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No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Conceptual Spiral Redux: John Boyd’s Blueprint for Thriving in Complexity with Chet Richards
Step into the mind of legendary military strategist John Boyd as No Way Out unveils a special redux of his transformative briefing, Conceptual Spiral, originally presented at the 1993 SpaceCast 2020 conference. This re-release includes a full transcript, restored slides, and an illuminating foreword from Boyd’s close friend and collaborator, Chet Richards, who joins us on this episode to discuss the relevance of Boyd’s concepts today. Sponsored by AGLX, this episode is a powerful exploration of decision-making, adaptability, and strategic agility.
Join us as we dive into Boyd’s radical “Conceptual Spiral” framework, a tool for leaders and teams to navigate complexity and thrive in an ever-evolving world. With the help of Chet Richards and legendary Boyd collaborator Chuck Spinney, this restored version brings Boyd’s voice to life, with slides and insights that guide you through his thoughts on implicit guidance, rapid decision-making, and continuous adaptation. Chet shares firsthand experiences with Boyd’s genius, revealing the enduring impact of Conceptual Spiral on leaders across fields.
Explore Boyd’s journey from energy maneuverability to the iconic OODA Loop, his critiques of traditional training programs, and his integration of Eastern philosophies. Hear how his insights on martial arts parallel business and military strategy, and enjoy some laughs as we reflect on 1950s cars—a lighthearted nod to the importance of resilience and innovation.
Speculate with us on where Boyd’s mind would roam today: from multipolar conflicts to the frontiers of artificial intelligence. Chet’s stories and reflections add depth, inviting you to consider Boyd’s influence on today’s challenges. Download the full, remastered transcript and slides of Boyd’s Conceptual Spiral here: https://www.aglx.com/john-boyds-conceptual-spiral-full-transcript.
Don’t miss this episode as we bring Boyd’s strategic wisdom to the forefront, helping leaders and teams navigate uncertainty and make decisive moves in today’s complex and competitive landscape!
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So well, chet, as you know, we've transcribed the video of John Boyd speaking at SpaceCast where he presents Conceptual Spiral.
Mark McGrath:We've fused that with two things from you the excellent foreword that you wrote that we want to talk about here with our audience, and also to the restored and sort of remastered slides of that presentation. And the great thing about the transcription is that what Boyd is actually saying goes perfectly with your slides. The one thing that's really cool at the end, the Q&A all the questions were unintelligible but Boyd's answers are brilliant. So what we're hoping for is kind of like we were talking about here before we started recording. What we're hoping for is to continue to keep these ideas fresh and relevant and in the minds of leaders and teams and as we continue to develop and build on top of what Boyd left for us because, as you know, he left all of this open for us to do exactly what we're doing and continuing to grow and revise and refine that and then, most importantly, show people how to integrate that into their lives, both personally and professionally, because, as we all know, it's universal and it applies wherever humans are making decisions and complexity.
Ponch Rivera:Hey, mark, I want to add one thing here For our listeners. In our show notes you'll be able to find a link to where you can download the PDF. I'm certain that Chet will put it on his website as well. Slightly East of New that will be out there as well. We'll put the links on there. It doesn't matter where you download it from, but we encourage you to download that. And one if you can download it and listen to this podcast, that should be a nice way to do it. If you can't go ahead and listen to this podcast and let's go download it and you're going to need to come back and listen to this again. So very excited to talk about this with both of you.
Mark McGrath:Chet, just you know we've had you on the show before and we've significantly increased our subscribers since then. And just why don't you give us at a very high level who you are, how you met John Boyd, and then we'll dive into why conceptual spiral is important? But give us some background on your experience with John Boyd.
Chet Richards:I'd be happy to. I first ran across the name when I was a very, very, very young, right out of grad school staffer in the I guess it had become program analysis and evaluation. It was the descendant of McNamara's old systems analysis group and they had evolved. It was still called systems analysis when I joined it, but then it got its name changed to program analysis and evaluation or program analysis and evaluation and I was in the TAC Airshop and I showed up and the vacancy they had was in the Air Force Fighter program. So here I am, graduate student mathematics, graduated in mathematics, and you know I couldn't tell an F-4 from an F-15 from. You know it may have quite. I had a private pilot's license from the Army but the Army didn't. I mean they helicopters basically, and that's what I would have flown if I had gone on active duty. For a variety of reasons I didn't Ended up as a civilian and in that shop Air Force fighter programs had the F-15, also had the F-14, which was not an Air Force program, but it was already pretty much out of production, it was out of our ability, and the A-10 went for a different guy.
Chet Richards:It had the lightweight fighter program which of course became the F-16 and the F-8. We had a couple of things here To the extent we did anything with the F4, that came under the roof. Of course, if we're talking about the F15 and getting into F15 and F16, you ran across EM stuff and you ran across the name John Boyd. But you know it was kind of a level of detail below what we deal with at the Office of the Secretary of Defense and basically we were concerned with all right. Given that DOD is going to have X amount of budget, it's going to roughly be split among the various departments. What's our advice to the Secretary for what he should put in the President's budget for the various service programs? You can't just take the service wish list and put them all together and send that over to the White House because it exceeds the national budget. It might even exceed gross domestic product if you let them run full blast.
Chet Richards:The Air Force originally basically wanted to have F-15s refill every role in the Air Force. Literally they're going to buy like 2,500 of those things, which is, I think, similar to their plan for the F-22 if they'd had their way. But we're right, obviously that wasn't going to happen. The Navy wanted to do the same thing with the F-14. They strong-armed the Marine Corps into buying the F-14. They strong-armed the Marine Corps in buying the F-14, and they were going to use F-14s for everything. But numbers just don't add up. So the Secretary, who is generally a civilian not always Lloyd Austin, was retired Army and may or may not have a background in defense at all needs somebody he can turn to and say you know what do I do? And that's why McNamara set up the Office of Systems Analysis and why Mel Laird, who was Secretary of Defense when I came on, kept it on as PA and I had that little slice of fighter, third-air fighter programs.
Chet Richards:So that's why I came across the name John Boyd. And then the guy who was running the office at the time got a two-step senior executive service promotion and went on to other things and there was a little gap in there. And then John Ahern, who was the principal deputy assistant secretary, deputy director of program analysis and evaluation, walked in one day and said well, you guys got to be boss. And he's Tom Christie. And I knew that name because energy maneuverability paper was by John Boyden, tom Christie. And I knew that name because Energy Maneuverability Paper was by John Boyden, tom Christie. I had no idea who he was. Anyway, tom shows up and Tom says hey, let's go meet John. And I'm trying to remember I'm not sure whether he had been officially confirmed yet or not At some point John went Actually, this may have been just before Tom came on.
Chet Richards:John went overseas to command the NKP in the Air Force US Air Force component ofa Thai air base and we'd walk in and there he was, this tall guy in an Air Force uniform. We all said hi and all that. And that was probably no later than 1973. I have to go back and look at the course. It may have been late 70s.
Chet Richards:So I forget all about Boyd. And in 75, after Boyd retires, I get this phone call from him and say hey, I need a mathematician to come look at some work I'm doing here and I was wondering if you could come over and take a look at it. He said sure, john. And he said meet me at happy hour Monday night, wednesday night. I said okay, meet me at happy hour Monday night, wednesday night. I said okay. So that's how things were done back then. So I show up and he shows me some of the drafts that he's working on. He says here it is. I'm using Gödel's theorem. I want you to make sure that I'm using it properly. So I read it. My degree wasn't in foundations or mathematical logic, which is where Gödel's theorem usually appears. But all graduate-level mathematicians, particularly if they're going into the more theoretical science, which I have done are familiar with Gertrude Stern, and we're praying to God that they never actually saw it in the wild, because it basically mentions everything that, if you run across it, that everything that you've done up to that point is total BS. Fortunately, it's very, very difficult to run into it in real life, so it's kind of like a black hole. You know they're out there, but you really don't want to run across one if you can help it, so anyway. So I looked and there was no mathematics in the way he was using it. His statement of it was okay, it's not the way we would have stated it because we'd use a lot of cruel symbols and everything and but, but yeah, but he was applying it to a problem in the field that I couldn't figure out. What in the world it was all about. He was talking about close, open systems and if you're inside a system and trying to examine it for yourself, you'll pop up confusion and disorder and all that. That's interesting stuff. I've been in the Pentagon long enough to see it in real life, but I had no idea. But I said, yeah, the way you stated it is fine. I really can't comment on your application because your application is not. But he kept sending me drafts of it and all of that and then he put it out to the extent that he published it. He put a date on it and started giving copies of it out.
Chet Richards:I went out to California, left the government service entirely and knocked around, went to Saudi Arabia, came back and came back to Washington in 1980 and ran back into John again and he was deep into patterns of conflict. I think he had already quit putting work numbers on them by that time. But the thing looked pretty much like it does now. I have a copy from 1980. That's sort of you know. You can see a lot of the charts are still there. Pretty much every chart has some word changes and there's a lot of new charts, but the basic flow of it is still the way it is today. And so I started going to Happy Hour back and forth and all that and John's working. I'm not particularly interested in land warfare at that time but I continued looking at graphs. And then in 1983, I left and moved to Atlanta to go to work for Lockheed.
Chet Richards:Kind of lost touch with John for a while in there, although we would continue to call Every now and then I'd go to Washington, arrange for me there on a Wednesday evening and go back half the hour. He did a strategic game after in 1987, an organic design for command and control, and then he kind of went quiet. And I get a phone call from him saying that he's kind of branching out, he's kind of this war stuff. He sort of milked it all that he thought it was worth and all that. And he's getting over into other stuff. And I said I had that idea, I sent him a copy. I didn't actually send him a copy of, I sent him the reference to Tom Peters' Thriving on Chaos. I said, hey, there's a lot of your stuff in here. And he read it over and he said, yeah, he said there's not the Oogloo, but you can see a lot of these ideas. And so I wrote tom a letter just out of the blue and he was, I think, still on the faculty standard at that time and he wrote back a very nice letter, sent me an autograph copy of the book which I still have, and I think that kind of got john really thinking about how these ideas are going to leak out of defense and over into other areas, which is an idea that he comes back to in conceptual style.
Chet Richards:As you know, this would have been probably 88, 89, and that's when I got onto the phone, the phone call list, you know. Like two or three times a day he would call and say, hey, can you call me back? Because I could call him on Lockheed Stein, and I did, and he would say here listen to this now, listen to this now what do you think? And it kind of went off and what he was doing was he was exploring the ideas. What he was really doing was reading me some of the stuff that you found, mark, there at Quantico, some of those notes.
Chet Richards:Now that I see them in writing, I can see where he was coming from. I want to try it. Suppose if I said it this way would it be more clear? I'd say, well, john, what is it you're trying to make clear? Tell me, explain it. He said, well, you remember I said I'm kind of getting away from this war stuff and with the Cold War kind of being over now, he said I want to look at the more general applications of what I'm doing. And this went on probably for a couple of years and we were going back and forth and back. So that thing at the end there where he talks about a conceptual spiral for all these triplets, ending with they all end in I inspiration, something initiative. I can't tell you how many versions of that we went through until we finally picked three or four that we liked.
Chet Richards:So it went kind of back and forth on this. He would basically try stuff out on you and you would give him to the extent that you understood what he was going for. You'd give him feedback and then he would say, okay, great. In the meantime we were also talking over this business stuff. I had started a region called War, chaos and Business where I was trying to, based on the fact that I'd gotten into the Toyota production system, which you'll notice, he mentions quite early in his briefing, although it doesn't show up. I don't believe it shows up. It does in conceptual as far as the very thing, but he talks about it quite a bit when he's talking about it. In to it, we're talking to the space cats, dude.
Chet Richards:And he went, he bought shigeo shingo and taiji on those books very expensive, uh, probably still is introduced by an app they call productivity press and they were the only ones that had the right to do it and if you wanted it you paid what they wanted, I think things well, over a hundred dollars, and that was in 1988, real money, you may remember. But anyway, he read all this stuff. He read Shigeo Shingo's book, non-stock Production, which he also mentioned in the introduction, and he was starting to see these parallels, particularly down at the cultural level. But he was also seeing how they use time and how they compress time, and the effect that it had on the American auto industry, and he can see operating side, the oodle kind of going in slow motion, you know, taking taking years, but being the same basic process and having the same effect on on the us auto industry that he was talking about in I call it a versus b conflict, uh, where you don't have a third party, a customer, sitting on the outside, it's basically whoever wins in a round. You understand that.
Chet Richards:So he started to put all this stuff together, as he mentions in his introduction, and playing it over and over and over again, borrowing from stuff that he had already done, not only in Destruction and Creation but of course the abstract, the one-page abstract where he's saying this idea of taking stuff apart and putting it back together actually made all the presentations that I have in my Green Book same process, which strikes a lot of people as odd, but it's true, having been involved in the process.
Chet Richards:It's exactly what he did. He was taking bits and pieces and trying to fit them together and seeing what worked and seeing what direction it led him in. Truly all of those are examples of snowmobiles. You've seen at Quantico the various earlier versions of patterns. You need to see how the various prototypes of the snowmobiles got built. And so what he did was he took that process of building these earlier briefings and he abstracted it and that became essentially a conceptual spiral. Somewhere along in there he made the explicit and I think this was very early as I was talking to him about connection with destruction and creation. He said, you know, it's really the early as I was talking to him about connection with destruction and creation.
Chet Richards:He said you know it's really the same thing I was talking about back in destruction and creation, gertl Heisenberg and the second law. That was an example of synthesis and all these other things were examples of synthesis. But in order to do the synthesis you had to first do the analysis. And that, of course, is the theme of conceptual style, the engine that drives conceptual style. Now, the real thing about conceptual style of course it passes along to other systems and I think I just realized it after reading the transcript was that Boyd although thinking back on it I can't remember it's been been 30 years, 32, 33 years Boyd really thought this was going to be his last movie. I really believe that that's true. He mentions Jack Kevorkian in there. I thought that was funny and he knew he had prostate cancer. But I think in 1982, he may have thought it was in remission I'd have to look at Coram's book again but I think it was more like about 1994, where it had come back. Of course he died in early 1990s.
Chet Richards:It may have even been 1995, about the time of Essence and Winning and Losing, and so when he was putting conceptual style together, we were going back and forth on the components of it, and I think you can see again from that last set of charts. There it's the nature of basically comprehending, adapting, shaping inside imagination. Initial thought he really thought this was going to be recorded. Now he explained his entire body of work. But this is the fascinating thing about it no theory is complete. And I think even while he was putting conceptual spiral together, and particularly once he started getting out and briefing it and hearing himself talk about it, he realized that it was incomplete in a very fundamental way, and you guys pointed it out in your description of what's different between the linear loop and the one that John actually drew, and that's the implicit part the implicit guidance and control John actually drew.
Chet Richards:And that's the implicit part, the implicit guidance and control. He had said way back in Strategic Game circa 1987 to emphasize it implicit over explicit in order to gain a favorable advantage etc. But as you guys mentioned, there's hardly anything, nothing implicit about the linear loop, and yet he had said to emphasize. But on the other hand, about the linear loop, and yet he had said to emphasize. But on the other hand, the linear loop, that loop kind of thing really did seem to explain a big piece of what he was talking about, besides an engineering part. But if you read Conceptual Spiral except for a few little I don't know references it's probably not even allegations near the end. There are no adversaries in it. In science and engineering we have adversaries. You can see other people trying to publish. You know idiots in the journal who keep rejecting your moronic reviewers who didn't understand the brilliant points you were making. But those adversaries only have an analogous sense. Conceptual spiral is not about conflict in that sense. It's not about what I call ADB conflict. It really talks about that circular portion of the loop that has hypothesis test back to observation and orientation. It's that component of the loop, that conceptual spiral is talking about and all that John talks about in his verbal remarks. The term never appears in conceptual style in the actual part of the book, although there's lots of loops in it. And I think that began and he was getting much heavier now into the Oriental stuff. At this point he had already read Tom Cleary's Japanese Art of War and of course he was very familiar with Sun Tzu. But in the Art of War, cleary's Art of War, and some of the things that were referenced in there, particularly stuff by a guy named Takuan, they keep talking about, there's not enough time to do this analysis. Everything just has to flow. You know you fight with what you got, and I think he started to think about what he did as 42nd boy and there wasn't any sit down and say okay, gee, you know he's pulling three degrees to the right, he's got 20 degrees head up. Now what should I do? Well, I could do. You know, I could do an emblem on. I could do this, I could do that. All right, if that stuff is happening, it's all happening deep somewhere else in the brain and you have to infer it because you don't see it. It's better to say that it's flowing directly from your orientation, which has been pre-primed by all the training you did. You notice, in his remarks he talks about his critique of the US training program, where he said you know, back then we killed more people in Korea in training than we killed in Korea, but that's why, once we got to Korea, we were on wheels. They kept telling us Korea's going to be easy compared to what you're going enough people. So anyhow, do that as it may.
Chet Richards:He realized that the A versus B part, the implicit part, which is absolutely required for A versus B type of conflict, was missing in the conceptual spiral. But it was missing in the sense that it wasn't explicitly called out, I think. The more he thought about it and we did talk about it he said you can't use this implicit part if it's not already there, because you fight. You know, once you get engaged, you fight with what you got. For the most part.
Chet Richards:If you try something new that you really don't have fingerspits in yet, for there's a really good chance you're going to mess it up and at least not accomplish your mission, probably get yourself hurt. So he said the foundations for it are there, but I didn't really bring it out. So you notice. The next brief Essence of Wedding and Losing starts out with our implicit repertoire and I think between the end of conceptual spiral and the start and the work about two years later it seems like about 94, which is where we started working on that and I was very, very heavily involved in that is where he tried to complete that last piece of the puzzle, which was to take conceptual spiral, which had basically how you put yourself in position to win and essence of winning, losing in there, where you actually then apply it to win, um and and one thing about that chat.
Mark McGrath:When you mentioned essence of winning and losing, that's the only time that he ever illustrated the ooda loop with the help of chuck spinney, correct?
Chet Richards:that's a very, very, very good point, Mark. In fact, if you go back and read the transcript and I'd forgotten about this he's still talking the circular loop in the transcript. If you read it very, very carefully, you can see, maybe, that it's beginning to understand that that's not complete. That's not how he actually operated, and the more that he read about how the samurai operated, he realized that wasn't how they operated either. Now, if he had ever wandered down to any halfway respectable dojo, karate or kung fu or whatever, even judo, jiu-jitsu, anything, any martial arts thing, and gotten some training in martial arts, he had realized it immediately, because that's foundational, of course. And that's why, when I'm talking with martial artists, they say, well, we don't understand the big deal here.
Mark McGrath:They say, well, it's martial arts for organizations doesn't it also doesn't it also show ch and we've pointed this out before with other guests on the show that Boyd's own thinking evolved and it didn't stay static, absolutely, and he was unique.
Chet Richards:Perhaps that he realized that. That's how he realized that energy maneuverability was fine but it was incomplete and it would get you in position but it didn't. Actually, you know, take you to find it didn't get in really inside the opponent's mind like he, uh, like he was, like he was trying to do, and then he got off onto onto land warfare, and land warfare is interesting.
Chet Richards:But land warfare, in a sense perhaps, is more like business than it is martial arts, in that the time scale can be much longer. Even in a squad or platoon engagement you're talking at least conglomerations of seconds or minutes. You do have time to maybe get your platoon, you know, bring your platoon sergeant over a couple of squad leaders and say, okay, here's what's going on, here's what I think we're doing. Anybody got any ideas? You know, if they work together real quick.
Chet Richards:There's some interesting videos of the Germans actually trading the deal. So seconds and minutes, whereas in the martial arts it's fractions of a second, and that's what Cleary was so adamant about when he was talking about how the Japanese operated. But they built the capability to do that via what he was describing as the conceptual spiral, and so when he went on to Essence of Winning and Losing, he embedded the conceptual spiral into his Oodaloo sketch. But then he has the two implicit guidance and control wings going on the outside and got arrows going in every which direction, not just one, set going around a linear circle or a linear spiral, for that matter.
Chet Richards:So that's the big, big fundamental difference when you change the topology, you change the time scale. The Sherpa shifts, during the engagement itself, from defeating the opponent in this engagement to more and more over to learning from what's going on and applying that learning as the battle, as the war, as the operation, marketing campaign, whatever you're into the product development as it continues to evolve. So even the fastest systems he may have mentioned this the fastest development systems at the time for developing cars, for Detroit was in the 45 year stage. Chrysler tried once in the 50s to compress it down to three years and turned out some beautiful pieces of junk, but they weren't gorgeous, but they couldn't manufacture them, which allowed GM then to catch up in 1958, having an extra year with their company.
Ponch Rivera:I'm laughing at the beautiful pieces of junk.
Chet Richards:You got a 57 Chrysler product.
Ponch Rivera:Okay, that's great, love it. Thank you, chet.
Chet Richards:You know, somebody once called the Jaguar the world's most beautiful, loudest car, and I think there's probably. I've never owned a Jag. I would love to drive one sometime, but I'm not sure I would ever want this ownership. Response to one of these things.
Ponch Rivera:What kind of car is that? Again A Jaguar, a Jaguar, hmm, interesting yeah they were noted for.
Chet Richards:Even today, the Jaguar Land Rover products typically rate right down on the bottom of the list, along with the Stellantis, I guess for a lot of people.
Ponch Rivera:Here's an idea Maybe Jaguar Land Rover ought to come to us and ask us how to improve their quality. To come to us and ask us how to improve their quality. What?
Mark McGrath:do you think about?
Chet Richards:that.
Ponch Rivera:It would be a great idea.
Mark McGrath:It would be a beautiful idea wouldn't it?
Chet Richards:They're owned by Tata Group out of India, which is, I suspect, the people in the Tata Group are familiar with these ideas. One of them, I suspect, is there is a special Indian edition of Certain to Win.
Ponch Rivera:Oh, there you go. Thank you for that, I didn't know that. It is.
Chet Richards:Let's get that it is Full up Certain to Win there you go, there's nothing to say they jazzed it up a little bit. I wrote a special introduction, special preface to it and got some quotes for the back. I have no idea. It was on sale when it came out for 395 rupees.
Mark McGrath:So, chet, we're at this point where we're bringing out to the world conceptual spiral from a very specific point in time. Conceptual spiral from a very specific point in time as you're describing, this sort of bridge of his thinking laid in his life. What would you advise to leaders today? Because I say all the time, if you haven't read Destruction and Creation, you're behind, and if your competitors have, you're in trouble. And with conceptual spiral building off of that and then flowing right into something like essence of winning and losing, why is it so critical? Why would you recommend to leaders and their teams understand conceptual spiral and read this document?
Chet Richards:One reason is that conceptual spiral is a really, really, really talks about and nails down the two big functions of the loop the circular loop, linear part of the OODA loop itself, without which you don't program your orientation and you can't develop the implicit guidance and control loops. So without what John's talking about in conceptual spiral, you can't apply the other, you can't complete the OODA loop. So you really do need to develop, really to study what he's talking about, because, as I mentioned in my introduction your readers will see it when I come back is that if you go back to Toyota, Toyota is more than about making a car that was better and less expensive than what Detroit was offering and developing it in less time. They did all that. But what Toyota is really all about is constantly evolving and improving the system that made that product possible, improving the system that made that product possible. So there's two things you have the product and you have essentially the system, the evolving system, Because if somebody just and Detroit tried this for years, I think they still quite got it right you can exactly copy the Toyota production system down to the last bill and it won't work because the culture is not there. System down to the last building. It won't work because the culture is not there.
Chet Richards:It's the orientation of the people working on the line, because they haven't been through the conceptual spiral type process to program their orientation so that they can actually operate the Toyota production system, which kites in continuous improvement. Continuous product improvement is a process improvement. That's a critical part. I think it's very, very important that people, when they say, how am I going to improve my operation? And as we just talked about, particularly with companies with commercial things, with the time spans, they may seem compressed to the people in them but compared to being in a gunfight or a knife fight or an air-to-air battle, the time spans are dragged out and learning becomes one of the key things. And Conceptual Spiral is all about learning and unlearning and coming up with systems within your organization that allow you to do this better than your competitors. You know.
Ponch Rivera:I think the lean community can really take a lot from this brief, that we have this conceptual spiral brief that is going to be available on your website as well. Looking at the machine that changed the world, you brought up Shingo Ono. Many folks in the lean community. They don't use the OODA loop correctly, in my view. They use the linear approach to it, and when you go through this brief for them, they should start to see a connection that.
Ponch Rivera:I agree with you 100%, that it's about the system. How do you change the system? How do you create that orientation, how do you create harmony within teams to have that shared purpose and that desired outcome, build that implicit guidance, control as team members and adapt to a changing environment. And I think that there's a lot in there that the lean community can take away from this, and I hope that those that are from the lean community really pull down this brief and then reach out to Chet because, chet, you wrote about this years ago as well. Let's improve the quality of how we deliver, what's behind John Boyd Doodle Doodle, and this is a great way to do that. So thanks for all that, chet. This is amazing.
Chet Richards:I completely agree. It's a very powerful observation.
Mark McGrath:We should also point out too and I think that this is critical that slide 33, if anybody listening to this podcast or reading the work that Ponch and I are putting out on the world of reorientation, slide 33 is critical because, after Boyd goes through slide 32, explaining the features of the universe uncertainty, entropy, irregular erratic behavior, etc. Irregular erratic behavior, et cetera Slide 33 is that the underlying message of the entire briefing is there's no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. And since we don't know how to do this, we must continue the world of reorientation. So I think that everybody can understand why this briefing is so valuable and important to Ponch and I and why we really not only love teaching it and helping people understand it, but also feel it's so important that we named our podcast after it and we named our publication after it.
Ponch Rivera:So, guys, I'm kind of wondering if we can kind of walk through, maybe, your highlights. What do you find really interesting about this brief? I know I have a couple of points, but I want to see from Chet and Mark when you look at this Mark just gave us a great example what stands out to you when you go through this brief that we have.
Chet Richards:Okay, for me, slide 20 is the apex slide. That's where he introduces novelty. That's really what conceptual spiral is all about, and this applies to anything with the strategic content, whether competitors, customers, opponents, enemies, whatever you have. Because if you keep doing the same old thing in the same old way, somebody will figure you out and you're leaving yourself open to somebody that does it cheaper, quicker, faster, better new features, higher quality, more reliability, whatever. If you don't continually engage in this world of reorientation, you may be able to survive for a long time. It depends on the competitive environment. You are constantly leaving yourself open to, uh, to the entry of new competitors, uh, who are going to change the market and and obviously, do bad things to your market share at the same. We've seen this so many times over the last 20, 30 years. Um, so I think that's that's. That's one of the key things is that, no matter how good things are going today, forget about it.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, and he does kick off the transcript. He does kick off with the snowmobile experiment After he kind of pulls the audience. You know, okay, who's ever heard of Einstein and who's ever heard of Henry Ford, but have you ever heard of oh no, have you ever heard of a heisenberg or gardel?
Ponch Rivera:yeah, so so, and then he goes and he goes through the, he goes through the snowmobile experience, uh, experiment which is novelty yeah, we've been looking at uh, affordances and we've been looking at kaufman's the theory of adjacent possibles, and I think what boyd does there with novelty is he points that out early and says that hey, as we create new things, the acceleration of technology is going to create more uncertainty, which allows you to find more novelty in the environment. So we've had a lot of folks that study I think it's Gibson or Gibbs affordances and then you get into Kaufman's, the theory of adjacent possibles. We've had people on the show to talk about that and I think that slide 20 that you brought up there makes that connection or can be a way to connect these emerging theories.
Chet Richards:It's very important Admitting the stories of organization-like success. As the elder Von Mölke once pointed out, victory makes us stupid. He had a lot of crude phrases, but I like particularly like that one. Or as Hermann Bok mentions in Patterns of Conflict if you tried something and it didn't work, do something different. If you tried something and it did work, do something different. And that also goes back to this ancient Chinese expression that I read across every day. That says the same thing.
Chet Richards:But most organizations you know they get comfortable with where they are because it's so easy to get comfortable. You know you have the office. You know everything is working smoothly, bonuses are coming in on time, people are telling you how great you are. You can solve the little fires that pop up every now and then. Life is good. The problem is that mindset leaves you vulnerable. If not now, then maybe a long period of time. You can get away with it.
Chet Richards:C-130, for example, blew in 1954. Lockheed's still cranking out the J model, you know, even to this day. They are finally now. Just to me it just seems like getting some credible competition, particularly on the Embraer. What is it? C-390, which is a jet-powered airplane that actually is a little bit bigger than the C-130, a lot faster, of course, turns a little bit more, but they're pricing it at about the same. So it's getting to now where if you really want a C-130, it's so that you have commonality with NATO and US Air Force. I rule out the A400M. It's a fine airplane. It's just too expensive. It's not even the same. It's not valuable, but you can. For a long time, general Motors, ford, chrysler, other names that have disappeared from history were very successful with the model head. Annual product updates. Don't put more quality into the product than the customer is willing to pay for. Don't worry about building it great, you're not going to buy it. That's an expression of the assembly line back then, and they can operate with that philosophy for decades, until Toyota came along.
Mark McGrath:You start to wonder what if executives at Blockbuster or Kodak or the big three, what if they had sat down and they had gone through conceptual spiral, which, of course, now that we're releasing this transcript, we're able to help people to understand that? Just imagine what if because those three I's at the end you know the insight, initiative and imagination. How else could you thrive, how else can you out-compete, how else can you out-maneuver if you don't have those things?
Ponch Rivera:I think there's something in this for everyone too, and you know, chet brought up the slide 20. And what I'm looking at is slide 10, where financial markets are really starting to look at Mandelbrot, and he doesn't really spend a lot of time talking about Mandelbrot, but he does talk about Claude Chan and there's connections to the free energy principle and all these other things that are emerging out of neuroscience, but the new orientation. He also brings up socialism, or was it scientific socialism? So Marxism, right?
Chet Richards:Marx and economics. Yeah, that was an example of something that was tried and tested. It didn't work.
Ponch Rivera:But he's looking at all.
Chet Richards:It was a hypothesis and it was tested. Therefore it's part of the conceptual spiral.
Ponch Rivera:Right, right. So this is the idea is we have to find those good practices, those good processes, improve them all the time. And what we're seeing now is the even on Wall Street I'm talking to our Wall Street listeners. Now there is a strong connection between Boyd Mandelbrot and, in my view, this emerging idea that we can use sacred geometry and I think Mandelbrot has a connection to that and there's other folks in there as well, but it's a new. It's a new orientation on how do we understand what's happening in the external environment so we can continually adapt and and, uh, not just thrive as a species, but but you know, I'm sorry not just survive, but thrive as a species, even if we have to go to mars, right? So that's uh, and I'm just bringing that up as another connection there, but I'm sure there's other connections we can make, uh, from this, uh, brief, I think you're exactly right.
Chet Richards:Um, yeah, I don't. I don't know. Organizations are strange things, as you, you know, as you all know, and you could give this. I mean, it's been out on the internet now for about 20 years since I put it up, but, uh, you've got to be willing to. For example, you say, at the key of this is analysis and a synthesis. Do you do you do that in your organization really? I mean really, or are you simply generating uh, excuses, uh for what you, or justification for what you're already doing, which is certainly very common In any hierarchical organization, there's a strong tendency to tell the person above you what you think they want to hear.
Chet Richards:Do you want to get promoted, do you want to stay employed or not? In that sense, I think the services actually were better places to work, particularly for Boyd, than the private industry might have been, because at least they tried to do to Boyd several times. But it was Mike Wiley who pointed it out. You can get away with an awful lot in the military, and you guys know this. So long as you know where the boundaries are and you operate within that system, you may get transferred, you may get put in charge of a free Canadian battalion in Alaska.
Mark McGrath:Chet, you need to listen to the episode we just released today about the Fat Leonard scandal.
Chet Richards:I saw that. Yeah, by the way, thank you so much for putting up Barry Boyd's in the news, the only place I know of where she has ever been really interviewed in print or for real. It's about time she got.
Mark McGrath:Oh yeah, she was a great we think, too, that hearing the personal accounts of people that knew him of course his daughter knew him, and you and GI Wilson and Chuck Spinney and others it's so important because, as we were talking about before we started recording, you know, boyd is so widely misunderstood and the idea that these theories are open and meant to be developed and discussed, and that these are for helping people deal with complexity and not linear boilerplate methods that can be introduced on an infotainment stage. I mean, these things are practical things that are deeply rooted and grounded in the way that Cosmos actually functions and flows, and that's what Boyd was trying to help us see.
Chet Richards:Yeah, that's absolutely correct. Good summary, but the organization has got to want to be willing to do it. Commercial organizations can get rid of irritants much, much easier than the military can. Here's your two weeks to get out Right.
Mark McGrath:I know we asked you this before, but you know, if, if John had lived another you know he died at age 70, and just say he had lived another 10 years I mean, what do you think that he was pursuing? You know, when you take into consideration his evolution to get to this point of conceptual spiral and then sort of his distillation of everything, with essence of winning and losing, you know, what do you think he would have done next?
Chet Richards:There are a number of possibilities. I know Bill Lynn and his group around 4GW, including folks like John Robb. I don't think John ever met John, but John Robb came and was the keynote speaker at one of our board symposiums. I believe he sort of made this point, but probably he'd gotten interested in the types of conflicts that were taking place, particularly when you got past the desert storm.
Chet Richards:You could have gotten into the world that we're in today, if it is becoming more multipolar, where you can have a group like Hamas face down, which is generally considered, person for person, the best military in the world for over a year now, a situation that's very, very difficult to explain using conventional military measures of effectiveness, even talking about maneuver warfare. Now John talks a lot about irregular warfare and guerrilla warfare, and so I think he would have not been surprised that it continues to live, continues to work, continues to take advantage of new technologies, that sort of thing. I think he might well have done a series of briefings on non-conventional applications of power, both soft power and energy in hard power. I can see him kind of working in that sphere. I know he read over some of the drafts of Bill and GI Wilson's 4GW paper, but I don't know what kind of comments or whatever.
Chet Richards:Of course he never used a generation war model.
Mark McGrath:We've discussed before that John Boyd loved technology and was not a Luddite. What would he think of AI? What do you think he would feel that's a?
Chet Richards:very interesting point. He was actually thinking along those lines a little bit before he died, because he was talking about things that were going to be possible with the tremendous increase in computers. I'm not talking just words of law here, but I think parallel computing was just starting to come out and become practical. Nowadays we talk, you know, multi-core, like eh, but back then it was really software to really use multi-core devices that was still in its development and of course the devices themselves tended to be very, very expensive.
Chet Richards:And I tried to explain to him from a mathematical standpoint, a parallel computer is still a Von Norman computer. There's still nothing you can do with a parallel computer that you can't do with a straight processing system. You can just do it and in some circumstances you can do it faster. But he said well, you know, it just seems like to me that as we get more and more processing power and more and more things are happening, that it's becoming more and more like the human brain and you can't argue with that. And that's kind of about where we, what you can see in the back of his mind, where we which you can see in the back of my hand, if I had, if I could just okay a neuron. I can see how I can simulate neurons. I can. But in neural networks the concept already existed back then, so it was. You see, he was.
Chet Richards:It's an area he probably would have been very, very, very interested in, both from the application of it, but also from trying to cut through the hype. I think you would have been fascinated by the problem of hallucinations, for example. Yeah, I think that would have been. You know, this is true. Maybe the other side is using AI. You know light comes on above its head. Do you think we can do to give it more hallucinations? Yeah, I think you would have loved that.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, chet, I agree. When you look at the emergence of the free energy principle and active inference and we've talked about this before it really pulls on second law, thermodynamics, cybernetics, a lot of things that John Boyd was looking at. Nice synthesis, yeah yeah, and even in one of your briefs you talk about it and Chuck Spinney kind of puts a boundary around it and talks about the sensory systems are the only thing that are having access to the external world as our actions. And you know, there's a Bayesian process inside the OODA loop where we generate a prediction based off of orientation. We kind of match that up against the signals that are coming in through our observations. It's pretty powerful. And we're starting to see and I'm going to share some insights here we're starting to see a divergent group of AI companies. What I mean by that is there are those that follow John Boyd's linear OODA loop and try to scale it that way. So that's large language models and there's this thing called Gentic AI, which I think NVIDIA is big into right now, and it's just scaling linear OODA loops, in my opinion. And then you get into the active inference part, which looks more like John Boyd's real OODA loop, what he wrote about, and my view on this is the companies that look at the linear approach are about to get their butts kicked by those that are looking at the highly efficient way of doing this. And that, to me, is what John Boyd gave us was a gift of.
Ponch Rivera:Here's a simple sketch and a bunch of amazing information behind it that tells you how sentient systems deal with uncertainty. Right, navigate that. And the concept of free energy is really about how do you create mismatches for your opponent? How do you create that disorder, confusion in the environment for them? So think about sports, or basketball, or football. How do you show to your defender that you're going one direction when you're actually going the other? Right? And then, how do you reduce that uncertainty or that free energy? And you do that by updating your orientation and constantly building good practices.
Ponch Rivera:And we're using good practice here because we know the language from the Kenevan framework is there are no best practices other in the clear domain, right, in a complicated domain. We have to update them all the time, make good practices. So I believe yeah, I agree with you 100%, and that's what we're trying to do here, and Mark and I are not saying we're right, we're just saying hey, given what we understand about John Boyd's OODA loop, we can look at these things that are emerging in these fields and go, hey look, this is a nice connection here, and I think the problem that we run into all the time is academics, researchers, will not look at John Boyd's work because he didn't publish anything. And you know, I want to get your thoughts on that.
Chet Richards:Well, I mean, it's actually kind of funny if you have looked at what's happening in the academic publishing sphere right at the moment. Uh, with the well, let me back up there there was a while back may still be a satirical scientific thing called the journal of irreproducible research and it turns out now that that's pretty much all of it. I mean, there's so many problems now. The publisher, parish, uh, world, all of it. There's so many problems now. The publisher, parish world and academia has just gotten completely out of hand. Sabina Hassenfeld, out on YouTube videos, goes into that in great detail. She gives a lot of examples of people who had hundreds of publications, all of which have now been withdrawn and redrafted, and some of it fraud, some of it just sloppy research and some of it just, you know, human beings just make mistakes. But because of the pressure now to publish, the incentives to cut corners, if not to downright cheat, have just gone off the scale.
Chet Richards:But your point is right. They wanted something that they could cite in their own research so that when they published you know their citation list. You know, past must have looked good. Everything had all those weird little abbreviations, language of academic references or uses. So I think there was a lot to that. Plus, he wasn't an academic, he didn't teach at a big, prestigious university, he didn't have that course, that power behind him, and so it just made him very easy to ignore. It used to drive him bonkers when he said you can cite anything. Back then he said I cited telephone calls when it just wasn't done.
Chet Richards:So I think there is a lot to what you said. Plus, let's face it, researchers have their own area of interest. They have their own reputation. They have their own preconceived, their own orientation by that area of interest. They have their own reputation. They have their own preconceived, their own orientation by that area of interest. And it takes a really unusual one, I think, to break out of that and plus, and to get your paper past.
Chet Richards:Peer review is another. Of course, depending on the publication, peer review, just with all this fraud going on, doesn't seem to be any big speed bump anymore. I think. A number of factors, but I think it's starting to change. Now you can always cite Zynga's stuff as well as more arguments. My paper was published in a Norwegian journal, but it's a reputable academic journal and I had a reviewer who did his or her job very well. I basically had to rewrite the entire paper. It pissed me off to no end, but it's much, much better because of it, so I guess so that you know there are things out there now that we can publish.
Chet Richards:I don't think we have any excuse, today you may or may not agree with it, but it's there, you can cite it, you can find it. If you don't agree with it, great, you know. Try to track your arguments out. Take a look well I love you right parts of his argument are incomplete, if not downright wrong.
Mark McGrath:So well, that's the point of the paper, your uh paper, the boyd's real oodle loop that we just wrote about and put on uh the world of reorientation, because I think I think what a lot of people do is that they limit their thinking to what they think they know at a surface level and they don't do any deep investigation beyond sort of the memes of what people think, so and so said or so and so thought.
Chet Richards:Well, I know it's happened in mathematics too. You get into a very, very, very, very, very narrow field and what you do is you try to, as you continue to think up and prove new theorems. You very carefully go those out. You know three good, three new theorems or three new papers if you're smart and uh, so they stay and so they're. They're looking at what they're done, what they've got, conjectures that they have in their back of the mind say, Okay, what can I do next? That will get me another publication, because that's how you get tenure, that's how you stay employed. That decides whether you're going to get faculty promotions, you're going to make full profit, whatever A lot of that is. They just waive a number of publications you have factored by the prestige factor of the.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, it seems like a lot of stuff gets suppressed or shelved and those sorts of rigid bureaucratic processes keep true knowledge from getting shared with the rest of the world that can be developed into understanding. I believe you're right.
Chet Richards:That's the point that Sabina makes Hudson's elder.
Chet Richards:I recommend her YouTube channel very highly. Another recommendation I'd like to make to your audience here real quick. Years and years ago, 1978 to be exact, there was a BBC series called Connections and it was hosted by a guy named James Burke. It only had, I think, 10 episodes and then it showed up in the States in 1979. Then in 1994, they did Connections 2. I think TLC was the sponsor and they've done a couple follow-ons since then.
Chet Richards:It is very, very, very much like what John is describing in charts, slides 10 and 11. How one builds on another and another and a piece of this and a piece of that, and if your viewers can find any of those, they're very well done. James Burke, a wonderful presenter, where he talks about such and such happened here in Greece and then a thousand years later, such and such happened here in India, and then just put together, it led to this and it led to that. Somebody brought this in. You can just see the process that God is talking about. It's real pictures and all that. So that's one thing I very much like.
Ponch Rivera:We've been looking at a lot of woo-ish things lately, so time is not linear, that type of thing. So what you just described there, this thing repeats, so maybe it's happening in parallel.
Chet Richards:Time even exists.
Ponch Rivera:That's right, right. So what this podcast has allowed us to do is kind of go explore things that we normally wouldn't have explored. Right, it doesn't mean these things are correct, it's just hey, there are people out there that have different orientations that we might be able to learn something from Exactly, and what I've seen from people that you and all of us know is they'll attack us because we had somebody on the show that brings a unique view on recently. Actually, this isn't a show, but it's a Substack article we put out there about orientation on genetics, culture and previous experience and how culture is pretty darn important when it comes to seeing new things. And then it gets into an argument online about you know, you guys are awful because you're bringing this person on. I'm like wow. And so we stopped Actually, we stopped listening to those people that pushed back on that. We're like you can go live in your echo chamber all you want, go for it. That's not what we're about.
Chet Richards:Exactly no, that's a very, very good, very important point.
Chet Richards:I think he has handled it very well. The only other thing I would suggest is and we talked about this a little here look at those charts 10 and 11. If Boyd was still alive today, what would he add to them? We talked about AI as certainly one. I think he was getting really fascinated by biology, particularly what we call neurophysiology. Getting a pre-grows himself, complexity gets into that. Neuroclasticity was just kind of being accepted. They were saying all right, well, you can strengthen synapses and weaken them. But now we're discovering it goes much, much, much farther than that, I think, boy, we're fascinated by the advances in what we're understanding now and also things like genetics. We talked about junk DNA, remember.
Ponch Rivera:And epigenetics, yep, yep.
Chet Richards:Yeah, epigenetics and all and you really can inherit epigenetics. And all that stuff and Dorp Boyd, I think, would have been fascinated by that.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so to add to that, you know we brought up Carl Friston's free energy principle, active inference. I think that would be one thing that we'd be added to that. And then, yeah, um, a little bit more on the neurodiversity stuff. Uh, mihi, cheek, semi-high's work on psychological flow. Uh, what we're finding now is the three types of cognition that lead to, uh, flow states. Uh, and you're familiar, familiar with this from being a yogi um with your yoga practices. You know what the cognition zero cognition, one looks like, um in an implicit guidance control.
Ponch Rivera:So I think a lot of the things that are emerging in the last 10, 15 years or 20 years, um, are additive to what John Boy was looking at. And, and I think, when people dismiss his OODA loop and go, wow, there's nothing there, while you're just, you're recreating everything, you're going to go out there and find all these things on your own. Why not start with something that isn't perfect but does contain a lot of connections to things like the Toyota production system? Right, we've talked about that here. It connects to neuroscience. We know we looked at that early, early complexity theory, systems thinking, cybernetics, the second law of thermodynamics, a lot of concepts that people are talking about today.
Ponch Rivera:They need to spend some time and just hey one, go download this brief, go look at it If you have questions. I mean that's why we have the podcast here, that's why we have access to chat, ask questions and we'll find the answers for you here on the show. But adding to that, you have anything else to add to the? What else do you think Boyd would be looking at there? Mark?
Chet Richards:Go ahead, Mark.
Mark McGrath:Well, I know that some of the criticism that he's received and somebody even wrote a terrible book about it that Ian Brown absolutely decimated, which was really good, but that he had a very, that he had a misunderstanding of the nuclear warfare, world War II or whatever, they really don't go into the fact that John Boyd had direct access to a lot of these guys like Balk and Rudel from the Stuka pilot and things like that. But Punch, I was just thinking because it's the fourth coming episode. I would love to be on a fly on the wall with John Boyd talking with Norman Oller.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so Norman wrote the book Blitzed and Tripped. And Blitzed is a book about methamphetamines and the use in World War II, nazi Germany.
Chet Richards:Just now realizing it. Yeah.
Ponch Rivera:But I don't think we're looking back the books and we didn't see that in anything. I don't think John Boyd saw that. But if you think about it, what they're trying to do with the methamphetamines is increase a flow or create a flow state, and that gives you a competitive advantage over your enemy, in this case the French. So, mark, you want to take it from there.
Mark McGrath:Well, it was interesting that one of the things that Norman pointed out was that the French were drinking wine, and the Maginot wine and the Germans were coming up with innovative maneuver tactics and, at the same time, compounding their efforts with these drugs to, as you say, create a flow state or keep them awake for periods of time. And what we know about John Boyd is that when he would learn something new or come across a new fact, he wouldn't hold out to an outdated dogma or tradition or anything that he would be. I'm sure that if he were here, he would have been open to hearing norma's perspective and learning about that um, and taking a lot of interest in it, to kind of compound with the very extensive research that he did on the Blitz.
Chet Richards:That's quite true.
Mark McGrath:I think that that's another thing about Boyd. That's a tremendous characteristic, and I think it's also characteristic of another misunderstood thinker that we had on recently. Andrew McLuhan came on to talk about his grandfather, marshall McLuhan and his work, and who I had first come into contact with with uh through John Robb, talking about uh, mcluhan and Boyd years ago, and I think that Boyd is reduced to OODA loop and Marshall McLuhan is reduced to the medium is the message, and no one goes any further than that and there's this massive misunderstanding about both. And what was interesting, one of the things that Andrew pointed out was he had went through, um, the one.
Mark McGrath:The things that Andrew pointed out was he had went through one of the things that you have up on slightly east of Nuchat the archives, components of the various books and things that Boyd read, and one of his takeaways was I'm stunned that none of my grandfather's books are in here, because literally every book my grandfather had on his work is on this list and they were sort of bracketing around each other, which was fascinating. But I think at the end of the day it goes on to what Boyd was saying. It's like you can't hold on to things and McLuhan said the same thing I'm an explorer. I'm not here to tell you exactly what is. I'm here to learn and explore and develop.
Chet Richards:It's certainly possible. You know that if Boyd lived another ten years, that he would have gotten over into that. I mean, if you look at how extensive his reading list was anyway, where in the world did he find time to even do this? You can see why there's going to be things he missed. He was working in a different area and put all of his time in that.
Mark McGrath:His margin notes. When we've been down in Quantico and read his margin notes on, say, on War or others, it's just, it's amazing.
Ponch Rivera:Yes, even his notes on Tom Peters are pretty interesting, that's right, yeah.
Chet Richards:He had that one coffee with Peters in the coffee shop at the Hot in Crystal City there in Washington DC Never found out too much about what they talked about. Probably His only criticism of Peter's incident was that he got too much checklist mentality. But I found out later that that is almost, or was at the time, foreshown by the business press. That was kind of their they wanted. All right, here's the thing. Now here's some things that you can do A, b, c, d and E. Okay, you're an executive. Now here's your best practices. I totally agree with Dave on that, by the way. And so yeah, and so just to get the thing, because if you look at it compared to the two before it, that book was much more lavish than writing on chaos.
Ponch Rivera:So I don't know whether that was really reflective of Tom's yeah, we could reach out to Tom to see if he can join us on here. That'd be great.
Chet Richards:Oh, absolutely we can ask him about that. He probably remembers me. It's so occasional.
Ponch Rivera:Okay.
Chet Richards:For a long time we were going back and forth. I learned incredible about bodybuilding, Applying these kind of topics to the world of business. I give him full credit.
Ponch Rivera:If I remember correctly, tom has a background in the Navy right? Yeah, yeah, okay.
Chet Richards:I don't think he retired, but he well, you still quite. Yes, yeah, he's a former Navy person. I don't want to get in more trouble than that person, I just don't remember.
Mark McGrath:Well, the Navy missed out on Boyd. In the quorum book they talk about it that they wouldn't sit down for six hours.
Chet Richards:So the Navy has had, you know, a fat lemon. All you can do is offer it Lots of challenges that I think some boy type thinking could really be helpful to them. I've given it to the Air Force, to the Marine Corps, several times to the Army, but never got invited to give patents of conflict to the Navy. I believe that's correct. If I'm wrong on that, I apologize.
Mark McGrath:I don't remember being invited to the Naval War College or any of their institutions, certainly willing. Well, chet, we're really excited about making this sort of you know, this remastered transcript of John Boyd's conceptual spiral to the public. We really appreciate the foreword that you wrote, the remastered slides and you know you've gone through all the briefings and you've preserved all of the slides and all the different briefings and you could also we could also send a shout out to Dan Grazer for making that video available on YouTube, which we transcribed and combined, and we're looking forward to feedback that we get of anybody that wants to learn how to apply this, because if we're working with your competitors on it, you're not going to be happy if you didn't understand. Make the effort to understand. Conceptual spiral.
Chet Richards:Yeah, I totally agree. I think you guys did great work and great service in making this transcript available Because, like most of Boyd's briefings, they were never really meant to be set down and read by themselves. As you know, he wouldn't even give out copies of patterns until you had the brief. He was absolutely fanatic about that, so to have the transcript itself is a tremendous resource.
Chet Richards:I even learned quite a bit from it and I was present at the creation. But you know, you see new insights. It's been 30 years since it's come out, a lot has happened and it's a chance to hear John explaining it again. Seeing him explaining it again, it's a tremendous opportunity. I recommend it highly to all.
Mark McGrath:Awesome. Well, we're going to do our part. We know that you will help as well getting it out on Slightly East of New.
Chet Richards:We don't sue you, it's available. All getting it out on slightly east of noon and sharing it with you. We don't sue you if it's available.
Mark McGrath:And I'll let. I'll let Ponch finish, but you know we're, I know speaking for myself and for Ponch. You know we're, we're both really honored to be on this journey with you as we continue to develop the work Ponch.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, hey, I'm just going to share this with we'll share with the audience as well. There is a possibility that John Boyd's old high school may be renamed after him, and I think Mark's going to go visit during that period. But I just want to offer you an opportunity, chet, to maybe suggest why or recommend why that's a good idea and we can go through that. John Boyd doesn't have anything really named after him other than I think it's the Fire and Weapons School, boyd Hall, boyd Hall, right.
Chet Richards:Now the Weapons School.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, the Weapons School.
Chet Richards:As far as I know, that's the only thing I would be hard put. I don't know the alumni list in that particular high school, but I'd be shocked to find that there was a more deserving alumni to name the school after, so I would certainly encourage that. That would be a good thing to have. Yeah, that would be good to do, mark.
Mark McGrath:Good luck, good stuff. We'll keep you posted on that.
Chet Richards:That's great guys. Thank you so much for having me on. I always enjoy these, and good luck We'll get the transcript up as soon as it comes out.
Mark McGrath:We'll close the recording here and thank you for coming and everyone to keep an eye out for the remastered copy of Conceptual Spiral which you'll be able to get. So thanks again, chet.
