Certain to Zen: OODA, IOHAI, Lean, and More with Chet Richards, PhD | Ep 16

Chet Richards is a retired Air Force Colonel, an independent consultant, and an author. He graduated from the University of Mississippi, where he also earned a PhD in mathematics. He served as an intelligence officer in the Air Force and as a strategy consultant and Lean theoretician.  Chet is a certified yoga instructor and holds a  Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT-500) certification with the Yoga Alliance. 

Colonel Richards is a colleague of the late American strategist John R. Boyd and is a gadfly-at-large for Boyd's ideas today. He has researched into the foundations of Boyd's strategy and has written "Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd Applied to Business" and "If We Can Keep It" (on national security policy). He has a blog at slightlyeastofnew.com, which also has latest edits of Boyd's papers and presentations.

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Chet Richards, PhD on LinkedIn
slightlyeastofnew.com
Twitter: @FuentesDeOnoro
Certain to Win
Antifragile
Being You 

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Transcript

Transcripts are machine generated and are NOT edited for grammar or spelling.

00;00;00;20 - 00;00;01;11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Good morning, Chad.

00;00;02;09 - 00;00;09;19
Chet Richards, PhD
Good morning, Bill. I just want to ask you real quick, can I assume from the model of that antique airplane behind you that you were in the Navy at one point?

00;00;10;07 - 00;00;12;29
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yes, sir. That's an F-14. It's been away. Oh.

00;00;13;09 - 00;00;33;18
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah. I have that weird wing on it. Sort of like the Wright brothers, you know, more wing than it turned out to need in the end. Yeah, I have I have great admiration for from military pilots. The training that you went through and the careers you had as is fantastic. However, I have to warn you, I wore blue and push comes to shove.

00;00;33;18 - 00;00;50;08
Chet Richards, PhD
You know who the hell I'm getting this? So but having said all that, you know, I just the notion of it landed on a carrier one time. It was in a helicopter that was scary enough. The thought of being a fixed wing airplane, much less than a 48, was just beyond anything I can comprehend.

00;00;51;16 - 00;00;51;28
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
No, it's.

00;00;51;28 - 00;01;01;20
Mark McGrath
Great. I wore I wore blue, too. But I'm on the blue team that you guys got rid of. Boyd. And we took them over on our end in the Marine Corps. Oh, all right. So.

00;01;02;16 - 00;01;12;00
Chet Richards, PhD
Yes, yes. And in fact, the only professional association that I'm a member of is the Marine Corps Association. So they have a awful lot of respect. Glad to.

00;01;12;00 - 00;01;12;12
Mark McGrath
Have you.

00;01;12;23 - 00;01;33;21
Chet Richards, PhD
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And they're the only ones that embraced Boyd Boyd's philosophy and a lot of question about, you know, how much it means a huge organization. So you're going to get a whole spectrum. But all in all, it stands head and shoulders above any other organizations for the degree that it really has imbued the philosophy that the John was espousing.

00;01;34;11 - 00;01;42;00
Mark McGrath
Well well, we grow up and we start podcast dedicated to his memory. So actually like a good Marine should. Yes.

00;01;42;00 - 00;01;54;21
Chet Richards, PhD
Yes. And of course, as you all are very well aware, you know, you he had his birthday back January 23rd and, you know, heading we're going to be, what, 96 and. Sure, 27. Yeah. So.

00;01;55;22 - 00;02;06;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So speaking of living, Chet, how do you Chad, I've got a question. Speaking of living, how do you look so young? What do you do? Do you yoga? You do some mindfulness practices. What do you do that looks like a film?

00;02;06;24 - 00;02;08;24
Chet Richards, PhD
There's a filter I use on the camera here.

00;02;09;08 - 00;02;09;21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay.

00;02;09;29 - 00;02;14;10
Chet Richards, PhD
That's a pretty cool air. Yeah. Makes me look like an average 76.

00;02;14;20 - 00;02;17;10
Mark McGrath
He's messing with our observations and our orientation.

00;02;17;10 - 00;02;20;08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Getting inside our little loop there with air. Nice. Yeah, I tried to.

00;02;20;08 - 00;02;39;06
Chet Richards, PhD
I tried to do a little of everything I was. I was a real nerd when I was a and I was growing up some of my I cut back some of my yearbook pictures from high school. My oh, my God. And but after I got after I got married. Excuse me. You hit the funny age again after I got married.

00;02;39;10 - 00;03;00;29
Chet Richards, PhD
I've been married about three or four years. Some hints for my wife. I, I started when I was at the Pentagon in Mississippi and started running, quit smoking, got my weight from one. I won 67 at one point down to 125, which is about where I am now. And it just kept it up. Over the years I've gotten older, I've had to shift go from running every other day, every day to every other day.

00;03;01;11 - 00;03;23;07
Chet Richards, PhD
Factoring in some yoga became a yoga instructor, which I thought was a and of course, yoga fits very nicely. It's the same. The fundamentals yoga are the same are the fundamentals of weight strategy. So and so that that fit very, very nicely. And just as you get older, you know, the the stretching, the range of motion stuff, the mindfulness as you move starts becoming more and more important.

00;03;23;07 - 00;03;30;09
Chet Richards, PhD
I would recommend it to everybody as they start getting older, just start start picking up a lot of yoga and start doing it every now and then. A compliment.

00;03;30;22 - 00;03;36;17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Could you dove a little bit deeper into the connection between yoga, mindfulness and the guru loop and what John Boy looked at?

00;03;37;01 - 00;03;58;01
Chet Richards, PhD
I thought you were going to I talk about one of the fundamental texts of yoga is a thing called the Yoga Sutras attributed to a guy called Patanjali. We know now from historical source there really was a guy called Patanjali and he wasn't the one that that compiled the yoga sequence. But that's a different story. Apparently they they come from about the same time.

00;03;58;01 - 00;04;21;13
Chet Richards, PhD
It's a fancy text and then maybe a little bit later than the Bhagavad Gita things, I guess we're talking about the turn of the first millennium, about in the time of the Roman Empire, birth of Christ, all that kind of stuff. A lot of stuff was happening about that and the yoga suit there's a lot I'm every yoga student has studied the yoga suit was the second of the the first yoga instructor just says, okay, now we're going to study yoga.

00;04;21;13 - 00;04;48;09
Chet Richards, PhD
The second yoga suit says the purpose of yoga is to still the imperfections in our mind. Now, in yoga, the mind sets between the external world and a thing called the Perugia, which is the real you. And there's a little Dix ex machina there. You know, the guy looking out their eyeballs kind of thing. True, true believers in yoga, by the way, will deny that.

00;04;48;09 - 00;05;11;07
Chet Richards, PhD
But you read the suit, and that's kind of how it comes out and said the whole purpose of yoga is to get rid of the perfections. One translation calls it the ripples in the mind, the things that keep us from seeing reality. Clearly, if you go in and study things like Should you use Suzuki Zen mind? Beginner's mind, he says the purpose of Zen is to see reality clearly.

00;05;12;02 - 00;05;37;00
Chet Richards, PhD
If you just go back to basic Buddhism one on one dating from well, the earliest written we have is about from that same period. The turn of that millennia is called the Pali Canon, written down in a language whose name we don't know. Poly just means text. And it and in there, in the Pali Canon, they talk about the eightfold path.

00;05;37;00 - 00;06;15;18
Chet Richards, PhD
The first to the eightfold path is essentially see reality clearly now translating all this stuff, as you know, is like I said, what am I think you can read three or four of these things, all from esteemed translators and wonder if they're if they're talking about the same text because see it to get an idea of of the problem even in English today go back and try to read something written in English for about six 700 A.D., you know, just a mere 1500 years ago, not to mention 24 and the same language English to pick up Beowulf you know you looking for some light fireside reading you just kind of help amuse yourself Hathaway Gardella

00;06;16;05 - 00;06;40;04
Chet Richards, PhD
And far for that yamagami spirit, then. I mean, Dave's way means way. So, you know, you say try doing that with the language. It's not relating, which is not an Indo European languages 2500 years ago. So you can and in a culture that that yeah. Has existed for at least a couple of thousands of years and you can see the problems and you get that same thing when you're trying to interpret the roots and board strategy.

00;06;40;13 - 00;07;01;01
Chet Richards, PhD
But I think if you see things like the censored texts and like the, like the yoga texts, like the early Zen text that they're all talking about, the importance of orientation. And as Thomas Cleary points out, Japanese art of war that gives you the orientation. The only other thing that you really need is an implicit link from orientation to guidance and control.

00;07;01;01 - 00;07;32;12
Chet Richards, PhD
And that's what the Zen people talk about removing sickness, removing hesitation so that actions flow smoothly. So what did jobs talk about? In his abstract, he talks about the need to make intuitive within, within ourselves and many actions that we need to survive in the world. Is this ever changing and unpredictable and threatening world? And that notion of making intuitive in ourselves, which I think you do a good job on the web, in fact, in your paper, upon addressing it, take those two together, you kind of have the classical loop.

00;07;32;16 - 00;07;55;23
Chet Richards, PhD
Boy, talk about the orientation and in the making. And all of those ideas, of course, date back thousands of thousands of years. Now, what yoga brings to the table and then in some of the others is perhaps the notion of developing mindfulness via meditation, but I'll go that's that's a whole separate a whole separate issue. Some people say, well, you know, mindfulness is the same thing as meditation.

00;07;55;23 - 00;08;10;27
Chet Richards, PhD
Other people say, no, no, no meditations seventh and eighth spoke to the eightfold path. And you've got to you've got to do, like Bush said, and sit in a quiet place, start off by watching your breath and then watch your thoughts. I'll join you again in about 45 minutes.

00;08;11;02 - 00;08;13;17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay. That'll be awesome. See you in 45 minutes. No, no.

00;08;13;17 - 00;08;30;10
Chet Richards, PhD
I'm so sorry. I wish I could. I wish I could do it for you. I'm. It's but the point is not how long that you do it. The point is developing that thing of being conscious of what's going on and using as allan what's here consciousness to examine consciousness. And that's really what the board is about.

00;08;30;28 - 00;08;51;08
Mark McGrath
What I'm hearing you say is like when, when, when we hear somebody reduce John to just a loop that you're talking about something that was so comprehensive and so far reaching and pulling from so many sources and of interest in Eastern philosophy, which seems to have a resurgence of interest in the last, I don't know, a couple of decades and maybe.

00;08;51;12 - 00;08;52;06
Chet Richards, PhD
50 years.

00;08;52;11 - 00;08;54;00
Mark McGrath
50 years. So I wonder.

00;08;54;15 - 00;09;03;00
Chet Richards, PhD
What he was writing in the fifties. Yeah, Sam, the beats after World War Two, I think. But yeah, you're right. It's a big event. You said it in about the last couple of decades.

00;09;03;17 - 00;09;27;18
Mark McGrath
So. So you have that beautiful epistemology of OODA tracking his inputs over time from destruction and creation to his final version before he passed. And that last graphic, there's that green area and it says Eastern philosophy. And then you come to realize that John Boyd was into beyond Sun Tzu. He's into Zen. And one of his favorite books was the Zen.

00;09;27;18 - 00;09;39;14
Mark McGrath
And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I mean, yeah, what was the what was the catalyst for him? You know, because you knew him personally, like, what was he what caught his attention around that? Who got him into studying that deeper?

00;09;40;21 - 00;10;08;25
Chet Richards, PhD
I have to speculate a little bit, but I think what happened was when he finished Patterns of Conflict, to the extent that you finish shooting, he was working and making changes to patterns tacked almost up the day die. And this is a point that I guess I need to make. And if you if you look at patterns of conflict, a lot of additions of it that are out on the web of people that have just taken the copy that Boyd gave him when he briefed him copy of the Green Book.

00;10;08;25 - 00;10;27;11
Chet Richards, PhD
Say, when he briefed it in 1990 or so, he made a number of changes after that, the most important perhaps being out of high. But as he was continuing to kind of move away from war for a variety of reasons, why he wasn't a land warfare guy. And I think he had he sort of figured he had done all he could do with that.

00;10;28;07 - 00;10;55;03
Chet Richards, PhD
The other thing that the Soviet Union felt and so as he saw it, the the possibility of large scale land combat between us and it and a true pure competitor, i.e. one that essentially said that war would the important for the survival of the state. And he said, you know, the only kind of war that would be important for the survival of the state now would be nuclear war and not much to talk about strategy and tactics.

00;10;55;03 - 00;11;13;14
Chet Richards, PhD
Then I think where you know, you have an exchange and each side has ten times the amount of force that they need to destroy the other. So even if one side has a lot more people surviving than the other, side after about five years are all going to starve to death, so that after about five months, it doesn't really make any difference.

00;11;13;27 - 00;11;44;22
Chet Richards, PhD
But the idea of large scale conventional conflict with the survival of the state is at stake. Doesn't apply anymore to the United States. That was his that was his philosophy. I think it's still I think it's still correct. They coined the term military political gymnastics. Now, the way for things that you get into that sort of look like wars and maybe wars for the smaller participants and that their survival is at stake like South Vietnam, certainly engaged in a war with North Vietnam, that survival was at stake, but the survival of the United States was at stake in the in the fire.

00;11;44;22 - 00;12;11;05
Chet Richards, PhD
So they can't a boy in his group coined that phrase, military, political gymnastics for that, you know, for that kind of stuff. That was a boy wasn't interested in. That's just, you know, just he's getting older. It's not really what he wants. And I guess maybe I can claim why, I'm sure, of getting him interested in in business conflict in business, because everybody's associated with business.

00;12;11;17 - 00;12;34;27
Chet Richards, PhD
You know, now if the Soviet Union is gone, everybody lives in a capitalist society to some extent or another possible exception of North Korea. And it's so yeah, it's that kind of conflict was around him all of the time and he read Tom Peters book Thriving on Chaos. Yeah. Which I still think is you have to pick just one book that really had the most influence.

00;12;34;27 - 00;12;56;06
Chet Richards, PhD
That would be my church thriving on chaos. And the way I would prove that is look at the title of of the same novel. I'm Ptolemy's last book, not the one he's got, but the title of his last longer. What's it called? Antifragile. What is Antifragile Thriving on Chaos? You know, it's not surviving chaos. It's thriving on chaos.

00;12;56;18 - 00;13;16;04
Chet Richards, PhD
And so this host guy and then you go back and before you said, oh, what we're talking about, boy, has his concept operating inside it, which is exactly the same thing. It doesn't work until you can get the balls all going up in the air and you can create some chaos. You can create more, not for lack of a better word.

00;13;16;07 - 00;13;37;15
Chet Richards, PhD
I think you're artists to understand chaos and may not be using it exactly the same way that Dave Snowden and that group do. But I think you get the idea until you can create some of that then then you really can't thrive on it. And it's and the other thing is, it's the side that can do it. The best is John said over and over and over again, you don't have to be perfect getting the stuff just better than everybody else.

00;13;37;22 - 00;13;54;01
Chet Richards, PhD
And if you are better than everybody else, then you have a strong incentive to create those conditions in the first place. And I think that's what Tyler is talking about. And and and and and our friends. Fragile. And for any of your readers, our listeners who haven't read it, I strongly recommend it's it's a yeah, it's a fun help to me.

00;13;54;01 - 00;14;01;15
Chet Richards, PhD
I mean if you've been put off by Tyler because you think he's too academic or too much over in the investing, forget all that nonsense any book that's got yeah yeah.

00;14;01;16 - 00;14;08;09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Speaking of that I think he just announced his next book is going to be titled Entropy. Right. And John Boyd talked about entropy.

00;14;08;09 - 00;14;42;02
Chet Richards, PhD
Yes. I haven't had it. Oh, that was entropy was the key difference in a sense was important. Clausewitz boy basically bought into everything positive. People talk about Boyd and get causes and a boy borrowed so much passwords. Sun Tzu, perhaps the one that influenced him more, however, where he thought Clausewitz went wrong in a sense, and I think is is because of the kind of warfare that caused me to study what was in his top down approach, trying to minimize confusion rather than create and exploit confusion.

00;14;42;19 - 00;15;13;05
Chet Richards, PhD
And and I think, again, it's you have to look at Clausewitz. His time is Newtonian mechanics. It's linear tactics, and it's short, short range, smooth bore muskets being built and smooth war cannon with a range of about a kilometer. And so if somebody once said that, if it if you're lined up in a late 18th century, you know why fighting another another battle like that, that really the last thing you want is the people in the line taking initiative.

00;15;13;21 - 00;15;33;06
Chet Richards, PhD
You know, you want them standing there pumping out lead, you know, faster than the other guy throwing more of it to the other guy. And then if you do that Manchester Square law text takes effect that you just shoot them right now. And that's the kind of thing you want top down. Yeah. You want you want a cohesion because you don't want people turning and writing.

00;15;33;17 - 00;15;54;20
Chet Richards, PhD
You want them just to keep going through that drill. And the Brits got very good, you know, the best British units could do for four rounds, minute, three or so. And the French typically trained up to around two. And this this and under the and the guys like Wellington who knew how to use that difference, that gave them a tremendous a tremendous advantage.

00;15;54;26 - 00;16;18;02
Chet Richards, PhD
So that's the kind of stuff. But that wasn't the kind of war that boy was talking about. So you can see it's you shouldn't trade off more in causes that you should say. What did he take from causality? Found useful ideas like centers of gravity, fundamental to Boyd's, you know, board strategy, for example, the idea of friction. Now, in Clausewitz, writing in the early 1800s, state of the art was the Newtonian physics.

00;16;18;02 - 00;16;43;03
Chet Richards, PhD
Entropy was in full generation in in the future 1850s, when when classes began talking about what became the second law of thermodynamics and the entropy principle. So what boy did was he kind of took work where Clausewitz was and took it to the next generation and essentially converted everything over to you. So you don't try to drain the energy out of the other side, and you can't.

00;16;43;03 - 00;17;05;20
Chet Richards, PhD
But typically you just want to make it so the other side can't use the energy that's that's there because the energy that's there not available for use. That's basically a definition of entropy. Yeah. And he got that because you have your fire and you have to correct me if I'm wrong on this, but there are, there are times in a jet fighter, particularly if you're at depending on your attitude and and and airspeed where the engine is jerk.

00;17;06;01 - 00;17;27;23
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah. Generating a huge amount of noise, but it's not really moving the airplane. Right. And that's what is actually that's what the impact energy shows. You heard the airplane is pumping energy into the system for energy that can be used to turn, accelerate or or climb. And as you pointed out in your paper, that's he had that little aha moment there at Georgia Tech.

00;17;27;23 - 00;17;35;28
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah, the energy's there, but we just can't use it. So how do we map where we can use the energy and that that led to to the M theory.

00;17;38;11 - 00;17;43;15
Commercial 
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00;17;43;15 - 00;17;44;01
Chet Richards, PhD
To building.

00;17;44;01 - 00;17;45;22
Commercial 
Your confidence in complexity.

00;17;46;12 - 00;18;05;14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. So let's build on this. You brought up we talked about yoga a little bit about mindfulness, talking about entropy. You recently did a keynote for I think with Lincoln Bourne and in that keynote you cited Anil Seth. Right. And that's a neuroscientist. And the quote you have in there and this connects back to how we create reality on orientation.

00;18;05;26 - 00;18;33;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Your quote was All perceptions are active constructions, brain based, best guesses of the nature of the world that is forever obscured behind a sensory veil. We know that Dr. Seth has a book out called Being You. It's about how we perceive reality. It's he calls it a controlled hallucination. It's top down, inside out. This very much aligns with what Boyd put in a lot of his briefings and the way we interpret the little loop as a way to construct reality top down, inside out.

00;18;34;05 - 00;18;53;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So can we can you talk a little bit more on on what John Boyd was looking at later in his life, like quantum physics, information theory, some of those other areas that Marc brought up as well. What was he looking at there that really helped him? I guess sketched out to make may include things like cybernetics as well.

00;18;55;03 - 00;19;22;00
Chet Richards, PhD
Okay. Now remember too, he got onto those things very early. Okay. The second law of thermodynamics, of course, from his his second bachelor's degree there at Georgia Tech and where he was, he was also exposed since he was it was an industrial engineering. So he had to take the engineering basic engineering curriculum. So he had he went back and I don't know what he was at at our I think his major was economics, if I remember.

00;19;22;00 - 00;19;45;16
Chet Richards, PhD
Right. So he may not have even taken physics there, but he certainly did in Georgia Tech. And so he got exposed to these ideas of the second law. And I don't know if he he probably didn't run across the incompleteness theorems and their because I don't usually you don't get those in mathematics are you a little further along.

00;19;45;16 - 00;20;19;14
Chet Richards, PhD
And George he would probably have been at Georgia Tech, but the Incompleteness Theorem, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and they all sort of sort of started saying the same thing there in which you tried to come across and destruction and creation. And it's important to realize he wasn't using them as analogies. A lot of people misunderstand that analogy. These are great for getting ideas, but until they're tested, until they're restated back in the domain you're interested in and then tested in that domain, they're still there's still ideas because analogies can be highly, highly misleading and classic rhetorical device.

00;20;19;21 - 00;20;46;18
Chet Richards, PhD
And so it's really important that you use analogies properly. This this he may have gotten the original ideas to analogies, but in that paper, what he's saying is that these are actual principles that apply to real systems. They have human beings in them. And to do that, he had to use versions of it that might not be that familiar to people that, for example, our our train physicists, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, perhaps being the most familiar.

00;20;46;27 - 00;21;05;27
Chet Richards, PhD
Now, he cites his use of the uncertainty principle there in destruction and creation. And in the original version of it, it was very much you know, the idea was that that observing an object changes. It has the potential to change it depending on how much energy you're pumping in to observe it. By the way, that that also gets back to your thing.

00;21;05;27 - 00;21;25;23
Chet Richards, PhD
Their observation is it is a result of activity and it Heisenberg. It sure is your puppet you're putting here you're putting photons, for example, into the system. Photons are massless, but of course they do have momentum. And I guess because they move at the speed of light, you always think of the momentum being mass times velocity, but that's not quite true.

00;21;25;23 - 00;21;42;28
Chet Richards, PhD
That's only true it quite a bit less and see so I'm told and anyway and so he got that's the version of it that that he used and trying to get more and precise observations of your system you have to interfere with it more and more in human systems. This is you know, this is this is obviously true.

00;21;42;28 - 00;22;00;04
Chet Richards, PhD
You send people into an organization trying to understand their new time in motion studies. What do people do? They react to the guy doing the time in motion. They you know, they know what they want to see. So while that person's there, you know, they're doing the third legs and all that. Soon as they leave, then they go back to doing it in a way that they think makes makes the most sense.

00;22;00;13 - 00;22;27;23
Chet Richards, PhD
The boss comes down, you know, everything. Everything changes. And then when the boss leaves, everything changes back. Trying to really understand what's going on. An organization is a it's an incredible problem. Voight addresses that a little bit in organic design. We talked about Van Travel's notion of Direct to Telescope and Van Kravitz book Command, Command and more. Another one I recommend highly to anybody, whether they read Arrested More or not.

00;22;28;10 - 00;22;50;26
Chet Richards, PhD
But that notion of how do you understand that's we came up with the idea of appreciation you sort of understand it by entropy is is is part of it part of it is you understand it by having this idea of of of people in the organization, but outside the formal line of, of, of command that can that can give you information.

00;22;50;26 - 00;23;08;07
Chet Richards, PhD
And you got to be very careful with that one. Of course, it sounds like spying on the organization, but if everybody knows what's going on and in the German system, there was a quid pro quo they tried to do they would send they would send members of the general staff down to observe. But the general those people were also responsible for sending the majority of the reports back.

00;23;08;24 - 00;23;30;18
Chet Richards, PhD
So they took that reporting burden, a lot of it at least off of the off of the line commanders. And they took that on as well. But they also got to send back information about their impression of what was actually going on. And then when the commander did go down into the field, commander was was there was really for, you know, for two reasons I'm sure the Marines are very familiar with.

00;23;30;18 - 00;23;56;04
Chet Richards, PhD
There's the they're primarily as cheerleaders and conductors. And, you know, people try to keep morale, but they're also looking in people's eyes and trying to sense how it's going on. Staying talks about this in the original invasion of the Crimea. As we know nowadays, the terrain leading into the Crimea that the isthmus right across there is very marshy, very, very difficult terrain, virtually impossible, the blitzkrieg type maneuvers on it.

00;23;56;10 - 00;24;20;04
Chet Richards, PhD
But they still had to get at it. And they were grinding and grinding and grinding against very determined Soviet opposition. Vermont, I wanted to know what who's going to break first? You said the only way I could do this was to go right up to the front and look our people in the eye and look the captured prisoners in the eye and try to come up with some idea and said it just it just seemed to me that they were going to break before we get that turned out to be correct.

00;24;20;12 - 00;24;39;28
Chet Richards, PhD
They broke a mug shot and he was able to chart it once he got into the Crimea, then he was able to use more more traditional German tactics. So the whole the whole idea of observing without changing that that he got from, you know, from Heisenberg. And this, again, it's not by analogy. It's applying a deeper underlying principle to a different domain.

00;24;40;03 - 00;24;44;24
Chet Richards, PhD
Take it out of physics, apply it somehow. And the same thing holds of the other two.

00;24;44;24 - 00;25;00;23
Mark McGrath
So, Chad, a term that I became familiar with when I read certain to when years ago as I was making my foray into the business world from the Marine Corps was a term called Genscher again Pat Sue. And it sounds a lot like what you're describing and you have a great go.

00;25;00;23 - 00;25;01;17
Chet Richards, PhD
And see for yourself.

00;25;01;17 - 00;25;18;11
Mark McGrath
Yeah, yeah. Could you share that story? I mean that's I find that in my business career, that's one thing that many leaders could do that don't do and they're so disconnected from reality. Tell you, you gave I think the Sacramento Kings version with Gavin.

00;25;18;11 - 00;25;22;15
Chet Richards, PhD
Gavin Maloof and then several years since I read the book.

00;25;22;15 - 00;25;34;15
Mark McGrath
Maxwell Well, you said you said something about how like, yeah, he went, he was the owner of the team and he went down to buy or buy a beer and he missed a whole half a basketball waiting in line for a beer. That's right. Yeah.

00;25;34;24 - 00;25;57;20
Chet Richards, PhD
That's. Yeah, well, that's that's a very good point. The point about get to that to a lot of people miss and this is driven home to me was one of the companies I was working at they showed the CEO going out on the production line and he's standing there and he's got this big grin on his face and he's got, you know, arm around a production worker or something like that, you know, just but he's presented a three piece suit, you know, and all that.

00;25;57;27 - 00;26;16;29
Chet Richards, PhD
And he's down there with, you know, you know full well he did not have a clue what was going on. This guy happened to be from the finance background, you know, it could have been a green wall. And then they dove in the factory after he left. He would have worked exactly the same. You look at the Japanese system to apply it and you get what?

00;26;16;29 - 00;26;56;11
Chet Richards, PhD
So the person has got to understand what they're seeing, what they're experiencing when they get down there. And the only way to do that and this is is in Italy, where I think the military has a huge advantage, is to have done it yourself to some degree. I think part of the most dangerous proposals that's been made modern times is the Marine Corps proposal to bring people in laterally at up you feel great wreck okay we already do that for certain specialties medical for example lawyers that's that's what we don't expect the doctors to be you know, to get out and operate as infantry, artillery, even intelligence or or engineers.

00;26;57;25 - 00;27;17;21
Chet Richards, PhD
Because the only way you know, and military organization to become a captain, there's been a successful attempt the only way to get command of a battalion, at least in theory, is to have been a successful company commander from the successful battalion commanders. We pick people to try out for brigade command so the person shows up as a new brigade commander.

00;27;18;09 - 00;27;53;07
Chet Richards, PhD
People certain they'll know it and then go back and look at his record. Yeah. He commanded the. Yes, he fought that he didn't. Yes, he did. That comes with comes with the credibility that they deserve already already built in. And Toyota is very big on that to be the head of a development project for a particular car, you had to have had a very successful and respected engineer just just to start out with that, would you have to be considered really an engineering genius and then they'll work you into how to manage it, you know, how you how to manage a program.

00;27;53;19 - 00;28;15;02
Chet Richards, PhD
But if you don't know automotive engineering to the point to where somebody is talking about doing a or doing they are doing said you can't sit there and and and not really know what they're talking about will be able to make informed inspired judgments about what all this means then you know, you might be replaced with a your place is a tape recorder at that point.

00;28;15;02 - 00;28;32;02
Chet Richards, PhD
You know, you're just you're just sitting there listening. And even if you did speak up, you might give me respect for it, because they know you have no idea what you're talking about. You may making engineering decisions on financial grounds or things like that. So yeah, the finance is important. Yeah, the design is important, but you've got to do development basically.

00;28;32;02 - 00;28;36;06
Chet Richards, PhD
You got to be an engineer. So you have to have demonstrated where.

00;28;36;23 - 00;28;55;19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yes, we're going to have a Shingo prize winning author on here soon to talk about what he discovered inside the archives and since we're talking about Japanese culture and a little bit of Toyota, could you just share some insights on what caught John Boyd's attention about the Toyota production system and how much that influenced him on his thinking about this sketch and his brief?

00;28;55;21 - 00;29;30;23
Chet Richards, PhD
Well, yeah, that's a good point because he really got into this, the Toyota stuff really starting in late eighties, maybe 89, 90, somewhere long in there. He bought the shingles book. He bought the titan of the book. I taught production system. And of course, he bought all that, all the Shambala press stuff that Cleary and other other translators that he could get his hands on, but specifically about Toyota, if you take the five principles, you know, the emphasis on height and the handicap finger spacing.

00;29;30;23 - 00;29;49;19
Chet Richards, PhD
If you laugh, talks have taken share, poke, which by the way, I have now declared to be, as you know, English words, recent loanwords from German like kindergarten, Ottoman blitzkrieg, sauerkraut, you know, that kind of stuff, which means I don't have to capitalize them, don't have to italicize them. And I got rid of the old Latin finger to get sympathy.

00;29;50;06 - 00;30;08;28
Chet Richards, PhD
So anyway, with that in mind, yeah, he and he was very easy to find all of those things. Let me give you just a for instance, in the Twitter Toyota used to and they still produce a guide for its suppliers. The introduction to the Toyota production system. Very, very good. And in there it's they never sold it. As far as I know.

00;30;08;28 - 00;30;31;26
Chet Richards, PhD
We got a copy because at one point Lockheed sent some people off to see if we could learn something from or maybe even supply some stuff to them. The answer in both cases was no, but we did get copies of the book and in there it's it is talking about Condor. And after describing it a little bit, he said, But the real thing about Condor is that the efficiency is I think the efficiency is maximal.

00;30;32;14 - 00;31;11;16
Chet Richards, PhD
Something like the paperwork is minimal and the employees themselves are completely in charge. Yeah. After I actually got here, they, you know, they operated, they make the decision when to start the next, you know, when to start the next job. And they make the decision to pull the and on if that's necessary and all that is down and then that's just that just that just harmonized so much so I'm left with the description, by the way, of the auto production system in that book starts out with the purpose of the Toyota production system is to continuously decrease the time between what a customer orders a car and when it's delivered.

00;31;11;16 - 00;31;31;14
Chet Richards, PhD
You have to think about that statement a long time because one way to do that would just be build two or three of every possible combination and every possible car, you know, with and without air automatic standard, you know, etc., etc., and just pass them up somewhere. And when a customer orders like that, don't grab it, send it to it.

00;31;32;11 - 00;31;49;22
Chet Richards, PhD
You find out pretty quick that that method of of building cars has some severe problems. The first one is you have a lot of inventory, of course, that you've that you've paid money to build and that by the end of the year just getting closer. If you haven't sold it, you have to start unloading it. Whatever the market will bear.

00;31;50;08 - 00;32;13;02
Chet Richards, PhD
That's the first thing. The second thing is building inventory. So you go over and and you and the guy wants a a Camry and red with a six cylinder engine and a premium sound system. So you say, yeah, I got one of those. Go over and grab it, contact the guy, hops in it, fires it up and the air conditioner doesn't work.

00;32;13;02 - 00;32;28;13
Chet Richards, PhD
You say, Oh, rats. Okay, well, I got another one. You go there you have it. Come over to him and you said, Oh, okay, this was fine. So now what you had to do is you had to build two cars hoping you could find one good one when the time came. So if that's your philosophy, then what's the philosophy?

00;32;28;13 - 00;32;50;19
Chet Richards, PhD
What's the incentive to get it right the first time? What's the incentive to make sure that the first car that you get the person is right? What's incentive not to build two and then have to fix one before you can sell it again? In other words, what's the incentive to drive out waste? And so when Tiger says inventory is is evil, he didn't say it was expensive.

00;32;50;19 - 00;33;12;05
Chet Richards, PhD
Oh, it is. He said it's evil because it corruption orientation and of course that job that would just sounds like manna from heaven corrupts the orientation. Yes. And so he was and of course, John was big into that ideology. Locking up your orientation, as we've said. Yes, it was financial stuff, really. Like your orientation is because it's always cheaper to build to build a lot of junk.

00;33;12;05 - 00;33;27;24
Chet Richards, PhD
Right at first. But at the end of the year, you know, you do the final accounting, you know, you may learn different. He said badly. You don't have that. The final accounting in the first accounting is the same guy. Yeah. So you got to do it. You got to do it right. And so he got into the idea of breaking trade offs.

00;33;27;24 - 00;33;28;04
Chet Richards, PhD
Go ahead.

00;33;28;23 - 00;33;47;09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
We are you know, we coach and say Toyota from time to time. And it's interesting, one of the books we came across and some of the product owners desks are this book, right? Right. So what we're seeing in there when we do coach, it's we're using a lot of lessons that John Boyd gave us, connecting it back to the Toyota production system, which we already know is inherent inside of the loop.

00;33;47;19 - 00;33;56;19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But let's switch gears a little bit. Going back to the archives and what what else was John Boyd looking at? And maybe, Mark, you got some ideas on what you want to look at.

00;33;56;19 - 00;34;19;27
Mark McGrath
Yeah, I, I think it's obvious when you go into study in depth from Boyd, you know, and what, what they grounded us, I said on podcasts a million times when I've been interviewed, I first came into contact with the The Boyd Cycle. When we read at the time it was known as FMF. I'm one as a freshman at Marquette in the Roshi program, Naval ROTC.

00;34;20;22 - 00;34;42;12
Mark McGrath
And well, John, I didn't, you know, he was still alive. But then as I got into really when I stepped out of the military and I realized and I come across your book and other things that what they had empowered us with was something far beyond what had been taught to me as a reductionist force, that process for tactical situations, that was a tool like any other.

00;34;42;27 - 00;35;06;29
Mark McGrath
And when Ponch and I met in the archives last month and early December, it was apparent to me and this is, of course, coming after years of in-depth study and application I was in the asset management business, tried to teach Boyd there. But when you get into his handwritten notes, you know, we were away from the books. The only book we really looked that was on war just to read is marginalia.

00;35;06;29 - 00;35;50;25
Mark McGrath
But the the handwritten notes and you're finding things on napkins and paper towels and on the back of shopping lists that have profound points. It seems to me that when you look at that stuff and then you look at something like your epistemology with all the inputs over the 20 years from DNC destruction creation to utility before he passed, which really comes after his many, many years of study and introspection at Georgia and Aerial Tax Study and Andrew Energy Renewables in he was running something down it's obvious when you're going through all that stuff he is he was running something down and chasing after something that was much bigger.

00;35;50;25 - 00;36;12;18
Mark McGrath
And in the Korean book, when he's over in Thailand, he's writing back to his wife saying, I'm on the verge of something huge. Everybody's going to think I'm nuts. But it just seems that Dave Snowden said when we interviewed him on our on our second episode, it would have been interesting to see if John had lived another decade or so to see where he would have taken it.

00;36;12;18 - 00;36;43;19
Mark McGrath
Because what we know is a loop and all that stuff probably wouldn't look the way it does. It would probably be continued and developed because he was dynamic, you know, and he was changing and he didn't want to have. So that's so what? So we want to know so someone who knew Boyd well and did a lot of work with him, you know, do you ever think that do you ever wonder, like, what was he chasing in the biggest broader scope of things that call guys like me and Ponch to set something like No Way Out to teach others?

00;36;43;28 - 00;36;51;13
Mark McGrath
Hey, there's still a lot to develop. This was left open and we got to continue the continue the pursuit. So, you know, what do you what do you think that is?

00;36;52;03 - 00;37;18;05
Chet Richards, PhD
Hmm? Well, tell you the truth, I don't have a clue, but I can pass along to you what Chuck's family told me. Chuck knew boy better than anybody else. I could see him. Even gear. I would have agreed with that. I mean, they shared adjoining side by side offices in the Pentagon. After John retired, Tom Christie gave John an office and and stayed close right up for the end of John's life.

00;37;18;05 - 00;37;34;01
Chet Richards, PhD
And what Chuck told me was that John told him beginning to sound like, you know, some of those religious texts that if you're familiar with the Hadiths of Islam, I heard from Abu Bakr, who said that so-and-so who's had silence, I would say, have you heard it from the practice? And this is going to be one of those stories, the Hadith.

00;37;34;01 - 00;38;01;10
Chet Richards, PhD
John-Boy Then I heard it from chaps, many who said he heard it from John Boyd. John said that what got him started on this was here he was a he was a captain a virtually no real combat experience right at the tail end of the career. I mean, the very tail here last month of the Korean War and and although he was pretty good stick and rudder guy and could find the heck out of out of the airplane.

00;38;01;10 - 00;38;22;15
Chet Richards, PhD
There were a lot of good people out there that could fly the heck out of the airplane, he said. But out of all of that and people that had a lot of these people had graduate degrees and graduate engineering degrees and math degrees, and all he had was a economics degree from what he called a corn college. No offense, however, this is just words and you can look it up in Robert Korb.

00;38;22;27 - 00;38;44;18
Chet Richards, PhD
And he said, Why was I able to what was it allow me to come up with energy maneuverability. I just don't understand, even to this day to you're a fighter pilot. All these other guys have had far more damage than I had, but I was the only one that came up with it. And he said, I'm obviously not smarter than anybody after two bachelor's degrees.

00;38;44;18 - 00;39;14;05
Chet Richards, PhD
And that was it. And he said, Well, what was it? What was it about my approach? What was it, by the way, that I went about trying to solve this? Had the problem, of course, was how to quantify air near area combat, how to how to rigorously decide between two airframes. And this gets back to your observation at the beginning of your of your paper, how to get back, how to decide between two airplanes, essentially, which one you'd rather buy, which is the superior for air area combat purposes.

00;39;14;05 - 00;39;34;14
Chet Richards, PhD
Now. And he said up until that time he talked to the Great Aces and what it is they all had kind of an intuitive feel. Well, he does this. I'm going to do that. When he does that, I'm going to do. And so they all had this this collection. He said it was like maybe talking to boxers or kung fu masters or things like that.

00;39;34;14 - 00;39;47;18
Chet Richards, PhD
He asked him, how do you do in a fight? Well, I'm going to I'm going to try to fake him out this way, and then he comes up. I'm going to go low. I'm going to try to kick, but I'm not. And basically, I'm just going to get into fight. I'm going to kind of wing it as it as it goes on its head.

00;39;47;18 - 00;40;06;16
Chet Richards, PhD
This battle of tricks they had that they had great, very fast thinking brain. And that was about the only way they could describe it. And John said, that's fine, but if we've got to design a new airplane, you know, what do we do? Because the Air Force at that time was absolutely not to buy another Navy fighter. And that was true.

00;40;08;00 - 00;40;25;01
Chet Richards, PhD
I was kind of on the periphery of that as a very, very junior staffer in the TAC Air office, the office of the Secretary of Defense at that time. We have responsibility for both the F-15 and the 50. And I had Air Force officers tell me we'll shut the Air Force down before we by the 14th and close it down.

00;40;25;01 - 00;40;49;14
Chet Richards, PhD
Just forget it. The baby can have the whole thing and but anyway, be that as it may. And so that got it. That got him to thinking about how do you come up not only with new ideas, but with new ideas that are actually going to have an influence out in the external world. And if you read Destruction in Creation, with that in mind, it's very clear that's the problem he's describing in destruction and creation.

00;40;49;14 - 00;41;15;03
Chet Richards, PhD
In his abstract, he talks about how do we make intuitive within ourselves? That's many trotted out an idea and if you go all the skip along over into conceptual spiral and then into essence of reading and music, it's the same problem where it is novelty. You get things novelty, where does novelty come from and how do we make it useful out into the real world and of course, then in essence of winning and losing is that same thing.

00;41;15;03 - 00;41;39;08
Chet Richards, PhD
Where does our where does our implicit repertoire come from? How do we add to it? How do we change it when necessary? How do we know when time to to change it is? And that's all that is. Ideas on that are just that's all the loop sketch does. And that just sort of incorporates is top level thinking about how you answer that problem of where does our implicit repertoire come from, how do we modify it, how do we change it?

00;41;39;08 - 00;41;50;03
Chet Richards, PhD
How do we even discarded if we if we need to it know the loop is supposed to sort of incorporate at the very high level the things that you need to make that, you know, to make that happen.

00;41;50;10 - 00;42;14;02
Mark McGrath
So and he was poor and he's pulling from but he didn't limit himself. Right. So like when when Ponch and I see people limit Boyd oh. To loop and that's it. And when you get into his work and you study it and you read the books and you go in there and you and you look at what he was up to, he was a he was pulling from so many directions.

00;42;14;02 - 00;42;32;01
Mark McGrath
I mean, the best visual depiction is you're you know, the epistemology is showing all these things that he's trying to coalesce. And I just wonder, like something was really driving him. I mean, do you think it was the pursuit of novelty, like understanding how novelty emerges?

00;42;33;01 - 00;42;55;18
Chet Richards, PhD
I think it became that layer, yeah. It started, I think, something much more general than that. It was just and I know it sounds kind of odd, but knowing John, it really, it really does. Then he went on back to the Pentagon where he had to basically engaged in in day to day fencing with other other colonels and other in other offices, typically in a panic.

00;42;55;20 - 00;43;20;16
Chet Richards, PhD
And Pentagon, as you probably know, the colonel is the lowest rank whose basic function is is more than going to make coffee, going to get the coffee. Typically, you have lieutenant colonels who do that. Sometimes colonels do, but typically the colonel is the lowest rank, actually sits behind a desk and tells people what to do. And then you you know, you have stacks and stacks and stacks of generals and senior executive service people.

00;43;20;16 - 00;43;41;16
Chet Richards, PhD
But anyway, it's a drama. But so he's in there dueling with these other colonels. And he's got he's got the you know, they're general stacked above him. And although it's current talks about a little bit boy had a fair amount of cover or he wouldn't have lasted long enough to have any influence at all beyond his earlier theories.

00;43;42;28 - 00;44;05;14
Chet Richards, PhD
So I mean he had people that that that looked out for him at least enough to make Colonel and that was as far as it was going to go, which John to the end of his life never really accepted to be to be honest with you. I mean, intellectually he understood it even, you know, back then it was much harder to make journal than it is today.

00;44;05;14 - 00;44;26;06
Chet Richards, PhD
And it's not easy today in program I was then we had 50 I think it was Colonel, I think two of us. Army General Officer So that was not for your people out there aren't familiar with the military. Talk about having a lot of generals and we do it on a percentage basis. Not very many at all. Very tough to make, you know, to make general.

00;44;26;06 - 00;44;57;01
Chet Richards, PhD
And when you don't have war going on at the time, it's it's even tougher. Then it becomes almost all bureaucratic, bureaucratic politics. And by the time the job would have come up for for would have been what are we talking about here? 1970, 71, 72. There was still war going on, but unfortunately he had missed it. So you know that even though he had done all this great engineering and development disaster, you know, he didn't have, you know, air medal from Vietnam, hadn't shot anybody down, hadn't commanded a fighter squad.

00;44;57;01 - 00;45;26;01
Chet Richards, PhD
He wasn't Robin Olds. And and there were plenty of people who had done those sorts of things to fill out the general officer slots above him. So, so having, you know, having said all of that, he was he was very disappointed. I think that one reason that he doubled down on things like destruction and creation and new conception carrier air combat, because I think in a way, he was going to show the establishment that they was kind of what they were missing, things they hadn't even thought about in their wildest dreams.

00;45;26;01 - 00;45;55;02
Chet Richards, PhD
But that they should have. And unfortunately, at the time, it was so abstract, perhaps. I mean, very few fighter pilots cared about girls there to this day. I think relatively few of them do. And very few promotion boards were were impressed by his his knowledge of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. So so that was so that was that. So then he got over into the he started he sort of got over into these other things.

00;45;55;02 - 00;46;16;16
Chet Richards, PhD
I think he said he said, all right, that's it. Pox on all your houses. And and and that's kind of what got him over into into business now he could have gotten into sports that's another arena of conflict. But I never saw that he had any particular interest in sports. He was a swimmer. And in college, which is essentially an individual sport.

00;46;16;16 - 00;46;26;21
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah, I know you have relays but it's basically a relay is for individual sports world and together, you know so basically he was in the individual kind of stuff. So how did.

00;46;26;21 - 00;46;38;00
Mark McGrath
You how did you when and how did you first meet John Boyd and then how did you get drawn into his collection of acolytes? Yeah.

00;46;38;01 - 00;47;08;05
Chet Richards, PhD
Okay. I got my degree in 71, a recession in the in the aerospace industry and in STEM hiring in particular two years before. And our program, people with master's degrees were getting hired out of the Ph.D. program. Offers of of of power positions and money. IBM would come down to our big office not far from us. They hired like three or four out of our new new recently graduated master's, recently enrolled Ph.D. candidate Hardaway.

00;47;08;11 - 00;47;29;21
Chet Richards, PhD
Two years later, they were all they all got laid off. Boeing was laying people off the Army and Air Force were both winding down there, there their procurement from Vietnam. So whereas two years before, even though I wasn't on the job market, I can take three, four or five offers from these people. I got my degree and went on the job market.

00;47;29;21 - 00;47;56;27
Chet Richards, PhD
There was nothing. It was really quiet. So at the suggestion of one of the people that the recruiters would still come around, keep, you know, keep a presence, they just weren't hiring. And one guy said, why don't you fill out the federal form blanket U.S., so and so and sequence anything going on in the federal government. And I think the guy I talked to actually worked for the Office of Personnel Management or, you know, Service Administration, something, like I said, fill it out.

00;47;57;13 - 00;48;23;15
Chet Richards, PhD
So I feel this long form out. And about a month later, I got a letter back from the office of Secretary of Defense Executive Intern Program and says, We have an opening for an executive intern and in in the Pentagon, in Washington, D.C., fill out all the rest of this paperwork and they will consider you for. And that was like in February.

00;48;23;15 - 00;48;45;11
Chet Richards, PhD
And in about June, I think they finally they they finally got this. If I had no job, just graduated, just, you know, just just put on the hood and all that, I was basically unemployed and and and they came through my one job officer and the executive intern program, the office of the Secretary of Defense. Now an ROTC scholarship like you manage in the Army.

00;48;45;21 - 00;49;08;02
Chet Richards, PhD
So I kind of kind of knew what the office of the Secretary of Defense was, but that was that. But that was man had no clue. An executive intern program was. But that was it. That was my one job. And what you did was you rotated around various departments and the office of the Secretary of Defense. And then the idea was that at at the end of your year, one of them would make you a permanent, permanent offer.

00;49;08;02 - 00;49;30;14
Chet Richards, PhD
And the one that I accepted was the was the office of tactical air analysis at the time. It was still the Office of Systems Analysis of McNamara's wishes. And although very shortly after that became PANAY, the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation. Anyway, that was a take your shop. And a year after I got there, Tom Christie took it over.

00;49;30;24 - 00;49;59;06
Chet Richards, PhD
And of course Tom Christie knew John Boyd very well. But before Tom came over, we were sitting around the office one day and the department of the the our leader, our manager was a really good guy. I can remember I can't remember his name now, but anyway he said, Hey, let's go meet John Boyd before he goes off to Thailand and I have seen the name a little because I'd seen the energy maneuverability stuff and Tom Christie and John Boyd.

00;49;59;06 - 00;50;23;12
Chet Richards, PhD
So we tracked down John's office and there's this tall colonel in all that he's got his uniform and. All right. And then we talk for a couple of minutes. We all shake hands and we all should march back out. He goes off to Thailand. I leave the Pentagon in 74 and then left Washington completely in 76. But in 75, early 75, I think I get a call from John and.

00;50;23;12 - 00;50;41;19
Chet Richards, PhD
I had seen him a couple of times, showed up in Tom Christie's happy hour. He got back from Thailand by then and he said, Hey, I'm writing this paper and I got a little mathematics in it. I wonder if you might look at it over for me. Sure. Why not give it to me? And so I did. And it was on girdles.

00;50;41;19 - 00;51;07;21
Chet Richards, PhD
There. And all 50 mathematicians are familiar with Gurney's Theorem, although only those that really work in mathematical logic actually get into it and employ it directly. But we're all familiar with it. So I dug out some of my texts and wrote some of the heroes of what they were. And I said, Well, you know, John, your statement, the theorem is fine or is is quite correct, but you're not applying it to, you know, like mathematics.

00;51;07;21 - 00;51;27;21
Chet Richards, PhD
You're not thinking up these theorems and try them based on girdles and trying to brute. We said, Yeah, I know, but just tell me, is what I wrote about there didn't get incompleteness correct. And that I did. I, you know, talk about the derivation, you know, clarity. Yeah. Know all that stuff. All that's that's fine. It's nothing. No problem with their guts.

00;51;27;21 - 00;51;49;10
Chet Richards, PhD
All they wanted to know and that was that in early 75 and I left went out to California, I was out there a couple of years without watch. Saudi Arabia for a couple of years, came back about an all around and in late a late 1980. Yeah, about March or April, 1980. I get back to D.C. working for TCI, you start going back to Happy Hour.

00;51;49;10 - 00;52;15;08
Chet Richards, PhD
And of course Boyd is still there, but this time he's pretty much finished patterns of conflict and he's gotten the loop and all of that and nothing to do with the first part. Two Patterns of conflict. And although I did get in on some of the later stuff and then he did an 86, 87, he did his two little briefings at the satellite, satellite briefings, organic design and strategic game.

00;52;15;28 - 00;52;31;18
Chet Richards, PhD
And then, you know, we're still going back and forth a happy hour and I start getting these phone calls. It is that I'm working on a new briefing here, so that might be something a little more down your line. He said, you try this. What do you think about this or what do you think about that? And he's got he said, you know, did you read rules book?

00;52;31;18 - 00;52;47;26
Chet Richards, PhD
I said, yeah, you know, everybody can read. You took a pilot and he said, Well, you remember that part where he says when he comes out of you shot down, what, nine times, whatever. And a lot of those who was injured got out of the hospital. It took him a while to get to them, like a month to get back in the game.

00;52;47;27 - 00;53;06;01
Chet Richards, PhD
So what does that tell you? You know, it took him a while to get back in the game. So it tells you that his orientation is going to come back up. It's got him. He's got a rematch with the ongoing reality. You see see what I'm talking about there, Tiger? Oh, yeah. Right now I got you know, you take a while to think about this.

00;53;06;01 - 00;53;30;19
Chet Richards, PhD
I think about the invention of the telegraph, and he's putting all this stuff together to put all this all this stuff have in common. That was is well, you think about it's got its merits many side and implicit cross-referencing and it's and and it's how they're they're making interactions and some of the interactions are good and some of them are not and then and and he started to put it in his mouth in the stuff off.

00;53;30;24 - 00;54;07;17
Chet Richards, PhD
And that eventually, of course became conceptual and spiral. And he talked about, you know, all the interactions and things and the some of the things he calls interactions just because he wants to fit them in there. And and so he's and that's that's kind of how I got back into it that a conceptual spiral and then hand time came to do essence of winning and losing apparently obviously the last one on the list that had a access to a graphics program is this was pre PowerPoint and so we did it in that that we already did it HTML and then I did a version of that and then converted it over to freelance converting to

00;54;07;20 - 00;54;14;28
Chet Richards, PhD
PowerPoint and finally converted it to keynote. So that's amazing. So I got, I kind of got back to a really big time with the conceptual spiral.

00;54;16;09 - 00;54;28;21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Which I think you should know that the web, I think, I think you should know that OCD hasn't really changed. You're still a bunch of oh six is running around. Some of us have economics degrees and not much is getting done and we're still using PowerPoint right now.

00;54;28;21 - 00;54;49;09
Chet Richards, PhD
So I think he is glad he does that, that he died before he had to learn to use PowerPoint. Although I think if he had got had an iPhone and understood how to use notes, I think he would have been like you said, there would be all this riding on the back of laundry lists and grocery store receipts.

00;54;49;27 - 00;55;01;19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So, but, but he would have been talking to himself more often, so. QUESTION Did you ever question his mental health like, hey, is there anything wrong with this guy? Or I mean, what was it like being around him when he's calling you in the middle of night? Any concerns?

00;55;02;16 - 00;55;21;13
Chet Richards, PhD
No, not really. I'm because, you know, you was kind of you were kind of honored to be part of that group, you know, with Tom Christie and pepper spray and Ray Leonard and Chuck Spinny. And I mean, these are these are people that have that had that had done a lot during their their careers. Ray Leonard was the co-inventor of Iridium, which is still here today.

00;55;21;28 - 00;55;46;20
Chet Richards, PhD
And, of course, you know, Chuck Pierre, that you know, that group. And just to be included in that to me was a was a tremendous honor and it still is. So I wish I had taken better notes. I actually saved some of my notes from later on, but not nearly, not nearly enough. I really wish I had saved a lot more of that stuff.

00;55;47;08 - 00;55;51;23
Chet Richards, PhD
But that's how I know. For example, go ahead.

00;55;51;23 - 00;55;59;04
Commercial 
You are listening to No Way Out sponsored by AGL X. Now let's get back to building your confidence in complexity.

00;56;00;03 - 00;56;05;28
Mark McGrath
Oh no, it's going well. I finished that because I had a question about integrating his theories into organizations.

00;56;06;15 - 00;56;41;22
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah, the thing about is there so if you go back and say, well, when did he when did he come up with IOI, for example? Well, I document that pretty, pretty accurately for my, you know, for my notes. And since he didn't define IOI Express recently because he didn't have access to a typist anymore and the patterns of conflict and patterns of conflict, it's like a Giovanni is replaced by a that adaptability and I don't think it has orientation that it's something that it has it may have a different definition of harmony but yeah I yeah inside orientation, harmony, agility.

00;56;41;22 - 00;57;02;26
Chet Richards, PhD
In addition, the question is, see, that's not the definition of harmony that he actually put into the that he actually put into the briefing the very definition of harmony. He put it the greeting. To me, it's much more powerful than that. So and you can go into my version of it and I'll show it to you, but that those are the correct thing.

00;57;03;00 - 00;57;11;06
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah, well, see, that's the thing. The definition of orientation is not correct either. That cannot be the definition of orientation.

00;57;11;06 - 00;57;14;12
Mark McGrath
Give us the give us. There's one word I would use.

00;57;14;13 - 00;57;17;16
Chet Richards, PhD
Well, go back to then. We'll go back to it. Go back to it.

00;57;17;27 - 00;57;20;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay.

00;57;20;22 - 00;57;44;22
Chet Richards, PhD
I think I did I didn't get a chance to re if it's the same one out of out of essence of winning and losing, then, then it cannot be correct which boy actually read it first. And I and I mentioned this and said because the definition from essence of winning and losing which you know mirrors his his definitions from organic design.

00;57;45;09 - 00;58;04;15
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah. I mean of course bothered images that is okay. Except that that one is okay there that that is not bad except I read that that really applies primarily to individuals the definition. So for go ahead.

00;58;05;14 - 00;58;13;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. For our listeners out there that can't see our screen right now, we're talking SCI Insight, insight, orientation, harmony, agility and what's the last one there?

00;58;14;01 - 00;58;14;18
Chet Richards, PhD
Initially, if.

00;58;15;01 - 00;58;15;09
Mark McGrath
It's.

00;58;15;21 - 00;58;22;12
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Initiative, right. And the notes that we have are from the archives and such is comments, comments, clients know what the updated ones are.

00;58;22;12 - 00;58;43;19
Chet Richards, PhD
Right. Your orientation, the problem with orientation, the orientation as he defined it, which is which is as you defined it here it is correctly, but you start to think about it, the orientation that's in essence of winning and losing, you know, very last reference. We have to assume that that's the one that he was the happiest with. The stuff that's inside that orientation box includes genetic heritage.

00;58;44;24 - 00;59;05;25
Chet Richards, PhD
That's one of the one of the little deals inside there. And we argue back and forth a long time and what should be in there. And I did get heavily involved in this and whether the line should be solid lines or dotted lines and have arrowheads at one end or the other end wants to avoid Lysenkoism. Epigenetics haven't been discovered yet, but genetic heritage does not apply to groups.

00;59;06;02 - 00;59;25;11
Chet Richards, PhD
Boy was big on that. You start down that line, you become a Nazi in a hurry. You just a way. It's a slippery slope. And so the question is, what does orientation then mean when you are talking about groups of people? And if you go back and look at his other things, he has concepts like overall mankind's faith scheme.

00;59;25;17 - 00;59;46;04
Chet Richards, PhD
There's a there's a government for it. But more of more specifically, he talks about similar implicit orientation in in my notes when we're talking about what orientation means in our high he wants to apply to group he can apply to our entire country as were our high I suppose if I remember its ingredients needed to pursue the national strategic goal.

00;59;46;07 - 01;00;07;17
Chet Richards, PhD
Whatever goal and if even if not nationally, it's the highest level organizational goal. It's a gradient you need to it. So it's got to apply to the whole group. And so common genetic heritage is not one of them that he put in there. But what he did was he he said, take my definition of orientation and now use the concept of a similar implicit orientation.

01;00;07;28 - 01;00;14;26
Chet Richards, PhD
And that's the yeah, that's essence of winning and losing. That's the.

01;00;16;04 - 01;00;16;15
Mark McGrath
Which we.

01;00;18;04 - 01;00;44;11
Chet Richards, PhD
See without our genetic heritage that we as individuals don't see that implicit right. He's talking about individuals here. That's the thing I keep telling about is that essentially Essence of winning and losing really only applies to individuals, but individuals, unless you're Musashi you're free fighting one on one or you're a gunfighter we are firepower it's that that are competing against each other that's important.

01;00;44;24 - 01;00;45;23
Chet Richards, PhD
And boy.

01;00;46;03 - 01;00;58;18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
To change that I want. I want to, I want to I want to just interrupt. So I want to make sure I have this right genetic heritage for individuals only. And then I, I oh, i four groups. Right. Is that how we.

01;00;58;18 - 01;01;33;08
Chet Richards, PhD
Talk all the way up to country is what you need to pursue your highest level. Okay. You know, overall overall national goal, he called it. And it's not that we don't have a genetic heritage. It's just that when you talk about our group, having a single genetic heritage in their right is dangerous. If you if if you look at Boyd's personal history, he still to this day known as the guy who integrated Las Vegas mayor, that may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but he certainly had no cards at all for a for discrimination based on just people's physical characteristics.

01;01;33;26 - 01;01;38;03
Mark McGrath
And great story, by the way. And Karakoram tells that story brilliantly.

01;01;38;03 - 01;01;48;11
Chet Richards, PhD
Yes, he does. Yes, he does. And several people gave him that story. Horne, by the way, was meticulous in and in in his sourcing whenever anybody was looking for.

01;01;48;25 - 01;02;10;07
Mark McGrath
And for the listeners that haven't read Quorum yet, we should say that at Nellis there was an African-American officer there training at the fighter weapons school that at the time Las Vegas was not integrated and Boyd forced to. He took him everywhere. They went to party out in town and they didn't care about the the segregation law. Yeah, man.

01;02;10;08 - 01;02;12;27
Mark McGrath
Not long after that, nobody anybody would.

01;02;12;28 - 01;02;31;29
Chet Richards, PhD
I don't know if Nevada actually had a law in, but it was certainly the practice. And he would take these large groups of people and they would show up at a thing and he'd say, okay, we just never come back. That's that's fine. Ever any of my people, nobody from Dallas. Well, will come. Whether he could have done that or not, who knows?

01;02;31;29 - 01;02;57;02
Chet Richards, PhD
But that was a threat he made. So I think at that time, Dallas was run by the mob. So all they were cared about was money anyway. So and of course, Boyd being a member of a fighter mafia later on, he had great, great, great sympathy for us for that approach. So yeah, so he appreciated a variety of, and all that stuff to, to give you more potential actions to draw.

01;02;57;02 - 01;03;07;14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. So I want to go back to Genetic Heritage in orientation and you brought up epigenetics. So the way I think about genetic heritage is it's kind of a bucket which could contain epigenetics.

01;03;08;09 - 01;03;11;26
Chet Richards, PhD
Which is how your DNA is expressed. Yeah, yeah, right.

01;03;11;27 - 01;03;30;21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. And it can also look at, you know, hey, our brain is burning 2% excuse me, burning 20% of our energy, but takes 80% space, that type of thing. Right. Right. So we have so underneath genetic heritage, it's not just one thing I think it represents things that are connected to our DNA, who we are, what makes us human.

01;03;30;22 - 01;03;33;12
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. So am I right in thinking like that.

01;03;33;23 - 01;03;49;06
Chet Richards, PhD
Way to look at it. But we came to. Yeah, but in that case, all of the things in there make us human. Why even bother to put it in at all? He was explicit on putting it, and I think the reason they put in is, is why are they, as you say, makes us human, that does control our our behavior.

01;03;50;03 - 01;04;20;23
Chet Richards, PhD
It explains, for example, why I why I never won a gold medal in gymnastics at the Olympics. For example, I plays while flowers will not make the Hall of Fame in the NFL. So so genetics is is is is clearly there and on the individual level it clearly is one of the things that that that controls our actions, both the actions that we can perform and which actions we do choose, how how quickly.

01;04;20;23 - 01;04;42;15
Chet Richards, PhD
For example, apparently there is there's genetics involved in all of that and that's all true. But that's not what he was on the individual level. He's just pointing out at one time, whatever you think is, you know, contributes to orientation, stick it in this block and you say clearly genetics at the individual. Would you get into trouble if you start applying the little group to group?

01;04;42;15 - 01;05;07;19
Chet Richards, PhD
And there's that genetic heritage there. And I've had that I've had people that. No, no, no, no. He does not mean that everybody has the same genetic heritage. That's not a there they have a similar implicit orientation, but to a large extent, the wider agenda here, the wider a range of experiences that they have, if you can harmonize them using, you know that you know the emphasis of the better.

01;05;08;23 - 01;05;26;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And so so here's what here's what we could do with this. We're going to bring in some experts on trauma that, look at genetics to look at you, sleep good. You know what you eat for dinner and your culture, language and all the all these things matter because they determine how we sense, decide and act. So there's a huge overlap there that we'll explore in the future.

01;05;26;10 - 01;05;33;25
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But I just want to make sure because like you, when you think about genetic heritage applied to a group that's kind of dangerous, it doesn't fit.

01;05;33;28 - 01;05;34;21
Chet Richards, PhD
In this category.

01;05;34;21 - 01;05;35;23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You think of those individuals.

01;05;36;02 - 01;05;55;25
Chet Richards, PhD
You want more genetic to to a large extent, you want the widest variety to choose from. There's a, there's a law in evolution that forget the name of it. It says something like The rate of evolutionary progress is a function of the amount of variation in the in the host population, which makes the evolution now has more to choose from.

01;05;56;07 - 01;06;33;12
Chet Richards, PhD
And boy, of course, theory of evolution by natural selection is one of the two pillars of his. Yeah. And the other being the theory of war. And so yeah, it's like you said, we all as individuals, we all have genetic heritage, which helps control not only what actions we can have, but how quickly we can switch between. Because the ability to handle the fastest rate of change determines who survives and the but when you get to groups, you want to flip it around, but you got to but you still got to harmonize it so that at the highest level, everybody has a similar implicit orientation drawing out all this other stuff so that we don't

01;06;33;12 - 01;06;39;12
Chet Richards, PhD
have to make explicit any more than we absolutely have to because explicitly swo, etc., etc. it, you know. Yeah.

01;06;40;07 - 01;07;07;18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. So we're going to have some fantastic neuroscientists published neuroscientists on here talking good brain and how that brain. So what I want to do so when we'd love to have you back in the future is it doesn't mean we're going to show right now, but we want to make sure that when you come back, we have an opportunity to speak with those or have a conversation with those folks and really get into things like the free energy principle, how we minimize surprise, how our brains work, how that connects to predictive processing will connect it back.

01;07;07;18 - 01;07;08;23
Chet Richards, PhD
All good stuff. Yeah, I.

01;07;08;23 - 01;07;27;27
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Don't say connect. What will make the parallels between John Boyd's loop and his work to these modern merging theories? I'm going to have Gary Klein on here soon. We'll talk about recognition, prime decision making, and make sure there's a connection. Because Gary and I had the conversation a couple of years ago and we looked at and said, Hey there, there's a lot of overlap here.

01;07;27;27 - 01;07;34;09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And of course, you know, the relationship between Gary Klein and John Schmidt and of course. Oh, yeah. There's so many amazing connections here.

01;07;34;09 - 01;07;36;15
Chet Richards, PhD
Yes. No, that's quite true.

01;07;36;16 - 01;07;37;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I would love to have you back on here.

01;07;38;00 - 01;08;01;27
Chet Richards, PhD
I'd be delighted. And it's because John, if you look at John's stuff, if you go look and you guys have there at Quantico, I just look at all the stuff that he had, look at here at his accession list there, and not just to mention what's at the back of patterns of conflict, but the actual list of all the stuff that he had that he wrote and all the marginal notes and everything that that made it clear he wouldn't have stopped.

01;08;03;00 - 01;08;24;12
Chet Richards, PhD
I mean, a complexity theory as far as he got in that was basically prigozhin, you know, and but it's gone a long way since, you know, since prigozhin people have thought and of course what little bit neuroplasticity and just maybe glimmers of it beginning to happen. Until then, people have said no number of brain cells you have, you're born with it.

01;08;24;12 - 01;08;52;25
Chet Richards, PhD
What you're going to have. And if you drink a beer, you're going to kill a million of them every time you take a beer. I think, of course, the fact you have 87 or maybe 100, nobody's really sure the billion and the things I love that 9 quadrillion connections. So you divide that into 1200 cubic centimeters and every cubic millimeter size of a grain of sand have what is it, 800,800 million connections and so yeah mean really none of that stuff was known to boy at the time.

01;08;52;25 - 01;09;08;09
Chet Richards, PhD
So the stuff that he told me one time you've had to do over again, I could start in the beginning. I figured physics is kind of gotten so woo out there. I'd go to biology. Biology, because he was telling my daughter, who is just starting as a biology majors undergraduate, that would tell you biology is where it's going to be.

01;09;08;10 - 01;09;11;27
Chet Richards, PhD
Shelly And I think she took him to heart.

01;09;12;14 - 01;09;17;27
Mark McGrath
And so that's like the leopard, how the leopard change their spots. Right? That's he was getting into.

01;09;18;12 - 01;09;19;19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah yeah I think the.

01;09;19;26 - 01;09;43;16
Chet Richards, PhD
Of the game getting guys like Gary Klein on anybody doing you know work like that I know if Jonathan Shay is still active or not, but you might try to track him down. He wrote two counties in Vietnam, one of the absolute classic books on PTSD really documented that lack of iron height is one of the main contributing.

01;09;43;16 - 01;09;49;09
Chet Richards, PhD
I think this is still true. You can ask them your people lack of iron height in your combat unit. One of the main contributors to PTSD.

01;09;50;08 - 01;10;06;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So so we're going to we're going to explore PTSD and TBI with anxiety, but we're also going to look at it through psychedelic assisted therapies. And that's where a lot of the information it's fascinating because I read somewhere that John Boyd's favorite movie was Dune, right? I don't know.

01;10;06;17 - 01;10;22;15
Chet Richards, PhD
You never talked about that. Pretty sure it wasn't syndrome. But okay. So we just never talked about it. I don't know. You're so much about John and I learned every day because it wasn't that heavily involved in his personal life. Maybe a little bit. Piano went down to see him in Delray Beach.

01;10;22;15 - 01;10;34;26
Mark McGrath
But Chuck talks about somebody went to the movies with him and it was the blue Max oh part. And that John was screaming like I heard, you know, break left.

01;10;35;27 - 01;10;57;28
Chet Richards, PhD
I think I think Top Gun would have given him apoplexy too hot. You actually, on the other hand, he might have enjoyed it, you know? Yeah, I'm not a Tom Cruise fan, but I think he did a great job in that movie and he's done some other really good movies, too. I think I'm fortunate, in my opinion, of Tom Cruise is that he is so he's so well compensated now that he's basically playing Tom Cruise over and over and over again.

01;10;58;07 - 01;11;17;05
Chet Richards, PhD
The same thing problem. I have a Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, incredibly talented people. They just play the same character over and over again. The Cruise did some great movies earlier in his career that were just fantastic eyes wide shut. Danny is just he just he's so great, so far out of the mold and that he should have gotten the Oscar for that role.

01;11;17;16 - 01;11;18;04
Chet Richards, PhD
I really think that.

01;11;18;05 - 01;11;22;20
Mark McGrath
Kubrick is good. Well, that was a coup. I think that was Kubrick's last is the very.

01;11;22;20 - 01;11;41;29
Chet Richards, PhD
Last film the very last film Kubrick made, you know, the very last word in that film, what it is spoken by Nicole Kidman, very last word and could have a very last film. So, yeah, therefore, word is a fitting way to end. Kubrick's a Kubrick.

01;11;41;29 - 01;12;02;00
Mark McGrath
I would be remiss if we didn't ask you this. So we're down in the archives and we see this briefing. It says No way out and on its own title page. And I can show you what we do, what we saw here. So let me share the screen here. We should probably you.

01;12;02;01 - 01;12;05;17
Chet Richards, PhD
Were going to have a Kevin Costner or something playing Boyd in his.

01;12;05;18 - 01;12;11;02
Mark McGrath
Know. Oh well is he is Kevin Costner tall enough to play Boyd because I think.

01;12;11;04 - 01;12;13;03
Chet Richards, PhD
We could do anything they were.

01;12;13;03 - 01;12;14;05
Mark McGrath
Supposed to.

01;12;14;12 - 01;12;26;18
Chet Richards, PhD
Right. When you saw Lord of the Rings, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You know the guy who played the dwarf, you keep punching Jimmy the door. He's the same height as everybody else in real life. But do the magic the. Are you making any height you want?

01;12;27;03 - 01;12;29;03
Mark McGrath
How. How tall was John, by the way?

01;12;29;16 - 01;12;38;12
Chet Richards, PhD
Oh, oh, he was a John among men guy. I don't know, five, ten, maybe. I mean, I'm five six. So everybody has a john among among me.

01;12;38;24 - 01;12;40;01
Mark McGrath
So yeah.

01;12;40;02 - 01;12;44;22
Chet Richards, PhD
That was the initial working title he came up with to two conceptual spiral.

01;12;46;06 - 01;12;47;21
Mark McGrath
No way out. Okay.

01;12;47;23 - 01;12;51;19
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah. And then of course he uses later in the book and changed it can say yeah.

01;12;52;07 - 01;12;52;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah.

01;12;53;02 - 01;12;53;24
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah. So we found.

01;12;53;24 - 01;12;54;18
Mark McGrath
The one that was kind of.

01;12;55;15 - 01;13;03;02
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah that's version the one that was not viral. Yeah. Good God I haven't seen that in years. Yes. That's an even.

01;13;03;02 - 01;13;26;11
Mark McGrath
One that was not disjointed and it didn't like the cover was why, why, why. And I so this was when I found this and Ponch, I was looking at it. You remember this? I'm like, I don't know. We got to do a word search and discourse and see if we can find it. It seemed like it was in two different briefings, but what I just thought, like, what he's asking was so beautiful.

01;13;26;11 - 01;13;48;28
Mark McGrath
But it also shows that he was something so universal and big picture. But he says, why does the world or universe appear to be the way it is? Why do events and happenings appear to unfold, manifest themselves in the ways that they do? Why do we become confused and bewildered in trying to ascertain what's going on on yeah.

01;13;49;10 - 01;14;05;10
Mark McGrath
And then more pointedly, with so much effort over such a long period of time by so many people to comprehend, shape and adapt to a world that we depend on for vitality and growth. Why does a world, although richer and more robust, continue to?

01;14;05;29 - 01;14;11;24
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah, that chart made it in with just minor editing into a conceptual spiral. Yeah.

01;14;11;26 - 01;14;18;08
Mark McGrath
To continue to be uncertain or to appear certain ever changing and unpredictable.

01;14;18;08 - 01;14;26;26
Chet Richards, PhD
Now you have to remember what you're seeing here because he took the time to write it all out. There's probably five or ten previous drafts that stacked up behind it.

01;14;26;26 - 01;14;29;21
Mark McGrath
So we saw the. Yeah, oh yeah, we saw. Yeah.

01;14;30;08 - 01;14;33;24
Chet Richards, PhD
Oh that's good. Yeah. Because he threw some way. That's good.

01;14;34;04 - 01;14;39;25
Mark McGrath
Good. This was the only one that was intact with this particular vein but like yeah it.

01;14;40;25 - 01;14;43;00
Chet Richards, PhD
Came out about a year later. Yeah.

01;14;44;02 - 01;15;14;07
Mark McGrath
What's the word. Punch. I forget rebuffs. Continue to something and to remain to remains uncertain and then he says response very simply review creation conceptual spiral and our own experiences reveal that the various theories, systems, processes, etc. that we employ to make sense of that world, contain features that generate mismatches that in them create such a world uncertain, ever changing and unpredictable.

01;15;14;07 - 01;15;15;06
Mark McGrath
And then he lists these.

01;15;15;06 - 01;15;33;11
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah. And you notice they're in this, in this thing that they're he's using conceptual spirals I think is a name of as the heading of one particular chart. Later it became he threw out no way out and conceptual spiral became the name of the whole briefing. Yeah because this is this is this is almost word for word from conceptual.

01;15;33;15 - 01;15;41;02
Chet Richards, PhD
This is one of his best charts, by the way, an interesting exercise to continue to add to it. But so yeah.

01;15;41;23 - 01;15;43;07
Mark McGrath
That's a that's a another chart.

01;15;43;16 - 01;15;49;03
Chet Richards, PhD
I love this chart, but it's incomplete if boy is correct and then boy is incomplete. I mean, that's.

01;15;49;25 - 01;15;53;15
Mark McGrath
That's our mission. Like, that's our mission. Yeah. Yeah. Keep chase, keep going.

01;15;53;15 - 01;15;55;16
Chet Richards, PhD
And then what do you do? And then complete.

01;15;56;15 - 01;15;56;27
Mark McGrath
Yes.

01;15;56;27 - 01;16;18;04
Chet Richards, PhD
Then there's no way out anything. However, since we don't know how to do this. Yes. Hi, God, this brings them. Yeah. I don't know that I ever actually I think she mailed me something on this which I quit, which because at this time, by this time he was, I think he was already down in Delray Beach and I was in Atlanta.

01;16;18;28 - 01;16;37;09
Chet Richards, PhD
So so we weren't together in in the I left DC in the fall of 83. So after that I didn't get back. So we talked a lot over the phone. Fortunately, I had Lockheed's long distance and so he'd call me up. They can call me right back, click. And so I call him on Lockheed's dime.

01;16;37;24 - 01;17;03;11
Mark McGrath
So I mean, I just when we were reading this, it hit us so hard that obviously we named the the podcast way out because there's and then Ponch was able to find the quote of of that's the introduction to the podcast if you've heard it there's there's no way out and he's he's quoting this from conceptual spiral and almost I thought that these six pages you could almost give as a standalone brief if you had a shorter time just to.

01;17;03;11 - 01;17;04;21
Mark McGrath
Pretty much since it's true.

01;17;04;29 - 01;17;24;19
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty much pretty much gets to the heart of the issue and basically just flesh these out conceptual spirals. Not that, but 40 something pages if I remember right. And if you go back and look it up online too, to put it into a keynote, I had to break some of the longer charts into separate pages.

01;17;24;19 - 01;17;35;22
Chet Richards, PhD
And that's why you'll see, for example, that list of all the things that that, you know, generate mismatches. I'd break that into two. Otherwise, it just got too small, too small to read. As you can see.

01;17;36;01 - 01;17;54;25
Mark McGrath
One of our on episode three, Hunter Hastings, who I coauthored the paper on orientation and entrepreneurial theory that could see over here. And Ponch has been a guest on his show as well. He said he thought that entrepreneurship and conceptual spiral align nicely.

01;17;55;04 - 01;17;59;10
Chet Richards, PhD
They're both about novelty. Yes, I agree. Yeah. Good observations.

01;18;00;14 - 01;18;18;25
Mark McGrath
Yeah, very last thing. The last thing I wanted to show you was the I think you saw me put it on LinkedIn. But just to show that and maybe you can speak to this characteristic about about John. But we found a a napkin or a paper towel. I don't even I don't even I don't even know if it was like a napkin.

01;18;18;25 - 01;18;38;26
Mark McGrath
Like sometimes you see things like a like a napkin. You could tell it's a napkin from a restaurant, but this seemingly was like a paper towel and it had the definition of share plonked on it. And failing to find the picture here in our in our stack. But there was it looked like something that there was a shopping list from his wife.

01;18;39;21 - 01;18;43;27
Mark McGrath
And then on the back of the shopping list was a theory.

01;18;44;27 - 01;19;06;28
Chet Richards, PhD
It could be. It could be. Yes. Fair Park being the only one of the of the ones that he actually uses that word as the as the title of that of the of the chart he talks about mission for how talk stop take mankind's space scheme or even height and agility I guess for a Hindu guy and he doesn't have a chart on things getting it from him.

01;19;06;29 - 01;19;11;01
Chet Richards, PhD
He uses the term one time in the strategic game. As I recall.

01;19;11;01 - 01;19;13;03
Mark McGrath
This was the one on the back of a shopping off.

01;19;13;21 - 01;19;14;03
Chet Richards, PhD
The.

01;19;15;25 - 01;19;17;00
Mark McGrath
Dynamic agent.

01;19;17;25 - 01;19;46;20
Chet Richards, PhD
Dynamic. That's a good giant. But he would he would, you know, he would edit that out. And that is actually I think and focuses in yeah focus and direction this is kind of how he defined SharePoint the idea then he's like you said it's the idea the concept that gives overall overall meaning that everything else has to support and his bill then points out it can be quite general can be more than one if they don't conflict.

01;19;47;17 - 01;19;52;14
Chet Richards, PhD
The Marines have, you know, one at a time when we found the trip about 3%.

01;19;52;14 - 01;20;04;10
Mark McGrath
Again it when you see him, you know, down there, we saw these notes and stuff. I mean, did he have any hobbies? Because the only reason I ask is just seems like the scope of what he was putting out.

01;20;04;10 - 01;20;22;05
Chet Richards, PhD
Can't think of it later on in life. He like to go walking. I don't think he ever jumped swimming up again. I don't I don't think he ever did anything. He had a really good place to swim. There wasn't a pool at the Pentagon, as I remember. I think it was the coming off an athletic center he had been there out of.

01;20;22;18 - 01;20;26;07
Mark McGrath
Don't the po. Yeah. I remember when my dad was in the Pentagon, he used to go.

01;20;26;07 - 01;20;29;11
Chet Richards, PhD
Yeah, oh heck yeah. And but I don't.

01;20;29;21 - 01;20;31;05
Mark McGrath
Here's the damn thing I found. That's a.

01;20;31;05 - 01;20;31;11
Chet Richards, PhD
Lot.

01;20;32;08 - 01;20;40;02
Mark McGrath
I found the napkin y mismatches because isolation. Isolation, focus.

01;20;40;03 - 01;20;49;00
Chet Richards, PhD
That is a paper towel. I almost bet you look at the look at the look at the margin over on the left anyway. What is why mismatches?

01;20;50;18 - 01;20;58;29
Mark McGrath
Because isolation and focus excludes phenomena that bear upon the existing conception.

01;20;58;29 - 01;21;17;14
Chet Richards, PhD
Okay, I'll write it down. We'll work on it later. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. These are all things that he then took and and and and continued to work. But he didn't forget them. That's that's that's the cool thing. All righty. Well, hey, guys, I'm going to have to.

01;21;17;19 - 01;21;19;18
Mark McGrath
We appreciate the chat. We really do.

01;21;19;28 - 01;21;21;04
Chet Richards, PhD
Why do you do it? This is fun.

01;21;21;04 - 01;21;41;25
Mark McGrath
I look forward to having you back. And we really appreciate the context and hopefully the people that are listening and coming into contact with Boyd's. They're still or maybe early in the face, can see that, you know, he's so much more than just you to loop that there is a massive scope of work to really understand and apply and integrate into everything they do.

01;21;41;25 - 01;21;45;21
Mark McGrath
Because growing up I always say it only applies where humans are making decisions and action.

01;21;46;16 - 01;22;10;08
Chet Richards, PhD
Going is have when humans have to interact with other humans in its patterns of conflict. But somebody once told me, I dunno if it's true or not. I think I don't think he gives me kind words. They said patterns of conflict is another acceptable translation of of the censored text. The pink for military methods and they give a whole bunch of things, he said.

01;22;10;14 - 01;22;19;13
Chet Richards, PhD
And you think that points and also patterns of conflicts are war, military methods that I'll end there so anyway fascinating stuff.

01;22;19;28 - 01;22;23;23
Mark McGrath
We'll start off the recording here and say thanks for coming and we'll see you again soon. Chat.