Episode 82: Digital Self Sovereignty and Avoiding the Long Night with John Robb

Informing your decisions with intelligence analysis and insight brought to you by the team@ooda.

Loop.Com hi, I'm Matt Devoe, CEO of OODA and you are watching the Oodacast and today we have our first repeat guest with John Robb, whose oodacast with us back in June of 2020 is the most popular, if not the second most popular. I haven't checked the stats yet, but I know it was kind of head in head between you and Chet who talked about the origination of the OODA Loop. So definitely a great dialogue that's resonating with everyone. I'll link to the video that we did down below so that people can go back and view your history and your work experience and also link them over to the global gorillas Patreon, which from my perspective is the highest yield, $5 per month you can spend with regards to insight and critical thinking. So, John, thanks for joining us again on the oodacast.

Well, thanks, Matt.

So I do want to kind of jump right into what's happened since we chatted over a year ago. We chatted, we were kind of right in the middle of the pandemic still a lot of emerging issues and frameworks being developed around that and things seemed like they were in a lot of turmoil, but we've had a lot of turmoil since then as well. So I'd love to kind of get your perspective. We had an election and then we had some issues with regards to rioting on January 6th. And as I was watching and observing that, it seems to play into a lot of your thinking around the emergence of tribes and tribalism. And that is kind of a new framework for thinking about the world. So can you give us your perspective on those issues and kind of does it fit within that tribal framework that you've been articulating for a while now?

Yeah, what we saw last year and what we're seeing today is playing into this network tribalism. First thing is that the online world, I mean, how we interact online is rewiring our brains. We're thinking differently now. It's moving us from reading something and thinking in isolation towards scanning information. The information flows are very, very high. We can't focus in and drill down much. What we do is we pattern match. We pull out pieces of information out of that flow that match patterns that we're curating. When we do it alone, that's our own small pattern that helps us make sense of the world. But they can also be done in tandem with millions of other people co curating a big Pattern. Those patterns tend to be the basis for a lot of tribalism we're seeing online. You have the anti racist tribe and you have the anti sexist tribe and you have all these different tribes on the left and then you have the tribes on the right that are more focused on anything that's regarding dissent or focused in on dissent. And then when you start layering on all the tribal dynamics, that pattern becomes the narrative for the tribe. And working together with other people on it creates this kind of fictive kinship. People start to see anything that contradicts that narrative as an assault and an existential threat. We see a lot of people saying, if you say this, it's killing people and you're the world's going to blow up if you contradict what we're saying. We saw that all played out last year. We saw it with BLM and the anti racist tribal group. Take that issue and bring it up to a national scale. Billions of dollars in damage and the like thousands of cops put in the hospital thing. Then we saw it with the COVID response, this growing dissent in regards to how effective the vaccine was, whether masking worked, that tribal dissent prevented the development of a cohesive consensus in regards to response to Covid. That played into the elections, that played into what we're seeing right now in terms of the aftermath of elections and people are still adhering to these tribal structures. Does that work for you?

Yeah, absolutely. It's been interesting. There's been a great Wall Street Journal series around Facebook. And not to just pick on Facebook. We have lots of different social networks and they operate with similar dynamics. But because of this, this series of stories, we get a little bit more insight behind the scenes at Facebook and the dependence on algorithms to provide us with these feeds that we see as we browse the social network and this bias towards things that would make people angrier or that get them upset. The algorithms are rewarding that type of behavior because it gets a reaction. Does that mean that we're creating these hyper network tribes that are almost guided by these AI algorithms that are really only reacting to engagement, but seem to be creating some of these issues that we're dealing with?

Yeah, I saw that firsthand a couple of weeks ago when I was testifying in front of the Senate, in front of the big data group, looking at trying to regulate Facebook and Google and the like. The day before there was a story about some bit of research done inside of Facebook about how Instagram impacted the psychology of young females in particular. And all the senators piled on they were all attacking Facebook. And the poor Facebook rep is like, you should have seen his face when he wasn't on camera. It was like the guy was like, you know, being accused of child murder and the like. I mean, it's like, you know, it was a total pile on. Some of those senators are really aggressive crews and. And it was particularly vicious. It was like the attack dog that once it gets your neck, you're done. Yeah. The big problem I have with this kind of Facebook regulation and Facebook algorithms. It's clear though, that Facebook's algorithm does promote memetic level content, ID level content distribution. The stuff that people like to share and people like to giggle over and they think it's cool. That low level content gets shared pretty easily on Facebook because it drives engagement. Sometimes that leads into political attacks. There have been a lot of changes at Facebook over the last year and a half or so, particularly in the run up to the 2020 elections that tended to mute that. A lot of the stuff that we're talking about in terms of how these algorithms works from 2019 and prior, I think the way they changed those algorithms I think played a lot into the lessening of Trump going into the election. How we measure that or how that impact could be accurately assessed is not going to be possible because there's no access to any of that data. But the way the Senate is approaching it, and maybe I was brought in to talk about digital ownership and digital rights in order to scare Facebook and Google a little bit, but the thing going into that conference and that hearing was that it was clear to me that the senators and Congress and a lot of other interest groups are very interested in not so much reforming Facebook and Google and the like, but they want to take control of it. If you look at it from step back and you look at what they've created and you know a little bit about how the NSA and other organizations work, you can see that the advances over the last 20 years in terms of data collection and surveillance and being able to actively make sense of what's going on and then act on it have been intense. I mean, we're talking quantum leaps in capability just over the last 20 years. But the thing is that all of this has been done on the commercial side for the most part. That's where most of the data is and that's where most of the AI development is going on. The more data you have, the better your AIs. There's a cycle going on here that they've basically created a surveillance state in a BOX China recognized this pretty early on. Three, four years ago, when Xi decided he wanted to become a dictator, he. He latched on to the surveillance state system being built by their corporations. He's slaving those corporations to a view of where society should go, and he's using that technology in order to do that. We have this here in the states and projecting to the rest of the world, given that our companies are so big, a similar capability. But the government is a little bit envious in terms of its ability to influence public opinion and contain elections. CLOSED OVERTON WINDOW so there's only this much room in the conversational space during elections to prevent, and I think this is probably across the board in most of the political class. Now they want to prevent another Trump or prevent Trump from reemerging. A lot of what we're seeing is Trump prevention. They're frantic right now. And to try to come up with the rules necessary to kind of shut down Facebook or lock it down in a way that Trump can't take advantage of that in next year's elections and then three years after that. Three years. Yeah, yeah.

So I didn't get a chance to watch your testimony that we'll go back. I have watched a lot of the testimony in the past, and I'm always struck by this thought that we are largely governed by people who are unfamiliar with technology. Was that your sense, or do you feel like they're starting to get a better handle on both the opportunity and the risks associated with some of these social media networks?

I think they're a lot better than they were. They're pretty savvy on a lot of the issues. But the thing is, you're not seeing it over the longer term. They're not really getting the here's where it's going kind of advice. For instance, the data ownership, from my perspective, this is like we're at, what, $500 per customer generated by data. Big data being collected by big tech right now in the U.S. from my perspective, that's going to just grow, grow, grow, grow exponentially. Because 20 years ago it was 50 bucks or so, and 10 years ago is $100, and now it's 500. And as big data drives AI development that permeates every single product and service that we consume, and it starts to play into how we do our work. Because data is accumulated during your work, and you transfer skills and knowledge over to your workplace, and they turn it into systems that's going to go up and up and up and up. And we could see 20 years from now it could be $20,000 per American. That's going to be a huge slice of the economy. It's better to fix the initial conditions now for what comes later. But they were only focused on the political consequences of how it works now. Trying to maybe enforce a little couple of privacy rules. But we've seen how privacy either destroys data in Europe, which is, if data is one of the most precious things that we own and key to financial and economic success long term, you don't want to necessarily destroy it, or it's used in what we see in health care as a barrier to entry. Like hipaa, they always say we can't share your medical information because of privacy concerns. But if you ask them for your records and ask a hospital for your records, they're like, no way, we're not going to give that to you. They actually act like they own it. Right. And it prevents kind of the kind of innovation we need to see in the health space rather than protect anyone. So yeah, they're knowledgeable in some ways, but they're missing some of the bigger picture issues like the money and you know, whether or not this is a surveillance system that they, you know, we need protections against. That's. Yeah, I was generally impressed in some.

Ways, but that's, that's encouraging. Maybe the staffers are getting them up to speed, you know, because the staff that I've interacted with certainly got it. But in, you know, your point with regards to the medical information, you know, I saw, and I'm covering it for my Global Frequency newsletter this coming Sunday that the FDA released a list, list of AI and machine learning enabled medical devices. And it's a lot longer than I thought it would be. So, you know, the use of that data in medical technology is definitely accelerating, but we do seem to have lost track with regards to how do we enable that data. With regards to some of your thinking around that, I've been a huge proponent of trying to find models for digital self sovereignty, getting more control over our data, what is tracked with regards to us and, and how that data is used. But that seems like an incredibly difficult challenge and we can't even convince some of these platforms to give us time based timelines. You know, they won't let us just scroll sequentially based on when something was posted. They, they want to feed us what the algorithm wants us to see. So do you think that we can develop any sort of model for digital self sovereignty that'll help kind of define how our data is collected and used and Give us a little bit more control over it over the next 10 or 20 years.

Yeah, just referring to the point that we're seeing more technology applied to healthcare. I think Covid helped a lot with that.

Sure.

And Covid helped us advance in many, many ways and kind of work from home. Quality of life for most people actually went up when you do the surveys. It actually went up during COVID And then it did allowed online medical visits and all that other stuff that all accelerated. All those rules that protected doctors from online competition kind of evaporated for a while and we were able to kind of get into that groove. So we're seeing a lot more advances in terms of kind of the sovereignty issue. I see it as kind of one of those fundamental switches that if we can get it right, everything else gets better, faster, and we get wealthier and we get happier. I've been likening it to feudalism. Kind of the feudal relationship we had in the 1500s that was broken up through the printing press and through the Reformation and through kind of the reforms that came afterwards as a result of that technology. And up until that time, everybody but pretty much was a farmer, but you were farming land owned by a lord, owned by the aristocracy, and only the aristocracy was allowed to own land. Right. And that you were constantly, you know, we could have rules. And, you know, I see privacy within that context as a, you know, the lord can only beat you on Sundays. Right. That kind of thing. It's just a lessening of the damage. But it was only the point where we actually let people have, I think the U.S. the colonization of the U.S. really accelerated this. People had these individual plots of land, their own farms, free from any kind of external control or ownership, and they were allowed private property, and they were able to build wealth at an individual level or family level. That things just zoomed. And we saw the middle class emerge, and we saw broad markets for all the products and services that we enjoy today, like electricity in everyone's home phone, all of the other appliances and the like. How do we do that in this data space? And if data becomes that valuable over time, the way to do that is through data ownership. I was sitting there during the testimony, and they had a major data broker there, and they're pretty familiar with taking buying data from all these different providers and the selling to marketing companies. Well, where's the consumer broker? Where's the one that's representing my interest? If I have money to invest, I have banks and brokers, I can go to financial advisors, and they have a Fiduciary duty and lots of regulation in terms of how they do their job. But they're looking after my interests. They're trying to make me money for the most part, trying to better my life. And I would want something similar for my data. I want to take it out in real time and I want from. Put it into a repository, kind of a data bank, you know what I mean? And from all these different sources that then is then made available to people who are building AIs for XYZ. It unlocks the potential of the data because the data only has a certain number of uses within Facebook and within Google. They only have a certain vision for where things are going to go. But if you open it up to all these different players, you can see things develop and new products and services come out of this stuff that could only imagine, particularly as we start to go into more digital environment kind of things like the AR stuff that's coming, then we can make money on it. Optimally, we start to move more toward an annuity or a royalty stream for the products and services that are being built on this. If these AIs become the most aggregate, become the most valuable technological artifacts that we've ever built, worth 20, 30, 40% of the economy, the people who provided the data that made them should get a piece of that action going forward. Data is not just a snapshot, it's a ongoing stream. It's a verb. There's constant flows of data that we're flowing into this. So a data broker can do that. We also need digital rights as part of the sovereignty package. Right now we don't have any digital rights in terms of what we say and control over what we publish. And that when we're censored or banned or not given access, there's no process for resolving that. There's no, like, I can't write an email back to Facebook and say, why was I banned? They won't answer me. I mean, if you're inside of, if you're an insider in Silicon Valley like a lot of my friends are, they'll talk to their friends and they'll talk to their friends and they'll talk to somebody at Facebook and then they'll get back in, they'll be reconnected. That's that back door. Most people don't have that. So we need kind of free speech rights, access rights. The idea that you could be disconnected from all of the services because of a single infraction or some infraction that you're not even told what it was. Can basically destroy your life. Because if you can't get email and you can't get online and you're not on any of the services, you're not on dating sites, you're not on job sites, you're not on all these things that could be blocked, you're not operating in the modern sphere. Finally, the thing that ties it all together is that we needed online identity, data ownership, digital rights and online identity. Not as a replacement for anonymity, but as an adjunct to it. We need a presence that ties together everything that we are online right now. We're just a collection of ephemeral accounts. Think of all the email accounts you've had over the years and things like that. Those accounts for a while represented you and they kind of disappeared. And different blog sites and different things that, you know, what we need something is some permanent presence there that we could then use to exercise our ownership rights over the data, exercise our digital rights in terms of access and speech and resolution of dispute. And I think that would go a long ways to solidifying what we see today because so much as the only people that seem to have any kind of real presence or enduring presence online are the corporations. Individuals really don't have that now we're just working on this or that our state and being farmed for data. That package I think is the sovereignty package. Getting people to think about it that way is tough, but I think we're slowly making progress. At least I got to the Senate and was able to say that. So we'll see.

No, that's great. I'd love to maybe collaborate for a piece on ooda. Loop around. What does digital self sovereignty mean? I think you've tied into a lot of things that have been a focus for me as well, but introduced some new concepts. I like this idea of the data plot and the analogy with feudalism for certain. And then having a data fiduciary, I mean that's important as well, right? That you know that they, they are, they are required to look after your best interest from a data perspective. And identity I think is also central as well. I've been playing around with that in a piece I'm working on right now where, you know, if we start thinking through new models of cybersecurity and we're trying to protect some of these critical infrastructures, say banking, for example, maybe you are unable to route to a bank's application unless your identity is registered as a customer of theirs. The same way that you provide your driver's license. Right. It Kind of reworks how networks and routing and all of that is supposed to work. But I think those are the new models that we're going to need in order to really advance cybersecurity and deal with some of these problems that we've been dealing with from a cybercrime, cyber espionage, cyber conflict perspective. So fascinating.

Yeah. And identity. Once you have an identity, you kind of trust it that it's being used in your best interest. I don't have any problem with it being 1000 factor identity check. It's looking at every single service and everything I'm touching, including the standard facial and thumbprint or whatever else you want to add to it. And then you build AIs to do that for you to tie it all together and make it hard to guess which things would actually trigger it. And then because you don't know what the data model is behind the scenes, you could make it so it's very tough to crack an identity. But you got to get people to trust that accessing all of this information, from your GPS data on your phone to the patterns of use to all the different pictures and things that would indicate who you are is safe to access.

I want to derive value. It's been a huge thematic for me. I want to derive value from my own data. I just feel like there's so much information that's collected on me that I could use for my own self benefit, just individually. And you don't have access to the data and you don't have access to the tools. So it becomes difficult. Hopefully we'll be successful with some of these initiatives, but obviously a lot of friction because the current economic model doesn't support that. So there's a lot of disruption that needs to take place.

Yeah, I think we can get it to be ported out. I mean, it's just standard setting and getting the political backing to say this is the standard and giving people who know how the systems work six months to come up with a standard for the APIs to get stuff out and how it should be stored. And then having companies set up as data brokers who will actually store that and different business models, some will resell, some will just store it. But I mean you won't get the kind of privacy control features for kind of telling Facebook and telling Google and telling everybody else what you want to share and what you don't want to share. Those things won't be built in an intelligible way unless you have that kind of centralization or where you have a data broker doing that. For you, because these guys at Facebook and stuff will make it hard to access, hard to find, and the tools will be limited and.

Cool with regards to disruption. Since we last chatted, we've had our first government that has created or has made Bitcoin a legal currency in El Salvador. Any thoughts on that or the impact that it might have with regards to banking the unbanked? Looking at the statistics, it seems pretty interesting and that more citizens have downloaded and used that wallet than actually have banking accounts in El Salvador. And again, with that tied to wallets on mobile devices, that is a very simplified form of identity, but starts to serve as the basis, at least for a financial identity for some of those citizens. Any thoughts on the developments there, what we can expect to see in the near term?

Yeah, well, I mean, it's all off the main chain is that lightning system where the transaction costs are minimal. It allows virtually frictionless financial transfers and financial transactions. And making a cell phone accessible. Everybody has a cell phone, even poor people. Poor people love cell phones and smartphones in particular, because smartphones have taken over that now. It makes this kind of electronic transaction capability accessible to everybody. And they start to do it for every little thing that they do. And the transaction volume so far has been pretty amazing. It could be that they're washing. There's some kind of criminal laundering of money through many small transactions and then having them bounce back and the like in order to kind of clean the money, generating that volume. But I tend to think that it's actually a lot of people just buying and selling and interacting in very, very small ways. And they're doing it for the first time and they're finding value in it. The interesting thing on the backside of this is that from a developing country standpoint is they're leveraging the same dynamic that the entire crypto space used to explore the potential of the technology. They're getting a lot of Bitcoin into their economy, and conceivably that bitcoin continues to rise as the usage goes up. And as that rises, everyone gets wealthier as a result of actually doing it. If I was in the commercial space and I developed something new in the crypto space, what I do is either I have a token or coin or something I put out and people would buy into it and the valuation would go up, and then I get liquid right away because I'm developing some cool new technology or way of doing it that tracks people in, and people want to participate in that. They're doing the same thing with Bitcoin. And they can actually see the economy, depending on what percentage of the economy has actually done in bitcoin, double or trouble just from the valuation increase. It's an interesting thing. I don't know what the dynamics are. I don't know how it would be modeled to predict where it would go. But I suspect if you had people getting richer faster, good things will happen.

It definitely seems like a worthwhile experiment given that it is still a developing economy and they seeded the wallets with the US$30. So it gave people something to spend to go and experiment that didn't impact their personal finances and start to create that comfort with engaging in those transactions. Definitely something that's going to be worthwhile to track here over the near term to see how it develops. As you mentioned, I got the alert before we got this call that Bitcoin is up 8 or 9% in the past 24 hours. That's a pretty big increase for those folks that are holding bitcoin in their wallets in El Salvador for the government who is buying into bitcoin as well or even starting to mine it now with geothermal energy off of one of their volcanoes. So lots of interesting things happening there. It seems like.

Yeah, since most of the stuff is just being done on the database side inside these wallets, it probably doesn't need that much energy. Accomplish the transactions. If they're pulling more bitcoin in and it goes up 10%. Is that a 10% growth in the economy if everyone's using Bitcoin rather than the US dollar? I don't know. I think it probably would be in a back end way. I think it's probably a good thing. It's not like they had a lot of alternatives in El Salvador. I mean, I've been in El Salvador back when it was during civil war and the like and it was a very, very place. So anything that actually could roll the dice and see some kind of improvement, that's good.

Yeah, I was there a decade ago as well, was similar. Incredible amount of poverty as well. So anything that can help improve that or has a chance at improving, it's probably a worthwhile experiment. You're going to do a kind of hard shift here. Would love to get your thoughts on Afghanistan. We Talked last in 2020. Again, a lot has happened. We've seen the US pull out of Afgh as part of a planned initiative, but with maybe an unexpected. Some would say it shouldn't have been unexpected, but an unexpected acceleration of the Taliban being able to take over the government. So I love your perspective on that. And what do you think that Taliban 2.0 looks like? I mean, we know the Taliban from 20 years ago, but they seem to have gotten a little bit more social media savvy. Have they learned some lessons that will make them a little less extreme? Kind of love your perspective on how you think that that plays out in Afghanistan.

Okay, I'll do the last first. I think that Taliban 2.0 got a little bit better in terms of how they did things on the ascent phase.

When they were.

Conducting the guerrilla war. I don't think that's actually going to sustain itself. Now that they're in power. Different group of people come in. There's the fighters and the discipline associated with warfare and a strategy to accomplish their goals. And then there's what comes after and different power players. And it's a very decentralized system. We're going to see the same kind of abuses. So I don't expect a lot. And the economic indicators are pretty negative. Things are going really badly in terms of Afghanistan. I testified back in 2009 and at the House Armed Services Committee on Afghanistan and other wars and I said, you know, kind of like what I did just a couple weeks ago, I said, okay, you know, here's looking out into the future. There's no way that this nation building will work either from, you know, holistic perspective or from our individual strategy on this. And that the best thing we could do is find an exit strategy now and get out. Of course they didn't do that. What we saw was a doubling down and next year will be better approach. That went on and on and on. Then trillions of dollars later and thousands of lives later, here we are at the end of the game. It was pretty clear that that whole process, that nation building had failed and the guerrilla war was being lost even back in 2009. And it should have been apparent to everybody coming into the drawdown retreat from Afghanistan, but apparently it didn't actually register. The whole process of getting out of Afghanistan, I thought was a kind of a disaster. They had checked out. The assumption was that this was just a thing that could be negotiated. And they gave it over to the negotiators at the State Department and let them run the show. And the military leadership tried to back out to the extent possible and get their hands off it because none of those guys wanted to be associated with retreating from Afghanistan. The end, the loss of war there.

Sure.

And that kind of hands off attitude accelerated as things started to go south. You know, it was Clear that the nation building had completely collapsed and the guerrilla war had been lost. When you saw the speed at which things were falling apart, I mean, whole units and cities just evaporating. Then there were a series of. Really, it was just inexplicable, except for that's where I came up with the Udishir and the like to explain it. Where these guys were stuck on their old assumptions and they couldn't adapt is that as you saw the country collapsing and we still had troops in Kabul, that we should have been trying to either slow that collapse to allow a more orderly withdrawal and coming up with contingencies that would protect those troops from being surrounded and cut off. And one of those would be the retake Bagram, which was still in the hands of the ANA up into the weekend before Kabul fell. And that would have been a more defensible location. It would have been something that we could use as a staging base for air operations. As it was, is that they just did nothing. Nobody would talk to the press for weeks on end about what was going on. Nobody wanted to be at the podium taking the heat and being the face associated with the collapse there. That goes from the political leadership as well as the military. And we ended up with the Taliban entering Kabul and surrounding the US Troops and a huge number of refugees around the airport with a single Runway, all within mortar range. Any chance to actually take out mortars that would potentially lobbed in would have been firing on a city of 5 million people. It's just not doable. And we put everything at risk. We rolled the dice, I suspect, and we're not going to know this for a while yet, even though it's been over a month since the operation, that in order to stop them from actually cutting off US Troops, shutting down the airport, cutting off everybody from the outside world where the nearest base was 1,000 miles away, and all of the countries around Afghanistan were not permitting any US Operations to be staged out of them, is that we capitulated on lots of things. We capitulated and we came up with this Taliban 2.0 stuff to kind of talk them up. We talked about we probably cut some deals to take them off, either off the list, terrorist watch lists and the sanctions list, or we're not going to enforce those sanctions and those terrorist watch lists as part of cutting a deal so we could get all those people out and get out of the country. And so that kind of diplomatic capitulation was something that we probably wanted to avoid, but we didn't because we didn't have any contingencies, we cut ourselves off. We didn't make any kind of plans or do anything. We're kind of frozen all the way up to the point where they had control of everything.

You touched upon the topic I wanted to get into next and that is this topic of UDA Shir. You mentioned it previously. I've seen you writing about it. Would love for you to give an explanation of what does that mean when you say UDA sheer.

Yeah, I was trying to come up with some ways of thinking about how the military leadership operated in retreat from Afghanistan and kind of explaining different things in my life in the past where I saw something similar, where people had that deer in the headlights kind of look when something was happening. When you have fast moving events, the environment is changing quickly. What happens to a lot of very brittle leadership is that they can't update their orientation. They're observing, they're trying to decide and act, but their orientation is set for something entirely different. They had a series of assumptions in terms of how Afghanistan would draw down at a plan in place. They were staying away from it. They were letting the negotiators do the job. They assumed that it would be like it was for the last 20 odd years with kind of a stalemate between the government and the Taliban, that the nation building had partially worked or it mostly worked and the guerrilla war was mostly won. And all of those assumptions locked them into a different view of the world that was incompatible with what they were seeing on the ground. They were seeing a wholesale collapse and it was moving quickly. And all of the decisions they could make were ineffective. Mostly it was decisions associated with trying to speed up or do more talking. Let's talk to them more, let's negotiate more. And they would say, Taliban would say, okay, let's talk and we won't take that city. And the next day they take the city and they say, let's do it again. And it would go on and on and on because they were all focused, the orientation was towards that negotiation rather than trying to look at it in a new perspective that this was collapsing and it could put everyone at risk. Because I mean, the chances that this could have fallen apart and there would have been a Taliban commander that actually shut down that airport and forced the US to withdraw across the landscape or to drive out through Pakistan that was possible. Like trying to replicate the old retreat from Kabul that the Brits experienced or worse, turning into hostages like our own. Yeah, that's udishirs where your orientation is locked. It's not it's brittle. The assumptions embedded in it are not being updated. And that means you're facing in the wrong direction. Your orientation, meaning you're facing in the, in a direction of solutions that don't apply to the current circumstances anymore.

You know, linear, basically. Instead of having a decision loop, well.

You can make it. You have a fast decision loop, you can gather a lot of data and you try to make decisions. But because you're facing entirely in the wrong direction, everything you're doing is not yielding anything. It's that you have to be facing this way in order to actually make decisions that are gaining ground. You might as well just be spinning your wheels in the mud.

So I don't want to make us feel old, but you and I are old school war gamers and red teamers. Going back over 20 years ago, do you think that we have a bit of a failing with regards to educating these leaders with regards to the value of critical thinking and decision making? Because in the old days we would have probably been involved in some sort of war game that was four scenarios for Afghanistan and we would have identified those and we would have seen what are some of the most negative things that could have happened and we would have looked at almost pre deciding or looking at the actions that would be necessary to prevent that from happening or to help mitigate it. Do you think that we're not doing that anymore? Or is there a failure of education in the current leadership structure that's preventing people from, from having these fully exercisable OODA loops and getting stuck in this OODA shear?

Oh, wow. Yeah, that was something I was talking about as an assumption and how that played into the way that our organizations work now. And you know, we had bad assumptions as to way things would play out in Afghanistan for years and years that weren't matching the data that was coming back from people who were there. They come back every year and say this isn't working, this is not yielding any progress. But people were locked into these assumptions because it kept the funds flowing, it avoided the embarrassment of defeat on their watch that they thought, well, if I kick the can down the road, somebody else has got to deal with it. That went on and on and on and on. I think maybe during the kind of retreat phase we had a situation where no one was willing and it went, you know, you could see it in the intelligence reports and stuff that up till just a couple weeks before the whole thing collapsed that they were still predicting at worst 90 days before the government collapsed. And then two weeks before all the major cities just fell. So there was failure all the way up through the chain of command and decision making system is that there were so much political capital tied up into this, so much reputational capital that nobody was willing to take the negative. No one was willing to challenge those core assumptions that if you challenge those core assumptions that the guerrilla war was lost, nation building hadn't worked and that this could unravel very quickly. You were quickly pushed to the side. You were talking about what ifs that they didn't want to deal with. Even if they were rational and you could prove that they had a strong likelihood of occurring. Longer term over the course of the whole war. People who did that were routinely ushered out of the military and ushered out of petitions of power. Careers were damaged. If they brought that up and that was magnified during the retreat. Is that why would anyone predict a disaster when there's no upside to it? It's like operation that was winding down. You know, it's just that it's. Yeah. I mean everything that we have now is kind of focused in on trying to keep the assumptions that were in place in place. We see it across society. It's like even though they're rotten and even though they haven't, they are needing of updating. There's a strong resistance to doing any of that. So much so that they don't get fixed.

So I mean it's friction or organizational inertia. It sounds like those are contributing factors as well. Right. Just the lack of being able to stay dynamic or incorporate change in our thinking. It maybe seems like it has short term impact, but it's compounding interest and maybe contributes. At the end of the day is what you see is this UDA sheer manifest itself in a situation like Afghanistan where we're just incapable of bringing in the orientation phase again. Yeah.

And these assumptions build on each other. So you kind of assume that the US military would step in at least on a decision making level to kind of come up with these alternatives. When they see a situation like that, they have a ability to adapt. So you assume that, you assume that the people before were competent in analyzing the effectiveness of the nation building and the guerrilla war. And then there's assumptions below that that are like, okay, one of the core assumptions that led us into Afghanistan was that we were at the end of history. And the all we have to do is expose the population to a democratic free market system and do that long enough and they will flip. There's no way they could go back. That may have been One of the problems associated with why it collapsed so fast is that the values that we shoved in, the online values, the values of a participatory democracy in the way we work now, commercial society meant that you had a whole generations. We're talking a population that doubled in 20 years. Is that all of the young people and young adults there weren't the kind of people who would be highly nationalistic, didn't have the value sets. They were globalists. They were talking about larger value sets and the like. And so the assumption that we would our values would create a strong nation was wrong. Which then kind of gets you thinking, okay, well, there's assumptions below that that the US is not vulnerable to kind of armed militias. Right. Because there's nobody on the other side who would actually fight or cared enough about the country to actually fight. They just want to flee, just want to leave the moment there was any kind of shooting. So it's like, okay, so there's a whole slew of assumption built on assumption that you start to question. And no one wants to question any of that stuff. Once you start questioning it, it's like, what about the next one below that? And if you question that and it comes up negative, that this thing's rotten too, what does that say about all these other things that were built on it in other areas? And it gets very messy very quickly.

Yeah, it's like the structural integrity of democracy starts to be questioned. Or at least the technology enabled capitalist version of democracy that we were promoting there.

Yeah. All of the institutions that were built on a series of assumptions and if those assumptions turn up negative, what are the value of those institutions?

And I think we see adversaries actively trying to diminish the trust in those institutions as well. That's something that I've written about with my colleague Neil Pollard a few times over the past couple of years. Is that trust is a target right now. And if you have these institutions that are trusted entities in society or in business and you can diminish the trust that has a cascading impact on society writ large. Pretty pretty. We could probably talk about that for another hour. But some interesting implications there. Definitely to be thinking through. You caught my eye a little bit as well with some of the Twitter tags you've been doing around this theme of the long night. Can you step us through what you're referring to? And you refer to stuff as the long night?

Sure. Just a rider on the collapse of trust. One of the things that really is collapsing trust very quickly is the decline of Nationalism, which is kind of a tribal decision making system that provides us cohesion and coherence in our decision making. Because we coherence is derived from, you know, I can trust you to agree on basic facts. You're not my enemy. Right, because we're all part of the same tribe or you know, in a loose sense. But if you don't, if you're part of different tribes, even the facts become antagonistic. And I think every fact that you're trying to put up is meant to harm me. So that decline is created this loss of trust generally, which has created the tribalism to gain trust again. Okay, so long night. Lots of ways it could play out. You know, it's very similar. What we're seeing in China right now is this idea that we can have this, this kind of surveillance system that we're seeing being built in the consumer space with big tech that gets deeper and deeper into our lives and starts to control us and limit us in terms of what we can say. And what we're, we're seeing that right now in Congress is that they're saying, okay, you know, they want more in this system to enforce speech codes more aggressively and shut things down like QAnon and the anti vax stuff earlier. They don't want any dissent, anything that could potentially be disrupted, they want shut down. As this develops, you'll see more and more controls on what you're allowed to think and how you're allowed to act, what you're allowed to buy. It narrows us down to this very sterile orthodoxy in terms of how you think and how you act generally at work, at home, online, in public, everything's going to be interconnected with that. I think once that locks in and once that's enforced by AIs that can actually look at the conversations of a billion people in real time and make sense of them and then act on them. And those AIs will get better and better, is that you're trapped in, you're locked in, it becomes part of the infrastructure. And that there's no gulags in the traditional sense is that if you violate any of the things egregiously, you'll be just disconnected. And being disconnected in a modern society like ours is tantamount to basically cutting your income to nothing. And your social life and your social sphere is limited to who you can interact with in it face to face basis. Yeah, it's economic and social suicide to a certain extent. So you don't have to imprison them, you just have to disconnect them. So I think that kind of system, once it locks in in different societies around the world, could be the equivalent of a feudal dark age. I call it. The long night is just locked into the infrastructure. There's no dynamism, there's no moving forward. There's no progress. Anyone who dissents is shut down because it's disruptive. Some of the bad ways it could end up being directed is towards, for instance, using a lot of these emergency procedures to create this kind of continuous emergency, this long emergency, the perma crisis, as I've been calling it, as we move into global warming issues and using that to control society, to reduce consumption and reduce their activities. But anyone who dissents from that says, oh, I want to drive a little extra, or I want to use my electricity a little bit more. I want to buy this or that product will be crushed, will be squeezed, they'll be ostracized, will be disconnected. There'll be punishment for that. How that ends up going, no matter how you slice it, without the kind of digital rights and data ownership and all these other things kind of protecting us, we have no protections against corporations doing this.

It's interesting, then you weave in the government. It's been fascinating to watch over the past couple of months as a large global retailer had a little bit of friction with the China. And as a result, you wind up with. You can't get a ride sharing app to that retailer's locations at the mall because they no longer exist. Like, it just. You kind of wipe them out of the data stream. And now it starts to have an incredibly significant impact. And you can't route to the website. The brand does not exist on the Internet. It doesn't exist as a place that you can route to. It's kind of interesting when you centralize that control that it can be exerted in ways that can be impactful not only to individuals, but to corporations as well.

Oh, yeah. And it's interesting because the Chinese way that they're kind of exerting their control of their domestic corporations applies a lot to how they're exerting control globally. I mean, just look at the Hollywood situation. Hollywood's not allowed to make any movie that's detrimental or negative about China, about the government, about its people. You know, no geopolitical thrillers where the Chinese are. The bad guys are allowed to be built or made. And that applies all the way back in the writing. The writing. You know, as soon as somebody writes something like that, they're immediately disconnected. And even it doesn't Even matter if the film is actually going to be distributed in China, they'll punish the entire studio if they do that. And they'll, you know, the studio would therefore make nothing that would piss China off because then they wouldn't be able to do any business with them or, you know, between companies. So, you know, it's a, you know, this kind of connected world is. Could be, you know, abused in ways that it's hard. You know, we're seeing it, we're actually seeing it, but no one seems to really care. Right. And as it starts to come into our daily lives, we see it. Little bits and bits of, oh, that person was disconnected. Well, yeah, they said something wrong, they deserve it. But what's the impact on them? Is it commensurate with what happened? Do they have any recourse? What if it happens to you and you don't know why?

Yeah, it's become, you know, even humorous. People refer to being put in Facebook jail. But that's kind of the equivalent, as you mentioned, right. You're. You're cut off. Lose those social interactions and we use them for everything. I mean, just by example, you know, we communicate for the middle school hockey team that I coached via a Facebook page. Right. So if I'm locked out of Facebook, I've lost the ability to use a primary communication mechanism just with a school hockey team. And to get back on the entertainment side, I mean, even if you just think about the economics of control, I mean, Legendary Pictures was bought by Wanda Entertainment Group, what, five or six years ago? How many people are aware of that or the potential influence that could have on what a studio like that might be producing?

Yeah, one of the models I was using for what we're seeing is it's a redux of classic fascism. And so the fascist model is basically dictatorial capitalism. So they figured out a way to turn a capitalist system where you have a bunch of corporations that do a lot of the work in terms of organizing society and the economy to get them to all align and focus in the same direction. They all going in the same direction and they tend to negotiate disputes between each other, but there's still a little bit of friction. And capitalism that operates in terms of driving towards efficiencies. But the old model required tons and tons of propaganda to get the limited way that they had to actually align these companies. But it seemed to work. They aligned everybody, every organization in society that way. We're seeing this now because of networking. It's research that the democratic capitalism didn't actually win at the end of the Cold War that now we're seeing increasingly sliding towards that kind of network fascism which we're seeing in China, where the government sets the direction and it uses all its network controls to get all of the companies and all of the organizations and individuals to all face in the same direction toward the same model of society that they are advocating and that we could end up seeing the same thing here. Right. And. Except the corporations are probably more on a partnership level with the government rather than subservient and agreeing on. I suspect that probably we'll see agreement more on a lot of the progressive agenda because those groups tend to be the strongest and most vocal and most influential in terms of their ability to influence corporations and the government and setting.

Those goals, likely to be in Facebook jail. Fascinating. I wish I had an hour on the calendar with you every week because it's always so thoughtful and gets me thinking and developing my ideas as well. I'll let you go, but ask one last question. And that is, you know, since. Since we've chatted in June of 2020, what's the best book that you've read?

Probably the best one I read, it was Anathema. Anathema by Stevenson. Yeah, yeah, that was. That was great. I mean, he's always great, but it's like the idea of kind of, you.

Know.

I was basically in a monastery at the Air Force Academy, so it's like this equivalent kind of experience. I appreciate that kind of focus on intellectual life and how do you move ideas over time? Because a lot of what we're seeing right now is about moving ideas over time, over long time periods. Even though all of the AI that we're developing is really this deep learning is about capturing complex methods and processes and then storing them in the AI as a neural network. And that makes it possible to move them over time over generations. And maybe that's our task over the next hundred years is how much of this that we do is moved up into that space. So it's always there forever. So, yeah, Anathem was great. That was the best. I remember reading a lot of lit RPG right now, which is like a role playing game literature. They're fun, they're light, it takes your mind off of all the heavy stuff. And it's this idea of applying kind of a game matrix onto either regular life or post disaster world, or being vaulted into something new. And how that structures and drive society is interesting to me because I see that AR is probably going to operate very much like that. Is that there's going to be this kind of overlay and what that data overlay will look like. That's interesting to me it's more of a strange fantasy thing they have all this Chinese version of it is interesting because it's all focused on cultivation and this whole cultivation process that has some kind of interesting dynamic to it.

Have you read Stealing Worlds yet? No I'll put the link to that one. Yeah it's great. It touches on these issues of digital self sovereignty and data control and new world economics so I'll send you the link over email. It's a great one to read.

Fantastic.

Excellent. Well thanks again for the time. Thanks Matt. Thanks for being the repeat guest on oodacast. Always a great convers and look forward to getting you at some point in the future for a third time.

Awesome thanks.

Thanks John.

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