The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or John Robb. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is John Robb. John is a leading thinker in military, political, and geopolitical strategy. He’s a former Air Force pilot and special ops guy and one of the first analysts for that newfangled internet thing back at Forrester Research. He’s an entrepreneur, a writer, and a thinker. Today he has a great Substack that I subscribe to – JohnRobb.substack.com. Welcome back, John.
John: Hey, Jim. Thanks for having me back.
Jim: Yeah, John’s been on too many times to count. He’s one of our go-to guys when thinking about strategy and interesting ways of looking at the world. He most recently was on EP 254 where we talked about one of his Substack essays, “What Went Wrong with America?” Worth reading. Today, we’re going to talk about his Substack essay, “Blitzing DC,” where we’re going to talk about the idea of network organizations taking control. So John, I’m going to jump around a little bit, change the orders a tad in your essay. Why don’t we start with the early roots of network warfare from the Iraq insurgency?
John: Okay. If I could back up even a little bit more. What we’re seeing is the emergence of a way of making decisions with networks and doing that within an organizational structure. And that’s being driven by networking changing the way we think and the way we organize society. It’s kind of McLuhan-esque, you know, the medium is the message. It’s rewiring us, just like the printing press rewired us and changed society as a result. You know, constitutional government, everything else, those printed documents that we use as the basis for organizing society. So what I saw in Iraq, being ex-special ops and having my experience as an Internet analyst, is that the way the insurgency was operating was different than the analysis that was coming out of DC, coming out of the DOD, coming out of the NSA and CIA. And it was operating differently, and it was making it very hard to run a counterinsurgency. And some of the core dynamics was, some of the differences, for instance, were instead of like one large insurgent organization, maybe two, that mirrored the nation state, with a political arm and a military arm, etcetera, that you could roll up, a big pyramid organization that you could roll up by taking the people out the bottom, flipping them, and going up to the top. We saw 70 different groups. Each of these groups had a motivation for fighting. Some were jihadi, all sorts of different flavors of jihadi. Some were pro-Saddam, some were anti-Saddam nationalists. They were criminal organizations, tribal organizations. Each group was paper thin, so you could roll them up very quickly. But somehow they were coordinating to take on the U.S. military and keep it at bay and score lots of victories against the U.S. So I started piecing together how it was working, and that was my first insight into the networked organization as an emergent organizational structure.
Jim: Yeah. It makes sense. It was quite interesting. Here we are, the most powerful country on earth with some powerful allies, and we couldn’t really cleanly defeat a bunch of ragtag dudes. And it was as you say, it was a swarm. You’d smack this one out. Another one would pop up, and the survivors from this would join with that one. And they could coordinate even though they were enemies. Right? And, of course, this is a famous Middle Eastern saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
John: Exactly.
Jim: At least operationally. And so the next time we saw this really pop up or more or less simultaneously with the Arab Spring and Occupy.
John: Well, the organizational type that I identified in Iraq, and we saw it also in Nigeria, was a kind of an open source dynamic. There wasn’t a hierarchy – these groups were all united based on a single “plausible promise” as it’s called in open source software, a single unifying goal. It’s usually a very general, very simple goal that everyone can agree with. You know, 80% of the people in a given country could agree with that one goal, and they all worked together to try to realize it. Each had a different reason why they were trying to achieve it and a different idea of what that actually meant when they did achieve it. They couldn’t agree if they did achieve it what to do afterwards. But that allowed them to coordinate, and they used a kind of very sloppy “throw it against the wall, see what works” approach. If it works, it’s reported by the press and other things, and it starts propagating very quickly. Everyone just copies the success.
The U.S. had a $3 billion counter-IED program, and these guys were running circles around it. They’d have fixes within two weeks – I think 30 times faster in terms of their innovation rate than the IRA. So this was like, wow. And then I wrote up a New York Times op-ed on this saying, here’s how you defeat it: you hit it in different directions by using the Shia militias as a kind of anvil. And that worked.
That kind of died down after the Iraq War subsided, and then we saw it again in the Arab Spring, the same open source dynamic. In this case, the best example was getting rid of Mubarak in Egypt. That unifying goal united a huge protest movement. It was done largely online, and they kicked it off. No matter what they did, they couldn’t unravel it because there were so many people that wanted that similar goal, even though every single person in that protest probably had a different idea as to what removing Mubarak meant.
The leadership – there wasn’t really any leadership. Anytime they had an influential figure come in and try to take control of it and say, “Okay, we should be talking about constitutional reform” or “This is what we have to do,” they were kind of pushed to the side. No one really wanted to talk about all that stuff. Really, they wanted to follow anybody who was leading them towards removing Mubarak. We saw a little bit of that in the U.S. with the Occupy movement and the Tea Party, that similar open source dynamic and protest structure. What we find with all of these is that they can create massive crowds, they can swarm the streets, and then all the typical ways that you would use to unravel a protest, like negotiating with them, giving them concessions – didn’t work because you couldn’t give enough concessions to everybody to unwind it. You might take out a tiny piece of it, but you wouldn’t be able to take out the entire group.
Jim: Yeah, let me respond a little bit on Arab Spring and Occupy in particular. One of the things you emphasized is empathy triggers. You know, famously, the Arab Spring was triggered when a merchant who had been treated unfairly by the police, I think, burned himself to death in Tunisia. And then one of these high emotional valence things – Occupy, I think was less a significant event. But the trauma of the first really devastating financial crisis in the lifetimes of most of the people that were participating with the Great Recession, which has now already receded into the rear view mirror. But it was pretty scary at the time. There were two weeks there where it looked like the whole house of cards was coming down.
But this is an interesting thing – both of those basically failed. The Arab Spring, yeah, they threw out Mubarak, but they got Sisi, an even worse dictator. And they did throw out Gaddafi in Libya, but now they’ve got chaos. Hard to say if they wouldn’t have been better off with Gaddafi. Occupy fizzled out. Basically it added one thing to the memetic stage was the 99% versus the 1%. So that was their one victory, but it didn’t really last. This shows the weakness in some sense of the networks of network warfare, at least in terms of long-term staying power against an entrenched power.
John: Yeah, I mean, the swarms have had a spotty record of success, you know, these swarm protests. And empathy triggers played a big part. I mean, the empathy triggers come out of – I dug into empathy and tried to figure out exactly what it was, and found out it isn’t sympathy. It isn’t what we think it is. It’s really just a mental modeling of a victim. And it’s a high information flow event when you have empathy for somebody being victimized in front of you, like George Floyd or the street peddler that immolated himself in Tunisia. You feel like you’re them, and you mentally model them, and their enemies are your enemies from that moment onward, and other people who do the same thing are united together. It forms a kind of loose tribalism that serves as the basis for swarm developing.
Empathy works particularly well online since we don’t have a lot of the filters that we would have in real life for empathy. I mean, in order to function, you can’t be empathetic to everything. You can’t mentally model everything that’s going on with everybody else because you’ll be totally incapacitated. Imagine a doctor or nurse trying to get through their whole day if they had to empathize with every single patient to the extreme levels that would be necessary. So we have filters in real life, but online we see it – it hits us viscerally when we see a video or a picture or something else coming in on our feed, and we feel it at a deep level and it connects us and we can’t filter it out, or it’s hard.
So yeah, empathy triggers is one of the mechanisms that can create a swarm. We saw some of that at work with the swarm in response to the invasion of Ukraine, and that kicked off. And in that regard, it escalated the conflict from a regional war to a new Cold War. And so now swarms are starting to get dangerous because we weren’t in control of that. That was just a kind of group mind reframing the conflict as a new struggle against an emergent Hitler or threat to the world. We had to go back to Cold War thinking. We disconnected them all at once and isolated and pushed them towards China. So at a strategic level for the United States, that was a terrible thing, because we didn’t really want Russia with China together, but the swarm pushed it.
Jim: Yeah. We’ll talk about Ukraine later. Because I think we have quite a different point of view on Ukraine, but that’s alright.
John: Okay.
Jim: So let’s move through the historic timeline here. The next big example that you give, and this is where it becomes, I’m calling it a hybrid swarm. Maybe you don’t use that term, but I’m going to throw it out there. And that’s the Trump 2016 campaign. Our mutual friend Jordan Hall did a really interesting deep dive on the red religion versus the blue church. Tell us a little bit about your take on the 2016 campaign and how that was a new variant on network insurgency.
John: Yeah. Jordan took a classic approach because he did a reformation kind of framework for this, where you have the wild Protestants, each with their own Bible, each with their own little variations on the church versus the kind of universal Catholic Church, which was sparked by the printing press. Martin Luther didn’t spark it off because he posted his thesis. It’s because it was printed afterwards and spread out. Right? So, we have the same thing, that the networking is that what we saw with the Trump campaign is that we took this kind of open source dynamic and applied it to politics. And there were a lot of people who were not happy with the way things were going and how this globalization of the United States was playing out. This kind of globalized perspective was not yielding prosperity, and they saw a lot of fraud. They saw a lot of corruption. They didn’t feel like they were making progress and all sorts of other reasons. And Trump represented a kind of plausible promise, a unifying goal. He was a grenade, a political grenade that could stick in the White House to disrupt stuff. And in that regard, he really wasn’t a candidate in the traditional sense. He was an idea bomb disruption. And this open source insurgency formed around him to get him into office. They pushed him and innovated, constantly adopted a form of political maneuver. It was maneuver-based operations where they were constantly shifting topics. Trump’s natural style kind of fed into that. He’d switch topics constantly, be disruptive, make big bold claims, fight in one direction or another, or feint in one direction or another, drawing the opposition off. He confused their psychology, disrupted the establishment, and it was successful. Got him into office. But he didn’t have any staying power. So as soon as he got into office, the objective was complete, the insurgency kind of melted away. And he was there alone, just throwing punches and the establishment was crushing him, and he wasn’t really able to do as much disruption as he possibly could. But they achieved what they wanted.
Jim: Yeah. It is interesting that the Trump administration really achieved very little. The only really substantive thing it did from the perspective of at least some of its backers was the big tax cut. And, of course, that was not very populist. You know, what was the most favored group in the tax cut? Real estate developers? There’s a real shock for you. And it wasn’t horrible for average Joes, but it was certainly weighted towards the fat cats. And so, not populist in the slightest.
John: Yeah. No. Its policies really didn’t matter. I mean, there were a lot of things like remember the Access Hollywood video and stuff like that? I mean, everybody came to me and would say, “Oh, he’s gone. He’s dead.” Like, by all conventional measures, he’s gone. He’s finished.
Jim: For about the twentieth time. Right?
John: Yeah. The twentieth time was like, had to be it. I go…
Jim: This has to be it. He’s done. Right?
John: And I was like, no. He’s not a candidate. He’s a weapon. He’s a grenade. I mean, they don’t judge him based on this. You know, they want him to be disruptive like that in there.
Jim: Okay, now let’s say “they.” This is interesting because there is no “they.” It’s not like there’s four guys sitting in a room saying “we’re gonna stir this shit up,” do you think? Or is this a true populist network vibration that forms this particular network?
John: Yeah, I mean, it was open source. There were lots of different people with lots of different motivations for joining it. And you can see it on Reddit. You can see it on other places. I did that whole… you know, the most popular group that was promoting Trump on Reddit. They did an interview with me the week after they did Trump because I was…
Jim: The_Donald? Was that what it was? Yeah. I was doing a statistical analysis of The_Donald in real time, and I calculated – what was the name of their little god that they produced? I would calculate the ratio of phrases versus their little god to show the rise and fall of memes in The_Donald. It was very interesting.
John: It was an idea factory. It was a clearinghouse for memes and other ideas, and it was completely outside of the control of the campaign.
Jim: Actually, this was an interesting thing. This is the insight I had from Jordan’s insight and some research I did – it wasn’t quite the meme factory. It was the meme amplifier. The memes were coming out of 4chan, and then they would get stuck into The_Donald. Some would get upregulated and improved. And then those would catch the eye of somebody in the Trump administration or Fox News, and then they’d get broadcast out and then they’d get recycled into a new generation. So it was like… exactly. It was really a wild, emergent system for memetic propagation that didn’t really get recreated in 2020 or 2024. It was like it seemed like it was a one-time thing. This unintentional emergent meme cyclone that got going there in 2016.
John: Yeah, I mean, it had to do with the fact that we were moving towards packetized media. And the packetized media broke everything down – all little videos, little pictures, little takes on stuff, you know, little posts that encapsulated various parts of a description of an event. That packetized flow is massive, I mean, it’s torrential. What they were doing using this mechanism was that they were piecing together patterns, patterns of understanding, sense-making. And those patterns are basically those memes and then other things. And they put them into an upregulation system. They were voted up or voted down or modified, and it was kind of a little bit more formalized than what we see in the open social media. And then it ended up at the top where they were being used by Fox and Trump and others as weapons. And it was an amazing thing to see from the ground. You know, seeing it from my interviews with them. I mean, I wasn’t fully, you know, “pro everything Trump does is a god.” And then my interview on The_Donald, I talked about the dynamics, and they were exactly following this pattern.
Jim: Yeah, I was watching it with great interest as a student of network dynamics, though also, in my particular case, a foe of Trump. But nonetheless, I had to admire the ad hoc creation of this engine, and I thought it fairly likely that it would work and it did. So Trump gets in and Red has made a move. Right? Red has learned how to – or has learned or discovered accidentally or something – network warfare was okay at it, unprecedented actually in American politics. But now Blue strikes back with their counter network. Now tell us about that.
John: The red insurgency rolled over the Republican Party, rolled over the Democratic Party, got him into office. The blue network started to form in response to Trump, and it took on a different dynamic, a different way of actually organizing. It based itself on a kind of moral standard, a common moral standard. It was a collective kind of sense-making, very different than the chaotic maneuver-based sense-making we saw in the red network. The blue network grounded a lot of their moral standards-based approach on being against something evil – like against racism, against sexism, against colonialism – against something that everyone agrees is evil.
They started using that moralism, that kind of moral standard as a weapon against everything that Trump did and everything that the Red Network did. They started convincing, very quickly, the people running the social networks that these people in the Red Insurgency were evil, doing something morally reprehensible, an existential threat to everybody. And the social networks started banning him, started censoring, started squeezing him to the side. That was really the big play in 2020 – Biden didn’t even run a campaign. By all measures, he just sat there and did nothing. What did happen is this network squeezed the red network down to almost nothing, censoring it.
I was worried that we were headed towards an era of universal censorship and control, particularly as AI was ramping up to make it even easier to do, which I called “the long night” – one orthodox way of looking at the world that would prevent anyone from having any new ideas or challenging the orthodoxy. Looking back at 2016, Trump was everywhere on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else, but in 2020, he was gone. There was barely any kind of flow, and people were banned and censored, and that led to the victory of the blue network.
Jim: But interestingly, let’s talk a little about the governance of the blue network, and also about the same time, just before the emergence of the victory of the blue network, the very curious George Floyd thing. I’ve researched the George Floyd situation, and there actually is zero excess killings by police of black men. It’s exactly proportionate to the crime rate of black men as it is for white men, as it is for Hispanic men, as it is for Asian men – exactly 21%. Roland Fryer’s much more detailed work with the Houston police also says that per encounter with police, if anything, less black men are killed by police than you’d estimate based on the number of encounters. So it’s a completely fallacious argument. But talk about the empathy – it was a horrific act and a horrific video of George Floyd being suffocated by a rogue cop. And it somehow resonated with people to get them to believe something that was just manifestly not true. And yet it swept the country, killed 20 people, billions of dollars of damage. Very interesting and curious movement based on false premises, basically.
John: Correct. Yeah. And the numbers are very, very small. We’re talking like twenties delta even if you don’t correct it for crime rate or socioeconomic status. Poor neighborhoods tend to have more crime. There wasn’t a factual basis, but there was a kind of emerging or growing lack of better placid. They were tired of being treated like criminals and getting stopped and pulled over. That might have played a factor, but frankly, it was the empathy trigger that kicked it off, and it was a way to oppose Trump as well. The Blue Network framed it that way, and it zoomed. We had a swarm in the streets, billions in damage, dozens of people killed, 2,000 cops in the hospital. And they didn’t even aggregate the stats on this. There was a resistance within the establishment to kind of hide everything and bury it. There wasn’t any coverage of the violence in the protests by the major media. They saw it as necessary – “mostly peaceful,” that kind of language. And that kind of excess was overlooked, and then the problem with a moral framework that’s “if you don’t agree with this, you’re evil, you’re an enemy, you’re an existential threat” – it can lead to excesses. And the Blue Network was incapable of policing the excesses of the framework, particularly once they won and started applying it. They were able to pull in the overreach of that. Just as a tiny example, the Blue Network’s approach to trans and going all the way down to sports and kids and other things and not being able to police that and saying, okay, this doesn’t make sense when you’re talking about nine-year-olds. Of course it generated a counter reaction.
Jim: Yeah. That was quite interesting. I was actually part of that. I helped form the MIT Free Speech Alliance, which is part of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance quite early on. I’m trying to remember quite when that was – think it was 2021. When we just thought this had gone too far. I mean, there is still injustice in America which needs to be remediated. Black citizens still don’t get a fully fair deal in our society. It’s a hell of a lot better than it was when I grew up. I still remember seeing a “whites only” water fountain when I was a kid, which was pretty disturbing. But there’s still a little bit left, but it’s nothing like the screaming that you got. And then to insist on censorship – particularly Dorian Abbott came to MIT to give an endowed speech on exoplanet atmospheres, very esoteric topic. But he had written with another scholar a popular piece in Newsweek, basically criticizing DEI and suggesting replacing DEI with MFE – merit, fairness and equality. It was a very level-headed piece, but he had violated the taboo of the time that you can’t criticize DEI. And so a bunch of MIT graduate students swarmed on Twitter: “We can’t have this guy give the speech at MIT.” And unfortunately, the head of the department that had invited him, with the support we believe of the administration, succumbed and disinvited him. And we all thought that was going too far. You can’t criticize something. So we launched the MIT Free Speech Alliance, and it quickly got lots and lots of members and got lots of influence. And there’s now hundreds of these free speech alliances all under the American Alumni Free Speech Alliance umbrella. And I felt that we were right at the tide turning. And I told people that at the time – feels to me that they have overreached. And now the tide is starting to flow the other way.
John: Yeah. No, it wasn’t just universities. I mean, corporations got pulled into it. I mean, you saw what happened after January 6. They came together to disconnect Trump from social media, all at once, kind of a corporate takeover of all media. Then anyone who was promoting ideas that were counter to this kind of blue narrative structure were being disconnected and marginalized and pushed out. And the resistance grew, because it was excessive. I mean, to go after everything and everybody and stifle free speech at that kind of level, you know, edging towards what I thought was a long night.
Jim: Yeah. And I can tell you personally, listeners to the show know I’ve been involved with the Game B effort for a long time. And we had, we still have a very popular group on Facebook. And the day after Biden was inaugurated, the Facebook algorithm killed the three admins of our Facebook group, including me with death penalty, unappealable deletions of our account. And for no reason at all. If you go to the Game B group on Facebook, you’ll find it’s a very benign, good citizen, nice kind of thing. And the people are very well behaved. There’s absolutely no reason for it to do so, but they had obviously turned the knob on their algorithm up the day that Biden got inaugurated and they whacked us. Fortunately we had some noisy friends, including Joe Rogan who put up quite a loud yell. I think we got 7 million views of our announcement of this thing. And we knew some people who knew people in Facebook and twelve hours later, they reversed it. But, you know, maybe we’re a bunch of blue sky utopian quasi-utopian hippie thinkers, but we’re certainly not anything bad, but they were so anti-heterodoxy of any sort at that point that that convinced me that this now had to be fought full on.
John: Yeah. No, it was one of these situations where people would get banned, they didn’t even know why they were banned, and the groups would be banned, and they didn’t know what triggered it.
Jim: The ones that we were hit with was no appeal. Same happened to Brett Weinstein. You know? No appeal. And if you try to appeal, says, no appeal. You’re dead. You know? I go, what the fuck kind of sick Kafka-esque bullshit is this? Right?
John: Yeah. No. This way, you know, when I was talking about the long night stuff, I was saying, okay, how we guard against this – I mean, years ago – is get some kind of digital rights to kind of make your version of yourself, your digital self, protected. Right? Make it more real. And that you could be banned for excessive kind of threats and personal stalking and that kind of stuff. But anything that would cause you to be muted or some kind of charge against you, you had to be informed of it and there had to be a process.
Jim: I laid all this out in great detail in an article I wrote for Quillette called “Musk in Moderation,” where I even allowed a marketplace. You’ll love this. If they had to ban you based on a rule, a regulation in their legislation, they had to quote what you said and the relevant section of their legislation. And if you wanted to challenge it, you could take it to American Arbitration Association arbitrator, and you could put up a stake. And if they lost, they had to pay you 10x. So, if you thought you had been opposed, that they said violated section 1.3.7.1, the arbitrator’s rule did not violate 1.3.7.1, then you put up a thousand bucks, then they had to pay you 10,000. And even better, you could syndicate your bets. So you could say, “Alright, here is a marketplace for bets against Facebook’s censorship.” I put a limit of a million dollars so that you could syndicate your claim with the complainer getting 20%, the betters getting 80% of the win. So even if you had no money at all, you could still put together a big war chest for a particularly weak claim. And I thought that’d be a great self-policing system because, you know, Facebook doesn’t wanna lose $10,000,000 out of making a wrong decision on something like this.
John: Well, I mean, it was going towards that kind of long night scenario at a pretty rapid clip in 2022. It’s getting worse and worse and worse, more oppressive. You know, we saw the terms of service replace the Bill of Rights, and those terms of service could change any moment that Zuckerberg or anyone else wanted to kind of flip them, tweak them.
Jim: And that was the key part of the terms of service: “We can change this at any time with or without your permission.”
John: Yeah, imagine a Bill of Rights like that, right? The president could change the Bill of Rights anytime he saw a need. The people that they had selected to moderate or arbitrate changes to that terms of service were all from activist groups, and it was just nutty. It was getting more restrictive. Can’t talk in the major media was supporting it, and social networking was suppressing it. Everything turned around. I mean, any kind of turnaround you thought was coming at the grassroots level was gonna get squashed. Especially as these – especially as, you know, if it progressed, then AI would arrive, and then it would be employed to moderate all those billions of people on Facebook and others at a very deep level simultaneously. So, the change happened with Musk acquiring Twitter.
Jim: I would say it happened a little earlier. It happened with the strong sense across society that this had overreached by the summer of 2021. And I would say that Musk was then the next step.
John: Yeah. No, I mean, I think there was a lot of people – there was a lot of brewing discontent with it. But I do think that the system as it was set up, the kind of way that the networks were operating, was that it was going to crush that.
Jim: It could well have.
John: Without some big change.
Jim: Yep.
John: That any kind of discontent would have eventually been squeezed out, and anyone who expressed discontent would become evil by definition and an existential threat. But I think the thing with Musk was that the trigger for him was watching that swarm response to Ukraine. And my first response was, “Holy shit. This is dangerous. It’s bringing us up to a global war.” And people with this swarm thinking were like, “We have to win at all costs. We have to defeat Russia. We have to depose Putin.” Putin was tied to Trump, he’s evil. And therefore, Putin is the ultimate evil just like Trump is. Therefore, we have to completely cause a regime change in Russia. And nuclear war doesn’t matter anymore – it’s just threats, just bluffs. The way we handled that in the Cold War and prevented World War Three with nuclear weapons, it doesn’t matter anymore. And I was like, “Holy… just step back a little bit here. Let’s get a little bit more rational in our approach.” Musk saw that, and he said in interviews that that was the reason he decided to make the bid. There’s no circuit breakers, no way of controlling. And his frustration at being kind of edited and censored, but that was the thing that kicked it over. And once Twitter was acquired, everything changed.
Jim: In November of 2022. Right? Let’s go back to Ukraine, though, for a moment.
John: Right.
Jim: I didn’t necessarily see it as a swarm. I know you did at the time, pro-Ukraine support. I thought it would be more of an elite action from the traditional internationalist parts of both parties.
John: There were the neocons that had seized control of the United States and brought us into wars in the Middle East and then started expanding NATO with the intent of completely encircling Russia. And as we got closer and closer to the borders, they started to be more reactive, just like Kennan wrote in the late nineties that this would eventually turn a democratic capitalist society that was just emerging into an enemy. It was an inevitable kind of freight train. And it did. As we hit right around their border, they started to have more resistance and more military response. But those neocons were in charge of things and had us on this pathway that was inexorable towards a conflict with Russia. And the swarm response was different for me. It was based on Putin’s connection to Trump and a lot of the hostility and attempt to kind of punish Putin for getting Trump into office. They came to office saying, “We’re gonna really make it tough for Putin because he got Trump in.” They sparked it, but the swarm response to it was so much bigger. I mean, all these little companies – everybody disconnecting simultaneously. Russians in discussion groups kicked out, every little connection that was possible with Russia being severed simultaneously in just weeks. And the whole framing of it turning from “we’re opposed to Russian invasion,” which happened before and we didn’t respond like this, it turned into a new Cold War.
Jim: I think that’s overstated. You know, again, I make this point regularly. Russia has the GDP of Spain or Canada. It’s not a giant country anymore. It no longer has the whole Eastern Bloc as its allies. It no longer has the rest of the USSR. This idea of painting Russia as this amazing threat is basically bogus, which actually then says it’s perfectly reasonable to stop Putin in Ukraine because he is stoppable and he doesn’t really have a credible threat to do anything else. He’s not gonna invade the Baltics. If he does, we’d whip his ass in a heartbeat. The Ukraine war has shown the Russian army is a paper tiger – couldn’t beat the twenty-second rated military in the world in a flat out fight. Ridiculous. So I don’t buy a new Cold War. I think the issue is that it’s a huge mistake to let Putin win a war of territorial aggression in the twenty-first century. And he needs to be stopped for that reason.
John: But we provoked it. I mean, we offered them NATO membership, pushed NATO membership to kind of punish Putin for support of Trump. And they said it was a red line, any more than we would say it was a red line if China decided to make an ally with Mexico and start putting troops and weapons there.
Jim: Remember, the USSR did the same thing in Cuba, and we managed to avoid war there. By the nick…
John: A lot of mistakes that were kind of… I don’t wanna see a repeat of that. I mean, they still have more nukes than we do. And as much as they’re a paper tiger and everything else, even if half those nukes don’t work, it’s still man, it’s still not something to do.
Jim: They’re not going to use their nukes, though. It’s insane. It’s not a credible threat.
John: Well, it depends on whether they see it as an existential threat. I mean, having Ukraine in NATO, they considered existential.
Jim: I doubt it. I think it’s geopolitical chess playing. They lose some ground if Ukraine becomes EU and NATO, but it’s not an existential threat. NATO’s never attacked anybody.
John: Well, I mean, if China put troops and nuclear weapons in Mexico, we’d consider it an existential threat.
Jim: We would be pissed off, but we wouldn’t consider it an existential threat. We would not nuke China over that. We would build up one hell of a big defensive army down there, and we’d probably try…
John: To invade them. We’d invade them in a second.
Jim: And probably try to cut the sea lines. That’s what we’d probably do.
John: Invade, regime change and all.
Jim: That stuff. We could probably just – we’re just going to fundamentally disagree about Ukraine. So let’s move on to the red network reconfiguration. And I will say that one thing that I’d like to add, it really wasn’t in this piece, is it wasn’t just Twitter. The other thing that was happening at the same time was the emergence of lots of other independent media from the Team Red perspective.
Somebody recently published this bubble graph that shows the sizes of various podcasters. For instance, the poor Jim Rutt Show was too small to show up on the graph, besides they wouldn’t have any idea where to put it. We’re not either green, blue or red, right? We’re silver. But it was clear that the red-oriented podcasters totally outnumbered the blue ones.
And you talk about Fox News – Fox News at its best draws four and a half million viewers to its prime time shows. Joe Rogan’s interview with Trump: fifty-seven million. His interview with JD Vance: twenty-five million. And so an underappreciated part of this new red network reconfiguration is this grassroots, entrepreneurially driven – people are doing this because it’s a business, but they’re also ideologically informed – thing. You know, Bannon’s War Room is a very classic example, has also fundamentally changed the media battlefield along with Twitter and also the alternative, mostly red networks as well.
John: Yeah, you know, that was the Red Network’s response to the problem with persistence. I mean, Blue Network solved the persistence problem with these networked organizations that usually fall apart once they achieve some goal or fail at achieving a goal. And by creating this kind of moral framework, they had this enemy, they had a narrative that created a sense of tribalism and unity that allowed them to operate as a cohesive whole for long periods of time.
So the Red Network didn’t have it, was more loose. And what it evolved into, what it merged into, were these large accounts, these large digital ledgers. A view of the world, a sense-making perspective based on individual personalities that became very popular, like Elon Musk’s 200 million plus followers on X. And these digital ledgers were highly evolved. They changed, tweaked, and improved their perspectives over time based on user and follower feedback and pushback. And they got really good, and they post a ton. They’re all kind of truth seekers, taking on establishment narratives and what’s being dictated through the media, challenging it and coming up with alternative sense-making perspectives.
There are a ton of these accounts, and they’re all dominated by the Red Network. There’s a little push right now from the Blue Network to try to do that – Michelle Obama and others – but they’re all fizzling because they’re not challenging any official narrative, it’s just not the same dynamic.
So you had these big digital ledgers, big accounts, and they took the war to the Democratic Party in the 2024 election. When Musk supported Trump in the summer, he eliminated any kind of stigma associated with supporting Trump, which was still there – that kind of shame, that kind of disconnection, that moral framework that the Blue was using to keep people out. And all these accounts started falling in line. Rogan officially came in, and all these others started to give their explicit support for Trump, and they put him in office.
Trump wasn’t really running much of a campaign in the traditional sense – I don’t even think the campaign was worth anything. It was really these accounts that were driving it. They came up with the narratives, they ran the maneuver warfare. They were constantly changing subjects, throwing ideas out, amplifying things that Trump picked up on and ran. And that carried over. That victory, those big accounts didn’t just go away at the end. They were still there, and they started to take over positions in the government.
You have Tulsi Gabbard, who has a big account, is a truth seeker, podcasts constantly, has her own ledger – she was put into a position of power. The same thing happened with all the other major agencies for the most part. These gray-suited unknowns, those insiders that they used to put in there, vetted by the establishment as the kind of people that would throw money this way and maintain these programs – well, they were replaced by people who were known, who had a position that people recognized, they had some kind of public visibility.
And most famous of that, of course, was Elon Musk as DOGE, coming in trying to hack the system. He wasn’t so much trying to disrupt it in the “I’m gonna break you” sense, but finding what I call system points inside the target network that would allow you to exercise the greatest control and influence. He found that in the Treasury data, he found that in the OPM records, the communication records of the various agencies, the email logs. And that data allowed him to…
Jim: Yep. Let’s hop in something you mentioned, and this is along the lines you’re talking about these big ledgers. The red digital warriors became more professionalized essentially. Right. We talked about 2016. This was all hobbyists and people in their mother’s basements, you know, typing away at 3:00 in the morning. But now we have actually an analog to mainstream media. Mainstream media used to put people into administrations. And now what we’re seeing is that, let’s call it professionalized – I think it worked hard – you use professionalized digital warriors are now candidates to be members of administrations. And many of them are now more powerful than any mainstream media voices. I’m sure far, far more people listen to Steve Bannon than read one of the columnists in The New York Times. And this is quite interesting and new, and team red has gotten there first to your point. Team blue is trying to figure out what to do about it, but they have a hard problem. And this is something else you talked about, which I think is worth surfacing. Blue way has defined itself in kind of rigid moralistic terms and has a very hard time adapting. As soon as you make any change, one of the factions goes, “Dude, that’s not right. That’s not nice.” Right? You’ve stepped on some woke, you’ve woke violated in some way or other. And so that makes you very vulnerable to maneuver warfare. And someone like the red team having a faster OODA loop as they can change and you can’t adapt, you get left behind.
John: Yeah. I mean, the red has its own problems. I mean, it’s not a unified view of the truth or of reality. I mean, they’re – each account has its own kind of unique approach. So it’s kind of disparate in that regard.
Jim: And then that may end up being what limits the power of red, is that because there are very different factions. You have the Silicon Valley boys who, to my mind, are aiming at neo-feudalism probably. And then you have the Bannonites and the Christian nationalists looking for theocracy. And then you have big chunk in the middle of normal Republicans looking for lower taxes and less regulation, but basic sanity. And how those three totally incompatible factions work things out is still very much to be determined.
John: Yeah. Well, it’s less the factions. It’s just the count. So you really want to kind of parse it up as, you know, who’s following who. There is a certain amount of influence that these big accounts have over their followers – they can take them into new areas of sense-making, pattern matching, and then overwrite the ledgers of their followers. Like, push them. And they do it, you know, unless they face massive resistance, it usually goes through. So they can actually change and shift the faction that’s following them.
The blue is interesting. I’ve been trying to figure out how they’re gonna oppose this. Their biggest flaw in their kind of moral warfare – and moral warfare usually works by constantly pointing out how evil the opposition is and forcing them to break into non-cooperative centers of gravity, where people say, “Oh, I can’t be associated with those people” and start to divide out. The problem with the blue network was it had a maximalist moral framework.
What it really needs, and what we need generally, I think, if we look at the longer view of this, is we want network decision-making at a societal level, in terms of our politics, in terms of our culture, in terms of our society, that has a set of standards – basic standards, both for us and potentially what we could globalize, that represent our values, but it’s not maximalistic.
I always think of the internet, going with a very simple TCP/IP protocol and saying, if you do that little thing, you can connect to us. And it spread. Right? If you went out with this kind of maximalist vision of the way things work – not HTML, but HTML with extras – and said, “You have to do this,” people just go “Ugh.” They’ll stick to their guns, not fully connect, not fully integrate.
So we need a simple standard. We use the red network for new ideas, new sense-making. That works great for solving complex problems, which are more and more prevalent in this kind of wild system that we’re running. Because you need to be able to come up with those wild ideas that may solve the problem, where your planning and your expertise may prove fruitless.
So we need to mix the two. The blue network probably is going to have to come up with a minimalist standard system. I’m not quite sure how they’re going to pull it off. Right now they’re in disarray. The popularity of the Democratic Party is way below the Republican’s – lowest it’s ever been in history. There’s no clear leadership because they don’t really work on a leadership basis. Their moral frameworks are in disarray.
They’re off on Substack network or collection of networks, and they’re not having the influence that they should have, or they need to have. Actually, in order to kind of revive themselves, they have to go on X, and X is the biggest one, and play that kind of wild environment and build themselves up.
I still haven’t seen what they’re going to do to create that kind of new approach to revive themselves. Just like it wasn’t really apparent in 2020 what the Red Network would do to revive itself. And it emerged naturally. All of a sudden, Ramaswamy’s huge and Musk is huge and all those other multimillion-person accounts and Tucker’s 10-20 million and all these others get massive. Wasn’t apparent in 2020 what that response would be. I do think we’re gonna get it – it’s just coming. These networks evolve. They improve. That decision-making system that they’re using to kind of improve their capabilities, tribalize better, create more cohesion is on its way. But I haven’t seen a lot of evidence as to what it will be yet.
Jim: And I will say the Trump administration has been making the job more difficult by operating at an amazing tempo once they got into office. I mean, I’m an amateur military scholar. You’re a more serious one. You know, we know that in war, tempo is hugely important and I’ve never seen tempo exercised in the political realm like the current administration is doing.
John: Yeah. They’re doing a lot of delaying tactics training with the legal or the lawfare and other things like that to try to slow it down, delay it. I mean, of course, some things have to be done. Running a $2 trillion a year deficit is not sustainable. We’re gonna end up in bankruptcy before you know it, at that kind of clip. So there has to be stuff cut. That tempo, of course – maneuver warfare, you constantly are shifting topics. It’s very decentralized now because they have all these different agency heads that have their own kind of truth-seeking agendas, they’re going off and changing things. The only thing really stopping them or slowing them at this point is the legal and regulatory structures that bind this, what I call a hollow state, together. Because the nation state died twenty years ago when we started to go globalization and focus outward. It’s turned kind of into a hollow state, where there’s all these – it’s really a mechanism for eluding what’s left of the nation state. And they built a lot of defenses, lot of influence networks, lot of regulations. If you’ve ever done any government contracting, you know how absolutely corrupt it is. I mean, if I pay $200,000, I can get this inserted to a bill, and it will be specific enough that it will address me in particular. My company, I’ll make 2 or 3 million or 10 million or 20 million because I’m the only one selling this. It’s awful.
Jim: I certainly hope that Elon digs into the procurement process, particularly the defense procurement process, which is like the rottenest pile of sludge ever. I had – I intentionally in my business career avoided government contracts. I remember once one of our companies, the SEC wanted to use one of our online financial products. When we got on the GSA register, we said, no, you can use it with your credit card because I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to get immersed in their horseshit. But I did have some encounters later. And I’ll tell you, very unpleasant, very bad. They could probably find their trillion dollars in defense procurement alone if they dug deep enough, you know, over a ten year period.
John: Oh yeah. And then you have these, all these fraudsters. My brother just retired. He was like – he ran all of the NSA’s hardware. A real little bit of it. He had all these different ways to actually improve it. You know, how you improve the contracting and a lot of it had to do with holding people accountable for results. And a lot of times it dies. If you try to hold somebody accountable, it’s just a corporate shell that gets punished, but not the people who are actually running it. And as soon as they fail, they transfer over to another shell. Right? And then they keep on going. It’s serial fraud. It’s serial kind of disaster.
Jim: And even the big guys will do the, you know, billion dollar – the IRS renovation project, the big SAIC information spy architecture that wrote off because the big boys, you know, fuck this shit up. And of course, partially it’s the government’s own fault because what they really should be doing is like, think about SpaceX versus the defense contractor method. SpaceX just said, what’s the problem getting weight into orbit safely and economically rather than some fucking 2,000 page specification that NASA writes and puts out to bid between Boeing and Lockheed. Right? And when you try to tell people how to do things, particularly if you’re relatively lower level bureaucrat, you’re very likely to grossly over-specify, make wrong assumptions about the best way to do it.
You know, if I were the dictator, probably not a bad idea. I would put defense stuff – okay, I want air supremacy. I don’t give a fuck how we have air supremacy. I want air supremacy and we’re willing to pay blah for air supremacy and let people figure out how to do air supremacy. What’s the mixture of man versus drone? Maybe it’s all drone. Maybe it’s a mix. Maybe it’s very close satellite drone plus man, but you let there be some mission-solving orientation to these bids rather than specification-based bids.
John: First principles kind of analysis – it’s not done nearly enough. People don’t go back to the basics and try to look at what, you know, we’re way downstream of what that first principles kind of development cycle was, and we’re like, we have so many baked-in assumptions to what we do now, and they’re hidden in programs and layers of thinking, and a lot of them are rotten. Right? I mean, stay in Afghanistan because we have to be there. Two and a half trillion dollars later in a failure and an evacuation. These things just persist. No one goes back to dig those suckers out, those rotten assumptions that are locking us into things. If you try to talk about it with people, they’ll go, “You can’t even address it.” You try to get into a serious forum, they go, “Oh, you know, we can’t talk about that. That’s too complex. That’s never gonna happen.” It’s not even worthy of consideration because it’s so far outside the realm of possibility that that can be changed, and they avoid it rather than, you know, they’ll want to talk about the edges and little tweaks and things like that. And it’s like, no, you can’t fix it until we do this.
Jim: And that’s one thing I do like about – I mostly do not care for Trump, but I do think he’ll end up being a net positive for our country and will no doubt break some things, but there is so much rot there that needs to be shoveled out, that it’s worth the occasional break.
John: There’s a reason why the counties around the Beltway are the wealthiest counties in the United States. I mean, those folks and their kids…
Jim: Yeah, I pointed that out more than once. I grew up in the DC burbs, and they were not the richest counties in the fifties and sixties. Right? One of them was Montgomery County, but none of the rest. But today, most all the richest counties in the United States around DC is feeding at the trough.
John: Yeah. I mean, I can understand. Like, I live in Middlesex in Massachusetts, and it’s wealthy. But it does stuff. It produces stuff. We have all the biotech, and then we have all the finance there and all that other stuff. I can understand the wealth that was created, but the DC area doesn’t. You know, you have USAID and other things, and you see these people. Like the head of USAID is a government employee, and goes from a million dollars net worth to $20,000,000 net worth in three years of actually running it. How do you do that? How is that even possible?
And you see these again and again and again, the kids of the connected inside there are making multi-hundred thousand, multi-million dollar deals, doing basically nothing, or advancing an agenda that is contrary to the interests of the United States. You know what I mean? I think we did this on the last podcast of what went wrong with America is that we have to become slightly more nationalistic. I mean, more Washingtonian and lead more by example, you know, just trying to improve the prosperity of Americans, coming up with ways to use all this new technology that we’re developing for the most part in a way that’s positive and something everybody else wants to emulate. Just like we did with electricity, just like we did with cars, just like we did with indoor plumbing, just like we did with all these other things that we pushed out into the general society, and everyone else copied us.
So I want to see that. You know, appliances, everything. All these things, I want to see this. So I don’t know how we get there from here with these kind of network organizations, but I hope we can find a way to turn network decision making into something that can solve the kind of breakdown in hierarchical and market-based decision making that got us to this point. It’s kind of dysfunction, this kind of hollowness. Low cohesion, low trust, dysfunction, corruption, inability to solve complex problems, and more. So, as chaotic as it is on the network front, it’s something we have to go through in order to solve these bigger problems that we have with the way we have been making decisions in the past.
Jim: A hopeful future with some question marks around it. I want to thank John Robb for yet another very interesting conversation here on the Jim Rutt Show. And of course, check out the episode page at JimRuttShow.com for links to many of the things we talked about.
John: Alright. Thanks, Jim.