Flaws and f-Laws of "TOPGUN" Thinking with Whiz, Ponch, and Gareth

What do Top Guns get wrong about leading in complexity.? What do they get right?

The conversation explores some common flaws of “TOPGUN” thinking—those bounded lessons borrowed from the cockpit and applied as gospel by business leaders—and the uncomfortable truths TOPGUNs know about business, leadership, life and teamwork. 

Three former “TOPGUNs” turned business consultants and authors challenge established practices often preached by former military consultants to include closing the execution gap, the limitations of the Swiss cheese model in complex environments, and the overuse of checklists.

Throughout our discussion, we peel back the layers of organizational safety and psychological dynamics that govern team success. We address the often overlooked value of cognitive diversity and the role of leadership in fostering environments where honest feedback fuels progress. Discover how the principles of cockpit resource management can revolutionize the way you approach team interactions and planning processes. And prepare to be intrigued as we delve into the surprising connection between effective debriefing and the potential of psychedelics in personal growth and team building.

Finally, we reflect on poignant lessons from corporate giants and the evolving battle between alternative healing modalities and big pharma. With an eye on the market dynamics of the future, we anticipate the significant shifts this conflict may bring. Our conversation stands as a testament to continuous growth and the relentless pursuit of organizational excellence. So buckle up and join us for a journey that promises to challenge your preconceptions and inspire innovation at every turn.

No Fallen Heroes Foundation
E. Matthew "Whiz" Buckley on LinkedIn
TOPGUN Options
Gareth Lock on LinkedIn
Covid Crash: From Panic to Profit: How a Navy Fighter Pilot Used Combat Strategies to Beat Wall Street
Under Pressure

AGLX Confidence in Complexity short commercial 

Want to develop your organization’s capacity for free and independent action (Organic Success)? Learn more and follow us at:
https://www.aglx.com/
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
Salience – with Ian Snape, PhD
Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
The F-14 Tomcast – with Crunch and Bio
Economic...

Transcript

Ponch: 0:58

Okay, hey, we're live. We're about four minutes behind schedule. It's all on me. Technical difficulties between LinkedIn and Riverside FM. We have it sorted out now.

Ponch: 1:06

With me today is Gareth Locke. He's here in Virginia, about four or five hours north of me today, and then whiz Buckley. Whiz Buckley is in Boca Raton, florida, today. So we're going to go ahead and talk about some flaws and F laws of Top Gun thinking. I'll do a quick introduction of whiz. I met whiz. We were just talking about that before we went live.

Ponch: 1:28

Today I'm not going to tell the original story that I told earlier. I'll tell the story that I took a little class from him called Fox three options. This is back before the flash crash, so this is about 2009, 2010, if I remember correctly, was, and now Fox three is now known as Top Gun options. A few years after taking that class, I met whiz doing some consulting. Whiz was taking lessons from the cockpit and applying it to business. That's kind of how I got started into the world I'm in right now, and now whiz is not only doing Top Gun options, but he's also the chairman and founder of no fallen heroes, taking care of our veterans out there that are suffering from PTSD, tbi, anxiety, stress and all that. So that's whiz. I'll let him talk here in a moment.

Ponch: 2:12

And then Gareth is one of my mentors that I worked with extensively a few years ago when I was doing some work in the US Navy. I had to learn a little bit more about complexity base safety or complex, complex adaptive systems thinking applied to safety. Gareth was in that world of human and organization performance. He was also in the world of safety differently safety to a lot of new advanced thinking and how we should think about safety in our organization. So I leaned on him quite a bit and right now he's he said he's up in Northern Virginia doing a diving course. Is that correct, gareth?

Gareth: 2:47

Yeah, teaching non technical skills, crew resource management into the diving space. But people are people and so there's this divers in the main have got other professional jobs, so they end up taking this stuff and applying it into their own business as well.

Ponch: 3:01

So, yeah, we all behave the same way when placed under pressure and we make the same silly, stupid mistakes, and it's about trying to build some resilience and capacity into the systems by understanding those and it's amazing that you can apply the concept, concepts and lessons from the cockpit to diving and now with has been doing this for years in the options market, the derivatives market and, for those of you who are familiar with the same teleps work in anti fragile blacks wants, you need to read that and understand options in order to do what it is you claim you do, which is hedge right, how you hedge, how you create optionality in your day to day life, and that's what is on a day to day basis. In fact, I believe on Sunday was your starting a new course. Is that correct?

Whiz: 3:46

I am man, it's. It's called full throttle, right. So we you know, punch and I aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, but naval aviation could take cave men, cave women like punch and I and in a short amount of time turn them into steely eyed air crew flying over bad guy countries off of boats. So I just kind of copied and pasted everything I was doing in naval air to the markets, right, because trading is a form of combat. Some is going to win, some is going to get their ass handed to him, so kind of.

Whiz: 4:16

When I first started learning how to investor, teaching myself how to trade, I'm like why don't I have a strategy? Why don't I have tactics that support this strategy? Why not before I even place a trade? How about I figure out when I'm going to leave for either max profit or minimum loss? And oh, by the way, how about I contingency plan what could go wrong during the lifetime of this investment? I can figure out right now instead of freaking out when it goes against me.

Whiz: 4:44

So it was. It was kind of common sense to me, but clearly that wasn't too common, because I kind of took that mindset to a multi billion dollar volatility arbitrage firm in Chicago and they thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'm like wait, you're not doing this all right now. And also, you know this firm in Chicago wasn't debriefing, which I know we're going to get into but they were. I look like Moses coming down from the mountain with the concept of debriefing to the business world. But very long answer, short question yeah, so Sunday, if you want to learn how to trade in 2024, you're going to head to go dot topconoptionscom. Slash, launch, ft and that stands for full throttle, launch, full throttle.

Ponch: 5:28

I love it yeah, we'll try to put a link out there for those listeners that want to jump in on that. I highly recommend it, as you can hear some concepts that we're going to bring from the cockpit, how they're used in organizations, and was going to be really specific on how to use them with the options trading, derivatives trading and creating the right type of thinking, since making when you're looking at the market and, in fact, one of the things that was does when he starts his brief on Sunday as he brings up something from Donald Rumsfeld and and was what is that?

Whiz: 5:58

Yeah, so you know, donald Rumsfeld either loved him or he hated him.

Whiz: 6:04

Kind of a gruff guy, he was an aviator, I believe yeah, korea right he you know, I remember one of his, his famous briefings, right him in the short call for or pal, and I forget what, what was going wrong at the time. But he kind of, with his glasses on, he looked at the reporter and he said you know, in war there are known, knowns. You know, there are things we know that we know. And then he said there are unknowns, there are things we know that we don't know. And then he wrapped up by saying there are unknown, unknowns, there are things we don't know that we don't know, and that can apply very well to trading, as to the business as well. So you know the fog of war, the fog of business, the fog of trading. I think that's a pretty appropriate quote. There are some things that we don't know, that we don't know ultimately yeah, and was this going to bring us to our first fly?

Ponch: 7:00

I think it's a major flaw in the way we think when we bring ideas from the cockpit over and before we get into that, I want to share with everybody that the comment that Don Rumsfeld make made back then actually came from Dave Snowden. So Dave Snowden was advising General Point Dexter at the time and Sec Def Rumsfeld picked up on us and I remember hearing Sec Def Rumsfeld talk at the Air Command Staff College and I thought he lost his marbles there because he was talking about there are no knowns, no knowns. I'm like there's something wrong with this man and you got you know removed three or four weeks later. But anyway, this brings us to one of the biggest flaws in top gun thinking and that is the idea of closing the gap between where you are today and unknown unknown in the future. So a lot of folks talk about this as a high definition destination that you smart goals. They try to use everything they can to define this future perfect end state, this utopia and work backwards from that. Now this does work in some context and there are some great context that we had in fighter aviation where it worked quite well, but this is that flaw that I think Gareth can build on as well here in a moment.

Ponch: 8:12

But you cannot always determine what the future looks like, right? You just don't know. So you have to do some probes to kind of get out there. The lessons from the cockpit do apply to help us probe and run parallel safe to fail experiments to get out there, understand the landscape. But one of the ways I can you know I talk about this is you know that you want to go out there and you want to land your aircraft, but you don't know where the airport is. There's only one airport out there. You don't know where it is. It could be a hundred miles from you. Do you want to take that risk? Right? So you can't define that.

Ponch: 8:42

And then something else that happens when we try to define a future high definition destination, a smart goal or anything like that in a in the land of unknown, unknowns is we try to force everybody to be aligned to that, right. And the problem with that is, if you're all aligned to an imaginary future state, you're blinded to all things that are around you. Right, you might find something that's novel, that could you can really amplify and learn from, but because you have to have alignment to this imaginary point. That's way out there. Companies don't adapt to novel situation, so that's that's one of the flaws. That's out there. And with when, when you talk about tactics in in complex markets, you're actually talking about known knowns. You know a bull call spread is a known tactic. It's a known thing, correct. But the bigger picture and I want to come back to how you do your daily briefs is you're talking about the unknown, unknowns out there, right, and can you walk us through how you do your daily briefs and why people push back on on that type of approach to yeah.

Whiz: 9:42

So it again copy paste from the United States military. I call it S O T strategic operational tactical. You know most folks trading, if they trade by themselves, they wake up in the morning, they put their bunny slippers on the, they drink some coffee listening to a bald guy that looks like kruschev. You know Jim Kramer and you know okay what's Jim say today and maybe that's what I'll trade. They're very, very tactical, right. They don't know what they're doing for lunch. Let it known what they should be investing in a couple years down the road.

Whiz: 10:14

So in our live trade briefs at Topkin options we use S O T strategic operational tactical. So the first depends on what's going on in the world. First five, ten, sometimes fifteen minutes of a Topkin options live trade brief, we pick up the binoculars, we roll the radar range out and we look at what's going on around the globe. First, right, what's going on militarily around the world, what's going on economically, politically, because that can potentially impact, impact our market, so strategic level. Then we kind of peel the layer layers back from the onion and then we get O operational. We take a look at what's going on in the United States. What's going on with Jerome Powell in the Fed, what's going on with interest rates, what's going on with earnings, what's going on politically? So we kind of we take a look at the United States, what's what's going on? Because all of those things impact the market from from politics. If you don't think politics impacts the markets, you're full. So after we do S strategic, then we do O operational then and only then can we get tactical.

Whiz: 11:34

Most folks, like I said, wake up in the morning and the very tactical traders, they want to get right in and start training. Matter of fact, sunday, I guarantee, when we kick off for full throttle training, I'm going to start S O and people are going to be like, where's the trades? I aren't you going to talk about trading? And I'm like, ok, I'll click on their name and I'll throw them out of the room because they just don't. It's not even worth my time to keep going. They're going to be very frustrated. A lot of people sit at the end of the dock like a big fat walrus saying feed me fish, feed me trade ideas. I'm like, no, no, no, man, not that I'm Jesus, but I'll make you fishers of trades, you know, fishers of men. So we do what's called S O T, strategic, operational, and then finally we get tactical and we place trades.

Ponch: 12:18

No, that whole opportunity or that. What you're doing there is making sense of the environment. You're sense making. You're what we call is. You're in a limital space. You're suspended in this space, looking at politics, looking at what's going on around the world as far as war, what's going on in the economy, what politicians are saying what, and that's just sense making.

Ponch: 12:39

That's a lesson we learned in aviation and I think one of the things we learned in aviation, when you go to the weather brief is you just kind of look at where the red stuff is and say let's avoid that and let's go over here, and we do that first. We don't just jump in a cockpit and go. We try to make sense of the environment. We look at the maintenance write-ups on the aircraft and go, okay, what are the possible things that can happen today if I get into weather and things like that? So sense making absolutely critical in what we do. I love how you do it, by the way, it's freaking awesome. I love how people push back on and say, hey, just give me the trade. Well, you're right. Those people that aren't curious about actually how to apply this to their day to day life.

Whiz: 13:22

So those people are also the ones that wake up, whether it's a vote on Brexit, it's a Greek dead crisis, it's Houtis sinking some ships in the Red Sea. All of a sudden they look at their portfolio and their positions, like, why are my positions getting hammered? I'm like, oh, you didn't know what's going on on the other side of the world. For as large as this world is, it's freaking small man, and these things are mobile fright devices or excitement devices.

Whiz: 13:51

So it's pretty funny that the same people are like just give me trades. And I'm like you don't want to know what's going on on the battlefield, you just want to sit here with your rusty bayonet, knock yourself out. Man and those, as you know, ponce, whether it's a tactical organization or a tactical trader, you can't do that forever. You burn out. You just you're either going to run out of money or you're going to run out of life force in the business world. If you work in a tactical environment where you don't know the S or the O, you just burn out or you just give up and you just kind of smile every day and go to Starbucks for two hours in the middle of the afternoon.

Ponch: 14:25

So this brings me to another flaw in thinking, and it goes back to Rumsfeld's unknown unknown Dave Snowden's work as well. Swiss cheese, I think, was you remember Swiss cheese from the cockpit and risk matrices.

Whiz: 14:38

Oh yeah.

Ponch: 14:39

And Garrett does a lot of work in this right now. So, garrett, can you tell us what's wrong with the Swiss right, with the Swiss cheese model and what's wrong with it?

Gareth: 14:46

Well, so the Swiss cheese model for those out there it's. It was put together, james Reason, looking at barriers to prevent adverse events from occurring, and what we're trying to do is put barriers in defense or defense in defense in depth. And one of the problems with that is that, as Pontius just put up here, it's a linear process and in fact, when James Reason's original stuff and as an animation that I've put together is those holes open and close and they move. So actually it's not as simple as that. We like to simplify things, to be linear, cause and effect.

Gareth: 15:24

Our brains are pretty rubbish at dealing with complexity and the emergence and the interactions that go on. So the positive side of the Swiss cheese model is it's a really easy, simple, graphic model that people can see what we need to do. We need to plug those holes. The problem is that it's not a linear process, it's almost spherical. And so when you were talking about the risk piece, I try to get across to people with dealing with uncertainties, not risks. Risks work in terms of and I would say probably from Wiz's point of view, you might be able to get the numerics and you can say this is what the gain is, this is what the loss is, and we can weigh something up In the real space when we're talking about social technical systems, where people are interacting with energy.

Ponch: 16:08

Probably the most he's in the matrix yeah.

Gareth: 16:12

And so we're in this piece. Is this bit that actually we've got to? We've got to reduce the amount of uncertainty? So you talk about the weather, brief. It is like, okay, so where's the places that don't want to be? This is where I want to go. So the.

Gareth: 16:26

You know there are some benefits to the Swiss cheese model. The downsides of it is that it is a linear process and we want to categorize stuff and the US government and lots of other organizations then built something called the human factors analysis classification system that sits, in effect, on top of the Swiss cheese model. And the problem with that is there. We go just like that and in fact, if punch opens up, you'll see all of the, the nano codes that sit inside of that. And the problem is when you start to attribute codes. The real world doesn't fit like that. So you either shoehorn something in to a code that doesn't fit or you create a whole bunch of other codes. So now you end up with a hundred codes, 150 codes, 200 codes. People can't remember what they are, so they just shove them in the easiest one and so we end up with a wrong attribution to the, the, the event that's there and in a complex space we don't have cause and effect. We have emergence, success and failure and it's deviations, these sort of little nudges, that can take us somewhere else.

Gareth: 17:33

So, going back to Wizzy's point about strategic, operational tactical. Tactical is you can pick your point way off in the distance and you can bounce and navigate and, you know, make your way to that endpoint. You've got to know roughly where it is. It's never going to be an island in the middle of nowhere, but you're trying to get on a trajectory and in a complex space we're trying to make our way in that trajectory, not in the absolute human factors analysis classification system. It's a great thing for organizations to start to categorize and start to supposedly trend stuff, but operators don't need trending information. They need context, rich stories, and those are a very different way. So how you tell stories and how you learn with an organization, very different needs for the stories. Loads of context for the operator. The organization needs trajectory, distanced and to a certain extent you can use data to help you get there.

Ponch: 18:30

Yeah, so there are a lot of safety lessons that we, you know we pulled from Naval Safety and we try to use in organizations. It's very useful, it's very good, but again, it's context specific. It has bounded applicability HFACS you and I discussed this a few years ago. We still see people trying to use that. We believe there's something better out there that we can use in complex environments. But it's not to say to throw that out. It still has some value, some merit, right?

Gareth: 19:01

It's understanding its limitations. What do you want to do? Do you want to count things or do you want to learn? Because organizational counting is not the same as tactical and operational learning. To get the real learning, you need the context, and when you start to pigeonhole data, you lose the context.

Ponch: 19:19

And I think this leads to something that's and that actually goes to Wizzy's point of that.

Gareth: 19:22

this, yeah, sorry, I was going to say for Wizzy's point of actually what's going on in the strategic space, what's happening in the operational space, what's happening in the tactical space. That's context, that's story. If you're just looking at numbers and you don't know why those numbers are changing, it ain't going to help you.

Ponch: 19:40

So this brings me to something else. You brought up what. What's happening. What's happening? Level one essay. Level two essay situational awareness, which is something we learn a lot about inside fighter aviation. But we also learn about effective debriefing, a planning process of cadence, of accountability, the ability to recount what happened, and we use a framework called P-Bed plan, brief, execute. Debrief. It's just a team life cycle, it's all it is. It's a way to understand what happened so you can improve future performance. That's what we did there. I want to bring this back to that context. We're really good at that, really really good at that. That can be applied to complex situations, to complex environments, but most people think it's just the framework that matters, that you need to plan, that you need a brief, you need to execute, you need to debrief. We disagree. It's how you plan, it's how you brief, it's how you execute and it's how you debrief. And I wanna throw that over to Wiz on planning for the markets. What are your thoughts on effective planning for?

Whiz: 20:44

Yeah, who is it Patton's like? I'd rather have a good plan executed awesomely with vengeance than a perfect plan that never gets executed right. So, whether it's in trading or in the business world, ban there's sometimes death by planning right. Some businesses have a plan to plan but, as you guys alluded to, where the rubber hits the road is actually the execution. So when it comes to trading, just like in fighter aviation, I use a checklist. I actually have a seven step checklist that we can follow right, because 90, I've been doing this I'm gonna age myself for over three decades I've been trading since I was in Ensign in 1991 in Naval Air Station, key West, my first duty station, and seven step trade plan. You have to start with step one. What's the strategic objective? Right? Kind of what we alluded to. Hey, man, and in training, you're either bullish, thinking the market's gonna go up, you're bearish, you think the market's gonna go down, you think it's gonna whip all over the place, which we call volatile, or you're neutral, I think it's gonna move sideways. So with that then I go through the rest of my checklist. Man, what's my target?

Whiz: 21:59

Step two is identify the target. What am I gonna trade? A stock, an ETF option. And step three I have, as you know really well Ponce, what we call commit criteria, right Airborne in a fighter jet. Why am I gonna commit my pink body and this big old airplane and my wingman downrange to do something? It's gotta hit certain commit criteria. So in the trading world I say, why am I committing capital to this trade? I call it the cocktail party pitch. Man, if you can't hit me with three to five sentences as to why you're gonna trade this thing, why are you doing it? At the end of that three to five sentences, if you brief me, I should look at you and go, oh my God, that's the best thing I've ever heard. I need to do it. And if it's not that convincing, why are you doing it? There ain't no half-pregnant in trading. It's either full throttle or off. So that's step three.

Whiz: 22:51

And then step four after we have our strategic overview, we identify our target, we have our commit criteria, we talk about our tactical employment, how we're gonna put on a trade, we're gonna sell this, we're gonna buy this at this amount, and then, after that step, we have what's called mid-course guidance. As you guys know, we never dropped a bomb in anger and closed our eyes and said man, I hope that hits something bad, right? No, no, no, if the bomb's steering off target, you gotta kinda guide that thing. Whether you know I'm really gonna age myself with a walleye or a Maverick or something like that, or an LGB, you had to steer that thing right through the window. Now these lazy new, sensitive, new age pilots can just click a JDAM and go back and get mid-rats aboard the boat. Back in my day I had to keep the flare on the target until it hit, but anyway.

Whiz: 23:38

So we have mid-course guidance and then the most important, I'd say, the commit criteria, obviously pretty important, but the most important part of my trade plan is step seven, the exit. Yeah, I call it the colon pal step. When George Bush the first, not the Coke one, but the first guy, the naval aviator when he went to colon pal and said get the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and he left the room, and before he could leave the room, colon pal said oh, hold on, mr President, what's victory look like? Before I even send one US troop there, when are we leaving? He was a Vietnam, you know, platoon guy, second lieutenant in Vietnam, and he saw the shit show. So before I even place a trade. I know when I'm getting out of it, either for max profit or minimum loss. So before he even squeezed the trigger on a trade, step seven of my trade plan says here's where you're getting out, back to the 90% emotional. That takes the emotion out of it, panch, and I probably can count on two hands how many guys or gals we knew who kind of stretched it a little bit too far, right, well, I know the book says to do this, but nah, yeah, you know.

Whiz: 24:48

And then boom, either landed short or hell. Man, I was an instructor in 101, there's a kid that over flew North Island single engine to get back to Mirmar. Why the maintenance guys? Hey, lieutenant, can you bring it back to here? We don't wanna drive guys. You know, 20 miles from Mirmar to North Island. A change in engine and of course in between North Island and Mirmar the other engine failed. The kid ejected, hit a condo and killed like a family. So you know, be disciplined.

Whiz: 25:19

So the trade checklist we use at Topkin Options keeps me honest and I, you know I don't use a word document, I use knee board cards from the squadron man. I pick up a pen and I write this stuff down. Why, cause, during the life of a trade, if something's going against me, I can actually look at it and go dude, you wrote this two weeks ago in your chicken scratch handwriting. Are you gonna listen to you or are you not gonna listen to and you're gonna blow it off as the tick? As the trader in command or the pilot in command? I ultimately signed for my portfolio so I can go. You know what. I did say that two weeks ago. But you know what? It's something to deviate from and I'm putting a cigar in my mouth and my scarf out the trading cockpit and if I get blown up, I knew it, but at least I had something to deviate from. So that's our, that's kind of our, seven step trade plan. We use it. Tgo.

Ponch: 26:06

Yeah, Gareth, can you build on that and how would you take that type of planning and apply it towards diving or even anything else?

Gareth: 26:13

Well, so for any. So the first thing that springs to mind is what's your contingency planning? And I see that as potentially your step seven. I was also interested in and about your step two or three was like right, that's it, I'm gonna do that. And my first thing was there's an emotional decision. That's a huge bias that goes into that, and so now you've got to sit there and that's really, you know and I know, punch through that, the red team thinking guys and just understanding how do you put constructive dissent together? Now, in a team, you can nominate individuals.

Gareth: 26:45

If you're doing it on your own, it's really hard. You've got to be really disciplined and a checklist can certainly help you go through that and say, right, where are the flaws in my plan, where are the holes? And if you've got time, sit on it, come back to it. Don't make rash decisions in the here and the now. When you've got that sort of, I've got to make it happen. And I would say that's the big thing is look for contingencies, look for holes.

Gareth: 27:15

I thought you were gonna come up with the Eisenhower phrase with you know, plans are useless. Planning is essential because it's that bit of actually looking at the plan B, the plan C, the plan D, whatever. You're unlikely to encounter those subordinate plans, but they get you to think about things differently. And if you've already looked in your trading side of the strategic, operational, technical, now you've got a better idea of actually what are the barriers that might be in place. So what's gonna get in your way? And you know the modern crew resource management now is about threatened error management.

Gareth: 27:47

There is an assumption that you are competent in what you do, in fly the aircraft, that you can communicate effectively. What's gonna bite you in the ass? What's gonna get in the way? What can I do to build capacity or optionality If you know that the weather's gonna be crap at a certain place? Actually, let's put programming the opposite runway with a frequency. So all you need to do is click, engage and off you go, as opposed to quick, pull the charts out. What are we doing now? Same thing for any of your plans. If you have got an idea of what your plan BC and DR okay, you don't have to think in the moment. Solve a problem and do the new thing. Actually, you can just jump much more quickly. It won't be perfect, but it'll be much more efficient than trying to solve those problems.

Whiz: 28:32

I wanna build, yeah. Well, mike Tyson says everybody's got a plan, until they get punched in the mouth yeah, All right. So, and actually so. At Topkin Options and Pontius a member of this group we have a group called Max Afterburner. It's got about 250 people in there. So we actually have a red teaming process, right, because a lot of people sit there and trade solo. They do that seven step trade plan and they convince themselves with that commit criteria that it's the smartest trade ever. Well, what we do at Topkin Options, you throw that in our group me and you say rip it apart, fellas or ladies, and if you can't, that's probably a pretty damn good trade. If 249 other people are like man, I can't poke too many holes in that then it's pretty good. So we do have programs at TGO to. You don't have to trade solo, which is great you can have. We kind of have a red teaming process, which is good.

Ponch: 29:21

I wanna come back to a couple things that you were brought up here. One, the checklist mindset on a planning approach. I wanna challenge that briefly and I also wanna talk about how teams plan. On the checklist approach was it sounds to me like when you're going through the seven step process it's not a linear thing. You don't go step one, step two, step three. You may come back to two right, or you may come back to three later on. Is that correct, oh God?

Whiz: 29:43

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Once you go through a planning, I take a couple cranks at that wheel. Right, it's not a hey, I'm done with one and I'm never coming back to it. As a matter of fact, when I get done with step seven, when I'm thinking about when I'm gonna exit either from max profit or minimum loss, that's when I kind of go back and readdress my commit criteria like wait a minute, did any of that change? Or yeah, absolutely, I go through a couple iterations, yeah, so it's not a linear thing all the time.

Ponch: 30:08

That's my point, and what we may talk about checklists a little bit later on and again, they have bounded applicability. They're not useful everywhere and I don't know if I'll have time to come back to that. True, okay, here's the next thing On planning processes. We need to have a shared we understand this we need a shared mental model of how to plan as a team. That means I need to know how all of us plan as a team. We need an expert planning process, just one, not seven, not 20 of them, just one that we all kind of adhere to and get behind and go In industry. Right now, from my point of view, from working in the agile space for quite a while, it's a free for all. There's no planning process. There's just go in a room and put strings on a wall and that will call that planning. It's actually embarrassing to watch, right? I want Garrett to comment on a little bit more about a shared mental model. That's what you want to call it unaffected planning. Any thoughts on that for a team?

Gareth: 31:00

Yeah, so the bit about a shared mental model. So aviation started off with cockpit resource management Make sure that the captain and the co-pilot and flight engineer knew what was going on. Then it became crew resource management, where you got cabin crew then speaking with the flight deck crew as well, and it was very much about communications and assertion. What I'm taking it further in the stuff that I do is about those shared mental models that everybody's working together. Now the conflict that exists where you talk about everybody's got to be on the same song sheet, but I have the same message Is the downside is you end up with group think so everybody thinks the same thing and so you've got almost a pure shared mental model, whereas actually what you want to do is use the expertise within your team members, so you want to have an overlap. But it's not a static thing.

Gareth: 31:51

One of the models I've taken from Meeker Endsley's working towards a team situation awareness is actually creating animation the balls open and close based on the context. In the real world. Your team understanding about what's going to happen is going to shift and to get an understanding from that we've got to create this big buzzword psychological safety. Now that really only exists in a team. It's not an organizational thing because it's shared trust and it's one to many, many to one, and that is the level that you can have within your team and that's creating the environment that you feel part of the team, that you can put something out there, make a mistake, and then it's accepted. You don't know it's a mistake until afterwards.

Gareth: 32:34

People will look for learner safety before they put themselves out there. If they have seen somebody who's in the planning space or the execution space make a mistake and somebody rips on a new one, they sit there and go. You know what? I ain't gonna say anything, I'm just gonna sit here and wait. And so now that knowledge that that person's got that constructed descent that might help find a hold in the plan is never gonna get shared. And then we want people intentionally to contribute those ideas and ultimately the leader creates the environment that you basically say the wingman turns around and go boss, that's a shit idea, it's not gonna work like that and you sit there going. Oh, I can thought about that. Cool, thank you. Tell me more. As opposed to my plan. This is how we're doing it Conversation shuts down before you've even got into the execution phase. And if you've shut down conversations in the planning stage, in the briefing stage, you're not going to get conversations in the execution phase. There is just too much to lose at that stage.

Ponch: 33:31

Yeah, you brought up something about a little bit about diversity, cognitive diversity, and I don't want to get too political here, but there's something very powerful about the lessons we learned in the cockpit, and that is we're all different, we all come from different backgrounds. We can create psychological safety. In fact, if you look at where Amy Edmondson did a lot of her work, she did it in healthcare organizations, surgical teams that were trained by aviators, right. So there's a connection there. We actually know how to do that. We also know how to do red teaming, liberating structures, things like that to leverage the diversity of the group. That's not what's happening in a lot of industry right now. They think that just throwing a bunch of cognitive diverse people at something is going to fix it. No, no, it's not. It actually you have to have some type of process, a tool, a technique that leverages, that mitigates some of the biases and pulls, you know, divergent and convergent thoughts. Wiz, what are your thoughts on that?

Gareth: 34:19

I know you bring up the idea I was going to say just for that Wiz was yeah, just before you go there. Actually, wiz was this bit about diversity. Often it's about surface diversity, veneer diversity, race, color, creed, gender, age, whatever irrelevant when it comes to being an effective team, because you can have a surface diverse team who all think the same way. What you want to have is the cognitive diversity. Now you can have cognitive diversity with similar surface attributes. So there's that basically the challenge piece. Just because you've got a diverse, inclusive environment, because, based on surface attributes, that's not going to help you solve complex problems. Sorry, wiz, go on.

Whiz: 35:05

No man, you nailed it. I don't want to get too political, but I can't even believe you have to say it. I don't want to get too political in front of a topic like this, whether it's in trading, in combat, it's in business. It's about winning, it's about putting the most qualified and who can get the job done.

Ponch: 35:25

Yeah, so I'm going to bring you back to the leadership lessons, the teamwork lessons and how do we leverage cognitive diversity. This is an amazing conversation to have and I don't want to lose anybody on this. What we bring from the cockpit is something known as mission command. We understand how to do that. We know how to ask probing questions. We go through a process and Wiz was part of this process and that is. It's an apprenticeship process. You go through level one, two, three, four, five and it's a process of leadership. How do you do these things? How do you plan? How do you lead a brief? How do you lead a debrief? How do you bring people together? How do you ask these probing questions? How do you create psychological safety, which I'm sure we'll talk about when we get to debriefing here in a little bit how do you do that? That's why, when we suggest you look at what we're going to call top gun thinking, lessons from special operators and so forth, you bring these lessons over and they're scalable in your organization. It doesn't matter if there's three white guys telling you how to do this. This is how the science works. This is what actually works for you. It's another place to, another reason to look at fighter aviation, top gun aviation, special operators to understand how do we leverage cognitive diversity, how do we create a psychologically safe space, how do we create that confidence to actually challenge assumptions and have that respectful truth over artificial harmony that we talked about?

Ponch: 36:42

Okay, I want to move along here. We talked about checklist. Briefly, let's just hit on that checklist. I think there's an overuse of checklists in industry. This is a flaw. People try to put a checklist to everything. Gareth, any thoughts on that?

Gareth: 36:59

Yeah, checklist is there as a mental prompt for a skill that you might forget. Fundamentally, we've got system one and system two, thinking that the system one, the fast thinking, low, cognizant, overhead. What we're trying to do with a checklist is reduce them, the number of errors that occur because of that. Often what I see is checklist to used as a liability transfer tool from the industry to reduce the amount of training that's required. Fill out that checklist. It's got 30, 40 lines in it. Nobody's going to do that. Invest in the training and this whole thing about behavioral economics. If it's difficult to do, if it's difficult to do, people won't do it. They'll find a way around it. And if the organization is not giving people enough time to execute the pre-job task, start the digger, the drill or the aircraft. People will find a way around it because you're rewarding those people for the outcomes. Checklists are a tool that requires a social environment to work and that social environment is based around fallibility. The reason why the World Health Organization of Safe Social Security checklist worked in reducing mortality by 43% and complications by 38 was because the hospitals empowered the scrub nurse to stop the operation if the checklist wasn't being done and there were standup arguments between hospital management and surgeons. They go. I know what I'm doing really, and something from the tail end of the early 2000s.

Gareth: 38:26

After I'll go, andy, the guy behind the checklist manifesto. He did a survey with some surgeons. Said right, you're ill, you're going into a hospital. How many of you would you like the surgeons to use a checklist before they operate on you? 94%. Okay, that's cool. How many of them use? How many of you use a checklist in your surgical theaters? 20%. So basically saying I'm perfect, they're not. That's what that number says. But actually you go and speak to those predominantly in the aircrew space, the nuclear space. They recognize I'm fallible and this is to slow me down and trap the errors that are there. And there is a science behind writing checklists and you can just go Google Degani and checklist design and, in effect, what you're talking about five line items, five words for a checklist. If it's more than that, create a new block and then move into the next transition. So, but there is a skill there. We go.

Ponch: 39:20

So with us we had these in the cockpit. We had to memorize quite a few things out of the out of them, but there's a note that we that we live by or live through in the in the top. So you remember that note about, about head work.

Whiz: 39:35

Well, the first page of that checklist punch probably says nothing. In this book takes the place of good head work and judgment of the pilot in command, right. So anything in here. If you want to deviate from knock yourself out comma, you better be right. If you're right you'll get a medal. If you're wrong, you're going to get clipped.

Ponch: 39:56

They're written in blood. That's what we were told. Right, there's a reason you have warnings on you know, don't drink the the Clorox in your, in your, your washroom, right Somebody did something stupid.

Whiz: 40:08

Yeah, yeah so that's it.

Ponch: 40:10

We have some questions popping up I want to get to. Before we do that, I want to move over to debriefing and you know, I think the group here is pretty squared away when it comes to effective debriefing and what's. That's what that's like. But I think there's another level we can take it to in this conversation and that is some connections to psychedelic assisted therapies, which I'll ask Wiz to talk about here if he wants to in a moment.

Ponch: 40:33

So, on effective debriefing, if we were to take a look back at the last three or four years of the COVID crisis, the the permit crisis that we had, we'd have to look back at what happened, right, and we're not going to do a national debrief, by the way, our global debrief, because everybody already forgotten what happened, and the reason for that is we always remember the misremember the past, right. We don't remember what we said. We don't remember what we put on LinkedIn. We don't remember pushing, you know, bad information out there and telling people that they should social distance and stand six feet apart. So we don't remember that conveniently. So we want some of us.

Whiz: 41:07

Yeah, some of us remember that. So apparently, don't.

Ponch: 41:10

So we want to have a debrief as close as to the close to the execution as possible, right? We don't want to wait six weeks, 10 weeks, 20 weeks a week, right? In fact, every flight we had, we'd come back and we do a debrief. And why do we do that debrief? And I want to share something with you we could come back and debrief 30 seconds, 40 seconds, two or three minutes of a flight, for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half sometimes. Why are we doing that?

Ponch: 41:36

And my belief is we're doing that to help people understand what happened. Because, as instructors, we have to present that to them and say you were actually on the left side, you weren't on the right side, the sun was here, you know your speed and angels were this, and that you don't remember any of that, right? So I got to help you remember that. But eventually they start to understand what happened and now they can be present and understand what's happening now, right? So that's really critical, and I think this connects to some things that Wiz might be able to bring some light to when it comes to psychedelic assist therapies. So on that, gareth, I wanna get some of your background on effective debriefing. Any thoughts on what effective debriefing looks like as a team?

Gareth: 42:21

It's. I'm gonna say to your piece it's all about learning and you know, even when I go in, you know, this weekend I was delivering a class in Washington DC, bunch of dive instructors all professionals outside. They do diving instructors at part time and one of them is teacher's students doing, and she said you can't reflect in the moment until you've reflected on the moment. So it's that bit of actually the need for a post-event debrief to understand how it made sense for somebody, you to do. What they did allows you to prep for the next time so that you can make the decision in the moment. And that links between that whole sort of naturalistic recognition, prime decision-making and the pattern matching that happens. You don't know what a pattern is unless you've actually got an idea and people say, oh yeah, you can join the dots. Novelists don't even know the dots are there, so what do they know to go looking for? And then there's that piece, so that you know, for me, the purpose of the debrief.

Gareth: 43:23

Very simple questions what went well and why? What do we need to improve on and how are we gonna do it? Why it went well so we can replicate it, how we will improve it so we can then do something about it. There are way more lessons identified than lessons learned. You've gotta do the transfer afterwards and it's really difficult. The why and the how are much harder questions to answer than the observations that are there, and you've gotta look at the context, not the outcome.

Gareth: 43:53

We're so seduced by the outcome, and you were. You know you talk about yeah, we got the kill. Okay, great. How did you create the scenario that put the aircraft in the right place so you can get that shot off In the diving scenario? Why did you lose that student? But even just then, the language you used, why did you lose the student? I'm asking you to justify your position. How did it make sense for you to lose that student is a very different question, because now I'm asking you to explore your rationality and we are almost hard-wired to jump into. Why did you do that? Because we want to understand the reasons, but if we wanna really improve, we've gotta look at the context and the local rationality that goes with it.

Ponch: 44:37

Yeah, you brought up separating decisions from outcomes. That's critical in a complex environment, because sometimes you just get lucky right. We know a lot of fighter pilots that get lucky.

Gareth: 44:45

Were you lucky or were you good, yeah?

Ponch: 44:46

yeah, yeah, you just have to be in the right place at the right time. You're actually horrible, but let's forget about that. So, separating outcomes from decisions. On the psychological safety piece, this is kind of important. In a group, within a team, there's an ego and it's a default mode of operating right, what we have to do is find a way to relax that, and the way we relax, that is, we display fallibility. You brought that up, gareth. So, wes, I want you to talk a little bit more about this too. In effective debriefing as a leader, how do leaders create that environment?

Whiz: 45:16

Based on your history of debriefing, Well, in the military, punch leaders lead right. In the business world sometimes that isn't the case. So in the military, in an effective fighter debrief, the flight lead, who led the planning, briefed the plan, executed. Airborne is going to lead the debrief and he or she is going to start with A. Guys and gals, here's what I know I messed up A, b, c, d, here's what I completely gooned up. And then they're going to go around the room and look at everybody in the flight and go what am I missing? What do you have for me? Next time I do this? How can I do it better? Hit me right between the eyes. And we have a. You know, we kind of have an SOP that says if you're going to throw a knife, make sure there's a note attached to it. Right, so it is. I will take all sorts of feedback. As long as it's got a note attached, you need to shine your boots and pay your mess bill with Make me better. So whenever a leader leads by inside out criticism, he or she's going to lower the barriers to communication. If I went into a debrief and just with a whole belt load of you, you, you, you did this wrong. You did this wrong, it's going to be an absolute shit show. So the way to lower that temperature is to unzip the flight suit a little bit and go. Hey, man, hit me with your best shot and make me better. I'll never forget.

Whiz: 46:45

You know, I left the rag, went to my first fleet squadron and of course you're flying on the skippers wing for a couple of months to make sure you're not just the complete village idiot. And you know, after flying on the skippers wing for a little while I was sewing my oats and feeling pretty good and went out and I think I slinged a couple of bombs off target or something like that. And you know, in the debrief, commander, pug boy, man, he just ripped me to shred. It felt like. You know, he ripped me to shred, so to speak, right, and I'm like whoa, I thought we were buddies, we've been flying together for a while and kind of crawled over to the officer's club. And you know, I saw the skipper come in later and I kind of gave him a tactical 90 degree turn, of course, and he came up to me. He's like whiz, what's up, man? I'm like well, skipper, I think you were a little harsh on me in the debrief and he looked at me like I was the village idiot. He's like what are you talking about, dude? He's like I think the world of you. I wouldn't let you near one of my airplanes if I did not think you could do better. I love you, I love Susie. My job is to make you better. Whiz, this ain't personal, this is professional. And it was like a two by four to the head. I got it right, the light came on and from that point forward in debrief I would solicit everybody like dude, what do you got for me? It was almost like a hunger to improve.

Whiz: 48:04

I got the chance to jump in the trunk of with Pepper McCoy up in an air show in Oklahoma in the Blue Angels. So I flew in the slot and man in a Blue Angel debrief. You would think these guys hated each other. They don't. They are, without a doubt, some of the closest aviators on the planet, but in that debriefing room they are brutally honest with each other and they love each other. Right, because they have to. If I don't trust you to self-identify like I goon this up, you know I have a great. It was intake, right, intake. He's like I was 20 feet low on the loop break cross and I'm sitting there. I'm like, how many of the Blue Angels saw him 20 feet low, right? How many of the 50,000 people in the air show in Oklahoma City saw him 20 feet low? Nobody saw him probably 20 feet low, except two Him and he self-identified, so that that leaves everybody on the team like, hey, man, he self-identified, that he made a mistake. And then the blues always end with I'm going to fix those things and I am glad to be here, meaning I'm going to take steps to improve my execution and, man, I am really glad to be here, so that the culture of debriefing it has to start with the leadership.

Whiz: 49:23

Here's how I got on Wall Street. Pancin and I were doing some business consulting and I ended up getting an event for a trading firm in Chicago and I had taught myself how to trade options and this was an options trading firm and we did a debriefing workshop. So me and about five other former fighter guys went up and I broke the firm up into tech traders, you know, legal finance, all sorts of like five different debriefing rooms and of course, I gave them that kind of little speech I just gave you and I walked around to each breakout with the owners of the firm. They were a husband and wife team my age, from Jersey, cool people and we'd sit in the back of the debriefing room, like in the techies or the traders, and they were unloading about stuff. And she's like why aren't we hearing this? She's getting red and starting to. I'm like I'm like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, can we go out in the hallway please? She's like why aren't we hearing this? We could be making X more money and do it. I'm like, maybe because of that, like maybe because of your attitude right now, you're getting all sorts of pissed off that you're not hearing this stuff. Maybe it's you, skipper, madam skipper man.

Whiz: 50:36

That night we went out to dinner. I could see their gears turning in hindsight because they called me Monday morning and they're like dude, when do you start? And I'm like, oh cool, I got some more consulting. They're like no consulting bullshit, when do you start? They're like everybody on our team needs we can't pull off this debriefing stuff because we just we can't do it. So when I went to Chicago, it took a good. As you guys know, systems resist change. Man. Ain't nobody digging, ain't no partner digging, standing in front of their team now going. I made these mistakes. It was brutal, it was a long slog, but, man, as a flywheel, once they started debriefing I just kind of backed up out of the way and and when did something on my own, because once you change a culture to continuous self improvement done. They never looked back and it was awesome. It was like watching a little birdie fly out of the nest. I'm like I did it and it was so cool.

Ponch: 51:29

So the reason they don't want to self identify. It it's on your hat, it's ego. They want to protect their ego. That's it and everybody wants to do that right. It's as simple, but but I want to come back towards something and see if this makes sense. What happens when you're underneath psychedelics? And is that? Is that like an individual debrief for you? Because your ego right?

Whiz: 51:49

Dude, it was the. It was there, ain't. No, this is the ultimate debrief. This is a deep, this is the infinite debrief on the medicine I went. I went millennium Falcon man. I went from zero to hyperspace. So it was like a cat shot punch. Even if you had the brakes on you ain't stopping. I went from zero to infinity and my my director of medicine operations If she was here, she'd kick me under the table. I died. Now let me clean that up.

Whiz: 52:20

It was ego death. So Chad and and Carrie at mental Joe this is, you know, the ego absolutely dissolved. 52 years of this bullshit frame disintegrated and I was left with who I truly am, which is perfect. Right Now people are like oh my God that you are. God does not make imperfect things. But from the second you came out and got smacked in the ass and started crying. Layers build up man and ego, and I cried and my mom didn't come feed me Does she not love me? Boom, layer, layer, layer, so layers upon layers, and that's it. Punch is ego. I'm the senior VP of XYZ. I'm not going to admit I made any mistakes. Well, guess what, dude, every team member in this room knows you gooned up. You not admitting it, you're wasting an hour of our time sitting here as we all can't say what we want to say, right, so ego death.

Whiz: 53:18

On psychedelics, I came back a completely different human being right, the the being able to have no ego, but it goes good in some respects. Psychedelics right, I mean, I know I can kick the shit anybody in a dog fight. There is a certain amount of ego that's required, fight or flight. Right, there's a lion run whiz. You can't be just completely egoless or you're going to get destroyed. But the psychedelics helped destroy and build me back up as a well, not a completely different person. I was the same person, but with a different shell.

Ponch: 53:55

You got to go back and visit things that happened in your past and see them from another light. Is that correct, oh, my God man Is that not the same thing we're trying to say when we say effective debriefing. You want to go back and look at what happened to reconstruct things, correct.

Whiz: 54:09

So, whatever word you want to use, I choose to use the word God. That's, that's where I am, but you can use the word source, creator, universe, truth, even the most agnostic or whatever people, at least with medicine experiences, are like. I'm not going to call it God, but it's something that was something massive.

Whiz: 54:27

I'm like, okay, dude, I'm going to stick with the word God. But God kind of had me under his arm and, as, as Pon said showed me, it was almost like a. It was. It was a video debrief. Ponch, it was this camera that allowed me sitting with my flight. Lead God to look at some childhood trauma to experience my sister who was killed by a drunk driver when she was 19. My dad, a bunch of buddies who who've moored it along the way, three suicides, man, it, completely it. I rewatched the flight to Pontius Point. I got to stop tape a couple of times and look at it, not as a member of the flight, but a member, just just like in the tax range in the back, like wow, and see my life from a completely different point of view. And it it was, without a doubt, the most therapeutic event and healing of my life and more or less destroyed that whole thing.

Ponch: 55:23

Yeah, so what I'm, what I believe is happening when we talk about using the Oodaloop to look at the ego, the way we perceive reality. We push that down, we get access to more novel things, we get to see things like a snow globe, and I think that's what you experienced, is, your world was shaken up, you're. You got to look back at everything from a snow globe perspective, reconstruct Great analogy.

Ponch: 55:42

You get to reconstruct how those things fit together and you, you create another ego. You're, you're, you're recreating your ego, really right? So what do we?

Whiz: 55:50

try, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was built up to not be so defensive or offensive. Actually, it was to be more empathetic, caring and compassion.

Ponch: 56:01

So my belief is the way we talk about effective debrief. You know what happens to you underneath the. The medicine are the same, right, it has to be. It's a fractal, and then we talk about this all the time, correct. So if what we're saying works for a team, it should work for an individual, right, yeah, correct. And that ego death is really providing you that psychological safety to revisit the past, to understand what happened, to reconstruct your new reality.

Whiz: 56:29

Great point punch to actually create a better future. Cause the medicine when it went my ego died. It allowed me to look kind of into a future, that high definition destination that you were looting to earlier and at least allowed me to say hey, man, now that I've unforenicated a lot of things, look at what's what's lying ahead of us. Right, it did. It allowed me to clean up the past, to make a better future, and there's a thing called counterfactuals and I think Gareth is familiar with that too right, what ifs?

Ponch: 56:55

these things that we run through in our mind. What happens when we, when that ego breaks down, is we can actually talk about the what if scenarios because, like when I'm debriefing with my kids about their basketball game, I talk about hey, let's take a look at this video and talk about what ifs, because now we can see it. Right, I'm like what if this happened? What if that happened? They could start to see new things, right, and that's what we can do in a debrief, and I believe that's what happened to you underneath the, the medicine as well as you got. What if this happened, what if that happened? What if this? So these counterfactuals build up and they allow us to create again that new ego, but the only way you get there- you know it's interesting punch.

Whiz: 57:30

Yeah, the God again whatever word you want to use took me to my past and actually showed me it was all you know. It's a great. What's that movie? Scrooge? I felt like what's his name? It was almost like that, hey, if you had done this or it all the things in my past that weren't meant for me, that actually was grabbing onto and you're dragging me away from it. God was like dude, look at that shit show, man, are you kidding me? That wasn't meant for you. So it was pretty cool to actually like kind of a ghost of Christmas pass like, hey, man, had you not done it? This is the way you're, exactly where you're supposed to be and you're doing, doing pretty damn good.

Ponch: 58:10

Now I think there's something here to talk about in the future when we really get into connecting mental health to teamwork, leadership, psychedelic, psychological safety. There's another connection to artificial intelligence and that's what we've been looking at quite a bit with the working.

Whiz: 58:24

Well, punchy, you and I, you and I have been doing it, working in the corporate world for a long time, the vast majority of corporate employees.

Whiz: 58:30

When they clock in or do whatever, they're absolutely miserable, Right? Especially if they're in that tactical organization. They don't have a strategic plan, they don't know what they're doing, you know, and they're just kind of they're out in the woods with the machete, just kind of hacking things out. So you want a high performing team Help them heal. Right, I will never work a day in my life because I've kind of put the mask on myself and kind of healed everything. So if you want a high performing team, help people, Help them be empathetic. Psychedelics aren't for everyone but man. I will tell you, if you're looking for some radical, a radical scrub these. These could potentially, potentially help you out. And looking at another future, maybe six months from now, MDMA should be approved for legal therapeutic use here in the United States, which should save a lot of life.

Ponch: 59:25

So I want to get back to the point here. The point is there's a lot of lessons you can learn from you know, for fighter pilots, former top guns about how effective debriefing works, how planning works, how to create sense making capabilities in your organization, how to increase the information flow to get to safety in your organization as well. What we're learning now is the same type of approaches that the research gave us. You know, the, the career resource management, the tactical decision making under stress has a connection to what's actually going on in your brain when you're stressed, right. So this is what's fantastic about this is my belief is, now more than ever, as we get into this secular, you know, as we go into this fourth turning, we need something. Our nation, our world needs something to heal with right, whatever that may be.

Ponch: 1:00:10

And my belief is it's people like us that came from a crew concept, that came from a high performing team that understands some of these things. We can help your organization succeed and we can actually actually point you to people that can help you overcome, you know, ptsd, TBI and things like that, and, again, it's not always psychedelics. It could be something else. But, with that being said, we got a couple of questions I want to get to. Unless you have anything you want to share, gareth or Wiz.

Gareth: 1:00:36

The only thing that I would just add was where Wiz was talking about the debrief and standing up and being, you know, just totally frank with what's going on and focusing on the actions, not the individuals. And it goes to the shared trust that happens within the team. If the leader stands up or if any of the other team members stand up and they don't talk about something that others spot, that's it. Trust is gone. So if you know that, you know that you screwed up or you've done something and the others in the team know that you screwed up but you don't talk about it, that's it's gone. So that's a critical thing. So, yeah, own the mistakes, not just because it's about creating the environment. Share them, because it's a shared thing that says if you can't talk about my mistake, can I trust you in the next activity that happens?

Whiz: 1:01:26

Boom. But you know, punch and I talked about this when we do business consulting, I jokingly say a debrief is like Vegas and church. What goes on in the debrief should stay in the debrief, but it's a church like atmosphere where you should be able to get everything off your chest. The only thing technically that should walk out of a debriefing room is the lesson learned. Not pond screwed up, but he said he's going to fix it by doing this. It's like no, no, this is what happened on our flight. Or this product launch. These are how we're going to fix it. Ain't no names attached to it, man. So a debrief should be Vegas and church. Let's get everything off our chest and we're going to get lessons learned that leave. It's not who's right or wrong, it's what's right. So that's the product, that's the deliverable that walks out of a debriefing room. Ain't names, it's improved execution.

Ponch: 1:02:23

We'll go ahead and wrap up here in a few minutes. We do have a couple questions. Number one question is about Boeing. What are they doing right, what are they doing wrong right now with regard to the door falling off the 737?

Whiz: 1:02:34

You know, pont, it's tough, right. I mean, you got to give the CEO a little bit of credit for saying what we're going to be honest and we're going to be very forthright and everything like that. If you're a CEO and you have to lead with we're going to be honest and we're going to be open, you haven't been before. I get there in like a weird PR place, but the last time we had some max fiasco, some of the emails that came out I forget the exact quote Some engineer like the max was designed, do you know it? What is it? Designed by clowns or something like that? Or, yeah, designed by clowns, managed by what I was like? Oh my God. So you know me, punch.

Whiz: 1:03:14

I use this line often and I'll use it here. I'm bipolar and so am I, you know. I think like whiz, hey man, here's what you need to do X, y and Z and Boeing's an absolute shit show. And but I'm Gordon Gekko man, or since that's a way old reference for a lot of young people Wolf of Wall Street, jordan Belfort, right, maybe that's a newer movie people have watched instead of Wall Street. It's got a government put underneath it. It's a government, it's a defense contractor, folks, boeing ain't going out of business.

Whiz: 1:03:45

We've seen these cycles before COVID Boeing. Nobody's flying and Uncle Sam has a nice little safety net underneath Boeing. So while whiz thinks one thing, I guess I would have bought Boeing with both hands down here as it's imploded. So you know, folks, at the end of the day, when you just sit at the end of the runway at DFW or O'Hare and multiply that by 100,000. And that's how many of these airplanes are flying on a daily basis safely. So I get it. You know, when a door blows off, I think of airport 77, with a flight attendant sucked out or something like that, and it's kind of a little bit scary. The flying is extremely safe and it's a headline stealer, but I'd be bullish on Boeing here.

Gareth: 1:04:30

Another question coming up here, my take on, that is, if you've got I was going to say if you've got conversations going on inside the organization. It's finding those conversations out and that's that's the hardest piece is creating the environment where you can hear bad news. And that means that leaders have to go out and intentionally go and look for it. And you know, when I go into organizations I say to leaders there are two questions you can ask that. You can go out there, what works around here, what sucks around here? And you will get a whole bunch of chaff. But you'll find some wheat, some real nuggets. Without mixing metaphors, you know you will find some real stuff. When people say this sucks, listen to it, find out what needs to change and go back to them and say we're going to change it or we can't change it because of X, y and Z and this is what we're going to do instead, or whatever. But go out there and find the bad news. If all you're hearing is good news, there's a whole bunch of risk out there.

Whiz: 1:05:22

Gareth nailed it, man, and there's, there's an art behind that, right, I guarantee you. The Boeing guy, the CEO, flies to wherever and walks into a workspace and goes, hey, let me have it hit me with the with this tough stuff, with all the supervisors and middle management standing there like looking at their employees. I don't know how many times in a business situation like I've I've been in like this. I said you seven guys and gals get out and are like like just go out in the hallway and I leave the CEO with the troops and you wouldn't believe what happens. So if the CEO of Boeing does do that, get rid of your one star and two stars and minders around put them in the hallway, man, and you go in with the troops and say what's going on?

Whiz: 1:06:07

Hit me right between the eyes. I ain't going to tell any of these jokers. I want you to just hit me with it and I guarantee he's going to get some.

Ponch: 1:06:15

We know that surveys don't work, and we grew up in a culture where we were surveyed to death, right? We never put anything on there that made any sense anyway. So what Gareth is getting at is how do you get to these insights, these water cooler conversations, what's actually going on? And, by the way, anytime you send out a survey, you're never surprised by the information on there, right? So how do you get surprised? How do you create that surprise? So these are actually techniques we use now, and we coach this to the Naval Safety Center a few years ago, and that is using sense making devices Tell me a story and then self signify against it.

Ponch: 1:06:46

So again, lessons that are coming from not necessarily fighter aviation, but from DARPA in this case, to help understand what's going on in your culture, when what Gareth points out, when everybody's telling you the great story, it's not the bad ones. Okay, got another question here, going back towards ready for this was Bud Light. Oh geez, what's the question? What did they do right? What did they do wrong? And we're going back. What? Nine months now?

Whiz: 1:07:16

They didn't do anything right. I stopped trading them. Well, here's what they did, right, they sucked and I printed money off of Bud Light. Not doing right, because Bud Light is kind of seen as football NASCAR Merica got you and it exploded in their face, right. So the stock tanked, it got destroyed. There is a conservative boycott. I think what they got wrong to answer Pontius question immediately is getting involved in social issues, right, I love Jamie Diamond man. He's finally got JP Morgan CEO. He's finally coming back to I'm done with all the extraneous stuff. I have a fiduciary duty to my shareholders, right. But let's get back to Bud Light.

Whiz: 1:07:59

The CEO, on repeated occasions, kept saying what buck stops with me. I'm old, I'm accountable, I'm responsible, I'm accountable, I'm responsible like and as naval officers. You know what we kind of know. So if the commanding officer of an aircraft carrier is sleeping on the treadmill eating with his sailors, are in the reactor and the ship runs the ground, she or he is fired. Well, and then civilians would go. Well, she or he was in the reactor eating or sleeping on the treadmill and, as the admiral relieving the skip, right, be like. Well, then I guess you should have spent less time doing those things and more time doing teaching people how to drive the boat.

Whiz: 1:08:37

So in my opinion, that guy needed to be. If you had any shame, he would have said I'm gone and let me take the heat out of this, and he didn't. And it just. It was like Steve Austin that crashed down the runway, just it kept. It kept spiraling.

Whiz: 1:08:53

You cannot sit there and say I take accountability for this and there's no, there's no. It's like Seinfeld. Anybody can take a reservation. It's the keeping the reservation. Anybody can take accountability. I fully take accountability for this and hundreds. There are so many retailer or bottlers in the south. People got laid off man, they absolutely destroyed people's lives with this thing. Instead of stepping up and go, you know what we go and up shouldn't have been. You know, in that type of pond we're going to do that again and it was gray and they didn't do it. So long as your short question punch zero accountability. In my opinion. I think the dude still there. I stopped trading it because I'm like it was too much. I made too much money pounding but like the dirt and then I just moved on from it.

Ponch: 1:09:44

I don't even know what's if it's still going on, but not, I think I saw commercials like the brood dog on there. No, not, I think, I think they although they did sign that.

Whiz: 1:09:55

They signed a contract with the USC, with the, what's his name. So I mean they're trying to, they are, they are writing big checks to get back into the good graces of folks. But man, stick to stick to fishing. If you're a fisherman and you're saying your lane, I think my opinion.

Ponch: 1:10:12

All right, hey, we're going to wrap it up there, guys, unless you have anything else for the for our audience on YouTube and on LinkedIn looks like we have a group on both. This is great. I appreciate your help and running through this to make sure the technology works currently have some issues to sort out. We definitely want to do this again and dive deeper into more of the, the connection between psychedelic assisted therapies and debriefing. We need to get a chance to talk about quite a few things. I know there's other things that may be on your mind, but a quick around the room anything you want to wrap up with Gareth?

Gareth: 1:10:43

No, love it. Thanks very much. I mean, it's great just that, the bits that as as aircrew, as military operators, that we take for granted that you go into industry, and the things like T doda as a decision making tool for people and they sit, they go, how do you make a decision? Oh, you could do this. Oh my god, that's amazing Really. No, it's not, but that's.

Gareth: 1:11:07

That's just the curse of knowledge that we forget how much we've got and how much has been invested in us by the military, by the governments. If you think about how much leadership and team training you've had as individuals, as aircrew, and then going out and operating most organizations, you might get a day a year. If you're lucky it might be a day every couple of years, whereas I think back to 18 weeks going through officer training course. Nearly two years is navigator training, and then every time on the squadron operating, we would have leadership activities going on and then continuing education. That goes on. So actually very humbled in actually how much has been invested and just make sure we can then share it with others so they can get better.

Ponch: 1:11:50

I think it's around six million dollars they put into our training. I don't know if that's still true with any idea.

Whiz: 1:11:55

I think it's about 10. I saw a number from a it's a lot for whatever. Yeah, it's got to be at least 10 million bucks, probably adjusted for inflation.

Ponch: 1:12:05

There's more. There's more where that came from. It's coming, isn't it Was any. Any last thoughts? Anything goes.

Whiz: 1:12:12

No man. Hey, check out the no fallen heroes foundation If you're interested in potentially psychedelic assisted therapy. The medicine is not for everybody, but literally on this phone or on this brief. Marcus LaTrell called me. He checks in a couple of times a week, man.

Ponch: 1:12:26

Okay, let's international audience again. Who's Marcus LaTrell?

Whiz: 1:12:30

If you've, hopefully you've heard of the book or read the book Loan Survivor, or you saw the movie Loan Survivor with with Mark Wahlberg about the Navy SEAL team. So Marcus LaTrell is the Loan Survivor and three years ago me, marcus LaTrell, jt, jared Taylor, one of the founders of Black Rifle Coffee another Navy SEAL, and then an NFL player named Robert Gallery, iowa All-American, played for the Raiders. We went down to Mexico and did psychedelic assisted therapy and if you do medicine work, whoever you. I met these guys on a Friday afternoon in San Diego by Monday. I know these guys literally for eternity and I will know them for eternity. So I the medicine is potential radical healing for folks.

Whiz: 1:13:17

We help veterans, first responders and their families because their families serve to. So if you know a veteran or a first responder family member who needs help, we provide healing grants for those folks so they don't have to come out of pocket to heal the trauma that they encourage serving this country, and I'd love to pitch into the fight to to our NATO allies or our our, our friends across the pond as well. This is coming. It is at. Ponce knows. 2024 is going to be the year of people really discovering the power of these medicines and you're about to see a big fight, big dog fight, between kind of big pharma and and these healing modalities. That that's help punch, that's a whole whole.

Ponch: 1:14:01

We can actually help them out. Actually depends on what side we want to pick, but you're right.

Whiz: 1:14:05

There you go. That is a great point we can take both sides. Exactly that's what makes the market.

Ponch: 1:14:13

No, I hate with Gareth. I appreciate your time today. This has been awesome. We'll do it again in the future. And then I'm just going to keep you on the line for a minute Once I hit stop on the recording. Thanks again, guys, appreciate it.

Whiz: 1:14:24

See you Thank you.