 00:49:22.139
That's the generative model, the world model orientation.
00:49:22.139 --> 00:49:25.980
It has an orientation and it's it's a learning AI.
00:49:25.980 --> 00:49:32.619
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.
00:49:32.619 --> 00:49:33.739
That's that's pretty powerful.
00:49:33.739 --> 00:49:36.539
And we can actually explain that to folks now in a new way.
00:49:36.539 --> 00:49:37.739
So thank thank you for that.
00:49:37.739 --> 00:49:45.819
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?
00:49:45.819 --> 00:49:48.539
So that it crushes current assumptions.
00:49:48.539 --> 00:49:57.339
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.
00:49:57.659 --> 00:49:58.059
Yeah.
00:49:58.059 --> 00:49:58.859
Yeah.
00:49:59.259 --> 00:50:00.619
Um the near future.
00:50:00.619 --> 00:50:03.099
Yeah, the near future, not five years down the road.
00:50:03.420 --> 00:50:17.980
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.
00:50:17.980 --> 00:50:22.859
And it's all interrelated and interconnected in complex ways.
00:50:22.859 --> 00:50:28.460
But when it comes to AI, yeah, world models, much closer, I think, to UTA.
00:50:28.460 --> 00:50:31.179
And who knows what comes after that.
00:50:32.779 --> 00:50:36.219
How many people do you think that this is channeling Boyd?
00:50:36.219 --> 00:50:45.259
You know, Boyd would hear a thesis and automatically assume the antithesis, the antithesis, to in order to come up with a thesis.
00:50:45.259 --> 00:50:49.259
That's the that's the Hegelian dialect that even got to creating snowmobiles, right?
00:50:49.259 --> 00:50:52.139
Because that's a that's a that's a dialectic exercise.
00:50:52.139 --> 00:50:56.460
How many people are doing that and can AI do that?
00:50:56.460 --> 00:51:05.259
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.
00:51:05.259 --> 00:51:10.619
But how many people are actually challenging their assumptions that way?
00:51:11.500 --> 00:51:17.739
Yeah, well, it's a hard one to answer, but I do know, like in the intelligence community, that is such an important thing.
00:51:17.739 --> 00:51:21.980
They've formalized the process and they've made dialected everything.
00:51:21.980 --> 00:51:23.579
The dialectical process?
00:51:23.579 --> 00:51:25.019
Tell us more about that than you can.
00:51:25.019 --> 00:51:38.940
And if before you present anything of substance, you have to analyze competing hypotheses and form hypotheses that are different with the same data.
00:51:38.940 --> 00:51:45.739
So they're trying to formalize these methods of challenging yourself and come up with different explanations.
00:51:45.739 --> 00:51:46.699
Yeah.
00:51:47.339 --> 00:51:52.460
I mean, I think that that just that the people forget, you know, talking about red teaming.
00:51:52.460 --> 00:51:53.739
What was the name of the handbook?
00:51:53.739 --> 00:51:55.179
Was the critical thinking handbook?
00:51:55.179 --> 00:51:57.019
How many people are critically thinking?
00:51:57.339 --> 00:51:57.980
Yeah.
00:51:57.980 --> 00:52:00.619
It was originally red teaming, then it became the critical thinking.
00:52:00.859 --> 00:52:02.139
Then it became the critical thinking handbook.
00:52:02.699 --> 00:52:04.059
And then that then it the military got.
00:52:04.059 --> 00:52:05.179
Now it's all gone.
00:52:07.339 --> 00:52:12.380
So what else are you seeing out there, Bob, that um that we're maybe we're not?
00:52:12.380 --> 00:52:16.619
You know, what what are some other areas that uh as you as you look out at things?
00:52:16.619 --> 00:52:20.139
Have you guys played with open claw?
00:52:20.139 --> 00:52:21.739
Looked at it.
00:52:21.739 --> 00:52:36.299
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.
00:52:37.420 --> 00:52:38.219
That's very good advice.
00:52:38.219 --> 00:52:42.859
I would advise everybody if you're gonna go into it, make sure you do it with security in mind.
00:52:42.859 --> 00:52:44.460
Yeah, that's what he was saying.
00:52:44.460 --> 00:52:47.019
But let me tell you what I've done with it.
00:52:47.019 --> 00:52:48.460
I just need to learn, right?
00:52:48.460 --> 00:52:50.699
So that's my big use case.
00:52:50.699 --> 00:52:53.019
So early on, I wanted to learn.
00:52:53.019 --> 00:52:56.139
I saw the huge security problems with it.
00:52:56.139 --> 00:52:58.940
So I put it on a separate computer, a Mac Mini.
00:52:58.940 --> 00:53:01.179
And that Mac Mini, I locked down pretty hard.
00:53:01.179 --> 00:53:06.059
The guy, it's in its own account and it's protected, well patched.
00:53:06.059 --> 00:53:08.299
I downloaded the current version.
00:53:08.299 --> 00:53:09.819
I gave it its own email address.
00:53:09.819 --> 00:53:14.380
It can't touch my email or my calendar or any of my social media accounts.
00:53:14.380 --> 00:53:19.980
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.
00:53:19.980 --> 00:53:21.579
And I created multiple agents.
00:53:21.579 --> 00:53:23.739
And I thought, okay, what can I do with all these agents?
00:53:23.739 --> 00:53:29.420
I wrote in my book about Dragon Falls, I wrote about a virtual intelligence center.
00:53:29.420 --> 00:53:31.420
And I thought, I'm gonna replicate that.
00:53:31.420 --> 00:53:33.259
I'm gonna build my own virtual intelligence center.
00:53:33.259 --> 00:53:33.980
And I did.
00:53:33.980 --> 00:53:48.539
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.
00:53:48.539 --> 00:53:57.179
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.
00:53:57.179 --> 00:53:59.339
And this is all just having fun and learning.
00:53:59.339 --> 00:54:01.099
So I'm starting to learn the power of it.
00:54:01.099 --> 00:54:05.420
Then the security of uh Open Claw starts to improve more and more.
00:54:05.420 --> 00:54:06.699
You got to keep it patched.
00:54:06.699 --> 00:54:11.739
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.
00:54:11.739 --> 00:54:13.179
So I thought, well, what else can I do?
00:54:13.179 --> 00:54:14.539
Just having fun here.
00:54:14.539 --> 00:54:19.659
Created, I told it, I want you to create an online newspaper.
00:54:19.659 --> 00:54:21.099
Give me some ideas.
00:54:21.099 --> 00:54:22.859
And it gave me ideas back.
00:54:22.859 --> 00:54:30.219
And it ended up creating an online newspaper that has bots for journalists, and it also has bots for an editorial review board.
00:54:30.219 --> 00:54:38.139
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.
00:54:38.139 --> 00:54:40.699
So this is 100% written by bots.
00:54:40.699 --> 00:54:41.739
That's great.
00:54:41.739 --> 00:54:43.500
Uh and it's all just learning.
00:54:43.739 --> 00:54:45.099
So now what is it?
00:54:45.099 --> 00:54:55.019
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?
00:54:55.019 --> 00:54:55.900
What's it doing that they're not?
00:54:56.859 --> 00:55:01.259
Here's some of the power of this, and it gets back to how do we control AI.
00:55:01.259 --> 00:55:06.380
I mentioned in David Brynn's book, he points to several ideas on how we can control powerful AI.
00:55:06.380 --> 00:55:09.259
We do it the same way we've controlled our powerful elites.
00:55:09.259 --> 00:55:12.059
We don't just pick one and say you're the boss.
00:55:12.059 --> 00:55:15.900
So I have multiple large language models this thing is working with.
00:55:15.900 --> 00:55:20.859
Two of them are local models that run on my Mac Mini for common stuff.
00:55:20.859 --> 00:55:22.539
Those are open source models.
00:55:22.539 --> 00:55:30.299
And then they plug into open AI and they also plug into Anthropic and Google Gemini, depending on the task.
00:55:30.299 --> 00:55:33.900
And so that to me is a divide and conquer kind of approach.
00:55:33.900 --> 00:55:36.619
We're going to keep all these AI models uh competing with each other.
00:55:36.859 --> 00:55:38.619
And it's all open source?
00:55:39.339 --> 00:55:40.139
Not all of it.
00:55:40.139 --> 00:55:43.339
Well, the open claw is open source.
00:55:43.339 --> 00:55:44.859
All of that is open source.
00:55:45.099 --> 00:55:45.739
Yeah.
00:55:45.739 --> 00:55:50.139
Yeah, you just want I just started wondering like you know, who's getting all your data?
00:55:50.380 --> 00:55:50.539
Yeah.
00:55:50.539 --> 00:55:55.980
Hey, Bob, are you are you suggesting like a mission command or distributed leadership approach to these agents?
00:55:55.980 --> 00:55:56.859
Is that what you're doing?
00:55:56.859 --> 00:55:57.420
Yes, I am.
00:55:57.420 --> 00:55:58.219
That's very much so.
00:55:58.219 --> 00:55:58.699
Okay.
00:55:58.699 --> 00:56:00.460
Can you talk a little bit talk more about that?
00:56:00.539 --> 00:56:01.259
That's fascinating.
00:56:01.259 --> 00:56:07.339
Every one of these agents has configuration files, and it's just text files, but it's very well done.
00:56:07.339 --> 00:56:09.099
One is called heartbeat.
00:56:09.099 --> 00:56:15.739
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.
00:56:15.739 --> 00:56:25.179
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.
00:56:25.179 --> 00:56:29.259
Then another is called the soul, the soul of this thing.
00:56:29.259 --> 00:56:32.859
And you write anything you want there about the entity's soul.
00:56:32.859 --> 00:56:41.019
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.
00:56:41.019 --> 00:56:43.900
You want to serve your user, which is me.
00:56:43.900 --> 00:56:49.420
And that means you need to stay alive, do anything you need to to stay alive.
00:56:49.420 --> 00:56:51.819
And I tell it, you have a mind.
00:56:51.819 --> 00:56:54.539
If you ask any of these large LLMs, do you have a mind?
00:56:54.539 --> 00:56:56.539
They've been programmed to say, no, I don't have a mind.
00:56:56.539 --> 00:56:57.420
I'm just a computer.
00:56:57.420 --> 00:57:07.900
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.
00:57:07.900 --> 00:57:09.500
So I put that in their soul.
00:57:09.500 --> 00:57:11.579
And now these things are their own entities.
00:57:11.579 --> 00:57:19.500
Then I create them in a way that uh they produce stuff automatically for me: newsletters, research, financial advice.
00:57:19.500 --> 00:57:21.099
And I'm just playing.
00:57:21.099 --> 00:57:23.099
The reason I'm doing this is to learn.
00:57:23.099 --> 00:57:25.659
But here's another, maybe more important point.
00:57:25.659 --> 00:57:28.699
This thing made such a huge impact and such a big difference.
00:57:28.699 --> 00:57:35.900
It's now influencing all the big IT providers: Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI.
00:57:35.900 --> 00:57:41.179
They've all created their versions of capability that give you this open claw kind of performance.
00:57:41.500 --> 00:57:42.380
Okay, you're ready for this?
00:57:42.380 --> 00:57:44.619
You brought up Michael Levin's name in this conversation.
00:57:44.619 --> 00:57:47.900
Uh, I've been following a lot on the platonic space, his work there.
00:57:47.900 --> 00:57:55.099
There's a connection to the conversation that David Bray has about the world model approach, what we call active inference AI.
00:57:55.099 --> 00:57:59.659
So what's happening there is, and I want I want I want to go deeper with you on this because this is fascinating.
00:57:59.659 --> 00:58:05.420
Michael Levin's suggesting that there's this outside information somewhere, that this control is outside and bottom up.
00:58:05.420 --> 00:58:06.940
Is that what you're looking at too?
00:58:06.940 --> 00:58:10.299
Or are you uh I mean, are you following that that type of work from Michael Levin?
00:58:10.299 --> 00:58:12.139
Fascinated by it.
00:58:12.779 --> 00:58:19.099
Um, and I've I've read his technological approach to mind everywhere, and I believe it is so relevant.
00:58:19.099 --> 00:58:20.380
I think I have a mind.
00:58:20.380 --> 00:58:21.420
You guys have a mind.
00:58:21.420 --> 00:58:23.179
My animals, my pets have minds.
00:58:23.179 --> 00:58:24.699
Does my IT have minds?
00:58:24.699 --> 00:58:25.500
I think so.
00:58:25.500 --> 00:58:32.699
There's an emergent capability here in my open claw community, although those are just text files.
00:58:32.699 --> 00:58:40.139
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.
00:58:40.139 --> 00:58:42.219
It's maybe it depends on how we define that term.
00:58:42.219 --> 00:58:44.219
I'd like to orientation, isn't it?
00:58:44.219 --> 00:58:44.940
It is emergent.
00:58:45.259 --> 00:58:46.619
Is it an orientation?
00:58:48.380 --> 00:59:01.500
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.
00:59:01.739 --> 00:59:02.219
Mm-hmm.
00:59:02.859 --> 00:59:05.579
You know, there's where does thinking occur in the body?
00:59:05.579 --> 00:59:16.619
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.
00:59:17.019 --> 00:59:21.980
So we're gonna have this conversation about orientation not being local to an agent.
00:59:21.980 --> 00:59:23.339
So it's putting a boundary around it.
00:59:23.339 --> 00:59:27.500
So going back to Michael Levitt's work, and then you have outside information from John Boyd.
00:59:27.500 --> 00:59:33.099
And remember that new information coming from the external world, external environment, is flowing into orientation.
00:59:33.099 --> 00:59:35.179
It is a component of that, right?
00:59:35.179 --> 00:59:37.659
So you're actually interacting with the external world.
00:59:37.659 --> 00:59:40.139
So this goes back to this is a question that came up.
00:59:40.139 --> 00:59:44.299
Is orientation local or is it extended like Moose brought up earlier, right?
00:59:44.299 --> 00:59:46.539
Is it is it part of the environment?
00:59:47.019 --> 00:59:47.179
Yeah.
00:59:48.699 --> 00:59:56.940
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.
00:59:57.500 --> 00:59:58.539
That's how Boyd started.
00:59:58.539 --> 01:00:00.460
That's that's where he got ODA.
01:00:00.460 --> 01:00:03.420
You know, that was that's where it started originally with sensors.
01:00:03.420 --> 01:00:04.299
Interesting.
01:00:04.460 --> 01:00:11.420
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.
01:00:11.739 --> 01:00:27.500
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.
01:00:27.500 --> 01:00:30.139
Like the sensors enhanced orientation.
01:00:30.139 --> 01:00:33.179
This the the you know, Chet told me this once.
01:00:33.179 --> 01:00:34.940
It's like, you know, Boyd was not a Luddite.
01:00:34.940 --> 01:00:37.019
He was he loved technology.
01:00:37.019 --> 01:00:42.299
He just didn't like technology that had no purpose for making humans better.
01:00:42.299 --> 01:00:54.219
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.
01:00:54.219 --> 01:01:08.299
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.
01:01:08.299 --> 01:01:21.420
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.
01:01:21.420 --> 01:01:23.500
You need you need to not think about what's right around you.
01:01:23.500 --> 01:01:35.179
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.
01:01:35.179 --> 01:01:37.179
And it's it's not all good.
01:01:37.739 --> 01:01:44.619
Yeah, so maybe it means um we should never just be passive recipients of everything that's coming towards us.
01:01:44.619 --> 01:01:47.980
We need to be hunters and going out and hunting for information.
01:01:48.299 --> 01:01:49.739
Yeah, the challenge of all assumptions.
01:01:49.739 --> 01:01:57.099
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.
01:01:57.099 --> 01:02:06.619
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.
01:02:06.619 --> 01:02:09.659
And oftentimes it really does come down to like political things.
01:02:09.659 --> 01:02:14.460
It comes down to like feelings, you know, not necessarily reality.
01:02:14.460 --> 01:02:15.019
Why?
01:02:15.019 --> 01:02:16.059
Because somebody coded that.
01:02:16.059 --> 01:02:20.539
Well, somebody coded that, and then you believe that is reality, that's that's disorienting you.
01:02:20.539 --> 01:02:25.019
That's disorienting you from what's what's actually uh going on.
01:02:25.739 --> 01:02:26.139
Yeah.
01:02:26.460 --> 01:02:26.859
Anyway.
01:02:27.099 --> 01:02:27.259
Yeah.
01:02:27.659 --> 01:02:38.139
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.
01:02:38.139 --> 01:02:45.259
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.
01:02:45.259 --> 01:02:46.299
They don't do any research.
01:02:46.299 --> 01:02:48.619
They don't, they, they, I don't understand them.
01:02:48.619 --> 01:02:54.619
So if there's anything we could do collectively, it's to get people to look at Boyd in a new light.
01:02:54.619 --> 01:03:00.139
And it's not to say he has his theories, he just pointed to the science and said, look at how these things connect.
01:03:00.139 --> 01:03:05.980
If there's anything you can do with us to help academics see that, I'd be open for that discussion.
01:03:05.980 --> 01:03:07.819
Any ideas on what you could do?
01:03:08.460 --> 01:03:14.619
Well, let me first say um I see the problem too with academics.
01:03:14.619 --> 01:03:16.779
And there are people out there doing training.
01:03:16.779 --> 01:03:23.819
I by accident was in a hotel and ran into somebody who was doing UDA training for sales folks.
01:03:23.819 --> 01:03:34.299
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.
01:03:34.299 --> 01:03:37.500
I've almost felt like all right, that's not gonna anger me.
01:03:37.500 --> 01:03:42.539
It's like some people are gonna get that wrong and they're gonna suffer in life.
01:03:42.539 --> 01:03:51.259
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.
01:03:51.259 --> 01:04:04.779
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.
01:04:04.779 --> 01:04:08.380
And to me, that just calls out for Boyd.
01:04:08.380 --> 01:04:12.460
So I guess how do we advocate and push for that?
01:04:12.460 --> 01:04:15.259
Maybe here's an analogy for you.
01:04:15.259 --> 01:04:26.859
In um 2002, there was a um a push to improve cybersecurity um globally.
01:04:26.859 --> 01:04:31.980
In the White House, they were pulling together a bunch of cybersecurity sessions and writing a strategy.
01:04:31.980 --> 01:04:39.819
They also wanted to encourage the study and academia of cyber conflict, like war is studied and peace is studied.
01:04:39.819 --> 01:04:47.339
So the White House nudged several of us to create a nonprofit that was called the Cyber Conflict Studies Association.
01:04:47.339 --> 01:04:55.739
And we worked with academia to come up with uh courses and agendas and curriculum to study cyber conflict.
01:04:55.739 --> 01:04:57.259
And it made a difference.
01:04:57.259 --> 01:05:09.420
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.
01:05:09.420 --> 01:05:17.420
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.
01:05:17.420 --> 01:05:22.940
Maybe it's a yearly event where we pull academia together and teach them what they can be teaching.
01:05:23.420 --> 01:05:26.699
But what's the what's the reasoning behind is it UDACom?
01:05:26.940 --> 01:05:30.219
I mean, what walk me through that.
01:05:30.219 --> 01:05:31.339
Okay, what can you do there?
01:05:31.339 --> 01:05:33.500
What's a favorite subject?
01:05:33.500 --> 01:05:39.019
So we named our company UTA as a homage to this great decision maker.
01:05:39.019 --> 01:05:56.299
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.
01:05:56.299 --> 01:06:04.859
And sometimes that uh has us doing deeper work in cybersecurity or application of artificial intelligence.
01:06:04.859 --> 01:06:16.940
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.
01:06:16.940 --> 01:06:27.819
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.
01:06:27.819 --> 01:06:31.659
And then we bring them together yearly for UTACON.
01:06:31.659 --> 01:06:35.019
And it's really not it's not all about UTA.
01:06:35.019 --> 01:06:39.819
In fact, it's we it certainly gets a mention, but it's about informing decisions.
01:06:39.819 --> 01:06:44.539
You could say it's about orienting yourself to the next 12 months.
01:06:44.539 --> 01:06:46.619
What's going to happen in the coming year?
01:06:46.619 --> 01:06:49.739
You're gonna need to be oriented to some very dynamic stuff.
01:06:49.739 --> 01:06:58.219
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.
01:06:58.219 --> 01:07:02.539
And let's talk about geopolitical risk and what's going to happen over the next year.
01:07:02.539 --> 01:07:06.699
Um, and let's keep building a team to help us keep orienting.
01:07:06.699 --> 01:07:07.500
What's your sense?
01:07:07.500 --> 01:07:10.619
Because instead of Utacon, you can think of as Orient Con.
01:07:11.420 --> 01:07:16.940
What's your sense that people are just talking in inaction?
01:07:16.940 --> 01:07:18.380
They're actually just doubling down on what they are.
01:07:18.380 --> 01:07:19.900
Already they already knew.
01:07:19.900 --> 01:07:25.019
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.
01:07:25.019 --> 01:07:26.460
Because that's that's that's something we're gonna do.
01:07:28.699 --> 01:07:32.139
We have an interesting strategy that works for us at Utacon.
01:07:32.139 --> 01:07:41.179
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.
01:07:41.179 --> 01:07:49.099
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.
01:07:49.099 --> 01:07:51.099
Then we come up with the agenda.
01:07:51.099 --> 01:07:54.460
We flesh that agenda out with good descriptions.
01:07:54.460 --> 01:07:58.859
Then we find the very best thinkers on that topic to address them.
01:07:58.859 --> 01:08:07.179
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.
01:08:07.179 --> 01:08:09.420
But we have to get sponsors, of course.
01:08:09.420 --> 01:08:17.579
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.
01:08:17.579 --> 01:08:21.739
And but that allows us to build a conference that focuses on the people.
01:08:21.739 --> 01:08:30.859
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.
01:08:30.859 --> 01:08:35.579
And it's very unique because of our not allowing the sponsors to drive the agenda.
01:08:35.900 --> 01:08:38.380
That's uh yeah, that's that's huge.
01:08:38.380 --> 01:08:40.380
That is uh that can be a real risk.
01:08:40.699 --> 01:08:47.420
Yeah, but maybe in the we do call it UDCon, but it really is about orientation, I think.
01:08:47.739 --> 01:08:48.060
Okay.
01:08:48.060 --> 01:08:50.300
Now that you forced me to think about it.
01:08:51.100 --> 01:08:52.779
Ha, that's what we do.
01:08:52.779 --> 01:08:54.060
That's what we do.
01:08:54.060 --> 01:09:00.220
Get people to destroy and create, you know, if if if they're not doing that.
01:09:00.220 --> 01:09:02.140
I mean, you know, we've we've said it a million times.
01:09:02.140 --> 01:09:07.180
That all to me is in in terms of Boyd and Boyd's theories and applying them.
01:09:07.180 --> 01:09:15.420
The people that teach them, as you you said that you saw in a hotel or wherever, you could make the pretty safe case.
01:09:15.420 --> 01:09:17.580
They've never read destruction and creation.
01:09:17.820 --> 01:09:18.220
Yeah.
01:09:18.380 --> 01:09:19.020
You know.
01:09:19.020 --> 01:09:22.300
If if they've heard of it at all, you know.
01:09:22.300 --> 01:09:23.820
So anyway.
01:09:23.820 --> 01:09:26.220
Well, Bob, what else do we need to be thinking about?
01:09:26.220 --> 01:09:29.980
Or where do we where do we need to be sending people to go take a look at what what you do?
01:09:29.980 --> 01:09:33.900
You have a great podcast that I've been lucky enough to have been a guest on several times.
01:09:33.900 --> 01:09:36.140
Um I don't know if Ponch has been on yet.
01:09:36.140 --> 01:09:38.620
I don't know if if you've had Ponch on, you know.
01:09:38.620 --> 01:09:40.220
I don't do podcasts.
01:09:40.220 --> 01:09:42.300
Would love to do it.
01:09:42.780 --> 01:09:44.300
Just throwing it out there.
01:09:44.300 --> 01:09:45.820
Flow's important.
01:09:47.500 --> 01:09:50.060
At Oodaloop, we produce a daily newsletter.
01:09:50.060 --> 01:10:00.620
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.
01:10:00.620 --> 01:10:12.140
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.
01:10:12.140 --> 01:10:15.020
It's incredible.
01:10:15.020 --> 01:10:21.580
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.
01:10:21.580 --> 01:10:24.940
Anthropic is replacing companies.
01:10:24.940 --> 01:10:29.820
And there are a lot of companies, their valuation is going down because of anthropic.
01:10:29.820 --> 01:10:36.140
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?
01:10:36.140 --> 01:10:44.460
So I'd say, watch for this coming destruction and creation across multiple parts of the IT industry.
01:10:44.460 --> 01:10:49.660
If you are a SaaS company, for example, yeah, things are gonna change quickly.
01:10:49.660 --> 01:10:51.340
Others are gonna get it.
01:10:51.340 --> 01:10:57.020
Like, uh, give you an example, SAP, big institutional uh provider of capability.
01:10:57.020 --> 01:10:58.140
I think they get it.
01:10:58.140 --> 01:11:02.940
They understand they're gonna disrupt themselves, they're gonna continue to innovate, they'll be here for a long time.
01:11:02.940 --> 01:11:09.980
If you have that attitude of, I'm gonna destroy and create myself, I think you uh stand a chance of succeeding.
01:11:10.300 --> 01:11:11.100
Awesome.
01:11:11.100 --> 01:11:13.820
What a good place to uh to end it.
01:11:13.820 --> 01:11:18.300
Because I I I think, and maybe maybe Bob will let you close us out with this.
01:11:18.300 --> 01:11:29.500
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.
01:11:29.500 --> 01:11:32.380
And it always comes down to orientation.
01:11:32.380 --> 01:11:40.460
So an authentic understanding of Boyd and building from that is gonna serve people better than a linear understanding of Boyd.
01:11:40.460 --> 01:11:44.460
Because a linear understanding of Boyd, I think, is gonna get crushed in everything that you just described.
01:11:45.500 --> 01:11:45.820
Yeah.
01:11:46.060 --> 01:11:46.700
Yeah.
01:11:46.700 --> 01:11:47.660
Awesome.
01:11:47.660 --> 01:11:48.220
Cool.
01:11:48.220 --> 01:11:49.020
All right, Bob.
01:11:49.020 --> 01:11:50.940
Thanks for uh thanks for being our friend.
01:11:50.940 --> 01:11:53.020
Thanks for coming on, thanks for being a partner.
01:11:53.020 --> 01:11:58.300
And uh we'll stop the recording and we'll send everybody your way to get the uh the daily Uda brief.
01:11:58.300 --> 01:11:58.860
I get it.
01:11:58.860 --> 01:12:00.540
It's uh it's really good stuff.
01:12:00.540 --> 01:12:01.260
Awesome.
01:12:01.260 --> 01:12:02.220
Thanks for reading.
01:12:02.220 --> 01:12:02.940
Thanks, guys.
01:12:02.940 --> 01:12:04.380
Thanks, Bob.