The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Guy Morris, Author of Intelligent Action Thriller Books

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Guy Morris, Author of Intelligent Action Thriller Books Guymorrisbooks.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com.

Welcome to the big show, my friends. And now a man who thinks pants are completely overrated. Maybe shorts, too. I don't know. I'm not going to tell you what I'm wearing underneath all this podcast equipment. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. I really appreciate you guys being here.

Go to YouTube.com Fortress Chris Voss or CouncilGoodreads.com Fortress Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Go to all of our groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all those crazy places the kids are playing these days. We have an amazing multi-book author on the show. We're talking about his stories, his history, and what he puts into his books. His latest book that has just come out, July 3, 2022,

The Last Ark, Lost Secrets of Qumran, the Snow Chronicles by Guy Morrison. As you can hear, he is live on the show with us today. So that's always good to have him live so he can tell us what's going on with these amazing books that he has. So we'll be talking about those as well. He is retired from a 36-year leadership career with a Fortune 100 software, high-tech, and global energy company. Guy Morris has also been a published songwriter for Disney Records, screenplay writer for Sojourn Entertainment, a patented inventor, a Coast Guard charter captain, a

paddy driver, a venture and now an author of intelligent, well-researched thrillers. Since his 2021 debut as an indie author, he's released three pulse-pounding thrillers inspired by true stories, actual technologies, true global politics and history. Welcome to the show, Guy. How are you? Chris, it's wonderful to be here. I'm so excited. Thank you very much for having me.

There you go. We're excited to have you as well. So congratulations on the latest book. Give us your dot coms, wherever you want people to find you on those interwebages. The easiest place to go is GuyMorrisBooks.com. That will give you buy links, fact versus fiction, image libraries of actual locations, review highlights and links, and way more. There you go.

There you go. So how many books do you have out so far? I've had three out. The last one came out this past November 22. I'm working on the fourth now, which will be another sequel. And all of the books, I'm inspired a lot by true stories and real history, real facts. So I like to build my fictional characters and plots on top of real solid mountains and legs of factual information and connect that to the real world in very, hopefully, creative and innovative ways, in part because I think

I write thrillers, and so there's nothing scarier going on right now than the news. I've seen it, yes. If I could basically just add on top of that a little bit, and of course as a thriller writer, I have one question to ask. Gee, what could possibly go wrong? I've seen that movie too sometimes. I don't want to see the big ending, whatever that is, the big nuclear whatever. So do you find that because you were 36 years in a career with the Fortune 100 software,

high-tech global energy, that kind of gives you a prominence or importance to try and put some of this stuff interwoven into your stories. Absolutely. And I think that there were a lot of individual experiences. It was a great experience. It was a real benefit. I started off rather poor, so to be able to co-work with CXOs and geniuses at Microsoft and Oracle and other places was a real honor for me.

But I have to say I never, I was trained as an economist. And you recently had an economist on named Clara Matei, who did an excellent job at explaining some of the current issues that we're all facing with austerity and capitalism. But so I was trained as an economist. And so I always had a clear view of what the real dynamics were going on. And I suppose I never really fully drunk the Kool-Aid of any business because I could see the conflict between what we would tell our customers, what we would tell ourselves internally, between the goals of trying to build better products our customers, what we would tell ourselves internally, between the goals of trying to build better products for customers, but yet really focusing more on profits for ourselves.

And so I took, there was a number of experiences I had during that time that were kind of eye openers for me. And some of them were because I was somewhat of an innovator. I was always playing with newer technologies far ahead of others in the business. I implemented early stage artificial intelligence systems when I was with an oil company. I would oftentimes read science magazines that would kind of force me to ask questions that I would really want to answer. And I think the inspiration for the swarm in the last arc started years ago when I discovered a short Associated Press article. And the article only said, it was real short, less than two paragraphs,

and basically said that a program had escaped the Lawrence Livermore laboratories at Sandia. Oh, wow. And if someone knew anything, that they should contact either this professor at Sandia or this FBI agent in charge of the investigation. Now, that stunned me, captivated me, mesmerized me. I became obsessed with that idea. Now, I figured two things were either somebody at Associated Press was going to get a ding on their performance review for a typo,

or somebody at Sandia was going to get dinged for slipping. Now, that particular lab, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories at Sandia, is a well-known NSA spy lab. So in my head, I'm thinking, okay, a spy program has escaped the NSA spy labs, and they don't know how to find it. And I thought, that is an amazing story. So I actually spent several months trying to reverse engineer in my head, using my knowledge of technology and architectures. And I'm not a developer, but I've been involved with technology my whole life. So I tried to kind of reverse engineer what kind of architectures could actually enable a program to escape an NSA spy lab.

By itself implied an intent, a level of intelligence, the ability to move itself, and the ability to basically race its log trails. So I thought, well, that's an astounding set of capabilities. And we actually can kind of confirm a lot of those capabilities today through some of the more modern NSA groups, like the Computer Network Operations, CNO group out of the NSA, and other places. But back then in the late 90s, it was pretty revolutionary.

And so then I thought, okay, well, what did the program, what was the program designed to do that it had that amazing capability to basically be software and stealth? And so I went through my data center. I went through my home office. I went through my home office. I went to my corporate office. I kind of said, if I wanted to be my perfect James Bond spy program, what would I want to do?

And I came up with a list of functionalities, and then I kind of came up with some theories as to why it left or why it was missing. And at the time, one of my dear friends was a film producer in Sojourn, and he was looking for ideas. And so we wound up producing a webisode series with this. We hired out-of-state actors, out-of-work actors, photo shoots, scripts. We really had a production job.

Won a bunch of awards. We were optioned by one of the studios two weeks before the option was going to come due to FBI agents show up at my door. Wow. They were rather perturbed that I had figured out something they thought should be top secret. Now, and I was now, of course, I'm jazzed. I'm thinking, yes, I nailed it. You know, validation.

They didn't want to. They didn't want to say it in so many words. Now, I've only been married to my second wife, who I've now been married to for 30 years, but I was only married to her for a few years at the time. Of course, she was freaking out, saying, why is the FBI in my room? Who did I

marry, and what did you do? You know? So, they wanted me to take down the show, and when I laughed at them and told them, I said, no, if you guys aren't smart enough to hide it, I'm not going to be smart enough to just, you know, let you let you get away with it. Wow. And so they went to the studio and killed the deal. I had to go tuck my tail between my legs and get a job at Oracle and restart my career. But I never forgot that incident and it really started me thinking more deeply

about not just where the commercial sector was in terms of technology development but if i were part of the government i would be three five as much as 10 years or more ahead of that sector in terms of how do i apply it to our most the mostsecret endeavors, espionage, cybersecurity, national security, weapons development. There you go. And so we've seen some examples of this in history, you know, where they unleashed that virus that went after Iranian nuclear sites. The FlexNet, yeah. That was actually developed at that same laboratory.

Yeah. And then we've seen some of the rumblings out of, I don't know if I'm pronouncing this correctly, but Planeteer Technologies, Planeteer Technologies, the software company and the thing. And some of the things, I mean, even like discussions about AI now

that are being talked about. Elon Musk has his comments and some of the stealth things. But yeah, I think at one point with the Susnex. Susnex, yes. Yes, with that virus, one of the problems was it started getting loose from Iran, and then they're like, oh, shit, we've got to protect ourselves from our own virus, right? We do have a tendency, and I think that's one of the themes in my books,

is that right now our technologies are advancing faster than our ability to control them, either morally or legally. And that has some real significant implications on society and domestic stability and peace and a number of things. And so I'm using that as a vehicle to really kind of raise larger questions. There you go. And so I look at, and I always emphasize that it's not the technology itself. You know, we've seen a lot of sci-fi where artificial intelligence somehow becomes

benevolent, takes on some sort of anti-humanistic sort of views and it becomes evil. But I don't necessarily see artificial intelligence as either benign or benevolent. The real danger comes from we have tens, dozens, tens of billions of dollars each year being invested in artificial intelligence by major corporations, major governments around the world, and even some secret ones done by billionaires basically trying to develop their own edge. The dark money, the things that we don't know, and the question I always ask is, are any of those entities looking out for the good of humanity? Or are they looking out for ways to increase their profit share, increase their ability to influence people's decisions, influence people to control population, control enemies, be better at war?

Are any of those entities really doing that for purely good reasons? And the answer is no. Really? That seems surprising to me. Well, there's some good that's coming out of it, but there's always either a profit motive, a market share motive, a domination motive, and there are some good examples of AI. And the other thing most people don't realize that there's multiple types of ai

and that one ai doesn't really fit all of the models within that that kind of term and you can take something called a narrow ani an artificial narrow intelligence and that might be an intelligence that looks purely at cat scans and trying to detect cancer cells. It's actually they've trained the AI so that the AI is much faster and more accurate than the best doctors out there. So that's a good application. Now that's going to come at a cost that gets filtered into our insurance costs and everything else, right?

There you go. But now you go to the other end of the spectrum and you have uh weapon systems um being made with ai and the real danger there is uh there's an international treaty called laws lethal autonomous weapon systems that basically says that you can use ai for purposes of making your system perform at a higher level of performance, such as finding the target faster, more accurately, changing the trajectory of your missile so that it's more accurate, using fuel efficiency so they can go farther. There are a number of ways that you can use AI,

but we shouldn't be using AI to both define the target, isolate the target, and then pull the trigger. Right. There always should be a human involved in that decision to make a kill shot. And so we're now, the problem is China, the U.S., Russia, Iran, North Korea are among the small number of countries, 140 countries have signed up and say, yeah, this is a good idea. We should limit legally with treaties the use of this new technology. Those that are most advanced in the technology have refused to sign. Of course.

It's all about power. So let's get into how this incorporates into your books. I'm looking at your website right now, and one of the pitch things on the books is, if Indiana Jones had the technological savvy of Elon Musk, and, you know, I mean, James Bond, those thrillers were amazing

because of, you know, the technology of Q's technology, and that was always what made the movies intriguing, was some of the different ways he would incorporate that. So, let's talk about some of these, the books. I don't know if you want to start with The Curse of Cortez and move through them, or if we should start with Last Arc and move backward. Well, let's start with Cortez and we'll move forward. Cortez, in part because Cortez stands by itself and it was the first book I wrote. And I wrote Cortez during my career,

for the most part. It took me well over a decade, close to 15 years, to research all the elements of it. It started off as a short story because when I was a single parent for my son, he liked to read, and so I started writing. I wanted to write short stories for him. And, of course, when he was 11 and 12, he loved pirates and treasures and lost civilizations and all of that kind of stuff that we all did. And so, but as always, I wanted to have the story based on something true.

I wanted to also teach him history, mythology, archaeology. I wanted to use those stories to basically teach something factual. And so the story that captivated me that was true was in 1672, Henry Morgan took 36 ships, 2,000 men to raid the city of Panama because it was the richest city in the whole new world. All of the treasures from Inca Empire were stored there. Treasures, silver, gold, spices, things from Western Mexico were stored there. But more importantly, all of the new treasures, they'd open up the Orient. So Ming vases, Ming bronzes, silks, tusks, all of those things that came over from the Orient were stored there. Well, Morgan decided he wanted to go after the bank. So he lost 1,000 men even before he got to the city.

So he's down to 1,000 men. But even so, he conquered the city in a day, stayed for four months, torturing people for hidden caches, brought back 30 tons, over a billion, billion and a half dollars worth of plunder. Wow. And when he reached his fleet in the Caribbean, he cheated every one of his men. He gave them a pittance of the gold each and then disappeared with almost the entire treasure and most of the slaves on three ships, none of it ever seen again.

Wow. Morgan survived and showed up with an empty ship in Port Royal, Jamaica, four months later, where he was arrested immediately by the British because he had technically broken a peace treaty. But in London, the guy is a freaking hero. He broke the financial back of the Spanish. They were never able to recover it opened up the caribbean to the english and the dutch and the french and everybody else and so they sent him they came charles knights him as sir henry morgan they send him back to

jamaica with a garrison of soldiers to get rid of piracy but instead of going after any pirates he only went after one man a man who captained a ship called the Cagway, which was part of his fleet, who cheated him in Panama. And then he went back and basically went into this, instead of going after his billion-dollar plunder that he had already killed thousands of people to get, he went into this drunken, haunted, depressed debauchery and burned his logbook so the world would never know what happened to his plunder. Wow. Three years after he died, the whole city of Port Royale sinks into the notion,

including his grave. At the time, many of the locals swore that they had been cursed by Morgan. Wow. All of that is factual. And, again, it was one of those things that I couldn't get out of my head. I wanted to find out two things. One, really hard to lose, harder than you think, to lose 30 tons of stuff, three ships, and 500 bodies without somebody finding something. Exactly. In fact, I discovered the guy who did,

and I'll get back to that in just a second. The second thing I wanted to find out is what happened to Morgan. What traumatized him so deeply? What scared him so profoundly? What made him just shake in his boots and give up a billion dollars? That's a lot of plunder to give up when he had the ships, the power, the manpower, the ability to go after and get it. And even if he had to pay off the men who helped him, there was plenty there. And then wuss out to the point where he would burn his logbooks. And so answering those two questions took me many, many years of researching. I read every book, every biography about him,

including the man who was on the trip to Panama named Alexander Esquimelian. I researched every island he was ever known to have gone to, every place that had a rumor, every place that had a Morgan name slapped on a tourist door. And I went diving in places that were interesting. I surveyed Mayan ruins. Along the journey, I had a cartel thug threaten to kill me, which I had to deal with separately.

It was an adventure in and of itself. And there was a guy named F.A. Mitchell Hedges in 1906 to 1911 was digging on an island called Roatan. Six months before he disappeared from the island entirely, he claimed that he had found Atlantis. Oh, wow. Really weird claim. Most people laughed him to scorn.

Several months later, he disappears. Now, the islanders at the time thought that he had died. You know, it was a very treacherous island. He was exploring caverns and caves he was off treacherous reefs maybe fell overboard you never know well he shows up in new york a few months after that with six million dollars of 1911 dollars so it's like 250 million or more today wow of newly smelted gold so he had he'd smelted it down so he nobody could tell the origins of where the gold had come from. And when they asked him where he found the gold, he lied to them as well, just like Morgan.

He wouldn't tell them. He basically gave them a story that they knew right away was a lie. He wouldn't really change his story. He went to England, bought a castle, and wrote his memoir called Danger, My Ally. I read that too. In his memoir, he never described how he found the gold on roatan nor would he describe what he found what he was also famous for which is finding the crystal skull so the so that became a fascinating story for me and i started researching the island of roatan

more and it turns out that henry mor Morgan's uncle, Edward Morgan, had conquered it 30 years before that from the Spanish and turned it into a raging pirate base. And so Morgan knew the island well. And it was a volcanic set of islands, actually. They're now called the Bay Islands off of Honduras. It used to belong to Belize. And there's volcanic lava tubes and caverns and all kinds of things. Many of them have now submerged. To this day, the island, the locals, refuse to go to some of the caverns on the east side because they claim that they're haunted by evil spirits.

Now, that connected me to something I'd read about Morgan, which was that he was hyper-superstitious. So something happened that really scared him deeply. Now, as it turns out, that island has conquered by the – all the indigenous people on the island were massacred 100 years before by an Inquisition Spanish massacre. That massacre ended a 2,000-year pilgrimage to the island before anybody bothered to say,

why are people canoeing 50 miles out of here? What's so special about this place? There were some ancient Mayan, they weren't Mayan, but there were ancient markers on the island that were pre-Mayan. They were so old they really couldn't read them, so they didn't really know what they were for, but there was something, the island, by studying geology and a number of other things in Mayan mythology to the 5,000-year Mayan calendar and, and when I studied their creation myth, they led me into studying their end-of-the-world prophecies written by a prophet named Shalambalam, who actually predicted that the Spanish would come 25 years before they arrived. And so this was all just a real incredible adventure for me. So rather than writing sort of this, you know, 100,000, you know, 100,000 word or 500,000 word sort of epic journey from across thousands of years of history,

I decided to basically create modern characters who had a family history on the island and sort of create an action adventure thriller that as you went through um the the the the actions or the the events within the plot that you would discover and uncover these things and connect these these events together um and that was really kind of that how that story came out as i said it took me so long to research that by the time i finished doing it my son was grown so it was no longer a children's book. And so I thought, well, that's good because it's way too much to put in a children's book. And that became the backstory for The Curse of Cortez. There you go. And so you bring it to modern times and you have a character. Tell us about

the character and what they're involved in. Well, it's a family. Sophia Martinez is what she believes is the last of her family name. She was orphaned as a child. Her parents both died tragic deaths. And her family's been under this supposed curse for many generations. And she's a modern woman. She's a tour operator. She has the internet. Even though her culture really is super superstitious, she's half Garifuna, she really hates it. She hates all that stuff and wants this shadow off of her head because she thinks she's the last one of her family. And so when an earthquake destroys part of the family home, it uncovers a number of ancient relics that she doesn't really understand, one of them being a blood-soaked logbook of an Inquisition executioner named Cortez, based on a real person, and I won't go into his history.

But there was a, back at that time when you had a happy mesito, when the father died, they would take the boys and they would basically essentially kidnap them and they would be forced to live in the monastery at Mani and be trained just enough education to read and write so that they could serve the priests and the monks. When the Inquisition happened, the Inquisition in Mexico started because two boys from that monastery stumbled into a cave not too far from there and discovered a bunch of old Mayan ritualistic relics that were taboo at the time. And so that event started the Inquisition. And when they got to the time where they were doing these horrific tortures of the Mayan and the local indigenous people,

the priests were too self-righteous and holy to do it. these horrific tortures of the Mayan and the local indigenous people, the priests were too self-righteous and holy to do it. So they would actually use a lot of these half-breeds to basically do these horrific tortures against their own people. Jesus. And that was the quartets. And so she finds this story, and as part of her, she starts by going to a local museum to try and find the history thinking that the factual history will dispel this baloney about a curse

but it starts to unravel she has to discover a relative she never knew existed who inherited three pages torn from this logbook that contained the curse itself he has to engage his son who he hasn't spoken of course, from this logbook that contained the curse itself.

He has to engage his son, who he hasn't spoken to in a decade because his son blames his father for his mother's death. So there's a lot of trauma. There's a lot of family forgiveness. There's a lot of feelings of resentment and redemption. They have to work together to basically kind of get through the plots of the story. And as they do they're uncovering this history they're uncovering the connections to the mayan creation and now at the time one of the things i should mention is 13 000 years ago when the younger asteroid hit

the islands of roatan the bay islands themselves were not islands they were actually above ground they were basically wetlands, but they were basically part of the mainland. And so what was underneath those caverns in Roatan used to be accessible from dry land. And in the 60s and later in the 80s, there were a number of roads carved into the coral in Belize and off of Honduras that led directly out into the ocean for miles until they got too deep. And I believe that those roads were part of that culture that actually created that. Now, a number of researchers, including Graham Hancock and others,

have talked about the cultures in Americas and elsewhere prior to the Younger Dryas event. And we've seen cave paintings or basically on a wall in Colombia that go back 20,000 years. So the Mayan creation myth says that we were created, that the world was created destroyed three times before the spanish arrived in 1514. and so i finally realized that the mayan calendar which is 5 000 years long is part of what they call an epoch and if i followed those epochs back the second creation in the mayan creation myth says that it was destroyed by a horrible fire and flood. And that equates to the archaeology studies or archaeology that happened after the Younger Trias. We have this archaeology, we'll talk about this two, three-inch thick black mat

that covers all of North America all the way down to Columbia, including Roatan. And so underneath that, basically that was the fire that destroyed everything, and that same asteroid caused the North American glaciers to melt, which caused the flooding of the Badlands, basically caused coastal flooding, and would have basically submerged all of this wetland. So it tied all the way back, all of it tied directly to the Mayan creation myth, their myth of Xobalba, which is their underwater place of death and fear. And I believe that that tied to the caverns that Mitchell Hedges discovered

that are still avoided today and now submerged. That had to do with this lost civilization and this sunken history. It's too bad it was all sunken that it makes it harder to access it. This is amazing, the amount of work that you're putting into the research on your books and into your books and stuff. Let's get the other two books in here for time. The next book in your writing was the book Swarm, Artificial Intelligence Decodes. Swarm takes the program that escaped.

Now, incidentally, in 2016, CNN reported how Russia had hacked the CIA cyber toolkit. And in that cyber toolkit, it further confirmed my earlier analysis that brought the FBI to my home. So all of the programmable functions I had assumed were in this program were actually included in that toolkit including what we now call the deep fake video technology. So I actually turned that factual program

into one of my fictional characters. I gave it a name, Sylvia, Sophisticated Language Virtual Intelligence Algorithm. Sylvia has attached itself to this underground hacker group, a white hacker kind of group, white hacks, which are basically benevolent. And a character, and the main character there is a, he goes by the name of Derek Taylor, but Derek Taylor is not his real name.

It's actually the name of a friend who was killed in an explosion that was meant for him after he had hacked a Bilderberg Illuminati server. And so trying to hide from those who still want him dead, he basically has partnered up with this fugitive AI. And the AI has now, one of the kind of the twists in the story is that the AI has now decoded end time prophecy. Uh-oh. stories that the ai has now decoded in time prophecy oh now what's interesting about that premise is that it allows me it allows the reader to basically explore all of the various crises that we've been that have been accumulating around the world for the last couple dozen years

including climate rise of fascism population loss ofs, and prophecies or a number of prophecies in Revelation that are called the seven trumpets that talk about loss of a third of the fish of the sea, third of the birds of the air, third of the beasts of the sea, pollution of all these rivers around the world, something that would have been just unimaginable 2,000 years ago when this was written.

But if you go through what triggered me on that connection was that if you actually will read National Geographic and other scientific magazines, you realize that we're already in the sixth extinction. The loss of those beasts have already happened. The loss of the sea stocks have already happened and is actually documented. The loss of the bird flocks have already happened and already documented. And I started thinking in terms of, you know, a lot of people think in terms of prophecy as sort of this very, you're the wacko on the corner wearing a burlap sack

and carrying a sign saying the end is near. It's me on Wednesdays. Well, I started saying, well, is there a more objective? And then if you listen to a lot of pastoral or biblical teachers, there's a lot of – they focus on the allegories. And frankly, I found a lot of the interpretations had a lot of cultural, religious, racial, ethnic biases in how they interpreted the allegories. But I realized that I could look past the allegory and look at the actual results that happened,

and I could tie those results to a factual documented event. And so I started looking at how would an AI, how would I objectively evaluate this to determine whether there was a factual premise for this by using mathematics, regression analysis, probability analysis, and the things that an AI would use in order to evaluate these kind of things? And so that made the connection there. And so I tie it then, right? That's the basic characters in the story. There's a naval lieutenant who's a female. Her name is Jen Scott. She's the Admiral's daughter.

She's very ambitious. She wants to get out of the Admiral's shadow. She's assigned to investigate this missing AI and this hacker named Derek Taylor. And that kind of evolves the plot there. But I deal with real facts in terms of cybersecurity, how many identities have been hacked over the last 10 years, what are the likely things that Russia and China might be doing with those identities that might weaponize that information using AI, using AI to do cyber espionage and cyber warfare kinds of things. Now, the U.S. is one of the most vulnerable nations in the world for cyber attack.

Even though we have the most advanced defenses, those defenses are not universal across all information platforms and corporations and infrastructure. And so if I were to develop an AI that would want, if I wanted to basically develop an AI that would weaken the U.S. in advance of an invasion of Taiwan or some other major invasion, I would attack our Internet. I would basically just attack our DNS sites. They're limited in number. The DNS sites are basically the linchpin of the whole Internet system that basically converts IP addresses into the Chris Fox show, right? The name, the web name. And if I could use an AI to basically bring down the DNS sites, I could basically dismantle the internet in a matter of hours or days.

But we'd lose the Chris Voss Show podcast. We'd lose information. We'd lose communications. We'd lose banking. We'd lose commerce. It might affect some of our infrastructure because we're now cloud-based and so you now basically have a scenario that could definitely weaken and so that's part of the premise of the work of the book swarm the title swarm actually comes from

a darpa weapon that's in development today in nevada it was tested in the 2020 gaza war that can there's two versions of this weapon system one is a six inch drone system that the navy has developed and the army is developing a 15 18 inch drone weapon and these are all connected weapons so they there's they communicate with each other at the rate of about 52 000 communications per second uh signals per second so that they don't crash into each other they can form um different um formations they can do They can pass intelligence along. They have high-speed cameras. So if I wanted to go into an urban village and clear it of all enemy combatants, it's really dangerous for me to send people in to do it. I could do what we do

today, which is bomb the crap out of it, which basically destroys the village for any future use. Or we could send in these drones. Now, imagine being surrounded by a swarm of a thousand hornets. There's no way that you can swipe and shoot and do whatever you want to basically defend yourself, but it's really almost an indefensible weapon. Now, imagine those hornets are 15-inch drones with explosives attached to them. You know, we're kind of seeing a perfect example of that, I mean, in the war with Ukraine and Russia. I mean, I've been telling people, especially with the popcorn explosion elements of Russian tanks in their design, you know, you see these videos now, these drones really just hanging over soldiers and dropping bombs on tanks.

And I'm like, I think tanks are dead now because drones, and there are these little commercial drones too that they're just using. And those are manually managed commercial drones being used for these weapons. Imagine a swarm of 1,000 or or ten thousand of them where they're basically automated with artificial intelligence communicating with each other and that lethal weapon um scenario i talked about a few minutes ago it would be impractical or impossible to basically have a soldier behind each drone deciding when to pull the kill trigger now you've got an autonomous lethal weapon system that has very few defenses against it.

So that's the premise. That's the structure around which Swarm is built. Now, the last arc is the second in the series. It deals with all the same characters. It goes through, at this point, our hero, Derek Taylor, is now a fugitive, made so by Jen Scott. He's now looking for the program Sylvia has gone missing again and has left him a bunch of breadcrumb clues. And tying back to this concept of prophecy, Sylvia basically leads him to discover a number of things, which are true.

Now, part of it goes back to a prophecy that talks about a third temple, which for many, many years I thought was practically conceptually impossible to happen, given the politics and the archaeology and everything in the region. And then I discovered something. So I started investigating, well, are there any facts on the ground that exist today that could possibly lead to that scenario with a little bit of speculation? So the name, the last ark, comes from two arks in history. One is in the Ark of the Covenant that's been in Ethiopia. It was actually there for 900 years. It left Israel 2,600 years ago. It was on Elephant Island for several hundred years until the Romans destroyed that temple. Then it was taken to Ethiopia

where it was in synagogues until the Templars came through and moved it into churches. Long factual history, there's archaeology behind it and it's really been there. Most people don't know and that's been studied. Graham Hancock has done specials, other people have done specials. But in January 21, the Ethiopian army and a militia stormed the city of Aksum and basically massacred 750 men, women, and children at the church where the Ark was kept, including the Guardian. The Ark was stolen and sold in the black market.

Wow. So the last Ark speculates who in the region has the money, the power, and the influence and the desire to have an ancient Jewish relic. That ties into a second ark. In the 1960s, there was a copper scroll found in the city of Qumran, or outside in the caves of Qumran where all the other Dead Seas were found. Different than the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were all found in alabaster or clay jars, rather, it was found in sort of this fake mud wall.

So it was basically hidden. I don't even think the people who wrote most of the Dead Sea Scrolls even knew it was there. It was in this pre-Babylonian, proto-Hebrew type of language. And this story actually is confirmed by a story in 2 Maccabees. So it's confirmed in the Jewish tradition. But in the scroll, it took them years to unravel it and clean it and decipher it. But it had 64 locations where temple priests before the Babylonian invasion had hidden tens of billions of dollars worth of temple treasures.

And in the 64th location, there was a second copper scroll that described where Jeremiah hid the Ark of Testimony made by Moses. For 50 years, no one's been able to find any of those locations. They were all looking in the city, assuming it was in the city of Jerusalem, but Jerusalem had been destroyed and rebuilt so many times, they thought, well, we'll never find it. Well, about six, seven years ago, an American, ironically, came along who was an investigator, and he actually decoded all 64 locations underneath the ruins of Qumran itself,

which the original Qumran goes back to the Babylonian Empire era. And so he convinced the Israeli Sanhedrin, which is their kind of priestly group for a new third temple, to get interested. They got the Israeli Archaeology and Antiquities group interested. They went out and they did metal scans on each of these locations and found non-ferrous metals in every one of them. They dug down about two or three feet,

even though the scroll said that they had to dig down like nine to 12 feet. But then they said, well, we didn't find anything. They covered it up and they tried to squelch it. They didn't want the rumors to go around that there was treasure there because Qumran is part of the Palestinian West Bank on the Dead Sea. If Israel tried to dig there, they would lose everything. It would go into this military warehouse it would be tied up in a tribunal

they would never see anything ever again it's like the last scene of the Indiana Jones movie all over again yeah where it goes into the warehouse and forget it, it's lost again now another 2,000 years before we find it but that was about the time that Netanyahu and Israel started

really pushing for a single state solution. So under the premise that under a single state solution is the only solution where they could actually dig those treasures out of Qumran and actually own them, including how to get to the Ark of Testimony made by Moses.

Wow. That's extraordinary. Those are some of the factual pieces. I also include the solar winds hack in the story and how that the solar winds hack was the most dangerous hack in our history. We've spent billions of dollars defending against an external attack on our infrastructure. The solar winds was ingenious hack because it went through, it has moles within the software industry that included this virus within a normal software update. 18,000 corporations, eight major U.S. agencies all had these updates, and it was discovered by accident nine months after the update had occurred. Wow. We still don't know for sure.

They can't find any incidents of the program disabling anything. They can't find any incidents of the program stealing any information, which tells me it was there to add information. That's important because a RAND Corporation study that went to the DOD in 2019 said that one of the top ten risks that we have in our national security is what they call AI data poisoning. So AI is based on tons and tons of data. For example, the chat GPT software that just came out

has 175 billion individual data points. The next version of it will have 100 trillion data points. But if I can start introducing bad data into that mix so that I could eventually cause a sabotage of that AI, and we have AI running our infrastructure, our national security, many of our submarines and nuclear power plants are run by AI because it's more efficient than using humans. If I could basically introduce that sabotage, it's an untraceable form of sabotage. Oh, wow. So I bring in all of these things into the mix, and then I add a speculative scenario

of a former U.S. president. He's unnamed. He's just a fictional president, but he's under criminal indictment. And rather than going to trial, he flees to Saudi Arabia, where he declares asylum, where he and his buddy, the Crown Prince, restart a peace deal for political theater using one of these arcs as an incentive to basically start to have peace with Israel and build a third temple. So we've kind of blended from the original swarm into the last ark, right?

There was somewhere in here we moved from that. Because I was going to try and make sure we siloed that. So the last ark is part two in your SNO Chronicles. What does the SNO stand for? Spinet Online. There we go. It's about snow. So we call it snow.

It's an underground group, and the way snow is structured is it's people from all walks of life, some spies, some bankers, taxi drivers, business people, every walk of life are basically the informants of this program that escaped is basically using its deep fake video technology to basically create relationships with individuals as sources of information into the real world. The analog world is considered the analog world. And so there's tens of millions of people within Snow. Most of them don't even know that they're talking to a computer. And most of them, even the people high up in the organization, don't know who all these people are. So it's essentially a worldwide set of confidential informants, as it were,

basically in relationship with this computer or the hacker, Derek Taylor, who goes by the Ailey Slapjack. And so they have relationships with these people, and they're trying to basically go after the world systems that are dominating them. Bilderberg, World Economic Forum, basically these globalized systems that are making the wealthy wealthier while making us more subjective to the wealthy. There you go. And so it's dealing with climate change, population. It's trying to deal with all these other crises that are facing us,

but doing so outside of the normal governmental structure. I wanted a hero that was different than your typical CIA, Navy SEAL, FBI, trained to kill you 14 ways before breakfast, sir, to a sarcastic, smart-mouthed, sardonic hacker who just can't help but mouth off once in a while. And did the characters pass between both books? Is it the same characters? The characters passed between both books, yeah.

And so you're getting more character development. Now, none of the characters really, they don't understand what Sylvia is trying to tell them with this prophecy stuff. They're all agnostic. It doesn't have to do, it strips away the dogma and the doctrine and looks at more, it's a vehicle to look more at the incredible levels of correlation between things that were prophesied that would happen in this time frame and things that are actually happening. And tries to get people to ask questions and have thoughts about, well, what does that mean?

What kind of personal choices does that really drive me to have? And what personal choices will it drive the characters to have? And how do they evaluate their careers and their future and their plans and wealth and things of this nature relative to that idea. Now, on some levels, I try to argue that every study I've ever read is consistent. The death rate is 100%. Wow. The question is how we live, right? We're all going to face that one way or another whether it comes from a catastrophe or natural causes if we knew that we only had certain amount of time how would

that change our perspectives and choices in life yeah right and so it the the the use of prophecy is a way of saying prophecy is not so much about how God will destroy humanity, but it's describing how humanity will do that to ourselves. And if we can see that coming, how would that change our priorities and our choices as individuals? And really, it only can happen in an individual way, because many of these things are motions or trains that we can't stop. Well, you've incorporated some amazing things into this where these are things that are being talked about. I mean, we just had Davos, and the biggest topic at Davos was chat.

The chat. Yeah, GPT. I can't say chat, I guess. I don't know why I can't chat about chat. It's already infected my brain. I don't know what that means. But no, that was the biggest subject there. It's all my friends that are in technology in Silicon Valley space are talking about it ad nauseum.

It's almost become like the new cryptocurrency. I'm not comparing that because we've seen a lot of sort of weird stuff go on with that. But it seems like I read something that this is one of the most interesting ideas or concepts to come forth. And since, like, maybe the birth of social media or just about iPhones or any sort of new technology that we've had, people are really interested in it and what the potential is. And some of the downside of it, some of my friends are, you know, they're copywriters. They're people that do PR and write ad copy. And they're kind of freaked out a little bit right now because they're being told that they might be out of a job. Yeah, implications for misinformation and propaganda are high.

We're already seeing GPT being used to develop malicious software. Oh, wow. So it's basically an AI writing more software. And one of the concepts I deal with in Swarm and The Last Ark is what happens when we start having our AI technology advancing our quantum technology, create quantum AI. Quantum AI basically then solves problems faster and then feeds that back into the original AI.

And what happens when this cycle of consciousness starts to accelerate? And there's a number of companies and individuals, something like Creative Machines Lab out of Columbia University and about a dozen others are actually working today on consciousness models for AI, and that's developing. So some of the chat GPT technology has been around for a bit of time. What's unique about chat GPT is they've created an open model that just anybody else can come in and use and pose questions to, but the technology, which I incorporate into the Sylvia program has been around for – and it's accelerating extremely rapidly for sure. And it does have both positive and negative implications to it.

And so we have to look at what's the nature of man, what's of the human nature to basically use this for good or for evil. And the answer is going to be a little bit of both. There you go. Great thrillers, great insight and technology that's being used, and so you're right on the cusp of what's going on in our world today.

There was someone who, great reviews too as well, a pulse-pounding grab-you-by-the-throat thrill ride. That's me on Fridays. You know, uh, someone else wrote, uh,

on the arc that, uh, it's a, it's a great version between Tom Clancy and another writer. I, I seem to Dan Brown, Dan Brown and Tom Clancy were to write a book together, look something like this.

And they were convinced that both Clancy and Brown would be, um, uh, proud to call me a contemporary. There you go. Any final thoughts you want to share on people before we go out? Yeah, I'd love you to get the books and read, but ask questions. Use it as a vehicle to basically think about the world as it is and make personal choices.

While I'm dealing with some very intense topics, I like to have characters that are smart, witty, warm, have good friendships. And so you're balancing out that humanity with the things that could happen. So you're not really ending with a dystopic type of field. You're ending with a sense that you want to follow these characters through more adventures. And so it's been a great experience for me. I get to do what I love, which is research and get into really intellectually deep topics. But rather than talk about it in a rather dense non-fictional format, a thriller is the perfect format for me because I get to have an exciting plot

and get you to turn the pages and get you to think. There you go. Guy, give us your.coms where you want people to find you on the internet, please. GuyMorrisBooks.com. It's pretty easy. And that will take you to buy links and everything else you'll need to know to ask questions. It gives you fact versus fiction. If I talk about programs, being able to program themselves.

I'll give you a link to an article. So all of these things that I'm talking about, they're not sci-fi. They're actually linked to things that are going on right now today. There you go. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Guy. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. There you go. And thanks to our audience for tuning in. Order up the books wherever fine books are sold.

Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss and all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and all those crazy places. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.