The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - John Robb: "Networked Tribalism, AI, and Asteroids"

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

On this episode, Nate is joined by author and technology analyst John Robb to discuss how geopolitics, information warfare, and technology are shaping how we understand the world and interact with each other. With the recent rise in global tensions and violence, plus an escalating threat of catastrophic scenarios, more and more people sense that the system is unstable. Coupled with accelerating developments in artificial intelligence, we live in an environment where interpretation and sensemaking - especially at an individual level - are more difficult than ever. What do these trends and challenges mean for governments and corporations trying to control the flow of information and data? How will near-term technological advancements affect the trajectories of politics, science, and journalism - and is it possible for individuals to be aware of and mitigate their influence? During a time where communication and collective problem solving is more important than ever, will it be possible to navigate between tribes and ideological groups amidst increasing polarization and fractured information systems? About John Robb John Robb currently publishes the Global Guerrillas Report, which covers the intersection of War, Politics, and Technology. He served as a tier one special ops, after which he went on to be a popular internet analyst, entrepreneur, the COO of a software company that open sourced the current RSS standard, and much more. He also published the book Brave New War on the subject of the future of warfare. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/b2n_Jk37cLE  Show notes, and more info: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/110-john-robb 

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagan's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Today's guest is John Rob, who currently publishes the Global Gorillas Report, which covers the intersection of war, politics, and technology. John served as a Tier 1 special ops in the military, after which he became a popular Internet analyst, entrepreneur,

and the CEO of a software company that open-sourced the current RSS standard. John also published the book Brave New War, which was on the subject of the future of warfare. This may appear to be an oddball episode on The Great Simplification, but I've followed John for a long time now and many in my inner circle make an effort to pay attention to what he says. This was a wide-raging conversation. We discussed AI augmented reality, information and sense-making, tribal warfare, fictive kinship, and even asteroid mining, which you might guess I am incredibly skeptical of. But I was also skeptical of things he said 20 years ago, which are

our current reality. In any case, I do not think you will be bored. Please welcome John Rob. John Rob, great to see you. Hi, night. How's it going today? It's going pretty good. So I've known of your work, uh, kind of from a distance for a very long time. You've been kind of ahead of the curve on, on many issues pertaining to technology, um, and global systems. Um, you've been an active speaker, um, for on an array of topics. You have a substack, uh, et cetera. Yeah, probably a lot of listeners on my program are not familiar with you. Can you bring us up to speed?

Give us a little bit of your background, how you got where you are today and, and what you're doing now. Sure. Um, astronautical engineer piloted the Air Force special apps with, uh, tier one special apps with Delta and TLTL Tim six for about five years. And then, um, first analyst, 95 through 97, at least the first one I think that got paid and got interviewed, quoted by everybody, New York Times to CNBC and whatever. Then I did entrepreneurial stuff in finance.

We did a site and whatever and it ended up selling for about 300 million and then went on to work on social networking back in 2001. Kick that off. The first social networks, you know, RSS came out of our little company, which was really simple syndication back then. And we grew social networking from there, got New York Times involved and everything else. And everything you see on Twitter and Facebook's pretty much looks exactly what we had back back then, long before they even started as companies. So back in 2003, I started writing a blog, Global Gorillas blog, on warfare. And it was really basically describing what I was.

seeing in Iraq that was different than what the news was saying. And I ended up writing a book, Brave New War, did a big circuit with CIA, NSA, that whole crowd, worked for the Joint Chiefs on future autonomous weapons. And most recently, I've been focusing on what I call the intersection of technology, warfare, and politics. So how online movements from, you know, the protest movements that we saw a couple years back to the network tribes that are battling it out online and globally. Your current work then focuses on the evolution of warfare into today's online warfare. Can you explain the three realms of warfare, what those are and how engagement in them

has changed over the last century? Well, the three realms of warfare, using John Boyd's framework. and John Boyd is the, arguably the America's best strategic thinker. He's from the military side, kind of a maverick, but his stuff is right on in terms of how people make decisions and how armies and militaries make decisions. The three realms are, you know, moral and physical and psychological. And moral warfare is very much what we see in guerrilla warfare. And it's very similar to a lot of the things that we see online. A lot of what we're experiencing is moral warfare.

Psychological realm is a lot of the disruptive elements that we saw with Trump and others, whether it's fast maneuvers between topics and moving so quickly from one topic to the next that your enemy can't create a cogent response. So whenever you saw Trump moving the topic every other day, that was an example. of that kind of maneuver warfare. Did he naturally just do that? Or was he a student of this sort of strategy? I think he naturally did it.

It fit his style. It fit his role in the insurgency. I called it an open source insurgency that got him elected and put him in office. It also worked really well with his superpower, which is really basically being able to circumnavigate the media using Twitter. And Twitter got him out to millions of people every day, tens of millions or more. And he could set the agenda. So whenever he was facing pressure from one quarter, he was able to change the topic or create an incident that allowed him to shift the conversation away from that.

And it's a very effective maneuver for disrupting the psychology of the opponent. And the final is a physical realm, which is mostly attrition. It's basically wearing down the enemy and eliminating. In the online world, we see that with big companies who are disconnecting, physically disconnecting opponents. So if you're banned and you're disconnected, that's attrition warfare. and that in the physical world, it's more artillery, wearing down the enemy, making them physically unable to defend themselves or continue on with the war effort.

So those are the three realms that I'm dealing with, and I work them into the online framework. So I'm going to get to the online framework in a second, but on a broader sense, you used to be, well, you just said, one of the very first internet analysts. And so you're thinking ahead on these issues. Is war and the resulting or inferred game theory that is attached to it, part of our evolutionary heritage, why are these mechanics so describable and predictable and observable? Well, what I try to do at least with my work is to see patterns,

a sea of frameworks that are potentially useful in being predictive of what's coming. There's a couple of reasons why we're seeing warfare in the current environment. One was McLuhan predicted this a long time ago, well before me back in the 60s, when he said, you know, World War III will be a guerrilla information war where everyone's a combatant. And that describes very much where we're at, was that where everybody's fighting over everything and basically the, you know, how we value things. And that fits, you know, very well with this environment. Another potential reason why we're in this situation is that, you know, now that we hit the global level, we're starting to turn inwards.

And any inward focus system tends to collapse, head towards, you know, entropy, accumulation, and death. And this is just a natural outcome of that decay process is that we'll start fighting with each other over all sorts of dumb stuff. And it'll only intensify as we reach the endpoint. Why did we become inwardly focused? And how would you define that? Well, I mean, McLuhan would say that we're all becoming global villagers. When he said global village, it wasn't like a positive thing. Villagers are bloody-minded.

They're nosy. They're into everybody's business. And anyone who steps outside of what they perceive, you know, the normal behavior is attacked. in terms of why we're focused inward is that our model for the world has reached the size of the world and I was digging into Boyd's theories on this

and basically what happens is that when you're not moving forward anymore you're not expanding anymore you start to focus on increasing the resolution of the increasing your understanding of what is inside the model And as you start to push down on that, what you'll find is more inconsistencies, more anomalies, more uncertainties, and those will grow and increasingly screw up your decision-making

process. I mean, we're in a world where we came up with a word microaggression, right? That's the kind of thing, an inward focus that we're talking about is that and that when the decisions go badly, we'll see states and we'll see corporations, we'll see network tribes try to push for coercive methods to force everybody into line to like COVID responses that I don't care if you think differently. I'm going to force you to think this way because all the other all the other methods I've used to try to convince you of doing something aren't working.

So this is something and we'll get back to your tribal moral warfare in a second, but this is something I've always worried about and intuitive that there's a limits to growth reality in our biophysical system. There's oil and copper and sink capacities at such. And by the way, there was a thing came out last week that was an update on the limits to growth study from 50 years ago. And it's like spot on tracking. It's remarkable how accurate it was. But there's the physical response. But as all that is happening, there's the social limits to growth that are hit before the actual physical limits. And what you're saying is that all these turning inwardly, even though we're at the peak of resources of all time

on our planet, there are these psychological dynamics that start to fray and affect the social contract. Correct. Yeah, it's a bad way of describing it would be kind of like, this is a peak, petri dish moment. You know, you see that. that experiment with the bacteria in the pet tradition, the population expands very quickly and it hits the limit of that system. It can't go any farther, can't go any, can't get outside of that pet tradition, everything starts to, all that entropy, all that foul stuff starts to accumulate and kill. Except from a strict biophysical standpoint, there is enough food and energy and resources for that amount of bacteria.

or humans and even more, but it's the expectations in the social dynamics don't allow for that pathway to emerge. Yeah, I think that would be true. But what ends up happening is that we focus inward on finding ways how best to fix everything. And there's a never-ending list of things that we have to fix. And there's no end point to that.

Too much inward contemplation is like people who are hypochondriacs or overthink their inward journey or constantly going, well, I was thinking this and this thing happened and I'm, you know, that inward focus is debilitating and especially at a societal level, especially at a global level. And we need an exterior environment. You need to get out of the house sometimes, you know, he always need to get like out and about, see an outside world that you don't control. in order to maintain mental health.

Yeah. Well, I certainly agree with that. How much of this is because of the meaning crisis that we had, you know, the dominance of global religions as agreed upon tribal grouping for a long time. And then implicitly, though, a lot of people didn't really state this outwardly, but we had economic growth for a long time. a very steep economic growth, which is now, of course, waning and only being supported by extraordinary measures by government, central banks, et cetera. So is it this subconscious

quest for some meaning and direction and goal that makes sense to people that is driving some of this networked tribalism? Well, things are definitely changing. As somebody who's been out, you know, just done stuff, you know, a lot of more operational level stuff is that you tend to think more about meaning when you're not doing that, when you're when you're stuck at home or stuck, you know, idle and not moving forward and not actually getting things done. But definitely there is a shift underway. The network is trying to, you know, create its own values framework and determine what's good, what's bad, and kind of dictate that. And it's not going well.

And it's clashing with traditional sources of meaning and valuation. You know, what's good in a life. And that's going to take some time to hash out. I don't see that as a fatal problem for us. I think that's a problem of. change in accommodation of the technologies in what's possible. It could be fatal if we see the network become completely dominant and enforces view. I've described that as the long night scenario, is that networking and AI in combination provide the means for the most aggressive

and intrusive and controlling system that we ever could imagine. That it will be in all our lives and control our perceptions of everything. AI not just scolding you, is AI as a persuasive entity? I remember the CEO of OpenAI said the superpower, we're going to see this. The greater than human intelligence we see out of Open Eye, the AGI that comes out of that will probably be most evident in its ability to persuade, above all.

And that's kind of, that kind of scenario, something I want to avoid and what I'd rather have is a more decentralized approach where we have a lot of pockets of people developing ways to live with this technology, live with on the earth in a positive and sustainable way and a good way. And maybe one of those pockets of innovation will yield a solution that we all can adopt in the future if the other ones fail. But by having it all won, we're risking complete collapse. I'm not an expert on AI, but I think it's important to wait into some of the things you just said. So on Open AI, the parent of chat GPT, the various versions, I've noticed that these chat GPTs, which is not all AI.

There's lots of AI and machine learning and other categories. It's not just the chat bots, but a lot of these chat bots are really biased, depending on how they were trained and what they learned. So do you think that the people behind the scenes of the various AIs in a McLuhan sort of sense that the media is the message can persuade lots of people? First of all, that presumes that lots of people are using. chat GPT or whatever. I don't know what the percentage is right now.

Is that the fear on the long night scenario? Is that people exponentially get more influenced by AI even than they were from social media? Yeah. My bet is that AI, whether it's chat or visual or whatever, is going to be the interface we're going to use for almost everything. It's going to be in every product, every service. It's going to be in the background. And that a lot of, from a technological kind of standpoint, a lot of the fight that we're seeing now over values is over who gets to insert their values into these AIs.

And they call it alignment. Who can align the AI to their value set? Who's allowed to? And it's a big fight. What will happen is, I mean, you're going to have AI tutors for your kids. kids, right? And people don't think that that will happen, but it will happen because these AI tutors are going to be better than any teacher that you could possibly have at school. Could you tell the AI tutor? I don't want any subjective opinions. I just want what's

demonstrable by science taught to my kids, or is that just... I don't think that's going to be possible. No, I mean, I'd rather see, that's why I've been pushing and I've been advocating for open source AIs and that if they're borrowing and taking all this data, my data, your data, and everybody else's data to build these things and they're incredibly valuable, they should at least open the code so we can see what's going on. And that I think that if people have access to these open source alternatives, they will be able to use those to maintain a degree of sovereignty. But if it's all dictated from whoever is able to align everything, you're not going to have any choice in how your kids are raised

and how things are rolled out globally. So things, and you use tutoring as one example, but things like that will be so cheap and easy that it will almost be the default path for all industries. I mean, I want to drill down in that, but how do you feel now looking at what's happening with AI versus 28 years ago when you were the first internet analyst? Is there a parallel?

Is this a totally different deal? No, it feels relatively similar. Now, I mean, there's an incredible amount of activity, and a lot of people are working on a lot of different elements and different ways to apply it. And I've used the tool, and I subscribe to it, and it's amazingly useful and good at what it does. And I see it's going to be used in just about everything.

It's just almost inevitable. Let me ask you a sell. serving question. I'm worried about a lot of things about AI, warfare being one, AGI and another, a big one is that will make things more efficient on all scales and therefore acts as a larger straw on the natural systems of Earth, ecological wise. But I am an educator and my role as a podcast hosts and a video purveyor and trying to do a reality 101, eight-hour series of videos for young people early in 2024. Is AI going to replace people like me and podcasts like me? And how would that happen? I've never, I didn't plan on asking you that. I've never thought

about it till till the second. But what are your thoughts on that? It will replace you if you don't use them to leverage yourself. So you won't be doing exactly the same thing you're doing. You'll use it to make it easier to produce what you produce. And you'll do it faster and you'll do it with higher quality and you'll do it with more interaction and more things that you could do. But if you don't adapt to that, it's like people who didn't get on the Internet or people who didn't adopt computers early on. It's going to be tougher if you don't leverage it. So that's from a presentation of snazzy looking videos and seamless transitions and colorful things.

But the real special sauce, I don't know if you watch my podcast, I do these Franklies where I kind of go for a bike rat and I think about the connections between the disciplines and how they fit together. And the AI can't access my brain. They can only access the things I've said in the past. Sure. So can AI really replace how I think and the inferences that I make to help people understand our situation? Okay, well, I do think that AIs will be increasingly able to model you. Okay. And so right now, just based on all of my, I had like 20 years of writing on Global Gorillas, that blog and what I've done on Twitter and everything else, and it sucked it all in.

I think even got my book in, it can write posts in my voice. And it can prepare and contrast me or my ideas against other thinkers like I did against Boyd the other day. And it was pretty darn good. Wait, you ask AI to compare your own thinking to Boyd's thinking? Yeah, it did a great job. Wow. And that if I have a new topic that I haven't really written about and I ask it to speak in my voice or write an essay in my voice, it does a pretty good job.

If I set it up with the right kind of questions, it can not just replicate me, but if I set up my question in the right way, way, it can dig into topics that I haven't seen anyone write about yet. I mean, really complex topics. You know, I wouldn't have been able to find anything that was similar online, which is awesome. I mean, so it does a pretty darn good job. Long term, I do think, though, that we're going to be modeled. I mean, you've heard the simulation hypothesis, haven't you?

Yes. Simula and Simulacrum. that, please explain it. Okay, the physicists, I'll think in terms of, you know, modeling physical reality at the computational level. Me, I'm, you know, more open to the idea that they would model human beings in our experience, which is a very, you know, much lighter computational load in order to create people that are similar, they did as something on Westworld recently that was similar to that,

is that, but you can do it much faster in a kind of a simulated, an online environment and that if there are minds that you want to recreate, you'd run them through a bunch of simulations to create that mind. And then you could ask it questions within its environment and that you want solved. So the potential is that we're not actually in reality, but we're actually in living and we're doing this interview in one of those simulations. Given the computational power and the ease of simulation, the number of potential simulations that could be run in the next 20.

to 30 years, it's very unlikely this is the actual reality. It's more likely that what we're doing right now is within one of those simulations, one of those 99.999% chance that we're living in the simulated environment. Yeah, I don't buy that. Yeah, I know. Well, of course, the immediate reaction is good. And I don't buy it. Yeah.

Okay. But that is what inspired the movie The Matrix, right? Not really. I think the Matrix was kind of a funky thing, is that they just created the simulated reality that all these batteries. Humans were used as a battery for the machine and they would just live in the simulator. What I'm talking about is like simulating a person's life because you want, you know, recreate an Einstein. And you take every bit of data that you have on them and try to. simulate those experiences such that when when you finish that simulation that mind is as close

to the real outstanding as you hoped so the more you actually put on more you put online the easier it is to simulate people oh i have so many questions now john first of all but this is kind of a tangent but okay sure well no go ahead yeah it's it's a tangent to your to your core work but i think it's central and I haven't had anyone on the the show other than maybe Daniel Schmachtenberger that understands this stuff. Einstein and Nate Hagen's what is online is high graded. I'm talking about my thoughts about the world. I'm not talking I'm not uploading my problems or all the things that I'm not sharing publicly. So AI would only access a tiny part of the larger self of me and the same with Einstein.

He's not writing equations about his personal life and some of the other things he cares about. So AI would only focus on a certain aspect, right? Right. Yeah. No, it's harder pre-internet, pre-network. And as we continue to upgrade the network and it becomes more, intrusive in our lives and more with us all the time

in monitoring us and kind of acting as data collection. It'll collect enough data that it makes it easier and easier and easier to do. But I suspect that everything you've written on Twitter and everything else it's going to be poured over by AI historians looking for kind of classic minds

or minds that could be useful and coming up with unusual answers to questions and that they'll pull individuals they want to recreate and minds they want to recreate. And of course, relatives could do it and other people who want to see that person again. But more likely, you know, if you want to get unusual answers to difficult problems, you want to create those people again. So, so some of the episodes on Black Mirror were not such science fiction after all, perhaps. Correct.

I mean, that was written based on the earlier philosophies of the stuff or thinking on this stuff by Boastrum and others. So there's a pejorative term in our culture called a Luddite or a Neo Luddite, someone that's kind of against technology. I think if everyone understood, like everyone, 330 million Americans, understood and believed, to the last 10 minutes of this conversation, that a lot of people would want no part of that. Right. But are they going to be forced into it? Is it going to be a compulsion,

either fear of being left out or some top-down necessity like Skynet or some of the things in the movies? Are we going to have a demographic in society that can choose to walk away from all this stuff? Or is that not going to be possible? You know how like a, if a human body got close to a black hole, the gravity on the head would be just a little bit more than the gravity on your feet and that it would stretch you out into this line of molecules. I'll take your word on that. Yeah, no, it ends up that you'll just have a line of molecules as they proceed into the black hole.

Is that we're kind of in that kind of situation in society with technology. I mean, as these things start to roll out, as we start to get augmented reality and selective reality. And then you get AIs and AIs as companions and AIs as accelerants, tutors, is that a certain subgroup is going to pull away, and they're going to be people at various stages all the way down to people who are disconnected. And it's going to be harder to make money in the disconnected and lower strata of that, more likely to be automated, more likely to be replaced, more likely to just be used for their data production.

Because every single work, every single job that you have, everyone going forward is going to be a data strip mining effort by your employer. They're going to be, they're going to be sucking your data and feeding it into system to either get paid for it or to put into a system that they control in order to replace you. Who owns all that data? Well, that's the thing that we didn't fix. I went in front of the Senate a couple years ago and about social networks and data and how this all work. And it's just before Open AI hit. And I said, we have to get this data thing right. Because data is becoming the new oil.

It's becoming so important. It's going to be used. All these social networks are accumulating it, Google included, to build AIs. And people are like, I, it's not going to have or happen. But what we need to do is make sure that people have data ownership. Just as a core right is that otherwise, you know, we're going to be like, surfs. We're going to be contributing our labor for free to the to the to the to the nobles and feudal feudal landlords and our data will be strip-mined and

excavated and we'll get no benefit in creating what these AIs are going to be the most valuable technological artifacts we've ever created and built off of our data and we don't have any equity stake in their in their in their value. They're just saying hey we'll give you cheap services or relatively cheap services based on these AIs and that's the payment you get for contributing the data that produced these. Open AI would have been possible without strip mining our data. So many questions. What about I've read that some of these big AIs or the firms that control them actually

manufacture big data, that they don't need John Rob or Nate Hagan's data, that they create their own data and then run AI on that. How does that fit in? Yeah, there's a new method. that they're working on to create synthetic data. Problem with that is it's going to end up being biased in the direction. There's a new data that's going to see. The beauty of the original large language models, the original is that they initially

focused on just predicting the next word or next sentence. And as they crunched it down, as they compressed it, is that they found that it actually did this at the conceptual level too. They basically created a world model for our abstract space. And it's a raw conceptual model of our civilization's abstract space. And they won't let anyone have any access to it. What they ended up doing then is trying to reinforce behaviors that they're kind of driving it and saying so it will have outputs that are constrained within certain limits. And I think the synthetic data is going to end up doing that too. You, if you you don't have enough data in that's right and good, well, let's create it synthetically

and then feed it into the model and train it. So it biases in the direction that you're hoping it goes. So they have 70% of a, of a dossier on Nate Hagen's and the 30% that's missing, they create using synthetic data, but it's biased on their own objectives. And so that profile and how they steer it. is then biased. Yeah. I mean, there isn't any kind of objective reality when it comes to AI output in terms of valuing it.

It's all based on what we like. That's a hidden secret about AIs is that we don't fund. We don't put money into. We don't put training dollars into or training GPUs into building AIs that produce stuff that we don't like. We don't value. They're kind of beholden to us. It's a built-in cycles.

we as individuals or we as a mass market. If we're not willing to pay for and not willing to use it, they won't build it, they won't train it, they won't to do that. So the more they go off on tangents, the more they go in the direction of synthetic data, the synthetic data may not reflect our wants and needs and they could end up creating a model that we don't use and don't like. Getting back to your, the warfare topic, as we head into difficult times because of physical limits and looking inward, etc., is it possible that AI will then catalog the political views and ideologies and historical statements by mining everything, someone said on their Twitter or Facebook or whatever, and that looking back that that itself is a

modern version of the SS or some, you know, social police. Is that something you worry about? Oh, you know, that's that long night scenario. Is that we, that the corporations have built a surveillance state, if they switch it on, that would make all the surveillance states we've ever seen in the past look like tea parties. It's not even close. It, they would require, those old states required rooms and rooms and rooms of bureaucrats sitting at desk, pouring over documents and other things. This thing can, this thing, these AIs can monitor, cajole, persuade a billion or more people simultaneously in real time. This is not a, that's, that's where we're headed is that I would rather not see this so centralized because networks tend to centralize. You know the whole Metcalf's law, right?

Is that the value of a network is square the number. No, it's it. And so a network that's big is so much more valuable than two networks that are like half, half the size. It's not like additive. So we tend to centralize networks. And that's why everyone is competing to get the best AI because the best AI will win out against all the others.

It'll just, yeah, there'll be maybe one or two. and they'll destroy everybody. And then there'll be the Chinese AIs, and a couple of them, and then, and nobody else will get anything. And Europe is turning off data accumulation. They're basically allowing people to destroy it. And so they're going to be left out and become technologically impoverished. So wait a minute. So Europe is, is in effect listening to your advice, saying that data ownership.

They're going exactly, they're going for privacy. So privacy destroys data. It blocks it. It doesn't let it accumulate. doesn't feed the AIs that will customize experiences and products and services, both as a seller of those and as a receiver of those. So Europe is turning themselves into a kind of a technological backwater. It's like banning cars. Okay. It's like, we like our horses. You know, you're going to fall farther and farther and farther behind. Data ownership is that I should have a royalty,

I should have some say over how my data is used. I want robust markets. I want a financial market equivalent for data. For when I give data, you know, you extract data from me at work or if AIs who are on Twitter or any other networks I'm using and they use that data to build an AI, I want a level of veto power over it, but I also want to make some money on it. If that thing ends up becoming the most valuable thing, you know, of that year, I want to have an equity stake in it. And I think if I had companies, you know, basically firms with a fiduciary duty to actually get me my best deal and get you, your best deal and get all of us our best deals, because we pool our data together to do this, I think that would give us a much better system long term than a system that's based on extraction alone.

Okay. Now I'm confused because if that happens, you said that AI is following the dictation. of us, broader society, which right now we are turning billions of barrels of ancient sunlight into micro-leaders of dopamine and convenience and short-term stimulation and comfort, et cetera. And if all of a sudden there's a boost in productivity, we're going to consume more, but we're going to get a rebate because our data is responsible for part of that. Isn't that just a huge positive feedback draw on energy resources and the environment? I mean, training more AIs that chew up the electricity of a major city?

Well, not only that, but the consumptive path. Oh, yeah. Well, I do see a shift and I think it'll be more forcible than it should be, is that people will start to consume more virtual goods. So once you get to AR, and that's really, really close. I mean, you know, 2007 is when the first smartphone came out. By 2021, 5 billion people were using, right? So it's possible that in 15 years, we're going to see people using augmented reality

that will change their visual field, their auditory field, selectively, as well as augmenting it and adding things. And if you want to decorate your home, you won't buy Martha Stewart's package in that. the store at Walmart, you're going to do it visually using that. You could share it with the rest of the family and anyone who visits. So you wouldn't buy the physical goods. There would be this virtual good, which is a fraction, fraction of the energy cost, inherent energy costs associated with buying a good. And then also I might have an augmented reality experience of going to the Bahamas instead of actually flying there as one example.

Oh, yeah. It'll make it instantaneous. You could be anywhere. Effectively, You know, the reason why we didn't, everyone always said, you know, technology is not advancing. And, you know, airline travel is an example of why that hit the wall or that hitting the wall that it's not doubling or improving. And I'm going, it just shifted. Shifted when you start to do telephone calls using video and you get more immersive audio. And you're getting 80, 90% of the visit for that meeting in Paris that you would be if you were there. and it's so much cheaper that you're opting for that. Now, when you get to the fully immersive, then you don't miss any of it.

You're instantaneously everywhere. That feels a little like the Matrix to me. Well, it's, I mean, augmented reality is different than virtual reality. Virtual reality is this gaming fantasy world, right? And augmented reality is this world plus digital enhancement. And if you visit me in this world, you're in my living room with me, talking to me as if you were physically there. The only thing I can't do is touch you, which, you know, that's the only barrier. Your physical reality might look like a scene from Sanford's sun, but your augmented reality looks like the perfect color and backdrop and cool ass.

It gets crazy really quickly, but it's like, I think there will be. kind of norms and standards develop so we can converse and interact. Because I can change, for instance, I could go down the street and I can change what everyone looks like using augmented reality. I get to put in a costume. Because you're wearing some sort of goggles or something? Yeah. I mean, oh, okay.

So augmented reality is that you'll have either contacts or glasses that can modify your visual environment, either subtracting things or changing things. I could do it day to night, night to day, that kind of thing. You've been ahead of the curve on these tech issues, which was one of the reasons I invited you on the program. I normally wouldn't cover this topic. But how likely, what sort of odds, given all the other crap going on in the world that you're aware of, how likely is the scenario that you just described to be our reality in the

next 10 or 15 years? I mean augmented reality and selective reality, that kind of thing where you get, shoot, you're Even, because the AirPods you have right now can be selective. It can mute everything except for the person talking to do. So that's just an example of it's already rolling out. And the first kind of ARVR high-end stuff is coming from Apple early next year, maybe a year after that or so. And then once it hits, it's going to be like crack. 15 years, 5 billion people, easy.

It's going to be addictive. Last week, I interviewed Art Berman. And his podcast will air before yours does. And he's quite confident that we are now passing because of declining well productivity in the shale fields that peak oil is now in the past. And it's not going to be a steep decline based on geology. There's above ground factors with wars and other things that might impact it. But we're going to have less oil going forward in the future, almost for sure. how do you view AI and some of the things you've been talking about with respect to both limits to growth and declining energy quality and energy availability of the kind that we've used up until now?

Yeah, that's the tough one. As we're more restricted in the future, our traditional economic growth path is limited. There are 3 billion people clamoring to become part of the middle class that's now increasingly unattainable. And it's going to make everything even tighter. I mean, just the last 20 years with just the China and the other people entering the middle class, putting strain on the whole system, both from climate to resources, is that as this kind of virtual environment starts to emerge, I do see a big push. to get people to start moving towards replacing physical goods with virtual goods, virtual

experiences, and that attempt is to ride the energy efficiency gains you get from computation. It's like Kumi's Law. It's like every couple of years, it becomes twice as energy efficient to deliver the same compute. So is to just increasing, I mean, it doesn't take much bandwidth and much manipulation of experiences to fill up our whole sensory matrix. So, you know, if we start replacing that, then we're becoming more and more vulnerable to AI, more and more vulnerable to manipulation and control, you know, especially if tied to a centralized kind of system, we get tied into a narrow orthodoxy in a way of looking at the world that is imposed on us. And that's just evolutionary death and, and, and,

collapse. So that's the reason why I was pushing for space earlier is that unless we start going out and changing this dynamic from everything, from energy to resources to the way we look at the world and beyond, we're in this collapsing dynamic that's not going to end well for us at all. But it's a decline is different than a collapse. I mean, we could have half to two-thirds of what we have today and maybe there's a smaller population and maybe we have less resources per capita and maybe we still have some complexity and I mean it's not I don't think I don't think it's a collapsing complexity in that sense is that um which is always potentially possible because a collapsing complexity from the most complex portions of civilization is is would be catastrophic

most people can't even grow anything, right? Is that the system will become more and more domineering and more controlling in order to maintain order and structure as the physical world dimensions. And that could go on for a long, long time. Our order and structure about to be about to leapfrog economic growth and more GDP as kind of the generator function of elites in charge. Like right now we're optimizing GDP kind of as our cultural goal and AI and corporations are underneath that. But I'm wondering how the whole authoritarian control dynamic is going to unfold if what

you're saying is true. Well, I mean, you already see it kind of on the edges, right? So the environmental movement is more about control and structure. All of the DAI stuff. is control and the structure. It's imposed. It's based on alignment. You must comply. It doesn't really matter if you don't make more money. It must be done. I mean, Disney lost more than half its value doing that. So it's like it's already happening. And, you know, I mean, just in the economic sense, our system is, if it doesn't continue to grow to handle, it won't be able to handle

the debt load. Correct. You know, that kind of environment after that will be very dire and slow and a grinding existence. And I think people will move to the- I've called that the great simplification, John. Yeah. Right. And, you know, what happens when you, you know, you don't have access to the things

you used to is that people move to the things that they get access to for very inexpensively, which is this virtual stuff. I mean, you go anywhere in the world right now. Even the poorest places, people have those smartphones. They're connected. You go into the Nitridelta people have three different services they're connected to, three different phones depending on which ones have connectivity at the time. And the same thing is going to happen to augment reality.

It's an ultimate escape. It's an ultimate way of controlling your experiences in the world. And if you don't do it in a positive way, a productive way, a way that's moving you and society forward, it's going to be used to distract you. And who's going to be pulling the strings there, the control levers? Is it corporations and billionaires or governments or some combination? Corporations for the most part with some government input, but most of those government

input is on behalf of network tribes that are kind of wanting certain things, certain levels of alignment. Now, it's a very, very small group. We've sent, the funny thing is that we, we, we won against communism because of their centralized decision-making system. You know, our decentralized system was more innovative over time and more productive, was able to solve problems. And that once we defeated communism and ended the Cold War, we globalized and financialized.

And that financialization returned us to a central, created a centralized system again. It was where very few people make most of the decisions about, everything that goes on. And they don't make good decisions. They don't make investments like you and I. I mean, all the billionaires I know, it's more I want to hedge my stuff or I want to gamble wildly. That's my experience too. Yeah, there's no in between.

Yeah, there's no in between. There's no like, oh, I want to invest in this. So it has a long-term payout. The only kind of anomaly in that space is to extend Bezos and, of course, Musk. Musk is a complete anomaly. Yeah. That he invests in the long term. So it's weird and kind of nerve-wracking to see so much riding on Musk, so much of the future,

from electrification of cars to the autonomous driving to all of space. Space was dead, and he revived it. And his potential to actually push that out and actually make that. a viable frontier for us again, expansionary frontier is, there's a lot to write on one relatively unstable guy. You know, it's a under pressure from everybody. And he's deeply involved in, in AI, presumably as well. Oh, he's got an AI coming.

So he's got the, he's got Rock, which is his AI built off Twitter data. And, you know, that's going to be another piece of this whole thing where, and he's going to open source it. So if you want to use. that in order to teach your kids or work as your assistant or work with you and help you augment your life, you'll know what is doing and how to change it and how to modify it. Because most of these open source AIs, you can get mods for them that point them in certain directions.

They're not dictated to you. Here's a question I didn't anticipate asking you. Okay. There's the factual implications of what you're saying and people need to educate themselves and learn and make choices. But the emotional implications of what you're saying are are really depressing and disheartening. And like people are already worried about climate change and resource depletion and the end of growth and other things. And now I think my sense, and I have a podcast, but I'm just kind of a normal guy in the Midwest and the people I talk to have no idea of the things you're talking about.

Oh, yeah, sorry. But yeah. Yeah, no, this is your expertise. You don't need to apologize. But this, I think this is like a really depressing, um, uh, load to put on someone about the future. It's like, what? This too.

And I just wonder how humanities, uh, what we already have, I don't know what percentage of our population, but a lot who are mentally ill. And how is this going to fit in with that? It just seems like another Cisophian boulder to push up. Yeah. No, no, if cancer was the 20th century disease, mental illness is the 21st century. We just see at the cusp of the mental illness that we're going to run into. I mean, there'll be people that are so divorced from reality based on these new tech.

It's going to be, I mean, we're already seeing a little bit of it, but we're going to see it. Well, look at like Jonathan Haight was on my podcast. And now the last month or two, he's been. tweeting a lot on how having TikTok and phones for 13, 14, 15 year olds is directly impacting their mental health in terrible ways and that those schools that don't allow the phones at all have better outcomes with the students and their mental health and all that. What you're saying with augmented reality and AI, it's going to be all that stuff on steroids, right? Oh yeah, 100%. Though I do think you can raise your kids in a way that mitigates the damage that they'll experience from these online and technological experiences.

You know, my two youngest, they're Gen Z, and now they have great jobs and they're the most stable, productive people I've ever run across. I mean, granted, there's a lot of wackos that they have to deal with that are in their generation. But, man, they're just, wow, what people. What do you attribute that to? They use TikTok. They use all of that stuff. It's maybe knowing what they're experiencing. I mean, I get it on to TikTok.

I use it. I use Twitter. I use all everything. I, you know, I can talk to them about how to approach technology and how to approach stuff. I've been counseling, I'm not becoming too political, trying to stay outside the phrase that this is also tribal now. You know, people see an incident in a country.

far far from them that they're not related to in any way in the physical world, but they're treating it like, you know, somebody killed their mother, right? And you got to avoid that stuff. You've got to back off. And because not only, I mean, there's going to be that stuff every month in coming years, everywhere. And TikTok's full of that stuff. I mean, that's the big war right now is trying to rain in TikTok because the TikTok anti-Israel effort right now is so big. It's not that there's disinformation. It's just making the case that Israel is the apartheid state. You have to get rid of them. And the amount of people that are seeing that makes it's more than all of the networks, all of the newspapers combined.

every day. Is this what you refer to in your writing as tribal moral warfare? Correct. Yeah, there's a tribal moral war underway over Israel. And there's one that was over Russia and invasion of Ukraine. You know, I saw the kind of internal politics, moral warfare going on with BLM. And I was projecting that it would go global and probably hit Israel first. But when I wrote about it. In 2021, I wrote about it that it was going to hit Israel. And Ukraine hit before that. So it was like that was our first over-escalation of a conflict that brought us to a new Cold War based on network amplification alone.

And now with Israel, they've lost the under 40s in the United States. They're 80% against Israel right now. They're not going to change. and the U.S. is going to take a big hit in legitimacy with those younger, younger people, because we've signed. Even though they live in the U.S. Yeah. Oh, well, U.S. support for Israel is essential to their survival.

Yeah. There's no way around it. And it, they've lost it online. Those kids, anyone, people under 50 do not watch TV. They do not watch. They barely read the newspapers. They get most of their stuff second head. People under 50 don't watch TV, generally?

TV, TV news. So generally, the TV news audience on any given night, say, 7 million people, one out of those seven million is under 55. All the rest are. One million. One million out of seven million people, total viewers is under 55. So, and then when the kids watch it, I've seen kids react to the kind of of nightly news stuff,

coverage of this war, they go nuts. They can't believe how stupid it is and how terrible it was. And it was like so misleading and but da da da da da da. And it really wasn't that good. But boy, the reaction is decidedly negative.

My mom's 83 and she watches nightly news twice. She'll watch it again an hour later. And I don't understand it. But I digress. I don't watch any TV. I haven't had a TV since 1990. John. Yeah, me, me too. And I used to delineate people like at a party. You could kind of tell who

watch TV and who not. There was an alertness. I don't know. It's changed now because I do have a computer so I watch Netflix and whatever else. So it's not quite the same. But how are we as humans who care about the collective future and our own personal and family and community, future, how are we going to know what's true or not going forward? Not only with social media, but now with AI. And are we going to naturally self-assemble into networked tribes that are stronger than the truth? Already we're seeing that the online news sausage machine is upstream of the conventional

traditional media. So how they approach it to? downstream is usually determined online first. You can do it. It's like a pipeline. And, you know, the more I look at this, the less it is about disinformation, the more it is about how that information is interpreted. So, you know, when somebody says, well, Israel's conducting genocide, you could disagree,

but it isn't like a factually wrong on an absolutely. level. It's a disagreement and interpretation. And that, uh, and what you do and how you act and how you respond to what's going on is based on that interpretation and that's being fought over. So, uh, there's a big battle over what interpretation, what values are being put into place to, uh, you know, make your interpretation win. And so that, you know, big effort to get the networks to, the social networks to enforce a standard whereby anyone who says anything different is screened out and blocked and isn't seeing it all. John, let me ask you this.

What do you, you obviously are wide and deep on a lot of these subjects. What's your day like? Like, are you thinking about all this stuff? Are you constantly finding new information on what's going on in the world? or like how do you make your own sense making of the world as a routine? Yeah, I've set up my network so I could scan them pretty efficiently. So I have a pretty diverse set of feeds that allow me to see what's going on in every single different quadrant of the political spectrum. So I'm not like being totally blindsided by something happening in an area that I was politically blind to.

You know what I mean? Like, for instance, in 2016, watching what the Hillary folks on Facebook were saying and what the Trump people were saying, being able to see both sides as they're working it up. The same thing with all the information silos that are out there. But for the most part, I'm looking for just very specific things to pop up. And when they pop up, it kind of fits in, oh, here's this framework that I wasn't able to actually invest in yet because it was still speculative. It's not speculative anymore because now I can see evidence of it's actually happening.

It means it's potentially predictive, therefore I should write about it. And how I write about it and how I kind of get this, it requires a lot of subconscious kind of grinding. So I'll play games and I'll read books and interact with my family and that kind of stuff. I'll let it grind in my background and subconscious. And then when it gets right, then I write it. That's exactly how I do. my Franklies and and some of my videos, there's this subconscious grinding that happens when I'm with my ducks or on a bike ride or something.

I'm not even thinking about it. It's like happening in the background. So getting back to the Israel situation and Ukraine and others, one of your themes that you've written about is something called fictive kinship. And could you explain what that is? I assume it's that as our ancestors, we lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes and who was genetically related to us. We cared about them immensely for evolutionary natural selection reasons, but now the internet has given us the feeling that we're related to people halfway around the world, even though we're not. Yeah, initially it was just the clan unit, which is blood relations.

And then to get to the tribe unit, which get you at a couple hundred people, you had to create this story and a set of rituals and other things that created a bond of fictive kinship with these other people. And that they were like blood relations and that you're going to be with them forever. And they're part of your tribal family. And that when that didn't fully go away, it was just changed over time as we've moved. moved into become nation states. And patriotism and nationalism is a form of that kind of tribal bond. But it's a kind of a diluted and version of it. Yet we still kill based on it, right?

Patriotism gets people to join up. But in the online environment, there are mechanisms to hack the way we think about things. And if you, we are very vulnerable to what I call empathy triggers is that if you, you don't have any of the defenses that we would have in the offline environment. So if you see somebody being attacked, like say George Floyd with a knee on his neck and you're watching that video, you feel that knee on your neck to a certain extent. Empathy is not sympathy. It's a, it's a forcible.

Neurons. Yeah. And it mirrors their mental state. And it's forcible and it's, you know, it can be involuntary. And then you're super mad at the, at the cop and you're very connected. You create this bond-affective kinship with the victim. And if you see an Israeli kid getting killed or, you know, or you see a Palestinian kid getting killed, you know, you can create that bond-affictive kinship. And that creates that kind of tribal connection that makes you.

you were rationally angry about that war that's thousands of miles away. Enough so that, you know, like that landlord outside Chicago, they went down and, you know, stabbed to death that kid that, that Palestinian kid that used to, you know, play in the treehouse he built for him. And just because he was Palestinian, he was exercised over it. So presumably you could be exposed and influenced in a effective kinship

sort of way by having empathy towards an Israel kid that got killed but then an hour later you could have the same reaction to a Palestinian kid

getting killed so presumably who is biasing or controlling the social media or the AI that is in our feeds is responsible

for triggering and creating that empathy or is the AI itself, you know, optimizing for clicks and for emotional response, therefore presented in such a way. How do you fit all that together? Well, right now, at least on X and TikTok, you can come at it from any different directions. So you could see both, but what ends up happening is once you've created that bond-affictic kinship with one, and it's usually tied to your friend group and other people that

are reinforcing that view is that you won't see the other. And there's a lot of reasons why you'll start to screen out any atrocity by the side that you are tacitly supporting. It's that tribal dynamic. You start to adopt the kind of patterns of sorting and sifting through information in order to support that tribal narrative. Do you sift it out consciously or does your feed sifted out automatically? increasingly, it tends to be the feed reinforces it for most people. And so, and then, you know, it'll put it in front of you and then expect you to like it or to, you know, agree with it. And you, you know, you've held that tension when you saw a post from somebody in, you know, this close to you in your feed.

And you couldn't post, you couldn't respond to it because it's just, if you did, things would blow up. And that's kind of, that's kind of the dynamic. here is that now granted you know if you control the network you could control what people are seeing and you could amplify only one kind of sediment we had a little bit of that at the beginning of the ukraine war you know you know anyone who wasn't a pro-Ukraine trying to isolate Russia anti-Russia create a new Cold War push push push was marginalized and attack aggressively tell me about it that's why i didn't really talk about that as much as I would have liked to last year. And I'm afraid that I'm going to be able

to increasingly talk about less and less. I think speaking truth to power generally is going to be fraught with peril in the next 24, 36 months. Right. You know, I pointed out really early on that this wasn't the kind of rational leadership of a we need in a nuclear world. It was very the impulsive kind of reactive leadership of a networked world, but it was running up, against nuclear realities and that we needed to take a breather and figure out what we're doing and not provoke this. I mean, don't let them send drones into Moscow. Don't let, yeah, that kind of thing that would potentially lead

to a nuclear incident would end the world. And, you know, so many people were like from March on where it was like attack, tack, tack, no such thing in nuclear war. It's not going to happen. If Putin does it, it's going to prove everything we said about him is true. I go, that doesn't matter to me. That doesn't matter to anyone. It won't matter to anyone if it happens.

Yeah. Yeah, if Nuclans in New York City and everything in between that in L.A., it doesn't really matter. So let's drill down on that. How does networked tribalism, which is the broad category of what you're describing here, and in some combination with AI, how worried are you about a nuclear exchange as a result of that in the coming decade? Well, we came pretty close. closer than a lot of people would admit. I agree.

You mean recently even? Yeah, no. Yeah, with the, and there's continually, you know, incidents that are potentially could be misinterpreted because those drones hitting Moscow look a lot like cruise missiles. Could alert the wrong thing and then set off the wrong kind of response. But so the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine went nuts. so fast because there was already a network that, a tribal network that was in place fighting Trump. And Putin was, you know, blamed for Trump's election in 2016 by that crowd.

Even though his influence was marginal, he was blamed as the ultimate evil in that instance. He installed Trump in our, and caused all the misery of Trump's reign of terror, according to them. So when Putin invaded, they went nuts. They went like, this is the worst thing ever. It's like he's going to take all of Europe. Hitler reborn. We have to fight him. And that got amplified on the network.

And it just went insane to the point where everyone was disconnecting Russia, corporations across the board, people kicking Russians out of discussion groups. It was like we went to embargo effectively from the west to Russia, which is like one step away from tactical nuclear use, according to least the nuclear ladder of Khan. I'm going to ask a specific Russia-Ukraine military question in a second, but this networked tribalism and this response that you just described. And sure, there's Ukraine, Russia. you mentioned an Israel example, there's lots of potential examples. Is there any way to combat that? If we can anticipate that that is a risk for society, this networked tribalism, which is

going to be on steroids with AI in the near future, I mean, you mentioned owning your own data, but like is this cat out of the bag? Has the horse left the barn in this risk? Well, they could put in circuit breakers. How so? You know, well, when sentiment for war or violence is spreading very, very quickly, you can slow it down, deamplify it during those initial weeks. So you won't get as outside, you know, outsized response. Except the people that are in control of this stuff probably don't want, they want to accelerate that response.

I don't think the White House even knew what they were doing. They're just riding the wave. they weren't thinking. And then the, I mean, the funny thing is, is that Musk's experience with that is the reason he pushed through and ended up biting Twitter. So, you know, it's like he saw it going nuts. And he's going, you know, this is dangerous. I really have to take action. And that this network didn't have a sense of mortality because it was a group mind.

It was a swarm and that it was willing to push way up to the edge and beyond. It was maximalist in his goals. It wouldn't accept any nuance or breaking the action. The only thing they would diminish it would be an activity over time or being distracted by another event. So, you know, that's the way I played out. And he ended up buying Twitter. I think that gave him, it will give him some level of control over that.

but TikTok's a different story. So I've heard that AI has increasingly actuation potential capacity and that in the example of Ukraine and Russia or anywhere in the world, that you can tell an AI attack Russia under these circumstances, these scenarios. And the AI will do it on its own. It will send out the drones under certain capacities and it will do a swarm so that they can't be shot down in some random way.

And I don't know if that's true or not, but if that is true and we're headed in that direction, aren't there just countless examples of AI-assisted Archduke Ferdinand moments? Well, I ended up writing the Joint Chiefs of Staff concept on autonomous weapons about four or five years ago. They wanted a 20-year lookout, and they didn't have any people on staff to do it. They brought me in, and I worked out, went through their whatever they had on the available, plus made some projections and worked out some of the kinks and nuances. They were hard over on human control, but at the time, but the reality is, that autonomy in weapons, which is basically AI, changes how you're going to use those weapons

and changes in a bunch of different dimensions. You could, you could, it's like a smart mind. You could have it embed itself somewhere for a long period of time and then act, okay, and act according to very narrow guidelines. You could have it, you give it a wide variety of different targets that is allowed to hit and then allow it to go out and you can make and judicate which ones to attack. It's kind of extension of putting a little carrot on your target and then firing the missile. It's just a little bit more varied than that. The most aggressive version would be AIs that can understand and execute mission orders.

mission orders are, you know, like the kind of order that Napoleon would write out and give to Marshall May and say, okay, here's what I want you to do. It's very short and sweet and you have a lot of latitude in terms of how you accomplish it. And then you give that AI access to swarms and of different capabilities and have it execute the order. Now, that's an entirely different thing, especially if they can self-provision, if they can embed deeply behind enemy lines. That gets really wild. One of the concepts I came up with, and I don't think it was really taken up by many people, at least, is that the really big breakthrough idea in using autonomous weapons is go for a concept called zero-day war.

is that you use drones and AI's to or AI and AI is on drones and I deeply embed them in the enemy's geography. Like, you know, they screw themselves into the muck of every harbor, every river, every forest, every, you know, mountain range. There are some drones and they have different kind of capabilities. And when the day zero of the war happens, the moment it happens, they act. They set up area denial right in the middle of the country. You can't fly a plane. You can't drive a vehicle without it being under attack. They started attacking the systems and bringing them down systematically.

And that they self-provision and they acquire the own electricity and other provisions that they need to sustain themselves. And that's a completely different way of warfare is that it makes it possible that once that starts, they'll capitulate before you even get your troops even close enough to actually take the locale. Well, maybe people, maybe you only think people didn't listen to you. Maybe they did listen to you. Oh, yeah, no, there's lots of cool things you could do that would probably save a lot of human lives is that they had a, say they had a silo of space, like over the Spratly Islands,

off the shore of the Philippines, say 100 miles in circumference or in diameter. And that it's a capture of flag kind of scenario, but you can only use autonomous weapons within that confines. And it's the military might and the technological capability of the sides involved. and China, the U.S., just fight it out constantly there to see who has dominance. And that actually kind of a kind of if somebody's, you know, one side is far more dominant than the other in terms of the technology. And it's assigned to the other side that they actually should back down or things be

very quickly. That actually makes sense to me. This is all fascinating. I have a couple of hardcore questions for you. And I know that your family is home and your dogs want to be fed. So I don't want to take up too much more of your time. Though, to be honest, I could go another two hours with my questions. But what are the odds that we make it through the next 10 or 20 years without a big war involving nukes?

It just seems like so many things are pointing in that, that potential is looms large. Just your opinion. And my first thing, the first thing I ever kind of delved into the military strategy was nuclear warfare. And it's hideously complex. It's all psychological. It's all in the mind. And I was hoping, you know, that up until a couple years ago, just before Ukraine, that, you know, we weren't stupid enough to actually stumble into it again, that all of our opponents you could actually visit and vacation in at that moment. And that all changed so quickly, showed that we're far less intelligent than I ever suspected.

So is there a potential chance? I mean, there's a relatively high chance that we could see a nuclear exchange. Now, hopefully, if it is, it's limited and it's so horrifying that we react against it. Just like, I mean, we were lucky. We get an emotional reminder of World War II. end. Right. I mean, it may have been morally wrong to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war quickly, but we are lucky they did it because that reinforced the horror of nuclear weapons and prevented the war that followed that would have been fought with them.

And to far more devastation, I mean, we were able to navigate a tightrope, the whole of the Cold War and not trigger a nuclear annihilation of the West. to, of the northern hemisphere. And that's a good thing. I just don't think our leadership right now is beyond the JV level. They're not serious enough people. And Biden has a little of that, but it's kind of scary, is that, you know, how prone they are to just jump on the bandwagon.

And I think there is like a little bit of sentiment inside at least the U.S. administration that, you know, things were easier when we were. in the Cold War. People listened. You know, if we could return it a little bit to the Cold War, we can get back to that level of stability and compliance with government mandates and things, but that's not, did happen and won't happen. This leads to my second question. I've been in a different overlapping realm than you for the last 20 years looking at the

system science of the human predicament, energy, resources, environment, behavior, economics, money, geopolitics. And I've concluded that there is one risk and domain that underpins all others, and that is governance and decision making. And given what you've said on AI and given what you've said on networked tribalism, how does a leadership or a government go beyond JV level? And especially in the U.S., how do our decision-making systems avoid the bad feedback loop of poor decision-making in this world fraught with peril? Do you have any thoughts on that? How does the political leadership in the U.S. mature? I don't think it does.

And for a bunch of reasons, one of those, the problems that we're facing are so complex that our leadership style and the method of government. and this is beyond its capabilities. The classic thing is in a complex environment, you have to try out a lot of different things, and you pick the ones at work and reinforce them. We don't, we're more, this is the way to do it. This is the bureaucracy says this. And if you don't like it, we're going to force you to adopt it.

Also, our system doesn't have any opt-in features, meaning that it doesn't have any equity participation in the sense that I get benefit for participating in it. And in a network world, that's important. and it's actually a requirement, we just kind of assume because you're inside the geographical borders, you will be loyal to it and contribute to it. And, of course, when you find that people don't think that way.

Another thing is that we're living, we're seeing a kind of a hollowing out of the old nation state. It's losing a lot of the power that he once had. A classic example. Most recently, it's like a lost complete control of the border. The border's gone. It's broken. And that, you know, letting 8 million people in over the last three years, the size of, what, the 13th largest state, largely almost completely unvetted, those people are going to disappear.

They'll never be seen again now that they're in. From all over the world, it's not just central or South Americans. And a hollow state, it, you know, has the facade of being, you know, effective government. It has all the pomp and circumstance. It gets on the phone. It acts like it's in control, but it has no effective control. It doesn't have effective control of the messaging over the borders, over the physical world. It doesn't have really control over its economy because it's all over the map.

It's too big to control. It doesn't have control over its finances because it's increasingly broke. Best we could hope for it, you know, like, it. A historical counterpart to where we're at is kind of like going back to late 1800s, 1880 to the kind of end of the golden age kind of time frame and where you're high levels of foreign-born immigration in the United States. And it's chaotic. Everyone's breaking into their little communities. There's no sense of unity and common purpose or desire to do things together anymore. We can't agree on anything. It's chaotic. I mean, almost all, I mean, funny thing is, like, almost all of our progress, you know, socially was done between the end of World War II and, like, 1980 or so. It's like, and that was like during the period of the lowest level of immigration ever.

It's like we assessed and consolidated. Well, it was also the highest level of economic growth ever. Yeah. But also incredible amounts of technological innovation and like it. So we didn't need that kind of, we just went to the opposite extreme. We didn't like to do a moderate increase in immigration. We went beyond. And it's hollowing us out even faster.

So what happens at the end state of a hollowed state? I think hollow states can exist for a long, long time. More and more of the power goes to corporations. I'm already seeing that. There's a tendency now. I did a report on my Global Growth Report thing on Substack and Patreon that looked at an Edelman survey, Adelman Public Relations is the super slick PR organization that handled Microsoft back Windows 95 days. And they were slick, I mean, super sharp.

And they were looking at corporate trust. And, you know, what do people trust and what do people demand of corporations? They found that corporations are far more trusted now than governments worldwide, always the collective west across 23 different countries, and that people expected corporations start to pick up slack, start to do what governments weren't doing, and take on bigger roles. And they were willing to politicize corporations and cede to them a lot of control over their lives

that I hadn't expected to see a shift that market. It was like 60-70%. Are we going to, with all the trends that you're describing, are we all going to gradually become authoritarianism fans of one flavor or another? One of the weird things about the current environment is that, you know, we wiped out fascism as a system back in 1945, 45, right? Communism, one big bureaucracy, U.S., kind of this chaotic system, but government was portion of it and a lot of corporate bureaucracies.

and there was everything was corralled in a kind of a common framework. But as we got into this new network age, almost everyone's become fascist of one state. China's become fascist. U.S. is headed towards a fascism, a network fascism. A network fascism is different than traditional fascism in some ways. But it works on the same principles that you create a bunch of enemies. internal and external, and you use that to get a very chaotic system of corporate and government bureaucracies and NGOs and individuals aligned and facing in the same direction. And that you have

to hype and hype and hype those enemies to keep everyone focused. And it works. It works really effectively, I mean, especially in the networked environment, it's much more effective than the big live stuff that Goebbels put in place. It's almost more pervasive, more insidious. And it almost for sure will get worse with AI. Oh, yeah. And so, you know, Chinese does the same thing. It's like focus on the enemy. And that works in the network tribalism I see. It's usually anti-something. And it's anti, it's never for something like traditional tribalism. It's always against anti-racism, anti-colonialism, whatever, anti-Israel.

And climate change is anti-fossil fuel companies. Correct. And so, yeah, exactly. So the problem with the fatal flaw of fascism, obviously, or maybe not obviously to people who think it's some other jackboots or something, because you've got jackboots in communist systems too. It's like, or secret police in those systems Two, the fatal flaw of fascism is that it eventually gets you into war with everybody. And you hype up the internal threat from internal enemies to the extreme that you're putting him in concentration camps and killing him. And they kill 12 million people because they're eternal threats that are so dire or you

declare war and invade everybody because everybody's an existential enemy that's presenting an imminent danger. And it's self-defeating that way because they get rolled. It's that you can't be at war with everybody. all the time. What is the cultural antidote to what you're describing and to the listeners and viewers of this program? What's the individual antidote to some of the things, some of the risks that you're outlining? I'm big into localism or local control, regional control. The more layers of decentralization we have between us and the global environment, the better. And in terms

of technology, I'm big into having more and more control, open source AIs and like, that that could be a safety valve. I hate the idea that all the apps and everything else go through these big megastores on the platforms charge 30% tax on everything they do, but and also limited and what can be offered and what can't be. We see more like a decentralized modding community for the AR glasses and everything where I can get mods from all these different things and load them up and use them without filters. But in order for some of those things to happen, people need to be educated about these risks first. Otherwise, there won't be the demand and the push for open systems for AI.

Yeah. It takes a long time. I mean, it's like trying to sell social networking in 2001. It's like a couple thousand people, right? Tristan Harris is a good friend of mine, and, you know, they've kind of failed so far on trying to regulate AI and some of the initiatives in D.C. I mean, I don't know specifics. I talked to Tristan, too.

It's like, yeah, he was up against a Goliath. I was hoping that he would just stick with something simple, like the data ownership thing. It's like once you get the idea that you could have a kind of a banking style industry managing all our data and there's going to be reams of it, not just their names and phone numbers and that kind of crap, I'm talking all the deep data like your facial expressions and how you walk and how you, and that goes into modeling populations as a whole. and creating simulations and other things that are extremely valuable to everybody. What you say, everything you say, how you say it. So first of all, I'm already kind of screwed. There's no way I can go and delete my Twitter posts and Facebook because I've been out there quite a lot. So if AI is modeling me, they've already got a pretty good model.

This is really depressing, John. I really wanted to talk to you about network tribalism because I'm worried. about polarization and the fact that we can't have conversations, that everyone has hot buttons that if you say this, you're a Putin apologist, or if you say this, you're a fan of the fossil fuel companies, and we can't have a balanced conversation about the human predicament in our reality. And you've kind of indirectly convinced me that things are worse than I thought. Yeah, but it might be ugly, but I think we're going to model. through. I'm just hoping that, you know, you can avoid a lot of the badness that's going to end up

happening. Probably not. But, you know, I'm betting on hopefully that we get out into space. I think that if we can't get into space, I think we could end up just collapsing to nothing. When you say get out into space, what do you mean by that? is that we have to start developing and expanding beyond Earth. And my guess is that Elon will probably, I mean, I wrote a little article about how to accelerate it using asteroids and the crap. But my guess is that Elon is probably going to end up putting his dojo supercomputer for training AIs in space because you get solar power cheaper than you can get on Earth

and volumes that, and a scalable volumes that far beyond. what you can get on Earth in the current environment. Particularly since those supercomputers now, and most of the cloud stuff that goes around with AI is so power-intensive, it chews up the power of a medium-sized city, and then it's growing even more. So if Elon wants orders of magnitude more compute than he has now, you think his plans are to do that in space?

Running these big clusters to train AIs and to host AIs, is almost all power related costs, 80% of the costs of actually running those systems is energy costs and energy costs are going up. Seems like everywhere here on it, terresturally. And here you have this window in space that he alone really can access. And that can allow, once that starts going, once he starts building those big solar rays, and then he starts looked at ways they do it cheaper. I think he could end up pulling in asteroid materials. And the reason why those asteroid materials are going to be so valuable is not just because they're equivalent of what you can get on Earth and cheaper, is that it's already in space.

And you use those materials to start building arrays and more and more solar arrays. I'm talking like solar arrays that could equivalent be equal to several diameters of the Earth. There's so much space up there. And writing our cloud infrastructure, first and then eventually over time becoming capable of beaming down energy to use the microwaves for swing production in various locales that need it that are paying through the nose for alternatives. But potentially electricity is almost too cheap to meter, if done correctly, in space. If that's all plausible, which I'm pretty skeptical of because it takes energy and there's a

payload and you have, there's mining and there's zero gravity, and how do you drill an asteroid and zero gravity? And there are constraints. I'm not even worried about the asteroid portion. I've just, the actual, that potentially downstream, but once you regularize space in the near-Earth environment, everything else becomes much, much easier. What are your opinions about climate change and the ecological destruction of species and some of the, you know, the environmental limits that we, already well exceeded and how does that fit into this story? No, it's just a thermodynamic box that we're in.

Human civilization has reached limits of its environment and has a dissipative system. We either expand and go out or we die. There's no going back, there's no turning back that system. It's too complex. It's operating too far from thermodynamic equilibrium and we're just dumping this entropy into our living environment and we will die, heat death. We will totally run out unless we create a larger external environment that we can expand into. And that's, if we don't get to type 1, and type 1 civilization is that we pull in as much energy or generate as much energy as the Earth

absorbs from the sun on a daily basis, then we die. It's like, it's like a short, it's like a We got to keep on going forward. We have to keep on getting to bigger and bigger environments or we perish. It's inevitable. Coupling that with two other things you said earlier that Elon Musk is, one might describe, as unstable. And number two, he's the only one that's accessing as has been the founder. And the first, what's the word?

for the early adopter of doing things in space. So doesn't that give you pause a little bit? Yeah, I mean, it's mitigated just a slight bit by the fact that Bezos has blue origins still, he's pouring billions in, and that if, and he has a big cloud computing company, is that if Must starts hosting the cloud in space for cheaper energy, Bezos won't be far behind. And then there'll be a race to see who can get the most cloud, infrastructure built running at a level of efficiency can't match at the terrestrial level. I don't think this is going to happen for various technical reasons, but a more larger

systemic reason, which is if that happens, then the great simplification is not true and or not going to happen. And I think we, our space exploration success has been based on. on an era of energy surplus, which is ending. And we're masking it by creating debt and central bank supports. But I just don't know that we're fiscally able to do the magnitude of things like that, even Elon Musk. That's why I came up with a, trying to come up with ways to simulate an internet boom

where we raised trillions in capital based on speculation and becoming, on paper, very, very valuable and that we build out the infrastructure that is needed for it to start to create its own weather dynamic, its own economy, and that if done correctly, it could generate the energy surplus we want and the resource surplus we need at infinitum. I mean, the whole solar system is available for us to take advantage of. It's just getting over that cost barrier. Right now, we're sitting at this kind of, we're at that step function level and we're looking up and seeing that cliff up there and we can't seem to get out of it. But if we can, if we can fool the system into into getting us up there, or get must to kind of create a little stampede on his

own by doing something that everyone else wants to emulate, then, then we might get out of this. But otherwise it's just more entropy on earth, more social entropy, more physical pollution entropy, more chaos, done. I would love to have you back to unpack some of this, maybe on a roundtable with other experts on this stuff. But as is, I really appreciate your time. This is an unusual interview for me because I usually am talking specifically. about ecology or oil or neuroscience, and I haven't talked to too many tech experts in this way.

And again, the only reason I invited you is because I've been following you for over 20 years, and I know that you have core insights on this stuff. So usually at the end of my interviews, I ask a few personal questions of my guests on their first interview. I hope you don't mind. But I think you've probably freaked some people out. that are watching this show, do you have any personal advice to the human beings just as a humans on what people can personally do during this time of what some call the metacrisis

now on top of network tribalism and AI and other risks that you discuss? What kind of advice do you have, John? Don't let what's going on in the online information space, the abstract space, dictate your mood and how you think. Focus on living life. Grow your garden, raise your family, spend time with them, work with them to make sure that they're successful as possible,

live great lives, live up to their potential. You know, I got a big house and I got to, you know, my two youngest are living here and working from home at great companies. and, you know, they're about to start their own lives with, but I want them here as long as possible, which is great.

And focus on that. And if you can do that, that level set you make you feel a lot better about the world. You can't, you know, and you can focus on improving that and looking for signs that that actually is being infringed upon or by this chaotic external environment and taking measures to. to kind of mitigate that damage. But don't let this, we live in this abstract metaspace almost too much now. I mean, I've been doing it since 94, 95, you're doing the same thing. It's like, I think we've developed our sea legs to a certain extent that we're not too thrown by how things are maneuvering and how things are swaying to and fro.

But balance. balance. This is a marathon, even if there is chaos. It's still a marathon. That's good advice. What do you recommend to young people? And just like you said, there's not too many people under the age of 50 that watch TV. There's not too many people under the age of 30 that listen to this podcast. But what recommendation do you have for 20-somethings becoming aware of all this stuff? I don't know. I think it's probably the coolest. environment to be alive in ever. I mean, in terms of the opportunity and things you can learn, I remember living before the Internet and then watching it turn on, you know, bit by bit by bit,

I mean, right in that kind of capricer watching this. It was like my brain turned on. I mean, it was like, wow, this is cool. And see the opportunity to learn things and to work almost anywhere. I mean,

I'm employing guys who do software for me at times. We're sitting on a beach and, Turkey, you know, living a great life. Or, you know, you can work online like my daughters do, and you can live anywhere. You can stay in a family house, or you could go live in London for a while, or go live in a cabin in Steamboat Springs or whatever. It's like the world is your oyster. It's awesome. And your ability to bootstrap yourself to wherever you want to be and wherever you want to go is easier than ever. And granted, there are the threats out there that can impinge on you in the future,

but develop skill sets that mitigate those damage. Learn how to grow stuff, learn how to fix stuff, learn how to do all those things. As long as you have the skill sets, it doesn't mean you have to do it all the time. But if the problems arise, then you can actually deal with it. What do you care most about in the world, John? Oh, family. That's pretty easy one.

Pretty much drives my life. And a far second would be like, you know, just dogs and things like that, just like daily conveniences. Well, dogs are family. Yeah. I mean, I've kind of created kind of, I'm more of a monk. I'm very kind of happy with that. I was happy at the Air Force Academy when I was up and, you know, isolated from everybody else

working all that time. It's comfortable. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your decisions, what is one thing you would do to improve human or planetary futures? Develop space. I mean, as much as everyone has a negative reaction to it, I've been thinking about it since I became an astronautical engineer, failed astronaut candidate, is that never really got aligned. shuttle blew up before I was had a chance. So we have to keep on going forward. And we've stalled out at this step function.

We got to, and if I could wave my line and say, let's spend this money or invest this money and build this infrastructure, then start regularizing our use of it, opening up horizons and looking forward into a world to future that has unlimited potential, I would do that. Because if you're just looking at your navel, looking at fixing the things that are wrong with this world, there's a never-ending hole that will go down forever. It's like looking into the abyss, you know, that famous romantic painting, right, gazing into the abyss. That's where we're at right now is we keep on gazing into the abyss and we're not looking up. We're not hearing that kind of, you know, the roar of a star.

You know, it's out there burning and calling to us. It's like, it's got to go. It's time to get up. Leave the womb, man. You know, we're in this womb and we don't want to leave. And mom's like, get out and we're not. And I would like to see us get out. My view, and I don't know as much about it as you,

is it actually would require a magic wand to make that happen. But we shall see. And I really respect you and your research and your opinion. So I'd love to have you back, maybe take a deeper dive on some of this stuff. Do you have any closing words to sum up this conversation for our viewers?

Sure. Since a good portion of it, at the end there was dedicated to the space, I got involved in the interactive television effort early on to build something like the internet back in 93 with the big tacos. And they could not. There was no vision from that point forward

that internet would ever, would be built. It's too much money, hundreds of billions of dollars. The payoff was too uncertain. They couldn't imagine what they do with too many technological steps that they still would have to discover and figure out a ways to do. And they abandoned it. And here comes this internet. It's done in the right way, the right kind of bootstrap. And it got built in a decade, a decade, something that never should have happened, but it did. And it's crazy how it built out so quick. And it's crazy. How it built out so And I think we can do that here with us with space. Same way.

Just ignite it in the right way and then it just goes. And it won't end. It won't end in our lifetimes at least. The first thought that came to my mind hearing your appeal there is, can you imagine networked tribalism with AI in space? Yeah, yeah. It gets pretty ugly. But, you know, if you do it right at the start, which we probably won't, but you can mitigate

a lot of those problems. Just like the data ownership and AIs, if we've done it right initially, everyone would have more participation in the upside potential of these AIs. And that would change the dynamic in terms of fear of where they're going and how they're developing a good bit. If you knew that you had some, if whatever this is going to develop in, you know, if whatever this is going to develop into this AI economy, that you had some upside potential there that all boats were rising. It would change your perspective on where we're going in a big way. But the way it's

looking right now is that a few boats will rise to the moon and back, and then the rest of us are saying, get sucked dry. I just want to see this doing it right. Thank you for your insights and your continued work. To be. continued, John. Thank you. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform and visit The Great Simplification.com for more information on future releases. This show is hosted by Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and curated by Leslie Batlutz and Lizzie Siriani.