Episode 25- A.I. and "Holy Crap Computers are Scary" with Guy Morris

Today, we discuss the journey of Guy Morris! Thank you for joining our journey through the arts. Like we always say "Pursuing your Passions is a Bitch... But it's worth it!"

Please Check out our friend, Guy Morris-
His Website- https://www.guymorrisbooks.com/

Also Check us out and our future projects at The Rogue Scientist Productions
Website- https://theroguescientistproductions.com/
Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100087537946337
Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/roguescientistproductions/

Check out "The World Beyond" by Charles Dockham on Kindle Vella- https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/story/B0BMZPTP6G

Check out "The Beautiful Beast" by Carolyn Clark on Kindle Vella-https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/story/B0BVMNPBKZ

Check out Watsynthebox- Guest host William Thornhill- https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100094728966282&mibextid=b06tZ0

Transcript

The Rogue Scientist Productions (00:02.18)
Thank you and welcome to Pursuing Your Passions as a Bitch. I am your host Charles Dockham, the owner of the Rhodes Scientist Productions and the author of The World Beyond, an ongoing story on Kindle Vella. With me I have my guest, Guy Morris, the author of Swarm in the Last Ark. Guy?

Guy Morris (00:17.307)
Hi, Charles, how are you doing? Thank you for having me.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (00:20.688)
Thank you for being on our show. So the thing I wanted to get started with, or I always ask every author that's on my show, what got you into writing in the first place?

Guy Morris (00:32.79)
Um, well, I think it was a, it was a, a series of things, actually. I mean, I fell in love with reading when I was in college. I think that was the first step. Um, I, I had, I was, it's had a pretty rough childhood. I was a homeless runaway at age 13. Um, um, left home with a GED at age 15. So I wasn't really much of a reader until I got back to college. And then I kind of discovered this whole new world.

Guy Morris (00:59.886)
But going into my career, it was really hard to find a chance to read anything pleasurable or for joy. It was always leadership books or technology books or other things having to do with my career. I think the one event that kind of started was I was a single parent. My son was about 11 or 12, and we'd go to the library every week, and he would get a few books and read through them by Wednesday.

Guy Morris (01:24.626)
and have time on his hands. But I had a lot of time on my hands and I had a lot of personal computers. So I decided to write him a short story. And, you know, of course, boys age 12, you know, it's got to have pirates, treasure, lost civilization, and maybe a ghost or two. So, you know, you start taking the things that they want to write. And he loved it. His cousins loved it. I never really tried to publish it. It was just more for the joy of it. But that really kind of got me

Guy Morris (01:53.69)
sparked and when I actually went to write a sequel to that story, I got hooked on the history and it took me well over a decade of research just to get the research, to understand the true story of what the next book in that series would be and that became my book, The Curse of Cortez. So throughout my career, one of the things I always believed, the other thing that I came out

Guy Morris (02:22.89)
an admiration for the men of the Renaissance. And what I admire about them is that they were trained, while we were trained in our society to be specialists, they were trained to be generalists. They were said that you have to be good at architecture and you have to be good at art, you have to be good at religion, you have to be good at science. They wanted somebody who was really fully fleshed. And so while I had a fairly technical, high pressure career, I always wanted to balance out my brain

Guy Morris (02:50.858)
with something creative, whether that was writing. I did some songwriting for Disney for a while. I recorded CDs. I produced a award-winning webisode series that was actually based on the same story that my first book, Swarm, is based on. And so I've always tried to basically be creative. And when I retired, it was sort of a no-brainer for me that this would really be what I'd wanna do full-time and not just for the writing piece of it.

Guy Morris (03:20.31)
but the deep research and the constant learning and growing piece of it as well.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (03:26.42)
No, that's amazing. And honestly, it just kind of drives even more subjects that I want to ask you about, especially when it comes to the award winning webisodes and writing music for Disney. That wow.

Guy Morris (03:44.054)
I've had a lot of fun. As I said, I try to stay pretty active. I don't sleep much. But if you can kind of get the whole sleep deprivation thing out of the way, it's really great life. But yeah, I did some songwriting for Disney, and I actually stumbled onto that by accident. It wasn't something I was pursuing. They actually called me up. A friend of mine was a film producer, and he wanted to do a film.

Guy Morris (04:11.382)
sort of an MTV, but for Nickelodeon for kids. And so he asked me if I'd write some songs. And so I did. We went in and recorded them. His project never really took off, but six months later, I got a call from Disney Records saying they wanted to sign me up for some contract writing. And I thought, honestly, I thought it was a prank because I had never sent anything to Disney Records. And they're saying, no, no, we're looking at your CD right now. And I said, I never sent you a CD. I said, did Jack put you up to this?

Guy Morris (04:40.058)
No, no. So we had to kind of go around for several minutes before I realized that my friend had actually sent the CD that I produced for him. So, but yeah, that may got me started. Disney was an interesting process because they would typically call you up on a Wednesday or Wednesday and they say, Hey, we need five songs or this new project. We're going to send you over the spec sheets by fax. We'll factual of the spec sheet back in the fax days. And we need five songs in a week.

Guy Morris (05:08.943)
It doesn't need to be fully produced, but just make it sound nice. And so you'd have to write and record the songs within a week to kind of get it to them for consideration. And then they would decide at that point whether they wanted one, all, or none of those songs. So it was an interesting kind of process for them. You learn how to really kind of get your craft down pretty quickly.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (05:33.728)
No, and I actually have some, at least a little bit of personal experience of working with Disney as well as like a vendor for a previous job and a previous life. But it's one of those things where you just kind of, you've worked with them in one instance and then suddenly you're on the list to be called. And it's a very interesting kind of feeling when you get that call. Like you said, initially your friend was

The Rogue Scientist Productions (06:02.628)
probably starting the project out doing these different things, but it didn't initially get picked up. But here you're now on the list.

Guy Morris (06:15.618)
I lost it, Charles.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (06:17.216)
Oh, you did lose me? Okay. But here you're now on the list. And so it's an amazing feeling.

Guy Morris (06:19.902)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I quit after a while. I had a real job. It got to be a little bit of a nuisance for a bit. And, you know, they weren't always honest with me. So I wasn't, you know, that always bothered me. So I decided to quit at the time because I always had a lot of other things going on. But now the inspiration for my book, Swarm,

The Rogue Scientist Productions (06:48.183)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Morris (06:49.394)
actually came out from a real experience. Now in my career, I was involved in a lot of complex computer modeling. I did strategic planning for big companies. I had a number of different careers having to do with technology. Part of it was introducing into the business I was in at the time, an early stage of artificial intelligence called expert systems. And so I was constantly kind of reading up on technology trends and different trends.

Guy Morris (07:19.594)
And I stumbled on, and this is all true, this was the spark for the book Swarm, the whole series, was that I stumbled on an Associated Press article. And the Associated Press article was one of those really short little two paragraph blurbs, you know, that you get in like an Omni or the old pseudo-science magazines, you know, where they give you two pages of basically little shorts. And the first paragraph basically said that a program,

Guy Morris (07:46.422)
had escaped the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories at Sandia. The second paragraph basically gave an FBI, name of an FBI agent and the name of the professor if you knew anything about this, what happened. Now, that article, very short, but it just stumped me. And I stumbled on it and I just, I cut it out and I taped it onto my monitor and I looked at it every single day.

Guy Morris (08:10.21)
for months and it didn't say that the program was lost. It didn't say it was stolen. It didn't say it had corrupted. It didn't say it had malfunctioned. The verb that it used with the program had escaped. Now, in my mind, now the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories at Sandia is an NSA spy lab. They do signals, they do cryptology. They were the one that created the sex net virus that brought down the Iranian centrifuge. So in my head, I'm thinking.

Guy Morris (08:36.262)
Okay, wow, a spy program escaped the NSA spy labs and they don't know how to find it. How cool is that? I said, that's an amazing story. I said, either somebody at Associated Press goofed up and they were supposed to say that it was lost or broke or something, or somebody at the lab basically screwed up because they weren't supposed to talk to the press. But I took this and I said, okay, well, I'm going to try and figure this out. And so I spent several months actually trying to figure out how.

Guy Morris (09:05.17)
a precisely a program could escape NSAID labs. Because in my mind, escape implied an intent. It implied some level of intelligence, maybe not as good as AI is now. It implied the ability for the program to move itself and then go back to the computer logs and erase its trail so that nobody know where it went. So once I had figured out how all that could happen,

Guy Morris (09:35.234)
I then spent another few months saying, okay, wow, this is like a stealth program. So what did NSA design the stealth program to do? Now, I didn't really know. I was just pulling stuff out of my fanny, using my imagination. I said, I'm going to put on my best James Bond Q head, right? And I'm going to think like Q and I'm going to say, no, what would I want my perfect James Bond stealth program to do? And so I came up with a bunch of functional attributes.

Guy Morris (10:03.718)
All of which were based on things that we could currently do at that time if I projected just a year, maybe two or three ahead, right? Assuming that government laboratories were ahead of the commercial sector without necessarily, you know, boasting about it. And so I came up with a program and this was all pretty interesting. I went to a friend of my friend who was the film producer and

Guy Morris (10:27.81)
We thought, well, do we do a screenplay about this or do we do a television pilot about this? And I said, well, let's do a webisode series because this is an internet-based experience that this program is on. And so we did, we hired some out of work actors and we wrote scripts and we did production sets and we basically produced this really nicely done espionage webisode series. We had fans all over the world. We won about 25 awards.

Guy Morris (10:57.238)
We were often by one of the studios. My biggest fan, this is, I always get a kick out of this, his alias caught my attention first. For the first several weeks, he never gave me his name, but his alias was orbit at nasa.gov. Now I'm thinking, whoa, this is the guy at NASA that's so high up in the organization.

Guy Morris (11:21.334)
that he's not even using his name. He's like, you know, this is Rocket Man. Well, of course everybody knows Rocket Man is so and so. Right? So this is a guy high up enough in NASA where he doesn't have to use his name for his alias. He's got a cool alias like orbit. So it turns out he was the director of flight operations for the Houston Space Center. He taught the astronauts how to fly a space shuttle. So he was one of our biggest fans.

Guy Morris (11:46.754)
Two weeks before the studio was going to exercise their option, two FBI agents showed up.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (11:53.621)
Really?

Guy Morris (11:54.774)
They were rather perturbed that I had figured out something they thought for sure was top secret and they wanted to know how I found out. Now, in my thinking, I'm tickled pink. And not first, again, I thought it was another prank. I thought, okay, they camped in my door, it's FBI. I'm thinking, oh my gosh, this is my friend Jack kind of pranking me again, right?

Guy Morris (12:18.646)
So I asked for their badges, they showed me their badges. I said, no, no, that wasn't, I said, show me them again. I said, I didn't, I gotta look at those. Well, it turns out that they were real. So I bring them in and I'm tickled. I, the fact that they're there tells me that I nailed it. I nailed my analysis. Now they don't wanna really admit that. They really did not, I was having it. I was giggling, I thought they did not enjoy my sense of humor. I tried to play with their heads, they didn't enjoy that. My wife was rather upset.

Guy Morris (12:47.582)
She came in, she pulled me aside for a minute, and she says, why are there two FEI agents in my dining room and what did you do, buddy? It took a few weeks to actually talk through that one with her. But yeah, so they wanted me to kill the website, they wanted me to kill the show. I laughed, I told them no, I said I had an option, this is how I was gonna.

Guy Morris (13:12.95)
you know, just like any other Terminator movie. And I said, just think of it as some other war spy movie, you know, and they didn't like my attitude. So they went and killed the deal. They went to the studio and killed the deal. And I had to lost a lot of money, tucked my tail between my legs. I think my next job at that point was either a startup or Oracle, I can't remember. And, but I never got out of my head, the idea that while I was...

Guy Morris (13:40.598)
we were busy working on the commercial sector of all these technologies, of what we could do on the commercial side, to start thinking about how would I be using this if I were wanting to turn this technology into national security or a weapon and espionage? How would these technologies be used for all of these other nefarious malicious means? And that really got me in touch with, I think researching that end of the industry.

Guy Morris (14:09.594)
And that program that escaped became one of the main characters in my book series, The Swarm, that started with Swarm in the Last Ark. And it's fascinating because it blends so much of the reality of what's really going on with AI weapons, AI in cyber espionage, AI in cyber national security, and all of the other ways that we're kind of going to start seeing.

Guy Morris (14:38.202)
AI basically affects society as a whole on a global basis. And it's really kind of putting those things in perspective. Rather than the 50 years from now, the iRobot AI takes over the world. This is basically how all of those things could be developing in real time.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (14:57.728)
No, that's such an interesting and amazing story. That you had the FBI called on you because you were right.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (15:11.604)
No, it's...

Guy Morris (15:12.15)
Well, as it actually is, I got in 2016, I got further confirmation. There was a CNN story about how the Russia had hacked a CIA cyber toolkit. And in that toolkit was every single one of the functional attributes I had assigned to this missing program, including what we now call the deep fake video technology. Now, when Russia got that toolkit, they turned around and sold it on the dark web, which is why deep fake is such a...

The Rogue Scientist Productions (15:34.317)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Morris (15:40.962)
worrisome technology today is because every despot enemy of the state or criminal has basically had a chance to buy it.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (15:48.712)
Yeah, and no, it's, I just have to say, it's a really interesting field to kind of get into when you come to writing, because there's so many different avenues you can go, especially when you're starting out in writing, you're like, I can do fantasy, I can do sci-fi, I can do this, but once you kind of get into sci-fi and you're starting to follow these different pathways, you start realizing and seeing patterns in certain things that you just wouldn't necessarily see before. Like you said, you saw the pattern.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (16:17.036)
initially with the article, the program escaped. It didn't get deleted. It didn't just, the flash drive didn't go. It went missing. They can't find it. And then you kind of follow this entire story where you're following it through. The FBI comes after you. You find another story saying that Russia hacked different things. It's an amazing kind of trail of events following all these different pieces and all this kind of thing. And...

The Rogue Scientist Productions (16:45.852)
you're then predicting forward in time going, well, this is probably where this is going to kind of take us. And we're starting to see those kind of pieces now where there was just a news article, I think of Elon Musk and a bunch of other high tech CEOs out in Silicon Valley saying we need to at least take a 10 month break or more.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (17:13.764)
from doing AI work because everything's advancing so fast. So it.

Guy Morris (17:18.818)
Well, I think what they're trying to bring up is something... Yeah, what they're trying to bring up is one of the topics I bring up in my book. So I'll not only deal with technology, but I'm dealing with sort of the larger philosophical social issues, right? So one of the things I bring to them by technology is why, you know, the companies that are doing this, they're spending tens of billions of dollars. There's a number of issues. One is that they're not spending that kind of money so that they can...

Guy Morris (17:46.306)
benefit humanity, they're spending that kind of money because they think that they can get a profit out of it. So they're looking at some other, some area where they can, you know, take jobs away from people. And matter of fact, Morgan Chase put out a report two weeks ago that basically predicted as many as 300 million jobs lost by 2030 to AI. And so these companies are doing it because they want, they think that they can make money.

Guy Morris (18:12.506)
either by displacing workers or by automating things or by, they've got some sort of profit motive to it. But it's in banking, it's in, now AI is an amazing technology and the potential for it to create really good, do good things is high, but there's, it's so disruptive that it's going to have some negative consequences. Now the other piece about AI is the dark money involved.

Guy Morris (18:41.09)
There's so many companies right now going after advanced conscious AI and so much money going after it. And most of it we really we unless a company is coming out basically announcing themselves we don't know what they're working on and how they're doing it. There's no necessary control so all of these scientists that came out recently or dealing with one of the other third issues I dealt with, which is

Guy Morris (19:11.13)
a conscious or sentient AI within a few years of that, the technology is racing faster than our legal, ethical, moral, or technology ability to control it is moving. And what that means is that there's nobody who's basic, there's no set agreed ways to basically teach technology or teach AI the...

Guy Morris (19:38.59)
moral standards, ethical standards, legal standards. We're teaching it how to do a task and it's gonna do what it needs to do to optimize that task without any of the evolutionary constraints that we have had over millions of years of evolving as a species to say, well, no, you don't harm a person in that way, or you don't lie to a person in that way, or there's a thing called opinion versus truth. And

Guy Morris (20:04.566)
We haven't really taught AI any of these things. So it has the potential of a malicious uses. And we're already seeing chat GPT being used to write malicious code. It could be used in ways where it's basically optimizing something that suboptimizes human comfort or safety. And there's a number of ways that it could go wrong. And matter of fact,

Guy Morris (20:34.962)
To highlight that point, in 2020, the Rand Corporation wrote a report to the DoD. And in that report, it listed AI at different versions of AI risks as two of the top 10 risks to our national security. The one risk was what we call an enemy creating a malicious intent software that could spoof our systems into thinking that...

Guy Morris (21:03.686)
a missile had been launched against us so that we would launch a retaliatory missile and basically AI could potentially goof us into starting a world war. And the second one, which was sort of related to this first one, was that now all AI deals with massive amounts of data, huge amounts. For example, the neural network for the current GPT-4, which has produced JATGPT and some of the other models.

Guy Morris (21:33.854)
has 75 billion neural transmitting, neural data points. The next version of AI will have an estimated 100 trillion neural data points. So we're dealing with massive amounts of data. Now, if I wanted to create a, now the layers of algorithms, the layers of neural network, the layers of programming within an AI are

Guy Morris (22:00.426)
developers already are at a stage where they're not always sure what it's doing and how it's doing it. It's sort of a black box. Nor can they always control the outcomes. But if I were to introduce, even for the best AI, something very narrow like running a nuclear power plant on a submarine, right? Where you'd want AI to basically monitor all the things to keep everything running smoothly and adjusting.

Guy Morris (22:28.862)
If I were to introduce bad data into the system, it could create an untraceable sabotage. And so they listed AI data poisoning as one of the top risks of facing our national security today.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (22:43.68)
Wow, and the first one that you mentioned, the spoofing our systems into accidentally creating a world war, what was the movie? It almost reminded me of War Games from the 80s.

Guy Morris (22:58.718)
Yeah, well, and it's a similar model. That was a computer model, a game model, that basically couldn't distinguish between the game and reality. And so we're kind of dealing a little bit with a similar problem, but it's much faster and much more sophisticated. And the DoD does have artificial intelligence war simulation systems. It's called Innovation Unit.

Guy Morris (23:27.826)
it's under the DOD. And that's designed to anticipate all kinds of variables from number of troops to supplies to ammunition stocks to will of the people to basically predict military outcomes on the battlefield. What it isn't designed to do yet is incorporate the cyber warfare field. So what happens if we got a artificial intelligence based virus?

Guy Morris (23:56.47)
that was designed to do nothing but they were designed to bring down the internet. Now, if we brought down the internet and you could do that by simply attacking the DNS sites. So if I take out the DNS sites, I basically take out the ability for any computer to translate www.google.com into an IP address. And so if I can take out those sites, I can basically bring down the entire internet.

Guy Morris (24:24.286)
And there's only about 140 of those sites. So it's not astronomically large. And if I could design an AI that acts like a virus to do that, it can evolve and change faster than our ability to basically try and patch it. So that's a potential for us right now. And if we brought down the internet, we'd bring down our commerce. We'd bring down our communications. We'd bring a lot of people get their news from streaming.

Guy Morris (24:50.754)
whether it's on YouTube or the televisions, it would bring down banking. It would essentially could, in a lot of ways, all the cloud services would basically collapse. So you would have a almost immediate collapse of a major portion of our economy just from a cyber attack. And so we still need to build in the cyber warfare field within our battlefield scenarios.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (25:19.92)
Wow. It's mind-boggling and it's a reason why I didn't get into cyber security.

Guy Morris (25:33.483)
It's, well, it's a tough field. I mean, there are certainly some best practices around it, but there's still a lot of holes in the system, in part because the system itself is porous. So here's another great example. Have you heard of the solar wind tax?

The Rogue Scientist Productions (25:43.951)
Mm-hmm.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (25:50.286)
No I haven't.

Guy Morris (25:52.15)
Okay. I thought it was fairly well-knowledged, but I'm surprised how many people aren't aware of it. About two years ago, in 2019, 2020, sometime in there, a company called SolarWinds, which is a software company in the software industry providing some sort of update software to other companies, completely by accident discovered that they had a virus in their system.

Guy Morris (26:20.058)
And they couldn't tell exactly what this virus was meant to do because it wasn't by, from what they could tell, it wasn't stealing information, nor was it necessarily corrupting their system. But when they tried to figure out how the virus had been, they realized that virus had been in their system for nine months. And when they tried to figure out how the virus actually got into the system, it didn't come through, you know, the normal firewall where we built billions of dollars worth of protections.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (26:32.304)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Morris (26:50.75)
thinking that we're going to be attacked by somebody on the outside trying to sneak their way in with a phishing or a password or a cracked password or something. They've discovered that it was actually installed through a normal package software update. So most of you know most data centers, they periodically get these update packages that might include updates from dozen different companies.

Guy Morris (27:17.146)
and it's set to help them kind of install and speed up that process of keeping patches on the mainframe. And while that's really good, and there's dozens and dozens of different companies involved in this infrastructure, that particular software update had also been installed by 18,000 corporations, including many of the corporations who are managing the data that are building, that are managing, that are supporting our AI.

Guy Morris (27:46.566)
both from a commercial and a national security perspective, and it was installed by eight major US agencies. Now, if that virus was there to basically create a back door from which I could introduce bad data into that AI infrastructure, we've now got a untraceable way of, we don't know where that, which company initially installed that piece of virus into the package. We don't know how it got in there.

Guy Morris (28:16.054)
but somewhere in the chain, the whole system itself has a lot of different holes in it from which we're vulnerable.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (28:26.372)
that's a lot to know and then to be able to take all of that information and then to apply it to your books. That's...

Guy Morris (28:33.486)
Oh yeah, and that I love that part. And I think I get excited because I'm constantly learning and growing in my own field and building up this expertise. And I get to whittle it down and then say, okay, now let's paint a scenario about these things. Let's take a, let's do some storytelling about this. What happens, who's affected, how do they react? Who's the hero? How does he save the day for now? You know, how would these dynamics play out? I think that makes a tremendous amount of fun.

Guy Morris (29:03.85)
Now, I took for myself, I actually took a unique angle, which is the program that escaped the NSA labs, which is now a character in the story. In my version of the story, which is fictional, I don't have proof that it's actually reached this stage yet, but I believe that within a lab someplace, we have an AI that's pretty close to being sentient, being close to being conscious.

Guy Morris (29:30.034)
And there's 26 companies around the world actively working on that today. We know that six months ago, the Lambda developer that for Google, that was working on the Lambda AI was convinced that the Lambda AI had reached a sentient level of consciousness. Google tried to deny it. The conversations between the AI and the developer were pretty, pretty eye opening. But there's companies actively working on that.

Guy Morris (29:58.914)
brings up a number of different scenarios. One is in the movie Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton, the author of that book, wanted to make a point of saying, we believe through our own hubris that we can control the things that we create, but that's not always true. And we even see that in something as innocuous as the social media.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (30:19.248)
Mm-mm.

Guy Morris (30:24.962)
having negative impacts on the psyche and psychology of a lot of kids. And we still don't know how to fix that, right? So we're building technologies where we're not necessarily anticipating what could go wrong. But in this scenario, we could really kind of come up with, it's pretty easy since we know that AI are being taught how to code, where a sentient AI couldn't create another sentient AI.

Guy Morris (30:54.482)
And we're kind of getting into those kinds of realms. So it's a lot of fun to kind of play around with those ideas and the philosophies behind that. And, you know, what's behind the curve and, you know, where are we going? How do politics play into this? How does commercial greed play into this? All of the things that we're seeing. How are these AI being used in weapon systems as of today? And we know we talk about.

Guy Morris (31:22.082)
DARPA development of AI drones swarms that can be used for military purposes. So it's fun. Now, one of the things I tried to do though with this AI to be a little bit different was to introduce the concept of what would happen if an AI could decode end time prophecy. So now I can bring in a lot of global issues

The Rogue Scientist Productions (31:29.392)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Morris (31:52.138)
raising people's anxiety levels with climate, food insecurities, clean water, droughts, escalation of fascist movements around the world, war with Ukraine, potential war over Taiwan. If China were to take Taiwan, they would basically cut off the advanced chip industry so they could basically starve the U.S. of chips overnight.

Guy Morris (32:22.63)
So there's a lot of different scenarios that allows me to kind of play into if I have an AI approach into looking at all of these global kind of trends, which allows me to kind of look at them from a statistical, from a probability scenario like an AI would do without a lot of the religious dogma. Right?

Guy Morris (32:45.474)
So it creates sort of an interesting scenario for me to kind of pull in even more of how our society works and some of the things going on into this sort of scenario with artificial intelligence and espionage.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (33:01.092)
Yeah, and I'm sorry if I'm talking a lot less or anything like that. I'm just amazed and my mind is just being blown the more you talk about the entire situation. It's really interesting and cool to hear you talk about just how fragile certain aspects of our economy are due to this level of...

The Rogue Scientist Productions (33:29.716)
artificial intelligence being developed and just kind of how hard each piece is. And just that we don't have any backups right now. Our our our. Infrastructure isn't developed, is is not developed far enough to be able to anticipate this yet. And so it and then to like just take that information and put that into your books. It's it's it's really interesting. And.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (33:57.628)
I've already followed you on Amazon, I'm ready to buy a car.

Guy Morris (34:02.782)
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I think my last book, I think to further that, and I try to bring in historical elements and everything else, my last book called The Last Ark, how it got that name is kind of going back to the sort of prophecy kind of theme with the AI, is the talk about a third temple. And a lot of people know, maybe not everyone, but

Guy Morris (34:28.962)
There was an Ark of the Covenant that was in Ethiopia for several hundred years. And it's a true Ark. It was actually left Israel around 2600 years ago with Solomon's son named Menenlek and 500 priests. Menenlek and these priests basically went and built a Jewish temple on Elephant Island in Egypt on the Nile River. They were there with doing temple sacrifice and there's scrolls, there's archaeology, there's temple ruins. There's all kinds of evidence of that.

Guy Morris (34:58.55)
They were chased away by the Romans in the second century and they went to Ethiopia where the Ark was in synagogues for several hundred years until the Templars came through and moved it into hand-cut hidden Christian churches. And it's been in this one church for the last several hundred years. There's been Graham Hancock in National Geographic and a number of other journalists have basically done.

Guy Morris (35:28.414)
stories about the Ark. So a lot of people know that it exists. What most people don't know is that in January 21, a militia basically stormed the city of Axum where this church was kept. And 750 men, women and children were massacred. That Ark was then stolen and sold on the black market. So now we have an ancient relic of the Jewish people basically in play. And so...

The Rogue Scientist Productions (35:51.312)
Wow.

Guy Morris (35:57.602)
The last arc speculates a little bit as to who would have the money, the power, and the desire to have that, that relic and why. Um, and then it combines that with a copper scroll, another true story of a copper scroll that was found outside Qumran in the sixties. Now Qumran is where they found all the Dead Sea Scrolls. This copper scroll, rather than being in the jar with all the other scrolls was hidden behind sort of a fake mud wall. So it was never meant to be found.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (36:17.373)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Morris (36:27.49)
They found it by accident, actually. Somebody backed into this wall and it crumbled. And when they finally unrolled and were able to clean up and figure out how to unroll this very brittle piece of copper, they found that it had the location of, it had 64 locations where pre-Babylonian priests had hidden tens of tons of temple treasures. So billions and billions of dollars for the gold and silver and other.

Guy Morris (36:56.642)
gems and other vessels. And in the 64th location is a second copper scroll that described where Jeremiah hid the Ark of Testimony made by Moses. Now in the Jewish tradition book of Maccabees, Second Maccabees, this story is also kind of talked about where Jeremiah's scribe, Barak, basically took five temple priests and they hid all this treasure and everything else. So it's basically, it has a historical base point to it as well.

Guy Morris (37:26.766)
For 50 years, people have been looking all over Jerusalem trying to find these 64 locations and failed miserably. They couldn't find anything. And everyone's excuse was like, well, Jerusalem's been destroyed and rebuilt too many times, you'll never find this stuff. Well, about six, seven years ago, I can't remember exactly, a guy, an American named Jim Barfield came along and he decoded all 64 locations underneath the ruins of Qumran itself.

Guy Morris (37:55.454)
he was able to get not only the Jewish Sanhedrin, which is their Temple Institute priestly group, and the Jewish Archaeology and Antiquities group to go out and do a survey and a metal scan. They found non-ferrous metals, gold, silver, under every single one of those locations, but they only dug down about two feet, even though the scroll said dig down nine to 12 feet, because they wanted to kill the rumor, because Qumran is part of the Palestinian West Bank.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (38:24.592)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Morris (38:24.682)
So by law, Jerusalem, Israel could not excavate any of those treasures or else they would basically lose them all into a essentially a military warehouse tribunal. So that was about the same time though that Israel started talking about a single state solution. So those are sort of the two historical elements that I pulled together in the Thriller of the Last Star.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (38:50.672)
Hmm. That's honestly really, I keep saying cool, but it really kind of pulls my interest in and like you said, it's huge that such a historical piece got taken and is sold on the black market and that it's not necessarily well documented or not necessarily well documented, I guess is not the right word, but in the news more.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (39:20.056)
these kind of events that happen that just aren't well dispersed. And so it's just kind of you stumble upon these stories and it's taking these true events and then kind of like you said, playing upon it. Who would it go to? Who had the money at the time? Who can who can kind of do all these different things? And it's really interesting. And I'm I'm I'm happy to read more of your work.

Guy Morris (39:49.854)
I think I'd appreciate it and I always love the reviews. And yeah, now I'm working on the fourth and it will deal with Ukraine and Taiwan. It'll deal with sort of the fascist government in Italy now that they've got a new leader there. And we'll bring in some elements of the Shroud of Turin and a few other things.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (39:52.845)
Yeah.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (40:13.188)
No, that already sounds really fun to be able to read as well. What would you kind of suggest for any new authors trying to get into the field and trying to follow in your footsteps?

Guy Morris (40:28.174)
Worked really hard at being a good author. Before I released my first book, I actually went out and spent my own money to hire a developmental editor. I hired a really good Simon & Schuster, ex-Simon & Schuster editor. And I said, listen, I have a really good story, but I really want, I don't want my writing to basically get in the way of people enjoying it. So I gave her an early version of my manuscript and I said, I want you to rip this up.

Guy Morris (40:58.05)
Tell me a new one. Tell me everything I'm doing wrong. Don't spare my feelings. You know, just, I need, you know, this needs to be my masterclass. And true to her word, she actually did what I asked her to do and she gave me 44 pages of typed notes along with almost every page in the manuscript have notes in it.

Guy Morris (41:24.438)
So my first thought was after getting all this was, oh my God, I suck. But once I was able to take that to heart, once I was able to really take those criticisms to heart and start working on them, my writing improved, my skill improved. It's not a destination, it's a journey. And so invest in yourself during the journey. I took master classes online with Dan Brown and David Valdalchi.

Guy Morris (41:54.786)
I've tried to really work hard at, I hire professional editors for all my books. Be careful, focus on the quality of what you're producing as much as the quantity. And really try and make sure that you're investing in your own skills, because ultimately that's how every reader is going to judge you is whether or not they really enjoyed the experience you took them on. And that...

Guy Morris (42:19.89)
you can have the best story in the world, the best idea in the world, but if it's not executed well, it won't land. And so focus on that execution and invest in yourself in that way because you're the only person who's going to be able to do that. And then, you know, really try to be original. Try to not be as derivative. Try and, that's hard. It takes some time to think about it and plan ahead. But there are so many great stories out there to be told. We need a lot of good storytellers to tell them.

Guy Morris (42:47.814)
And I don't think there's anything, it was narratives, stories, or what sets us apart from every other creature on the planet. We're the only other creature who basically communicates to each others in narratives and stories. It's how we learn, it's how we communicate, it's how we understand the world. And if you can be a good storyteller, that's a skill that can spread almost through any career.

Guy Morris (43:18.7)
on the planet.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (43:20.424)
And thank you so much for that. Our time is running short at the moment. And I wanna thank you for being on our show. Are there any social media platforms, websites, events that you're doing that you'd like our listeners to be able to follow you on?

Guy Morris (43:39.818)
Well, a good place to start is my website, GuyMorrisBooks.com. It has not only pages for each of the books, it has links to each where you can buy the book. It has highlights and links to major reviews from major viewers like Kirkus and Booktrib and Booklife and some of the others who've all given me rave reviews and praise.

Guy Morris (44:05.854)
fact versus fiction pages. So if I talk about how AI can code itself, I might link to a research paper. There's image libraries of all the real locations that actually took place in the book. There's some videos and some of my podcasts and other media kits are on there as well. So it's a great place to start. And that should kind of get you to that should also take you to the other social media.

Guy Morris (44:34.154)
I'm on Twitter at Guy Morse Books, Instagram and Facebook and a number of others. But I think if you just start the website, that's a good place.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (44:45.04)
Thank you. And as for me, you'll be able to find us on our website, the road scientist productions.com where we have our merchandise and links to my story on Kindle Vell, the world beyond. You also have all of our pod, our road scientist social media platforms, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter. The best way to support us is to like our podcasts on your favorite podcast platform of choice and let others know how much you've enjoyed our show. We want to thank you guy for being on our show today and thank all of our listeners for joining us as well.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (45:14.052)
This has been our podcast to all of those out there looking to start a new career in the arts such as acting, writing, music, comedy and more. Always remember, pursuing your passions is a bitch, but it's worth it.

Guy Morris (45:26.25)
Yeah.