John understands applied violence at a level of sophistication far above even most people in the American military because he builds the tools for it via his company, Modern Intelligence. They’re working on modular and composable AI systems designed to rapidly assess increasingly noisy and strange battlefields. What they’re building will eventually enable previously impossible sensor integration and problem solving for brains of all kinds, hardware or wetware.

We cover a ton of ground over more than three hours, from Jimmy Torre’s Clausewitz-tier ideas about the “noise floor” to modes of conflict other than full scale war. We talk about specific weapons systems and their implications as well, and in great detail. There are a few cuts here and there where we had some light technical difficulties, but even with that in play I’d say that this is by far the best discussion I’ve taped for this feed yet. Enjoy!

We talk about the state and direction of the Project, the potential paths to policy influence presented by the incoming Biden administration, and much more. This episode focuses mostly on politics, we’ve decided to do a deep dive on Wikipedia at a later date.

This was recorded on February 2nd. The audio is a bit washed out on this one, we had some microphone problems, but it’s still very listenable and the content is excellent. Enjoy!

But then things popped off in DC and we started to get all metacontrarian. Tyler suggested that instead of spending two hours wallowing in misery we change direction and talk only about the good stuff and the silver linings. Scraping for whitepills, in other words.

It might come off as a bit awkward and stilted at first, and honestly I had to really had to force myself to come up with things that had any positive implications at all. But after sticking with the premise for about a half hour we both got into a groove. It ended up being a great discussion, and we both felt really good afterwords, like a burden had been lifted. Turns out that focusing on the positive actually can make you a bit happier.

There are still good things happening in the world. Hope you like it!

This was taped the week before Christmas and unfortunately took a while to process. There were some fairly pernicious complications with the audio that required a manual rebuild from the backup tracks, so if there is more than the usual amount of people talking over eachother the fault lies with my amateur editing skills.

I’m taping a few more episodes in the coming weeks, looking forward to more interesting discussions with interesting people. Suggestion box is open as always, curious to hear what everybody thinks.