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
Navigating Complexity: Patterns, Entropy, and the OODA Loop with John Bicknell
Ever wondered how to surf the disorder of a complex world? In this electrifying episode of the No Way Out Podcast, we dive deep with John Bicknell, a retired Marine and complexity science innovator, who’s cracking the code on everything from national security to market shifts. From decoding global news with cutting-edge tech to spotting weak signals that could change the game overnight, Bicknell reveals how entropy and patterns shape our reality—and how we can turn them to our advantage. Expect mind-bending insights, a dash of jazz and Grateful Dead, and a fresh take on John Boyd’s OODA loop that’ll leave you rethinking how you navigate life’s unpredictability. Tune in for a wild ride through the science of chaos and opportunity!
• Applying process mining techniques to naturally occurring events reveals patterns in complex adaptive systems
• Using the GDELT dataset (Global Database of Events, Language and Tone) to track worldwide events every 15 minutes
• Measuring system entropy helps understand when populations or leaders are experiencing cognitive overwhelm
• Identifying moments of "cognitive arbitrage" when systems are most vulnerable to influence
• Calculating changes in complexity creates opportunities for strategic engagement with minimal resource expenditure
• Integrating with Boyd's OODA loop framework enhances situational awareness and decision-making speed
• Commercial applications include optimizing global brand management and targeted advertising
• Emerging applications in environmental monitoring for forestry and wetlands
• Potential to revolutionize market analysis by detecting weak signals before they become obvious trends
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You and I met several years ago at a complexity conference. I think we did it online. We were talking with several folks.
John Bicknell:It was Garth Jensen's DOD Complexity Group.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, and hopefully that's still going strong. I know the DOD is in desperate need of understanding complex adaptive systems as they are in understanding John Boyd's Observer-Oriented Side Act Loop. There's one delta that you and I had and that was my understanding of how do you navigate a complex environment through data. And let me just give you my perspective, and I think it's shifted since you and I last met. That is my view, is informed by the Kenevan Framework, which says basically you can only find the relationship between cause and effect and retrospect in a complex environment. My view has shifted a little bit. I believe there are patterns in complex adaptive systems and I just want to get your take on that and see what you're doing with the latest and greatest in science, of both artificial intelligence and data science.
John Bicknell:Yeah, well, yeah Again, fellas, thanks for having me onto the forum. Whenever I have these kinds of discussions, it's always great because it always reflects whatever kind of like what you just said, Ponch. It reflects what I'm thinking about today in this space, because it's so rich for being able to do something useful. And so we're doing national security work and we are, as far as I know, we're the only or one of the only organizations. That is like attempting to apply complexity science principles in a measured and uniform, consistent way to complex systems across the national security landscape. And as far as your question goes, Ponch, we are. I'm sorry I spaced on your question.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, just remember that when you and I met, I looked at complex adaptive systems as a way where you couldn't understand the patterns in the system, right?
John Bicknell:Yeah, oh, patterns, yeah, patterns, yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's changed a little bit.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We're hearing things, and let me just give you more context. In the last few weeks, we're hearing that entropy is geometry, geometry context uh, in the last few weeks, we're hearing that entropy is geometry, geometry is entropy. There's a lot of things that are coming out of, uh, you know, quantum, quantum physics, quantum mechanics, uh, string theory, quantum entanglement, um and and so so my view has shifted slightly, saying that I believe there are patterns that we, just just because we don't see them, doesn't mean they're not there, right? So so, um, yeah, that's yeah.
John Bicknell:I I, I, I. I would tend to buy into that hypothesis. However, we have yet to identify consistent patterns within complex systems which can then be turned into actionable insights. But I know you guys talk a lot about the golden ratio and have had people on to talk about dynamics within the stock market and, like you know, up two, down three, up five, down seven, and it has, like you know, the what is it? The Fibonacci sequence embedded into it and things along these lines.
John Bicknell:I'm willing to entertain the hypothesis, but we've not discovered any kind of a consistent pattern like that. There could be ways of looking at the measures that we're creating and doing, like Fourier space transformations, in order to gain insights, but again, we've not explored that. We are probably taking a little bit more of a linear, direct approach to applying complexity science, to having organizations gain better, faster situational awareness than what you guys tend to espouse. But one of the reasons why I was really looking forward to this is to see if we can link the kinds of things that we're doing and put it into a richer orient John Boyd framework which is a lot more nuanced than just the typical like Oodaloo, just do things better, stronger, faster. There's a lot more nuance to that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So building on that orientation, which is important because that's how we're going to build a better understanding of the natural world, the consensus reality space, however you want to frame it. But we talk a lot about entropy. We talk a lot about complexity. I don't think a lot of DOD leaders understand complex adaptive systems. When we talk about entropy generally it's connected to the second law. Sometimes it's connected to Shannon's entropy information theory, to Shannon's entropy information theory and where I'm going with this. I just want to build up a context so you can kind of talk us through how your orientation, how you would help people and how your technology helps leaders understand complex adaptive system. You get the law of requisite variety. We're looking at things from attractors, we're looking at affordances from Gibson, all these different things people are hearing us talk about. They're going what the hell are you saying? So walk us through how you create an orientation, help develop an orientation for leaders who are trying to understand complex adaptive systems or complexity.
John Bicknell:Sure, do you mind if I take a moment just to have a little background on this?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, absolutely.
John Bicknell:Yeah, yeah. So, um, when, when I started my business, uh, back in 2018, we're using a technique, uh, that's called process mining and, uh, for those in your audience that may be unfamiliar with process mining, it's a, um, uh, a way of examining processes in a more objective manner, where you're using data, specifically like system data system event logs to model processes. And the way it was originally developed was for organizations, businesses to model the processes which run the business, and you know, all businesses run on systems like an ERP system or an HRIS system, a CRM system, manufacturing systems, on and on and on All these systems create event logs from which you can model processes. And so that was our original direction, was to, you know, do this kind of process mining and process modeling was to do this kind of process mining and process modeling. It quickly became apparent to me, as a young entrepreneur, that just putting out a shingle and saying, hey, let me model your processes that was going to be very difficult, because organizations are very protective of their data and so getting access to organizational data was not going to happen in the short run. So we started thinking about, well, how else can we use this technique? And it dawned on me that you can also model the world as a process, and all of the naturally occurring emergent systems that we live in and that affect us and that we affect can all be thought of as emergent, unfolding processes. And so we went to see how can we apply this exact same process mining technique to the world.
John Bicknell:And one thing that's very different from naturally occurring processes, from like linear, you know relatively linear, administrative, operational business processes. One of the things that's very different is that naturally occurring processes don't tend to have the same consistent relationships from one process activity to the next. And you can only imagine, you know there's a process for breaking down a rifle, or a process for breaking down a pistol, there's a process for, you know, hiring people, on and on and on. These processes tend to be relatively established and predictable, whereas naturally occurring processes are not. Moreover, they're changing all the time.
John Bicknell:To not abandon but to adapt our process examinations, from going from a probabilistic where you go from activity A to activity B, to activity C to looking at how the process changes over time and this got us into looking at the changing complexity of processes and measuring you said it Ponch the information entropy of processes and depending upon how many process activities are present at any given moment in time, and all of these are.
John Bicknell:You know, the way you measure process, the way we measure processes. You know you can measure it at the daily level, the weekly level, the monthly level. You can measure it a whole bunch of different ways, but it goes to the law of requisite variety, and so we're measuring the variety of activities within an overall process, but also the variety of information, entropy of processes at any given moment in time. And as the process changes in complexity, it has something to say about what is happening right now. We're also connecting it to human cognition and I'm happy to unpack that more. But let me let me hit pause on that to see what kind of reaction you have.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, so immediately. I think what just happened for me in your explanation is when we talk about the OODA loop, we usually use it as a boundary and put a boundary around a system and define that system. What I hear you saying is you're identifying the patterns or processes so the implicit guidance control process, if you want to call it that IGNC that's happening within the system and that tells you as that changes. That's giving you an indication of what's happening on the external environment. And those are my words. I'm just trying to kind of visualize this thinking. Before I was thinking that you were busy trying to map the external world. What I think I'm hearing from you now is you're trying to map the internal world of the system that you're looking at, correct?
John Bicknell:Well, I guess it's both. I think it's mapping. So one of our applications we're actually calling it cognitive terrain, but we're measuring what we can observe in the external world. So we're observing events in the world and we are calculating the state of the people who are either experiencing the system and I'll give an example here in a moment People who are either experiencing the system or the people who are driving the system, and so, for example, so what we're doing is we're measuring global events that are as being reported in global news sources.
John Bicknell:So we're leveraging a data set that some of your audience might be familiar with. It's called the GDELT dataset, which stands for the Global Database of Events, language and Tone, gdelt. It's sponsored by Google, or partially funded by Google, and, by the way, it's a 100% free dataset that anybody can access. It's very robust, and so what the GDELT dataset does is, every 15 minutes, it goes out to thousands of online news sources and it harvests all of the news that has been published within that 15 minute period of time, and so those guys are doing a lot of the heavy lifting and they're grabbing all of these articles and they're, you know, machine translating them and they're identifying in the articles. You know who the actors are, what has what took place, and, uh, they're, they're, they're characterizing these articles in a bunch of different ways. Okay, so we're, we're writing on top of this data set and we're we're segmenting this into a whole bunch of different systems, right, uh, and we're riding on top of this data set and we're segmenting this into a whole bunch of different systems, right, and we're looking at it globally, across all the countries of the world, and we're drilling down to the state level or the province level and down recording, are you know, things like a diplomatic meeting, crop burning, small arms fire, civil unrest, ethnic cleansing, trade deals, on and on and on. They're categorizing all of the events that are being recorded in the global news. These are the activities that we are calculating entropy on top of, okay, and so those are the external observations that we are using.
John Bicknell:Okay, but now think about the government leaders or the local populations that are part of these systems. Right, the local populations are the people who are experiencing the systems. Right, the local populations are the people who are experiencing the systems, right, and so you know, crop burning is something that happens all over the world at relatively predictable moments, right, and when crop burning is happening and there's other agricultural related phenomenon happening that's being recorded in the news the people who care about agricultural systems. When the entropy is high, those people are more likely to be cognitively overwhelmed or they're more likely to be stressed out due to the activities that are within their system of interest. And the same thing could be for the transportation system or the forestry system or the education system or the energy system on and on and on right. So as the variety increases, as the entropy increases, on average those people are more likely to be cognitively stressed out. I'm not saying that people are running around sprinting with scissors like the sky is falling. I'm just saying that, on average, they're more likely to be overwhelmed than otherwise. And so those are the people that are experiencing systems.
John Bicknell:But there's also people who are contributing to or who are driving the systems, and so we're also looking at it from a different perspective, where you have actors on the world stage, countries, non-state actors. Who has something to say about the cognitive state or the intention of actors who are contributing activities to the system? And the more activities or the greater variety of activities that a country or an actor are contributing to a system, the more challenging it is for them to do so. It is a lot harder to have nuanced diplomacy than it is just to treat everything like everything. All you have is a hammer and everything's a nail. All you have is a hammer and everything's a nail. That is easier, from a complexity standpoint, than it is to have a more nuanced diplomatic lay down. So, anyway, that that was a lot of stuff, but I'm hoping it makes sense.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, to me. I'm going to check in with Mark here in a second. This kind of reminds me of the narrative based approach to understanding a complex, the disposition of a complex adaptive system. That is, the stories, the antidotes that you hear from folks, the stories that people tell at home, the stories to tell their friends and family when they are outside of work, gives you the dispositional state of the system so it's, and then you have them self-signify, those experiences, and that gives you more information about how a system is situated. This sounds very similar to that, very similar in a way, but you're using the. It's called GDELT, right? Am I getting that right?
John Bicknell:Yeah, gdelt is the data set Correct.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So these stories that are being told, they could be manufactured, they could be from AI, I mean, there's a lot of things that could happen, and I'm not saying that they are at the moment, but that's the best we have at the moment to help us understand the disposition of the nature of the entire system, which we call the universe. We'll call it the universe for now. But you can focus in on an area and say, hey, this is what's emerging out of this portion of the state of Georgia, or the country of Georgia, right, or the EU, or whatever it may be. Yeah, right, that's only available because of what Google has at the moment. Right, we talk about affordances on here. The only reason you can do this is because there's this capability, this thing that exists, this medium that exists, right, that?
John Bicknell:is true. We are riding on top of a capability that another organization is providing, so you're building the snowmobile, You're taking things and you know again, this is a Boydian thing, right Something emerged.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Over here we have this I can't think of the name right now, but I'll call it affordance right now. So these snowmobiles are being created out there. You're building another snowmobile from that and you're probing to see if it works. So to me, there's nothing wrong with this. This is a somebody taking a novel approach to understanding the disposition of a system or systems, using what I'll say is a known approach, which is using the narrative of that landscape. So I'm going to kick it over to Moose, because I think he has some questions and possible other applications on where this could be used. Moose, your thoughts on what you're hearing.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I mean, I guess the impression I get is that a lot of times when data is aggregated it's like John was saying you start to have hammer and nail syndrome because things in the aggregate become too generalized and we think what works in one data set works for everybody within that. But, as you know, economists and those have studied things like Austrian economists and Hayek and others we know that that's impossible because we're human and, to Poncha's point, we are complex, adaptive systems and even in the sort of the tribal collected orientations of a Marine Corps or a city or a state or whatever, we're still all unique and different and it seems like John's approach is trying to account for that but at the same time or and at the same time, you know, try to avoid some of the pitfalls. As you said, john. I mean you're concerned with the nuance. You know, you understand that there is nuance and differentiation.
John Bicknell:Yeah, 100%. We're not making any kind of a claim that we are measuring everything. And I, you know, in Destruction and Creation, you know Boyd talks about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, etc. Cetera, we're not measuring everything. Google's not measuring everything. Even you know, I mean just to take it to you know that level, right, even Google is not measuring everything. But we're measuring global news, but we're not measuring anything that's happening within social media, which is its own separate ecosystem.
John Bicknell:Again, very important, words are more likely to reflect what is happening, at least on the ground, in reality, than what's happening in social media. Moreover, the global news events that are being published tend to be one of the major inputs into social media. It's not the only input. So people challenge me on this. That's not, that's not true, and I'm like, listen to my words carefully.
John Bicknell:I'm saying that you know news events, you know people take URLs and they pop them into their social media, and so it tends to be an input into social media. So what we're measuring, I think tends to be, on average, a leading indicator of the kinds of things and the churn that happens on social media. So that's one of the directions that I would like to go with our technology is for people to take it and think of it as like a leading indicator into a lot of what winds up transpiring on social media, because it's stuff that happens in the real world on average. And, like you said, punch, it's not that there isn't fake news promulgated on global news sites. I'm not saying that either, but because global news sites tend to have an editorial policy and publishing standards, it's more likely to find things that are closer to ground truth than in other types of systems like social media.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So as a quality of data. This is interesting.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, this is interesting because I've had a lot of conversations about a lot of topics and, ponch, we were chopping up some of these yesterday. You know, I think the one thing that when you, john, when you talk about news and things of that nature, people don't realize that their orientation is being influenced and hijacked by external forces of someone or some group or something that has an agenda that you inherently become part and parcel to without realizing, because, like boyd said, you don't have the ability to smash your. You don't have the ability to smash your mental models and create new ones, because you know you're, you're looking at the world the way someone gave it to you, not the way that you might feel it or or challenge it. Um, uh, yeah, kind of a corollary topic, but um, sarah and I were watching a thing about Ayn Rand the other night and it was Mike Wallace interviewing Ayn Rand in 1959.
Mark McGrath:And like, like, part of it makes sense. You're like, oh, that makes a lot of that makes a lot of sense. But then you start digging into it and you start putting in like, like, complex, adaptive systems. So you start looking into it. You're realizing that actually what she was talking about was extreme linear rigidity, which doesn't account for the things that you're talking about the fact that, like, the world is complex, it's non-linear, it's, it's, it's asymmetric, it's, it's uh, it's nuanced, right, and I think that even in in, like her extreme, we still are subject to so many of these things that, whether it's a corporation, or whether it's a news media outlet or whatever, they're still trying to force a frame of thinking that, ultimately, is linear or brings you down to some sort of a binary flow chart, that if I do this then this, if I do that then that, and that's not how it works, that's not how things work.
John Bicknell:Yeah, for sure on that. That's not how things work.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, for you accept that, like Boyd you accept. Eh, I could be wrong and if I'm wrong I'll reorient. There's that too.
John Bicknell:You mentioned Ayn Rand, though there's a great Ayn Rand quote, I'm not going to get it precisely right, but she said something like you can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
Mark McGrath:I thought, okay, that's good, right on, I actually put a note on Substack about it that you should read her novels. They're great. I mean, they're very predictive and prophetical what's going on in the world right now. And the one flaw that she had or well, amongst others, but the one that you seem to be addressing with your work is that she believed that all reality was just purely objective and that there was no wiggle room.
John Bicknell:Objectivism, that is her thing, yeah, right.
Mark McGrath:But we know, through Boyd and McLuhan and others, that reality is not objective. It's completely subjective, based off of your own personal preferences and tastes and fears and emotion and psychology and everything else, and the fact that the world is constantly in a state of flow and is that you're in, as Ponch would say, you're in a controlled hallucination of it all.
John Bicknell:So there's no, there's no, there's no such thing as objective reality, right, right, I mean this is a really critical point to the measures that we're creating and for the audience. You can, you know, just visualize a line chart where you know, up is complex, down is less complex, up and down, up and down, up and down, and it's more about the relative change than it is about the precise measure, right? And so when there's a large shift in complexity, either direction, we're saying that that has an effect on human cognition, because you're changing the variety of activities that people are experiencing with the news. There's like a supply and demand or like a chicken and the egg kind of thing going on with some of this as well, with some of this as well. So we can visualize or we can identify spikes in news volume and you know, for like a country, for all the news outlets, for country X, there's a big spike in news volume. So maybe there was a natural disaster, like an earthquake or, you know, hurricane or what have you, there's a big spike in news volume. Or there's a civil unrest event and again we can see a big spike in news volume.
John Bicknell:Why is there a spike in news volume? I mean, really, why would we observe a spike in news volume? Well, one of the reasons I think would be is because, well, these are global news outlets. That's their job is to report the things that are happening that are meaningful within a country or within a system. But the other reason why they're doing that is they're trying to capture people's attention. They know that something happened. Something happened, and so this gets into another topic that I wanted to get into. That you guys put on the show relatively often is novelty.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah.
John Bicknell:People seek out novelty and people try to resolve uncertainty. Uncertainty If a bomb goes off within earshot, I'm going to probably go onto social media or I'm going to go online and say what the hell happened, right? Or if there's an unrest event or there's a natural disaster, people are going to go to their news sources and try to resolve you know that uncertainty I'm not sure what happened, what the heck is going on, right. And so news outlets are anticipating that and they are publishing stories as quickly as possible so that they can harvest revenue. I mean, that's how they make money is through people's attention. But you kind of see, it's a little bit of a chicken and the egg kind of a thing going on.
John Bicknell:And all of this gets fed back into the you know orient cycle and taking action, resolving uncertainty. You know going after, you know uh, you know, uh, seeking, not not just seeking out novelty but uh, resolving novelty yeah anyway, what are your thoughts on all that?
Mark McGrath:well. Well, I go back to I mean this might be kind of esoteric, but like when I think of what we talked about when you were mentioning Fibonacci and sacred geometry and things like that, the trends that you're talking about. I mean there are arguments and there's a lot of research that these things actually do happen in waves.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, and there's the idea of attractors too. So you get a, you know, from biology, you get these attractor landscapes or tractor fitness landscapes with attractors in them and that's all they are is just trying to attract attention to it and that's, you know, moving from one phase to another or however you want to look at it within a complex environment and the other the other law I was talking about earlier I didn't bring it up properly as the theory of adjacent possibles, right, that's the snowmobile analogy is. You know, more technology today equals more technology and capability tomorrow. So I'm kind of jumping off the topic here, but it's that landscape, that world reality landscape, or whatever you want to call it. You're trying to. If you understand how to get people's attention and collect money off of that, you're creating an attractor.
John Bicknell:Oh yes.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, that's what I think is happening with the news is they're just following basic laws of nature.
Mark McGrath:Oh, wow, that's good, they're tapping into it. Yeah, like we were talking about. I don't know, posh, do we want to bring up that one topic that we're going to make the video about? But there's platforms out there that are tapping into the biological tendencies of human breeding. Of what Human breeding? Human breeding and keeping the species alive?
Mark McGrath:Which is a very scientific term of saying that there's a lot of content creators out there putting stuff up on the internet that they might not normally had done in times past. But I think that it like, again, it's something, something's being tapped into. That's, yeah, something human is being tapped into by external forces that you know people are leveraging. So, whether you know, kind of like the media, they tap into fear, they tap into uh, um, you know, and it goes back to I don't know, I get, I, I, I, I start thinking about that. I think of Marshall McLuhan. Like you know, people here in Manhattan are caring about what's going on in Zimbabwe right now and it has nothing, it has literally nothing, to do with the course of their, their day and their care for their family or whatever.
John Bicknell:I've heard the name McLuhan before, but I must say that I'm less familiar with that person's work. What is just the quick 101 on McLuhan?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, like Boyd, he's often misunderstood and reduced right. So, like Boyd is reduced to just OODA, loop McLuhan would be just reduced to his famous phrase the medium is the message.
John Bicknell:Yeah, that's okay yeah.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, yeah, and what it's been limited to is just communication in mass media theory. But in reality his definition of media is technology and environment. So the parallel with Boyd is really interesting because our circumstances unfold within our environment, which has a direct effect on how we're oriented. And you know, there's a, there's a very nice, you know, click with McLuhan. We've had Andrew McLuhan, his grandson, on our, our, our podcast. I've done, we've done some collabs with him, but that's that's kind of the idea. There is that he had this other concept of global village, that electronic technology, electronic media, was going to connect us all in such a way where your orientation is going to be hijacked in Manhattan because you're so concerned about people in California, their house burning down. It has literally nothing to do with anything that you're going to do with that day, or vice versa, that you're going to do with that day, or vice versa, a woman getting set on fire in the subway by an illegal immigrant is going to hijack your mindset in Cedar Rapids, iowa, for the day, because this global village is.
Mark McGrath:The technology is bringing us together in a bad way. That's cool.
John Bicknell:Where my mind starts going with that is we're doing some work with the Army right now related to information warfare. The Army calls it information advantage, information operations, right and Moose. I start thinking about, like maneuver right and you know, attention getting hijacked in one area of the information environment and using that as a fulcrum or a maneuver moment to do something else. And another way of thinking about the measures that we're creating and this goes back to Shannon's work as well is thinking about it as noise. So if you have a communication channel and you know, shannon developed this very simple model of a communication channel where you have a sender of information, a receiver of information, and there's the channel itself, but into the channel is coming noise.
John Bicknell:There are things that are coming in like physical things, like static, perhaps in this channel, hopefully, you know, relatively low but there's also conceptual noise, and so that's the way to think about what we're measuring. We're measuring how much headspace are activities taking up in a global leader or in a local population's head which can be thought of as conceptual noise? And so if something happens, bang somewhere in the information environment that gets a lot of people's attention, I'm turning my head as if that's what people are doing in the information environment. Turning my head as if that's what people are doing in the information environment no, but you know they're. They're actually preoccupied, just like you were saying Moose, in something that happened, you know somewhere. But that gives an opportunity to maneuver and do something elsewhere that would perhaps go undetected or, you know, would otherwise help the blue team pursue their goals.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:John, give me, let me build a another, build another metaphor analogy here on this topic. So in the world of sport, playing basketball, you're trying to create mismatches, right, You're trying to shimmy one way to get the defender to go in that direction. What I'm hearing from you is these shimmies that are happening in the environment are getting the attention of leaders to look over here kind of look at an attractor space, whatever it may be, and knowing that, knowing that they're looking in that direction, is an opportunity. Is that correct?
John Bicknell:Yes.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Okay.
John Bicknell:Absolutely, Absolutely. And on top of that there's another concept. There's a Wikipedia page on it. It's called Recognition Prime Decision Making Recognition Prime Decision RPDM.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, we know Gary Klein. Yeah, gary Klein's been on the show. Oh, you do, okay, yeah.
John Bicknell:So I'm unfamiliar with his work other than that, but intuitively that's the kind of dynamic that I think is possible. I kind of liken it as well to high-frequency trading, in that traders identify a moment of arbitrage within global systems. The price of corn is 10 cents here, it's 12 cents there. You can arbitrage the difference and very quickly, you know, capture a little bit of gain. That's the kind of tactics that I think are possible with looking at these changes in complex system and arbitraging, cognitively, arbitraging these system changes in order to make little incremental advances in influencing populations and leaders so that it redounds to our benefit. And you can kind of start to, you know, settle this into the whole OODA loop kind of a methodology. But as I said back up at the top, I think we're taking a much more linear, direct approach into, you know, what most people think of as the OODA loop and like literally trying to, you know, orient and do things more quickly within the information environment using this recognition, prime decision making.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, so one of the interesting things about RPD and I don't know if you know this, but, um, let me get some names right. John Schmidt, who worked with uh John Boyd, uh, or you know, john Boyd did some mentoring of John Schmidt on uh maneuver warfare.
Mark McGrath:He uh John Schmidt now works for Gary Klein. He wrote Warfighting, warfighting. Thank you, yeah, oh, okay, yeah, yeah.
John Bicknell:So so uh, John's working for Gary Klein, fm1. Yeah.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yep, yeah. So Gary Klein and I we sat down and we looked at RPD and the OODA loop and I said, hey, and this is before I came across the free energy principle there's a lot of overlap there. Now I would say free energy principle kind of makes RPD obsolete, because now we know from the maths that's involved in the brain and how we do things, particularly from the brain. We now have a better model of how we perceive reality, how we make sense, how we plan, how we make decisions, how we learn and adapt right. So these are all living systems.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:The nice connection between RPD recognition, prime decision-making and OODA loop I think is in situational awareness, creating that essay, which to me is really about building that orientation, having that previous experience, so you can have that intuition, you can build that capability up. So I do believe there's a lot of overlap between what you have, how you're looking at RPDM and, of course, john Boyd's work and bringing it all together to help military leaders see what they normally wouldn't see Right. So I do think there's a lot of capability there.
John Bicknell:Yeah, that's why we're calling it cognitive terrain, because you can think of the ups and downs as terrain.
John Bicknell:But something I neglected to mention closer to the top but I think it would be a good time to inject it right now is you bring up the free energy principle Again.
John Bicknell:I don't have as nuanced an analysis of this as you guys do, but I think of the free energy principle as people, systems, organisms, generally try to minimize the amount of energy that they expend as they are pursuing their goals.
John Bicknell:And this also gets to one of my early thoughts about measuring the entropy of systems, because I had the notion of basically driving entropy or exacerbating entropy, and thinking about it almost as like surfing complex systems and using the crests and the valleys, the ups and the downs, almost like using the momentum of the system to your advantage in order to minimize the amount of energy that you are putting into the system. And so you know if a enemy, combatant or a geopolitical rival, if you can estimate that they are at a moment of relative cognitive overwhelm or their system is relatively stressed out, as evidenced by the variety of activities that are present at that moment, If you can make that estimate, then what if you were just to pour a little bit more on, just bounce that system a little bit more at these opportunities and just like stress the adversary out at moments when they're already stressed.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But that's the whole idea of creating.
Mark McGrath:A mismatch, though, is that's when we say you're getting inside somebody's doodle loop is that's what we want to do is you want to take it?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:um, uh, seize the advantage there which is, again, it's. You know, I'm gonna use my basketball analogy.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:When you watch, you know, Steph Curry or somebody, uh, you know, shimmy to to get somebody moving in a direction that's what they're trying to do is take advantage of the external environment, create, help create those conditions that allow them to have lower energy costs of shooting the ball, right, yeah, so it may not be the best analogy, but that's exactly what's going on in warfare, right? That's? That's what we want is is we are trying to create mismatches in the environment, and I think what I'm hearing from you is you're trying to identify those mismatches that are naturally occurring so we could take advantage of it and lower our energy costs when we're trying to defeat an enemy.
John Bicknell:That's why we think of complexity as opportunity. I mean, complexity is hard, complexity introduces challenges. Complexity is something that businesses and organizations have to grapple with, but you can also think about it as opportunity. If you can measure it consistently, then you can identify moments of engagement where you are more likely to have outsized effect, or you can do things to potentially reinforce your system's success, depending upon how you're measuring things. Yes, I can't hear you at the moment, so the application of maneuver warfare.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Inside information warfare is still true. And if you look at a landscape, again, you're looking at the fitness landscape, you're looking for those attractor spaces, what's afforded to you and you're trying to take advantage of it. So that's still maneuver right. And I hear people are saying that maneuver warfare is dead.
Mark McGrath:I'm like no, it's not, it's actually more life now in the information space than ever yeah, I put I don't know if you saw in, uh, substack.
Mark McGrath:I put a note the other day of one of the greatest books on this that's the I say greatest in the sense of accessibility is um systems thinking by william detmer, which has boyd oodaloo, kanevan, framework warfare, theory of constraints, you name it. It's all, it's all in there and it's accessible and it's. It's not the perfect book, but it, boy, I tell you, for the things that we're talking about, it's a great text to get people, to get people moving in this direction. Because I think to your point, it's like we can leverage this stuff if we understand it. And Because I think to your point, it's like we can leverage this stuff if we understand it, and if we don't try to understand it, we're just going to constantly get rolled by it. The information warfare is a great place. We've been doing a lot more work with PR and other things and you've got no shortage of opportunities to look at, one that I've been eyeballing lately.
Mark McGrath:In fact, I just got a note from a buddy of mine that's a chief communications officer at a company. I told him. I said I predict that southwest is going to just get completely rolled by this.
Mark McGrath:Uh, you know, running away from their tribe with the no more free bags and yeah, yeah, you know and he was just saying that on cnbc today, frontier airlines is like full assault, like the ceo is the guest on uh ceo and he's going, or cnbc, he's going full assault on offering all kinds of freebies or whatever to steal that tribe away. Um, but it's a fluid environment and it's, it's not like, it's not unlike war fighting. Um, it's the same, it's the same thing yeah, yeah, for sure, maybe even more so too.
Mark McGrath:Maybe even more so too in the sense that it's not necessarily kinetic or physical. But you know the cognitive domain. There's no difference.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Getting inside the OODA loop right, that's 100%. That's it, yeah.
John Bicknell:That's right. Yep, yep, yep, yep. That's why we call what we're doing, you know, cognitive arbitrage, and Like trying to identifying moments of you know, identifying differences in cognitive states faster than your adversary is, so that you can take advantage of that arbitrage opportunity and doing it over and over and over and over again.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:The downside of this, john, is your internal processes, your ability to act on the environment. You have to have a distributed approach to it, meaning that you know. So go back to mission command, go back to all these things. These things cannot live in isolation. So if you understand the external environment, that's one thing, right, but how you act on it is another. And I think a lot of organizations that you know, with their hierarchies, their bureaucracies, they're not able to maneuver in that space and take advantage of that. So so it's not just one thing, this, this to me, this is that I hate to call it the front end of the OODA loop, but it's that sense-making piece, right, making sense of the external environment, and yet you have your internal processes that delay your action. So so I think, for leaders out there, it's it's not who can make sense of the environment the fastest, it's the holistic approach to bringing John Boyd's work into this and who can actually create action.
John Bicknell:Yeah, 100%. I have no control over how organizations are adapting to today's competitive landscape. I do know a lot of organizations are talking about doing things faster the speed of relevance and speeding decision making. I know that that is, aspirationally, what a lot of organizations are talking about, and our technology is there and ready to go when the organizations get there. When the organizations get there, and I think that there's there is a major forcing function going on right now with, uh, you know geopolitical events, that you know our national security and I'm you know, I'm an American, I'm a retired Marine, I'm a Patriot. I believe that our national security apparatus is uh, uh, is going there and they might be forced to get there even faster than where they're currently going, but I have no control over that. But this kind of a capability is at the ready when our national security apparatus gets there.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Let's talk about civilian applications.
John Bicknell:Skating to where the puck is heading, if you will to where the puck is heading, if you will.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, so you're mainly focused on DoD.
John Bicknell:Any applications for, let's say, markets. Have you looked at that? Yeah, well, yes, a couple. Well, so you guys mentioned brand management just a moment ago. I do believe that there are applications, especially for large multinational companies that are interested in their global brand and so being able to identify, like moments when they can influence, you know, key audiences for their global brand. I think that this is a way of doing that.
John Bicknell:And back to you know Shannon's communication channel model.
John Bicknell:Right, if you can estimate the amount of noise that is going into a communication channel, shannon's answer to countering noise is to reduce the entropy of a message that is going into the channel in order for that message to have a better opportunity to get through to the intended receiver.
John Bicknell:So, measuring the noise that's coming into a channel, you can modulate the message based upon the noise and so in in like a social media advertising models. You know one of the things that that we're looking at doing and would love to talk to anybody who thinks that we could test this kind of a thing but would be to measure the conceptual entropy of someone's social media feed. Right, you're looking at shorts, you're looking at posts, on and on and on measuring the entropy of that feed and then serving up an ad to that person based upon the most recent noisiness of their social media feed kind of a test, kind of a way in order to see if there's any kind of model lift from adjusting the entropy of advertising based upon the noise of someone's social media feed. But the same kind of thing could be done at a more macro level for global brand management. So those are the kinds of commercial applications that we're looking at, so, the future applications.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It sounds to me like just going through a simulation here. As AI becomes more prevalent in our day-to-day lives, as we're known more to the external environment, our activities and how we think, the path that you're on is going to be more. It's going to provide more opportunity. Right, there are many unknowns out there. That and again this goes back to the basic idea that if you want to understand the disposition of a system, you don't interpret it. You have the people, you federate it out, you ask people what's going on, you collect the insights and, using a red team technique or think, write, share. That's kind of what you're doing here, using chaos theory, separating all these agents from each other and collecting information from them. That's how chaos works for us in a novel way, and that's what you're doing. The same approach. This is to me. This is on the path to creating better awareness of what's happening in a system. It may not be perfect right now, because you don't have perfect data. Right, you don't have it Never will.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We never will, but this is a path. I want to throw a couple of our ideas out to you about patterns and I want to get your thoughts on this. Anticipate after a few beats of a song and you know, just hearing a few things, we can anticipate where the song's going and we understand when, uh, it should change, based off of patterns, right, because music is kind of within our I'll call it within our dna, it's within our biology, it's within the universe, so we can recognize these patterns early, early on. So these patterns exist. So there are tractor spaces out there based off musical notes, melody, tempo and all these other things.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So humans are pattern matching beings. We also project vibrations into the world. So by just the act of observing something, we can change it. There's ideas that this whole oneness of consciousness, that we're all one conscious being, which is possible, that we're all projecting things into the environment. So if that's true, an organization that can tap into that early and get those insights is worth a lot, and I think I'm going to get your thoughts on that. Are you track any of that and how your technology can help identify those potential patterns, are you?
John Bicknell:tracking any of that and how your technology can help identify those potential patterns. I was not tracking that, but I think it's a really interesting hypothesis. Carl Friston describes that also as inactivism with an E, inactivism where it also sounds to me like a cybernetics way of looking at the world and that the world is affecting us and we are simultaneously affecting the world and in such a way we are co-creating reality. And it is really easy to take that concept and go towards the kind of woo world where you just think it and it manifests, and it manifests. I am what's the word? Not skeptical? I'm not, I am. I'm receptive to that as long as it includes action. So I mean, just merely thinking about a time machine is not going to manifest a time machine. But if I think about a time machine and I put the effort in to actually do the work and build a snowmobile, right, build a time machine, then okay. But in such a way you're kind of co-creating reality. But someone could argue it's like well, you know, if millions of people are thinking, millions of people, billions of people have thought about creating time machine before and you know, we humanity or creation just hasn't created it yet, but it is in the it's in the soil, you know, it's something that is percolating in there. The concept of a time machine exists and because the concept exists, someday people or AI or somebody is going to figure out how to actually manifest that. So it just hasn't happened yet. So what is the delta between thinking something and having that manifesting? And there's, you know, there's, there's different, you know, deltas depending on like I can think about picking up my cup of coffee and having a sip. Wow, that was momentary. But, you know, manifesting a time machine is different. So that's kind of where my thought goes with all of that.
John Bicknell:But I, you know, I, I've, I've also thought about but I'm not sure that our technology has anything to contribute to this but harvesting dreams or turning dream time into a more productive time, or, you know, dreams are already productive, I think, because they're a necessary part of our human existence. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing them, I think, if there was not an evolutionary and a breeding reason for doing it right, reason for for doing it right. Uh, so dreams exist for a reason. But how can we, uh, more, not productively? How can we more, um, intentionally, you know, go into dream states in order to have it be something that helps us pursue our goals more anyway. Psychedelics psychedelics.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I think the same thing if you can capture the narrative and psychedelics of the patterns you might find, extraterrestrial beings and who knows what we'll find.
John Bicknell:I can see how, if you go about some of these projects dreaming or taking psychedelics if you do it with the right kind of intention or something like that, I can see how that could really uh, leapfrog, uh, uh, you know, or put, put you in a better competitive posture in in in the real world or in change perspectives.
Mark McGrath:It's reorienting.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We were trying to put uh, Dave SenseMaker into the psychedelic assisted therapy space because they're using traditional approaches to capturing what's going on and to me, surveys and things like that don't work, and I think you and I talked about this years ago, so the disposition of the system matters. If anybody from the psychedelic assisted therapy community is listening to this, I think what John has could be useful, as is things like sense maker using a narrative based approach to capture the self-signifying ideas of what just happened underneath a psychedelic assisted therapy experience yoga experience and things like that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Collecting these things independently and collecting that data gives you a system, the fitness landscape of a, of a system, to understand where their tractor spaces are and then from there you can actually understand what's possible so that new novelty can emerge. And I think that's exactly what you're trying to do now is the same application or similar application to the I'm not going to call it the rural world, but the world consensus reality space, if you want to call it that. So, john, hey, the world consensus reality space, if you want to call it that. So, john, hey, the world consensus reality space. Yeah, yeah, there's, I tell you, there's some amazing things coming out of psychedelic assisted therapy research because they're using complex adaptive systems, the free energy principle.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I'd argue that they're using a lot of OODA loop for it to understand what's going on. So they're the ones that are talking about the things that I think a lot of military leaders ought to be talking about, because it's world is in a way that it's just our sensory it's just the way we're sensing the world, which which which has distortions and is not literally reality.
John Bicknell:Uh, so, yeah, all that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Hey, any anything you want to cover, anything that we left unturned today Anything.
John Bicknell:You want to look at the global news and event ecosystem, but also using it to monitor forestry and wetlands and the changing dynamics of these kinds of systems as well, and so, rather than looking at global news events, we're looking at activities or events that are evident within, like hyperspectral or multispectral imagery that is being collected over forestry and wetland systems and modeling the changing complexity of, you know, chemical compounds and you know making inferences about tree health. And the outfit that we're working with is in Mississippi and they're interested in measuring the recovery of wetland ecosystems after, say, like a natural disaster, like a Gulf oil spill kind of a thing, and so measuring the recovery of these kinds of ecosystems using the exact same technology. So all of it is you know, all of this nests under the bumper sticker of situational awareness and from a complexity perspective, Now, again, there's so many applications that I can think of you know.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But again there's so many applications that I can think of you know just from data science and what's happening relative to AI and how important it is to have good data, right Context, and how important context is with data as well, right.
John Bicknell:You mentioned music. I mean I'm a huge music lover and I know you guys talk about about jazz and getting into the flow. I mean I love music but I can't stand jazz. Tell me more about that.
John Bicknell:Well, I know that there's got to be something to it, right, otherwise millions of people wouldn't love jazz, but I just don't get it. You know, maybe I'm not getting into the flow, but it's just like. It's just, it's like noise to me and I've, I've, I've, I've watched audiences like getting into a jazz ensemble, you know, riffing, and they're, they're, they're jamming, they're grooving off of one another. And you know, I, I can see people in the audience like just having like moments of, of, of ecstasy, when, when, when certain, when certain things happen, or like one player, like you know, riffs and the other player takes up, and stuff like that. But I'm just like, ah, I don't know, I don't get it.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I think it's an acquired taste. I think, just like anything, it'll call to you and I don't think you need to force one. You don't need to force different modalities on the folks. You need to let them find out what they're. Again, it's a tractor space, right? So I want to share something with you that just popped up.
Mark McGrath:I was just going to say really to John's point jazz is the Marine Corps of music. It's because it's improvised, adapt and overcome the whole thing.
John Bicknell:Ah, okay, what do we got here? What did you pull up?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:This is just a sacred geometry applied to John Coltrane's music.
Mark McGrath:Really.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, and this just popped up yesterday Again, it's the patterns, again. But these patterns just don't exist in jazz, they exist in sport, they exist in nature. And again, I think to answer your question just because somebody doesn't like jazz, doesn't mean they're not a good person. It just means I don't like jazz. Right, I used to like jazz.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I'll be honest here and I'll let Mark feel it. Grateful Dead I've tried listening to them. I just don't get it. It doesn't mean I'm not musically inclined, because I love jazz, it doesn't mean you're a bad person.
John Bicknell:I like the grateful dead as well, but I I tend to like their songs that are okay. I tend to like their songs that are a little bit more bounded. I don't like the uh, the uh whole album side of dark star or whatever you know like I so think of. I don't get into that think of grateful debt.
Mark McGrath:So I'll just I'll just keep overusing this analogy, just like, think of them as the marine corps of rock, right so. But like totally, totally adaptive, totally improvising, totally breaking all the rules, like, uh, all following a very clear intent. And also too, I mean from a tribal aspect, like I get people ask me all the time oh, you must go look to see dead and company. I'm like, no, I'm not going to pay 450 dollars to see that it totally defeats the spirit.
Mark McGrath:But to see a derivative band yeah, well, like some of the members are still there that are alive, but with john mayer as the lead. But the problem is, is that again it's like a ticket master over commercialized thing which is anti-Grateful Dead?
John Bicknell:Grateful.
Mark McGrath:Dead was more sort of emergent. It was an emergent, complex, adaptive system, that sort of built tribes around it, not a canned. That's what's unique about them and I've written a lot in the sub stack about them, because that book, the marketing lessons of the grateful dead, I mean it's everything that we talk about. It's, it's emergent, it's bottom up, it's intent driven, it's. It's basically oodle loop um yeah, they also.
John Bicknell:they also gave away their music, right? They they encouraged or allowed and encouraged fans to record their concerts and it's just like, yeah, bring it on.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, the opposite, total opposite, If you do a. Taylor Swift concert. You're going to get arrested.
John Bicknell:Right, there was an analogy here with I think that there's Okay. So yes to all of that, even if I've got, you know, different, you know likes about jazz and the Grateful Dead. I get the point and I think that there's. You know, you can extrapolate all of this out. I mean I'm, you know, think about national security all the time, but you can extrapolate that out to national security as well.
John Bicknell:And, um, uh, from a uh, you know, I don't know, like a, a monetary, transactional model of geopolitics to you know more of like an osmosis or an influence model of geopolitics, right, and so the Grateful Dead captured lightning in the bottle, but it was cultural and it was of its time and things like that. And I don't know, I mean thinking about the, you know. I mean we fought for it, obviously, and but we have, you know, I don't know, we basically took, took stewardship of the, you know, western Enlightenment experiment. And part of our success, I think, was, you know, our culture, like exporting our culture to the world. And that's not all just monetary or it's not all like hammer and nail. There's a organic, emergent kind of a dynamic. That was part of that success and part of infusing the world with our influence, but now the kinds of stuff that I hear about.
John Bicknell:There was a podcast that I just listened to yesterday. I'm forgetting exactly what it was but thinking about what's happening in Ukraine, thinking about like what's happening in Ukraine and the EU, the way the EU is looking at the problem, is they're looking at it more like transactionals, like well, we'll help fund the war effort for 800 billion euros or whatever. It is lots of money, but it's like we're going to fund success instead of trying to organically influence and win in that way. So I don't know, in that kind of a way I'm just trying to extrapolate that music jazz, grateful Dead example. I'm not sure whether that's making any sense at all.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I get it yeah. Everybody has a taste or a preference? Yeah, and unfortunately my kids are listening to horrible music.
Mark McGrath:That goes back to what we talked about earlier. It's all nuanced. You can't over-aggregate and determine mathematically or formulaically, like the Keynesians and everybody else does. Yes, you can't do that.
John Bicknell:Yes, right, yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, I'm a big, big fan of Hayek. Uh, for sure, and that, um, uh, you know things, things have to be emergent and you can't measure, measure things precisely and you have to accept it. You have to accept that this kind of imprecision do your best with what you have and just go for it thoughtfully.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, yeah, cool, that's another podcast. We could do a whole show on Hayek. Yeah, I mean the Hayek-Boyd connections, and Boyd did use the fatal conceit as one of his late sources of patterns of conflict.
John Bicknell:Have you guys had much discussion about gen AI and LLMs and all that kind of stuff.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, We've had, at least from the free energy principle side. We've had folks on the show that. So let me map this out. I think you understand. You're familiar with Kenevan framework, right, the Kenevan framework.
John Bicknell:It's been a while loosely yeah.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, so you get clear, complicated, complex, chaotic and of course you get disorder or confusion in the center.
John Bicknell:So different, different, different quadrants with, like some, something in the middle. That's kind of unique.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, so confusion in the middle so the idea is it's if you take a a like LLMs are to me John Boyd's bad OODA loop observe, orient, decide, act, right. It doesn't have an external connection out there other than the person that's putting in there. And again it's where do you put the boundary on the system, the agentic AI. So we get a lot of agentic AI folks using John Boyd's Observe, orient, decide, act loop and what they're trying to do is use again bad OODA loop and scaling that. Now it's okay. We're not saying that's wrong, we're just saying hey look, that was not the intent of John Boyd's work. He didn't spend 40 years looking at something to come up with a circle and go here's John Boyd's OODA loop. No, he looked at complex adaptive systems, systems thinking, cybernetics, physics, quantum physics, all these things right.
John Bicknell:So it's a nonlinear approach. His that famous OODA loop sketch was actually very, very late in his life, Was it not Okay, yeah?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:95, 96, right.
John Bicknell:Yeah.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So actually, we're going to talk to Chet here soon to go over his latest, the essence of winning and losing, his new update, because he's adding information and energy to that conversation which, if you look at the OODA loop as a flow system from the construct, a law standpoint, then the currency that flows through it is information or energy, the very things you and I were we were just we were talking about today. So, going back to LLMs, they're they're stochastic parrots that are repeating things that are given into them in a, in a fixed data set. Right, you get into a gentic AI starting to scaling a little bit less energy potentially, and you get into I think it's called regenerative, it's RGM or active inference AI, which is John Boyd's real OODA loop, which reduces the energy requirements, which reduces requirements for large data centers potentially, which is a challenge, which is a huge challenge to the current assumptions in the market, which is we need nuclear power plants, we need more energy, we need all these things. So you want to talk about weak signal detection. If this technology works, if it sounds like it does, then these LLMs and this agentic AI that's emerging right now are going to be obsolete.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We're going to see a phase shift, basically overnight. So, again, this is what we're tracking here. I don't think a lot of people would agree with us, but based on what you know, we're you know from our guests coming on the show and talking about what's happening using natural approaches to AI. So, modeling what the brain does the best we can and applying it to AI, I think what we're about to see is going to be absolutely phenomenal, which would actually make your world a lot easier, your technology or approach easier, because you'll have better access to higher quality data.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, I'm tracking everything except for making LLMs obsolete. I'm not understanding the jump, yeah, so LLMs are good in the clear domain. So going back clear and complicated domain Relationship between cause and effect is a little bit of hallucination. It's a ordered domain approach to AI. It's good, it's really good. So going back to Knaven framework, the land of subject matter experts is a complicated domain. That's where you and I learn how to fly aircraft. That's how we do. You know, not everybody can fly an aircraft. If Mark jumps in the cockpit, it's going to be a complex environment for him where you know he's not going to know how to do anything, whereas it's going to be pandalirium, right, right, right. So subject matter expertise works. You get a repeatable process. You learn how to fly. That's the complicated domain. That's where agentic AI is kind of maneuvering into right now.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Oh I see, I got you.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But, the complex domain is where you and I, all of us dominate, which, because we're complex, adapted systems, that novelty emerges. There's that liminal space in there that could be used to train AI, and that's that. Again, it's a complex approach to creating agents I'll just put it that way that are using things like recognition, prime decision making, do the loop and free energy principle to navigate the external world, and that is a lower energy requirement because they're engaging with the external world and they're learning and they're updating their orientation and they're not being fed a shit ton of information into their data sets.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So now they're adaptive. They're adaptive agents in this environment. They're not going to be like humans. I mean, I don't want them to be, but that's the next generation. So that could be a phase shift that we see in the next six to nine months to three years, I don't know. I see.
John Bicknell:Six to nine months to three years, I don't know.
John Bicknell:I see, yeah, in some of our current Army work we did experiment with using LLM prediction technology and we didn't do it so robustly that I want to make a really strong statement here, but it didn't work. But I know that there are a lot of people that are looking at LLM technology for time series prediction and I think that the best that they're going to be able to do is, you know, whatever the next couple of times time steps are Uh, but there's, there are techniques already that are, you know, uh forecasting techniques that that do a little bit of uh time prediction, and you don't need LLM technology for that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, no, I'm not saying that LLMs are bad, Don't I'm?
John Bicknell:saying they're actually very useful.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But I think to be honest with you and maybe we ought to work on this together and we need to explain, and in the flow system I use the OODA loop, the dominant parts of the OODA loop, in different domains of the Kenevan framework. It doesn't say that you don't use the whole OODA loop. It just says, hey, when you sense act, respond. What are you trying to do there? You're going through the implicit guidance control pathway of the OODA loop. You're bypassing the deliberate decision-making because it's an automatic thing, it's automation, right, so that pathway through the OODA loop already exists and then you go to the complicated domain.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:You go to the complex domain. I believe what needs to happen and I'm happy to work on this with anybody listening the podcast, listen to podcasts is let's take the Kenevan framework either linear Kenevan or the regular Kenevan approach and kind of show people what LLMs look like, what a genetic AI looks like in this next generation of artificial intelligence, and what we get out of that you can actually do this on a Wardley map too is you'll find that novelty will look more like the modeling of the human brain. Again, we're not saying we can model the human brain. I don't think we'll ever be able to do that. I don't want to do that. It's just saying what we know.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And let's go back to John Boyd's OODA loop, all the work that John Boyd gave us, if we understand it correctly. I'm not talking about the warfare piece, I'm talking about all the science. You looked at philosophy and all that, all the overlapping, the consilience of it. If you look at that and you tried to build an AI off of the real OODA loop, you're going to dominate everybody that's building AI off the linear, observer-oriented side. Act passive approach.
John Bicknell:I see, I see and I yeah, back to the novelty. I mean, I don't know. I mean, there's ways, I'm sure, of modeling this more precisely or going to stop working because of the way the world is evolving and the enemy, or your competition, is also evolving. So you have to develop novel engagement modalities or tactics in order to continue the competition. And this gets back to the law of requisite variety. You must develop new varieties of tactics in order to continue to out-competing your adversary. Let's do this right.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So, 100%, take your technology and let's take a recent scenario after DeepSeek, r1 dropped right the news media that came out those days hey, lower energy requirements, whatever it may be. If I understand your tech right, you could capture those days afterwards and see a shift, potential shift in the way people are thinking. And then later on, a couple of weeks after DeepSeek comes out, microsoft drops its requirement for bigger data centers. There's a lower requirement for energy capabilities. So what I believe is happening and what you can do with that technology you have is you can identify those moments where there's some entropy in the system.
John Bicknell:Yeah, almost like an entropy seam or a gap.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, but better yet. How would you find that weak signals prior to that news getting out that deep sea came out and their energy requirements was lower? Somebody knew beforehand. Right, and that's the novelty we have to go after with these technologies, whatever it may be. So my point is the practical application for what you have, married with the requisite variety that you just brought up, is you have to anticipate what's next. So the tactics, if you want to call them, we'll call them strategies. The strategy that Microsoft put out there weeks ago was we need bigger data centers, we need more energy, we needed all these things. That shifted immediately after deep seeking. Are they related? I don't know?
John Bicknell:Oh, right, yeah.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But I believe there's a weak signal in the industry now that we do not need the energy or data requirements that we thought we needed, especially if we're going in towards this, and if you could capture that. Let me paint another picture here. You just gave investors, traders, a competitive advantage, right, and, for those that are listening to this, that's why things that john's working on could be applied to market shifts, right, yeah, yeah, right it's a weak signal.
John Bicknell:It could be a weak signal. Yeah, 100. Yeah, uh, we've, I've. I've talked with a guy before about, you know, uh, applying this technology within the uh patent and trademark database to get these kinds of leading indicator signals of things that are being developed and patents by their very nature are novel and are not part of the corpus of existing data. Right, because it's assembling.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I mean, they're all snowmobiles, yeah signals, say, like within the patent uh corpus, um, which is um commercially available data. Yeah, uh, I mean this. This is a fascinating. What I think we can do with our, the knowledge that we're sharing on no way out is is I mean, mark and I are busy. I know Mark has something to do today um, which is pretty novel, and we could talk more about this offline, when we're not recording, and I think we should. But yeah, man, I'm fired up about what you have going on. I didn't agree with you several years ago. I'm like you can't map this out and it's mainly because I didn't understand it.
John Bicknell:Well, that's part of the entrepreneurial journey. It's just like oh yeah, yeah, well I, I, I know that that that what we're doing, has, has, has relevance and applications in the real world and I'm driven to see that agenda through, and so that is that.
John Bicknell:That is part of what's driving me. So, yeah, so thank you. I mean, you know, and having conversations with guys like you punch that, you know, inject a little skepticism. I mean that's okay. That just makes the kinds of arguments that I make better, because all of that feeds back into it's like well, how do I take this constructive criticism and resolve it so that what we're doing is more clearly productive?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, it makes sense now, man Uh it really does, I really do appreciate the uh, the dialogue and the conversation today. Uh, let's wrap it up there Anything else from Moose or John?
Mark McGrath:Nah solid stuff man.
John Bicknell:Yeah, yeah, no, I really appreciate y'all. Uh, having having me into the forum, I, like I said, I've been looking forward to doing this for quite some time. And to your last point there, panch, I was like until maybe just recently, the way that I describe what we're doing and some of the applications. It might have just been like, hey, this guy's saying just the same thing as he did to me a couple of years ago and so thinking about things a little bit differently, and it's more obvious that what we're doing has real world applications we can help.
John Bicknell:That's right.
Mark McGrath:All right.
John Bicknell:John Awesome.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We'll wrap it up there. Thanks, man.
John Bicknell:Yep.
