Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
To help members optimize opportunities and reduce risk, OODA hosts a monthly video call to discuss items of common interest to our membership. These highly collaborative sessions are always a great way for our members to meet and interact with each other while talking about topics like global risks, emerging technologies, cybersecurity, and current or future events impacting their organizations. We also use these sessions to help better focus our research and better understand member needs.
To encourage openness of discussion, these sessions take place with Chatham House rules, where participants are free to use the information in the meeting but are asked not to directly quote or identify other participants (we also keep privacy in mind when preparing summaries of these sessions, like the one that follows).
The July call was held on Friday, July 15th. Topics discussed include:
The meeting began with a reminder to OODA Network members to register for the upcoming OODAcon 2022. Carl Schroeder was also mentioned as a confirmed speaker. Schroader is a futurist and science fiction writer. His Stealing Worlds deals with issues around AI and cryptography and blockchain, and digital self-sovereignty. OODA CEO Matt Devost describes Schroeder as “Alvin Toffler and William Gibson in one person on stage – a really bright, articulate forward-looking guy.”
OODA Network Member and Former Congressman Will Hurd has also been confirmed as a speaker. Hurd just wrote a book called American Reboot that provides his perspective on the way forward in the U.S.
OODAcon 2022 – The Future of Exponential Innovation & Disruption
OODA team members will attend the following August events in Las Vegas. If you plan to attend, please reach out with opportunities to connect with the OODA Loop community.
BSides Las Vegas – After shaking off the rust, we are happy to announce it is full steam ahead for the 13th BSides Las Vegas! Join us at the Tuscany Hotel and Casino on August 9th and 10th, 2022 for all of the education, communication, and mischief you’ve missed.
Black Hat USA 2022 – Now in its 25th year, Black Hat USA is excited to present a unique hybrid event experience, offering the cybersecurity community a choice in how they wish to participate. Black Hat USA 2022 will open with four days of Trainings (August 6-11). The two-day main conference (August 10-11) featuring Briefings, Arsenal, Business Hall, and more will be a hybrid event—offering both a Virtual (online) Event and a Live, In-Person Event in Las Vegas. See the Conference Highlights below for more details.
The Black Hat USA 2022 Innovation Spotlight Competition was also mentioned as an event Network Members should attend if possible while at Black Hat: The Black Hat Innovation Spotlight is a new video competition for cybersecurity start-ups to present their products and solutions* live and in person at Black Hat USA. The Innovation Spotlight competition will be judged by a panel of industry leaders. Once all videos have been reviewed by the judges, four finalists will be selected and announced on July 12. These four finalists will be invited to exhibit in the Start-Up area at Black Hat USA 2022, and present their product/solution live to the judging panel at Black Hat USA 2022, where a winner will be announced. Wednesday, August 10th, 4:30-5:30 PM BUSINESS HALL, BAYSIDE ABC, LEVEL 1.
The Finalists competing at Black Hat are:
Also in Las Vegas in August:
https://oodaloop.com/archive/2022/07/08/the-global-cyber-games-charity-battle-2022-at-the-hyperx-esports-arena-on-august-11-2022/
The 2022 International CyberSecurity Challenge (ICC) was discussed on the call, where the inaugural U.S. Cyber Team took the Bronze.
Two interesting takeaways from the conversation:
For a detailed report on the event:
A wide-ranging discussion of the geopolitical climate ensued including the following topics and talking points:
The global economy is doing two things at once: It is slowing down and speeding up. It’s slowing down in the wrong places and speeding up in the wrong places. For example, inflation has just run away in many countries, Argentina has 71% inflation. People are having trouble getting food supplies. There are massive riots in Sri Lanka – running out of fuel and food security protests caused the Prime Minister to flee the country. We’ve seen protests like that before in history. It’s happening in a lot of countries at once because of inflation and food scarcity, water scarcity.
Cumulatively, all this unrest and uncertainty is something we have not seen in recent memory. We have not seen runs on banks in China and riots in China, maybe since WWII. Should this all give us cause for concern? What should OODA Loop analyze for you to help inform your decisions when it comes to these global geopolitical events? What are you interested in that maybe we can dive a little deeper into RE: business issues? Do you have any other data that might help us make sense of all? Have you ever seen a situation like this?
There is a convergence of several different trends that are happening in the world right now that are causing us to be at an unprecedented point in history. Whenever there is an inflection point (i.e., the agriculture age to the industrial age) you start to see trends arising.
It’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen next in terms of global relationships and the use of new these new technologies and the use of information. We don’t have the rules or precedent to understand how to effectively manage it or guide it from a global perspective.
One member noted: “Energy and environmental concerns will come to a head at some point. Much like one could guess that the Soviet Union was going to fall, predicting exactly which year it was going to happen is another matter. What we’re seeing is almost a perfect storm of the pandemic, but also Xi Jinping made a decision back in the mid-2000 tens to double down on a construction-based economy – even though there were already signs that that was not working. And so that’s coming home to roost for China. And that’s why you see what you’re seeing in China. We know there are people now that are refusing to pay their mortgages and it’s being erased, but it’s happening.” See: Xi Faces Surprise Revolt From Chinese Homebuyers on Mortgage Boycott.
And that is having a ripple effect. The US has been absent from putting in investments into South America and Africa seeding it to the [Chinese ] Belts and Road initiative, which doesn’t solve any of these issues of food or water. And now with what is happening in Russia and Ukraine, we are going to see an increased period of volatility because people are not going to have their basic needs met. And the question is what are we the United States going to do about it? By the time we’re able to finally act the world will already be committed to a path where there are going to be riots. There are going to be bulges in the system.”
A member played devil’s advocate. “I’m hearing a lot of negativity in all these comments. And for the last, at least my entire lifetime, all of the predictions I’ve ever heard just turned out to be dead wrong across the board. Markets are not inelastic. Markets are not static. There will be adjustments. You probably have thousands of wheat farmers out on the planes right now planting the next crop. There will l be3D printed food. Those factories are coming, artificial meat, et cetera, et cetera. The technology is moving along very smartly there. Markets are going to adjust. Yes, there’s going to be a period of volatility. You’re telling me that the debt crisis in the seventies and the eighties, wasn’t a problem – the OPEC oil shocks in the seventies? The fall of the wall and all the things that happened coming out of that problem. The Arab Spring?”
A member responded: Potentially the places that need it the most will not be able to pay the markets that can provide them. And so yes, the US is probably the best place to be now as we experience this crisis because we will weather the storm and get through it. We are not talking about population bulges or anything like that. We know we’ve had famines in the nineties. We know we’ve had famine into 2000. The places that need it the most that cannot pay for what the market can provide will go without because there will be a lack of short-term supply to meet the needs of long-term sure. In another 18 months, 24 months, but it’s only four days or sorry, it’s only four meals for her. Someone says I’m now going to riot or go into NRC because I can’t feed my family. So the market will respond, but not overnight.”
A member provided some context: “Less than 20% of the electricity in our power grid comes from nuclear energy. That is more than most places in the world that have less than 10% of electricity generated by nuclear energy. Well, there are new approaches to generating nuclear power that should, could move that number way up and move the cost of energy way down. And if you move the cost of energy way down, then things like vertical farming become just a no-brainer, or producing nitrogen becomes cheaper. And nitrogen is used for fertilizer, which is also just a no-brainer. We can come up with an abundance agenda like this that can inform businesses and maybe the government – and that might be a helpful thing to do.
Two Municipal entities and bond placement strategies for creating battery storage plants for that excess energy synergy were discussed by a member:
“The good news is these types of projects are happening. It is a longer timeframe. Things look good for America. They look bad right now in the short run, but in the long term, things are looking good. The question is: how long the short term is “hit” before the long-term trend we are on keeps us heading in the right direction.”
The interesting blind spot that a lot of people appear to have has been about storage, not about power generation. You’ve got a lot of people spending a lot of money, fielding intermittent generation facilities, but then they didn’t have any place to put it. So there appears to be this gap around energy storage right now that has been a dramatic oversight that people have literally run into after having fielded pilot projects.
A network member with a background in thermodynamics offered this perspective: “There are a lot of people who are ignoring the second law of thermodynamics when they talk about green energy, which is an oxymoron. And where is the source of the charging come from? the reason nuclear energy is expensive is that we regulate it that way. If nuclear energy were taken seriously as opposed to regulated to make it completely cost ineffective, a lot of problems are actually solvable – perhaps even nuclear electric generation with electric vehicles that makes a lot more sense. But right now, anyone who draws the control volume properly to include disposal costs, which people are not accounting for in wind and solar and they need to – it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t close.
if you haven’t taken thermodynamics, you don’t really understand some of these concepts inherently and intuitively, but you, there, those of us who are trained in this go through a lot of time to fully understand the concept of what it means to say there’s no free lunch, right? A lot of the assumptions underlying this from someone who has done a lot of work in thermodynamics doesn’t work and I’m embarrassed because a lot of engineers are keeping their mouth shut because they smell money.
It is impossible to make nuclear power “on the cheap” not because we don’t know how to do it, but because we can’t get the thing approved now. By contrast, we’re subsidizing solar energy for God knows what reason. If you could cover the entire earth with solar cells, how efficient would they have to be to meet the energy output of the earth today? Just do that calculation. I invite you all to do it.
And then I ask you: is this really what we should be doing? Versus maybe going back to basics and saying: ‘look, the problem with nuclear has always been the storage issue after you’re done.’ The smaller modular reactors are addressing some of those issues just because modularizing everything makes that problem a little bit more doable. And by the way, the disposal issues of solar and wind are just as extraordinarily toxic to the environment, not to mention all the slave labor and mining stuff. Doing a systems engineering “apples to apples” comparison is what I’m advocating for.”
The recent NIST announcement and OODA Loop coverage prompted a discussion of the nuances and technical differentiation of the four algorithms:
The “So What?” of the NIST Quantum Resistant Cryptographic Algorithms Announcement
CISA and Quantum Security Industry Leaders React to Recent NIST Post-Quantum Announcement
URLs from the July Monthly meeting chat:
It should go without saying that tracking threats are critical to inform your actions. This includes reading our OODA Daily Pulse, which will give you insights into the nature of the threat and risks to business operations.
Use OODA Loop to improve your decision-making in any competitive endeavor. Explore OODA Loop
The greatest determinant of your success will be the quality of your decisions. We examine frameworks for understanding and reducing risk while enabling opportunities. Topics include Black Swans, Gray Rhinos, Foresight, Strategy, Strategies, Business Intelligence, and Intelligent Enterprises. Leadership in the modern age is also a key topic in this domain. Explore Decision Intelligence
We track the rapidly changing world of technology with a focus on what leaders need to know to improve decision-making. The future of tech is being created now and we provide insights that enable optimized action based on the future of tech. We provide deep insights into Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Quantum Computing, Security Technology, and Space Technology. Explore Disruptive/Exponential Tech
Security and resiliency topics include geopolitical and cyber risk, cyber conflict, cyber diplomacy, cybersecurity, nation-state conflict, non-nation state conflict, global health, international crime, supply chain, and terrorism. Explore Security and Resiliency
The OODA community includes a broad group of decision-makers, analysts, entrepreneurs, government leaders, and tech creators. Interact with and learn from your peers via online monthly meetings, OODA Salons, the OODAcast, in-person conferences, and an online forum. For the most sensitive discussions interact with executive leaders via a closed Wickr channel. The community also has access to a member-only video library. Explore The OODA Community.
About the Author
Daniel Pereira is research director at OODA. He is a foresight strategist, creative technologist, and an information communication technology (ICT) and digital media researcher with 20+ years of experience directing public/private partnerships and strategic innovation initiatives.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence