Fragile Systems
Hi, listeners. Welcome to another episode of 2 Parachutes Podcast. As always, I'm your cohost, Sean Baker Garcia, the accidental entrepreneur. And with me is Scott who I'll let introduce himself.
Scott:Hey, everybody, and welcome in. I am Scott Olson, and I am still a retired FBI agent and currently a private investigator. And I'm, as always, delighted to be here with you, Sean. What's on your mind today?
Shawn:Well, know, we have been having a lot of personal off off the the record conversations that led me to think we should introduce a new topic in this episode that I think is appropriate as we enter into this two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of our nation, the great United States Of America. And so I thought in lieu of current events and a lot of dynamics we've been seeing in the last probably, like, ten years, we should think about exploring or see where is the value in exploring the limits of systems. I am a self proclaimed systems thinker. I enjoy fixing systems and operating within them. I enjoy the symbiotic nature of them, or potential at least, of systems.
Shawn:So for me, it's a really I always thought of systems as a good thing. It's something that, you know, you always systematize. You don't just want one off successes. You wanna operationalize things in a system wide manner so that you can reap the benefits of, you know, whatever the changes that you're making in your organization. Certainly as an entrepreneur, I would argue that.
Shawn:But also, as somebody who has worked a lot in foreign capacity building, you know, initiatives, you never wanted anything to be unsustainable, which often meant that you go, you train partners to hone a specific skill set or capability, and then you, you know, work with them to not just operationalize, but systematize throughout their institution this new practice or behavior or standard. So but with that said, I think, Scott, you and I have been talking about everything from the, you know, the US IRS tax code and filing process to the EU to The United States as a, you know, sort of compilation of what were independent states that were, you know, joined together in a sort of singular country, external, you know, presence, but but very much operated independently from many years of our founding within our founding or after our founding. So, you know, where are we at in 2026 with The United States as its own system, other global systems like the EU and the African Union, perhaps the United Nations, or even something as basic as, like, our American tax code. And and as a system, you know, is it too big? Is it too convoluted?
Shawn:You know, is the system failing us? Is the system failing, period? So anyway, those are some contextualized topics, subtopics within the broader topic of systems that I thought, you know, there seemed to be a pattern there that Scott and I recognized that might be interesting to put our brain power towards to understand it a little better and see if there's something there as, you know, average American citizens and citizens of this world that we should be paying attention to, Scott. So with that, I'll sort of kick it over to you to get us started.
Scott:Yeah, so there, as always, there are a number of rabbit holes we can go down, but the one that I keep coming back to is how systems evolve and how they grow and how they change and they don't you know always change for the better. Sometimes they get better, sometimes they get worse and that's a function of opinion, You know, anytime there's a change in a system, some people will think it's better and some people will think it's worse. But if we take a step back in this episode and look at the broader context, maybe without the value judgment, and I think it's appropriate too as we're coming up in The US on two fifty years, is to understand that systems grow and develop, but essentially once you build a thing, as that thing is modified, it becomes what I sort of process as a franken system. It's sort of like continuing to remodel a house. Maybe you had an ancestor that built a little cabin two fifty years ago and over the generations everybody has remodeled that cabin and so now maybe it's a bigger house but parts of it have been built out and then you found termites, you tore it down.
Scott:You had somebody who didn't like a wing and so you tore it down and so now you have this edifice, this house that's been modified and built and rebuilt over the years, and the question then becomes, is it savable in its form? Do we continue to remodel? Or do systems at some point come to a place where the best thing to do is to chop it down to the foundation and start anew. And I think that the challenge with that thinking is, for example, you look at just as a random example, The US tax code. One of the criticisms of The US tax code is that it's so convoluted and so complicated and there are so many exceptions in it.
Scott:And we're always talking about reform, but we never really reform it to make it simple and direct because with all of those exceptions when you're closing loopholes and you're removing things there's a segment of people that have come to rely on that this thing and they are opposed to that so you have that influence on the system saying we need to remodel. The other part of the problem is if you're gonna tear down something that's two fifty years old why do you not tear down the foundation? And I think that's a huge concern when you go from the metaphor to The United States. There may be people out there and I think that there probably are who think we should tear the whole thing down, including the US Constitution as the foundation and start anew. And so maybe, well, I'm interested as I rally this thing back to you, and as I'm sort of thinking out loud about systems and franken systems, can't avoid systems being built onto and built onto.
Scott:They're going to be franken systems at some point, but as they get more Frankenstein ish, they get less and less efficient and less and less purpose built, and so my question to you is, if we look at how this has unfolded in other places in the world, at two fifty years The United States is relatively young. If you look at Europe, European political systems have been around and you can pick your mark, but I'm going to arbitrarily pick the Roman Empire as a mark. So it's maybe three thousand, three thousand five hundred years, four thousand years, and you have the Roman Empire that eventually led to the Holy Roman Empire, that eventually led to feudalism, which eventually led to the parliamentary forms of government in Europe, which unlike The United States, is built on the requirement for a super majority to make decisions. In Europe, you've got millennia as the sort of economic and emotional basis for the majority rules, and so a majority comes in, forms a government, swings everything one way, two years, five years, ten years later, there's another majority and they unwind everything. So The United States system is more frustrating because it's on a slow move, but I think the European system is equally frustrating because you have these pendulum swings back and forth and they're not predictable.
Scott:So my question to you is, as we in The United States begin to sort of look at our legacy and start talking about what do we do now, can we be informed by other governments that have been around for longer and how they struggle with the Franken system, with the continued remodeling instead of, you know, the Roman Empire collapsed? Is that a burning down of the system? The Holy Roman Empire emerged from those ashes at some level? Was that fundamentally different? I don't know if that shakes anything loose for you, but that's sort of where my thinking is going.
Shawn:Well, at the risk of completely hijacking this conversation, because I think what you've introduced is a really interesting focal point of this systems conversation, which is, you know, yes, The United States as a country is young relative to all of these prior established, you know, in some cases, millennia old nation states. Although nation states, it wouldn't be millennia because it would only go back to the sixteen hundreds, the Westphalia treaty. But but but, you know, that had been some sort of defined political social entity that had definable sort of borders. Right? You know?
Shawn:While, yes, we are young relative apples to apples compare compare comparing them apples to apples to other states, I would argue or I I would proffer this as a different way to think about it. We are only young relative to the other nations insofar as, you know, again, founding length of stay, you know, like, and are still alive. I think we might look a lot older or more mature if we actually factor in the fact that up until the industrial revolution, there was a very consistent, let's call it the perfect, you know, nuclear family. Let's use the analogy of the perfect nuclear family. So you have a dad, a mom, 2.5 children, a dog, a cat, a white picket fence, and that is what all the nations up until the industrial revolution could be characterized as.
Shawn:Right? It was predictable. It was, familiar how they sort of elected there or not. You know, how they established leadership in their nations or over their territories was fairly consistent from a social human experience perspective. Post industrial revolution, we see each, I would probably argue, each decade an exponential quickening of societal and human experience change.
Shawn:The nineteen fifties were very different from the nineteen sixties. The nineteen sixties were very were very different from the nineteen eighties. The nineteen eighties, you know, are very different from the 2000. You know? So we're having these because of technology, the pace of technological innovation and and integration into our day to day lives, I would say that the The United States as a country is more like a you know, was raised more like, you know, by a single working mom who's like in you know?
Shawn:And so what does that mean for the nation? Well, that means the nation has to grow up way faster. We have to mature more rapidly. And so maybe we're wise beyond our years even though we're the youngest ones on the block. You know?
Shawn:So I think it's a it's a fair caveat to offer just because tenure doesn't equate to wisdom always, you know. And I'll just throw that out there, is I think we have a lot to offer as a country, which I'm not saying you were not saying that. But I think the listeners, you know, I think it's an interesting idea for us to think about. Because we do have a lot of people in this country that kind of, you know, beat up on The United States because of our inexperience, our newness, our, you know. But there's a lot that we have had to learn that we have not had the luxury of millennia to figure out, you know, because things are changing so rapidly.
Shawn:So we've had to sort of unnaturally accelerate in our governance and societal, like, you know, interaction practices, understanding, flexibility, resilience. So I would just say, you know, I think it's still important to look at the question of systems for The United States, but through that lens. Yes, we're youngest, but it doesn't mean we're not wise and we haven't learned as much as some of these older societies maybe have learned. It just took us less time to do it out of necessity, you know, because we didn't really have a choice. I think the question I would want to surface and then sort of suss out and and I think this hopefully will speak to your, know, putting your FBI hat on for a minute, is, you know, what are some- what are ways that we as human beings who are often trapped by the systems that we rely upon?
Shawn:You know, the IRS tax code and filing process is a good example of that. But just, you know, our natural political process is another example of that. Right? So when what what maybe are there indicators that we can sort of start to become familiar with so that we're like, uh-oh, this is not heading in the right direction because I see these sorts of things, you know, happening, or this is becoming inefficient. You know?
Shawn:So in other words, you know, is it complexity of a system? Is it accessibility? Like, you know, you and I were talking about the tax code thing, and we're you know, I think we'd argue that between you, me, and and my husband, Greg, like, three of us, you know, we're we're we're we've seen some things. We've done some things. We're pretty literate.
Shawn:Like and yet somehow we keep getting surprised by the IRS. It's like, how is that So if we're getting surprised, what's happening to others who maybe haven't seen quite as much or aren't grappling with as much complexity? Is the system just consuming them? And is it fair? You know?
Shawn:So that's when I say accessibility. I mean, can the average citizen manage it? You know, that should be a litmus test or an indicator in my book of whether or not something is an overall societal benefit or harm potentially. Things like, you know, viability of it. Like if too many people are getting hit with penalties and fees and, you know, surprised by things, then that might be an indication.
Shawn:Is the system accurate? Is it producing actually common good outcomes? Or is it just, you know, or is the good that's coming out of it skewed towards the system? And and and if it's skewed towards the system, then are are there transparent arbiters or executors of that system so that we can follow a very clear trail of breadcrumbs to intent? Like, are these people, like, actually working on our behalf, or on theirs, or on the systems?
Shawn:You know what I mean? And we should be able to see all of that pretty clearly, especially something as fundamental as, you know, every citizen has to file taxes. I mean, unless you make, you know, I guess under a certain amount is my understanding. But but for the most part, we're all working citizens, like, you know, paying into this system. And so I think it's accountable to us and and accountable in a way that is that I don't need to go take a graduate level course to freaking navigate it.
Shawn:You know what I mean? Like, I don't you know, maybe that's an indicator that the system is is too big or is starting to break down. There are other, of course, examples not using the IRS tax code as the example. Again, you could look at the United Nations. Why did that fall apart?
Shawn:You could look at the EU. Why did that fall? You know, I know a lot of people would be very satisfied to be like, oh, is The United States not, like, you know, kind of being supportive? I'm like, no, that's not why systems fail. I mean, because if a system is good, it's not going to be, you know, hyper vulnerable to like, you know, a variable, even if it's a big variable.
Shawn:You know, it should still have I work in the international I have worked in the international community for twenty years, and I've never seen anybody not say that the UN was broken. You know what I mean? Even people wildly supportive of its initial goals. Right? So I mean, yeah.
Shawn:So I guess I'm going more towards, you know, how do we diagnose a system, its worth, its benefit, its value? And maybe if we develop some indicators for assessing whether a system is still viable or working toward our common good or not, maybe it's in the indicators that we can find avenues to either decide, Okay, is this worth targeted surgical fixing of some particular areas, and it'll strengthen and reinvigorate it? Or, like you were saying earlier, what's the go no go decision about, we just need to scrap this and start over because it's not the Frankenbaby is not worth trying to save at this point? It's so Frankenbaby that now it's producing, you know, just jankier versions of itself, you know, instead of actually something good. But, yeah, I don't know.
Shawn:What do you think?
Scott:Yeah. You've said a lot that I agree with and a lot that I think puts us in the right direction. The easy stuff first and as usual you're shaking out old memories for me. Decades ago when I was teaching people how to lead hikes and climbs. So it's one thing to be able to go into the woods and go hiking for a week and then you know go with your buddies hiking for a week.
Scott:But it's a different thing if you are taking a group of people who are not particularly skilled or it's their first time and you are responsible for making sure that they get safely through that one week trip. One of the things that we used to say is experience is not a substitute for good judgment. And you can have the most junior person in the group look at an environmental situation in the wilderness and go this is not safe, while the experienced guy is saying well I've done this a thousand times and we're going to be fine and the inexperienced person is making the right judgment call and it actually difficult for an experienced person to be in an environment that that person has been in over and over and over and to see it with fresh eyes. So I think your point is correct that just because a system of government has been around for a long time doesn't mean that it's good. It doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be changed and decisions that have worked before may not work now because if you're looking at it with eyes that expect to see a certain thing, you're not seeing what's new.
Scott:So I agree with you. I think that there's still an interesting juxtapose that maybe at some point we should discuss between government systems that have been around for a long time and government systems that have not. But I like your fundamental point that just because a system has been around for a long time doesn't necessarily mean that it's great, it doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't need improvement, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the old guys that are running it will always have the best decision or will drive the right outcome. That's why we have shows like 2 Parachutes Podcasts, so that we can talk about this. And we want 17 year olds debating with their grandparents, debating with 77 year olds about this.
Scott:And we seek a rational, open and honest conversation, one that doesn't devolve into accusation but produces the best result, but that really takes us to where you're leading us and I want to follow you, which is what is the best result? I think that as we, as a group of people, look at a system, opinions vary. Some people will look at a system and go it's good that this is a franken system because it allows me to navigate and get what I want and other people will say it's bad it's a franken system, we need to have it be fair, whatever fair is. We need to get rid of the arbitrariness, we need to make it simple and that reminds me of one of my favorite authors. This is a guy named Naseem Nicholas Taleb, and he's written a series of books from the Black Swan' to a book called 'Anti Fragile', a number of really interesting books and again we don't have an economic relationship with Mr Taleb but I highly recommend everything he's written, particularly in light of today's discussion because what we're really talking about is, is a system durable or is it not?
Scott:However it was created, however the house was renovated, will it collapse under its own weight? Is it fragile or even though it's been built and rebuilt and rebuilt, is it actually durable? Will it survive the earthquake? And so I think the question becomes less, you know, is the system good or bad because opinions vary and opinions change, but the question really is, is it going to collapse of its own weight and therefore is it fragile or is it strong and will it withstand the next cycle of debate to make it better? And I think maybe that's where we start, because if you look at systems that are in that direction of fragile, most of those systems, and I'm going to back up a quick second, when you're looking at things that have been renovated, the governmental systems, not necessarily the political system but the government systems, those have all grown because of scale.
Scott:The United States started with 13 states and now there are 50 states. So we started with something small and it grew into something big. Fragility is related to scale. As you grow, as you get bigger, the question becomes how do you build something that is durable but is also bigger? It's very easy to get fragile and I think fragility and this is my view and my opinion but I think I can prove the point, fragility comes from control.
Scott:If you have a centralized control system that system is fragile because it will disappear, it will collapse if you take out that central node. Star Trek and you'd mentioned that's the Borg in Star Trek. The way that the Borg, which was this unstoppable group of sort of humanoids. The way that they were stopped is, you know, when our heroes in the show realized that the entire board collective was controlled by one mind, and they destroyed that one mind, the entire thing shut down. And so when you look at a system that is highly centrally located, that system is inherently fragile because it's got way too much to do, and if the central location is somehow disrupted, if the dictator dies, a lot of times that system collapses.
Scott:In The United States what made The United States I think survive early on is that there wasn't a strong central government. Each state sort of has its own debate and I think that diffused decision making makes a system strong, the converse, the criticism of that is, well it's not fair, people are doing what they're doing and sometimes these people over here do something that those people over there don't like and it's not fair. And so my question to you is, as you scale, as you're building your house out and you're putting another wing here and another wing there, as you make it bigger, how do you make it not fragile? And I think the instinct is more control makes it strong, I think that instinct is wrong, so then what is it that makes something durable if central control is not that thing?
Shawn:I think we might be able to pull potentially lessons from some of the more successful franchised businesses in The United States who managed to build a brand and product service, you know, that then sort of proliferated throughout The United States. I think Starbucks is a great example. McDonald's is another example where you have empires, really, consumer empires, where they built a product or an offering that, you know, was locally supported and flourishing, and then they were able to replicate that success. Kinko's the in 1990s, I think, was another fundamental example of that ability to scale rapidly and and aggressively. And it involved a lot of homogeneity, though.
Shawn:Right? Because you had to retain the purity of the brand and the service. And so but I think that those types of things have a lifespan. Because at some point, you know, everything changes. Tastes change, preferences change, competitors arise, societal expectations and norms evolve.
Shawn:And so it's really challenging to find a lot of companies that you know, it'll be interesting to see in fifty years if we're less so lucky to be alive by then, maybe not. But, you know, because I think that, you know, again, in The United States in the industrial pre industrial revolution, or maybe on the cusp of it, you had a lot of very strong companies that rose and were sort of monopolistic. And then, you know but they they had very strong brand reputation and household name recognition, and so that carried them for generations. You know? And some of them were clever and managed to change with the times and adapt, and whether that was creating different product lines or evolving the ones that they had.
Shawn:You know, things like, you know, Procter and Gamble and and, you know, what are some of the Dow Chemical. You know, there's a lot of brands actually that people wouldn't realize, but they've been around forever, and and they've just adapted. So I think there might be a a lesson in there for us to talk to to to understand how how do you survive, and how do you, you know, grow and and try to prevent frailty. You know, it's like spreading butter over bread. It thins out, like, and so by default, you know, it it also has something to do, I think, with resources and just, you know, how much access do you have to to certain types of human or or capital or, you know, material resources.
Shawn:The question that it makes me think of, though, is is one, are we chasing, you know, the proverbial, you know, unicorn in the sense that, you know, maybe things aren't last aren't meant to last forever. And and so so so maybe you just need to have a plan for how a system ends, you know, or or, you know, build in some resilience that allows it to sort of, like, shrink and grow and shrink and grow to sort of preserve its existential viability so that the thing itself doesn't just die, you know, rather than just stubbornly persist because it just wants to keep expanding, you know, to the point where, well, if that's your goal and there's no alternative state of being, then the choice is to expand or die. You know? And so I think building resilience and expectation of what the system can or should look like in terms of its size, and function is maybe another way to manage frailty. But the question then for me, and and we we did in a sort of didn't really have a formal prep session for this episode, but we we did talk a little bit about the the issue before we just went live on the air, is that systems are dual use in the sense that, theoretically, you systematize for efficiency and to bring as many people as you can, a greater good or a common good.
Shawn:Hopefully, that's what it's being used for. But on the same side on a different side of that same coin, though, is, you know, how do we determine when a system is either not good and it needs to be destroyed, but now you can't because it's it's quote unquote too big to fail, right? And then what do you do about that, right? Because if you make a system too strong and too good and it can never die, well, we may very well see an evolution of societal norms and standards and needs that actually you're like, no, that thing needs to die. Like, that's not a thing anymore.
Shawn:We need this thing to go away. But now it's so strong that it's like, you can't actually kill it. And so so that's an interesting way to look at systems, you know, from a human vulnerability perspective rather than looking at the system. So there's systems vulnerability. So there's vulnerability in good systems that you wanna keep going, and then there's vulnerability to humans in bad systems that we cannot destroy.
Scott:Yeah. And I wow. I I love I that. And just for the audience, I'm gonna go back and re listen to what you just said in the last ten minutes because I think that's really important in a lot of different ways. So here's what's tumbling out for me, old story and I don't know where it comes from of the oak and the reed and the oak is this big strong tree and the reed is this slender little thing and the the question from the master is who's stronger and the the huge wind comes by and you know the oak stands up to it until it gets knocked over and the reed doesn't stand up to it.
Scott:The reed bends and bends and bends and then when the wind is tired and stops the reed pop back pops back up. That's in artfully telling the story but hopefully more artfully supporting your point that every system whether it's McDonald's or General Electric or the US government or any government, part of being durable, of being not fragile is how do you absorb something bad? How do you absorb something negative? And your concept of a system that is not fragile, part of what makes it not fragile is that it can absorb something negative by contracting and then it will expand again. Know, Bruce Lee, when your opponent expands you contract, when your opponent pulls back you expand.
Scott:It is that the dance and I think what we don't see in government is that there is no place for bad ideas to go and die.
Shawn:What we
Scott:do see in non government is bad ideas die. You can list lots of successful companies and then you would have to go and do a bunch of research to find companies that started and were large in their time, and then forty years later went out of business or got subsumed, but you still have ideas when their time has passed in the non government realm disappear they make room for the new good ideas. Government doesn't do that and I don't say the US government, I say
Shawn:all government. Because
Scott:there's no mechanism in government for a bad idea or an idea whose time has passed to die and that sort of makes government inherently fragile because there's always going to be a segment of people who like this thing that maybe isn't that great for everybody but they like it or we can we can fix it so we continue to have this layering on and I don't know what the solution to that problem is, because as I see it, it's inherent to government. We struggle with things, We want term limits, we want sunset provisions, But for me fundamentally, the more government tries to do, the more government tries to do things that non government is kind of better at, the more fragile it becomes, because the bad ideas don't have a place to die, we want things to be structured and controlled so it's centrally located, the authority is centrally located and all of a sudden we have things that are really restrictive and it's not just that they make people prisoners, it is actually that they make things worse and we can look at this system that's actually pretty bad and there's no way for it to die.
Scott:I'll go on the hook for the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act is not affordable. The reason that we've been arguing in the last year, you know, twenty four, twenty twenty five, and it's not in the news now, but the debate goes on. The reason that the premiums that people are charged for Affordable Care Act insurance coverage need subsidies. The reason they need subsidies is because it's actually not affordable.
Scott:The way that law is structured makes it so that it's too expensive to provide the service. It doesn't work. And what you see now is that in the debate there are people who are saying this actually works great! And it's demonstrably not true, but there's no place for that law to go to die. And that's an example that's going to trigger debate and here at the 2 Parachutes Podcast, we love ourselves a good debate.
Shawn:I was going to say, and not only that, but that goes back to my point about, you know, do we have transparent arbiters or executors of the system? And a lot of times, the answer is in government is no, because a lot of times, if you follow the trail of breadcrumbs for why a system is behaving in the way it's behaving, part of it is complexity and convolution built into the system over years of bureaucratic bloat and and, you know, kind of adapting to ever larger needs due to the size of The United States growing, you know, again, from that 13 to 50 states as it were. Part of it is because and I think you had made a point before we started recording to this end, and I'll probably say it in artfully, but essentially, it was something to the effect of there may be people, you know, at the top who are sort of in charge who could be potentially in charge of changing the system, but there may be a disincentive to do so because it generates revenue or income particularly, or some other, generates some outcome that will get them votes.
Shawn:So I think that we always have to be cognizant of, can we follow the money trail back to who is in charge of managing the system? And if there is an inherent economic benefit to either changing the system or allowing it to remain the same, that the executors of that system are are benefiting from, then then then we have to ask, is this a conflict of interest? Is this, you know, how it was supposed to be set up? Is there a way to firewall, you know, sort of the potential abuse of power, you know, to resurrect a failing system, or to frankly tear it down if it no longer serves the common good, which is ultimately what this country and governance should be about. Insert, you know, choice of alternative recipient.
Shawn:I mean, you know, if you're in the United Nations, you have to ask who's who's benefiting from what at the at the leadership levels. And and the same question should be asked. You know? Is there a conflict of interest there or with the tax system here in the in The United States or head of the EU. You know, you just have to ask those questions to kind of keep the architects and the operators of our systems, the protectors of these systems, the stewards or whatever you wanna call them, the gatekeepers, like, to keep them honest and accountable.
Scott:Yeah. And it's, you know, I pull back from what you're saying, not because I disagree with it,
Shawn:but
Scott:because I want to make a different sort of meta point, which is if you compare the Affordable Care Act to Bernie Madoff, both made specific promises about outcomes. Those promises were not true. They in some ways are demonstrably lies, which means somebody said something and they knew it wasn't true at the time. Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme, not an investment house. President Obama said under the Affordable Care Act, if you like your doctor, you get to keep your doctor.
Scott:At the time he said it, in my opinion, he knew that wasn't true. But what's the remedy? Bernie Madoff went to jail. There is nobody who helped move forward the Affordable Care Act who has been held to account And why is that? Right.
Scott:The reason is sovereign immunity. You actually can't hold government officials, political officials who have been voted into office, you can't hold them accountable for when they lie because you can't sue the sovereign. If a person runs for office to be governor of some state and they say I'm going to do all this stuff if you vote for me and then when they get into office they don't do any of that stuff, you cannot take them to court. So if you have a big company that says invest with me and you're going to get this big return and it doesn't. Marty Maynard goes to jail, Sam Bankman Fried goes to jail, the guy that made the, there's an ongoing list of people not in government who have made promises that turned out to be not be true and they're in jail.
Scott:When politicians make promises that turn out to be not true, they don't go to jail.
Shawn:Well, or pay a fine. Right? Like, that's false advertising. You it is really what it comes down to is, you know, there's no catch all control for a false somebody who a political, you know, actor who goes in and makes a series of promises they don't keep or fulfill. And, you know, again, anybody in the private sector would get hit with false advertisement, like suit know.
Scott:Right, which is exactly why, in my opinion, and let's have this debate, the biggest problem with the government being involved in things like healthcare, housing, food, automobiles, gasoline, electric power is sovereign immunity. When the government gets it wrong, when we say we're going to solve the housing crisis by doing this, this and this and they make the housing prices worse and you can go to New York and California and a number of other places and look at the problems with housing and there's a direct correlation between the problems with housing and the regulations. There's no way for those ideas to fail, there's no way for that problem to be fixed, and there's no way for the people who are being harmed to have their day in court because of sovereign immunity and that is why personally, I'm a fan of small government, because there's no remedy.
Shawn:Well, and what I also think is inherently flawed in when you start getting government bloat and man you know, mission creep and mandate bloat in a government, a federal government such as the United States' federal government, is that you become like, there's no scenario where even if you solved whatever the quote unquote crisis is that you're attempting to solve, there's no way you're not looking for the next crisis, even if you have to fabricate it. Because then solving crises on behalf of the American nation's people becomes your reason your your, you know, reasons for existence. So if there are no crises, then you don't have a reason to exist, which they can't have because they need a reason to exist. And so rather than limiting government at the federal level to, again, border security, because you have an external border that, you know, even though the internal states may not have a direct equity in that external border, they do in the sense that if those borders aren't safe, the internal borders then get breached. Facilitating interstate transport and trade, right?
Shawn:Like you want- that's something the government should kind of help manage. Like from a federal level, everybody dumps into a pool. We have highways that go across The United States, north, south, east, west, great. You know, international trade, you know, all of those things, all the external leaning things, right, that you want, just partners and trade partners and security partners and all that. You know, but other than that, they should get out of it.
Shawn:And the states, you know, and this is partially, again, coming full circle to systems assessment, like good or bad, the good, bad, the ugly, and the potential, right? Like, some of them have potential. It's just, you know, understanding the limits of a system's ability to bring benefit to a society or to a company or to, you know, whatever sort of situation you're dealing with. I think when things start getting less transparent, so you can't see who the puppet masters are and what their incentives are. Or maybe you know, but you follow the trail of breadcrumbs, so you have no way to assess their objectivity in executing the system, which I think is problematic.
Shawn:It comes down to complexity. If the average person can't easily, predictably, reliably navigate it, then something's wrong. And the system needs to be either surgically assessed and repaired. Or if deemed unsalvageable, destroyed to create something different or new, or to not create anything at all, because maybe the system outgrew its need, and it's just no longer needed. And that can be very true.
Shawn:Systems aren't designed to wanna die, though, as we know. So that's a problem. You know? And and finally, is it producing, you know, a defensible, obvious, common good. And if it's not, then rather than just finger pointing at all the different ways some entity or other is making it not, then I think, again, it's time for an objective third party analysis to come in and make an assessment for what's really going on.
Shawn:Right? And that's gonna be very difficult, especially in The United States as a very hyper partisan sort of country, at least right now. But I think whether you're a company that is struggling with scale, or if you are an individual government agency that is struggling with producing good outcomes, whether you're DMV or the IRS, or if you're a country and you're struggling with cohesion and solidarity, right, to the point that it's causing combustions to potentially lead to a civil war literally, then those are all different ways that systems work in our lives. And, you know, I think the you know, you said earlier, I don't know what the solution is. Well, I certainly don't know either.
Shawn:I mean, we've done a pretty good job at diagnosing the the Frankenbabies, but, you know, but what's what's the what's the, you know, but what's the prognosis, and more importantly, what's the treatment regime being recommended? And the best I can come up with is unsatisfying, but it's a start, which is we need mechanisms for objective systems analysis, and, you know, then you need action oriented people, not theorists, not intellectuals sitting up on a fricking hill on, you know, in the clouds. You need pragmatists, people who have practical experience in whatever the system is that they're analyzing it. You need practitioners, you know, coupled with the smart folks, and then an interpreter who can communicate between the two so that we can get these folks in sync to then say, okay, here's the diagnosis. This is this Frankenbaby is on life support.
Shawn:You need to, like, euthanize. Like, it's, you know, and either, you know, don't create any more Frankenbabies or create a whole other kind of Frankenbaby. You know what I mean? And and you know? Or to say, no.
Shawn:No. No. There's still a lot of like, this is a good franking baby. You just have grown a sixth pinky that you don't need. Let's just cut that franking baby's sixth pinky off, and let's let's move on.
Shawn:So that's my very inelegant, know, knuckle dragger assessment of what is needed without any accountability to actually help me make that happen.
Scott:Well, may be all those things, and I just love listening to you articulate. Because it's wonderful. And it's understandable. I depart from you is the practical applications. I think people would argue when they're coming at me and saying, all right Olsen, you want the debate?
Scott:Here it comes. What do you do when the little guy is crushed? I mean, you're presuming by saying sovereign immunity is a problem, the government should get out. You're presuming that there's an equal playing field.
Shawn:And
Scott:you take that legitimately and say there has to be this third party arbiter. The United States, we have the courts. Their function is to be that third party arbiter. At the world level, though, we have third party arbiters and they don't work.
Shawn:They're just bad. They're not good at it.
Scott:Yeah. Well, they're not good at it. But the problem is they're human.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:You know, the International Criminal Court has a problem because it is not diverse enough. And that will annoy people but the reality of it is the International Criminal Court has a particular political agenda, it is not above the fray, It is in the fray. The UN is the same.
Shawn:Can I ask a clarifying question? When you say it's not diverse, like in what context are you saying? Are you talking about national representation or are you talking about like something more narrow like gender or ethnicity? What's the diversity that's missing?
Scott:So for me, diversity doesn't mean skin color, religion, ethnicity, it means viewpoint, it means agenda, it means the way of processing the world and when an organization becomes political, and I would include the International Criminal Court, I would include universities in The United States, when you're in an echo box where everybody agrees, you're not diverse.
Shawn:And I
Scott:think the criminal court is an echo box. They're not coming out with measured thoughtful approaches, they're coming out with a political agenda. It's the same thing with most of the institutions that are within the UN, you know, when you have despotic regimes that are in organizations designed to be fair, You're in an echo box. So that's what I mean. The problem is a problem of humanity.
Scott:We talk all the time at 2 Parachutes Podcast about having opinions, being thoughtful, having opinions and being willing to be convinced, but still having opinions. The problem with the third party arbiter, a judge, is that by virtue of the fact that that person is one person, they are necessarily going to have a viewpoint set that is not all encompassing. The reason that appeals courts in The United States are multiple judges is so you get different viewpoints and the point of it is that the whole of the court will have a more broad and measured result because you have more people with different opinions and that's the problem. The problem is not with the concept of we need a neutral and detached third party arbiter, the problem is in the execution. How do we find a neutral and detached third party arbiter?
Scott:But the problem remains. How do we protect people from being crushed? Do we protect the weak, for lack of a better term, from being crushed by the strong? And I think and in our last sort of four or five minutes here, I'm going to throw this little tornado at you. One of the things that we're looking at right now of what to do and what the impact is, is with artificial intelligence, with AI.
Scott:Here we have a new technology. It already is pervasive. Some people are better at it, some people are worse at it, but it's going to affect us all. What do we do? Do we put government in it?
Scott:Government where good ideas can grow, they can become bad ideas but over time but they can't be killed. Bad ideas, we've to try something, we've got to do something, bad ideas can't die and so my question to you is your concept, which I think is absolutely correct and which I love, is that systems in order to be durable need to be able to expand and contract. They need to be able to withstand the blow and not die, but you know to cut out the tumor so the rest of it can live and it's okay. We understand that as this mass grows, as we build the house, we're going to take part of it apart if it's something that no longer suits us or something that's no longer good. We're not going to mourn that because we recognize that it's going to grow and contract and grow and contract.
Scott:How do we try and create in government a system that can grow and contract rather than a system that just grows, which is what we have now, not because we intend for it, but because we don't have a mechanism to contract in government. And what do we do with AI? Do we just let it go and hope? Do we put some kind of regulation in it?
Shawn:Yeah, well, a global security standpoint, which is where my academic and professional training has has led me and as, you know, sort of a somewhat I don't know if I'd call myself a full expert. I probably could. But, you know, what I would say to the artificial intelligence phenomena is that we have to proceed with caution and optimism. So as with a lot of day to day things, chemicals, you know, we see this in in, you know, different types of equipment that you might use in a laboratory that could also be used to make a weapon. It's what we call dual use.
Shawn:Right? It it can be used for benign, life affirming, you know, purposes, as well as it can be manipulated to use for nefarious lethal purposes. And so it's inherently a dual use technology and and sort of phenomenon. So the the way that the global community has dealt with all dual use things since, you know, probably the end of World War two when they first outlawed mustard gas as a weapon of war is that, communities of technical experts will get together, assess the relative applications, you know, and and dangers associated with the technology, and then an international regime or policy framework will be developed that then countries around the world will have the potential to sign on and be a party to if they agree that those policy parameters governing that technology are are reasonable and and achievable for them. And a lot of countries may not decide that that is the case for them.
Shawn:And so they are not a party to those treaties and therefore not bound to them. Now those countries are generally treated like international pariahs. I'm sure you can imagine the North Koreas, and in some cases, like Israel, I think, is maybe not a party to one or like the NPT treaty, the non proliferation treaty, I think, maybe. I don't know actually if they are not. But you just always hear about Israel maybe having a nuclear program that nobody knows about, in which case they would either, you know, be violating that treaty if they were a party to it, or they're just simply not a member of the treaty to begin with.
Shawn:But so that that's that you know, I don't that that's an example of a system that actually is in place that I think works quite well. And I think it's served humanity fairly well. It is, you know, these these technology and and security frameworks that states then can can, you know, choose to opt into. How we utilize it at the local level, you know, within our own country, I think that generates a whole other series of questions for, you know, systems that we have in place. Our national laboratories are typically where you would localize, you know, assessment of certain expressions of technology.
Shawn:You know, that's how we sort of manufactured the atomic bomb. And, you know, it was very, of course, secret. It was kept across, you know, a number of different laboratories across The United States and very, very top secret so that, you know, it wouldn't fall into the wrong hands. But I think for artificial intelligence, probably. I've heard people suggest that we need, like, an AI, you know, Manhattan project.
Shawn:And I I I fundamentally just don't understand what they mean by that because, you know, the atomic bomb was a very specific technological product that you were trying to develop. And so you can have something like a Manhattan Project to dump all your resources into developing this particular thing. Right? Okay. Fair enough.
Shawn:We're gonna put the sort of fission part of it over at this lab. We're gonna put the delivery, know, kind of what do you call that? The delivery system. We're gonna build that over here in this lab. And then you build it all, and boom, you got your That's a Manhattan Okay.
Shawn:Great. I understand that. How do you Manhattan Project AI? There's like a billion different expressions that you could leverage that for good or for bad. So to me, that was brought up at a conference I was at a couple years ago here in DC.
Shawn:And I was just like, Like, wait, what do you mean by Like, you know, there's just so many different ways you could pursue that. It didn't make any sense to me. To me, was just people grabbing at straws trying to contextualize what they know. You know what I mean? And and what they're familiar with.
Shawn:It it it doesn't work for AI. It just doesn't work. AI is like the the Internet. You know? I mean well, actually, it's not even like the Internet because even the Internet is finite.
Shawn:It's like you know what it is. It's, how we communicate in the cloud and how we electronically are connected to each other to some extent beyond just networks. So anyway, so that's a system that's definitely it's brand new. It's an ecosystem that's growing, and we're gonna have to pay close attention. And hopefully, lot of smart people way smarter than me are thinking about it and helping to manage that so that we don't destroy ourselves inadvertently or let the machines destroy us, you know, because we weren't paying attention and we thought we were smarter than we were.
Shawn:Always a possibility. Up until now, we haven't really had the machines in a position to be able to do anything about that. But we better be careful because that reality is about to change. And that was kind of where we led our conversation with before we got onto the recording was, is AI shaping us, or are we shaping AI? So in other words, who's using who in this situation, right?
Shawn:You have to ask yourself that question. But but to kind of just close this up full circle on the systems question, you know, and and how do we get government to self enroll in in sort of self evolution, it's a really tricky question. They don't really want to. There's no built in incentive. I would say that it is feasible, though, you know, just from a practical standpoint, I see any number of ways that that a a third party could get introduced into government and and whether it's, you know, something as simple as how how the State Department is currently being run.
Shawn:And and there are inefficiencies right now. When DOGE came in, they cut all of sort of foreign assistance programming. A lot of the staff were were were fired. And you know? But now it's as it turns out, well, we we cut the hair a little too short here, and now we're bald.
Shawn:And we don't you know, we don't look very good, and, you know, it's affecting our performance, you know, I guess. So that's probably a bad metaphor. But, you know, what they did was they came and took a private sector mentality and applied it in a government context, which, you know, maybe if they were lucky, about 60% to 70% of their approach was applicable and integratable in a government context setting. The other 30%, 40% was absolutely not, and that's the part they didn't understand. And so the answer is like, it's not that it's not possible to get that kind of expertise.
Shawn:The Trump administration has shown that, oh, no, you can do it. You can bring in a bunch of private sector people. They could try to fix it. But what they lacked was an actual familiarity with the system of government. And, you know, without respect to a value judgment on whether that's good or bad, you just have to understand the patient.
Shawn:You know what I mean? And they didn't understand the patient. And they thought that would be Okay. But then it triggers things like what you're talking about, which is what happens if you harm the greater good because of what you're doing. And I think this administration would just say, well, you know, a little, you know, no pain, no gain, right?
Shawn:Which, okay, fair enough, you know, like, fitness guru, like that, I get you. But like at the same time, I think that it's not an either or choice. I think it's a false choice. I think that, you know, politicians stick their foots in their mouth all the time, right? Like when Hillary Clinton was running for president the first or second or tenth time, I have no idea.
Shawn:You know, she went into West Virginia and made the gaffe of basically saying, suck it up, buttercups. Your way of life is over. Now, you know, figure out how to do something different or or get lost. Right? Like that you know, I I paraphrase.
Shawn:Was something that it wasn't very it wasn't very comforting. It wasn't very compassionate. It wasn't certainly wasn't empathetic. Right? Well, okay.
Shawn:But, like, you can enforce change, and you can like, that's that's saying that's her saying, we're gonna kill the Frankenbaby. Cole is dead. Okay? Regardless of who it hurt, regardless of, you know, generate without any appreciation for generations of families whose livelihoods have been, you know, sort of, you know, essentially cultivated through this industry. It wouldn't take much to change your approach to how you talk about it.
Shawn:I mean, the fact that it goes away is okay. But, like, let's create sort of a a landing for these people. Give them a you know, it's not it's like just throwing them over on the Titanic without a lifeboat. Like, give them a lifeboat. Like, show them that we're going to get rehabilitation for training programs, and we're going to There are many different policy ways you could have softened that blow and eased that transition to get people who were tethered to this one system prepared to live in a different one.
Shawn:So I'd say that's one way to do it. The other way to do it, again, is if you're talking about public private partnerships, get some people in there, people like you, people like me. You know, not that we're shamelessly plugging to come fix the government, although I'm sure we probably could if given the opportunity. You know what I mean? At least to some extent, you know, to have surgical teams that are both private sector and government sector experienced and can distinguish, can make a diagnosis based on it's like, you know, having a doctor specializing in the thing that particularly ails you.
Shawn:We have to be familiar in all those things. You can't just be a pediatrics, you know, doctor, you know, or an OBGYN, right? You have to have specializations in the thing that's ailing the patient. And so I think it's possible. I'm an optimist, though.
Shawn:I do see room for the government to get better and ways that they could leverage the private sector to do it. And maybe now, Scott, they'll be incentivized because they've seen what happens if they just stubbornly refuse any kind of change. You know? Maybe.
Scott:We'll certainly see.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:But I I will say this. I love your passion. We are way over. Are over and We're I do gonna wrap up this one and we've got a lot of inroads into our next one, but part of the debate, part of having opinions and being willing to debate is the passion and you're a great example for that and that's why you make such a great partner on this podcast. So thank you and we're gonna sign off.
Shawn:All right. Until next time. Thanks, Scott.
Scott:All right. Thank you.