Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/28/22 John Robb on the Geopolitical Ramifications of Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

Scott talks with John Robb about the major consequences of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Robb has written about how the internet created a global geopolitical environment determined chiefly by the network effect. Notably, the hysteria surrounding the war in Ukraine is brought about by this network effect in both a top-down and bottom-up fashion. It seems that Musk intends to end the top-down suppression of dissent against the NATO narrative of the war. Scott and Robb discuss possible consequences and examine the broader effect this network has on American politics and foreign policy.  Discussed on the show: Global Guerillas Apocalypse Now Hate Inc by Matt Taibbi John Robb is a former special operator who now writes the Global Guerrillas Report which examines the world at the intersection of war, technology and politics. Follow him on Twitter @johnrobb This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott Horton comedy. That's right, I'm doing an event with Robbie the Fire Bernstein here in Austin on the 5th of November as part of Robbie's porch tour. It's kind of an audition, actually. I'm trying to get the job to replace Dave Smith as Rob's sidekick. So show up and pretend to laugh at my awesome, hilarious comedy jokes. Robbie and another dude are also doing stand-up. Then Robbie and I are going to do a live podcast about libertarian themes and Star Wars and things. That's November the 5th.

Go to thefireticks.com to find out all about it. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at Scott Horton.4.

You can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, on the line, I've got John Robb, and he writes on Substack at Global Gorillas. He's a former Special Operations Commander,

and I think I read Delta and C. Yeah, no, it was a tier one unit worked with Delta and Seal Team 6. Oh, I got you. A bunch of other guys combined together, yeah. Okay, so the book is Brave New War from 2007, the next stage of terrorism and the end of globalization. And I've read about half of that, John, really good stuff. And I have a lot of questions for you about all that, but we should not bury the lead.

And the lead is that Twitter has been taken over by Elon Musk. Finally, yesterday, the deal was done. the CEO, et cetera, were frog marched right out of the building. And so what does that mean? Yeah, it's going to be tough for Elon to do anything to fix the situation. What's the situation? Well, the acquisition started back in April when it became apparent that Twitter was having a outsized impact on our potential survivability as a species as a civilization and what i mean by that is

that you know twitter was the epicenter of a rapid escalation of the war in ukraine and um you know i've been tracking network movements for a long long time and you know understand how they operate saw thought, you know, move from insurgency back in Iraq all the way up to politics in the U.S. and protest movements, you know, how the network actually mobilized people to act and then how these movements proceeded forward to do damage or take control. And what we saw with Ukraine is that, you know, we had a regional conflict between that that was between two nuclear superpowers you know typically that would be kept at a you know regional level in order not to escalate it there would be selective sanctions and there would be

a dance in terms of the amount of aid that was given to ukraine and the uh you know kind of pressure that was being put on russia to kind of damage them bleed them a little bit bleed the nuclear bear a bit. And the ultimate goal would be to kind of soften in Russia and make it less likely to run offensive operations in the future. You know, the standard superpower competition kind of thing, you know, it's something that we developed over the last, you know, 70 years. It's a dance that you have to have to do in order to prevent escalation to nuclear war.

And that didn't happen. You know, what happened is that it ignited a network firestorm and what I call a swarm developed that in a couple weeks time, reframed the war from, you know, this regional war with a nuclear superpower, you know, competition component into a global war against evil, anti-democratic forces. You know, Hitler revived. World War II analogy started coming out. It was now, you know, an existential conflict. And then we added in the ability of the network to mobilize, you know, against Russia, who is now the new target. And what it did is it disconnected Russia in about two weeks. So the selective, you know, very careful sanctions that were being put in place by the government were

tiny, tiny compared to all the companies and all the disconnection that went on. I mean, companies pulling out, stopping any kind of connection at the API level in the software space or in the financial flow space. You know, Russians being kicked off of forums. It was pretty torrential. And, you know, everything except for the gas deliveries to Northern Europe, was disconnected and just recently now that's gone but that escalation brought us right up to the edge of nuclear war it was like unprecedented and most of the standard conventional analysts the academics that typically look at the space totally don't account for that network component they are totally oblivious to it can't they can't modify their models they don't

understand the kind of situation we're in and if you look at it with that kind of modification, and you look at, say, you know, Kahn's escalation ladder, which had, you know, 40 some odd steps on an escalation to nuclear war, we're at level 20, just so, you know, one before first nuclear use. And that's where we're at. You know, we've been kind of running the ragged edge of just at the edge of nuclear war. And, you know, only thing that we're getting out of the government now and out of this network is this constant pedal to the metal, keep on escalating, Slavu, Ukraine, like, let's keep on going, you know, damaged the bear forever, you know, existentially damage it, you know, force them to submit kind of thing,

which is just a one-way trip to a nuclear confrontation. And, you know, Elon had to see it. I mean, the guy is all about trying to save the world or accelerate it or, you know, thinking big, big picture. And, you know, that's why he started the bid in April. I mean, he's getting distracted on a bunch of other stuff, but associated with Twitter. But I think fundamentally, if he can solve that, stop that pedal to the metal escalation system, you know, brought on by the network, may save us all. well he's a great example right he floated some peace terms and twitter let him have it his ratio to oblivion just a couple of weeks ago but now let me ask you all this stuff about well it's a moral crusade and everybody's hitler and whatever this is the same thing that

they done to manuel norega and david koresh and saddam hussein and momar kaddafi and Bashar al-Assad ad infinitum this whole time my whole life so what's different now much of that and and and you know those runups were done by a very small group of people it was part of a marketing kind of propaganda campaign in order to get this thing going this you know so they could turn it off they could modify it you know i mean the classic kind of thing would be like the uh the quady nurse that would show up at the at the at the u. and talk about, or I guess she was testifying in front of the Congress about how the Iraqi soldiers were disconnecting the incubators and throwing out the baby so they could ship the incubators back to Iraq. Well, we found out that was a lie and that was promoted and that was like all part of this manipulation campaign, you know, to get us into this war and a manipulation campaign that was like aided and embedded by the media.

but this this is different this has an open source component it's network it's a huge group of people millions of people acting in concert

there's no one that can shut it off there's no one that can modify it's not run by any one person and it's it sends its fingers and tendrils into organizations at the mid to you know

CEO level and inside bureaucracies where people are taking action on their own to kind of move the war forward, move it towards... And those of us in opposition. We're not a swarm of our own. We're not a network that is counteracting what you're talking about in any meaningful way. They're a swarm, but we're just kind of stuck here overwhelmed by them?

Well, I think we're... See, I see politics is a different thing now. It's not right or left. It's more this... coercive swarm versus dissent and sometimes you know the swarm was great because it can mobilize resources fast um to get things done uh get people pointed in in the same direction but it's also very very dangerous if it outlives its usefulness or or points in the wrong direction and there's as a descent doesn't come from any one location it comes from a lot of different locations

like getting it's like i live in the new england area and you know right next to where i live is where where the, you know, the act in militia formed to march on Northbridge, right? It's like, and then there's like little mile markers on the British retreat from the Northbridge and it's like the bloody angle and where they were sniped all the way back. That's kind of more like to say it's like people are, you know, taking pot shots at these, this cohesion, this swarm and solely, you know, disintegrating their arguments. But it's not coming from any single cohesive system. That's why, you know, it's very important to kind of keep the system open enough for dissent

to form. And over time, it wears it down. It's not like a, I mean, you and I can, you know, take shots at this thing, but we're not necessarily going to come at it from the same direction. Yeah. And that's a strength, too, but it's also a weakness. But the war party, on the other hand, they're disciplined because all they have to do is say he's Hitler and you want to be.

peace Hitler and everybody knows that it's always 38 and you never do that and so and then that's it and they just say that every day and call it a genocide and i remember in fact i got an argument i'll go ahead and bring it up i respect this woman for various reasons uh lindsay bierstein she's one of the creators of the daily show back when i think and we got an argument on twitter a polite one um at the time of the i guess when the russians withdrew from buka and then the media came in and the Ukrainians came in and found the dead bodies and built up this narrative that this is a genocide, that they were going in there, the Russians, and killing every civilian in order to exterminate Ukraine as a civilization and all these things. And this was right

when the Turks were hosting the talks. And this was right when we needed a realistic narrative about, yes, the war is ugly, but it's this, not that. And instead, we got all this hysteria about genocide in the essentially the perfect time to undermine negotiations and make it seem like again we're dealing with adolf hitler and you don't negotiate with hitler you destroy him it's the only way to go yeah it's open source um you know it's like anyone can come up there's no barriers to entry you know open source uh or uh you know everybody can participate so they come up with an innovation like that, they can put it into practice. And then, you know, open source wars are held together by, you know, what I call a plausible promise, a really simple goal that everyone can

agree on, regardless of the direction that you, or your motivations for joining it. And in this case, it was like defeat Russia, defeat Putin. And, you know, as long as it's moving towards that goal, people will, you know, repeat and amplify, you know, any effort that moves it towards that goal. So it's a very strong form of warfare, you know, it's particularly now that they can leverage the online component. And it's very difficult to be, I mean, it can be beat, but it's hard to do so. Well, I mean, so back to the top of the hour news here with Elon Musk, now taking those. over Twitter, you're not going to get kicked off a Twitter for being good on Ukraine anymore. So that's something.

It used to be that, and I don't know exactly how much it's going to change, but it has been just absolutely not just by, you know, peer pressure and group think and intimidation and trendiness and whatever, but it's the algorithm that's been waging war against the centers on there, people getting kicked right off or being shadow banned or, you know, I saw a thing, Pedro Gonzalez had a tweet this morning about showing a couple of one particular Ukrainian journalist who got two million followers with the snap of his fingers, and while everyone else on the other side is getting their point of view completely crushed. So with that now presumably set to change, that may change everything then, according to your theory of the swarm and the group think

and the power of these tools, no? Oh, yeah, no. I mean, definitely, uh, the swarm and what we've seen in politics over the last four or five years is is greatly aided and embedded by you know corporate partners and the corporations are more than willing the big networks are more than willing to you sign on to support this group um because it gives them a legitimacy that allows them to continue making money any way they want to make uh and without any kind of political pushback or regulation and um you know the algorithm is is definitely a key here is that he can make the biggest changes to how things operate on Twitter by just changing the algorithms that are used.

And, you know, it's far, far more important and less of a lightning rod than, say, bringing back people, like unbanned people would cause all sorts of, you know, chaos or, you know, focusing on lifting a lot of the speech bans or word bans. if he could just leave that alone and change the underlying dynamic, which would allow people that are already on the network who are voicing dissent to get growth and get the kind of footprint that they need to actually, you know, take down this one, that would be a lot, lot more important with a lot less pushback. And, you know, ultimately, I mean, his people have been so unfairly persecuted on there, though.

Oh, yeah. I feel sorry for him. It's such an important place to have a voice. And then you get banned for no reason. You know, there are people who got banned for saying that if you get the inoculation, then you can still spread COVID to somebody else. And they got permanently banned and it's their biggest

soapbox. It's their AM radio show. The closest they got to being able to have their say. And then if they get a new email address and a new handle, then they get banned for ban-evating. And it's just, you know, it really does suck. And I've been really lucky. I've been sort of shadow banned, I guess, but not persecuted that badly. You know, I've been kicked off for a couple of days at a time or a week

at a time before, I guess. Yeah, no, I mean, it's all a question of tactics, right? So do you immediately, you know, start the massive controversy and push back and fight and the regulation and they kind of, they kind of criminal investigations that the government will launch and and everything else by by rolling back the bands right away right or do you change the algorithms change the dynamic on the network um you know let the people voicing dissent they get get some popularity and and slow down the algorithmic driven growth of the people that are driving this this war forward and uh so we can get some kind of sanity and save the world in the meantime because none of this matters if if we escalate to nukes and then that runs out of control all right so talk

about that because, look, as you well know, you say nukes, it just sounds alarmist and silly, and everybody knows it. No matter what, nobody's going to drop age bombs. I had my friend Peter Van Buren on the show was like, come on. This is one error that nobody's made since way back when nobody could do anything about it under Harry Truman, you know, and, you know, on the other side. But, you know, so the point is, I think it doesn't seem to me. me that we're likely to have a nuclear war and yet at the same time obviously the chance of it has been raised by some giant percentage and the damage potential is so vast that we might as well be alarmist about it like it could break out tomorrow because we're talking about you know a world

war two worth the dead in the first day and that's just the first day of a thermonuclear war so But I guess, well, let me just say how I look at it real quick so that you're going to say something better based off of that, maybe. I'm looking at it like the Russians don't need nukes to win this war. If they have to conscript their whole male population and just stand on street corners and occupy all that territory, eventually, you know, probably I think that they could do that. So they're not going to need to use nukes in the war there. But on the other hand, NATO has all this money and all this tech. and it's willing to continue to pour it in there, and willing to continue to ratchet up, too. And they swear that they're going to help Ukraine win this war outright, no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes.

And sometimes they seem to be pretty certain that they're saying they're going to help them take back the Crimean Peninsula, too. And so this is an unstoppable force versus an immovable object. And so I don't know in detail the syllogism about how it escalates to nuclear war. but I just know that, geez, you can't really have that level of tension and with a total refusal to negotiate on the American side, at least, without it at some point leading to H-bombs because, I mean, what the hell? I don't know. But so, I don't know. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. So tell me why you think this is a real danger then, because you brought it up a couple times already here. Yeah, no, I mean, you know, the reason we avoided war for all that time is that we had a dance, you know, between the way we kind of negotiated conflict in the past and recognizing that the opponent has red lines, that particularly when it's close to their territory and affects their security and that they will not. not accept a humiliating defeat. And the way you get around that, if you want to, like, battle him out, is let, like, Russia

invade Afghanistan, and you just lightly throw in just enough to, you know, spoil that their ability to actually conclude the war, and they chew themselves up. And if they go through a governmental change like they did, at the fall of the USSR, you stand as far away as possible to let them do it to themselves. But, you know, in this instance, we don't consider their threats or their interests as anything important, and particularly the way the network frames it as an existential moral conflict, which means that there's no consideration of any interest on the Russian side. Yeah, as Daryl Cooper says, they talk about Putin like he's Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the bin Ladenite leader of the caliphate who has no legitimacy whatsoever, even as a man, much less the leader of anybody else.

Right. And that you're going to force them into humiliation and defeat, and that's not going to happen. And, you know, from Putin's perspective, once you start looking at it as a two-sided conflict, like, you know, standard Boydian kind of thing, it's a contest of minds, is that, You know, Putin is much more concerned about losing internally, and he'll get less pushback for actually escalating this to nuclear weapons than losing inside Russia. That he's at risk personally if he actually ends up being humiliated, Russia is, you know, defeated in this way. So is it possible to have a limited nuclear war with Russia somewhere other than here and Austin, Texas goes up in flames too?

There is a potential, but, you know, initially I was thinking that they would escalate if Ukraine pushed, you know, the way I modeled it right off the bat was that, you know, as Ukraine pushed into Crimea, that became the red line and that they would use tactical nuclear weapons. And, you know, given all the kind of threats that they've gotten in terms of conventional attacks against Russian targets, if they did that, potentially even nuclear attacks against Russian targets, is that they can't go to the tactical level. They would have to escalate it farther. And they would also need to set up a kind of a totem, a kind of warning to the West that they would

not permit any intervention or destabilization of Russia in the future. And the only way to do that is go straight to countervaluing and take out a couple of cities. And that would mean that, you know, any escalation beyond that goes straight to mad, you know, trading cities between Russia and Europe, trading cities between U.S. and Europe. And I don't think the West is that far gone that they would actually engage in that. So it would, that would be a limited nuclear war. Ukraine would use two, three, four, five cities. the world will go to hell in terms of, you know, the anger and, you know, everyone would say, look, you know, we were right, Putin is the most evil thing, even though the escalation made

that possible. You're telling me, really, John, you're saying that Twitter is making this inevitable, that there's no way that Biden and his government can have anything like a reasonable take, never mind that this is all their damned fault in the first place, dating back to 2014 and beyond. but just because Twitter won't have it. Like the lady from who's the boss will get very upset and then he'll have to take it back, just like the liberals who wrote this letter had to retract the letter a couple days ago here. That's what you're telling me, right, is that this is inevitably because of the network effects

of a bunch of NPCs retweeting each other on Twitter. Yeah, but those NPCs are the ones, I mean, that's where news, you know, Twitter, and the network in general sits upstream of news right now. It sits upstream of policy, sits upstream of politics. It's where everything is done. It's vetted. It's like that's where it's produced. That's the sausage factor for all of this stuff.

And there is a group of people that are largely in control of that. And it's their good opinion and their views on this that, you know, Biden is trying to win and people inside the administration are trying to get on their side. You know, anyone, anyone in the academic has. establishment, anyone in the policy establishment that spoke out against this war, even if they didn't do it on the network, they were found out, and it was broadcast on their network, a third enemy, and they went to try to get them fired, discredited, pushed the corners. There's not anyone in the administration that really wants to take that kind of heat,

both here and in Europe. And then they also want to lead it. You know, they see that as their people. It's like, this is like their constituency to a large extent. And leading in open source movement like this requires that you, it's a contingent leadership. It's not like appointed or you're not there because of your position. It only is given to you if you move the ball towards its goal.

And its goal is to defeat Putin. I mean, the very start of this network and the reason it started so fast, right? I mean, it went right out of the chocks and it was gone. It was zooming is that a lot of the early, the vanguard and a revolutionary movement is like a vanguard that kicks it off, a small group of people that set the right conditions for the revolution to ignite, the insurgency to ignite. And it came out of the political environment that initially was against Trump and Trump was connected to Putin, and then it was against fascism, Trump and Putin, after January 6th and the

hearings and stuff started redefining it as a war against fascism at Broad and at home. And these folks were in this whole war frame from the get-go, and when Putin did this, you know, gave the green light, and he made the error of trying to go for the entire country rather than just regaining or taking the Donbos and the like, is that he proved them right. They're saying, we said he was evil. We said he was the ultimate evil. We said he was Hitler. We said he was, you know, the one who, you know, inflicted Trump on us. He rigged our elections. He intervened with us. The whole intelligence community, a lot of people in the intelligence community and national security communities that, you know, been talking about this, you know,

angry at Russia for years and they all jumped on board and then it was off to the races. And no, Twitter, Twitter is not just some kind of like little chat space or whatever. And it is, it is upstream of all these other systems now. And that's why it's so important to control. That's why Elon's buying it. I mean, you know, that poor guy, man, I mean, I don't, I don't think anyone's really truly appreciated what he's done. I mean, he's the most important person in the world today by far. It's not even anyone even in the same ballpark.

The guy, I mean, he accelerated electric cars, and I think there's a big deal by 15, 20 years. We might not even have a electric car industry. We'd still be smattering of it, right? He totally changed that dynamic. He introduced, like, autonomous driving, which is, you know, used by millions. I mean, people were using it to drive to work and back. And it's only caused, what, five, six accidents, to fatal accidents since it was introduced. Yet they're still attacking for it.

That's, you know, if you have older people in your household or disabled people or whatever, that's like a godsend. It gives you all your time back. And there's still kinks, but it's still stuff that people rely on, like 24-7. And then in space, the whole thing was run by a cartel of big defense companies that had totally flubbed the whole thing and kept the cost per kilo and the tens of thousands. And it was just nuts, expensive, making all other space development impossible. And the guy broke into that industry, destroyed it, and now I was launching a satellite or having a launch a week almost. satellites are going up in droves. I mean, it's down to, you know, 1,200, 1,200, a pound in dropping.

And all of a sudden, we have a vibrant space sector and a zooming. I mean, he opened up space. And then on top of it, he built internet, a satellite internet, almost overnight, accessible anywhere in the world, I mean, for, you know, 100 bucks a month or less. And that will only get cheaper. I mean, you know, basically connecting the world with it. So he's done all those things. And there's a lot more that he's going to come and do.

But, you know, now he has to come back and try to save this system from killing us. I, you know, and I wish I could do more. I wish, you know, I was more of a contributor in this. But, you know, I wasn't, I didn't have the same continuity events in my past to kind of pull that off. But wow, you know, what a weird place we're in right now. It's like, you know, nuclear war or, you know, intense naval gazing where everyone's like fix more problems internally, fix ourselves first, everyone has to think the same way in order to progress is going to just chew us up and drive while we're drawing down energy resources and drawing down, you know, trying to, you know, slow the pace of the economy and switch everyone over to, you know, virtual instead of real consumption. And that's just a collapse formula from hell. That's, you know, while restricting speech all the way down, it's an absolute disaster.

Man, John, so let me ask you this. Presuming that we live, can you give some advice to the anti-war movement? I mean, let me start you with one example here. We do have a program now, and it has not gone quite as viral as I would have hoped, but we have had some sort of success in this push to get people to call Congress to support the war powers resolutions on Yemen. And we got them passed before, but Trump vetoed it, but it'd be much harder for Biden to veto it, I think. And I'm not sure how much you know about that war. I presume everything. And so this would be a hell of a lot. It would make it illegal for the support for the Saudis and the UAE and AQAP to continue there. And so, um,

there's like 113 co-sponsors we have here's let me if I can figure out how to articulate it we're right at the cusp of making this thing

important and viral we got some momentum like man we need a kick in the ass to figure out how to get everybody to be excited about this thing when I don't know I mean you're saying that Twitter's upstream of everything

it seems to me like TV is still the boss And if TV said if it was all about Yemen this week, then we'd really get somewhere. But we don't have a single hero on TV that champions this. Kennedy lets me talk about it every couple of weeks on Fox Business Channel. But there's no host that really is into it. And so, but I feel like, man, we could do it if only we could solve one little puzzle here. And then, of course, the next part is we got to do the same thing about Ukraine. And like starting right now.

We have to do something. All the stuff you see on TV, it's done on Twitter first, and it's down, you know, TV's downstream. It just picks up the messages and amplifies them. I mean, it's truly, this is where you're going on fight. Your luck is that with it trying to stop the Saudis from chewing up people in Yemen, is that Saudi Arabia, with this price hike coming, or, you know, production reduction has, pissed off the swarm right so the swarm is like you are you are either with us or against us and they're going around the everywhere everywhere around the world asking that will you isolate Russia and they you know China fell a foul of that now they're getting hammered Saudi Arabia

fell afoul of that and now they're getting hammered they think they're okay because most of their their biggest customers China now but that has really soured outlook or viewpoints on Saudi Arabia. It's gone very, very negative just recently, just in the last five, six months. They're seen as an enemy, increasingly as an enemy of the United States. And once I go through those production cuts, so Biden's already on board to kind of review all of the relationships they have with Saudi. So your interests are actually aligning with the swarm right now.

So, you know, you can ride that, is that Saudi Arabia now or in the not too distant future is going to be seen as an enemy of the United States. Hey, man, you guys should all sign up for the Libertarian Institute's email list. Will Porter's been putting together this great newsletter every week. And all you got to do is go to the bottom of the page at Libertarian Institute.org and sign up there. It's real dang good. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism is finally done.

Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, and soon on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there. It's my history of America's War on Terrorism, from 1979 through today. Give it a listen and see if you agree. It's time to just come home. Enough already. Time to end the War on Terrorism, the audiobook.

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That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty classroom instead. Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level, and it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, Real history, real economics, real education. Your business doesn't move in a straight line. Make sure your team is taking care of through every twist and turn with Canada Life savings, retirement, and benefits plans.

Whether you want to grow your team, support your employees at every stage, or build a workplace people want to be a part of. Canada Life has flexible plans for companies of all sizes, so it's easy to find a solution that works for you. Visit canadalif.com slash employee benefits to learn more, Canada Life, insurance, investments, advice. So that's how we played the... I interviewed a Nell Sheeline, and this is her narrative, and this is how he titled it, was,

oh, you're mad at Saudi Arabia? Let's end the war in Yemen. And in fact, it sucks, though, John, because what you do is you got this narrative comes out of Congress, these damn Democrats. Oh, well, we should just entirely break off our relationship with Saudi Arabia and get every last soldier out of there, which is, of course, my dream come true, but it also means that they don't really mean that, right? And so, instead, we get nothing. When we have a very reasonable ask on the table, which is, let's stop.

this genocide yeah no it's it's only going to become possible because of this increasing war with russia and and anyone who disagrees with us but i just know we need to focus it from well we're just all mad at saudi now aren't we to we really got to get these war powers resolutions passed like that's what i'm i don't know if you know the answer but that's what i'm trying to get from you It was like, how do you get the swarm to pay attention to the right? Like, we have them on the right subject, but on the wrong topic. You know what I mean? We just got to get them focused on these war powers resolutions for eight weeks, for Christ's sake, and we win.

Yeah, no, you'll get some traction on isolating Saudi, but for the wrong reason. I just wrote a report earlier this week. It focused on one of the elements, one of the things actually driving this forward. It's called Glykechelten. Are you familiar with it? No. I read your article, but I didn't know how to pronounce it. Yeah, it's a, it's kind of like a secret sauce of fashion.

Now everyone's using the word fascist now, and it's mostly like authoritarian, you know, strongman kind of thing, jackboots kind of stuff. That's kind of the superficial definition. It's more an epitette against anyone they disagree with. And so the reality, the thing that really made fascist system so strong, and one of the big three contenders in the 20th century for, you know, dominant system, the system that can wage total war the best, both in peacetime and during wartime, was that they had this secret sauce called the Glegg Schulton. It's a way to, it's the first three laws that Hitler passed, and once he took power and invoked state. of emergency. And it's also the reason what he later attributed to their success as a party is that it's really about getting a capitalist economy and messy capitalist, well, all these little bureaucracies and organizations and different groups and individuals all pointed in the

same direction. You know, how do you, you can't run them all, you know, under one bureaucracy. That would be a communist or socialist. And that just crushes innovation and long term any kind of flexibility. that you would have, you get a lot, you keep a lot of that if you keep this decentralized structure and that you, but you have the benefits of being a command economy if you get everyone focused in the right direction. And the way they did that is this concept called Galichshelting. And it's about everybody buying into what they had is Nazi ideology, but that really just boiled down to everyone has the same enemy. And they found they got the most punch out of that. That's the thing that, you know, when the propaganda ministry gave out a narrative about why this group or why this nation is an enemy, that narrative would then be picked up by the compliant media.

And then everybody would use that as their goal. And they would work together in order to achieve it, even if they had different motivations, you know, in terms of making money and things. So they wouldn't, like, outcompete each other in ways that would be deleterious to achieving that goal. So the problem with that thing is that approach is that in order to remain effective, you know, that fear of that, you know, of internal enemy, that anger, that, you know, focus is that you have to increase the intensity of it over time. You have to make that enemy worse and you have to, you know, make people increasingly mad at it. And the end result is that you, and the fatal flaw of fascism as a system was that you end up being aggressive to everybody. And, you know, you end up with the Holocaust where the eternal enemies are so terrible.

You have to like go with a final solution to wipe them out and you kill six million Jews and six million other people, communists and dissenters and anyone that disagrees is wiped out. And you declare war on almost every other nation. because they're all enemies and they're all less than, they're all, you know, tribal existential threats. That kind of like hyperaggression in order to maintain alignment of a complex society is ultimately fatal. So, you know, what we're seeing here is a networked version of that. It's kind of revival of that, is that everyone has to think the same in order to go forward.

And we're doing that through these. common enemies. And you can already see it proliferating. First it starts with, you know, domestic enemies, you know, Maga, Trump. Then, you know, we see it now expanded to Putin. And then now it's like China and Saudi Arabia and, you know, North Korea and Iran and others, all these nations are going to be put into this threat camp. Yeah. It's already proliferating. We're going to end up being at war with almost everyone except for a handful of countries in Europe. Yeah, but okay, so I'm a I'm a little confused, because, I mean, I understand what you're saying that no one's driving, but somebody kind of is because, you know, obviously what you're talking about is it's all the interests of the U.S. National Security State that are being reflected here, and the swarm doesn't ever disagree with them. This is the FBI and the CIA. Run Twitter. Run those algorithms. A bunch of former employees of these agencies infest Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and all the rest of them.

Yeah, they're not that smart. This is open source. I mean, they were in. A lot of people, a lot of organizations and a lot of corporations and others, the military industrial complex, and it's real. But more reflects the old way of U.S. alignment was to make war profitable. And that's Roosevelt's kind of innovation. Rather than forcing everyone to, you know, into this propagandistic kind of framework, he just made it worth money, right? And people participated willingly.

Yeah. But, yeah, but the thing is, it doesn't have to be. conspiracy with this framework is that there's so many players and they all have motivations and some are more powerful than others some are big pieces some are small pieces in this septic tank is that they all are focused on the same goal and uh yeah but how come the goal is always what bill crystal wants that's just a coincidence that the dumbest people with the wrongest narrative about everything, get to dominate every time?

I wouldn't credit up with starting this. No, I just mean it's just coincidentally, the swarm always agrees with him, he always agrees with them, but I mean, you look at his point of view, it's not like he's bending on anything. Well, maybe he was just a

you know, in tune with network fascism from the get-go. Well, now he's like for gay rights, because that's what his audience wants to hear more. He's moved like back toward the left, as far as it's foreign policy or whatever. It just seems like that's the consent. And I'm just using Crystal as shorthand for, you know,

the very worst centrist, moderate types, supposed moderate. The McCain's and the Bidens and the Bushes and the Clintons of the last 30 years, who've ruined everything that everyone hates, who are the reason that Trump was able to win against them in the first place. Somehow they are still completely dominant when it comes to the narrative. Well, I think Crystal's kind of like, he's a, he's just weather vading to whatever the dominant Glechalkshultung is demanding, right? You're just early, early at picking up the wind that was moving in that direction. You know, there's no independent thought on his part.

The fact that he is like picking up all the left-wing value system that is being pushed out as, you know, you have to. adopt this as to be part of the society that's Glechtel um he picked it up early and it you know i think the way out is it is that you have to and hopefully you know i'm able to do this is affect those as algorithms allow the dissent to accumulate um and that that dissent will pick away at this at this at this at this at the swarm at the system because if it wins you know we're in this perpetual war and all dissent is is is is muted and and you know we're in this like orthodoxy this narrow you know sterile stagnant orthodoxy of thought there were no thought can be put out there unless it's like pre-approved and vetted by the by the by the network and it's I call that the

long night. It's 1984 but worse because we could build systems now once it gets into the infrastructure that moderate and control the conversations of billions of people simultaneously. I mean, that's like the totalitarian's, you know, wet dream. It's like they hope they could never build a system like this. It would take, you know, millions of people in a bureaucracy going over all these conversations. And now we have a way of automating it through AI and, and like, that they that allows you to do it in real time at the scale of billions of people. And then you're going to add into augmented reality, everything else. It's like moderating your perceptual stream and what you're allowed to see and how you see it

and how people see you all controlled by this network through corporations, implementing these systems that ultimately want to narrow your thinking. Yeah. And that's the only way to have your say is to use their, medium to have your say, but then your control, your message is their medium. Yeah, there's no gulags except for

being in the medium, but the thing is if you, but you have to, in order to succeed or like to work or do anything, you can even see it right now in the online spaces. I mean, what we have already is that unless you're connected, you're basically dysfunctional.

You can't even, you know, like even dating or looking for a job or everything requires an online component here. So to put a person in the penalty box, to punish them, disconnection is equivalent to a Gulag. It's an open-air prison. Yeah. It's all Neil Postman predicted all of this stuff. Except actually being connected. Yeah, well, being connected actually is really truly the re-education system. So you're motivated to go back to the re-education system because you can't function in the society unless you are. And a lot of people say, oh, well, I can do okay on my

own, well, go ahead. I mean, if you want to be poor. Right. That's what I'm always telling my guys at the Institute. You young whippersnappers need to get on that TikTok there and get us some TikTok traffic. Because you got to, that's how it is. It's the surrender of culture to technology. That's what Neil Postman called it back 25 years ago.

But hey, let me spend a little time asking you about the Ben Ladenites. Because my opinion is that that ain't over yet. And I was reading your book. I got about two-thirds of the way through, unfortunately, I wasn't. able to finish it yet. Brave New War, which was written, like, right in 07. And so there's lots of interesting things in there. We surely can't cover it all. But, you know, since then, of course, Obama and America's allies helped build the Islamic State and then destroyed it again. And we've had, you know, the war in Yemen, where we switch sides. And we've been fighting on al-Qaeda's side.

We now call them the Giants Brigade. And they work directly for the United Arab Emirates on the ground there in Yemen for the last almost eight years. And so it seems like the war against AQAP at least is going to continue indefinitely. And these are the same guys who have reached out and touched people in Europe. And they almost pull up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. And of course, it's all Bush and Obama and Trump and Joe Biden's fault. And yet here we are and it seems like nobody's even paying attention to these guys anymore and yet all of their motives for attacking us which you got right in your book congratulations a lot of people don't get it right and especially for 07 is relatively early there you hadn't heard rom paul beat down juliana yet

and you're still right about the motive and the strategy of alcatus war against us but so it seems like all those things remain and i don't know about 9-11 sized attacks but um we have more or less called off the terror war. We still got troops occupying in Saudi, I mean, in Iraq and Syria and all that. But our support for the dictator's remains, our support for Israel remains, and our pressure on them to keep their oil prices

artificially low for our benefit remains, and all of the reasons they attacked us in the first place. And so I wonder what you think about the next phase of that war, whether we're just waiting for another shoe to drop there, or whether no america would have to hire the Saudis to do it if they wanted that to happen yeah no i don't think there's any interest or or they're they're on to bigger targets and bigger wars and um i mean what's left of alpada is yeah they think al qaeda and a whole as you know jihadi thing is all over i mean they're they're at war with russia and china and and

in Saudi Arabia directly. This is, I mean, bigger fish and more danger to all of us, you know, hopefully we survived this, is that, yeah. Well, what about all the guys in the Italy province? It was a really hard to. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to disengage. And, you know, I was in front of the House Armed Services Committee back in 2009, and they asked me, what would you do about Afghanistan?

I said, leave. And here's how, pop, blah, blah. And it's like, people like, what? They were looking for a strategy to kind of continue it. I think there's no, there's no waiting here, get out, right? But these guys were like totally distracted by it. And that whole distraction was, you know, I wrote a report not too long ago on that global guerrillas report thing I do, is that it, our big thing after the Cold War should

have been trying to figure out ways to onboard Russia and China, right? We're going to bring them into the global system, that we should have been focusing on making sure that they onboard correctly or interact with us correctly, and they don't become threats. And we got distracted in the Middle East, and we got distracted by all these wars, thinking that oil was the biggest problem, you know, when it ended up fracking made it at all useless, is that And then we turned Russia into China into threats within, you know, 20 years, you know, a little over 20 years. I mean, China wasn't even even remotely a threat 20 years ago. And we screwed the pooch so badly that, I mean, I mean, we're talking a colossal grand strategy error, unforced error.

it's amazing in how stupid it was and I'm paying the price now and you know by trying to re you know correct it by declaring war on them and trying to roll it back it's just nuts well and so I get it about the swarm and it's just the group think and the peer pressure and the moralism and all. And I guess you're saying even the military industrial complex and all of those interests take a back seat to just the narrative building on all of that stuff. That's the most important aspect of all of it.

Never mind even think tanks or anything else. It's just goofballs on Twitter. All those guys in the think tanks, and I know a lot of them and I see a lot of them, they're all just appealing to the swarm. They're all appealing for clicks. They're all being trained. I mean, look, this isn't like a, it's Glykeshulting, it's like there's a whole like Hitler youth,

you know, like you send kids into the, into the program and they get indoctrinated. Well, I mean, what do you think you get when you get on Twitter and Facebook and stuff? It's like you're getting the likes, you're getting the follows, you're getting the strokes from people, you know, agreeing with you and interacting with you. And then you get the punishment, zing, you know, from the unfollows, from the pushback, the trolls, It's a training program for a view of the future, a view over the world. And it's, you know, those guys are just as susceptible to it as anyone else. You don't have a, you know, those policy people, those academics, those people in think tanks, they're all, they're all competing to see who's the smartest on this, on this platform.

Who can have an input? Now, so. If you're not there, you're not, you're not relevant. But now, so back to the bin Ladenites for a minute. There are still a hell of a lot of these guys. And, you know, as I read your book, I thought, you know, you couldn't see the future. You were trying very hard and making some really great predictions. But it turned out that the bin Ladenites really the best they ever did is Bush sort of accidentally gave them Western Iraq for a little while.

But then it was the local Sunnis who kind of cleaned their clock and took care of that problem for us. But then Obama took their side in Libya. Syria and in Yemen. And that has been such a boon to them. And they built a gunning Islamic caliphate bin Ladenai's fantasy could have never happened. It used to be Glenn Beck's ridiculous war propaganda. Oh, there's a caliphate out there. It's coming for you. Well, Obama actually built him a damn caliphate. Now, I know that they blew it up again, but there's still a lot of refugees from that. And so I'm interested what you say about, well, they got bigger and better things to do like maybe the CIA and the Saudis and the Turks will ship them off to fight the Chinese

is maybe what you're implying there. I mean, if they're going against America's allies, then that sounds like a joint condominium with the Saudis and the Turks. It's the way they back the Chechens in the 90s and all that kind of thing, right? And the Uyghurs in the late 90s in Afghanistan? Yeah, all the battle lines will be drawn about who sides with Russia, who doesn't, who takes a neutral stance and who doesn't need neutrality to the network is the same thing as being as an enemy um so the bin laddnites have always been good on russia from america's point of view right right so we're allies with katab

in chichnia 20 years ago to the extent they undermine russia and china and saudi arabia is now that saudi arabia has decided to decide with the chinese and the russians uh yeah then we're uh we're who could actually undermine those guys. Well, that's interesting. I mean, Saudi intelligence is how we run our jihadis. So we've got to have to build a direct link, I guess just to use the Turks to run them even against the Saudis now. We'll see where Saudi Arabia ends up.

I mean, they're in play right now. So, you know, which sphere? And now that this is like, the way that the way that the tribe of bin Nayef, right? And so they really don't want bin Laden. been Solomon, they can't get along with him? Is that it? Yep. And then they can't do anything about that? Seems like the CIA could just do something about that. As things, as things heed up, we'll see what happens on that.

Interesting. Yeah, there's also a strong tribal dynamic in all of this, is that, I mean, the folks on the network, they see every, every enemy is in the exit. Existential enemy. They don't see him as human either. Okay. So, you know, that can increase the intensity and increase the range of action that you're able to take against them. It's very, you know, very tribal in his in his orientation. Remember Apocalypse now? Sure. Okay. You know, you know the whole basis of the movie, right? Kurtz was looking for a way to get his soldiers out of this Western mentality, meaning that everybody has a fundamental. right or you know you know meaning for life and stuff it you know when his soldiers had to do things that were too aggressive they're putting heads on pikes and stuff like that it would wreck them they would be run into mental problems and have difficulties whereas a tribesman that he was

working with or able to go do all the horrific stuff associated with war and coercion and making you know winning a insert against an insurgency winning uh as an insurgent is is that, and then they'd come home, and they'd kiss their wives, good night, and, you know, your kids, good night, and it'd be absolutely normal because they didn't see the anime as even remotely human. And he wanted his soldiers to do that, but it was so hard, you know, the horror, horror thing. We're kind of doing that to ourselves to a certain extent with this networking, is that the enemy isn't really human, and Russians don't really exist at all. And it's Americans versus each other, too, right? I mean, Matt Taibi has this great book, Hate Ink, about how everybody's in their narrow little silo. I mean, God forbid, there are literally people who call them, not very many, but there are some who call themselves Hortonians, because they're just like my kind of style of libertarianism or something like that.

That's a very narrow silo of people, and then that point of view is not represented in many other places, and then everyone in all the other silos would look at me and my people as a bunch of cooks compared to all the things that they all agree about. And then we're not even talking to each other. In fact, that's all the thread this morning is how many people are quitting Twitter. They don't want to talk with the people who are now potentially to be unbanned. And they just want to go somewhere else instead and not share their swarm with our swarm. Yeah, that won't work. You know, it's the same departure from Twitter that occurred with Trump's disconnection. There's no other place.

you go off you go out to those alternative go to Macedon it sucks nobody listen there nobody you want to connect with it is there and you come back

same thing with you know all the other alternative networks on the right you know networks are weird they had this kind of Metcalfslaw thing going

and they you know its value increases by the square of the number of nodes in it right and that you know the network this big

with all the, you know, the people in all these different organizations, all interconnected, is unreplicated right now. So it also kind of, that's one of the reasons, Metcalfs Law is one of the reasons why, you know, we're seeing so much aggression, too, is that, you know, if what we're seeing is a network at war with the world, it's that it wants to expand. And the two most independent networks are the kind of dark zones. from our existing network. The one it can't really control is Russia had its own social network, own kind of infrastructure, and China, which is set up its great firewall. And now it wants control

of that. The big global one that we're part of wants to eat it, wants to expand into it, add those additional nodes, get those increases in value. And this is that topologically, that's like this is just expansion on that network it's like it wants control it wants dominance let me ask you this john what about the importance of podcasts here because the most important podcaster in the west at least is joe rogan who i wouldn't say is a hardcore radical dissenter or anything like that but he's certainly a very open-minded guy and has radical dissenters on there who oftentimes make a big splash on there and of course he is i don't mean to sell him short either he's taking his stands as well, especially on the COVID stuff and all of that. And they haven't quite been able to

clamp down on podcasts, at least yet. What do you foresee there? Well, and even what is it, first of all, what does it mean that Rogan is the biggest big shot and that his numbers even make Tucker Carlson pale in comparison. Tucker Carlson has by far the biggest cable TV news show. Well, online's bigger than off. And you can see that. The network. numbers in regular TV or upholstery compared to what you can do online. And he, you know, Joe is lucky that also that the, that Spotify's there. You got to have a network that has some dominance that will protect you. And there's no, there's no surety that he would still be on YouTube if that was the only

point of failure. Right. So, yeah, I was just going to say, if he'd just been on there, he'd have been kicked off by now. Well, Spotify also said just recently that it wouldn't take Kanye off either. And, you know, for better or worse, I mean, he definitely pushed a lot of people's hot buttons, but, you know, they're kind of making a stance of trying to maintain its level, a level of openness. They're taking, I mean, they lost some customers and they continue to lose customers as a result of that, but they're able to, and they don't make money through advertising. One of the keys here is. I think about how crazy that.

I'm sorry to interrupt. But just think about how nuts that is. Where this guy, Kanye West, I mean, I don't know a single song by him, but I know that he's been essentially a superstar for about 20 years, 25 years or something. He's an extremely famous and important guy. And I know that he's been crossing some lines and pushing some buttons, as you say there. But the idea that you could just unperson him off the internet, like he's a Nazi or whatever, which I don't even think they ought to be able to do that to Nazis either.

But, man, like, you can't just unperson someone as important as kind of. Kanye West, can you, really? Yeah, I mean, they disconnected the most powerful person on Earth. I mean, they took off a president, a sitting U.S. president. I know it. It disconnected him. And his supporters. It wasn't just him.

They disconnected all the networks. Yeah. Took away the email providers, took away the payment systems, took away everything. But Kanye is a cascade of color. That's one of the reasons why you don't see as much of the vocal online. portion of it it's all a back back end kind of disconnection so you don't see a lot of a lot of the vitriol you normally would have seen it to kind of egg it on but it is being done on the backside right it's an interesting kind of connection between the traditional

disconnection whisper network for uh anti-semitism to and then you have a network add on an amplification and uh you know brought on by the network um yeah Guys, sorry, I don't mean to go all FDR on you or anything, but here's the new deal. All the interviews are now going up first at Scott Horton's show.substack.com. Of course, they'll all be going up at Scott Horton.org the next day, and the archives going back to 1999. We'll still be free for you there at Scotthorton.org. But I got to generate revenue, you know. Hey, y'all, they've got great deals on weed at the hemp spot.com.

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Spell the, T-H-C. You guys, my friend Mike Swanson has written such a great revisionist take on the early history of the post-World War II national security state and military industrial complex in the Truman Eisenhower in Kennedy years. It's called the war state. I have to say, it's the most convincing case I've read that Kennedy had truly decided to end the Cold War before he was killed. In any case, I know you'll love it.

The War State by Mike Swanson. It is pretty insane the way. And the first precedent that I think, well, maybe they went after some Nazis first, but the first major precedent that they went after was Alex Jones. And apparently, just like you're saying there, it was unofficial. Like, you have to just use your imagination. I guess they had a lawn party on a Saturday afternoon, and they all had a conversation that agreed that Monday,

when we all go back to work, we're going to kick this guy off of every single platform in Silicon Valley all at once and that's amazing and then once they used him as the um you know the kind of benchmark that look we can do that then they've been added ever since oh what fun we can just unpersoned whoever we want no matter how important they're yeah that well that's the thing is that that's that's that punishment mechanism it's uh you know with corporations willing supporters because they get the legitimacy necessary to you know continue to wield the kind of power that they do And still make a lot of money.

And the inability of government to kind of keep stability. And they basically did have a wink and a nod to corporations to do it for them, right? You know, keep things in line. They, these corporations work in tandem. It's like, you know, once one big guy goes, it's like a cascade of disconnection that occurs. Right. And no one has to take, no one has to be responsible for it. Because like, I'm just playing a part.

No one, there's no coordination. It's just they did it. I did it. Right. The next guy's doing it. Yeah. all the responsibilities diffused. And we're corporations.

We can do anything we want, right? Okay, but John, so... You know, we're not beholden. If you're a leader of the global guerrillas, I mean, you're... As far as how horrible all this swarm is and all of that, I mean, your whole concept here, too, is about all the many points of failure

of all of these systems and how we could make their swarm fail. We could undermine, if we do it right, by using all these guerrists, type tactics, you know, and information about how networks work to change the situation so that the lady from who's the boss doesn't get to decide for liberals anymore, what stupid war they're supposed to support or whatever it is. No?

Right. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, one angle of attack would be like what Elon just did. He bought the epicenter, right? And, you know, supporting him, even if it doesn't look like. he's going in the right direction, regardless of what he's doing, there's a bigger battle underway that you probably won't see that he, you know, he's fighting to switch it from an advertising network to something else because the advertisers will enforce this network kind of viewpoint on

things indirectly by affecting his revenues. But yeah, there's also the disconnection. And, you know, a larger frame for this, the way of understanding this is that we're in the process of building a what Marshall McLuhan, you know, the really good insight into the long-term impacts of this stuff is that we're building a social artifact. Something, a system, a technological system that kind of encompasses all of our social and economic system. You know, it's going to be big and it's going to be a way that we can, you know, interoperate, hopefully interoperate in a way that makes us a whole better offer interacting with it but uh you know we're fighting over the assumptions and the and and the the kind of moral substrate and everything else that goes into

how you build that thing you know early we're still in the early days of building it and um it's like a global war you know is it going to be restrictive like the you know the swarm wants it to be you know, or, you know, limiting all one thing of pre-approved stuff, or is it going to be open? And, you know, that war, like all online wars, and most wars right now have a center of gravity is mostly online, even if there's like physical warfare underway. The physical warfare really just punctuates the online competition, particularly when it gets to be kind of insurgency based, is that, you know, we're going to keep on, I'm trying to fight more on trying to put limits into the system early, you know, kind of like blocking factors. So I introduced, I went in front of the Senate. They were looking at Facebook and how to regulate the big social networks. And it was

me in front of the Senate committee and this guy from Facebook. And he was, man, that guy, I mean, he was absolutely ripped apart by the senators that day. And I'm in the back room with him. He's sweating bullets, man. This guy was, I mean, Ted Cruz, when he gets going, it's like vicious. That guy is like, never want to have him as my prosecutor. And I introduced this idea of a very simple thing. I don't know how much it got it, but at least it got into the public's discussion is this idea of digital rights.

You know, basic free speech rights were not being defaulting. to whatever's in the terms of service at these different corporations and the terms of service are more important than the Constitution, and they could be interpreted any which way they want by the corporation in implementing them. So digital rights and digital data ownership, so we have a piece of the future because all that data that we're producing is all being used to train AIIs and they're going to be worth trillions. So we contributed to the creation of these things and we're not getting any stake in their future. It's kind of just being stripped mind from us right now. And then

openness. Like open access for businesses, you know, to the store, thing like that. Right now, the big guys charge 30%. And on every transaction gun goes through your phone. So it's basically you're taxing the whole of the smartphone

economy. And they'll tax all the AR stuff as it comes online and it will be 10 times larger. So we want like, and they control who gets actually into those stores, which then will control our perceptions. So we want open. stores open access to businesses or you could grow your site your like little little business on organically on like a facebook or social network without having to pay a facebook tax where they're

depressing you and making it harder for you to grow your site intentionally to force you to buy advertising so as a small business you're like being taxed and it's not an open system to allow you growth so things like that and uh you know if we can get like the blocking action and i talked to the texas ag and then they they put into place uh uh at least a legal framework or the initial legal framework for you know protecting people online so you can't be disconnected based on your views if you're from texas and it stood up to appeal and they you know i talked to them again i get by expanding that to some ownership, like they would represent the data being produced by Texans on these networks and seek some potential ownership rights for them so they would

either get paid, which could be substantial over time, or they would control who gets access to it. You know, those kind of blocking actions make a big difference downstream. It's like the initial conditions on a complex system that's just. booting up you know if you can get those initial conditions in place things turn out better right long-term those digital rights get them done now you stop a lot of excess and disaster long-term because dissent dissent can continue right but there's like things for digital rights for instance you have to have like identity because

you mean you can't just attach rights to a anonymous entity right and people get mad at that but you know what you can keep an anonymity but it's going to have more filters and restrictions and algorithmic suppression you're going to have to deal with that but if you want rights you're going to have to identify

yourself and the anonymous accounts are also too easy to spoof using bots and AIs and things like that so you're not going to want to assign rights to those things and I need to read a lot more about that because you know I mean honestly

I was so hesitant to even get into the internet in the first place back in high school in 1994. I was like, don't you see it's all an S-A-CIA plot to get into your brain and hook us all together to show who all knows who, to track all of our financial transactions, to read everything we're writing to each other that would have just been in a zine or whatever that was none of their damn business who was reading it or not. It used to be a time, I remember, you could go to 7-11, get a slurpee, go home, and it wasn't a part of your permanent record anywhere you could go to the beach for the week and come back and no one knew where you were and it wasn't written down not that it's a secret but it was

just it never mattered it was never anybody else's business what you were doing until our very recent kind of history where now everything is on our permanent record everything right and you know things change i mean i was there right i was uh you know fresh out of the military went to school and then came back and I was the first internet analyst professional one I guess in the entire world back in 95 so every single internet company came through my doors back then so I got to see how this thing was built from the get-go and you know I was also one of the guys that back in 2001 created the early social networks so we were a lot more optimistic and utopian back then we had an open system based on what we called really simple syndication RSS that we put out as an open standard and it got big What was it called? It's still out there. RSS? Oh, yeah.

No, I know what RSS is, but I was saying there was a standard. Yeah, our little company did it. But that was the social network itself was RSS too? Oh, yeah, no, yeah, we built the software. So, okay, so we took the early blogging tech, and then we turned it into a network. We attached RSS to every post and allowed people to subscribe to each other. And then you'd get a feed on our software. But I'm just saying, which one was it?

That was at blogger or? One of those? Oh, no, it was a user land software. So we didn't actually have, we went with the decentralized approach. I got you. And we had it on our desktop software, which was our fatal mistake, too, is that all the early people in social network and we're using our stuff. And the feed you got from your RSS feeds, the blogs you were subscribed, look just like

Twitter does today. I mean, exactly. And you could take any posts. See, that's how I wish it was. Add to it. Isn't that how it should be that Twitter is an app on your computer. computer, not anybody Zuckerberg to tell you what to do or Elon Musk or anyone else. Now, we're not, we're not an open computing system like it was under Microsoft and Windows.

This is a closed computing system. Yeah. Smartphone is a closed computing system. The big apps are all closed. One of the things that Elon could do to kind of break this up and really make this thing is he could put RSS on every. account. And then, you know, people could publish to Twitter and there could be other networks that develop that off of this, like a platform, where RSS serves as a kind of an enabling feature for really blowing this up and making it bigger. So it would be pretty wild. That would be

a, that would be a big change and take a lot of the power away from Twitter, but also make it bigger, putting RSS back into the equation. Because we were hoping that it would stay at open. kind of decentralized system and, you know, four or five years later, you know, Zuckerberg and Jack took our interfaces and turned it into these centralized monstrosities. Yeah. I mean, there was a time when it was the comment sections on the various websites and blogs were the community. And I had a great community of people on my blog stress. And then it was Facebook. Everybody just dropped everything and went to Facebook. And that was the death of it all. I know. Our radio user land publishing interface was blue just like Facebook. It looked exactly the same.

I mean, we did the whole reverse chronological order. We added the timestamps on the, on, on every single post. You know, we added the, you know, the comments that you could carry along. So were they just copying you? Essentially. I mean, you know, there wasn't anything innovative in Facebook, you know, from from the first couple years. Well, I mean, at first, what it was is that looked so much cleaner than MySpace. That was exactly what our, that's exactly what radio useland looked like like. Yeah, yeah, MySpace had it where you had to have this static background with the foreground that moved over it in a way that was just ugly and stupid and couldn't change it.

Oh, no, no. That was a page creation tool. That wasn't a, you know, it wasn't any, it wasn't a publishing platform. I mean, Facebook looked exactly like radio usland. I mean, even the color. Yeah. That initial blue that they had was exactly like us. And, you know, the guy was in.

college he wasn't you know he's just copying whatever he saw so it wasn't any any innovation um they added the like button that was a big deal but that's pretty much it and then they started really their big innovation was on the business side of it as they got bigger is that they were able to to mine and sell this idea of this like social graph that's very big of you to not sue him for a billion zillion dollars there yeah you know i come up with lots of ideas and implement them and I was early on a lot of stuff, so it doesn't really pay, you know? I got to keep on moving forward

and you just do what you do. Yeah. Well, listen, I mean, what you're doing is very interesting. I've been reading all your articles here as they come out and I'll probably finish up this book today or tomorrow. I got some traveling to do, Brave New War. Lots of interesting stuff about a Rock War II. Isn't that funny?

Just I was thinking this as I was reading this morning. that. Nobody likes talking about Iraq War II at all. That might as well have happened before Korea or something. People just, you know, like they would say the forgotten war about Korea. Who would have thought that Iraq War II could be a forgotten war? And yet now it's just like the whole society just wants to avert their eyes from that thing so badly. And just to read you talking about the details of who's blowing up, who's mosque, at what time, and how this was the most important thing in the whole world back then compared to nothing at all now. Yeah. Yeah. And they also forget Afghanistan. I mean, when they're thinking, oh, there's no way that we put $100 million, $100 billion a year into something like Ukraine. It's just like, oh, like Afghanistan, right? It's like, we can, we will, we do it. And keep that thing alive. I'm pretty sure Russia doesn't want to fall. I mean, they can see that. They don't want to burn themselves out like they did in Afghanistan, but at an accelerated pace. All right, so now back to Ukraine and Russia and all that real quick to wrap up here, I guess, because I know you've got to go and I do too, but, you know, it's the comparisons made to the Cuban missile crisis and how, well, you know, at least you had Jack and Bobby Kennedy trying to talk to Khrushchev and figure out something. And here we're not even talking to the Russians. At the same time, we're not stationing nuclear missiles in Ukraine either.

But still, we have kind of this height of crisis. And as you're talking about, the swarm just will not allow reasonable takes here. So I wonder if you think that there's at some point, can adults intervene here and someone who's just not even on Twitter and who just doesn't think that way? Like, this sounds crazy and stupid and Lord, forgive me if you exist. But like, what if you just sent Henry Kissinger over there to hammer out a deal? We know that he has a relationship with Putin. He's sworn that, hey, guys, we need to wrap this war up in a couple of months.

here back a few months ago and what the hell he ain't dead yet and he's not going to start bombing louse or something let's just send him and or maybe like is that possible or this is just it sounds like a lot of what we're talking about is irrelevant because we're going to all be dead by new years or something okay by so by our first anniversary of this war that's the danger of this swarm is like it it eliminates all off-rams right all reasonable off-rams and it and it says anything other than complete and total victory is is off the table and that no communication no kind of interaction is allowed and uh anyone who tries it at this moment is going to be attacked and and discredited and burned and uh it's not possible that's the important for

everybody everybody listens to this everybody who's acting out there just you know find a reason to critique this goddamn thing you know and attack it dissent Right. In fact, the more dissentings out there, the more cover. Yeah. They went after Kissinger. All of a sudden, they remembered all the people who lionized him this whole time and ignore all his war crimes. All of a sudden said, oh, yeah, what about that time you killed all those Cambodians? Like, yeah. As soon as he preaches patience, and as soon as he says something about restraint, they attack him. Rather than saying, wow, we're being chastised by our great hero, the gray beard wizard guy we're supposed to listen to. Oh, 100%. But if there's enough to.

sent out there pounding on the door like throwing out it doesn't really matter whether any one recommendation for how to off ramp this thing it's right and i don't i'm not it doesn't matter just get them out there right flow the zone flood the zone with demands for peace yeah and and that gives cover to the adults in the room to act right right i mean that's the one thing about this at the nuclear level it requires some adults in the room to actually so we just need a hot hashtag or something is that it well enough of them i mean we're talking this thing is huge yeah and it's tied into a whole set of wars and attitudes and and anger that uh are unrelated to the war and it's like unless you all you can do is is conduct maneuver warfare online maneuver warfare means you know attack them

for all that you swarm it from a lot of different directions or you know come at it from a lot of directions with a lot of different topics, a lot of different avenues attack. And you confuse the psychology of the, of the opponent. Make it hard for them to counter you. I'm here trying to quit Twitter so I can get this book written. And I'm so addicted to it. I'm either on the wagon or I'm off. And I was doing pretty good there until YouTube censored my Matt Taiibi interview. So then I had to get back on Twitter to raise hell about that. And now I'm back on the meth again. And I can't quit it. And it's sucking up all of my time. And I can't get my book. written and then but i also kind of realized too i can hear just a romando complaining in my ear

his ghost that twitter is the battlefield forget the book stupid and just do this but i really want to write the book and i'm halfway through it and i promised everybody i would and i got a great co-author and it's a lot of it's done i can't quit now but write it in chapters and installments put it on substack and put it out every month or two you know another chapter and that's the way to do a book now and then you you you can put it all together at the end and then you you package it for the people who want the you know flip the pages by hand the problem is all my research is out of order it's so out of order so I would have anyway I hear you though you can smart though you could go back to previous report or you know previous chapters and say oh I've updated this people will love that

yeah it's an interactive process now it's not a you can't do these things in isolation and then kind of just it takes too long things change too fast and you get support along the way while you're doing it so you can you can support yourself yeah you know I wonder if I went with the report format with the global guerrillas I mean I could write another book but man that you know I may at some point but by breaking it into reports and allows me to focus in on one thing and boil it down to the essentials so I don't waste people's time I'm trying to put like a chapter worth of content into like five pages right all bullet bullet paragraph bullet bullet bullet really easy to read scan bam i get it complex idea done and i do you know at least last month

i did three of those so yeah they're great too and then the podcast really great reading um oh thanks i wonder if i could get away with doing that with my last book enough already and just serialize it on sub stack and build audience that way and then maybe me and darrell yeah me and darrell yeah me and darrell are working on provoked America's role in the rush Ukraine war now. Daryl Cooper, the great podcaster, Mortar Made. Oh, yeah, you do that plus you add the audio component for each chapter. Oh, you got a moneymaker right there. I mean, and it's real money maker.

It's like meaning that people will want really like to be part of that and they get their hit. Yeah. It's worth it. I go in and get a chapter. I have an audio version, you know, with Daryl's voice, radio voice. going at it and. Hey, mine too. Oh yeah, no, you're good, but you and I are okay. It's just that something about his voice, man. No, he's great. It's awesome. But I do my own audio

books, damn it, so we're going to have to like trade off chapters or something. Okay, okay, you can do an A, B, test here. That's right. You can both read the chapter and then see who gets downloaded. He's, he's, uh, he's, uh, by far the more famous and influential, the two of us for sure. So, um, I'll let him read it. And plus, I got to tell you, I hate doing audio books. I like having the finished result of it, but I'm such a perfectionist and it's such a task. It's so much harder than just doing a damn radio show. It's just nuts. Yeah, the perfectionism is killer for me because I keep on going. I hate that little pause or that, you know. Any word that ends with an S has two little clicks after it. And I have to go and cut out

every single one of those little things are all going nuts. Yeah, that's nuts. But you don't have to do it with somebody else's stuff. That's true. Yeah, exactly right. I just encourage him to drink lots of water. Okay, dude. So now you've got to plan forward, man. I think so. I think that's it. And we already got our title. And look, I mean, the book's already written from beginning to end. It's a speech that I originally wrote in 2020 called the New Cold War with Russia. It's all America's fault that I gave the day they locked down Seattle. I was there given a speech, Leap Day, 2020. And then when the war broke out at the beginning of this year, I just added to it and gave the same speech again. again. And then, so it's already written all the way through. It's just what we're trying to do now is add a million billion things to it and make it better. And maybe I got too far off on the track of turning this thing into fool's errand again when it needs to be, as you say, much

briefer and not waste people's time and just really get to it. But I got so much research that I found that I wanted to put in there, you know, it's just. It's easier if you do it in this this way too because I found that trying to put a entire book into my head hurts you know because I have to have the whole all the chapter structure and everything all at once to get it down it's hurts it's just easier just to do it on the chapter by chapter by month by month and then you're participating in the network politics of dissent on this stuff right now yeah and that's where it matters and giving people like deeper content to you know to draw from when they're out in the world trying to beat this thing back yeah it's important

to do it in that way because it not only increases your impact and makes it easier for you and you make some more money more money doing it that way than you know trying to sell the finished product um yeah there's no other way to really do it now all right so let me ask you this then we're gonna run my buddy dave for president as the libertarian party candidate and he's gonna be great but we're up against the frankenstein gangster computer gods as you describe them in the network swarm how do we what's the secret sauce we can use this swarm again them and turn the thing into a giant win for the unified field theory of human freedom here yeah I wouldn't hold I mean you know US has hollowed out to a large extent so that's why it's like so relying on this network winning there is really the key I would suggest more like Borlaji is working on but I mean I battled all and went through a lot the topics that he's he's currently trying to push forward who's that a decade ago belagie uh the tech the guy uh who just wrote a book on networked state okay i don't know how to pronounce his last name anyway you have never heard of him

no okay yeah he's got a pretty huge following in the in the tech you know the tech libertarian space okay like the crypto he was really good in crypto early on but he's basically about creating network states like alternatives like and and trying to create the you know simulate kind of opt-in society it's tough but i mean things that go beyond the state that kind of go draw members and participants from from a variety different locations and people can opt in and get a lot of the kind of protections and and capabilities you'd normally get from the state but through a networked entity so it's like kind of competes with the state right as we know it a geographical thing that we're dealing with right now but you know trying to compete

for ownership or control of this thing that's already in decline it's hollowing out you know so many of the features of the nation state that we used to expect during the cold war and stuff are gone yeah i mean control over borders control over narrative control over everything it's gone right but so this is this hollow shell so i mean but that's the thing is like it sounds to me like what you're saying is we have a huge opportunity here i mean we're not going to lock up the electoral college and make my man present but the left wing and right wing leadership such as they are are so intellectually hollow and compared to our narrative I don't think they can hold up.

It's just a question of, you know, the way this would have been put in the past is like, when let us in the debates. But that's not the point. But the point is, how do we, you know, use our global guerrilla type tactics to essentially dominate the discussion? No matter what Kamala Harris and her handlers think the campaign is supposed to be about, we want to force them to talk about central banking and war, inflation and the boom-bust cycle, and imperialism and the police state and all the corruption on Wall Street and in Big Pharma and all the things that we really hate about what our government is doing in this country. And so that's the win, is if we can make it where our discussion is, if not the dominant discussion, at least a major part of the discussion in 2024, because they just can't avoid it.

Because everywhere they go, people say, yeah, but that Smith guy keeps saying X, Y, and Z. So what about that? And it's just part of it because they can't escape it. because we've somehow mastered this swarm for ourselves and can use it against them, right? That's the real challenge that we have here. Yeah, a couple hundred thousand people online acting as a squeaky wheel, always asking the same questions, you know, relative to the same pattern can have an effect. They can sway things.

And if they have a few, maybe one issue that they really think is the most important and they're constantly pushing on that, there's a good chance that that thing will be. implemented. Try to make it as narrow and as focused and as widely held within your group that this is the thing. Right. That we want to get done. And man, you do that online and you show up here. You're in all their tweet streams and you're in all their responding to every single one of their articles, you know, both in the comment section as well as online and the big networks. Man, you can, you can, it will, it will rise. It will get attention.

Great. Because they see you as a potential audience that's favorable to them. And if they can win you over, it's goodness for them. Yeah. Hey, that's a great place to leave it on some good advice for the future here if we live to see it. So, thanks very much for that, John. Yeah, yeah. Hey, my pleasure.

Thanks for having me on. That is John Rob. And Global Gorillas is his substack and his book about Iraq War II and so forth. It's called Brave New War. Really good stuff. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.